Table of contents
Last week, myself (Dolly) and Maria attended BrightonSEO. For me, it was my first BrightonSEO, however, Maria had attended in previous years. We both thoroughly enjoyed this year and hope to attend next year.
This year’s BrightonSEO had 8 stages, 88 talks and 90 speakers, making it one of the biggest ones so far. We know that not everyone is able to take the day off and travel to Brighton, so we thought we’d summarize the points of some of the most useful and informative talks that we attended for publishers that were unable to make it.
The New Blueprint for Content Campaign Success – Alex Jones
In his talk, Alex from Zazzle Media discussed the importance of supporting content alongside your main campaign. Although this may seem obvious for some, not everyone implements this strategy. Supporting content refers to material that goes beyond what is being promoted and can include content such as interviews, features, visual assets and case studies. The purpose of this supporting content can vary; it can be a way of indicating a level of expertise or knowledge, or it can be reactive and topical. Either way, incorporating supporting content that a wider audience can relate to will increase your readership and provide valuable insight to potential customers. In turn, these elements will contribute towards a strong and meaningful digital campaign.
For Alex’s slides and a transcript of his talk, please click here.
Email Anatomy: How to Get Top Tier Links – Alex Cassidy
Alex Cassidy from Verve Search shared some useful tips on writing a good outreach email to journalists. Alex’s strategy involved the consideration of the following five aspects:
- Subject – A clear and concise subject line that will capture the attention of journalists. Try to mirror their in-house style.
- Lede – The opening line of the email must summarize the information in as few words as possible.
- Links – Make it clear from the beginning that you’re after a link as this is easier than chasing journalists for a link later on down the line.
- Angles – Ensure that there is a clear angle that is relevant to the journalist (and avoid a ‘themed’ day as an angle!).
- Methodology – A strong methodology will give stability to a story and can circumvent the fact that a story is branded content.
Alex also emphasized the fact that whilst it can be beneficial to have prior relationships with journalists, this does not necessarily guarantee future coverage.
To view Alex’s slides, please click here.
What’s new in Structured Data – Charlie Norledge
If you’re not already using structured data then it’s definitely worth looking into – structured data is a way of adding extra markup to a web page to provide additional information about a page’s content. This markup provides search engines with a better understanding of a page’s content, which in turn can help with relevancy signals and has the potential to give sites benefits such as enhanced results in SERPs and higher click through rates.
Charlie Norledge from Impressions looks at the different types of structured data markup available based on Schema.org’s guidelines. There’s information on tools to help generate schema markup & how you can implement structured data on your site. He also gives advice on how to test your structured data once on page and how to monitor it once in place.
To view Charlie’s slides, please click here.
How to Create Connected Schema Markup and Knowledge Graphs – Martha van Berkel
Martha van Berkel CEO of Schema App looks at how schema markup helps contribute towards creating knowledge graphs. Martha’s talk offers tips on value types and how best to combine schema markup value types (preferably in 3’s) to get the most benefit for your site.
To view Martha’s slides, please click here.
Other talks
There were plenty more talks on offer from BrightonSEO that publishers might find useful, you can find a full list of slide decks here (with transcripts) or downloadable slide decks here.
If anyone else has suffered from the medic updated which focuses on E-A-T and YMYL, then there’s also a couple of useful talks on how to recover from these algorithm updates.
Thinking of attending BrightonSEO?
If you’re interested in attending BrightonSEO 2020 then information for next years events can be found here.
