With 2023 branded ‘the year of SEO’, the search engine optimisation industry is gaining momentum, with over 90% of marketers planning to place more of their budget with SEO this year. But to the uninitiated, the discipline can seem more akin to a dark art than a credible career path. Imogen Jones, SEO Executive, took to the stage to explain why young marketers should be putting SEO on their list of career options.
Demystifying SEO for next-gen marketers
For years, the world of SEO was a bit of a strange place, And to some extent, it still is.
From SERPs to Spamdexing and trending topics around Chat GPT and SEO: the discipline is ridden with terminology that surrounds what is effectively making your website attractive to Google. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, this webpage has been ‘SEO’d’ in order to get you here in the first place).
But when it comes to understanding what it is, how it works, you can’t beat a practical demonstration. And that’s where our SEO Executive, Imogen Jones, came in to help, with a brilliantly confident session to a large group of aspirational 17 year olds, covering:
- The three pillars of SEO
- How SEO fits into the wider marketing mix
- What qualities you need to consider a career in SEO
Aspiration Digital 2023
Aspiration Digital is an annual event at Maidstone Grammar School for Girls, held by Reflect Digital. As part of her own career development path, Imogen Jones, sought opportunities to share her knowledge, and landed a guest speaker spot to talk about her career in digital marketing and more specifically, SEO.
What’s the event all about?
Aspiration Digital is a one-day digital skills conference designed to educate students on the different roles in digital and various career paths, and is aimed at media studies, business, computing, IT and marketing students. Imogen was part of the Marketing and Content stream, and was joined by Senior Paid Media Specialist Gary Monger at Reflect Digital. As a result, there were plenty of takeaways for the audience when it comes to aspects of digital marketing, whether that be paid media or SEO.
Our guest speaker – Imogen SEO Executive
So what did Imogen cover in her talk? Well, the main aim was to help inspire prospective students to consider a career in SEO, and more specifically to learn about how optimising for Google (ie. search engines) can influence overall brand visibility and traffic to a website. But more importantly, the event helped attendees understand the benefits of progressing SEO as a career.
Pulling on her own experience of working within a large SEO team, Imogen was able to provide her own real-life perspective on what it’s like to be part of this digital field. In just 20-minute session, Imogen was able to cover the core pillars of SEO: content, tech and local, bringing the talk to life through a screen recording to demystify the processes of analysing search engine results pages (SERPS), which in turn influence the search strategies that we deliver to clients here at the agency.
Imogen says:
“There’s so much to learn in SEO, whether it’s the technical route of being involved in new web projects to supporting local businesses with Google Business Profiles. After all, organic search remains the dominant source of trackable web traffic and the largest digital channel, making it a crucial part of any businesses’ marketing strategy.”
What did the audience think?
“They were brilliant”, says Imogen. “The attendees came across as really well engaged and eager to learn more, particularly when discussing how we work alongside web developers, and yes there were a few aspiring young web developers in the crowd!”
Why did Imogen attend?
“More than anything, I think it’s really crucial to have these conversations when you’re beginning to think about university, careers and life beyond GCSEs and A-levels. Even if we inspired only a few of those in the audience to think more critically about their longer term vision, then that’s time worth spending and makes the event that much more rewarding’.
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