Brighton SEO 2024: Actionable insights to take away

In SEO, whatever was helping your content rank last year, may not be enough to maintain visibility today. That’s why such an important part of my role is staying up to date – and while newsletters and blog posts certainly cover that on a day to day, there is no comparison to spending two full days sitting in the same room as some of the biggest minds in the industry and learning from them.

My goal was to crack what the future of search might look like and to gather all the tips that can help us improve processes and give our clients better outputs, from research, to reporting and truly communicating the value of our work. The talks I attended surely surpassed those expectations, and while there is so much more rumbling through my mind from it, I’m eager to share some of my biggest takeaways here.

SGE will not kill organic traffic, it will just evolve

Search Generative Experience (SGE) has undergone several changes since it was first announced that users would be able to experiment with it on Search Labs. Speakers Tom Capper, Kapwom Dingis and Marcus Tober talked about their experience using the AI-powered engine and how they think it will shape search experience.

The reality now is that there are plenty of queries you don’t really want or need to visit a site and get an answer – think the weather, time zones or definitions. Google has been diligent at generating snippets that can provide that information as easily as possible for users, and the future seems to be leaning towards an increase in these type of results, especially if AI-chatbots are to be included in the equation.

This leads us to think there will inevitably be a decrease in the organic traffic that the first results in the SERP were getting (predicted at as much as -30%), as users will have the information they need without needing to click anywhere. While this may bring forth fears that SEO might be dying, we don’t think that’s the case. Generative AI will not be able to fulfil the needs of those users with a more informative intent looking for sources.

We haven’t been able to see Google’s finalised product yet, but it is unlikely that it will allow so many sites to be affected drastically, so here are some of the predictions from experts on this matter:

• We should expect a spike in 0-click searches, our ways to measure success will have to change for us to communicate value.
• E-commerce is about to see its prime on Google. The search giant has been prioritising the online shopping experience and will likely bring all the best elements of it to enhance e-commerce.
• Quality content is AI bullet-proof. The SERP, even with SGE, prioritises quality content with high text relevance, backlinks and user experience factors.
• We need to make our answers more specific for relevant queries. 18-24 year olds have reported the highest rates of satisfaction with SGE. We need to work in understanding their needs to provide the right answers for them.

Automation can bring your SEO game a step forward

At this point we’ve all probably had a play with ChatGPT, or even use it on a regular basis to help with work tasks. But in the realm of SEO, I discovered there is so much more this fantastic tool can do for us.

While I often complained about the inaccuracy or the lack of useful information provided by ChatGPT, the tips from Yvie Ansari and Christopher Hofman Laursen helped me understand that what you need is to actually work with AI, rather than let it do all the work for you.

Tasks like keyword research, clustering and mapping tend to consume an important amount of time for us, but ChatGPT has come to save the day. The key? Make sure you collaborate with the tool rather than let it do all the work. Feed the tool some of the information you’ve input manually and let it do the rest of you. Christopher and Yvie suggested giving as much contextual information as possible to get the most from it, such as who your buyer personas are, the business context of your product and potential category opportunities. A great tip from Yvie was to manually categorise 10% of your keywords and let AI do the rest to make sure it understands how you classify them.

Some key tips if you decide to put this into practice:

• Take some inspiration from case studies and suggestions put online, but make sure to change your prompts so you don’t get the same results as other users.
• Remember this is a trial-and-error process. It may take several iterations for the tool to give you the results you want, so have patience and check the outputs thoroughly.

Divergent SEO can be the winning strategy for e-commerce

When working with product categories, reaching the highest positions in the SERP can seem daunting, especially if your client doesn’t have the authority of giant marketplaces like Amazon. However, Victoria Roscow was sure to change my perspective on the matter.

While many businesses rely on paid channels to drive traffic to their e-commerce sites, organic results can also be dominated with the right number of trials and monitoring. Victoria proved the point by showing various examples of SERP results for different product categories and evaluating the elements that were making those pages rank higher. Often, smaller sites with weak core web vitals and less authority score were outperforming bigger players in the industry.

Victoria describes her process as constant research of the results and optimising different elements of pages at a time to determine the winning formula. Some interesting instances noted during her talk are:

• Optimisation of category pages can be a big win for smaller businesses, allowing them to rank for key terms.
• For certain terms, longer text pages can rank higher than traditional product pages.
• Keyword and topical research can be guided by user-centric content, finding ideas in Reddit and other popular forums.

Communicating commercial value is key

Organic search continues to be one of the main sources of commercial revenue for thousands of businesses, however, as SEOs we often fail at sharing our wins in a language that means something for CFOs.

Elliot Haynes and Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries reflected on the importance of accuracy and clearness when dealing with stakeholders, from our working timelines to reporting in a language that makes sense to them. Things to take into consideration going forward if you want to prove your value in SEO are:

• Remove ‘it depends’ from your vocabulary. Use time ranges or refer to past projects to reflect on the effects your actions may have.
• Be clear on your stakeholders and their needs. Find out what success looks like for them and make sure to address it.
• Find out who your reports are going to. Your reports are probably also going to be seen by other people within the company beyond your main point of contact, so find out who they are and what they want to see.
• Make sure to tell a story with your data. Tracking keywords is important but the impact on traffic and ultimately conversions is what brings revenue to our clients.

It’s hard to pick just a few of the things that struck me as valuable from Brighton SEO. You really had to be there to make the most of it, but I’ve come away with so many actionable templates and pieces of advice that will drive growth for our organic search team at Fox Agency. Until next time, Brighton!