Day 1 Attending BrightonSEO 2024 Conference in San Diego

Last updated 12/01/24 ✧ First posted 12/01/24
~22 minutes to read.

I attended the BrightonSEO digital marketing conference in San Diego this year, held November 19th & 20th, 2024. (I attended last year too, but never made a post about it. Whoops!)

BrightonSEO is, more specifically, a search marketing conference with multiple tracks built for SEO, and another couple of tracks for paid search (which is known as HeroConf). It started small in the UK and has been going since 2010, but only came to the US in 2023, and got even bigger this year. It’s turning into the conference to be at for SEO, so I’m thrilled that I get to be there.

Here’s how I spent Day 1 (November 19th) of BrightonSEO. (I also have a post for BrightonSEO 2024 Day 2.)

8:30am: Pre-Conference & Arrival

I woke up and walked to the Grand Hyatt, where it was held. Yes, you can stay in the hotel if you want, and it would be a lot more convenient. But it’s also more expensive! I’m here on the dime of my own business (Jadecraft, a luxury brand consulting company), and I don’t mind walking a few blocks in the morning. Actually, I prefer it, because you get better coffee on the walk.

Today I went to Tiger Café on my way to the conference. Tiger Café is across the street from the Lion’s Club of San Diego. I asked the barista if this was done on purpose, like there are lions and tigers here, but she had never even considered the idea.

It’s hard being a comedic genius sometimes.

Arriving at the hotel, I quickly realized the conference was being held in a different area from last year. And there were no signs! But I followed the general group of people as they wandered around, and we made our way upstairs and finally saw the logo.

There’s always a HUGE line to get your badge printed, which is crazy because they email you your badge a couple months in advance, and then again at least two more times. You have all the time in the world to print it yourself. And if you do, you get to skip the line and just walk right in.

If you go, print your own badge!

The vendors were right outside the speaker rooms this time, which was a huge upgrade from last year. I got a neat pair of Conductor socks, and then met a nice guy named Wyatt from SimilarWeb who walked me through a great demo.

I said hi to a friend I frequently see at these events, Patrick Stox from Ahrefs. I think this is the fourth time I’ve seen him? Pat’s such a nice guy, I always look forward to seeing him–super supportive, always happy, effortlessly impressive, incredibly smart, I really can’t say enough good things.

Ahrefs has a new children’s book out to indoctrinate children into SEO entertain SEO enthusiast children, but I did not get a copy because I guess I am not a child 🙁

Then it was time for the first talks to get started.

9:30am: The Future of Search

(How This Works: There are three rooms, and each room has four sessions of three talks each throughout the day. So you see one set of three talks, all with a certain theme, and then there’s a break, and you can switch rooms if you want. Sadly you’ll only ever see a third of all the talks, since the other rooms are always active, so you have to make some tough decisions. For my first set of 3, I picked Track 1, and this set in this room was themed The Future of Search.)

I debated if I wanted to sit in the first or second row and was invited to sit in the first by a man who I quickly learned was Fabrice Canel, the Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing.

There are like 100 rows in these rooms but I don’t know why anyone comes and then sits in the back row. Come on! Move up!

Nearby I saw Louisa Frahm, who I met four years ago at the Advanced Search Summit in Napa. She’s since moved to Connecticut and leads the SEO team for ESPN–wow! She also was giving a talk here at BrightonSEO this year, but tomorrow. Great to catch up.

The host, Kelvin Newman of Rough Agenda, kicked us off.

Talk 1: Fabrice Canel – What’s New at Microsoft Bing?

Fabrice talked a lot about AI (naturally). He made a great distinction of search behavior, where you use search if you know exactly what you want, at least in some sense, but you use AI (like Microsoft Copilot) if you only sort of know what you want.

He called AI the future of search as people get used to less precise queries. I wonder if it will be, in part, a generational difference?

He noted that clicks in AI experiences lead to higher engagement than clicks in traditional source, citing a post on the Seer Interactive Insights blog.

Another fun note was that Bing Webmaster Tools has a cool Copilot integration now.

Then there was a lot of talk about IndexNow and the API that lets you immediately notify Bing about updates and new pages.

There was a sort of silly commercial video played here that just featured, I think, stock videos of people being happy or sad at a computer depending on if a site did or didn’t use IndexNow.

