Are you lucky enough to have got yourself a ticket to the highly anticipated Brighton SEO conference this April? If so, congratulations you're in for a real treat!
Brighton SEO is a free conference lead by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility. Twice a year hundreds of SEOs from around the country descend on the seaside town to the Brighton Dome. The conference invites many guest speakers on an array of SEO and digital marketing subjects. September was my first experience of the conference. We think the one-day, free conference is perfect for young, aspiring SEO's and in order to prepare you for what to expect I've carried out a short recap on the speakers and highlights from the September conference.
Predatory Thinking - Dave Trott (@DaveTrott)
This was one of my favourite talks of the day, it harked back to my University days and really dismantled advertising back down to the basics.
Some key points I took away:
- On average each person receives around 1000 advertising signals in a day.
- We've become incredibly good at filtering out these signals with 90% going completely unnoticed.
- Never lose site of your target customer, the media and channels change all the time but the only constant is the people.
- If you can't explain your marketing model to an 11 year old it's too complicated.
- All advertising decisions should be made considering the following 3 steps:
- Impact
- Communication
- Persuasion
- Keep your message simple, but different, and it will get noticed.
- Targeting the opinion formers within your industry and getting them interested in your message and they will do the rest of the work for you.
Do You Speak Brand – Anthony Mayfield (@amayfield)
Anthony's talk really resonated with me when he spoke and BrightonSEO, he looked at the shift that is affecting the SEO community at the moment, the shift towards techniques that are used and work on all advertising formats.
Main points from his talk:
- SEO is now more about creating the content that your user wants, the time of black hat and white hat techniques are over.
- Techniques should be measured under a wider umbrella, looked at as a single marketing effort.
- SEO is now Brand Marketing.
- SEO is a great way to target the customer at every stage of the buying cycle.
- SEO is earned media.
Speaking Your User's Language – Stephanie Troeth (@sniffles)
Next on stage was Stephanie, who took us away from the technical side and focused more on user experience, language used and what makes websites clickable.
One of my favourite quotes from the conference included her “the only way you will know what to say to your audience is if you listen first”.
Key takeaways:
- Speaking your audiences language is very important. She showed us examples of how changing the working of a CTA button to evoke emotion rather than rationality can massively improve click through rates.
- Too much information on your homepage will overload the user and damage their experience.
- User listening methods:
- Analytics
- AB Testing
- Interviews
- Focus Groups
- Surveys
- Language is: Voice, Placement and Tone.
How to make friends and influence robots – Martin Belam (@MartinBelam formerly @currybet)
Martin has extensive experience working in SEO and User Experience within the Journalism sphere. During his talk, he explained how a lot of people outside the industry feel SEO is not important, this is of course wrong, however, its vital to never lose sight of user experience.
- Write your headlines (and title tags) for users not robots.
- You cannot control the context of your headline should it get shared.
- How do they look in isolation? Are they still clickable?
- Don't bother with page rank sculpting – its a red flag to Google and is asking to be punished.
- Navigation, Navigation, Navigation.
- Ultimately if you make your easy to navigate and relevant for humans, you will be rewarded by the Googlebots.
Chasing the Algorithm: Smart SEO or Hopeless Effort? - Rebecca Weeks (@BeccyWeeks)
Drawing on experience from work her and her agency carried out for a client. Rebecca's case study revolves around improving rankings and visitor numbers of a website using off-site SEO tactics only. In a post Penguin and Panda world this threw up some interesting finds.
What she found in this challenging task:
- Links from local sites with location based anchor text work very well.
- Going back and amending (varying) anchor text on current links had a positive effect against penguin. Albeit only for non-toxic links.
- If SEO best practices are not available, it might not be a job worth taking.
- You're going to be constantly playing catch-up if you are trying to beat the algorithm.
API? WTF? - Tom Anthony – Taken by Will Critchlow (@WillCritchlow)
Tom wasn't able to take this presentation to fellow 'Distiller' Will Critchlow stood in.
Will takes us through how traditional we used to search, find and click on a search result and be taken to a web page. Now, especially in some verticals, we needn’t even leave the SERP before we've gathered all the information we need.
20 years ago: The internet was just text with no formatting or images
15 years ago: Images were added and used widely
10 years ago: Starting to resemble what we know now. Most websites still basic and users spending around 40 minutes a day online.
In the next 10 years: Actual webpages accessed in relation to information gathered will be reducded as Google API's and Siri type programs will gather the information for us.
The issue facing these API's and what context we mean when we search. We need to open up our websites to the semantic web and mark-up with schema.org.
How to be a better SEO – Richard Baxter (@RichardBaxter)
Next on stage was Richard from SEOGadget, discussing how to stay on top of our fast moving industry and be the best SEO you can be.
His tips on bettering yourself as an SEO:
- Decide what your goals are.
- Have a mentor.
- Love what you do.
- Learning how to pitch yourself to clients is vital.
- Think about peoples perception of you.
- Never stop learning.
- Learn something new every week.
- Self-management is key.
- Move out of your comfort zone every now and then.
