Brighton SEO: 2022 Takeaways

For those serious about sharpening their skills and staying ahead in the world of digital marketing, Brighton SEO is the main event in the training calendar.

Thousands flock to Brighton SEO to gain insights and tips from leading SEO agencies, both UK-based and from overseas, to witness technical talks from Google Specialists, both past and present. As a result of the latest Google Helpful Content Update, back in late August, this event had a greater emphasis on developing unique and engaging content written from first-hand experience.

This year, select members of our teams made their way down to sunny Brighton. Representatives of the SEO and Content Team attended multiple talks and seminars, and the Sales Team met new and existing clients at our exhibition stand.

There was so much information to absorb during this two-day conference. So, we’ve highlighted three main takeaways from the event that you cannot miss.

1) Indexing – If Google Can’t Crawl Your Page, It Won’t Get Indexed!

Although it seems a basic principle and can be overlooked, it’s vitally important to ensure that the GooglebotGooglebot is a web crawler. It follows links and indexes pages for search engines to make it easier for users to find what they're looking for. can crawl as many web pages as possible. Our job as SEO specialists and webmasters is to make Google’s job easier, after all!

To help Google crawl as many pages as possible, we need to focus on the following three key areas:

1. Generating quality and unique content
2. Address any technical issues, such as creating fasting loading pages, offer a clean and error-free XML sitemapA site map is a list of pages on your site and their relative importance. Use sitemaps to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for, and to ensure that search engines can find all the information they need. and ensure that canonical tags are set up correctly.
3. A strong internal linking strategy to key pages across the site.

You can learn more about Google Ranking Factors & Important Search Engine Signals in our Knowledge Hub.

Not all indexable pages are crawlable by Google. It’s best to ask your web developer to access the “website log files”, so you can determine which pages Google can crawl.

In summary, the more pages that are crawlable and indexable by Google will result in more impressions, leading to more clicks and helping you to gain more organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page..

To ensure that your website is optimised for peak technical performance, consider undertaking an SEO audit.

A technical SEO audit is like having a car serviced. At Click Intelligence, our specialists review the site manually, enabling them to highlight the range of issues which needs addressing and, most importantly, how to fix these. By amending the technical issues on your site, you’ll have a better chance of increasing your visibility and traffic from the search engines.

2) Google Analytics 4 Is Coming… Sooner Than You Think!

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will replace Universal Analytics permanently on July 1, 2023. As a result, it’s wise to start implementing Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible and ensure that data flows into your GA4 account.

Ideally, you want to make sure that GA4 data is pulled through by January 1, 2023, so that you have a clean slate of web traffic data heading into the new year.

According to Google’s support page, after July 1, 2023, you’ll be able to access previously processed data in your Universal Analytics property for at least six months. 

SEOs shouldn’t fear the power of Google Analytics 4. The enhanced version has many great features, including:

More Default Channel Groupings

Previously, most of the unknown traffic was included under “direct” traffic within Universal Analytics (GA3). Now, with GA4’s new tracking capabilities, unknown traffic will be added to the correct traffic source rather than be accounted for as “direct traffic”.

Greater Analytical Capabilities 

Now, you can explore traffic at the “user level” and “session level”, allowing you to understand better how users visit your site. Within GA4, you can also review “scroll tracking”; this is great for apps and landing pages with a lot of content.

If you’re a fan of URL pathing and discovering the user’s journey, in GA4, you can now view a user’s journey up to 10 steps.

Reporting

Reports are a critical component of any SEO campaign. Now with GA4, you can build any report you desire with more options available than ever before. As Google Analytics 4 now supports “event tracking” in greater detail, there are more opportunities to build more concise reports.

From our understanding, Google Analytics 4 is a work in progress. There will be more updates in the coming weeks and months.

3) The World Of AI Content & How It Can Impact SEO

There’s been plenty of talk about AI (artificial intelligence) content and the power of AI Writer Software to save time. There have been questions about whether the content written by AI software is any good and whether we should worry about this.

Let’s remember that Google has always been on the search for high-quality, well-researched content that is intended for the user first and foremost. This will always remain the case.

Although AI content is generated from sourcing the web, it’s also important to remember that a large amount of content is not professionally written or reliable. As a result, this leads to open-ended questions as to how trustworthy AI content is.

Here Are The Potential Pitfalls Of AI Content That Conflict With Google’s Guidelines

1) Content developed by a machine lacks first-hand experience and human emotion. Google is looking for content based on Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (Google E-A-T).

2) The accuracy of technical-related subjects generated from AI sources is questionable. As mentioned previously, Google insists on first-hand experience, and for technical topics such as “cloud computing” or “medical-related content”, it’s vitally important to generate content from specialists in the field to gain creditability. Google’s search engine must deliver credible results.

3) AI Content isn’t 100% accurate in terms of referencing and where it gets its information. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to do your research. Google is looking for trustworthy content.

In summary, AI content may be useful for generating ideas. However, Google focuses on providing users of its search engine high-quality content.

Let’s not forget that Google is so sophisticated in detecting patterns that are intended to trick and outsmart the “algorithm”. So with the latest Google Helpful Content update in mind, it’s essential to work within Google’s Guidelines.

At Click Intelligence, we also offer well-researched professional content writing services that comply with Google’s guidelines. Our professional writing services help clients save time and increase their online visibility and Google ranking potential.

There you have it; there are three main takeaways from this October’s Brighton SEO conference. If you missed the event in person, don’t worry, as you can always catch up with the online edition at: https://october2022.brightonseo.com.