Day 1 Recap: Chiang Mai SEO Conference

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show. This is our day one recap of the Chiang Mai SEO conference. I'm joined by Arthur. How you going? Good.

ARTHUR: Very good.

ROB: Good to be back. Joined by Rob. Hello. Hello. How you going?

ARTHUR: Good. Good to be back after a long day of SEOing and nerding out.

MICHAEL: A lot of nuggets. We have been nerding with the best of them today. Not even the best, but friends of the show. Which are the best. We've just endured a long tuk-tuk ride back from the conference to where we're staying, which is probably about 15 minutes away, but 15, 20 minutes. And we're doing this now while the thoughts are fresh in our mind. So the conference had Six speakers, I think today.

ARTHUR: Six, yeah.

MICHAEL: Two sessions and a break, two sessions and a break, two sessions. Yes. That's how it went. So it started off strong with Matt Diggity. Matt Diggity into Cloudwell Roof. We were talking about intro music, our thoughts on intro music. So before, what was the, cause we were trying to guess what intro music they'd be walking into.

ARTHUR: Well, I thought it was going to be Guess Who's Back. Because I guess the whole theme of the conference is we're back after being out of action for four years due to COVID. So I thought maybe that one, but he actually came out to… Gets you back Eminem. Sorry, who did you think, what did you think he was going to come out to?

MICHAEL: We were laughing saying, um, party rockers in the house.

ARTHUR: You know, like very cliche.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But I don't know that. I really thought that was what he was going to walk out to. I had a, yeah. I thought there'd be no music and just walk on stage. Well, no, that would have been awkward. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, what did we get? Um, what's the song called? The one that goes no diggity by black strip.

ARTHUR: Is it no diggity? Yeah.

MICHAEL: Can you sing it for us? No, I'm not going to sing it. Everyone knows it. No diggity, no doubt.

ARTHUR: Well, it's a little bit of a play on his name, Matt diggity, which works.

MICHAEL: It does work very well. It makes total sense. We picked ACDC for Karl Roof for some reason, but he just walked out to like generic music, audio royalty free type music.

ARTHUR: But anyway, what was, what song would you come out to if you were making your conference debut speaking?

MICHAEL: Um, what about, what about Lincoln park? One step closer to the edge. Cause in SEO, just one step closer to the edge of the Google abyss. I've been building too many links and one step closer to the edge. One too many links.

ARTHUR: I actually struggled to think of anything on the tuk tuk ride back. So I asked chat GPT a question, give me some song recommendations that you can reference SEO for an entrance for a conference. So I got a few good ones. Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tamal Tureed, signifying overcoming SEO challenges. Eye of a Tiger. Classic. I can see clearly now. Symbolizing the clarity after solving SEO issues. Wow. These are really lame. Raw by Katy Perry. Metaphor of the impact of a strong SEO strategy. I would love to see you walking into Raw on stage about to deliver a speech. The Climb by Miley Cyrus, representing the ongoing effort to improve rankings. Anyway. That's enough. So chat GPD is not as good. I would have come out to Goldberg's wrestling theme with the… But anyway.

MICHAEL: Do you have a song, Rob?

ROB: I wouldn't mind coming out to the, uh, to the Eminem's Slim Shady song. Okay. But it's like, yeah, but I've never been there before. So that's true.

MICHAEL: Well, let's talk about the day. So, um, six speakers. Yeah. I would say there was a mix of good and not, not so great.

ARTHUR: I'd say beginner. Beginner focused. Yeah. Yeah. Probably good to those who haven't heard it before, but for those intermediate to advanced SEOs.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Which I would argue most people coming here would be. Would be. Yeah. Like if you've come all the way, it's kind of hard to get here if you're not from Thailand, you know, you can't just fly straight to Chiang Mai. Anyone making the trek here is like invested. They've got skin in the game.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's a solid day of flying.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Kyle Roof was interesting, like we spoke to him on the show about his rhinoplasty plano. Yep. He gave updates on what he's seeing in this day and age. Let me pull my notes up here. So what I liked that he spoke about in his preso was if a page is stuck, so it's indexed, but it's not ranking, He has been testing sending ads via Google Ads to the page for two weeks with like a $20 budget cheap. And then almost instantly he was seeing that that page was ranked for lots of search terms. It happened the same day. And this comes back to this whole thing of does Google Ads affect SEO, which we always say no, it doesn't. But it's not necessarily Google Ads I don't think that's affecting SEO here. It's like user signals, people going, traffic going to that site and people using it that are having an impact. But that's something, you know, I guess from a client point of view, it makes sense to run both, right?

