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. “But 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 becoming more like website consultants,” says Abbie. “The user journey element is becoming even more crucial in SEO. SEO was never easy, but it was a bit more straightforward.”
So how is Abbie’s team adapting to these changes?
- Expanding team expertise – “Before we were made up of copywriters and SEO specialists, but we’ve now got CRO experts, analytics pros, social media content creators and even web designers.”
- Responding to Google’s AI – “Google has launched its new AI experience, and that has really changed things for SEO. 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 – “We have been looking at other channels to ensure 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.”
- Shifting focus to bottom-of-funnel content – “People may be going to things like Tiktok to get ideas, but then they’ll come to places like Google to purchase. So that bottom of the funnel piece is going to be really important.”
👉 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 explain why it’s important.
With over a decade in the industry, Rob Twells, co-founder of The Digital Maze, has seen the SEO landscape shift dramatically – and not always for the better – so 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. “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”
YYou spend weeks in a slew of back-and-forth emails, calls, and crafting a meticulous proposal for a potential client – then 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 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 time for conversion is getting a lot longer. Previously it might be within 30 days, but now we’re looking at more like 60 to 90 days.”
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.
On the surface, it seems there’s not much agencies can really do about it.
But Amanda has been tackling the problem with these 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.”
- Understanding the client’s internal hierarchy – “It’s about understanding what that dynamic is and who actually holds the power in that relationship, so we can maximise our time.”
- Getting the basics right – “Sometimes it’s really easy to get carried away in these really big, kind of in depth, technical SEO elements, but fundamentally, you miss some of those really simple basics that get overlooked.”
👉 At SEO Leaders, Amanda will explore the impact ghosting is having on the SEO industry, why it’s happening, and how agencies like yours can overcome similar situations.
“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.”
Rebecca Weeks, performance director at Curated, believes that successful SEO lies in understanding the psychology behind buying behaviour.
“SEO has gone from being keyword or query-led to more conditional: needing to be the best answer to that query,” she explains. “And now it’s evolved even further – you need to understand the motivation behind why someone might be searching for something. We’ve moved into ‘need-based’ content.”
Rebecca (Bex) is now opting for emotive content that runs parallel with SEO practices.
“Previously, SEO would focus on the bottom funnel – now SEO plays a role across the entire funnel,” says Bex.
For example, Curated was working with a client in the finance sector. Bex’s team decided on a strategy that would follow someone 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.