Two visits to Brighton in one week and both filled with sunshine – I think that’s a win ☀️ First off was being super inspired cheering my run club crew, and anyone else running the Brighton Marathon. Words fail me, which is rare, as both determination, emotion and resilience is shown not only for the runners but also their support crew. Friends and multiple generations of families coming together to celebrate someone achieving something that only 1% of people achieve. Second visit was to brightonSEO and I felt super inspired by Megan Roberts’ session. Firstly because wow – can she hold a room, loved the vibe and felt like every single word and sentence was a drop of insight and honesty. It made me think deeply about how we focus so much on metrics, figures and process – often forgetting what that means for the end user. How does that sentence land? How will this copy be perceived? How will this experience feel?

Great couple of days at #brightonSEO with the Press Box PR team. I even made the front page… sort of! Thank you to everyone who popped over to our booth to say hello and learn more about what we do, all the amazing speakers across the various stages and masterclasses, and the many other exhibitors who all brought the event to life. Special shout outs to PBPR’s very own Katie Storey for kicking things off on the main stage on Thursday, Joshua Blyskal for his insights on where SEO and AI search overlap (and where they don’t), and Megan Roberts and Akash Jhaslani for making the case for an internet that’s engineered for humans rather than algorithms. An extra special shout out to Phil Atkinson, the man behind the camera putting people on their own front page throughout the conference. See you next time, Brighton!

Friday, I had my first ever taste of brightonSEO. The session that stood out most was ‘The Human Side of SEO’. It was thought-provoking and not just for SEO. It made me question whether there’s a human side to marketing at all anymore. Are we too focused on algorithms that we’ve lost sight of who we’re actually marketing to?

Well, brightonSEO certainly lived up to the expectation! My first time attending, and hopefully won’t be the last. A lot to take in, but I came away with heaps of useful information. Ray Saddiq and Megan Roberts’ sessions were a couple of many highlights from the day.

On the way back from the Brighton SEO conference – some great sessions across the day. I’d particularly like to thank: – the organisers of brightonSEO for the free ballot ticket – Kazushi Nagayama for the new perspective on how to join up your data and spot meaningful indicators for driving and indexing issues – Gabriela Jennifer Trokler for the insights into product pages that balance psychology and persuasive selling – Megan Roberts for reinforcing the importance of understanding the person behind the search – how words create expectations which in turn shape perception And the climate for the glorious weather… this was ☀️

Search is personal. So is SEO. In a beautiful talk about humanistic SEO, Megan Roberts spoke about putting people before the search engine. It’s useful to remember that every search is a person out there, looking for something real – and we must optimise for this person, not the algorithm alone. It was fantastic to be taken through the history of SEO by Lily Ray. She spoke of the ease and amazing clarity of who knows the SEO world like the back of their hand. To someone like me, who is new to the world of SEO, that is super insightful. I also learnt that free ice cream makes everyone happy. Excellent ROI. (Also shoutout to Rahul Verma, Shashit Shanmugam Aditya Narayan and Gavin Willis for the chats!)