BrightonSEO October 2024 Key Takeaways

A BEHAVIOURAL HIGHLIGHT

We love it when our incredible colleagues have the opportunity to become speakers at BrightonSEO. October’s event featured the one and only Dr Lottie Namakando, our Director of Behavioural Science and Innovation.

USE YOUR COMPETITORS TO SUPERCHARGE YOUR SEARCH

Lottie isn’t a new face on the BrightonSEO schedule having spoken before, but this time she took to the main stage to share her insight into applying Competitor Research to your strategies. 

No brand operates in a vacuum and the digital marketplace has become noisier than ever, so Lottie took us through the ways she thinks about examining the wider competitive landscape for opportunities and risks.

Lottie suggests mapping out your competitors in a way that considers not just what they offer, but how they are offering it. By building a bank of insights into what ad copy they’re running, what meta descriptions they’re using and how they frame themselves online - you can overlay your marketing calendar with a whole new depth of analysis.

Using behavioural science and focussing on a human centric approach to marketing, Lottie wove together fascinating stats around brand loyalty and consumer motivations with technical models and frameworks to understand them better - like the COM-B Model for behavioural change. Did you know that 71% of people switched brands at least once in a year? Or that there are on average 5 different brands in a persons consideration set?

She gave us insight into the power of cognitive biases, decision fatigue and behavioural nudges to drive performance outcomes. Throughout the talk, she broke down complex ideas into a really digestible presentation that was applicable to every business in the room.

We believe focussing on understanding consumers first is what drives real results and Lottie’s talk was a testament to the great work we’ve been doing to help our clients truly connect with their audience.

SOME OF OUR FAVOURITE TALKS

LAZARINA STOY - HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR CONTENT AUDIT WITH THE HELP OF MACHINE LEARNING

Machine learning is one of those topics that could fill any given speaking slot, but Lazarina’s talk was a highlight of the conference with easy to understand and practical advice for integrating the technology in common SEO tasks.

We loved the frameworks she presented for deciding where Machine Learning (ML) is a good fit, such as:

Organise > Understand > Evaluate > Deliverable

She also demonstrated a great template for delivering an impactful auditing report driven by automations. 

By combining the key information around what has been audited and the results with additional data around who is responsible for the action and why it matters - we can see just how much clearer this template could make automated auditing.

Lazarina also talked in detail about the application of ML in clustering analysis. By using custom trained AutoML applications or VertexAI she demonstrated the value in being able to extract insights automatically from historically dense datasets. We’re already applying some of these ideas in our work with clients, but can’t wait to dig deeper into other use cases Lazarina talked about such as extracting user intent from ranked Search Engine Results Page (SERP) features.

Our ‘to-do’ list from this talk would be a blog post in itself and we loved how many tools, technologies and content creators we learned about along the way.

YASMIN BURCHILL - THE DIGITAL GENERATION IS HERE: WHY YOU’RE ABOUT TO OVERHAUL YOUR ONLINE STRATEGY

Everyone knows digital marketing is always changing and the next generation to shake up the industry is doing it in a big way. Yasmin’s talk was a great example of how understanding human behaviour isn’t a static process. 

She discussed the things Gen Z actually care about, not just the buzzwords and tropes they’re associated with. When it comes to priorities, younger people care about sustainability but it’s practicality that comes first. The impact of the cost of living crisis on their lives is fundamental to how they live and spend their money.

Yasmin also talked about the need to redefine the path to conversion. The linear conversion funnel model is dead and as an industry we need to adapt. This means deploying robust measurement to understand where users are entering and leaving the path. 

A key takeaway from Yasmin’s talk was around the impact of personalisation on the modern digital audience. With User Generated Content (UGC), dynamic copy insertion and sequential creative we can help our message resonate far stronger with Gen Z than ever before.

We don’t think this is exclusive to the younger audience - understanding your audience and meeting them where they are can help build brand loyalty and positive sentiment, no matter their age.

PADDY MOOGAN - WHY MOST MANAGERS ARE DESTINED TO FAIL AND HOW TO AVOID BEING ONE OF THEM

One of the best things about BrightonSEO is how diverse the topics of the talks are. It’s not just about SEO anymore, we’ve been to so many incredible talks about our relationship to work, each other and the world. Paddy’s talk at this event was one of them.

With more and more people being shifted into management positions without proper training, the importance of learning these skills is greater than ever. Paddy believes this is down to three reasons.

Firstly, that career progression is broken. With promotions beyond senior level almost always relying on management, what makes employees good at their jobs doesn’t make them good managers.

Paddy also highlights the lack of training on offer around how to be a good manager. In fact, 82% of managers in the UK aren’t given any formal training before managing people. Despite it being a huge step to move from being independently successful to trying to build and maintain successful teams, most companies see management training as a ‘nice to have’.

Lastly, but certainly not least, Paddy points out that managing a team often comes while still having our old jobs. There’s no time given to being a great manager and we end up having to balance the old job with the new.

It wasn’t all about the problem though, Paddy talked about what we can do to help change the status quo. Through using both Factual Knowledge such as books, courses and training as well as sharing Experiental Knowledge through feedback and conversations he outlined a roadmap to success for our teams.

Being human first isn’t just about our clients and their customers, it’s about our teams as well. Events like BrightonSEO are a great chance to not only listen to incredible talks on the topics we care about - but to have important conversations to share that experiential knowledge too.

LUCA TAGLIAFERRO - DIGITAL MARKETS ACT - HOW THE NEW EU LEGISLATION IS CHANGING SEARCH

We’re living through a potential sea change in the world of search. Google is facing real challenges to its monopoly for the first time and this could mean a fundamental shift in how digital marketing operates. Luca’s talk dove deep into the situation and explained the how and why behind this important development.

Straight off the bat, he pointed out that Google is not the only company in the world’s governmental crosshairs. In fact, any company with annual revenue over 7 billion euros is classified as a “gatekeeper” under the new Digital Markets Act (DMA).

These gatekeeper companies are under scrutiny to determine whether they are operating fairly in their marketplaces and not abusing their monopolistic positions. The stakes are pretty high, too, with fines reaching 10% of turnover or up to 5% of daily turnover periodically, that’s no small thing.

Luca then broke down what Google’s monopoly practices actually entail from the perspective of an individual user. When someone goes to search in the highlighted markets, what do they actually see and experience? Turns out that Google has been ranking its own services right at the top for a long time now when it comes to flights, hotels and more. Serving themselves up as the best result has been unfairly driving traffic towards themselves and minimising the visibility of their competitors in these arenas.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, Luca showed us the positive impact the DMA is already having. New comparison features are appearing roughly 10 times more often since its introduction and you can now report non-compliance directly to the appropriate authorities.

What’s good for companies like Google isn’t always good for consumers and we were glad to see the positive changes that are already happening. It’s important to step back from thinking about SEO as just ranking well on Google and to see it as offering the best information to people that we can, in a way that serves them best. This story is far from over, though, so we’ll almost certainly see more about it in BrightonSEO talks to come!

WE DO LIKE TO BE BESIDE THE SEASIDE

It’s not just the incredible talks that make BrightonSEO a highlight of our year, being a stone’s throw from the beach makes for a great break from the office!

With a chance to relax over lunch in HarBAR + Kitchen as well as ASK Italian, the team was buzzing with new knowledge, ideas and inspiration. We’re already excited for the next conference in April and can’t wait to start implementing these great ideas in our work.

Want a behind-the-scenes look at our two days at BrightonSEO?
Check out our Instagram Reels @reflectdigital to watch the team in action!