It’s that time of year again, when the UKs most picturesque seaside city is taken over by thousands of curious SEOs, looking to find that new tool or piece of information that will give them the edge. We hopped on the train to Brighton last week to be part of the UK’s biggest and best SEO event.
With a diverse range of skills across the team, we decided to split up and see as many different talks as we could, managing to catch probably around half of what was on offer (no mean feat in itself!). Here are the best talks the team managed to catch at Brighton SEO 2017.
Gary Illyes – Google
Any SEO worth their salt can’t turn down an opportunity to pick the brains of a Google employee, so when we saw Gary’s name on the scheduled we knew we had to go. Gary – a webmaster trends analyst at Google in Switzerland – had a half hour session, in which he fielded questions from the audience. A fantastic talk to cap off the day!
Greg Gifford – Dealeron
Link building is a vital skill for any SEO to master, as it has a hugely positive impact on keyword rankings, but how does this change when you’re doing local SEO? This was the focus of Greg Gifford’s talk, and his argument was certainly food for thought. His strategy is to forget about domain authority, and simply focus on building as many links as possible from local businesses. So if you’ve got a business in Brixton, stop chasing that Guardian link and get one from the restaurant next door instead!
Matt Beswick – Aira
It’s no secret that Facebook ads are becoming more and more essential for businesses that use the platform, so it was great to hear from someone who’s been using them since the beginning. Matt built a game on Facebook in 2007, which became one of the 10 most popular on the platform, and in the process of growing it spent tens of thousands of pounds from his own pocket on Facebook ads to promote it. He used his insight from this time, and the decade he’s spent running social ads since, to go in on social advertising best practice, providing plenty of insight along the way.
Bobbi Brant – Kaizen
When you’re creating and pitching content, data gets journalists’ attention, and helps SEOs to build links. But what if your campaign has no budget to get new survey data? You could get data from an open source, but what’s to stop a journalist ignoring your painstakingly crafted content, and lifting the numbers directly from the source? This talk provided a solution; play around with the data. Combine open source data sets, filter out results, provide detailed analysis. Give the journalist something they can’t just get from the original data set and you’re onto a winner.