Although I sell my sites as being SEO friendly: I do not sell myself as an Search Engine Optimiser. There’s a lot of crossover in what I do when it comes to performance optimisation of WordPress, and more and more of my days has been spent making Yoast’s SEO plugin dance to the tune of the current head of SEO at the time, but it’s a huge discipline, and things like strategy, curation and general marketing is not my skillset. I can offer an opinion, but by and large the strategy is best left to other people.
Nevertheless, I’ve kept my fingers in the SEO pies, and have a lot of friends and colleagues in the community. So when Whitworth SEO announced Hive MCR last year, I was excited….until I looked at my calendar and I was double booked. Nevertheless when it got announced that it would come back in 2025, I made sure that I was able to attend.
Morning sessions: technical SEO & reinforcement
I arrived and after breakfast in a nearby cafe, I sat down in the bar waiting for the venue to open. I saw some long term marketers and had conversations that already provided me with a spring in my step and inspiration that was worth the price of the (free) admission.
That was reinforced with the first talk from Kirsty Hulse’s “Herding Cats and Hitting Goals: How to Focus, Build Confidence, and Stay Calm in Chaos”. Kirsty’s talk was incredible, full of energy and if she is on any speaking lineup then make sure you see her. She gave a much needed pep talk to 150 folks on how to feel more confident and focus more in work. It was full of actionable insights, and some of those insights were put into action within a day when I launched my side project Gone Fission!. The launch has been excellent for the past 24 hours (it’s already my most played game on itch), and a lot of it’s success is due to a confidence boost that Kirsty gave 24 hours earlier. Go see her.
The rest of the morning was taken up with technical SEO insights. It had moments Michael King’s “The End of SEO As We Know It” shared a slide that I really want to turn into a WordPress plugin, and talked about how SEO has changed and how they can get involved in brand budgets. Barry Adams had two great moments for me: his standalone talk “Managing Googlebot’s Greedy Tendencies; Optimise for Efficient Crawling and Indexing” was a wonderfully nerdy journey into how Google crawls your site, lots of discussions on status codes and how it crawls the site. He also was the highlight of the Tech SEO panel was answering a question from an SEO who – when asked what to do when the developers wanted to render client side – responded with “Fire your developers”. It’s something I’ve seen a fair few times: perfectly good WordPress sites being torn down and replaced with some JavaScript monstrosity that never ranks as well. So much so that leaving that talk I had a revelation which is best explained in meme form.
Afternoon sessions: more authenticity & insights (with some hallway tracks)
The majority of the afternoon sessions were dedicated to Digital PR, which – whilst important – isn’t quite as useful for me, so the majority of the time was spent in the hallway track (which was located on the beer garden of the bar downstairs): connecting with the SEO Community, chatting and making connections. Nothing really bloggable as client names were shared but a much needed connection time with fellow freelancers and agency owners.
There were highlights. Aleyda Solis’ “AI Search: Where Are We & What Can We Do About it?” was a data-driven whirlwind into SEO and AI Overviews and how you can get your site involved. The day ended with Lisa Paasche “The Neuroscience of Authenticity – How Being Authentic Makes You More Successful”. Another fascinating talk on how she grew a business on authenticity, and played to her employees strengths. It’s something that connected with me and I’m planning on creating a vision board based on what she said. I do try and be authentic (I believe people buy from people, rather than algorithms), and made lots of notes to try and be more authentic and connect with folks.
A much needed tonic for the tech industry
The after party was great, the top floor of YES, with some pizzas and a range of drinks (they even had non-alcoholic rum which has been my discovery this year!), which allowed for future connections and chatting with folks. Getting the second-to-last train home I left re-invigourated from the day. Being a freelancer can be a lonely experience and you feel at times disconnected and you’re facing struggles alone. Events like Hive provide opportunities for the community to connect again, which can be a great re-enforcement that you are all in this together.
It had the odd issues: the chairs were uncomfortable for long periods of time for example, and a few more breaks would be welcome, but overall it was great event. I do like single track events because there is no paralysis by choice too! Well done Charlie, and I encourage you to all go next year.