I really enjoyed Brighton SEO this year.. Due to coronavirus, this year SEO conference was run online.
It was an interesting experience... The only downside was that a few equally important sessions were run at the same time... Although I added all sessions I was interested to my schedule and opened the tabs to watch some of the sessions later.
The best sessions of Thursday the 1st of October were :
Getting to grips with Python and Machine Learning: How it can help with your Technical SEO -
from Ruth Everett Technical SEO Analyst, DeepCrawl - @rvtheverett
You can get to see Ruth's deck here.
What I liked about this presentation?
I have been trying to learn Python this year but the course I found on Coursera was probably too advanced for me so I did finalize it sadly. In her presentation Ruth presents a few other options to learn Python, so now I will be probably able to pick up a site which may suit my learning style better:
- Codeacademy - 20 weeks long Computer Science course
- Data Camp - interactive course
- Code Combat if you want to learn via video game
She also mentioned useful Phyton editors such as Mac Terminal, Google colab or Jupyter Notebook as the ones to use when learning.
Why to use Python in SEO?
1. Automationg repetetive tasks e.g page speed audits
2. Data extraction and analysis (e.g log file analysis, validate href lang, comp analysis)
3. Efficiency ad time saving (.eg. optimising images with Pythin script :-)
4. Future proofing our jobs :-)
Ruth suggested having fun when learning Phyton or any other programming language so maybe use for 100Days of Code to stay on track :-)
The other talk I enjoyed was from Oliver Mason @ohgm_ the title was so. interesting 'Esoteric SEO Tips I Hope You Don't Already Know' but so was the actual content of Oliver's preso.
Why I liked his presentation?
- he was showing examples of clever use of robots.txt file when 'cloaking' any unwanted stuff (geo IP redirects, interstitials)
- he reminded us that redirects to irrelevant locations are rather unlikely to pass any value through
- he proposes 'duplicating' content on undesired URL in order to canonicalize it to the original article which is now duplicated..--> more about that idea +.steps - here. I suppose this is an interesting solution for WP pages when you neither have an idea how to use 301 or you don't have a paid version of Yoast or any redirect plug-in - I personally hate plugins, so I keep them to a minimum. For my own content, I was 404ing anything dated and without value and using canonicals for anything I wasn't redirecting but I was typically canonicalising to my home page which isn't the wisest from PR perspective... 'Duplicated' content passes more value to the chosen non duplicated page from the 'cloaked' page? I may test that approach on my blog to see if Google obeys the canonical.
- finally, he was talking about internal linking and mentioned a very interesting article on this subject
- I really like this idea even though it may be risky :-)
Extra tips
Alexandra Tachalova was talking about targetting low hanging fruit when link building--> she was suggesting to go for the sites with low yet decent DR but a good number of referring domains - kinda no brainer :-)
She was also mentioning outreach tools such as Pitchbox, Buzzstream, SemRush, Hunter.
As always there was a tip to go after public data using tools such as the Office for National Statistics, gov data: https://data.gov.uk/, statista, NHS, Indeed, Spotify, etc.
As always you can use Facebook or Slack groups related to outreach/content/SEO.
Another speaker, I think Judith Lewis debunked an SEO myth that you need links to rank well. Search for 'hammock' and see who is on the 1st page of SERPs.
I suppose I don't have to as I have proof of that with my other blog -- as my very own Money Saving Girl does appear for many queries on page 1 of Google and those pages don't have many or should I say any links as I never build any so all I get it's from people naturally linking to me.
Guys from seeker.digital were recommending bespoke content optimisation tools such as
-Surfeer SEO or
- Page Optimiser PRO
I also liked a deck from Andi Jarvis as throughout his deck about 'Using consumer psychology to improve your marketing strategy' he was reminding us that people need a story to buy a certain product hence describing any sold goods on a site when conveying a story is crucial.
I also liked Spying on Google: Using Log File Analysis to Reveal Invaluable SEO Insights from Faisal Anderson.
On the second day of the conference, I enjoyed a talk about 'Reducing the Speed Impact of Third-Party Tags' from Reducing the Speed Impact of Third-Party Tags Andy Davies
I really enjoyed a talk from Kevin Indg about 'A story of zero-click searches and SERP features it was a good insight into the ever changing search landscape.
No surprise showing a growth of featured snippets in the UK but even more so in the US...
Automating Google Lighthouse from Hamlet Batista was rather technical to me...
How to Optimise TTFB by Roxana Stingu. She suggested tips on how to improve TTFB when including: reduced network latency, GZIP compression, tidied redirects, faster DNS lookups, move to the latest SSL protocol, optimising your database design, and going for a static caching.
Finally, I really liked How to automate your SEO with Google Apps Script by Gabor Papp using his method you can automate:
-on-site Optimization
-create New Content
Gabor was saying that he doesn't know how to code and all did was going through what's available online to compose his working script. Skills!
Time Saving Tips for Google Data Studio by Greg Gifford was an entertaining talk, as always when Greg presents. Tips on using Google #DataStudio:
1. Show "Pre-Service Date Lines"
2. Add Google Analtyec data and use the "Reference Line Element"
3. Move labels done next to the line
4. Add calculated fields at the data source level
5. Add video explainer links
Sophie Gibson was mentioning nice free SEO tools to do competitor audits. She was relying on:
- Screaming Frog (xml sitemap data)
- Google Search Operators- for troubleshooting indexation issues
-Small SEO tools - for checking the internal linking and not only :-)
- Seerrobots
She was also formulating her hypothesis or calculating potential business loses when relying on the study cases from 'Think with Google' and SpyFlu & SimilarWeb.
All slides from BrightonSEO 2020 are to be found here. Enjoy!
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