The city of Brighton has a lot to offer at any given time during the year, from the beautiful seaside location to the tasty delicacies that beckon to any foodie. But twice a year, Brighton is best known for the BrightonSEO conference that works its magic, and draws in thousands of search marketing professionals to learn about the latest industry insights and network with like-minded individuals.
Regardless of your level of expertise, there is always something to be learned and this year was no exception. With over a hundred lectures spread across two days, mixing novice and experienced speakers, BrightonSEO covered quite a bit of territory and a whole lot of interesting topics.
BrightonSEO conference highlights
The post pandemic conference felt like it was back to full capacity with a lively vibe. One participant tweeted, “Feel like #brightonSEO has even better vibes than usual this year – didn’t know that was possible?? It is *buzzing* at the Brighton center this morning!”
The Oncrawl team was also present for this edition, so if you didn’t get the chance to attend the event yourself or you just want a recap of some of the great search marketing tips and best practices shared, read on for our key highlights.
Chima Mmeje – On-page optimization lessons from analyzing over 400 blog posts
Chima Mmeje, a content strategist, an SEO copywriter and a BrightonSEO pro, gave a talk that, according to social media, was a resounding success. Take a look at a few of the comments shared from Gianluca Fiorelli, Nicolás Milloch, and Georgia Gadsby March.
She took to the main stage on day two to discuss on-page optimization lessons. With incredible stage presence and captivating stories, she shared a lot of helpful tips from her own personal experience such as:
- Gated content only works when the offer is crazy good.
- Your content should include quotes from authoritative sources with great E-A-T on the topic.
- Your goal is not to rank better but to be in Google’s circle of trust.
With so many tips concentrated all in one place, you may want to download this presentation to keep as a reference. You can find it here.
Photo source: Twitter/Credit: Nicolás Milloch
Jérôme Salomon – Using APIs and automation to resolve SEO challenges
For his very first BrightonSEO talk, Oncrawl’s own Jérôme Salomon spoke about the power of APIs for automation and its custom features. If you don’t know how or where to start with APIs and SEO automation, Jérôme’s presentation offers an ultimate API Starter Pack for SEOs.
Sharing his experience and using use case examples, Jérôme demonstrated how to automate long manual tasks or create custom features with SEO tools APIs. He explained that APIs are easy to use with Python and learning Python basics is something that’s accessible to any SEO.
His tips for moving from a long manual process to a fully automated script included:
- Splitting your manual process into small steps and automating them one by one.
- Finding existing scripts and adapting them to your needs (no need to start from scratch!).
- If the results are good, industrialize the process with developers.
For a complete look at the use cases he referred to, download the full presentation.
Photo source: Twitter/Credit: Julien Deneuville
Areej AbuAli – Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Product Listing Pages
It had been a couple of years since Areej attended a live BrightonSEO conference (check out her soundbite below), so she was excited to be back in person and also presenting. This time around, she spoke about the hidden value behind product listing pages: the pages that drive the most organic revenue in the e-commerce industry.
Where do you look to find that value? The building blocks of your PLP pages: content, internal linking and filters. Areej used a real life example from her current position at Papier and the presentation offered some great technical insights for those working in the e-commerce industry. It also offered tips for any SEOs integrating into a tech team. The whole presentation was really well structured and easy to understand, even for the most novice SEOs. It’s definitely worth it to check out the full presentation.
Photo source: Twitter/Credit: Navah Hopkins
Danny Richman – How to use GPT-3 for Keyword Research
Did you know that OpenAI’s GPT-3 can write Google Apps Script? Well, a lot of others attending Danny Richman’s conference didn’t know that either. With the recent release of Google’s Helpful Content Update, there has been a lot of discussion and debate around the use of AI to create content.
Danny gave an interesting talk about how to use GPT-3 to upgrade your keyword research. He also spoke about how he thought Google will likely incorporate AI technology in the future and what that will mean for SEOs. Participants also walked away with free scripts to download and use. If you weren’t able to attend, check out the video recording.
Photo source: Twitter/Credit: Ryan Jones
Oncrawl Events & Webinars
All done for this edition of BrightonSEO
As always, there were a number of great presentations that we weren’t able to highlight here, but if you are interested, Brighton always provides access to the presentations in their video vault. There are also a number of resources you can access to help you find all the presentations if you would like to download them.
Overheard at BrightonSEO
With everything going on at Brighton, it’s likely you missed out on something. Or even if you’re having a bit of withdrawal, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! Here are a few things we overheard at BrightonSEO.
“It’s so good to be back in person! The last time I was in person was September 2019. It’s great to see a lot of new speakers as well taking the stage for the first time.”
Areej AbuAli, Head of SEO, Papier
“BrightonSEO is my favorite conference in the world. I speak at tons and tons of events all over the world and by far BrightonSEO is the best conference out there. There are more opportunities to connect with speakers. There are more opportunities to see first-time speakers with new ideas, so it’s not just the same people speaking over and over again. There are awesome connections with vendors and it’s an awesome town, so everything altogether makes it an amazing experience.”
Greg Gifford, Vice President of Search, SearchLab
“Brighton is just a really great event that I always like because there are so many good ideas and it’s just great to meet people that you know online. You finally get to see them in person and exchange ideas and interactions.”
Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix
“Areej’s presentation was a masterclass. Absolutely incredible, both in terms of content and form! It was very interesting, the storytelling was great and I learned a lot about e-commerce. I even learned things that I could apply to my clients who are very small. I’m very happy to learn the things that don’t just apply to huge sites with millions of pages.”
Alizée Baudez, SEO Consultant
“The event is going great! It’s been a few years since I’ve been here, and it’s always a great atmosphere. I’ve been able to see a lot of partners I’ve worked with in previous years, especially Oncrawl.”
Benoit Chastellier, Head of SEO & ASO, Alibaba
“My day has been fantastic and my talk went really well! The room was incredibly full! I’m really glad it went well.”
Judith Lewis, Founder, Decabbit Consultancy
“I’m really excited to be here at BrightonSEO. I’m looking forward to finding out about things I don’t know today. So I will probably be avoiding some of the technical stuff and getting into more content and other subjects like team management. I’m just trying to broaden my skills a bit more.”
Chris Johnson, Head of Technical, Bamboo Nine
“Moderating has been great! I have the easy job: you stand up, you introduce very clever people, and then you sit down. It’s really good fun, the BrightonSEO team do a really good job of organizing it and the talks all match really nicely together. They blend experienced speakers with not so experienced speakers and they’re all helping each other out. It’s just a really nice community.”
Andrew Cock-Starkey, SEO Consultant, Founder of Optimisey
