I was in Brighton this week for the BrightonSEO fringe event, the PR and Link Building Show. I’ve been coming to BrightonSEO since the second edition more than a decade ago, but not attended in person since 2019, when I trained and spoke here. It was great to be back among the digital PR and search community and it was among the most valuable days I’ve experienced at the show.

Here are some key takeaways:

Google’s new priorities require a shift in tactics

Two key recent Google developments came to the fore: Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust (EEAT) as a quality rater (basically, Google wants to reward first-hand experience of a topic), and the Google Perspectives section on its search results page.

Firstly, let’s look at EEAT. To demonstrate authority on a topic, Lauren Hewitt-Crabb from Blue Array said that brands must:

• Create content that utilises their expertise 
• Showcase their internal experts
• Be relevant and topical, and get involved in the conversation

She included a great example of a pension client. The agency focussed on the rising cost of childcare using research to demonstrate how childcare costs often make it difficult for people to put toward their pension. The campaign gained 80 links for the client, and it even ranked top on Google for ‘pension’. 

Lauren concluded that to succeed at EEAT, brands should:

• Only use expert quotes that add value
• Don’t pretend to know what they don’t know
• Be the first to jump on a trend

Digital PR consultant Abbie Johnson of We Are North cited EEAT as one of her three pillars of reactive SEO, alongside Objectives and Reporting. Successful reactive PR relies on speed, budget and creativity, Abbie said. It’s about joining the relevant audiences quickly. Brands need to tick these three boxes with their content:

• Is it relevant to the target audience?
• Is it a topic the brand has authority to discuss?
• Is it an original angle?

James Hayward-Browne from Bottled Imagination added the “relevance sweet spot” lay at the intersection of “what you want to talk about”, “what journalists want to talk about” and “what the consumer cares about”.

Influencers’ role in EEAT and Google Perspectives

In his talk on search-integrated influencer marketing, Ashley Liddell highlighted that Google is looking to combat the increasing use among consumers to use TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest for search. Google’s new Perspectives search element emulate those influencer-led platforms, so there is an opportunity here for brands to work with creators to help build their search profile.

Liddell underlined that content should inspire, educate and entertain, citing the example of financial app Revolut’s partnership with YouTubers Sidemen, which generated more than 70 million impressions. 

Creativity is more valuable than ever

Given that both Google and journalists want original and engaging content, marketers are tasked with being ever more creative. My favourite talk of the day was Luke Cope’s funny and engaging talk on “how to generate ideas like an AI”. Luke talked the audience through several campaigns end-to-end, citing the data and thinking behind them. These included arguing that you can get better 4G on the moon than in some parts of rural Britain, to customised sneakers (trainers), and even creating a fake footballer to highlight the risks of gambling. All of which created coverage because they were interesting angles.

Finally, I also really enjoyed Zoe Burke’s talk on how to pitch to a journalist, which invited PRs to focus on…

• Personalised pitching
• Pitching before noon
• Summarising the story in 300 words max
• Exclusivity
• Follow-ups

…to stand a better chance of the journalist noticing you among their many hundreds of unread emails.

Thanks again to Kelvin and the BrightonSEO team for another phenomenal show.

The post How to EEAT Well: Summary of the PR and Link Building Show appeared first on Eight Moon Media, B2B Technology Copywriters.

Writing for the Web is an art in itself and there are three key reasons for this:

1) Attention spans are shorter than ever

In an era where a great deal of content is consumed on mobile devices, our attention span has now slumped to less than eight seconds, shorter than that of goldfish.

If that stat is true and you’re still reading, you’re doing well!

2) We have a global audience 

Our content – once consigned to print, radio and TV in designated geographies – is visible everywhere by people with a good level of English. Many of them are potential customers or advocates.

3) Search engines

When people use search engines they use plain English, whether it’s text or voice search.

The enemy of all these three is corporate speak. [Continues]

Kill corporate speak

Corporate speak is becoming less and less relevant.

I wrote an article for PR Week as long ago as 2008 appealing for an end to corporate speak. As a former journalist, I’ve been confounded by the ways businesses have found increasingly complex ways to describe what they do, as if using expansive language actually makes them sound more professional.

In earnest, the reverse is true; many organisations sound the same. They’re all global leaders providing a wide range of innovate business solutions and services.

The problem is that when we go online, we don’t search for ‘innovative business solutions provider’, we look for ‘accountancy software’ or similar plain English with a view to answer our query.

Plus corporate speak is just plain dull. Companies should be optimising more of their content around how they solve business problems rather than pushing what they sell.

As marketing legend Seth Godin said; “If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.”

This is what people want. And increasingly, as Google gets more intuitive, the people get what the people want served up to them.

Writing for the Web is an art

There’s more to writing for the Web than just plain English, of course.

There are two audiences to impress: humans and search engines.

How we break up copy to make it easy to read is key as we increasingly scan content to get what we need or want from an article.

You’ll notice that my sentences are short and that the opening, above the fold gambit that people are most likely to read is bulletised as a list. This is to impress the human audience. They get what they need.

To impress the search engine is also key. This means doing the search engine optimisation (SEO) housekeeping to make sure that search engines can read and index your copy, and deem it relevant and significant to potential searching audiences.

Data is key to success

The only way we can understand how our content is performing is through regular data analysis and iteration. Are people reading our content? When are they dropping off and why might that be? What is their click path? Are they sharing our content?

These are all questions we need to answer if we want to succeed.

We run training sessions on Writing for the Web. If your business is struggling to articulate its offering online, then please contact us.

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