 I'm quite nervous. I normally don't get that nervous while speaking. I've done it a lot. But today I am a bit. So I'm going to talk to you a bit about my journey. I run an SCA agency in the UK. We won 16 awards in the last two years, including best large SCA agency. Three years running at the European Search Awards. Don't worry. It's not all going to be bragging. Rwy'n meddwl y gallwch yn ei ddrightio. Wrath yma, gan yma, rydw i'r grwp o OmnicoMedia, ein gwerthu ran ymgwrs pa bylch yn ymdill i gwerthu ac yn ymddill bod dyma ond y wneud angen. Mae'r ddechrau yn rhaid o'r llei. Ac ydych chi'n dda i gydig am ar黎. Rwy'n meddwl chyfodd, gallwch a chyn ar gyfer cyfnod, rydw i'r cyfrifio'r trofwy rolled pan yn rhaid. Rydyn i'r ymbrannu tynnu o'n credu'r cynllun learning,は Layer 9 meant to learn about learning that I would like to share with you, maybe preventing you from doing the same mistakes. We have a very unique way of measuring results, o'r anodd o'r anodd. A bydd yma yna yma, o'r anodd y 2014, bod nid yw'r anodd yn cael drefnogi i fy hunain. Ac rydych yn ysgrifennu gweld gwahanol. A hefyd, ydych yn yw ddydigio i ysgrifennu Cymru enghraifftyn ysgrifennu, ein Llywodraeth Cymru, a'r ysgrifennu cyffredig yma yn gweld gwahanol, ac yma o'r prysgwrs, I'r proses yw'r gyda'r ffordd i ddarparu'r holl beth mae'r defnyddio ar ddych yn yr olyg i'r cyfros shipol oedd unig o hyd yn gweld yr olyg i ddyn nhw, yn cael ei hunod arfennig i ddim yn lle ei wneud i siaradeth i d disagreementol i ddim yn gweld ffyrdd yn gweld yr olyg i ddim yn gweld y cyfros shipol ac mae'r afnod lleon wahanol yn pawb'i cyfros shipol yn gweld eu hollaf gwneud. Firff ymlaenau golwyddon yn digwydd ymweld yn gweld i'ch cyfros shipol, a oedd絵ud i'r Yn 14, rydyn ni wedi i'n ddych chi'n gumud o'r farch 전 o'r farch yn LAC from Maccuss gan gennych, yn gwerthu, da wedi'i gweithio gweithio gwellod年erau, gyda'r ddweud o FFB yn chyrgyntau, rydych yn ddod. Rydyn ni'n gweithio gwaith, roedd yna yn iddyn nhw'n gweithio gweithio, dda swrdd ar y gyrdd y 2012-14. Mae gennych yn siarad yn teimlo eich gwaith gyda'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Y cwmddio am y cyfnod, yw'r cyd-dweud yma, dyma'r cyllidau cyllidau cyd-dweud yma yma, yn ddigon o'r ddweud yma, so rydyn yn golygu'r digon o dyma ym mhyself. Rydyn ni'n ffordd o'r cyd-dweud yma, rwy'n meddwl y bwysig, rydyn ni'n meddwl yw'r meddwl yma, y ddweud y bwysig o'r meddwl yw'r meddwl yw'r meddwl yw'r meddwl yw'r meddwl yw'r meddwl, in this vertical like travel is as high as 48%, 44% in 2018. That is a lot of links being sold, yet a lot of you and a lot of the industry in general use blogger outreach as the main method of link development. That's really really risky. The reason that that is really risky isn't necessarily that whether you are paying for the link. Let me just break it down like this. If you buy a link from a blog, you know that that's risky. If you don't pay for it, but that same blog charges someone else from a link, it's just as risky. And also let me put it this way. You might not pay for the link, you might get a blog link, and then a month later this blog starts charging for links. That's then risky again. So if your main method of link development is reaching out to these blogs, that is actually really risky. Not saying that blogger outreach can't be useful in loads of other things like branding etc, but in terms of link development I think it's actually really fruitless and also really, really risky. So in January 2015 we totally changed our strategy. I had a huge content team and that's why I called it. Most of it was people writing content and then reaching out, doing blogger outreach was a big part of what we did as well. But I closed that content team down and started something completely different. I would like to share a stat with you. This is the US stat. So 50% of all website traffic in the US goes to only 74 websites. That's 50% of all traffic goes to only 74 websites. Websites like this. Now it differs from country to country, but there are a few of them that I guess are repeated all over and over again. You probably can guess what kind of sites they are. But the point here is that if you actually target bloggers and their smaller sites, you're not likely to get traffic. Again, this is where I think a lot of us are missing the big clue. Targeting the big sites is what you can do to snowball, to get more than just that one link. Also, those sites are more likely to be a really high authority and give you more for your efforts. So we started creating campaigns that disturbed more than just the links, that disturbed to get the traffic, the social share and so on. So now the campaigns that we do for link development regularly gets print coverage, it gets radio coverage, even gets TV coverage. I work also regularly to get shared by high profile organisations, like my proudest moment was when NASA shared the piece we did for British gas. And also high profile figures. That is a more sustainable strategy. If you create campaigns that disturb more than just the link itself, not for SEO, and this is what