What a wonderful day to celebrate the eternal sunshine of the spotless SEO mind! If you weren’t at the conference today or missed something, it’s alright, we’ve got your back - here are the key takeaways from the BrightonSEO September 2017 main stage. Check them out!

1. BRIGHTONSEO SEPTEMBER 2017
TAKEAWAYS

2. #BrightonSEO
INCREASE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC BY
UP TO 200% WITH THIS SIMPLE TRICK
"The good, the bad, the ugly. Keep the good, disavow the bad
ones, repair the ugly."
The secret how to increase the search traffic:
- Full link audit & Disavow risky links
- Fix broken pages & Win back links
CHRISTOPH CEMPER | LINKRESEARCHTOOLS
"Are you doing only partial link audits? Don't look at one slice -
it's like checking 1 tooth only."

3. #BrightonSEO
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
ON RANKING FACTORS
JO TURNBULL | DANIEL FURCH
SEARCHMETRICS
Find the top performing articles on your blog and update them. Repurpose what
you've already got
Tailor your content to the users workflow: explore their intention & topics,
understand their funnel stage and needs, find out what their questions &
problems are, create content in live-data environment... then measure &
optimise!
Different ranking factors apply to different niches.
A good example: SEO blogs have HTTPS implemented more often, websites with
recipes have microdata (schema.org) integrated widely

4. #BrightonSEO
MARKUP, USER DRIVEN CHANGE AND YOUR FUTURE:
DO THIS TODAY FOR SUCCESS TOMORROW
Context will influence content even more. Forcing businesses to learn new ways to
be more relevant.
DUANE FORRESTER | YEXT
What will shake up the industry we all in? Mobile is the most important thing to
focus on:
1. If this isn’t your current #1 planned for investment, you are loosing
2. Seeing investments across the board assistants and AI
3. Apps have taken over, consuming 50% of our time on devices
How to be useful in voice search:
1. Keyword Research- Focus on long-tail, conversational queries
2. Build detailed answersMark-up your content
3. Make sure your entire website is clean and accessible
4. Mobile friendly matters
5. Secure your site- move to HTTPS

5. #BrightonSEO
TACTICAL, PRACTICAL KEYWORD RESEARCH
FOR TODAY'S SEO CAMPAIGNS
For the mid to the bottom of the funnel users: analyse reviews for your market
leader product. Use word clouds for better visualisation of their inquiries
Businesses need to build brand awareness that will let people shopping for your
type of the product know that you exist in the market
You need to identify triggers for your product for the top of the funnel potential
customers. Use shorter and incentivised surveys. Get insights from your sales and
customer support teams. Take your most common triggers and work out how
people will search when they will be experiencing that
What you get out of a tool is only as good as what you put in
STACEY MACNAUGHT | TECMARK

6. #BrightonSEO
ANSWERING THE PUBLIC: HOW TO FIND TOP-NOTCH
AUDIENCE INSIGHT IN SEARCH DATA AND HOW TO APPLY IT
"Using labels to further understand your audience, their lives and where you can
help them. Identify Audiences with the «for» branch."
"Identify influence with the «like» branch and share your insight beyond your
SEO or content team."
SOPHIE COLEY | PROPELLERNET
"Audit your audience. Can you serve them well?
Don’t default to content. Delight your audience. Make them search for your
brand, rather than asking Google for help. "
There is the person behind every query. Help them in the most appropriate way.

