BrightonSEO - Day 1 Summary
With the echoes of some questionable karaoke still ringing in our ears, Viaduct Generation descended onto the first day of BrightonSEO April 2022. The event that first originated in a room above a pub now serves as a melting pot of knowledge, networking and socialising for search marketers globally. At VG, we had heard the stories and as it was the first time many of our team had attended the event, we were raring to go.?
We decided to tackle Brighton Scooby-Doo style: to split up and look for clues. It was impossible to hit every single one of the 100+ sessions over the two days but we gave it a pretty good go! We’ve collected our notes (albeit, some of them were more scrawling than others) and we’d love to share our run-down of BrightonSEO April 2022.
We've broken down this blog by location and sessions - enjoy the read ??
Auditorium 1: The Main Stage?
Aka: where the magic happens. The main stage at BrightonSEO was held in the huge auditorium space of the Brighton Centre, with tables and chairs set up for the studious laptop-weilding types like us and stalls to squeeze everyone in.?
SESSION 1: On Page SEO
Mordy Oberstein: The Full Scoop on Google’s Title Rewrites
??‘We’re at a pivotal moment in SEO history.’
Mordy Oberstein, the head of communications at Semrush and Head of SEO Branding at Wix , kicked off proceedings on the main stage. He discussed the way that more and more title tags are being rewritten by Google – initially using content from the H1 tag but now relying on it less. In his words: ‘Google will rewrite that shit!’
So why is Google rewriting title tags? And is there anything we can do about it??
The topic of Google’s title tag rewriting has gained a lot of speculation and concern in recent months, so Mordy Oberstein’s insights helped clarify the topic. He used data to demonstrate that a lot of the speculation about the reasons behind title tag rewrites has been incorrect.?
He debunked myths of Google rewriting title tags based on the position of a page in the SERPs, because of the length of the title tag, or the length of the keywords. In fact, his argument is that Google is mostly rewriting title tags for an entirely different reason: to show off.?
‘It’s strutting its stuff, it’s moving like Jagger,’ - Oberstein, on Google.
He argued that the reason that Google is rewriting so many title tags is in order to show that it can not only understand content, but can also rewrite it so that it’s better suited to user intent than the original title tag.?
Is there anything you can do about Google rewriting your title tags? Not really. Is that scary? Sure. Is it bad? Not necessarily.?
Benu Aggarwal: Entity Search: Your Competitive Advantage
Next to take to the stage was Benu Aggarwal , founder and president of Milestone Inc . and entity search expert. She explained why we should be focusing on entity search to increase the discovery of our content.?
Search is no longer just about keywords, she explained: it’s about conversation, building relevance across various types of search.?
For entity search to work, there are three things to consider:
After sharing tips for entity and schema optimisation, she highlighted that these practices are about increasing the discoverability of the page early in the funnel. It might be hard to measure the revenue generated by these, but key metrics such as SERP coverage, clicks, impressions, and performance by schema type can indicate success.?
Benu Aggarwal honed in on her point that ‘it’s not about creating brand new content, it’s about enhancing current content based on what consumers are looking for.’
Lidia Infante: SEO Gap Analysis: Use your Competitors’ Data to Drive Strategic Growth
Though she prefaced her talk by claiming that her talk had the most boring title of the entire convention, Lidia Ifante ’s enthusiasm for SEO strategy shone through.?
“SEO strategy is my jam”- Lidia Infante.
Discussing Gap Analysis, she identifies how SEO strategists can “take down [their] competitors” by identifying your weaknesses and targeting those areas to really pull ahead of the game. Lidia broke it down by looking at a top-down and bottom-up approach.?
The top-down is the easiest and the one most will lean to by default. It involves asking other departments to list their competitors, involving them in the process and checking these competitors using tools like Semrush or Searchmetrics . In this approach, you’ll look at what target keywords they’re ranking for and how they compare to you.?
The bottom-up approach might be trickier, but Lidia believes it can be more effective. Start by identifying the keywords, put them in a tool such as Ahrefs and look at the results. Take a look at what result pages your competitors dominate and the often competitors show up on results pages relating to those keywords. To really get that avantage, you need to cluster the keywords. It’s about reverse engineering your competitor’s SEO strategy.
SESSION 2: Content Marketing?
Joshua Hardwick: Why Scaling (Great) Content is Bloody Hard??
‘It’s easy to maintain editorial standards when you’ve got a small team,’ Joshua Hardwick, Head of Content at Ahrefs explained. But when you start scaling content it can be hard to keep that same quality. Sure, it’s easy to hire more freelancers and start churning out content, but as the team grows it becomes harder and harder to maintain consistent and high quality content.?
In his talk, Joshua spoke from experience about this problem – when he started working on Ahrefs’ blog it was only a small team of a few people. He shared some of his best tips for creating great content while scaling.?
His main format for scaling quality content was:
His next tip was based on a policy that he implemented at Ahrefs: peer review. In this, each piece of content would be looked over and edited by a different writer with expertise in the topic.?
