Brighton SEO is one of the biggest events in the search marketing calendar. With over 2,000 SEO’s from agency and in-house roles gathering on the South Coast, we just had to be in attendance. Below is our summary of the day and highlights from some of the speakers that we managed to catch.
Stacey Cavanagh, The Habits That Land You Links
Stacey spoke on the need to build good links, and the habits to integrate to earn the best links possible.
1. Ideation - creating great ideas for content marketing is hard. Bernd Rohrbach in Germany came up with the 6-3-5 method of idea creation. You need 6 people, a simple worksheet and 30 minutes. Start with a problem statement, and then spend 5 minutes to create 3 ideas each. Pass worksheets to the left at the end of the 5 minutes, and write 3 ideas inspired by the 3 you’ve been handed. Repeat this for 6 rounds. This will give 108 ideas in 30 minutes. Try doing this as well as verbal brainstorming, crowdsourcing ideas, solo ideation sessions.
Mark each idea out of 10, by how new it is, how unique it is, and how feasible it is. This will give you a mark out of 30 for each idea. Anything under 20 normally gets removed. Next, seek impartial feedback from people who will be honest.
realtimeboard.com and mindnode recommended as tools to help with this. Generate dummy tweets and split test the headlines on fivesecondtest.com.
2. Asset generation - create an image attribution process. Set up a flickr account with creative commons access for each client. Ensure that people will link by setting the right terms. Use great imagery and ensure they are optimise in terms of titles etc.
Imageraider.com is a good tool to automatically reverse image search based on your Flickr account - meaning you can reverse image search for link building in a ore scalable way.
Survey data is great for news links. Google consumer surveys can give you lots of responses for low cost.
3. Outreach - outreach is all about building your little black book. Start this straight away with a contacts audit. Find a list of journalists and bloggers who write about you, write about your competitors, and who you want to write about you.
Use pickanews.com as it tracks broadcast, online, print and radio. Then use BuzzStream to keep your database in one place.
Muckrack.com is a good alternative to Help A Reporter Out. Pay attention to the reciprocity rule - helping others will encourage them to help you. Make people care first before a big piece, pick your outreach targets carefully, and sell in smaller content or things of no value to yourself.
Vicke Cheung, Tips for Designing Great Content
Vicke Cheung of Distilled talked on tips for designing great content.
Use behance, dribbble, and patterntap for design inspiration rather than Google images. Use Pinterest to get moodboards going, by pinning your research as you go along. Be broad with your initial research, then refine this with analysis.
Comment on the pins as you refine what you want. Tell your designer what you want as well as what you don’t want to set parameters. Think about brand restrictions, where it will live, and responsiveness.
Streamline your process by setting up a briefing template. Realtimeboard is a great tool to build ideas in a collaborative and visual way. Use browserstack to check browser compatibility, also use responsinator.com to spot any mistakes quickly.
Stocksy.com is a great way of using imagery that isn’t too stock focussed. Real people, more believable and more engaging. If there’s no budget then use search.creativecommons.org to find freely available images.
Patrick Hathaway, Cool Shit You Can Do With WordPress
Patrick Hathaway spoke on ways that WordPress integrations can help in multiple ways. Examples covered included news sites, and automated posting to social media.
Slickquiz is a free WordPress plugin that is great for creating quick quizzes within WordPress. “Snow fall, the avalanche at tunnel creek” is a great example of parallax content, and this can be recreated in a simpler sense by using WP parallax themes or bigvideo’s jquery plugins.
Dixon Jones, Do Links Still Matter in 2014?
Dixon from Majestic SEO talked on the value of links in 2014. He argued, naturally, that links are still highly important and backed this up by looking at ranking factor studies. Dixon then talked about the new topical trust flow metrics released yesterday in Majestic SEO.
Rob Bucci, SERP Driven Case Study
Rob Bucci spoke of the need to understand how people are searching in order to dominate localised search results. A case study on Geico, US car insurance brand, showed the need to focus on localised results and focus based on market share potential.
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