Staying on top of Digital Marketing Trends – Brighton SEO

As a top digital marketing agency, it is our job to understand the latest industry changes, market developments, technology advances and consumer behaviour patterns. By understanding the constantly evolving world of digital marketing, we are able to better anticipate change and advise on how it will affect our clients’ businesses.

Our team foresee upcoming changes and create proactive strategies to overcome hurdles before they become issues, rather than being reactive. This type of approach allows us, as digital marketing consultants, to suggest new and innovative ways to climb above competition and dominate search engines.

Digital marketing agencies really do need a finger in every pie, understanding changes and developments across a range of industries and technologies. Our team at Digital Ethos is constantly upskilling, researching and questioning industry norms to help improve our skills and offer the best service and consultancy to our clients.

Digital Marketing Training and Upskilling

We regularly engage team brainstorming sessions to share our ideas and new learnings, this helps us think more critically and improve our problem-solving skills as a team. We love bouncing ideas of each other, allowing us to come up with the best possible solutions for individual projects. Brainstorming allows us to work collaboratively as a team, utilising our individual skills in the process.
Each member of our digital marketing team is enrolled in a number of industry standard courses, we love exploring sites like Udemy and Hubspot academy for the latest skills in website design, inbound marketing strategies, best practice content marketing and so much more – check it our for yourself.

As well as industry courses, Google Partner exams and livestreams – we also invest in training offline. As a digital marketing agency, it is important to get involved in live events such as conferences, workshops and unique learning sessions. These in-person events offer a range of benefits, not only to our team members, but to our clients and our brand.
Conferences and event days are a great way to meet experts and influencers in the industry, share knowledge and experience. Depending on the type of event, whether it is networking, learning and group working, it is great brand exposure and can often bring in new business opportunities.

Brighton SEO Conference

Our latest offline event was the September 2018 Brighton SEO event, a few members of the Digital Ethos team travelled down to the sunny city of Brighton for a full day of learning and knowledge sharing.
Brighton SEO is organised by Kelvin Newman, digital marketing events specialist. This event is one of the biggest in the industry and runs only twice a year, educating a wide range of companies and brands in the latest search marketing trends and developments. The one-day event offers practical in-depth talks on a wide variety of talks and training courses with industry leading sponsors and influencer talks.

Content Marketing and Fundamentals

We approached the day tactically, planning which sessions each team member was going to attend. We downloaded Brighton SEO’s helpful mobile app which gave a full time-table of the day. The first morning session offered content marketing, onsite tech SEO, site speed, customer experience, enterprise, fundamentals and international marketing.

With the wide range of sessions available we chose sessions that would be most beneficial to our digital marketing agency growth. One of our marketing consultants attended the Content Marketing session and found it extremely useful and insightful. The session reconfirmed our knowledge about the importance of Live Video content marketing, offering your audience valuable content they genuinely find useful. There is no point investing in content and scattering it across the web if it isn’t useful to the target audience.
The Fundamentals talk really got our brains ticking, we considered our internal processes and the effectiveness of our planning funnel. This session allowed us to reflect on new ideas to improve the efficiency of processes and operations. Digital Marketing isn’t rocket science, its about following processes and implementing the right strategies. Our task is to create the most efficient processes and deliver tangible results.

Technical SEO and European Market

Brighton SEO conference took a head first dive into the technical SEO, covering topics like SEO tools, mobile and AMP, project management, European Market. At Digital Ethos our technical SEO experts are constantly adapting to industry changes, taking an outside in approach. This means that as technology develops in the digital world, we adapt our SEO strategies, working in different ways in the back end of websites.

As a growing Digital Marketing Agency, our clients are targeting customers all over the world, meaning we must implement international SEO tactics. The European Market session secured our knowledge about the difference in search terms, language phrases and search engines. The SEO process is simple and effective if done properly, but understanding the difference in cultures and languages shouldn’t be considered lightly when applying these strategies internationally.

Voice Search Optimisation

The final part of the day at Brighton SEO focussed on upcoming industry developments, talking about the importance of SERPs, link building, voice search, crawl management and ecommerce paid advertising.

As a team, we attended the Voice Search session. It is our job to foresee changes in Google’s algorithm and prioritise SEO on the user intent. Statistics show that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be done via a voice search device. Look out for our next blog that talks about preparing for this change and goes into depth about what voice search means for ranking on search engine results.

Ranking Factors

The last seminars of the day talked about ranking factors, reporting, budgets, paid social and migrations. Whilst marketing consultants will never fully know all of Googles hundreds of ranking factors, we continue to test processes in order to gain a better understanding the impact of each factor. Staying up-to-date with the latest algorithms and attending these in-person talks allows us to share knowledge and insights. The sessions confirmed our knowledge that one of most influential ranking factors is domain authority and page authority. Google’s main goal is to bring the most relevant information to the user at the point of search. The more we help search engines find what we have to offer, whilst answering the search query, the better.

MOZ Keynote Talker – Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin made the final appearance at Brighton SEO; he is the founder of the largest community of SEO’s on the planet. Moz offer tools that make SEO, inbound marketing, link building and content marketing easy. His keynote talk was engaging, questioning the norms of SEO practice and the looking into the future of SEO strategies.

The keynote sessions highlighted the changes in Google and how it will affect user experience and rankings. Google is now focusing on answering more search queries themselves, keeping the user on the Google search engine result page for longer. These queries are being answered through maps, featured snippets, Google embedded websites and search questions. The future of SEO will place more pressure on driving users to land on websites, as they have their queries answered more easily in one place.