It’s a neat feature that I will use, but very self-explanatory. I would’ve liked to see more demo of the BWMT Copilot integration instead in the time this took.

But that’s a minor quibble, this was a really great talk to kick the conference off with! I like Bing.

Talk 2: Jovan Johnson – Do You Want Flying Cars or Clicks, Leads, and Sales?

I’m not really sure that the title of this presentation matched the content. But there was one takeaway I really liked. It was an enhancement of an old-school linkbuilding strategy.

There used to be this tactic where you’d offer a small scholarship, and colleges would list you on their scholarships page, and then boom, you’d get a bunch of .edu backlinks. I mean, I say “there used to be this tactic” but it’s certainly still around, I’d argue, just treated as passé by most.

Jovan suggested a great upgrade of it, and I later tossed the idea around with another couple SEOs after-hours and we figured out a few more takes on it. I’m not even going to mention it here, but it has to do with how much CEOs and business owners love to hear themselves talk.

Hey, I’m a business owner… and here I am blogging your ears out… hey, heeeyyyyyy…

Talk 3: Paul Norris – The Relevance Gap – Why Big Brands are Losing Ground (and How You Can Win)

Paul is from Journey Further, Director of Organic. He works with Beth Nunnington, who I met last year and remember fondly due to her great digital PR talk & stories.

Paul’s talk was about branding, which I really appreciated. I think SEOs forget about branding sometimes.

He used a doctored photo of Colgate-brand Beef Lasagna to demonstrate via instinctive reaction how we all know what brands are relevant for and what they aren’t relevant for.

He argued that our job as SEOs, especially in linkbuilding, is to dial up category relevance. Backlink number continues to matter less vs. category relevancy.

I wouldn’t say there was a lot new to me here but I really love what it reinforced. The one new takeaway for me was a way of analyzing backlinks – if you didn’t know what the website was, could the backlink portfolio (the websites and/or the anchor texts) tell you clearly what category it was in? I like that a lot.

Those three talks being over, it was time for the morning break.

10:35am: Morning Break

I walked around the vendor areas for a half hour and saw some I didn’t get a chance to earlier on.

I stopped by the Screaming Frog booth and got an incredible stocking cap. Such good quality merch, from such a good quality product. This must be the chillest job, because what SEO hasn’t heard of or doesn’t use Screaming Frog? It’s basically a requirement. And the guys at the booth were great.

I talked to the crew at Amethyst for a while. I like amethyst (the gemstone) and I feel a certain affinity for other mineral-monikered marketing mavericks (since I named my own thing Jadecraft). Amethyst is a tool that combines GSC, GA4, and the Inspect URL API into a way smoother interface. Neat, and nice crowd.

There was an unattended booth that had amazing socks laying out. I couldn’t resist taking a pair. I mean, they had octopi on them! I have other octopus/squid-themed socks and they need friends. So the least I can do is throw Jet Octopus Log Analyzer a full backlink here.

This probably makes me seem like I collect a ton of merch, but I really don’t. The last thing I need is another logo shirt or mid pen or vinyl bag or whatever. I turn down the vast majority of things that get offered to me, I swear. But I can’t help it if I’m a sucker for fun socks.

Time for the next set of talks. I changed rooms/tracks and sat in the second row, because the first row in this room was reserved for the VIP ticket folks.

11:00am: Measurement

My love for measurement is immeasurable.

Talk 4: Brie E. Anderson – GA4 for Search Marketers

Wow. Brie Anderson, founder of Beast Analytics, is a great speaker–dynamic and energetic. Talk about keeping a crowd enthused! Doubly so since her topic was, not only an analytics platform, but an especially despised analytics platform! Great skills on display.

Brie noted that connecting GA4 to Google Ads would unlock the Advertising section under Explore, where attribution data lives. Wow! I had no idea.

Although I’m not as bad at GA4 as I used to be, Brie’s talk helped with some ways to think about it, including the all-important explore section: “Column 1 is what data you have access to, and Column 2 is how you want to see it.”

In Explore, when selecting a segment, there’s a whole Include Sequence option that I never knew existed. And in the segment builder area, there’s the option to Save as an Audience that simplifies things too.

