Brighton SEO is a bi-annual conference welcoming 3,000 SEO experts to meet, mingle and learn from one another. We went to the latest conference and while the weather wasn’t great, the conference outshone expectations…
Brighton SEO: recurring themes & top tips
Brighton SEO brings together the best speakers in the digital industry; combining their knowledge and looking for common themes can really help you gain an overview of the industry as a whole and what we need to focus on in the coming months and even years.
Last year, speakers focused on brand and PR.
This year, unsurprisingly, common themes were surrounding the audience and user, and how to give them the best experience. As audience expectations increase, digital needs to work harder to fill these needs. Here are some of the themes that were discussed:
Content
- Make your content sustainable: there’s no need to re-invent the wheel each time you’re looking for a killer piece of content to outreach.
- Create content that fulfils a purpose: entertain, persuade, educate or inspire
- When creating content, have an editorial vision: why is it going to be valuable to the publisher?
- Creating amazing content can be time-consuming, but once you’ve got a structure that works there’s no reason why this can’t be reused and redistributed time and time again.
on-page optimisation
- Keyword research is still important, however matching exact keywords is not. Google is starting to work in ‘vectors’, similar to themes surrounding a topic.
- Page titles and meta descriptions should be thought of more as ads, with propositions and calls to actions.
- Review your on-page strategy from an optimisation, technical and conversion-led, psychological perspective. The pages should serve the users’ intentions.
- Integrating with a Google-approved reviews company will pull organic star ratings into the SERPs, which can increase conversion rate by 17%.
technical SEO
- Take notice of crawl optimisation issues. Often these issues aren’t seen as a priority, however the time it takes search engine spiders is important, otherwise your pages may not be crawled and indexed correctly, affecting the way your site will rank. Identify crawl waste, optimise sitemaps and minimise internal redirects for more efficient site crawls.
- Introduce answer and question formatting within your content for your audience. Google seems to really like this as long as it’s clear. Review your current pages with good search viability and see if you can introduce this for an increased chance of gaining traction through rich snippets.
- For every 1 second of improvement in site speed, the site’s conversion rate increases by 2%. Compressing images, fonts and icons can significantly speed up your site.
- Marketers should stop fearing dynamic URLs. More content is becoming dynamic and SEO needs to be part of that conversation.
link building
- Don’t ignore sites based on low metrics; local sites normally have a low domain authority but will help your site gain local SEO value, and are just as important for business in Google’s eyes.
- Be flexible: use ongoing outreach to source additional opportunities. If outreach is working, just keep going.
- Links may not be equal across industries – in some industries, they can be considered as more (or less) important.
- Relationship building is the key to link building. Giving publishers exclusives significantly increases the chances of acquiring a placement.
UX & audience
- Use a reviews strategy to help boost sales: 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business, with customers likely to spend 31% more on sites with excellent reviews
- Segment your audience and provide personalised content for these groups
- 75% of consumers like personalised content experiences
- Your audience needs to be at the heart of what you do. Start with them and end with them.
