Lessons From Brighton SEO 2019
For me, Corey, this was the first time I would experience Brighton SEO after hearing about it over the last few years, and as a bona-fide search nerd I was excited to see what was in store and listen to what some of the other experts had to say!
Originally Brighton SEO was hosted in the upstairs of a local bar, however, this year was much different…
The event was held in the Brighton Centre, a large concert & exhibition space just a stones throw from Brighton Pier, sat opposite the beach, with a capacity for more than 5,000 attendees. There were sponsors far and wide giving our swag which mainly consisted of the usual stuff; pens, books, stickers, hard-sales pitches.
The events for the day were split between 8 different rooms and 4 different sessions, with approximately 3 speakers per session throughout the day, providing us with 87 fact-filled presentations for us to choose from!
There was a great variety of speakers from around the world, with differing levels of expertise, in different subject matters, topped off with a Q&A session with John Mueller, the Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google.
Top 3 Presentations of the Day (for me)
Google Smart bidding: How to train your algorithm – Kian Njie
Kian provided us with some fantastic insights for understanding automated bidding strategies on Google Ads and how we can use the data gathered from these campaigns to optimise our campaigns further to make them work for us! Although this information may be tailored for higher volume campaigns I feel like the depth of knowledge provided by Kian can help us all in taking the uncertainty out of automated bidding strategies and help us to understand what’s going on, especially during the volatile times!
Become a Local Hero: PPC Tips to Boss Your Neighbourhood – Oliver Ewbank
Oliver is an award winning PPC & SEO consultant, based in London and has appeared in most of the big digital marketing publications you can imagine. Oliver has some serious credentials in the industry, so certainly someone worth listening to. The majority of his presentation focused on driving traffic to local campaigns and using Google Ads to drive footfall traffic and create local sales. Often when we think of digital marketing we tend to separate online sales from in-store sales. Oliver gives us ideas of how we can use some of the Google Ads tools we are used to using on a day to day basis in alongside one-another to come up with some extremely interesting out-of-the-box results!
Search is Stagnating: It’s time to explore more biddable diversity. – Matt Whelan
Matt was certainly one of the most memorable presentations of the day. In this talk Matt covered some of the doom and gloom of paid search, how search results are getting more competitive, how Google is removing some of the control of the advertiser and turning the SERP’s in to something akin to the classified section of your local newspaper. Matt was hilarious and certainly shone a light of some of the limitations and more difficult topics that we often don’t tend to focus on, and rarely discuss. Unfortunately, his slides don’t appear to be available yet, but I’ll update this blog when this has changed.
This was a hugely rewarding day which is certainly worth a visit for any avid search marketer, in fact, I was so inspired by my first Brighton SEO that I’ve already submitted my interest in speaking next year (fingers crossed)!
If you’ve missed this years Brighton SEO and want to find out what all the fuss is about here’s a full list of the speakers & slides from this years Brighton SEO.
