“SEMpdx Engage” Marketing Conference 2024
Topics Covered: SEO, SEM, Digital Marketing, Social Media, Paid Content, Advertising, Indexing, Crawling, Content Creation, Innovation
Conference Overall Ratings: Venue (4/5) - Food (4.5/5) - Speaker Content (5/5) - Networking Opportunity (5/5) - Likeliness to Return (5/5)
Initial Conference Overview: Though this event was two days in full, I could only attend one day. From what I experienced, I definitely missed out on day one! This event was packed with well selected speakers and presentations on fascinating tricks, strategies, and insights of the digital marketing world. I learned so much. Each speech lasted about 50 minutes including Q&A, though many flew by from being so interesting. I probably saw five speeches in total and enjoyed many snacks and meals. There were hundreds of attendees and a handful of vendors with tables.
Bullet Point Notes from Conference :
There are many categories of SEO to specialize in (not limited to) Local SEO, Nonprofit SEO, B2C SEO, News SEO, General SEO, B2B SEO, Marketplace and Lead Gen SEO
“In a few years we may have a Google killer.” - Rachel Heseltine, VP SEO CBS Digital, Paramount
I can’t help but think this sounds quite similar to Boeing, Rite Aid, Toys R Us’ business trajectory… being lead into bankruptcy over decades with the top leaders playing dumb the whole time. Without getting too deep into this here, I heard a theory on this years ago. It continues to pop up as a possible explanation for what’s going on here, as I experience events like this. Is Google intentionally failing its customers, ever so slowly over time, so that it will seem natural to the unknowing consumer. This is a tactic that has taken down hundreds of other legacy companies over our lifetime. I wonder if a small few collection of people are profiting off or their downfall… and additionally will. profit from the necessarily inevitable replacement.
There is so much disconnect from Google’s resourcefulness… and their ability enhance the UX experience (especially for superfans). This can’t be that hard to do, and yet the customer dissatisfaction is steadily growing. Google continues to move forward with changes that users don’t like… they are too smart and resourceful to behaving this way, am I, right? Especially upsetting so many experts in the industry. I just can’t help but speculate if this may be auspiciously intentional.
“We’ve heard for many years that SEO is dead. No, SEO has evolved.” - Rachel Heseltine
In a merger & acquisition, you integrate websites and workflows. Either bring in new staff or you get your team to take on new projects and challenges. Often 30% of employees are redundant in a merger.
Tools without in-house management become a liability.
45% of US workers in 2024 feel “burnt out” - Rachel Heseltine
Does your current job excite and challenge you? 45% of Americans are thinking of quitting this year. What matches up with your life’s expectations?
Every month, write down the things you did well in your job. Review these quarterly.
It’s better to lose 2 years of progress than get stuck in a job you hate for 20.
As you go through life, work/life balance becomes more important. You have to make sure you’re in a creamer that can bring you joy in and out of that role.
Build a network to help each other, even if you are competitors. Compare and review what has happened in your experiences.
Find communities and talk to them. Get to know people are are professionals in the industry. Then become one, yourself. Write articles, write about things you are an expert on. Get your name out there.
“Crawl budget is a lie and nuance is for communists.” - Jamie Indigo
Google does not care about your Page 2. Want to get crawled, indexed, and rank? It has to be on the homepage. “Next Pages” are considered to be “unstable” and won’t be discovered. 😲
Homepages are crawled and checked in on all of the time, so leave it there if you want it discovered.
Also, remember we learned how homepages lose so many viewers when it takes more than a few seconds to load?
Crawlers take lots of resources so they can’t afford to waste any resources. Don’t have wasted space, pixels, etc on your website. Build like your career depends on its usefulness. If it’s not crawled, you can’t rank it. Consider every pixel as a cost.
Google’s New Crawl Priorities:
Crawl Less
Save Money (by reducing data consumption)
Rely on dynamic triggers to dynamically control crawl (quality searches)
If your content is shared on other domains the bots don’t like that (like, if you have a stock photo - or something made from Ai, when they’re crawling they figure that out and you rank up or down as a result. If you have pictures found on other websites or pictures made by Ai, they don’t like this). It’s MUCH better to have unique pictures, images (not even from Ai!) to get more attention from the algorithms, google, and crawling to get indexed. They like authenticity.
Your website is an entity home. (For your entity to be identifiable and traceable, it must have a destinctive URI.)
You’re getting crawled by Google so push DATA, Google values that.
