Brighton SEO is a bi-annual conference taking place in, err, Brighton, with a huge and diverse range of talks in all aspects of SEO from coding and social media through to how traditional marketing can leverage your SEO and online efforts.
For anyone within the industry, novice or expert, it is a great event to attend to meet new people, see some familiar faces, learn lots of information on SEO and what other people within the industry are doing, attracting close to 2,000 industry experts.
So why was I at Brighton SEO?
Looking after our clients’ SEO is one thing. Future proofing it is another. It was a great opportunity for me to see what is happening in the industry further afield and what other reputable companies are doing outside the legal sector in particular as well as how they’re doing it and most importantly why.
We all know Google is ever evolving. Brighton SEO was a chance to have huge insights into what Google will be looking for based on data-driven changes and how they collate their information. Take this information and steer it towards what we’re doing for our clients; SEO will ensure future proofed campaigns with maximum effect and output.
One of the most important things for us at Conscious Solutions is to measure and prove what we’re doing is successful. Yes, the ultimate is ROI but measuring what leads up to that is key. I’ve walked away from this conference after being introduced to some great tools and software that will make this easier to do.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of our SEO clients, you’ll soon see what I mean.
Want to know more about what Conscious Solutions can offer your firm through SEO? Contact our Search Marketing team or your account manager for more information.
Day 1: Advanced Link Building & Outreach
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This seminar was the main reason I was there. Link building is certainly not dead and is as much of an important element to any successful SEO campaign as it’s ever been. The way it’s done and how it works has changed.
This day was brilliant for me to see what other successful people within Search Marketing are doing, with real life case studies. Although I personally disagreed with a couple of pointers (you’ll always see clashes of opinions between different SEO’s) the majority of the day was beneficial to me, us and our clients.
The areas that were covered were:
- Working with what you’ve currently got
- How to future proof your link building
- Effective outreach
- Utilising other marketing mediums
- How to deal with penalties & manual actions
- Negative SEO
- PR, Social & creative link acquisition
- Site quality, tools and KPI’s
The open discussion was a huge beneficial part of the day, listening to other peoples views, where they see their advantages and where they are struggling both in house and agency side.
Day 2: The Brighton SEO Conference:
I had to plan my day carefully as time was of the essence. We kicked things off in the grand concert hall of The Brighton Dome. Below are a couple of my personal favourite speakers.
Ian Miller (Crafted) : Predicting the future of Google and why it’s no longer a search company.
Ian kicked things off with an overview of what companies and technologies Google have purchased over the past six months. More interestingly, Ian went into detail on how Google collate their information and where they get it.
- Google doesn’t want to be the company that didn’t react to changes as a business.
- Content isn’t king; context is. It will matter more where your users are, not what they are doing.
- SEO teams should be working with media buyers (in some cases) to optimise the entire search funnel.
- It’s important to think about what other pages the user will be visiting at each stage of their search cycle.
- SEO is a two-sided education coin with learning on one side and teaching on the other.
Kirsty Hulse (Found) @Kirsty_Hulse : Earning links through audience segmentation.
“We can create content that is actually meaningful to the user – because we’ve been stalking them and that’s powerful”
The above statement means to me that we need to look at is how to use your user data in a more powerful way.
- PR agencies are worried, and should be, about the history of SEO spam
- Use SEO tools and software to show changes in traditional PR KPI’s and metrics.
- Online personas still work, yet different from offline personas.
- Get social & measure – Socialmention is a good tool to be keeping an eye on along with All SEO Software.
- Kirsty’s top 5 different types of content are aggregation (mass group of the same people), distillation (pulling the most important aspect) , elevation (higher placed content), mashup (mixture of everything) and chronology (arranged in order of meaning).
Lukasz Zelezny (USwitch) : Effective visits – why they are more important than visits.
- An effective visit is a visit excluding the bounce rate.
- Concept of comparison should be year on year and not month on month.
- Not enough effort goes into on page SEO these days – it’s what keeps people on your site.
- There are 2 types of traffic – predictable & non-predictable
- Bounce rate may increase but may not be a bad thing
- Don’t use month on month comparisons in Google Analytics – it’s not 100 accurate – do it separately in a spreadsheet.
Recommended tools to looks at:
- Brand24 – for brand name tracking
- Search Metrics & SEM Rush – for keyword research intelligence
- Google Webmaster Tools, MajesticSEO and Ahrefs – for backlink research.
- Google Analytics, Omniture Discover, Analytics Canvas – for traffic tracking and data extraction.
- Moz, Screaming Frog and SEO Clarity – for onpage optimisation
- Tableau and Excel – for reporting
Summary
Overall the 2-day conference was a great opportunity and learning experience for us to take part in, have our say and listen to what other leading SEO experts are doing and thinking about for the future of their clients and businesses.
If you’re keen to know more about Brighton SEO, take a look at their site.
Enquire early enough and you can bag yourself a free ticket for the next session in March. It is well worth attending for any law firm who have SEO and Search Marketing on the forefront of their digital strategy.