7. #BrightonSEO
SCARY SERPS (AND KEYWORD CREEP)
Fake news is real, it's often being used in position 0 by Google
It would seem that the machine learning is involved in query re-writing in many
cases. What you are searching for is not actually what is being searched for on
Google
Machine learning is a practice of using algorithms to analyse the data, learn
from it and make predictions
KELVIN NEWMAN | ROUGH AGENDA
To optimise a page you need to do more than add keywords. Add all the phrases
and words the user would expect. Look for what other websites are writing for
them

8. #BrightonSEO
QUICK AND DIRTY SERVER-SIDE TWEAKS TO
IMPROVE YOUR SEO
"Great optimization is about web server optimization"
"Grand optimization you do with network layer optimization"
PETER NIKOLOW | MOBILIODEVELOPMENT
"Good optimization starts wit database optimization"
"Don’t miss the brand new Google protocol QUIC (Quick UPD
Internet Connection)"

9. #BrightonSEO
ADVANCED SITE ARCHITECTURE - TESTING
ARCHITECTURE & KEYWORD/PAGE GROUPINGS
Site architecture is matching up intents to templates and pages, as well as
linking and relating those pages so search engines understand the relationship.
The second part of the definition is mostly about internal links; it is matching up
the intents that we really need to focus on
DOMINIC WOODMAN | DISTILLED
If you work in SEO or in marketing, information architecture is just as important
for you as the architecture is for the engineers.
Answer the questions:
Who buys your product?
What are the steps to buying?
How can you reach people in each step?
Where search is the answer, get keywords.
How to split those KWs into pages?

10. #BrightonSEO
GENERATIONAL CRUFT IN SEO. THERE IS NEVER A
'NEW SITE' WHEN THERE'S HISTORY
"The challenge is not in indexing, but in keeping everything indexed up to date.
Incremental crawling never ends."
"Efficiency is not just about URL scheduling. It’s about near memory storage (e.g
CACHING) too."
DAWN ANDERSON | MOVE IT MARKETING
"Sites are not disposable. In reality … Gone is never gone.
No URLS are ever gone."
"XML Sitemaps are your friend - they help pass «importance» signal to URLs. But
never leave them to just autogenerate without periodically checking «the
foundations» underneath the site. "

11. #BrightonSEO
MARKETING IN 360 DEGREES: PHOTOS, VIDEOS
AND VR
Google, Apple, Samsung, Facebook - these companies investing into VR are only
on the tip of the iceberg.
It is the job of sales executives to tell users about product features. The job of
the marketers is to show customers why they need this product.
The audience engagement journey: Status Update -> Photo -> Video -> 360 -> VR
JES SCHOLZ | RINGIER EMERGING MARKETS
The times of the websites being the primary points of online conversion have
come to an end.

12. #BrightonSEO
WHY YOU SHOULD SCRAP
YOUR "CONTENT" BUDGET LINE
Define the size of the opportunity, define the user intent, align this with the
most relevant tactic and then allocate content spend within your channel
REBECCA BROWN | BUILTVISIBLE
Questions you should ask before allocating budget content:
How much traffic will this content send me?
How will traffic convert?
What is a feasible ranking for my site?
How many links will my content need?
What are the onsite changes required for me to rank?

13. #BrightonSEO
LINKS, LOG FILES, GSC
AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN
Do not theorize much - get into the data, understand it and let it drive your
actions
Log files are something that has been around for a long time. Now they are more
and more often recognized as an important part of SEO. Incorporating log file
data into a crawl reveals where crawl budget is wasted
JON MYERS | DEEPCRAWL
When you are using backlinks data with crawl data, you need to consider the
following:
Backlinks authority distribution
Where are the backlinks landing on?
Are these backlinks positive or negative?
Are they leading to the orphaned pages? Or to broken or non-indexable pages?

14. #BrightonSEO
CHAT ABOUT GOOGLE SEARCH, SEARCH CONSOLE,
AND EVERYTHING SEO
"There are 2 to 3 changes to Google's search algorithms every day"
"Every single update that we make is about the quality of the site, its content,
links, etc."
"If you publish high-quality content that is widely cited (not only links are
important but also social media mentions and people talking about the brand),
then you're doing great. Some fluctuations in traffic may occur, but it would be
weird if they never did"
"Most of the time SEO 'weather reports' get it right but remember that we have
several updates every day''
GARY ILLYES | GOOGLE SWITZERLAND
"We made penguin real time a year ago and then we just let it do its thing."