Make your website easy for Google to index and don’t burn their trust. Provide good and accurate info on your website to THRIVE in crawls and indexing.
Do not put anything you do not want indexed on your website. Google bots will find it. “no index, indexifembedded”
There are many indexes, get into as many indexes as possible.
Index coverage reports are powerful.
Index Now: Communal Index, “the only sustainable way to move forward”
Where you can crawl but put in your data as well. “common crawl”
Ask, but in exchange, you put in your info.
Do you have what people are asking for?
Source/Research Journey: I need to find.
Purchase Journey: I need to buy.
Meta Descriptions are hot again. Identify the best type of data to put in the descriptions. Is it a text for a page? Summarize your reviews, what are people looking for?
Unlock Merchant Center, there are so many features and opportunities you’re missing out on if you don’t (lens to find products, promo codes and coupons). Helpful content = profitable content.
Context Knowledge Graph: a collection of relationships between the entities displaying connections in the context of your website, using standardized vocab from content. This new knowledge can be full of information.
Knowledge graphs can help search engines understand, dissect, and contextualize your content. Then you will rank.
Knowledge graphs are extremely up-and-coming, the #2 most popular tool sought out after Ai.
Explain the hierarchy and relationships between the entities on your page. FAQ, Product Page, Mention, About, Product Descriptions, Glossary… connect it all.
Glossary Pages = things defined thoughtfully for something you want to take authority for. The glossary ties the entities together for other inferencing. The glossary can link together a lot. Definitions can plug into your own or external sources. Think about what you want to define and what not to define. Identify entities in the text.
Go back to the business. What is important to be known for? What is your strategic area of growth? Why words do your customers use when they search? Come up with a bunch of terms, build the glossary to define how its all related.
Answer the questions (example): department, area served, sponsor, member of, founder, contained in place, location, organization, company
You do entity linking using your schema marking. What is schema markup? Machine readable data that you place on your website to help search engines better understand your content + entities to stand out on search engines. Schema markup helps you achieve rich results.
Structured data is to help us understand, to emphasize that it’s this evolution. Connect everything to each other within your website to help your information be processed be search engines.
Some pages may be very loosely connected. Can they be more connected?
What is the user’s intent when searching of this? Shopping, information, entertainment? Put on the user hat and go to google. Understand how people get to you and what we’re looking for as users. Understand your user’s intent and match it to content. Research each topic to its entirety from a search perspective. See what people are asking for, what people are literally asking for.
Identify the current patterns to get on Google’s Page 1. How has the search prompt style changed over time?
Optimize SEO phrase, “as seen in”.The blog “mentions” (sounds worse than) this blog “is about”. SEO will play a more major role in data architecture for the next few months.
Be the most specific you can as you write about your blog, as to what is in reality. Looking at the past can help you with that.
There are 7.5 million new blog posts published daily. You need content strategy & SEO mindfulness to rank, drive traffic, and build authority.
Search engines prioritize intent matching and authority building.
Take topics and check the search popularity. Is this topic trending? General baseline of at least 5k
Execute on blogs in a scheduled manner. See if the content works, then expand in real-time (rather than pre-scheduling too many). Schedule out social media posts but have no link in the description. It makes you rank lower. Instead, add the link in the first comment using MetriCool
Affiliates and professionals know their audiences. They spend money on research. Learn from them. Use their data and put it in a spreadsheet.
Look for non-branded and trending affliates. See what words they use to pre-sell, their calls to action, phrasing, put it all in a spreadsheet. Look at their font size, colors, templates. Match what you like about it to yours.
Low engagement and high bounce rates are not good. What’s working? Where is the gap? Look at your competitors. Ask users. Leverage 2nd topic ideas. Align topics with what matters most to users.
Content Inventory: What exists on your website?
How does your website model your values, it this covered across the entire context? How much existing content is in line with your values? Are your organizations’ values showing up in your website?
Strategically focus on AI in SaaS. Are our predicted verticals talking about these entities? How much context to do we have on this topics?
ScreamingFrog.com = crawl the naviation. Tun on javascript too and connect APIs for any data you have access.
“Google Analytics 4 seems to be a ‘Greek Tradgedy’”
Kelly’s Conference Confession: Again, this was another speaker (admittedly, I never got his name). But he said that Google Analytics 4 was a greek tragedy! It seems standard in the industry that people are upset with Google and I can’t help but think it’s on purpose after hearing so many people find evidence that they’re intentionally failing over the next few decades like many others…
Being pleasant to work with makes your life better. Don’t let others waste $6k of their time. Make it worth it. Making the company money is everyone’s job. Create an ongoing story about accumulating success.
