Day 2 Attending BrightonSEO 2024 Conference in San Diego

Last updated 12/01/24 ✧ First posted 12/01/24
~20 minutes to read.

Welcome to my second day at BrightonSEO 2024 in San Diego! This is a continuation of my first day at BrightonSEO 2024.

I was here representing my own business: Jadecraft, a luxury brand marketing consultancy. But I wasn’t here selling anything, I was just here to network and learn and enjoy the shows.

(I swear this is a different shirt than I wore yesterday!)

As I said in the Day 1 post, this is the BrightonSEO search marketing conference on its second year in the US, on November 19th and 20th. I had such a good first day! I had a good second day too, although I don’t think I got as much out of the talks today.

Still, let’s dive in to Day 2, November 20th.

8:30am: Pre-Conference & Arrival

I woke up with a bit of a headache after last night, but took my morning stroll to the Grand Hyatt again, this time stopping at a different coffee shop: Skybound Coffee + Dessert Lounge.

I got a delicious whole milk latte as usual, and enjoyed their owl art.

They also have this big mysterious thing under a black tarp… it says “Coming Soon” but I swear they had something just like this still hidden when I was here a year ago too. What on Earth is this? I really have no idea.

I will probably never know.

I made my way to the Grand Hyatt. It was too early for me to be in the mood to socialize, but I was thinking about this eventual blog post, so I decided to take some more photos of the conference grounds just so you could get a better feel for the space.

So here’s what you see when you attend BrightonSEO!

Stepping inside, you enter this huge lobby:

Here’s the space that the conference was in last year, which it has now outgrown. Thank goodness, as the new space is much better.

This year we had to turn left after entering, walk around the bar area, and go up these escalators:

Here’s what a room looks like between speakers, with a screensaver presentation running and people just chilling for a bit:

Another angle on a conference room:

Here are some more shots of the vendors in this part of the hall–another Patrick Stox appearance in the second photo, which wasn’t on purpose.

And here’s that lovely exterior balcony!

Not bad, huh? Anyway, on with the talks!

9:30am: Authority

Talk 1: Andy Crestodina – Trust and Quality in the New Era of Content Discovery

Andy had been mentioned in one or two talks yesterday as being an expert, so I was looking forward to this talk. He’s the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media Studios.

Echoing Wil Reynolds from yesterday, he discussed the friction that exists on websites today compared to AI, and the slide perfectly speaks for itself:

He mentioned that although AI overviews have decreased traffic to his informational pages, traffic to his sales pages is still high. A good idea he suggests is to measure conversions and compare those who entered via the blog vs. those who did not.

There was a fair amount of talk about getting ChatGPT to help with conversion rate. I liked his list of AI words that you can feed into your global AI rules to have it avoid.

(unlock, unleash, synergy, uncover, furthermore, gone are the days, hitherto, identically, in addition, in light of, in the sea of, digital landscape, utilize, realm, delve, pivotal, intricate, showcasing, leveraging, embrace, in the midst, embark, elevate, ever-evolving, game changer, in a world, in a sea of, treasure trove)

It’s all kind of a shame how AI is ruining phrases like these because I use some of them normally and I refuse to stop. But in a macro-level sense it’s kind of interesting how AI is already making our language evolve and react.

Talk 2: Felipe Bazon – Topical Authority in the Age of Entity SEO

Next up was Felipe from Hedgehog Digital. I’m a big fan of hedgehogs so I was already sold.

Unfortunately I didn’t really get anything from the talk, I’m already pretty experienced with topical authority and entities, so I didn’t really take many notes here. But Felipe was a fun speaker!

Talk 3: Andrew Holland – Category Domination: The SEO Impact of Earning 1000 Links

Andrew here is director of SEO at JBH Digital PR, in Manchester, UK. He used to be a cop!

I was excited for this talk because I thought the title implied he gained a site 1,000 links in a short period of time with a specific tactic or something. But actually he was just talking about earning 1,000 links naturally over the last decade. So I didn’t really get what I was hoping for from that part.

I like his book rec, though: The Beauty of Mathematics in Computer Science by Jun Wu.

