3 key themes from Brighton SEO 2017

Our round-up of this year's best seaside SEO conference

My trip to BrightonSEO this year was my first (and long overdue) time attending the conference and I can say with 100% confidence that it was worth the time and expense. Not only was there an awful lot of great lessons and insight from the conference but I was lucky enough to be in Brighton during the warmest weekend of the year so far!

One of the main motivations for attending BrightonSEO was my determination to stay up to date with the latest trends and developments. Although I am no longer primarily responsible for SEO in my current role at PepsiCo, being aware of how search is evolving and where it’s likely to go is still an important consideration, as I believe it will be for all types of business and brands in the coming years as I’ll highlight in the sections that follow.

Rather than produce a round-up of the individual sessions I attended at BrightonSEO, I’ll instead highlight some of the key themes and trends I took from away from the conference. There were a number of really good seminars and talks but of course I couldn’t attend them all so if anyone else has any notes of insight from the conference please feel free to share in the comments!

1. The future of search is multi-faceted

The conference kicked off with a section of the future of search, which for me was one of the highlights of the entire event. It was fascinating to learn that by 2020 50% of all searches will be made by voice and that consumers are 80% more likely to interact with image-based content, reinforcing the need for marketers to be forward-thinking in their approach to search and to consider content beyond just words.

The two stand-out speakers from this session were Raj Nijjer from Yext and Purna Virji from Microsoft. Raj focused more on the futuristic aspects of search, particularly in respect to AI and structured data, whilst Purna provided some great insights around keywordless searches. Here are some of the top takeaways:

Conversational, question-based searches using Alexa are now being made throughout households.

In fact it’s interesting to watch children using these intelligent devices because the questions they ask are vastly different to what we’re used to. For example, small children will ask real, conversational questions rather than keyword-based questions because they have no concept of how traditional search engines operate.

Google Home was launched in the UK on 6th April, the day before for conference started.

This is significant for two reasons: a) the device is currently cheaper than Amazon’s Echo, and b) it will have access to Google’s Knowledge Graph and immense search power. This will put an increased emphasis and importance on brands optimising for the Knowledge Graph because this is what will power voice searches and if you’re not here then you simply won’t show up.

 Organic search = structured data

Unless you’re utilising reviews, ratings, business type, times and location then you’re likely to miss out. This is evident for searches made on mobile using terms such as ‘cheapest’, ‘best’ or ‘closest’. On the Saturday after the conference I fancied a cream tea in the afternoon for lunch and my decision wasn’t guided just by the top results but by the ratings, reviews and ability to call ahead and enquire about availability. 87% of consumers won’t consider a business with a low number of reviews so brand reviews should be paired with ‘best...’/ ‘most popular...’ search entries

 2. Content relevance is more important than ever

The importance of ensuring content is as relevant as possible has been a theme now for a good number of years, however it felt particularly pertinent in light of the future of search session covered above when we consider the increasingly high standards consumers expect from search. This section had a mix technical (Google Tag Manager top tips) and planning (content distribution) but Marcus Tober from Searchmetrics offered some interesting philosophical points in respect to content strategy and the use of data.

Content needs to be data-driven and explore user intent in order to be successful.

80% of online content is ‘polluting the internet’- just consider the sheer amount of content produced by About.com. Yet when About.com’s recipe content is compared to thekitchen.com (US site) for example, the specialisation and increased relevance of the latter’s content has led to greater visibility despite far fewer indexed recipes on the domain

Content relevance is now the #1 ranking factor and there’s nothing technical SEO can do to help.

Because keyword intent correlates with the conversion funnel, content needs to be optimised accordingly, i.e. from awareness and consideration, through to transaction. An example of a brand missing out is Tesco, who produce very transactional pages for iPhones and Galaxy S5s yet haven’t produced an effective comparison page (consideration stage content) despite the huge search volume (aka consumer appetite) behind this query

A recommended content strategy for the new age of relevance follows three stages:

• Specialise - content marketers should specialise on specific subjects rather than attempt to cover everything (i.e. thekitchen.com vs. about.com)
• Clean-up - German site pflege.de removed 95% of the content that wasn't driving traffic and focused on improving the remaining 5%, leading to an overall increase in SEO visibility

• Update - update and enrich existing content, and develop a more effective user experience to ensure content is user-friendly

 3. Behavioural science

The final session was the conference’s keynote speech and it was delivered by the wonderfully eloquent Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and currently leading Ogilvy’s ‘behavourial interventions agency’ Ogilvy Change. Rory Sutherland is certainly no SEO expert and yet his keynote was designed not to provide the audience with the latest search trends but to inspire new thinking and perspectives that could help us all as digital marketers.

The world of behavioural science and economics has been covered before on this blog but Rory Sutherland highlighted a few additional areas of interest that is certainly worth summarising:

Over-optimisation is not necessarily the best course of action

When we optimise one particular variable there is a cost elsewhere. Nature never purely optimises along one direction, for example bees! When a honey bee locates a food source they perform a carefully choreographed "waggle" dance to instruct the rest of the hive where to find it.

Yet 20% of the bees ignore the dance, which at first glance seems odd - why not go where the food is? The reason is that if all the bees leave the hive they’ll be open to attack and there’s a risk they will starve. The remaining 20% are the ‘R&D’ bees who focus on new areas and food sources

Always budget for test & learn

The honey bee example above demonstrates the value in always having a balance between the short and long-term. The implication is that marketers should take a balanced approach to planning and have two budgets:

1. Harvesting budget (80%) - focus on doing the everyday things right and profit at a reasonable rate in the short run
2. Speculative budget (20%) - test and learn new ideas and build for the future. There will be failures but if the big era pay off they will generate value in the long run

Perception is everything

Instead of looking to optimisation to make an improvement, consider changing the metric instead. Look for things which are objectively similar but subjectively different – or vice versa.

For example, instead of making the trains arrive more frequently (optimisation) London Underground started to include projected arrival times on the platform. No optimisation occurred yet customers were happier because the psychology changed - London Underground had simply reduced uncertainty (who'd happened to be the real issue, rather than a desire for more frequent trains)

Summary

Like most conferences BrightonSEO offered a mix of brand new, innovative insights and best practice updates. As digital marketers it’s always important to get a balance of the two, similar to the short/ long-term test & learn recommendation Rory Sutherland made in his keynote.

The stand-out insights for me was around the future of search, and whilst some elements are still in their infancy, other areas such as voice are starting to really take hold, particularly with the rise in adoption of more advanced intelligent devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. Unlike traditional web search where Google has dominated, voice is very fragmented space, with Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and of course Google all competing for share. These early days give us all a real opportunity to experiment, test and learn and best ways to reach consumers in a rapidly changing and evolving search ecosystem.