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WTSFest 2025

Five key SEO takeaways to elevate your strategy.

Our Senior Digital Expert, Gracia Novoa, travelled to London for the WTSFest 2025 conference, hosted by Women in Tech SEO, to absorb insights from some of the industry’s most respected professionals. Below are some of the key takeaways she brought back to implement with the team this year.

SEO is an ever-evolving field where hands-on experience provides only a portion of the knowledge required to excel. Engaging with other professionals, exchanging ideas, and learning from leading experts can significantly enhance a team’s ability to perform at its best.

WTSFest delivered on this front, offering thought-provoking sessions that will help shape more efficient, holistic, and results-driven SEO strategies.

 

The danger of tunnel vision

Website copy is not all about SEO or all about tone of voice, a successful experience needs to consider a multitude of factors, all focused on better serving users. Depending on the intent of the page and the commercial relevance of it, the inclusion of keywords can hold more importance than in others. Naturally integrating keywords to align with natural language will have a bigger impact in getting your message across to users.

SEOs need to understand that it’s better to choose those pages where SEO research and keywords hold a higher relevance, and let all other factors guide the experience where brand needs to hold protagonism, then you will start driving organic traffic at the right stages of the funnel and use your mapped users’ journey to help with conversion.

At Fox Agency, we like to align our planning stages to this, from our keyword research to the subsequent mapping and briefing we do, we evaluate the importance of SEO across money or brand pages to allow our copywriters to get a better idea of what needs to be done.

Amplifying organic traffic opportunities through faceted navigation

A personalized experience goes beyond a few tokens on an email, it’s now set to inform our entire digital experience, and search is a big part of it. Especially if you have an e-commerce site, personalizing your users’ experience through faceted navigation can propel your site’s visibility and boost organic traffic exponentially, whilst better aligning to the intent of their search.

Think of this example: you’re a buying manager at a healthcare facility and are looking for a new provider of gloves. Your search is likely going to be highly specific, specifying the material, safety standards or even color of the gloves you’re looking for. This is where a faceted navigation comes in and serves those users looking for ‘medical-grade nitrile yellow gloves’ with a dedicated page, rather than having them land on a generic ‘hospital gloves’ page where they need to navigate and use filters.

Keep in mind that 61% of users will go to another site if they don’t find what they want within 5 seconds. So, if there is value in creating a facet for products of specific characteristics, get hands-on and expect to see improved results.

Implementing a faceted navigation can be challenging from a technical perspective, but with the right planning and research, handling this process can be made more seamless. Naomi Francis-Parker from Charlotte Tilbury Beauty gave the following tips for deployment:

  • Plan within the context of the existing categories on your site.
  • Existing pages should remain part of your PLP, but facets can be added as dedicated pages or under existing facets. Consider user navigation and consult with developers.
  • Weigh in the value that the pages will add. If there is no significant volume around them, you’re better utilizing your budget on other activities.

AI can and should be used, responsibly

At this stage, almost every SEO out there is using AI to a certain degree for their work. We get it, it’s saving us loads of time every day and, if we use the right prompts, can get amazing outputs to inform our strategies.

However, there is a degree of understanding around how Large language Learning Models (LLMs) work that is needed to ensure that we use these tools responsibly to avoid bias, protect our client’s data and ensure the environmental impact is minimized.

Emina Demiri from Vixen Digital recommended looking into Cornell University transformer explainer to understand these in more depth, but highlighted the importance of being able to adjust the temperature of learning models, ensuring privacy protection for our clients and considering ethical elements such as avoidance of harm and bias in our responses.

Once all of that’s covered, there were some great examples around automation opportunities for content brief creation such as supporting with content writing and enhancing on-page SEO by loading helpful resources such as brand guidelines, customer questions or demo notes. These are definitely some learnings I’ll take home and explore until I have positive outputs.

SEO and PPC can win together

It would seem obvious that SEO and Paid Search teams should pursue the same goals and work collaboratively towards them, but it’s often the case that both teams work in silos, using different tools chasing after different KPIs.

As the search landscape evolves so rapidly, it makes sense to have different perspectives and ideas on how you can own space in the SERP through paid and organic efforts.

The solution to this is to take a few steps back and think of a more integrated team approach, thinking of those gaps and additional opportunities where search can become a unified force. These can be thought around collaboration, ways of working and shared tools, with actions such as:

  • Shared keyword research processes
  • Implementing feedback loops
  • Shared A/B test results
  • Regular team check-ins
  • Shared internal chats and task management

These are only some ideas, but auditing the current ways of working can uncover additional areas for seamless and more successful strategies for clients. The end results should see a more efficient budget, a faster journey to growth and conversion, and more dynamic testing.

Drop the SEO lingo and get more executive buy-in

All technical folks understand the struggle, you are so often immersed in data, algorithms and parameters you need to follow you end up forgetting stakeholders may not have the same knowledge as you do, and likely have limited time to understand the technicalities of your request.

The advice from Chase Kreuter (Conductor) really stripped it down to a change in mentality, focusing on building executive trust through education, executive reporting, storytelling and effective communication. Basically, this means remembering to highlight the importance of search to your stakeholders in a concise manner that avoids excessive jargon. The key points here are:

  • Connecting actions to impact – what did you do that caused growth or drops?
  • Focusing on negative trends observed – avoid major issues in the future by targeting them now.
  • Maintaining a point of comparison with benchmarks – Give clients and stakeholders a clear perspective of where your site stands in the industry.
  • Tailoring the metrics and language used – Focus on your stakeholders’ needs and wants to capture their attention with the right metrics and terminology.

 

WTSFest 2025 reinforced that SEO is more than rankings, it’s about delivering meaningful experiences, leveraging AI responsibly, and integrating across digital disciplines.

By applying these insights, we’re optimizing our strategies to drive smarter, more sustainable growth for our clients. Looking forward to seeing you again next year!