I’ve worked in SEO for almost 20 years and enjoyed many SEO meetups in my time.
Most have been in Australia with a handful in Dubai.
I’ve been in Dubai for over 10 years and have been to a lot less than 10 SEO gatherings here.
I had high hopes for many of the groups that exist – I figured as SEO awareness would grow in the region, so too would our meetups.
This has not been the case.
I’ve seen fewer SEO jobs in the market and SEO is still underappreciated and misunderstood.
So this is what prompted me to start an SEO Club for Dubai based professionals.
This is why DubaiSEOClub.com exists!
My idea was to forego the more structured, expensive meetups and get people together organically, much like our work in SEO.
Get together wherever, whenever. Come if you can, don’t come if you can’t!
Sure, there’ll be a need for some kind of regularity and structure as things grow but for now, its quite casual.
We had 1 meetup with 15 people and it started late, went on for longer than expected but everyone had fun and we learnt a lot.
The transient nature of Dubai means its quite tricky to build communities that endure – but not an impossible task. I wish I had done this sooner but hey, better late than never.
Ideally, Dubai SEO Club is for Dubai based folks working in SEO. But in true SEO fashion, I’ve gotten requests to join from people outside of Dubai (I’m ok with people being in the UAE) but there’s people from all over the world and in non-SEO related fields wanting to join.
This must be what it feels like to be a recruiter these days – all sorts of unqualified, irrelevant applications flooding your inbox!
For now, Im prioritising Dubai/UAE SEO folks but will open it up to others (we initially had it open to everyone but started getting spammers).
Let’s see how this goes. I dream of a great big SEO conference in Dubai like BrightonSEO.
One day!
