SEO in 2023 » Livestream Launch Transcript

David Bain:

SEO in 2023 is live. Hey, it's David. Welcome to the four hour launch live stream of SEO in 2023, the 500 page book, podcast and video series, brought to you by Majestic, featuring 101 of the world's leading SEOs. Now, today, we're gonna have 60 of the books contributors joining us live over the next four hours. But just before we get going with that I'd like to know two things from you. First, two things from you watching live. First, number one, where in the world are you watching us live from? So we're starting to get some people watching us live. So if you can share a little bit in the chat, that would be great. You know, are you watching in the uk, Europe somewhere else around the world India. Where do you happen to be? It'd be great just to get a feel for where you happen to be in the world.

It might be a little bit early in the morning for people from the usa, but we'll get maybe some of them joining a little bit later. And then secondly, how are you gonna consume this content? So this content is published, as I said, in a physical copy book format that is available now on Amazon. So if you search your local Amazon store for SEO in 2023, this book should pop up there. Big chunky thing, 500 pages, as I said, and hopefully well worth the money. If you're gonna buy copy, please write a review as well, because, you know, reviews will help to make the book visible to other people as well. And we've got page saying hello from, sorry, in the uk hello from Majestic HQ in Birmingham. I'm not broadcasting live from Majestic HQ.

But hello to Majestic hq. Anyway, how else is this book being published? Because the second question is how do you want to consume the content? Do you want to consume the content as the paperback book? Do you want to consume the content in the Kindle version? Do you want to consume the content as a video or as a podcast? Got Olga saying hello, everyone cannot wait to join in less than an hour. That's right. Olga is gonna be our second co-host. So watch that in just a second. But anyway this is how you can consume the content now. So go to Amazon, search you in 2023, grab a copy there. As I said, you can get copy, physical copy book on paper bank or the Kindle version of the book there. You can also, if I can move forward here, consume the content in video form on the Majestic YouTube channel.

So just go to the Majestic YouTube channel, scroll down, and you can see the first results there just underneath the introductory video. It says SEO in 2023 playlist. We've started publishing each contribution in video form from Monday of this this week. So that's just yesterday. So there's two episodes published so far. If you wanna watch it in video form, that's where to go. We're available as a podcast as well. So whether it's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever flavor of a podcasting platform is your preference. I'm sure you can find SU in 2023 there if you find that. But I don't wanna go on about just where you can grab a copy of the content at the moment. I want to actually introduce you to loads of people who are actually going to participate in this livestream, and that's the contributors of the book themselves.

Just before we get there, I just wanna say if you can't decide what form of content to consume this resource using, just go to SEOin2023.com. That will take you to this page on the Majestic website. And there you can actually opt into email updates and whenever we publish a new episode and things like that, you will be informed of the case anyway, who is going to be participating in the first session here? So we're gonna have four sessions for our long session, each broken up by half an hour actually to have as many contributors as possible to share what they actually shared in the book and maybe give their thoughts on what they think of the book as well. So the first session is gonna be hosted by Si Shangase. We're gonna have some brilliant people join in including Adelina, Billie, David, Emily, Kevin, Nitin, Rebecca, and Sarah. So without any further ado, let's bring up everyone. So starting with Si, hello Si Si's the cohost for this session.

Si Shangase:

Hi, David. How you buddy? How are we doing? Very

David Bain:

Good, thank you and great having you on board. And let's get everyone else up who is gonna be contributing to this session. And I'm just gonna pass over to Si straightaway, and Si is just going to be doing whatever he does and hosting for the next hour. So over to you Si.

Si Shangase:

Brilliant. Hello fellow SEOs. Happy doing this morning. So we're gonna start with just a quick round of intros. I'll start with Adelina and yeah, just like to introduce yourself.

Adelina Bordea:

Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm Adelina Bordea. I'm content SEO at Freepik company, and I'm so glad to be here with all of you.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. Nice to meet you Adelina. Sarah.

Sarah McDowell:

Oh, sorry. Yes. Hello everyone. My name is Sarah. I work well. My role is SEO manager at a podcast hosting platform called Captivate. And I'm also a podcaster. And I'm very excited to be here and with all these amazing people as well. So, yeah, hi everyone.

Si Shangase:

Great to have you on. Sarah, Kevin?

Kevin Gibbons:

Yes Kevin Gibbons founder of Re:signal, specialist SEO agency in London. And yeah, looking forward to discussing all.

Si Shangase:

Perfect, great to see you, Kevin, Billie,

Billie Geena:

Hi I'm Billy Geena. I'm the learning and development manager at Salt Agency, and it's so nice to be surrounded by so many amazing SEOs. Thank you for having me on.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. David.

David Iwanow:

Hi, I'm David. I'm Head of Search for Reckitt, used to be Reckitt Benckiser based here in the Netherlands, and yeah, glad to be a board.

Si Shangase:

Great stuff. Nathan.

Nitin Manchanda:

Hey, I'm Nitin Manchanda founder of Botpresso my consultancy, which I found a couple of years back I more than 10 years of experience in seo. Thanks for having me.

Si Shangase:

Likewise, Emily.

Emily Potter:

Hey everyone, I'm Emily Potter. I'm the head of customer success at Search Pilot. We do AB testing for sel.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. Great to be here. Great to you. Great to meet you, Emily. Rebecca.

Rebecca Berbel:

Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be here with so many amazing people. I'm Rebecca Berbel. I'm the product marketing manager at Oncrawl, a data provider for technical SEO.

Si Shangase:

Great stuff. Right? So 2022 has been an event for I'm sure for most of you. One of the main things I'd like to ask you as well is in terms of the contribution that you've made to the book what's your key tip, your other tip essentially for 2023 going into next year? What would be, what would you be looking at in terms of your EO strategies? So I'll start with Adelina and work my way down the list.

Adelina Bordea:

Well, for me as I said in the book as well, is key to make powerful content for any kind of search. It doesn't matter. You have a super big search or you have like the smaller search, the, the competition out there is fierce. So you have to make sure you give the, the people you are attacking the people you want to buy your product, the best content.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. So the main focus is definitely a content for the following year. That sounds great, Sarah. What do think about that?

Sarah McDowell:

Yes great, great tip. I know that we all got asked, didn't we for the book? And I, I, I've forgotten what I've said, <laugh>. So I'm gonna give another one. Hopefully it's gonna be the same, but prioritization, right? So that is key. So obviously with SEO there's so much stuff, right? It's a massive umbrella. So just make sure that you're always aligning your seo, the things that you want to tackle with your wider business goals and what's really gonna like generate revenue, hit those KPIs. And yeah, don't think of it so much as a tick box exercise but more of a, okay, how can SEO really support what my business wants to achieve?

Si Shangase:

Yeah, that's brilliant. You know, I get a lot from, from colleagues within the performance space, the allers want to drive results for their businesses. So that's a great tip. Thank you Sarah, David, what do you think about that? What's your tip for next year?

David Iwanow:

So I was quick enough to open up the PDF version of the book. But yeah, no, very much aligned with what Sarah was saying. I guess it's the, as SEOs we're guilty of trying to do too much with sort of too little time. So I think it's about sort of cutting through the noise, because now the thing which is trending on seo Twitter is GPT3-chat. So now there's questions on, you know, how can we optimize for GPT3? And it's just like you, you still haven't, you know, talked beyond, you know, how to optimize for TikTok and now you're onto the next fun buzzy, fun, exciting thing. So I think it's very much, you know, dealing with the amount of noise and volume and questions like, you know, there's markets which are now, you know, looking at, you know, image optimization, you know, it's great, but if we look in the conversion metrics, at least from past experience, it drive traffic, but it may not drive revenue.

So yeah, so I think it's very much kind of placing a couple of big bets along with maybe a couple of risky or long shop bets because the big bets may stall out due to a migration that's delayed, or it may be a site rebuild that takes more resources. So yeah, so I think it's very much cutting through all the noise and yet trying to prioritize on some big bets, but I still think it needs some longer shots, some risky plays. And we're not talking blackout risky. We're talking about things where it never worked in the past, but if we approach 'em a better way or better data, we may succeed.

Si Shangase:

Yeah, that's brilliant. It, you know, with us SEOs, we are quite guilty of finding or going for the shiny object syndrome, right? We like new things and going for that. So yeah, that's, that's, that's a really good tip. Billie, what are your thoughts for next year?

Billie Geena:

So my tip was all about user intent. I think that's just going to be like, we all know it's important. What's the point in doing something if we're not serving the user that we're trying to meet? But I think it's just going to get more and more intense around user intent, especially over the next year. We know that search is changing a little bit, being, I know not exactly Google, but they've just announced Index they're doing more focus around index now. I feel like the entire indexing process is potentially going to be changing over the next year, and it's really, really time to just actually serve our customers rather than doing these big mad SEO campaigns where they don't convert. We need to actually go straight to the consumer.

Si Shangase:

Sounds good. Sounds perfect. And Rebecca, what are your thoughts?

Rebecca Berbel:

I know I'd spoken to David (Bain) about monitoring in general and sort of piggybacks on what Sarah and David were saying that there's so much to do. And some of what's really important is not just trying to get it all done, figure out how to build the right strategy. Having the right information at fingertips to know really what should you be doing? What is critical, what should be prioritized. And so monitoring is really one of the sort of undervalued strategies that helps you know, what's going wrong, what could go wrong, where are your opportunities? And I think that's really something we should be focusing on. Even as Billie was talking about when we talk about things that are changing when we talk about how algorithms change, how indexing changes, how user interaction is so important, those types of things. When something goes wrong, when you've updated something, or even just the environment that we're working in changes, it's really good to know that as soon as it happens.

Si Shangase:

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you're thinking more about having scalable monitoring abilities and capabilities.

Rebecca Berbel:

I think that's really essential.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. Emily?

Emily Potter:

Yeah I don't think it's a surprise to anyone though that my tip will revolve around AB testing. But yeah, I mean, I spoke about this last year and this year one of the things we've at SearchPilot been thinking about, and this actually I think related to everything that was just said Will Critchlow, our ceo, has been talking about this concept of what he calls 'Moneyball SEO', but the idea is getting data to focus on the things that actually matter and actually make a difference. So testing is a great way to be able to do that. The sort of caveat I should make is we work with large enterprise websites, so of course the type of testing we do isn't necessarily available to everyone, but again, as David and Rebecca and Sarah were all saying like, data is really gonna help you figure out those things that matter.

And as Billie was saying, everything's changing all the time. Now. It's, we're seeing all the time at SearchPilot that what works on one website doesn't necessarily work the same on another, what people think is SEO tried at best practice maybe doesn't work. So obviously there's things that you can't test, like the riskier things that David mentioned, maybe new site sections, new pages, but when you can test things, it's really, we would recommend getting a testing program stood up and something like SearchPilot lets you do that quickly and adapt really quickly to things like Google's now overrides title tags, what does that mean for our whole website? So yeah, we definitely would recommend looking at implementing something like that into your testing pro into your SEO program.

Si Shangase:

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think it really aligns to what David was just saying a minute ago about, you know, if, if you're looking at optimizing like image tags and things like that you can use something like search pilots on an AB test platform to see if that makes sense for your website or for your, for your business, essentially. Yeah. So that's brilliant. Thanks Emily. Nitin what, what are your thoughts for next year?

Nitin Manchanda:

Yeah, my, my tape that I've covered in the book as well is around keeping the user in the center of your strategy. And then you can think about marrying your demand and supply parameters to build your strategies so that you're not justing traffic through seo, but also generating traffic which converts, right? So we often miss that, hey, you know, if we have demand about some particular topic, we think about covering that through, you know, our product, and then we generate traffic which doesn't convert, which is probably not a good trust factor, and we are not able to retain a user forever. So code should be, when you get a user, the user stays with you forever, not thinking about anything else, any other brand when it comes to what you're selling. So yeah, it's around keeping your user right in the center of your SEO strategy and then marrying demand and supply parameters on top of that.

Si Shangase:

That's perfect. That's really good. And I said we'll come back to that, to that topic as well. Kevin yeah, been in a space for quite some time. What are your thoughts for next year? I think you still mute Kevin?

Kevin Gibbons:

Oh, yeah. <Laugh> school boy error. So yeah, I think for me the, that I picked was really where we see the biggest results for our clients. So outside of if they have any technical blunders or kind of big issues, and that's the big thing, but outside of that, the biggest thing we found that drives growth is content. And what I mean by that is having a very clear content strategy and breaking that down in terms of free stages. So content auditing don't create any content until you figure out what you have, how well it's working. And I think sometimes you can rush into the new thing but actually understand what you have and how it can be improved and learn what doesn't work as well as what does work. How you can then identify gaps against competitors in the market and understand your customer in terms of new content opportunities that you could be creating, and then turning that into a seasonalized plan and roadmap for your team to create against.

So I think that's really important. And I think following on from the points around just experimentation, not everything you're gonna do will work, that's life more than just seo. But if you can have that approach where you're trying new things, you're learning, you're improving, and I think you are, you're gonna go much further than if you have a kinda more rigid mindset. So I think just yeah, kinda obviously play the odds in terms of where, you know, the opportunities are. But yeah, certainly echoed the, the statements around, take a few risks, try a few things, and if it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world as long as you can learn from it and then take that into the next thing and improve.

Si Shangase:

Sounds great. And what, what do you think about how Google is going to sort of change the, the SEO landscape next year? So I think I'll start with David with this one.

David Iwanow:

So it may not be a popular thing for the Google team, but I think they're gonna deal with a huge spike in AI generated spam based on how many people are kind of jumping on board with it. I, I, I think there's gonna be panda coming back which is kind of annoying because you are now gonna have to go back to the old days of educating particular markets or particular clients on don't do dumb things just because your competitors are doing, it's working for them in short term. So yeah, so I think it's very much kind of gonna ramp up at a whole new level, which I don't think their spam team is prepared for, at least in English speaking markets. I'm, I'm not sure what other markets is working. But yeah, I think the GPT3 topic is going to have some, I guess, collateral damage on some smaller sites, I think. But yeah, that's my big thing.

Si Shangase:

And Sarah, how about you?

Sarah McDowell:

Sorry, trying to find that the unmute to button there. <Laugh>, I don't know if this is more of a hope of mine, but I hope that things around accessibility become more of a focus. I did see that within the latest Google Search Console or some testing tool that you do get a score nowadays, aren't you, for accessibility and, and stuff like that, which is always great to see. So yeah, I hope that definitely like websites and companies that are taking time to look into this kind of thing and making sure, and I know it's hard, right? Accessibility is so hard to do. But yeah, if those companies, websites that are putting time into that can see some more rewards and and things like that, then that, that's gonna be, that's gonna be awesome. So, yeah. Maybe that's more of a wish to Google if they're listening. Anyone from Google?

Si Shangase:

<Laugh> Adelina, what are your thoughts?

Adelina Bordea:

Oh, well, I have some thoughts similar to David. I think there's going to be a lot of spam around you know, the, the search engines and Google will have to clean or all that up. Also, I'm very intrigued about how the helpful content is going to evolve and how is that going to impact all the, the sides. I, I mean I think they are going, this particular thing is going to impact more on smaller sides as, as David said but I mean, it will impact the biggest sites as well eventually, I dunno when, but yeah. So I'm very intrigued by that specifically.

Si Shangase:

That sounds good. And, and Billie, I've got a new question for you actually. Do you, what, what thing would you say that SEO should stop doing in 2023 that doesn't drive value? What's the main thing

Billie Geena:

For those that know me, hear me rant about this one quite a lot.

<Laugh>, like the amount of times I've spoke to SEOs and non SEOs this year about AI content. "Stop It. No. Just don't do it". We all know it doesn't work, it just generates just a mess. You're stepping on your toes. And also I, I'd really like to see less of people saying, to do well at seo, you need to produce 30 pieces of content, each one or hundred pieces of content each month. Just none of these are realistic. And they drive me absolutely mental and probably shouldn't have chosen me to switch questions there, cause the anger's out. But I'll not ran

Si Shangase:

<Laugh>. Yeah, I think so people have got, like David saying it's 32 pieces actually <laugh>, which is brilliant. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Billie. That makes perfect sense. And I've got a more of a scalability question now for Rebecca, Emily and Nitin. What, what are your thoughts for, in terms of scaling SEO in 2023? What would you recommend people to actually do? I'll start with Rebecca first.

Rebecca Berbel:

I'm gonna have to sort of echo what Emily said earlier about what works for some sites, doesn't work for others. We've seen that so many times that sometimes the scale of your site is going to depend, depend on how you're going to scale and what you're going to want to scale. So I kinda wanna leave that there before I break somebody's site with advice that doesn't apply.

Si Shangase:

All right. Emily.

Emily Potter:

Yeah I mean, similar to my answer before, but I guess I can elaborate a bit more on what we're doing that makes it scalable for large enterprise websites. We have meta CMS technology, which is similar if you've heard about edge technology that you can kind of do at the CDN level where we're able to change websites without developers having to change the code base at the origin level. So that means we can add new content, change title tags, remove elements, add components, developers can even develop things and test it through our website before they deploy it. So that means you can put something out and roll it back within seconds. So that kind of allows us to test things at scale quickly and create those business cases that developers can then use to adapt quickly. It also, you know, some of our customers just leave things deployed through search pilot. If you wanna talk about, you know, Google's changing things so quickly, you might have had a positive title tag test last year and now Google's overwriting, all of 'em. So yeah, I think that kind of ability to change things at scale when you're, especially for large enterprise websites, depending on what works for your specific website, based off the tests results that you get, is really important.

Si Shangase:

That's perfect. Thanks, Emily. It makes perfect sense. And Nitin what your thoughts?

Nitin Manchanda:

Yeah, well the number one you know, thing that I, I wanna say here is automate everything that's possible, but do not go for a hundred percent automation because we have machines, right? ChatGPT, for example, is on fire right now. Everyone is talking about it, but don't think about, you know, like that machine run your content strategy for strategy. You need someone who understands user intent, who understands, you know, how your user would see this content, right? So you should have someone sitting on the top of the processes, right, to run the strategy. So that's one. And also I think like Emily mentioned, so we have, you know, someone from such, but if it's amazing here, because I think experiments should not be expensive. If, if you're talking about massive, massive organizations and they're spending, let's say six months building something and it's a failure, that's a massive cost.

They're paying to, to check whether something is working or not. So think about MVPs, think about running smaller experiments. If they work, you can scale it up, right? You can start from one and then scale it up to 10 and see whether it's working or not. If it's working, then you can think about going even 200, right? But you don't have to pay six months, let's say developer cost for 10 people who could build something else. You know, then knowing after six months of project failed. So yeah fail fast, learn fast, but yeah. Aim to fail only once, right? For a particular thing. Yeah. So that's what, that would be your my take on automation and how we scale SEO in 2023.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. Thanks Nitin. And Kevin, I think we've got a couple of minutes left with this group. So I just have a question for you in terms of, I think you spoke about content and how you create that with your team. How is ChatGPT going to impact what you, what you're actually doing for, for 2023, if at all? You today, Kevin?

Kevin Gibbons:

I'm so bad at that. So yeah, I almost feel like it's maybe a bit too early as a question in terms of like what's going to happen with it, if I'm honest, I, we launched a conference yesterday, I haven't paid that much attention online to everything else. I'm aware of it. I've seen so many examples, but I can't say I know enough about it to give her a full answer. One, one thing I would say, just based on the previous question in terms of just where things are going, is there's a quote from Jeff Bezos. He was talking about what's the future of retail? And his answer was, rather than looking at what's gonna change, cause so much stuff is gonna change, actually what's gonna stay. And for Amazon that was, we want to be able to provide customers convenience and the lowest price so they double down on Amazon Prime.

And obviously making sure their suppliers and everything else can provide the best, best value. And I think from an s perspective, there's a lot to be learned from that in the sense of what your customers need. And it's like high quality content, products cetera. It's again, loading. It's all of the things that you think that's not gonna go away. That's what people are gonna want more of. I'm kind of more focused on that area of actually where do we need to double down? And to the point, an experimentation, if you can take a small percentage of your budget, say five, 10% and try new things and dip your toe in, I think that's good. You don't wanna be left behind, but equally, there's not enough at this stage to say, I'm gonna go all in.

Si Shangase:

Yeah. Makes perfect sense. Right. thank you very much for joining in. I think we've got some new members that have joined us as well. Hello to those, but yeah, Kevin, thanks. That makes perfect sense. I think with that I'm going to introduce the new members to the team. So yeah, I'll say goodbye to Sarah, Billie and Emily. Goodbye guys. Thank you for joining us, right. Hello everybody. Welcome to SEO 2023.

Sara Fernández:

Hi.

Montserrat Cano:

Hello everyone.

