Brighton SEO San Diego: Special Report

In this week's Growth Through Content special, I'll give an exclusive review and report on Brighton SEO San Diego.

You'll learn.

• If it was any good.
• Some key learning points.
• Some details about my talk.
• And much more.

Is Brighton SEO San Diego Good?

So, I'm trying hard not to make this an 'SEO-style' article, so I'll just get to the point.

Yes, it was brilliant.

But not for the reasons you think.

Sure, the venue was amazing, both the hotel and the city of San Diego.

And yes, there were brilliant talks (which I'll get to shortly).

However, that's not really what has made this event so memorable.

It's going to sound cliche, but it was the people.

I've attended several conferences over my life. I was curious what would happen when you placed a British conference brand in the States and mixed British agencies with those in the USA and surrounding nations.

But what took place was something I wasn't expecting.

An ocean of friendliness.

People walked up to total strangers to say hello, and everyone was happy to chat.

Our conference badges acted as tribe-like signals to others, and there was a feeling that we were all part of TEAM BRIGHTON SEO.

Brighton SEO San Diego is an event that people can attend independently and quickly make friends.

So, if you are a freelancer who would be nervous about coming to next year's event, don't be.

Equally, many agencies were present, and we all hung out together and had a great time.

My Key Talk Takeaways

Like any event, you'll enjoy talks depending on your role, interests and goals.

And I didn't attend every talk. But here's what stood out for me.

Danny Sullivan

Google's Danny Sullivan gave a hugely engaging presentation which explained the logic of the search engine Goliath.

My key takeaway from this was that we should expect many more updates and focus on people, not trying to chase algorithms.

This sounds a bit basic, but I fully 'got' what he was trying to say.

Google is trying to give the best search experience to users, and we need to focus on users, not trying to 'game' search.

Everything we do must be user-centric.

Ross Hudgens

Ross Hudgens gave a great talk about AI content.

If you know Ross, he's a super sharp marketer, and I loved how he talked about using AI to tackle 'commodity content'.

The general premise is that you use AI to tackle the things that don't make up the main originality.

So, for example, if you're creating an 'ideas' style post with real images, you can use AI to create a few lines of text about the image.

Humans create the images, but we don't need to write the text.

I liked this approach to content creation with AI. It's a simple idea that can have huge upsides in productivity.

Beth Nunnington

Beth Nunnington from Journey Further gave a great talk, which I'll sum up with this great line: 'DON'T BUY LINKS'.

While writing this, I've had 5 messages from link sellers. It's now becoming a real harassment issue in this profession.

Now, I'll say this.

I've purchased links in my career...a lot of links.

And I'd never purchase a single link again.

Why? Risk is one factor. When livelihoods depend on how you undertake your SEO, you don't take risks.

The other reason is even more straightforward.

Performance.

Links you buy generally don't perform anywhere near as well as those you earn.

And in SEO, the speed of results matters.

Beth gave a masterclass on why you don't need to buy links and why earning with digital PR is better.

Britney Muller

Britney Muller gave a superb talk about language models and AI.

But this was the nugget that made my day.

Brand mentions could be the backlinks of the future.

This is something that the team at JBH have been talking about for years. Sure, links are great, we all love them, but brand mentions help to increase brand visibility.

And in an AI work, where language models are trained on information from the most significant sites in the world, it makes sense to be featured there.

Many more talks were great, but it's sunny outside in San Diego, and I haven't got the time to mention them all.

The NEW SEO Metric That Makes SEO 10 X More Valuable

Ok, so to finish off, I'll talk about my presentation.

First, you can download the slides here.

My presentation's main takeaway is that you must focus on Share of Search.

This metric is a brand proxy, but as SEOs, we can also apply this to buyer intent keywords.

Also, I talked about pouring the right fuel into our SEO, which is digital PR.

This is so we can have faster results because faster results mean that our SEO will generate sales faster, increasing business profits.

I'll talk about this more in the future.

But for now, download my slides.

Ok, so that's a wrap on this special edition of Growth Through Content.

I have an 11-hour flight back to the UK.

But brightonSEO San Diego...you've been amazing.

Thanks for reading.

Andrew Holland