Ash’s take: Scaling with AI, migrations, and overcoming implementation blockers
Senior SEO Consultant, Ashleigh Noad attended several AI-focused talks. She found particularly valuable a session led by Michal Suski, the Head of Innovation at Surfer, who discussed how AI could be used in an “undetectable” way to read like human output and, ultimately, avoid penalties from search engines.
For Ash, the idea that we should use AI to scale up and replicate existing SEO processes that already work, rather than trying to overhaul workflows with entirely new AI-driven methods was critical. By leveraging AI to enhance proven strategies, we can increase efficiency without losing focus on what’s effective.
Migrations were another hot topic, with Tina Reis discussing several ongoing challenges. The key takeaway for Ash? “Migrations continue to fail because SEO isn’t embedded early enough. In many cases, SEO comes in as an afterthought, trying to fix issues that could have been prevented if they had been integrated earlier in the project. With tighter budgets and reduced focus on SEO, involving SEO from the early stages of a project is more critical than ever.” Waiting until after a migration to address issues results in wasted time and resources, and risks losing valuable traffic.
For a deep dive into this topic, our recent webinar, “SEO Migrations: How to Turn Risk into Opportunity,” is available on demand. In it, our CEO Geoff explored strategies to manage migrations and maximise their potential.
Implementation challenges were a major focus at this year’s BrightonSEO, with Ash herself leading a session around how to overcome common implementation blockers and secure buy-in. Hellen Benavides, an in-house Product SEO at Giffgaff, discussed overcoming these challenges by educating developers and stakeholders on SEO tools, thus turning them into advocates for organic search. Similarly, Alexandre Hoffman, Managing Partner at Passion Digital, emphasised the need for SEOs to bridge the skills gap by mastering basic HTML and JavaScript to improve communication with developers.
Olivia’s take: Expanding beyond Google and innovating through split testing
Olivia, our Head of Content and Promotion noticed a growing theme at BrightonSEO: thinking beyond traditional search engines like Google to capture new audiences.
Sabine Ljunggren highlighted the importance of social search in SEO strategies, particularly for platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube, which people are increasingly turning to for product reviews, inspiration, and entertainment.
“The key consideration with branching into new platforms is understanding where your audience are first of all”, says Olivia. “It can be very tempting to push budget into the shiny trending platform (especially when you see case studies showing how impactful it was for another brand), but if your audience isn’t on that platform in the first place, it’s a wasted investment. The TL;DR is to carry out your due diligence through audience-first research before getting stuck into cracking a new platform.”
Olivia also attended a talk by Elise Morel, SEO Manager at Trainline, who presented a case study on leveraging split testing to increase click-through rates (CTR). Elise emphasised the value of “making small changes to release at scale,” rather than implementing significant changes in one go.
“Testing on a small area e.g. part of a website, or testing a specific idea with a small budget initially is a great way to support adoption and scale, and senior stakeholder buy-in. The fact that SEOs both in-house and agency are thinking about this demonstrates how SEO has been sidelined, and how we need to change tack to ensure SEO strategies are implemented in the future. It’s something we’ve been working on ourselves internally too and the introduction of our Named Project Workflows with testing as standard is just the beginning”, says Olivia.
Harry’s take: Topic modelling and AI in brand sentiment
Our Head of SEO, Harry, attended several insightful sessions on AI and brand sentiment. One of the standout discussions for him focused on topic modelling and content auditing, with one speaker explaining how tools like BERTopic can help SEOs analyse content in a more keyword-agnostic way.
This BERT language processing technique allows SEOs to see a website from a crawler’s perspective, grouping content by topic rather than just keywords. Harry saw this approach as being particularly useful when analysing high-performing competitors to ensure that a site’s content aligns well with Google’s understanding of topical authority.
In another session, Marcus Tober from Semrush, spoke about how AI search shows a positive bias toward brand sentiment – reassuring for brand managers. A key example Tober shared was Purple Pillows, whose subreddit “r/LifeOnPurple” ranks in the top 10 for their branded search terms on Google. “With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) summarising online sentiment, platforms like Reddit are becoming an increasingly important space for managing brand reputation”, says Harry. “And one that we, as SEOs, need to bear in mind as we develop our overall strategies.”
What’s next?
BrightonSEO is naturally a big event on our calendars. It presents the opportunity to discuss our thinking and ideas with peers and clients, in a dedicated SEO space.
More importantly though, it’s a chance to learn from others in the industry and implement their insights into our own work. SEO is a rapidly changing industry, as is marketing more generally, and we take our commitment to keeping at the edge of new developments seriously.
Want to discuss some of the ideas mentioned in this blog with our team? Get in touch today.
