On Friday 13 April the 2018 DANI Awards were held in Whitla Hall at Queen’s University Belfast. Since 2018 the DANI Awards have celebrated the great work in digital done in Northern Ireland, and this year was the biggest event yet with more award submissions than ever before.
We were up for three awards and, with a shortlist full of great companies and exciting projects, we knew there was going to be tough competition in every category.
The one we most looked forward to was of course the Best SEO Campaign award. In an ever-changing industry where many agencies chase after the latest hype, we are unashamedly an SEO-only agency. It’s the one thing we do, and we try to do it as well as it can be done.
So we were very happy and honoured to win Best SEO Campaign and take home the prize!
It was an evening to celebrate – not only did we win, we also saw many of our friends in the Northern Irish digital industry pick up awards! Huge congratulations to the folks at The Tomorrow Lab, Digital 24, Loud Mouth Media, and Fathom, and especially to Emma Gribben for winning Young Digital Person of the Year!
(I interviewed Emma as part of my NI Digital Experts series, read her story here.)
We won the award for our work with TheSun.co.uk, and sometimes people ask what makes for an award-winning campaign. How do the judges decide what’s worthy of recognition, and are the winners really deserving of it?
I don’t usually share specific client results, but since this was such a great project to work on and has been written about before, I feel it’s okay to share a bit about this project.
Since the launch of the new TheSun.co.uk site in 2016, search visibility growth has been astonishing and the site has been going from strength to strength. This is what the Sistrix graph of an award-winning campaign looks like:
While I collected the award, it’s really for the combined efforts of everyone involved in SEO at The Sun. They are some of the smartest and most driven people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.
Lately many news sites have had to deal with significant algorithm updates from Google that had a profound impact on the industry. These are the types of challenges that I thrive on. Hopefully we can continue the site’s stellar growth and demonstrate the power of an all-encompassing approach to SEO.