Fringes
MeasureFest:
1st Group: Kathryn Choi, Helene Jelenc, Ellie Hughes
These talks discussed how SEO reports to clients need to have a narrative as well as being visual and this also means not following a one-size-fits-all approach. Guiding the client through the insights area in their language makes it much easier to understand. Just having some metrics accompanied by green and red arrows does not tell the full story (especially when spam gets involved). This is something we’re always improving and tweaking for our clients and it’s great to explore this further.
2nd Group: Giullia Panozzo, Joe Johnson, Anna Lewis
The first talk was based on landing page content and how A/B testing is something that should be done in regard to the placement of content such as images, text, and video. Giulla said it was essential to test multiple versions to get a clearer understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
Joe was the next speaker and discussed online workshops. Joe stated how before COVID face-to-face workshops were great but then discovered after COVID that the restraints on face-to-face workshops were obvious (getting people from all over the place to one meeting, the cost of commute, lunch etc.). They discovered that even now after covid people opt for online due to the efficiency. This is an interesting fact, do you prefer online or in-person workshops or meetings?
3rd Group: Rowenna Fielding, Saksham Sharda, Gemma Fontanè
The first talk from Rowenna was based on data law and “not being a git”. This was based on not scraping data and not selling data for profit. This talk focused on the legal use of data and avoiding malpractice. Fandango Digital are committed to following best practice with data.
Saksham’s talk was based on a case study that he found from Tesla. Tesla, unlike every other car manufacturer, does not have a marketing budget instead they simply budget for data research. Tesla has been able to find this success as a company due to its ability to be able to customise everything on their website. This is from colour, mileage, features, and everything…Because of this, Google reacts positively meaning Tesla doesn’t even need a marketing budget. This works for multiple companies such as shoe companies where you customise the look, Online groceries, clothing, and more. This is definitely worth exploring for your business.
Gemma Fontanè went through the main GA4 reports like acquisition in high levels of detail. Gemma also signposted listeners to a list of GA4 events that anyone can use to create customer GA4 events. If you’re unsure about GA4, we can help!
Final Group:
The first speaker, Kyle gave a bunch of useful dimensions, metrics, and filters to use in exploration for reports on accessibility, 404s, organic channels and more. Our digital marketing services are ideal for telling your business’ story in data, contact us to set up your GA4 property.
Other talks in this group discussed Big Query which is a large database owned by Google. They describe it as a “warehouse” of data. For Big Query to work optimally, data needs to pass forward and backward from the “warehouse”. This means hooking your analytics account up to send data and allowing data to flow back to your account to bolster reporting. This is an interesting consideration for digital marketers but only necessary with large-scale businesses.
Digital PR and Linkbuilding
The focus for the PR and Linkbuilding talks was on keeping SEO at the heart of your PR strategy, being reactive, and honing the links to your site. When earning links, you want to target specific sites, publications, and social media accounts that are within your niche and will pass valuable traffic.
Digital PR is a great way to show off your expertise, experience, and authority in your business niche. By sending out press releases to online publications about new products or services, you receive links back to your site and build domain authority. There needs to be careful attention to trustworthiness for these types of backlinks. Obviously, you want to build the trustworthiness of your own site content so picking where links come from is paramount.
Joining relevant conversations
Another great point made in the first talk was to join relevant conversations to your business, industry, and niche. You don’t need to be in every conversation just like you don’t need to be on every social media platform!
Creating linkable assets
A lot of what digital markers do revolves around content, content that deserves to rank first due to it’s helpfulness or expertise. This was amplified by the idea of creating “linkable assets”. If you’re asking someone to link to your content or site, it needs to be valuable for their audience and not just a link for the sake of a link.
Supporting SEO with Digital PR
A resounding thought was floated at BrightonSEO this September- to use digital PR to support SEO strategy. Digital PR can be used to push content to the masses and earn impressive links back. John Mueller (Senior Search Analyst / Search Relations team lead at Google) commented that good practice digital PR can make all the difference.
Thursday Conference:
1st Group: Dom Hodgeson, James George, Judith Lewis
Firstly, Dom had his talk about the 10 biggest mistakes he has seen from monitoring 100,000 websites. He used AI to create the images based on different mistakes. These ranged from canonicals leading to the wrong place, 404s, accidental no index, changing the URL structure, and not redirecting. Dom shared his product, called Little Warden, which could be beneficial at picking these things up easier without it just appearing one day. Getting an SEO native on your marketing is essential for digital success!
James’s talk was based on competitor analysis. He said to use the SERP to find competitor activity but otherwise, tools like SEMrush (which we use for digital strategy) have the answers. Importantly though he did mention that there are three pillars to work down which are content, offsite, and technical. These three working together are central to good SEO.
Judith emphasised how important it is to consult an SEO before you make large site changes. In hilarious desperation, Judith begged site owners not to change the menu design, ensure Hreflang tags are there, and canonicals are all in line before anything is actioned.
