We’re delighted to have won both Best Small SEO Agency and Best Use of Search in Finance at the European Search Awards last week.
The UK and European Search Awards are hugely competitive and to be shortlisted alone is an honour to be in the top tier. We’re very proud of the work our team has put in to win both of these awards, taking us to the grand total of 15x Search Awards wins!
Best small SEO agency in Europe
The winner of Best Small SEO Agency is @re_signal. Well done! 🤩 #EUSearchAwards
— European Search Awards (@eusearchawards) June 20, 2019
This sounds great to be able to say, especially as we’re doing a lot more work with global clients on multilingual projects (including working with ASICS as their European SEO agency), plus it follows nicely from winning the best small SEO agency at the UK Search Awards in 2017 and Best SEO Agency at the 2018 UK Agency Awards.
It’s never been our goal to be the biggest agency out there, but we always strive to be the best we can be.
I love the analogy from Simon Sinek on how money isn’t the goal, it’s the fuel. I couldn’t agree with this more. We need to make money from our work to do more of it, but the very reason we have an agency is to serve our clients and produce excellence in our work to drive the real business results they deserve.
Our vision over the next 3-5 years has nothing to do with aiming to get bigger. It has everything to do with getting better.
Best use of search in finance
What a night! We are very proud to be chosen as Best small SEO agency and won Best use of search (finance) at @eusearchawards in Budapest!🥳 #EUSearchAwards #seo #contentmarketing #searchawards pic.twitter.com/dZFCWyZIEs
— Re:signal (@re_signal) June 21, 2019
Our key client sectors are travel, retail and finance, so it’s great to now complete the perfect hat-trick of awards in each of these categories. WorldRemit has been a fantastic client of ours for nearly 2 years now, and in that time we’ve achieved significant organic growth with our technical SEO and on-site content production, which is fantastic to be recognised amongst industry peers against such strong competition.
The most important thing is to delight our clients. One of our core values is to “be proud of your work”, providing we have complete alignment in our goals, achieving award-winning results certainly allows us to achieve this.
Are industry awards important?
I can’t answer for everyone, and they’ll always be mixed views on this – but having been involved on both sides (I also judge the US / MENA Search Awards, DADI Awards and The Drum Content Awards), I can 100% say that these events are held with unquestionable professionalism.
Should you enter every award? Absolutely not. You could probably go to an awards night 5 nights a week if you really wanted to!
I respect anyone’s decision in not entering awards, they can become very expensive in both time and money, and you’d rather focus on doing great work for your clients. However, my view is if you’ve done the hard work already, this is the reason you probably should enter.
I’ve written before about how I run an agency, but spend less than 10% of my time on marketing is a good thing.
We used to focus a large percentage of time on our own marketing, speaking, blogging, media interviews etc… I think these are important, but do less of each myself now. For the key reason that there’s no point looking amazing publicly, and not being able to deliver on your promises.
For us, the key has been first and foremost to do great work to delight our clients. That helps us to retain and grow with them, it leads to more word of mouth referrals (we still have zero sales people!), it builds strong case studies and future award entries.
Awards can bring huge benefits; it’s rewarding for both the team and client to be able to put their name on award-winning work, it can secure additional buy-in, and attract key talent / new clients via increased reputation.
Plus it’s always good to aim towards delivering award-winning work to keep us on top of our game.
