6 Min Read
On Thursday afternoon, a team of Digital Next-ers set off on an epic journey* from our Manchester UK head office to Brighton for the annual BrightonSEO event held at Brighton Dome on April 22nd. (*not really that epic, just your standard train ride down to London, and a hop skip and a jump to Brighton)
Now, if you’ve never heard of BrightonSEO before, well where have you been? It’s only the biggest SEO conference in the UK. But, don’t worry… we’re coming to your rescue, here is 22 things we learned:
The queues weren’t like ordinary queues, they were out the door, down the road and then some… although this was to be expected after tickets sold out in 60 seconds! At the keynote speak at the beginning of the day, Kelvin from BrightonSEO announced that from September they would be relocating to a new venue, with more capacity to allow even more SEO fanatics in, but we still would advise you to get there early, and embrace the day!
How to Optimise a YouTube video to its full potential – the Fundamentals talk at the beginning of the day really got us off to a good start; teaching us how to take advantage of the tools YouTube offers, including description, transcript, tags.
Did you know that videos hosted on your own domain are more credible to help you become more visible?
Did you know 85.5% of sales still occur in person? And 4 in 5 local mobile searches result in a purchase; showing the importance of making sure you are visible online with the correct contact information and local details.
Understand your demographic in order to create good quality content. Try a tool such as YouGov to break the information down and delving into a deeper understanding of the habits of your consumer, i.e. we don’t just want ’18-30-year-old females’, we all know the population is much more diverse than this and the information is out there for you to use!
Keep on top of your customer’s media habits, they’re changing all the time! Gone are the days of using one channel to advertise or connect with your consumers, with the introduction of on demand TV, mobile internet etc. take a look at how you are structuring your business, avoid communications risks and letting business slip away from you.
How important and how easy it can be to get your content featured on Google News to be seen. It is the window to the world, and although it can be very selective if your content is ‘newsy’ and relevant enough it will be picked up and featured and this can be very beneficial for your brand.
Video content is more important than ever, it is a professional but friendly way to convey your brand message and utilise tools across the internet to optimise your business online.
Utilising video in your email marketing campaigns can lead to a 300% increase in click through rates!
And if the information is wrong or missing, it won’t fix itself. Every journey starts with Google, and missing URL’s, phone numbers etc. can cost up to £900m in lost revenue!
We can’t expect this type of behaviour from them, as an agency we need to help the brands publish the content, and this is why brands outsource to us.
Localising your social media campaigns help you to target the correct people in the correct way.
Get to know your audience properly before you attempt to market to them, create conversational pieces that will really make sense to the reader and grab their attention!
Localised optimisation techniques (Google My Business and Blogging) how to create and develop a strategy focused on boosting local visibility by deploying content, social, video, e-marketing, and organic and paid strategies. Local links are “badass’ and it’s better to have a lot of backlinks from local sources with low DAS, rather than have one backlink from a national source with a high DA.”
Every 1 second improvement in site speed can result in up to a 2% increase in conversions by simply optimising the performance on the front-end of your website.
Are you using a simple checklist? Your SEO Ranking is likely to fail, the emphasis should be on user intention and content quality/relevancy. Understanding the customer journey is pivotal to success.
This can help to guide content strategies and enable you to understand (and visualise if you utilise YouGov) the demographics and needs of the people you are trying to appeal to, persuading them to convert in the process.
Whatever your role is in ensuring your customers see their journey through to the end and convert, understand that this decision making is inherently emotional!
The number one local SEO ranking factor is consistency of citations across the web!
Whilst keeping up with the latest news and events is important, creating evergreen content which utilises the fundamental concepts of your industry is valuable for your content strategy and should be factored in.
Obviously with it moving in September, this might be a little different, but we heard it’s going to be in an even better location! Either way, there are SO many little cafes, big chains and pubs for you to stop off at during the intervals to refuel you throughout the day, and they will usually do offers for attendees so keep an eye out for these in the materials they give you at the beginning of the day!
And so will wearing a bright orange jacket! During the content talk in the Old Court House, Conor McNicholas used Frozen references to get his point across that sticking to the rules when it comes to content marketing isn’t going to cut it anymore, you need to be more like Elsa, who built a snowman (Olaf) who could withstand warm weather!
Wherever you are in the country, if you can manage to get tickets to their next event in September, it’s definitely worth the trip. Coming from Manchester, we stayed in Brighton for two nights, and got to experience Brighton’s nightlife as well as learning a lot about what we do at work every day.
Were you at BrightonSEO on Friday? We’d love to hear what you took away from the event!
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