What did we learn from BrightonSEO 2019?

At around 08:45 on Friday, 12 April 2019, Sergio and Itamar from our SEO agency London got on the train from London Victoria to Brighton - for the BrightonSEO conference. We wore our custom t-shirts featuring a funny tweet from Google's John Mueller. https://twitter.com/MintTwist/status/1116613672237879298 When we arrived in Brighton, the conference was only a 10-minute walk. It was situated right next to the shore - which was awesome!

Our favourite talks

How to Make Fake News for Links - @OliverBrett

This was one of the most hilarious talks of the event for us. Not only for the great insights, tricks and creativity but also because of the way Oliver presented it in a very casual way, Game of Thrones-themed and quite relaxed and funny. Oliver resumed traditional ways to do linkbuilding and its risk associates. Strategies like:

• Building directory links
• Blogger outreach
• Buying backlinks in bulk
• Building PBN’s
• Unlinked mentions
• Press Requests
• Press Releases
• Surveys
• Egobait
• Infographics
• Data-driven pieces
• Interactives
• Linkbait

From this chart, linkbait is considered a low risk and rewarding linkbuilding tactic.

What is linkbait?

According to Google, linkbait is content designed to attract attention and encourage those viewing it to create hyperlinks to the site, with the aim of improving the site’s position on the list of results returned by a search engine. Oliver showed us some really cool case studies from eCommerce websites that used funny stories to catch people and journalist attention. For example, they photoshopped some Star Wars items made in China with funny names: And then waited for the news outlets to do the rest:

How to do linkbait

• Have great ideas
• Remember to be funny
• Never promise anything to your client
• Don’t be too obvious
• When photoshopping, be realistic
• Fake rebranding adds authenticity

Time for linkbait outreach

When coming up with the idea and it’s implementation it is time to start your outreach campaign. The most effective way is to use a PR agency and send a press release with the story. Alternatively, you can do it yourself reaching out news magazines or journalists. Conclusion: Linkbait is quick, cheap, you can win big links, but it is not for all the clients.

10 tips to scale organic outreach for your clients - @sammorton775

We were pleased to learn some good link-building tips from Sam Morton, the Client Services Director at Click Intelligence. Sam gave us some recommendations depending on the size of your campaign and your budget or resources: micro or macro.

Summary of the talk

• Google Alerts for brand mentions
• Image search technique: to download the image of an author, upload it to Google Images and compile a list of all the websites where this author has been featured.
• Create personas for each niche
• Perform competitor analysis. Recipe for a competitor analysis:
  • Pool a list of competitors
  • Segment by link type
  • Find the types of content attracting the most backlinks
  • Look at the content that didn’t attract backlinks
  • Identify the rate at which good quality links are being built
  • Which sites in your clientes vertical look more likely to an approach
  • Start pitching the sites and making friends

• 404 Recovery: Find broken 404 links, create content to fill that intention and reach out that website suggesting a link to your new content.
• Tips to outreach personalisation:
  • Adding more personalised layers mean a higher response rate.
  • Personalised titles and subject lines.
  • Use first name, use it more than once, mention the site.
  • Use a point of reference. - blogs, social, news article, content URL.
  • Be expressive.
  • Tailor segment a few example ideas in the email / give more options.
  • Constantly make new variations of the pitch.
  • As soon as you start to see a dip in the pitch response, change it.
  • Schedule a follow up email, or 2 follow ups.

Restructuring Websites to Improve Indexability - @areej_abuali

https://twitter.com/MintTwist/status/1116653715778363393 Fun fact: Areej had the most amount of slides out of all the presenters are BrightonSEO this year. She began her talk describing the misconceptions between crawling and indexing. Areej then talked about a case study of a client, and stated that fixing the tech is the most important thing before any work can commence. She created a script for her job-finder client - which features certain rules that will either index/no-index pages depending on various factors, which you can see here: Some of these rules are related to whether or not the job is available, keyword search volume etc.

