Everyone who works in search understands how fast paced the sector is. Technologies, platforms and search engines are developing and growing at an extremely fast rate, making it very important to keep on-top of the latest changes in digital.
Agencies and individuals that don’t keep themselves updated on industry changes may find themselves losing ground and unable to update client’s strategies to this ever evolving world. The team at MEC keeps up with industry trends by attending key digital conferences throughout the year.
On the June 5th and 6th eight members of the search team were lucky enough to attend SAScon, a search analytics and social conference held in Manchester. The conference is well regarded in the industry and features two full days of industry speakers and panels from all over the world.
Below is a quick review of some of the sessions from the first day of the event.
Session one – Brett Tabke founder of Pubcon
The first speaker was Brett Tabke, who is the chief executive officer and founder of Pubcon. Brett delivered a great talk focused mainly on what he believes is next in the world of digital. He focused on social media and virtual reality and how users in the coming years will become addicted and immersed in virtual reality. Brett even predicated that sports fans might be transported to stadiums through virtual reality!
In terms of search Brett pointed out some key insights for online marketers including:
- People are three times more likely to use an app than a website
- Newsletters should always be optimised for mobile first
- 90 per cent of people flip between devices
Brett was a motivating speaker and really got the audience engaged in what he was saying.
Session two – SEO penalty shoot out
Next up was a panel about SEO penalties, which included Tim Grice from Branded 3 and Paul Madden from Link Risk. The idea behind this session was interesting, the audience was asked to provide questions about penalties for the panel to answer. This turned out to be a great concept as people in the audience were able to get answers to their particular problems.
As normal with SEO however, there isn’t always one clear answer, some questions were answered differently by various members of the panel. Some key points the panel stated were:
- 99 per cent of links that are built for SEO should be removed
- You can get out of a manual penalty without removing a link
- You should no follow guest posts and build for audience reasons
- Syndicating press releases can cause many low quality links
- Don’t build too many infographics as this causes a footprint
Overall this was a very useful session with some good questions being posed by the audience. It was interesting to see how different agencies had a very different approach to penalties, with some advising to just disavow, while others advised to remove.
One thing that was agreed on is that you should be making a strong attempt to remove all manipulate links as quickly as possible.
Session three -Scaling a model of earning authority in organic search
Next up was another panel on how to scale an earned model of link building, this session was led by Neil Walker. Some key concepts that were discussed are:
- Don’t lose focus on technical SEO, this should be reviewed first
- Gain a full understanding of the product and its USPs
- Building an influencer database is key to scaling
- You can use free tools such as social mention, Google alerts to gain insight for content creation
It was good to hear some actionable tips that can be used for more small to medium enterprises that can be managed and delivered. The biggest takeaway was ‘who has the most data wins’.
Conclusion
The first day was a great success for the organic performance team, providing some key insights into the search world and the future technologies that experts are predicting will take off. The event provided a great opportunity for the team to network with key influencers and other agencies, helping to ensure we are always providing the most up-to date consultancy for our clients.
