As a Digital Marketing agency working right at the coal face, no one in the team at DSC had previously visited a SMX convention, largely due to workload but also because we have a built in suspicion of a room full of people that have no logical reason to actually help each other.
So when the dates for SMX London 2013 were made available, we decided to, largely due to curiosity, attend this years conference.
We also thought there was a good chance that Interflora’s agency would be poked fun at and oh how right we were – there were no less than four blatant swipes at them including this quote.
“You’ve got to go pretty far to get yourself banned for your own company name”
Oh, how we laughed.
Our CEO, Greg Cooper, attending the conference held at Stamford Bridge (the home of Chelsea Football club).
We wanted to meet some of the people who help shape modern thinking and strategy for SEO and PPC. We were also looking to reconcile our own methodologies with those of our peers, as well as picking up fresh ideas and tips from some of the American delegates.
Firstly the choice of venue was great, the club offered fantastic facilities including lunch and refreshments sponsored by the guys over at Linkdex.
We chose to attend the seminars on the SEO track of the first day, as opposed to the PPC. We are a Google certified PPC partner so tend to get some good information directly from them as opposed to the slightly more limited information with respect to SEO.
We also felt with the recent releases from Matt Cutts and the imposing penguin update that it was the right choice.
This track featured fantastic speakers such as Maile Ohye (Senior Developer Programs Engineer (and all round hero of DSM) at Google – @maileohye), Vincent Wehren (Lead program manager at Bin Webmaster tools – @vincentwehren) and Marcus Tober (TBA at Searchmetrics inc – @linkvendor).
The topics covered ranged from authorship, link building and “power tools” for search marketing companies. The tonality of the presentations varied from the more humorous presentations of Grant Simmons with his “kingier” concept to wholly data driven pieces such as that of Marcus Tober. Marcus and Greg met face to face for the first time and shared more than one beer.
Overall the event met our expectations well and allowed us too finally to put some names to faces of the people we interact with day to day. We left the conference with a genuine feeling that we were doing things the right way and, to be fair, some great new ideas that are coming over the pond.
A special thank you goes out to Sandra, the European SMX convention organiser for Rising Media, not only organising a very well-run and professional show but also for hiding the fact that we are pretty sure she is a Bayern Munich fan quite well.
For more information about our experiences at SMX London or how we could utilise the latest search marketing techniques to benefit your site, don’t hesitate to contact us.