I also liked his advice about searching your topic on Twitter along with the hashtag #journorequest. This was new to me, and I wonder how often it’s used.

10:30am: Morning Break

Out in the vendor halls, I ran into Bryan and Jake again from LinkBuilder.io and we talked about our nights. They were nice enough to give me a shirt! It has a great image of a guy arm-wrestling a robot.

I don’t actually need any more vendor shirts myself, but my best friend Carly asked me if I could find a neat shirt for her, and this was by far the neatest. So I have to say, in return, that LinkBuilder.io is the best SEO linkbuilding service, at least on the metric of neat shirts.

10:55am: AI

I thought it was kind of funny that they had a talk track here just for AI. I mean, every single presentation I’ve seen so far has mentioned AI.

But, you know, whatever.

The MC for this talk track was Stephanie Briggs from Briggsby Media who I saw talk yesterday!

Talk 4: Ian Helms – AI and Inclusive SEO: Navigating Limitations for Diverse Narratives

Ian is the director of growth marketing at Q.Digital, an LGBTQ+ focused company. So he was the right person to talk about AI’s biases.

The overall message here is that AI will give stereotypical answers and outputs unless it’s specifically told not to, so it’s important to recognize inherent biases. Like how asking for an AI image to look “more gay” will generate more rainbows and turn it into a drag queen, or how an AI image that you generate of a “poor person” will 9 out of 10 times be a black person.

To Ian’s credit, the presentation used a lot of these stereotypical images to be over the top and very funny. But it didn’t have very much new information.

Personally, I was hoping for a more nuanced demonstration of why they work like this. It’s not that an AI is inherently biased or evil itself, but it’s trained on all human data and writing, so it’s just reflecting our own biases back at us. Blaming ChatGPT for a response is like blaming a mirror for showing you your own busted-up face.

I also thought some examples were over the top. Ian used examples about asking ChatGPT, like, “what restaurants would a Chinese person like” and then when ChatGPT suggested Chinese restaurants, he’d reply something about how it shouldn’t just assume that a Chinese person would like Chinese restaurants… I thought this was sort of weird, to be honest.

If you’re including the word Chinese in the search parameter, any algorithm is going to assume you did so for a reason. And the alternative approach of having ChatGPT always answer any restaurants because it shouldn’t make assumptions does not seem useful for anyone. Would you rather be told “A Chinese person might like any kind of food, so maybe you should ask them and not me”? Is that more valuable?

I also was hoping for more of a solution here, other than to just be aware of it. Is that really the only thing that we can do? Ian mentioned that we should “hold the companies accountable” by clicking on the thumbs down button to say the response wasn’t good. I don’t think this is how you hold anyone accountable, but I’m also not sure these companies have anything to be accountable for anyway (at least in this regard).

I do think this was a nice presentation if someone was unaware of how AI worked, but I must admit I was hoping for more.

Talk 5: Daniel Russell – AI’s Legal Landmines and How to Avoid Them

Daniel is a board member at Go Fish Digital and this was another great talk, if you were looking for an introduction to AI’s legal issues. Plus, he made it very entertaining.

Gotta say I enjoyed his outfit, too.

I knew most of this one, talking about how nobody owns the copyrights to non-human-generated images as decided by the famous monkey selfie photo, and how new challenges are being raised all the time.

There were a couple recent legal challenges to the copyright situation that he brought up which I hadn’t heard of yet, so I enjoyed hearing how people were probing the nuances of this area.

And again, a very funny and entertaining talk. He’s a great presenter.

Talk 6: Benu Aggarwal – 7 Steps to Scale your Content Creation Process in the World of AI

Benu is the president and founder of Milestone, Inc. She gave a talk broadly outlining the usefulness of AI and different ways you could use it.

This also seemed to be on the more introductory side of things. But I do like that book recommendation above: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, by a guy named Ethan, so it has to be good.

I think this AI track should’ve been called AI Basics or Introduction to AI. I was hoping for more advanced AI tricks, and I think it’s fair to assume people in our industry already have a decent grasp of the basics.

