Last week, our digital team were excited to travel to Brighton for the big SEO conference - named, as expected, BrightonSEO. As it says on the official website, this is "a huge, twice-yearly search marketing conference and training event".
As digital marketing and SEO are both constantly evolving, keeping up to date on the latest news, trends, techniques, and best practices is vital for us to ensure we're offering our clients the very best possible SEO service in Bristol.
The team split their time between content and technical areas, and have come back to the office with pages and pages of notes, heads full of ideas, and inboxes full of demos and trials of new and exciting software.
Here's what they're most excited about...
Greg Gifford spoke about this topic, cramming a lot into his talk! We've only captured a little of it here, but there were plenty of actionable insights to take away, including:
The 'budget/cost-effective' SEO stream was particularly interesting. We work with a lot of start-ups and scale-ups, and we're always looking for ways to make budgets stretch further. So the three talks in this stream were especially useful.
Helen Pollitt talked us through gap analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, gaps, and areas of excellence, to help guide and direct future activity.
Image search optimisation was a particularly interesting area she covered, because so few businesses are doing it. Sure, it might not be the biggest indicator of high intent (that depends on the industry), but it's a great way to get seen in more places, and get more share of the Google SERPs.
As marketers, we need to understand how humans behave - that's a given. But how much do we really pay attention to how our words and content affect people? Google mimics humans better than ever before, so we absolutely have to include the human element in our work.
Kenda Macdonald used a great analogy for understanding the way our brains process information - Minions (those yellow guys from Despicable Me). They're effectively the gatekeepers of our attention. They're the automatic processes that sort out what we can skip over and what needs conscious thought.
If we can't catch the attention of these gatekeepers, our content and marketing gets auto-discarded. So, we need to be thinking about how to cut through the noise to get our content flagged up for conscious review.
Even with the best efforts, not everything takes off. Which can be frustrating, especially when you've put a lot of work into a piece of content. When it doesn't really get much traction, it can be pretty demoralising.
Which is why supporting content is so important. Most digital marketers know how important it is to have pillar content and supporting items, to indicate a level of expertise and knowledge to search. But Alex Jones (not that one) emphasised the need for additional content as a way to ensure that pillar content continues to get reinforced - one of those supporting pieces might make the difference between the main content being noticed and not.
The key point here was not to make your pillar content then scrabble around thinking up extra bits and pieces to support it. It's about making those supporting pieces part of your ideation process - making a web of content from the beginning. That way, you can work on different, but related, content that hits different platforms. You want to get onto Owned, Earned, Paid, and Shared - and the best way to do that is with content geared to each platform individually, but all relating back to and supporting your pillar.
If you have an eCommerce website, the individual product pages are extremely important. Let's face it, the product page is where you would expect most consumers to decide on a purchase, which makes it the one of the most important pages.
Product pages can improve organic search rankings, especially if your eCommerce includes branded products. Plus, people are much more likely to share an individual product page than a homepage. Having an attractive product page encourages people to share with their friends.Alexandre Sigoigne shared some useful tips:
Collecting reviews about the products or services your business provides gives valuable feedback from the customers and users, not only improving SEO ranking but giving new customers confidence. Ben Barker's session went into the ins and outs of how important reviews are for modern businesses on the web.
- Hat tip to Alejandro Mateu for his input after a LOT of note taking during the conference!