Yet another #BrightonSEO conference has ended. Many thanks to Woorank for my free ticket :-) and for the below drawing (you had to choose 3 balls with key-words for Woorank to draw it :-)
The sessions I attended:
Nichola Stott - SEO SUX: How and Why UX Must Be Front and Centre to Your Technical Strategy
1. Young generation (Generation Z) expects to get a cool product, whereas older generation still cares very much about a cool experience, focus on your products, since generation Z will become 40% of all customers by 2020!
2. She recommended a presentation of Paul Haahr (Google engineer) to learn How Google works & Ilya Gregorik 'Preconnect, prefetch, prerender...'to get some best practice for optimisation :-)
3. Nichola reminded how important are:
-  page speed (use Google Speed Tool to check your site uploading time)
-  all device accessibility (go for responsive design & AMP-accelerated mobile pages project)
-  and direct to object (did you know that 75% of Buzzfeed visits comes from FB & Snapchat?, sounds like Gen Z is taking over again...)
4. Ensure you get your apps indexed (deep linked pages from apps), so that whenever users look for your site they get the app opened instead. Plenty of businesses do not do that!

Mel Carson-Summary of his presentation: Discoverable, Sharable & Memorable: How to Make a Better Impression through Personal Branding and the deck is here.

Rob Buccci-Deep diving into featured snippets: How to earn more and rise to the top of the SERPs
1. Featured snippets present loads of opportunity- why- they drive organic traffic /a high value traffic(since they are trusted as an authoritative pages, they help with conversions due to that as well)
2. You don't have to rank in pos.1 (more than 70% sites with snippets don't rank at pos 1) but pos 5,6, 7 to appear in featured snippets, thanks to featured snippets you can still appear at the TOP of SERPs.
3. getSTAT collected 1mln queries with the highest CPA to extract the featured snippets.
4. 9.38% of their queries had featured snippets, then they started collecting the on-page data (site speed, content structure, schema, link profile etc.)
5. They saw a few different types of rich snippets:
- paragraph 81.5%
- list 10.77%
- and table snippets 7.2%
28% of snippets had images
6. Not a single time they saw a places and rich snippet results, there is not much overlap for blended search results.
7. Different words trigger featured snippets - math and finance words were the most prevalent
 words triggering featured snippets. Then time related and health care related ones (these could overlap with local results). The keyword 'definition' obviously triggers a featured snippets so does the jargon.
8. No subjective opinion can be found in rich snippets but definite answers.
9. Analyse your keywords rankings and keywords you rank on page 1 with rich snippets.
10. Come up with a list of keywords to target first (difficulty)
11. Create new content targeted at snippets (great value content)
12. Bring in question and answer formatting (try to include 1 question and answer in the article if possible, if that is not possible ensure you structure the content in a way Google understands it - use subheads, lists and tables for that reason)
13. Polish your existing snippets for higher CTR (update your on-page content for that)

Above presentations and a few other which took place in the Dome can be found live streamed at


Rhys Jackson- Why marketers need a great A.S.S.
1. Rhys pointed out how important it is to segment the data in GA and not to look at the average metrics since quite often they do not add up.
2. He mentioned that if you have email addresses of your customers you can upload them to Facebook for their insights for audience analysis.
3. He reminded us to use sites such Office for National Statistics or Open Geodemographics(census data) to see what is your audience like.
4. You can actually combine your customers postal codes with the data from census (using the code prepared by Rhys- he created an audience analysis tool, and postcode clustering code both available at : https://www.rocketmill.co.uk/brightonseo2016) to get behavioural data for brand targeting with the right content.

Arianne Donoghue-What it's like having GA Premium?
1. Arianne pointed out the main differences between the free and paid versions of Google Analytics and explained how icelolly are utilising their GA Premium in order to make the most of it.
2. It looks like it does help heavily with measuring the TV ads.

Stephen Kenwright- Engagement Rate Optimisation: How and Why to CRO All the Things
1. Steve reminded us why not to rely on DA (OSE being not up to date with a small amount of links compared to other backlink checking tools) when assessing pages for link building.
2. He mentioned the limitation of using Trust Flow as a trusted metric as well mainly due to the fact that the tools are not objective in trust flow spread analysis and only Google knows how the trust is being spread, therefore this metric is imperfect as well.
3. He reminded us that getting links over and over again from the same site (quality site) is actually good because Google will treat this page as a site which trusts us, therefore can earn Google's trust.
4. Google relies heavily on Disavow files to establish which pages can be trusted and which shouldn't and on traffic to the site - what does the traffic do to the site, which brings up the need for link earning (reason based outreach : great content gets relevant audience which engages with the site bringing quality traffic which in turn makes the site authoritative in the eyes of Google)
5. Ensure that when you’re speaking with a journalist, give them a reason to link back to your website (hold some information on your website). Do not send out infographics since they don't give them any reason to link back...Ask in a clever way for a link, instead of asking for a link ask for a credit.
6. Quote experts (create landing pages for them)
7. Place survey data in a downloadable PDF


Juan Gonzalez-The trend is your friend - 10 examples of how bad SEO decisions can kill your upwards trend on Google
1. Juan spoke about the need to comply with Google guidances to avoid manual or algo penalties and produce quality content/experience for the users.
2. He reminded us how important it is to watch out for trends using excellent tools such as SISTRIX in order to avoid SEO catastrophes.

My favourite presentations came afterwards, they have been all streamlined :-)

Jon Earnshaw-How to Fix any SEO Problem
Jon brought up a duplicated content issues & cannibalisation issues and explained why his clients Waterstones experienced them (paperback books fighting against the hard covers and then fighting against the books publishers). He reminded us that Google saying that they are ignoring 'hidden content' is not true as analysed in Waterstones case. 

 Lisa Myers & James Finlayson-Why SEO Needs to Get Emotional
They brought to us a beta version of their emotion based search engine 
Greg Gifford-Marketing to Local Customers
By far the funnies presentation I have seen in Brighton today! Check it out yourself!


 Louise Li-What Everyone Wants To Know About Google Direct Answers
Louise was mentioning that getting to Google direct answers helps increase organic traffic and CTR (up to 8% in some cases) she was also explaining what to do to appear in Google direct answers:
1. Identify a simple question
2. Provide a direct answer
3. Include some additional valuable information
Answers which entice clicks are usually generated as lists (steps), include a link: 'more info' or provide a teaser text (truncated content)

Gerald Murphy-The Real Reason Why Google Invented Hummingbird



 Rob Kerry-Using PHP To Reclaim Your Organic Search Keyword Data
Rob shared his way to use Google Search Console API and PHP to get the (not provided) keywords of the tool. Check out Ayima site for the code on Monday!

Natalie Nihai-Creating Persuasive Content - check out Natalie's presentation toward the end of the video posted above.