On Tuesday this week I was invited to speak about SEO at the Cambridge Marketing MeetUp.
The organiser of the Cambridge Marketing MeetUp, Joe Glover, has been positively lovely (which is no coincidence given “be positively lovely” is one of his rules for the MeetUps) with support and advice whilst I’ve been organising my own Cambridge SEO MeetUps, Optimisey.
The ‘being lovely’ mantra has clearly worked as everyone at the event on Tuesday were bloomin’ lovely to me too – despite me talking at them about SEO for 20 minutes plus and jamming in an arbitrary theme.
It drew comments (and photos like the one above from the super-social Lenka Koppova):
Don’t think about keywords, think about topics says @Optimisey at #CambMarketing. Great point! pic.twitter.com/j0Q4tDJC9z
— Lenka Koppová (@lenkakopp) September 5, 2017
Learning so much from @Optimisey‘s SEO talk. #CambMarketing pic.twitter.com/Ch6RMSDX4s
— Charlotte Steggz ? (@charlottesteggz) September 5, 2017
which – no word of a lie – really made my day (there were some others too, but it already feels quite ‘chuffed with myself’ to be posting those two!).
It did also make me realise why I’m getting other people to speak at the Optimisey events.
Much as I enjoyed presenting, I’m conscious it’s not my strongest suit.
I’m also aware that I still have a lot more to learn about SEO, which is why I’m getting people far more knowledgeable than me to come and present at Optimisey.
SEO Myths
So what did I rattle on about for nearly half an hour then?
I talked about some SEO myths.
I toyed with a few ideas of things to talk about but I find it really hard to know where to pitch an SEO talk.
If you assume no knowledge you can end up boring people to tears. Assume too much and their eyes will glaze over for other reasons.
I felt comfortable with myths, thought I could make it fun and engaging but also mix up a blend of some fairly basic stuff with a few more advanced pointers for those that were more familiar with the subjects.
What are the big myths in seo?
Well – if you want to know that you should have come to the MeetUp!
If you want to see the slides from my SEO presentation you can but a quick summary:
- SEO is a scam – it’s not, there are just some people out there laying claim to ‘doing SEO’ who are really bad at it, giving the industry a bad name.
- You can be #1 – one (arguably the) correct answer to this is “For what?”
- SEO is dead – yeah, I had to tackle that one (again). Spoiler alert: it’s not.
- Google is SEO – other search engines are available.
- Google knows… – this one is true. Google does know, a lot. Knowing what it knows (and how) can really help you.
- Google is evil – they’re not. They’re a business. They do what works for their business.
- If you build it… – Everyone ‘builds it’. Help search engines understand your content, use schema and rich text, sitemaps etc.
- Content is king – Nope. Content on it’s own is no good. You need to understand keyword research, ngrams, topics and entities, link graphs
That was it really.
If you’re wondering how I strung that out for 20-25 minutes, you needed to be there to see it!
Come and MeetUp
If you haven’t heard of the Cambridge Marketing MeetUp you should really go. If the idea of ‘networking’ makes you wince – it’s really not like that. Joe’s amazing, gets great speakers (natch!) and the people that turn up are… positively lovely.
And if you’re interested in SEO and MeetUps do please join the Optimisey SEO group:
Fair warning, there is a waiting list for the first event now (woot!) but amongst the advice Joe imparted is that drop-out rates for events like these can be pretty high so please don’t be put off. Join the waiting list. There’s a pretty high probability you’ll get a place.