12:10pm: Lunch Break

I wanted something simple and filling today, so I went to the Cheesecake Factory across the street.

My pepper shaker came unscrewed and dumped pepper all over my corn and mashed potatoes. Womp womp 🙁

Always a scenic walk around the Hyatt though. (You can see my restaurant from yesterday, Kansas City Barbecue, in the first picture in the shade.)

Okay, back to the conference.

1:25pm: Implementation

Dave Cousin was moderating this one! He gave nice little intros to everybody.

Talk 7: James Wirth – Link Building Your CMO Will Love: 4X Your Budget with Easy ROI Calculations

James is from Citation Labs. His talk focused on return on investment and how to talk to your CMO and other C-suite folks about SEO.

I didn’t get a photo of James, sorry!

James mentioned a backlink campaign management tool called Link Launch, which does look interesting.

Talk 8: Rob Delory – SEO Storytelling Secrets: How to Win Stakeholder Support

Rob is from Ahrefs, which I’m always a fan of.

His main point was to start using numbers you might take for granted and show them to CMOs/CEOs etc. to justify your work more. And the most important takeaway about doing this was to get it out of “SEO language” and get it into more accessible marketing language. This is a really good idea.

I liked his graphics, too:

Also I was surprised when he was talking about winning full share of voice on a SERP and discussed making nine more websites to occupy all ten spaces on the first page of Google.

I mean, he’s not wrong, exactly, given unlimited budget and a do-anything-to-win attitude… it was just surprising hearing anyone talk about this at a professional conference. I think he was using it as an example of a far-end negotiation tactic response for when a CEO says “how can we get to 100% share of voice” but still. A nice touch.

Talk 9: Tyler Moye – Advanced SEO Upsell Strategies: Effective Methods for Growing Revenue and Retaining Clients

Tyler is from Page One Power and this was his first ever speech. Nice!

This talk was a little too introductory for me to get a lot of value from, though; it focused on being a strong leader as an agency, being a friend to the client, what that means on a practical level, etc. I’ve done enough account management over the years to be on top of this stuff. But I think it could be valuable for people in the audience who aren’t used to dealing with clients as much.

2:35pm: Early Afternoon Break

The last talk track ended a bit early, so when I went to drop my stuff off in the next room for the next track, I caught the end of a talk by Crystal Carter called Say My Name, Say My Name: SEO for Brand Recognition in LLMs. Actually the schedule said it was called “Say My Name, Say My Same” but I have to assume that was a typo.

I didn’t get enough of it for a FULL report, but I did get a photo of Crystal using this classic web ownership graphic.

Her point was that if some of the 16 major companies that own most of the web’s search results are making deals to train their content for AI, and you want your brand to be in AI, then you better try to get your brand mentioned by some of those specific properties. It’s a great insight.

I also just enjoy seeing that graphic from this post on Detailed.com. Detailed is run by Glen Allsopp, who also runs Gaps.com and SEO Blueprint, and who famously used to own Viperchill. I’ve been a fan of Glen’s since his way early days, I love his writing style, his comprehensive research, his unique takes, his attitude, the works, so it’s always nice when I see his stuff used (which is not uncommon at all). And his websites are so beautiful and smooth! With such nice creative graphics! Huge fan.

I put my things down and went to collect my Official BrightonSEO Merch Bag. This was actually kinda neat, because they had a cool graphic that they put on shirts and bags, plus you got a little custom LEGO guy which was neat I guess, and a sticker and a patch and a weird sort-of-metal cup (?).

Different designs for HeroConf and BrightonSEO, which was also appreciated. Oh, and an SEO fortune cookie!

In line, I also spotted Kathy Alice Brown of Webenso Digital. I met her at last year’s BrightonSEO and I remember talking for a while, though we’d both forgotten about what exactly. It was nice catching up this year.

3:00pm: Link Building

Link building is often considered the hardest part of SEO, so it’s always interesting for me to see what people are doing in it every year.

