In yesterday’s blog, we touched on the key takeaways from the two morning sessions that kicked off Brighton SEO 2024.
In this blog, we’ll continue the discussion, focusing on the insightful talks that took place in the afternoon.
Upon returning to the Brighton Centre after lunch, I made my way to Syndicate 1 & 2, where Ray Grieselhuber, Matt Greenwood and Nabeel Tanveer presented fascinating talks about SEO analysis.
SEO Analysis
Ray Grieselhuber was first speaker to take to the stage, presenting his talk titled ‘going beyond “what happened?” in SERP analytics’. The talk centered around looking past “what” happened when looking at SERP performance and instead focusing on the “why”.
Using metrics from Google Search Console metrics, he presented a basic overview of the search funnel, stating that while clicks and average position tell us what has happened, there’s no explanation as to why here. Impressions and click through rate are a derived metric, but they don’t tell the full story.
Ray went on to explain how modern SERP features could be having a detrimental effect on our performance on the SERPS, with visuals appearing at the top of the results page and taking up valuable pixel space, ultimately pushing our pages further down. This one left me wanting to go off and search all of our target keywords to see how they’ve been affected by Google’s pixel problems.
Matt Greenwood was next up, presenting a talk on a beginner’s guide to Regex. A lot of notes were taken during this talk, with numbers, letters and characters flying around left right and center, all representing a handy way to filter data.
Matt explained what dots, asterisks, questions marks, forward slashes and everything in between represented in the world of Regex, and how powerful they can be to an SEO when used in conjunction with one another. The next time you’re working through a list of redirects or filtering URLS in a particular folder than mention a specific keyword, regex will be your best friend!
Nabeel Tanveer, Global Technical SEO Manager at Electolux, concluded the session with his talk on ‘scaling up your SEO with Google Big Query’.
During this focused session, Nabeel discussed how beneficial Google Big Query can be, with the ability to hold a lot more data than your local disk. With Big Query, you can avoid data limitations and access historical data.
He went on to discuss how you can integrate large amounts of data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Sheets and Facebook to Big Query. You can then use structured query language to find valuable SEO insights from this data, which can be easier and faster than manual processes.
After a much-needed break to process the information of the last hour, I returned to the main auditorium for the final session of the day, which focused on content success.
Content success
The first speaker, Natalie Arney, presented a talk titled “reduce, reuse, recycle your way to content success”, which focused on the effects of content decay.
She explained that a decay in content can be caused by a number of factors, including a shift in search intent or general aging of content, all of which can cause a decline in organic search traffic over time.
Natalie discussed how a good content audit can help you understand what works well and what could be a problem on your website. By reviewing the content you already have, you can assess if the content meets its intended purpose. If not, reducing, reusing and recycling are valid options.
If you’re struggling with generating new content ideas, this is a good place to focus your efforts. Why not review what you already have and save time and money by repurposing your existing pages?
Zoe Burke, editor of Hitched.co.uk, was next to the stage, presenting arguably one of my favourite talks from the day. This session focused on how to read your audience’s mind by creating content that converts.
Unfortunately, Zoe wasn’t Mystic Meg and couldn’t tell us exactly how to read someone’s mind, however, she did share some valuable information on how taking the time to understand your audience can lead to content that converts.
Zoe shared her personal experience in using TikTok to engage with her audience, acting as a virtual meet and greet with her user base. She shared that users on TikTok don’t hold back and love to share their thoughts and feelings, meaning that she’s been presented with comments that she has been able to take valuable insights from.
There’s no easier way to find out what your target audience are looking for than by asking and receiving their responses as comments.
The final session of the day was presented by Erik Wikander, who discussed the future of search and content marketing in a post-AI world.
Erik looked forward to the year 2026, when Google’s search generative experience has been implemented and AI takes over the results page.
He went on to look at how this new and improved results page will help provide users with exactly what they’re looking for and will likely see an increase in the potential of long tail keywords.
Using “things to do in Barcelona with a 3-year-old boy in December” as an example, he showed the current results page, and how the suggestions aren’t the most ideal ways to spend time with a three-year-old boy in Barcelona in December.
He went on to discuss how in the year 2026, we could see more specific AI-generated results, which would be much more useful to the user. However, this could be a scary thought for online marketers who could see their rankings plummet below Google’s pixels.
The final session of the day ended with a call to the East and West bars for a drinks reception, where I contemplated the future of my career thanks to Google’s Search Generative Experience over a glass of sauvignon blanc!
- Google updates viewing experience for search engine results - October 18, 2024
- Is it important to track key events in Google Analytics 4? - October 10, 2024
- How to create custom alerts in Google Analytics 4 - October 9, 2024