‘The SEO industry is full of bullshit advice and misinformation and we don’t want to contribute to that,’ he said.?
His final tip for maintaining high quality content while scaling was to focus on hiring the right people. ‘What you don’t want when you’re trying to scale content is people who need a lot of hand holding,’ he said. Hiring autonomous, talented content creators who have a good eye for detail is vital because this means that they’ll work effectively without too much support.
Alex Hickson: How to Go Viral on a Budget?
How do we go viral without spending a load of money? That’s the million-dollar PR question, and Alex Hickson is well positioned to answer it.?
Alex Hickson and his fiancé created a viral product called the 2020 candle, a candle with four smells that represented the year: banana bread, hand sanitiser, DIY musk, and Joe Exotic (cheap aftershave and body odour). Despite starting with zero budget, they got more than 300 links and were featured on 20 TV segments and over 100 radio segments. They earned ￡20,000 in direct revenue.?
?‘Going viral is all about emotion’, Alex Hickson explained.?
To go viral, you have to promote the story first and the product second. He spoke about how things go viral because they make people feel a certain way and they share the thing because they want others to feel that way, too. The TikTok you send to a mate because it made you laugh; the tweet you retweeted because it made you feel nostalgic, etc.
To do this in practice, he shared some key tips. First, he explained the importance of tying a product into a trend – identifying a trend, ensuring that it will last the time it takes to develop the product and create the campaign.?
He also recommended taking inspiration from bigger brands that have created successful PR formats, even if they seem impossible because of their big budgets. ‘At the heart of them, they’re just really good stories.’?
An insightful tip to sell your stories is to search for articles with the same call to action in the title as your press release. Then, you can send the press release to these journalists who are most likely to share the story.??
To conclude, he shared the three key points to creating a viral PR campaign.?
Rejoice Ojiaku: The Content and Buyer Show: Let’s Map.?
Rejoice Ojiaku is a powerhouse woman in the SEO industry. As the co-founder of B-DigitalUK , it’s pretty fair to say we have a professional crush on her. In her creative and engaging presentation on content mapping, she shared how to personalise content for consumers at each stage of their buyer journey: awareness, consideration and decision.
Awareness: consumers know they have a problem and they don’t know how to solve it. At this stage in the process, educational and informative content such as blogs, infographics, social media posts and podcasts are useful. Your brand can reach customers with ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’, and other modifiers like ‘improve’.??
Consideration: consumers understand their problem and are considering different ways to solve it but are not yet ready to buy. At this point, content such as comparison guides, case studies, and explainer videos are useful. Keywords like ‘best’, ‘review’, and ‘troubleshoot’ are valuable at this stage.?
Decision: the customer is deciding on the provider to buy from to solve their problem. They are very likely to make a purchase so the content they need to see would include testimonials, free trials, FAQ pages, pricing and landing pages, and demos. Keywords like ‘buy’, ‘book’, ‘test’, and ‘discount code’ are useful to target at this stage.?
?Rejoice Ojiaku shared some useful tips for content mapping:
SESSION 3: Reporting
It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone hates reporting. That’s why when this talk promised more efficient ways to approach the dreaded task, we were all ears. Greg Gifford, Martin McGreggor and Simon Lesser spoke to the art of balancing automating and customising valuable, insightful, and stakeholder-friendly reports.
Greg Gifford - Freddy Krueger’s guide to scary good reporting?
Greg Gifford took the belt for the most entertaining talk of the day. His energy was unmatched, and the only thing more impressive than his energy and SEO understanding was his extensive knowledge of horror films.?
Greg’s talk had a horror movie theme, as he took the audience through 100 slides of horror films, linking each image to a clever point about why “your SEO reports bloody suck”. Greg believes that people are spending too much time reporting to clients with the wrong sort of information.?
He argued that there needs to be a shift in focus to sharing the right information with your client, and not overloading them with information that will make little to no sense to them, or even boring them. It’s about stripping it back and presenting the report in layman's terms that provides only what’s necessary. There was also emphasis put on presenting the information in an aesthetic way that not only engages them, but also assists them in understanding what they’re looking at.?
‘Numbers don’t tell a story’, noted Greg.?
It’s about asking questions and providing the answer in your report. Particular focus was also put on the customisation of reports to each client, and that it’s not enough to use the same template for each client as they all have their own specific goals and problems. Every client has different problems and goals, and therefore customising the reports to show different sets of data and information is key to demonstrating that your SEO efforts are making a difference to their bottom line.?
Greg wanted to drive home the point that too much effort is often put on increasing traffic, but that’s redundant if the client isn’t seeing an increase in leads and sales. A truly entertaining and insightful talk.
Martin McGarry - SEO strategy care of England manager Gareth Southgate - my football inspired SEO target setting framework?
Using cheeky football analogies, Martin McGarry of Search Assistance tackles the SEO-favourite catchphrase: "it depends".?
Arguing that it presents a lack of confidence and understanding, he urges SEO's to include timelines and tasks in reports that address the number one client question: "why aren't we number one yet?". To this, he also adds insights to the importance of celebrating wins with clients and jointly reiterating the value of your work together with your clients. McGarry likened SERP to a football tournament, the players to the web pages and on-page SEO to the game.?