Si Shangase:

<Laugh>, we'll start from the top Montse, would you like to introduce yourself? And then we walk away to page?

Montserrat Cano:

Sure. my name is Montserrat. I am an international SEO and digital marketing consultant working for, with brands all over the world from Spain at the moment, <laugh>. And I'm very pleased to be here with so many good people.

Charlie Williams:

Hi everyone. I am, I'm name's Charlie. I'm an SEO consultant based in Oxford in the uk. I work in SEO and content strategy for a variety of people. Independent seo, just do it freelance myself. That's about it really.

Paige Hobart:

Hi, I'm Paige. I'm SEO manager at a company called Unily. I was agency side for about seven years at a company called Roast, but I've recently switched to what was described to me as the dark side, but I'm loving it and so happy to be here. Got my, got my book and I've got my Christmas jumper on, which I'm very disappointed that no one else. I actually think Crystal's got hers on.

Si Shangase:

Yeah, I can't, I can't actually see it from here.

Paige Hobart:

Oh, it's just kinda like glittery tartan.

Si Shangase:

That's pretty cool. <Laugh>. I can see it now. Perfect. go see everyone. Page Bastian, you like to introduce yourself, just quickly just make sure you're not mute first.

Bastian Grimm:

I was gonna say I'm muted. Would help. Thanks very much. And sorry for being late. A typical German thing you could say. I'm, I'm Bastian the CEO of PeakAce and yeah, very excited to to be here. Kind of a bit of a tradition. I enjoyed last year's episode quite a lot, some familiar faces here, so that's really cool.

Si Shangase:

And Crystal, you just introduce yourself.

Crystal Carter:

Hi, my name is Crystal. I'm the head of SEO Communications at Wix. I'm a big fan of lots of people who are in the room today, which is great. I am also I'm also somebody who does lots writing and lots of podcasting and speaking about seo, so I'm really pleased to be here and I'm really excited about this session.

Si Shangase:

Likewise. and can't see. And last one, not least, Sara.

Sara Fernández:

Hi everyone. So I'm Sara Fernández and I'm from Barcelona and I'm currently based there as well. And I'm an international SEO consultant working for b2b brands at the moment for software comparison and review tools. And yeah, so I work in international ceo. I've also worked in content marketing, and I also have a background in UX and translation. So yeah, I'm really happy to, to be here and it's such a pleasure.

Si Shangase:

Yeah, great of you on board. All right, Paige, what, what are your thoughts on 2023? I know this year's been busy. What was your main tip from the book? For next year?

Paige Hobart:

My biggest tip was stop making content for content's sake. <Laugh>, if I see another top 10 blah blog, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna throw my laptop out of the window. Nobody cares about, no one's not opinion. So really about giving your content KPIs, having it, it doesn't have to rank. That's fine. I know we're all SEOs and that's like the worst thing you can possibly say, but it doesn't have to just have an opinion. It can do other things, but just, yeah, start making crap content for no reason. <Laugh>

Si Shangase:

Brilliant. Thanks Paige. Charlie, how are you consulting people for next year teams that you're working with? What's the major tip?

Charlie Williams:

My tip from the book was to run content inventories essentially. To actually, I think it borrowed us very nicely on from page's point, to be honest with you. To actually take stock of what you've got, especially at the beginning of a campaign or a project, and go actually understand here's the actual size of our website, here's all the pages that are being considered, here's the good stuff, the bad stuff, the stuff that can be improved, the stuff that should go in the bin and learn from that. See what's working, what you can improve, but also what you wanna do more of in the future, which again, I think follows on nicely from page there to actually do the stuff that works for your audience, works through business goals, et cetera. Perfect. That was great, Charlie, thank you.

Si Shangase:

And Montse, I know you're quite big on its national SEO front. What's your major tip for 2023 for most SEOs to implement Montserrat?

Montserrat Cano:

Yep. I was, I'm, I was muted. <Laugh>. I think my biggest my step for everyone is to kind of put your house in order. Cause particularly now, if we are going to enter into a recession, into an economic downturn of any sort, you really need to know what exactly it is that you've got to implement to improve what you have, your positioning, your technical side, your content, etc, et cetera. And what else you need to kind of check in the bin. Definitely. if you don't know that, if you don't know that, it's just not possible. It's just not possible for you to for you to understand what your audience is actually is actually saying about you, how your audience is interacting with you why your audience is buying from you as well. Try to connect searchers intent with whatever it is that you, you've got for that you really need to understand your position and you need to understand your tech, your content cetera, et cetera. That to me is essential. And it is, most of the stuff that I've, I've seen over the years derives from a lack of let's say a lack of care <laugh> about that.

Si Shangase:

Yeah, that makes sense. Putting your heart in order is definitely one thing. I think it kind of echos as well in terms of the type of content that we are creating and how much of that's it's scaled as well. So harks back to Paige and Charlie's points, and Bastian, what's, what's your thought for 2023?

Bastian Grimm:

It seems I'm kind of on the on the opposite side of the spectrum, which is not just surprising, but I mean, some of you might know that I'm a big fan and look at when it comes down to testing and, and trying things and, and playing the things. And I guess the, the big beast right now obviously is all things generated or AI generated content, you could probably say. And I guess I feel like if people are just way too afraid to kind of understand what's possible with new tech and that I feel that they should just, you know, test more cannot talk less, if that makes any sense. And just really understand, you know, what capabilities are there. Because I think the one thing that I would say is kind of certain to me is that roles in seo, not only in seo, but also generally I guess in, in in marketing are changing and that people need to evolve with it.

And I mean, that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? I mean, that could, that could also be that you leverage tech in, in, in different way shapes of forms. For example, you know, if you take the, this kind of very prominent example of like the recently like launch, you know, open ai kinda products, you could use them for research as well, which could cut down on hours that you would spend previously when you, when you have like a ton of time to invest in quantum production, right? So that's what I mean, like, I think it's, it's not like the bad stuff, it's just like, be smart about what you can do with new tech and, and test that out. I think that that certainly helps. But then I guess, you know, if, if you do it wrong, then we are back to what you guys have been saying then it is about cleaning houses. So I guess it's a bit of both. Yeah.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. Yeah, we'll come back to the topic actually as well. Question Crystal, what are your thoughts for next year? And yeah, what, what you're looking into focusing on for Wix in 2023?

Crystal Carter:

So for the, in, in the, in the book I shared some insights on visual search. I've been talking a lot about visual search this year, and then at Google io and the autumn, they said, welcome to the age of visual search. And I was like, I told you so <laugh>, so basically I think it's really important to think about visual search because visual search is not the same as image search or image optimization. So visual, visual search optimizations are not the same as image search optimizations with visual search. The search, the image is the query. There are no words to, to make the query, you put the image in and then it gives you back some search results, which might include words or might include images. And I think that it's important for SEOs not to just sort of leave that to chance, but to actually get involved and to actually manage that search experience and to think about it more coherently.

There's been a lot of, of developments even since, since we recorded this, this session. So Google ends is a lot more, more usable on, on desktop for instance. Now you get a sort of pop out panel and you can see lots of different images and that's really important. And I think also I'm just hoping to see lots more SEOs get involved with the visual search conversation because I think that SEOs have an incredibly, an incredibly nuanced way of looking at the way that, that humans access information online. And we, you know, we have, we can look under the hood in a way that most people can't and we can tell Google when they're messing up, for instance. So I think that there's lots of ways that we can that we can, we can help them to have a better search experience and we can help our clients and our teams to, to to use visual search in a way that's, that's helpful for everyone.

Si Shangase:

That sounds great. Yeah. We'll come back to the visual search element. I wanna know more about that actually. So Sara, how about you?

Sara Fernández:

So for me for 2023, I think that it's very important that as SEOs we embrace the term search experience optimization or SXO. And that we understand that SEO can no longer exist without UX and vice versa. So for this reason, we need to stay on top of UX best practices. That doesn't mean that we become US experts, but things like UI design, localization, accessibility, cognitive biases, UX flows, inclusive designs, we should all be aware of these things and best practices since they make a good user experience. And it's true that some of these things are not always a ranking factor, but if it's still good for the user, we should do it. And I also suggested that we should, well, that we stop working in silos because whereas it's important that SEO and UX teams keep their independence.

It is really, really important also that we have regular checkpoint meetings so that we are all on the same page. Because in the end we're all working towards the same goal. And for this in my tip, I also highlighted the importance of having access to the information that other teams may have more qualitative data, for example, customer service teams, any kind of feedback that we have from our users and clients because it's through that many times we try to measure things quantitatively and we forget about qualitative data. But it is also, it is also very, very important because in the end well, as I said, we are working towards the same goal and there are so many things that make a good user experience that as SEOs we can also influence. And just because it's not a ranking factor, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it at all.

Si Shangase:

That is, that's incredible. So that's, that's really good. A lot of good tips here. So yeah, I'm, I'm going to open up to a wild card question. And I think there's a theme that's underlying these talks. I think one of them is mainly around AI and how you can use that to create content. And I, the thing that you talk right now is a shiny object as as eos do you have the shiny object syndrome Chat GPT. What are your thoughts around that? Charlie, I think you have some probably thoughts around that and then we'll move on to BA and page. So Charlie, do you wanna just take us through what you think about AI and content?

Charlie Williams:

Sure. I'm, I'm gonna caveat this by saying I don't regard myself as an expert. I've worked on a couple of projects recently in the last year or so where we've used AI to generate different stages of content or at least the initial framework of the content which then gets human reviewed or whatever it might be.

And sometimes it's been around things like creating the snippets of copy you get on PLPs or category pages, product listing pages, that little intro text there, which if you wanna do is scale, you know, costs an awful lot to produce with an expert writer. But if you can give a framework and ask the expert writer just to edit and put the tone of voice and things in place. And if you can train a model that can work well, and I've used it also in another project where we're trying to do something slightly more complex and it was less successful and you see things like ChatGPT and you kind of go, well that could be, you know, a step forward and means next time we try and run that experiment it could well work better to echo best point, you know, try out, see what happens.

I think that's, you know, a really cool thing. The point I also have made on this to other people is that it's all about how you use it, isn't it? You know, the people who you know, sort of try and do the best quality websites, the best quality SEO, they're gonna look at that and go, this is a great tool. Exactly. As best said, this is something we can try on new sites. We can speed some things up. Maybe we can produce more than we could before. Maybe it'll help us go more in depth in our articles cause it'll pull things out. We hadn't thought of all these really cool things. You can use this as a tool to research again to help come back to or to actually produce stuff. That's great. But the fact is, is that we know that anytime anything gets happens that's new in seo, what everyone says is on certain sides of SEO is does it scale?

I think, you know, the biggest cliche in SEO is not, it depends, is people are saying that, can I scale this? And as soon as you say that with something like AI content, it means basically how many rubbish, I'm trying to think of not where on the live stream a posts can we produce to try and target and chefs links in or try and bulk out our blog without putting the effort in or to write on topics that we have no expertise in. So we're gonna try use AI to produce expertise for us and it's gonna produce low level churn stuff that's not going to rank very well and it's just gonna basically stuff up more of the internet with crap. That's my concern about AI is not that the people maybe in the room right now or that are listening right now or they know that a lot of people we the right weight.

I think it's a great tool. It's, those are potential for me. And again, maybe I'm sticking more and more I shouldn't do I I think there's actually a large number of people, a large percentage you're gonna do the same thing we do with anything else in SEO. We're gonna stuff it up by just abusing the absolute Jesus out it. If anyone remembers guest posting, you know, sort of 10 years ago it was great, it was really cool. Then we set up all these platforms to automate it and then suddenly guest posting was slapped down. All these things we ruin anything cause we try and scale it and that, you know, we can't have nice things so cause we can't help ourselves and that's my concern with it. But yeah, generally it is a positive thing.

Si Shangase:

Yeah, yeah, I agree. As you, as we yeah we, we we sometimes we know how to how to abuse things so to speak. Paige, what do you think about, you know, all these shiny objects that are come out and, and content creation?

Paige Hobart:

I, yeah, I completely agree with Charlie. I think there's a time and a place PRP project listing, product listing pages. As Charlie mentioned, you're a perfect example of where that would be useful. You've got your building blocks of what information's gonna be on that page. You might end up having the exact same PRP as every single other seller. So a different at all. But yeah, there's a time and place, but if you're gonna create blog content or content that's supposed to be driving e a t don't touch it. There was a really, really good talk on AI content at Brian SEO this year. The guy used AI generated images for every slide as well, which was so fun. It should all be online still if you can get access. But that was a really good talk. And I actually compared AI content to poorly written human-generated content, which I thought was fascinating. So you've paid a fiber and you've got someone to write you this blog, actually the AI content performed better than that, which is fun. If that's your options, maybe it's worth it. But versus the expert content from someone who actually knows what they're talking about, it's gonna fall down every time. So it just goes back to why you producing content? Can this help or is it actually gonna hinder you?

Si Shangase:

Wow. Yeah, that's incredible actually. AI performance better than human. So yeah, I think you're probably gonna get a lot of SEOs rushing into that after this call or after this. Definitely.

Paige Hobart:

And maybe there's like a translation element that that can save you time there. Like if you've already got the expert content, maybe AI translation is actually gonna be a much bigger industry than AI generated from nothing.

Si Shangase:

Yeah, definitely, actually. Well

Bastian Grimm:

I suppose it also hugely depends on the, on the training data, right? I mean, that's also one thing that people just don't understand that obviously what you're do in like the English language regions, it's like a significant difference to what you can do in, in like smaller mean, no offense to anyone, but like smaller region markets obviously. So I did a I did a keynote like three weeks ago and as an opener I had like, so we, we put like coverts under the seat of everyone and there was there were two texts inside. One was machine written and the other one was editorial created and there was like different types of content. So that's why I was like kinda shaking my hat on the, on the p p side. I, I I see where you're coming from, but those were actually like, let's say much better pieces and there was extremely fascinating.

So there was a thousand people in the room and roughly 50% favorite the AI written piece over the editorial written piece. And it was not poorly created editorial content. So I, I would argue similar to what you've been saying, that, you know, there is a time and place and it's not only ps it is actually really very much depending on, on the audience. And I think what we are forgetting here is that we are not the benchmark. I unfortunately there is, there is a wider audience that potentially has a bit of a different flavor when it comes to consuming content pieces and especially when you talk about the the complexity of those items. So a funny thing that we did on top of it, I'm not sure, I guess you are, but I'm not sure what everyone else is like, there's a there's a scoring called the Flesh Index where you can like obviously figure out how easy is something to consume.

And what we also did as part of this kind of opener for the keynotes, we ran like the AI pieces and they were all in, in German by the way, so they were not even English. So it was one of the small, kind of at least small in comparison to English and run them in comparison to the editorial ones. And that also turned out that obviously the flash index, well not obviously, but the flash index of the AI pieces was higher, so they were easier to consume, which I guess goes back to that point. Like it is sometimes depending on audience, their favor to have something that's extremely easily to understand and to consume. And again, like I'm, I'm actually really fascinated by that topic because I think there is there's a lot of things that are coming in the next one or two years, especially if you compare like what happened in the last two years and what's happening now. So like we have this turning point of the curve where like things like accelerating extremely fast. So yeah, I think it's gonna be I'm kind of excited again, like I've been doing this for way too long and I'm like, yeah, finally there something new. And so it might be shiny. I think it has this place right now. Yeah.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. Perfect. And, and Montserrat, what your thoughts?

Montserrat Cano:

Well I made a crazy prediction a few days ago about embracing AI for creating contents, particularly when I think about PLPs and things like that as a page says there's a time for that. And then think about it and the more read about it, the less crazy it seems to be honest. Just think about, just think about a huge website with millions of pages <laugh>, millions of URL where you need to create content all the time. And it's not perhaps expert content, but it is factual content such as transactional content, things that I would never actually leave a machine to create on it own only, but it can help, it can help there because the content teams normally is very small. And so this can be an added resource to that. But yeah, again, just to stress, I would never leave a machine to actually create the content of the sound. I think if it is supervised, it's better because I think, well, most of the content that I have seen so far created by ai, it looks correct, looks very good, but when I read it, I don't really think that's high quality. That's not a high quality that I would actually put on my website or any client's website. So we need to think about this very, very intensely <laugh> before we actually produce that. But I think it's a great help definitely.

Crystal Carter:

If I can what, jump in quickly one of the things I think is really fascinating about ai, about the AI content is, is using it from, for a research point of view to sort of understand how machines are understanding what you've written or what you've created. So within visual search, for instance, there's vision ai, which is a, which is a tool, a machine learning tool, machine learning algorithm from Google where you can put in a photo that you have and it will tell you what it thinks is in the photo based on visual, visual search cues. And it will say, you know, I think that's a picture of a bicycle, or I think that's a picture of a tree. And you might be like, that's not supposed to be a picture of a bicycle, that's supposed to be a picture of a T-shirt. And it's like, well, so

Si Shangase:

Is that, is that, is that similar to like Dall-e as well?

Crystal Carter:

No, it's not an image. It doesn't generate images. It, it looks at images and it interprets the images. So if I, I, so I've spoken on this and I showed a picture of my mom stood next to the Statue of Liberty and it understands that that's the Statue of Liberty based on information that it knows about it and it knows the geo coordinates and it knows that it's a landmark and it knows lots of different things about that entity. The other things you can do, like for instance, Google, Google Docs uses AI to summarize your document. So if you write a document and it said, it says what's the summary and it tells you that the summary is about bicycles and you thought it was supposed to be about T-shirts, then you can say, actually maybe I need to go back over that document and see what's going on there. Similarly, you like with chat is it chat g p t, we got the acronyms correct that for instance, if you wanted to see what the consensus is on a certain certain topic you could type in something, something like, you know, what's the best mountain bike? And you could see what, based on all of the information from the whole of the web, the web thinks the best mountain bike is for instance.

Bastian Grimm:

That's a direct point, right? Yeah. Because you, you're slowing up the, like you, you're speeding up what you've been doing like in a manual kind of fashion. So it's a fantastic point that you're making. That's what I mean, like if you're just getting faster, if you use it in a smart way and it's just a, yeah, it's a really cool way to do that.

Sara Fernández:

I can jump in quickly I agree with everything you all said and also regarding what Montse said it's very handy, it speeds up the process for sure, but it doesn't take into account the all the ends. It doesn't take into work out localization at all. And I was using ChatGPT this morning and I saw that the, I don't know, like it's very neutral, like the answer. Like it doesn't really want the like, I don't know, like if you wanted to like write an opinion article for example, it would be impossible, you know? And yeah, I also, I wanted to mention, I don't know if you saw post that audit <inaudible> published. She was she asked why do SEOs always say 'it depends', and I was surprised with the answer that ChatGPT gave, I have to say it was, yeah, if, if you wanna assert it, like I encourage it to do it because you'll be surprised <laugh>, so don't underestimate it.

Si Shangase:

Why, why do you think Sara, that SEOs always say it depends?

Sara Fernández:

Well, I think that, and also I agree with ChatGPT, we are in an ever evolving industry, so it's normal that many times we may not have an answer or that, you know, it depends, well sorry, <laugh>, it came in automatically. Yeah, depending on, on the website, the niche, like, you know, we, nothing is set in stone and we are all aware of it. So I think that it makes sense that it depends.

Si Shangase:

Perfect. Crystal, I think you spoke about image optimization and a lot, a lot around that as well. What would you say for people to look up for in 2023 in terms of how they could approach that?

Crystal Carter:

So image optimization in there, in Google, Google io, the last section, they, they said, you know, welcome to the age of visual search and if, and all of the features that they had showed images everywhere. So, you know, they're, they're adding them to, to lots of different things. Now, sometimes if you go to the top of the search bar, they'll add in, in theater, they have the preview, the preview dropdown of like different previews. Like the first thing, bike bikes might mountain bike, city bike, et cetera. And then they'd have like a picture of a bike. You mean this bike and that sort of thing. So they're filling the SERP with, with images. So when you think about visual search, I think it's important to think about about users and how users might be searching, searching for your content. And I think it's also important to get involved.

So try out images, test your images, see what, what Google understands your images to, to, to show. And I think actually going back to AI and going back to Dolly, like for instance, if you were to, if you were to type in something like bicycle, like see what kinds of, what kinds of entity elements show up roast regularly in those, in those, those those AI generated tools. Because again, that can give you an idea of like what you should focus on maybe in your, in your images. So I think that there's, I think there's lots of different tools and I think looking forward, think about your composition, test your images and and, and make, make use of tools. In, in the Wix cms, we have vision AI built into the cms. So every time you upload an image, you get the first 10 tags from Vision ai, which is a great tool. So if you've got something like that, make use of that, review them, check them out. You can also use vision AI to, to generate, to generate tags at scale. Going back to the scalability thing, and that's a super useful thing for everyone.