So you can make a Funnel, select a conversion event as your last step, then Page Path & Screen Class (page view setting) back and apply it under breakdown (if I took my notes right??) – and you can create an audience segment from this. Did that make sense? I have to go back and do this myself while looking at the screen.

Anyway, a great talk!

Talk 5: Manu Nair – AI Meets Analytics

Manu, like Fabrice earlier, is from Microsoft. Do you think they know each other? How many employees can a little business like Microsoft have anyway.

This was Manu’s first ever conference talk, and he killed it! As I mentioned to him later, I’ve seen far worse talks that were not a person’s first, and he did a great job here.

As an aside, that’s also why I like BrightonSEO so much. They encourage and empower a ton of people who have never spoken at events like these before. It’s a great kindness.

Manu’s talk was on heatmaps and behavioral analytics and, specifically, the Microsoft Clarity tool, which combines those things with AI. It started simple but got very interesting.

Clarity uses AI to analyze heatmaps and session replays in massive aggregate, and then can pull out common behavioral issues that they categorized as: Rage Clicks, Dead Clicks, Excess Scrolling, and Quick Backs.

The tool can tell you about issues, cite relevant parts of replay videos, and offer suggestions automatically. Really interesting.

This part is my metaphor, but it’s similar to looking at your website to find the metaphorical behavioral “desire paths” that people are taking anyway, and pave them.

I also later got shiny cat stickers from Manu and Microsoft Clarity, so, just in case I wasn’t sold already…

Talk 6: Derek Perkins – Advanced BigQuery Techniques: Blending Search Console, GA4, and Rank Tracking Data

Derek is from a company called Nozzle. I love that name for a company.

This talk was totally above/adjacent to me, as I do not use BigQuery. But you know when you can tell when someone is clearly an expert even if you don’t know what they’re talking about? Yeah, I could tell. I still don’t fully understand what Nozzle does but I’m sold on their expertise.

Time for lunch!

12:05pm: Lunch Break

I had learned last year that San Diego is known for their barbecue restaurants. I had went to a couple last year, and there was one across the street from the Hyatt I knew I’d go back to: Kansas City Barbeque.

KCBBQ is notable for being a filming location for the original Top Gun movie. They mention it everywhere. Granted, it is pretty cool.

There was a long line for a table since a ton of conference people were coming, but since I was alone, I got to skip the line and sit at the bar right away.

The place is covered in license plates, which I took ample photos of to eventually post about on my very important scholarly License Plate Blog.

The guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation and I noticed he had a badge too, a fellow conference attendee. His name was Michael Sick, with the amazing URL getthesickness.com for his business. We had a nice chat through lunch.

One barbecue pulled pork and glass of chardonnay later, I went back across the street and back to the conference, and chatted with Manu Nair about Microsoft Clarity. I also spun their prize wheel and got the best option, “Your Choice of Prizes!” Out of t-shirts and other big merch, I chose the aforementioned shiny cat stickers.

On my way back to the next talk room, I did a double-take and saw a major SEO celebrity: BARRY SCHWARTZ!

THE Barry Schwartz is the man behind Search Engine Roundtable, which I don’t think needs any introduction. He was talking to someone else and I didn’t want to intrude, but I did go up and say hi. I didn’t even think to get a photo–to be honest I was a little star struck. I’m not even sure what I said. Holy crap, Barry Schwartz!

I was texting my SEO friends about it as soon as I was seated for my next talk track.

1:25pm: Content Optimization

Talk 7: Bianca Anderson – From Guidelines to Growth: Unleashing the Potential of E-E-A-T

Bianca was from hims & hers, and I know I have a former coworker who also went to that company, but I can’t remember who (or if they’re still there). A lot of her experience also came from HubSpot. I have mixed opinions on HubSpot but Bianca’s talk raised them.

This was a pretty neat talk. I kinda think that most things about EEAT that need to be said, have been said already, but Bianca managed to go further.

I loved how she said the quality rating guidelines seem “vibey” and then I really loved her idea of taking the guidelines, feeding them all into AI, extracting chunks, and having it translate those vibes to actionable steps and ideas. What a great connection!