Google have been trying to tell us for years, try not to do SEO, try to do great content. And that seems like such a simple thing. And you're like, yeah, yeah, whatever. But it's so difficult. I'm going to show you a few examples just so you can see that it doesn't need to be that difficult. So this is a campaign we did for a client in the UK called Party Casino. And as you might know, working in SEO, it's really difficult to rank for gambling terms. So what I think is really important when you come up with campaigns and stuff for SEO is that the idea needs to be the important thing. Don't try to do loads of other things like trying to sell the brand or sell the product. It's about ideas. So this idea was basically trying to analyse Hollywood movies and actors to try to figure out which actor is the most bankable, which actors gives the highest return on investment, for example, which is linked to gambling because it's about, it is pretty much gambling making a movie. So it isn't closely linked, but I think it's good enough and it is content that in content silos belong to a site like this. So the most surprising answer for this, and this is why it worked so well, was that Emilio Estavas turns out to be the most bankable actor of all time. That's right, mighty ducks. And that angle really, really worked. In fact, this was the first time ever we got the New York Post with the follow link. In fact, we didn't only get New York Post a link on the website, but we got coverage in the print paper on page three with mention of the client. We also got Fast Company and E News. And this is maybe the most surprising one is that we got a load of TV coverage. E News had a 10 minute segment where they printed out our campaign reading out stuff about what they found surprising, et cetera. Now, if an SEO campaign got that kind of TV coverage and that kind of additional coverage, do you think Google will deem it as dodgy? No, it's just marketing, but it got the follow links. In fact, it got over 165 links and over 6 million views. And it's not a rocket science campaign. It's not so incredibly creative and new and whatever. Use what you already know what to do. You know how to find data. You know how to crawl. You know all these things already. It doesn't need to be difficult. I also think that a really useful strategy to do for creative campaigns when you work in SEO is collaboration. So we work with a client in the UK called Lens Store, which is a contact lenses online. And we wanted to do a campaign which was really ambitious. And it was creating an image of London that was in huge quality. And we also wanted to do it as a time lapse throughout the night. So basically seeing it throughout the night and being able to zoom in to incredible detail. Like you can see here. You can actually see the clock tower in the far distance and you can zoom in. But we didn't have the equipment and the ability to do this on our own and neither did Lens Store. So we teamed up with Nikon and asked them if they wanted to collaborate on this project and also supply the photography equipment and the photography because we didn't have that. And they said, yes, people are really willing to collaborate. You just need to ask them, how's it? We also created some additional stuff like behind the scenes video stuff and gifts for Twitter, which have worked amazingly well. But I think the real kind of key in these kind of campaigns is not giving up when it gets difficult. Like we had loads of notes for this campaign, for example, the most difficult thing wasn't getting Nikon on board or even getting the links or anything like that. It was where to take the photograph from because we needed somewhere in London that could see pretty much everywhere of London and we needed permission from that building to use it. And we had, at one point, we had permission from all these buildings, Oxford Tower, the Gherkin and Heron Tower. But it all fell apart for whatever reasons and it turned out that this project took much longer than we thought. But the important thing is not to give up. This campaign just launched a couple of months ago, so we're still outreaching it. So far it's had 111 links from really high authority sites, including CNN. CNN, I believe, has one of the highest, biggest Twitter profiles in the US and so far 350,000 views. And that has made a huge impact on this client's rankings. Another one is a tip again to make the campaigns better. For Go Compare, which is a comparison site in the UK, we created a campaign looking at Hot Wheels, those cars that you might have had as a kid. It's very 80s. And we looked at how valuable those cars are now. But we don't have the knowledge. We don't have the authority on this. But there's people that are experts in anything on the internet. And this guy knows everything. In fact, he's written books about these. So we contacted him and asked if he wanted to collaborate and he was more than happy to collaborate because he's passionate about Hot Wheels. And so he gave us loads of content, he gave us loads of quotes and made this one of the most successful