David Bain:

Hey guys, just to let you know that, so we've got three minutes left of this particular session. I'll be kicking out some people soon. Nothing personal, so just in case you're trying to get back in.

Crystal Carter:

I'm taking it personal, David, I was, I was being very sentient, <laugh>,

David Bain:

It's personal for some, but I don't want to actually say which ones could tell <laugh>. So yeah, you've got about few minutes, more minutes. So as more people gather in the background for the next session, I'll just be kicking a few people out. But I'll leave with Si for another couple of minutes.

Si Shangase:

<Laugh>. Yeah, I dunno. Finish making your point. That one. This is how, yeah, we've got like a few minutes, like two minutes left off. Who wants to live off with some final remarks page? I think we haven't heard from you if you've got some time.

Paige Hobart:

Oh God. Yeah, I think everyone in this session's been really, really good. I hadn't even heard of Chat GPT before the previous session, so I'm gonna go Google that. And anyone watching this and feeling bad that they hadn't heard about it before, you're not alone <laugh>. So

Crystal Carter:

It's had a bit of a wordle moment. You remember when like no one had heard of Wordle and then suddenly everyone was like green squares everywhere. That's ChatGPT right now.

Paige Hobart:

Yeah, <laugh>, go and ask it about why, why we all say it depends <laugh>. So thank you Sarah and thank you. So you've been a great house for us. Thank you

Si Shangase:

And thank you guys for coming on board. Yeah, it's been a great, been a really great, great chat actually. Getting all your thoughts. Had a lot to think about for, for next year. So see you all later on and thank you so much.

Paige Hobart:

Bye

Crystal Carter:

Bye.

David Bain:

Oh, Si, that's a wonderful hosting session that he delivered to you's gone quick pronto there, but I appreciate everyone coming on there. We've got a few people starting to join us for the next session and we've got our next host for the next session, which is newly named Olga Zarr. Hi Olga, new surname?

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, that's a new one. I hope this one is way easier to pronounce for everyone as well.

David Bain:

Which, which country was the worst at pronouncing your previous one?

Olga Zarr:

I would say everyone but Polish people and Ukrainian people wasn't able to like, pronounce it correctly. So yeah, it's like I would, I can only say two countries. UK Polish people were able to pronounce it. Other countries were doing like similar

David Bain:

<Laugh>. Look, I just wanna remind everyone watching that. Obviously the book is available now on Amazon, so if you search Amazon for SEO in 2023, you can grab, it's a podcast. There's a video series as well for free on the Majestic website at SEOin2023.com. But if you wanna grab a copy of the book, please remember to leave a review that really helps with just helping to raise the prominence of the book. And here we go.

Year? There you go. It is a wonderful Yeah. Door stop. No oh, piece of content to read. That's what I meant to say. Yes, absolutely. It's it's a really chunky book. It's over 500 pages, so I'm sure you'll find something in there that's gonna be relevant for your SEO strategy over the coming year. Bibi just joined us there as well. So got more guests Bibi just went blinded me with our headphones there. <Laugh> Olga I'm gonna position you in the top left hand corner of the screen there and loads of more people are, are joining us live there as well. So this hour or so is gonna be hosted by oga and we're gonna have some more guests appearing on the half hour again, so we'll do a quick changer of guests then. But I'm just gonna hand over to Olga just now to do the rest. Thanks for hosting Olga.

Olga Zarr:

Okay, thanks. Thanks. I am very happy to be hosting this second, second, second, second session I think. And yeah, so my name is Olga Zarr. I am an independent SEO consultant from SEOSly. And now let's briefly introduce yourself. So let's start with let's start with Jake. I don't see your, I don't see your names right now, so maybe let's go. Okay. I can see your, so let's start with Jake.

Jake Gauntley:

Hi, Olga. Hi everyone. Thank you very much for having me today. Really excited to, to be on here and, and have a discussion. So yeah, my name is Jake Gauntley. I work at Reprise Digital in London global Performance Marketing Agency and I'm account director on the SEO team there. I've been working in SEO for around 10, 11 years now, both for agencies and client side. But yeah, really excited to be here the day and to talk about SEO in 2023.

Olga Zarr:

Hi Jake. Hi. It's very nice to have you here. Okay, so I think next comes Bibi, how are you?

Bibi the Link Builder:

Hi. Hi. Hi, can you hear me?

Olga Zarr:

Yes, yes. I've been your fan for a long time, so now it's time for you to share.

Bibi the Link Builder:

Oh, Thank you. Yeah, I'm Bibi the Link Builder. I'm in Amsterdam and yeah, I started as a social media marketer in the automotive industry and then I kind of fell into link building and it's going really well. So yeah, I hope I don't say anything stupid and and my career on this call.

Olga Zarr:

<Laugh>, I don't think so, <laugh>. So, hi, and thanks for joining. Thanks for joining. I'm very curious about your, your tip. Okay, so let's move on to Irina. Can you briefly introduce yourself? Hi

Irina Serdyukovskaya:

<Laugh>. My name is Irina and my surname is really hard to pronounce. Also <laugh>. So even Russian people couldn't pronounce Serdyukovskaya.

Olga Zarr:

Serdyukovskaya.

Irina Serdyukovskaya:

Yeah,

Olga Zarr:

I almost got it right. Yeah,

Irina Serdyukovskaya:

Yeah, you got it. So I'm a freelance SEO consultant and I'm also focusing now on GA4 and Google Tech management, tech manager and analytics. So yeah, I'm passionate about Tech SEO, while my tip was and ease about the content because I think that without the content we could not have a successful website, even if all the technicals things I said it. So that's, that's me.

Olga Zarr:

Okay. Okay. I will ask you a bit more about your tip in just a second. Okay. Adriana, let's move to you right now. So, hi, welcome.

Adriana Stein:

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Olga Zarr:

I'm very happy to have you. Can you briefly introduce yourself?

Adriana Stein:

Yes. So my name is Adriana Stein. I'm the CEO and founder of AS Marketing. We're a holistic marketing agency that specializes in multi-language seo and my tip has to do with SERP volatility. So I'm very excited to touch on that later.

Olga Zarr:

Okay. Okay. I'm very excited to hear about this. Okay. And now I think Jono can you, can you briefly introduce yourself?

Jono Alderson:

Hi, thanks for having me. This is great. Super exciting. Yeah, I'm Jono I'm head of SEO at Yoast, which hopefully everyone has heard of. We are an SEO app that runs on WordPress and Shopify on about 13 million websites. I'm a tech SEO, have been for about a hundred years. I'm an analytics nerd web developer. I've worked in agencies and tool vendors. A big part of my job is kind of product R and D and road mapping and working out what we should be building. So having something like this is a cheat sheet is super, super handy.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Yeah. Cool, cool. Okay. So I think we are now it is like all of us for now, so let's now move on to sharing our tips. So Jake, why don't you start with your tip?

Jake Gauntley:

Sure, yeah. So my tip for 2023 is all around brands building out expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, but not purely just for the SEO benefit of it. There's, there's such a bigger kind of impact that EAT can have for brands like digitally, but also offline as well. Like this shouldn't just be an SEO tactic, if you like. And the best brands do this really well. You know, ultimately if people are coming to your website, whichever channel they come through you're going to want them to trust you and you want to show your expertise to help increase kind of conversion rates and engagements. It just also has that kind of added benefit of being very important for SEO as well. So in the book I talk about a few examples of brands that we work with who tie kind of offline real world activity where they're, you know, doing workshops for people or trainings and kind of real life awards that they're out winning within their industry and bring in all of these kind of offline elements of real world EAT and kind of combining that with your digital presence as well to reap the, the digital benefits of that, but then also just kind of enhancing your position as a brand or a company in the real world as well.

So yeah, I know EAT isn't necessarily anything new, certainly not in 2023 but it's just trying to get brands and businesses to think of it as a bigger business objective rather than just something that the SEO team sees that they need to do.

Olga Zarr:

Yes, I would say this is this maybe some, maybe e a t is not new, but your approach is kind of, I would say, original and new because like in many cases, SEO's approach e a t in a way that, okay, so we need to add offer bio to, to the article. We need to write that this article has been reviewed by this person, but there is definitely way more to it than even in the, in the offline world. So definitely this is, this is a great tip. Exactly. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. So Jono, why don't you share your tip right now.

Jono Alderson:

Sure. my tip is that we should be treating our websites as databases of information that we're communicating to search engines and other systems. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and I think this is key because if you think about how marketing works on the high streets and in the real world, we manage the information that we provide, we control how we communicate it, we craft our messaging so that it's understood and it resonates. We call that marketing and we should think about the same way. Think about that the same way that our websites communicate with Google. We should think about that in the same way. A big part of that is using structured data and schema.org to actively manage the narrative that we're telling these systems so that we are describing all of our things in our properties and our attributes. Jake mentioned awards, for example, if we're talking about the importance of E A T, I think that exists in the way that we describe our content, the relationships between those things.

Not just saying, I'm going to copy paste some schema to my website cuz I've heard about rich results. But say, actually I really want to actively describe to Google that this author of this recipe on this article has these credentials and won these awards and went to this university and is trustworthy and has demonstrable expertise. And I think this is super important because once upon a time, our job was to convince and manipulate humans to come to our stores and our websites so that we can control the narrative. And now we don't get the chance to do that unless we've already proven to systems like Google that we're a potentially good fit. You have to convince these ais and these systems that you deserve their audience and their traffic. And if we're not actively managing the messaging and the narrative and the marketing we use to do that, then what is our strategy other than just hope, like you've gotta take control. So I think this is really critically important for the certainly now and moving forwards.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. So that's, that's a great, great follow up to, to what just Jake said. So not only should we be like looking at e a t from a bigger perspective and managing it at a higher level level, but we should also be like managing EAT let's say through a schema. Like we, we want an award, why don't we indicate it in schema? Or we have those credentials, why don't we tell Google it in a way that Google understands very well. So that's a great tip. Okay. Irina, now it's your time to share your tip.

Irina Serdyukovskaya:

Yeah, my tip is actually also not super innovative I would say. But I think that especially a lot of small businesses still miss it. It's create content to match user intent. So we already in, so I think for the last 10 years, we can create any content and we know how to rank the content. But the main point of the content, especially I think in the next year, is to understand what content you should create for your audience. What users or your potential customers or, or the, the customers who are working with your or buying the products for you, what they are looking for, what they have in their mind and what you can provide them as an SEO. And I think here you need as an SEO as a content marketer to walk closer with the customer support, for example, to understand what, what actually questions your customers ask.

Because sometimes you could not find this data in the Google in tools because maybe there are not enough questions to have this data as a cured search volume. But actually it can be pretty high number in your customer audience. So I think this is very important and we know already a lot of research is about zero volume keywords, which are actually performing pretty good and they are bringing actually the real conversion. So I think this is the main, main deep and main focus in the content in the next year to try to invest some time and manage the data we have from SEO with the real users interest and actually bring value for both to the users and not to create content, which can be can have quite high search volume, but to understand which content can actually bring value to users and bring us or our clients conversions we're looking for.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Yeah. That, that's a very, very nice tip. Yeah. So can you share a bit more about your experiences with zero volume search? Keywords that in tools are like nothing, or they don't even show up in tools, but for example, you can only see them in Google Auto complete feature. Mm-Hmm.

Irina Serdyukovskaya:

<Affirmative>. Yeah, we had I think that it's not zero search volume where we had really good success, but it was like 10, 10 people are searching monthly and we had like thousands people visiting per month. So it can be really, some, some of the questions can be very basic. So I work with them, they're selling boats and a lot of people are interested about doing it license to actually drive the boat. And it's, it's kind of very, very simple question. And it doesn't show a high search volume in uk you know, you say yes because when you say you have more people, but it brings much more traffic to the website and much more visibility comparing to other keywords which are showing much higher search volume. So this is one of the examples. Sure. But it's not directly about the conversion because most, mostly people are not really decided to buy a boat, but they already have seen the brand and then when they decide, okay, I have license, so I don't need license, I can buy a boat. So they already have the, this name in their head.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thanks. Thanks for sharing. So I think Bibi, now it's your turn. What's your

Bibi the Link Builder:

Tip? <Laugh>? yeah, so again, this is not very new stuff, but it does tie into some new stuff happening with retail chains and manufacturers. After pandemic, some stuff has shifted and people wanna move away from, you know for instance, manufacturers wanna move away from selling through other parties like Amazon and stuff. So they're focusing more on their own sites and building those into eCommerce sites. And retail chains have noticed that there is another income stream that they should invest more in because, you know, if something happens, again, they can't sell stuff if they don't have their store in order. But what I notice with those types of clients, and this is more with a pain point of link builders, is that they let the their link building strategies depend on the state of their site, their current state of their site, right?

And that's a really good way to start, you know, you don't have a blog or you have a crappy blog, or you don't have all those type of funnel things or linkable assets, and then you start link building, but they often get stuck in that first type of link building that they're doing. It's p pr links or paid links or guest posts or whatever. But they should right from the start, start reverse engineering what other people are doing. That's picking up a lot of links. And that can be really simple things like stats pieces, you know, around the industry or related industries, but also look at your affiliates sites. So a lot of times affiliate sites are beating they're, they're beating the actual manufacturer or the actual product company. So really look at those, what they're doing and then, you know start investing in content. I know it's very weird. No, it's not very weird, but Link Builders will often not refuse a client, even if they have nothing to build links to. But I'm saying, please, please have something to build links to <laugh>. Cause that makes it really hard if you are building links to a retail chain or a manufacturer. And it will cost you a lot of money in the end if you keep doing that without, you know, improving your site's content. That's my tip.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Yeah, that, that's a very nice tip. So I, I, I can totally relate to that. I, I once was auditing helping some, some sites some sites I was, I was supposed to provide the recommendations for the growth and the sites actually wanted to basically build links. They, they were looking for Link builder, I, they turned to me. And when I reviewed the size, like there was nothing to build links for. And we started with just like the entire SEO strategy, SEO audit, like content pruning. And only after doing that for, I dunno, 9, 9, 9 months, we, we, we could start thinking about like, specific pieces of content that may actually like, benefit from having a link here and there. So, so yeah. Totally, totally can relate to that. That's a great tip. And okay, I see. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Bibi the Link Builder:

Oh, I said cool. Thank you.

Olga Zarr:

Cool. I see we, we are having Eilish back, so yeah. Hi, why don't you introduce yourself and at the same time share your tip.

Eilish Hughes:

Is it working now?

Olga Zarr:

Yes.

Eilish Hughes:

Great. Cool. is it just a tip from the book?

Olga Zarr:

Yeah.

Eilish Hughes:

Cool. Okay. I missed the question. I'm eilish and thank you for pronouncing my name correctly. That really nice. No one ever does <laugh>. I'm an SEO and content director, atha, I've been an SEO for about six years now. And my is just strive for excellence in everything you do and always talk about what your, excellent, so it comes down to, everyone's talking about like ESG and sustainability now, but brands are talking about it and trying to rank the topics that aren't that like relevant to them. So there we go. So yeah, like create excellent content, have great websites, but make make sure it's what you are the expert in.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. So so I can say your tip is kind of similar to mine because my tip was, I will be sharing it later on as well, but generally it was about going an extra mile with everything you do in seo, so mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. So that's, that's more or less the same great minds. Yeah. Okay. So have, has anyone of you read the book already?

Bibi the Link Builder:

No, not all of it. <Laugh>.

Jake Gauntley:

I might need the full year to do that. <Laugh>.

Jono Alderson:

Yeah,

Olga Zarr:

Because last year I, I think I, I was like on a binge watching session and I basically watched all of the sessions, but yeah, I think it took me, I dunno, almost the entire day. But I, but I, what I wanted to ask you is, what is your favorite tip from the book, from another contributor, if you have already like, managed to spot something that, that draw drew your attention?

Bibi the Link Builder:

Oh no, I haven't read it yet. I'm sorry. <Laugh>.

Jono Alderson:

Naughty

Adriana Stein:

Neither. I'm sorry. <Laugh>.

Olga Zarr:

Oh no. Yeah,

Adriana Stein:

I only just got it a few days ago. <Laugh>,

Olga Zarr:

How about you, Jake? You read some, some of it

Jake Gauntley:

Not, not loads, but I, I have been looking at like the, just the overall tips. I know there's quite a few in there around like diversifying content as well which I think is like a really important topic obviously for next year. But just in general within seo. I think when it comes to putting together things like contemp briefs, that it can often just be, you know, words on a page that it ends up being. Whereas when you look at things like the engagement metrics when articles include video and just like the amount of people who for kind of an explainer type piece would prefer to have that video alongside it, I think the statistics show that it is worth kind of diversifying the content that you have. And that also has the benefits of, you know, other channels that YouTube where that content can be hosted. So I can't point directly to a specific topic, but I know there are a couple that are similar to that. So I'm gonna say that.

Olga Zarr:

Sure. Okay. Anyone else? Or

Jono Alderson:

I can cheat, I can say the whole of chapter 13 cause that's the best chapter, even though it's not the one I'm in, suddenly we got beaten out which was about thinking outside the box, which I really think is something as an industry we need to do more of and get better at. Like, I, I still remain convinced that seo we've put ourselves in a box because we need links and content and tech. And actually as, as the whole field gets broader and broader and broader, we are the only people who are constraining ourselves. And there's no reason we couldn't say, for example, you know what, the best SEO strategy for this restaurant is to increase the quality of our ingredients or to train our customer service staff, cuz these things generate better reviews, better positive feedback signals, yada, yada, yada yada. And there's some really good stuff in that chapter about broadening our horizons into areas like car crystal talked about visual search earlier, Barry Adams and Nick Wilson talking about Ed Jeo, which I remain convinced is a huge deal like completely turning the way the websites work inside out.

And loads of thoughts on content ai, which I know you talked to death about, about an hour ago, so probably not worth going into that in too much depth. But yeah, like thinking, thinking broader and outside our neat little columns is, is gotta be really key for us.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. But I, I think AI, content, AI in general, it's definitely going to be talked about in 2023 and used even more. So why don't you share your thoughts on that? Like, how much have you been relying on AI content using AI tools or what are your plans regarding that? You know, does anyone else

Jono Alderson:

Call that? So I don't talk for hours, so I've definitely got opinions, but I like it. Ai, but that's personal preference. <Laugh>, I haven't done anything with it SEO wise, so

Olga Zarr:

Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, how about your Irina? Have you been playing with Jasper?

Irina Serdyukovskaya:

I, no, not yet. <Laugh>,

Olga Zarr:

Are you planning on?

Irina Serdyukovskaya:

Yeah, I think in general, when I was just started in SEO and we were writing product pages, text mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and you can imagine how you, you hate this job because you need like hundreds of unique content pieces and I think here and and I can really, really help us because we don't want to make this manual to create unique content. So I think that I was thinking about that and I think that it's kind of the same as we use other tools. So they help us to do less manual work and spend more time analyzing stuff, creating stuff creative maybe becoming more creative in their work because we have more time. So I think we should not be worried about i e but we should see it as a helpful tool to actually save us money for more intellectual work, I would say.

Olga Zarr:

So. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. How about your Irish?

Eilish Hughes:

It's not something that I've used yet, and to be honest, for ages, I was really kind of scared of it and against it because I was like, no, but all of my friends are content writers, <laugh>, and we don't want them to be out of a job. But the more I've read about it and understood of it recently, like you just said it's, it can be definitely used as natural tool to help us kind of like be more efficient with certain processes. And I also think it can be quite useful for when you're struggling to kind of think about, we no need to rank for this, but we can't think of anything new to say or that kind of spicy. So sometimes like you can see how an AI piece of content can be like a jump up point for creating like your own content hubs.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a great insight. How, how about you Adriana?

Adriana Stein:

Yeah, so I, I think AI is quite interesting because this is something within our agency, within our internal marketing projects. We're a little bit hesitant to put it deeply into the client projects.

Olga Zarr:

Oh, I think, oh no, I think we lost that.

Eilish Hughes:

AI killed her.

Jono Alderson:

That's bad.

Olga Zarr:

She was kicked

Jono Alderson:

You about to spill all the secrets,

Olga Zarr:

The robots. Thanks. Oh, Jay, why don't you take over with your opinion on AI content?