She also had a great suggestion to do experiential content gap analyses on subreddits related to your niche, to find pages on your site that are missing that are covered by people’s personal questions or tales on Reddit. A great idea.

I believe at the end she recommended a product called Glimpse, which I will certainly look at given her endorsement.

Talk 8: Melissa Chowning – Growth Through Content Organization and Topical Authority

Melissa is the CEO of Twenty-First Digital. Her talk was all about categorization and information architecture.

Content should only fit into one category on your site, as opposed to many possible tags. If you’re stuck between categories, your category plan is probably wrong.

She also impressed the need for tags and tag pages, and tag gateway pages, noting how they did this with a disorganized old news site for major world leaders and saw a huge gain.

The example was something like, if you’ve written a thousand pages about John A. Worldleader over the years, but don’t have one page to guide someone through them, then Google will pick one and it won’t be great for you. But if you make a “John A. Worldleader” dedicated page that has some info and then links to all the posts you’ve made, you’re in business!

This was a really great talk but to be honest I didn’t really learn anything because information organization is kind of already my bag! I’m basically doing something like that with one of my own web properties at this very moment! But I really appreciated her takes on it.

Talk 9: Misty Larkins – Don’t Be a Clickbait Butterfly: Hooking Customers with Content that Delivers

Misty is the president of a company called Relevance, so it feels relevant for her to talk about clickbait content.

There was a lot of emphasis to focus on conversions, not traffic, which was sort of a common theme in many talks this year. She discussed how websites should generally “stay in their lane,” echoing the brand relevance topic from Talk 3 today by Paul Norris.

My favorite part of her talk was this really neat 3D vector space model of all the content on a site. It would be a little extra for me to do that on my own website here, but on a massive website, I could see this sort of analysis being great to highlight obvious outliers. She’s showing it in the photo above, and I think she could’ve based her whole talk around that!

2:30pm: Early Afternoon Break

On this break, I finally met up with my friend Ava Lynch, from Austin, TX. I met Ava back at that 2020 Napa conference and we had toured some castle dungeons together at a masquerade party. You know, normal conference things.

2020:

2024:

Ava is doing great, a director now at The Zebra, with a team, and has been enjoying San Diego despite long flights. It was nice to say hello.

3:00pm: Onsite Content

Talk 10: Khalil Kanbar – Blogging in 2025: How to Turn Blog Traffic into Conversions

Khalil talked a lot about the marketing funnel through blog posts. He mentioned that lower funnel but higher converting posts don’t always have to be that SEO-friendly. I don’t inherently disagree, but you definitely need to have a solid strategy to drive people from high traffic pages to these pages and hope they don’t click out. It felt like his suggestions were for sites with long and very precise funnels.

I have to say I did not agree with his call to use up white space and fill it up with other stuff. At least on content sites, I hate that.

Granted if we’re talking about the kind of sites my friend Daniel makes, that’s different. Fill everything up, go wild with web revivalist maximalism! But I don’t think that’s what Khalil was talking about.

Talk 11: Stephanie Briggs – SEO Projects that Work (and How We Found Them)

Stephanie is the cofounder of Briggsby Media and has a neat looking SEO Substack that is on my list to check out.

Stephanie’s talk suffered because of a tech issue that was slightly compounded by the staff. Her slides didn’t work, and as she started talking, no one from the tech crew in the room waved at her or apparently did anything to alert her at all. Nor did the host of this talk track–someone should’ve signaled her and let her know to wait and then start over when they fixed the issue. It took someone from the audience to say something after a couple minutes, but it shouldn’t have fallen on the attendees. How long was the tech crew going to sit and let her continue for??

Anyway!

Once things were going, Stephanie gave a nice talk. She made the point that “informational” as an intent label isn’t really enough. What kind of information, in what form, and on and on should really be considered and subcategorized. Good point.

She talked about faceted navigation and making pages from facet combinations. Very-long-time readers of this blog, back when it was called Corporate Charm, may recall when I made a hugely authoritative post about faceted navigation involving what pages to make and how to use programmatic logic to index or noindex certain combinations and facet types and permutations. I took it down years ago with the intent to update it and then never did, but Stephanie’s talk brought me back to it. Really valuable topic and she nailed it.