3rd Group: Daniel Axelsson, Saipaiwong Bay, Jared Keleher
Daniel’s talk was about keyword research. The Voxel dashboard was pretty good as it shows the keyword movement daily and heatmaps these in dark/light green or red. This is software where you are able to put everything into categories and discover loads of keywords that have search volumes. Although, as was discussed in the next group volume isn’t everything. The importance of keywords, rankings, and presenting this clearly is a central consideration for our SEO strategy.
The second talk by Saipariwong Bay, stressed the importance of integrated global rules for content. This is ensure the internet is accessible to everyone. The focus should be on breaking down barriers like accessibility, language, and more.
Jared stipulated that it takes 5-6 months for content to mature and beyond the 6 months you can see the content start to dip so this is where you need to refresh or reoptimise. He then talked about different rules in content between countries and how this needs to be altered for different areas. Turkey cannot show kissing, the UAE can not have faces or license plates and Singapore has to work in a political sense that is adjacent to Singapore itself. This is something to consider, as content can come across very differently across cultures.
4th Group: Dixon Jones, Tuhin Banik, Kapwom Dingis
Dixon discussed that keywords while being great are not the be-all and end-all. Google uses entities to try and personalise the search to the user. An example he gave was when you type in Paris, you shall also get suggestions of Paris Saint Germain and Paris Hilton. He mentioned that adding schema to the website for the entities (SERP features) is highly beneficial as this makes Google more likely to show these. Implementing schema on your website will add context to your pages (and the site overall)
The second speaker discussed the crawl budget and how this can be reduced, and this followed a more technical approach regarding the core web vitals of the website but also areas that seem obvious but aren’t necessarily. Clean internal links, sitemap optimisation, reduce unnecessary URLs, and decrease the number of unimportant pages.
Kapwom suggested looking into the keywords that place 5-15 and focusing on these as they are obviously relevant but just need the work put in to get them where they need to be. Semantic keywords and topic clusters were mentioned, and this was shown via SEMrush. Kapwom discussed how ‘click here’ buttons do nothing for SEO so it’s time to phase them out! This group of talks pushed for the schema to be used as it adds context to individual pages and whole sites. This is something we can work with web developers to implement on our client’s sites.
Story Effect Optimisation
This was expertly delivered by professional storyteller, Pascalle Bergmans. She stated that stories should be 65% pathos as in empathy, 25% lothos as in logic (logic, facts, statistics), and 10% ethos as in experience. This can easily be applied to telling stories using SEO. An effective website should empathise with customer wants and needs and solve problems, solutions need to be backed up with factual evidence, and experience needs to be shown to gain trust with customers and search engines.
Pascalle went through a typical arc that stories follow. The stages were as follows:
- Build the world.
- Discuss the problem.
- Discuss the challenge.
- Describe the new world.
- Explore the results.
This can be applied to most businesses. First, you build the world where your customers are situated and what their main problems are. Then you can go into detail about the challenge and how they can overcome this (preferably with your product or service). Next, you can describe the new world customers will find themselves in, what are the benefits of solving their problem with you? Then you can explore the results further, showing your experience in delivering these results before.
Storytelling is key to marketing and lots of business disciplines. From website building to presentations to reporting telling a good story is a timeless activity. After all, we have been doing it since we drew on cave walls.
Will AI take our jobs?
The answer is no, at least not yet. AI is still limited to regurgitating content or ideas that have been done before. While useful for planning or getting an idea off the ground, it still needs assistance from human input to be anywhere near good. Although, for automating tasks, it is great and not to be overlooked.
John Mueller did say content writers will be very busy in the future. As AI all works from the same database, there will be a lot of duplicate content dominating the web soon enough. It was suggested in their Googler talk that we should work with AI to humanise content. This is interesting as Google recently changed their guidance to straight up banning AI content to “please edit it so it’s not duplicate content”.
A great sentiment that Pascalle Bergmans said was “Rise of AI equals loss authenticity and identity”. Which is something to consider as we live alongside AI.
Googler Session with John Mueller and Billie Geena:
John Mueller and Billie discussed a range of topics and advised SEOs to use best practices for their site to do well. With a broader philosophy being to “create the web that you want to find”. This is a great sentiment.
Google has been rolling out Search Generative Experience SGE in some countries, but he did not give a date that it would be ready in the UK. The Search Generative Experience will use generate Ai to create a brand new SERP feature where the content is dynamic on the page. To prepare for this, websites need to have interactive websites with multimedia that can be fed into SGE’s.
The August rollout has just finished so we shall see what that does rankings. There was a question on why some of questionable websites rank so highly and John just said, “Well they must be doing something right” Look out for SGE coming soon though. Mueller also said that content writers will be very busy in the future as AI all works from the same database so there will be a lot of duplicate content dominating the web soon enough.
For core web vitals, First Input Delay is going to be phased out and replaced with ‘Interaction to next paint’ as in how long it takes for the user’s next action to load. An interesting development and something to focus on for devs.
We’ll be back for another BrightonSEO takeaways blog next April so check our socials for when that’s ready.
