BrightonSEO has grown exponentially in the past few years, showcasing the increasing interest in the SEO industry. Over 3000 people, from SEO veterans to newbies were in attendance. There were also an impressive number of speakers at the conference, 78 speakers over 7 stages to be precise.
BrightonSEO couldn’t have put it better themselves –
“BrightonSEO started out as a few people meeting at an upstairs room in a pub. Now we’re at the biggest venue in Brighton. Still not quite sure how that happened.”
With so much to see and the inability to be in 2 places at once (or 7), even the most enthusiastic SEO’s will have missed a large amount of valuable content. But thankfully most of the presentations are available online.
One of the most beneficial aspects of the day was getting to meet so many SEO enthusiasts like myself, I’d never realised there were so many! It was humbling, exciting and amazing witnessing 2000 people in a very large room, fixated on what the experts had to say. You were guaranteed a good conversation during each of the breaks, whether it was about SEO or not, everyone I met was very friendly and interesting in their own right.
My three favourite speakers at the event were:
1. Aleyda Solis
Aleyda Solis was probably one of the more recognisable faces at the event, as she is internationally known for her SEO expertise. She was included in Forbes as one of the 10 Digital Marketing Specialists to follow in 2015 and in Business Insider as one of the 50 Online Marketing Influencers to watch in 2016. She is also a great person to follow on social media whether you have a little, or a lot of SEO knowledge.
Aleyda is an International SEO Consultant, a blogger for Search Engine Land, State of Digital and Moz, a speaker and an entrepreneur. She also gives classes for various SEO & online marketing courses.
Her presentation can be found here: How to Drive Growth through your SEO Audits: Questions, Validations & Tools to Maximize your Results – Learn how to focus your SEO audits providing a strategic perspective to your competitive, technical, content and links research & analysis that drives & prioritizes growth.
2. Jon Earnshaw
Jon Earnshaw is a regular at these types of events. I very much enjoy his presentations, as he is so enthusiastic about his subject. His presentation style is very engaging and the information he offers is extremely interesting.
His presentation at this event was all about the dangers of site migration, all the intricacies, procedures and secrets to performing a successful one. Including the various tools to make it easier.
As CTO of Pi Datametrics, Jon is passionate about the future of search technology and in particular, personalisation and semantic search, which is changing both the way we search, the way we interact with search engines, and the subsequent outcome of a search. Jon is an accomplished speaker and well known within the digital marketing industry.
His presentation can be found here: How to avoid a site migration disaster – Who is maximising page 1 real-estate?
3. Malcolm Coles
Malcome Coles’ presentation was very interesting and probably my favourite of the day. He talked about something I have limited experience in, Google’s “In The News” box. He explained the SEO behind it very well and how Google pick and choose which news to post, and which sites get the most real-estate and the higher positions on the page, even though this is a grey area still.
A very interesting take-away from his talk was how big news corporations, like The Telegraph, write all kinds of articles based on what they think will happen, from who the next Prime Minister will be, to whom the next elimination from The X Factor will be. They do this for all prospective outcomes, so that the minute they actual result is released, they can post the article onto their website. This is one way that they get to the top of Google News, because content freshness is a big part of the Google News algorithm.
Malcolm is in charge of digital content, including SEO,social and interactives at the Telegraph. Before that he was editor of Which?
A video recording of his presentation can be found here: SEO for news. We do WHAT? – Just how do you do SEO when your brand new article has no links pointing to it and you need it to be top of Google? Here are some of the secrets of news SEO.
