It's only one day but its jam packed full of exciting presentations oozing with actionable content and its where the SEO rock stars get their groove on! I was especially looking forward to seeing Rand Fishkin, Will Reynolds and Mike King. When you follow these guys on Twitter you get a feeling for their style and quality of what they have to say, they certainly didn't disappoint!
1. Rand Fishkin – F%$#! Link Building. Content Marketing FTW
It was 9am and I’m sitting up front with Pete because I don’t want to miss a thing! Rand starts with an update on the state of search with Google, what links used to work and why the don’t now.
Organic search still has the lowest cost of customer acquisition: $15 dollars for search $35 for social and $95 for paid search. SEO is far from dead but it is changing shape and creative content that people want to share (social signals) is the future for successful agencies.
He went on to provide a plethora of examples of how boring sites/products have made themselves super sexy through imaginative and creative content – I love this stuff!
2. Mike King – Quantifying Outreach
Next up is a very tired Mike King! Despite suffering from extreme jet lag he really pulled off a great presentation about outreach. Mike is a favourite of mine as he shares so much great content on outreach, personas and how to build the best relationships. This presentation was primarily an evaluation of a bunch of data that gave some really strong pointers about what works best for outreach. Even down to adding graphics in signatures and not including your phone number!
3. Branko Rihtman – Which Social Shares Actually Get Links
Branko is a very smart chap whose presentation came with some serious scientific backup! This is a video I am going to be watching again with a finger on the pause/rewind button.
Some great detail was shared about his personal techniques for identifying the social signals that work best. I’ve come away from this presentation with some new tools and tactics that will definitely refine our approach.
4. Jane Copland – Getting Golden Links
Jane’s emphasis was on thinking differently about how you build links – for get about challenges and look for the opportunities. A pretty radical example was used to illustrate this point… sending a stripper out into the middle of the Olympic Games with your brand logo on his chest will get you a lot of exposure (!) and a fine of £20k but that’s much cheaper than paying for sponsorship! Risky, but you get the point.
Jane really helped to emphasise that creative campaigns that are bordering PR stunts are great ways to get noticed and therefore get viral links.
5. Will Reynolds – Stalking: How You Land the Links You Want
Ok, so I confess that Will is my favourite by quite a long chalk! Will’s presentation is the highest value, most actionable and blow you away awesome presentation I have ever seen. The topic was stalking, link stalking, with the end goal being to get some people with serious clout to notice you and link to your stuff.
Will’s enthusiasm is infectious, his style outstanding and his process is second to none. This was a step-by-step approach to get under the radar and build a genuine real life relationship with pretty much any one you decide you want to get close to!
Social is about people, relationships and conversations – Will gave us the key to creating these relationships using publicly available tools and some serious smart! Great job Will!
6. Tom Anthony – Putting the Love Back into Links
I stood at the back for Tom’s presentation, partly to charge my iPhone but largely to start stalking out Will.
Tom gave a very frank talk about how Google is so serious about cutting out spam & cleaning up the web that they are willing to sacrifice some white hat businesses along the way. He doesn’t expect them to stop the current pruning so watch out!
This presentation concentrated on link graphs and how Google is changing the way it views links. The message is that the your emphasis needs to be on people (influencers) and relationships for the quality, authority, diversity and natural relevance. See how the theme of Linklove is tying together? Such good quality stuff!
7. Martin MacDonald – Tips, Tricks and Secrets from the Trenches
Martin is larger than life and never stands still so all my pics, and there are lots, are blurry. This is the best one! Martin doesn’t do things by half and is one of the heavy weights in SEO so he grabs your attention straight away. Hi emphasis is on scaling and leveraging link building which is a great strategy.
He provides some very specific strategies that I wasn’t aware of before so great value there. Martin is a leader in testing various methods of link building to prove or disprove something to the SEO community so he’s definitely someone worth following.
8. Will Critchlow – Mediocre to Great
What a very nice man Will is! Despite being the last presentation of the day he held everyone’s attention and shared some great information that is relevant to team leaders and agency owners. It was a long day packed full of strategies and tactics. I felt that Will’s presentation was more about how to do all of the above in a very smart, scaleable and achievable way. Perfect way to end a great day!