Twice a year marketers from all over the world collect in the seaside city of Brighton for BrightonSEO, the biggest search and marketing conference in Europe. Held at The Brighton Centre, this April’s event was attended by over 3,500 keen marketers and SEO’s, eager to learn about the latest marketing, digital and tech trends, news and tactics from industry experts.

BrightonSEO is a staple event in Identity’s calendar, which we have attended now for several years. The day is full to the brim with fascinating sessions across seven different rooms, fantastic networking opportunities and a multitude of freebies. Here are just some of Identity’s highlights from this year’s event.

Content

It can be hard to decide which sessions to attend, but the first one we chose was on content, in the main auditorium where nearly 3000 marketers collected. The four speakers included Marcus Tober from Search Metrics, Eleni Cashell from Hotcourses Group, Steve Rayson from Buzzsumo and Giles Palmer from Brandwatch.

Marcus Tober spoke about how the ranking factors that create Google search results are constantly changing, making it more difficult for marketers to identify and respond to trends that impact sales.

His session, titled ‘Out with the old, in with the niche: content for the moments that matter’ discussed how there is no universal way making sure your content reaches the top of search results, it’s more important to cater to your audience with the way websites are structured, making sure that it serves the users intent. For example, a recipe site should include lots of large images videos and text to explain to its audience the process of the dish. Whereas a divorce lawyers website would benefit better with a more serious and structured approach, where videos and heavy imagery is not relevant to that particular audience, therefore potentially hindering the search results.

Another highlight of this session was Eleni Cashell’s talk on ‘How to unleash the power of unique content’. Eleni highlighted that a shocking 29% of the entire internet is made up of duplicated content, which is chunks of content within or across domains that completely match or are similar, which search engines do not like. She talked us through the simple wins for removing duplicated content off your site, ensuring all information your company provides is unique, ensuring for a higher place in search results.

Link Building

In the afternoon, we attended the Link Building session with Identity favourite, Greg Gifford from DealerOn, Laura Hogan from Ricemedia and Marie Turner from Amara Living. Link building is determined on how search engines process and analyse data when it comes to seeing how websites relate to each other, which in turn makes links. The more valuable links your website contains, it will then appear in various searches and appearing higher up on results pages.

Greg’s sessions always follow an entertaining theme, and this time it was sci-fi movies (which included 77 film references!). It focused on building links at a granular level such as links from your company’s local community. Greg suggested that it’s much more valuable to build links based on partnerships that have real-world value, beyond SEO to not only promote your business online, but offline as well.

Laura Hogan’s session on ‘Big Links for £0’ was also thoroughly interesting. By keeping on top of unlinked brand mentions such as online articles or blog posts, journalist requests and newsjacking, marketers can quickly and cheaply grow their links back to theirs or their clients website. She provided lots of easy tactics and real-life examples of how staying alert to opportunities to attach a website to a relevant and big link.

Guy Levine’s Session, ‘What we Learnt from Spending £1,000,000 on Facebook’

The final session of the day was from Guy Levine of Return. Guy provided key strategies his company developed after spending over £1,000,000 on Facebook advertising, such as personality insights for audiences.

He shared IBM’s study with us, where they researched into whether personality characteristics inferred from social media data could predict people’s behaviour and preferences. The results highlighted below found that people’s behaviour definitely had a profound effect on how they shared information across social media.

His engaging lecture broke down how to target specific audiences in a company’s sales funnel through Facebook, where Guy suggested that video ads and Instagram stories were used for pushing reach and brand awareness, banners and carousels were popular for driving traffic, collections and carousels were also used for remarketing and driving conversions.

Exhibitors

Not only are the sessions valuable and interesting, there is also a wide range of big name companies exhibiting at BrightonSEO. From the likes of Bing, Trustpilot, SEMRush, DeepCrawl and many more, the conference is a fantastic networking platform. With each stand offering fantastic freebies such as t-shirts, socks, smoothies and the odd cocktail ice lolly, as well as entertainment from a piano playing zebra, plus a wealth of information, you can learn a lot even from standing in the foyer.

Conclusion

BrightonSEO is a go-to event for Identity. With a building full of marketers and SEO’s, it’s the hub for all the latest tech news and trends, with helpful, new techniques to improve businesses marketing efforts. With nearly a hundred top speakers, a wide range of freebies and fun activities all under one roof, we recommend this conference to any marketers to attend.

For more information on how Identity can assist with your events marketing, please contact us today by calling 01323 469111 or email us at letstalk@identitygroup.co.uk today.