Our top takeaways from BrightonSEO 2022

19th October 2022

Laura Fletcher

Senior SEO Executive

5 minutes to read

As October rolled around, we were all feeling the effects of colder climes and darker days. And the best cure for the Autumn blues? A trip to the seaside, of course!

Jess and Laura from our Performance team jetted off to Brighton for one of the world’s biggest search marketing conferences - BrightonSEO - and this is what we learned...

Driving more traffic with less content 📈

Anna Gregory-Hall from Snaptrip shared her top tips for getting more traffic to your website without relying too much on churning out new content. First, she outlined the importance of identifying issues with your current content: Is there any cross-site duplication? What about keyword cannibalisation?

Next, make a keep, redirect, and delete list and try not to be sentimental! To align with Google’s Helpful Content Update, it’s important that your content is purposeful and of use to your audience.

Anna also reminded us to consistently monitor the performance of your content and adjust as needed. Review internal liking structures, optimise images to improve page speed, and don’t forget to regularly update sitemaps.

How to avoid digital PR pitfalls 🤦

Another insightful talk came from Katie Swann at Digitaloft who shared an acronym with us, which we’ll keep front of mind when working on future digital PR campaigns.

Katie coined HICCUP as a way to ensure your PR campaigns are reasonably foolproof - here’s a breakdown:

Your headline must match your data
Understanding the intention of the original source is a must
Cover your bases when creating round-ups or listicles - don’t miss somewhere important!
Check your sources for relevance and recency
Understand the possible dangers of your campaign message being lost in translation and preempt narrative changes
Proof and proof again to ensure there are no spelling, grammar or data errors

The importance of accessible social content 📱

Content freelancer Eleni Cashell delivered a brilliant talk on how to optimise your social content so it doesn’t get ‘ghosted’. For us, the key takeaway was accessibility - did you know that captioned videos get 40% more views? Not only does inclusive content boost engagement, but it also captures a percentage of your audience who might previously have been missing out.

Eleni shared some top tips to make your content more accessible for screen readers:

Avoid using special characters and decorative text
Minimise emoji use within copy
Put hashtags in the comments and capitalise each new word in the hashtag
Always add alt text and have fun with the copy
When sharing video content, give a rundown in the copy

The power of probabilistic thinking in SEO 🧠

As Managing Director at remote consultancy, Crawl, and ‘Chief of Scripts’ at Keywords in Sheets, you won’t be surprised to hear that Andrew Charlton delivered an insightful talk on probable thinking, and how to adopt this mindset in order to make better SEO decisions.

Here are some great takeaways to help you when creating SEO strategies and managing client expectations when it comes to the results:

Don’t shy away from low risk- low reward activities, if these are done regularly they can develop over time and have a significant impact overall
Using ranges and intervals can really help when there isn’t enough data to give estimates with certainty to clients
Communicate unknowns such as algorithm updates to prospective and current clients from the beginning and be honest that strategies may need to change if negative impacts happen

SEO testing: find out what works for SEO 🧪

Experimenting and testing within SEO can be tricky and it’s difficult to know where to start. Martijn Scheybeler’s talk uncovered some secrets on SEO testing and gave us some top tips to follow, with the key takeaway being to divide data testing groups into 4, not 2.

Everything Martijn said made sense and enforced the theory that you should only test what is necessary (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it). So, where do you start?

First, you need to take a good look at the data you’re testing and draw on your knowledge to create a hypothesis, from there you have a theory that you can review as you go on and this can act as an anchor for your data analysis post-testing too.

The zero-click SERP - taking you closer to the money 💰

Jon Earnshaw is well-known in the SEO community and is a regular speaker at Brighton SEO. In this brilliant session, Jon discussed the power of the SERP and how to achieve page one domination by leveraging important insights.

The zero-click for and against argument is always ongoing, however, it's hard to argue against the ability of SERP features after watching this talk.

Here are a few things to consider when doing your own SERP analysis prior to planning or optimisation:

Forget focusing on trophy terms and look at refining search terms to understand the intent and therefore the search results
Video is the SERP feature that is prominent throughout the majority of results in a search journey
Start with the SERP when planning then build your briefs or recommendations around that

We soaked up all this knowledge at BrightonSEO to help make us better digital marketers, so we can continue to deliver the best solutions for our clients.