No fewer than 360 minutes did I spend scribbling on the topic of just about anything, including:

• Hiring sustainably
• Keyword research
• Content strategy
• Causal inference
• Google’s latest trickery…
• …and a whole lot more.

You can imagine that this makes for quite a few notes. So I thought it might be fun to present the takeaways instead, with a few tips for your presentation skills.

Accepting an award? Sharing expertise? Pitching to a client? Learn from the pros with these little presentation gems, courtesy of BrightonSEO 2021’s speakers.

1. Take it slow…for the drama

This is an interesting one to start with, as I’m told Searchmetrics CEO Matthew Colebourne was drafted in at the last minute. Regardless, he smashed it with his talk on search data for decision-making.

Some sobering stats in this talk. Nine in 10 of us think that data-driven decision-making is important, but just 58 per cent practise it. How did Matthew deliver these facts? Slowly. With dramatic pauses in the right place. Time for it to sink in. (And sober us up.)

2. Give it a killer introduction

I know what you’re thinking. This should have been point #1, right? It’s probably best to take a breath before leaping into the content though. Paige Hobart, Head of SEO at ROAST, let us know exactly what we were in for with her keyword research methods. Extraction. Metrics. Expansion. Optimisation. Boom.

Likewise, she nailed that structure by reiterating her key points. We saw a similar technique with Lucy Alice Dodds’ talk on content strategy – always referring back to that data-driven, holistic and actionable approach.

Hammer home that message to help them make notes…and stick in their minds.

3. Make your opinions known

It’s a rare skill to impart wisdom and make people laugh all at once. Tom Capper did it with aplomb.

Rather than succumbing to the demands of Google’s Core Web Vitals update, the Senior Search Scientist at Moz gave us his opinions on it – warts and all. The result? Hilarious real-life examples of just where Google has cocked up.

Only a true expert can speak with such conviction while the rest of us mere mortals cower behind the traffic lights. Thank you for your opinion, Tom!

4. Tell your stories

If you want to make a point, I’m more inclined to believe you if you have the personal experience to back it up. Bethan Vincent’s talk on hiring sustainably hit us right in the feels when she told us about her first day on the job in hospitality.

We’ve all fretted over the customer who wanted a jug of milk, Bethan. We all have. Gentle ribbing aside, Bethan’s talk had some eye-opening stats on the benefits of hiring Generation Zs.

It also brought to light the misconceptions about young people “not thinking for themselves”. As Bethan rightly puts it, they’ve had 18 months learning by themselves. They can do it.

5. Introduce a new concept with familiar examples

Jumping into the technical SEO talks with both feet was always going to be a giant mindf*ck, but my goodness. Causal inference, query classification, intent mining…I only came for the beach!

Only, Dateme Tubotamuno’s talk on causal inference and search intent didn’t make my head explode. Why? Because he illustrated every new concept with an everyday example. Case in point: he classified queries using the Brighton Centre as a search term. “Where is the Brighton Centre?” is a position query; “hotels near Brighton Centre” is a location-based query, and so on.

Lots of new words…brain remains intact and does not resemble Carol Vorderman, post-spontaneous combustion. Knowledge acquired.

6. Look at it from a different angle

We couldn’t get this far without mentioning Rise at Seven, surely. In his talk on bringing search, brand, PR and social together, Stephen Kenwright presented an interesting idea:

TV advertising helps search engine rankings.

Ridiculous, right? Wrong. Like Dateme, he used real-life examples, citing a campaign for Evans Halshaw. Rather amusingly, his teams managed to get Evans Halshaw ranking for “we buy any car” thanks to a TV ad script. In SEO terms, the TV campaign built up entities, which drove search.

“Most SEOs focus on facilitators – things that allow people to search. But we forget about drivers – the things that inspire us to take action in the first place.” If you’re running an SEO campaign, don’t forget your PR, social media and influencer marketing.

And if you’re doing a presentation…wow them with an alternative viewpoint.

7. Use your own data

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Your war stories will back up your point and so will your data. You can imagine my delight when Dimitris Drakatos, SEO & ASO Lead at Peanut App, shared his campaign data. (Did I mention we contributed a tasty chunk of the content for this campaign?)

Dimitris shared his insights on publishing velocity, extolling the virtues of finding writers who understand SEO and creating content clusters. The results? A massive leap from 200 organic entrances a month to 785,000. (Did we mention that was down to content? Yeah?)

Finally…a word on presentation from yours truly

It would be remiss of me not to say a huge thank you to Kelvin and co. for giving us the opportunity to present at BrightonSEO. We took to the stage at MeasureFest to talk about weighting systems for making decisions. It wasn’t the main stage but it was a chance to dip our toes in – hopefully in prep for a talk at the main event next year.

My two cents? “Always start with a joke.” OK, that’s David Brent, but the Chandler Bing in me can’t help it. I’d also argue that meeting the audience’s gaze every once in a while helps. And don’t be too scripted, for goodness’ sake. This is a presentation, not Henry V.

After two years, it was a privilege to attend BrightonSEO once again. It was also a revelation in how far we’ve come.

For starters, it’s we now, not me (say hi to Craig!). And I realised that rather than wandering around trying to chase new people, I was speaking to people I already knew. Transcending the Twitterverse and speaking in real life. One person even came up to me and told me she loved what I do on Twitter. Can you IMAGINE?

But enough gushing. If you’ve learnt even a tenth of what I learned at this year’s BrightonSEO, then it’s been worth your time.

Until next year…see you on the beach.

The post Nailing Your Presentation Skills…as Told by BrightonSEO appeared first on Katie Lingo.

