This was my first “proper” visit to Brighton SEO. I attended an AHREFS networking event on the eve of last year's (2024) October conference, but this year I felt it was essential for my team and I to attend.
More has changed in SEO over the last 12 months than across the last 12 years. The discipline is now more complex than ever before, requiring increased levels of knowledge and professionalism.
If you weren’t there, don’t worry! In this blog, I’ll summarise my key takeaways from the show.
Link building & PR in SEO
My morning sessions started with talks about link building and PR.
Abi Bennetts took us through her tactics for building backlinks to commercial pages using PR tactics.
Katie Storey gave us a masterclass in Newsjacking as an SEO tactic for building links. This involves reactive PR and being prepared to think quickly, like a journalist.
One of the most interesting talks of the day came from a PR agency we work alongside;
Magenta’s Greg Bortkiewicz and Tanya Kant discussed “Cheat GPT” Generative text AI use in UK PR and communications.
They have conducted extensive research on AI use at PR and marketing agencies (including JL Creative). They highlighted the need for more transparency, more trust, and ethical use of AI. Greg made the case for the creation of AI guidelines and training.
It was the only discussion around sustainability, something we are also passionate about. Asking Chat GPT something costs 60-200 times more carbon than a regular Google search.
Create fake experts controversy
I heard this on the main stage and at a talk about Ai strategy. It has quickly become a flashpoint on Linkedin.
Consider the fact that at the same show there were discussions about the ethical use of AI and setting guidelines for proper, safe use.
The idea that SEO’s are going to start creating fake experts is concerning and feels pretty unethical to me.
SEO and content efficiency
My first visit of the day to Arena 1 was for a set of talks I found to be some of the most useful of the day.
Mindset-based targeting - achieving 5x more with 5x less
Sarah Pokorna focused on mindset-based targeting. She explained the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, and how to create better content by tailoring your message to these psychographics.
There were some interesting takeaways here:
Demographic targeting doesn’t work
Fixed = Born with intelligence, tend to dislike feedback and are jealous of success
Growth = Learn intelligence, love a challenge, have a passion for learning and going on a journey
Use LLM’s to analyse fixed vs growth mindset language
Fixed vs Growth mindset messaging should factor into A/B testing
There is also the dual mindset (a mixture of both) to consider.
Look up Carol Dweck for more information on the subject of mindset.
Using content clusters for human-centric conversions
In this session, we had a useful reminder about the power of content pillars and clusters.
Content pillars, or cornerstone content, can still provide businesses with huge wins over time. The problem, as was discussed, is, it is hard. The resources and buy-in required to do it properly ring true and all too often, content ends up in the blog when it could be so much more.
The key to successful cornerstone content is to understand exactly what your audience is looking for, why they are looking for it and what stage of the journey they are at.
I like the idea of using an empathy map to review what your audience says, thinks, does and feels when they see your content.
Does Google AI think your content is helpful?
JL Creative has already been doing a lot of work on this behind the scenes, so this was an affirming presentation.
Firstly, I think it is important to highlight a couple of things from this session:
There is no such thing as AI - We're still dealing with large language models, not true artificial intelligence.
Google has always been a machine learning tool. LLM is just a natural extension of machine learning
SERP is changing but nobody knows where it's going to end up so there is little to no point in speculating
Brighton SEO proved to me that we’re probably all a bit guilty of overthinking AI.
We still need to prepare and evolve however. One thing we can do now is to harness the power of Gemini, understand the way it crawls your site, create a scoring system, and make improvements based on analysis.
We will be implementing this as soon as possible.
Making an impact
After a spot of lunch along the sunny seafront, fending off seagulls, we were ready for the afternoon sessions.
SEO and CRO were the first topics.
I completely agree that SEOs are no longer just SEOs. That doesn’t mean diluting the skill set, it just means paying attention to more than just generating traffic.
Linkless search is increasing, AI overviews now account for around 37% of all searches and 60% of all searches are estimated to be zero click.
That means when they get to your site you need to be looking at engagement metrics and optimising for conversions.
James Perrott explained the concept of Search Experience Optimisation (SXO) and why its important to focus on making every session from SEO count.
SEO data
Screaming Frog’s Oliver Brett did a fine job of teaching us how to avoid embarrassment when discussing SEO metrics.
We’ve now moved into a world of uncertainty, in so many ways, particularly with data.
GA4 is a mess, as we know, but we took away some useful nuggets of information like tweaking the default engagement rate setting and visualising data for presentations.
I like the concept of telling stories in reports. Simple tips but useful nonetheless.
Leveraging competitor research to accelerate success
Possibly my favourite talk of the day gave us a practical example of how to run basic competitor research in a 1 hour time frame.
We do competitor research all the time but do we do it as well as Emily Barrington?
She showed us how to reverse engineer a competitor's SEO strategy using AHREFs and AI to filter the data quickly.
Super useful and we’ll be actioning quarterly spy sessions for our clients very soon.
Query counting for SEO
Last but not least one of my favourite SEO experts on Linkedin, Daniel Foley Carter, explained query counting, showcased on his tool, SEO Stack.
It was great to be in the room to hear him go through his presentation.
Query counting is a great way to show client's long-term progress on SEO projects when initial results may not be as obvious.
By monitoring the number of queries a page ranks for, you can get an idea of how valuable Google thinks the page is.
Pages that are set to increase in value, should start to see queries increasing over time. Likewise, devaluation (when queries start to decrease) shows Google no longer perceives the content as valuable. This could be down to Algorithm changes or something else. It can be this first sign that you need to take action.
I also like Dan's attitude to honesty where SEO is concerned, setting realistic expectations is something we should all do.
Conclusion - The best conference I have attended
Brighton SEO is a melting pot of ideas and knowledge.
It is by far the best, most informative show I have attended in my career. The atmosphere is great and as a learning experience, I don’t think it can be topped.
For agencies I believe it is essential to attend, particular when there are so many changes happening in search right now. Register here.
