Top Takeaways from brightonSEO October 2024

This month marked one of the highlights of the year for the global search community: brightonSEO. Two days, over 150 talks and 5,000 people – it’s the world’s biggest (and best) SEO conference.

If you attended, you almost definitely came away feeling inspired. But if you didn’t make it this year, here are my top three digital PR takeaways from the event:

It wouldn’t be an SEO conference in 2024 without mentioning AI.

Overall, everyone agrees that Google is still king (no surprises there). But search is going through the biggest transformation since, well, ever.

The explosion of AI and social search might spell the end of the ’10 blue links’, and the anti-trust lawsuits may threaten to impact Google’s monopoly. But honestly, no one really knows. The only certainty right now is that search is about to change. There were plenty of great talks exploring this at brightonSEO, but Nathan Height’s session on diversifying beyond Google was a highlight for me.

As an audience-first agency, we’re big believers in putting your target customers at the centre of your strategy. And it’s great to see the industry starting to align on this.

The shift to audience and people-first SEO was a key theme across so much of the event. In particular, I’d recommend catching up on Sophie Coley’s session on audience personas, Carla Dobson-Elliott’s session on curiosity and Mel Barfield’s session on verbal identity.

At Energy we’re firm believers in earning our links and coverage. And with good reason.

Brand building, E-E-A-T, credibility, audience engagement. Earned media provides all this – alongside the link building SEO benefits. It’s a futureproof, algorithm-proof approach to your PR and marketing.

Despite this, brightonSEO showed that many SEOs are still investing their time and money in tactical, paid link building. And while it might be working for some, it’s not for us. For one, it doesn’t offer the wider brand benefits of digital PR. Plus, the risk of Google penalties is very real.

This is a topic we could talk for hours on (we won’t do that here). But ultimately, we think those still investing in paid link building in 2024 are missing a trick.

• Sophie Coley’s talk on link relevance gaps – ever considered using natural language processing to analyse website content? It’s now on my to-do list!
• Mel Barfield’s talk on verbal identity – getting lost in a sea of beige content? Mel provided real, actionable tips on how to hold on to your humanity.
• Hassan Ud-deen’s talk on branded content – Hassan’s content case study was just brilliant. Why doesn’t all content planning start with insights from from product, sales and customer feedback?
• Will Slater’s session on SEO writing lessons from The Princess Bride – you might not agree with Will’s claims that the Princess Bride is the best film ever made, but you will learn some incredible hacks to improve your copywriting.

If you attended this year and want to catch up, or are just interested in chatting about the event, drop me an email at ben@energypr.co.uk.