BrightonSEO: A simple guide to content and SEO

Another year, another BrightonSEO event. Throngs of SEO and content specialists from across the country congregated at the digital event of the year to gain insights into what’s ahead for the SEO world, and how to make the most of the tools we have at our disposal.

So, there were countless conferences and speakers, but what did we take away from our time at BrightonSEO?

Content

Content was hugely popular at this year’s event. The key focus points were why content marketing should be data-driven, and what tools and metrics you can use to get the most out of your content.

Do your research!

Content marketing should be researched and revolve around data – there’s no point in just picking a topic out of the air and spending time writing a blog post or filming a video about it. There has to be a measurable need for your content. A great tool to find relevant and searched-for topics is The Topic Explorer – its basic functions are free to use, and they allow you to see what topics are being searched for using specific keywords, the search volume of these keywords, the YOY growth of these searches and the CPC if you were planning to do some keyword online advertising.

Optimise

Is your content as optimised as it could be? Optimising for SEO is vital to ensure your content is seen by your targeted audience. It’s really simple to make sure your site is accessible and searchable – make sure your content and page titles are SEO optimised using Yoast, test your site speed to ensure a good user experience and utilise video to appease the Google Gods (Google favours video content over text).

Ads

A recurring theme of BrightonSEO was that none of the speakers talked about paid search/content/ads as if they were unusual – paying to get your company seen is THE NORM. We can’t stress the importance of this – you’ve got to pay up to be seen.

Using ads gives instantaneous feedback on how people engage with your content and lets you know where the best places are to target your audience.

Work Smarter

Although more people are using ads, 77% are not happy with the leads they are getting. To get the most out of them you need to be smarter.

Enter, ad extensions. Ad extensions are extra snippets of relevant information about your business that can be added to your AdWords text ads. You can create Ad extensions to give people that extra bit of information that will ensure your leads are more relevant – these can include your business’ location, phone number or business ratings.

You can also do some advanced targeting to reach the people that are most likely to complete your conversion goals. This can be done by choosing people that closely resemble your customer profiles – whether that be age, profession, gender etc, or by using your own email database to specifically target the people who are already potential leads.

Analyse, Optimise and Track Goals

You can pay for 1,000 people to go to your site, but how many people converted? By using Goals in Google Analytics, or even a form on a webpage, you can track what value people are to your business.

Social

Social is key to a business’ success – there’s little point in creating content if you don’t have a social strategy to back it up – both organic and paid! You should consider an advertising budget to boost content and reach your target audience. Even for a short period to launch a specific campaign or message.

Social media gives you an amazing breadth of information. You can target people with advertising based on their gender, profession, age range, interests, education and family status – this allows you to completely tailor the audience that sees your content.

Look beyond the obvious

Creating ads for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn is obviously important, but remember they’re not the only social channels available to your audience. Think about posting to things like reddit.com and forums when producing specific content. There will be a dedicated, passionate audience out there around most subjects – it’s your job to find them.

And there we go!

That’s just a (vaguely) short overview of the discussions we were a part of during BrightonSEO, and what we think current businesses need to be paying attention to if they want to be noticed by their intended audiences.

If you have any points to raise, don’t be afraid to comment below, or if you need some help with online advertising, creating more content awareness or getting more bang for your buck, contact us at Roland Dransfield and we’ll help you out. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram to make sure you’re the first to see our latest blogs!