In a few short years, brightonSEO has grown from a handful SEO’s meeting above a pub to 3,500+ marketers selling out the Brighton Centre in under 5 minutes! Now legendary in the industry, brightonSEO has expanded its offering to include a pre-conference training day, a full day conference loaded with much-revered industry speakers, a pre-party & an after party sponsored by leading marketing businesses!

The brightonSEO weekend was kicked off with The Tech Off! An evening previously described as ‘The Lovechild of TED Talks & WWE!’ which featured Mexican wrestlers, tech talks and chaos!

Kudos to the Tech Off organisers who have taken a perceived intellectual event into a cerebral crowd fuelled, geek off!!   And even more kudos to Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson for laying it all out there and slam dunking the night with the most awesome share of ‘things he bought online’!

Then came Friday! Our MD, Natasha & Digital Marketing Executive Emma attended the brightonSEO talks and were amazed at the amount they learned! The conference itself is extremely highly regarded in the industry and offers Marketers an opportunity to share ideas, learn from their peers & meet likeminded people in their field!

And that’s exactly what we did!

The team were able to spend a great day in Brighton, catching up with some folks we’ve already found jobs for, people we’ve hired on behalf of and just lots of old and new friends including lunch with Brighton Digital Women.

Here are the top 10 things we learned at brightonSEO:

• ‘Near Me’ is no longer needed for mobile search

Users are beginning to realise that Google knows when they are using mobile to search, and therefore that they mean pizza/shops/parking etc. nearby!

• Dom Hodgson is an incredible rapper (and online shopper)

After winning The Tech Off on Thursday night, Dom was spotted at the conference with the prize wrestling belt! You can see his performance here. Don’t forget Dom is running (yes, running) multiple 10k’s for charity, donate here.

• Orange suits are in but ‘funny’ 404 pages are out!

Christoph Cemper (in his iconic orange, from top to bottom) explained ‘customers aren’t laughing’ when their search is interrupted by a pointless 404 page, they will simply go to your competitor.

• Future digital job titles will be shaped like a ‘Digital Knowledge Manager’

An interesting one for our Digital Marketing Recruiters, Duane Forrester explained that he has seen a shift in senior Digital roles. Instead of hiring Department Managers, new roles are evolving in businesses that aim to have one employee with overall responsibility for ALL digital assets of the business.

• Sometimes you do have to answer to ‘generic cynical man’

Amy Harrison explained that even with the most exciting, successful digital campaign, you sometimes have to think like ‘Generic Cynical Man’ to back up your data.

• Google is not planning to mark non-HTTPS sites as insecure in SERPs

Google’s webmaster trends analyst, Gary Illyes explained during the conference’s Keynote Q&A that he is not aware of any plans for Google to mark sites that are not yet using HTTPS as insecure.

• brightonSEO does the best freebies!

Did you manage to get your hands on the frozen cocktails, BrightLocal beer, yoyos from Sendible and Fresh Smoothies from SEMRush? Just to name a few!

• Voice search is growing!

Already in the mainstream market with Google Home, Amazon Echo and Siri, voice search is growing and by 2020, 50% of searches are set to be through voice!  It’s becoming so mainstream that even Natasha’s own Sky Q TV can be voice searched using her remote control! Be prepared folks, voice search is only going to grow.

• You CAN track dark social shares!

Chelsea Blacker explained how Marketers are able to track Dark Social shares by tracking URLs, find out how many times your content has been shared privately here!

• Though it might be a personal aim, ‘having 300,000 Facebook fans is not a business objective’

Allegra Chapman opened her talk on measuring ROI for Social Media with the above statement explaining that no customer purchase journey is linear and your consumers aren’t on social media to buy things, they’re on there too… well, socialise! So measuring the success of your social media can be a challenge, see tips on Allegra’s slides here.

If we’ve missed a key takeaway from the day, please don’t hesitate to let us know! We hope you enjoyed the conference as much as we did!

If your day of networking and learning has inspired you to think about career progression, let our digital marketing recruitment specialists help you get your “utopia” job in digital. Get in touch by either calling 0203 7514108 or sending your CV to jobs@clockworkTalent.com!