BrightonSEO has become one of the most popular and respected natural search conferences in the UK over recent years. Speakers from both client side and agencies are invited to share their experiences with their peers.

We sent a couple of our SEO team members down to the event to enjoy BrightonSEO 2016, to capture the very best takeaways from some of the key thought-leaders in the industry.

Although we did see many talks across all the spectrums that SEO covers, we’ve cherry-picked the most relevant, high quality talks and reformatted into a few digestible points for our partners.

If you’d like to see more information from the event, we’d recommend checking out this page where all the presentations have been handily condensed: 

Emerging Forms of Search 

Tom Anthony – Distilled (@TomAnthonySEO)

Three new forms of search are becoming increasingly popular as we see intelligent personal assistants becoming commonplace. We are going to see the search and conversion funnel collapse down so people are sorting and filtering your products/pages inside the search engine and checking out there too.

• Web search will be inadequate for handling more and more of these searches.

• Conversions will also happen in-situ, especially with IPAs.

• Opportunity to leapfrog web-search competitors by creating Apps.

Intergration: SEO and Content Marketing

Briony Gunson (@BrionyGunson)

Successful SEO strategy today requires stakeholder integration, particularly when handling content. By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

The interconnectedness of SEO means we have to create broad, inclusive and holistic strategies if we are to be successful, which compliments the full marketing mix.

5 Attitudes and behaviours that clients can adopt to help in this evolution:

1. Invite your agency in to work from your office (once a month).
2. Identify where your SEO team add value.
3. Avoid pigeon holing.
4. Involve them in everything (and do it early)
5. Share knowledge, data and insight.

Keep in mind that, “progress is being consciously aware of change and changing with it.” 

Avoiding a Migration Disaster

Jon Earnshaw – PI Datametrics (@jonearnshaw)

Key things to consider:

• Involve SEO in scoping and planning to build SEO in at all appropriate touch points.
• Allow SEO team to build relationships and establish credibility with your internal teams.
• One person should be responsible for managing migration.
• Create a detailed redirect map.
• Thoroughly test in staging and after launch.

Remember: SEO is not the icing – it’s a key ingredient. 

Read our blog post on building an SEO Strategy for a Website Migration for more information. 

Trends Shaping The Future of Local Search

Myles Anderson – BrightLocal (@bright_local)

Several trends are shaping the future of local search that we should be taking note of:

• 33% of mobile searches have local intent.
• 10% of all searches are now voice searches.
• 22% of voice searches are local.

So what should local businesses do/have?

1. Accurate address on landing pages (mark-up with Schema.org).
2. Accurate citation on local sites.
3. Gain links from local sites.
4. Site/town in anchor text that links back to your website (anchor text).
5. Put detailed local content on your website.
6. Implement an effective review strategy.
7. Publish reviews on their own site.
8. Be persistent in getting more reviews.

How HTTP2 will change the Web as We Know it

Nils De Moor – WooRank (@ndemoor)

HTTP 2 means faster websites and a higher Page Speed Insights score. Key benefits are listed below:

• Intelligent prioritisation of above the fold content loading.
• Automatic compression.
• Multiplexing – a single connection serves all files rather than multiple server connections uses by standard http protocol.
• Server push predicts resources to load without a request.
• Tests have shown a 30 – 40% speed increase.

When running HTTP 2 it’s important to avoid the following:

• Domain sharing.
• .htaccess compression rules.
• Inlined resources.

Making your website record breaking fast

Fili Wiese (@filiwiese)

Site speed is crucial for site owners and not just for the SEO ranking benefit. User experience is the most important reason for speed optimisation.

Key things to consider:

• If GoogleBot can’t crawl your site, it slows down the crawler to prevent causing a DDOS attack.
• The slower Google crawls your site, the fewer pages it will index. This is particularly pertinent for larger sites.
• Front End – Use progressive enhancement to improve crawl/site speed. This involves loading content first then the fancy stuff after (CSS & JavaScript).
• Remove unused/duplicate CSS to speed up rendering.
• Use Chrome Developer Tools Audit tab for technical advice.
• Apply AMP guidelines across whole site to improve overall speed.

Check out our takeaways from BrightonSEO 2015.