She also mentioned the value of stacking carousels (like “related links” on top of “others also viewed” on top of “people also purchased” etc.) which I’d never really thought about before, but was another great point.

The event photographer, Steve Hall, snapped a photo of Stephanie’s speech where I’m visible in the front row, facing her, hand on my chin, solid grey shirt.

More about Steve the photographer further down!

Talk 12: Alyssa Corso – How to Update Blog Articles to Increase Traffic and Revenue

Alyssa gave one of my favorite talks.

It was all about when and how to update content to maximize its lifespan. I thought it was great.

She did mention a piece of content’s “natural decay phase” which I thought was interesting, because I’m not sure that’s always really the case. But it was definitely a new concept for me to consider, which is always appreciated.

I especially liked her idea about showing off that a post was updated in its title or description on a homepage or category page, to draw more people in and let them know there are new parts. That’s a good point.

She also showed off her personal hobby cooking blog a bit which I appreciated as someone who owns hobby websites myself. I love it!

4:10pm: Late Afternoon Break

During this break, everybody gets kicked out of the talk rooms while they reorganize them and pull out the fake walls to make them into one massive single room. Then there’s a final keynote talk there for everyone, each day.

So during this break there was more socializing outside than usual. I talked to Cody (or Kody? sorry) from SEMrush, who introduced me to the new SEMrush Enterprise software suite. Very cool stuff happening here. C/Kody was also nice enough to hook me up with a couple drink tickets. Wow, I love SEMrush!

I also met a man named Slawomir Gawlowski from WhitePress, which connects publishers and marketers in some form. Seemed pretty neat.

4:40pm: Keynote Speech

Talk 13: Wil Reynolds – Reverse Engineering is a Core SEO Skill

Wil’s speech was in a different league. There’s no other way to say it. An absolutely phenomenal, motivating, wake-up-call of a speech. Holy shit.

Wil is the founder of Seer Interactive and is a notable figure in the SEO world. His talk was focused on shocking us out of our complacency regarding AI and the friction of current search. He compared some webmasters and UIs to Blockbuster, shortly before Blockbuster was eaten alive by Netflix.

He pointed out how the current search process is full of customer friction points that we’ve gotten so used to we don’t even notice, or we lie to ourselves about. Typing something in Google just to see ads, unrelated results, pop-ups on websites (in the form of notifications, cookie alerts, chatbots, whatever), and how searches need more and more refinement to even work half the time.

Compare that to AI, and AI just works. Yes, it’s not perfect, it hallucinates sometimes, but what’s the difference functionally between hallucinations and bad results? Aren’t they equivalent? Aren’t bad results just Google’s own hallucinations of what you want? This was such an “Einstein relativity a-ha” moment for me.

He made the point that monopolies in search actually make it easier for SEOs. We only have to optimize for one company. But does that make us lazy? Are websites more generic because of this? (I wonder if Wil likes web revivalism.)

As Wil mentioned, in the old days of SEO, we were all testing something. Running experiments on different techniques and tactics, seeing what worked, whispering between trusted folks at conferences or smaller information sources… I may not be as wizened as some here, I’ve only been in SEO since about 2012, but I do remember some of those days too. And the SEOs who started in the last 4-5 years, from COVID and on, I think it’s a different world for them entirely.

I used to test a lot of things, and I still test a few fun things, but truly my attention has turned away from SEO and more onto art as of late, so my creativity has just been elsewhere. But I’ve had this blog in one way or another since 2014 and I’ve posted a few interesting niche things myself, if I do say.

He mentioned that Perplexity AI search said in a pitch deck that they may, eventually, tell brands who spend advertising dollars with them what queries people are searching for about them/related to them. Maybe. That’s good to know. Currently, you know, we get 0 data from AI tools, other than referral data in GA4.

ChatGPT also seems to use directories to get its information–for better or for worse. Wil noted that he’s seeing websites make fake but realistic-looking directory pages for their own business categories on their own websites, and then of course putting themselves over their competitors, because ChatGPT will see that as another directory with information to scrape and use. Hah!

Wil noted that SEOs are too focused on checkboxes these days (totally) and mentioned putting tables of contents on every page as something we just do automatically, like, who likes those? Well, hey, I like those! I’ve been putting tables of contents on my sites for years and I do it because I love the usability. So I like it when sites have them! But he IS right that it’s been a trend in the last year or two after some Google comments and now they feel overused. I’ve just been happy about that trend, though, personally speaking.

