Christmas is just a matter of week’s away and I’m sure it’s been a busy year… So why not end the year on a high and get yourself down to the SEO Christmas Hootenanny in Brighton!
If you’re an SEO and you’re based in Brighton, make sure you put the following date in your diary -
Friday 21st December from 7pm
I will be announing the venue within the next couple of weeks and will post all the details shortly.
So… who’s up for a night of search, santa and sambucas?
With so much talk about the SMX conference in London last week and with many great conferences in the States coming up soon, how do you justify with your boss the costs involved and more importantly get the time off work?
If you work for an agency or consultancy then you probably don’t have this problem. However, if you’re an in-house SEO you will need to sell the idea to your boss so he gets his cheque book out and signs you off work for a few days.
Here are a few tips that should help you sell the idea.
1. You’ve got to stay ahead of the game!
The search industry in the UK is competitive, if you’re going to stay ahead of the game and learn what those around you are getting up to, you really should attend a conference. Many conference sessions offer valuable information that is not always available online. The chance to then go and grill the speaker and ask questions after his/her presentation is invaluable. Research your competition online and show your boss how they are doing certain things that you may need to learn about, tell him that if you are going to compete and reap the rewards financially…you need to go to this conference.
2. Don’t mention the partying!
Search conferences provide great opportunities to party, there will be evening pub meet ups, invites to go and eat at restaurants and all night drinking sessions in the hotel bar… but your boss won’t like the idea of his few grand being spent on a drunk employee with a killer hangover. Instead talk about the type of experts that are going to be attending and how the conference will provide a great opportunity to network with them. Tell your boss that you have a strategy to meet certain experts and ask them lots of questions. That way if a picture of you getting drunk with a bunch of SEO’s appears on the web, you know what to say.
3. Save money on consultancy!
Could you imagine the cost of getting Matt Cutts in for an hour to look at one of your sites? What about asking Danny Sullivan to come and carry out a site audit for your lead client. It just won’t happen. However, if you manage to grab one of the hotshots while at a search conference, as long as you’re polite and don’t go too overboard with the questions, they will always be accommodating and will answer your question. Approach experts and say “Hi, I read your blog all the time, can I buy you a beer?” That always works! Go to the conference with a list of things you would like to find out, tell your boss that you have a strategy in place for what you are going to learn and come back with.
4. Spread the wealth!
If your company decided to take the whole team out to PubCon in Vegas, it’s going to get pricey. If your boss pays a few thousand quid for you to go, he may have concerns that you are going to be offered a job and may not come back. Instead tell your boss that you are going to gain as much valuable information as possible, take loads of notes and then brief the whole team when you get back. Spread the knowledge around your organisation and provide write ups for employees to read, blogging the information is also a great way to spread the word around your team.
5. If you’re part of an agency, pitch it to your clients
If you work for a few clients or provide consultancy, why not speak to them and inform them about the conference. Pick out a few key areas that they are interested in and discuss the benefits of you attending the conference and coming back to implement everything you have learned on their website. If you are lucky they may even offer to contribute to the cost of you attending. This can happen, trust me.
6. Choose the right conference
If you are like me you probably want to go to all of them, but some are better than others. Research the conference schedule, see who is talking and what they are speaking about. Make a list of things you really want to learn and make sure the conference has the relevant content. Ask questions at forums and blogs with industry experts and ask them for their view on a particular conference. Tell your boss that you have researched all of the conferences and have picked the best one to go to.
Hopefully these tips should help you sell the idea of going to the next search conference with your boss, maybe you have some other tips or ideas that you would like to share.
See you at SES in Feb!
Mike Grehan has written an interesting article stating that SEO Is Dead… I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Mike on a few occasions and he is an extremely colourful character… the article speaks a lot of truth although the title is 100% link bait material.
I agree with some of what he is saying though, I personally come from a marketing background and agree that the old days of SEO geeks optimising description tags and tweaking code is pretty much gone. However, web users will always want to find stuff and online marketeers will always need to sell stuff – SEO is all about branding, content and information and making it all readily available and easily accessible. Optimisation is more about usability; the use of title tags, breadcrumb trails, well structured content and sitemaps is as much about the user experience as it is about spiders and crawlability.
SEO is not dead, it’s just evolving. It’s all about writing compelling content that web users can interact with, image and video optimisation has been going on for ages now so a lot of us SEO’s are ready for the new and exciting looking SERP’s which will only improve the overall web experience for everyone.
eConsultancy, an online publisher of internet marketing research and reports, has just released information about their recent SEO roundtable briefing. The monthly group discussions, which cover various topics in online marketing, include some major companies and employees within the UK SEO market. It makes very interesting reading and I would recommend anyone interested in the UK SEO market to go and download a copy.
Some key facts…
It’s a good time to be a UK SEO. There is a lack of expertise in this area and currently demand is outweighing the supply. This is certainly going to benefit a lot of the seasoned pros, as more and more set up internships and conferences in order to increase the UK offering.
SEO is now widely recognised as an essential requirement for any web project and more and more marketers now understand what it is, and how important it is. I remember a time when client meetings involved educating those in the room about how the search engines work and why you cannot simply build a site and expect people to find it. Those meetings are now far more progressive; a client will often ask “have you seen this new development?” “Would this work on our site” “I notice a title tag changed the other day” etc. This is obviously a far more positive way of working, the more that is known about SEO, the better the project progresses and overall goals are achieved.
The main reason a clients interest and excitement increases in SEO is obviously down to the measurable ROI. Often when a project is 6-10 months in and the ROI is being measured, clients will often see that due to keyword inflations and click fraud concerns, that SEO is much stronger than PPC. More emphasis is then placed on the organic optimisation and interest grows in what results can be achieved.
The future also looks bright for the UK SEO market with social media optimisation, personalisation, localisation, content, vertical search and mobile search all playing a major role in the future of the engines. As more and more spam is found and removed from the SERP’s, the power of ethical white hat SEO increases. This is great for the white hats out there and can only be a good thing for the consumer as the SERP’s become cleaner and clearer.
My only concern for the future is with the amount of cowboy, fly by night companies that keep popping up who claim to be SEO experts. As the demand increases, more and more “so called” SEO experts suddenly appear offering “Number 1” placements. I just hope this doesn’t effect the reputation of the rest of us.