Embryo by the sea side: Our team’s highlights from October’s Brighton SEO
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Brighton has held several SEO events since 2010, and we were lucky enough to attend their 30th conference this October. It was a great opportunity for our Graduates to connect, network, and apply their new industry knowledge at such a huge event in the SEO calendar.
With 6000+ tickets sold, and a jam-packed schedule, it’s impossible for everyone to attend each talk. We are going to summarise the key sessions we went to and provide the top takeaways and highlights.
We kicked off the day with all things social media.
Our nine Brighton SEO highlights
Sabine Ljunggren
Sabine Ljunggren is a senior SEO specialist and Partner at Maia- a digital growth agency based in Stockholm. She started the day looking at how search behaviour has changed with an increasing social media focus. By not optimising for organic visibility on platforms like TikTok and Pinterest, you could be missing out on huge search volumes.
Key takeaways we took from this session:
- Ranking factors hold huge importance for visibility within social platforms. Specific ranking factors that Sabine urged listeners to focus on were:
- 1) Optimise content
- 2) Maximise the Time the user spends on the platform
- 3) Focus on improving the click-through rate
- 4) Be unexpected and retain engagement
- 5) Hold authority
- 29% of Millenial and Gen Z prefer to use social media as their search engine
- TikTok has a 36%, 35% and 34% search share for recipes, new music and DIY tips respectively.
- Using the TikTok creative centre is the most updated way to see what songs, hashtags and creators are trending
- Over 90% of Tiktok users use the search function within 30 seconds of opening the app
Rana Abu Quba Chamsi PhD
Elevate your video SEO game: unveiling secrets, tools and extensions
Rana is an experienced trainer and consultant working for Expando Digital based in Switzerland. Rana’s expertise lies in data science, SEO, social media and AI integration. This talk gave insights on elevating your video SEO for both YouTube and your website.
- Rana’s insights were:
- A Wistia study revealed a page is on average 1.4x slower if there is a video compared to without.
- VidIQ is a great video tool for trending topics, search volume insights, keyword competitiveness and keyword opportunities.
- Tube Buddy should be used for optimising your YouTube channel
- Each video should have a related page, which ensures that your Video SEO content is meaningful and useful to the user
Teresa Litsa
Teresa is an award-winning marketing professional, freelance trainer and speaker. Teresa shared insights on how to effectively optimise a business LinkedIn profile for maximum reach and visibility.
- The top tips and stats were as follows:
- Make sure your LinkedIn page overview description is aligned with your website. This overview should be kept updated and include keywords you want to rank for
- 2-3 content pillars are enough to keep LinkedIn search users engaged in your profile
- Look at the ‘job titles you were found for’. This will give a good indication of what searches you appear in
- 80% of people on LinkedIn drive business decisions
- LinkedIn is the #1 channel for brand confidence and trust compared to all other social media apps
Our next three talks all had a focus on e-commerce optimisation.
Naiomi Francis Parker
Naiomi is an SEO Manager at Charlotte Tilbury Beauty. She explained how by using filter and category analysis to look at consumer behaviour, website navigation can be improved for commercial growth.
- There are two options when it comes to faceted navigation:
- Facets with a corresponding page that takes users to that page when clicked on
- Facets work as normal and only change the content of the page
- A case study- The Secret Sofa Co.
- 50 new categories were added to the site, combining colour, fabrics and type of sofa
- This was done using a mix of search data and internal data to see the most common combinations of sofa
- Supporting blog content for each of the new combinations
- These pages generated £30k in the first two months after being set live
Ahmed Bhula
Developing the perfect optimised woo-commerce site for maximum conversions
Ahmed is the founder of the digital marketing agency, REMdigital. He shared his expertise on woo-commerce and how to get a high-performing site using, content strategies, conversion design and correct server set-ups.
- Key statistics shared:
- 1 second delay in page load time results in a 7% decrease in conversions
- 53% of mobile users abandon a site which takes more than 3 seconds to load
- 38% of consumers look at the navigation links when on a site for the first time
- 2.7x increase in conversions if there are trust signals on an e-commerce website
Peter Richman
Is headless Shopify the way forward for eCommerce businesses?
Peter is the CEO and Founder of the digital agency, Plug and Play. With a specific focus on combining the benefits of Shopify and WordPress, Peter talks through the benefits of having a headless Shopify.
- Having a headless Shopify helps with:
- URL management
- Duplicate content for categories
- Load speeds
- Content
- International SEO
- Being more customer-centric
In the afternoon, we had a final look at content optimisation.
Dixon Jones
What is topic clustering, and does it matter?
Dixon is the CEO of Inlinks, a company which helps track market trends, optimize content for SEO & automate internal links. He explained why topic clustering and topic modelling should be understood and used by all website owners. The process of content creation isn’t just as simple as keyword research anymore.
His insights were:
- Content planning includes an element of human bias and is rarely thought about from the POV of the consumer
- Content clustering should help a user get to a single point of search, instead of leading them on tangents or linear searches
- A meta-study of 64 articles on topic modelling concluded that none of the papers could agree what the definition of a topic was.
- Google is shifting towards rewarding websites which write with the intent of creating and connecting entities.
Adam Collins
Rapid visualisation: turning keyword data into actionable visual maps in minutes
Adam is the owner of SEO agency, Ignite. He shares his method for creating visual content maps which can help with making data-driven decisions and helping clients understand their SEO content journey progress.
By creating colour-coded maps for content projects, Adam and his team managed to increase client contract length by around 60-70%. It helped him to effectively communicate with clients, which in turn allowed clients to relay this to their team and justify the need for an SEO agency.
Aaron Rudman-Hawkins
Humanise your brand with video
Aaron is the Founder and Managing Director of The Evergreen Agency. In this talk, Aaron not only explained the importance of video but also how putting a face and showing the people behind the brand can take results to the next level. This has been seen with brands such as Dove, Always, and AirB&B.
Aaron’s insights included:
- Stop trying to be famous to the masses, this isn’t effective.
- The aim isn’t ever to go viral. If it happens then it is a bonus
- Knowing who your videos are for is the most important first step
- Knowing what your customer’s pain point is comes next
- Providing the how for them, and giving the customer the solution to their problem in a video
Final thoughts from our team
If we had to summarise the talks into one key takeaway, we would say that understanding who your audience is, and their pain points should be at the heart of everything else you do. Overall it was a great experience at Brighton SEO, and the day put into perspective how important it is to understand the ever-changing and evolving world of digital marketing.
