This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series - feel free to nominate someone over here.
Aaron Dicks is only 27 years old but has been running his marketing company for over five years now. He lives in Nottingham, United Kingdom and has helped that region grow a community around SEM and digital marketing.
Although very young, Aaron Dicks has been very active in the industry. He routinely contributes content to industry publications. He is often sharing new information on Twitter. His young company was awarded the "Best Small PPC Agency in Europe" last year.
I personally do not know Aaron, but Laura Hampton nominated him and wrote:
Aaron has been instrumental in driving the digital community here in Nottingham forward and, as the head of a hugely successful digital agency, continues to inspire and enthuse digital professionals across the UK.He founded his digital marketing agency, Impression, back in 2012, at the age of just 22. Having employed much larger agencies himself whilst working for a national energy brand, Aaron, alongside his business partner Tom Craig, had noted that the work they got back as a client was often below the standard of what they felt their could achieve themselves, and lacked transparency or any real insight.
Impression was Aaron's answer to that problem, and continues to be built on a vision of building a world-class team of digital experts that delivers innovative, data-driven campaigns that genuinely (and measurably) impact their clients bottom lines. Impression's success is in large part due to that vision; we differentiate ourselves by simply being unique, and being the kind of brand with which others want to associate.
More than this though, Aaron has invested considerably, through Impression's resources, in the development of new digital professionals. He works closely with local universities to provide digital marketing advice to their students, has employed graduates into digital marketing roles and continues to share his own advice with other business owners, too. His dedication to furthering the digital industry, in Impression's own city and throughout the UK, is commendable and it is for this reason that I believe he would be well placed in an honours piece on Search Engine Roundtable.
Aaron Dicks Bio: Aaron Dicks is Managing Director of Impression (https://www.impression.co.uk), a UK search marketing and web development agency which was founded in 2012. Impression is award winning for its Digital Strategy and search engine marketing campaigns, and works with companies of all sizes, from funded startups through to SMEs and PLCs.
Favorite thing about the SEM community? My favourite aspect of the SEO community and industry is by far the people involved within it. Everyone's keen to further research, share content, publish insights, pass around recommendations and continually evolve the practise and theory of digital marketing. It's also a social industry, which makes conferences all that little bit extra fun!
One piece of advice to the SEMs out there? For new SEOs, I'd definitely recommend reading from a broad variety of publications. Unfortunately the industry still has a few bad actors, but equally, on the positive, there's a number of different opinions/practices out there which all work equally well so it's important not to dismiss alternatives for the wrong reasons.
For experienced SEO's/SEM's, it's definitely around brand building, for you and your employers. Keep pushing the industry, and make time to advocate and complete research. Give back at least as much as you get from the industry.
Favorite things in general? Monday to Friday I'm in work mode. You can't stop me developing internal tools or completing exciting work for our clients. Outside of work I spend time with my girlfriend, family and friends. I spend a fair amount of time socialising in Nottingham and London (UK), and love to travel. I try to get to Rock City as often as possible 🤘.
What you want to be known for in the SEM space? Technical SEO. I'm a developer by trade and love to get involved in technical SEO optimisations, crawl mapping, implementing CDNs and caching solutions etc. I'm still not afraid to get my hands dirty in PHP, Python, JS, etc.
You can learn more about Aaron at his company site and connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.
This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series - feel free to nominate someone over here.
