Friday 25th February was a day that Dena, SEO Manager at Equity Digital had marked in her diary for months. The Women in Tech SEO Festival 2022 – a full day of being surrounded by inspirational women in the industry, imparting insightful knowledge in 10 talks across the day. In this blog, she shares her experience of the day.
SEO is a fascinating industry, and it is also surprisingly diverse. However, as is often the case in other sectors, conferences and talks are dominated by men. Twitter and LinkedIn is much of the same, with male voices being amplified. Being a woman in SEO can feel quite isolating at times, especially having worked in very male dominated agencies throughout my career.
Although never having faced discrimination at Equity Digital, and only being treated with the upmost of respect, this has not been the case in previous agencies and is not uncommon among other women in the industry.
When I first discovered the Women in Tech SEO community a few months ago it was amazing to see so many women from so many walks of life uplifting and helping each other navigate SEO, which is sometimes gatekept by those male voices I mentioned above. I did not have a typical journey into SEO, working as an Event Manager for many years with social and website marketing under my belt until I stepped foot into Digital PR and then realised my real value was within SEO.
Because of this unconventional path into the industry, becoming a part of the Women in Tech SEO community was my only link to other women working within SEO, and I had never even met any of them.
Being a women-only space, the WTSFest is dedicated to providing a safe, harassment-free space for women to learn and network. From the minute I stepped foot into the Barbican on the Friday morning I felt safe, secure and welcome by the community. The day kicked off with coffee (of course) and pastries in the beautiful Garden Room, and a chance for me to speak to some of the other attendees and a couple of the speakers.
The day of talks was split up into 4 parts: Analyse, Advance, Innovate and Empower.
Analyse had great talks on gap analysis, content and profile pages, by 3 amazing speakers; Lidia Infante, Rejoice Ojiaku and Crystal Carter.
All 3 talks were so good I’ve already re-capped through the slides! Crystal’s talk in particular was really useful and a brand-new way of thinking for me on how to approach profile pages – and she was lovely when I caught her for a chat later on.
After a quick coffee break in the beautiful surroundings of the Garden Room in the Barbican, it was back to Advance talks, with the excellent Roxana Stingu and Aleyda Solis – two really practical and useful talks – I read Aleyda’s email newsletter every week so it was great to get to hear her impart knowledge in (virtual) person.
Lunch break complete, next up was my personal favourite section of the day (although every talk was brilliant)- Innovate – with Paige Hobart, Lazarina Stoy and Miracle Inameti-Archibong. As a non-coder I was slightly sceptical ahead of time as to how I would be able to implement the subjects of these talks, but I came away feeling like a fog had cleared and my standout talk of the day was Miracle’s wisdom on how to speed up alt text generation with Python.
The day ended on a high with Empower by Lou Chiu and Shannon McGuirk – it was lovely to leave having gained all that knowledge and a newfound confidence too!
Overall, the day was really well organised and laid out (big thanks to Areej Abuali for organising) and I can’t wait to see everyone again at the next conference!