Earlier this week (Wednesday 20 March 2013), Fresh Egg’s SEO consultant, Tony Goldstone, and business development manager, Joanna Ross, attended Econsultancy’s Digital Cream event, held at the Emirates Stadium in London.

The day focused around SEO best practice, measurement, ROI, trends and much more. Tony hosted the SEO table on behalf of Fresh Egg, giving many senior client-side marketers the chance to learn from his wealth of search marketing expertise.

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What happened at Digital Cream 2013

The day consisted of three separate roundtable sessions, with an opening speech from Ashley Friedlein, CEO of Econsultancy. During each of the three sessions, delegates were invited to join tables of their choosing, with each one covering a range of subjects including SEO, content marketing, email marketing, mobile commerce and much more.

Against a backdrop of excellent facilities, support and organisation from the Econsultancy team, Tony’s sessions proved to be particularly popular, with each of the three discussions welcoming a full table of delegates from a broad range of sectors.

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Key themes and takeaways

Across each of the sessions, a number of questions were raised along similar topics, giving strong indication as to what matters to today’s digital marketers in the world of SEO.

Internationalisation

At all three of the SEO roundtable sessions, the subject of internationalisation was brought up, as more and more brands (and in turn digital marketers) look to roll out international versions of their sites. The pros and cons of using country-specific top-level domains (TLDs) versus subfolders was discussed at length, as was how common the use of rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” to help search engines serve the correct language to users really is.

Tracking success

As digital marketing is becoming more integrated in its approach (no longer can SEO perform well as a silo; its success is intrinsically linked to other facets of digital marketing, including content, display advertising, social media etc.) the way in which we measure success in our industry is a subject of much exciting debate. However, perhaps one of the most interesting takeaways from this year’s Digital Cream was that SERPs positions and rankings are still important to clients.

Google updates

There’s no escape from Panda and Penguin. Numerous questions were raised throughout the day about these two key Google algorithm updates. These ranged from what the updates actually are, through to how marketers can go about gauging what link-worthy content now is and how to create it in the post-Penguin world.

Basic onsite SEO and site migrations

Tony was there to advise and provide food for thought about a whole host of onsite SEO considerations, including:

  • What can be done to make a new site SEO-friendly
  • The impact of site architecture on SEO
  • Microsite roll-outs
  • Site migration process and best practice
  • Search-friendly URL best practice
  • Optimal number of links per page – this in particular proved a hot topic for debate – just what is “a reasonable number” of links, as recommended by Google?

Mobile SEO

The rise of mobile search: it’s undeniable and so unsurprisingly proved another topic for serious debate. Delegates were keen to discuss the various approaches to delivering mobile-friendly websites, how people use mobile search and whether or not mobile SERPs are (or will be) skewed toward sites with mobile compliant offerings.

So, there was plenty of SEO talk flying around the Emirates and plenty of fantastic questions raised. Of the event, Tony said:

It was a great day and I particularly enjoyed catching up with a few people who I’d met at last year’s Digital Cream event. The support provided by Econsultancy and the Emirates Stadium staff was outstanding. I’d also like to say thanks to the head chef and his team for serving a fantastic lunch.

If you’d like to find out more about how the Fresh Egg team can help you with your digital marketing, or you’d just like to find out what we have to say about it, feel free to contact us.