Brighton SEO 2022: Our Key Takeaways

It’s an opportunity to get inspired, learn the latest industry tips and tricks, and ultimately, improve our quality of work to drive better results for our clients!

2022 saw the event become a 2-day extravaganza with even more talks than ever before!

Talks ranged from content marketing and quality assurance to health and wellness, and crawling and indexation - there was something for everyone. 

Not only is there plenty of talks to enjoy, but BrightonSEO also presents a perfect opportunity to network with other like-minded people AND hit the different brand stands and grab the freebies they have to offer.

Our amazing CEO and Founder, Becky Simms, and our fabulous Senior Paid Media Manager, Freya, graced the BrightonSEO stage this year to deliver two fantastic talks. 

Becky, spoke about Brand vs SEO: How to win allies and influence brand guardians, whilst, Freya, spoke about Attribution Models for Marketers looking at how to evaluate the marketing touchpoints a consumer encounters on their path to purchase. 

We may be biased - but both delivered two of our favourite talks of the entire event!

What were our key takeaways? 

Quality Assurance 

Becky Simms spoke about the importance of winning over the brand team to get SEO buy-in. 

One of Becky’s key points was ‘the art of compromise’ aka striking a balance between brand and SEO. Because, controversial opinion, it’s not all about SEO. 

When winning over the brand guardians, presenting your case is going to play an important role in securing your SEO win. With this in mind, psychological theories are going to become your best chance to maximise the communication pathways between you and the client. Relevant psychological theories include:

• Cognitive Load
• Nudge Theory
• Identifiable Person (Victim) Effect
• Availability Bias
• Endowment Effect
• Confirmation Bias
• Herding
• Opportunity Cost Neglect
• Decision Paralysis

The last key takeaway - education should be a two-way process; educating the client on SEO and educating us on brand.

Fundamentals & Content Marketing

Dale Bertund’s talk on purpose-driven SEO: an authority-based approach that Google loves from the fundamentals. Dale spoke about how can achieve great results without throwing loads of money into a campaign and how you have to put faith in yourself and your own skills. This can be the focus on authority indications to drive organic traffic through purpose-driven SEO. 

Corrie Jones’ talk on how to create genuinely compelling content for your customers discussed how we should understand users to market to them through creativity, psychology and data. With the aim of content resonating with consumers and saving them time. 

Management
Kim Dewe delivered a fantastic talk on ‘Transitioning into people management’. The talk gave insights on how you can go from specialising in SEO to managing a big team. 

Did you know that 44% of first-time managers people don’t feel prepared to lead? We didn’t either!

Here are our key takeaways:

• Discover what leader you are. Are you:
  • Green leader: Brings everyone together
  • Yellow leader: Propel the team with action
  • Read leader: Uses logic-based skills
  • Blue leader: Dream and inspire
• Provide psychological safety. This can be created by:
  • Show frequent appreciation
  • Nip negativity early
  • Avoid blaming and focus on solutions
  • Solicit feedback
  • Promote positive dialogue and interactions
• Learn radical delegation!

Reporting
We made our way to Auditorium 1 for Greg Giffords much-anticipated talk on reporting. If you’ve seen, listened or heard a Greg Gifford talk, you’ll know he’s not one to miss. And his talk on reporting certainly didn’t disappoint.

We left with plenty of inspiration on how to improve our reporting! Some of our key takeaways include:

• Simplicity is key
• Show trends over time as this is much more valuable 
• Clients care about the bottom line so ensure we’re showing the most important metrics that impact their bottom line
• Get rid of bad reporting points like bounce rates, average session duration, percentage of new users, work completed last month and keyword ranking tables 
• Label reporting elements with questions so they can easily understand i.e ‘organic traffic’ vs ‘how many organic visits did you receive last month?’
• Automate as much as you can but no report should be the same across clients 
• Your client has come to you with a problem, you’re the solution to that problem so your report should reflect that
• And finally, Bullet points kill kittens!

What are our top tips for visiting Brighton SEO?

• Print your badge ahead of the day so you can avoid registration queues and walk-in
• Download the BrightonSEO app and plan your schedule for the day
• Make the most of the brand stands (+ their feebies are a good addition of course) 
• Take lots of notes and photos of slides (as there are a lot of great links to useful resources)
• Make the most of networking and meeting all the industry experts
• Get active on social media with #BrightonSEO to virtually network and send praise to your favourite speakers 

What are our team’s thoughts on the event?

Zoe, Strategy Director 
A highly interesting day with candles that smell like 2022 and why bounce rates should be chucked 

Hannah Tree, Growth Marketing Manager
Greg Gifford’s talk on reporting was a personal favourite. What I love most about Greg’s talk is you always leave with a bunch of actionable insights you can implement the very next day! 

So simply put - “Your client has come to you with a problem, you're the solution to that problem so your report needs to reflect that.” 

Hannah Kane, Growth Marketing Manager 
A great inspirational day seeing so many wonderful talks and coming away armed with exciting tips and tricks into how we can do our job even better. I particularly enjoyed Becky’s talk about communicating with brand teams using behavioural nudges, Kim Dewe’s talk on people management where there were some top tips on how to manage a team mainly on the importance of delegation and finally Greg’s movie run-through of how to create exciting reports that are tailored to each client and focusing on relevant data. 

Freya, Senior Paid Media Manager
The three days were wonderful to figure out we’re on the right track to make sure we’re getting the conversions we want to. Such an honour to talk at the event and meet so many wonderful people 

Ellen, Growth Marketing Executive 
Drhiti’s talk on onboarding was enlightening on how to ensure your team are providing you with all the tools needed to thrive in your SEO work. As someone who went to university, apprenticeships were certainly not something that was discussed whilst I attended sixth form. It was a breath of fresh air to hear about Madison Crawford’s experience on completing and now hiring apprenticeships. The talk gave employers an overview of how they can maximise the apprentice's experiences.
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