ROB: Run a multi-channel strategy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. What else did he talk about? He spoke about no testing, no follow links too.

ARTHUR: So he likes to do a lot of testing basically for those who don't or haven't listened to his episode. Scientist.

MICHAEL: Yeah. He took a very science themed prezo. I like it.

ARTHUR: He had his favorite scientist on there and he's like, what was, who was his favorite scientist? I can't remember. Halley's comet.

MICHAEL: That's the guy that was into Halley's comet. Yeah. And then whoever his nemesis was. So it was a good thing. It was a good thing. It's a good story. So the way he tests is like, he will find a keyword that's total gibberish. So it would be like, frozelwump got 10 or something so that when you search it in Google, there's no results. Then he will build five pages and rank them for that term. Then when he wants to test, he will send, he'll change like the middle ranked one to see if it moves up. So for example, he had his five pages and then he sent a nofollow link to the middle page and it increased the rankings. But what he was finding is that the page that he's sending a nofollow link from has to have traffic, like organic rankings and traffic itself to have an impact. That's cool.

ARTHUR: Very cool.

MICHAEL: That's a good process for testing.

ARTHUR: Doesn't he have a patent for his testing? The process that he uses? That's what he says. He said that he was the only SEO that has a patent for SEO and also has a guideline written after him. Yeah.

MICHAEL: For his spam guidelines. He spoke about that on the show he did with us. Do you remember?

ARTHUR: I do remember. Yeah. Yeah. I do remember.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I thought you might. What else? Option tags.

ARTHUR: Yeah, he was talking about option tags and people not actually looking into the data. So using the tool that he created, Page Optimizer Pro, it has a feature which counts the number of words on the page. So someone would run like a pop audit and it would come out with a huge number of words, like way more than what it appears to be like on face value. So rather than trying to figure out why that is, they would send him an angry email saying, your tool's broken. But what he found was that they had option tags that had different content hidden in the code. And that was what was being picked up. And he found that option tags or content behind option tags is still crawled and indexed by Google and is a ranking signal.

MICHAEL: So if the content is in the code at all, it gets read?

ROB: Yes, basically. Same as display none as well? Yes, same as display none.

MICHAEL: Which there was a little period in SEO there a while back where Google were like, we're not reading text in like hidden behind read more toggles. And then they came back and said, now we are again. They probably were the entire time. That was a while back.

ARTHUR: I remember when I, roughly around the same time I started and people were panicking, removing all the read more hidden copy and my clients were getting like worried as well. But here we are 2023 and still doing it.

MICHAEL: The thing I found amusing is his, you know, Lorem Ipsum that he ranked, he spoke about on the episode with us. And then when he went and spoke in Garden Grove in California, and then Milan and Bali and stuff, he ranked sites in those locations using Lorem Ipsum. And those, he showed screenshots today of them still to this moment in time in Garden Grove, he's ranking number one for rhinoplasty Garden Grove, above other legitimate, like, cosmetic surgeons.

ROB: I'm actually really interested in the rhinoplasty garden grove. Like I want to go in and kind of dissect and see ways placing each word and how Google is picking it up.

MICHAEL: So it's really interesting. It will be also interesting to see how competitive it actually is. Like we did a case study where we built a site live and ranked it in Tuck pointing, which, you know, there's some competition, but it's not super competitive. I seriously doubt you're going to rank number one with Laura Mipsum in a rhinoplasty niche in somewhere that's super competitive. But anyway, it was interesting. It's cool. I spoke about PageRank simulators too, which… Yeah, I have that note here.

