Last week I spent a few days in one of my favourite places for my first BrightonSEO conference. Along with other team members, I made the 250-mile journey across the country, in the hopes of finding fish & chips and gaining some SEO insights.
As a Digital Content Executive, I had the pick of the litter when it came to the talks and panels, and I went to quite the range. I left feeling very impressed by how actionable and engaging the discussions were (and still dreaming of the Donatello’s Tiramisu).
If you couldn’t make it to the conference or found yourself torn between conflicting talks, this blog is for you. I’ll be summarising my standout talks and sharing the top takeaways and highlights. Read on for a comprehensive overview of my most impactful sessions from BrightonSEO.
I kicked off my first day bright and early with two talks on relevancy in Digital PR….
Liv Day – How To Find The Relevance Gap
Liv opened the conference by highlighting the crucial role relevance plays in a site’s link profile. She offered a clear explanation of why relevancy is a metric we simply can’t afford to neglect. Through a compelling case study, she demonstrated the impact of irrelevant backlinks on traffic and rankings. These links, she explained can contort the topicality of a website, potentially causing search engines to misinterpret the site’s focus.
She then shared her process for identifying and bridging the relevancy gap between a site’s themes and its backlink profile. Her team employs tools like IBM Watson’s natural language processor to identify relevant concepts, analysing both the site and the linking pages to check for alignment.
Liv’s talk underscored the importance of maintaining a relevant backlink profile, and thinking carefully about the subject of your campaigns. Today, shoehorning a connection can do more harm than good but the good news is, there are new tools being developed every day to help us guarantee topical alignment.
Sophie Coley – Audience-centric Planning and Creative Personas: a strategic approach to relevancy
Sophie then followed up with a different, but equally compelling angle on link relevancy. Drawing from her journalism background, she advocated for a persona-driven approach to help brands create more resonant content.
She recommended using platforms like Reddit or TikTok to understand audience pain points, or simply playing around with seed phrases in an incognito browser (e.g. ‘travel insurance when… ‘, ‘travel insurance for…’ etc.’
Sophie then used this travel insurance example to outline a framework for using AI tools like Perplexity to assist with ideation of relevant content ideas. Upon providing a detailed prompt, the tool generated five hypothetical persona examples, complete with first-person statements explaining their experience shopping for travel insurance (including motivating factors, challenges faced etc.)
It became evident that considering these tangible personas makes it significantly easier to ideate creative yet relevant campaigns. As Sophie put it: ‘Having broad boundaries in place makes ideation a lot easier’.
Yasmin Birchall – The Digital Generation is Here: why you’re about to overhaul your online strategy
Later in the morning, Yasmin drew our attention to Gen Z, how they are changing search, and how we can adapt accordingly. She highlighted that we’re now living in a new age of people who’ve never lived without technology at their fingertips – and that this generation now makes up 15% of our population! As a result, we need a holistic, multi-touch approach to guarantee engagement. Some key points I took away were:
–>Users are diversifying away from Google, now it’s TikTok that the new generations are looking to first when considering where to go for dinner, or when planning their holiday agenda.
–>Gen Z prioritise authenticity and individuality – they’ll respond well to tailored content, rather than being ‘creeped out’ by how well the ads are aligned with their online behaviour.
–>Price is as, if not more, important than sustainability – Yasmin drew on a Mintel survey to highlight that for 51% of Gen Z, managing their finances is their biggest priority.
Yasmin’s insights provided a valuable glimpse into the minds of Gen Z consumers and reminded us not to get comfortable with our strategies. Brands and marketers must evolve their approaches to meet the changing expectations of our younger audiences.
Nathan Height – Diversifying Beyond Google
Nathan’s talk similarly discussed how search is changing, but focusing on the search engine landscape. Whilst Google still undeniably dominates the market, we’re seeing a greater number of competitors than ever before. He even highlighted that Google and OpenAI themselves are turning to Reddit to inform their generation of information.
