Fresh off the plane from Brighton SEO, and as always it was incredible. These past few days have been a masterclass in local search, spent shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the industry's sharpest minds. I've corralled these brilliant folks to share their best digital marketing insights with you in this week's episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week I’ve got a killer episode for you - I’m sharing tips from the speakers and experts at Brighton SEO!
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to hop the pond and head back to Brighton SEO in lovely Brighton, England. This trip marks ten and half years of heading over to Brighton twice a year for the conference, and as always, I took my camera with me. I grabbed as many speakers and experts as I could and had them share tips that would help business owners and marketers do better digital marketing. The tips were amazing this time, check ‘em out:
Yordan Dimitrov:
When it comes to SEO, the only constant is change. So embrace it.
Masha Gaganova:
So about 70% of us can't actually keep up with the level of change happening in the world, economically, politically, technologically. It's just all coming at us. So what I think is really important for everybody to nail is three things when you're going through different change in transformation programs, is build trust, so I trust you're gonna tell me exactly what you think, um, empathy. We're gonna step in each other's shoes and try to see how it's like for different person or a different team member, and the third is accountability. I'm accountable for doing my job. You're accountable for doing yours, and this is just the baseline from which we're working on. And if those three things come together, then we can deliver any change successfully.
Crystal Carter:
My top tip for marketers who want to be better at their job is, is to stop thinking like you need a checklist. You don't need a checklist. And in the way that search is evolving right now, you don't necessarily need a checklist because where we're going, there ain't no checklist. AI mode, AI overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, et cetera, they're writing the rule book as we go. And we need to be available to evolve at the same time. This means that you need to use data to make good decisions. You need to use agent solutions like NotebookLM, like Perplexity, like, um, you know, other, other tools with ChatGPT, for instance, that can help you get there.
And you also need to, um, create your own solutions. So vibe coding, for instance, is a really, really, really great way to do this. You see a problem and you can actually build stuff to solve that problem directly for you right then. And I think it's an incredible, an incredible opportunity and an incredible way to address some of the challenges that we have right now. So I, I would say, you know, think, think boldly, act boldly, and embrace the opportunity that we have right now.
Ryan Jones:
My biggest tip slash takeaway would be to always focus on testing. I think a lot of people are scared of testing purely because testing means failures. Uh, I think I would look at it from a perspective of always be learning, always be testing. Don't be scared of failed tests, because that just shows you what you don't need to be doing. Focus on the winning tests, build your strategy around that, and you can't really get wrong from that.
James Yorke:
A tip to make you a better digital marketer is to have a CTR-first mindset. In the past, SEOs have focused on rankings, but now rankings and position one don't mean traffic. Having a CTR-first mindset means you look for ways to generate clicks and get out of search engines. Continue to generate traffic from search engines.
Azeem Ahmad:
Okay, digital is changing every day. We know that. You log onto LinkedIn. Every third post is AI, AI, AI. Be everywhere. Be on every channel. Be here, be here, the new channel coming out. One of the things that I think is super important is not to be on every channel, but it's to be where your customers are. So spend some time, spend some budget figuring out where your customers are and do something with that information. Every other day, you'll see this news about being absolutely everywhere, or you must be here, you must be there. I think at the moment, the industry is having this phase of shiny object syndrome with AI. Take some time, take some budget. As my friend Andy Jarvis says casually, "Speak to your customers. Find out where they are." We've got a great talk called Search Pulse, which will help you do that. Download that from searchpulse.reflectdigital.co.uk, and that will help you be smarter and be a better marketer today.
Sarah McDowell:
Hi, my one tip, but it's kind of two tips, but know your audience and have a goal. So whatever content you are creating, whatever you are doing, it has to serve a purpose. What are you trying to do? And you can only serve that purpose if you know your audience. Really make sure that you know who you want to talk to, because then you're gonna be more successful.
Anthony Barone:
Hello everyone. A tip from me is, what is your why? If you're working in agency side, if you're working in brand side, you've gotta figure out those goals, set those expectations. What are you doing? Is it to make more money? Is it to, is it 'cause, you know, you wanna build your ego? Is there, sell more products? What is that why? When you're dealing with any agency, whether it's SEO, PPC, digital, direct mail, whatever it might be, you need to be aligned on the goals. What is your why? What is that north star that you are all focused on? So that each one of those strategies, each one of those social media channels, SEO, any of those digital marketing strategies, line up so that you are all singing from the same hymn sheet and going along for the ride to make sure that you all achieve those goals. Hey, make more money, get more sales, get more leads, fill out more forms. Make sure you know what your why is and how you can all sing from the same hymn sheet and be together on that journey of achieving those goals.
