From a certain point of view I’m a lifelong company man, in that the roots of brightonSEO lie in the first job I took after leaving university. That role, at Site Visibility, was where I cut my teeth in SEO. It was an exciting time for a relatively new sector, with something changing, or something new to discover every day. I enjoyed talking about the work we were doing, which was why I started the company blog, and everything else bloomed from there. 

Because there wasn’t one! At that time, in the dim and distant days of 2010, SEO was still something of an emerging, or somewhat unofficial, discipline within marketing. There weren’t really any hard and fast rules of going about search, let alone “best practices”, which meant SEOs always learned more from each other than anywhere else.

Brighton felt like it was at the forefront of what was happening, but I didn’t know many others in the industry. I only discovered there wasn’t already a “meet-up” where professionals could exchange knowledge and bounce ideas off each other when I went to look for one, so I suggested to my employers at Site Visibility that we host one ourselves. No-one at that point imagined it would become the beast it is today.

The “room above a pub” is an essential part of the brightonSEO “lore,” and still sums up our ethos, but we only actually held brightonSEO there once.

The second one, held the summer of the first year, was at the Community Base on Queen’s Road before we moved to the Sallis Benney theatre the following April. The trajectory was rapid, but it was still a natural progression, with each move to a bigger venue, or using more of the same one, feeling like the right next step for us.

It’s always fun to think big, but 14 years ago I couldn’t have predicted we’d be a multi-channel, multi-day, transcontinental conference, filling up the Brighton centre twice a year! I’d like to think we’ve only ever tuned in to the community and responded to the natural demand from our audience. When we’ve sensed, or heard, they’ve wanted more of something, we’ve tried to provide it.  

Depending on who you talk to brightonSEO is either always teetering on the precipice of chaos or chugging along like a well-oiled machine. Most of the team have been with us throughout the many different ages of brightonSEO so there’s very little they haven’t seen or can’t handle. The most important part has always been to observe and to critique and to change things when you think change is called for.

That’s really hard! Everyone you already know or could want to meet in digital marketing under one big roof beside the seaside. 

Since making it to Brighton Centre, it has grown even further with Hero and even an American event.

It’s definitely not been easy! But it was something we were looking at for quite a while. It might have come along sooner, if not for Covid, and there were obviously fears that real life events like this might never bounce back. But they did, which gave us the confidence we needed to make it work. You can’t go over Niagara Falls slightly - eventually you just have to take the plunge, so we did.

About other areas of marketing, I would use the word “inclusion” rather than “diversification.” Although SEOs are a particular type, tending to occupy the slightly less formal edge of the online space, and having personalities to match, there’s huge overlap with other areas of digital marketing. brightonSEO has, for years, been more than SEO anyway, with digital PR, UX, CRO, behavioural science etc., all carving out space for themselves within the main conference.

Paid search has always felt like a natural bedfellow but has needed more time and space than we’ve been able to give it - until the opportunity came along to take on Hero Conf.

So many! Although I suppose I’m the figurehead of the whole thing, brightonSEO is, in all the ways that matter, a team effort, and it’s the team that keeps you coming back and excited to do more.
Obviously, my family as well! And our dog, who maybe isn’t a person but very much is. 

It is a big question, so it’s easier to answer it in microcosm. brightonSEO has always had to respond to the changing needs of the industry. As Google’s algo/s and the product itself, has grown, and become ever more complex, so we’ve had to incorporate more of the kind of talk topics that are going to be of benefit to people working in those spaces.

Link building, for example, occupies far less space in the schedule than it used to, with much more time given to content and conversion. In general the talks, and the advice contained within them, are much less about straight rankings improvement these days than they are about how to serve the end user and help build the best website you can. 

Probably not! But you can hardly blame them. For smaller companies marketing has generally been something you get to when they’ve sorted out everything else. And even after all these years SEO is still, for most, more opaque and mysterious than, say, a billboard or an advert in the newspapers that people aren’t buying.

I still regularly get asked by small business owners if I can help get sites “up the Google list.” My answer is generally as unhelpful as you can imagine. 

Pandora’s box opened a long time ago in that respect! From a business viewpoint it can’t possibly be healthy for two companies to control so much of the advertising market. Advertisers are so dependent on them for so much of their traffic, and to have to respond without complaining to every decision they make, which are, after all, only taken to benefit their own bottom lines.

It’s arguably even worse for society, with the collapse of news and other consumer media being a direct result of the Alphabet/Meta monopoly. We had the Google antitrust trial last year, and the EU intervened against Facebook two years ago, but this sort of thing really needed to happen a lot sooner.

With browser extensions designed to block them? Obviously, AI is as “disruptive” as it gets, but I actually think products like overviews, at least in the form they’re currently being presented, aren’t as radically “new,” or happening as fast, as we’re being told they are.

Google, and others like Perplexity, are increasingly offering themselves as answer rather than search engines but that’s been happening for years - it’s now just AI providing those (wrong) answers rather than an algorithm. SEOs have always had to react to e.g. algorithm updates that have caused traffic to drop overnight.

All the signs are that in its early incarnation AI is going to be a different version of something familiar rather than something completely transformative. 

Probably the same I would give to anyone starting out in any industry: work out what interests you the most and pursue it. Early on you might not have as many options as later, but the goal should be to be stimulated, fulfilled and energised by the day-to-day. Success should follow.

For the free ice-creams! Or to meet like-minded individuals! There’s a very good reason IRL (in real life) conferences haven’t been replaced by video, which is the human connections that are possible in person, just aren’t through a chat window. The people that come to our shows are just like you: warm, kind, interesting, funny, clever, a bit insecure, maybe odd in brilliant ways and they want to meet you too.

For more information on brightonSEO go to https://brightonseo.com

The Brighton conferences take place on 10th & 11th April 2025 (includes Hero Conf) and 23rd & 24th October (includes MeasureFest).