Last week, a handful of the team at Engage Web made the long journey to Brighton to attend the world’s largest search marketing conference, Brighton SEO.
Held over two days, the event saw visitors and speakers from across the world meet at the Brighton Centre to talk all things search marketing.
There was an interesting variety of talks available to attend, with six different talks running at the same time, all presented by industry experts.
Regardless of your interest in link building, copywriting, keyword research, tech SEO or AI, the focused, 20-minute talks were guaranteed to leave you with some useful strategies to implement in your search marketing campaigns.
You can’t be in two places at once, so our group split up and I chose to attend the first day of talks on the following topics:
- SEO Success
- On-site SEO
- Tech SEO
- SEO Analysis
- Content Success
Three speakers gave 20-minute talks during each hour-long sessions, discussing their knowledge and experience on the topic.
In this blog, I’m touching on the key takeaways I’ve drawn from the first day of speakers at this year’s Brighton SEO conference.
The first talk of the day took place in the main auditorium, where a quirky ice cream van served marketers their favourite flavours and an oversized deck chair provided the perfect backdrop for photos.
SEO Success
Introduced by Kelvin Newman, the founder of Brighton SEO, Rad Paluszak was the first to take to the stage, presenting a case study on how he experienced a 40% drop in traffic due to an algorithmic penalty to a 55% traffic and 373% revenue increase.
This was followed by a talk by Paul Ngoie, exploring how to craft your SEO strategy for longevity in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
This focused on the importance of being adaptable in today’s digital world and addressing the changes and challenges of search engine algorithms, technology, and user behaviour.
The third speaker to take to the stage to discuss this topic was Tom Vaughton, who spoke on the good, the bad and the ugly of SEO success.
Tom shared real-life examples from his 24 years in the industry, showcasing examples of good (and bad) SEO strategies, and how we can define the success of our SEO campaigns.
The session was split by a break, where an ice cream may or may not have been consumed at 10:40 in the morning. I remained in the main auditorium for a session on onsite SEO.
Onsite SEO
First to take to the stage to discuss onsite SEO was Emilio Takas, Head of SEO at KingBet Media.
Emilio looked at how to thrive in competitive niches without backlinks and touched on the importance of high-quality content.
He urged that by focusing on content velocity, semantic SEO and an effective internal linking structure, your site can thrive without the need of external backlinks. The message that content is king is still going strong, and there are guidelines on how Google ranks the quality of its content.
Next up was Tom Mansell, who was well-versed in using an evidence-based approach for an organic search strategy.
This talk gave some food for thought, as he shared the idea that to demonstrate the value of your SEO efforts, we must identify the size of the prize and understand how to get there.
He offered a framework and methodology to help with this, which included creating a performance baseline, calculating the incrementality using forecast position and CvR improvements, and prioritizing using a difficulty/opportunity calculation.
Tom shared a Whiteboard Friday that he presented on SEO Forecasting with Moz for those looking to expand their knowledge on this topic.
The final talk of this session was presented by Abbie Dando, founder of Monday Clicks, who discussed how to double your brand’s online revenue and leads through SEO-driven blog content.
Abbie shared insights on how to produce blog content to improve business profits by following a few simple steps.
This included not writing blindly without a call-to-action focus, considering how a page would fit within your website structure, understanding your audience buying journey and where you can capture a user in the awareness, considering, decision or post-purchase funnel and, most importantly, writing a content plan.
The second talk of the day concluded at midday, just in time for fish and chips on the beach!
Find out about our key takeaways from the afternoon sessions of day one of Brighton SEO 2024 in tomorrow’s blog.
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