Previously Mark Flanighan Managing Director of FOK Marketing delivered SEO training to private groups as well some public funded projects. However during 2009, all workshops were put on hold whilst the focus was put on rebranding ICS Learning and developing large lead generation sites.

The move to the Wilton Centre (ex ICI offices Redcar) now means that seo training can resume using the excellent facilities present here. The Wilton Centre offers rooms to suit very small groups to much larger ones, within its own theatre. The beginning of 2010 has seen more changes to the SEO world with Google Caffeine and of course the gradual development of search through 2009.  This means that strategy is becoming even more important to deliver Google rankings than ever before and so training is based around the same processes that FOK marketing use with their own projects.

SEO has become so complex, that you just can’t learn everything in a day, so the course is suited from beginner up to those with web experience, looking to trade locally with their websites and wish to be on the first page of the search engines.

The day starts with the theory and on page factors, then moves on to link building practices then a practical session, to recap everything taught using real examples and the websites owned by those attending. This means the learning’s can be applied directly to their own sites.

Refreshments are included, but there needs to be a minimum of 5 people attending for a course to go ahead. If anyone is interested in the day, the cost is £110 + vat to included lunch. Use the contact form to gain more details

Heh, what a great day this turned out to be! Ok didn’t quite like the breakfast workshops as the title of the workshop did not match the content but it got much better as the day went on.  Personal favourites were Robert Senior the CEO of  SSF (Saatchi Saatchi and Fallon), who explained that with great ideas people come to you, rather than you needing to push your message to them. Examples of their work included Cadbury’s drummer chimp and the recent T Mobile dancing in the station campaigns. I found this a bit like SEO, where people come to you via search term, looking for a service. Another key statement was how people buy with emotion, so marketing should be just about that, the emotions your target audience are likely to feel to a marketing campaign, get it right, its a winner, get the emotion wrong then back to the drawing board. For the record, Robert stated that Social Marketing was shit! Oh ok??

Collette Dunkley of X and Y reminded me that selling to women is totally different to selling to men and the figures quoted were outstanding. They have had success in the telesales market, where by changing the way they talked to women, increased sales by 43% or so. There is a real argument, that search engine optimisation and websites should be segmented in to male and female segments. An example is how men and women buy cars differently, a sector that FOK marketing is closely associated with, but had never realised the conversion rates we could get by focussing on the female view rather than just the men’s.

But it was Tim Smit who stole the show, not talking much about marketing and more about team creation and having real values, before you die. He was very funny and even though he apologised for not talking about marketing, you pretty much understood if he was talking about people that you were learning about marketing.

The day was finished off nicely for me with a private chat with Peter Cobley of I Spy. He was not shy and explaining the link building principles of Littlewoods and how they managed to get deep level links to their site, increasing revenues and search engine rankings. Really good stuff!!
Days like this are fascinating, and the fact it happened in the North East is a credit to Business Link who arranged it.