Internal linking, chatting to John Mueller and angry seagulls: BrightonSEO
Written by
Adelaide
on
TeamMarketing at HappyKite took a trip to the seaside last week for BrightonSEO and we’ve come back with some great ideas to implement for our clients. The line up of speakers was great and we found it really difficult to choose which talks to attend but we’re happy with our choices. Each member of the team has shared their standout talks and highlights of the day below.
Jenny is thinking about joined-up workflow with development and SEO plus talking to John Mueller!
This was my 3rd visit to BrightonSEO. The first being back in 2014 when it was held in The Brighton Dome. With the event getting bigger and bigger each year, it shows the interest and value that this conference brings to the SEO world! The jam-packed schedule of talks was a little overwhelming at first (there were too many to choose from!), but I decided to go with Site Speed, Measurement, Competitor Research & SEO Automation. I opted for a bit of variety with the intent of bringing back some ways of working into my daily role at HappyKite.
My top talk of the day was by Delete’s Head of Search, Polly Pospelova. What I really liked about her talk “How to get a 100 % Lighthouse performance score” is how she highlighted the necessity of both the frontend & backend developers as well as their SEO team having to come together to gain a 100% lighthouse performance score. This combined way of working is what drove their success in gaining 100% on the site speed tool.
We already adopt a similar way of working in HappyKite but we are also keen to develop this further so that there is a mutual understanding of the benefits to a client’s site.
Pospelova’s talk was broken down into the processes taken, changes made, and the results gained. Exactly what you would want to learn from this type of talk and there are some actions that we can implement in our ways of working when looking to improve the speed of a client’s site.
A personal highlight of the day was having the chance to meet and speak to John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google. Unsurprisingly a queue had formed to speak to John who was very patiently answering everyone’s questions (sometimes 4/5 questions!) I chose to just ask one question that I couldn’t find the answer to online. My question was “Businesses in the United Kingdom whose website is on a .eu domain, will Brexit affect them?” Johns response initially was a laugh and then he politely responded with:
[At Google] We see .eu domains as generic and not geo specific, so no, Brexit will not affect the [.eu] domain.
John Mueller in conversation with Jenny Muncey, BrightonSEO 2019
So there you have it! If you have a client based in the UK who has a .eu domain and were worried if there would be any implications with Google’s algorithm after Brexit, John has confirmed there will be none.
Adelaide is thinking about boosting performance with internal links
It was my first time attending BrightonSEO and I really enjoyed listening to the knowledgeable speakers and talking to the sponsors.
The standout talk for me was Christoph Cemper’s ‘Improve your Rankings with Internal Link Building, and no headaches’. It raised an excellent opportunity to think about our internal link structure and how making some small changes could really improve their performance. I particularly found it interesting to think about using more “money phrases” rather than brand phrases in our internal links. Definitely something to think about implementing for ourselves and our clients.
It was great to take a marketing team trip down to Brighton (with 2 of the 3 HappyKite kids in tow too thanks to another great accessible conference with childcare – thanks BrightonSEO!) and we couldn’t have gone back on the train without fish and chips on the beach. Highlight of the day for me, Jenny under siege by hungry seagulls!
Phil is getting excited about Content Gap Analysis
BrightonSEO was really eye opening for me in terms of the sheer scale of the event and the creative ways in which companies are trying to engage with us to use their tools and services! I very much enjoyed the breaks where I sampled doughnuts from Conductor and a SEMRush branded beer!
In closing your website’s content gap with your competitors, it is important to take a step back and not just focus on your new content but review all old content and the keyword opportunities you are missing. Content creation should be an iterative process and continually optimising existing content can reap huge rewards. We’ve learnt some great processes to identify keywords to target, understand the search intent of those keywords and find further opportunities from existing content. Razvan showed us a scalable process to do this largely using Google Search Console and Keyword Planner.
Oliver’s talk was on creating compelling stories as a link building strategy , even if those stories are not… Let’s say fully rooted in reality. It was the funniest talk of the day, with some hilarious tales of the ideas they’ve come up with to help their clients gain attention from the likes of the BBC and even internationally. This isn’t necessarily something we’ll be doing with our clients but really goes to show how creative we can be to gain traction and high quality links.