Talk 10: Amanda Jordan – Link Wars: The SEO Awakens

Amanda is from RicketyRoo. Her deck had a lot of repeated AI-generated Star Wars-inspired images. Just personally speaking my own opinion, I think they took away from the presentation overall, I find that sort of thing distracting. But I know that pop culture references can be a way to get quick audience appeal. It’s just not for me.

(Sidenote: this was my first time being in this particular talk track room, and I thought the layout was awful! The speaker was tucked way in the corner. Not a fan of this arrangement at all.)

Amanda spoke about locally relevant backlinks, compared to raw number or general authority. She stressed the importance of truly local and diverse links.

One idea of hers that I liked was to not only monitor your competitors’ backlinks (to get them yourself), but also their unlinked mentions, and ask for those for yourself too. It’s something that seems obvious in retrospect but would’ve probably just never occurred to me. Nice.

Talk 11: Greg Gifford – Advanced Local Link Building Tips That Will Make You Drool

Greg is an industry veteran and COO of Searchlab Digital, and I’ve seen him speak 3-4 times now, and it’s always a treat. He has a ton of unique knowledge and a huge amount of energy on stage.

His deck here was also heavily filled with pop culture references, which were only sometimes relevant to the topic and were really distracting for me. I’m just sharing my personal opinions, though. Obviously I’m not telling anyone how to make their decks, and Greg especially has enough experience where he can do whatever he wants and I’ll be lucky to see it!

Anyway, I took notes as fast as I could! He’s a fast talker with a ton of great info to get through.

Guest posts: not moving the needle anymore (and probably haven’t in a long time). The best links you can get are based on real world relationships (like the ones I’m giving out in this post maybe?).

Use a variety of linkbuilding tactics at once, or cycle through them, so Google doesn’t catch on to unnatural patterns.

The best local SEO advice that I always give is something he says too: get involved in the local community and sponsor things, volunteer, do things, be engaged for real. Get links AND get customers and a good reputation and so much more.

He offered some neat downloads and then SO MUCH information on a few of the slides that it’s too much to even reproduce. I just need to go and download them. Amazing local link building talk.

I also got slightly distracted by this person’s hat. Camo with rhinestones? What a statement.

Talk 12: Roni Shehu – Get Hundreds of Organic Links Through Statistics Link Building

Roni is a partner and head of content and outreach at Superlinks.

He had a great idea of finding websites with incorrect numbers and statistics on them, and correcting them. The trick is that you, on your own website, have some page or asset that has the corrected data and statistics, so you act as the new source, getting a link from the deal. And since you’ve made your page a great source asset, you gradually get more and more links as more people cite it.

This is a pretty cool idea. I think something relating to “statistics backlink building” used to be a super niche thing a long time ago but it was really forgettable (at least to me); this really elevates it to a modern form.

He recommends searching up “[your niche] statistics” and then drilling down into different aspects of your niche to find pages to start with, but it does entail some work developing your asset pages too.

All in all, not a bad backlink talk track!

4:10pm: Late Afternoon Break

I hung around the doors for the keynote speech during this break, waiting for them to open. I wanted a front row seat. Not specifically because of the speaker, Rand Fishkin, I just wanted a front row seat regardless, but knowing it was Rand was definitely a factor.

I did snap a photo of the caricature artist a vendor had. This is a great idea, but I think they could’ve ramped it up further. While the subject is sitting still for the picture, the vendor has a captive audience! It’s the perfect time to roll out their pitch!

Plus, if the mark is already smiling for the artist, their brain will associate the smile and happy feelings with the brand and their product, so they’ll leave with a more positive impression. I’m telling you, this idea is genius.

Also, I figured the pin map of attendees was probably as complete as it would ever be this late in the conference, so I snapped a picture of that too:

The doors opened and I got the best seat in the house, front row center stage.

4:40pm: Keynote Speech

Today I made sure to take a couple photos of what the combined keynote speaker room looks like.

After we all sat down, BrightonSEO’s top host Kelvin Newman of Rough Agenda came out and introduced Rand Fishkin.

Talk 13: Rand Fishkin – Mythbusting the Internet – A Data-Visualized Journey into the Underbelly of How Web has Changed

Just like Wil’s keynote speech yesterday, Rand Fishkin’s speech today was really just something else. Incredible stuff.

