Takeaways from Brighton SEO

Every year, Extramile sends some of its digital marketing team to BrightonSEO to learn advances in the search world, and its accomplices – from social to PPC.

After a week of processing the talks and training sessions from BrightonSEO, the Extramile team are ready to share what it thinks are some of the most valuable takeaways from this year’s session.

BrightonSEO April 2025 Takeaways

This instalment of the conference was dominated by a strategic approach to digital marketing, putting an emphasis on multi-channel strategies to drive SEO success.

Tristan Veasey, SEO Account Manager:

1. Trust and authenticity matter more than ever. People want real stories, social proof, and personalised experiences.
2. Adapt to user expectations: Younger demographics use social platforms for search. If you’re not there, you’re invisible to them.
3. Combine formats: Articles + videos + answer cards = greater share of the SERP conversation. Use social and PR to drive brand awareness and build demand outside of search whether that’s through listicles, short-form video, AI overviews, forums or more.
4. LLMs Are Real Traffic Channels – Don’t ignore ChatGPT and similar tools, they’re sending high quality traffic to your site.

Georgina Sheard, Digital Marketing Apprentice:

1. By staying aware of what keywords are ranking well organically and acting quickly to alter ads to reflect this, you can target keywords that aren’t performing as well and gain traffic from all directions.
2. Conversion tracking can’t always be 100% accurate – no matter the method. However, a clear, concise strategy will support your results and KPIs moving forward. Optimise for intent so your content is much more trustworthy.
3. PPC is heading in a more creative direction where your data should complement creative decision making. Emotion rules decisions.
4. Video is proving to be key and needs to be introduced across all platforms to be favoured by Google, even PPC.

Katie Smith, Key Account Manager:

1. SEO isn’t just about Google, at this point it isn’t even just about search engines as we know them. Approximately 70+% of young people are using TikTok and Instagram as their main search engines right now, so how can we ensure that we are including that in our SEO strategies. It highlights the important for attribution and how can effectively track data.
2. BrightonSEO also highlighted the importance of landing pages, how we can use simple tools such as HotJar to ensure that they are designed correctly and optimised.

Sara Whitehouse, SEO Account Manager:

1. The SEO landscape has shifted as much in the last 12 months, as it has in the previous 12 years.
2. With a 60% decrease in clicks, impressions should be a key part of reporting – whether that’s branded or non-branded.
3. We need to shift from silo work as SEOs and focus more on ‘search experience optimisation, looking at the user journey as a whole and integrating with other channels. 

Jim Keeble, SEO Account Manager:

1. Social and SEO should be married at the hip, their strategies should be bound together and compliment each other to aid growth.
2. The importance of glossaries in SEO is about to take off. Looking at common terms from your business’s products, services and wider industry can be a great way to maximise visibility.
3. SERP analysis is by far and away the most important thing to do alongside any keyword strategy.

BrightonSEO October 2024 Takeaways

Having undergone a variety of different training courses, from Advanced Technical SEO to Analytics masterclasses, Extramile is currently implementing a myriad of changed and optimisations to some processes.

Jade Bird, Social Media Manager:

75% of decision makers are between the age of 25-30. Marketing teams need to start revisiting their tone of voice to talk to their audiences in a way that resonates with them – particularly on social media.

Jenna Jones, PPC Account Manager:

Spend more time ensuring the foundations are in place on each and every campaign, no matter the marketing channel. Whether you’re setting Google conversions to UTM tracking or keyword research, the fundamentals are essential.

What’s going on behind the scenes is what makes campaigns tick so pay attention to it and review frequently.

Sara Whitehouse, SEO Account Manager:

SEO isn’t dead! Its just forever evolving and changing. SEOs need to understand that SERPs are becoming an ever changing beast. They’re likely to get busier, with people searching in different ways. Both content and technical SEO aspects need to be optimised for SERPs to keep adapting and providing users with the information they are looking for.

Jene Knight, Head of Digital:

The importance of evergreen content is increasing, rapidly. This content is typically informational and should start with the question ‘what is’. Keep this content simple, update it yearly and have a clear definition with a minimum of 1500 words.

Jim Keeble, SEO Account Manager:

Internal linking is nothing new but the importance is increasing even more. Passing page rank power through to related pages has never been more important with Google looking to reward topical authority more now.

Oh and also, don’t eat fish and chips near the seagulls.