BrightonSEO – When, Who, Where, What, How – Your questions answered….

Hi All,

Last Friday (Friday 13th), I attended BrightonSEO. It’s been a real eye opener, not so much in terms of SEO learnings (aside from deep dives in to log files), probably as I’ve been doing this for around 15-years, but more so in terms of what is happening in the marketplace and how things are evolving.

I was fortunate enough to have been given an invitation to the event, however, I certainly made the most of it, visiting every stall and attending a number of sessions. Even as a paying attendee, I would still have seen a benefit from attendance, especially if I were working in an in-house marketing capacity.

Who was there?

I shall elaborate on my findings from the event below…

Most of the attendees that I saw were in-house SEO roles, rather than Agencies. At the event itself, the agencies didn’t have stands, instead they presented, in some cases to a very large audience. The SEO presentations were not on anything new in particular, aside the change in nofollow links being the big topic, but rather more focused on the same old SEO topics. In many cases this is fine, as this reiterates that whilst there has been some evolution it comes down to the same factors being links and content.

So what types of companies did I see at the event?

  • Link building software
  • Reporting software
  • Content Generation software
  • PPC Management software
  • SEO Management software
  • PPC Management agencies
  • Website crawling software

Who were the companies?

ScreamingFrog – We use this already (if you have never used it then please do).

  • OnCrawl – Website crawler.
  • DeepCrawl – Website crawler.
  • LinkResearchTools – Backlink analysis tool.
  • PitchBox – Outreach Automation.
  • Adzooma – PPC Management and Automation.
  • SEOzoom – Complete SEO Management Platform.
  • Majestic SEO – Backlink Analysis
  • Swydo – SEO and PPC Reporting.
  • MyposSEO – Complete SEO Management Platform.
  • Similar.ai – Product and Category Content Generator (useful for e-commerce only)
  • FatJoe – Outsourced SEO Service Provider.

… As you can see, mainly software companies!

What did these software platforms do?

  • Help to fix broken links.
  • Scan pages for missing SEO aspects such as ALT, Headers, Title, Meta, Internal Links, Broken Links, Keyword mentions etc.
  • Automatically produce more content for pages that don’t exist, along with pages that do that are missing content.
  • Look for what the competitors are doing that you aren’t.
  • Diagnose poor quality links and help you to remove them.
  • Automation of the link outreach process.
  • Automation of the process to make the software do the findings and the thinking, even some of the implementation.
  • There was also a PPC software provider – off-piste, but a smart move from Adzooma there!

Why did I attend BrightonSEO?

The reason for my attendance was threefold. Firstly, I wanted to learn more about changes in SEO to ensure that we are keeping updated with the latest trends (turns out that we are), secondly, I wanted to connect with attendees to see whether there was an opportunity to generate leads, thirdly, I wanted to look at what software is available for implementation in novi to make processes and delivery easy to help improve capacity and decrease workload across the team.

What’s next following BrightonSEO?

I have compiled a list of software providers (above). We are then going to sign up for trials to see which are beneficial to the team at novi. I’ve suggested to our teams that everyone pick one platform from the list, review the platform and let me know their recommendations. Let’s see what comes back!

In other learnings, (not from BrightonSEO) here are some interesting stats:

  • There are 10% as many apps downloaded each minute as there are searches on google.
  • There are more videos watched on youtube than searches on google each minute.
  • There are nearly 10x as many messages sent on messenger and WhatsApp as Google searches.
  • There were 1 million views on twitch – this is people watching people play games. There’s people watching other people play sports? How about people watching people work, is that the next big thing?

How can we capitalise on this?

In digital marketing, to be a leader, you need to work out the future before it happens and that is exactly what we plan to do!