In this week’s episode, I share some awesome digital marketing tips from some of the speakers and experts at Brighton SEO a few weeks ago. The top minds in digital marketing have shared some amazing tips that will help you excel at SEO and digital marketing – check them out:
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’ve got digital marketing tips to share with you from speakers at Brighton SEO!
If you’ve been watching for a while, you know I love to share tip compilations from the bigger conferences I attend. If this is your first time seeing this, I basically grab speakers, experts, and friends at conferences and have them share a quick tip, and then I compile all the tips into a single video. Once again, we have a video packed with awesome quick tips – check it out:
So, my tip is about strategy versus tactics, right? Because people who are in strategy tend to make strategy sound really big, really complicated, and really difficult. They often say things like, “You should be more strategic,” which leads most people to go, “I don’t really know what strategy is.” Dead simple. Strategy’s where you’re going, tactics is how you’re gonna get there. So stra- strategy’s all about direction, which direction are we gonna take? And then it comes to tactics, and that’s how you’re actually gonna get there. One is not more important than the other. You need strategy because if you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know when you’ve actually got to your destination. But if all you have is strategy, you never go anywhere, you’re just like, “Oh, we wanna go over there,” but you never get there.
Strategy and tactics, both equally as important, strategy, where you’re going, tactics, how you’re gonna get there. Thank you.
One of the things that I shared in my talk yesterday was the benefits of diversity. So when you activate multiple facets of diversity, such as age, gender, even geography, your business can make a better decision 87% of the time, which means more money in the bank for you. There’s no reason not to do it.
My big SEO tip from Brighton would be to not forget about the value of featured snippets for brand awareness, and building authority, and all of the benefits of being in position zero. Uh, feature snippets, don’t forget they exist.
So, a really simple SEO tip, find your traffic generating pages where most people are coming to your website, and link them to your money making pages. Find your high conversion rate pages, send everyone there.
When you work in international SEO, make sure to use meta keyword stack for Baidu, and Yandex, because these search engines still recognize this.
You know, I think my tip is, don’t think of the world of the internet in terms of words, think of it in terms of topics, and ideas, entities. So, the world is, is, is shaped in concepts and ideas, not in, you know, in, in words. So you can call, uh, it a, the Eiffel Tower, le tour Eiffel, or a big metal thing in Paris, it’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter which language you use, it’s the concept. So think of concepts, not keywords.
So, when you’re doing offsite SEO, when you’re guest hosting, when you’re appearing on a podcast, when you’re appearing on a YouTube, uh, video, like this one for instance, make sure that you think about your biographical entity. So make sure that your biography has lots of good entities, and good, um, specific entities within your bio, so that they can tie it back to who you are, what team you work for, what you do, and make sure that you back that up with things that are on your site. So if you appear in a podcast, make sure you’ve got a good biography that talks about what you do and all that sort of stuff so that Google can connect it to the information that’s on your website, and make sure you have a good biography on your website that has all of that information backed up by schema, and good, uh, on-page SEO, and all of that stuff so that you can amplify your message and your presence.
My tip is about SEO migration. So I just worked on a really big one for a client, and they were like, “Oh, do we need and SEO? I’m not sure.” And there are just so many things that you save big developers from messing stuff up. And the one that they messed up was the, the whole duplicate content thing. So somebody was in their talk yesterday, Garry Illyes saying, “Oh, the web is full of duplicate content,” I mean, it is and it isn’t, but the duplicate content for this example was just the trailing slash. So all the URLs were the same ’cause they’d migrated them all over really nicely, good job developers, they decided to remove the trailing slash ’cause they thought it looked ugly. Those are not the same URLs as far as Google is concerned. All of those in there, they’re gonna create hundreds and hundreds of redirects. If you’re gonna do migrations, then you wanna keep URLs the same, keep them exactly the same. That’s my tip.
If you remove your redirects after a year, it’s really looking like it’s not gonna have any impact. We, we always thought that it loses signals, but Garry Illyes in a tweet thread a couple years ago said they don’t. I’ve actually been testing this, I removed a bunch of redirects that have been in place for longer than a year, and right now I’m seeing no impact. I’m gonna do more testing, uh, do a big case study on this, but, uh, this, this has really massive implications on our industry, the tooling, for domain buying, even recommendations and strategies that we’re using. So, uh, I’m not taking this lightly, but, uh, it really is looking like that’s the case, that removing redirects after one year won’t really affect you.
Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.
So something that we’ve been doing at StudioHawk lately with clients is taking a look at their content, just because we’ve been looking more closely at Google’s helpful content system, which I think is more important than most people realize. So actually taking a look at the content on your site collectively as a whole, and if you find that you’ve got a lot of content that’s just not helpful, not adding value, doesn’t serve a purpose, it’s worth looking at that, seeing can it be updated, should it be removed entirely, or if you might wanna keep it for whatever reason. But definitely take a look at your site, make sure every page has purpose so that you don’t run into any issues, in terms of Google deeming helpful pages unhelpful because the majority of your site contains unhelpful content.
What I say is that, uh, it’s crucial now to, to get engagement, so keep, keep user en- keep users engaged, and don’t make them lose focus. So what is the most important now is, uh, user engagement.
So you need to do way more than include the right words on your website in order to win the ranking race. So now Google has so much data on customers, it knows where you’ve been, what you do, it has access to all of your calendar, Gmail, it knows absolutely everything about you. So, in order to really rank, you’re gonna need to understand your customers, what they need, and what they want. So, in order to do that, I really like using the five love language to create the right type of content. So making sure that people that like words of affirmation, that I’m actually thanking them on a thank you page, that I’m including little notes, nice little gestures. The only love language I don’t recommend you use is physical touch, ’cause that’s super creepy, can’t do that with your customers, you’ll go to jail. Um, but love language is a really nice way to make sure you’re communicating with your customer in way that actually makes them feel appreciated.
My quick tip is to use your Local SEO data for more than making content recommendations and automizing listing. Make sure you’re paying a lot of attention to what your competitors are doing overall as brands, and use that to your advantage to take advantage of their weaknesses.
My tip for Local SEO, and for people that need some help with Local SEO when they have businesses, is don’t give up on GBP support, be tenacious, be kind, give them the information they need, and they can and they will do their best to help you.
Here’s the thing, we’re done poo-pooing broad match, broad match is hero, and here’s why. Audiences are now baked into broad match, and broad match gives us access to cheaper phrase and exact match. So whether you’ve always been broad match lover, whether you’re a reluctant broad match enjoyer, or whether you haven’t even given it a chance yet, this is the time to leverage broad match because your competitors are, and this is not a US thing, a y- a UK thing, a Europe thing, everyone’s using broad match. So get on the broad match train, and get cheaper auction prices, and audiences you wouldn’t get otherwise.
Okay, so my tip is, when you’re using a Lighthouse report, um, you can go into the network blocking tab, and you can block scripts that are causing, um, too long, the page too long to load, um, so you can actually simulate what it would lu- be like if you removed that script to speed your site up.
People are too often looking for the most difficult answers to SEO queries, when it is actually the simplest thing possible. Occam’s razor is really one of the things we need to be keeping in individual when we’re SEOs. We’re too quick to think about the impossible answer, and not the probable answer. So instead of looking for obscure things that are wrong with client’s website, go back to basics, it could quite possible just be they blocked the whole thing with robots.txt, or it could be something else, but think simple before you think complex.
