Matt
BrightonSEO is a great, industry leading event. We attend because it helps us stay sharp, learn new skills and keep up to date with the industry. My mission for Brighton SEO 2014 was to look for ways in which our monthly client reporting could be improved. The ‘Effective Visits Like a Sir’ by Lukasz Zelezny helped me do just that! His methodology for reporting year on year as opposed to month by month made a lot of sense. It provides a better overall picture of search traffic and how it’s trending over time. His advice on why not to use the Google Analytics compare feature was a complete revelation. He went on to explain that if you discount total visitors by the bounce rate to remove bounced visits, you are left with ‘effective visits’. Using this metric provides a better representation of how people are interacting with your website. This will also reflect the impact of any one page SEO or conversion rate optimisation work that might have been performed.
Gisele Navarro’s talk on international outreach was also very interesting. Her advice to digital marketers was to start looking further afield when building links and placing content. A simple, but potentially effective concept. She shares a unique process for international outreach as well as some of the pitfalls she encountered along the way. These, if avoided, could yield returns in the form of authoritative backlinks and referral traffic.
Rachael
One of the topics which is of most interest to me is always the ongoing relationships between PR and SEO. This sits under the overarching Content Marketing umbrella. Relationships are key, in almost every profession. Laura Crimmons in the Links track highlighted the importance of working together to get maximum results. Whether that’s with another agency or another discipline. It seems obvious, from working in an integrated agency, that social media, SEO and PR should be working closely. Especially to get maximum exposure on content. However there are so many silos within PR and Marketing which need to be overcome. Particularly when it comes to meeting the KPI’s of clients ranging from conversions right through to brand awareness.
Another session which really got me thinking was Kirsty Hulse who shared her thoughts on link building through audience segmentation. As Atelier partners with data insight business Uncommon Knowledge, we are accustomed to the idea of data-led marketing. We appreciate how essential insight is for informing marketing campaigns. However for some clients, a full scale data insight programme is not budget-friendly. Kirsty’s session gave some actionable advice and top tips which can be used to generate insight for client’s large and small. For example, demographic and interest reports set up in Google Analytics can determine which demographic ‘profiles’ are converting best through your site. This undoubtedly determines which target groups are most important to your business, or which groups are reacting best to your website and digital marketing. There are also useful tools such as Similarweb, SocialMention, Radian6 and Givememydata which allow you to pull data and insight about yourself, your social networks, your customers and your web visitors.
Gareth
The thing that resonated with me most significantly was Andy Miller’s talk on how you can create simple, go-to processes for content creation. As an agency, client content is obviously something we create a lot of and Andy’s method for benchmarking content relevance and quality was a pretty invaluable bit of advice.
It’s fantastic being able to rationalise and standardise content, especially with clients who employ a distinct emotional selling point rather than a rational one. Combining this with content documents, automatically created via IFTTT recipes and RSS feeds, has granted us a new department-wide standard that has greatly improved our creation efficiency.
It’s an elegant and simple idea, and that’s where the beauty of it lies for me. A great failsafe to ensure you’re never creating content just for content’s sake. Chapeau!
Jack
There were many great and interesting presentations at BrightonSEO, but the one that stood out for me was Alexandra Tachalova’s talk on ‘Advertising analysis: Beyond the numbers’. The presentation focused on using emotional triggers within ad copies to get higher click through rates. Using instant gratification to create urgency within your adverts can increase your click through rates and customer interaction. Phrases like ‘Book Now’ or ‘Online Today’ proved to be popular in her research.
Another interesting point made during the presentation was how important it is to learn about your competitors; analysing their current and past advertising activity. Knowing this important data can help give you a better indication of what your competitions advertising presence is, allowing you to modify your advertising campaigns to take advantage of areas your competition may not be targeting.