We took the long but ‘worth it’ journey down to BrightonSEO Europe’s largest search conference last Thursday. Here are our key takeaways and a list of slides from BrightonSEO September 2017.
Stacey MacNaught Tactical, Practical Keyword Research for Today’s SEO Campaigns
Stacey always provides tactical advice for improving your search strategy. A few takeaways from her talk which you can implement today are below:
Interview customers to identify triggers from customers.
These comments and data are invaluable for interrupting the search journey an example is understanding why people buy a washing machine:
Use this information to inform your strategy and tactics to get consumers to your site.
Using Amazon’s question and answer section to make sure you are answering these yourself as a brand.
This is a gold mine of understanding your customer’s considerations when buying.
Identify common positive adjectives from reviews and create word clouds.
These positives reflect the importance of these factors within customers buying decisions, so including them in on page copy around your products is probably going to help convince.
Sophie Coley Answering The Public: How To Find Top-Notch Audience Insight in Search Data and How To Apply It
Sophie started with a thought provoking comment:
Have you ever asked Google something you can’t ask someone else?
An interesting thought here is that is Google data who we really are and social is how we want to be perceived? And how can we apply marketing to these pieces?
Use labels to further understand your audience
The above led nicely into understanding how audiences identify themselves. Are the someone who reads? Or do they identify as a bookworm? Within this example, people search for all kinds of stuff that match with their deep-rooted identity e.g. 'tattoos for bookworms' 'careers for book worms' The ‘for’ arm in answerthepublic’s data is great for this.
Dawn Anderson Generational Cruft in SEO. There is Never a ‘New Site’ When There’s History
What is Cruft?
Dawn explored a topic that isn’t really documented within the SEO industry ‘cruft’ which distilled down is the fact that once something is created it is there forever and this can snowball to brands having a lot of unnecessary rubbish associated with their site. A few things to keep an eye on here are:
Understanding the history of your sites
One other key point for business is to ensure there are handovers and a full understanding of the history of your sites. As internal teams can churn as well as external agencies. Ensure you have all the documentation and versions to hand and passed down employee lifespans would be a good place to start. Dawn's slide deck is a hefty one but a real eye opener backed with comments from Googlers and data.
Interview with Google's Gary Illyes
There is obviously a lot of interest around Gary and what he has to say on the inner workings of Google. Some takeaways that came out of this interview session:
- Google have been looking to work better with publishers to help quality publications. Which could or could not lead to a ‘subscription tag’ being implemented within search results.
- Gary confirmed that the algorithm update labelled as Fred is not a single algorithm but it is more the ongoing tests Google implement every single day (around 2 to 3)
- Fluctuations will always happen in traffic due to these tests but if a brand is creating content that is highly cited and being talked about on social media then it can only be positive.
- Confirmation that Mozcast usually gets algorithmic changes right but the scale between Moz findings and Google’s own can be very different.
- Rankbrain uses historical data to make predictions about what satisfies users. And uses the example of Python within personalisation. Whether people are looking the snake, programming language etc. Rankbrain works this out through an individual’s click data.
- Penguin hasn’t been updated for a while and is running in the background. Stating that “If it makes you feel better use the disavow tool” But in the same breath. “disavow is a very powerful tool”
- Google still applies manual actions against buying links and he’s quite happy when this happens.
- There is value to fixing broken links but you must keep context in mind.
- No update on mobile first index but with mobile indexing Google will look to crawl amp versions of the page and they are working hard to not rely on webmasters for labelling.
- There is a tiny boost for sites on https currently (basically a tie breaker of quality) but may increase in the future.
- If rankings don’t stay stable on a site migration then it probably will be something wrong on the webmaster side. However, Gary was interested in seeing moves from http:// to https:// that haven’t gone smoothly.
We are sure there are some more gems from other talks which we didn’t make but we will be reading through over the coming week. The video stream and current list of published slides are below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeSozRzol2w
(And you can check out the event's website here if you're interested in all other news to do with BrightonSEO and future events)
Fundamentals
Danny Richman – The small tweaks you need to be making to boost your existing rankings
Ric Rodriguez – The SEOs Guide To JavaScript
Nicole Bullock – Managing Multi-Location Listings in Google My Business
Online PR
Shannon McGuirk – News hooks: what are they and how can you make the most of them in your digital PR and link building strategies?
Sophie Everett – How to package and pitch a story to journalists
Bobbi Brant – How to Get Top Links With an Unknown Brand and No Budget
APIs in Search
Yiğit Konur – Connecting APIs without Coding Skills to Create Your Own Dashboards
Kostas Voudouris – Performance-based optimisation using Google Search Console API
Stephan Solomonidis – Using Natural Language APIs in SEO
Paid Search
Jeroen Maljers – Top 10 AdWords Tactics for B2B Lead Gen Campaigns
Saija Mahon – How to use remarketing tactics to activate and enhance client retention
Anu Adegbola – Excel Formulas PPC professionals need
Affiliate Marketing
Helen Southgate – Affiliate Marketing – what’s it all about?
Ranking Factors
Christoph Cemper – Increase your search engine traffic by up to 500% with this simple trick
Jo Turnbull & Daniel Furch – A different perspective on Ranking Factors
Duane Forrester – Markup, User Driven Change and Your Future: Do this today for success tomorrow.
Javascript & Frameworks
Bartosz Góralewicz – Can Google properly crawl and index JavaScript? SEO experiments – results and findings.
