It has been almost exactly one year since I stood on the main stage at brightonSEO and delivered my talk on Human-centric SEO. I have been meaning to write this post for a while, and with the anniversary coming around, now feels like the right moment to reflect on the experience and what it meant for my work as an SEO consultant.
What is brightonSEO?
For anyone not familiar with it, brightonSEO is one of the biggest SEO conferences in the world. Held twice a year in Brighton, England, it brings together thousands of SEO professionals, content marketers, digital strategists, and UX specialists from across the globe. It is known for the quality of its content and the genuine sense of community it fosters across the industry. Getting the chance to speak there was something I did not take lightly, and I spent a lot of time making sure I had something genuinely useful to say.
The Talk: Human-centric SEO
My talk was titled Human-centric SEO: Putting People Before the Search Engine, and it is a topic I feel genuinely passionate about. The core idea is simple but often overlooked: SEO works best when you stop optimising purely for algorithms and start optimising for the actual human beings doing the searching.
In the talk I explored how psychology, UX principles, and content strategy can come together to create search experiences that feel natural, relevant, and genuinely useful. I challenged the idea that rankings and keyword volumes should be the starting point for an SEO strategy, and instead made the case for understanding user intent at a much deeper level.
When you align what your website does with what a person actually needs in that moment, the rankings tend to follow. More importantly, the conversions do too.
The session was aimed at experienced B2C SEOs, content marketers, and digital strategists, and the conversations I had afterwards confirmed that the message landed. People are tired of chasing algorithmic shortcuts. The industry is maturing, and the practitioners doing the most interesting work are the ones putting their users first.
What the Experience Meant
Speaking on the main stage was a full-circle moment for me. I have been working in SEO for a number of years now, with a particular focus on eCommerce brands and Shopify SEO. A lot of what I covered in the talk draws directly from work I do day-to-day with eCommerce clients, where the gap between what a search engine sees and what a customer actually needs can have a very real impact on revenue.
eCommerce SEO has its own unique challenges. Product pages, category architecture, structured data, site speed, and conversion all have to work together seamlessly. When you layer human-centric thinking on top of that, asking not just “will this rank?” but “will this actually help someone make a decision?”, the results are consistently better. That is the approach I bring to every client engagement, and it was rewarding to share it with an audience of that size.
Looking Ahead
A year on, the ideas in that talk feel more relevant than ever. Search is changing rapidly, with AI-generated answers, zero-click results, and shifting user behaviour all reshaping how people interact with search engines. In that context, the businesses that will win are the ones that have genuinely invested in understanding their audience.
If you are an eCommerce brand, particularly one running on Shopify, and you want to build an SEO strategy built around your customers rather than just your rankings, I would love to work with you.
And if you are curious about the talk itself, the slides are still live over on the brightonSEO website. Have a read and let me know what you think.
Here is to the next year.
SEO consultant specialising in eCommerce and Shopify brands. Human-first strategy that drives organic growth.