Last month, we had the privilege of attending brightonSEO 2023, the world's largest search marketing conference. This exciting event brought together search marketers from all over the world, providing a valuable platform for sharing innovative ideas, networking, learning, and elevating our SEO game.

The conference was an absolute blast! Listening to the insightful speeches delivered by the brightest minds in the industry was an exhilarating experience we will cherish forever. 
 

Now, we are ready to implement our newfound knowledge as we aim to take our clients' SEO strategies to the next level.

Here's a roundup of our key takeaways from brightonSEO 2023:

Alexandros Kyriakou

In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, staying on top of technical SEO practices is essential for optimizing and analyzing a website's user interactions. At brightonSEO 2023, renowned experts delved into various aspects of technical SEO, shedding light on key considerations and insights. Here are some of the valuable points brought up by three speakers at the conference:

- Each redirection can potentially increase the Time To First Byte (TTFB) by up to 80 milliseconds.
- QUIC with HTTP/3 shows speed improvements but has limited browser support.
- BR compression has been observed to be more efficient than GZIP.

Ash New: "Web Server SEO: Make your TTFB Faster!"

- There are numerous XPath combinations that can be leveraged by the Document Object Model (DOM) to locate specific elements within a webpage.

Jonathan Moore: "The Xpath to Discover"

- It is important to keep in mind that local testing alone may not be a sufficient representation of the diverse user base that interacts with your website. Moreover, it is possible to validate your results much earlier than the next CrUX dataset update.

Aymen Loukil: "What your Google Lighthouse Score Hides from You"

General Takeaway: Adaptation is crucial in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Additionally, Brighton is a fantastic city to cycle around!

Katia Maraka

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint! It requires research, collaboration between the right experts, and calculated risks.

Greta Munari, The redemption of content automation: How to scale unique content to 4M+ pages

When SEO is done well, it offers superior experiences, differentiation through creativity, as well as a wide array of opinions and ideas. SEO experts should leverage AI to remove friction in the user experience, direct customer attention, and attract engagement. However, AI doesn’t replace an SEO team!

Ashley Liddelll - Where should -and shouldn’t- AI & ChatGPT play a role in your SEO strategy?

Generative and conversational AI is going to affect search in many ways. So, SEOs should make their content future-proof, focus on content that can’t be replaced by a summary, up their content game, and create citable content by following existing best practices for rich results.

Simon Lesser, Google Bard, ChatGPT, the sky is falling, and SEO is dead (again)

All in all, content is (still) king, despite the rise of ChatGPT - AI does not replace SEO experts, it gives them superpowers!

Lefteris Eleftheriou
 

• It is good to see that link-building is always relevant (and yes, it still is in 2023). We need to step up the game, not the budget. @Brenton Thomas made it very clear in his talk about “the secrets to generating powerful backlinks without blowing your budget”. The key takeaway based on case studies is: It is about relevancy not quantity, so when on a thin budget, make sure every link you build counts. 
   
• I was very happy to see @bibi Raven give chatGPT an alternative name AKA Geppetto in her talk “yU nO RePLY?!” Oh yeah and the nice analogy: “Link-building is like dating - you have to be genuine, consistent and patient”. This is some great life and link-building advice.
   
• We got some great insights on how we can scale up content production to a whole new level. @Greta Munari showcased in her presentation “The redemption of content automation” how to use simple spreadsheets to avoid the usual AI route to come up with some high-level high SEO value content. Oh, and when we say “some” we mean 12 million pages.

General takeaway:

Content and links are still king for SEO in 2023, make sure that you use AI to do the repetitive boring stuff, so that you can focus on your SEO magic. Ah and yeah, beer always tastes better by the sea.

Vasiliki Kokmotou
 

1. You have to invest energy and hours in link-building & outreach to have optimal results.
    
2. When organizing your link-building strategy you do not need to emulate your competitors. However, you cannot ignore them either. Continue doing what you already do, but consider incorporating things that your competitor does better than you in your strategy.

Pay attention to local link-building because it is more valuable than you may think! There are so many opportunities out there that can turn into quick, yet long-lasting wins. One step is better than no step at all, so just start by getting involved in the local community.

“Most businesses need local SEO, but unfortunately don’t realize it!”, Greg Gifford, Link-building.

3. Although email templates save time during the outreach process, you have to remember that personalization is key when it comes to communicating with people, because… people are strange.

“Link-building is like dating: You have to be genuine, consistent, and patient. And if you‘re lucky, you‘ll end up with a strong, mutually beneficial relationship”, Bibi the Link Builder, Y u no reply? How to Write Outreach Emails that Convert.

4. You have to benchmark what you want to measure. Monitor and track metrics that can reveal the impact of your campaign. Maybe it is not only one page but several pages across the web, where your content (videos, images, comments, etc.) exists.

“We have to rebrand Digital PR. It is not PR, Digital PR, or SEO PR. It’s all about brand reputation, brand awareness, brand equity, social media growth…”, Isa Lavahun, Showing the value of Digital PR beyond coverage and links.

All in all, as Greg Gifford (well) said, checklist link-building never works well. So all you have to do is to be creative!
 

Anastasia Kourou
 

“Track and learn from all SERPs. Try to be present in multiple doorways in multiple SERPs.” @Jon Earshaw in his talk about “Optimizing for the SERP multiverse: a 4-step process for success” pointed out that multiple SERP features are gifts and we just need to optimize our content in order to be present.

“As SEOs…

1. We are part of an exciting growing industry
2. We are as cross-functional as it gets
3. We help make the web useful for people”

@Areej Abuali in her inspirational talk about “The Future of SEO” gave her input about how we, as SEOs, differentiate from other teams and I totally agree with her. Those three bullets are the reason we continue to do our work with excitement and anticipation for what the future of SEO holds.  

Nowadays, Content Automation relates to content creation through AI algorithms, but @GretaMunari showed us that for her team, Content Automation means scaling content written by humans. They’ve built their own tool and succeeded in creating 12.000.000 unique content pieces that ranked within a short period of time.

General Takeaway: SEO is about learning, adapting and collaborating. As SEOs, we need to be open to changes and look into things from different perspectives.

ps: Remember not to make important decisions with an empty stomach.

Kostas Vavouranakis
 

One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing and SEO is the measurability of actions. Analytics is the one tool no marketer can do without. Indeed, we are currently at the crossroads of an important shift from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4.
 

In a similar data driven spirit, Max Flajsner presented a “total search” approach, tackling one of the most asked questions in actual running projects: “if I do rank on organic traffic, is paid traffic incremental?”. All experienced marketers know that the answer is “yes”, but Max presented how their tool can measure this incrementality and shared some ideas on viewing paid and organic as one big superchannel and what to keep in mind for making real time optimizations depending on both organic and paid performance.
 

General takeaway: Digital marketing without monitoring and analysis is severely crippled. Upgrade your game with custom alerts and segmentations that reflect your ideal user journey and evaluate & calibrate your strategy accordingly. Try to keep your eyes on the big picture and see how your traffic channels can cooperate instead of antagonize each other.