Identity’s Highlights of the April 2019 #BrightonSEO Conference
The first BrightonSEO of 2019 took place on the 11th and 12th of April. With an expected turn out in excess of 4,000, 2019 was due to be the busiest BrightonSEO yet. There were a lot of speakers at BrightonSEO but we’re only going to cover our favourites, so here are our highlights of this year’s event – be warned this year’s BrightonSEO highlights features a strong content marketing vibe…
Phil Nottingham was first up explaining how to produce high quality video content with a modest budget. The audience was treated to an engaging presentation covering the benefits of video but the biggest point he drove home was to emphasise quality over quantity. A video may go viral but that doesn’t guarantee any new leads or benefits for the business. Phil’s biggest piece of advice was to focus on the goal first and foremost, leaving creative for the final stages of the process.
Another of Phil’s points was to focus on the story and narrative which ties in with the quality over quantity mentality. Showing comparisons between the performance of an advert filmed with an iPhone, £10K camera and £100K camera, the differences didn’t warrant the vast differences in spend between the three. Of each of them, the £10K advert performed best with the iPhone advert coming in a close second and the £100K advert coming in dead last.
The next session covered onsite performance and took place in the packed Auditorium 1 which even featured a Game of Thrones throne. The first speaker was Christoph Cemper who was adorned in his trademark bright orange suit, Christoph explained the importance of internal link building and how to do it without too much fuss.
Lastly, Razvan Gavrilas spoke about content gaps and how to fill them, with every piece of content a competitor has and that you don’t creating a ‘gap’. Using research and analytics we’re able to gauge where these gaps are and minimise them. This largely takes the form of creating content people are searching for but it was interesting to hear his techniques on how to gather this information.
Corinne Card sung the virtues of podcasts during her talk and similarly to Phil Nottingham’s point earlier, suggested focussing on goals first and foremost. Corinne mentioned that a colossal 93% of podcasts fail to go beyond episode 7 and by focussing on a goal, a podcast series is more likely to endure than those that don’t. It’s certainly given us food for thought regarding the proposed Identity podcast…
Immediately after Corinne came Beth Joy whose passion for words was inspiring and who wanted to highlight the importance of the brand voice. After running through a few examples, Beth was able to convey her points about the power of language and consistency while shoehorning in a few pictures of dogs. The salient point from Beth’s talk was how getting a brand voice wrong can be damaging and that it must be indicative of the type of brand you are and wish to be.
Finally, after Beth came Shannon McGuirk who gave the audience some advice around campaign failures and what to do in that situation. After buoying the audience with personal examples of failure and subsequent success, Shannon’s key point was to persevere and plan – if something should fail, deconstruct it, optimise it and then relaunch it – great advice!
This year’s BrightonSEO marks the third year in a row that Identity have attended but this felt the busiest, attendees were everywhere! People from all over come down to Brighton to improve their digital and search marketing skills and the first event of 2019 hasn’t disappointed.
