Top Marketing and SEO Professionals speak at Ungagged 2015

The Rundown of the event and what I learnt

Wow, what an experience I had at Ungagged, an SEO conference to top them all! 3 days of pure information can be a total overload for some, but I found it so exciting. The speakers and the charged atmosphere of 300 individuals who couldn’t believe the juicy hints and tips we were learning, made this the best investment I’ve ever made!

I took down 15 A4 pages of notes and armed with links to the slideshows, I couldn’t wait to get home and start putting things into action. Us attendees knew the power of the information we learnt because none of it can be found anywhere else online! We learnt the behind the scenes running of multi-millionaires businesses, the nitty gritty and the real results of their work for clients. Below I have given highlights to the talks and provided the twitter ID’s so you can connect with the speakers.

The Speakers and the Subjects Day 1

Marcus Tandler | Co-founder of OnPage.org | Twitter: @mediadonis

Marcus kicked us off with a mind-blowing talk on the rise of the machines, that is the AI’s (Artificial Intelligence) of today and the future. What made it so interesting? Marcus had made similarities in the science fiction films of our time and the present day creations from Google and the tech that we never thought imaginable! So Terminator, Back to the Future and Star Trek come to mind! In-depth information went deep into the factors Google is gathering at speed from everything we do which had us in silence by the end……I guess we were gob-smacked!

Bastian Grimm | Founder of Peak Ace | Twitter: @basgr

Bastian blew me away with the actual website coding we can all use to make our sites MEGA fast and we know that Google finds this key to ranking your sites in the top 4 positions! The talk was very intense but because he’s a whizz, Bastian brought it down into manageable sections to rocket your website not only with code but also CDN’s and for WordPress, the best plugins to use.

Matthew Woodward | Owner of MatthewWoodward.co.uk | Twitter: @MattWoodwardUK

The title of the talk was ‘How To Build a 6 Figure Blog’ which included everything you needed to know on marketing, SEO and building a list of subscribers that actually engage users on a regular basis. Matthew highlighted throughout the mantra of KISS and giving your audience value. Not only did we receive a step by step approach from the inside of his business but also the emphasis of treating everyone like humans and not just a number!

Murray Newlands | Founder of InfluencePeople | Twitter: @MurrayNewlands

With an impressive background of writing for Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com and VentureBeat and published work for the likes of The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Forbes etc., we knew we were getting the hints and tips from an established public relations individual. Cutting the fluff, he told us how to really get PR and how to make it work by building relationships with journalists.

The next speakers were the highlight of my SEO life, I could of fainted if I didn’t have my professional head on!

Kaspar Szymanski & Fii Wiese | Founders of SearchBrothers | Twitter: @filiwiese @kas_tweets

These guys are like royalty to us online marketers due to their long employment in the Google webspam and search quality team as well as Google webmaster outreach and communications. It felt like we were at a press conference, image below, and some things had to be a secret due to Google’s NDA. We all got to ask our questions and I even piped up on the microphone to ask mine. I asked “Can Google penalise a website, like an SEO company, if they feel like it?” and they answered no, phew!

SEOktoberfest All Stars Panel; Marcus Tandler, Bastian Grimm, Aleyda Solis, Murray Newlands, Kaspar Szymanski & Fii Wiese

This was our chance to find out what really matters for SEO in 2015 and the future by asking the questions that mattered to us. The factors that were mentioned throughout the whole event were clarified here. It’s all about user experience and on mobiles too, the speed of your website, providing value, being sticky, solving your user’s problems and exceed them! Links ARE staying because that’s how the worldwide web works!

You can see how a ticket at $895 was sooooo worth it!

Day 2 of the event

Joe Sinkwitz | Chief of Revenue at CopyPress | @CygnusSEO

A refreshing and funny start to a Sunday morning with Joe dressed up as spam! The insights Joe gave into the world of hackers and spam definitely opened our eyes to the potential threats online and how to ramp up security in areas you never thought possible!

Matt Beswick | Co-Founder of Aira | @MattBeswick

Another exciting highlight of the event because we all like gadgets and software that gives you the shortcuts! Lots of interesting data, left my jaw gaping, thinking of the potential uses of API’s and automation that will save me weeks in research and ultimately save my client’s money. One interesting point to mention here is that its all above board and the clincher service I will definitely be using is Google Surveys!

Ruth Carter | Owner of Carter Law | @rbcarter

You could say Law is boring but not if you could get killed by just blogging! Yes, you can be sued, fired, arrested or killed by writing the wrong thing in the wrong Country/State even if you don’t live there! If you are travelling and writing a blog, do check the rules of the country you are visiting. We learnt about the important but mostly overlooked factors of running your website or blog.

Another exciting speaker next, he had my full attention throughout and the brilliance just oozed out of him!

Akiva Ben-Ezra | Owner of Ben Ezra Marketing | @akivadbenezra

YouTube optimisation instructions on hyper-drive! We learnt all the tools, tips and tricks to making some serious money through ranking, ads, powering traffic and Facebook videos. I had to write my notes very quickly because Akiva is THE authority in optimising YouTube!

John Limbocker | CEO of Limbo Vision Inc | @JohnLimbocker

Famously known for teaching SEO via his online courses at SEO Dominator’s Club, there was plenty of talk prior, that he was someone to watch. John gave advice on what SEO holds for 2015 and beyond and not like anyone else, he has made a tool for everything as the solution. “Brand is the big deal” in search and he called it cloud cover, “fake it till you make it!”.

UK royalty next lol!

Lukasz Zelenzy | Head of Organic Acquisition of uSwitch.com | @LukaszZelezny

Google Analytics was broken down and evaluated to really drill into the hidden data the big companies use. Lukasz showed us how to forecast traffic and understand how to calculate the real bounce rate, really interesting view on what we all take for granted as gospel. Social media and SEO insights on where to be and how to use it as a brand and to talk to the right audience.

Day 3, the last chapter!

Evo Terra | Digital Strategist | @evo_terra

Wow, Evo and his wife have the most amazing life travelling the world together whilst working! They sold everything to embark on their journey. The title of the keynote was ‘Disrupting Complacency – It Only Works Until It Doesn’t’ and he nailed it! One fact Evo quoted that leaves you reeling – Google made $17,300,000,000 billion in revenue last quarter!

Paul Bongers | Senior Manager Business Development at Searchmetrics | @BongersP

Through some of the advice Paul gave, this was the reason I have written this post the way I have. He had some case studies that impressed us all on giving the reader as much information as possible to score better in search results compared to the performance of eHow, which has lost out in most of their previous rankings. eHow has so much content on the same keywords/subjects that their relevance has lost out so Pauls’ advice was to merge topics and explore it in-depth on one page.

You can see how info packed this event was, SEO is my passion. The t-shirt wasn’t rocking it for me so it’s Gav’s!