Jake Gauntley:

Yeah, absolutely. So it's funny, we were playing around with Chat GPT this morning. I know there's been a lot of talk on, on Twitter and everything about, about that tool. And someone on the team actually asked the chat bot to try and convince it that AI was going to replace SEO jobs in the future. And the chat bot actually gave a really good answer. It came back and it was like, AI is not going to replace any SEO jobs. Like SEO is actually a complex mix of bringing together, you know, like business objectives with kind of technical optimization and creativity. And it basically said like, look, I'm an AI chatbot, I can't do that. I can, you can give me an input and I can give you an output, but it doesn't have the ability to think of the, the bigger picture complex questions, which as SEOs we have to, when you're pulling together all the different areas of a strategy. So I think it's going to be a useful tool for sure. And definitely like we're saying in terms of like creating efficiencies, like if you have to churn out, you know, 200 meta descriptions is part of a migration, great. You don't have to pay someone to do that mind numbing work. But in terms of like the bigger picture strategic things, like you're always going to need a human to kind of input at that level, I think.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. So, so I would, I would add is that what we would need as SEOs is copyright at the skills to managed the skills to know how to, how to operate those tools, but not necessarily, at least I hope within our lifetimes we won't be replaced by by them. We'll see. Exactly.

Jake Gauntley:

Even with like, if, if you do use it, right, meta descriptions for example, you're always going to need that human level of review as well. You can never trust a role or whatever to, to do that. So I think we're safe in our jobs for at least 2023.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Yeah, I think so

Eilish Hughes:

Just on the human like review thing, I also think that one of the, as much as writing meta descriptions and title tags for loads of pages can be like really sole destroying when I was an exec just starting out, if I hadn't have had to do that and sit through that and review them, I wouldn't have my mid to average attention to detail that I've got now. But I think that we don't wanna like, have too many efficiencies that all of these little tasks go away because they are just such an important like learning tool and learning curve as well.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, yeah, sure. Adrian, it looks like your back.

Adriana Stein:

Let's hope my connection stay. Sorry about that. No worries. Yeah, so I, I think AI is quite interesting. Being an agency owner, it's, it's definitely something that we've had to test because we get clients who ask like, should we be using this? Or should we avoid it? Does it really work or, or does it not work? And I, I can see some use cases like mass meta descriptions where it could potentially be useful. However, where we have found to be the bigger issue is the fact checking and really being able to describe very complex processes. So we as an agency specialize in b2b, not necessarily tech, but it could be very technical products, physical products as well are also consulting services things that involve regulations and guidelines. And that's an area where I would definitely not suggest to use AI because you could get in trouble for saying something that's incorrect.

And so I think if you're talking about something that's simpler and you have short form content maybe even email it, it could potentially work. But if you're doing more long for more complex type content, I really would still suggest to stick to a human person just making sure that all of that information is technically correct. And what we've seen, because we have checked in terms of like the time to create such content doesn't actually save you time. Even when you have a human person running the AI tool, it's actually about the same. Because even with a, a writer who would be starting your process, you would still need to be fact checking them and making sure that they have described everything technically correct as well. So when you're looking at, okay, there's the cost for the AI tool versus the cost for the writer and the end, it's relatively the same and the time it takes to finish the content is relatively the same. So I'm not super convinced yet of the value of AI holistically, although I can understand there's some context where it might work and where it might support your process efficiency.

David Bain:

Yeah. I'm gonna start kicking off a few people soon. Oh, again, nothing personal time for the next panel, just in a second. So I can carry on for a minute though, but you'll be disappearing.

Olga Zarr:

Okay. So maybe I will just quickly share my, my my experience with ai. So I tried to write a few articles, but it was about seo, which is changing. So like AI wasn't properly trained, didn't, didn't have the, like, the information all it should have, but it took me way longer to create an article with the help of ai and I simply like gave up on that, at least for now, <laugh>. Okay. So it looks like there are fewer of us. Okay. New people are joining. Hi people. Hi. Hi. Okay, so it looks like we have everyone.

Navah Hopkins:

I have to say I'm really glad I stopped in early because I got to prep for one of the questions that I saw you stump everyone else with. So I'm excited,

Olga Zarr:

<Laugh>. Ah, that's, that's cool. So we'll get an extra five minutes, <laugh>. Okay. It looks like we, we have everyone. So yeah, so let's get started with briefly introducing introducing yourself. So Navah?

Navah Hopkins:

Yeah. Yes. Nava, think of Java. Java, but with an N at the beginning and an H at the end. Hello everyone. I'm Navah Hopkins. I've been in digital marketing about 15 years. I've worked for SaaS companies, I've worked for agencies. I currently run my own consultancy. And this was a really happy experience to contribute cuz I started an seo, transitioned to ppc and it was just a delight to be able to share a paid media perspective in the context of seo. Cuz we really do work better together.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Cool. Welcome, welcome to to this slots. So Ulrika, am I pronounce it correctly. I think you are muted. You're, so I still don't know if I have pronounced it correctly.

Ulrika Viberg:

Sorry, I did not mute myself. Someone else did. <Laugh>.

Olga Zarr:

Oh, <laugh>, that must be David.

Ulrika Viberg:

I did David, David <laugh>. So you pronounce it Ulrika Viberg

Olga Zarr:

Ulrika. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, let's get started with you or can you briefly introduce yourself? What are up to an seo?

Ulrika Viberg:

So I'm mostly a tech seo, but nowadays I run an agency, an SEO agency in Sweden's, Stockholm. So we are focusing on user-centric SEO as a, as a whole. Everything that we do, we, we always ask who are, who's our, who's the end user in this? And then we go from there. But we offer tech, seo content, seo strategies and, but also web analysis. So the whole everything.

Olga Zarr:

Okay.

Ulrika Viberg:

Except link, link building.

Olga Zarr:

I get it. Sure. Okay, thanks. So now I think it's Pedro. Hi Pedro, how are you doing?

Pedro Dias:

Hi, I'm doing well. Thanks for inviting me. My name is Pedro. I've been in search for 16 years now. Mostly doing SEO four, I'd say like from the 16 SEO is like 10, 12. So I worked in a search engine that everybody knows. Then I founded on business, which I ran for nine years, 10 in Brazil. Then I came like three years ago. I got fed up of the marketing side of things. I went into the product slash engineering side of things, and that's where I've been in here in the uk for almost three years. And yeah, I'm, I'm on the product side of things now.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Cool, cool. Nice to have you here. Okay. Gus. Am I pronouncing correctly?

Gus Pelogia:

Yeah. yeah, that sounds good. People have a hard time with my last name usually, so it's fine. Hi everyone. I'm Gus I work in seo for Indeed. I've been doing SEO for I think around 12 years, something like that. Worked a lot of for, for many years in agencies, in house, link building content client management, you name it. Now I work as a product manager, so spend a lot of time putting documents and trying to get buy in from people that will execute my vision.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, sure. Nice to have you here. Okay, now it's time I think for Krzysztof. Hi Krzysztof. How are you doing?

Krzysztof Marzec:

Hi, I'm fine. Happy to be here. So I started my quest with SEO and both Google Glads in 2005. Now I'm running my own agency Deva Group, and we work from Poland, beautiful place, but not in this time of year. It's, it's raining all day, every day, <laugh>. And I worked for a small, medium and large clients of course, but I gathered the knowledge at one of the largest sites in Poland. So my greatest passion was technical seo. But now I'm working toward reassuring quality in agency and working together in both channels. Like Nav said cooperation between Google Ads and SEOs is very, very important and we get great results doing this. So that's it.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Hi, Krzysztof. Okay, now Nick, how are you doing?

Nick Wilsdon:

Yeah, I'm good. Hi, Olga. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. Hi. Yeah. I think my history in seo, I've been this here about 23 years I think has started about 99. I worked in Russia for seven years probably with another large search engine that Pedro knows. I came back, I helped set up the SEO team to Arena and Havas, built that was head of content across Dentsu. And then went off to run the SEO program globally for Vodafone for seven years. And then subsequently to that, I run a consultancy providing sort of top level cons, you know, strategic seo. And we've recently got into kind of edge consultancy, so we, we kind of advise on Akamai and Fastly to large kinda enterprise clients.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, I had the pleasure of interviewing you recently and you geeked so much about Edge and Enterprise seo. Yeah.

Nick Wilsdon:

I think I surprised you. I think I surprised you on say geeky. I think you thought that.

Olga Zarr:

I can't wait for your, for your tip. Okay. And last but not least is Myriam. How are you doing?

Myriam Jessier:

Woohoo. So I'm Myriam and I feel impressed by everyone around. So I'm gonna cap it here by saying, apparently once you get really, really good at seo, you either have your own agency or you go product side, or you do all the things like Nick does <laugh>, in which case, like impress it. Yeah, I've been doing SEO for 15 years and I do my best to not get bored. So it means that I learn constantly and I get to teach others. So I'm mainly an SEO trainer. If you have trouble in your agency, you usually call me and I will not tell anyone I'm here to help, but I will help. And if you are client side, usually you are a developer who's fed up about something and you heard about me, so you called me that sums it up. I'm officially headquartered in Canada and I'm doing the snowbird thing by avoiding the snow in Italy.

Olga Zarr:

<Laugh>. That's cool. That's cool. I'm very happy to see you here. Okay, everyone. So let's, now let's now share our tips. So why don't we start from the end, Myriam, why don't you share your tip.

Myriam Jessier:

Oh, I'm, I'm so ill prepared. I was, yes, I was officially told this morning by someone who listened to my intervention going actually really liked your tip. I'm like, which tip? Tell me

Olga Zarr:

My tip.

Myriam Jessier:

Yeah. I was like, oh, the way I talk about, you know, how you can be in a niche. So this is, this is something that I'm a bit tired of. Everybody's always saying SEO is going to die every year. I mean, clearly, look at Pedro, he's still going strong despite the death of seo. Yeah, you got called out. But realistically speaking though, you should just always embrace change. Things are changing all the time and people are resistant to it, which means that it takes forever. It's painful instead of being a learning opportunity. So, tied to this, everybody keeps talking about the long tail and how important having a niche is, but if you are working client side, you already are working in a very specific niche. Like this is nothing new. Okay? So just embrace the change that comes with it instead of trying to redefine this as a brand new thing.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, that's, that's a great, great tip, really. I love it. I love it. Myriam. Okay, Nick, now it's your time.

Nick Wilsdon:

Okay. I'm, I'm I'm fairly obsessed at the moment. I think everyone's talked to me in the last year with Edge. And I know everyone's talking about AI content at the moment, but there's a few areas that you need to understand as a, as an SEO or a technical seo, even if you're not heavily involved in it. And I think, you know, apart from, I love the GPT3, GPT4 stuff, it's great, but Edge is absolutely revolutionary. And I know I've talked to Pedro a lot about this too. You have a new platform now that exists within the Edge layer within, and that's Akamai, Fastly, CloudFlare. These are the main CDNs out there. Amazon has a a, a CDN as well Cloud front, but it doesn't do edge particularly well. Computer Edge within this layer. It's got very clever.

It, it's, it is advanced dramatically. We can now process in this, in this layer. We can we have increased CPU power memory. We have the ability to store databases within the edge and execute code effectively. And that means we can do redirects at the edge. And that's one use case. We can replace entire pieces of content within within the, the request. So say you have problems with, with the underlying servers, if you have multiple CMSs, which happens a lot, you've got a layer above all of those above, above the origin servers that allows you to adapt and change and, and create a new response. And that, that really gives you limitless opportunities. And I would say that's, it's probably a more practical thing to learn than AI text. AI text is quite exciting right now, but I, I'd be more excited about the edge capabilities that you can bring in.

You can fix things with the origin servers, you can fix your redirects because you're not bouncing people through the CDN layer to the origin. And then giving them the new redirect destination that's bouncing them back out to the to the CDN again. So immediately, if you are redirecting them from the minute they touch the CDN layer, then you've already reduced that time by half, which is great. Imagine knocking half the, the response time off all those requests. And, you know, some of my clients are doing, you know, literally billions of requests now per month. And yeah, I mean, some of the, the forward rewrite capabilities, and, and a lot of people here know about Redirections. Not a lot of SEOs understand what a a Ford rewrite is. And I'm sure everyone on this call does, but a forward rewrite will, you'll go for your a and the request will come in for your LA but you'll show the content from your b.

Now, that's a really useful thing if you're trying to create content on the main domain of your site. And for example, you have a content SubD domain. So instead of you wanting all that content on the content SubD domain, you want it to appear within the body of the main domain. So you can imagine you can start to bring in content, stitch it in, and, and display this content through key parts of your architecture. So there's, there's, you know, huge opportunities on edge, and I think every SEO should really get their head round, just kind of architecturally how this works, even if you're not doing the ins and outs of it. So you can actually speak to the developer teams about the opportunity here.

Olga Zarr:

Wow, you are so geeking out. Yeah, I love it. <Laugh>,

Myriam Jessier:

I love it too. Like the passion that comes through is just cont

Nick Wilsdon:

I love my job. This is yeah, I hardly feel like I'm working every day, so

Olga Zarr:

You can tell. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's, it's, it's written, written on your face. So basically, if I can like say it in a lay layman's terms, you're basically bypassing all the difficulties, all the obstacles that in enterprise we have, which are usually we are unable to change something in cms, we are unable to get access to cms. You, you are just bypassing everything and doing whatever you want in terms of seo.

Nick Wilsdon:

Exactly that, yeah, you can bypass any obstacles, any roadblocks, you can recreate the entire request on the fly through your edge.

Olga Zarr:

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's really, that's really nice. Yeah, I'm definitely going to open the book. What page on what page is your tip? And so will be, but

Nick Wilsdon:

It's a very good question. We need, we need an index. It was actually organized by writers. I was gonna stress out for the next edition. It's a bit bit of an ego trip there, but I liked looking up all my friends and seeing what they've written. So yeah, you, you're fine. It's towards the end, towards the end of the book. Well, we'll pass three quarters of the book, but I haven't got the exact page number.

Olga Zarr:

Okay. Okay, sure. So now Krzysztof, what was your tape?

Krzysztof Marzec:

So if you even specialize in only seo I'd like to to think about, to understand how Google ads works. So the basic knowledge about quality score and the parts of quality score that you can see on a Google Ads account, it's very important for a SEO also. Why? Because you can learn how Google thinks about the quality of an ad, and then you can think about the same stuff in terms in organic search results page, for example, those four ads above our organic results, and not just simply four ads, they're rotating all the time. So we have a lot of more ads there, but every ad is a test. It's up to 15 headlines and four different texts that Google is constantly rotating. So the knowledge is there, if you put a lot of headlights and text, you will know what kind of keywords, what kind of wording is best for, for example, CTR for your user, for this keyword.

And then you can learn how to update your title and your description. And if you're not doing this, you will waste your ctr, waste your visibility, because even if you have high positions, you are very visible in Google, the ads will steal your steal your traffic. Also, if you learn how Google ads work, you will not be worried about a lower conversion rate and conversion numbers in terms of, for example, performance Max campaigns. They will steal your brand keywords. And if you look only at the last click attribution, you'll see, oh my God, I'm losing traffic. Like I have traffic, I have visibility, but I'm losing the conversions. So my SU is not working. This is not true. A lot of automation in Google ads leads to not knowing that you are putting ads in your brand keywords and they are simply stealing your, your conversion.

So you have to put a different kind of attribution. You have to look at Google Analytics for Yeah, we, we don't like the new interface and new stuff there, but we have to learn this. Right? And you have to look at this examples and there is a more if you, for example, want to test new keywords and know for sure that you have to fight for this keyword in seo, you cannot check the results before you waste a lot of time and resources to get the cured. But you can test it in Google Ads. I can put the campaign for a while, gather some data, and not that this keyword with my lending page is not working or is it working? Or I can test a lot of lending pages with Google Ads campaign and then choose the best one in marketing terms or in business terms to my SEO campaign, like upgrade this lending page through the data streaming from Google Ads. So if you even focus on SEO only, you should check how Google put a value to the landing pages, to the ads and keywords and everything in Google Ads, just to know more about how algorithms can work also probably in seo.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, because I think there is nothing worse than writing like 5,000 word article only to learn that this is not the topic your users are converting or interested in, or like people are just reading

Krzysztof Marzec:

It. Exactly, exactly. The thing you cannot check before is a user intent. And if you are putting this in Google ads, the intent will be very much the same. It's not like exactly the same because there is a difference between sponsored ads and organic results, of course, but it's very, very similar. So you can check before you waste a lot of time for putting, for example, link building stuff and to making sure that you get this,

Olga Zarr:

This cured in organic. Yeah. And I believe like some percentage of people, I think the, the younger they are, the more of them cannot even tell the difference between ads and organic results. So, so yeah. Okay. Thanks that, that's a very nice step. So Gus, I think it's now your time.

Gus Pelogia:

Cool. So my thing for next year is work to get buy in from different people that are working on projects with you. I've been, you know, sitting as a, a pm now, like most of my day, is writing initiatives and putting together all the steps, the opportunity and kind of selling that idea to people. So if we do this, this is what can happen and those are the people that need to be involved. And I think working smaller teams before I would always, you know, beg a developer to give me a half an hour a week or one hour a week and try to fix little things now that actually have a bit more resources and people that are dedicated to seo now I need to convince them that something is worth their time. And I think often, like if, if you start talking with people you know, people in different teams, let's say you have someone on the content team and we want to do some content that can I dunno, naturally attract links, let's put something around statistics.

And like talking with people, I realize, oh, we have some people that are writing just about this, like the, you know, labor statistics in different areas. So can we format this content in a certain way? So I think my strategy so far has been if I spot a project that can have a co involved and I see that someone's already working on it, I just jump in on, on that project. So, you know, half of the, the buy-in is already there because people already understand what they're doing. You're just kind of adding an SEO twist to it and pretty much just, you know, having people involved before you start a project. I think it's so important if you're gonna need someone from ux, if you're gonna need a developer, if you're gonna need someone to write content bringing them at a planning stage and say, this is what we wanna do. You know, you make them feel part of the project, they will give contributions that will take you out of the d c mind sometimes that I'm guilty and maybe a lot of us are guilty to just staying into that bubble. So, you know, just planning and talking with everybody that you, that you can, that might be involved in the project will definitely help you to make all of your big bets turn into reality.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, sure, sure. Great tip. Thanks for sharing. I think, Pedro, what's your tip? So

Pedro Dias:

My tip, my is, is a life battle. Is mostly like what I've been preaching all, all the time, and I see very little of it. I think we should understand more what we are sitting for as SEOs and be less focused. I mean, it's maybe less is not the right word, but less emphatic about you know, or less obsessed with all the great aspects of Google. So we under what you are solving for, we, I I'm the kid that when I would get a present after a few hours of playing with it, I would open it to see how it works. And SEO is no different to me. So I, I want to understand why I'm solving something instead of what's, what are the guidances of Google for that thing? So I on my path to learn seo, okay, I was blessed I working inside the search engine, but search engines didn't, didn't they, they, they, they told me what was like the, and how to, you know, evaluate, debug, search and everything, but they didn't tell me what users want.

I mean, I couldn't part of it. But you understand what you need to solve for when you start learning SEO through areas like information architecture or web accessibility or usability. And why, because seo every problem in your life is gonna be different because it's, that's why we always say it depends, because the technology depends. The, you know, the, the content, it depends the user, it depends. Everything depends. So when you learn to solve the problem, you, you, you, you know what you are solving for. And, and that means that, you know, that, for example, JavaScript ASIO is not really, JavaScript tissue is progressive enhancement or grace for that from areas of usability. And if you know URL architecture, you know that it goes toward like cognitive loads and it goes towards how people organize information that comes from information architecture.

So you know how, how, how these things work because you understand them, not because you have a, a cheat sheet or Google tells you this is the, this is the guide. So what I want more for SEO is actually people to understand what they're solving for rather than, you know, having a cheat sheet to guide themselves. So, you know, we have now all the g PT three novelty and everything. People are gonna run well with it until they understand that it's not gonna solve their pro content needs. Because content is, again, is everything that's on a page. It comes from test, from even the navigation that you present to the user. Everything that the user consumes on a page is content and can be visually present, can be audio presented, can be textually presented, and you know, anything. So once we learn all these states and what we are solving for, we will be better eos that's what I, that's my tip for 2023.

Olga Zarr:

Okay. Awesome. Thanks. Now, Ulrika?

Ulrika Viberg:

No worries, no worries. No, I can pronounce money. I'm gonna speak a speed, speed up here a bit <laugh> so that I can give my tip. But I wanted to talk to you about like, such as Jake and Jono did in the previous session, and now Pedro is also touching it. That SEO has to be more holistic and user centric and less isolated and less isolated tactics. I think we already seeing this, but I think that next year we're gonna see it more, at least. I hope so because that would be fantastic. <Laugh> actually. So what does that mean, hands on like it, for, for me at least, to mean, I think for most as yours, it would, should mean that content or the message isn't just the information, it's also about the how present, how you're presenting it, tonality, what it looks like, order of stuff and whatever.