- Make yourself indispensible.
- Have your own website, this is a must for this industry (one of the reasons we started Marketing My Journey).
- Show people how much you care about what you do.
- Make sure your team knows the company goes and knows how to work towards them.
SEO Deliverance – Tony King (@ToastedTeacake)
Tony's speech was on how SEO should be done within a large business, focusing on how to avoid being caught up in company politics and to prevent becoming 'another brick in the wall'.
Key takeaways from his speech:
- The search industry is very creative.
- SEO can become invisible within large companies. Often not getting the freedom they need rto make a difference.
- Aim to become the go-to guy to drive the company's online efforts forward.
- Monitor competitors, not just for where they perform well, but also where their weaknesses lie.
- Never miss the basics, always run a full SEO audit.
- Site speed is a critical SEO factor.
- Project the returns of any SEO campaign.
- Think about who you are pitching too.
- Monitor, Maintain, Perform.
Separated by a Common Language - Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist)
First things first, words wont give justice to how impressed I am with Lynne's twitter handle, talk about having a name for a job! Her speech had similarities to Stephanie's speech from earlier in the session, Lynne talks about how the constantly changing English language is a constant challenge for SEOers and content creators.
- Using the correct forms of English on a site is very important, it will have an impact on user experience.
- People subconsciously put British accents in a higher social status.
- Accents are associated with intelligence.
A Decade In Affiliate Marketing – James Little (@3wdl)
Not only is affiliate marketing growing up but all areas of online are. James Little (probably the only man to manage to get a Crystal Palace shirt on the Brighton Dome stage) attempted to change the opinion people have with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing and SEO have a lot in common, one of the main issues is trust.
There are now tighter controls on online marketing behaviours, forcing people working within these areas to become a bit more grown up and responsible. In order to survive as an affiliate marketer, you must become a true brand, and therefore trusted.
The final part of the BrightonSEO conference was split into several 8 minute presentations by different speakers. Providing quick, actionable and bite-sized chunks of information and opinion. It was the first time the conference had been carried out this way, we think it was a great success.
7 Things You Need To Know About Mobile SEO – Aleyda Solis (@Aleyda)
- Whats your mobile audience behaviour on site.
- Check the site behaviour for mobile search results.
- What your audience behaviour in Google’s mobile search (specific).
- Check site behaviour with mobile devices.
- Check you content works for a mobile user. it may need to be different.
- Check you have the technical capacity to build and SEO and mobile site.
- Decide the type of mobile web you need.
Content Planning In A Post Panda and Penguin World – Simon Penson (@simonpenson)
- Content marketing strategy is not all about blog post, blog post, blog post.
- An effective content marketing strategy will have several peaks and troughs.
- Can't have a content strategy with constant 'Big Bangs'.
- Don't exhaust your best content in one go.
- Regular blog posts must fill the time between the big bangs, which really create traction for the business.
- Data visualisation is the upcoming trend in content planning and link bait.
Social Media Reverse Engineering – Yousaf Sekander (@ysekand)
- Content is not it, it is a 'king-maker'.
- Producing compelling and shareable is, in most cases, not cheap.
- Use Yousaf's tool (Social Crawlytics) to track your competitors sharable content and leverage it.
- Use your own URL shortener when sharing infrographics.
Future Proofing SEO On Large Websites – Berian Reed (@berianreed)
Straight away Berian Reed grabbed my attention with his multiple Back To The Future references (Yes I'm a big BTTF fan!), but he also grabbed my attention as I'm responsible for a large e-commerce website with 1000s product pages and variations. Heres what I took from his quick-fire 8 minutes:
- Copy and pasting is still the number one way of sharing content. Be that on social media or emails.
- Tynt – a tool that adds a href tag to content lifted from a page.
- Focus on referral traffic to find where traffic is coming from, use this data to build relationships.
- Monitor your competitors websites – Use changedection.com to be notified when content changes.
Client Checklist For SEO – Sion O'Connor (@sionoconnor)
- SEO and its impact is very measurable.
- There is rarely just one right answer.
- The whole industry and practices can change over night.
- Analyse and Research at sub-category level. This is often left out.
- Provide regular, full reviews of your clients campaigns.
Pinteresting SEO – Danielle Fudge (@D_Fudge)
- Using Pinterest to gain new link leads.
- Pinalytics tool helps you do this.
- Monitors how your content is shared across Pinterest.
- 80% of Pinterest users are women.
- Most users are looking for funny images.
Summary
After experiencing my first BrightonSEO conference, I would definitely recommend it to other people within the SEO industry. Although I wouldn't say it should be your first port-of-call if just starting out in the industry but once you've got your foot in the door it is definitely an event to attend.
The overall theme I took away from the conference is that SEO is no longer technical, website wizardry, it has spilled over into a much broader umbrella of marketing, and as such, SEO's must adapt.
Did you go to the September conference? Or do you have anything you're particularly excited for this time around? Leave us a comment about your experiences.
*Note: If you're not able to make the conference you can also keep up to date with the conference as it happens via BrightonSEO's live blog.