Search Elite is a brand new conference taking place in London, May 9th. This is a one day event, one track where there are 8 speakers from 8 different areas of search sharing their tips with the audience. Search London and SEO Jo Blogs is proud to be a media partner of Search Elite and in this post, I interview the Directors of Search Elite to find out more about this exciting new conference taking place May 9th.
Craig, Rayner is the Co-Founder of GoEvents that is organising the conference and I wanted to ask him about some of its USPs.
What Should People Look for in a Conference?
To know that they will leave having learnt and taken away new actionable information.
To feel comfortable in their surroundings in order to achieve their goals for example if it’s about collecting business cards or if it’s about learning, choose the right sized conference with familiar speakers or companies in attendance.
Ultimately you should know what you want to achieve when spending a day out of the office. If you can allow yourself the budget or get sign off you really do want to gain as much as possible. Don’t over commit on your time any money until you are sure it’s money and time well spent. For example in your area of interest like SEO or CRO try a 1 day event first or maybe go to a meetup and see which conferences the people there would recommend.
Networking is a crucial element but the word itself may make some shyer people feel very nervous. This can be helped if the conference is intimate and you know you will be sharing your time with like minded people. If there’s barely any ice to be broken you’ve chosen the correct conference.
To some people lots of speakers over multiple tracks is a great option but if a speaker is only doing 1 session during that event and it clashes with another speakers session you will miss out. Either plan your schedule carefully before the event and face FOMO or even better go to a 1 track event and soak up all of the knowledge sharing and training from the same seat!
What is the USP of Search Elite?
1 track, 1 day under 1 roof with a wealth of industry experts who are on hand all day training and sharing really practical knowledge to benefit both in-house and agency professionals enhance their skill sets for a very affordable ticket price of just £245.
Andy Brown is the Founder and Director of Reality PR and is a co-founder of GoEvents.
How Did You Get into PR?
I suppose I first got into PR when I worked at BT as a marketing manager. The job evolved and as I moved around the organisation I was becoming more and more involved in PR for the company. I left the corporate side to work for a PR agency that was PR’ing established businesses and start-ups in digital marketing and two years later I set up my own company called Reality PR.
How Do You Think SEO and PR work together ? (You can also explain why PR may not have worked well with SEO before or why there is resistance sometimes).
The two roles work together now like bread and butter. PR is about good content, either through bylined articles, press releases and so on which gain media coverage.
SEOs should be helping the PR team optimise the links within those articles with keywords that boost rankings. PRs and SEOs should align their messages and timings to ensure consistency of content and theme and avoid mixed messages. I think it all comes down to communication. PRs and SEOs can no longer work in isolation. Content from either side can be shared to help each other achieve their objectives but they need to collaborate and keep each other up to date on what they are working on.
I have known Jackie Bissell for a number of years as Jackie has been organising Conversion conferences and SMX since since 2007. Jackie is the co-founder of Go Events.
How Did You Start Organising Search and Conversion Events and What Have You Enjoyed Most About It?
I’ve been involved in organising Search and Conversion events for around 10 years. Obviously Search came first and i’ve been really lucky to work with some of the finest over the years including Danny Sullivan and Mike Grehan. Its been real eye opener to watch this sector grow over the years. Search is covered in many digital conferences but we felt that it needed a one day highly focused event like www.searchelite.co.uk
Do You Think There is Much Overlap Between Search And Conversions – please explain why? (If not, why not?)
I’ve been working on Conversion Conferences since the first in 2010. Again i’ve been lucky to work with experts such as Tim Ash, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. Conversion is a fascinating sector which covers so much, CRO, UX and Online Psychology, Data Analytics. Its been interesting seeing and working with the people with the cross over of SEO/SEM and CRO. SEO’s are having to know about CRO, implement strategies and tools to run a fully function Digital business. It’s always been interested watching each vertical sector grow within the area of e-commerce. Search and Conversion are both fast growing sectors, therefore anyone working in this space really should be attending the Elite series of events to keep in touch, network and share knowledge.