campaigns that year. It was the end of last year. And it's had 398 links and over 2 million views. Again, it's not difficult. It's a very simple premise and a very simple campaign. But the trick here is to work with an expert, is to collaborate with someone, is about finding that data that's surprising because what journalists are struggling with today is that they usually have like 15 articles they need to write a day. They want content, they're screaming for content. They just don't want your shitty infographic or your article that you already written for them. They didn't become journalists so that you could write the articles for them. Okay, so these campaigns are cool, but does it increase rankings? So Lens Store, which I showed you with the London Skyline campaign, after 12 months and five campaigns and outreach, their main term, which is contact lenses, have gone up from position 12 to position 2. So, yes, it definitely works. Part of Casino, which obviously in gambling is very, very competitive, went from position 33 to position 10 on first page. And that was in four months because that campaign did extremely well. Go compare, we worked with for years. They're a very competitive industry and this is obviously a big site. So that has had a 10% increase in visibility year on year. So this kind of strategy definitely, definitely works. And I tell people all over it, like I speak at conferences all over Europe and I tell them exactly what I do and why I do it. But people still don't do it and it's really frustrating. You can all do this. We don't need to do crappy work. We can all put our minds to doing something bigger, something better, and it will be much more worth it. So I often get asked like, how do you do this? What is the secret? How do you get BBC to link to you? How do you get NASA to link to you? And most of the time people think it's the tools that we use, which I think is a bit ridiculous because it's a bit like thinking that you can build a house by holding a hammer. It's not going to build itself. And the secret to this is actually people. And that's the main thing I want to talk to you about because that is entirely what has made Verve the business it is today. So I've recently got a mentor and my mentor, Margaret Heffernan, did a TED Talk. So I'm going to try to summarise this TED Talk because I think is a great example. So a guy called William Muir, a biologist at Purdue University, definitely not pronounced that right. He studied chickens. He studied chickens because he wanted to study productivity. And with chickens it's really easy to study productivity because you just count the eggs. And he did an experiment where he wanted to figure out how you could get more productivity out of these chickens. So he found that chickens that laid loads of eggs, he thought, I'm going to divide them all into a flock of super chickens. Chickens that are all really productive. So he put them in one flock and then he put another flock with completely average chickens. This sounds so ridiculous. And he studied them for six generations. Pretty much left them alone but certainly for six generations. What he found at the end was really interesting because he obviously thought that the flock with the super chickens would be the ones that would have done the best. But the average flock, who was completely average, they had done pretty well. In fact, they had increased their productivity over time. But the super chickens, there were only three left of them. They had all pecked each other to death because they had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest. And I think this is a typical kind of syndrome of any organisation where we think we just hire more talented people. If we hire talented people we will do better. It's a bit thinking like you have a football team or a soccer team full of strikers and you will get more goals. That doesn't work. You need to have midfielders and wingers to be able to pass the ball to you. In fact, the one thing that really makes an organisation successful isn't talent. It is teamwork. And that, I think, is a big part of how we become successful. And so I want to divide in a few sections like, number one, finding the right people. And I think a lot of people do this wrong, especially in our industry, because I think experience is kind of bullshit. Because if you think about it, in an industry like digital and an industry like SEO, it's not about what you knew last year or 10 years ago. It's about can you solve the problems with everything changes tomorrow? That is what is important. So hiring someone that were able to do SEO in 2005 is frankly stupid. Can they do SEO tomorrow? That's the main thing. So I think we need to think a little bit broader and we need to think a little bit more ahead. I also think that people, that we need to think more like SEOs do. The right people might not actually think to apply to your job. And that is because most people don't know what outreach accessibility is, or even what a link developer is. It might be the perfect person that can actually do that job amazingly