ARTHUR: I've not used. It's just internal linking, right?

MICHAEL: Yeah. And to see what the impact would be on like internally linking to a page in terms of its page rank itself. So maybe that's an episode we can do. Yeah. Something to play with and test. Um, maybe we don't need to recap all of the speakers today. Let's um, let's stick to our favorites. Okay. So out of the six, I would say one was Ahrefs, which was like a big ad for Ahrefs.

ARTHUR: Just a massive ad.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Maybe we can… The guy that spoke after Kyle. Robert. Robert. Polish Robert. Yeah, me. He's the Polish Robert SEO. That's it. He… I was having trouble remembering exactly what… He made a lot of cocaine references.

ARTHUR: He made a lot of cocaine references, but the general gist was using or like leveraging AI to create knowledge graphs. And he went into a lot of detail as to how he does that.

ROB: Rob, you were pretty impressed with what he did. Yeah. So it's pretty cool. So he would scrape basically the top 10 competitors or top 10 results for us on the keyword and run it through a large language model and extract like the facts, the relations and the details from that content and sort of use that as a basis to fill in the gaps for the website he wants to rank. So yeah, it's pretty cool.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And he, so he, he extracted all that stuff and then he would prompt the AI to structure content around it that fully covers it well and like what questions it should cover.

ROB: Right. Yeah. Basically covering everything. Um, so any sort of facts or questions? Yeah. The AI just basically gives you like. everything related to knowledge graph. And then from there, I think he would just generate the content using AI. So, yeah.

MICHAEL: And he had an example of a site he'd made in some Spanish market, some coffee, coffee targeted. So it's sort of like speeding up the process of researching, you know, I guess the keyword research and topic research and stuff that might've taken hours in the past, literally takes minutes.

ROB: It's super in-depth as well.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So that was cool. Um, I think we, we, we all really enjoyed Chris Christopher Holton at the end, but we actually have recorded a podcast episode with him earlier this week that will be coming out in the future. So we probably won't cover anything that he had to say because you'll hear it from him in an episode in the future. But he was the last speaker of the day and he came up there with the goods in terms of actionable tactics. Black Hat SEO. Black Hat. He's in casino. And yeah, it was very interesting.

ARTHUR: The thing about him is very honest and upfront, which is rare for a lot of SEOs.

MICHAEL: Yeah. People tend to be cagey about… I'm sure whatever he spoke about today… You have a little man crush on him, don't you? Whatever he spoke about today is probably stuff that he's happy to let go, because the real juice he's working on now, he's not talking about. Of course not, no. That's secret. Yeah. Kevin Indig. Kevin Indig. Friend of the show. Friend of the show. What did you think, Rob?

ROB: Amazing. I think, yeah, the last two, Kevin Indig and Chris, very… I would say polar opposites in terms of the content that they cover. Contrasting, right? Yeah. Yeah. But they're both very exceptional, very knowledgeable. Kevin, who specializes in enterprise SEO, you really can see the knowledge come across. Yeah. Yeah, no, a lot of really cool nuggets from both of them.

MICHAEL: He's a great speaker and thinker, Kevin. Growthmemo.com, well worth subscribing. What did we like? You were very taken out by his use of APIs and chat GPT to pad out content like programmatically on pages.

ARTHUR: Yeah, it's a great way to scale content. What was the example that he used? I can't remember. He was writing a real estate website.

MICHAEL: Australian real estate website.

ARTHUR: Yeah, plugging into like APIs about different schools and things to auto-generate or programmatically generate all this content for the website to help it rank and it ranked really well.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so like facts and data about cities, Brisbane. Cities, yeah. And they would pull that data into a prompt. Yeah. So he's really about like, you know, a prompt shouldn't just be a couple of sentences and then you're done or something that you spend an hour working on. Like it needs to be something that you take a long time and you iterate on and you improve. You build on it, yeah. And then once you get it, you can use it over and over. That was one of the main takeaways.