“You can’t win the tournament on day one of the project”, the ‘players’ have to work together to get the right result.
Simon Lesser - SEO reporting: slay the time-sucking monster and deliver amazing reports
Simon Lesser , CEO and Co-founder of Dragon Metrics , closed up the session by outlining different strategies to tackle the trade-off between customising and automating reports. We all know that too much time is spent performing manual tasks when it comes to reporting. Simon Lesser pointed out that with more automation in reporting comes less room for customisation.
He cleverly suggested various softwares, like Google Data Studio or Zapier , to import and unify data into a single report. The trade-off can be managed, he suggests, via automation that is customised per client (automation that is not universally applied to every client), to meet their specific business needs, goals and interests.?
SESSION 4: Keyword Research
Session 4 is always a tricky one for speakers to handle – we’re all a bit caffeined-out and sleepy, but Paola Didonè, Mark Williams-Cook and Liraz Postan took on the challenge valiantly!
The keyword research talk discussed the importance of long tail keywords in SEO strategies. All three speakers discussed common pain points for SEOs like how to make your clients understand that bigger isn’t always better – that the smaller keywords bring value for SEO strategies. This talk would be awesome for any client or in-house marketing team who wants to gain functional knowledge on SEO principles.
Paola Didone - How to go after the long tail keywords (and why it matters!)?
Paola Didonè of Amiya kicked off the discussion on how to target long tail keywords. She suggested that to improve traffic, SEOs should prioritise optimising existing pages rather than building new ones to target long tail keywords.?
She continued, offering good tips on how to build a keyword mapping document and keep it updated, how to create a keyword cannibalisation tracker, and how to research which long tail keywords your competitors are ranking for.?
Mark Williams-Cook - Effective zero-volume keyword research and why it’s important?
Mark Williams-Cook , Digital Marketing Manager at Candour , spoke about the benefits of zero-volume keyword research. He argued that many SEOs who are concerned with search volume when targeting keywords are looking at it the wrong way. After all, 70-80% of searches are in the long tail.
Remember: 15% of daily Google searches are brand new searches that the search engine has never seen before.?
He made the good point that zero-volume keywords do not technically have zero searches – they’re just not very common. ‘Intent volume is much more important than search volumes of specific queries,’ he elaborated. Many seemingly zero-volume keywords are just different formulations of the same search intent. Finishing up the talk, he recommended including zero-volume keywords at the beginning of SEO campaigns to ‘leave you lots of doors open’ and see great results.?
Liraz Postan - The hidden gems of low search volume
Liraz Postan also identified the pain-points of many SEOs in that many businesses are reluctant to target long-tail keywords. She asked CMOs whether they would approve a strategy targeting low search volume keywords and only just over a quarter were in favour.?
Auditorium 2: Absolute Digital Stage?
If you attended any of the talks in Auditorium 2, chances are you weren’t far from a member of the Viaduct Generation team - you may have spotted many of us proudly sporting our VG merch! Auditorium 2 held a wide range of talks in this bout of BrightonSEO. Over the course of Thursday, speakers went into depth on various topics: quality assurance, fundamentals, onsite content and link building.?
SESSION 1: Quality Assurance
Aleyda Solis - Goodbye SEO f*ck ups! Learn to set an SEO Quality Assurance Framework?
Aleyda Solis , founder of Orainti , kickstarted the morning by highlighting the unfortunate fact that 85% of SEOs experienced moderate-to-high SEO quality incidents in the last year. These incidents come alongside diverse losses: direct monetary costs for the client, and massive loss of time and opportunity cost for the SEO. It would seem that learning how to not f*ck up is a pretty good start to the day…
Quality Assurance frameworks prevent SEO mistakes by educating relevant stakeholders and decision-makers on basic SEO principles. She advocates agencies to include educational resources in cost bundles + record teaching sessions to maximise efficiency.?
Aleyda then went into the process of how to negate SEO mistakes by validating processes with integrated checklists that produce data that can be comparable over time. Finally, Solis emphasises the importance in monitoring everything - including internal SEO process as well as relevant consumer trend changes.
Myriam Jessier & Gianna Brachetti-Truskawa - Technical SEO QA: shining a light on invisible work?
Myriam Jessier , SEO trainer at Pragm and Gianna Brachetti-Truskawa , VP of SEO at Startdowns shined light upon the "invisible nature" of Quality Assurance - highlighting that it should be integrated seamlessly into existing SEO processes to eliminate and minimise as many "SEO f*ck-ups" as possible. They shined light upon the importance of manually checking codes, processes, and languages.??
Pro-tip: your developers will deploy code without telling you!
Both emphasised the importance of creating standard configuration files and checklists for future checks, and reviewing their relevance periodically - your website is not static, customer behaviour is not static, the industry is not static.
