Another tremendous brightonSEO conference has just passed (September 28th) and we were lucky enough to be able to attend. A whole day of inspiring and very insightful talks, plus we got to see Rand Fishkin and the DeLorean – not sure who got the most attention!
I’m writing this piece as a short take-out of what was, in my opinion, really important to remember. Being a technical SEO geek, I found the talks of Mike King of iPullRank, JP Sherman of Red Hat and Barry Adams of Polemic very practical.
– Mike spoke about automated testing to bridge the gap between development and SEO and pointed to the right approaches to planning and executing tests.
– Barry held a fantastic session on technical SEO pitfalls and how to solve interesting problems with JavaScript and site architecture.
– But most notably, JP spoke about how underappreciated onsite search actually is, how little attention is being paid to those searches and the interface of the internal search engine. I found it fascinating that the amount of information you can gain from that is so vast.
Another super important talk was Patrick Reinhart’s ‘Indexation, Cannibalisation, Experimentation’ – a few case studies of website indexing gone really, really wrong and how these got fixed. It provided me with a whole bunch of ideas when it comes with dealing with these sort of problems – and that sometimes you just have to take the drastic approach!
The conference wrapped up with Rand Fishkin’s keynote speech on the future of Google SERPs. It seems like, due to the current market share of Google, they can afford to implement more and more changes into the way they display results – slowly shifting from a search engine to an answer engine. More knowledge panels, featured snippets, 
panels about travel, hotels, restaurants, weather, sporting events, booking flights – you name it, Google most probably has it in the SERP already. Rand gave us ideas about how to approach SEO in the era of no-click searches, how to grow brand awareness and how to structure and publish good quality content.
A great quote that I found notable was: ‘Your number one goal isn’t getting clicked on a bunch of keywords, it’s making sure your brand is searched more than any other.’
Overall, I found the conference to be the best one yet & truly helpful in gaining an insight into the future of search, content, AI, data and machine learning. Roll on next time!
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Ekaterina is our resident SEO expert, and Ask Ekaterina is the stamp of her boundless wisdom. Got a question about SEO, Google or search marketing? Why not #AskEkaterina? Follow Kat on Twitter – @AskEkaterina – and LinkedIn for all the latest and greatest developments in the search marketing world.