Earlier this month Marco Ferrai (SEO Strategist) and I (Hollie Gibson, Senior SEO Strategist) headed to the Big Smoke for MozCon London, one of THE most exciting events on the SEO conference calendar this year.
As one day conferences go it doesn’t get much better (well, apart from Re:commerce, obviously…), and the event boasted some of the brightest minds from the search industry, including Dr. Pete Meyers, Areej AbuAli, Luke Carthy and Rebecca Jackson to name just a few.
We learned a bunch at MozCon, and somehow managed to distill all of those insights from 10 amazing speakers into five key takeaways:
- Still focusing on vanity metrics? Please stop.
- AI and conversational search is changing EVERYTHING
- Brand authority and trust are central to success
- Content and SEO strategies must evolve
- Technology and AI tools are enablers, not replacements
Let’s check them out…
Stop focusing on vanity metrics
Yes, we’re talking to you in the back. We see you there, boasting to senior stakeholders about how many impressions your ads have had over the last month and that your average search ranking in Google Search Console has increased from 10.4 to 8.3.
Honestly? This has been true for years now, but it’s still a common issue.
It’s understandable. After all, it can be really tough to prove genuine value from our efforts sometimes, but ultimately you’re undermining your own work by not demonstrating true ROI from the marketing investment.
Rebecca Jackson, Organic Strategy Director at VERB, kicked her talk off with this message. Numbers that look good on the surface don’t necessarily tell us anything about business impact. Instead, the real challenge is figuring out how to drive more conversions with fewer clicks.
She explained that this often comes down to stronger calls-to-action, reducing unnecessary steps in the user journey, and ensuring the brand is present at every point. For Rebecca, brand and performance shouldn’t be seen as separate strategies—they need to work together.
This was reiterated by Helen Pollitt, Director of SEO at Getty Images.
“Clicks don’t pay the bills,” said Helen.
Her point was simple but important: while we often measure SEO success in terms of rankings, impressions, and clicks, none of those really matter to stakeholders if they can’t be tied to financial outcomes. What businesses truly care about is value, not vanity metrics.
If you’re an SEO you might be thinking, ‘Okay, great. But my job is to drive increased organic traffic to my site / our clients’ sites’.
That’s true, but only to a point. We need to get our heads out of GA4 and Google Search Console to think about the bigger picture. As search marketers, particularly ecommerce search marketers, we need to be concerned about the whole journey, from first click to checkout, because ultimately it’s those conversions that are keeping us in a job.
This requires a unified approach from everyone in the team, from SEOs and paid media specialists through to customer service reps and CRO experts, to figure out where the issues lie that are holding back growth.
AI and conversational search is changing EVERYTHING
Oh, AI, really? Didn’t see that coming. Nope, super surprising.
Okay, of course we were going to talk about AI here but don’t worry, we’ve actually got something useful to say about it too, and so did a number of the MozCon speakers.
Now, we don’t recommend going to see Dr. Pete Meyers for that thing you really should get checked out, but for advice on how to deal with the impact of AI on search marketing? You better book an appointment, and stat!
Dr. Pete has been in the industry for a long time, and he started by giving some important background on how the search landscape has evolved. AI might feel like it’s burst onto the scene in the last couple of years, but he explained how the turning point was actually way back in 2013 with the Hummingbird update, which allowed the search engine to interpret entire queries in context rather than just matching individual keywords. This was the real start of semantic search.
Dr. Pete described how Google has been shifting from being a traditional ‘search engine’ to more of an ‘answer engine’ for some time, and that while voice queries rose in popularity around 2018, they never fully took off the way people expected. However, they did change the landscape by pushing search toward a more conversational style.
This all laid the foundations of where we are now with AI and large language models.
Dr. Pete went on to explain the ‘Query Fan’ concept, where a single search like “What’s the newest iPhone?” can generate a series of related, relevant questions. For example, “How many cameras does the newest iPhone have?” (subtopic fan-out) often leads to natural follow-up questions like “Should I wait for iPhone 16?”—queries that reflect shifting intent as users move from awareness to consideration.
The problem for SEOs and brands is that Google is finding a way to answer these questions itself, with AI Overviews popping up in more and more of these types of queries. Our challenge is to find those areas where Google doesn’t simply provide the answer, because this is where we can step in with editorial content, expert opinions and unique perspectives that add genuine value.