Becky Simms - Brand vs. SEO: How to win allies and influence brand guardians
Becky Simms talked about the value of mind-reading, particularly in the context of bridging the gap and balancing brand, SEO, and business priorities. In order to do this smoothly and effectively, there needs to be an equal playing ground between yourself and your client (in terms of language and understanding).?
By understanding language, you can speak to the priorities of the brand team.??
Understanding what an internal team is excited about makes it simpler to capitalise on those insights when you present your SEO strategy to maximise pitch and strategy sign-offs. This enables you to empower your strategy's credibility and build a supporting culture, moving closer towards your client goals.
Becky Simms also acknowledged the nature of balancing priorities in compromise - we hate to say it, but sometimes SEO isn't the only answer. To build confidence in your compromises, celebrate brand wins in a transparent, empowering, and uplifting manner.
SESSION 2: Fundamentals
Dale Bertrand - Purpose-driven SEO: an authority-based approach that Google loves?
Dale Bertrand , Founder and President of Fire and Spark , delved into the importance of having real, authentic purpose in your SEO strategies.?
Google’s AI is “a collection of different algorithms” that allows Google to learn about users in a variety of ways. The AI is trained by humans, and goes on to mention “how even regular searchers like my mother can grade websites… which can then be used to train the AI to provide better results”.?
He uses this connection to show how monitoring search behaviour is key, and the more depth that AI can go into the more it can understand its user search intent. If a user bounces back to the search results after a query is made, this can be very insightful data as it tells the AI that the results didn’t solve the problem.?
Understanding the ‘real intent behind the query’ is essential.?
Bertrand really honed on the idea of multi-factor authority, using a case study of his own that helped him to realise the importance of purpose-driven SEO.
Having a mission or a story is a great way to build brand momentum, and Betrand made a point to explain that it’s fine to create a mission to help drive your SEO strategy, as long as that mission is authentic and true to the brand.?
Claire Carlile - Beyond the basics: 5 (or 10) Google Business Profile elements you might not know about but REALLY should?
Claire Carlile debunked the “set it and forget it” mindset of the Google Business Profile by presenting 5 important aspects of a GBP that may often be overlooked or unknown altogether.?
Her five main tips were:?
Carlile concluded her talk by driving home the point that “your GBP is never finished”. It is an ever-changing feature and it is important to continue monitoring and altering to ensure that your GBP reflects who you are to help your business appear to searchers.
Nadia Mojahed - SEO challenges and wins for small and big businesses?
“SEO process will always be complex” stated Nadia Mojahed , and everybody in the room nodded accordingly.?
However, things can be simplified when we focus our SEO strategies around users rather than the competitors. It may sound simple, but often the obsession with chasing and beating competitors can take away from what the user is looking for.
The competition will always be changing and fluctuating when it comes to SEO. One day there can be a certain top ranking page, the next day it can be another one but your brand and users will never change. If you are only focusing on your competitors' keywords, then you are focusing solely on something that is never stable, always changing meaning you have as much chance of losing rankings as you do as temporarily gaining them.?
With the landscape of search engines constantly evolving, there are always changes and updates being made. What often happens as a result of this is people panic and attempt to implement these changes into their SEO strategies as soon as possible in fear of missing out. Nadia explained the value of waiting instead, and monitoring these changes to see if these updates are relevant to your specific strategies.?
SESSION 3: Onsite Content
The three speakers in this session took very different approaches to onsite content. Before we could yell ‘fight!’, grab the popcorn and see who came out on top, all three speakers provided great insights.
Edward Ziubrzynski - E-A-T: have we been looking at it backwards??
Edward Ziubrzynski of Fibre Marketing spoke about the SEO bread-and-butter: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, also known as EAT.?
His advice for ensuring EAT for your site??
Lazarina Stoy - How to incorporate Machine Learning in your internal linking audit?
Lazarina Stoy , the SEO and data science manager at Intrepid Digital , discussed the topic of incorporating machine learning in your internal linking audit. She stressed the importance of trial and error when it comes to auditing.?
‘Failing is part of the process,’ she explained. ‘You need to test different configurations to find out what actually works for your website.’?
Of course, you don’t need to use machine learning to audit your internal linking, but it’s valuable to dig deeper into your site to understand how it’s seen by crawlers in order to improve it. In fact, many websites need additional help with internal linking.?
She cited a study that found that 82% of linking opportunities are missed – a major problem when internal linking is essential for improving the structure, user engagement, and topic authority of your website. Employing machine learning for an internal linking audit allows you to draw insights from classification of anchor text, GPT3 classification of keywords, and identifying entities and entity relationships.?
Chima Mmeje - How to do comprehensive research for your topic cluster
Chima Mmeje , wow, how are we supposed to find words for Chima?! We’re crushing on her. HARD.?
The woman herself presented on how to do comprehensive research for your topic cluster. These are great for your readers because they are comprehensive and can provide the information readers need at any point in their journey or research. By increasing dwell time and user engagement, topic clusters are great for reducing bounce rate and driving users toward transactions.?
Choose a topic you want to build authority on – for new brands, this will be the word that comes to mind when someone thinks of their brand.?
