Want to meet other people interested in SEO offline? Give an SEO meetup a go.
In my experience, it’s one of the best ways to meet like-minded people and provides a more relaxed, informal setting than a bustling
If you don’t live in a big city, it may be difficult to find a good meetup, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any in your local area.
Here are my tips to help you find new meetups near you.
Tip 1 – Use Google’s advanced search operators to uncover new meetups
As new meetups pop up all the time and often without notice, it’s worth doing some digging to see what’s out there.
You can just do a regular ol’ Google search, but we’re SEOs—so let’s use some advanced search operators and spice it up a bit.
In this example, I searched for the phrase “meetup” in the title, plus my location and my favorite SEO tool, and it managed to uncover Tim’s tweet on our London Meetup.
This is just a very basic example, and you could use any website or location, but it shows how you can uncover information about new meetups with a little research.
Tip 2 – Trigger the Events SERP feature
By searching for events or events near me, you can trigger the Events SERP feature. In the example below, I found a few SEO-related events by prepending “SEO” to the search.
Once you’ve triggered the feature, scroll down until you find an SEO meetup that catches your eye.
Tip 3 – Use Meetup to find an SEO meetup
If you can’t find anything on Google then it’s a good idea to run a quick check on a specialist community platform.
One of the most popular platforms is Meetup. It allows you to find events near your location on any topic.
Over the years, I’ve attended a lot of smaller meetups through this website, and they have always been interesting and a place to make new connections.
Tip 4 – No SEO meetup in your area? Start your own!
I started my own mini-meetup in 2018 on WhatsApp with some former colleagues, imaginatively titled #seodrinks.
It started from humble beginnings in a room in a small pub in London, and it’s still in a room in a small pub—somewhere in London. (If you want an invite, let me know on LinkedIn.)
We only have semi-regular meetups in London and a small group, but every meetup has to start somewhere.
If you want to start your own SEO meetup, platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram are the best free places to start, but if you want a more specialized paid option, you could try Meetup or another similar platform.
Final thoughts
You don’t always have to attend a big SEO conference to meet other amazing people in the industry. Some of the smaller meetups I’ve been to have resulted in making more contacts than the bigger conferences.
As such, SEO meet-ups are one of my favorite ways to meet people who are just as interested in SEO and marketing as much as you are.
Did I miss an SEO meetup? Add your SEO meetup here, or let me know on LinkedIn.
