#BrightonSEO 2015 Roundup

Adam Brown 9 years ago

More than 1700 of the best digital marketing specialists in Europe descended on Brighton last week for BrightonSEO 2015 - a free one-day conference sharing the most cutting edge thinking in digital.

The Zazzle team was there to capture the very best takeaways and we share those points below alongisde our own MD Simon Penson's "The Head Term Is Dead" presentation from the event. You can capture the full transcript and deck from that one by clicking here.

So, without further 'ado' here is the best of the best from the event...

Show Your Flare and Pivot for Social Image Sharing - Erica McGillivray

Erica Mcgillivray from Moz took the stage on Brighton Dome Hall to talk about flare and pivot for social image sharing.

• The five basic design principles for social media image sharing - high contrast, Clean and Crisp, Branded, Bold, Unity!
• The five social media psychology triggers - match copy to the image, challenge audiences, take risks, establish creditability and make human connections!
• Designers - need to be able to quickly pivot to image sizes, keep up to date with changes for designers. Jump on to Upcoming social media. Create custom templates, so you can change the image and text.
• Developers - explain the business case - project overview. They need implement open graph tags, twitter cards, correctly across social media. twitter cards with large vs small - build sharing into your culture. On WordPress you can install plugins to fix this. Get developers to code your own if not on WordPress.
• Prioritize repeatable and evergreen projects!
• Case study: YouMoz social images - 313% lift in visits. An average uplift of 469.95% per blog post by using images on Twitter.

Designing Content for Mobile - Vicke Cheung

Next up on the stage was Vicke Cheung a brilliant graphic designer to share her presentation on designing content for mobile first!

• Mobile is the big deal, set to get even bigger with the update on the 21st of April. Content marketing is mobile marketing!
• Space is premium, follow the KISS rule. Keep it simple stupid.
• It's about designing for a fluid framework, there is no point in designing for specific screen size as they're are far to many.
• Test on actual mobile devices and get opinions from real people who haven't worked on the project to get a true representation.
• Use patterns and familiar elements such as the hamburger menu - pttrns.com is great source - just make use of tried and tested patterns, don't reinvent the wheel!
• Form follows function - performance is KEY - load times, check on Google chrome mobile emulator.
• Serve images selectively - save the same images in different sizes, and define in browser when to load each image to save on load times.

Making Competitions Fun - Iain Haywood

Iain Haywood from the Competition Agency enters the stage to talk about what makes online competitions successful and fun to get the maximum benefit and reach of conducting one.

• Here are a few reasons to run a competition or giveaway: SEO, Social, User Acquisition, Opt-in, PR and finally Revenue!
• You need to focus on the campaign priorities - The Yield (what's the payoff, links etc.) The Cost, Overall time to create and is the competition fun to make and participate in?
• The 3 golden rules
• There is more than one type of entrant, one is interested in winning and the other is interested in your brand, broadly speaking.
• Your competition is unlikely to be a solution to all your problems!
• Incentivisation changes the nature of intent.
• The difference between a competition and a giveaway. A competition is a skilled based entry and is judged. However a giveaway is a non skill based entry and is a random draw.
• Create a landing page for your competition, so you can start capturing links, data and signals.
• Technical entry, more likely to enter and share. Some great plugins and websites to create websites on. Gleam, Rafflecopter and Antavo
• Doesn’t have to cost the earth! (see slide 45)

Schema, JSON-LD and the Semantic Web - Kirsty Hulse

Kirsty Hulse the Head of SEO at Linkdex takes the stage to explain what schema, JSON-LD and the semantic web is and how it can benefit us as SEOs and our clients.

• How can we implement structured markup to support a semantic web, when it is complicated and expensive?
• Semantic web is to create a common framework that allows data to be shared and re-used, for search, the use of markup reinforces the meaning of the information.
• Only about 0.3 percent of domains use schema markup on their websites
• JSON-LD is a way of exchanging data without markup, it can be placed in the head code not the body so can be implemented easier.
• However having markup doesn't necessary mean you will get it included in SERPs.

A 10 Step Technical SEO Game Plan - Mark Thomas

Mark Thomas is from Deepcrawl a popular in the cloud crawling application, and presents a 10 step technical SEO game plan every technical SEO should follow.

1. Engage - begin with the end in mind, objectives, prioritising, blocking?
2. Comprehensively audit - you need to dive deep into the data.
3. Sell two key wins from the audit that is going to have the most positive impact.
4. Share architectural insight, which will be available from the comprehensive audit.
5. Analyse impact - make sure you link back to your overall business goals!
6. Automate -perform regular checks and analysis, it's a sustainable way of working in commercial organisations.
7. Start making history, how is your website evolving? Build a cache of your website over time.
8. Be there in the hour of need, especially migration, all websites releases should be pre-tested.
9. Simplify reporting - ensure your communication isn't losing people, deliver digestible information.
10. Control the future, be the person everyone looks to when there is a problem and be informed on how your website is evolving.

Doing an Awesome Site Audit - Jono Alderson

Jono Alderson the Head of insight at Linkdex arrives on the stage to talk about doing an awesome site audit to make sense to all the audiences within the company you are doing it for.

• Technical SEO is hugely important...yet consistently terrible!
• Fixing things is often big and complex, technically and politically.
• Nobody want's an audit, they want to see results, your responsibility is to make things happen!
• The process - consider you have multiple audience, all with different needs, know the audience you are communicating too.
• To communicate to all of the audiences of the business you need the following deliverables:
• Quick wins, a long form editorial audit, a spreadsheet of prioritised issues, cheat sheets and a storyboard style presentation.
• When conducting the audit, focus on the cause, not the symptom.

Ecommerce SEO: Boosting Visibility With Faceted Navigation - Alec Bertram

Alec Bertram from Allotment Digital enters the stage to explain how to boost your website's visibility with a faceted navigation.

• 70% of UK e-commerce websites have a variation of this problem.
• The purchase decision cycles tends to follow the user having awareness of your brand or product, then comes the interest and finally the consideration of the user buying from you.
• In terms of keyword's the awareness are the head terms, interest is the mid-tail keywords and consideration to buy are the long tail keywords.
• Relevancy outranks authority
• To fix this you need to improve the category pages to have more in-depth mid-tail keywords.
• Build a business case - All possible keywords x search volume x current rank & click through rate x conversion rate and average order value.
• Be sure to create unique content on each page - at the very least unique titles and meta and page headings.
• Be sure to limit crawling and indexing within filter groups!
• Find the problems your customers are trying to solve, make sure you have 'indexable' pages to solve those problems and finally don't try to solve problems which don't exist.

Other Awesome Presentations!

Below are some more presentations from BrightonSEO 2015 we didn't have the pleasure of viewing live, in one place, for your viewing pleasure!