Last night we finally made it down to the regular SEOProSco event, a regular meet-up for SEOs (and anybody interested in SEO) held alternately in Glasgow and Edinburgh. SEOProSco only started about a year ago but the two man team behind it – Nick Duddy and Andrew Marshall – already have 7 events under their belts.
Last night’s event was held in the Summerhall TechCube and was attended by around 60 SEOs and online marketers from around Scotland, a pretty impressive turnout for a meetup that started out as a handful of SEOs in a pub.
A completely free event, the evening was sponsored by LBi, and kicked off with free beer and pizzas whilst the cameras and presentations were being set up. Whilst partly about networking and getting together with likeminded professionals, there’s also an element of learning involved and last night featured two speakers giving presentations on two very different topics.
First up was Jodi Mullen, an Outreach & Engagement Strategist from LBi. Jodi’s presentation was about using creative in SEO and focused on using creative content for successful outreach and engagement strategies. He ran through some good and bad examples of creative content LBi have used for outreach in the past, along with results and feedback, giving some real insight into what does and doesn’t work. It’s always interesting to see actual examples of client work in these situations and to hear what obstacles other agencies have had to get over in order to make creative outreach work for their clients.
Next up was Paolo Ciarocca, a developer with Yard Digital, introducing the basics of APIs. Paolo explained the basics of API requests (focusing on RESTful APIs), explaining how they work and showing how easy it was to interact with APIs. He didn’t go into lengthy detail about what could be done with the results afterwards – I expect that would have been too technical to be appropriate for the evening – but it certainly gave food for thought for anybody in the audience interested in development.
You can download Jodi’s slides from the evening here and view Paolo’s slides here. The presentations were also being filmed and we’ll add links to the videos here once they are available.
Overall it was an excellent evening and we plan on bringing more of the Serps Invaders team along to future events. There was interesting discussions on the night about scaling it up and doing full day events in the future which we think is a fantastic idea. It’s great to see an event like this in Scotland and encouraging to see its growth. Our thanks go to Andrew and Nick for doing such a great job organising them, here’s to many more.
