BrightonSEO 2025 April Recap

Brighton has treated me well, with sunshine and the eventful BrightonSEO. I started with the Python training with Ruth, followed by two days of inspiring talks. To be honest, there’s a bit of information overload, but it’s also been very fruitful.

This blog post is a recap and notes of the presentation that I attended.

Responsible SEO: Putting People and the Planet First

When the SEO world is buzzing with AI tools and keyword hacks, it’s refreshing — and necessary — to take a step back and ask: Who are we creating for? And at what cost?

Sarah Pokorna: Mindset-based targeting – achieving 5x more with 5x less content

In a world hyped on AI and LLMs, Sarah’s talk was a breath of fresh air. She reminded us that effective content starts with knowing your audience — really knowing them.

She introudced the Mindset theory coined by psychologist Carol Dweck and how people with fixed or growth mindset react differently to marketing copy and messages. 

It is not only useful for SEO but also for marketing. SEO is usually part of the marketing team and it is beneficial to understand 

	Fixed Mindset	Growth Mindset
Core Belief	Abilities are innate and unchangeable	Abilities can develop with effort
Motivation Drivers	Status, recognition, validation	Improvement, growth, learning
Product Preferences	Products that signal success or make things easier	Products that challenge or help them grow
Content Style	Polished, prestige-focused, social proof heavy	Informative, in-depth, process-focused
Action word in CTA	Master, Crush, Dominate,	Learn, Grow, Improve, Explore
Content Type Formats	Testimonials, case studies with measurable outcomes, expert reviews, webinar with high-status speakers	How-tos, tutorials, learning-focused newsletter, podcast
Buying Behavior	May avoid products that risk failure or challenge image	Open to trial and error; values learning

And of course the world is not always that clear-cut and you can attempt to create a message that targets both mindsets at the same time. 

An example of a dual-mindset message: “How I Became a Top 1 % Designer – And the 7 Skills I Had to Learn the Hard Way”. It addresses the achievement and status (Top 1%) while highlighting the learning and journey (7 skills I Had to Learn)

Further Read: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Oluwatobi Folasade Balogun: Maximising content efficiency with minimal environmental impact

The SEO industry doesn’t always have the best reputation — it’s often seen as spammy and as a contributor to web pollution. 

But what really surprised me was learning just how much our work impacts the environment:

• The internet contributes 4% of global emissions
• If a webpage loads in 5 seconds instead of 1 seconds, it emits 3 times more of CO₂ per visit
• Each internet search produces 0.2 grams of CO₂

With the rise of AI, it’s easier than ever to generate huge volumes of content, but much of it goes unread, adding noise and digital waste without real value.

So it’s not just about spamming the web – we’re also polluting the planet.

Let’s be more mindful of what we create. Don’t dump more digital waste into the world.

Clive Loseby: Google is blind, what this means for you in 2025

Accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have, but it’s becoming law. With the EU Accessibility Act coming in June 2025, it’s time to get serious.

Key reminders:

• Use descriptive alt text for images
• Maintain at least 3:1 color contrast (logos excluded)
• Make sure navigation works with Tab + Enter
• Use aria-labels for pop-ups and modals
• Implement a focus trap so overlays don’t break UX

Liam Cumber: What the f**k is alt-text, and how do you write it?

BrightonSEO did a great job to put Liam’s talk right after Clive’s accessibility presentation. 

I really like Liam’s opening remark about everyone has access needs – these needs can be situational and temporary impairment. So, be empathic and put yourselves into other’s shoes when drafting your alt-text.

AI & Content

Eoin O’Neill: Does Google AI think your content is helpful?

Google’s algorithm is always about machine learning. It has evolved from keyword-oriented to a more semantic and contextual approach.

Eoin and his team built a system using Cloud Run, Gemini and BigQuery to simulate LLM knowledge and NLP and how they understand your content.

Based on the URL and user intent, they run the content through a system to score it based on: 

• Originality
• Trustworthiness
• Comprehensiveness
• Shareability

While it is not easy to replicate this methodology, the idea of quantifying your content quality and mimicking how LLM or NLP work is a great direction that SEO Specialists should explore.