Emily Grossman – PWAs and New JS frameworks for Mobile
David Lockie – Using Open Source Software to Speed up your Roadmap
Future of Search
Daniel Rowles – Using Advanced Social Listening Techniques to Drive SEO
Saeley Jnr Johnson – Speak Easy – The rise of Voice Search
Vikas Arora – Psychology of Search
Reputation
Ammon Johns – The Myth of Domain Authority
Myles Anderson – Harnessing your Online Reputation to win New Customers
Ben Harrow – Quality PR Linkbuilding – with Terrible Budget
Advanced Keyword Research
Stacey MacNaught – Tactical, Practical Keyword Research for Today’s SEO Campaigns
Sophie Coley – Answering The Public: How To Find Top-Notch Audience Insight in Search Data and How To Apply It
Kelvin Newman – Scary SERPs (and keyword creep)
Influencer Marketing
Allyson Griffiths – Why micro influencers are a knee jerk reaction to poor influencer marketing
Sophie Bishop – Field notes from my PhD on Zoella
Mindy Gofton – Don’t Call Me Bae: Are You Engaging or Annoying Your Customers?
On Site
Chloé Bodard – SEO quick wins from a technical check
Sébastien Monnier – How Google Tag Manager can help your SEO
Aysun Akarsu – On The Road to HTTPS Worldwide
Business
Stephan Spencer – How to Hire an Insanely Great SEO
Dorothy Agnew – Surviving the transition to the General Data Protection Regulation
Chris Munch – How to Triple Your Client Close Rate Using The Kings Rule
International
Cécile Monty – International SEO – Optimizing Your Site For a Global Audience
Gemma Nortcliffe – Why International Doesn’t Always Mean Multilingual
Gavin Colborne – Web Governance in Multi-nationals
Content Marketing
Amy Harrison – The Customer Disconnect: How Inside-Out Copy Makes You Invisible
Chelsea Blacker – ROI Measurement in Content Marketing
Sam Charles – Blogging advice that’ll make your job easier – guaranteed!
Analytics
Tim Stewart – Convert with Intelligent Analytics
Lunch Keynote
Crispin Sheridan & Seth Besmertnik – Is Your SEO Getting Enough Credit? Build an Attribution Model that Works for You
E-commerce
Emily Mace – Technical SEO for Ecommerce at home and abroad
Samuel Dean & Vlassios Rizopoulos – What we have learnt from indexing over half a Billion products
Ann Stanley – Top tips for using Google Shopping ads
Technical SEO
Peter Nikolow – Quick and Dirty Server-side tweaks to improve your SEO
Dominic Woodman – Advanced Site Architecture – Testing architecture & keyword/page groupings
Dawn Anderson – Generational Cruft in SEO. There is Never a ‘New Site’ When There’s History
Email Marketing
Philip Storey – How to revolutionise your customer lifecycle with email marketing
Chatbots
Hannah Jane Giles – The distinct SEO advantage: messaging apps and bots
Emilie Reynaud – What I have learnt from launching a chatbot
Jonathan Seal – Creating more human experiences with chatbots
Paid Social
Duane Brown – Video: The Next Frontier in Marketing
Susan Wenograd – Facebook Ads: Turning on the Faucet Without Drowning
Matt Beswick – Ridiculous to Sublime Paid Social: The story of the million dollar dog
Link Building
Fili Wiese – Linkbuilding 2018
Dixon Jones – Creating Workflows for Link Building
Greg Gifford – Righteous Tips for Building Totally Excellent Local Links
Content Strategy
Jade Tolley – Hub, Hygiene and Hero: The Three Content Types You Need
Laura Hampton – Kick-Ass Strategies for a Customer Focused Content Plan
Alan Cairns – The shortcomings of data for content strategy
Video
Jonathan Pascoe – What short form content means to ITN Productions
Sam Hanni – The Youtube Potential: Why marketers are losing money from ignoring YouTube as a traffic source
Onsite Content
Jes Stiles – Marketing in 360 degrees: Photos, Videos and VR
Rebecca Brown – Why you Should Scrap your “Content” Budget Line
Jon Myers – Links, Log Files, GSC and everything in between
Strategy
Olga Andrienko – Agile marketing: A step-by-step guide
Andi Jarvis – The 7 questions you need to ask before you start digital marketing
Chris Simmance – What makes a good SEO strategy?
Crawl & Indexation
Chris Green – Robots: X, Meta & TXT – The Snog, Marry & Avoid of the Web Crawling World
François Goube – How to optimise your Crawl budget?
Cindy Krum – Understanding the Impact of Mobile-First Indexing
Market Place Optimisation
Darren Ratcliffe – Getting a competitive advantage on ebay
Prabhat Shah – Amazon Sponsored Ads – Beyond Basics
CJ Rosenbaum – Avoiding and Recovering Marketplace from Suspensions
AMP
Aleyda Solis – Setting AMP for Success
Jon Henshaw – Forget AMP – Make Fast Sites!
Danni Lapham – R-AMP Up Your Mobile Content – The Accelerated Mobile Pages Roadmap
Outreach
Marcelle Antunes – How to produce creative campaigns worthy of BBC coverage.
Hana Bednarova – The missing link – How make sure Journalists include links in their coverage
Simon Brisk – How you can use automation to personalise outreach?
Social
Luke Knight – Does the Trump card always work on Social Media?
Allegra Chapman – Measuring the ROI of Social Media Marketing
Hannah Dempsey – Broadening your social listening beyond your brand
Keynote: Chat with Google’s Gary Illyes
Chat about Google Search, Search Console, and everything SEO