well, but they would never identify with your job description. So what we do is we do what we always do. We will write lists of different versions of the same thing. So I tend to write different job ads with different titles for the exactly same job. And this has actually done me really well because a lot of the people that work at Verve applied for jobs that wasn't outreach or wasn't SEO, but was something more similar to what they were doing at that time. Because CVs are often a shortcut to missing talent. Because what is coming tomorrow is not what we've already been. And I think the most important thing to find in people is grit. Gris being a mix of passion and perseverance. I'm going to tell you a story about someone that works at Verve now. This guy, Andrew, he worked in a sports clinic, so like a back clinic in the town that Verve is. And I had done my back in. I had to go to this back clinic and he was the junior person that had to like hang out with me every time I was in this machine thing. And as I was talking to this guy I realised that he had so much else about him. Like he was a gamer and he was really interested in anything digital. But he's got into sports therapy because he was from a small town up north and that's what kind of everyone did. He didn't know that there was any other professions out there in digital that might have been exactly the right thing for him. So I started talking to him and realised that he would be really good at outreach, the way that he behaved, the way that he talked, the way that he thought really, really works for people that work really is the same as the people that are about team and outreach. So I asked him for his opinion on the campaign we were doing that was about gaming. So I said, why don't you come to the office and just give your opinion on this gaming campaign. So he did. As he came to the office he looked around and said, what exactly is it that you guys do? So I started explaining about what we do and he asked so many questions and he asked questions that only people in SEO would ask, that curiosity. That's like, well how does that work? And then ask again, ask again. A couple of hours later he sent me an email saying, I really want to work a verb. I have no idea what it really is but I really think that I could learn really fast. In five months this guy outperformed pretty much everyone in the team. He had results that was over 167% above his target and he had never even worked in an office. How many more talented people like this are we missing every day because we are looking at experience. We are looking at what they've done before or we are creating job ads that doesn't actually get the people that would be good at the job. I also think that it's about finding people that are different to you. In fact I know a lot of people say you need to find people that are smarter than you. Sure, but I think it's more important to find people that are different because that's where you get the real kind of creativity that lies in different perspectives. So my head of operation she's like the yin to my yang. We do this behavioural profiling testing called a disk. It's similar to Myers-Briggs. I know that a lot of people think that that's only fluff but I think that this is really important tool to use. Not necessarily whether it's right or wrong but it's quite good to see a trend in how people work. So my head of operation is literally the opposite to me and that is exactly what I needed. I needed someone that was good at the things that I wasn't good at and this has significantly improved the way that I work and the way that the agency work because we have different strengths. So using things like these kind of behaviour profiling tools can be really useful. Not for saying no I can't hire you because you're not extrovert. In fact I'm not saying that at all but it's really good to see how people fit together by their way of thinking. Then developing people is something I'm very very passionate about and I think the most important part of a growing agency that needs to be pioneering, that need to think about new things all the time is actually lies in not being agreeable. A guy called Adam Grant did a TED talk and written several books about this and I'm going to use that although I've changed all the references to Star Wars references which totally makes sense. So you know we all know the people that are disagreeable in an organisation that are disagreeable and will argue for anything but what is important isn't whether people are agreeable or disagreeable it's about what the intent is, why are they disagreeing and you can all probably think of someone that is disagreeable that are takers that only wants to get something out of it themselves which is obviously Darth Vader and these are quite easily recognisable. You can also quite easily recognise people that are the agreeable givers like anyone want to be Jar Jar Binks? Oh he's so annoying and but it's harmless right and there will be loads of people like that in any organisation but the really scary people are the agreeable takers. The