Day 2 of BrightonSEO was just as jam packed as Day 1. I have written a few notes from the sessions I attended:

Phil Nottingham – Turning an unloved corporate YouTube
channel into a traffic generation machine
Daniel Morehead – SEO For television: the rise of streaming
Ahmed Khalifa – Cut the crap-tion! – How *real* captions can
take you and your video engagements to the next level

Turning an unloved corporate YouTube channel into a traffic generation machine

Phil Nottingham

Just because you do not understand the process of creating videos that does not mean You should not do it.

Principles of Search Marketing that we have in Google, can be applied to video.

EATE

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trustworthiness
• Experience

Expertise, Google will understand the context of the video.

• E can add another A = Aesthetics, does it look good, does it sound good?
• T – Thumbnail – very important to have this
• WE can expand the EAT principle and it will therefore be EEAATT

Then Phil took us through an example – fake example of Kelvin Newman’s YouTube channel.

YouTube optimise in 6 steps

1. Define channel value proposition (have a clear audience and a problem). SO we are doing Tutorials and Reviews for DIY BIKE Mechanics on YouTube (One channel er audience.
2. Keyword research. And market research (YouTube buddy is good and another one is vidIQ (https://vidiq.com/) – DO not worry about the long tail. Find the topics and ideas for terms
3. Cut, trim and reframe existing videos (first type of content is the serial content. This is something news, reviews, it is repeatable formats). The second type is service (content to capture latent demand – topic oriented) and the third is Spark content (this is to generate demand) (If there are videos that do not meet this is make them unlisted). – shorts (content to advertise other content) – this is clips and trailers.
4. Design new Thumbnails – Did a study of 80m videos. One was the talking head, other product close up, action shot. Text overlap – so make sure bold, high contrast colors, clear focus on logo, large, stylised text. Can measure thumbnail effectiveness by impression click through rate.
5. Include CTAs and External Links – do not put all in your YT. Save some of the good stuff for your website. Wistia channel is v good advert free experience. When you have that set up, then do description links. Then think of adding an overlay. Drive people to your website after. Phil recommends aiiming for 1 to 2% of views to be your visitors.
6. Rank videos in organic search – embed these on your site. Use the schema via JSON-LD. If you want to get key moments, use the Yoast video SEO plugin. Then when measure success, look at GSC. Google likes the video to be v. prominent on the pages.

SEO For television: the rise of streaming

Daniel Morehead

Channel 4 is funded by adverts.  It reaches 78% of the UK audience each month so 47million people in total.

It was called 4 OD but now ONALL4. It is live streaming and on demand. This means there are 1.2 billion views streaming. Now it is moving to Channel 4 (for online streaming).

There are three families of search intent

• Informational – This is for users who are searching for terms such as what time is England vs Italy
• Transactional – This is for users who want to do something. Once you have read that, then may want to watch it.
• Navigational – This is for users who want to go somewhere (eg Euro 2024 – an area of opportunity for live streaming).

When you look at keywords want to rank for, do not focus on “we want to be number 1 all the time”. For example the rugby and football may rank for the same terms.

Build brand page for the football. Once finished broadcasting, then get an episode page. Need the right time of page ranking at the right time.

Now we have the rise of the streaming platforms. Website has to be optimised and quick. So you need to focus on three pillars.

Technical SEO, Content, Off-Page SEO

Now Channel 4 are focusing on getting the video pages ranking.

Technical:

• Look at the correct schema requirements.
• Do not have orphan pages, get rid of them.
• When create a new site map, if you have your content, make sure search engines can access content.
• The technical is the bedrock of SEO. It does not matter how great the content is, it will not perform as better as it could.
• The SERPs will change and change their intent

Cut the crap-tion! – How *real* captions can take you and your video engagements to the next level

Ahmed Khalifa

Auto-captions are CRAPtions so we need to CutTheCRAPtions.  Ahmed gave a great presentation and it was also very funny.mAhmed showed us all these different captions and they are not correct.

What are benefits from using captions?

• There are 1 in 5 people who are deaf.
• 40% of Netlfix global uses use captions all the time.
• Younger people tend to prefer captions
• Captions also provides better user engagement.
• Watch videos on silent
• Improve SEO on Youtube
• Easier to follow if video watching not in your language
• Improves literacy rate
• Learn new languages faster
• Adhere to laws
• Context matters in how you speak (eg someone speaking in Old Norse or another language link Miniose)
• When accuracy really matters – politics, using brand names (also NOT using negatives if it is positive)
• Context matters in sound
• Don’t hide words – even profanities
• Make it readable – Do not make so many lines. Do not highlight as people are speaking, karaoke style
• Translate the content – do not say – speaking non English

Rules of captioning

Progress over perfection – use auto caption as your starting point to then edit it.

