BrightonSEO is the world’s largest search marketing conference in the world dedicated to providing digital marketing experts with the opportunity to learn and network with some of the most influential experts in the world of search. Previously we shared that we were sponsors again this year and some of our team attended the event to gain valuable insights, network with other industry experts, and learn about the latest trends in digital marketing. Now that we’ve had time to reflect and go through our findings with the whole team, we wanted to share our key takeaways from the event.
Optimising the SERP for the Multiverse – Jon Earnshaw, Pi Datametrics
We need to be aware of the different ways in which we can optimise the SERP for the multiverse and stop obsessing over the ‘keyword game’ and SERP 0. A couple of key points from the talk included:
- Autocomplete – These are not merely suggestions, but predictions based on other successful searches.
- Landscape of Voice – We are at the tipping point of voice and SERP is pushing it, so it’s important to take into consideration Alexa and Google Home.
- Refine the Search, People Also Ask, and People Also Search for – Manifestation of the search intent.
- Tracking and Learning from All SERP Features – How different are they? How present are they? How does your biggest competitor stack up?
- Look at Competitors from a Different Angle – How have they got to where they are now? Remember to look at search visibility score and search position breakdown.
Taking Your Business to the Next Level with the Power of Ecommerce SEO – Anna Moragli, Search Magic
In the past there was an obsession with rankings, algorithms, generating backlinks, and producing content. However, now rankings don’t translate into traffic and revenue as successfully anymore. The key focus needs to be on bottom-line metrics such as non-brand revenue, conversation rate, and new customers.
Website Migrations, What Can Go Wrong? – Richard Hird, Stickyeyes
Website migrations play a crucial role in SEO, however, there are a lot of things that can go wrong during a migration from not taking into account SEO advice until after the migration, to not ensuring you have the support needed from the technical and brand teams. Traffic and revenue can drop drastically from a wrongly implemented migration, and it can be a long process to restore rankings. Therefore, it’s important to plan it out properly and consider SEO advice from the very beginning.
Is TikTok the New Google? – Rachel Pearson, Watch This Sp_ce
TikTok has become a global phenomenon, with explosive growth and worldwide popularity. It’s not just other social platforms that TikTok is surpassing, it’s now also rivalling Google. TikTok is being used as a search engine with 40% of young people (e.g., Gen Z) using it when looking for recommendations, this is because it’s quicker and easier to digest content that is perceived as unbiased and authentic.
Even though TikTok is not a threat to Google, it’s worth the attention of SEOs and keeping a close eye on how this develops. It will be interesting to see how the platform progresses and if they can continue to grow their older audience further which is already starting to increase. With viewers increasingly having shorter attention spans and expecting concise informative material, it’s only going to grow even more in popularity and become the favourable platform for information for more people.
Hacking GA4 for SEO – Nitesh Sharoff, Growth Runner
Everyone is talking about the latest changes and new features to GA4 which include:
- Event Driven – Data model is not based on page views anymore, making it highly customisable.
- Personalised Reports – As it’s a non-standard interface, everything can be set up from scratch. You could potentially have an entire SEO section.
- Cross Device – You can track App and web all in one place, making it very useful to track the impact on organic.
- New Channel Grouping – New channel grouping with disclosed definitions and sources.
Our team expanded on the learnings about GA4 and shared a couple of tips:
- Integrated GSC – It’s not a default setting but your GSC data is available directly in your UI as a separate report.
- Events & Alerts Customisation – You can highly customise events, adding parameters to these events to track new aspects. Also, with custom alerts you can set any condition that you want to be notified for channel changes.
- SEO Content Value – Using custom audience triggers and automated events, you could track if your SEO content is moving people down the funnel from awareness to conversion.
- Scroll Tracking – With the help of GTM you can set up Scroll Tracking and see the number of users per % of page scrolled.
Basic Automation Hacks for SEO – Tom Pool, Blue Array
When it comes to automation, it doesn’t have to be complicated and there are lots of benefits as it saves time so you can focus on other tasks and improve your team’s workflow making it more organised and efficient. A couple of examples for automation from the talk included:
- Providing ChatGPT with prompts to help you write code in Google Apps Script – This can help with tasks you have to do all the time like formatting sheets or slides, and making them uniform such as the same colour, font, and size.
- Schedule crawls in Screaming Frog and export data directly into Google Looker Studio
- Inclusion of Macros – Macros are a series of recorded actions within Google Sheets. As an example, you can automate a certain set of actions which you perform in Google Sheets to analyse data, without having to write code yourself. Once recorded you can activate a macro with a menu item or shortcut key.
Neuroscience of Search: How the Brain Shapes Customer Behaviour – Giulia Panozzo
Neuromarketing has a lot in common with CRO and SEO. The way your website is set up is crucial for the user experience, but also for the decision-making process. It’s important as taking this into consideration can increase traffic and conversions as it puts users back in focus, wins the attention over rankings, and increases engagement. A couple of key factors to consider include:
- Making every part of the journey count and focus on a flawless experience to avoid negativity bias.
- Optimise for the user, not the search engine. Throughout the user journey, connect on an emotional level.
- Negative emotions and experiences take precedence over position emotions and experiences.
- Bolding words helps with scanning, anything that deviates from the regular catches the eye.
- Include social proof such as user generated content and reviews.
ChatGPT: Localisation Friend or Foe – James Ball, Croud
In this talk James discussed a test they performed about content localisation based on editorial testing. The main idea was to understand if ChatGPT was good enough in terms of content. Their findings found that it was very evident that machine translations were used and there was a lack of emotive language. However, for EU languages they found that the text was generally grammatically correct, but this was not the case with non-EU languages.
The key takeaways were that AI for strategy content can be really helpful (ask what products a company offers, top products, what is the brand known for, etc), and it was also found to be good at proofreading and QA (they conducted a test vs Grammarly and it was better).
The Fast and Furious Guide to Real World Link Building – Greg Gifford, SearchLab Digital
Greg shared actionable tactics for building real world links that matter and walked through the actual process of link building, which is not normally covered at conferences. These are the main points we wanted to highlight from the talk:
- The best links are based on relationships that have real-world value beyond SEO.
- It’s important to think outside the box with link building.
- Link building doesn’t necessarily require a massive budget and dozens of specialists working on campaigns.
- You can apply localised strategies that yield results in the long term, even though you are not doing local SEO.
- Be creative, follow a documented process or framework, and monitor results every three or four months.
Summary
There were many other incredible talks the team attended at brightonSEO, but we wanted to share a couple of key highlights from the talks that our team enjoyed the most and found most valuable. We attend the conference twice a year as it’s a valuable way for our team to learn, grow, and build connections within the industry and look forward to sending different team members later this year.
If you’re interested in digital marketing services or want to learn more about us at GA Agency and what we do, feel free to get in touch.