Becky Simms:
So my top tip is that you need to think about the messenger for your content. So the messenger effect from psychology says that when we're out there looking at things, we're analyzing it partly based on who is saying what and deciding whether we believe that and agree with that and how we feel about it. So sometimes your own voice as a brand isn't the best voice. Sometimes it is. You need to weigh it up. So the different, different types of voice you've got to consider are your voice or your brand voice, UGC, your audience's voice.
So you can also take a bit of control over that, of helping amplify that more by getting your audience really clear on the fact that they can go out there and make comments, and that you are gonna help push those and, and put them out there, especially on social. You then also have the, um, amplified voice from the media perspective, and then you have the influencer voice. So the trusted voice, the voice that comes from people that are already known for talking about a certain topic that fits alongside your brand authentically. So think about the messenger next time you're planning your content.
Tom Winter:
My number one recommendation would be to define how good looks like. Once you know exactly how good looks like, you can create a quality gate that will let you through it. So if you're, for example, creating content, you have to understand how good content looks like so you know which way to go to get to your goal.
Dixon Jones:
Keywords and topics and entities are not the same thing. I mean, we tend to use all three interchangeably. I use topics and entities interchangeably because people get scared of this concept of an entity, but they're not the same thing. Uh, an entity is something in a knowledge graph. It's something in a database of concepts and ideas. A topic is an idea that we understand as human beings, and keywords is a way to represent or describe those in a, in a thing. So one's a subset of the other. So think of your SEO in terms of entities if you can, topics if you can't, keywords at the very, very least, because honestly, your world is not about convincing somebody around a specific keyword. It's around convincing somebody around the product, the idea that you use. Think in entities.
Ray Grieselhuber:
Uh, so the biggest chip that I would advise to people these days based on what we're hearing when we've talked to clients and agencies is, uh, spend some time to really understand your data. Um, there's been so many advances and tools and data sources over the last couple of years with AI, uh, and a lot of companies are trying to, they're kind of flailing around, trying to figure out what their move should be. It's worth taking a moment bit of extra time to really understand what these strategy's gonna be for next year. Um, put a plan together. Understand who your, your main provider's gonna be. Make the right decision. Don't just do, um, you know, like a, a quick, you know, decision if it's not a hundred percent sure that you, you're gonna be comfortable with who you work with.
Luke Carthy:
Alright, cool. So my tip is cookies are a bitch. Can I swear on this? Too late. [inaudible 00:07:31]. Uh, (laughs). Cookies are a bitch. If your audience are big on Safari, if you've got a lot of Safari users, ITP, go and research it. Go down a hole. It is a problem. And what it does is it causes new users to be attributed way higher than reality. So like 25 to 45% of all new users from Safari are actually existing users due to ITP, which is a pain for attribution, for data, for modeling, for understanding you're new, but of course, existing customers. It's a real problem. It's short and sweet. I don't want anyone to fall asleep, but in your own time, research ITP and go to that rabbit hole. You won't regret it. That's my tip.
Darren Shaw:
Alright, so one thing I don't think people are really caught onto yet in local search is a massive increase in the importance of review recency. So you can see businesses that have like 300 more reviews than their competitor, but the competitor is out ranking them because they're getting like five, 10 reviews a day. That influx of reviews, Google has really cranked the dial on that factor. So if you are not asking for reviews on a regular basis, your 10,000 reviews that you got before are stale. They're old news. You need to be getting reviews on a regular basis if you wanna stay at the top of the local pack and max results. That's my tip.
Tazmin Suleman:
Don't deprioritize the things that are actually going to give you energy. Prioritize things like your physical health, your mental health, your relationships. The toxic hustle culture will encourage you to push those things lower and lower on your priority list. But that's not going to give you the energy to succeed, and it's not going to give you the longevity of career that you see.
Awesome tips, right? Thanks for sticking around to watch all of them. That’s definitely all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
