14 Feb 2024
- 24 Feb 2023
Glass Digital delivers Digital Pathfinders SEO strategy workshop with Sunderland Software City
On February 22nd, Glass Digital’s Head of Marketing, Jen Macdonald, delivered an SEO workshop to local businesses looking to grow their online presence. The workshop was delivered through the Digital Pathfinders program, which aims to upskill North East businesses on their digital knowledge.
During the session, Jen covered how to develop and implement an SEO strategy into a growing business, focusing on different aspects of website optimisation and the importance of maintaining a strategy for business growth. The 3-hour workshop aimed to provide businesses with key information that they could take away and implement into their own strategies.
The event, organised by Amanda Potts, Digital Adoption Manager at Sunderland Software City, ran smoothly with lots of discussions, coffee, and sweet treats. Held in Newcastle’s Clavering House, the event was well-attended in person as well as streamed via Zoom for people to join the session remotely.
Feedback we received
The workshop was extremely well-received with great feedback from all the attendees — one even said, “it was the best workshop I’ve been to”! Jen asked participants to fill out an evaluation at the end of the session, with 100% of people stating they would recommend the workshop to a friend. Each reported that they enjoyed the workshop and found it ‘informative’, ‘insightful’, and ‘helpful’.
One attendee’s feedback showed that they had ‘discovered loads of great tools’ at the session, as well as ‘how to link-build and introduce digital PR’. Another stated that they learned what ‘hero campaigns’ are, while another now understands ‘the importance of SEO’. All-in-all, the comments were positive and showed that digital knowledge was improved across the board.
This is not the first digital skills workshop we have run — in October, Jen held a free live workshop for six local charities as part of our ongoing collaboration with skill-sharing charity Connected Voice, following a successful free training session for Friends of Jesmond Library earlier in the year.
What was included in the workshop?
In the session, Jen discussed the three main pillars of SEO:
She went into detail about what each means, the importance of each for rankings, and ways to implement them into your business strategy.
For technical SEO, she mentioned key technical aspects of a website to monitor to improve customer journey and increase search engine rankings, such as: site speed, crawling and indexing, canonical tags, duplicate content, thin content, structured data, URLs, and redirects.
During the content marketing section of the talk, Jen asked everyone to have a discussion around what they thought were the elements needed to enhance content for SEO, before going through different types of content, keyword research, online tools, and creating inclusive content.
Jen then went through the art of link-building and how this aids website rankings. She ran through some of the stand-out campaigns Glass Digital has delivered for clients, before asking everyone to discuss campaign/asset ideas they could create for their own businesses.
Finally, the group discussed developing an SEO strategy using the three pillars discussed, as well as how to use reporting to track optimisation efforts.
Overall, the workshop was a huge success, and we are happy to have helped growing businesses in the region develop their digital skills. If you have any questions regarding your SEO strategy or would like to discuss workshops with us, get in touch today. You can also keep up-to-date with all things digital by signing up to our free newsletter.
