BrightonSEO – Big takeaways from 2024

It’s the biggest and best (we think!) search marketing event in the country and Front Door Beth was lucky enough to be there for this year’s BrightonSEO, learning all about the future of search, content marketing and to no one’s surprise… AI.

There were some fantastic speakers at the conference this year, with talks on everything from proving your SEO worth in 2025 to ‘should you start a podcast?’. Lots of takeaways from BrightonSEO 2024, but these are a few of our highlights:

• Businesses are spending a lot of time in optimising content for algorithms and trying to create campaigns in line with the latest social updates, and not enough time on overall brand awareness. Marketing platforms may evolve – we’ve gone from print ads to movies, in-home TV, internet search and eventually to social media, but one thing that always stays the same is the consumer.

No matter where we see an ad, we still prefer to buy from brands that we recognise and trust, and that comes from brand awareness campaigns, multi-channel marketing and top of funnel PR. Business leaders will always want direct conversions and a clear ROI, but if we focus too much on sales, ads, and metrics and not enough on wider brand visibility, we risk losing sight of the bigger picture – consumer trust and recognition.

• It’s getting harder and harder to gain top of search visibility on Google because of its AI Overview feature that gives users as much information on-page as possible, without them ever having to scroll or click. To combat this, content writers need to start prioritising articles and pages that answer some of Google’s common snippets – for example ‘People Also Ask’.

• TikTok is becoming a much bigger and more powerful search engine than anyone expected. Over 40% of consumers are now using TikTok as a search engine, including 64% of Gen Zers, which just goes to show that we’re missing a huge trick by focusing solely on Google for our search marketing strategy.

User generated content (UGC) is incredibly valuable on the platform for building trust in your brand, and so working directly with consumers and influencers is often the best place to start in creating content for search. On top of this, TikTok is rumoured to be rolling out the ability to include links in your content in the future, which for the first time means that we can send direct traffic from videos, and measure impact accordingly.

• A fool with a tool is still a fool. Or – we shouldn’t ever be relying on AI to make us look better. ChatGPT (other brands are available) is a powerful tool but without a combination of AI and the human experience, it’s only ever going to churn out fluff. If you ask AI to ‘write me an article on xx’, you’ll get surface-level, highly repetitive content – however, if you do your research and give it a proper plan, you can ‘work together’ to get something well-rounded and well-written.

Treat it like a colleague – suggest data sources, propose an outline, say what outcomes you’re looking for, and research what’s worked well for your target audience in the past. Feed all of this prep into AI before it gets started and remember that it’s no longer content that’s king, but context.

• Creating evergreen articles really hasn’t changed that much in the face of Google’s evolving algorithm and the rise of AI overviews. Still, the most important things are to demonstrate authority, show expertise and keep content refreshed. Top tips from the experts include beginning each piece of content with a definition – e.g. What is evergreen content? Evergreen content is…..

This way, the search engine crawlers know exactly what to expect from your article and have clear and easy access to a definition snippet for the top of search results. On top of this, an analysis of this year’s most popular evergreen content showed that they all had at least 10 links included – either internally linking to somewhere else within the site, or externally to relevant cites and sources. They were also refreshed at least once a year for updates – much like evergreen trees, they need regular watering to thrive!

• Finally, it will come as no surprise to anyone that AI-driven content is starting to infiltrate the news publishing world. In the US, 10% of Americans go to AI for their news updates, compared to just 2% in the UK. While the Ukraine has recently been the first country to introduce its first AI news reporter – Victoria Shi, who I personally find very creepy, but who has apparently gone down quite well with the public.

It’s still yet to be seen how far we’ll take AI in our news generation here in the UK, but what we found most interesting was that while in a recent study most adults stated that human-written news stories were seen as ‘premium’ in their eyes and therefore better quality, respondents from Gen Z felt far less strongly about whether news came from a human or from AI, and did not feel that AI-generated content had to be stated as such from the outset. Watch this space!!

And that’s it for us at BrightonSEO 2024. It’s been a brilliant year and we’ll definitely be back for more again in the future (we hope!) but for now, it’s time for a cup of tea and an SEO overhaul. Sorry clients!!