A double “thank you” to those that attended both the first and second SearchNorwich event, we managed to fill every seat again and had some of our most popular talks yet!

The talks and speakers

 

Charity: Carol Plunkett from East Anglian Children’s Hospices

• Chris Elliot from The Benjamin Foundation
• Presentation on Slideshare

 

Elodie Partridge: Content with more ‘crunch’

• All resources: Content with more ‘crunch’
• Video of talk on YouTube
• Presentation on Slideshare

Key takeaways from Elodie:

• Google does not want you to research lots of individual keywords for lots of different pages anymore.
• Use ‘content clusters’ to organise content into a hub and spoke type model
• Useful search results are about answers peoples’ questions and satisfying intent
• Better search rankings comes from context + content
• Stay focused on your niche and write for your audience
• Consider if you are actually the best person to write the content

 

Craig Campbell: Blackhat SEO

• All resources: Blackhat SEO
• Video of talk on YouTube
• Presentation on Slideshare

Key takeaways from Craig:

• PBNs work and the risk is minimal if you take care and do them properly
• You don’t have to link directly to your site with PBNs to get benefit
• “Boost” sites that link to you by pointing PBN or paid links at them
• Delegate, outsource and automate where possible to scale
• CTR is definitely at least a temporal ranking factor
• Beware those who offer free audits / want access to your Google My Business page
• It’s possible to outrank big sites if their content (such as contact pages) are poor
• Everyone is busy and rarely checks facts, that can get your links if you’re prepared

 

Your feedback

We achieved our goal of making one talk a bit more simple and one talk more technical!

This made me really happy! After the first event we set out to make one talk a bit more basic and the second talk more technical, with the aim of catering for both complete novices and those that are more technically inclined. Mission accomplished!

Craig Campbell caused quite a stir – but you loved his talk

Whether you agreed with what Craig had to say or not, it was clear that he made an impact. In fact, almost 75% of you rated Craig’s talk as 10/10 making him our most popular speaker to date.

“Craig was one of the most entertaining talks I’ve ever seen.”

 

What we’re changing: Talks overrunning

This one falls entirely on me. We did get a few bits of feedback about scheduled talks overrunning. With this in mind, I’ll make more of an effort to try and get everyone to stick to the agreed timings.