Speakers
📢 Here are the current speakers we have for this event. We will also hear from you – the event is all about taking part.
“How We’re Staying Agile During Rapid Industry Changes”
“We ended last year with great results for clients, and went into this year with similar sorts of strategies,” says Abbie Dando, founder of Monday Clicks. “This year, there have been a few times where I’ve gone to our clients and said, ‘I’m going to redo our strategy.’”
There’s a reason Abbie’s changing strategies this year – because the SEO landscape itself is changing more than it ever has.
Google’s AI has turned SEO upside down; TikTok is becoming its own search engine, and clients are demanding more than just traffic – they want cold, hard ROI.
“We’re now finding that we’re becoming more like website consultants,” says Abbie. “The user journey element is becoming even more crucial in SEO. Whereas before, SEO was never easy, but it was a bit more straightforward.”
So how is Abbie’s team adapting to these changes?
- Shifting focus to bottom-of-funnel content – “We used to do a lot of content funnelling; we’d make content that sat at the top of the funnel, and funnel those customers into decision making pages to grow that traffic. But now… the importance of the decision-making pages is becoming more of a priority because many of Google’s AI results are for top of the funnel keywords”.
- Expanding team expertise – “We’re getting different members into the team; whereas before we were made up of copywriters and SEO specialists, we’ve now got CRO experts, analytics pros, social media content creators and even web designers.”
- Responding to Google’s AI – “Google’s launched its new AI experience, and so that’s really changed things. We’re testing a lot with our clients, and so far, we can see that top and middle of the funnel content is being affected mostly by it.”
- New TikTok search service – “Because top of the funnel clicks are being affected by Google’s AI we have been looking for other channels to ensure this content gets found. TikTok is great for top and middle of the funnel content which is why we have launched a new Organic Search for TikTok service.”
👉 At SEO Leaders, Abbie will dive deeper into these strategies and share how her team is staying agile in the rapidly evolving SEO landscape, and how you could potentially do the same.
How to Effectively Communicate the Value of SEO to Clients
If you’re an SEO expert, you need to not only be good at SEO, but you need to be able to talk about it.
With over a decade in the industry, Rob Twells, co-founder of The Digital Maze, has seen the SEO landscape shift dramatically. He believes that today, effectively communicating the value of SEO is more crucial than ever.
“Four or five years ago, [an SEO expert] didn’t really need to understand nor care about the commercials,” says Rob. “But now we spend a lot of time with our customers understanding their average order value and the profitability of their products.”
“You can then use all that data to put together financial forecasts that work in line with the potential increase in traffic from SEO.”
Clients are no longer satisfied with vague promises of ‘better rankings’ or ‘increased traffic’ – they want to see how SEO directly impacts their bottom line.
And so, SEO professionals are finding themselves in a whole new environment: boardrooms. They need to be able to explain complex algorithms to CFOs and CEOs who speak the language of finance, not just search engines.
“We put a lot of thought into who’s going to be in the pitch meeting, who we’re going to be talking to, and what sort of information is going to land best with them,” explains Rob.
“If we see a finance director in the room, that pitch is going to be very different to if the finance director wasn’t there.”
Rob has found that technical expertise alone is no longer enough, and as a result, it’s changing who they hire.
“There’s a much bigger demand now for people to go and visit clients,” he says. “Having a bit more charisma, a bit more of the ability to talk about SEO.”
“Our hiring decisions are very much based around what this person is going to be like whilst standing in front of a client, maybe even a boardroom.”
👉 At SEO Leaders, Rob will be sharing strategies for communicating SEO’s value to those in the c-suite, techniques for tailoring your pitch to different stakeholders in the room, as well as some real-life examples of how it’s benefitted his agency.
“How We’re Tackling ‘Ghosting’ – and Other Industry Challenges”
You spend weeks in a slew of back-and-forth emails, calls, and crafting a meticulous proposal for a potential client, and all of a sudden…
They vanish into thin air.
No rejection email. No explanation. Just… silence.
Amanda Walls, managing director at Cedarwood Digital, is no stranger to this. And unfortunately, it’s not exactly a random phenomenon in the industry.
“There’s a lot of people speculatively reaching out, going through the whole sort of pitch process with agencies, and then you literally just don’t hear anything,” says Amanda. “You don’t even hear, ‘I’ve gone with another agency’. There’s just no feedback.”
“The actual time for conversion is getting a lot longer, whereas previously it might be within 30 days, but now we’re looking at more like 60 to 90 days.”
But fear not, because Amanda has been tackling the problem with these three steps:
- Pre-qualification calls – “One thing that I do now is I won’t do a proposal for anyone that won’t agree to a 30-minute video call before we start the proposal.”
- Proposal presentation meetings – “I’m then saying that we won’t prepare a proposal until they commit to a meeting to run through the proposal.”
- Clarifying team allocation upfront – “A lot of people want to know who’s going to be working on their account, which is completely fair enough. But the problem is, because there’s such a long lead time to come back to us, and because people are ghosting left, right and centre, it’s really hard to say, ‘you’re going to have this senior SEO.’”
Amanda says that they’re even hearing from people who they spoke to six months ago. These extended sales cycles and pricing pressures have been adding to the complexity of running an agency, making the planning process more difficult.
👉 At SEO Leaders, Amanda will be getting into some of the ghosting stories she’s experienced, as well as delving into why it’s happening, and how agencies like yours can overcome simila
“How We’re Adapting SEO to Focus on Audience Needs and Emotions”
“With SEO, there’s so much more to consider – it has all evolved beyond keywords and queries.”
Bex Weeks, performance director at Curated, believes that successful SEO lies in understanding the psychology behind buying behaviour.
“It’s kind of evolved over time,” explains Bex. “SEO has gone from being keyword/query led and moved to more conditional, it has shifted towards needing to be the best answer to that query.”
“And now it’s evolved even further – you need to understand the motivation behind why someone might be searching for something. It moved into need based content.”
Bex is now focused more on emotive content that runs parallel with SEO practices and has been using it to play a role across the whole funnel now.
“Previously, SEO would focus on the bottom funnel – now SEO plays a role across the entire funnel” says Bex. “We delivered a huge project recently for an automotive client – helping to create an electric hub. The strategy was to create a one stop place to convert someone into buying an electric vehicle. All the content that went with it was at first understanding the audience, and every single question and query that they might have, to educate, to change perception.”
In another example from the finance sector, Bex’s team focused on “nurturing someone from applying for a child savings account, all the way to getting a mortgage. We’re nurturing the audience over time so they’re committed to staying with one bank throughout all life stages.”
👉 At SEO Leaders, Bex will be joining us to explain how her team is adapting their SEO strategies to focus on audience needs and emotions. She’ll share her tips on creating content that resonates with your audience throughout their entire journey, and how to implement these strategies in your own SEO practices.