What We Learned At BrightonSEO Spring 2021

BrightonSEO was a little different this year, as the event took place entirely online, with all virtual keynote sessions. Whilst this did mean attendees missed out on all that sunny Brighton has to offer, it did open up the event to a wider audience, as well allowing BrightonSEO to welcome the best keynote speakers from around the world.

Taking place on Thursday 25th March – Friday 26th March 2021, we share some of the best insights we picked up over the course of this year’s event.

1. Link building in 2021 when you’re a bit crap at PR

First off, Stacey MacNaught (@staceycav) proved you don’t have to be an expert in PR to build links and be successful in SEO. 

We all know how important it is to build relevant, authoritative links in order to improve rankings and domain authority, but this can be incredibly difficult without the help of a strategic PR campaign. 

Stacey’s session was super interesting, proving you don’t necessarily need the help of a PR agency in order to land links on sites like The Independent, Women’s Health, or Reader’s Digest. With brilliant content, alongside some outreach skills, problem solving and a bit of creativity, it is possible to acquire some brilliant links. 

Some content marketing strategies to consider include:

• Reactive PR stories – answering requests from journalists
• Self generating content – also known as link bait or link magnets
• Stealable assets – links from people who use things you’re giving away for free (such as images!)

Stacey also shared some useful tools and tips for sourcing opportunities, such as #journorequest, Response Source, Press Plugs and Press Loft.

If you missed Stacey’s talk, you can catch her slides here.

2. Will the Core Web Vitals Update change SEO Forever?

As the Core Web Vitals update in May creeps ever closer, digital marketers everywhere are frantically wondering how to prepare their websites. In light of this, we had to tune in to Marcus Tober of Searchmetrics, as he discussed how Google’s Core Web Vitals ranking signals update will change SEO as we know it.

Some key takeaways from Marcus’ talk include:

• Google is focusing on giving users an even better experience online
• Lazy loading – being ‘lazy’ might actually be beneficial
• Website page is more important than ever before
• Worst case scenarios – what underperforming websites have in common
• Preparation is a team effort – page experience should ALWAYSbe part of an SEO audit!

Missed the session? You can view Marcus’ slides from the event here. 

3. Shopify SEO: How to Optimize For Ecommerce in 2021

With Shopify becoming the fastest growing ecommerce platform in recent years, we had to join Chris Long’s talk all about how to optimise your Shopify website for SEO in 2021.

Whilst Shopify makes it easy for anybody to sell online, it does come with some SEO downfalls and inconsistencies, which Chris shared with us in the session. 

Firstly, Shopify has a major internal linking issue, whereby it links to the non-canonical version of all your product pages. This can cause SEO issues, sending Google conflicting signals. Chris has found a relatively easy fix for this, which he shared in his session and talks about here.

Chris also shared some of the duplicate content issues that can exist within Shopify, such as duplicate collection and product pages caused by pagination and product ‘tags’. Again, this can be avoided fairly easily, and Chris covered some useful tips to solving these issues in his talk.

We also learned which Shopify themes are best for site loading speeds, as well as which plugins to avoid. 

If you weren’t able to join his session, Chris has shared his top tips for 2021 in his post over on Moz.

Overall, the two days covered some excellent tips and opinions from some of the best experts in the SEO industry, we’re already looking forward to the next one!