Another year, another Brighton SEO and I have come away with amazing insights and tips from some of the industry’s top players. It’s come such a long way from being held in a room in a pub, and this years event (on the 12th April) was well worth every penny spent by 3Sixty Digital on a Friend’s of Brighton SEO ticket.
There was a real atmosphere of excitement even before the conference started; steel drums were being played as we filtered into The Brighton Centre, and the crowd was absolutely massive (and well organised by event coordinators).
Here are my best takeaways from some of the inspiring speakers at this year’s conference.
Izzi was captivating to watch and listen to; I particularly enjoyed her presentation on Driving meaningful clicks with enriched SERPs and came away both frustrated and fired-up for the amazing things we can achieve for our clients IF we get it right.
Izzi’s emphasis on ‘meaningful’ was important. It’s so easy to chase the traffic that clients measure SEO success by. But is that traffic actually ever going to convert? I also really enjoyed Izzi’s take on different forms of search intent and which intent drives the significant clicks. We have our own thinking on this too, and you can read more about user search intent here.
I was really psyched to hear Kenichi Suzuki speak, and he did not disappoint with his presentation on A Structured Data Case Study: How to Make Your Websites Stand Out in Search.
Kenichi is a webmaster at Google, as well as being a leading name in the field of SEO internationally, and certainly showed he knows his stuff.
Kenichi focused on how structured data can be used to get better results from optimising for rich features.
I love structured data, and I personally think it is often under utilised by SEOs. So, it was great to see it being applied to tangible results in search pages.
Fili’s presentation titled Why I adore Sitemaps, an ex-Google engineer’s love story, was by far my favourite topic at Brighton SEO this year.
Just before he came on to the stage in Auditorium 1, Kevin Newman spoke a little bit about Fili’s training session the previous day and why he had been so drawn to the sitemap topic when picking speakers for April’s agenda.
Sitemaps are a basic of SEO, and yet the basics are often overlooked whilst chasing metrics for clients who want to see results quicker than optimisation will allow. SEO is a long game; it won’t change your ecommerce revenue overnight. Getting the basics right should be fundamental to every SEO strategy. Build solid foundations now, and you pre-empt ant potential issues that might arrive in the future.
Sitemaps, robots.txt files, canonicals, no index/no-follow directives; they all have to agree with each other to work as efficiently as possible.
So in summary, what I have taken away from Brighton SEO this years is:
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Do the basics to get results. You can’t ignore the fundamentals
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Optimising for rich results should not be measured by clicks, but by meaningful user actions
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Structured data: utilise it for competitive rich result entries
You can have a look at the rough agenda for Brighton SEO’s September conference here.