Hey there, I’m Anna Cook, Snr Digital Marketing Executive here at Sleeping Giant Media, and I wanted to share with you…

What I Learned At Brighton SEO Online

I’m sure all SEO lovers out there are very aware of the magnificent event that occurs every year called Brighton SEO! A place for all digital marketers and search-based geeks to get together and learn all about search engine optimisation and everything else that relates to it… what could be better? 

In October this year we had almost twenty of our Giants attend the in-person and virtual event, taking in all kinds of learnings, delivering our own talks and generally hunting swag.

It’s really important, no matter how much we think we know about a subject, to broaden our horizons and learn more to help us extend our knowledge. 

Having attended the virtual talks, I wanted to share some of the great talks I attended and the key learnings I took from them.

How To Get More Traffic With Less Content   

Anna Gregory-Hall, Snap Trip

A fantastic talk with some big wake-up calls.

In her talk, she explained how having lots of content could be viewed as a good thing through the act of dominating the SERPS with your content and targeting loads of keywords, but then quickly address that that’s not necessarily the case.

Actually, having too much content on your website can cause resource constraints, keyword cannibalisation, cross-site duplication and more issues. Not only that, but Anna mentioned that Google has a new ‘helpful content’ update which, as it says on the tin, wants your website content to actually help people and answer questions etc., otherwise you might find your content getting penalised in the SERPS instead!

Anna went on to talk about the ways we can fix this by getting rid of pages and redirecting them, whilst remembering to follow SEO optimisation rules like updating your sitemap along the way and much more (sorry, not too many spoilers).

This talk was really insightful and I’m sure helped a lot of content writers out there understand the importance of helpful content and when, actually, we might be going a little overboard!

The Elusive ROI of Content Marketing 

Tim Soulo, Ahrefs

Tim started his talk off with a poll that showed almost 50% of people measure content marketing ROI and the other 50% don’t… but then posed the question… “is content marketing ROI actually measurable?”.

The short answer, is no, it’s not a measurable metric, technically. But this does not devalue our content marketing! Tim follows on by suggesting that if our content is bringing awareness to our brand and website, bringing you traffic and clicks, that these metrics are also massively important to your business. It’s not all about conversions and leads!

And I think that’s the main message Tim was trying to bring to his talk is that a lot of us, me being guilty of this at some points, are guilty of just focusing on the sales and leads that we bring into the business, when there are other important factors we should consider as well, such as brand awareness and more.

Tim goes on to talk about how to create high-value content if you’re not measuring your ROI… but I’ll leave that to you to find out yourself by watching his talk online!

What we can learn from losing tests – the importance of paying attention to negative outcomes

Will Critchlow, Search Pilot.

Will started off by setting the scene about how SEO “is like an adventure” and that we need to go out, be brave and test things out to know if they work or not, and this totally resonated with me!

He spoke all about how to run an SEO test which I won’t go too much into, but it’s something that, if you don’t know how to do, definitely watch his video or research it as it’s very useful to know.

The important message from Will’s talk was not about how we can use the positive outcomes from these tests, it was about how we can use the negative test results, which are actually just as important as the positive ones!

A statistic he shared that stood out to me was that just from not implementing the negative outcome of a test, you could see a 80% drop in engineering tickets. This is really funny, as I think we all forget that if we just implement everything, we are making work for so many other people who could focus on other things, but we made them put something on our website, that we don’t even know if it would work or not.

Overall this talk was a real eye-opener on how actually, a negative test result, can definitely be a positive result!

What the (cluster)f*ck? Convince Google you’re an expert and plan your content faster

Alice Rowan, Content Marketing

Alice went into some more detail about the previously mentioned Google ‘helpful content’ update and how we all need to make sure our content is; purposeful, informative, specialised and specific. All these things combined will make an epic piece of content.

Her talk was really in-depth and interesting, but in a nutshell, she mentioned eight steps to help your topic cluster which were as follows:

• Choose your topic wisely
• Lead magnets e.g. e-books and webinars
• Supporting content e.g. blogs and videos
• Optimising your content
• Quality research through thought leaders
• Internal linking to your content 
• Cornerstone content (which is like a massive blog, really in-depth that will work as your ultimate website landing page for your website customers) 
• Distribution of your content

As I said, this was very in-depth and important so make sure you check out her talk online to get a full description of the workings of how to help your topic cluster and start writing some awesome content! 

Brighton SEO is a brilliant way to broaden your knowledge and even just find out different perspectives on things you already know. So don’t hesitate to take a gander online and get learning, you never know what you don’t know! 

If you were interested in learning more about our talk at Brighton SEO this year, all about How To Sell Social Media Creatively, then download the slides & see further resources here.

And remember, for any of your business marketing needs, contact our experts at Sleeping Giant Media to take your website to the next level.