It’s that time of year again; when hundreds (1,700 to be precise!) of digital marketing types flock to the south coast for the twice annual BrightonSEO conference. BrightonSEO is the UK’s largest SEO and digital marketing event and what’s more it’s free – meaning tickets disappear quicker than the contents of a dropped chip tray on Brighton seafront. This year they sold out in just four minutes!
So if, like us, you missed out, the team here at K2L have lovingly compiled a handy go-to-guide of all the best speakers’ snippets and takeaways – and we’re not talking chips anymore. Here’s everything you need to know from BrightonSEO.
- Pippa Moyleand the ’24 Hour News Cycle’
Pippa discussed how to apply certain journalistic techniques to create newsworthy content which will grab and hold the attention of your reader. She says that “Most content these days is quite impersonal, irrelevant and superficial. We need to start hitting people on a personal level” and encouraged her listeners to “Think like a journalist”. The central idea is to create content that is not only in the human interest, but of human interest too – content cannot just be useful alone; readers must care about it too.
Simon emphasised how important it is to write for the way your particular audience searches. His top tips included a great plan for blog writing. First decide on a topic, and then find out which words or key phrases rank high in Google (other online search engines are available) for that topic. Then do some keyword research, incorporating those keywords in to the article and all importantly, in the title. Simple, but effective stuff.
- Jon Earnshaw and Chris Green on ‘Cannibal Content’
Does what it says on the tin (SEO wise, of course). The term describes the issue that arises when you have two, or more, very similar pages on a single domain which then compete to be the ranking page for a particular focus keyword. The competition makes it difficult for Google to choose a specific page to rank and therefore both are pulled down.
Jon suggests specifically selecting which page you want to rank by giving it authority. The original slideshare on ‘cannibalisation’ can be viewed here. Chris took a different approach, by suggesting posters rethink their keyword targeting or change the site structure. He also suggests giving your preferred page more ‘marketing love’ to help it do well and that ‘prevention is better than cure’. His slideshare can be viewed here.
Greg’s slideshow on SEO in a specific geographical area seemed to hit a homerun – fortunately, as it was made up of no less than 128 slides. He stresses the importance of adding a targeting city into your H1 heading, the copy, the URL, the meta and title and embedding the site on Google Map from GMB, not Maps. He also suggests using Moz Local to check your citation signals are optimized – and pointed out that a Moz Local paid submission is now available in the UK. His message – local customers come first.
If your content ticks all of these SEO boxes, well done. But how do you know if it’s working? Lastly, we have an entry from Christoph C. Cemper – on how to measure the success of your content marketing.
Christoph emphasises the two dimensions that need to be examined when measuring the success of content marketing; the buzz and the impact. The two need to be combined to understand the true value of a piece of content. His slideshare goes into more detail about the two here.
Just in case you weren’t all BrightonSEOed out, we’ve taken on the advice from all the speakers and decided to be useful as we can. You’ll find a huge list of all the interesting and valuable slideshares from this round of BrightonSEO 2015 here. Enjoy!
If this entire post made absolutely no sense, then you probably need some help with your content marketing; fear not, you’re in the right place. As an integrated marketing agency, K2L offer the entire package – from the compelling copywriting to specialist SEO that will make your website, and ultimately your business, perform to its true potential.
