In April 2016, Ocean Learning will be launching a new training company as a joint venture with Software Promotions Ltd www.softwarepromotions.com .

For many years, we have had clients ask for digital marketing courses and we have always declined, not because I don’t recognise the importance of such courses but because the market was always so crowded with self-proclaimed experts. I attended several courses to help build and develop my own Inbound Marketing Strategy and usually I was somewhat disappointed, either because the person running the course was simply talking through the theory (much of which I had read) or worse, was using the course to sell consultancy services (in which case they didn’t really have an interest in teaching us enough to solve our own problems).

Then I met Dave Collins. Dave runs a business called Software Promotions and they are the people who the Software Industry (550 businesses worldwide) trust to manage their SEO.

Dave Collins

I first met Dave a few years ago when I was speaking at the Business of Software Conference in Boston. In fact, I heard about him long before I met him. Several delegates at the conference were talking to me (at different times) about sales and how to convert inbound sales leads into customers. During the course of the conversations, they mentioned Dave and his team as being the only people in the business that they wanted to manage their SEO and their Awards campaigns.

When I finally met Dave. I found that not only was he super knowledgeable about SEO, but that he was passionate about helping businesses grow. I learned more about SEO over an (admittedly long) breakfast at the conference, than I had on all previous courses.

For the last couple of years, I have been trying to persuade Dave to share his knowledge and experience with a wider audience and we finally started to work on the idea  in the summer of 2015.

It is hard to get time in Dave’s diary because his clients demand a great deal of his attention, however, the more we talked, the more we realised just how useful an SEO course could be for business owners and marketers.

• The principles of ‘good’ SEO apply across all industries and markets. Equally, the most common mistakes can impact negatively on any business.

• The best way to learn and understand SEO is to apply the lessons learned immediately to your own business. The theory is useful, but what really matters is making changes to your site that actively drive more traffic (customers) your way.

• The nature of SEO, or rather the way it has been perceived as highly technical, complex means that many businesses are tempted to either ignore it and hope for the best or to farm it out to third party experts and hope that they know what they are doing.

• Organic Search is crucial to all businesses who seek to attract customers on the web.

• We know that people trust organic search more than paid advertising on Google. We also know that most people will not look beyond the first page of the search listings.

• Business Owners must take SEO seriously and whether they do it internally or hire someone to do it for them, they must have an understanding of how Google rank businesses and what they can do to come higher in a search.

In April 2016, we will be launching Smart SEO Training. Our business aim is simple – we want to empower business owners to be able to make better decisions about SEO and to help them get more web traffic.

We also want anyone coming to a Smart SEO Training Event to have the very best learning experience.

Dave and I have worked together to combine his 16 years of SEO experience with my 20+ years of training and development experience to create a workshop that will engage , entertain and educate. Most importantly, it will provide you with real value by;

• Demystifying the SEO process and explaining the most important parts in clear, simple, actionable language.

• Running a workshop rather than a lecture. We encourage you to bring your laptops and to work on your own website strategy throughout the day.

• Showing you the most useful SEO tools available to you and how to use them.

• Helping you to create an SEO action plan for your business.

I want to stress that all our courses (there are a whole range in the pipeline) are aimed at the business owner and marketing professional. We do not train SEO agencies, nor will we ever pitch for your SEO business. Our business is empowering entrepreneurs to grow their own business.

Dave has published a really useful primer, “SEO for the rest of us” that you can download here www.smartseotraining.co.uk/the-seo-book 

You can find our more about our courses here www.smartseotraining.co.uk