Driving *Meaningful* Clicks with Enriched SERPs - @izzionfire

Izzi specified how it is unclear whether or not CTR is a Google ranking factor. This has been disputed by many people in the industry, however it is likely that if it was a ranking factor, Google wouldn't tell us. Izzi stressed the importance of focusing on the users, and that there is a purpose behind clicks that webmasters should capture. She also said to avoid the pure answer intent - since these won't actually generate clicks. Another great insight was to enrich your entities. That way, Google will steal the correct data about your website, which can help you rank higher. We attended 13 talks altogether, including a Q&A featuring Google's John Mueller. The Q&A was quite fierce at times, with John getting asked some controversial questions regarding links and Google's ad placements. At the end of the Q&A, we got a picture with the legend himself. https://twitter.com/MintTwist/status/1116760443165581312

Conclusion

BrightonSEO April 2019 was a fantastic event. We learnt so much and met some amazing marketers from all around the world. We still have many slides to go through of the talks we couldn't attend! Here's hoping we'll be back for September's conference :)

All of the talks from BrightonSEO (April 2019)

Big Brand Video Advertising on a Small Business Budget -Phil Nottingham Restructuring Websites to Improve Indexability – Areej Abuali 8 Ways to Increase your Ecommerce Conversion Rate – Faye Watt Featured Snippets : The Achievable SERP Feature ? – Emily Potter Predict the impact of technical SEO changes – François Goube A Structured Data Case Study: How to Make Your Websites Stand Out in Search – Kenichi Suzuki 10 Do’s and 5 Don’ts for Small Biz Local SEO Success – Claire Carlile Speed & Performance Optimisation: How to Meet Users’ High Expectations – Rachel Costello Crawl Budget is dead, please welcome Rendering Budget – Robin Eisenberg How to Drive Content Marketing Success – Irma Hunkeler and Ed Trippier How to Marie Kondo your SEO – Rebekah Dunne How To Maximise Your Ecommerce Revenue Over Black Friday – Alexandra Coutts Harry and Lloyd’s Idiot-proof Guide to GMB Optimization – Greg Gifford Leveraging EAT for SEO success – (PDF) LILY RAY Living on the edge: Elevating your SEO toolkit to the CDN – Nils De Moor Driving *Meaningful* Clicks with Enriched SERPs – Izzi Smith 10 Tips to Scale Link Building for your Clients – Sam morton How To Get a 100% Lighthouse Performance Score – Polly Pospelova State of the web pagination and infinite scroll – Adam Gent Command Line Automation for Repetitive Tasks – Mike Osolinski Killer competitor content research and strategy – Lana Burgess Efficiency in the Workplace Mindset Mastery and Meditation – Briony Gunson How to Pitch and Idea Your Client/Boss Cannot Say No To – Chris Lee Improve your rankings with internal link building – Christoph C. Cemper Chrome Puppeteer, Fake Googlebot & Monitor Your Site! – Tom Pool [Also check my Puppeteer tutorial] Optimize your content to stand out in Google Discover – Aymen Loukil Google smart bidding : How to train your algorithm – Kian Njie Building an SEO Exponential growth model by closing your content gap – Razvan Gavrilas Why UX is SEO’s best friend – Michelle Yilding Baker Simple ways to visualise your crawl data with no coding knowledge required -Anders Riise Koch Using Google Tag Manager to Send Scroll Depth and YouTube View Measurements to Google Analytics – Azeem Ahmad Competitor Analysis: A scientific method – Paola Didone The content comeback : 5 steps for bounding back yhen your campaign fails – Shannon McGuirk How to Repurpose Existing Content to Help With Your Strategy – Coral Luck How to trim JS, CSS and external stuff to slim down and speed up your site – Chris Simance The Seedy Underbelly of Keyword Research And Search Intent – Mark Osborne 5 Time-Saving SEO Alerts to Use Right Now – Marco Bonomo