After another successful team trip to brightonSEO, we’ve put together some of our top insights from the day, which we present to you below. From how to make your video captions beautiful and SEO for smaller budgets, through to grabbing (and keeping) the attention of top journalists, here’s Koozai’s journey through September’s brightonSEO…
Offering up a humorous and witty session to combat the groggy heads at the start of the day, Helen Pollitt discussed the most important steps to make an impact on SEO without the backing of a large budget. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Start with a rigorous assessment of the brand, conducting a content gap analysis, identifying where the business is already excelling and if there are any strengths in current content or SEO.
Step 2: Think about a strategy. It’s best to start small with campaigns or look to optimise one or two webpages on your site. Now’s the time to think outside the box, looking into the right channels for your brand, alongside what your competitor’s do and don’t do.
Step 3: Implementation. Do some serious competitor research, you can even set up a custom search against your competitors to see how you’re ranking in comparison. It’s also good to look into backlinks, what have you earnt against your competitors?
Other useful tips:
During Stacey MacNaught’s insightful talk, we were exposed to plenty of hints, tips and advice on how brands without giant budgets can use outreach to build links and get people talking about them.
Tip #1: Focus most on the story of the content rather than the format of the content. Human interest stories are great, so using case studies to add context is favourable. If you need to source a case story, you can use free tools such as ResponseSource and PressPlugs.
Tip #2: Research is essential. Look at trends for when the media start talking about seasonal topics (or your chosen topics) using Google trends, Meltwater (or another social listening tool) and Google news. This will help you identify when and who to speak to. It’s also a good idea to source your target publications’ feature calendars.
Tip #3: Consistent, low-generating content is best, especially if it answers a specific query. Ranking for content around research or reports will help you gain coverage naturally over time, with people looking for sources to cite.
A final thought: “spend more time planning your content – data doesn’t have to come from surveys”!
Showcasing examples of some super-successful PR campaigns, Carrie Rose from Rise at Seven powered through a deck of over 100 slides, sharing some fabulous insights into not only how to grab the attention of journalists, but how to ensure your story makes an impact. Here’s some of Carrie’s top tips…
Hosted by experienced speaker Ahmed Khalifa, this entertaining talk discussed how context is key when it comes to video captions. Starting with the basics of clear and concise content, this session developed into further useful tips to help deaf viewers (or anyone watching without sound), with description around types of music and tone of voice being highlighted as important factors.
With some rather humorous examples of where auto-captioning has got it wrong or made some interesting contextual assumptions (I’ve included a couple below), when you consider that captioned videos get more viewing time (Facebook), it’s important to ensure your video captions are on point before upload.
Detailing how websites act as a digital salesperson, Amy Bishop’s session discussed how brands should be using audiences to find out more about which users to retarget. Here are some of the main takeaways…
Want to know how you can use Gmail ads to beat your competition? Here are our top learnings from Jacob Tibbott’s advertising session:
Hosted by Becky Simms of Reflect Digital, this talk explained the advantages to SEOs of having a better understanding of what content means for real people.
When you consider that Google is set up to mimic human behaviour and thought processes, it’s important to think about the overall impact of your story alongside the numbers. Ask yourself, what does it mean for real people? Here are some great areas where you can invest your thinking to achieve the above:
To help you out, they’ve created Rate My Content, which is a super-useful scoring tool. Simply paste your content into the box and it will look at metrics such as level of engagement, selflessness, whether it uses kinaesthetic, visual or auditory language and more.
Focusing on the importance of call tracking, Adam Chapman-Ballard from Mediahawk began his session by identifying the reasons and types of products which are more likely to require a phone call. This was demonstrated using the below graph:
©Mediahawk
Although it was recognised that quick-contact services shouldn’t automatically push users to call, when you look into the stats, 60% of mobile users prefer to call to get information about products, and a massive 70% of mobile searchers use click to call, making call tracking a valuable asset to your business.
We hope you’ve found our September 2019 brightonSEO round-up useful for your business. Until next time…
As you’ve made it all the way to the end of this post, here’s a little reward of some main stage entertainment featuring two of our Koozians…
PS If you want the lowdown on what other digital marketing events and conferences are happening across 2019/20, check out this blog post.
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