Twice a year flocks of search engine optimisation (SEO) experts descend on the Brighton Centre to take part in talks, training and workshops on the latest SEO trends and developments.

More than 30 expert speakers turned up from around the world to cover all aspects of SEO from “Building an SEO Exponential Growth model” to “The Seedy Underbelly of Keyword Research”, content analysis, competitor analysis, keyword analysis and all the other analysis’ in between (we just love to analyse).

It was impossible to attend all the talks but we found a few recurring themes which resonated with us:

Remember to focus on your strengths and capitalise on the assets you already have (the phrase “pick the low hanging fruit” was used a few times by multiple speakers).

• Featured snippets – If you have a page that ranks alongside a featured snippet you don’t own use that ranking power. Do some quick competitor analysis, imitate that snippet, put your own personality on it and you may just steal that spot and increase your CTR (Google loves lists, tables and bullet points for snippets, use them).
• Content – User intent is always changing/evolving don’t just focus on creating new content, continually review and update old content to keep it relevant. Create a content review plan.

Use the right tools (or influencers) for the job at hand

• Outreach – 68% of marketers engaging in influencer marketing struggle to find relevant influencers that work for their brand. In a world with everything from celebrity influencers to nano influencers and every influencer in between, it’s important to think about what you’re after and what you’re trying to achieve with your outreach strategy.
• International SEO – When it comes to SEO and Translations across international sites it’s important to be careful when using automated tools because they can dismiss important culturally relevant keywords that might get lost in translation.

Make a plan

• Structured data – Plan where you want to appear and include as much (relevant) structured data as possible. Well implemented structured data allows Google to understand your business better and gives you a better chance of showing up for rich results.

Focusing on your strengths, making a plan and using the right tools for the job are a few seemingly obvious concepts however you’d be surprised how often these practices are neglected.
Anyway, there are many, many more interesting thoughts, topics and takeaways we could delve into from optimising site maps to improve site performance, to restructuring your site to improve indexability.

However, as we’re well aware that keeping your content short and concise is also an important part of optimisation, we’ll leave it there for now!