This week on Local Search Tuesdays, we dive into the most insightful digital marketing tips gathered from the Brighton SEO conference. We’ve compiled the key takeaways that will elevate your digital marketing game. Stay tuned to discover the actionable tips and expert knowledge that can help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I have got another group of awesome digital marketing tips, This time from the speakers and experts at Brighton SEO.
As always, I spent some time walking around at Brighton SEO collecting tips from some of the speakers and experts that were there. Brighton SEO is my favorite conference series in the world and it’s worth going just to experience the awesomeness of Brighton. But, hey, the conference is amazing too, and Kelvin and the rough agenda team do an awesome job of building out an epic lineup every single time.
So here are the tips I collected this time around.
I’m a brand SEO, so I’m gonna tell you about conferences. As a digital marketing, you go to lots of conferences. It’s It’s really intimidating, particularly when you watch people like Greg speak because he has so much information packed into, like, twenty minute talks. So my tip is take one or two things from every presentation that you go to.
Don’t try and do it all. It’s way too much. Don’t try and run before you can walk. One or two things.
Go back. Try those things. If those work, great. Come back. Do some more. Take it easy.
So in my session at Brighton SEO, we talked about marketing as a team sport. And the reason why we talked about that is because I think the days of someone being expected to be the SEO and to do all of the SEO things are over. It is, you know, it’s a question of people who need to do ecommerce SEO or local SEO or technical SEO or content SEO. And even within SEO, there are lots and lots of different elements.
Not only that, but Google itself is very, very diverse at the moment. So a SERP for a brand, for instance, will include lots of information about social, about their their products, about, lots of other content that they’ve got out there. And it is important for somebody who is looking after the digital presence of a brand, including SEO and including other other elements of digital marketing to be aware of all of that. So in order for you to do that, you need a team, and you need to be able to to connect with the team and to connect with a range of channels in order to balance that really, really well for your clients.
So I think that it’s not just a question of you trying to upskill on everything and try to be everything for everyone. Make sure you’re part of a team and make sure that that the brands that you are helping are represented by a collective of digital marketers who can get them great results.
My recommendation is always focus on users. So social media or be it YouTube or, s g or, content, whatever comes, I always recommend you to, to put put in top priority on users. Got it?
Okay. My SEO tip for you guys today is make the search engine’s job easy. If you’re thinking about what to do, is this the right thing to do in my website, if it’s gonna make the search engine’s job easier to understand your website, understand your content, then you should do it.
So I’ve just been talking today about Googlebot data and Search Console data, particularly as it relates to SEO testing.
Punchlines. Googlebot data is good for running more tests more quickly because you can end inconclusive tests sooner, and you can, minimize the time you take between tests in what we call the cooldown period. Search Console data is great for explaining test results, less good for figuring out if a test is a winner. If You want more? Hit me up on Twitter at Will Critchlow.
My tip to improve your digital marketing is that if you’re building a website or you’re doing a reskin of your website, make sure to speak to an SEO. And why is that? Because you wanna make sure that your wireframes, your navigation, the structure of your website, and the structure of your pages is correct and optimized before it goes live. So you don’t have to then speak to an SEO after it’s live, pay the developer again to fix up all the pages because the SEO told you what you should have done in the first place. So that’s my tip.
The one tip we’d like to share is that we’ve done some, empirical research into, responses, and to reviews.
Every one percent increase in the reply rate actually leads to point three percent growth in, impressions and actions, and a point one four percent growth in the average rating. We’ve also seen, the speed of the response have a direct impact on your conversion rate. So the longer you wait with responding, your, for nine out of ten customers, the average, conversion rate on your listing, will slowly decline.
My tip for you is if you like Kahoot like myself but don’t want to pay for it, become a teacher at an SEO school, university, or course. Sometimes it’s even a ten hour gig once a semester, and you can have, educational accounts for free.
I think it’s really important, especially when core updates come out and are announced from Google, is to actually check through the documentation carefully and thoroughly so you get the full context of what’s being said so that you don’t have to guess if certain things are being enforced at different times, just so you’re more in the know and you have a better and clearer understanding of what’s actually being looked into and impacted so that you can retroactively go and look at your sites and be able to apply anything that you need to correctly and thoroughly within whatever is being stated there. So always do your due diligence, read through stuff carefully, and also, you know, use common sense and have critical thinking too. So that’s my tip.
I think a lot of people are worried about AI content.
It’s still what a lot of SEO agencies and and writers did. It’s almost the copycat type content. It’s not sustainable. Even Google, I think they’re gonna do more than they’ve done, which is probably scary to a lot of people. But I think they have to. Because if you look at the results, it’s still like the it’s almost like reading the same article over and over and over again.
So they have to show more diversity. They’re gonna have to figure this out. They’re gonna have to show more interesting things. Like, they had a a what was that called?
The hidden gems update. I think there’s gonna be a version two of that where it’s gonna be a lot more diverse, a lot more interesting results.
And I think then people won’t consider the results bad. Like, there’s a lot of complaints.
And what has to happen is that more diversity, more interesting things, more diverse viewpoints, more, content that’s not like reading the same content over and over.
So in marketing today, I think that for about a decade, probably more, I’ve been really trying to inform people of, like, the power of being on Reddit as a place to not only promote yourself or to be able to, like, participate in the conversation, but effectively to really learn and to understand user journeys. I think that when you think about the interaction that happens on Reddit and the scope of how people dive into topics, you really get an insight into what your potential audience really wants. You look at a lot of the companies that have been super, super successful on Reddit. They’ve really gone into the user group to find out the topics they’re just talking about.
With the latest deal that has Google spending sixty million dollars a year to basically buy Reddit’s data to feed the AI, now we don’t know where AI is gonna land, whether SGE is gonna fully roll out, whether it’s gonna be pulled back. But if nothing has been more clear, it’s that user journey is now the focus And understanding user journey through Reddit, participating in the community, I think, would be really helpful. The one thing I will say is that Reddit is very much like a real life community. And in order for you to be successful on Reddit, you really need to consider it.
It’s not a one community. It’s a bunch of communities on a platform that allows them to have their own space within a larger group. So if you’re thinking about how to be successful on Reddit and you’re, you know, curious about the ways that you can engage, think about how you would walk into a local community hall, into a community, and try to be a part of that group. You have to go in, take the time to really understand where you fit.
Are you in the right community? Is this the right place for you? Are the conversation they’re having in this community aligning with the conversations that you wanna have with them? There’s no forcing your way into Reddit.
There’s no coming in and just broadcasting yourself. You really have to take the time to find the right communities, find out what the conversations that they’re having are. Do they resonate with you? And if so, start participating slowly.
Listen first, start commenting, and then share your thoughts and share your influence in there. It may take time, but if you really wanna see how important it is to be successful and ready, just look at how much it’s changed. Every single one of these tool companies here is showing me data of how quickly Reddit is growing in traffic. Everyone’s talking about Reddit showing up in search.
Everybody’s talking about the influence it’s having, and they just went public. So in my opinion, one of the really cool opportunities for people today is to find yourself a place in Reddit, learn it, get involved, and find success there.
So my top tip, especially if you’re working in local SEO, is to make sure that you are using metrics to report to your stakeholders, but also to inform yourself as a marketer about what is working and what isn’t working. And all the metrics are really great and I love measuring things.
Pretty awesome tips. Right? That’s all the time we’ve got left for this week’s episode. So you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here.
We totally just high five because you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
