Last SEMcamp was glad to host several European keynote speakers, who made this conference an incredible event, among them were Kevin Gibbons, Adam Crawford, Bas van den Beld, Simon Dance and Jose Truchado. Promodo had great opportunity to talk to them.
Kevin Gibbons, UK Managing Director of BlueGlass Interactive
How do you like SEMcamp?
This is a pretty good event actually, good audience, good crowd, very nice people.
Would like to come for the next SEMcamp? What kind of presentation would you prepare proceeding from the audience you have seen here?
What I have found interesting is that I got a lot of questions about Chinese market, that wasn’t what I anticipated too much. Actually I know we started working for China in our team, hopefully, next time I will do a lot more and come back and report on, how is it going, it would be really good.
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Do you remember your first joy as SEO marketer, your first success in marketing?
Yeah, it was 10 years ago, I worked for web design agency, and I kind of play around with a lot of my SEO projects, and I was a student, I had a student web space, which basically means it was really easy to rank on Google back then, so yeah I was just playing around with my stuff. I had a project as part of University host, it was to create driving school website, and I managed to get it ranking locally for driving school terms and made a little of money of AdSense, Google AdSense, so it was a really good way to learn.
And then you thought that you would like to do this in future?
Yeah, I realized I could do it quite successfully for myself, maybe have clients I can help that have the same kind of problem, just take it from there.
How do you see the future of internet marketing and what would you advise to focus on to people who are involved in this sphere?
I think what focus on is kind what my talk was about – there is no longer SEO or anything done in solo – now it is actually a digital team and in a lot of cases marketing team offline and online integrated together. Certainly, where we are going is an agency, which is a lot more full-service supporting clients in everything they are doing in terms of online marketing. I think it is more bring everything together; I am probably focused more on bigger projects as opposed to individual SEO projects.
Do you agree with Bas point of view that first of all is to think about consumers and what interests them?
Yeah, of course, I think many people doing wrong by thinking about direct results in terms of “I wanna generate links”. And, naturally, if you think what your customers want, then you can think about how it can add SEO value and reference afterwards, you can’t normally get far wrong if you giving customers what they need.
Adam Crawford, Head of SEO atCheap Flights, Momondo Group
How do think, what is the biggest challenge in promotion of multilingual websites and how to handle this?
The biggest challenge I guess, I am not sure I can give a single answer, so let’s split into: The first is optimize your site, your code base with the single platform you can apply to every single market, and then the real challenge is to localize things, to promote the site in the way the most appropriate for each local market. So I guess the idea of having the single strategy for your own site structure and then localize approach for your offsite marketing.
How do you like SEMcamp so far? What topic would you like to talk about next time if come to us?
It’s been really interesting, I enjoyed all the speakers. What I really like to get out of the conference like this is to learn more about specialism of the people in a country. So I really enjoyed learning a little bit about SEO for Russian and Ukrainian markets.
Are you interested in SEO for Yandex, for example?
Absolutely, this is definitely something we would be interested in as the majority of our markets are very very Google centric, so Russian market with dominance of Yandex is something really important to us. So definitely more Yandex-, SEO-focus sessions would be of interest.
If there were no SEO, what kind of career would you choose?
That is a good question! I have no idea. Yeah, I used to want to be an architect before getting into SEO, so maybe something in architecture. Then would you live in London or go to some other city? I do like London, but have fun living in the mountains as well, so I split myself between big cities and mountains and countryside.
Thank you, Kevin and Adam!
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