BrightonSEO April 2022 recap, notes and slides
I can’t believe this was my 5th time at BrightonSEO (IRL). I don’t do many conferences, but this one is worthy enough for me to travel 1000+ km twice a year to hang out with fellow SEOs, learn tons, make new friends, and, of course, grab a fish’n’chips on the beach - if the seagulls don’t steal it from me!
I took loads of notes, and plan to catch up on the talks I couldn’t attend on the BrightonSEO video vault. Until then, here are a few excerpts of my notes, as well as useful links and resources.
Quality assurance
Goodbye SEO fuckups! Learn to set a quality assurance framework
Slides and talk by Aleyda Solis.
Notes:
85% of SEOs have one to two major SEO incidents each year
We generally spend more time fixing and improving than building stuff
It’s not only a matter of catching error faster but to prevent them too
SEO monitoring should be a part of a broader SEO quality assurance process:
Educate to prevent SEO mistakes
Validate to avoid launching SEO errors
Monitor
Technical SEO QA: shining a light on invisible work
Slides and talk by Myriam Jessier & Gianna Brachetti-Truskawa.
Always have a staging environment to test things on
Define what’s important for your QA:
Critical pages
User flows
Core functionalities
Questions to ask yourself: Is it crawlable? Is in indexable? Is it rank-worthy?
Make sure to communicate potential risks to the teams
What matters:
Do not overload with thousands of pages
GSC has a time delay, so keep it in mind for QA
Some QA checks must be manual
QA your code: canonicals, schema, and hreflang
Use a configuration file in Screaming Frog, so everyone does QA the same way every time
Be aware that each type of site has its own QA flavour
Some deployments are not done by humans: cron jobs, scripts, server updates
Brand vs SEO: how to win allies and influence brand guardians
Slides and talk by Becky Simms.
Use personas, even when you work on SEO
SEO and the brand both use the website as a vehicle, so there’s necessarily some overlap or collaboration opportunities between both fields
Fundamentals
Beyond the basics: 5 (or 10) Google Business Profile elements you might not know about but REALLY should
Slides and talk by Claire Carlile.
There’s now a “request a quote” feature in Google Business Profile, but it can show how your potential clients can get quotes from your competitors as well
In your local results tracking tools, include your competitors
UTM trackers in URLs are crucial in GBP
When you ask for reviews from your clients, give them ideas on what they could write about to avoid “empty” or boring reviews
Use Vision AI to check what Google sees in the pictures you add to your Google Business Profile. You want to make sure what Google sees reflects what you want your business to show.
Reporting
Freddy Krueger’s guide to scary good reporting
Slides and talk by Greg Gifford.
There’s an unconscious bias where clients don’t always trust digital marketers or SEOs. That means every time we get in touch with our clients we have to overcome the mistrust.
Your client came to you for a problem, and you provide a solution, so the solution needs to appear in the report. Clients want to know quickly if the stuff you do is working.
So the most important thing is to know what to put in your report.
You need to make it crystal clear that what you do matters. This is often as simple as:
Organic traffic
Leads
Organic leads
That’s all you need in the end and that can up be put in one page.
Customise reports to each client to speak to each clients goals. Use questions over jargon for headlines.
Keyword research
How to go after the long tail keywords (and why it matters!)
Slides and talk by Paola Didone.
For long tail keywords, instead of creating new pages for each, start by focusing on pages you already have. You can add a small paragraph on a category page with those long tail keywords and it will do the job for the most part.
Check what is already ranking for the keywords you are targeting
Look at the proportion of the search volume of the head term vs the long tail keywords volume. There’s more point to targeting a long tail keyword that represents 30% of the head search term volume than 0.5%
Effective zero-volume keyword research and why it’s important
Slides and talk by Mark Williams-Cook.
Interestingly, the content ideas AlsoAsked provides will likely have zero search volume.
70-80% of searches are long tail keywords
15% of searches are new
So by not focusing on these keywords, we are actually getting on just 15% of keywords.
It’s not because you have a very low search volume that you shouldn’t write about something. Think about intent volume instead of search volume.