And sorry, to do this properly, we actually have to work with other disciplines such as marketing departments the UX or tech guys. And all of us need to collaborate. And because we also have tons to learn from them. And because if all of these areas are good, then we are also gonna be good. SEO is gonna be good if we are doing good marketing, if we do, we have the same messaging all around the internet because, you know, SEO is not a standalone thing. <Laugh>, it has the messages on other disciplines as well. But also if we learn with or work with ux, we're gonna learn more about what is user friendliness and, and how is, what is user centric because they actually know that and really they're really good at it. So yeah, that is my tip in a two minute format.

Olga Zarr:

Sure. Thanks for sharing Navah. Now it's your time

Navah Hopkins:

And I will equally be as, as quick as I possibly can. So what's really fascinating with how the se result pages evolved is that it's not just a dynamic ser r in terms of paid and organic coming together, but also in terms of video content, visual content, and again, how much that's blending. So my tip is very simple, collaborate and get the data in the way that you need it. There are two absolutely free ways that you can do this from an organic side to get that intelligence using paid ads or Google ads. The first is dynamic search ads to actually run your site, not, don't spend any money, you don't have to spend any money, but run your site through a Google ad campaign to see how Google is viewing your site with a search volume is for those terms and what the auction prices might be for those ideas.

So you can get a sense of where would the ROI be for SEO versus in content versus on page. The second way, and this is actually very, very important, is actually using the Google ads preview and diagnosis because then you can see what kind of search result pages are actually serving for the terms that you're optimizing for. There's a really weird bug that Google's been putting out where organic has actually been on the right side of the page for a lot of local queries. And they, every time I bring it up, they're like, it's a bug, it's a bug. I'm confident it's not a bug. This is, this is just one of the new search result pages now. But one of the, the really useful things about using ad preview diagnosis is that it doesn't create impressions that don't need to clicks in the wild. So it's again, giving you that data without degrading your content, be it organic or paid. So amazing advice all around. I wish we could spend five hours talking about all of our various things, but it's just, it's a delight to be able to collaborate with everyone. And and hopefully you all get value out of everyone's amazing tips.

Olga Zarr:

Thank you. Thank you for sharing. So yeah, it looks like we still have, I think, two minutes left. So what are your predictions for 2023? I won't be asking you about ai, but what are your predictions? What's going to be the thing in SEO in 2023? Myriam

Myriam Jessier:

Discoverability. Everybody's obsessed with TikTok, but what's behind TikTok, what's interesting is how people think about looking for content. So when I got started, I used to be a librarian and I saw firsthand how Google impacted people looking for books. They didn't know how to use an index. They didn't know how to think about looking for information, even in the library catalog. So for me, it's going to be really rethinking how humans are reacting to search what's been changing concretely instead of crying about it.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, that's, that's a great prediction. How about the rest? What are your predictions? I think David started to kick out people. So it looks like <laugh>.

Navah Hopkins:

Yeah, you, you asked the question, which like, less than a minute left. So it's like,

David Bain:

You got a minute, you wanna choose one more to, to finish up,

Olga Zarr:

I think. Yeah, I think we can, we can like be wrapping up here, right? So my prediction, my prediction is that we will be still like relying on those basic, basic SEO rules, fundamental SEO rules. And I believe they will be still like, leading, leading us. And I am into not going after the shiny objects as well. Like, I want to like stick to the, to the basics because usually in most cases I can see this is what works. Oh, I can see new people joining. So hello everyone and bye as well.

David Bain:

Olga, thank you so much for hosting a wonderful session. Again, you know, that was an incredible session. It was difficult to get rid of people, but I'm sure we're gonna have just as incredible people come on for the next session. So thank you, thank you very for hosting Olga, you know, or get good to have you on, you know, Navah, Ulrika, everyone else who was part of that session. Thank you again. Thanks.

Jamie Indigo:

Bye bye.

David Bain:

See you, see you later. So yeah, we're gonna have another great session here. The next hour is gonna be hosted by Pam Aungst Cronin. Hey Pam, how you doing? Hopefully, yeah, hopefully the unmuted version of Pam.

Well, so I think we've got everyone that is going to join having joined this session. Jason, Jess, Begum, Jamie TaylorEva as well. We might have one more coming, we might not. But I just wanna get straight onto the content here because Pam's gonna host hosting the next hour in about half an hour's time. We're gonna be changing up the guests again. But Pam, just, just simply straight over to you, please. All

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Right, thanks for having me today. Hi everyone. Welcome to SEO in 2023. I'm gonna start with introductions and I'm gonna go in the order. I was doing a little studying on all of your tips last night. I'm gonna go in the order of which you're in the book. So it's I believe Taylor page 75 is our first one. And what, Taylor, why don't you introduce yourself?

Taylor Kurtz:

Sure. Hopefully everyone can hear me well. My name is Taylor Kurtz. I'm the owner and founder of a SEO company called Crush the Rankings, originally from Taylor, Florida, now living in Fort Collins, Colorado. But yeah, pretty much all in on the SEO subject.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Awesome. Thanks for joining us. All right, so next we have Jamie from page 94.

Jamie Indigo:

Oh, what a privilege to be a nineties child again. Hi, my name's Jamie Indigo, specializing in Tech SEO, no idea how rankings work. Go team, and based on Denver, Colorado.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Great. Thanks for joining us. All right, so next for this first half I think is Eva.

Eva Cheng:

Hi, yeah, I'm Eva, Digital PR consultant at Evolved based in Newcastle in the UK.

Olga Zarr:

Hi, thanks for joining us. All right. So Jason, you are page 2 21.

Jason Barnard:

Hi everyone. Yeah, Jason Barnard. I'm the Brand SERPs guy specializing in Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels based out the south of France. I was traveling the world for a long time and I've just got back to the south of France and reinstalled myself if you're allowed to say that in English.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

<Laugh>. Very cool. Welcome back to, well, not welcome, but <laugh>. Hope you enjoyed your travels and are happy to be settled.

Jason Barnard:

Okay, I did

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Good. All right. Jess from page 421. Oh, so close to 420. <Laugh>

Jess Joyce:

My name's Jess, Jess, Joyce and I'm an SEO consultant based in Toronto Ontario, Canada.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Great. Thanks for joining us. And let's see, Begum from page 440.

Begum Kaya:

Hi everyone, I am an SEO consultant based in Turkey,

Olga Zarr:

Great. Thanks for joining us. And I think last is Aleyda from page 482.

Aleyda Solis:

Hello, how are you everybody? Thank you very much for having me today with all of you. Always a pleasure to share.

Olga Zarr:

Yeah, thank you for joining us. All right, let's cycle through that again and everyone give your tip from the book and a brief overview of the tip. So starting with Taylor again, page 75.

Taylor Kurtz:

Sure. So of course my tip is really twofold. One is really fo the primary goal is to focus on the user experience, which I really take two approaches of one Google certainly helped out by bringing the core vitals into play as someone who travels a good amount, you know, going on a website that's loading and clicking view menu of a restaurant you're interested in, and then the page loads and you know it's a mess and you're on another, another page, obviously, things like that. But my big, my big, big tip in focus as cliche as it sounds, is on content. I think that, you know, we all hear it every day, but more than ever, it seems, you know, in 2018 Google released documentation on how to recover from a, a core algorithm update. And the bulk of it emphasized focusing on your content.

And then obviously they kind of brought that a little more into reality this past year by implementing the helpful content update. So I think that people need to focus a lot more this coming year on just relevant questions to your audience and question, not necessarily writing for the sake of gaining business or gaining traffic, but more so being the ultimate source of information on whatever it is you are trying to, whether it be educate on, provide whatever it is you're the experts on. So for me, I think that in 2023, writing to be an expert on something rather than writing to rank or writing to drive certain traffic or making your analytics just look good is really the goal more so relevant traffic than just traffic. But those two things are, my, my main points are, and both have to do with user experience, making sure that when someone lands on your page, they find the information they need. And beyond that, making sure that once they're on your page it's a seamless, well integrated experience where once they do find the information they're looking for, if they choose to convert that's seamless as well.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Absolutely. And a big theme of the day today has been AI as it relates to content and having, you know, bots generate content, which they're getting pretty good at. You know, I, I don't wanna overdo the the topic here, but just I think it, the, the fact that it's such a running theme in today's discussions means that it's becoming very prevalent in our world. And I think that just makes what you just said, even all that much more important that you really have to demonstrate expertise. Yes, at the most basic level we have to give searchers the information they're looking for, but AI can do that. Now, I was just playing with that, that chat GLP thing that everyone's talking about, and, and you can get a simple answer to a simple question from nearly anywhere now that everything's powered by ai. So that demonstrating expertise that you mentioned is really, I think, a point of emphasis for 2023.

Taylor Kurtz:

And, and also to touch on that, you know, and I may have even mentioned it in the book, I feel that when the AI tools are by no means necessarily new, but a lot of times it was just aimed to rewrite things, take a, like basically mold existing content into looking original, which I never felt was, you know, unethical or the right thing to do. But that being said, AI has, as you guys have seen and is a big topic in the SEO community, now evolved to a point where ruling it out as, you know, I wouldn't say it's a loan content creator, but ruling it out as a contributor to your content strategy isn't necessarily like an assumption I would make anymore at this point. It very much seems to have evolved to the point where, you know, Google, I don't believe is gonna sit there and say, AI helped with this article. Take it outta the search results if the, if it provides value and you're able to again, convey that expertise and provide the information that the user's looking for or will help them, I think that AI could be like I said, not the, the only part but could play a part in any content strategy and clearly AI's not going to regress. So I suppose embracing it now and learning how to work with, instead of work with against AI is probably, probably our best approach, I would think.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Great thoughts on that. And in case anyone's wondering that what we're talking about when we say ChatGPT I might have said the wrong letters before ChatGPT is something you can play with so you can get a little more insight on what we've been talking about today. All right. So next up we have Jamie of page 94

Jamie Indigo:

Go nineties. Yes, Jamie of page 94 and Lumar. Hello. I'm excited to be here. And I think you just gave me an amazing launching point because AI can do great work and can produce great content. It's all about the bots, right? Well, we've kind of had this bit of a wild ride the past couple years. Don't know if you noticed <laugh>. And we went from being like digital first to digital By default, our lives as humans were based on our access to the internet. We became very reliant on the information we found in SES to know when it was safe to go outside. Dystopian world bots rule us all, we can't go outside here we are hazah, but the fundamental fact of it is we can make great content now with bots, but real humans still need and inherently trust these little lovely ubiquitous boxes all in our pockets.

Most folks don't think to question why they trust the box in their pocket and Google's found themselves in a place where they're, oh no. Suddenly between writing that like publisher and platform happy, happy place where there's not really accountability, there's a lot of it. And they're being asked when things happen, you know, why were these algorithms presenting these kinds of informations? And they're making adaptations to the algorithm constantly. But one of them is, well, many of them are truly designed to bring facts and how do you establish facts in a world full of zeros and ones really they're having to make and build the world that they're trying to interact and provide real humans with answers from. It's all about content that is based on entities and understanding. No matter how you misspell the Pfizer vaccine, it's gonna give you answers. The power technology powering that is of course mom and mom powered about nine out the 12 features that they really touted it search on big event where they're like, here's the showcase of all the new things they're gonna have in search engines this next year.

So in order for us as humans, on the opposite end of this, we don't work for the search engines, but we do their bidding kind of weird. Seos are the only people who do the bidding of one company and we're getting a check from another, but here we are <laugh> we need to craft content that is based around facts and understanding, and we see that there are entities behind these results. So Douglas Adams is always Q 42 in this database, no matter how you refer to him, it knows, and in order for good to provide fact-based information to real humans in a world where AI chat is writing great content, you have to create content that's based on facts and it ties into how entities are understood.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Yeah, and I was going to ask you about like, wow, mind blown. That's, I feel like we're living in a sci-fi novels. Funny you mentioned Douglas Adams <laugh> after, after hearing that explained quite in that way. But I was, I was gonna say how do you distill that down into an actionable tip for people to do in 2023? And I think is what you just kind of wrapped up with, right? Create content based on

Jamie Indigo:

Doubt, the sources of truth. You wanna tie yourself into understanding their understanding of entities. So Wiki data is a free source. You can go and you can look up any entity and every entity is made up of properties and interconnecting statements. So Douglas Adams, our friend Q 42 is an instance of an author and they will have a webpage that connects those two statements as a fact. So when you're creating your out links, use those, tie yourself back into the entity structure.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Yep. Makes sense. And one quick clarification, when you said mum before, just in case people haven't heard of that yet, it's MUM and tell us a brief, brief definition of what that is.

Jamie Indigo:

Ah, it is the multimodal unified model.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

<Laugh>, you passed the quiz. I didn't wanna, I didn't, I just realized maybe I shouldn't put you on the spot cuz who needs, who knows that <laugh>, but

Jamie Indigo:

You do. It's all good. Like we've, we've had so much backlink based ranking, you know, everybody links to this, so it must be true. And now we're having no, no, if we go ahead and we build an understanding and we document the facts, let me know about an entity. How do you create SES that surround and promote fact-based results in search because those 10 blue links on a page of a real life impact and also provide context so it's not just the most recent piece of content that came out, it puts it contextually into the larger frame.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Excellent. Thank you so much Jamie.

Jamie Indigo:

Thank you for thinking my tinfoil hats so pretty

Pam Aungst Cronin:

<Laugh> it it sure is. As is your hair <laugh>. All right, so Eva of page 206.

Eva Cheng:

Hello. so my tip was to focus on reactive PR this year, well, next year. It's not 2023 yet, is it? So <laugh> with that, it's just using your onsite content that you have which is based on generic searches of hows whys around a certain topic, and then hopefully using that information that you've sourced from experts, whether that's from your site or experts that you sourced outside of your business. So like a sleep expert or someone who's a psychologist, someone from the medical field to offer expertise on that certain topic. So once you have those expertise as a, then you can reuse those comments from your website when it come, becomes relevant within the news. So an example which we, we did a while ago was actually my colleague Becky, she did something on the Tinder Swindler when that was a big thing back then,

Pam Aungst Cronin:

But did you say, sorry, just wanna make sure I heard that right. The Tinder Swindler that, that Netflix thing. Okay, gotcha.

Eva Cheng:

Yeah, so we had an article on the website which talked about how you can be scanned on the internet and how you can spot a scan from the internet and as well as within Dayton. And we just repurposed those comments and used them within our press releases and managed to gain links for the client's website from there. So it was a great one. Yeah,

Pam Aungst Cronin:

I, I had to read really fast last night when I was trying to get through everyone's tips and so I saw reactive PR and I was like, reactive, wonder what the reactive part of that really is. And I kind of got it by skimming really fast, but that the Tinder swindler example I think is a very good one of how you can react to something that's happening, kind of ride the tailwinds of it or head ones, whatever term that might be. Exactly.

Eva Cheng:

It's just about keeping on top of trends or what everyone's talking about. So like using Google search trends looking on TikTok, that's a really great place to have like a source of keeping on top of your trends

Pam Aungst Cronin:

<Laugh>. Yes, definitely. Now I think what my clients would ask me if I started talking to them about this is, well, you always say that SEO takes so long to work. Why should I focus on what's happening right now? How would you answer that?

Eva Cheng:

I would say it's a long game, isn't it? So SEO in general is a long game. So hopefully if you are building those links within those relevant sites as well. So back to the Tinder swindler kind of angle, if we were to focus on financial sites, they will have that topically topical relevancy towards your site, which will help hopefully push for your seo.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Gotcha. So you're, you're, you're working with the now in order to plant seeds for the future in a sense. Yeah. Right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Very cool. Awesome. Thanks so much for that.

Eva Cheng:

Thank you. Right.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Who do we have next? We have Jason of page 2 21.

Jason Barnard:

Thank you. Yeah, page 2 21. Great place to be. Thank you Pam <laugh>. What, what, what everyone seems to be talking about is trust expertise. I lo I love trust the bot in your pocket and people forget that they just trust the results of Google and the ultimate source of expertise from Taylor. Great point. And from our perspective at ccu, we're working on educating Google. We take Google to be a child and we're saying Google needs to learn, it needs to understand it's a child that's trying to learn everything about everything. And that's a phenomenally big task that it set itself. And if we look after our little corner of the internet and we educate Google intelligently and consistently about who we are, what we do, and which audience we serve, Google can then match us to our potential audience, the subset of its users who are truly our audience, and it can serve as when we are an expert, it can serve as when we can be trusted to provide the best solution to its user searching on Google.

And we work from a perspective of entity homes. We talk about webpages, but one webpage that represents the entity that is controlled by the entity. So if you're a person, it's your personal website. If you're a company, it's your company website. Google is actively looking for that source of information from the entity itself, because then it can go around the web and check the corroborative sources to make sure that what you are saying is true and what those corroborative sources are saying is true. So you need to build from your entity home outwards to educate Google about who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

I love that. It's basically reversing our thinking that we've been thinking all along, that we have to be the ones to learn about Google. Just flip that on its head. No, we need to teach Google what we want it to give, what information we want it to give the world about us, right?

Jason Barnard:

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think we, we tend to think as company, as, as people that we have a really clear and clean digital footprint, and we don't, it's a big mass. The web is a huge mass, and I think when people use Google, they tend to think, well, the web is actually quite well organized, but they're looking at it through Google's filter and Google's filter is there to organize the web for us. And if you dig down deep, you'll realize that your digital footprint is a total mass. And that's true for pretty much everybody and every company and every music group, every podcast, every entity out there. And it's up to you to clean that up, make sure it's consistent, make sure the corroboration is accurate and consistent across the entire internet, and map it all back to your entity home using either links or schema market with same as linking out to these sources, linking back to your entity home and creating what David Bain calls the eternal cycle of, oh no, it's the infinite cycle of, excuse me, the infinite cycle of self corroboration. And that's a delightful little phrase that David came up with to explain this. It's Google comes to your entity home, finds the facts, you point it to the corroboration, finds the same facts, comes back to the anti, he sees the same facts and so on and so forth. And it keeps going round in circles, this child learns by repetition. I wouldn't recommend teaching your own child that way, but Google learns by pure repetition

Pam Aungst Cronin:

And yeah. And corroboration, like you said, being able to fact check, if, you know, you just think of it as a giant fact checking system. But you're the one that needs to provide the facts in a neat and clean and organized manner. I think that would help some people understand all this AI entity stuff that we're talking about. It's really, you know, an entity is a thing, a person, place, whatever, and you're just providing facts about that thing, and the bot is gonna try to fact check those facts against other sources. And so, yeah, like you said, our digital footprints are a mess. Even if you just, anyone who's gone through a, a website redesign of their own sites, like, oh my God, one was like a match <laugh> so many cop webs from so many years ago, we don't even do this anymore, blah, blah, blah. And that's just within one site. You gotta then go look at all your social profiles and anywhere else that you mentioned on the web. And yeah, it, it's a lot. But you know, just to boil it down, I think connecting those fact dots and thinking of Google as a giant fact checker is very helpful, so thank you for that.

Jason Barnard:

Yeah, and I think kind of we have to take responsibility for our own digital footprint and the idea Google will figure it out. It probably will figure it out and it will probably understand, but then what you need to do is build the confidence because confidence in understanding is actually the key. And if you wanna be the expert in your field, Google has to understand who you are, be confident in understanding who you are and understand what your expertise is. And if you can get that, you are up and running.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Excellent. Love that. Yes, confidence. Another thing to think about in 2023, what level of confidence are you giving the, the bots in what you're providing to them? Very good, thank you. All right, Jess of page 4 21, unfortunately, so close <laugh>.

Jess Joyce:

So my is 2023 is gonna be, I think a big one outside of like algorithm specific. It's more measuring what you have access to and then iterating on it with whatever tools that you have access to at the moment. Since July 1st, 2023, happy Canada today we will all lose access to GA three or universal analytics as we've all grown. Very, very comfortable with boo sadness exhumed in a different dystopia as Jamie would say, <laugh> as for our lives as we have all got digital by default. Again, to hook into something that JB said though we do need to be able to measure all of our efforts in some sort of way.

So whether or not you're going to GA four way that sounds great. It's not where it needs to be though. So you, there's also alternatives out there at this point. So I think 2023 will be a big year of looking at your analytics in a holistic way and looking at the alternatives. There's some great ones, privacy based ones one called Fathom Analytics that I'm very, very keen of <laugh> and a ton of different ones out there. As well as making a backup of your, your data at this point, I think data warehouses are gonna become a giant thing moving forward. And something like snowplow or Snow snowflake, I, I think it is, that's the one Snowplow, snowflake fast companies are coming out snowy. That'd be a good one. <Laugh>, how do you spell it? That be a fun one.

