A great night was had by all at the annual Brighton & Hove Web Awards last night. The awards are created and hosted by local charity the Sussex Community Internet Project (SCIP) and are part of the Brighton Digital Festival. The month long festival celebrates the city’s reputation as the UK’s leading hub for new media with the awards being one of the highlights.
We were once more proud sponsors of the event and with search at the core of our business we were delighted to be judging and presenting the ‘Leapfrogg Searchability Award’ for the forth year running. This special award highlights the prominence of search engine marketing for local website owners. The winning website, Visit Brighton, impressed the Leapfrogg team with pretty solid ‘on the page’ optimisation, high link popularity and some movement in to social media activity.
The latter has seen massive growth in the last year. To succeed online, every website owner needs to consider social media in their search marketing strategy. We certainly noticed a higher level of activity, compared to last year, in website owners participation in blogging and distribution of video content, for example; which is great to see.
We would like to add however, that although the standards improve each year, there is a great deal of room for improvement in certain areas, not just for the sites that did not make the shortlist but even for those that did! This reflects the fact the search marketing is an ongoing activity where resource needs to be dedicated to a wide range of disciplines. We therefore hope the award will help to raise awareness of the importance of search and inspire other companies, both locally and nationally, yet to invest their marketing budgets online.
As this once small, low-key event has continued to grow in size and status within Brighton & Hove so too has Leapfrogg. We first presented at the awards four years ago. In this time we have jumped from a team of two to 13, working with many small to medium sized business owners to realise their potential online.
One or two of those staff had rather sore heads this morning as a result of the complimentary wine! Ouch!!