Last month myself and the SEO team attended Thursday and Friday events at BrightonSEO. For me, this was my first time attending the event in person and actually my first time ever visiting Brighton!
Having attended the online conferences previously, I already knew that the talks would be super insightful and full of useful tips that can be integrated into our SEO strategies and inspire us to think outside the box. The in-person talks did not disappoint and I came away with my knowledge of SEO enhanced.
For those who might be interested, below, I have outlined the 3 talks that stood out to me the most and have listed some of the key takeaways and actionable insights from these:
Entity SEO – Genie Jones
Genie gave such an interesting (and entertaining) talk on the power of using the SameAs tag in your schema. Genie talked us through how to mark up entities within schema using the SameAs tag and how topical authority can be achieved through using these.
Throughout the talk Genie linked schema back to psycholinguistics to provide outside context to better describe entities and schema (which, as a Linguistics graduate, was really useful to contextualise this!)
We learnt that creating entities through schema helps to disambiguate information, helping crawlers to better understand what the site and its pages are about and the connections between these pages to help build up a Knowledge Graph filled with all of this information.
Genie recommended using the SameAs tag to clearly demonstrate entities on your pages. This could be marking up a specific element/entity and providing a link to a clear definition of what that element/entity is. For example, for a page about farm animals, you might want to provide a SameAs tag to show that you are talking about an animal and this is the exact animal that you are talking about. E.g., marking up ‘pig’ with a link to ‘https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig’ to tell a crawler that the pig you are talking about is the same as the animal described on Wikipedia.
This is definitely something that I will be exploring further within our strategies to provide clarity on different entities that might appear ambiguous and are therefore not being viewed or ranked well as a result.
The SERP Multiverse – Jon Earnshaw
Talking about SEO success and the future of SEO, Jon’s talk surrounded how to optimise for the ‘SERP multiverse,’ looking at intent on the SERP landscape, leveraging competitor analysis and looking into what the future of SEO might look like.
Jon looked at the different SERP landscapes of what would appear to be two related queries at face value were actually completely different when we looked deeper into the pages returned, showing the importance of user intent when considering the keywords that we are targeting.
My key takeaways from this talk were as follows:
⭐️ The future of SEO could look more into voice search so, in some cases, it could be a good idea to target the answer card or featured snippet so that virtual assistants such as Siri will be more likely to return information from your site.
⭐️ When looking at a competitor analysis, take your keywords and assess who was on the SERPs 12 months ago, are they still there or have they dipped? Why?
⭐️ You can use ChatGPT as a resource when considering voice search to optimise for these queries. Jon suggested asking AI to return a list of potential voice queries for a certain keyword. You can even ask the AI to take on different personas depending on your target audience.
This was certainly an interesting talk that allowed us to look outside of just search engines and consider the future of SEO, where things could be changing and how to optimise your content to better match this intent where relevant.
Featured Snippets – Niki Mosier
In this talk, Niki explored the value of featured snippets and how we can structure our SEO efforts to be better positioned to win these in the SERPs. This is an area that is important when it comes to trying to gain enhanced visibility within the search results.
Featured snippets are the results that you sometimes see on a search results page that aims to answer your search query as soon as possible by taking the most relevant content from a ranking page.
Here are my key takeaways from Niki’s talk:
⭐️ To be in with a chance of winning a featured snippet, it’s important that you already rank within the first few results on page 1 for that specific search query.
⭐️ Appearing in multiple featured snippets for related search queries can help to increase your authority on the subject matter. This is particularly important for sites covering YMYL topics.
⭐️ 77% of search results with featured snippets come from search queries that start with ‘Why’ and using Google Search Console is a great way of helping you to find these question-type queries that you already perform well on and could be targeting ‘Position 0’ (the featured snippet).
For some more tips and tricks picked up from this talk and a dive into some other insightful talks, check out Marcy’s BrightonSEO review!
As you can see above, there were some really valuable takeaways from very experienced SEOs and it was great to learn it all in person.
We really enjoyed our time at BrightonSEO and would recommend it to anyone in the world of search marketing who wants to learn more, no matter your experience level there will be something that you can takeaway. With SEO, there is an abundance of information and things to learn and it’s great to hear and learn from other professionals who have their own case studies for issues that haven’t yet experienced on your site!
What’s more, you’ll also get to visit sunny Brighton and whilst you’re there I’d definitely recommend trying the Belgian fries!