So at least making a backup of your data before that July 1st comes in is a huge thing as well as I saw yesterday Shopify isn't putting in pure integration of GA four until March of 2023, so they're only giving you four months to be able to get your GA four up and running integrated fully, unless you're like a developer and can go in and copy in the code. So just putting together a plan and making sure that you can measure what you have currently and then iterating on it for 2023 because it's gonna look a lot different by the time we come out of it. I love that. And, and I've a couple of people's tips, although they're about different angles of SEO have kind of been about that. Like, cuz it's so overwhelming, where do you start? Yeah, do what you can do, find the simplest, quickest thing you can achieve and accomplish.

Check that box off and then just keep iterating after that. Exactly. I love that. And, and great points too about having to back up your data at this point with the whole GA four mess. I'm holding out hope that, you know, maybe that's July 1st, Canada Day deadline gets pushed as all their other deadlines and all of their history have ever gotten <laugh>, but who knows, this will probably be the first time that they don't push a deadline on us. Yeah. So you gotta be prepared, you gotta back up that data. That relates to my tip too, but we'll get to that later. But well, I had a question actually about one of the things it, it's probably not a quick answer, but you mentioned the privacy based analytics becoming a thing, and that I think is the whole genesis behind why Google Analytics is you move to a totally different measurement model with GA four.

But I, I thought it kind of an oxymoron in a way of when you said with the Fathom Analytics, I'm actually able to see if somebody's clicked on a WhatsApp chat. Yeah, I think the WhatsApp was supposed to be the most encrypted private messenger app out there. So how does spam analytics know that? Well, they can just tell you the source, so they can't tell you anything else beyond that, but they're able to see that you're able to click from a WhatsApp, they're also able to tell if it's coming from a Slack which is kind of cool. But again, all of the, the PII or private identifiable information doesn't get transferred through.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

That is awesome. I mean, especially for B2B clients that I know have long year long two year long sales cycles for, you know, when they're selling software to an enterprise or something and, and it's a lot of internal decision makers in a big corporation to be able to know that stuff's going from Microsoft teams or or WhatsApp. That's amazing. So yeah, good time to evaluate what else is out there before you invest the to NGA for or in addition to it. Very cool. Thank you. All right, so let's see. And do quick time check too. Oh, we gotta go kind of quickly, but definitely wanna give you guys time to give your tips. So Begum on page 440.

Begum Kaya:

Alright, that's alright. Yes. my tip was to wear the data scientists had more often, I believe as SEOs we kind of take those steps, but without learning the machine learning or data science models, et cetera, we are doing them most smaller scope. So even though Excel or Google Sheets is doing stuff for us we can take that on a bigger scale and I think that's even more useful when you take it that way. I generally compare it with the things that I do at the moment for my smaller clients, but when we take things to bigger scales I really enjoyed using Python. I think it's like a, not a recent tip, I would say. So not a specific tip to keep in mind because it's not new at all. But the application of it and using Python or data science more often could benefit SEOs in 22, 23, especially with the data transition and data revolution coming.

Absolutely. And I think that's a great way of saying what a lot of people have mentioned so far today is that, oh, I don't think my tip is very new. I don't think my tips very new. Well it's, it's, it might be an existing thing, but applying it in a new way and it's really actually, you know, people say to me all the time, SEO changes constantly. I'm like, no, I wouldn't say changes. It evolves. It's the same core tenants that just get more and more complex but different. So I like that, you know, you might need to take some of the things you're doing and apply them in a different way, including, and especially analytics this coming year. And for, for us nerds Python, absolutely look into it if, if you are, you know, in the techy side of seo.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Thank you very much for that. And last, but most certainly not least, Aleyda from page 482.

Aleyda Solis:

Hello. Hello. So my tip is certainly nothing necessarily new but important that it is always there and holding our SEO process results back establishing an SEO quality framework. Unfortunately we come with all of this new sophisticated ideas to maximize results. But the reality is that many of these cannot be implemented or executed as expected because we're always chasing box. There is always something that really is a lot of SEO errors, a lot of issues, a lot of problems. And it is because we haven't set a proper SEO quality framework. And for that, a lot of people think about, yeah, SEO monitoring tool real time checkers, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if you rely on the, on monitoring, even if it is fast to prevent EO mistakes, you will, will indeed continue to spend your time chasing the aero. So my proposal here is to establish a framework that is full circle education to provide the SEO mistakes in the first place, validation to our launching the errors and then fast monitoring, real time monitoring to catch them and also while coordinating with other teams to ensure that there's a proper process to tackle these issues whenever they, they come forward. Right? So hopefully with that only that will allow us to execute our EO process much faster effectively cause effectively and also successfully to achieve results.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

I love that so much. I I, I often preach about how people are too quick to jump on the algorithm, change blame train when, when traffic dips, all of a sudden, what was it, oh, it must have been an algorithm change, eight or nine outta 10 times outta 10, in my experience, it's some kind of a technical error or some content got deleted from the site or something along that chain of, you know, quality assurance got broken and it's so important to track all of that stuff. So I think that's an excellent kind of outside the box tip. So thank you very much for, well

Aleyda Solis:

Thank you very much for the opportunity and well looking forward forward now to, to here and learn from the new guests that I see. I hear. Thank you. Bye bye.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Take care. Welcome everyone. I don't know if David's gonna pop in or just let me do the transition here.

David Bain:

I can pop in - always in the background, but <laugh>, I'll leave you to it Pam.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Okay, great. Thank you to the wizard behind the curtain there. Welcome everyone to the second half of the hour. It first half went so fast. Time flies when you're having fun. So let's make sure to get right to it and I'll keep doing what I was doing before, which is going in order of where people are in the book and for that so first we'll do a round of introductions. So just brief introductions and then we'll cycle through again to, to share our tips. So first we have page 70, Olesia Korobka. Oh, you quick on mute there.

Olesia Korobka:

I've done <laugh> Done. There you go. Nice to meet you. And this is the second day I have my voice backs <laugh>. I'm very lucky. Yeah. And my name is Alicia and I'm working in for quite a bit specialize in mostly technical part and then some device changes. Should I start with my tip?

Pam Aungst Cronin:

We can do it that way this time if you want. Yeah, let's, let's do intro and tip all in one.

Olesia Korobka:

So if you have been watching this stream as myself for a few hours already, <laugh>, you might have noticed that many have started that they don't say something new, but that's evergreen and that's important for the coming year. So I've noticed at least half of the participants done that. And my tip is about that it's kind of time to then automate and to write down all your processes and make them like very smooth so you can do them with your eyes closed and that everything goes in the times when you need that, when you are under stress, because we have crisis come in, economic crisis, you might feel unwell, you might feel like myself losing voice or something like that. So when you have everything on hand and prepared, given that we don't have that much change changes at the moment, you just go and proceed with your work without losing in its quality and in results.

And the second part of my tip was to prepare for like we might have consequences of this economic crisis and these overall global crisis going on in the world right now. So prepare the backups, make your devices not, not be dependent on some outer platforms or some other parties that parties make it your own that you can plug in from everywhere where you can be even if you don't have access to internet or some <laugh>, you have blackout electricity, but you have all your information and your data stored with you on a device. So you can go and do that from any point in the world where you get electricity or internet or something like that, and that you don't lose your data. So if you have this processes written down and if you have all this data stored reliably on various sources, even physical sources, then you have fully armed and very competitive in the times, which can be sometimes hard.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Yeah. Wow. That's, that's an understatement to say that we've had a rough couple of years or started with the pandemic and then sadly tragically, what's going on when Ukraine, where you're from and so many of our, our SEO friends and colleagues are, are from Ukraine and it's it's, it's things that challenges work, challenges they're dealing with that they've never had to before. We have a couple team members there and, you know, having to charge the power banks at the right times of day and move around and it, you never know when something's going to happen and you're going to not be able to go to your physical office anymore because of a, you know, a pandemic or, you know, whatever it may be. It's honestly, I was impressed when I read it. I was like, I never really thought about disaster preparation as something that we as SEOs should be thinking about, but honestly it's affects, you know, everyone and everything. And the world's been really wacky lately. So never a bad idea to make sure you've got all your processes written down, organized, like you said, even just to remind yourself if you're so kind of, and that can just happen from a personal emergency or something too in your personal life. You know, you, you kind of just lose touch with your, your brain cells some days and you just having your routine written down and knowing where everything is, keeping things organized, it, it goes a long way. So

Olesia Korobka:

And I have one more fresh example because my camera, which is on this, which I was prepared for the stream, it just felt in five minutes before the stream, but I had another camera. <Laugh>.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

There you go. Exactly. Very good, very good. And thankfully you got your voice back cuz I don't think I have a backup for your voice, <laugh>. Although I could have been, I would've read your, your tip for you <laugh>, but that's great stuff. Thank you so much. Glad you could join us today. All right. So who do we have next in order that would be Sarah from page 1 59.

Sara Taher:

Okay, let's Hi everyone. I'm also testing a new mic like Olesia. There is issues, but I hope it's working. You hear me well, right? Okay. I'm, I'm Sara. I've been doing SEO for over eight years now. I've worked in house and agency side and I'm super happy to be here today. My tip is basically divided into three things content context and how, how you look, look and search. So content, obviously content is king, have always been king and continue to be king. We need to make sure that we are writing the best content out there. We may also wanna show how credible our content is by mentioning or highlight, highlighting the people behind the, the, the content. And then context is how articles connect to each other, how topics connect to each other on your website through internal linking. That's super important right now. And it was also super, I always important, but now there's more knowledge and experience out there that this is actually valuable. And the third part is how you look like in ses. Schema is very important right now again and also because SEO is getting more and more challenging, it's time that we also focus on our ctr. So testing and yep, that's about it.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

<Laugh>, excellent stuff. Wow, I love that. So yes, content is still king, but you know, perhaps context is queen is kinda what I got from that. I find myself talking a lot about context these days, you know, and talking to clients about content production. But then also appearance, you know, is, is important as well. It's something we don't often think about. That's like our goal is just to get there, just get on the first page. Well, you still have to compete with nine others once you get there. So that's where schema markup and rich results and all of that comes in. So, excellent stuff. Thank you very much for sharing that with us. All right, next we have, pardon my post-it overlapping each other. We have Martha from page 2 31. Speaking of schema,

Martha van Berkel:

I was gonna say, there we go. And Sarah, you're also in Canada, so like seriously, you and I need to hook up and have a, a great conversation talking about content

Pam Aungst Cronin:

When that happens. Let's connect afterwards. Definitely.

Martha van Berkel:

I'm, I'm on it. I'm on it. I love it. So first of all, big thank you for having me here. My name is Martha Van Burle, the CEO and co-founder at Schema app. And we love structured data. We do structured data all day long. And so my tip has actually really, you know, kind of builds on a little bit what Alicia was saying around like, preparedness. And typically with schema you'll sort of be like, oh, I'm an e-commerce, I'll go after product, or, you know, I'm, I I I'm sort of focused on one or two types of schema markup. And with all the volatility and changes that we've seen in the ERP this year, my tip's really about like planning for diversification and comparing that to your financial portfolio. You would never just invest in crypto. I'll just pause there and just let everyone just digest that, right?

Like, you never do that, right, because it's volatile. Like, and, and it's not sort of, if that's where you're sort of betting on your retirement. So the same as schema, don't just bet on one type of schema markup which means you need everyone in sort of the, the organization to be thinking about that diversification of content. And so I love also sort of Alicia, your call out like on content areas as well because you know that content planning is sort of how you then, you know, plan and how you have the process for content planning where you're asking the questions of how you wanna show it up in se it's all, it's all really related. And, and so I said so important sort of as we see Google really amping up sort of those changes around structure data. So my tip is all about diversification, making this a team sport building process to sort of think of rich results before you get started. Not new, but I would say like even more important, the customers we have that have done that investment in diversification are the ones that are thriving.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Very cool. So the first thing I thought of when I read your tip was I don't know how much more different types of schema I can do as just a kind of, you know, plain old consultancy services business. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what's new out there? What should I be looking at?

Martha van Berkel:

I think you have to like think beyond, so like everyone knows I love faq, like faq you can put on lots of different things. So even though you're describing your service you can multi-type it by the way with product if you have pricing on there and that will help you get that rich result. But let's say you don't, but you have like, you know, the questions people ask when they look for your type of service. So you can sort of nest faq. I love people thinking about their blog content as not just long form content, but is it a how to, is it answering questions, right? So, so it's about sort of thinking beyond the obvious about, you know, really planning content and not just how is it gonna answer that intent, that question, that need that specificity, but how you also are gonna have it stand out. And if you can do both of those things and think sort of of that broader piece, you know, if you do webinars, make sure there's event markup on there, make sure you're sort of including that content. Yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Wow, that's awesome. You just gave me another field for my content calendar editorial calendar spreadsheet, which I, because I never really think about each individual blog post could potentially have different types of schema. I just tend to think about the pages themselves, you know, the static content. We should have the spot for each article that we're planning for. What type of schema can we potentially apply

Martha van Berkel:

To this? Yeah, maybe the blog post. Yeah. Video's another great one that you can like nest with any, like should we do blog posting with video? Yeah. So just kind of think beyond the obvious is maybe, maybe sort of the other piece to,

Pam Aungst Cronin:

To get. Awesome. Love it. Very good. Thank you. And I apologize before I didn't think about the fact that we had two Sara's and <laugh>. You might not be too familiar with being identified by your page number just yet, but for now, <laugh>, so from now on the, the next Sara will always be known as other Sara from page 2 59.

Sara Moccand-Sayegh:

Yeah, exactly. I'm the other Sara. So I check it before because I was sure that that was happening, so I knew which page I was. So I'm Sara Moccand-Sayegh, how's everybody? Got it. I work at Liip, which is a mobile and development agency, and I am the co-founder of a meetup called SEO North Switzer. So what is my team? So something that I realize speaking with other SEOs and everything is that everybody related on tools, which is cool because I do the same, but sometimes we forgot to check the ser <laugh>. I mean, that is the basic, you know, like go check visually check compare my what you have. And so I, I have tons of example, but it was like in the book, if I remember well, I gave an example that I will probably use here and it was like I was doing some tests to became an entity.

Okay. I, Martha, I love your schema <laugh>. I, so I am still in the process of testing and everything without using a weak something. Know. No, we, yeah, I know Wiki does all this kinda stuff. And what I realized then there was something super weird with my images. My images were not clear. So for example, I had this presentation, I did a presentation for Brighton SEO and I choose specifically a very pretty picture of myself. Now, you know, when you go in the presentation, they picture and then I was checking on Google, it was not this picture, it was the worst picture of myself ever. And I was like, what's happening there? Why they substitute my picture with this one? And and I find it super weird, but that like started making think, mm, there is something weird about Google understanding who I am from the pictures.

And then it went on like a couple of weeks date. Some were changes, you are like, ah, and I always get it. And instead what I had like me with tons of picture tagging myself, like coming from Twitter, this picture is coming from this place, this other picture for so clearly there was a problem in the understanding of the picture. They probably still, because it didn't work so much on it, but that it's an example on a more serious note, that is an example of I think than we trust tools, which is good because we have to, I mean, especially when you have large clients and everything you need to, to work with tools to make your life easier. But sometimes we, we need to at the same time check the certain <laugh> whatever we are doing it now. And you want, you select some kind of pages and then you check on the, okay, it's working, not working is exactly what it really saying. Yes, no. So for me it's more about my tip is used to, but please also check this up.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

I love that I'm so guilty of that. I, I, yes, we, we rely on the tools. You know, when we first start using them, we double check them to make sure we trust their accuracy, but then we get in a groove of just if the tool says it's in position three and it has recipe scheme of, you know, rich results showing, then we just kind of trust it. And, you know, you may look at it and be like, oh my God, that's the wrong recipe for that post, or whatever it may be. Also doing keyword research. I constantly need to remind myself to actually search the keyword that I'm thinking about assigning to something and using on something to see what the Google's understanding of that word is and to see what the other results are. A lot of times it's someone else's company name, even if it seems like something really bland, like blah, blah, blah, compliance software you know, you feel like it's not a branded term, but it turns out to be. So, you know, excellent reminder for use SEO tools, look at the data and the tools, but also look at the actual search results as well. Excellent reminder. Thank you. All right, next we have Natalie of page 3 21.

Natalie Arney:

Hi, I'm Natalie. I am a freelance SEO consultant. I deal with holistic seo, so tech content and links. My, my tip is to not sorry. Basically in order to, to reap the full impact of your link acquisition activity to make sure that your that your site is technically sound from this <laugh> follow, follow, follow following me in the book is BB Raven, who then goes on to say about about not letting your technic the technical side of your site hold you back. And I think those two going well in tandem. I think some people might read it as that they're rivals. It's not at all.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

That's what I was gonna say. I was gonna ask you if you didn't bring that up. I was gonna ask you about that. I was like, now maybe gave the exact opposite tip as you, but Yeah, but explain why it's not really the opposite.

Natalie Arney:

So it's not really the opposite because you can start doing link acquisition activity whenever you want to. However, whether your client side, whether you are a, whether you're a consultant or whether you are an agency, I think it's really, really important to be able to understand that there are limitations to how much equity links pass pass to, to and from sites. And obviously, you know, if, if a site is, is structurally sound, then obviously you're gonna see a lot more kind of, I hate saying the word, like link equity, link, whatever, whatever people wanna call it, the authority that's being Yeah, the authority that's being passed on by that link. That link acquisition activity is, you know, if, if, if your site's structurally sound, then it's going to flow through your site better and more, more pages on your site is, are going to be able to benefit from it.

However, that doesn't mean that you have to hold back on on actually doing the activity because there's so many other dis other benefits of doing the work. When you're doing link acquisition, there's lots of different ways to do it. And if you're doing it through, especially through a digital PR and contact marketing type of activity, that's building a link is only one benefit of doing that work. When you're doing digital pr, things like achieving mentions, building up your brand reputation taking up visibility in the ses, they of, you know, there are additional benefits. And when you're do, when you're doing things like digital pr, you are not just aiming for links, you are aiming to get all of the additional benefits as well. Which is why they're not rivals <laugh>. And they're not. The opposite is, is that the two things can work in tandem, but if you are a, if a client or you have the aim to pass, like to acquire link equity to your site and to pass it onto those pages, then obviously, you know, if, if it's as sound as possible, then you'll, you'll be, you'll be able to get the results that you want.

Yeah. Rather than saying to your client, yeah, we built these great links, they're fantastic, but we, we, you know, the page that we built the links to there's, there's a, there's two three, there's two redirect chains to the product pages and to the category pages that we're actually, we were actually actually trying to get the link equity to. So the work that we did didn't really get as much impact as we wanted it to. So, you know, obviously all of it being a perfect scenario, you would get all of it, all of it in one. However, we don't live in a perfect world.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Absolutely. And I, that makes me think about redesigns as being the number one situation in my experience where people, you know, kind of turn a blind eye to the link building efforts as it pertains to your redirection efforts. It's the example of redirect chain made me think like, oh my gosh, yes, how many times I've been reached out to by a client that said, oh, our traffic dropped after the redesign. And, and part of the issue is, you know, the redirects the way that they did them lost their link equity.

Natalie Arney:

So yeah, definitely. I been seeing a lot of that in migrations. Even if you can get a, you know, as, as perfect to migration as you can, you're still gonna be seeing your, you're still gonna be seeing certain drops just because you're losing that link equity if you have to implement additional

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Redirects. Yep. Yep. So links in technical, absolutely. Hand in hand. Excellent. Thank you very much for that. Thank you. Great. And we now have, Andor of page 3 35.

Andor Palau:

Hello. So yeah, I'm, and I'm independent SEO consultant based in Berlin. And actually my tip was about accuracy more or less in general, but you can actually, you know, use that in regards to internal linking or implementation processes, et cetera. So when we, for example, talk about internal linking I often see, you know, this is something you have a hundred percent on your, in your hands, right? So you can influence that actually. You can influence which pages are linked to which anchor text are you using. How do you use descriptive anchor text? Is there something broken, et cetera. It was already talking about that actually. And you know, when probably every, every SEO consult can relate to that, but when, when you're doing again, on audits again and again, and you, you, you see the same things again and again and again, you start actually questioning, you know, guys, what are you doing there?

I mean, we, we love to talk about the next big thing, the next shiny object. And a lot of people are not even able to write proper snippets or, you know, prioritize the right pages implement structured data on, on, on correctly way. You know, I mean, there, there a lot of many elections actually, if you, for example, if you don't implement the job posting structured data, right? Or something like that, and, and you see those things again and again and again, and I think sometimes we, as due to the fact that we really, you know, love to deal with a lot of things, we, we start to lose our focus and we don't get things finished. And I think what some sometimes we should do do is, you know, focusing on maybe two, three bigger topics in a year, but get them done actually, and really, you know, get them to end. And that actually leads to, you know, internal processes as well that leads to, to checklists actually to train people to make cases with people so that everyone is aware of that. But yeah, so in, in general, I think it, it sometimes it's, it's necessary to, to go the extra mile when we talk about that, but to get things done, actually, yeah, it is, I think, important to really focus on something and, and work more, more accurately, actually.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

I I absolutely love that. And it's funny the way that this order ended up going here, because the final one we get to hear from, other than maybe I'll sneak mine in at the end, is Helen of page 4 69, and I think these two topics piggyback perfectly off of each other. So Helen, why don't you talk to us about your tip and tell us, introduce yourself, and then tell us about your tip.