Wil then moved on to the focus on creating FANS, not just traffic. I mentioned earlier that the message of focusing on conversions and engaged users over traffic has been said a lot, but Wil took it to the next level with his use of “fans.” This was so good. He went in detail on this in a very emotional way that’s hard to reproduce here.

But he noted that with an active LinkedIn and active socials in general, as well as audience information, he can see who liked his posts, track them, and then know what to talk about when they reach out. And it’s something he can only do because he markets to PEOPLE, not just traffic.

Wil mentioned his speech was recorded and I have to find a copy. It was so good.

5:30pm: Exhibitor Happy Hour, Sponsored by SEMrush

Time to put those SEMrush drink tickets to use.

I met a woman named Madeline (iirc) from Originality.ai, which is a sort of copy checker. She told me about being from Canada, being a lifelong skier and snowboarder, and having a son with my name.

I met Bryan and Jake from LinkBuilder.io, from Florida, both very chill. Jake wasn’t drinking tonight since he’d be giving a talk tomorrow, good call! Kind of funny to throw a backlink here to a linkbuilding service, but I was really impressed by their answers to my service questions, it seems like a really solid company.

I also talked to Dave Cousin, who I had met at last year’s Brighton, and we caught up a bit. He’s on his own now as Dave the SEO. He’s been coming to BrightonSEO since it was really small and new. Great guy.

7:00pm: Karaoke at Barleymash & Ginger’s, Sponsored by Google

I left the hotel and went back to where I was staying, and put my feet up for a while. Phew! Then I slipped into something more comfortable and made my way to Barleymash & Ginger’s, a restaurant bar and basement bar, just a couple blocks away. It’s the same place we had our afterparty last year.

They changed the entry door, so I was confused and stuck outside for a moment before a guy inside pointed out the right door. I went and thanked him, and we chatted for a bit–his name was Steve Hall, the professional event photographer.

Steve had been in advertising and media for decades, before digital advertising was even a thing, and has contributed to and owned some neat web properties, including his blog AdRants, which is now top of my list to browse through. What a cool guy, I would’ve loved to hear a conference talk from him. A great highlight of my whole time here.

Who would have guessed one of the most knowledgeable marketers at this whole event would be the photographer?

Downstairs at Ginger’s bar I got a (blurry) photo of him taking his photos.

At various points, I met Raycheal Proctor from Unlimited Mixed Marketing, Clay Kramer the Head of Product at SEO Radar (which looks very neat), Avani Oswal the CEO of Catalyst Growth, someone (James? Garrett?) from Citation Labs, and probably some others I have forgotten. Talked to Bryan from LinkBuilders again too.

The downstairs bar (which is the place called Ginger’s) is always packed, but they do karaoke. This year it was hosted by “Mike All Night.”

Dave and I both signed up for karaoke, though I forget who went first in line. Dave sang Purple Rain by Prince:

And I sang Inside Out by Eve 6:

I WOULD SWALLOW MY PRIDE,
I WOULD CHOKE ON THE RINDS,
BUT THE LACK THEREOF
WOULD LEAVE ME EMPTY INSIDE…

Mike All Night abruptly stopped doing karaoke at 10pm. That was all night, I guess.

A little later, they opened up the bar & restaurant to the general public again, not just the SEO afterparty crew, and more people came streaming in. I like this because I like talking to everyone, not just other marketers.

The Google branding was replaced by these trippy graphics.

I hung around a little while longer and made conversation, and met one other person (Bel M.), but then finally made my way to a pizza place and then back home to crash in bed.

PHEW! What a long and amazing first day of BrightonSEO 2024.

I don’t expect anyone to have seriously read this whole post start to finish, but I’ll probably review it myself before BrightonSEO 2025.

I also just wanted to give all you nice folks some personal little backlinks, low-value as they are from my silly homepage here. (If I didn’t give you one, I probably couldn’t find you–just hit me up. Note that I do not link to Twitter.)

Join me tomorrow for DAY 2 of BrightonSEO 2024 San Diego!

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Written by Ethan J. Hulbert.