With a standardised scoring system, it is easy to correlate your effort and outcome.

Technical SEO

Rasida Begum: Calculating SEO opportunities through a technical lens

Putting a number to your work makes it so much easier to communicate the value of your SEO initiatives and build a business case to push forward your SEO tasks in the pipeline.

It helps major stakeholders to understand the revenue or potential loss if something isn’t done.

Rasida provided a practical walkthrough on how to measure the revenue potential of your SEO initiatives.

What you can always keep in mind when doing forecast and calculation

• Segment and categorize your landing pages
• Calculate the traffic value

You can access Croud’s SEO forecast calculator by filling this form: ​​https://croud.com/en-gb/resources/seo-forecast-calculator/#form

Technical

Martin Splitt – Rendering – what, how, why?

I started my SEO career in SEO Content and I learnt technical SEO through a lot of trial and errors and self-learning. So it’s great to have a refresher from Martin about what is rendering. 

Some quotes from Martin:

“If a URL isn’t fully rendered, we can’t rule out it being a duplicate, because we don’t know.”

“Just because it was crawled and rendered, doesn’t mean it will be indexed.”

“You could have allocated your crawl budget on the best pages, have them gracefully server-side rendered but if it scrambles a meta tag or it’s just a pointless page it may not go through the index.”

Folashade Uba: From reactive to predictive: using machine learning to anticipate customer search behaviour

Folashade delivered an amazing talk and case study on how to become more proactive in your SEO strategy.

She is using Ahrefs search data with predictive analysis to create content before a demand peak and anticipate shifts in user behavior and trend. 

As an SEO Specialist, there are already a lot of data that we can leverage:

• Google Search Console: Current performance
• Google Analytics: User Behavior
• Market Data: Market direction

And combining the above data can help us:

• Spot trends before they peak
• Measure growth potential in key topics
• Prioritize resources by future value
• Build a robust data-driven calendar
• Identify content opportunities and gaps

Tools and ML Models mentioned: 

Feature Engineering, XGBoost, Random Forest, ARIMA, PROPHET, AHREFS

Mark Williams-Cook: Improve your SEO with video games and exploits

Playing the SEO game is just like any other game – you need to know the rule and know what the system goal is.

Key Insights:

• Search queries are categorized into different query types based on intent:
  • Short fact, Comparison, Consequence, reason, definition, instruction , bool, other
• Google determines reliability through a consensus score, ranking content that aligns with widely accepted truths higher.
  • Debunking Queries: If someone searches for “Is the Earth flat?” Google prioritizes results supporting the round-Earth consensus. Contradictory or neutral content is unlikely to rank.
  • Subjective Queries: For politically charged or opinionated topics, Google intentionally mixes consensus, neutral, and non-consensus content to offer diverse perspectives.
• Titles affect rankings via predicted click probability, even if CTR isn’t a direct ranking factor.
• There is a Site quality score patent – even though Google says it’s not a ranking factor, it is not something you should overlook.

Eyüp Alikilic:Beyond the basics: the real value of GSC data in BigQuery

Eyüp provides a comprehensive overview of how we can leverage Search Console data with BigQuery. 

Although I’m working with GSC on a weekly (if not daily) basis, Eyüp demonstrated just how much more insight you can uncover by going beyond.

With bulk export, we can overcome sampling and query anonymization. There are also some useful examples and code snippets. Overall, it was a super actionable session that I’m excited to apply to my SEO workflows.

Slide here: https://alikilic.co/gsc_bigquery_advanced_brightonseo.pdf

Russell McAthy: Your marketing data is broken: here’s 3 ways to fix it!

Measuring impact is part of our job and we discuss KPI all the time. But some of the metrics are not as clear as we imagine and how we calculate the KPI should fit the purpose of the analysis.

For industries that have a long sales cycle, it is not always straightforward what is the exact conversion point and how we should attribute the traffic and conversion. Russel discussed the machine learned attribution that gives a better picture of how behave and engage across the funnel.

SEOFomo has already consolidated various presentation decks: https://hub.seofomo.co/surveys/best-brightonseo-presentation-decks/