BrightonSEO 2019 September Edition Review by two first-time attendees
First thing first, what is BrightonSEO?
BrightonSEO is one of those things you either know perfectly well what is, or you have absolutely no clue what on earth is.
In short, BrightonSEO started out back in 2010 when a few SEOs met at an upstairs room in a pub in Brighton, and which today has turned into the world's biggest- and definitely most professional conference around the topic of SEO.
The conference is being held seaside in Brighton (no shit), situated on the southern cost in UK, about 30 minutes by train from Gatwick Airport, London's second largest airport.
The conference is being held twice a year; once around September and once around April. Although BrightonSEO is a one-day conference, the day prior to the conference is filled up with lots advanced training courses for professional SEOs to keep competence top notch.
The conferences in 2018–2019 has attracted some 3500–4000 attendees.
What is SEO, actually?
Duh.
Sure you are reading the right article?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is basically the process of trying to make websites and specific webpages (URLs) show up (rank) as high as possible on the organic (the non-paid) search results on search engines like Google.
The professionals working full-time on SEO are called SEOs, Search Engine Optimizers, or — the abbreviation we like better; Search Engine Optimists.
Review of the conference, please!
Right.
Pre-conference
After signing up for a few of the classes and the conference, the information-flow up to the conference was pretty much top notch, with loads of useful information from accommodation-tips to transport to what to bring (yes, Kelvin, we remembered to bring our bottle of water!).
The BrightonSEO website could have been slightly improved UX-wise, specially on the Program-page, but most attendees are assumed to be ninja internet users so guess all managed to navigate their way through the site blind-fold anyway.
BrightonSEO also has a neat Ballot system, from which SEOs on low budget can apply for a free ballot ticket for the conference. I applied for such a Ballot ticket — and got it! Wop! (it wasn't until later I found that all training course tickets included access to the conference for the next day — so I wouldn't have needed the ballot ticket anyway).
Arriving with high expectations!
We have attended literally hundreds of conferences over the 20+ years we’ve been in the internet business, and this was one of the first conferences in a long time we really had high expectations for would bring us more knowledge.
Scroll to the bottom of this article if you want to learn if our insanely high expectations were met.
Getting there
According to BrightonSEO staff, people from around 50 nations came over to the conference.
Getting to Brighton and to the venue was a piece of cake. As Norwegians we of course flew our favorite airline Norwegian, which took us from Oslo to Gatwick Airport in just around 1,5 hours.
From Gatwick Airport (we arrived at Terminal South) there are trains going directly to Brighton at least once every 30 minutes.
Note that there are quite a few train tracks at Gatwick, so if you just missed your planned Gatwick-Brighton train you will most likely find another stopping by at one of the other tracks minutes later.
The Brighton train station is located a little “up-town”, and to save some 15–20 minutes of walking down to the seaside/beach where most hotels are located taking a taxi from the train station can be a good idea. Uber is also very common in Brighton, and works like a charm to easily get you around.
The location
Although we didn’t get to know all the yey’s and ney’s of Brighton during our relatively short 3-days on the ground, our first-impression was that the city covers most needs, with a combination of modern shopping malls (there is one very good with tons of stores including an Apple store, McDonald’s and all of that just behind the venue) and old pubs that has seen its better days, yet still have tons of atmosphere.
Most of the training sessions on Day #1 are being held at various conference rooms in the different hotels nearby the venue, all within very short walking distance.
The conference on Day #2 is being held at Brighton Center, which is situated on the seaside/beach, in-between tons of hotels like the somewhat old Hilton next-door.
Remark for tourists: The long beach just over the road of the venue and most hotels is a rocky one, so don't expect to chill down and relax on some soft sand.
Day #1 — the SEO training courses
We decided to take one training course each. As we both are pretty hardcore seniors within the field of both internet stuff, SEO and eCommerce in particular we decided to go for the Advanced Technical SEO (Grade: Advanced/High) and SEO for eCommerce (Grade: Intermediate/Medium).
Course 1: Advanced Technical SEO
This course was held by Fili Wiese, a former Googler working on the Google Search Quality Team, and now working as a consultant at SearchBrothers, which help companies with the most complex SEO tasks.
The Advanced Technical SEO course was fully booked, and from what I counted 18 men and 14 women attending.
Over the years I have been thrilled to see the ever-growing number of women joining the internet industry, bringing new ways of thinking along with top competence.
Fili Wiese is an engaged and experienced instructor, which for sure knows most there is around the field of SEO. It is difficult to have such an advanced one-fits-all-32-attendees-course, however Fili's experience as an instructor seemed to make it very useful for most of us. He also balanced nicely on taking some questions from the attendees as the course went along, which can often generate tons of interference and irritations by the other attendees who dont care about other attendees' issues.
One nice little “trick” Fili Wiese had done post-course was to do a very brief SEO audit of several of the attendees' websites (and even some of the client’s sites / showcases), and then use ourselves as examples. This surely kept the focus of the attendees up-to-speed throughout the course!
