SEO’s are online marketing Superheroes

This was perhaps the stand out quote to take away from day one of the ionSearch conference in Leeds. The PushON team made the trip over yesterday for the first half of the two day event, organised by Blueclaw, to listen to experts in the search world who had travelled much further, from Germany, Canada and the US.

The theme of the day was very much the future of SEO and Search, with discussions on how to move forward from the Penguin and Panda updates that have impacted the industry. This was centred around both a cleaner, content led approach, as well as some reputation management for SEO’s – particularly those who are wrongly labelled spammers!

BIG Data was the buzzword in the keynote from SEOmoz’s @AndrewDumont who kicked off the day with why we should be looking at a wider range of reporting data (or BIG data!) than just the basic website metrics. He suggested a range of tools that he uses to report on important social data, and briefly mentioned a related secret project that SEOmoz are working on – you can find out a little more about this and sign up for updates at Moz.com

The day was split into three tracks, with workshops and expert panels running alongside the main speakers. These discussions covered the day’s theme of SEO recovery and future plans, with the first panel talking about link removal and Google penalties. There was some great advice to be taken from this, notably DON’T PANIC and rush into using the disavow tool prematurely. Further panels looked at using content to drive conversions and thoughts about ‘what makes a great link’. Kelvin Newman revealed one of the proudest links he’s built – from PR9 site w3.org – or “the inventors of the internet!” as he more delicately put it!

Without a doubt the highlights of the day was the presentation by animated German Marcus Tandler (@mediadonis), in which he led us through 477 slides in less than 45 minutes (honest!!) Marcus put some answers to the question ‘what’s next in search?’ and whilst it was hard to take detailed notes as he jumped from slide to slide of amusing Matt Cutts quotes and images, he made some important points about the  need to continuously producing new linkable content, as search is time sensitive and subject to trends. A thoroughly entertaining presentation though, and I look forward to attending his event in Munich later this year – SEOktoberfest!

The final, and much anticipated, talk of the day was delivered by Martin Macdonald, finely titled “Why I’m quitting SEO” (he isn’t..) Martin ran us through the issues that we as SEO’s are facing, due to bad exposure after penguin and panda updates, which have tarnished the industry with the tag of spammers. This is where he delivered the stand out quote from the day – “SEO’s are online marketing Superheroes”. Martin’s point was that SEO’s ‘get the net’ (another favourite line) and will be responsible for managing the reputation of SEO and encouraging people that our future SEO work is clean, creative and capable of delivering great results. The only outstanding question was what we will be called? Growth hackers, inbound marketers and content marketers were all mentioned, before Martin ended on his belief that one day SEO’s will have taken over all the top marketing jobs and world! Watch this space..

Notable mentions also go to Shain Shapiro, who revealed the secrets of Hootsuite’s social community and #hootups, as well as Nichola Stott and Ross Hudgens, who hosted fantastic talks on link building strategies rapid-fire content marketing.

As is tradition with these SEO events, we headed to the nearest bars for a much needed drink after a long day of talks, before we all met up again at Tiger Tiger in Leeds for more drinks and a social! It was a shame that the PushON crew had to leave at a reasonable time to come back to Manchester but I’m sure the rest of the night was enjoyed by all! No doubt there’ll be some bleary eyes at the second half of the event today (which we’re disappointed to be missing!) focusing a bit more on Social Media alongside SEO.

Big thanks to all at Blueclaw and the sponsors of ionSearch for a great, and incredibly entertaining and thought provoking day. See you all at SASCon!

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To each of us, our team is the biggest in the world and the only one that matters, yet we always find ourselves entertained or obsessed by what our rivals are doing. That is why I (as a red) have been unable to ignore City’s (massive) growth online and through social media. Now whilst I won’t admit to physically ‘following’ them on across all their platforms, it doesn’t take an enthusiast to notice how lame in comparison United’s efforts are.

City are making big moves in social media, and whilst their 3.8m Facebook fans are dwarfed by United’s 29m, the blues have a presence on Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Instagram, with United notably absent on each. It is their move onto Instagram which most interests me. The platform which was bought by Facebook for around $1bn earlier this year, and has since seen over 1,100% growth and 11m daily users is clearly one of the biggest and fastest growing areas of social media. City have shown similar growth aspirations both on and off the pitch, and so associating themselves with this growing trend (amassing 28,000 followers to date) shows how City are not only in touch with what their fans are doing, but also searching for every possible way to engage with them; in the case of Instagram with fan photo competitions.

Our MD joked about City being mocked by Google’s recommended replacement search a few years ago; a simple joke which caused much debate! The SERP has changed now and City are back. Now whether that’s due to some responsive SEO work by unhappy blues, or simply because their trophy cabinet de$ided to reopen its doors, they are now not completely the butt of red jokes. However fiercely things are fought on the pitch I’d simply like to see United take a proper dive into social media before they become a MySpace to City’s Facebook.

I’m sure the football banter will never cease at PushON, and it’d be interesting to see how it develops if we were ever to move within close proximity of either Manchester team’s ground…

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