Ten key points from BrightonSEO
We thoroughly enjoyed the BrightonSEO talks this year. Held twice a year, it brings together some of the best speakers in the world of search.
Content strategy driving an SEO campaign was a key theme touched upon in many of the talks. Here are ten of the main pointers we took from the BrightonSEO sessions this year:
- Word count is still extremely important for SEO. Increase coverage by localising your content, if relevant to your business.
- Lots of tools and software are used for content publishing and measuring, but most content authoring starts with no tools or data underpinning it. Guide content creation with data, as well as subject matter expertise.
- Understand the relationship between topics – not all are relevant. Customer retail journeys often start with high volumes of comparison/research – create content for this, not just transactional product pages.
- 80% of global content created by companies is not visible online due to poor strategy – which is significant wasted budget. Specialise, and don’t try to cover everything.
- Don’t be afraid to remove under-performing, poor quality content.
- Storytelling is as relevant as ever today. Use tools to understand your audience – such as YouGov profiles or Facebook Insights and create personas from data/profiles. Then think of issues these personas might encounter.
- Write ready-made articles for time-starved journos, and always try to create or find unique data for a hook. Without a hook it won’t travel.
- Voice search is powered by structured data and off-site websites and directories. Use them. The Knowledge Graph is more important than ranking. Make sure you’re in it.
- Reviews are important. Get stars. This is all called ‘digital knowledge control’ and is different to SEO.
- We won’t use keywords as much in the future – images, emoji, photos will become more used. Useful when you can’t describe what you’re searching for but can see it. Create more visual content!
