A Close Look at the Five Most Interesting Talks from BrightonSEO 2016

Last Friday, myself and a number of fellow Distillers made our twice-annual pilgrimage to Brighton for the excellent BrightonSEO. Throughout the day, we took in as many different tracks as possible to get an overall view of what was on offer.

There are a number of excellent tip lists already available. In fact, I've linked to a few at the bottom of this post.

These are excellent if you want to pick up a few quick tips and upgrades, and without wanting to repeat what’s already been written, we’ve decided to take a deeper dive into five of the most interesting talks from the day, and what we learned from them.

1. Deep diving into featured snippets: How to earn more and rise to the top - Rob Bucci (STAT Search Analytics)

As CEO of STAT Search Analytics, Rob Bucci is a man who backs up his presentations with plenty of data. His talk at BrightonSEO was certainly no different. Taking a deep dive into featured snippets (the blocks of texts that sometimes appear at the top of SERPs), Rob walked us through the best tactics for helping your own brand or client feature in these snippets.

Why featured snippets?

Featured snippets, as Rob puts it, “represent a valuable opportunity to drive organic traffic for sites that are capable of getting them” and give your content a “big credibility boost in the mind of the searcher”. They’re valuable, basically.

Number one isn’t everything

Looking at Google’s traditional method of ranking, you’d expect that results sitting at number one in the SERPS would, by default, enjoy seeing their brand in the featured snippets. However, as the stats show, over 70% of rich snippets are not sourced from the first ranked result.

Subjective words rarely appear

Featured snippets are designed to give an answer. This means ‘objective’ words are more likely to appear. General question and definition words, like ‘does’, ‘cause’ and ‘definition’; as well as financial words like ‘salary’, ‘average’ and ‘cost’ are likely to trigger a featured snippet. Conversely, the word ‘best’ triggered zero featured snippets in over 20,000 instances.

There are tactics to help you appear in featured snippets

Beyond analysing the data, Rob suggests a few tips to help you appear in the featured snippets. Start by looking at your keyword opportunities to identify what high-frequency featured snippet keywords match up with your existing keyword targeting. You can also bring in Q&A formatting in your content, ideally by devoting one page to answering a single question.

2. What is AMP and do I care? - Dom Woodman (Distilled)

Here at Distilled, we’ve had Google Accelerated Mobile Pages on our radar for quite some time now. In fact, our CEO Will Critchlow wrote about AMP way back in October, and we’ve watched eagerly as the new initiative has been rolled out throughout the early parts of 2016. Therefore, it’s fitting that the Distiller representing us on stage at Brighton, Consultant Dom Woodman, was talking all about AMP.

What the heck is AMP?

As Dom explained in the opening part of his talk, AMP is two things. You probably already know that it allows you to create web pages in a very specific way, so as to guarantee speed. However, it’s also a way of Google having a greater level of control over the distribution of content. With this in mind, the first companies hopping on the AMP bandwagon have understandably been publishers.

Should non-publishers be using AMP?

As is often the way, the answer is ‘it depends’. In his talk, Dom laid out a number of questions you need to ask in regards to your site, which will help you decide whether or not you should be investing time and energy into AMP.

Interestingly, the answer is never ‘no’, but sometimes it is ‘hold off’. If Google News is an important source of traffic, if you have an ongoing problem with site speed, or if your site gets a large proportion of traffic from mobile, now might be the time to start getting AMP on your site.

What benefits will AMP bring?

The first and most obvious benefit you’ll see from AMP pages vs regular desktop pages is a huge decrease in load time. The time it takes for a document to load fully can be reduced by a huge 84%.

Beyond that, AMP is mainly a bet on the future. We’re assuming that the initiative will continue to gain traction, but having the backing of Google and the quickly growing list of supported ad networks (12 in February, 26 as of writing), signs are positive that AMP will continue to grow.

3. What games can teach us about user experience and conversion - Aferdita Pacrami (90 Digital)

I admit, I’m always skeptical about analogies as a basis for a presentation topic; they can sometimes feel a bit stretched. Aferdita Pacrami’s talk was certainly not one of these. In just 20 minutes, she explored how video game techniques can be used when improving a website’s user experience with a surprising amount of useful tips.