I recently attend the BrightonSEO conference for the third time in succession. Held every six months (April and September) at the Brighton Centre, it is amongst the world’s largest get togethers of search engine optimisation talks and networking events.
Whilst I have been doing SEO for 20+ years and know a lot of the basics, it is great to attend this event as there is always something to learn and re-inforce what is known already. We always prescribe the basics of promoting your web site as :
- Great quality unique content
- Organising that content in SEO and web visitor friendly ways
- Backlinks – credibility from the rest of the world
- Site speed – how fast does your web site / page load
- PPC – Google AdWords primarily is an essential part of the toolkit
These five broad areas are dissected into infinite details at the conference into technical, business, marketing and all other ways possible so you have the best understanding of what is possible…. or leave you completely overwhelmed!!
This year I went with my colleague Darren from Trading Depot who has different requirements from my clients who have smaller catalogues and less sophisticated than their huge Magento based catalogue. I was interested in dipping my toe into the European markets optimisation as we are looking at rolling this out for Cater For You next year (give or take Brexit complications!) and came away with a few useful tips.
Most if not all of the slides can be found on Slideshare or YouTube. Some of the interesting talks I went to all made interesting suggestions:
- Content Marketing
- SEO Tools
- International Expansion
- Small Budget SEO marketing
- Keynote talk by Rand Fishkin – founder of moz.com
The areas that we picked up included
- use photos of humans looking at the text on the page
- Use hotjar to see how people use your site and blockages
- a/b testing
- Competitor link analysis
- Influencer events
- Link reclamation
- Give something back free locally
- Ego bait – promote your customers, create your own awards
- Upload images to Flikr
- Targeting featured snippets
For basic customers, there are so many SEO improvements that can be made straight away, for more advanced web sites which have had time and money invested in them, this conference really does deliver the marginal benefits that are needed to rank higher in the highest positions.
If you would like to chat about your web site and the scope for improvement, contact me and we can chat about it over a coffee.
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