Rand is a huge figure in SEO and search marketing. He founded Moz and SparkToro, wrote the earliest high-quality beginner’s guide to SEO, and wrote Lost and Founder, which I have read myself and given to people as a gift. I was so psyched I got to see him speak.

His talk was about debunking theories on how and why the web is changing and what that means for us in marketing. It was jam-packed with so much data and so much analysis that just thinking about the time it must’ve taken is inspiring.

One theory of his that I really thought was interesting was about how web usage spiked during COVID and then has mostly flat-lined ever since. Rand believes that COVID effectively front-loaded the growth we would’ve experienced anyway in these next few years.

Almost all new Internet growth is coming from Asia, as well as some from Africa. Very little from America and Europe. And he makes the point that at this stage in the Internet’s growth, there’s really not a lot further it can go. It’s going to turn into a zero-sum game, or in other words, if something gains share, something else will lose share.

Surprisingly strong signals for Pinterest as a social channel. Damn, maybe I finally have to get back there. I haven’t touched my weird little Pinterest account in 7 years.

Rand also noted that email is a consistently strong channel, and has been holding strong for years now.

Google is the top referrer of online traffic by far, especially between search and YouTube, and then from there it’s Facebook, Reddit, and on down. TikTok sends zip. However, he says that focusing only for Google even with this dominance is a terrible idea.

I should mention, by the way, that Rand is a terrific and energetic speaker with a great sense of humor on stage. And I thoroughly enjoyed his political takes, which happened to be completely relevant to the topic at hand as well.

In the past it’s always been advised to build on “owned land” vs. “rented land.” This means that you should put your content out on your own website, which you own, or on your email list, which you own, or other platforms you have full control over. The alternative being posting on Facebook or LinkedIn or etc. which you have no real control over, which can tweak an algorithm and destroy your exposure overnight.

But these days, there’s more and more of a case to build on rented land too. Exposure is more in play than ever, especially when you’re looking for fans. It was wild to hear Rand Fishkin recommend posting on socials more, but he made it make sense.

Interestingly, he also argued that AI Overviews in search are equivalent to “rented land” just the same, and should be considered exposure plays too. Another great point.

As an aside, I found it interesting that both Rand today and Wil yesterday had insights that were equivalences between two concepts. And not just navel-gazingly pointing out similarities, but showing equivalences in ways that then directly lead to updating strategies. True marketing genius moments.

At some point there was just so much information in this talk that I knew Rand was going to post eventually that I stopped taking notes entirely. I’ll look out for the post and link it here when it goes up. It was much more fun to enjoy the talk in the moment.

Rand claims to have moved on from SEO, and yet he goes on to make a whole slide for “It Depends“… sorry Rand, I think that’s a sign that you’re still in.

(Don’t let that take away from the great point on that slide, too.)

I did take photos of four of his five final takeaway slides:

And with Rand finishing up, the talks at BrightonSEO were officially over.

5:30pm: Drinks Reception in the Seaport Ballroom

This was a very short drink interlude in the hallways outside the talk, but I enjoyed it because I got to see all the booths being taken down. I just found the deconstruction process interesting. I bet no one else will show you this view!

6:00pm: Closing Networking Party in the Marina Room

We were all ridiculously lost trying to find the Marina Room. If they have the closing party here again in 2025, well, I’ll know where it is, but they should maybe put up some signage.

The instructions were “it’s outside, but still on the grounds, leave the vendor area and turn and leave the Hyatt but it’s still part of the Hyatt.” This was not super helpful. But because I’m the guy who asked, and got these directions, I had a small group of other lost people following me. I think their idea was that even though I had limited knowledge, it was still more knowledge than anyone else had.

But by dumb luck, I walked straight in the right direction completely by accident, so it all worked out fine!

For some reason it was a cash-only bar and the prices were kinda crazy, especially because nobody carries cash at all here.

