Kaizen’s Key Takeaways from BrightonSEO 2022

In the first week of October, a group of eager Kaizenites joined thousands of other SEO and digital marketing professionals at BrightonSEO, one of the most popular search marketing conferences in the world.

There were so many brilliant speakers lined up this year, and we felt spoiled for choice trying to pick our favourites. Fortunately, we’ve managed to narrow it down to bring you our key takeaways from a truly illuminating and inspiring selection of talks.

Declutter Your Design – Margaret MacArthur, Head of Design at Kaizen

Thursday 6th at 11:45am, Syndicate 1&2

“A designer knows they have achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

Our number one BrightonSEO highlight was watching our very own Head of Design Margaret MacArthur take the stage to share her design expertise.

Her fantastic talk on decluttering design focused on the many benefits of incorporating white space – AKA the areas of a page without any print or pictures. 

Here’s some of the wisdom she shared to keep in mind for any future designs:

• Design is separate from art. You can be a great designer, and a not-so-great artist.
  • Art expresses creativity, but graphic design exists to convey a clear message
  • Blurring the lines between art and design can cause confusion
• White space leaves room for the eye to focus, which creates a great opportunity to communicate your message clearly – think wedding invitations and business cards.
• Micro and macro white space are both important.
  • Micro white space = space between letters, lines and paragraphs.
  • Macro white space = the space that fills the rest of the page
• Simplicity is key. Think about what you can take away, rather than what you can add.
• Empty space can define a brand.
  • For example, many high-end brands use a lot of white space in their web design to indicate luxury.
• Use white space to highlight key data, e.g. in decks or digital PR designs.

How to think differently, get out of a rut and generate new ideas – Jo Walters, Founder of 25 Dots

Friday 7th at 2:30pm, Auditorium 1

It’s this kinda thinking from @jowalters and the rest of team supporting @kelvinnewman that makes #BrightonSEO continually bloody brilliant time and time again! pic.twitter.com/9BLCOhcrPF

— Luke Fitzgerald (@lukefitz) October 7, 2022

Jo Walters, freelancer and founder of communications consultancy 25 Dots, gave an excellent talk on Friday about how to dig yourself out of a creative rut and get ideas flowing. As she said, “creativity is for everyone” – which means this talk is for everyone, too.

Here are Jo’s top tips to boost creativity and come up with your best ideas yet:

Ask yourself…

• What if it isn’t?
  • For example, toothpaste is typically mint flavoured – but what if it isn’t? What other flavours could we explore?
  • Great for challenging assumptions and sparking random ideas
• What would they do?
  • Use other brands as inspiration
  • Look outside your own sector for fresh ideas
• Yes, but why?
  • Ask ‘why?’ at every opportunity
  • Allows you to challenge norms and check you’re solving the right problem
• What’s the worst idea?
  • Think about the worst possible idea you can come up with – then think about the benefits of that ‘bad idea’, and how to implement them to inspire new ideas.

How Digital PR Is Done In Germany – Bert-Jan Vos, Digital PR Manager at Claneo GmbH

Wednesday 5th at 3:30pm, Syndicate 1&2

And the final speaker @bertjanvos tells us all about how digital PR is done in Germany. What an amazing day it has been! Great speakers, amazing audience! Thank you for having me @brightonseo #onlineprshow pic.twitter.com/X0w1B1n82m

— Hana Bednarova (@Miss_HanaB) October 5, 2022

Bert-Jan Vos, Digital PR Manager at German agency Claneo, shared some invaluable insights into how to break the German Digital PR market. We have a lot of DACH region clients at Kaizen, so we knew we couldn’t miss this one.

Bert-Jan advised that a combination of content marketing, SEO, and traditional PR is the winner in Germany, and that there’s a strong focus on content over a particular product or service. Here are some other helpful insights we learned from his talk:

The most popular campaign formats in Germany

• Indexes
• Surveys
• Maps/ infographics
• Industry studies

What German journalists value most

• Quality
  • Representative results, data-led stories
• Credibility
  • Transparent – be transparent about methodology
  • Communicative – prompt responses
  • Expertise
  • Relevance – needs to have topical relevance to the client
• Personalisation
  • Tailor press releases to target groups (lifestyle, business, finance, etc.)
  • Adapt information & tone of voice
• Timing
  • Allow 1-2 days for follow ups (and only follow up once)
  • Avoid Fridays for outreach

Logs analysis guru level. Take control on Googlebot – Serge Bezborodov, CTO at JetOctopus

Thursday 6th 10:00am, Syndicate 1&2

In this talk, Serge Bezborodov (CTO at Saas crawler JetOctopus) taught us all about Googlebot’s behaviour, based on an analysis of 80B log lines. He covered how to visualise bot behaviour and find out which factors impact it, as well as how to conduct our own log file analysis of a website.

Here are some of the main questions a log file analysis should answer, according to Serge:

• What percentage of my website is indexed by search engines?
• Which parts of my website are indexed and which are not?
• How far down is my site being crawled?
• How frequently are specific areas of my website crawled?
• How frequently are routinely-updated pages crawled?
• How quickly do search engines locate and crawl new pages?
• How has a change in site structure/architecture affected search engine crawling?
• How quickly is my website crawled and resources downloaded?

We hope everyone had as much of an amazing time as we did at BrightonSEO. We can’t wait to do it all over again in April 2023!