My top 3 presentations from BrightonSEO: September

This was our SEO team’s second venture down to BrightonSEO, and I was ready once again to learn some tips, tricks and tactics to help make me better at my job.

For those working in the search marketing industry, the biannual BrightonSEO conferences are just as important as Christmas and their mother’s birthday. With the allotted free tickets being snapped up in just 4 minutes, down from 13 minutes in April, the scramble for free tickets is only increasing.

Travelling down from the MintTwist team were myself, Mike, Emily, Grace and our two new account managers, Natalie and Chloe. Our experience and knowledge ranged from several months to several years, and yet we were all able to leave having learned a lot.

Here is a brief summary of the three talks I found most insightful and interesting:

1: Taking audience insights from AnswerThePublic; Speaker: Sophie Coley

We were treated to some great talks in the advanced keyword research session and all speakers introduced some great ideas that I was able to immediately implement into my own work in PPC keyword research. Sophie Coley gave a particularly insightful talk on different ways to think about and understand your target audience.

She introduced a very cool website called Answerthepublic.com which allows you to type a keyword and see the volumes of all the related question keywords. She suggests the tool can help us understand how users search, and that these searches are often performed in the moment without prior thought.

The tool works by entering a keyword such as “dresses”. The tool takes the keyword and pulls the following, all questions searched on google relating to your keyword, all prepositions relating to your keyword and now all comparison searches related to your keyword. What you are left with after using this tool is a huge amount of data on all related searches for your keyword, helping you to understand and identify your public, understand your influence and benchmark your brand.

By using this data you are able to see how the search terms differed and form several audiences. Understanding this can help you market your product or brand through multiple marketing campaigns and understand if your product fits with their niche. For example, a restaurant without a delivery service would not pursue users who search for a takeaway restaurant. Though the example seems fairly obvious, what Sophie is saying is that you cannot please everyone and focusing on users who will appreciate your product is far more useful.

A second useful function of this tool is that you are able to benchmark your brand. She shows that through seeing how users search you are given a brief glimpse into their lives and we can use this to understand how consumers see your brand. The example given was that of different chocolate companies. For the chocolate company Cadbury, users were searching for things like “how are Cadbury chocolates so good?”  or “how has Cadbury’s recipe changed?”. When we compare these searches for Lindt, users were asking “how is the Lindt chocolate cold inside?” and searches for the quality of the chocolate were not present. This represents a big difference in how these products are received.

She finished by making the argument that an increase in brand searches and direct traffic is often as valuable as increased generic terms. By winning your consumers hearts and minds, you are bypassing the generic search space, which is just as useful.

2: SEO quick wins from a technical check; Speaker: Chloe Bodard

Chloe from RiceMedia gave a really good talk on high level technical SEO quick wins. Her talk provided a great overview of how to go about auditing and spotting areas of your site that require attention. Issues such as 301 redirects, robots.txt and canonical tags, in other words, your hygiene SEO – essentially the stuff you should be doing and checking weekly. However, this is often not the case as with so many sites, these issues go unchecked and forgotten for too long – only to be in a real mess when an audit is finally carried out.

3: Blogging advice that’ll make your job easier, guaranteed; Speaker: Sam Charles

Sam Charles was back with another great talk, after her presentation in April, both of which were thoroughly enjoyed. This time we were given advice on blogging that would make our jobs easier, guaranteed.

Sam introduced a number of tools that help to save her time, energy and embarrassment when writing a large amount of blog content. These tools span across time management, content creation ideas, user engagement, amplification tools, language tools, and finally sites to help with topics and sourcing free beautiful imagery. So, a very complete guide to blog writing.

In talking through these tools and their uses, Sam certainly delivered on her promise to make blog writing easier. I’ve linked her slides which includes links to all the tools she recommends using.

And there are my three favourite presentations from BrightonSEO September. Another great day with lots of great talks from some great speakers. As always we are immediately looking forward to the next BrightonSEO, for now at least, we have some great implementable insights.

The team at MintTwist thoroughly enjoy attending these conferences in Brighton, learning new things to take back with us. For help with your SEO strategy, contact us today. We provide tailored SEO services, where we make sure our work helps you meet your targets.