BrightonSEO is rapidly becoming the preeminent conference for the SEO industry in the UK and in only a few years has forged itself a place as a highly popular, respected event. BrightonSEO gives agencies, in house operatives and search marketers from all over the country the chance to share ideas in the Brighton Dome.
Attending the event from the Coast Digital online marketing team with me were were Liam Shepherd and Mike Hall. This was the second BrightonSEO conference I’d attended, and my first with Coast Digital. The format this year was new with three rooms filled with talks. This made it tough to decide on which presentations we had to miss and which we would watch later on BrightonSEO’s website (there will be videos of them available).
We were all keen to watch the Ex-Google employees Q&A session, along with the Bing presentation, and so made the decision to stay in the main hall for the day. These talks gave us great insight into both search engines and Dave Coplin from Bing (in my opinion) gave the talk of the day entitled “Future Forward”.
Apart from the talks I’ve mentioned there were countless other presentations that really delivered:-
My Highlights of the Day
- Hannah Smith from Distilled gave a great presentation called “Go Big or Go Home” she detailed about how spending a lot of time on “big” content releases gave them big results. Although I didn’t agree with everything she spoke about, the main point of her presentation was valuable and it helped me think about great new ways to build brand reputations.
- Geoff White from Channel 4 News gave a presentation titled “How to Pitch to Journalists” this was my second favourite presentation of the day and Geoff spoke a lot of sense about the news and how they select stories for their programmes. As well as being engaging and interesting, it gave me a lot to think about in terms of our clients (big and small) and how best to approach third parties in order to market our clients business more efficiently helping them to get better results.
- My final highlight was Rich Falconer from LBi who had the horrific task of following Dave Coplin’s presentation and although he had a shaky start he really delivered. Rich’s presentation was “SEO as Part of a Multi-signal Search Strategy” and was excellent; he spoke about the more technical aspects of SEO and the reason I found this talk so interesting was that he spent part of it talking about tools to help sites convert their visitors better. I loved this section because even though SEO is important to get traffic to your sites, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is necessary to help convert them.
We all found the day to be extremely enjoyable and well-organised and would like to offer a huge thank you to all of the speakers and to Kelvin Newman for organising such an excellent event. On the whole there were plenty of actionable tips and tricks to take away, and it was a great opportunity to listen to other people’s perspectives on the current state of search, and what the future holds for the industry.