Jordan Reeves, Digital Marketing Executive
Last week, I went to the BrightonSEO event, along with David Gilroy and four other Conscious employees. The event lasted for two days, Thursday was the workshop day, and Friday was the day of the conference. Myself and Dan, the Head of Marketing, took part in the Advanced Link Building and Outreach workshop. We learned about a variety of topics including the “Zero Moment of Truth” which refers to the point in the buying cycle when the consumer researches a product. We also learned about content, ways to make content more sharable, changes predicted for 2015, backlinks, link strategy, useful tools and resources, and what you should do if Google imposes a penalty on one or more of your links.
The most important thing to take away about content you intend to use is that the content that you produce should be editorial and it should always engage whoever is reading it. Another key topic of discussion was how you should stop searching for websites and start searching for people, this allows you to engage on a more personal level and start building relationships. Also, when contacting a blogger or a journalist about either posting your content to their site or producing content for you, instead of coming across as though you would be doing them a favour, you need to try to build a relationship with them. You need to prove your success to them, as well as showing that you can add value to their website. Instead of making it a win/lose situation, you should make it a win/win for both sides of the deal.
Ollie Boyd, Paid Search Marketing Manager
Last week the team and myself went to BrightonSEO to learn the latest techniques and advise in the digital marketing industry. We learnt and spoke about a number of subjects within the field and some great tips on how to improve Quality Score within PPC.
Quality Score is a not-so-hidden metric within Adwords (Google’s PPC platform), which is applied to the keywords within an account every time that keyword triggers a search. It is also the key factor when deciding how much you pay per click (PPC!) and hence your ad position within the SERPs or in the Display Network. The Quality Score number is decided by the following factors (in no particular order):
- Keyword relevance to the landing page
- Historic CTR
- Historic overall CTR of the account
- Page speed
So even if you have a hyper relevant landing page and keyword but you are receiving no clicks but a lot of impressions will cause your Quality Score to decrease and making your campaign overall more expensive to keep up!
Marloes de Bruijn, Relationship Manager
Creating great content can be very hard. There are definitely a few more things I could learn regarding the subject, so I followed a very interesting workshop given by Erica Mcgillivray who works at Moz in Seattle. She was very eager to explain how you can create an effective content strategy that delivers results.
She actually made me work hard and gave me several exercises to do. I practiced having a content audit on the website, determined the brand aspirational and set website achievement goals. The most important lesson I took away, is to always keep your audience in mind and don’t be afraid to ask clients what they are actually looking for. By creating personas you can segment your clients and offer them more relevant and specific content. A brand guide will help you use the right tone of voice and will determine what channels will be most appropriate to use.
Jamie Stevens, Search Marketing Manager
At BrightonSEO last week we attended a fascinating workshop on local SEO techniques hosted by Greg Gifford, who travelled to Brighton SEO from the distant land of Texas. There have been many changes in the world of local SEO recently, such as the Pigeon and Hummingbird algorithms, so it was great to hear about the techniques that work from someone in the states (since they get these new updates about 6 months before us!)
The most important thing that we took away from the training was how important citations are, and how if you don’t keep on top of them it can cause massive problems such as incorrect Google maps listings, decreased search engine rankings and reduced user trust. Essentially, your information needs to be where Google expects it to be, and it needs to be correct and without any inconsistencies! If you don’t have time to do all of this, at least make sure to claim your Google My Business listing!