As it turns out, people fly in from all over the world to attend. The event tagline is “a long way from a room above a pub”. That’s an understatement. I’ve seen shorter queues for world-famous rockstars’ gigs. Suffice to say, when I strutted up at 9:50, there was no way I was making the 10am talk.

“Let AI be your friend”

Nil desperandum. Despite missing The Cash-Strapped Marketer’s Guide to SEO, I managed to catch the tail-end of Sal Mohammed’s talk on the future of search. Why AI Will Be a Key Part of Your Team, Not a Replacement featured some pretty eye-opening statistics.

For example, we produce 2.5 exabytes of data every day. (That’s 2.5 quillion bytes – the equivalent of all the words ever spoken.) How can we use data to our advantage when we can’t process it? This is where, Mohammed says, we should let AI be our friend. He cited Netflix and 5G as prime examples. We can get the most from AI by using our creative minds to complement its incredible processing power.

Impostor Syndrome

Over in the links and outreach showcase, I found out more about the best tools for reactive PR. Will Dobson taught us about newsjacking and content planning, citing ONS, BBC Live and even Piers Morgan as worthwhile sources.

You can go to bed an expert and wake up a novice.

Afterward, I was heartened to discover the Wellbeing and Inclusion stage. There, Amy McManus delivered her talk on battling burnout and Impostor Syndrome in digital. McManus hit us with pretty some sobering thoughts: truths that only become apparent when we consider how volatile this industry is.

Working in digital is as bad for mental health as medicine and law. Why? As McManus put it, “you can go to bed an expert and wake up a novice”. Digital is one of the most erratic industries out there, not to mention the dangers to our health, from screen time to unattainable social media perfection. She encouraged us to share our personal “impostor stories” with one another and assured us that there was no judgement.

“F**k me Doris – an exercise in content strategy

After a lunchbreak trip to the 90s (thank you retro gaming station), it was time to swot up on content strategy. Alex Jones set the bar with his talk on supporting content. He extolled the virtues of propping up your main content piece with other assets, from interviews to features, case studies and video.

Perhaps the best takeaway from this one was his focus on what journalists want. Quite simply, they want a story that causes readers to exclaim “fuck me Doris”, as above. In English, that’s unique data, case studies, exclusives and human-interest stories.

The golden circle

Up next were Lukasz Zelezny’s insights into gap analyses with SEO. He talked us through the SEO search volume “golden circle” – why, what and how. “How” is the stand-out interrogative when it comes to search volume. He outlined his detailed strategy of analysing competitors, narrowing keywords by search volume and keyword difficulty, then finalising with SEMRush’s Keyword Magic tool.

“Build a brand that transcends Google”

Sam Marsden concluded with his talk on profitable content strategies. Despite the conference theme, he advised us to go beyond rankings when building a brand. Rankings are only meaningful to SEOs – instead we should look at brand loyalty, and how we can help people with resources. He suggested:

• Building awareness with a distinctive voice on social
• Educating others with whitepapers and external collaborations
• Training and hosting events
• Providing content to help make decisions
• Adding personal touches like client gifts to build loyalty.

Befriending journalists with Google’s AI

I chose link building and outreach for my penultimate talks, starting with Alex Cassidy’s tips on emailing journalists. He advised using subject lines that could be headlines. Think capitalised words for real tabloid emphasis.

Likewise, he warned us to cut out the fluff. We need to focus on stats, quotes and unique angles. When we pitch, we should think of a journalist’s KPIs, such as clicks, shares and comments. A piece on the Royal Family’s pet names, for example, was a unique angle with instant shareability.

Extracting entities

Next up was perhaps the most fascinating talk of the day. Ross Tavendale and Jack Merlin Bruce showed us how they “hacked Google’s AI” to analyse journalists. They identified journalists’ major “entities” – i.e. the topics they discuss most frequently – and encouraged us to diversify our pitches.

Many modern-day journalists are freelancers, writing about a number of topics. For that reason, we shouldn’t pigeonhole them. Tavendale and Merlin Bruce ran thousands of journalists’ stories through Google Cloud, using Gorkana’s RSS feed to analyse the biggest headlines. Next, they compared their press releases to the results and determined which journalists would most likely accept their pitch. Who said AI wasn’t our friend?

“Where the f**k was YouTube with Greensleeves?”

I must admit, I didn’t know what to expect with the keynote. “Simple is Smart, Complicated is Stupid” is a pretty cryptic title.

What ensued was a hilarious expert account of all the mistakes advertisers have made over the years. Keynote Dave Trott somehow managed to take the obvious and make it incredibly engaging. Not to mention hilarious.

He warned that marketers are often so caught up in trying to sound clever, they alienate their customers. Technology has changed, but people have not. In perhaps the simplest example, he showed a video of an ice cream man playing Greensleeves. “That was written 500 years ago and it went viral. Where the fuck was YouTube?”

Despite the laughs, Trott offered some very straight-talking insights. There are three things we need as marketers: impact, communication and persuasion. Simple.

The Richmond Running Festival

Those of you connected with me on LinkedIn might have heard me mention something a few million times. My networking at BrightonSEO was a reasonably sober affair thanks to the Richmond Marathon taking place two days later.

If you want to run Richmond, be warned, it’s nothing like the big events you’re used to. This year, 43,000 runners took to London. In Richmond, there were 978.

This probably explains why go meant GO – no time waiting around in pens. No time to warm up. Just go. This turned into a very leisurely 26.2 miles along the River Thames with the crowds quickly dispersing. It was almost like a Sunday morning run. You know, one of those four-hour, I-wish-I-was-dead runs.

A personal best (4:48) rounded off the perfect weekend. Big talks, beach walks, log flumes and Lucozade. I’m certainly sold on BrightonSEO.

Until April, folks.

View the slides from BrightonSEO here.

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