You’re listening to Digital Drop, our monthly roundup of digital trends to keep you and your digital up to date.

Hi everybody, welcome to Digital Drop. It’s Gavin here and Jack. Do you want to say hello Jack? Hi everyone.

So this month, what’s happening in digital? Well last, when we go Jack? The 7th of October we went to Brighton SEO. It was your baby, wasn’t really? You said we should go. Yeah. It’s a big event, we’ve got a go there and it didn’t really… didn’t disappoint. Didn’t disappoint at all, did it? No.

So first of all, Brighton itself – lovely! Never been before really, really nice. You have been before. It’s a lovely place to go and the seafront, particularly nice. We were so lucky with the weather, it was a bit windy, but generally very nice. Places to eat, where did we eat out? We went, on the Wednesday, Fatto a Mano. That was lovely. We also went to Burgerz ‘n’ Bangerz! Yeah or Bangerz ‘n’ Burgerz? One of the two. That was really cool and places to shop, loads of shops!

Plenty of pubs. Lots of pubs, not that we went to the pubs. No. We did go to one pub. It was an unreal pub. Yeah and Brighton, what a great, great place. Yeah lovely. I imagine it’s going be very nice as it gets towards November as well with Christmas shopping and things like that.

So yeah, Brighton. We’re going to just share with you some of the interesting bits that we found when we were there, from the sessions.

Okay, so first up. We would like to sort of share some of the info we learned from the “How to love G4” session with Krista Seiden. Now there was a lot of sessions during Brighton SEO. It has like the biggest gathering of SEO experts in the world, isn’t it? Yeah. There was people from America, from Denmark, about 40 countries. It was massive.

So, there’s a lot to take in and obviously we have to be selective on which sessions we went to, and which ones we saw. So sometimes we split up, me and Jack did, to go and see different ones but this one we both decided we wanted to go and see and it didn’t disappoint.

So Krista Seiden is really engaging, someone I’ve been listening to on YouTube for quite a while. While she was at Google and now as a digital consultant and she was, she was really engaging and she did show us some parts of G4 that we’ve not explored before. Yeah she provided a really good insight into what GA4 is going to be and I suppose to give some backdrop on what GA4 is.

So currently we have Universal Analytics that tracks kind of website performance which Google have decided in all their wisdom to… archive, get rid of from July next year.

So GA4 is the new way of tracking your website and like you say, Krista went into some really good depth. It was exciting and she, well, the main thing was she showed us with real data. She was showing actually quite a bit of her own website. Some of it, how she works through tracking clients through from emailers into podcasts and it really did show how the user intent and engagement and GA4, such as like first click attribution, not last click, is actually going to help us do our jobs better Yeah. And you know, show clients lots of measurable statistics and proof points in way more detail. And I really liked how she was showing us how to customise things, which is the big thing is, it’s a shift, isn’t it? Going from Universal Analytics to GA4. Not everyone is comfortable with it. No, I think when it was announced everyone… No one likes change. No one likes change. So when it was announced it was probably difficult for SEOs to get their head around and digital marketing.

But, I think with more and more information that comes out about it, it shows that it’s going to be really good – especially for the customer reporting. Yeah. And that is what Josh was saying, wasn’t it? Josh did a GA4 master class in September before we went to Brighton, and he was really engaged with it and he’s been actually deploying it for our clients and yeah, making sure we’re gathering that data now rather than waiting until July next year.

So yeah, GA4 I think we’re going to have some really good results, dashboards, information and how we can show clients how users are engaging with their websites in way more detail and that’s for us to learn and show value back to the client.

And speaking of learning, while we were in Brighton we learned a brand new acronym, EAT or E-A-T. Jack, what does it stand for? It stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness. So essentially, it’s helpful content that helps the users because it explains kind of specifics but it also helps Google and other search engines to see that your page is relevant to what you’re talking about and increase your rankings. Yep. So that’s got to be a respected website with good domain authority. It’s got to be created by an expert, It’s got to contain accurate information. And also, why we keep telling everybody, it’s got to be updated regularly.

Content is going to be king over the next few years with GA4 and helpful content, and helping build up that authority on your website.

Okay, like Match of the Day let’s talk highlights. I’ll be Gary, you be Alan. Gav, what were your highlights? Okay, first off. It’s Greg Gifford, Vice President of Search Research Lab. Amazing energy and passion, and loads of best practice and tips that we’re ready to bring straight back and apply to our business from the self-titled local SEO nerd.

My personal highlight was the content management talk where they spoke about how to optimise your website to make the content meaningful.

Essentially, they gave me a really good three word mantra to live by; keep, redirect and kill. So if you’re looking at improving your website or developing a new website, you need to look at pages that have traffic that you can keep, that don’t have traffic but maybe could one day, redirect them and anything that doesn’t bring any traffic, kill them off. That is it. And don’t forget we also saw that live podcast ‘Search Off the Record’ which has over 1 million downloads. That was amazing to see as well.

This has been Digital Drop. We’ll see you in the next one.