What is SearchLeeds?
SearchLeeds is the biggest digital marketing conference in the north of England. This year more than 1,500 people joined us at Leeds first direct arena on the 14th June to watch 36 speakers deliver talks about paid and organic search, content marketing, data and digital.
What we learned this year
Shout out to some #SearchLeeds speakers…
We have 5 first time speakers and almost a third of our speakers have done less than 5 talks: you’re on the bill because 1. We know you’ll be absolutely awesome and 2. You wanted to talk about something that we think will blow our minds pic.twitter.com/e0rekBzfae
— Stephen Kenwright (@stekenwright) June 14, 2018
We’re hugely grateful to everyone who gave up their time to speak at SearchLeeds. We received nearly 4x as many speaking pitches as we had slots to fill (and we approached some of our eventual speakers ourselves).
5 speakers delivered their first talks at SearchLeeds this year – including Mayflex’s Luke Carthy who stepped up 3 days before the event – and we want to make sure we get similar numbers of new speakers next year. A third of our speakers had delivered less than 5 talks – we put two of them on the main arena stage and they got some of the best feedback. So we know to programme the tracks on the strength of the talks rather than the experience of the speakers.
This year was the first we had specific themes for each stage: the Search Laboratory Stage returned yet again but exclusively as a paid media and data themed track; this year we also had the SISTRIX Technical SEO Stage. Last year the least attended talks were the PPC focused talks on the main arena stage; this year the PPC talks on the Search Laboratory stage were totally full, with people sitting on the floor (sorry!)
We did plan for an increased attendance (50% bigger third stage, 300% bigger second stage) but they were still both full. We’re looking at potentially taking even bigger spaces in the arena for next year.
It’s pretty clear to us now that the best pitches translate into being the best attended talks and the more detail speakers can give us, the more people end up in their sessions. We’re looking at additional labelling of talks next year so attendees know how advanced a session is and what they can expect to get out of it.
We recorded the talks on the main arena stage – we’re looking into the possibility of live streaming all the talks next year because even though we got attendees from 8 countries we know not everyone can make it.
The slides
Stage One – main arena
St. Ives Chief Digital Officer J Schwan
The Future Doesn’t Exist in Silos
Purna Virji – Bing
Intelligent Search and Intelligent Assistants: Exploring the AI-era of Search
Rob McGowan – Edit
Useless Projects: Where AI Meets Human Creativity
Kirsty Hulse – Manyminds
Content Marketing Tips That Won’t Break the Bank (Or Your Spirit)
Hannah Smith – Verve Search
What Happens When a Werewolf Bites a Goldfish?
Jon Myers – DeepCrawl
The Mobile-First Index: What, Why and Most Importantly When
Kristal Ireland – Virgin Trains East Coast
Jasper Bell – AmazeRealise
Retailers – Stop Thinking Store, Start Thinking Story
Lexi Mills – Shift6
Advanced Integrated Influence Strategies and Tactics
Kelvin Newman – Rough Agenda / BrightonSEO
Three Practical (and Inventive) Ways of Pinching Keyword Insight from Your Competitors
Branded3 Strategy Director Stephen Kenwright
Customer-Centric Search: Serving People Better for Competitive Advantage
SISTRIX Technical SEO Stage
Bastian Grimm – Peak Ace
Gerry White – Just Eat
Past, Present and the Future of Mobile
Steve Chambers – Stickyeyes
How Not to F*ck Up a Migration
Fili Wiese, Search Brothers
Kristine Schachinger, Sites Without Walls
Entities, Search, and Rank Brain: How it works and why it matters
Dawn Anderson – Move It Marketing
Power from What Lies Beneath: The Iceberg Approach to SEO
Dave Freeman – Treatwell
Creating Knockout On-site Content by Simply Understanding Your Customers
Luke Carthy – Mayflex
How to Optimise the S*** out of Your On-site Search
Rachel Costello – DeepCrawl
Stop Confusing Search Engines with Conflicting Signals
Julia Logan – Irish Wonder
How to Audit Your Site for Security
Oliver Brett – Screaming Frog
Why SEO Wizards Need User Testing Hobbits
Craig Campbell
How to Fix the Most Common SEO Issues Using SEMrush
Search Laboratory Stage
Jill Quick – The Coloring In Department
Track Your Campaigns Like a Bloodhound: Making Your Marketing Work Harder
Branded3 Senior Insights & Analytics Queen Emma Barnes
Analytics Tracking: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Google Tag Manager
Andraz Stalec – Red Orbit
5 False Assumptions About Your Traffic
Hannah McKie – Missguided
PLAs: Small Company or Large, Everyone Has to Start Somewhere
Chris Rowett – Journey Further
Angus Hamilton – Search Laboratory
Holly Ellwood – Receptional
Matt Holmes – Distrelec
The International Paid Search Playbook
Anu Adegbola – MindSwan
AdWords Script Automation & Pitfalls
John Rowley – Ferrero
Creating a Data-Driven Customer Journey with Personas and Smarter Investment
Elizabeth Clark – Dream Agility
Branded3 & Edit Media Directors Jon Greenhalgh & Sam Wright
How to Deliver Growth in the Most Efficient Way Possible