Chima shared great insights on competitor alternative landing pages – pages designed for searches for an alternative to a product. These should not be blog posts but rather a specific landing page aimed at users who are ready to make a purchase.
A common thread of Brighton 2022, Chima recommended thinking beyond keywords and prioritising money-making pages that drive conversions.?
SESSION 4: Link Building?
Chris Czermack, Rebecca Moss and Dixon Jones finished the day’s talks in Auditorium 2 with the Link Building Showcase which focused on optimising content, re-evaluating your approach to link building, and E.A.T backlinks.
Chris Czermak - Using search intent in your link building efforts?
Chris Czermack , of McNaught Digital kicked things off by sharing his link building method that required no outreach at all. He made the case that outreach is tedious and time consuming, and yet not always necessary.?
In what he called ‘passive link building’, he explained that if the data and the content is valuable, backlinks will ensue. Chris honed in on the importance of PR and content being in sync, with his main tips for creating a ‘passive backlink’ pipeline being:
Rebecca Moss - Product, service and category page links (and how to get them)?
Rebecca Moss drove home the point that a good campaign is only as good as the research behind it. As a Digital PR Director at JBH , we reckon she was a pretty good person to be learning from!?
Rebecca’s three part framework for link building: discovery, pitching, and gathering.
By re-establishing the basics, Rebecca successfully reminded everyone of the priorities PR’s can easily forget: build links to relevant publications; and create relevant content for readers.
Dixon Jones - How to EAT links
Dixon Jones , Global Brand Ambassador for Majestic and CEO of InLinks , closed the showcase looking at E.A.T backlinks and how to build them.?
领英推荐
Instead of looking at Domain Authority (DA), Dixon spoke of Page Quality Score (PQ Score), highlighting that links should always increase the link prospect’s PQ score. Dixon reiterated the damage irrelevant links can cause. Using Starling Bank as a case study, he expertly explained how to build expertise, trust, and, in turn, authority. E.A.T links sit at the heart of a high PQ score.
Syndicate 1 & 2: Kleeks Stage
SESSION 1: ECommerce
Duane Brown - Google Shopping: How to 2x Your ROAS in 2022
Duane Brown , the founder and Head of Strategy at Take Some Risk , talked about how to double your ROAS in 2022 using Google Shopping.?
He explained how his team scales clients and creates amazing shopping feeds using SKU optimisation, smart shopping, and automation. To create a great shopping feed, his main recommendations were to:?
Prabhat Shah - How to Launch a NEW Product Successfully on Amazon
As a Marketplace Consultant, Prabhat Shah helps businesses increase their presence on Amazon and eBay. He explained that there are two types of products on Amazon - products where the product is popular but the brand is unknown, and products that are unknown but the brand is known.?
He also explained about backend keywords, which are not visible to users but are indexed. He recommends:
Jane Reeve - Revolutionising SEO Performance: Automation and AI as Business Accelerators?
Jane Reeve , Business Partner at Kleeks , spoke about using automation and AI to revolutionise SEO.?
74% of global consumers now say that they have increased their daily internet usage.?
Meanwhile, there has been a 16.9 increase in e-commerce use globally. So, Jane asked, how can martech help? In her presentation, she explained that technology can increase human potential and enable businesses of all sizes and sectors to succeed. One particular area which Jane focused on was using AI for 24/7 competitor analysis to help businesses improve their strategies.?
SESSION 2: Crawling and Indexation
Jess Peck - How to build your own crawler, and why you should give it a try?
Jess Peck , Machine Learning Operations Engineer at Local SEO Guide , opened the session with a discussion of the benefits of building your own crawler.?
For many people, the idea of taking the time to build a crawler might not appeal. Luckily, Jess Peck is a self-proclaimed Python enthusiast and she explained some of the reasons why they can be advantageous.?
Crawlers can find broken links easily or identify images without alt text, analyse SERPs, check schema, or even crawl your competitors’ pages. Although some prebuilt crawlers like Screaming Frog and Deepcrawl exist, they have limitations.?
In the words of many people on Twitter, ‘oh god. We have to code.’?
Jess then explained how to build a crawler and the different types of crawlers you can imitate. Nothing makes you empathise with engineers quite like trying to build a crawler yourself!?
Fili Wiese - Mastering robots.txt: SEO insights by an ex-Google engineer?
Fili Wiese , SEO expert at SearchBrothers.com , had many key insights to share in his presentation about how to master robots.txt. With robots.txt.?
As an ex-Google engineer, Fil explained how you can manage your site’s crawl budget and preserve bandwidth by communicating with search engine crawlers. He shared key robots.txt best practices such as never putting sensitive information in your robots.txt file, and carefully checking for missing slashes, misspellings, and other errors. Any small mistakes in your robots.txt file can lead to poor crawlability and cause your website rankings to tank, so it’s essential to get this right.??
Shweti Prabhu - Using IndexNow API to directly control which content gets indexed on Bing, in realtime
Shweti Prahbu , Senior PM in Microsoft’s Bing team, spoke about the benefits of using IndexNow API .?