How to get your SEO work prioritised in-house

Maddie McCartney

Product Owner SEO Content at Vodafone

Maddie has a lot of experience working in house. For the past 4 years she has been working with Agile. She said that only 5% of companies surveyed say they do not work in agile, so it is the way to work.

Agile and SEO is LOVE

1. What is agile
2. The challenges
3. Tips and tricks

What is agile?

It is based on 4 values:

1. People coming together from different specialisms
2. Something that works – delivering a MVP
3. Working with the customer – test and learn and create different interations.
4. Welcome and adapting to change instead of rigitd long term plans

How does it work?

• Scrum
• Kanban
• SAFE

There is a team and product owner and scrum master

Product owner is the backlog of work

Scrum master – how the work is delivered.

Written on cards

• Epic
• Feature
• User story
• Cards are managed on boards and whole company uses the workflow management
• Work is cadence is 2 weeks sprints.

Starts with sprint planning

• Standups – every day
• Sprint review
• Retro – what worked well, what could be imorovided, what will commit to doing in the next sprint.
• Refinement, prepare the next sprint.

You do not prioritise the backlog

Focus on efficiency and delivery

How can we continue to demonstrate the value?

What are the Benefits?

Customer first

• Takes us out of the SEO team bubble
• Can estimate customer and business value
• Collaboration
• The work goes live

Tips to help make agile work for SEO

• Training – Agile courses
• In-house SEO training
• Market the training
• Align your epics
• Ask for the calendars

Get support from your networking – scrum masters, chapter leads, product managers, ecommerce leads.

Documentation

• There is still a place for documentation – how can SEO help, set this up. Link to the board for updates and collaboration.
• The essential brief – content insights , include metas and headings
• Use templates as well
• Extensions and tools – include this

IF YOU ARE NOT working in agile in agile but others are in the company, then start doing this.

How to create an SEO scoring system that makes things happen

Nati Elimelech

Nati spoke about the SEO scoring system at WIX. This system is used by over 30 product teams at Wix and hundreds of engineers.

Why have a scoring system?

• Many stakeholders and teams
• Knowledge gaps
• Difficult making informed decisions
• Too many meetings

5 Lessons Learned from the system

NOW Used as a tool NOT a report.

Lesson 1

• Keep it simple and actionable !!
• Keep it simple for non SEOs
• Help management make informed decisions.
• Show possible paths to success.
• Wanted a system that is self serve.

Lesson 2

• Picking the right criteria
• Score by page type
• Pick widely applicable criteria
• Limit to 20 – 30 max
• Include basic and advanced principles.

Lesson 3

• Keep the admin simple
• If we created a complete system that need to maintain and it breaks, then we spend too mch time.
• So use Google Sheets for calculations and as data warehouse
• Data Studio as user facing UI

Lesson 4

Create a competitive environment

Lesson 5

• Once they start caring about the scoring system.
• Once it works, need to handle success.
• Do not rock the boat
• Stakeholders crave stability
• Adding/removing criteria
• Sensitivity to scoring changes
• If it is not in the scoring system it won’t get done

The traditional approach to SEO Is broken – Here’s how to prioritise your efforts & drive rapid growth

James Brockbank

How can we help our clients drive the results we want to see? This comes down to prioritisation. Where do I start? When starting with a client maybe have 3 to 6 months to show results.

How do you show things in months?

The deep-dive audit – first approach to SEO is broken

What is the most important thing to do to drive growth. NO two businesses are the same so do not try the cookie cutter approach to SEO.

Prioritisation is what breaks or makes it a success

• We are looking at how to prioritise NOT what to prioritise
• First let us start talking about goals
• Most projects start with forecasts, NOT goals
• We need to start thinking where do we want to be in 6, 9 months. THEN can work backwards.
• When comes to setting goals, start by determining these goals and work back
• Stop asking “what can we achieve” and start by “Here is what we need to achieve”

A proven process for a goal first approach to strategy

• What results do you need to achieve?
• What is your average organic conversation rate?
• How much traffic do you need to achieve these goals?
• How much extra traffic do you need to achieve these goals.
• What are your keyword strategy options?
• What ranking growth do you need to see?
• How do we do that?

SEO Springs: An agile approach to driving rapid growth.

If your recommendations are not being implemented, do not be suprised when you are standing still.

Then James went to a prioritised approach to tactics for quick win results. (add the photo from James) (need his slides did not get this – was a black box)

James’ team fixed the quick wins. Doing the right things at the right time.

A prioritise focus to keyword and topics.

• What topics should be prioritised
  Which keyword rankings should be prioritised
• What actions need to be taken to drive growth across specific areas of focus?
• Regular small wins will lead to big wins over time

The post BrightonSEO April 2023 Write Up Day 2 first appeared on SEO Jo Blogs.

The post BrightonSEO April 2023 Write Up Day 2 appeared first on SEO Jo Blogs.