Highlights From BrightonSEO October 2022

Last week, over 8000 marketers from all over the world joined together in Brighton for round two of BrightonSEO and fringe events 2022. We were even lucky enough to have two of our very own speaking at the event, Danny Smith with How to Feed GA Data into BigQuery with R and Alex Jones with Landing Links in Regionals & Red Tops. 

We’ve compiled some of our favourite talks from this year’s speakers. So, if you didn’t make it to Brighton this time, here’s a little bit of what we learnt…

• How to get more traffic with less content
• The elusive ROI of content
• How to come up with content ideas without relying on search volume
• How to create accessible social media content

How to get more traffic with less content

Anna Gregory-Hall, Head of SEO at Snaptrip

Anna shared some fantastic insights on how to reduce the amount of work you need to do in order to get the same amount of traffic. That sounds too good to be true, right?

Less can be more when it comes to content creation. Publishing too much content on your site not only takes time and effort, but can lead to cross-site duplication, keyword cannibalisation and may exceed crawl budget. 

So, you need to inspect all your URLs and decide what to keep (200), redirect (301) or delete (404). It’s time to throw sentimental feelings out the window and remove any content that does not serve a purpose. Anna recommends going full ‘Marie Kondo’ on your webpages!

Some of the key elements to look out for include the page’s traffic, backlinks and future potential. After conducting a brutal ‘keep, kill and redirect’ mission, you can get started on thoroughly optimising your pages now that there are fewer to do. 

The elusive ROI of content

Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs

Every marketer will know the challenges that come with measuring content ROI. During his talk, Tim explored the meaning of ROI and how to ‘measure’ the success of your content. I use the word ‘measure’ here loosely, as Tim states it may actually not be possible to measure this. 

Return on investment, or ROI, is calculated as return minus investment, so the value of your work minus the cost to do said work. Value is usually defined by the number of leads, conversions and sales you obtain from a piece of content, but Tim explains that this is just the tip of the iceberg – literally. 

As you can see, there are many other factors to consider when it comes to the value of content. In the words of Tim…

How to come up with content ideas without relying on search volume

Steph Naylor, Senior Content Strategist at Journey Further 

Keyword research is finite, so Steph discussed some of the tools and methods you can use for content ideation that don’t involve search volume. These include:

• Searching in your subreddit for topics that people discuss, many of which won’t appear in any keyword tool.
• Using your site search feature. This can be a goldmine because the terms people might use on your site might not be the term you’ve optimised that page for. You can also get new ideas for categories, products, blog posts etc.
• Take advantage of insights from your sales team. Many of the questions they encounter could be from people very interested in your product/service, which will inform you of some key questions within the purchasing funnel.
• Social media can be a fantastic source of information from your target audience, giving you insights into which of your posts they really engage with.
• Monitoring your competitors’ social media can also help you get further insights. 
• Using Google Trends can help you get an idea of what search terms are gaining popularity and give you the opportunity to optimise these before your competitors.

How to create accessible social media content 

Ellen Cole, Marketing, PR & Social Media Director at Little Seed Group

The 2010 Equality Act states that providers of services need to take steps to make their communications accessible, and that includes social media. Ellen discusses the steps social media professionals can take to make their sites more accessible to benefit both users and business. 

Some of Ellen’s recommendations include:

• Alt text – this describes the appearance of an image, which can be useful for visually impaired individuals. This is something you need to add manually in most cases.
• Capitalise hashtags – breaking up hashtags can help screen readers by ensuring they are legible.
• Limit use of emojis – screen readers hate emojis so make sure to limit your use where possible. 

October 2022 BrightonSEO was packed with insights and information on the latest search marketing developments. Don’t miss your opportunity to watch the virtual event and check the full list of talks from BrightonSEO and fringe events. 

You can watch a recording of Danny’s Measurefest talk and Alex’s BrightonSEO talk for free at anytime