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Brighton SEO Round Up – Part Two

Part Two of our trip to Brighton SEO rounds up the highlights for the remainder of the team. There is a lot to take in throughout the day so studying the schedule and breaking it up lets us cover a lot more ground.

Holly’s Highlights

Brighton SEO provided a jam packed agenda of one thought provoking talk after another, and as a newbie to the conference it certainly didn’t disappoint. Starting the day in ‘API’s in Search’ with Yigi Konur (@yigitkonur), Kostas Voudouris (@kvonweb) & Stephan Solomondidis (@SSolomonidis) set the tone for the wealth of knowledge about to be unloaded and the further research that was going to be inspired.

Yigi Konur, Kostas Voudouris & Stephan Solomondidis at Brighton SEO

But for me, coming from a paid search background there were 3 stand out talks that provided me with actionable insight. Starting with Sam Hanni un-masking the huge potential YouTube holds not just from an SEO background but from a paid one too, highlighted with a great example from the Dollar Shave Club whose whole business was built around clever advertising. Paired together with Jonathon Pascoe (@jpascoe) from ITN Productions, insight into what goes into creating their short form productions it becomes clear that in order to get the most from your video content you need to ask lots of questions – what is the story you are telling? who is the story about? and who is the story aimed at? Once you have the answers to these questions you can dive into the keyword research which may yield some different results to what you traditionally use for Google.

Jonathon Pascoe of ITN Productions

This was followed up by some great talks on Amazon & eBay marketplaces from Prabhat Shah of Day to Day eBay (@daytodayebay) and Darren Ratcliffe (@webdarren) of Digitl. Darren took us through how we can gain a competitive edge in eBay by optimising product data, and one key take out here was to ensure your data matches up with what eBay has regardless of whether that’s how you would list it or not. This includes eBay’s pre-defined category selections and brand lists. Failing to do this could make your products extremely difficult to find and you risk losing out on potential traffic and sales.

Prabhat was talking on Amazon Sponsored Ads and ran us through the different ways in which these can be used to target competing or complimentary products and highlighting, similar to AdWords, campaign structure is key to gaining the most from your ads.

Prabhat talking Amazon Sponsored Ads

To end the day we all piled in to Auditorium 1 for a comical on stage chat with Google’s very own Gary Illyes (@methode) who toyed with everyone’s intrigue into the world of Google’s algorithms, with Gary revealing they run 2-3 updates per day.

Gary from Google Keynote Speech

Sian’s Highlights

Here at Anicca we work together using an integrated approach across all of our disciplines rather than in Silo’s and so our trip to BrightonSEO was for the benefit of the whole team.

This was my first (of hopefully many) trip to Brighton SEO and a conference on such a large scale.

The biggest topic on the agenda of the September 2017 conference was that voice search is key and although the UK are slow adopters, it is coming and you need to be ready. With this in mind, optimisation for local search and long tail keywords need to be top of the priority list.

There were so many quality speakers on the day it was hard to pick my top 3, but here goes!

The first two on my list were both within the topic “The Future of Search”.

First talk of the day was by Daniel Rowles @danielrowles from Target Internet and focused on using advanced social listening to drive SEO.

His presentation focused on the well-known Sony Bravia adverts with the bouncy balls and also the paint explosion advert.

Using social listening, Sony noticed that were getting bad feedback from the paint advert and how damaging it must have been to the environment. Their quick response to the negativity, using the advert below, stopped the backlash in its tracks and stopped all conversation.

Screenshot from youtube video

Using tools such as brand watch allows you to pick up on any mentions of your brand/products and can help with your crisis management.

My second talk on the top list was by Saeley Johnson Jr @saelboat from Speak Easy and was all about the rise of search.

Much of the day was spent listening to talks related to voice search and the importance of optimising for local and long tailed keywords.

Saeley used various stats to inform listeners of why optimisation for voice search is so important.

Percentage of global smartphone owners

The US and Thailand are ahead of the game with Spain and Japan close on their heels. Surprisingly the UK are quite far behind on the uptake of voice search.

And the types of searches people are doing may surprise you.

Global regular voice tech users

Users are craving intimacy. When asked about voice search:-

69% of voice users said, “it would be much easier if technology could speak back to me”

73% of voice users said, “if voice assistants could understand me properly and speak back to me as well as a human can, I’d use them all the time”

My final talk of the day was from our very own Ann Stanley @annstanley telling us about the new AdWords interface and how to enhance your Google Shopping Ads.

Ann Stanley speaking at Brighton SEO

Important points from the talk include:

    • The new interface now shows you how often you are number one for ecommerce. This has been frustrating for agencies and businesses using AdWords in the past, as there hasn’t previously been a ranking available on shopping ads
    • Changing the bid strategy to target ROAS has seen an increase of 1.5% – 2% in some accounts
    • Crealytics research shows that improving product titles has a massive impact and may give you up to 18% uplift
    • Use custom labels to help manage your feed
    • Correcting product type, gender and missing attributes using Merchant Centre can vastly improve your feed and increase your conversions

A final statistic to leave you with from Saeley Johnson:-

29% of voice users say they have had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant.

Really?!

Presenters Daniel Rowles – Target Internet
Twitter: @danielrowles
Slides: targetinternet.com/BrightonSEO

Saeley Johnson Jr – Speak Easy
Twitter: @saelboat
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/SaeleyEwanJohnsonjnr/

Ann Stanley – Anicca Digital
Twitter: @annstanley
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/annstanley

That is the end of Part Two rounding up our trip to Brighton SEO. If you missed the start of the story then just pop over to Part One here.

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