Brighton SEO October 2024 | Talk Highlights
8th Oct 2024
Last week, on 3 October 2024, search marketing professionals were given a fresh perspective on how search is evolving in the age of AI, as Tom Vaughton, founder and CEO of Varn Health, presented at Brighton SEO. This is the world’s largest search marketing conference, held in the UK and is a 2-day conference with the aim of helping search and digital marketers meet, learn, and do their jobs better. Tom’s talk focused on the implications of AI-powered search technologies for brands and businesses, emphasising that the core principles of great SEO remain critical for success.
Tom shared insights from his 25 years of experience in SEO, highlighting how search engines are becoming smarter, using advanced tools like natural language processing (NLP), voice search and image recognition. These innovations are transforming how search engines interpret content and rank websites, and as a result, all organisations must adapt to remain competitive, including healthcare.
Tom urged marketers to embrace the evolving landscape and in terms of healthcare, this means aligning your SEO strategies with the needs of patients and healthcare professionals and will include creating high-quality content that meets patient needs, improving user experience, as well as focusing on technical optimisation.
From a healthcare perspective, AI’s growing ability to understand complex patient queries means healthcare SEO strategies must focus on personalising content and meeting user intent at every touchpoint, from research to diagnosis to treatment options. By doing so, healthcare organisations can ensure they capture and convert patients with the most relevant and valuable information.
At Brighton SEO Tom outlined four critical areas where AI is changing the landscape of search:
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP enables search engines to better understand patient queries by analysing the context of whole sentences rather than just keywords. Healthcare marketers should shift their SEO focus toward addressing broader concepts and themes, creating more patient-centric content.
- Voice Search Interpretation: As more patients use voice search, conversational phrases and local search optimisation become crucial for healthcare brands to appear in relevant voice search results. Structured data and website speed are vital components of this strategy.
- User Intent Analysis: AI can now better understand patient intent behind queries, so healthcare sites must align content with intent, whether informational, commercial or transactional. This includes updating site architecture and internal linking to stay visible and relevant.
- Image & Video Recognition: AI technologies like Google’s Vision AI are improving search engines’ ability to interpret visual content, making high-quality, relevant images and videos essential for healthcare websites to rank well and effectively communicate product or service information.
Tom emphasised to the Brighton SEO audience, that we must continuously experiment with and refine SEO strategies to keep up with the rapid advancements in AI-powered search, ensuring they prioritise exceptional user experience and deliver valuable helpful content that meets search intent, and we would argue this also applies to healthcare more than ever before. Tom’s talk offered a forward-thinking perspective on SEO in the AI era and encourages healthcare marketers to remain flexible, explore innovative strategies, avoid shortcuts and always prioritise the needs and experiences of patients and healthcare professionals.
If you want some advice about how to stay ahead of the changes we are seeing with the advancements in AI powered search, do get in touch with our expert Varn Health team.