Necessary Teammates (you are not always the expert):
The Cheerleader: Keeps people motivated. They will do the work for you.
The Sage: Sees connections and knows the history of the company. They’ve seen it all and know what doesn’t work. They show you how to get things done.
The Champion: They’re excited about what you’re doing. They’ll take your message other places, take your message to the masses.
Build Big Change from Small Change.
Doing new things is hard and scary. You must understand the process of change. If someone can do most the same things and you still get mostly what you want, let them. Understand their process first before you change anything.
Sometimes people don’t want accountabilty because it will show how little they’re contributing. Some people aren’t very good at their job. You need to figure this out.
Why aren’t people using resources?
What would make it easier for them?
Every step in a process requires an executive function… you’re getting a limited amount of EF juice each day. Optimize the process.
Highlight blockers: be loud, be annoying, make change. What is stopping you? Highlight it and keep at the issue until it changes.
Gamification implementation helps people feel excited to do things for you. It helps them make sure they get credit for it. Everyone can celebrate successes when you share credit lavishly. This makes people want to help you. Collaborate empathetically on common goals and get stuff done. Share credit like crazy, make them look good.
Measure and iterate how things are working and how to make them better.
60% of resources updating and optimizing existing content,
40% of resources creating new content and executing on new topic ideas.
40% of Adults are using Chat GPT daily
Conference “Overall Rating” Further Elaboration:
VENUE - 4/5
OPPORTUNITES FOR IMPROVEMENT: This university building has its quirks. I was stuck using the elevator more often than not because the stairwells were very un-instinctual at this university building and I got lost more often than I was proud of 😂. Probably the students have it figured out, but it’s hard to master in a day. The room sizes were very good and practical for the size of this event. Though, it seems they could have forgotten the main hall for breakout sessions (used that time to clean up or let people mingle with vendors), then use smaller rooms for each speaker. The main hall never seemed to fill up for speakers (minus the keynotes, of course) which may give the speaker a feeling like the room is empty. Also, when people were returning from other speeches, it sometimes cut-off the speaker in the main hall from getting to answer Q&A and experience a proper goodbye. But overall, I loved how everything was easy enough to find, in the same building, well lit, reasonable temperatures, and good audio/visual.
FOOD - 4/5
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT: Almost every meal had a mix of healthy and just simply delicious options. I was amazed by how good the breakfast and dinner were… I ate a lot at those meals. The food at lunch had too much sauce though (but it was good to take. little break)… and then salsa used at the snack break was a little questionable. But, overall, I was extremely happy and well fed. 😂. (Seriously, I’m so full from yesterday and all the amazing food I enjoyed. Hahaha. My body literally needed a day to regroup.)
SPEAKER CONTENT - 5/5
ALLOW ME TO ELABORATE: There was so much useful information to learn at this event. Even for someone like me, with hardly any experience in this industry at all. I walked away with so much new understanding and delight for digital marketing.
NETWORKING OPPORTUNITIES - 5/5
ALLOW ME TO ELABORATE: From the “Welcome Party” to the frequent breaks, to the lengthy meals, to the “Goodbye Mixer”… socializing was prioritized and there were lots of ways to meet others at this event. (TBH I didn’t meet many people. I spent so much of my energy taking notes! Usually event topics aren’t quite this useful & interesting. But this one, each speaker kept me interested for the most part, so I had to preserve my energy) On top of that, the host kept things fast-paced, timely, upbeat, and funny. He had a lot of jokes he threw out nonstop. It set the tone to keep others in a good mood too, happy to be there. I did hear some coworkers at lunch mention to each other how these speeches were way more in-depth than they’re used to/understood… It was great people had a chance to build new relationship, spending time reflecting on what they’d just learned (and I bet they learned even more than they realized!)
LIKELINESS TO RETURN - 5/5
ALLOW ME TO ELABORATE: This was a fun event that taught me a lot about niche topics like (SEO, Website Content Development, Working with Crawlers to get Indexed) and I saw even more of what it takes to host a great event. I would definitely return to this conference in the future.
Until next time, I wish you the motivation and success to search for opportunities around your area. Search and explore: Who is out there giving talks? There are new things happening all of the time
Find relatable or interesting topics you like and check them out! Maybe even something hosted at a cool venue, if there’s no other reason to go. Let’s see what you can learn and discover not too far from home. 😊
