At the beginning of September, Reed Exhibitions contacted me about a public speaking opportunity at Online Retailer Roadshow in Brisbane which came about via Dan Petrovic of Dejan SEO.
The one day conference went off without a hitch and Reed Exhibitions should be commended on finding such as a great list of speakers for the event. I really enjoyed the presentations from Faye, Steve and Josh – they are all doing some really interesting stuff:
- Faye Ilhan
Head of Online – Dan Murphy’s
- Steve Toth
Director of Omni-Channel & Mobility – Dick Smith Electronics - Joshua McNicol
Head of Marketing – Temple & Webster
The suggested topic for my presentation was great SEO tips for 2014 that’d genuinely help the attendees run a better online business and hopefully make more money online.
Given that the conference was specifically about online retailing, I focused a lot of my tips and suggestions on taking care of common issues with ecommerce product websites, website performance so users don’t have to wait for the site to load, producing great content that outpaces your competitors, link building and a couple suggestions around leveraging rich snippets and advanced social sharing implementations such as using Twitter Cards for example.
This was my first public speaking engagement with an audience of over 100 other professionals. I was quite nervous listening to the other presenters and watching the clock ticking down to my start time but once I got onto the stage – that disappeared and I think I did quite well. Two things I’ve learned out of the experience, speaking to a time allocation is an art – I went over my 30 minute limit and there is an impressive amount of time & effort required to produce the incredible slide decks you see on slideshare – for which I am left wanting but will definitely improve upon for my next presentation.