Brand authority and trust are central to success
AI might be forcing its way into the search results, but do consumers trust it? This is potentially one area where brands can have an edge, and a consistent theme across the day was that authority, consistency and trust increasingly determine visibility in both Google’s rankings and AI-driven outputs.
Lidia Infante, Head of SEO at Survey Monkey, argued that brand has become the new foundation of SEO, with trust a key element of that. LLMs don’t just need content to work with; they need authority and trust. A brand that consistently produces authoritative content and earns user trust is far more likely to be surfaced in AI-driven results.
Our friend, Women in Tech SEO founder and SEO legend Areej AbuAli agreed that visibility only comes as a byproduct of established trust, while Exposure Ninja CEO Charlie Merchant said that, with organic reach shrinking, brands must consistently appear as trusted answers, not just occupy space in results.
Of course, the difficult part is actually building that trust.
Authoritative and deep content on the subjects that matter the most to your audience is key here, not least because it gives your brand the best chance of being credited in AI summaries.
“If a searcher sees your name appearing in AI overviews, you become associated with trust and reliable answers,” said Charlie.
On top of that, AI engines repeatedly cite reviews and external mentions. Building a footprint of credible reviews across multiple sites—and ensuring your brand is referenced in the right places—feeds directly into large language models. Those mentions become the evidence AI draws on when deciding whose content to highlight.
Content and SEO strategies must evolve
Again, this feels like a bit of an obvious one. In fact, when has this not been true?
Fortunately, Moz’s very own SaaS Content Strategist Chima Mmeje had some actionable insights that went beyond the platitude.
Chima introduced what she called the new content playbook, a strategy she argued is increasingly essential in today’s crowded landscape. At its core, the playbook is driven by the principle of affinity, a reminder that creating content people genuinely value and engage with has to go far beyond surface-level tactics.
She urged the audience to always ask, “How did I hit?” In other words, reflect on performance through a retrospective content recap. This process allows marketers to identify what worked, what didn’t and how to continually improve to perform better next time.
Chima also stressed the importance of multimodal content and emphasised three core principles:
- Use contrasts – Stand out by avoiding uniformity and giving audiences a clear reason to pay attention.
- Give what not everyone else is giving – Content should go deeper, offering genuine leadership or inspiration rather than simply echoing the noise of the industry.
- Adopt a publisher’s mindset – The goal is to create content that is not just informative, but addictive. Brands should strive to become part of people’s habits, breaking away from sameness and positioning themselves as indispensable voices in their space.
Finally, Chima reminded the audience of a critical but often overlooked point: publish where the content already lives. Instead of forcing people into new behaviors, meet them where they already are to ensure the message lands in the places where the audience is naturally paying attention.
Technology and AI tools are enablers, not replacements
So, is AI here to eliminate us (think Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator film) or help us (think… Arnold Schwarzenegger… in the second Terminator film)?
According to Andy Chadwick, co-founder of both Snippet Digital and Keyword Insights, it’s the latter. At least for now. And as long as you’re not a developer…
During his talk, Andy set about demystifying the process of building SEO tools with AI. His main message was encouraging: you don’t need coding experience to create something powerful (sorry again, devs). With today’s AI assistants and accessible platforms, anyone can build customised tools in a matter of hours.
The opportunity here for search marketers is obvious: you can create new tools quickly that increase efficiency and allow you to focus on more strategic thinking. To prove the point, Andy demoed a content prioritisation tool he had built in just over an hour. By combining SEO APIs such as Moz with the OpenAI API, the tool could score keywords based on their likelihood to convert. Andy also showed how plugging in Keyword Insights’ clustering API allowed him to group thousands of keywords at scale and prioritise them in a more strategic way.
Be among the first to hear about Re:commerce 2026
MozCon London isn’t the last MozCon event of 2025, but we’ll let them worry about promoting that.
Instead, we’re going to let you know that you can sign-up below to join the Re:commerce mailing list and be among the first to hear about Re:commerce 2026, including access to special Early Bird offers before anyone else!
News on this special one-day conference designed exclusively for ecommerce brands and marketing professionals will be coming very soon, so don’t miss out.
