On SERP SEO – The Infuriating Reality of Search’s Future

Last week, I was invited to give the closing talk at Brighton SEO, one of the SEO field’s most well-attended events. The host, Kelvin Newman, was gracious, thoughtful, and personally still runs much of the event’s operations, giving it a truly special, authentic, non-corporate feel.

My presentation centered on the shift in Google’s behavior over the last few years away from an engine that drives searchers to other websites for the answers to their problems and toward self-hosted answers and solutions. That’s made SEO much more difficult, as Google, for the first time in its history, is sending less outbound traffic.

What can marketers do in response? Well… it’s gonna be difficult, but there are a number of strategic and tactical moves that we should all consider. The video of from my presentation is below, courtesy of Omi Sido. Note that early in the talk, there’s a slight issue with the slide visuals, but it’s fixed up quite quickly (huge thank you to the A/V team for nailing that on-the-spot recovery).

I’ve also uploaded the slides, which are available below:

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the talk, and of course, any helpful suggestions you’ve got for other marketers who are dealing with these challenges.