This tool lets website publishers index instantly to participating search engines by notifying search engines that content has been updated.
A good site may have 80% of its pages indexed. Even though search engines are constantly crawling for new content they might still encounter 404 errors, stale information and more.?
IndexNow is designed to improve your ability to tell search engines to reindex your website using a ping notification that tells them exactly where and what to crawl. Shweti Prabhu then explained how to do this:
1. ? ? Generate the key at bing.com/indexnow
2. ? ? Host the key on your root folder or elsewhere (but share the path)
3. ? ? Submit URLs using a JSON file - individuals or in bulk?
4. See details of URLs submitted and discovered in Bing Webmaster Tools?
Shweti explained that this can help you keep fresh content without the need for constant crawling, reduce server costs, and be better for the environment. Using one API across search engines also makes it simpler for you.?
SESSION 3: Enterprise
Enterprise SEO took a slightly different tone to the showcasing talks- it focused on each of the speaker’s personal experiences and their succeeding in managing huge websites and scaling for enterprise businesses.?
Dan Morehead - How do you optimise the world’s largest website??
Dan Morehead took the lead discussing how BBC worked through optimising their vast portfolio by centralising the content from all of their services: sports, news, iplayer, sounds, bitesize, weather.?
Dan discussed the search intent for different services on their domain, and the different areas of the platform which this could relate to. The key takeaways were the importance of centralising data, the use of regular templates across the site and identifying their core goals.?
The BBC’s three core values are:?
Manick Bhan - Master crawl budget optimization for enterprise websites?
Manick Bhan from Linkgraph then spoke on how to maximise your website crawl budget, and how this becomes an increasingly pressing issue for enterprise businesses as their website grows.?
His three main tips to maximise a crawl budget were:
Nitin Manchanda - SEO at scale, the product-led approach to grow a brand organically
Botpresso’s Nitin Manchanda discussed how to scale SEO through the combination of automation and human quality assurance. Though Nitin could not attend Brighton in person, he made a convincing case for the adoption of AI and automation to assist with the heavy lifting for SEO, such as copy writing for product descriptions. Nititn suggested a two-step structure:?
Then, for more insightful posts like thought leadership, leave it to the humans!
Syndicate 3 & 4
…One of our writers slept in. We missed the first talk. Sorry.??
SESSION 1: Careers
Jen Penaluna - Red light, green light: interviewing for SEO roles?
Evoluted ’s Jen Penaluna discussed all things careers in SEO and putting potential employers through a ‘Squid Game’ style vetting process.?
Lanie Bayliss - I’m back pitches! Returning to your digital marketing career after having a baby/taking a break?
Lanie Bayliss discusses balancing a career and parenthood and the challenges which a mother with a child in their terrible-twos may face.?
Alex Wright - Stoicism in digital
Alex Wright of Clicky Media discussed ancient philosophies and how they might help digital marketers handle the daily stresses of SEO life. Alex discussed how adopting these methods can help you to:
SESSION 2: Management
The management speakers shed light on the importance of recruiting and onboarding a team of diverse skill-sets and knowledge levels, as well as how to effectively manage such teams for maximal organisational benefit.
Kim Dewe - Transitioning into people management?
Kim Dewe from Blue Array talked about the difficulty of transitioning from being a technical SEO expert who focuses on tangible and measurable outcomes towards an SEO people-manager, pursuing intangible and abstract goals.?
87% of managers felt as though they needed more people-management training.
Kim spoke specifically on the importance of promoting psychological safety in your team. This means ensuring that people feel seen, heard, and celebrated, and results in a team that is committed and satisfied, inherently motivated to further business goals via honest and helpful feedback.?
One way to foster this is through radical delegation - whilst it can be very difficult (especially as a new manager), you must ensure you have a team that you love and trust. Create solid feedback channels, promote positive dialogue, show frequent appreciation, and "nip negative energy early".
Madison Crawford - What you really ought to know before you hire an apprentice!?
UNBXD’s Maddie Crawford spoke from her personal experience to illustrate the double-sided value of apprenticeships (for both the business and the apprentice). Maddie became somewhat of a rockstar over BrightonSEO with her “don’t be a dick” rainbow slide!
For the business, the apprentice is a low-cost, high-reward investment. Nonetheless, you can only reap this value if you have a solid apprentice recruitment process. Keep in mind that your knowledge and expertise can be taught, but an eager, creative, and engaged attitude must come naturally.?
Most importantly, "don't be a dick". Maddie spoke to the importance of nurturing an apprentice's growth by giving them educational opportunities - "do not put taking out the trash on their to-do list". Include them in brainstorm sessions and make them feel heard - this way, you can use their fresh-eyes for both of your benefit.
Dhriti Shashikanth - How to ace your team onboarding strategy
Given that 77.4% of SEOs learn the best from hands-on experiences, Dhriti Shashikanth from Mindshare reiterated the importance of thoughtful onboarding and SEO education systems.?
