Thursday 28th November 2024 – 1.30pm to 5pm
Shoreditch Treehouse, London
• Meet other SEO agency owners in a confidential setting
• Break out of your cocoon and rub shoulders with other leaders in your shoes
When you work in SEO, the only people who understand the pain and thrills of your role are OTHER people who work in SEO.
And right now, we’re navigating a tough landscape…
You are invited to join us in London to share your journey with other SEO agency owners and leaders. You’ll get to talk confidentially about your business with people who know what it’s like to walk in your shoes… because they’re currently doing it.
- “This month we have had three people all hand in their notice – one of them a senior manager!”
- “I’ve just invested £300k in non-billable talent to take us to the next level. Should I have sat on the money? Banked it for a rainy day?”
- “My focus is on building a profitable, growing business that doesn’t need me. I don’t want to be doing this in three years’ time.”
We’re meeting up in the amazing Shoreditch Treehouse for a confidential afternoon of down-to-earth conversation and interactive presentations. You’ll hear from other agency leaders about attracting and retaining high performing talent, managing client expectations, finding the right balance between growth and agility, and growing your business despite incessant market changes.
Who you’ll hear from…
“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.’”
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.
- Expanding team expertise.
- Responding to Google’s AI.
- New TikTok search 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. [Read more]
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 the profitability of their products.”
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.
“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.
👉 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. [Read more]
“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 head on.
👉 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 similar situations. [Read more]
“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.
“SEO has gone from being keyword/query led and moved to more conditional,” explains Bex. “It has shifted towards needing to be the best answer to that query.”
“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.
👉 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 how to create content that resonates with your audience throughout their entire journey, and how to implement these strategies in your own SEO practices. [Read more]
Meet people who are interested in your story
SEO Leaders is an afternoon that will helps you get inspired, and meet other people you can learn from. We blend interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We start the event at 1.30pm, so try to arrive by 1.15pm.
The afternoon’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by an Agency Hackers facilitator who makes sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to “pick on” on the day.)
We will serve tea, coffee and sweet-toothed things to keep you going, but please eat a sandwich before you arrive. The schedule doesn’t leave us time to serve lunch, unfortunately.
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from are the actual guests at the event.
We decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the “talks” aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them “fireside chats”, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured . We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is only for people who own or run a SEO agency, or offer SEO as a service.
Why? Well, the event only works if everybody broadly shares the same pains and challenges, so for that reason we ask that only the person invited attends. Sorry!