Helen Pollitt:

Yes, indeed. So, I'm Helen. I'm head of SEO at a company called Car and Classic, and I'm in the uk, although I'm aware that my new lighting system makes it look like I'm stood about a metre away from the sun at the moment. And my tip is all around the fact that we need to finally put to bed this idea of there being best practice in seo, that there is a way that you have to do seo, and if you don't do it that way, you're gonna fail. And by that I mean that when we start out in SEO in the industry, we have all these checklists and these guides, and we go through our entire website to see whether every single meta title is less than 60 characters in length, and do we have anything other than a 200 status code in our crawl?

And we obsess and we worry, and we think about these things, and we are really happy and satisfied with our SEO when we're getting all of the green lights on our SEO tool of choice. And I feel very strongly that best practice in SEO is actually a misnomer, because what works well in one industry or one type of website just isn't gonna work well in others. Case in point, doorway pages, doorway pages should not work. We all know this. It's best practice SEO to not use doorway pages, but there are some industries where they absolutely do work. And you'll be out ranked by companies that have websites with doorway pages. And it's confusing and it shouldn't be the case, but it is. And when we get really fixated on best practice, we stop being strategic, we stop being experimental with our seo, and actually the effectiveness of SEO is really diminished. So my tip is all around making sure that you stop focusing on what you believe people are telling you is best practice for seo, and find out for yourself what works for your niche, for your industry, for your website. And from there you'll actually be focusing on activity and strategies that really promote growth, move the needle, rather than going through all these checklists and feeling happy at the end of the day that you've ticked all the boxes and completed seo.

Pam Aungst Cronin:

I, I love it. I think those two go, go perfectly hand in hand, focus on fewer things or different things and do them really well, focus on accuracy. But I do love the other things that here in, in your tip, perfection can be the enemy of progress. And I, I <laugh> I think that's definitely

Helen Pollitt:

Agree, definitely

Pam Aungst Cronin:

Right? Yeah. It's like a constant balancing act between accuracy, but not, you know, paralysis by analysis and over focusing on perfection and getting stuck, right?

Martha van Berkel:

I love, they call it also an experimentation, right? Which is like, pick one thing to try to move, test, test to measure, test to measure, test to measure, right? Like, you can do that in all areas. I love that it's been working well for us as we do our own site, right? Like, what, what can we try to move? What's gonna work?

Helen Pollitt:

Yeah. And I think if you're not careful, you just get complacent with seo. And I see it a lot with people who are new to the industry with juniors, with interns, and they, they've been doing SEO for a few months and they tell me there's boring. SEO should not be boring. There's nothing boring about it. But when you are looking at best practice and taking all the boxes, of course it's boring. It's it's really formulaic and it is dull. So if SEO's ever boring, probably not doing it right?

Pam Aungst Cronin:

I love that perfect quote to wrap it up with, if SEO's boring, you're not doing it right. Excellent. Thank you so much. And so I'll take the last two minutes here. Thank you to all of you who joined us, and give my tip, which I remember what the tip is, but I don't remember my page number. <Laugh>, I am page four 30. And my tip to sum it up really briefly is about GA four and how we're all gonna have to learn how to set it up. But a very common thing I'm hearing from people is like the, the sense of overwhelm with having to learn a whole new interface. Well, my tip is don't, don't learn it. Learn how to set it up, but don't learn how to use the interface. It's horrible. It's a terrible way of displaying data. It might be a better way of collecting data.

I agree the measurement model might be better, but as a reporting tool, stay away, run away <laugh> and run to Data Studio, which Google, just Google Data Studio is what it was called before Google just bought look and combined it. So now it's being called Looker Studioanyway, it is a free tool from Google, and you can connect your Google Analytics, both your GA three and your GA four to it. So that might help you with some of those issues that were mentioned before about, you know the, the not having year over year data, if you didn't transition in time. So you can connect your GA three, your GA four, and all sorts of other data points from, you know, Google and non Google things, Google ads, and you know, Facebook ads, whatever it may be. Anything that has an api, you can connect it, bring it all in there, make beautiful simple charts. Yes, data Studio has a learning curve, but so does GA four. So if you're gonna spend time learning something, learn Data Studio. That's my tip.

David Bain:

What a wonderful tip, what a wonderful way to finish off there. And a great third session. That was the third session. What an incredible day so far. I've got another right session coming up, but Pam, I just want to give you an extra special friend of applause for being a great, now I didn't do that. Thank you. That's that, that's Mr. Entertainment, SEO Dre <laugh>, who is on as that moving forward. But Andre will be hosting the next session there as well. But yeah, Pam, thanks so much. You know, so many great tips. Yeah any, any final thoughts? Did you enjoy hosting the session?

Pam Aungst Cronin:

I definitely did. Every time we do these, it's just like amazing how, you know, you feel like you're touching. Everyone keeps saying, I feel like my tip is not new. We're talking about the same things over and over, but it, it's all about applying this, the core tenants in new ways in a new year. And I got a lot out of, of listening to that and listening to the sessions before. And I'm gonna keep listening now, so thank you so much.

David Bain:

Superb. Okay. Yeah, there's an always a slightly different nuanced version of each tip. And even if on the surface on the title of each tip, it seems the same, you dig into it, there's always a slightly different angle. It could be opposing angles, actually, and you have to compare them and see what's right for you. Pam, thanks so much again. So it is now over to Mr. SEO Entertainment Dre de Vera. How are you doing, sir?

Dre de Vera:

David? What's up, my man?

David Bain:

Wow. today just got a lot more entertaining since you arrived. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Dre de Vera:

Hello everyone. Hello. Hello.

David Bain:

Yeah, super to have you on here. I'm gonna invite Kevin Indig in here as well. I think we've just about got everyone in here as well. I'm going to kick from the studio just to make sure that we've got everything arranged as it needs to be. I just wanna point out first shout out of this session needs to go to Nik Ranger, who is probably joining us from the middle of the night in, in Australia. So I just want to acknowledge that. Thanks, thanks for coming Nik.

Nik Ranger:

Thanks so much. It is 3:00 AM here, so if I'm a little, if I'm, I'm a little slower than usual. That's, that's why I also hosted SEO Collective, which only finished about three hours ago as well.

David Bain:

You don't believe in sleep, do you? <Laugh>?

Nik Ranger:

What's that? I've, I've never met her. <Laugh>

David Bain:

Dre. I will pass over to you, sir, to do whatever you want for the next hour.

Dre de Vera:

Hey, thank you, David. Welcome everyone, SEO pros and everyone watching out there. Okay. Today we're gonna go over our favorite tip of the SEO in 2023 book. And first off, I wanna make sure I ask everyone here to think about this first, because I'll, I'll go first, but instead of your telling us your job title or wherever your company you're from, I want you guys to come up with a meta title. Your very first, like something that describes you, something that's fun, click baity, whatever it is. And like, think click 70 characters less. So it's not that long. So I wanted to go ahead and start off with mine, and I'll put, like, I put something like this, enterprise SEO drives 500 million in yearly revenue for B2B SaaS, learn more. So that's my meta title. My name's Dre de Vera, I am the host of the SEO video show.

And I wanna go ahead and I know this may not be, I'll go ahead and start my tip so everyone else can think of their own meta title right now. And my tip in the SEO in 2023 book is about video. You wanna make sure you wanna dominate page one with Google, with video page one, actually, and Google, it's all about dominating pixels now, cuz there's so many different types of carousel. And you know, being number one is not the only thing to drive, you know, more traffic. But now you can get video carousels, you can get your articles, you can get your tweets in there. So, but my focus is on video, so be shared to check mine out and optimize your video, optimize your SEO with video. Okay, I'm gonna go over to my left. Sante, what is your meta title?

Sante J Achille:

Hi, everybody. Good afternoon. Yes, I'm Sante. I was writing my meta title, so you caught me in the act of of doing it. My meta, my meta tag would be no frills, seo data, data driven, no, let's say, can I say no? Bs. Let's be polite. Yeah, <laugh>, huh?

Dre de Vera:

All right, Sante, let us know what is your one tip in seo 2023.

Sante J Achille:

Oh tips. There, there are so many things stray about, about seo. I was listening to the end of the previous session. I think, yeah, there, there, there's always a major disconnect, isn't there? Year, year after year, between what we try to do and what clients want from us what they understand that that is going on, which is all sometimes very, very limited. I've, my tip is sort of like a feeding onto what I had said last year as well. I tend to do a lot of data analysis more and more. I try to go down the data analysis thing and I have a thing about natural language processing that I try, I nurture as a, also as a bit of a, let's say, not a hobby, but I'm fascinated by by that approach. So a lot of the work that I do is, goes down that path.

So I, I I think let's feed off of what was just said on the past session. So there are no rules. I forget the name of the lovely lady that was mentioning, you know, no, no, no. There is no set fix let's say roster of, of, of, of things that you can do. And everybody's gonna be happy because your site's gonna rank, it's gonna change from vertical to vertical. And so if we push that limit, if we push that a little bit more, I say the first thing that I would tell people to do is when they're tackling a vertical, is to go with some search terms and analyze the ses. Be very rigorous about analyzing your serp. See what, see which concepts are actually written there on that, on those ses and try to break that down as much as possible into entities of some kind that you could, might fit into a matrix.

And try to find the common denominator of those entities that sit around that com that, that, that query, which is actually the expression of a need of some kind. And then try to go back to your to your search console, alright? And see how those concepts map and Google search console in terms of search queries that Google has associated to one or more of your pages. And try to build the puzzle. Try to put the pieces of the puzzle together. See where, where they fit. Do the concepts that you find on the serrp actually appear somewhere in your search console results. If they do, it's good. If they might not all fit on the same page you might need to regroup them. So I would definitely say, you know, that that would be the first thing that I would like to do. And and work a lot tightly, you know, a tight mesh between your search console data and what you're seeing on the SERPs and try to integrate the two.

Dre de Vera:

Love it, love it. Sante, but those that didn't catch that, be sure to read his excerpt in the SEO in 2023 book. Let's go on to our next guest to the, my, I guess that's my left, my left Nik Ranger, what is your meta title?

Nik Ranger:

I'm so glad that you brought on the sound effects because now I'm really putting it to the test. When I was on your show I said that it was like getting an injection of caffeine. So I'm really, really appreciative of this in this moment. Well, my, my hot tip about SEO is, is really, it's like hoing back to the basics. And I really resonated with what Pam said on the previous session, which was, we're not necessarily doing anything particularly new, it's just we're redefining a little bit of the goal posts. And, and we're, we're just understanding that things are getting a lot more refined and we're needing to really be a lot more scrutinizing about the, maybe the way that we we work. But again, having that wonderful flexibility. So it's kind of like, it, it's granular, but then it's not, then it's big picture.

It's macro. But again, I think going back to basics, really, if you can't crawl, render, or indexed pages in your feed out rankings of get, get, getting those rich snippets and ultimately conversions. So that's, that's really it. Search engine calls, they're ambiguous. They can enter the site from a multitude of different ways relatively regularly or not. Take a look at even the date of the URLs in your search console or in your log files as log files are the, the true canaries in the moon shop. And I, I, I think what, what if I would think about the meta title that maybe describes me or about seo? I'll keep it quite simple and brief. Think refine the saw of your logic and be able to think laterally through problems. I think starting there in a lot of what I really love to do with talking to other ACOs and being on things like this is that really at the, at the core of it, we all are refining like our basis base level of logic of how we approach things, what are hints, what are directives how, from our experience this has gone, it changes for different websites.

But again, like there are some common threads of this. So it's kind of like due to experiments, test things and set up a framework of methodology to be able to detect these patterns. That's really the, at the core of what my chapter's about. And again, maybe just touching on and reminding people what are those core intrinsic things that link all these, these common nominees together? What its <laugh>. Thanks.

Dre de Vera:

Love it, love. Thank you, Nik. Thank you for that. All right. Keep it, but keep it to keep it basic. Keep basic guys. Okay. William Alvarez, what is your meta title? Oh, you're on mute. There you go.

William Alvarez:

There you go. So my meta title is giving SEO a Seat on the Table. Turns out that I sit in the intersection of many channels from the agency side, and I have to deal with so many issues. And SEO is usually like the poor kid that doesn't have a voice. So I have to say, what's happening here? What is the role of our channel within the media mix? And confronted very often by CMOs, the data marketing offers officers about like, are we getting the fair share of search today? And my mission is to facilitate the data that everybody needs to make SEO work better for them. So in my statement in the book, I said, no matter how much money you're willing to put on your, on your, on your media mix, if your SEO is not performing well, your email marketing, your paid search affiliate is not gonna perform well if the foundation of your performance on your experience on the website is not solid enough.

Seos are usually given the function of cleaning up websites when it is not. Like we've come up with it nowadays in trying to fix performance when performance, it does affect seo because Google is understanding that we need to make websites better, but that wasn't our function. It's someone else's job content, we need to fix it, but we should be thinking about other things because the content team didn't fix it, didn't do it well. So I'm in the intersection of everything trying to maximize the potential of the channel from a content perspective, from a technical perspective, from an authority perspective, from a perception, reputation, manage management perspective to make your dollars work more efficiently. We have run an unlimited number of experiments. I have the, the fortune to work in with different industries. I work with finance, I work with cpg, I work with entertainment.

And yes, everybody has said that we cannot compare NCO in the same way because it's not gonna work well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So yeah, so it is how do we understand the data for each one of those channels to make it work for a co and vice versa. Once you have everything in place, you'll be able to play nicely with the rest of the channels. Let's say for example, you can run a campaign using your product feeds on Google shopping, and you upload a number of images and you realize that those images or the, the, the listings are not getting the right clicks next week, you're gonna rotate those images. Let's say for example, on an interesting industry like female underwear, and you realize that white gets more click what close that we of speci a specific hype get more clicks or like six, then you're gonna know that in your paid search campaigns, that is gonna perform better because you have tested it on an organic environment mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.

And you're gonna use that information to improve the content, all the images on your digital assets, on your organic landing pages. But at the end of the day, if you're as smart, you're gonna be using the same landing pages on your website. So it is a, a whole ecosystem that is connected where SEO is a foundation. If you don't get it right, nothing is gonna work. Let's say for example, retail search, which is like huge right now, E-commerce, you, you know, that has exploded. Tremendously use what Amazon defines others are the best practices to offer the best experience. And if you understand well, Amazon algorithm, you know that you need a component of high performance of SEO to make your paid campaigns work well and vice versa. So I think Amazon gets it really well because they make you optimize their pages so they can have the double effect of ranking well on Google, and also letting your products rank well within their own algorithm. If you attain certain level of perfection of compliance based on those requirements, you're gonna be able to extrapolate that to your own landing basis on your website. Aren't you gonna have a similar experience? So that is my advice for today.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Love it. So I wanna make sure, make sure you're giving seat of the, for the SEO at the table. All right, my man, Kevin Indig, let's go. What is your meta title and job? Tip in SEO 2023?

Kevin Indig:

What's up? Good to see you Dreto everybody else here on the call, and of course to David for putting this together every year. Crazy effort. Nik, I dunno how you do it without sleep. I'll be, yeah, falling apart, but yeah, could be here. I'll keep it brief. My meta title is using Systems Thinking to Understand the Inputs and Outcomes of SEO. And that's a bit of a mouthful, but yeah.

<Laugh>, the basic point here is just really, you know I think it's super important to understand what moves to needle and what doesn't. It's easy to, you know an seo you know like do a whole bunch of things and then see traffic going up or see rankings change, but not really knowing what, what drove that change. So I think it's important to spend the time and see, you know, what, what moves the needle? What are the outcomes I'm aiming for? Is it traffic or revenue? What are the inputs that that, that drive that outcome? Is it number of organic pages, content quality, you know, titles or whatever. So that's really my approach. And my tip is about faceted in faceted search or faceted indexing. Better said. At the time that I gave the tip, I was still with Shopify, and so of course my, my mind was really focused on e-commerce.

And I think there's an, an opportunity for eCommerce sides to be very intentional and targeted in letting Google index certain facets. So here's how you do that. So generally, you know, facets are things like, like variations of a product. And typically you don't want them to be expect Google, because most of the time they cause some form of duplicate content or, or crawl waste that is not really necessary. So if you think about, you know, your, your, your store, your online store, you sell fashion, and a category, category could be t-shirts and a facet could be gray shirts, blue shirts, red shirts, black shirts. Typically don't want these facets indexed, but there are cases where you actually do want to intentionally index certain facets. Not all of them, but certain ones. And the way to make the decision is to look at where you have a high overlap of the same sites ranking for the same types of keywords within a category.

And where you have a different mix of sites or different mix of pages ranking for the same keywords. So if, for example, you look at your own page for it's a category, page four T for t-shirts, and you look at maybe your four or five biggest competitors, you look at all the different facets and keyworded variations, and you see where are, are you and your competitors all ranking, say the top five search results, top six, top eight and wherever that's the case, you don't index a facet. But when you see a variation, when you see a new page, a different page showing up, that might be an opportunity to index the facet. And you wanna test that. You wanna do that for some time. See if the rank of your, of your main category and of the facet, if they, if they both go up or if they change.

And if your main category drops in rank and the facet you index doesn't rank, right, that's a negative signal. So you wanna, you wanna test into that. But Google has gotten to a point where they're smart enough to understand this, the, the, the tiny nuances between certain products. And they understand that that searches search for very specific products. Say for example, use they, for example, look for iPhones with 256, you know, gigabytes instead of 1 28 or maybe certain colors. So Google tries to, to serve people and searches the page that best fulfills the user intent. And sometimes that's a facet, but you wanna test your way into it. You wanna look at the overlap of the same page as ranking for different facets and make the decision based on that. But if you do it well, and you, if you build a system, as I said, my title then it can be an incredib powerful driver of traffic.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Love it. All right, let's go on to our next SEO pro Filipa Serra Gaspar. What is your meta title and seo SEO 2023 tip.

Filipa Serra Gaspar:

Hello everyone, thank you so much for having me here. I already gave you a little bit of a spoiler, but my me title would be SEO Leaper, don't Let Them Catch You, Be On Top. Them would be the update, let's say. And my advice goes related with content and UX basically. So we are usually told to be good friends with the developers, with the developing team. So I would say it's also good to be really good friends with the UX team cuz I really believe that, you know, SEO and ux, they go hand in hand. And it is really, really important. And I think they should always have into consideration the other one. So like, SEO should be should having to consideration UX and then us also seo. Cuz I believe many times when we are doing seo, sometimes we bring a lot of traffic, but then the traffic might not convert. So it is our job to really go and search why is it converting? What is converting, why it is not converting, you know, really go in detail, see what is working, see what's not working <laugh> and really try to dig deep and really find out what the user is, is, is searching for. Obviously it goes together with many other SEO factors. But that would be my biggest advice. <Laugh>.

Dre de Vera:

Thank you. Thank you. Right. Let's go to our last SEO for this, this session here. Andrea Paternostro.

Andrea Paternostro:

Hi Dre. Thank you and David for having me here. This terrific project book and the podcast. My advice in the book is about content consolidation. I feel so much the topic of being overwhelmed in the marketing team and the digital team. Let's say that in daytime, I am in, in our CIO for a B2B business and nights and weekends, I am an entrepreneur. As a publisher, I have a background, a background in publishing. So having coordinated so many content writers and producers, I feel the need for analyzing what, what, what is working, and avoid how to have plenty of content that doesn't work, doesn't rank. You know, that when you produce a lot of content just as a <inaudible>, the 20% is going to give you a great result. The 80% is going to give you a fewer result.

So don't be overwhelmed. Have a four step processor starting with you should avoid to have a low quality pages. You should make intelligent use of existing content, which is so important for marketing teams and align with KPI from the business because for example, in my b2b company, when I work as in our ceo if I don't gain the sponsorship of the my top management, I, I, I'm not going to have enough time to produce a quality content that will rank and we we will go over the competition. Let's say that, for example, in the data management field, there are so many huge corporations competing you know, talent, Oracle SaaS, Informatica, so many huge corporations. We are a small company from Italy, but we do compete in search ranking in free languages because we produce high quality content, we curate it.

