Back In Brighton – Our Highlights

 

At Uprise Up we’re back from enjoying all that Brighton SEO 2017 had to offer!

Brighton SEO is not just about Search Engine Optimisation. We gained some great insights into Analytics, Social Media and Email Marketing, as well as Business Strategy. The wide-ranging sessions from industry experts offered real food for thought and were jam-packed with tips, do’s and don’ts, discussions and new tools to help meet our digital marketing objectives.

It’s safe to say we’ve all learnt something we’re eager to put into practice and in this blog, we’ve pulled together our top take-aways:

 

Top 30 Takeaways

 

Technical SEO

 

• Google’s Gary Illyes hinted that the rank boost of secure sites might be getting stronger!

 

• Bing’s research into trust online showed that 74% of users trust the search engine’s ranking as much as the brand.

 

• Local links, irrespective of the type of sites they are, can be enough to cover Google’s relevancy criteria for local SEO.

 

• For ecommerce sites with multiple languages, use the sitemap to assign hreflang tags rather than the page.

 

• Think about infinite scroll & pagination. When infinite scroll goes wrong you can get orphaned pages & uncrawlable content, which can impact ranking and sales.

 

• Using faceted navigation gives a great user experience and works well with infinite scroll, but can lead to many competing pages throughout a site. To combat this, make good use of robot.txt files, canonical tags and parameter handling.

 

• You can dynamically change meta data through Tag Manager instead of through the CMS, and Google will be able to use these changes when ranking. For example, an ecommerce site could dynamically append the current offer to each product page (e.g.. 25% Off – Black Shoes).

 

• Tag Manager can be used to extract the meta data on every page. Then, by creating a custom dimension in Analytics, this meta data can be seen alongside your regular Analytics stats (Pageviews, Bounce Rate etc.).

 

 

 

Content SEO

 

• Create data heavy content to increase the chances of people linking back to your website.

 

• When approaching a webmaster about content, look for the ‘what can I do for you’ and not the ‘help me by sending a backlink’ approach. Use as many sources as possible when creating your unique content and make it relevant to your target audience.

 

• Use the 3 H’s content strategy – Hero (big-ticket featured content), Hub (regularly scheduled content) and Hygiene (helpful, informative content).

 

• Blogs receive on average 97% more inbound links than other content.

 

• Statistics blogs are a great source of links, even on obscure subjects. Don’t be afraid to try one for your business!

 

• Long form video (15 mins+) ranks higher in the YouTube search results than short form video.

 

• Video doesn’t have to be expensive to make as modern day smart phones are capable of recording high quality video.

 

• Using 360-degree photos and VR technologies allows you to engage with the consumer on a higher level, evoking emotions and memories in the viewer (making an emotional connection). This will ensure they engage better with you and your content.

 

• Utilise user reviews for your product or service to look for potential keywords. What adjectives do users use when they give you 5* reviews? What about 1*?

 

• Free resources recommended by speakers included: https://piktochart.com/ a free tool for the easy development of infographics, https://www.theatlas.com/ for charts/data and https://www.canva.com/ for graphics.

 

Ecommerce

 

• Keep out of stock & seasonal pages live where you can! Advise the product is retired or out of stock, then direct them to similar products, or take their information and email them when it is available. However, for non-priority pages, it is still best to redirect to a similar product.

 

• Avoid using years in HTML developments.

 

• The usual SEO factors don’t apply for ecommerce sites. Search engines know what ecommerce sites are – they don’t need the same amount of text as a content page would. What is important is the use of relevant keywords, easy access in menus and good usability of filters.

 

• Make use of keywords in your ecommerce sites’ descriptive text.

 

 

Social Media

 

• Use a tool like Brand Watch to discover latest trends, search phrases and affinity with brands and use it to steer content.

 

• Have a social media strategy that integrates with all of your marketing mix. Don’t tweet and blog about random things, make sure it fits with your brand and overall marketing strategy.

 

• Micro influencers can be a better investment than larger influencers. Choosing micro influencer followers of a larger influencer only keeps the message within that network, so branching out is important. YouTube influencers will be more willing to be flexible.

 

• Brand evangelists are 52% more valuable than the average satisfied customer. They will be the fans who will truly get involved and will share your message to friends, family and beyond.

 

• Take the time to understand your audience – learn how they engage, the language they use and how your brand personality matches theirs – then develop your strategy, A/B test and measure their engagement beyond the number of likes. Ask for feedback, reviews and ratings!

 

• Don’t fill the need, create the need. You’re not filling the need of buying a drill, your filling the need to create the hole.

 

• If you want to create Facebook video content, make sure you optimise and upload it to be viewed vertically. Only 9% of users do this, and the vast majority of videos are played this way.

 

• Don’t worry about your sound in social media videos, 85% of people play them on mute!

 

We hope you find these take-aways useful! All the slide decks from the conference will be added to the BrightonSEO website blog page, or if we can help you with your digital marketing at all please do get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!

 

Also, if you want to see our previous experiences of BrightonSEO and see how these takeaways compare to previous BrightonSEO conferences, you can read our blogs on Brighton SEO Key Takeaways – April 2017 and Brighton SEO – Our Top 9 Takeaways (Sept 2016).