Agency & Freelance SEO
Managing expectations with “impossible keywords”
Slides and talk by Jessica Maloney.
“Impossible keywords” are the ones where the SERP is dominated by a brand (ex. Chapstick) for example, the ones where the client wants to to rank for X without further explanation.
How to proceed with the client:
Understand why
Education
Data : it’s your backup to explain and show the client what’s possible, keyword difficulty metrics
Offer alternative keywords
Use your own data from Google Search Console
Eyes on the competition : when a client comes with a competitor and a keyword, they are often more annoyed by the competitor than by their own ranking for this keyword. So showing them what this competitor does will work better.
Explode your agency growth: be more you
Slides and talk by Nicole Osborn.
Blending in = invisibility
Home page should say :we know what your problems are and we know how to solve them”
Add call to action on the first screen of the home page
Your copy has to be super attractive, honey to a bee
Don’t be too vague on what you do great
Purple and blue themes are overdone
Stock images are boring
About page: have pictures of the people, not the building
Boring won’t get you on the best shortlists 😉
3 strategies to ditch boring:
Stand out brand values
Connect with stories: be noticed by more of your best fit clients, tell people about who you are and they will come
Show your personality
People want to work with people they like, and they will talk about you if they believe they’ve found a rare pearl
Future of Search
Web design for people and planet
Talk by Tom Greenwood.
Check out the Website Carbon Calculator
Practical step to make a website more efficient for everybody and the environment:
Do you actually need this bit of code or this image?
Images weigh way more than a thousand words
For simple stock photo pictures, is it really communicating useful information?
Blurring the edges of a photo where you have a subject in the center can reduce the size by 50%
WEBP files are 30% lighter than jpeg
Use SVG files and optimise them by hand because Illustrator adds extra information
Auto play videos burn through data and are detrimental to the environment and to people who don’t have access to a lot of data
Animated SVG are cool
System fonts are zero waste, like Times New Roman, Courrier New, and Arial
WOFF2 font files are lighter
Reuse styles rather than adding styles to improve CSS
Jquery for forms is heavy
MinimalGA for Google Analytics tracking is lighter than Google Tag Manager
Contextual ads over personalised ads -> example: have sports ad on a sports article
Test on Motorola Moto E6 or similar because that is the average of what users have worldwide
Use dark mode
Search in the Metaverse
Slides and talk by Kara Thurkettle.
Impacts on search:
Search what you see
Use AR
Try on clothes virtually so the user gets more information
Use these technologies to do product demos, people are searching more and more for AR related terms like “see flooring in my room”
The Metaverse changes the user journey, where the SERP becomes a 3D virtual street, or where the information provided to the user is even more personalised
Search intent
How to determine search intent for B2B
Slides and talk by Adriana Stein.
Buyer personas are as important up in B2B in B2C
The challenge for SEOs is to align search intent and purchase intent
B2B is more complicated than B2S in the purchase decision stage because you have multiple people deciding to make the purchase, so we need to understand whether the search intent is B2B or B2C, as well as understand what different buyer personas we will have to deal with.
Step 1: Streamline the buyer personas
It’s impossible to talk to people without knowing who they are
Update buyer personas regularly
Simplify it by categorising the personas
End users - the ones that use the product
Influencers - people who have a voice in the buying process
Decision makers - the ones that decide the purchase
Step 2: Keyword research and clustering
Check keywords by hand and look at what the SERP looks like
Depending on the results you’ll be able to tell if they are B2B or B2C queries
Step 3: Keyword map
Map keywords to each page/type of page
Use multiple keywords to describe one product, by tying it to different use cases, different contexts
One seed keyword, multiple related keywords
Step 4: Create content
Use seed keyword, determine what buying stage this refers to, create title, then h1 and body, repeat with another seed keyword.
This is just a quick summary of some of the talks I attended in person at the event. I haven’t mentioned the keynotes which were both incredible, or the talks I’ll catch up on in the BrightonSEO video vault.
If you want to check out all the slide decks from the event, SiteVisibility has them all listed here.
This is hands-down the best SEO conference I have ever been to, I already have my ticket for October 2022 and even pitched to talk! 🤞
