This is the second part of a Two page write-up on Brighton SEO. Missed the first Part? Find it here

The Age Old Battle

With the constant buzz and excitement building over lunch, there was a real confusion in what to hear next, and it was kind of an old school battle…

Links VS Onsite???

Now my onsite is good, in fact since I’ve been with Blueclaw it’s become really good. Yet the idea of getting some next level, new information in this field genuinely excited me,

So with Dara from Fresh Egg discussing something like multi-channel attribution, analysis and management I was kind of hooked from the word Egg…

Not sure what I’m talking about?

Take one thing from his presentation; customers don’t buy from one visit, nor do they only visit your site using one device or one medium, so stop acting and most importantly reporting like they do.

I’ve been looking at this over the last couple of months in analytics. With the steady decline of fundamental keyword data in analytics, because of (not provided), our old-school reporting is no longer relevant.

Now I know.

“Your clients don’t know any better?”

“To tell them would be to confuse them?”

But actually you aren’t just doing yourself a disservice; in fact you are failing the whole industry.

Analytics has given us some fantastic tools in the form of model attribution; we can now see how one conversion is influenced by a range of mediums, but this means that your Organic Traffic is more than likely contributing to nearly every sale in one format or another.

So why wouldn’t you boast to your clients about that?

The next presentation was hosted by Norwegian CEO Lisa Myers

Now whilst I don’t really agree with her idea of link building, she tells her team never to ask for a link because “if they have to ask, they haven’t earned it”

However, Lisa has some fantastic knowledge on the markets, as having been in search since 2005, she has seen the good old days (and she was not the only one to remind us of them, Paul Madden’s whole presentation was basically around those days and how to rectify it) and because of this knowledge, highlighted another point I felt showed the evolution of search.

Lisa used the key phrase “Hotels” as an example; the word “Hotels” has seen a steady decline since 2001 in the number of searches.

Do you think this means people are searching less for hotels?

No, didn’t think so.

It means as search has evolved, so had the way we search.

Now instead of “Hotels”, we search for “5 star hotels in Greece”, because as a nation we tend to know what we are looking for, and now we kind of expect our search engines to know too.

Now there are many arguments for optimising for the big money key-phrases; mine, in case you’re interested. is to look at optimising them by creating amazing content and thus pulling in the long tail, however Lisa’s point was set towards long tail filters.

She made the point that if companies such as ASOS don’t get it right, it blows the door wide open for smaller retailers to capitalise on long tail traffic, which tends to convert at a much higher rate.

Needless to say, filters, the number of indexed pages and internal linking are something we have been monitoring closely of recent times, and are also one of the main reasons for the development of our Magento plugin.

And with that brought the end, the electricity had turned to excitement of beer and games, the buzz of creativity was still there, but shared, and you could tell the few hundred people that had attended were each taking their own version of events away.

Conferences are and always will be a funny thing.

No one wants to share too much information and give away all their secrets, the speakers become mini pop stars for a day, and the audience goes away feeling like they have a million ideas,

The key, I think, is to take one strong idea and implement it.

Mine unsurprisingly will be the art of seduction in outreach, building long-term relationships which will last, and therefore help every client I work with, not just one.

As a final point

We work in the most exciting industry since the industrial revolution. Each person who is part of the digital industry is helping to connect a world, and everyday barriers of trade get broken down and new businesses thrive where they never could of, but with all this, the way we do business has changed.

Some people still talk about the cowboys of our industry, don’t.

Because we are all guilty of the old days and times have changed, search has evolved and we are finally building an industry that creates…not manipulates.

Cheers #BrightonSEO, see you next time!

Missed the start of this 2 Part series then click here for the beginning