Alizée Baudez - SEO Consultant

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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:

  1. Educate to prevent SEO mistakes

  2. Validate to avoid launching SEO errors

  3. 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:

    1. Understand why

    2. Education

    3. Data : it’s your backup to explain and show the client what’s possible, keyword difficulty metrics

    4. Offer alternative keywords

    5. Use your own data from Google Search Console

    6. 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:

    1. Do you actually need this bit of code or this image?

    2. Images weigh way more than a thousand words

    3. For simple stock photo pictures, is it really communicating useful information?

    4. Blurring the edges of a photo where you have a subject in the center can reduce the size by 50%

    5. WEBP files are 30% lighter than jpeg

    6. Use SVG files and optimise them by hand because Illustrator adds extra information

    7. 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

    8. Animated SVG are cool

    9. System fonts are zero waste, like Times New Roman, Courrier New, and Arial

    10. WOFF2 font files are lighter

    11. Reuse styles rather than adding styles to improve CSS

    12. Jquery for forms is heavy

    13. MinimalGA for Google Analytics tracking is lighter than Google Tag Manager

    14. Contextual ads over personalised ads -> example: have sports ad on a sports article

    15. Test on Motorola Moto E6 or similar because that is the average of what users have worldwide

    16. 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! 🤞