Brighton SEO Recap

Brighton SEO is a firm­ly estab­lished fix­ture in the SEO cal­en­dar, and this year Linkdex had the plea­sure of the being the offi­cial pre-par­ty spon­sors of the event. So after a fun-filled night meet­ing and greet­ing indus­try friends, and “offi­cial” break­ing of ice —...

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Brighton SEO is a firm­ly estab­lished fix­ture in the SEO cal­en­dar, and this year Linkdex had the plea­sure of the being the offi­cial pre-par­ty spon­sors of the event.

brighton

So after a fun-filled night meet­ing and greet­ing indus­try friends, and “offi­cial” break­ing of ice — name­ly, a few drinks to keep our search-hun­gry minds lim­ber — we rose from the post-par­ty slum­bers to take in a excit­ing sched­ule of talks and pre­sen­ta­tions.

This year’s event took place at the Brighton Dome, not a small venue by any means, yet absolute­ly packed by 10 o’ clock.

Talks took place across the five rooms of the venue, and were grouped into cat­e­gories includ­ing: links; con­tent; ecom­merce; ux; and tech­ni­cal SEO amongst oth­ers.

What­ev­er route you chose, you were sure to see some great talks.


High­lights, for me, includ­ed James Per­rot­t’s Guar­an­tee­ing Suc­cess with your on site strat­e­gy which tied togeth­er some clever SEO fore­cast­ing, oppor­tu­ni­ty analy­sis, con­ver­sion opti­mi­sa­tion and on-site strat­e­gy.

In the Dome Con­cert Hall, Lisa Myers and James Fin­layson gave a fan­tas­tic talk on Why SEO needs to get emo­tion­al.

Why SEO needs to get Emo­tion­al #Brighton­SEO from Lisa Myers

Draw­ing from sci­ence, psy­chol­o­gy, and the work of Anto­nio Dama­sio, Myers and Fin­layson explored the rela­tion­ship between SEO and the human con­nec­tions that peo­ple make which influ­ence their deci­sions. To illus­trate their point, they unveiled Lava the “emo­tion­al search engine”, which mea­sures sen­ti­ment over time for celebri­ties (although it’s assumed the tool could also be used for oth­er enti­ties and brands) across 8 mil­lion media arti­cles. Lava con­firmed that Katy Hop­kins, per­haps as expect­ed, is the most hat­ed per­son in Britain (above Don­ald Trump and Vladimir Putin), but per­haps more sur­pris­ing that amongst promi­nent democ­rats, Bernie Sanders is actu­al­ly bet­ter received that Clin­ton or Oba­ma. Do check out the slides above if you missed the pre­sen­ta­tion as it was a fan­tas­tic talk.

Greg Gif­ford, Direc­tor of Search and Social at Deal­erOn, gave a pre­sen­ta­tion, Mar­ket­ing to Local Busi­ness­es, packed with SEO good­ies, local-search insights, and no less that 88 movies ref­er­ences from car movies.

Greg’s talk was a mile a minute and cov­ered every­thing from best-prac­tice local SEO, Face­book tar­get­ing, and iBea­cons, and I’d strong­ly rec­om­mend hav­ing a look through the slides if you have an invest­ment in local SEO.

Mar­ket­ing to Local Cus­tomers: Mov­ing Beyond Local SEO to Win the Race from Greg Gif­ford

Col­lette Eas­t­on, from Linkdex, gave a pre­sen­ta­tion in the Corn Exchange on The Secrets of In-House SEO Teams. Col­lette has the inside track on in-house SEO, and spoke to heads of SEO from in-house teams at uSwitch, JD Williams, and Sky­scan­ner to gain some insight on the secrets, as well as the chal­lenges brands face, when it comes to in-house SEO.

It was a fas­ci­nat­ing per­spec­tive on in-house SEO, but there were lessons there for all orga­ni­za­tions invest­ed in the chan­nel. Key take­aways includ­ed the notion that in-house need to oper­ate in a con­sul­ta­tive man­ner for oth­er in-house depart­ments, and that com­mu­ni­ca­tion and per­ceived avail­abil­i­ty are very impor­tant. Teams, also need to be very flex­i­ble and be able to piv­ot and change direc­tion as required, which is often a chal­lenge for in-house teams. You can view the slides from Col­let­te’s pre­sen­ta­tion below.

In-House SEO teams: Brighton­SEO (April 16) from gin­col­lette

All in all it was a fas­ci­nat­ing day of talks. If you want to revis­it any of the speak­ers slides from the day, you can find them all here cour­tesy of Nick Wils­don.

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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