There’s always a lot to take home from brightonSEO, but when I think back on San Diego this year, some of my favorite moments weren’t the ones happening on stage. They were catching up with old friends, meeting people I’d only known online, talking shop over tacos or a beer, and spending time with a community I’m really grateful to be part of.
I already shared some of my thoughts on AI, brand orchestration, and where search is headed in my blog post, My Takeaways From brightonSEO on the Future of SEO in the AI Age. This time, I wanted to talk about the people who made the week so much fun.
Reconnecting With Friends and Meeting New Ones
One of the best parts of brightonSEO is getting to see people we usually only interact with online. We kicked things off by catching up with friends like Adrienne Kmetz and Noah Learner, and spending some time with Patrick Stox at Karl Strauss. There is something different about getting to sit down and actually talk when so much of our day-to-day communication happens through Slack, Zoom, LinkedIn, and email.
At speaker orientation, I also had the chance to meet Navah Hopkins from Microsoft. I had questions about some of the increases we’ve been seeing in Copilot referral traffic, and she was incredibly gracious about taking the time to talk through them with me.
Those kinds of conversations are one of the reasons I love coming to events like this. Everyone is trying to understand a search landscape that is changing incredibly quickly, and there is so much value in being able to compare notes with other SEO industry people.
The Boardwalk Bash and The SEO Community
The Boardwalk Bash was another highlight of the week, and a huge amount of credit goes to The SEO Community for creating a space where everyone could actually spend time together outside the conference.
More than 200 people went this year, and the event also supported the Jacobs & Cushman San Diego Food Bank. I love that something designed to bring our industry together can also have an impact on the local San Diego community.
A special shout-out to our own Marli Jimenez, who volunteered at the event and helped make the night happen.
We also got to catch up with Chima Mmeje from Moz and Michael Bonfils from SEM International, along with so many other people we don’t get to see often enough.
I think The SEO Community is doing something really important. Search can be a surprisingly small world, but it can also feel very spread out when most of us work remotely and spend our days behind screens. Having people actively creating opportunities for us to meet, learn from one another, and share what we’re seeing makes the entire industry stronger.
If you aren’t already familiar with The SEO Community, I definitely recommend checking them out and getting involved.
Spending Time With Women in Tech SEO
I also loved getting to spend time with the Women in Tech SEO community while we were there.
There is something special about walking into a room filled with women who work in search and immediately feeling like you have things to talk about.
A big thank you to Melissa Popp and the other volunteers who helped bring everyone together. Community events take a lot of work behind the scenes, and I’m always grateful for the people willing to put in that time so the rest of us have a place to connect.
Women in Tech SEO has built an incredible global community around education, mentorship, networking, and supporting people in the search industry.
If you’re interested, I highly recommend checking out Women in Tech SEO.
Watching Our Own Team Get Involved
It was also really fun watching our own No Bad Days Digital team become part of the conference.
Kate Yen hosted speed networking, which gave attendees another way to meet people outside of the usual conference conversations. It was a great space to meet new people and hear about what they do.
Kate also brought her friend Devon Glenn, a published author and editor. Kate spent more than a decade at Hay House Publishing before moving deeper into SEO and digital strategy, so it was fun having some of that publishing and editorial world represented alongside the SEO world.
We also had a chance to catch up with Greg Haines from Compass Digital and hear what he’s seeing from customers right now. I always appreciate conversations like that because they pull us out of our SEO bubble. Search data can tell us a lot, but there is no substitute for actually listening to what customers are asking for and what businesses are hearing in their conversations.
Lunch With People We Trust
One of my favorite lunches of the week brought together several people we’ve gotten to know and trust through our work. We spent time with Ryan Castillo, the Co-Founder of Knowatoa, who we work with around AI visibility tracking, James Sperry, who brings deep expertise in agile project management, Benj Arriola, who has been a trusted resource in technical SEO and reputation management, and David Lewallen, CEO of Verbatim Digital, who we collaborate with on AI visibility projects.
One thing I’ve always valued about this industry is how much expertise exists within it. Nobody can or should be the expert in every part of search, especially now. Technical SEO, content, AI visibility, digital PR, analytics, reputation, development, and project management all require different kinds of expertise. Having people around us whose work we trust means we can learn from one another, challenge each other’s thinking, and bring different perspectives to the problems our clients are trying to solve.
Getting on Stage at brightonSEO
Of course, one of the biggest moments of the week for me was getting on stage to present “How to Prune, Shape, and Replant Your Content So Your SEO Thrives After a Redesign.”
My talk was about something we see all the time at No Bad Days Digital: companies invest years building content and authority, then a redesign or migration changes the environment around all of it.
The answer isn’t to blindly bring everything with you or delete anything that isn’t currently driving traffic. I talked about looking at performance, potential, purpose, and experience before deciding whether content should be retained, refreshed, consolidated, redirected, or retired.
I loved getting to share the stage with my co-presenters and seeing familiar faces in the audience, including Lee Mills from Vibes Matter and Pixly.
It was also such a nice surprise to see Ayaka Uchida publish a write-up of my session afterward. It’s always interesting to see what someone sitting in the audience takes away from a presentation, and I really appreciated her taking the time to share it.
You can read Ayaka’s recap of my brightonSEO presentation here.
A Conversation With Andy Crestodina About the Future of Websites
One of my favorite unplanned conversations happened with brightonSEO headliner Andy Crestodina. We started out talking about website migrations and headless CMS platforms and eventually ended up on a much bigger question: What happens to the CMS when AI agents can build websites?
Andy was incredibly gracious and fun to talk with, and I loved getting the chance to think through where all of this might be going with him. AI may make it easier for companies to create pages or even entire websites, but enterprise websites still need structure, governance, consistency, workflows, architecture, and people who understand how all of those pieces fit together.
I have a feeling that conversation is only getting started.
Continuing the Conversation Beyond the Stage
I also had the chance to do two interviews while we were at brightonSEO, one with Raymond Martinez of Search y Sazón and another with Tyler Einberger of MKE DMC.
Getting to sit down and have longer conversations about what we’re seeing in SEO and where the industry is going was another highlight of the week. It’s easy to think conferences are mostly about attending sessions and collecting information, but so much of the value happens outside the official agenda. One conversation leads to another, someone introduces you to a person you should know, or you hear a perspective that changes the way you’ve been thinking about something. That’s what I came home appreciating most.
The Best Part of brightonSEO Was the Community
Search is changing too quickly for any of us to have every answer, and I think that makes community more important, not less. We need people we can learn from, ask questions of, disagree with, share ideas with, and sometimes just sit down and have a beer with.
So thank you to everyone who came to my talk, stopped to say hello, shared an idea, grabbed a meal or a drink with us, volunteered, interviewed me, introduced us to someone new, or just made us laugh during a very full few days. I’m already looking forward to seeing everyone again.
Get My brightonSEO Presentation
If you missed my session, you can still get a copy of my full presentation, “How to Prune, Shape, and Replant Your Content So Your SEO Thrives After a Redesign.”
I walk through how we evaluate content before and during a redesign, including what to retain, refresh, consolidate, redirect, or retire, why traffic should never be the only measure of value, and why a technically successful migration can still leave you with a broken user experience.
Fill out the fields below to get a copy of my brightonSEO presentation.
