Brighton SEO April 2023
The One Where Everyone Talked About ChatGPT
Search Marketing – My Takeaways from Brighton SEO April 2023
I’m back. I’m exhausted. I feel as if I’ve just got home from a festival and in many ways I have. Brighton SEO has a main stage and several others, fringe events, thousands of people, and parties every night (if you are so inclined). But I never learnt this much whilst getting crusty in a field.
Twice a year the real gurus of search marketing gather amongst the seagulls on Brighton Seafront to share their knowledge. You know they are the guys and girls to look up to, because they feature on their own set of Top Trumps cards, this year’s hottest item of conference swag, courtesy of Bright Local. Talk subjects range across the SEO spectrum – content, tech SEO, link building, reporting, e-commerce, B2B, and they even let paid search and paid social come and play. It’s never made official, but the nature of the game means there is always a bit of a buzz topic. Over the years I’ve been going this has been Mobilegeddon, pigeons, penguins, BERT (algorithm updates), GA4 (so last year!) and this time around, we found ourselves asking if ChatGPT is coming for all our jobs. Spoiler alert: it’s not, it’s helping us.
I have reams of notes. I could use them to write a marketing dissertation…. But you might not have time for that, so here is one idea I took away from each talk I attended across 3 days in Brighton at the Paid Search and Paid Social fringe events, and Brighton SEO itself. Not direct quotes, just what I thought most useful…
Paid Search and Paid Social Tips from the Fringe Talks
Creating a PPC Campaign Using ChatGPT – Farah Radford
Working with ChatGPT is like working with a keen but fairly inexperienced Apprentice. It can be really helpful but needs very careful management. @Farahpaw
Product Feed Optimisation for E-Commerce – Tom Chandler
Use the feed rules in Merchant Centre to make simple modifications, e.g., change “flip flops” to “sliders” if search term use changes. @tomchandlerMW
Using Image and Video Creative to Get Better Results in Paid Search – Duane Brown
Just because you CAN have loads of assets doesn’t mean you have to. Aim for a quality set of minimum assets rather than loads of poor-quality image and video. Saying that, raw and real works better than professional. Avoid studio footage if possible and stick with stuff that looks like UGC. @duanebrown
Building Recession Ready Marketing Strategies – Sarah Clarke
Is your product Essential? A Treat? Expendable? Or Postpone-able? Combine that with how your customers respond to a bit of belt tightening to decide on your strategy. Sarah Clarke
PPC Automation – Navah Hopkins
Humans can get ideas from machines, but need to have the final say. Good conversion data will bring you happiness but never blindly implement recommendations from Google. @navahf
What Lead Gen PPCers Can Learn From E-Commerce Post Click Experience – Sophie Logan
Avoid things like “call us to discuss pricing, price on application, ask us for a quote”. Give them at least a clue as to your minimum pricing. @MarketingSoph
PPC Success Outside the In Platform Tactics – Salome Joia
Use your first party data to understand and target your customers. Let it inform your bidding, your content and your targeting. Salome Joia
Profitable PPC in a Cost of Living Crisis – Greg Holland
Advertise only what needs to be advertised, when it needs to be advertised. Optimise your feed so you don’t spend ad money on anything out of stock. Consider optimising your ad spend for products with higher margin using the COGS metric, but don’t forget the impact of lifetime customer value on even a small sale. @GregPPC
How to Nail Social and Political Ads on Meta – James Armstrong
Sometimes don’t put on a learn more button as it then looks more like a normal post. That can get more traffic. @JJFArmstrong
Why Your Meta Ads Aren’t Working and What You Need to do About it – Fiona Bradley
Consider the full customer journey. What is blocking conversions? Is it something on your website or are you bringing the wrong people in with your ad? Look at the Pixel data to see where people are getting stuck. @fbcommsagency
LinkedIn B2B Ads – Poppy Court
LinkedIn ads are expensive, so you want to make sure they are bringing in people who are engaged with the page content. Use the LinkedIn Insights Tag and Hotjar to monitor impact. @PoppyKLC
Brighton SEO Day 1 Talks
TikTok for Search Marketing – Rachel Finch
80% of the content on the For You page is content you haven’t chosen to follow. So it is great for top of the funnel discovery. @RealRachelFinch
