Living in London means having the chance to participate in some great marketing conferences. Now it was time to hear from the SEO minds out there at the MozCon 2025.
I usually like to join these kinds of events to try and see the light at the end of the tunnel. And oh boy, I needed that. With Zuckerberg saying that advertising will be 100% made by AI in a few years, and in fact already taking steps towards that — advantage+ etc, plus the AI overviews taking a shift in CTR as we had never seen before, I was hoping a conference would help me see through it and get that energy boost to keep swimming.
What’s wrong with accepting the natural course of action
Don’t get me wrong. I truly love SEO. I can spend hours talking about it. It is my favourite subject in the dozens of workshops and corporate training I have conducted. I used to lose track of time while talking about it. However, in these past months, we have been seeing nonsenses that make us marketers question everything. We have AI influencers making success on Instagram, people having trouble to realise whether a certain video is fake or not, people hiding a good old em dash because it looks like chatGPT wrote it.
Besides, when I open LinkedIn lately, all I see is a constant moaning and fight about whether SEO is dead or not.
All this makes me wonder – I am being cringy?
Is this how the traditional advertising guys felt 15 years ago? I remember being the youngest in meeting rooms where colleagues had absolutely no clue about digital marketing and couldn’t accept it would take over. It was that era where the client needed a digital agency and an “offline” agency because the industry couldn’t yet see it was all part of the same game.
But now, guess what? It is all the same again. Let’s not invent a dozen new terms for SEO. Our industry is evolving and that’s the natural course of action.
MozCon 2025 insights
The MozCon 2025 helped me realise I am not alone. I could see with a fresh pair of eyes that there is just so much we can do, and that’s exciting!
We have been empowered by this remarkable technology that, although it has also brought us some setbacks, can help us achieve more.
Don’t worry, I didn’t come here to be another one saying SEO is not dead and just evolving. You got that.
The speakers at the MozCon 2025 gave away several tips for us more forward. These are my highlights:
Browsers are killing our data
Luke Carthy brought the wake-up call: at a time when so much is changing, having the most precise data is crucial to be able to act accordingly.
He (not so) kindly reminded us we simply can’t avoid the cookieless era. Unless we get our s*** together and move towards server-side tracking, browsers like Safari and Firefox are killing our data.
He also introduced the attribution paths report and pointed out we are probably doing attribution windows wrong, especially when it comes to SEO, since it is common to attribute last click.
People still like listening to people
Charlie Marchant gave us a master class on how to appear in generative AI searches.
So if you thought it is over and there is nothing you can do, she would have proved you wrong.
And guess what: it’s a lot about what we have been doing for decades: that thing that is not dead 😉
But then my favourite part comes: Digital PR is making a massive comeback. In order to get AIs talking about your products, we need to get others doing the same. We are talking about citations and content, yes content!
AI overviews and being the first
Beyond content, it is clear that Google isn’t (yet) attacking commercial keywords, because well, that is how they make money.
The appearance of AI overviews is also lower in branded keywords. So it is time to focus on the brand.
The next speaker, Chima Mmeje went all in on affinity, and how we need to ensure to become the primary source of information. AI, API, and automation are here for it.
If it’s not helping, what tech is here for anyway
Speaking of automation, some valuable and actionable advice came from Andy Chadwick. He’s making sure the robots are working for us, not against. In fact, he prefers bots to humans. I’m not here to judge.
The point is: there is a lot of cool automation that we can build with AI to tackle those manual tasks — in SEO or any other industry. And we, at BLND, love this!
Way before the AI boom we were already making the life of publishers, social media managers and content managers a lot easier by introducing smart spreadsheets with little algorithms to help:
- PPC campaign creation and bidding
- Smart reposting
- Scalable keyword research
The good news is we can now do much more with the power of AI.
And ahead we go
I used to create hundreds of Google Ads campaigns, ad sets and ad variations within a few hours using Google Sheets.
Now a simple prompt achieves the same in a few minutes. Brilliant, isn’t it?
Well, I can say this SEO conference has definitely helped me fall in love with our industry once again. There is a lot to learn, test and great results just awaiting us out there. We just got to keep swimming.
If you would like to know more about how we have been introducing AI into our own daily marketing activities, feel free to reach out or stay tuned for more insights.