Of course we don't we don't forget all the old content from the past, but we try to consolidate into a new, stronger content, a new stronger one. And we, we try to do a lot of content of operations just by reusing the existing content. For example, you can have a checklist of four possible content actions, which is a new content, already existing content or internal linking, which are often undervalued or external linking. And just, you can give this to contemp writers and help them to strike the balance between the content freshness and the consolidation. So this is my advice to make marketing teams work better.

Dre de Vera:

Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Right. We got about five minutes more to go. So I wanna go around the, around the room and let us know how come people get ahold of you and you know, what, what platform are you on and what is your contact Sante, I'll start with you.

Sante J Achille:

Well LinkedIn is my preferred channel right now. I tweet from time to time, not much time to really do much, much writing unfortunately, I hope to get back on the scene and on the ball and doing some writing. But look me up on LinkedIn and you'll definitely you'll definitely find me.

Dre de Vera:

Love it Nik.

Nik Ranger:

For me, Twitter's Twitter LinkedIn maced on, I'm Nik Ranger, @NikRangerseo, it's like in there or like if, yeah, I'm also, I live on Slack channels, so if you message me on the Slack channel, I'm more responsive than any other social platform, including Messenger, <laugh>, as my friends will attest. That's the best way.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Love it. William.

William Alvarez:

Mostly on LinkedIn and Mastodon. My Twitter account is still there. If you send me a message, you, you pin me, I'll, I reply to you, but I don't actively go and open it,

Dre de Vera:

Right, Kevin?

Kevin Indig:

Yes, LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm my, my blog is kevin-indig.com and I just started a new podcast with Eli Schwartz called the Contrarian Marketing Podcast. Thank you.

Dre de Vera:

<Laugh>. Love it. Filipa?

Filipa Serra Gaspar:

Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn. Or it's @afilipagaspar on Twitter. I don't tweet that much.

Dre de Vera:

And Andrea?

Andrea Paternostro:

Oh, same for me. You can find me on LinkedIn and on Twitter. Linkedin is so great for discovery.

Dre de Vera:

Love it, love it, everyone. Let's give a, a round applause. So now we have our next guest around, the guest coming up.

David Bain:

Yeah, absolutely. We've got our next guest coming in the next few minutes or so. We've probably running about four minutes live or so. But I just wanna thank everyone that's participated and of course, Dre's wonderful effects. I I, I presume that you recorded all those sounds yourself in the back. Dre

Dre de Vera:

<Laugh>, they're part of the production <laugh>. I <laugh>,

David Bain:

I thought you had your own little band going on in the background. I just wanna make

Dre de Vera:

Sure. Oh, oh yeah, I got, I have them play right now.

Nik Ranger:

You just got a hundred people, people behind him just clapp <laugh> and go.

David Bain:

Hopefully, hopefully that's YouTube safe, otherwise, bye-bye <laugh>.

Dre de Vera:

It is, it is,

David Bain:

It will be, yeah, many times before. Superb stuff. Well listen. I'm gonna just say Byebye to everyone that's taking part just now, and I'm gonna spend just two minutes just reminding people where they can get a copy of this book from. So I'm gonna push my screen out there and say, if you haven't got your copy already of the book, then go to Amazon, search Amazon for SU in 2023. Hopefully all Amazon stores has it already. If your store hasn't got it, then let us know. And hopefully we can do something about delivering it there. But I'm sure your store has it already. And if you've got the book, please write a review. A review would be much appreciated. And of course send the, the, the book closer to the top of the charts for different keyword terms we all we'll want as well.

You can also subscribe to this content on the Majestic YouTube channel. So if you just go to Majestic on YouTube and actually have a look down there, you'll see the first playlist on the Majestic home screen is su in 2023. We are publishing all the individual tips on a daily basis, starting from yesterday. So we're broadcasting live today on the 6th of December, 2022. And from yesterday, the 5th of December, up until about April of next year, we're gonna be publishing five days a week, every single day one of the, the tips. So make sure you tune, stay tuned to that if you can. If video is not your preferred thing, of course you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever podcast platform happens to be your preference. And of course if that was too much to go through too quickly, just go to SEOin2023.com. That'll take you to the Majestic website, the page of the Majestic website, and you can subscribe to the email updates there to see what we're doing and when we're publishing it. There we go. So that's a, a quick whistle stop tour in terms of what's happening in terms of show production. Thanks again so much for everyone that was on the previous section. Let me, defocus me and if, if I can perhaps get everyone who participated in the last session just to the mush to <laugh>.

Apart from you, Dre, you're gonna be hosting for the next half hours though, but everyone else is gonna be replaced. I'm sure. It's it's, it's, it's not necessarily better, it's just different. Yeah. So we've got some wonderful new SEOs joining us here. We've got Joseph, Nikki, Koray, Olga there Olga you got, you go back on. How did that happen? Yeah, <laugh>. Anyway, Dre and Dre's going take care of this particular session section. Hopefully we've got a couple of more people joining. We've got Lily Ray joining us just now as well. We're just one minute away from the official start time. Remember, SEOin2023.com is where you want to go. Dre over to you for the second session.

Dre de Vera:

All right, welcome SEO pros and welcome to the second session here of the SEO in 2023 book. I'm, what I'm doing right now is asking everyone to write their own meta title and what, like, for example, what mine was for the last one I gave was Enterprise SEO drives 500 million in revenue last year for B2B SaaS. So that's one of those things I want. And what to kind of think of their own meta title, think click, ba keyword rich, that describes you, and we'll go ahead and get to you when it comes around. All right, so I wanna go from my, my, again, this is hard, my left Joseph Kahn, what is your meta title and tip of 2023?

Joseph Kahn:

Awesome. Yeah, this is a funny thing. My tip for SEO 2023, I was trying to think, what did I say to David Bain? Like, I, I don't remember, cuz I always give out different tips. My meta title would be SEO Harmony will add tons of traffic to your Results. And the tip is basically thinking about, and I see Lily Ray down there, our main thing is kind of creating harmony around the searcher intent. So we think about, in our organization, we're built around this harmonic creating harmonic ranking factors, harmonic signals. And that's basically thinking about what we do as, as a song, as something that somebody is looking for. So when we think about title, we think about a song title, kind of like what is the intentions that we're matching? Are they looking for something that's gonna drive their heart something that's gonna feed them something, you know, what are, what are they looking for?

So we try to match that, that search or intent around the harmony of what goes along with that. And just like with music, we think of Google like the auditorium. So they're not our competitor. Our competitor are the people that's coming into the auditorium that's driving, you know, the interest to them. So we think about the auditorium as Google, and we think, we think about our competitors as the people, people competing for that top spot. Like if we're trying to get the lin and gig of that top spot, then, then we gotta be the ones that match what the audience wants the most. Meaning, meaning what the audience wants the most is gonna get the top spot. So, so that's kind of what we're in. If we're looking, you know, at gigs or we're, we're looking to see are they matching? How's the audience reacting?

How are the people receiving, what's going on? And so that's kind of what we look at is who's got the most harmony in the market, in the space based on the search or intent, who's singing the, the people to the, you know, to the water, to the path. That's kind of what we focus on. And then we make sure, my tip is, is to make sure you're using all the other channels in harmony because that, that adds times 10 to our results. What does that mean? Adding your email promo to it? Adding, if you do a blog post, adding your social promo to it, meaning adding any of these other things, show Google that the auditorium has interest, that people are interested in the song, the, the artist, the whatever's being created. So, so when we look at it that way, it really makes a big difference.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. SEO Harmony by Joseph. Kahn. All right, let's go to our next guest, Nikki Halliwell.

Nikki Halliwell:

Hi. So in terms of my meta title I don't know, I feel like I'm, I'm under pressure now. I should have had a few minutes to think about it while, while Joseph was talking. I like, it would probably be along the lines of how I usually try and describe Tech SEO to, to other people. And that would be around Tech SEO is like, is like having a good mechanic. So your, your car doesn't work well if you don't have a good mechanic that helps it running and it's the same with a website. You need, you need good working tech SEO to, to keep that running nice and smoothly. My tip was around using you, you can use other tools to do this, but I also did it manually, but it was looking in Google search consult to find keywords that have a high number of impressions, but then a low number of clicks in comparison to that.

So in terms of a tool, you can use something like Query Hunter, but I also used it myself just looking at, at the data within Search Consult to find where those opportunities are. It's things like, it's, it's a cheesy term, isn't it? But like, looking at the low, hanging through or like the quick wins, whatever you wanna call them, it's what clients wanna see to, to get those, those, you know, ROI nice and quickly, but, you know, looking in positions like three to 11, so those valuable keywords and those valuable posts that, that are performing, but they need a bit of extra love to to get them to that next step. So that's what I was, was looking at, and it's a really good way to multiply your, your traffic and just look at the, the underserved queries basically. It works for, for all types of businesses, whether it's service based businesses or our e-commerce clients, it works really well as well. But that's that was basically my, my tip for 2023 in, in a nutshell.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Love it. Thank you, Nikki. Now let's get to our next guest, Olga, What is your meta title and SEO tip in 2023?

Olga Zarr:

Yeah. Now I'm trying to teach Google about this change and we'll see how, how long it will take Google to kind of realize that this is me now and connect the dots, but, okay, so my meta title will be connected to my, to my tip for 2023. And since my second profession is kind of is running, then I will be doing a running analogy, which is always run an extra mile with, with whatever you are doing, especially in seo, not only in running, it is important to always like, run this extra mile, not to make your workouts shorter, but to make them longer or, or to do more than you can you think you're capable of doing. And I think the same role applies to seo. And my suggestion, my tip in in the book was that as an seo you probably do a variety of different tasks.

Some of our, some of us are more focused on one area of seo, but usually it is like a few different things. For example, in, in my case, even though I specialize in audits in technical seo, I also do keyword research. I also write articles. I also do some other like content SEO on page seo. So my recommendation is, is, is with whatever you're doing, always go that extra mile. So if you're doing keyword research, why don't you come up with a ton of different, different topics with supporting keywords. Maybe instead of just creating like coming up with three keywords, maybe you can just come up with a whole group of keywords which you can turn into a silo and then have like real authority on that given to. And for that purpose, I would also use Google Search search console in a way that Nilki mentions.

So that's one example. My my, I think my favorite example would be with SEO auditing. So if you're doing an SEO audit, like audit the site with a bunch of different tools, compare the results, don't blindly listen to what those tools, to what those tools are telling you, but like, use your own SEO experience, your own seo, mind your human brain and try to like come up with your own, with your own conclusions and what actually has to be done, what actually is a, is an issue, what isn't an issue. So, so that's my my more. So, so that's my, my tip. So be always more than 100% like doing yourself, doing the best.

Dre de Vera:

Go the extra mile with Olga Zarr. All right, let's go to Isaline. Hello, what is your meta title at SEO 2023 Tip.

Isaline Muelhauser:

Hi there. It's easily, in fact, easily I know <laugh> and it's about multilingual seo. So basically you should treat translation like languages and audience like human. I mean, that sounds pretty obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people just forget about that. And when I say translations, I mean translation in a very, very large sense because for me, like Swiss, German and German are two different language and probably you could say the same with English in different countries. And like, it's not only about the words, but sometimes it's also about just the way the information is explained and just the way the argument is made. Just to give you an example, like Swiss Germans, they like to give details about stuff and then they get to the point. And whereas in French, we rather have it like, just tell me the point of this thing you're trying to tell me and the details later.

And so that's the main thing. Sometimes people are like, oh is it cheaper just to go like automatic or is it cheaper just to do it with humans? Because you talk to humans and obviously it's going to be too expensive to do it, like with copy writers, but you need to think about a roadmap, what makes more sense for the business and what are conversion pages, what are interaction buttons. Another examples that is very frequent is words in English that can be a verb or noun. So you see it on a button and you think it's verb, it's an action, but actually when it's automatically translated, it can become a noun and there's no action there. And so the users are no incentive to click. So really it's about thinking about what's important of the website and what you're trying to get and to do with that website and prioritize the work. As always, <laugh>

Dre de Vera:

Thank you is all right. We saw Cindy sneak in here, but let me go ahead and let me go and get to, cause what we're doing here is we're also meta titles and you're tip and description of your tip in the 2023. So I'm gonna go to Lily Ray. Lily, what is your meta title and SEO tip in 23?

Lily Ray:

Awesome. well, originally in the book I said expand your content strategy into other formats, which is not that <inaudible>, but kind of straight to the point. I talked about the importance of being beyond text content, which we've been talking about for a long time in seo, but it's clear with new ser features, you know, with YouTube, with discover, with web stories, with TikTok, with everything that's happening in the search results that's you know, visual and interactive and a lot of videos and short videos, it's increasingly important to you think about just formatting your, your content and your ideas in different ways. So audio and visual particularly Google lens and multis searcher are still rolling out. There's still a lot of work to be done there to kind of make those products a little bit more user friendly. But I think that that's a thing that marketers and businesses should be focused on because I think in the next five years we're gonna see people searching with their phones, with pictures a lot more.

And also just like in general, I didn't say this in the book, but I always talk about this. The e and e expertise is probably for me the single most important factor in SEO right now, because especially with the rise of AI content, the importance of having actual subject matter expertise and firsthand experience is becoming increasingly important. If you read Google Product Review guidelines, I personally think this is should be the rubric for all SEO strategies, not just s because they're asking us to show the user and the searcher evidence that we actually know what we're talking about, whether that's evidence, video evidence image evidence, and then just reading through the text and having something new and unique to say is increasingly important. So those are my tips.

Dre de Vera:

Da da, become more of an expert, guys. All right, Lil Ray, thank you for that. Let's go on, Koray, go. What's up my man? What is your meta title and tip? That's 28 3.

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR:

So probably the meta title or the title tech in this case will be like, importance of information responsiveness or how to balance page rank or the need of the page rank. And probably I will be using this title tag in the future as well. My a is actually practical, the too, because it tries to explain how we can compete against the main authorities if they have really, really, we can't actually measure the page rank today, but we can guess it with different types of programs or the systems that we use. But let's say they have really big popularity signals or really good amount of centrality inside the link graph, and you try to outran them. In this case, actually information responsiveness is one of the concepts that you can actually use. And there are other concepts there that we can actually process, like information literacy, information quality, information extraction, and most of these things are actually coming from the Googlers, again, especially the last two.

When it comes to the information extraction, it is a different thing from information rie. And in the red level systems, you've tried to focus on the relevance and you try to rank the documents according to relevance. So most of the time relevance, of course, it is one of the most important important signals or the factors when it comes to ranking and also indexing or organizing the indexing or indices or the indexing charts. But when it comes to the actual understanding, who is the real authority, the quality of the information actually will be determining the end goal there. And right now, I know that everyone is actually talking about the ai, but there are actually other things to consider there as well. For example, AI can't create actual new information. The only thing that they can do is actually choosing a sample from the language model and reflect an existing tool. They can create a new team there. And to be able to show your actual real authority, as I say, for the last two years, we should be focusing on the actual information gap, not the keyboard gap. We should be focusing on actually most of the meaning or giving unique value as much as possible to prove the responsiveness of the source so that you can spend less money for buying links.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Thank you, Koray. All right, last but not least we have, Cindy, what is your meta title and your number one tip in SEO 2023?

Cindy Krum:

Hi everyone. So for me, title and, and stuff like that, as well as just kind of everything. My big tip is I think it, it's gonna be more and more important to start looking at actual search results again and not just relying on your numeric data. And so for instance, Google, you know, has played around with rewriting title tags and they're constantly changing how they display their own ERP features. And how they modify your search results to look different in various conditions or with various associated with various queries. And so that's what we do, is we actually track sometimes day by day, sometimes week by week, what a real search result looks like from a particular location or in a particular language or from a particular device, because all of those things can change. And so I've always kind of fretted that there's this mass generalization that happens with the tools, especially when you're doing averages and all people look at is the averages.

But it's important to look at the actual result itself and see how is it changing? What's Google testing and what's working. We're working on a project right now where we're gonna actually mirror and match up, click through rates from search console with the different ways that Google is presenting a search result. And I think that that's, that's important too, because you have ranking, but then you also have, you know, pixel height from the top. How far down is it? Which used to be predictable, but now it's very much not, especially on mobile. And so we wanna tie all those things back to click through rate where, you know, position, pixel rate, and presentation, the three Ps <laugh>.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Love it. Okay, I wanna go ahead and go let's go around and let everyone know, like, how can people get a hold of you and any current projects you got going on. Please start, start off with Joseph.

Joseph Kahn:

Yeah, you can get in touch with [email protected]. So Joseph scon, k a h n dot com. And I'm Joseph S Kahon on everything Social. We're really big on Twitter, so if you do slash Joseph S Kahn on Twitter slash Joseph S Kahn on YouTube, we have a YouTube channel there. So we're, we're starting to, to get that cranking up there. And one of the biggest things that we got going right now is hum jam circle.com. It's a free harmonic growth club. So if you're looking to do the harmony and growth and omnichannel stuff, we're doing that for free at home jam circle.com.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Thank you Joseph. And Nikki.

Nikki Halliwell:

Yeah, you can catch me on LinkedIn at just Nikki Halliwell Twitter. I'm still around we'll see how long for, but I'm still on Twitter at Nilki Halliwell. Well my website is nikkihalliwell.com and I've also recently launched a new website. So I spend a lot of time working on audits very similarly to, to aga, you know, I specialize in, in tech SEO and audits. I just launched a new website in that space, which is tech seo audits.com. Go check out if you're looking for, as it says, an audit, you would research whatever you need. There's a whole new way of, of of getting a bespoke audit for yourself of on there. So go check that out and let me know.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Love it. Olga.

Olga Zarr:

So I am still on Twitter @OlgaZarr, so this is my, my Twitter handle. I am also on LinkedIn, so you can connect with me here, both in both those places. I'm also at my website, seosly.com, and I have recently launched an SEO podcast, SEO slide podcast, and I also have a new YouTube channel, and I've seen Nikki's website. It's, it's very cool,

Dre de Vera:

<Laugh>. Love it. Thank you, Cindy.

Cindy Krum:

Yeah, the easiest place to reach me is still Twitter as long as it exists. My screen name there is Su su zed i c k S. And that's my screen name most places. But if you can't find me the mo the Mobile Moxi Web Place is is the second best place to go. And I'm always there too.

Dre de Vera:

Love it is.

Isaline Muelhauser:

So you can reach me through my website, pilea.ch or on Twitter its @isaline_margot. I do mostly multilingual websites, targeted for the Swiss markets, so French and Germans and yeah, love it. So looking forward to seeing you.

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Love it. Thank you Isaline. Lily.

Lily Ray:

You can Google my name and mostly find wherever you wanna go. I'll be probably there with my name still

Dre de Vera:

In Love, that love

Lily Ray:

Helpful content update is rolling out again right now, so that's fun. I deal with a lot of Google updates. I work on a team at an agency called a lot of different audits and algorithm, update projects, migrations, and all these things. So if you ever need or an audits on e or anything like that, we do a lot of those things, so

Dre de Vera:

Love it. Love it. And Koray,

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR:

If you want to reach out to me, you can use actually the holistic seo website but the website is actually a testing website. Usually you can also reach out to me from the YouTube or LinkedIn. And if you, if the situation is not urgent, you can also use my email. I will be answering it in two weeks at, at last.

Dre de Vera:

Thank you. Thank you. And my name is Paul Andre de Vere, aka Dre, I'm the host of SEO video show. You can find me at SEO video Show on YouTube. And I wanna go ahead and bring, let's go ahead and give everyone a run on a pause. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Taking everyone in. David, back to you.

David Bain:

Oh, what an absolutely superb session. Just as the rest of them. We've now gone nearly four hours here, four hours straight, and I'm sure we could go for another four hours, but we're not going to go and do that. And we're gonna leave you in suspense and ask you to check out all the content that already exists at SEOin2023.com, whether it's book form, that's the book. If you haven't got it already, you know what to do. In fact, you know what to buy all your friends for Christmas fill out their stockings for Christmas. That's, that's what's the ultimate stocking filler is this year. So yeah, if you want it and in paperback form, in Kindle form, in video form, in audio only form on podcast, just go to SEOin2023.com and you can get whatever desire fills your heart over at that particular web address.

I think just to summarize a statement from Olesia probably just summarizes things really well. Great lineup, great insights. I think that applies to this session and every single session so far. That is all that we're gonna do in terms of livestream just now. Thank you for being a part of it. We've got more questions coming in in the chat. We've got a few thanks there. Yeah, coming in, in the chat as well. We're not gonna go to more questions just now because we could go here be here for a very long time. If you've got more questions feel free to join the future Majestic webinars majestic.com/webinars. That's a great place to interact there as well. Hopefully we'll see you there in the future. If we don't see you before then, have a wonderful Christmas, have a wonderful new Year, and we hope to see you in 2023. Take care. Thank you all