Brighton SEO Conference - what is it all about?
Brighton SEO is upon us again this week at the Brighton Centre, a twice-yearly search marketing conference in Brighton which is completely free of charge and definitely the biggest and best free marketing conference out there.
It's easy to take it for granted when we have the luxury of wandering into town and attending each event, but we are starkly reminded of how lucky we are when you see how far hundreds of people travel to attend the conference.
What happens at Brighton SEO?
There's probably going to be someone in a Panda costume, and someone in a Penguin costume, having it out in a nerdy way on a stage in front of a VW campervan.
But more importantly, there's an excruciating choice of interesting talks to go to which will satisfy just about every marketer. You can stick to a theme and attend talks relating to content, technical SEO, PPC, social media, link building, international SEO or E-Commerce, or you could go bonkers and go all jack-of-all-trades on it. Up to you!
Brighton SEO remains free to attend thanks to the many large sponsors of the event. Companies such as SEMrush, Bing, Conductor, Deepcrawl and many other mostly-software companies exhibiting in the main hall. It's free merch a-plenty and a good chance of getting some free ice cream too!
Key takeaways
What a boring subtitle (H2 for all you nerd friends out there). Seriously though, we wanted to share our key takeaway from BrightonSEO last year; one we tested out and got fantastic results from.
Content is king! This phrase has been so over-used its actually feels laughable to use it, but the fact of the matter is, its still true! The secret to SEO success is to create truly remarkable content. We aren't just talking about clickbait headlines, the "You won't believe what happened next" type of headlines. We mean unique, useful, interesting and relevant content.
How do you make your content unique, useful, relevant AND interesting?!
DATA! Use real, raw data from a variety of trusted and reliable sources (or collect your own if you can), and create a piece of content which is bloody useful because it's saving other people the bother.
We tested the theory with a very small client we work with. We dedicated some extra time to one piece of content, gathering data from various reports on the Office for National Statistics to create a single, simple-to-digest news piece with a catchy headline. We chose a topic which we knew there was some search volume for, we checked to see what sort of search results were already coming up, we checked to see what data was available to us and then we tucked in.
What were the results? The news piece quickly became the most landed on page from organic sources and has been ever since, boosting our modest numbers of organic visitors by 225%. The news piece currently catches 30% of the over-all traffic to the site.
What did we learn?
It's better to spend a bit longer and create one whopper of a piece of content, than to bash out something every week in the hope that at least one of them will get noticed some day. It's also worth spending the time looking through data sources and turning it into something meaningful and unique. This was only one tiny example to test the water, but it's certainly something we will be doing more of when budgets allow.
We also learnt that we need to truly understand the purpose of our content, other than to drive organic traffic. What do we want next? A link? An enquiry? Increase page views? SEO is not just about building rankings and enticing visitors in, it's also about goals and only enticing in the right people.
Want a piece of the pie?
BrightonSEO is on again this Friday 27th April 2018 at the Brighton Centre. Tickets go within minutes of release so if you want to go this time, you'll have to pay. However, there's another coming up in September so if you're lucky you can get tickets!