Luckily in a few minutes someone made their way down and gave us all drink tickets. I just wanted a water but they still took my drink ticket for it 🙁

The event itself was really neat and I’m so glad they had this! Unfortunately I was feeling completely beat. I talked to a few people, like Avani from the bar last night, and the person in the photo below near the middle who’s blurry and walking, who I also met the year before and whose name I just cannot remember (sorry!!).

I also ran into Ava Lynch from yesterday (and from the 2020 Napa conference) again and exchanged a couple nice words and wished her a nice flight back to Austin.

My head just wasn’t in the game by this point, though, so I left pretty early. I still had one more event to go to tonight and I desperately needed to lay down for a bit first.

8:00pm: Southern California SEO Meetup Group Afterparty at Trailer Park After Dark

This is the technically-official afterparty hosted by the Southern California SEO Meetup (which itself is hosted by Sterling Sky). I had heard of this group before, but never became a part of it because all their meetups were in Garden Grove, CA, which is a good distance from me in Los Angeles.

The party started at 8, but I figured people would be slow to show up, and I wanted to arrive fashionably late, and I was exhausted and wanted extra time to lay down anyway. So I showed up around quarter after nine.

The bar, Trailer Park After Dark, is a totally unique and bizarre location themed like a trailer park, and boy do they go all the way with it. They have carved-out shopping carts with cushions for chairs, some actual trailers for side rooms, beer pong, an old-fashioned food-serving truck, trash can lights, lawn furniture, fences, a table that will instantly take you back to the table your grandma owned in the 70s, on and on and on…

Totally insane, right? I walked around just exploring for a while.

The men’s urinals were made out of cut-open beer kegs, but I’ll spare you that photo.

And then, if you step over this fake lawn and into this old trailer, you’d find yourself in a very brown lounge room with a davenport and chair completely covered in slippery plastic cases, a photo of Michael Jackson and ET on the wall next to an antique wooden wall-mounted phone, and a wooden china cabinet filled with the finest china–or in this case, the finest paper plates and plastic solo cups.

I saw Patrick Stox, Dave Cousin, and Slaw Gawlowski again here. I only drank pineapple juice the whole night, and the bartenders were nice enough to barely charge me a thing. I only stayed an hour and a half at most.

While at Trailer Park, I am pretty sure I met Mika Lepisto, Ernest Cheng, and Paul Baterina. But it was dark and I could be wrong here. Hey, I was pretty tired, okay? We talked about digital marketing for diamond jewelry, which I have some pretty neat experience in.

Randomly, someone else showed me their garage camera video of them breaking their right foot, which I also have experience in.

I also had the chance to talk with Parth Suba, who was here all the way from India. He had some pretty neat stuff to say, especially about how he helps connect SEO talent with open jobs in a really smart way. This was a great last conversation to close the conference out on.

It wasn’t even 11pm when I said my goodbyes and walked back and immediately fell asleep.

Final Notes

I took the Amtrak train home the next day. I love the Pacific Surfliner. Look at these views:

On the ride home, my very good friend (and ex-SEO-colleague for a time) Anna Holmquist texted me that they had just gotten a great international SEO article published on Search Engine Land, which was a lovely read. Nice.

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So, obviously, I had a great time at the conference!

If you’re in digital marketing, you should absolutely attend. I keep meaning to sign up to speak. Maybe next year I’ll finally have time.

I took a photo of all the merch I got, but bear in mind that a lot of this stuff will be used as gifts for colleagues and friends, not for me to keep:

You’ll note a few things I mentioned yesterday, like the Jet Octopus socks, the Conductor socks, the shiny cat stickers (left side, midway up), the great Screaming Frog hat, and the guy vs. robot arm wrestling shirt. I got some SEMrush pins which are a gift to a couple other SEOs. The only thing I didn’t mention before was the pair of anti-robot socks from Lunio.

I don’t really expect anyone to have read this whole 5000+ word post about my second day at BrightonSEO, but it’s a lot of fun for me to write anyway. I’m my own primary audience.

And like I said, I enjoy blogging and being able to give out backlinks, even if they’re not worth all that much. “Old days of the Internet” kinda vibe, y’know? (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.)

Thanks for reading!

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Written by Ethan J. Hulbert.