Whenever Wave attends the BrightonSEO conference, it seems to be growing even bigger, and this year was no exception. More attendees, more talks, and more speakers are sharing their knowledge from the SEO world across the globe.
This great conference based in sunny side Brighton is dedicated to digital marketers and offers a fantastic opportunity to learn from experts in the field, expand your network and gain useful tips for business marketing strategy.
Among the many fascinating topics covered during this two-day event, one practical theme stood out – machine learning and AI.
Leveraging AI For SEO
During one of the talks, a presenter asked the audience who uses ChatGPT daily at work, and nearly 90% of people raised their hands. This shows how quickly we adapt artificial intelligence to support our day-to-day job-related activities. It is no wonder because AI can speed up tasks and help automate the processes that improve work efficiency.
Combining AI with different reporting tools allows you to create an SEO audit within a few minutes. This solution is a very effective way of delivering regular SEO updates for clients, especially for large websites with hundreds of pages.
The risks of using AI in content creation
AI can be a helpful tool for creating reports, but it should be used wisely when writing content. While publishing a lot of AI-generated content can help you increase visits in the short term, it may harm your ranking in the long term and risk your website being penalised by Google. When this happens, recovering your ranking will be more challenging and time-consuming.
It’s important to remember that Google prioritises high-quality content, so providing valuable and insightful information is more important than the number of blog articles.
Website migration best practices
This topic grabbed our attention because it relates to many of our clients. Migration can cover many areas, such as content migration, changing domains, moving from HTTP to HTTPS, creating a new design, or changing the entire site.
The SEO manager’s role in website migration is crucial. They need to get involved as soon as possible and prepare a plan to minimise the risk of losing the current ranking on search engines.
These steps also relate to another topic covered in the BrightonSEO conference about content strategy. It is essential to determine which content is relevant for your website, review all pages and check if they generate visits. Consider how you can improve the quality of pages you want to keep that are relevant for the business. Do they need more informative content or a different call to action?
The advice on avoiding pitfalls and preparing for the site migration was very helpful. However, it also stressed the need to test and monitor the website after the new launch.
Measure Fest
Originally, Measure Fest started as a separate event, but it was included as part of the BrightonSEO conference. Here, all talks focus on data, reporting and measurement. It’s the part of the conference where speakers share useful tips for anybody interested in Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager and other analytics tools.
This time, we learned that it is better to measure specific metrics that align with your business objective rather than trying to track and analyse every action on your website.
Interesting tips on data visualisation were also shared, such as using the right colours to prevent misleading interpretations or using patterns, symbols and arrows to highlight trends and discrepancies. Also, adding annotations to the graph can provide a better explanation for those unfamiliar with the data.
Takeaways of SEO for recruitment websites
All the insight gained at the BrightonSEO conference can be applied to Wave’s recruitment website design and build, from designing a website that attracts talent and engages candidates to construct a well-SEO-optimised website which encourages candidates to apply for jobs.
- Use AI to streamline SEO and content audits. For a recruitment website, this can be particularly useful when analysing hundreds of job listings or blog articles.
- Focus on quality content instead of quantity, and be mindful of how much of your content is AI-generated.
- Plan website redesigns or migrations carefully and make sure to include an SEO expert from the beginning.
- Ensure that tracking is implemented from the beginning and make use of an analytics dashboard to measure the success and ROI of their investment in the recruitment website.