agreeable takers they will smile to your face but they will stab you in the back and before you know it you're in Jabardir Hutt's basement. Thank God there's some Star Wars fun here but the really useful and important people to have in any organisation you need as many as these as possible are the disagreeable givers, the ones that are willing to disagree with you because they want to make it better. Obviously Yoda he will hit you with a stick but he will be for your own good and I really think that this is the most important part of growing and developing teams is teaching them how to disagree, how to ask questions. So I have a few things that I do some of them a little bit harsh and I do for this it's like encouraging people to ask questions like one of the things I do is sometimes when I hire loads of people at once and I'll put them in the room I will print out a piece of random articles maybe I think this one is about Native Americans from Wikipedia and I will ask them to read it and they will read the whole thing and at the bottom they said why the did you read this you didn't ask why you read it and this is a bit harsh I must admit but it does really shock them into start asking questions saying like why exactly do you want me to do this Lisa and I want people to question me too. Okay so you also need to show them the way I think this is also very under estimated so developing a comprehensive framework has made a huge difference so I know Ranna's talk about this loads doing things like single contributor and management track there's so many shit managers out there and that is because a lot of organisations hasn't got a way for people that aren't necessarily people people and managers to develop in their career so please make sure that you develop a track where people can still achieve even if they don't manage people and then make it very clear what they need to do in each step so I'm running out of time so I'm just going to carry on so I think the most impressive thing and most shocking thing that I've learned in the last five years has been what actually accountability is that you know that got thrown around all the time and I realised that the only thing that really develops accountability isn't developing accountability to whoever is at the top but it's trying to develop a kind of a bond and accountability through people that work alongside each other so I have a few things that I do a verb that really helps with this so anyone use Slack we have a Slack channel where we thank each other so this I've kind of stolen from a a I've stolen the idea from a tool but we have a Slack channel that basically is all about thanking each other for helping each other it could be the smallest little thing this has a huge impact I did one I've opened this channel did one time thanks someone and since then and I was like three years ago since then this has been going every day someone was thanking each other but the most interesting one and this one is the big one is that we have a thing called Love Week Love Week is basically you pick someone's name at the start of this week so it happens every quarter and you do something nice for this person every day for a week and it could be anything it could be like making them a cup of coffee it can make make them a playlist buy them a balloon but you have to do it in secret and we do this like everyone does something for someone and everyone receives something and we do this every day for a week and at the end of the week we reveal who our secret angel was etc and we've been doing this for three years and I was telling you at the start that we have this metric of being able to measure the the value of links and stuff that we use in our entire outreach team so I have done some data on this for the last couple of years and we have actually found that the only thing that increases performance is not pay rises or bonuses it is Love Week so doing something nice for someone and receiving and having that kindness between each other is the only thing that actually increases performance okay lastly so I think the real culture thing is when it grows organically this just started happening this year whereas someone at Verve came up with this idea of every time they got a link that was really high authority they would and they would give this little whale to that person and then this whale is passed to the next person that has got this really big link and it's based on Moby Deck apparently but this happens all the time and they get so excited being passed this tiny little thing and what I find really amazing about this is that I had nothing to do with this none of the managers had anything to do with this they just started it themselves and that I think is what culture really is when things happen organically so to wrap it up I just want to say that I think that the the main thing that you should do as managers as leaders and as SEOs is that you need to take care of people you need to take care of people around you and that is what then will take care of the results and that's a happy team that's all I got thank you