Brighton’s bi-annual SEO conference took place at the city’s prestigious dome this month and five of MEC Manchester’s digital team were in attendance to meet and learn from some of the best in the business.
Guest speakers included Dave Trott, Executive Creative Director at CSTTG and Richard Baxter, founder of SEO Gadget, with around 1,500 SEO and search enthusiasts in attendance keen to leave with all the knowledge and exciting industry updates they could.
The event covered a wide array of SEO topics, ranging from new and exciting link building techniques such as PinAlytics to advanced Predatory Thinking techniques aimed at influencing decision-making processes and getting that all important advantage over the competition.
From the wide range of speakers that appeared, here are a few that caught our attention in particular:
Richard Baxter – Founder of SEO Gadget
How to be a better SEO
Richard’s talk focused on detailing key requirements that he feels are needed to become a better SEO. These included good common sense pieces of advice, such as:
- Being entrepreneurial – Setting up your own websites and online business ventures are the best way to learn as an SEO. Learn from your mistakes and use the best bits in your everyday work
- Be curious – Continuously aim to better yourself and keep up to date with the latest SEO industry news
- Always take yourself out of your personal comfort zone and develop confidence in your ability to become more independent. Learn to sell what you do and pitch yourself under different circumstances
- Work to make your manager surplus to requirements and make people realise how much you care about what you do
- Develop a specialism in one area of SEO, which could be anything from mobile, analytics, link building or maybe even blogging
- And finally, above all, love what you do and never settle for just ‘OK’
Dave Trott – Executive Creative Director at CSTTG
Predatory Thinking
This talk focused on altering your thinking to be able to turn problems you can’t solve into ones you can. Dave explained the potential advantages a predatory thinker can have when competing in the marketing arena by applying it to real world examples.
One such example used was the launch of the Apple iPod in 2001. A device so small people would naturally carry it around their pocket, meant that nobody could actually see which music player consumers were using. Apple overcame this by selling only white head phones in a market place of all black ones, differentiating their product.
Opinion formers were happy to be different with the white head phones, while the Opinion followers soon followed. Dave concluded by illustrating how only 10 per cent of all advertising messages are seen and remembered, meaning the other 90 per cent never reach their intended audience. This highlights the importance of making sure your message does not get drowned out.
More information can be found in Dave’s new book called Creative Mischief
Danielle Fudge – Head of SEO at Foward3D
Pinterest as a tool for SEO
Danielle from Foward3D presented an exciting new search tool called PinAnalytics, which is designed to scrape the image-based social network Pinterest to deliver, source URL, domain authority and social shares in an easily exportable spreadsheet format.
This is a great tool for blogger outreach and Danielle went on to explain that since being rolled out across her team it has increased blogger outreach productivity by five. She went on to demonstrate its effectiveness using gardening blogs as an example. Although only currently in a beta stage of development the search tool can be accessed by visiting; www.pinalytics.co.uk.
Summary
Although not quite as advanced as some might have liked, the 2012 Brighton SEO conference was a great free event and opportunity to gain a deeper insight into the rapidly growing SEO industry.
The whole event was very enjoyable – thanks in part to the free-flowing guest ales and entertainment in the evening – and as the night drew in, karaoke and retro gaming rounded out what had been a very informative and enjoyable day.