Brighton SEO 2018 content marketing round up

Brighton SEO started out as a conversation in the pub when Kelvin Newman and his mates were chatting about search.

Fast forward to 2018 and the conference has grown rapidly. There are now over 3,500 SEO professionals from over 30 countries that attend the SEO conference in beautiful Brighton. It’s a chance for SEOs to meet, learn and then do their job a little better.

To help you get a feel for what it’s like to attend Brighton SEO, we have created a short video of our own experience for your enjoyment.

Content marketing is constantly changing. For this reason, we need to make sure we are always up to date with the latest industry news. Brighton SEO is the place to be to help you get to grips with these trends and hear thoughts and opinions from the leading experts.

We have put together a round up of the talks that really stood out to our content marketing team and we hope you agree, there’s always lots to learn!

The Importance of Niche Ranking Factors

Marcus Tober, the founder of Searchmetrics, kicked off the day with an interesting talk around niche ranking factors. He explained that we should be making content for the moments that matter and therefore we need to sharpen our focus.

Marcus carried out a study to showcase the importance of niche ranking factors and the results proved that ranking factors should not be seen as universally applicable.

He reviewed niche content topics such as fitness, dating, divorce and recipes among others. A few key findings included:

• Videos rank well for fitness related content – after all, you don’t get fit by reading!
• Divorce content is serious and structured, containing long in-depth content, supported by lists and tables – content can even be longer than some marriages!
• Recipe pages use lots of microdata with delicious imagery – something to aspire towards!

You should review your old content to see whether it needs updating. Does it need more images? Would a video represent the content better, or does it need a list or table? You need to make sure your content is unique and remove all cannibalizing content. This study has ultimately helped us to understand that you can’t be relevant for everything and that content specialisation is key.

How to Drive Content Effectiveness

Steve Rayson from Buzzsumo and Giles Palmer from Brandwatch teamed up on stage to talk through their 2018 content trends report.

Using the Buzzsumo database, they sampled 100 million posts in 2017 and found that the average number of links gained from these posts was 0. In fact, over 70% of all content published was never linked to from another domain. This just emphasises the harsh reality of link building.

Social sharing has also been declining since 2015. This is due to factors such as growth in competition, the rise of private sharing and Facebook algorithm changes.

Facebook are trying to reduce the amount of clickbait stories added to the feed. This algorithm change is having a negative impact on publishers that rely on Facebook for referral traffic and companies that specialise in producing and distributing sponsored video content for Facebook. This social media change has affected some major players within the social industry. BuzzFeed, who rely heavily on video content, missed their targets this year and their social engagement is currently down 60% in the last 3 years.

These trends have identified that SEO is becoming increasingly more important. We need to create more user generated content. We need to take advantage of evergreen content that can be consistently gaining likes and shares. Less is more when it comes to high quality content. You should spend your time and efforts on creating exclusive content that will gain the likes and shares.

Applying Emotional Goal Optimisation (EGO) to Your Website

Emotional goal optimisation (EGO) was explained by Danny Richman, a guy who has been helping businesses and organisations grow their offline traffic since the birth of the internet.

EGO is a method of using the limbic map to help us understand why people behave the way they do when:

• Performing an online search
• Clicking on a specific result
• Engaging with the websites they find
• Taking action on these websites

Our emotions and feelings help us make the decision to act. The limbic system is part of our subconscious mind that drives all our decisions, behaviour and actions. When we start to think about why we have acted in a certain way, our conscious mind kicks in to process what actions you have taken and why.

Once you implement the EGO process to your website content, it can help you improve visitor engagement, keyword rankings and conversions. Google is increasingly moving towards user satisfaction signals to determine which pages should be shown in the highest positions in the search results. This is made clear by the SEMRush report that was published Oct/Nov 2017. By creating content that is designed to satisfy your emotional goals, you are likely to see high improvements in online engagement and conversions.

Danny wanted to put his knowledge about the limbic system to the test and conducted an experiment on Google Adwords. In this experiment, he used a control ad and then tested it against ads that explained how you would feel. For example:

By adding these emotive adjectives, it reveals the subconscious thoughts around why the searcher originally researched that particular topic and brings it to the forefront of the conscious mind. In this example people want an easy recipe and they want the people they are making it for to compliment them on how delicious their apple tart is.

The experiment ad achieved a CTR of 14.6% after 200 clicks. An improvement of 59% compared to the original.

So, what can we do? We can start by identifying the emotional goals of our client’s visitors using the limbic map. We should apply these emotional goals when creating the meta content for a website in order to improve click through rate.

Our BrightonSEO 2018 conclusions:

• Specialise your content towards your niche
• Less is more, so focus on creating one high quality piece of content
• Don’t go for the clickbait tactic
• Identify the emotional goals of your visitors and apply these goals to the content you create
• Understand what your customers care about, what outcomes they want to achieve and how you can help them achieve these

Start off with research. You should be constantly asking questions, but most importantly asking questions to the right people. It’s about thinking about the bigger picture and understanding that not everything should be a sales pitch. Remember, we are living in an attention economy and your content needs to stand out in order to compete. So, make sure your content is exclusive and start driving visitors to your site today!

Need some help? Why not contact the content marketing team today at john.readman@summitmedia.com. Find out how we can help improve your onsite engagement with our creative ideas and expert knowledge.