Is Content the King in Modern SEO? – Carlos Meza
What makes content great? Think H2E3 – Helpful, Human Centric, Engaging, Empathetic, Easy to Consume. Put the customer at the centre. Put their needs before yours. Don’t just be polite. Ask yourself, what is my audience going to thank me for after consuming this content? Carlos Meza
Stop Writing SEO Articles – Templated Content That Ranks – Dale Bertrand
Make sure you use your brand voice and tone and each page has multiple types of asset. Quality is more important than quantity when telling your story. Include useful data – whether that is scraped data, your own data or public data. @fireandspark
Basic Automation Hacks for SEO – Tom Pool
In Google Sheets, use macros or Google App Script to apply the same formatting to all the tabs on your spreadsheet e.g. font, size, bold top row etc. @CptnTommy
Automation Scripts for SEO Success – Robin Allenson
Keywords don’t just tell you how users search, they tell you how users think. @similar_ai
Hacking GA4 for SEO – Nitesh Sharoff
You can totally customise your reports. Why not build a full SEO report into your library looking at all the organic factors? @NiteshSharoff
Data Driven Approach to Scale SEO – Nitin Manchada
If people are searching for something, make sure you have content about it in at least three places – your Category Page, your Product Page and your Blog – and that they all have good internal links. @_nitman
Using UTM Codes Like a Boss and Building Beautiful Dashboards – Jason Yip
Brand your reports using your client’s colours and logos, even include screenshots of their campaigns. Use all the options in your UTM tracking so you can filter by them in GA and Looker Studio. @jasonyip
The Future of SEO (Keynote) – Areej AbuAli
Overall Google updates aim to make the web more useful – and don’t we all want to be a part of that? Stop thinking of it as a fight against the algorithm, and learn to focus on the things that your audience appreciates and Google rewards. @areej_abuali
Brighton SEO Day 2 Talks
Owning TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube SERPS – Carrie Rose
Search volumes on Google might look like they are declining but overall search volume is not. People are just looking in other places – TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube. Add it all together and SV might even be greater than it was. @CarrieRosePR
Optimising for the SERP Multiverse: A 4-step process for success – Jon Earnshaw. Google’s auto complete suggestions are the things people ACTUALLY want to know, are you optimising for them? How different are those landscapes? @jonearnshaw
Taking Your Business to the Next Level With the Power of E-Commerce SEO – Anna Moragli
Break down your keywords to be 40% Commercial, 20% long tail, 20% informational, 10% high search volume and 10% branded. Use this format for your research. Anna Moragli
Your Metrics are My Metrics – Ashleigh Noon and Sunny Matharu
To have a real impact, teams need to work together – and both usually end up compromising to some extent but then CRO and SEO both get results. @ashleighnoon and @s-matharu
How Content Design Impacts SEO and Accessibility – Chloe Smith
Use short simple sentences using plain language – maybe reading age of 9. Think of your content as a book – Title =Cover H1=Cover Page H2= Chapters H3=Sub Headings. In a longer blog, include jump links to headings at the start. @chloeivyroseseo
Why Empathy Should be a Key Player in Your Marketing Strategy – Dr Kiran Webster
Is your customer Homer Simpson, reacting based on gut instinct? Or Spock – weighing up pros and cons carefully? Basically we are all mostly Homer. @Kiran_Webster
I hope that some of that is useful and maybe inspires you to attend yourself. If you’d like to catch up on this one, the talks will be streamed live across 3-5 May and you can sign up on the Brighton SEO website. You can watch them free live, but I highly recommend buying a replay ticket as trying to take it all in back-to-back can be overwhelming. While you’re there, even better, get yourself an in-person ticket for the September event.
Brighton is a long way journey from Cornwall, unless you’re a seagull perhaps, but well worth the trip. I wish I had also had the energy and time to party with the awesome ladies of the Women in Tech Seo Community but by then I was collapsed on a friend’s couch watching South Park’s ChatGPT episode (Season 26 Episode 4). Watch it. You will never read your partner’s text messages in the same way again.
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