There was a bit more than the usual excitement around Brighton SEO this year as Creare had not only one, but two representatives from the Local Team. As such, we were keen to attend as much as we could with anything that covered or hinted Local Intent. There were many key speakers of the day, below is a round up some talks which we think are worth sharing.
KEY TAKEWAYS
- Use great content
- Your blog should be seen as a local destination page beaming with relevance
- Low Authority links are equally as important for Local SEO
- Reviews, over 80% of consumers trust reviews, you need 5 reviews to get a Google star
- Don’t build links, earn them!
- Digital measurement strategies are a venn diagram of what we ‘Can do’ and ‘want to do’
- Service and non transactional websites are most at risk of being able to marry up offline and online sales effectively
- Anyone can do advanced SERP analysis
- Get Links through Wikipedia citations, broken links or your own listings
FAVOURITE SPEAKER OF THE DAY
Matthew Barby (@matthewbarby) with his talk on 10 ways to build links in 20 minutes flat as our local team can sometime find links difficult to earn which this gave some really good tips on.
SUMMARISE BRIGHTON SEO IN 5 WORDS
Rank and Roll with Google
QUOTES OF THE DAY:
“Marketing has never been about keywords, it’s about people†– Simon Penson
“Combine great content with great links and you stand a chance of ranking on the first page of google†– Matthew Barby
ROUNDUP OF THE BEST TALKS OF THE DAY
The Head Term is dead – Leveraging content to own the implicit query opportunity – Simon Penson (Zazzle Media) (View slides – http://www.slideshare.net/simonpenson/brighton-seo-the-head-term-is-dead-leveraging-the?qid=73a1408e-7d8d-43a1-bddc-af68f41a20c3&v=qf1&b=&from_search=4)
Simons’ talk re-emphasised the age old adage that Marketing is about people…
Not only did this presentation focus on this idea that chasing keywords is not the best way of cultivating the sheer number of potential customers, also re-engineered the idea of the growth of the long tail by taking into consideration of the explicit query and implicit query by maximising and utilising the use of content.
LOCAL SEO WILL HELP YOU LIVE LONGER AND PROSPER – Greg Gifford
Greg Gifford’s sci-fi themed talk (view slides here) was centred on Local SEO tactics, strategy and fundamentals; he once again delivered an insightful understanding of the Local SEO eco-system.
This talk was particularly insightful as there was good comparison and contrast with some of the more well-known MOZ local ranking factors.
Fundamentally Greg’s presentation was important because not only because the talk was neatly arranged into onsite factors as well as offsite factors and the impact these have on rankings, he also provide some simple mathematics as to why Local SEO is extremely important if you are a small business. Neatly packaged, the presentation very effortlessly elaborated on the pigeon algorithm update and the causal impact this had on search results and its implications for Local SEO.
 
Essentially he reemphasised how important Local SEO is if you are a business with a physical location and or serve a local area. From a personal perspective it was extremely pleasing as much of what Greg elaborated on reaffirms the Local SEO ethos which is practiced and preached at Creare. Quintessentially there was agreeance that the contributions of citations are significant and wrong or misaligned NAP information can be harmful to one’s Local online endeavours.
 
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Advanced Competitive Analysis – Three questions only the SERPs can answer – Rob Bucci
As a local SEO, this talk sat really well with me as the impact of SERP’s can sometimes be lost in the day to day management of traffic vs conversions and communicating this to clients. Rob has done some really amazing SERP tracking on Ebay, Amazon & Argos. Naturally you’d expect that Amazon or Ebay would come better off in the majority of the data as they are global giants but Rob unearthed some really cool facts on ranking data for Argos. Surprising hey!
I think he also gave some great ideas on how smaller companies or even in house SEO’s can start to do this for themselves. I think there were a few valuable questions to ask yourself when you sit and wonder where to start:
- What types of keywords are most valuable to you/your business?
- What user experience are you giving visitors from SERP to checkout/enquiry?
This post is part of a series of write up’s from Brighton SEO – you can click here to see some more great posts from our other departments.