This year’s BrightonSEO event was particularly special, with ThoughtShift’s own Digital Strategy Director, Alexandra Coutts presenting her insights and expertise on Black Friday SEO, to a room full to the brim with professional marketers.
The event did not disappoint, with over 4 thousand marketeers attending, interested in learning the latest developments in SEO. The welcoming community at Brighton SEO were more than willing to share ideas on how create first class digital marketing strategies to increase ecommerce revenue.
Here’s a breakdown of our key takeaways from the day!
Alexandre Sigoigne CEO of Myposeo
Alexandre’s talk on building your new etail content strategy based on SERP competitor analysis was music to any digital marketers ears. Particularly when he laid out that SEO and content strategy is a big investment. “You can’t reach the sky on a bike” – brilliantly put by Alexandre when explaining how SEO content strategy takes time and money.
Alexandre’s team write 100 articles a year to get their results, emphasising how these strategies are not quick wins!
Mark Osbourne, SEO Manager from Blue Array SEO
Mark’s talk on ‘The Seedy Underbelly of Keyword Research and Search Intent’ was a very open presentation about his methods of using Google Cloud, Screaming Frog and Meta Data, to better understand competitors search intent.
Mark showed where he was able to find information on how Google is seeing content. On the Google cloud natural language section, you’re able to ‘try the API’ and search any term you’d like more information on.
Mark explained that the best way to use this information is for featured snippits, as this tactic “shines a light on why Google has chosen one (a featured snippit). You can use it to compare your suggestions against the competing one.”
The ThoughtShift team have taken several tactics away from this talk, which we will be rolling out for our clients in the coming weeks and months.
View Mark’s presentation slides here – https://www.slideshare.net/MarkOsborne41/mark-osborne-brighton-seo-april-2019-the-seedy-underbelly-of-keyword-research-and-search-intent/1
Rachel Costello, Technical SEO and Content Manager at Deep Crawl
Rachel’s talk on Speed and performance optimisation and how to meet user’s high expectations, gave some interesting insights into just how high those expectations are. Even just a 1 second delay on mobile load times can negatively impact mobile conversion rates by 20%.
Rachel focused on user centric optimization techniques, emphasizing the importance of the ‘above the fold’ content load time. In the presentation Rachel made a comparison between the above the fold load time of the Guardian, compared to the Telegraph. From a user’s experience the Guardian’s page loaded in 1.2 seconds because this is the speed in which the above the fold content loaded. When in fact the whole home page loaded in 6.4 seconds. Considering the user’s perception of speed is crucial to improving bounce rates.
Faye Watt, Digital Marketing Specialist at Edico Media
Faye Watt shared the stage with ThoughtShift’s Alexandra Coutts. Faye’s talk, ‘8 Ways to Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates’ was just before Alexandra’s, which was a great opportunity to learn from Faye’s insights into increasing ecommerce conversion rates.
One of the statistics that stood out from Faye’s talk was that, 34% of shoppers will abandon their cart if there isn’t an option to checkout as a guest, making the checkout experience much simpler and quicker. This highlights how this guest check out option is now expected from users.
Faye went on to provide good and bad examples of her top 8 tactics to increase conversion rates.
One of those top 8 tactics was personalisation. Personalising your home page can increase sales by 7%. You can personalise your home page in several ways by using previous browsing history, current cart contents, by gender or previous purchase history. Faye gave some examples of companies that were over complicating the presentation of these personalised sections of the homepage and then some examples from Wayfair. Their simple layout of their ‘Just For You’ section, displaying current cart contents or previous browsing history provided helpful insights into how this tactic is best utilised.
You can access Faye’s full presentation and discover her remaining 7 tactics here – https://edicomedia.com/blog/60/8-ways-increase-your-ecommerce-conversion-rate-brighton-seo
Overall the BrightonSEO event was an enriching and inspiring day. Connecting with so many experts in their fields and having the opportunity to share our own expertise on the big stage was a welcome experience.
Click here to read more about ThoughtShift’s Digital Strategy Director, Alexandra Coutts’ talk at BrightonSEO – Black Friday SEO: Where and when to start, quick wins and top tips.