The course itself took us way down into the core parts of SEO, from crawling to indexing to the actual search, always focusing on the more complex parts of it, from crawl budget to technical issues easily causing hickups.
The course also covered important topics like content, performance, structured data and much more.
At the end of the day the course had clocked in at well over 500 slides.
The Advanced Technical SEO course is indeed an advanced course, and you need to be a very experienced SEO to get something useful out of it. Developers and senior SEO advisors will also benefit a lot from the course. If you are for example a content-producer then this course is not for you.
Pros:
- Highly technical and advanced — learned many things!
- Highly skilled instructor
- Nice trick of pre-auditing the attendees sites as part of the course
- Awesome location / facility
- Personal mail to each attendees prior to the course, requesting questions to be brought up in plenum
Cons:
- No diploma (buhu)
- No access to the slides post-course (reason: included slides with the attendees SEO results, though this is all public information)
Course 2: eCommerce SEO
The eCommece SEO course was held by Maria Camanes Fores, a technical SEO consultant at Buildvisible. Maria's long-time experience from online marketing and journalism, along with tons of industry qualifications, and her strong passion for the technical parts of SEO, gives her a perfect position around the broad field of eCommerce SEO.
The course took us all the way from the very basics (h1, URL structure, etc) to the more complex topics, like keyword research, crawl budget and HTTP response codes.
Maria took us nicely through tons of practical SEO tasks, from how to handle facets, navigation and sorting, how to handle discontinued products, duplicate content and much more.
In the world of SEO it is often difficult to find the exact answer, often due to the fact that it is very relative. However, from her strong background in tools like Google Analytics, Maria was able to easily demonstrate why approach X works best for issue Y, and how we could find the best approach for our clients' exact SEO issues.
The eCommerce SEO course is perfect for any SEO- or eCommerce manager working hands-on with the content and/or structure of a webshop.
Pros:
- Great and highly valuable course content
- Lots of examples
- Great instructor
- Perfectly balance towards the more technical parts of SEO, never ending up in “dark matter” (e.g developers-food)
- Full slide-deck shared within 48 hours post-course
Cons:
- No diploma (buhu)
- Cramped conference room
Day #2 — the conference
The conference was packed with super-interesting topics ranging from highly technical in-depth talks going way below surface (like server configuration optimizations related to SEO) and all the way up to content-production and digital marketing.
Although the sessions were really crowded, and the fact that the air-conditioning stopped working on several of the conference rooms, everyone seemed very happy about everything.
We split up throughout the day to cover as many talks as possible, and I think we managed to reach over a total of around 20 talks — new record!
A few of the talks we really enjoyed
- Roxana Stinghu — all the amazing SEO-things you can do with your .htaccess file
- Serena Pearson — how to not fuck up your site migration, including great guidelines to follow
- Tim Soulo — Rethinking the Fundamentals of Keyword Research with Insights from Big data
- Fili Wiese — I keep thinking, my website can be faster!
- Paige Hobart — SERP Features Glossary
Many of the talks we didn't get to attend will be listened to as soon as they are published as podcasts / audiostreams.
The quality of the talks at BrightonSEO is plain simple world-class.
Listen to the talks online
If you were unlucky enough not to be able to attend the conference, relax and know that all talks are being made available as podcasts / audiostreams in the days and weeks afterwards. It is definitely worth every second of it.
Summary
As we mentioned in the beginning of this article/review, our expectations of BrightonSEO was skyrocket high. We are therefore extra excited to summarize it all up with the fact that not only did BrightonSEO meet our high expectations — it exceeded them, which last happened to us a decade ago or so.
Will we be there at the next BrightonSEO? If we manage to grab some tickets? Most definitely!
Thanks for reading — and happy optimizing!
Some final-note optimization tips to BrightonSEO for the future conferences:
- Too crowded on several of the talks. Popular is fine, though make sure to have enough “server resources” (here: real estate) to handle the traffic. This can be dummy-solved by live-streaming the talks over to other rooms.
- Pre-printed badges next time. Not sure who came up with the uhm brilliant idea of not printing the badges in advance, instead of people simply state their names and have the badge delivered in seconds. Maybe to save a tree. Not sure. As conference-seniors we of course had our badges ready in advance, and could bypass the queue, but felt somewhat sad for the hundreds queueing up on the sidewalk outside. Ah, maybe it was a social trick! To force people to stop, and talk. Nice one! Seriously!
- Diplomas or some other proof for attending the courses. People love these, and the cost is basically zero (BrightonSEO-staff, contact me if you guys want a great Adobe Illustrator / InDesign template).
- Free snacks and fruits throughout the day. These things injects important elements of sugar to make people more focused throughout the tons of complex information floating around. Just add the cost to the conference tap.
- More conference swags. People love swags. More BrightonSEO stickers. Hoodies (yes, those we can pay for). Yea, we know about the BrigthonSEO merch store, with its three lonely products.
