BrightonSEO is a conference for professional search engine optimization industry experts – SEOs, digital marketers, web designers and developers, social media creators, content writers, bloggers and vloggers.
It began around 10 years ago above a pub in Brighton, East Sussex, and has since grown into a biannual event held at the Brighton Centre, attracting thousands of people from around the world. The recently introduced overseas version in San Diego is now well established.
Keeping up with the latest SEO trends
Naturally as specialists in both web design and SEO, BrightonSEO has been an important date in our diary for several years. We use it to hone our technical and content skills as well as staying up to date with the latest SEO trends. That’s crucial in such a fast moving industry.
We attend each April and September and listen to around 30 talks from the biggest industry names globally. And it’s great to get validation from those experts that you’re doing things right. Even Google doesn’t keep us that well informed!
After each BrightonSEO conference, we like to provide a quick write up of tips and discoveries (see our SEO Tips for 2023-24 post).
Here are our SEO best practice nuggets from this year’s event (we find a lot of this obvious but not everybody follows the latest in SEO!)…
SEO success
- Be transparent to clients with your monthly SEO services, it builds trust
- Are you being mediocre? For example, are your website case studies up to date?
- Measure stats against the competition as well as the wider industry
- Be intentional – stay ahead of the SEO innovation curve
Onsite SEO
- Your blog should be authentic and SEO-optimized, and it should hit a nerve so choose topics that your audience can identify and emote with
- Identify which keyword(s) to target first, and ensure it’s embedded naturally throughout the post
- Include a juicy call-to-action at end
- Don’t be afraid of using AI for inspiration – ask ChatGPT what the target customer wants
- Feed your keyword research into the customer journey
- Create content funnels, ultimately driving the reader to the end action, eg purchase
- Research what posts are already ranking well and beat them – look at images, headings, downloads, word counts and FAQs
- You don’t have to post weekly – one good article per month is better than one mediocre one per week
Copywriting
- Turning lurkers into leads
- Use storytelling – or ‘Storyselling’ – to build the picture, describe the current world, identify problems/negatives, show what benefits/answers you can offer, describe the new world, provide the call-to-action
- Be the trusted expert
- Create E-E-A-T super content – that’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and Google will love it
- Write content that search engines and humans can really understand
- Use AI tools to find related and similar keywords and topics to help expand your keyword base on a certain topic or blog post
How to manage content decay
- A content audit helps identify pages/posts suffering from ‘content decay’, where blog posts or website content has simply become out of date or unuseful
- Don’t be afraid to reduce, reuse and recycle your content – historical posts have less value
- When repurposing or rewriting content, start with the old and valueless
- Removing old or unused content is actually an eco-friendly task – every page and post on the internet causes use of bandwidth, power and storage
Long tail searches
- Google searches are likely to become more ‘long tail’ as their AI hones in on more detailed human search strings
- Search text entered is becoming longer and more naturally worded, and Google is improving its understanding of what we type in
Video SEO (#vseo)
- YouTube is a search engine as well as a video hosting channel
- Promote your YouTube video immediately after upload and if you have make edits, do so within 3 hours or they’re effectively ignored
- Be consistent in your posting frequency
- Longer content is better – a 1 hour video viewed for 10 minutes is better than a 1 minute video being viewed in full
- Use behind the scenes videos, which create trust through transparency and honesty
- Use a compelling video thumbnail for a good click-through rate, use branding and colour palette
- Search engines read closed captions (subtitles), including translations
- Embedded video increases user engagement on a website or blog because users spend more time on page
- Video offers increased backlink opportunities
- Google likes mixed content – video, paragraph text, headings etc
- For ecommerce website and blogs, use ‘shoppable’ videos
- Use keyword research to identify your video meta tags, title and description
Search intent
- Term-Weighting BERT helps Google think like a human and understand search intent, words and sequence of words, eg “running shoes” being different to “running” and “shoes”
- Rolled out in 2019, it focuses on the nuances of language
- Quality of Google search results has got worse recently (spammy, flooded by AI content); using TW BERT can help address this
- Confirmation bias in human searching is an issue, eg anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists only viewing the results that fit their narrative
- Search results are providing more mixed messages than ever before, often even the same website giving opposing answers to the same question
Social media marketing with TikTok
- TikTok represents high numbers of referrals to websites so should not be ignored
- TikTok is a search engine, and the information source of choice for Gen Zs
- Check its wide usage demographic – you may be surprised!
Need help with your SEO?
We hope you find these pointers useful. If you’re after further information on any of the above please get in touch for a friendly chat. We offer website and SEO audits, content writing, search engine ranking (SERP) reporting and more digital marketing services.
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Photos from BrightonSEO 2024
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