An event looked forward to, and looked back upon now with delight. Hands-on, informative, and widely relevant, we were proud to be represented by our CEO on stage, and eager employees in the crowd (or lurking in the arcade room). Here is our CEO’s wonderful presentation, as well as some of our colleagues’ key takeaways from Brighton SEO 2017.
Tom Doidge, one of our Designers said:
“Brighton SEO was a great event. Being a designer, I wasn’t quite sure what would be relevant, but the talks were inspiring and there were a lot of great snippets to take away. One of them being Daniel Rowles talk ‘Using advanced social listening techniques to drive SEO’ was really interesting. He talked about how they used social listeners on the Sony Bravia ads to influence positive conversations and to help manage negative reviews. His theory that social success comes down to ‘social diffusion’ also made a lot of sense.”
Nic Fusciardi, one of our WordPress Developers said:
“Turns out that Brighton SEO isn’t really just about SEO. The diversity in talks and stands catered for almost anyone. Some of my key takeaways were getting some useful tips on javascript debugging for Google Search from Bartosz Góralewicz, seeing how chatbots are being used in today’s customer services, and then finishing off with a QA with Gary Illyes, who gave some interesting insight to Google’s constant adaption to modern behaviours.”
Jasper Cheyney, one of our Designers said:
“I really enjoyed Brighton SEO this year, in the largest venue in Brighton! As a designer I was keen to make the most of the event by attending talks that I could benefit from the most. My favourite two sessions were the “Future of Search” and “Chatbots“. Saeley Jnr Johnson’s talk “Speak Easy – The rise of Voice Search” was particularly interesting; it looked at the increase in popularity of Voice Assistants and how brands will need to consider not just how their company looks, but also how it sounds. Johnson also discussed the future of formatting information to ensure Voice Assistants can process it effectively when responding to its user, making sure your brand doesn’t miss out on potential customers. Looking forward to next year!”
Simon Cooke, our Marketing Director said:
“Another great event from Brighton SEO as you might expect. From what I heard, the Rough Agenda team only had a few hours to set up, due to the TUC moving out late, so I can imagine it was pandemonium at 5am! For me the Javascript & Frameworks session was great, I was blown away by the concept of machine learning to inform predictive links, speeding up delivery by actually loading content for a link based on what the user ‘might’ click on next. Mind blown! I also had the chance to meet the guys at Sendible and take a look a their Social Media management tool for agencies. Having used quite a lot of this stuff in the past, Hootsuite etc, there were some great features in there, such as influencer targeting. Nice touch guys, really like what you are doing there.”
Tom Chute, our People Director said:
“I always hunt out the slightly geekier talks at Brighton SEO that focus on technical subject matter. I saw two great talks on Javascript and Progressive Web Apps during the morning session. One point that really stuck out was that if you have page or post content served up via JS, only Google and Ask (I didn’t know this was still a thing!) search engines will crawl the content! This OK for UK audiences, but not if you are targeting areas where Google has low market share. Emily Grossman’s talk on Progressive Web Apps gave some great tips on optimisation and some new ways developesr can make websites feel faster than they actually are – smoke and mirrors! I caught some business talks later in the day. The guys from PressCable gave an inspired talk on winning business like a King. We then were given more reasons to get prepared (scared!) for the GDPR by Dorothy Agnew – I think it’s going to be a common theme at conferences for the foreseeable future!”
Callum Harrod, one of our WordPress Developers said:
“SEO Brighton was a conference with thousands of people; heaving with designers, developers and marketers alike, and I really felt that they had catered to all of those people. The main reason I wanted to go was looking towards the future of user experience design and I felt that the ‘Future of Search‘ talks were the best fit. I found the talk from Saeley Jnr Johnson really thought-provoking and really gave me an understanding of what the main uses of voice search seem to be. It also showed how little we make use of every-day voice search and how little of the features people use. I felt that it was a thoroughly enjoyable day, especially when you add a free drink and loads of arcade games to play in between talks.”
