With 20 years of experience under his belt, Malcolm Slade joined Epiphany Search (now Jaywing) as one of its first employees and has led projects for many well-known brands, including Disney, Greggs, Pretty Little Thing and Virgin Holidays. Now Performance Director at integrated agency HUB, Slade shares his views on the state of SEO in 2024.
I've attended many BrightonSEOs of various scales and one thing has always remained consistent – it's a great place to network with industry peers and get a sense of the current state of affairs when it comes to SEO.
The event was first held in a pub in 2010 but has continued to grow since then, now attending twice a year with over 6,000 professionals looking to deepen their knowledge through two days of talks across multiple presentation theatres.
The first BrightonSEO of the year ended on April 26th. Let’s take a look at the main themes of the event and assess the state of SEO in May 2024.
artificial intelligence
While generative AI and large language models (LLMs) were the talk of the town in 2023, the gold rush and general buzz around ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc. has subsided considerably in recent months. This is thanks to a general understanding spreading, Google clarifying its position on the use of AI, and industry professionals becoming more realistic about what the current generation of LLMs cannot do. Don't get me wrong, there was still a lot of talks on AI content, but it was more thoughtful and realistic based on the latest experiences.
Chima Mmeje – “AI and Machines: How to Become a Source of Truth with Trusted Content” provided a helpful level of detail on how to expertly work with generative AI and combine it with expert knowledge to create great content. This isn’t as simple as a single prompt and will require a lot of revisions and iterations to get there.
In his presentation titled “5 Effective Ways to Leverage AI in Your SEO Strategy,” Damian Salkowski explained how to use AI, embeddings, and knowledge graphs for various purposes, including topic mapping, competitive research, content gap analysis, and link placement.
Jonjo Rowlands gave a really fun presentation on humanizing ChatGPT, explaining how to use ChatGPT within your content creation process, rather than just having ChatGPT write sentences.
Overall, the key takeaways were clear throughout all the AI talks.
- Google is getting smarter through semantics, weighting BERT, etc.
- LLMs such as ChatGPT can be taught to be more human-like and less “obviously ChatGPT-like.”
- Humans will still need to be heavily involved in the content process: critique, fact-checking, humanization, and a level of expertise that isn’t available to AI at the time of training.
Google's search generation experience
SGE is another topic that got everyone’s attention in 2023, but has become less important since then.
There were several talks about SGE and how to prepare for it, but the most interesting one was by Tom Capper of STAT/Moz, who used STAT data to show how Google's Search Generative Experience has changed over the past six months, and how and why it may change further before it rolls out.
The most interesting statistic is that Google has moved away from just forcing users to use generated answers, to instead providing a button prompt that indicates they can generate an AI-generated answer if they want.
Tom and I have always had very similar ideas about how Google will evolve in the future. We even shared the same stage previously at BrightonSEO, discussing ranking factors and branding, something I'm very passionate about.
Google has begun rolling out SGE to users in the United States as of May 14, with plans to expand to other countries in the coming months. This slow release seems like a smart move for Google, allowing it to monitor adoption and public reaction to this new way of interacting with search.
Currently, SGEs often provide a worse user experience than current SERPs, and generating SGEs is computationally more expensive than simple standard results pages. As Tom says, “it takes a lot of work.” Google can't risk losing market share, or even advertising revenue, by chasing Bing and ChatGPT down the rabbit hole of generated experiences.
Will it eventually be fully rolled out? Probably. Will it be as disruptive as initially thought? Probably not. People will still search “Google,” but the main change is that they won't necessarily visit websites for information. Websites that thrive on monetizing information are likely to be hit the hardest over time as users slowly become accustomed to interacting with Google in this new way.
A question I get asked often is, “Should I still stick to informational content?” My answer is always “Yes.” Your site should contain all the content your customers need to achieve their goals. The fact that that content might not generate much traffic from Google is less important than the fact that it supports your users' journey to conversion.
Experience, expertise, authority and credibility
EEAT (and previous E-A-Ts) have been a staple topic at SEO conferences for a while now, and it shows no signs of slowing down. 2023 and beyond is bringing with it several major Google updates aimed at improving the quality of search results through human-like signals like expertise, user experience, subject matter authority, and trustworthiness.
We don't know, and probably never will know, the exact details of how EEAT is calculated and how it affects rankings, but this high-level concept is a surefire way for Google to guide us towards creating “better” content and experiences on the web.
Every website I have tried to help recover from potential EEAT issues often follows a similar pattern of over-monetization and a clear bias towards revenue over user experience.
Amanda Walls gave an excellent foundational presentation titled SEO for the “Your Money, Your Life” Industry, where she covered the concepts of EEAT and YMYL, as well as proven methods for pleasing the Google algorithm.
Annika Haataja’s talk “How to diagnose brand SEO health issues” was another interesting talk that covered several areas aligned with the EEAT and how to assess a brand’s strengths.
In his talk “How to Increase Google Rankings and Improve EEAT with Video,” Benjamin Szturmaj discussed how video can be used as part of an EEAT strategy, something we at HUB are very passionate about. Google's move to introduce short-form video to compete with TikTok and others and to prioritize video content in certain SERPs shows that the shift from text-based learning to other formats is a very real concern and a big growth area. This is likely due to the simple fact that text-based learning gets the point across succinctly and is less intrusive in its monetization.
Calmon Dominguez’s talk “Goodbye SEO Strategies, Hello Organic Strategies” explains how to deal with the “I’m ranking #1” problem.st We’ll discuss the “traffic is declining” scenario and how EEAT and the principles behind it can help you overcome this as part of a holistic organic strategy across all your content channels.
Every talk I saw brought up the fact that EEAT goes beyond just a website, adding authors, etc., but ties directly into a holistic, integrated approach to branding and content across all channels. Being present and providing value everywhere your audience is looking for you and what you do has been a stable strategy for many years and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
lastly
BrightonSEO continues to be a pillar of the SEO community, offering content for all levels of understanding and the opportunity to network with top minds from around the world. One thing that was always a concern was size. With five consecutive stages across two days, it's impossible to attend every talk, so the video package is a must if you want to get the most value out of the experience.
My key takeaway from BrightonSEO in April is simple.
- We may have stumbled a bit recently, but like any mature marketer, we’ve been adopting AI and thinking about what impact it will have going forward.
- Change is inevitable. Google isn't going to tell us the secret to success. We just need to learn, test, adapt, and follow the core principle of marketing: do what's right for your users with the least amount of friction.
- SEO is alive and well, and as a practitioner with 20 years of experience, I can say it’s just as interesting, exciting, and sometimes frustrating as ever.
The next BrightonSEO will be held on October 3rd and 4th. Come join us!