Dhriti suggests the importance of a guiding "Welcome Pack", which can assist new-recruit's onboarding (i.e. gaining access to all documents/platforms, setting up accounts, etc). For junior recruits who need learning, it can also be helpful to set up a "Welcome Form", which can allow you to gauge their knowledge-levels in a safe and acceptable manner.?
Dhriti stressed that the supportive approach should extend beyond onboarding. Simple changes, like providing context-first briefs that clarify anything the new recruit may not know can be an effective support for newbies. Break-up tasks into smaller, more approachable tasks, and offer consistent support/kind feedback during 1-on-1's, and watch your teammate flourish.
Showcase Stage
The Showcase stage was the self-professed ‘best venue at Brighton SEO’. The in-room coffee table and coat stand was definitely a plus, but the rotating informational talks really took centre-stage.?
SESSION 1: SEO Success
Will Critchlow - Lessons from hundreds of SEO A/B tests?
Searchpilot’s Will Critchlow started proceedings by demonstrating the power of SEO A/B testing.?
It was pretty much immediately established that SEOs are shooting in the dark when it comes to their search hypotheses. SEO testing provides quantifiable data to support the value and ROI of SEO.
On Twitter surveys, only 33% of people surveyed guessed ranking outcomes of different SEO strategies correctly.
Laura Green - Localisation: expectations versus reality?
Croud’ s Laura Green took no prisoners when discussing the importance of localisation for international businesses. Establishing her argument with age old bread roll/ cob/ bap/ barm cake/ stottie debate.?
It comes as no surprise that she stressed the importance of localisation for conversions and trust in a website. After all: when was the last time you purchased a product on a website which did not display your local currency??
Her talk provided clear actions for SEOs to take in their efforts to localise their domains for different audiences, with nuanced understanding of a market being of the utmost importance.?
Laura’s main localisation factors were:?
Maciej Wroblewski - Implement digital PR into your SEO strategy before it’s too late
Prowly’s Maciej Wroblewski rounded off the hour, discussing the value of thought leadership for digital PR and recognising the limitations of focusing solely on backlinks.?
He provoked an interesting discussion on imposter syndrome when encouraging thought leadership in SEO. He stressed how specialised the SEO industry is and how this knowledge should not be understated.
SESSION 2: SERPs
The second talk of Showcase focused on the complexity of SERPs and the reductive practices which many SEOs fall victim to when creating their content strategies. Both talks were complimentary, stressing the point that most users do not know what they are looking for in their first search.??
Jon Earnshaw - The hidden power of the SERP??
Pi Datametrics ’ Jon Earnshaw kicked off this discussion by contextualising the ‘search landscape’ in holistic terms of the user journey, intent and ever-changing SERPs.?
Jon drives home the question: What is the point of ranking for the wrong terms? And begs clients to stop asking, are we one page one? And start asking how many times are we on page one?
Webpages in the first position of SERPs now receive 50% less clicks due to SERP features, but the total number of clicks remains mostly unchanged.
?Jon discussed the importance of dynamic SERPs and the features which define search results in different markets. For instance, paid product ad features dominate ecommerce SERPs.??
“The ‘related questions feature’ as a “great manifestation of intent”?
Jon encourages search marketers to adopt an ‘if at first you don’t succeed’ methodology. In other words: “why settle for one touchpoint?”.
Gerald Murphy - Win the SERPs: A story of SERP feature trends by industry, keyword and device
Similar Web’ s Gerald Murphy rounded off the talk with a fascinating talk on the importance of different SERP features in different industries. He shared some best practices for defining content strategies by categorising keywords not by the traditional search intent queries of navigational, informational and transactional but by the stages of the buyer journey phase: awareness, consideration, decision and inspiration.?
Likening a SERP to a pinball machine, Murphy argues that pogo-sticking is a positive search habit and is indicative of engagement.?
He went into detail on the best SERP features in different industries and encouraged a holistic approach to search marketing by combining PPC and SEO efforts through SERP features.?
“Google focuses more on audiences over individuals, so it’s more important to define your brand’s marketing with a specific feature in mind”.
Throughout the talk, he stressed the importance of staying up to date with trends and the volatility of SERP features in line with Google guideline reviews.
SESSION 3: Privacy and Security
The privacy and security showcase brought together two great presentations from expert speakers.?
Chris Spann - Google, Cybersecurity and You?
Chris Spann , Senior Technical SEO at Deepcrawl kicked off the session with his talk on the topic ‘Google, Cybersecurity and You’. He started with a scary statistic:?
60% of small businesses close within 6 months of a data breach.?
Data breaches can damage customer confidence and brand reputation as well as causing direct financial damage to a business. So, what can businesses do to improve our online security??
Chris argued that SEOs are well placed to increase the security of websites because of the tools we already use in our day-to-day jobs: Google Search Console, Google Analytics, tools for looking at backlinks and crawling, and Logs.io.?
SEOs can help prevent security risks by identifying weaknesses and malicious activity early on. For example, Google Search Console will notify you if it thinks your website has been compromised. He proposed some security techniques SEOs can use such as setting up a Google alert for ‘site:github.com ‘your-website.com’ just in case developers leave things public.?
