On September 10th my work colleague (James) and I had a day out in Brighton, attending BrightonSEO for the first time. I had previously been told that the event is a brilliant day out, very welcoming, busy and lots to see and do, but most importantly, filled with information that can benefit our agency as well as my individual knowledge of the ever-growing industry of Digital Marketing.
First talks began at 10:00am and we went straight to the largest room (Auditorium 1) for the first three talks, which were all about user intent. Before the talks started, Kelvin Newman, the founder of BrightonSEO, gave a short opening speech to give the attendees the run-down of the day and introduce himself.
After Kelvin finished his introduction, he welcomed the first speaker to the stage. Up first was Jack Nottidge who talked about understanding user journeys and search intent and why search experience is more than just Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are a set of performance indicators that are used to assess the user experience of a website. While fundamental web essentials have been a hot topic of debate, Jack highlighted how there is much more to enhancing the experience we offer. He also explained how we need to figure out how to learn more about why individuals search the way they do. This was a very interesting talk; James and I took plenty of useful information from it.
Talk 2 was held by Kenda Macdonald and she dedicated her talk to how cognitive bias is running your conversions. Kenda explained that the human brain has an unusual habit of doing strange things. It’s full of inconsistencies, or cognitive biases, and these minor blunders that we all make on a regular basis are detrimental to your marketing efforts. They hurt your conversion rates, cause you to lose consumers, and make your marketing efforts ineffective. But it’s not all doom and gloom. We have the ability to fight back against the brain. Kenda showed us four specific strategies to fight cognitive bias.
The third and final talk before a short break was taken by Rory Hope. Rory’s talk was based on audience intelligence and SEO, and how to integrate data sources to develop SEO personas. Rory discussed how SEOs may use various data sources to create SEO personas at the keyword level, which can assist to improve the efficacy of an SEO campaign. Learn how to enhance and modernise your approach to SEO, content marketing, and digital PR by utilising developing audience intelligence technologies, Google Analytics, CRM, web monitoring, and social listening tools.
After those three talks were completed, James and I couldn’t help but take a few photos, we especially had to get a photo with the Batmobile’s that were present. After all I am a massive fan of the Caped Crusader! We also went for a browse around the site, played a few retro games on old consoles and James unfortunately beating me at table football, although it did go down to the wire! Of course, we picked up any freebies we could find. We talked to some other companies around the building as there were many stalls promoting their businesses.
A very welcoming lady named Faye Thomassen was one of the first people we met whilst walking around the area. Faye is the head of marketing at Mediahawk. She is a CIM Chartered Marketer with considerable expertise in a variety of industries, including developing digital marketing strategy and techniques, overseeing channel expansion, and establishing brands. It was lovely to meet her and learn about Mediahawk as well as telling her a bit about our agency and what we specialise in.
After lunch we went to listen to the talks based on On-site SEO, first up was Luke Carthy, with his talk dedicated to how to grow organic traffic faceted nav SEO. Luke is an experienced eCommerce consultant, eCommerce store creator, and worldwide speaker who has helped eCommerce businesses achieve double and triple-digit growth. When it comes to SEO, faceted navigation may be intimidating and confusing, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Luke’s presentation taught us how to make faceted navigation both SEO friendly and conversion rate friendly. This presentation was my favourite because not only was Luke informative and knowledgeable about his subject, but he also made the presentation his own and was very engaging and very funny.
Up next was Emma Thompson, (no not from Nanny Mcphee), but SEO Account Manager of Absolute Digital Media. Emma showed us how to optimise JavaScript without learning JavaScript. She discussed the foundations of JavaScript SEO optimisation, including concrete actions that anybody with a basic grasp of technical SEO may do. She went over which tools to use, how to make an action plan for improving the performance of JavaScript-heavy sites, and even include a glossary of terms so you can communicate with developers in their own language. A very well put together talk I must say and much taken away from it.
Lastly was Hannah Rainey who is an SEO Account Manager at Roast. Hannah began her digital marketing career in 2014 and has since gone on to become an award-winning writer while managing several international accounts and strategically obtaining page one rankings for her clients. Hannah’s presentation was committed to why organic click-through-rate is low and discussed a few of the main reasons why organic CTR isn’t performing as well and what you can do about it.
To conclude the day at BrightonSEO it was very enjoyable, James and myself had a great day out, learning new aspects of digital marketing and taking all of the information on board to benefit Fandango. We met plenty of great people and had lots of fun, I am much looking forward to the many more days out to BrightonSEO!