So, what can SEOs do to cater for these changes? Nathan shared some practical advice, including the importance of creating content for conversational long-tail queries. He pointed out some good ways to build an understanding of these specific searches (Quora, Reddit, TikTok keyword insights etc.) that I’ll be factoring into my keyword research going forwards.
This talk offered a persuasive case for SEOs to broaden their horizons beyond Google. My overall takeaway was the importance of diverse content creation and understanding user intent across multiple platforms. The online search scene is increasingly fragmented and it’s important to stay ahead.
Carla Dobson-Elliot – Is SEO killing curiosity
How many times a day do you find yourself reflexively reaching for your preferred search engine when a question pops into your head? For many of us, this habit has become all too frequent. Carla opened her talk with the now-familiar scenario of “going down an online rabbit hole”, highlighting how search engines have become the go-to source for satisfying our curiosity.
Carla emphasised that brands need to tap into this curiosity as well, rather than letting search engines monopolise our inquisitiveness. She argued that traditional demographics like age and gender are no longer sufficient for understanding audiences. Instead, she proposed a new framework based on “curiosity cohorts” – five distinct modes by which people search for and consume information and advertisements.
These cohorts should inform content strategy. For example, an “exhilaration hunter” might be drawn to Uber’s random promotion spinner, while a “novelty seeker” could find a Spotify playlist as a call-to-action more appealing. Carla urged marketers to identify their audience’s curiosity type and create fresh, engaging content tailored to these preferences.
I found this a really innovative approach to content creation, and will definitely be taking Carla’s curiosity quiz to discover which category I fall into.
Chris Meabe – 100% Evergreen Articles To Survive Search Updates
Now, while this title sounds a bit too good to be true, Chris delivered a practical guide for creating content resilient to algorithm changes. By analysing a set of evergreen articles, he’d uncovered several suprising commonalities:
📌Most articles began with ‘what is’, or at least opened by defining key terms
📌Introductions typically ranged from 100-150 words, with overall word counts between 1,200 and 3,000.
📌The number of backlinks was less crucial than internal links. Successful articles contained at least 10 outbound links to authoritative sources, often citing statistics.
📌Total word count mattered less than the depth and quality of information provided.
📌Lastly, Chris cautioned that while these articles were evergreen, they were not just left to their own devices, but were refreshed annually to maintain relevance.
📌This was a super actionable talk, giving me some clear Do’s and Dont’s to keep in mind when content-writing.
Sabine ljunggren – How To Maximise Your Search Visibility On Social Media
The final track I attended before sadly bidding Brighton farewell focused on social media, beginning with Sabine’s guide to maximising visibility on social.
Continuing a recurring theme, she emphasised TikTok’s emerging role as a new search engine. She cited a 2024 Adobe survey revealing that “new recipes” and “DIY tips” are among the most searched keywords on the platform. A particularly striking statistic showed that over 90% of TikTok users use the search function within 30 seconds of opening the app. So, if you’re not capitalising on this evolution of search behaviour, you’re missing out on some hefty search volume.
To capitalise on this trend and increase brand visibility, Sabine offered a few key tips:
- Prioritise creating optimised content that will improve click-through rate and maximise the time users are spending on the platform.
- Implement ‘pattern interrupts’ – unexpected frames or different camera angles.
- Develop ‘comment-friendly content’ that encourages interaction and debate in the comment section.
In summary
If I was to distil everything I learnt from the conference, the overarching themes were:
💡Understanding your target audience is more important than ever, and go beyond basic demographics
💡Like it or not, TikTok has evolved to be a significant search platform and ignoring it potentially could mean missing out on engagement opportunities
💡The quality and relevance of your links matter more than quantity. Irrelevant or low-quality links can potentially harm your SEO efforts more than they help.
Need a hand with your performance marketing strategy? Whether it’s SEO, link-building, or paid advertising that you’re looking to enhance, we’ve got you covered.
Cedarwood Digital are an award-winning digital marketing agency, based in Manchester but working with SMEs and large multinationals internationally. Get in touch today to chat about how we can improve your online visibility.