In true secure fashion, Chris didn’t share his slides.?
Nate Burke - DuckDuckGo: privacy and the future of search
Nate Burke , the CEO of Diginius with 25 years experience in search, e-commerce, and software, spoke about ‘Everything you Need to Know about DuckDuckGo, Privacy, and the Future of Search’.?
Opening by mentioning the changing popularity of search engines over the years (anyone remember AskJeeves?), he explained that it can be exciting to come across a new search engine in our Google-dominated world.?
The growing popularity of DuckDuckGo, he explained, is linked to the rise of privacy concerns in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA leads and Cambridge Analytica. It has no search history, encrypted websites, hidden IP addresses, and so cookies. Unlike incognito browsing, which hides search history only on the device, DuckDuckGo is a more comprehensive solution. While browsers like Chrome have 63.5% of browser data linked back to you, DuckDuckGo has nearly 0%.?
?So, from an SEO perspective, how can we optimise for the DuckDuckGo, which is growing in popularity? Quality backlinks are very important, Nate Burke argued, as well as engaging content and structured data. It’s also useful to submit a !Bang, a shortcut that lets you search directly on other websites.?
?Nate finished with a quote from Mark Zuckerberg: ‘I believe the future is private.’?
SESSION 4: ECommerce
Charlie Nock and Elena Doni - Total Search: aligning SEO & PPC to advance search effectiveness?
Charlie Nock and Elena Doni revealed their latest "Total Search" strategy, which aligns and unites paid (PPC) and organic (SEO) strategies to grow online ecommerce businesses via prioritising user experience.?
Whilst the two are usually split into distinct teams, goals and agencies, they share goals of growth and efficiency. Charlie and Elena argue that a unified focus on marketing insights can effectively unite SEO and PPC to maximise user experience in a manner that not only makes sense to relevant stakeholders and business managers, but also drives performance.
Adam Freeman - Driving ecommerce growth with dynamic SEO
Adam Freeman analysed the importance of the predictive qualities of SEO and market analytics in today's ecommerce and retail market.?
Adam outlined how an alternative and forward-looking approach to search and trend analytics can enable businesses to position themselves ahead of the market and cater to the fast-changing needs and desires of the contemporary consumer.
KEYNOTE Speaker
Andi Jarvis - Strategy vs. Tactics: which is more importanterer?
Now for what you’ve all been waiting for. The legendary keynote speech from Andi Jarvis , Strategy Director at Eximo Marketing . We don’t know about you, but since Andi’s keynote, Lethal Bizzle’s Fester Skank has been on loop in our heads, as well as his impressive dad dancing!?
Andi brought everyone together in the final discussion on digital marketing strategies vs. tactics. Using the example of Lethal Bizzle’s notorious KFC campaign, he shows how a lack of strategy can be damaging to a brand’s reputation. With the key lyrics of his hit single ‘Fester Skank’ advertising one of KFC’s competitors, it’s unsurprising to see why.?
“You might see me in a Lambo'
Camo snapback, Rambo
Five hundred horses, Django
Two two chicken, Nando”?
Andi outlined that strategy is "where you will be going", and tactics are "how you are going to get there". He explained that wrongfully focusing on only one of the two will lead the business down an expensive path to an undesired destination. Andi went on to show that in digital marketing terms, Sun Tzu’s theory on the Art of War wasn’t quite right.?
In digital marketing terms, tactics without strategy is the slowest road to victory. By the process of elimination, you can use the same tactics in different spaces to slowly increase your online success.?
“Strategy without tactics is just a really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really expensive piece of paper”?
Andi went on to bring in the idea of "Bothism" (read both-ism, not bo-th-ism) and the value in leaning away from "either/or" duality in favour of embracing the pros of competing strategies: from SEO and PPC, to strategy and tactics.?
In this discussion Andi perfectly summarised a common thread in the Thursday talks which hadn’t quite been articulated as neatly. In practising ‘Bothism’ in our digital marketing, we stand more chance of gaining the results we want. This notion of ‘Bothism’ set the precedent for Friday’s talks, which shared the theme of holistic marketing and negating silly dichotomies of ‘this or that’.?
Andi wrapped up his keynote and the first day of Brighton SEO in classic digital marketing fashion: with a CTA to go to the pub.?
Marketing strategy. Professional speaker. Strategy Sessions podcast host.
2 年These might just be the nicest words ever written about me >>> "Andi wrapped up his keynote and the first day of Brighton SEO in classic digital marketing fashion: with a CTA to go to the pub."
Strategic Digital Marketing Manager | Elevating Brands with Data-Driven Excellence | Expert in SEO, SEM, and Google Ads
2 年Good work, Thank you
Marketing bij Swydo
2 年Great roundup! For those interested you can find the presentation of Greg Gifford here https://www.slideshare.net/greggifford
Thank you for mentioning Prowly PR Software and Maciej Wróblewski (he/him) ????! And kudos to all #brightonSEO speakers! ????
Product-Led SEO @ Lingo by Abbott
2 年Great summary... looks like someone was taking really good notes throughout the event!