What did we learn from BrightonSEO 2019?

At around 08:45 on Friday, 12 April 2019, Sergio and Itamar from our SEO agency London got on the train from London Victoria to Brighton – for the BrightonSEO conference.

We wore our custom t-shirts featuring a funny tweet from Google’s John Mueller.

Ready for #brightonSEO? We’re giving away 2 t-shirts in honour of @johnmu to people attending the event! RT and find @itamarblauer and @sergi_seo today 🙂 pic.twitter.com/c3Hwxy7kIm

— MintTwist (@MintTwist) April 12, 2019

When we arrived in Brighton, the conference was only a 10-minute walk.

It was situated right next to the shore – which was awesome!

Our favourite talks

How to Make Fake News for Links – @OliverBrett

This was one of the most hilarious talks of the event for us. Not only for the great insights, tricks and creativity but also because of the way Oliver presented it in a very casual way, Game of Thrones-themed and quite relaxed and funny.

Oliver resumed traditional ways to do linkbuilding and its risk associates. Strategies like:

Building directory links
Blogger outreach
Buying backlinks in bulk
Building PBN’s
Unlinked mentions
Press Requests
Press Releases
Surveys
Egobait
Infographics
Data-driven pieces
Interactives
Linkbait

From this chart, linkbait is considered a low risk and rewarding linkbuilding tactic.

What is linkbait?

According to Google, linkbait is content designed to attract attention and encourage those viewing it to create hyperlinks to the site, with the aim of improving the site’s position on the list of results returned by a search engine.

Oliver showed us some really cool case studies from eCommerce websites that used funny stories to catch people and journalist attention. For example, they photoshopped some Star Wars items made in China with funny names:

And then waited for the news outlets to do the rest:

How to do linkbait

Have great ideas
Remember to be funny
Never promise anything to your client
Don’t be too obvious
When photoshopping, be realistic
Fake rebranding adds authenticity

Time for linkbait outreach

When coming up with the idea and it’s implementation it is time to start your outreach campaign. The most effective way is to use a PR agency and send a press release with the story. Alternatively, you can do it yourself reaching out news magazines or journalists.

Conclusion: Linkbait is quick, cheap, you can win big links, but it is not for all the clients.

10 tips to scale link building for your clients – @sammorton775

We were pleased to learn some good link-building tips from Sam Morton, the Client Services Director at Click Intelligence. Sam gave us some recommendations depending on the size of your campaign and your budget or resources: micro or macro.

Summary of the talk

Google Alerts for brand mentions
Image search technique: to download the image of an author, upload it to Google Images and compile a list of all the websites where this author has been featured.
Create personas for each niche
Perform competitor analysis. Recipe for a competitor analysis:
- Pool a list of competitors
- Segment by link type
- Find the types of content attracting the most backlinks
- Look at the content that didn’t attract backlinks
- Identify the rate at which good quality links are being built
- Which sites in your clientes vertical look more likely to an approach
- Start pitching the sites and making friends

404 Recovery: Find broken 404 links, create content to fill that intention and reach out that website suggesting a link to your new content.
Tips to outreach personalisation:
- Adding more personalised layers mean a higher response rate.
- Personalised titles and subject lines.
- Use first name, use it more than once, mention the site.
- Use a point of reference. – blogs, social, news article, content URL.
- Be expressive.
- Tailor segment a few example ideas in the email / give more options.
- Constantly make new variations of the pitch.
- As soon as you start to see a dip in the pitch response, change it.
- Schedule a follow up email, or 2 follow ups.

Restructuring Websites to Improve Indexability – @areej_abuali

Tuning in for @areej_abuali’s talk about improving indexability #brightonseo 💯 pic.twitter.com/nEVVxCWppN

— MintTwist (@MintTwist) April 12, 2019

Fun fact: Areej had the most amount of slides out of all the presenters are BrightonSEO this year.

She began her talk describing the misconceptions between crawling and indexing.

Areej then talked about a case study of a client, and stated that fixing the tech is the most important thing before any work can commence.

She created a script for her job-finder client – which features certain rules that will either index/no-index pages depending on various factors, which you can see here:

Some of these rules are related to whether or not the job is available, keyword search volume etc.

**Driving Meaningful Clicks with Enriched SERPs – @izzionfire**

Izzi specified how it is unclear whether or not CTR is a Google ranking factor.

This has been disputed by many people in the industry, however it is likely that if it was a ranking factor, Google wouldn’t tell us.

Izzi stressed the importance of focusing on the users, and that there is a purpose behind clicks that webmasters should capture.

She also said to avoid the pure answer intent – since these won’t actually generate clicks.

Another great insight was to enrich your entities.

That way, Google will steal the correct data about your website, which can help you rank higher.

We attended 13 talks altogether, including a Q&A featuring Google’s John Mueller.

The Q&A was quite fierce at times, with John getting asked some controversial questions regarding links and Google’s ad placements.

At the end of the Q&A, we got a picture with the legend himself.

We had a great time today at #brightonseo with all the amazing speakers and of course the one and only @johnmu 😁 @sergi_seo @itamarblauer pic.twitter.com/IT9RFnASqB

— MintTwist (@MintTwist) April 12, 2019