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This week I was lucky enough to attend the exclusive invite-only
SEJ Summit in London, where I was blessed with the wisdom of some of the industry’s top people. It didn’t take long to impress either. The venue was the
Ham Yard Hotel, possibly one of the coolest venues I have been to. Not only was the décor interestingly quirky, the staff were friendly and refreshments never ended (just check out the spiral orange dispenser!).
The line-up
The speaker line-up promised a day of insights and, best of all, I was never going to miss anything as the event was staged in a single room. So, the conference introduced me to some of the most influential members of the digital industry:- David Naylor, Bronco : Partnering PR and SEO for Brand Marketing Success
- Pierre Far, Google : Mobile In 2015 and Beyond
- Nick Wilsdon, Vodafone : From Search to Store: How SEO Can Empower Your Brand’s Business Units
- Marcus Tober, Searchmetrics : The Content Evolution
- Andrew Girdwood, DigitasLBi : Is Combining Search, Social and Content Impossible for Big Brands?
- Kelsey Jones, Search Engine Journal : Thinking Outside of the Text Box: 6 Ways To Increase the Life of Your Content
- Jim Banks, Cheapflights: PPC Best Practices: Getting to Your Bottom 10%
- Jon Myers, Marin Software : Unifying Search with Performance Media
What did I learn?
This is hard to sum up in one post as there was so much to take in. Although the conference promised three Key Takeaways from every talk, the quality of the speakers and their extensive knowledge led to constant note taking.PR and SEO: A love affair
A barrage of info came straight off the bat from Dave Naylor – someone not afraid to speak his mind and share his (occasionally) controversial opinions. But everything Dave discussed made perfect sense in order to make PR and SEO work together for more successful brand marketing. Dave’s three takeaways were:- Solid structure: Get your house in order before attempting any fancy content creation or outreach. “Spot a failure and fix it early”.
- Good neighbourhood: Clear out any poor links/bad neighbours before you start content marketing. Conduct regular checks to make sure no bad neighbours move in!
- Healthy relationships: Make human contact with writers. Keep a check on competitor activity, identify further relationship opportunities and collate all the contacts into a central database segmented by industry.
Mobile marketing and the future
Pierre Far was up next to talk about Mobile in 2015 and Beyond. Pierre spoke a lot about user intent, summing this up by saying that any agency or business should always be asking: “Why are your customers here and did they get what they needed?”
This resonated with me and is something that I pass on to clients all the time – the importance of serving the needs and intents of customers. Often the answer is not positive, but Pierre’s three takeaways were just the thing for combatting this:
- User context and tasks: It’s all about reducing friction. Use mobile phone features to enhance your customer experience.
- Technology stack to serve it all: software is ever advancing and Is getting cheaper, so it is easier to get the right mix to serve all your client needs.
- Your user needs may change
Make your case
Nick Wilsdon from Vodafone was up next and was the most valuable talk of the day for me, mostly as it was very relevant for a number of our clients. Nick had worked both agency and in-house so was well versed in dealing with getting projects signed off. His three takeaways backed this up:- Learn to make a good business case
- Be interested, open and diplomatic
- SEO can influence many business areas
Nick kept giving insights from some of the clients he has worked with previously, which was the beauty of this conference. Every speaker would give real-world examples that they have tried and tested, as opposed to theoretical talks that you often find at other industry conferences.
Content and customer intent
Marcus Tober, the founder of Searchmetrics, was up next. The day was going so quickly, but was packed full of information and Marcus did not disappoint. His talk focused on ‘the content evolution’, reinforcing the need to focus on the intent of site users and content relevance.
Some of the key points from Marcus’s talk included:
- Using the most relevant language within your content so that your message makes a connection with your audience.
- Don’t provide keywords – provide answers. In other words, don’t optimise a page with what you know search engines will be looking for in a checklist style manner. Instead, ensure your content answers the users intent.
The rest of the day
The afternoon was just as action packed, with talks from the wonderful Kelsey Jones, executive editor at Search Engine Journal; Andrew Girdwood, media innovations director at DigitasLBi; Jim Banks, global head of biddable media at Cheapflights and finally Jon Myers, VP and MD EMEA at Marin Software. Some of the highlights from their talks included:- We are all publishers
- Be open and transparent. Work in collaboration with any department and/or agency as there is much you can achieve together
- Set up a digital toolkit that can be shared internally and externally in order to complete various tasks and projects
- Repurposing content can lead to increased traffic and rankings in a very cost effective manner (this was just one of the amazing and actionable insights from Kelsey. This was definitely one of my favourite talks of the day as it was all stuff you could go out and do straight away, often without the need of any of your clients resources!)
- PPC is not a magic wand!
- There is no such thing as a bad keyword, only bad execution
- You don’t need to spend a lot of money to test a theory
- Get away from working in silos!
- Attribution modelling is critical to understanding the true value of your marketing efforts
SEJ Summit was certainly one of the best conferences I have had the pleasure of attending and the organisers could not have been more accommodating. There was a lot to take in, but that’s the beauty of the summit. I feel I have learnt so much, not missed out on anything, just need to put it all into practice now! If you are interested in any of the talks, here’s a
link to all the decks plus other SEJ Summit’s from around the world, there’s plenty of takeaways to be had. Have you attended any great conferences or talks recently? I would love to hear your experiences so let me know in the comments and maybe we can meet up at the next industry event.
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