It’s that time of year again when over 4,000 search marketers from all over the globe come together for the biggest SEO conference in the world. And that’s why I travelled to Brighton, to find out more about the latest developments.
There were 87 speakers talking about different SEO topics which meant I was spoilt for choice as to which sessions to go to. There was so much information to digest, but here are my key learning points from the top three talks I went to.
Future of search
The first talk took me to the future of search. The speaker was Greg Gifford from Wikimotive who, rather surprisingly, said you have to scrap everything that you know and go back to the beginning! What he meant by that was that we need to return to old school marketing, and create content that is relatable. The copy needs to sound more like a conversation, rather than keyword stuffing or link building. As a result, you are much more likely to rank, as people actually understand your content, rather than being shown an over optimised piece of content.
Keywords
The second speaker was Tim Soulo who looked at keyword research. In a nutshell, he explained that just because a keyword has a high search volume, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to target it. Rather, the search intent must be relevant to the topic which you are writing about.
Tim thinks that ranking #1 for keywords is overrated because content which is sitting on page 2 still gets 22% of the total number of clicks from users searching on the web.
What you need to do is look at your competitors, see what they rank for, then check for their top-ranked pages to discover how much traffic they actually get from those keywords. They may get more traffic from keywords which actually rank lower, which will tell you the best keywords to target, which actually get traffic.
Structured data
The third speaker was Charlie Norledge who talked about what’s new in structured data. The four key new features are:
- Breadcrumbs
- FAQ
- Review
- Recipe
Schema markup is important to a website’s ranking as it gives Google a bit of additional code to help read the webpage as well as helping your website stand out in the search results.
Here’s an example of how each of the new forms of schema markup looks in the search results!
Breadcrumb Schema:
FAQ Schema:
Review Schema:
Recipe Schema:
These were my key takeaways from Brighton SEO. All we have to do now is implement the new learnings to help our clients rank higher and get more traffic!