ARTHUR: Like if it takes you 10 minutes to prompt, then it's probably going to be a shit prompt. And you're not going to get a good output. So it's like we used to say, like the content you give or the content you get is as good as the brief. So the content that's output or whatever the output from AI is, is only as good as the prompt. people spend all like days just putting together different prompts. Like it's prompt engineering.

ROB: So yeah. His prompts are really impressive. Like I've got some of the screenshots here and like some of it's like, Oh, like make sure that the data is coming from like an official source. Yeah.

MICHAEL: You'd link the source where relevant.

ROB: Yeah. Don't repeat this word more than X amount of times. Do not use like three word phrases, like very specific and very on brand to the particular company that he's working for.

MICHAEL: Yeah. He also, what else did he have? He was talking about sort of humans, not necessarily being replaced by AI, but it like AI augmenting humans, which, yeah, I think in the short term for sure, long term, I'm terrified AI is coming to get us.

ARTHUR: Is he talking about indexation API?

ROB: Himada AI? Yeah, that was, that was good.

MICHAEL: Outside of the speakers, what else? I know Arthur was very excited, he got himself an Ahrefs shirt and then someone stole it.

ARTHUR: I don't know, maybe I dropped it, I can't remember. Well, you're very attached to your shirt. I instantly blamed the person sitting next to me. You gave me yours, so it's all good. Well, I'm not worried anymore. It's not confirmed yet. That was good. Got some surfer shirts. Got some surfer SEO hoodies, shirts, two shirts. I've got the singlet from the other day, so I'm set for any climate.

ROB: Oh, did you tell a story of that yet? Or was that a secret?

MICHAEL: Well, we actually spoke to Mihael from Surfer as well earlier in the week. And then Arthur ended up swapping clothes with him later that night at the opening.

ARTHUR: It's a good promotion for the SEO show.

MICHAEL: Yes. He ended up walking around that event with Arthur's shirt on the whole night, which was cool. And I got to wear a bodybuilding singlet. Everyone was happy.

ROB: Especially Arthur is very, very attached to that singlet now. I am.

MICHAEL: Were you into lunch?

ARTHUR: How was your lunch? Lunch? Good. We spoke, we met a few other SEOs, an Aussie SEO living in Bali. Cool. Had a little chat about him and what he does and you spoke to another… Casino guy from Malta. Yep. Lunch was okay, the food wasn't that good but, you know, what can you do?

MICHAEL: Yeah, standard conference type. I would say it's better than a lot of like conference type snacks.

ARTHUR: I haven't been to that many conferences.

MICHAEL: One of my snacks was like a chocolate filled… Pastry? And when I bit it, it went everywhere. So that's my only, I guess, downer.

ROB: I mean, the conference food was, I guess for the lunch, had a lot of variety. It was huge though.

ARTHUR: Like I was just, you know, I heard 800 people, but seeing 800 people there, this is massive. You know what I mean? Like, yeah. It was a big kind of conference room, 800 people all in one room. It wasn't split up. It was good. Like really well set up, really well produced. Like I think it exceeded my expectations.

ROB: Yeah, that was really good. I think the one thing that could be a little bit better is a tiny bit, a tiny bit more room on the sides.

ARTHUR: A hundred percent. Yeah. Well they had to cram 800 people into that little, little big.

ROB: My shoulders are definitely like, yeah.

MICHAEL: We were all sitting with our arms tucked in in front of us the entire day.

ARTHUR: And trying to get 800 people up to the fourth floor in two lifts is a nightmare.

ROB: Yeah, those lifts aren't that big either. They're not. They're very small.

ARTHUR: So we have to get early. Get there early. But a good first day, right? Very good day, yeah. It set a good precedent for the next day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

MICHAEL: As long as we're not out drinking tonight, which we're not. We're having a beer now, a celebratory beer for our first day. But we'll be back tomorrow with another recap of day two of the Chiang Mai SEO conference.

ARTHUR: Is there anyone you're looking forward to seeing tomorrow?

MICHAEL: Well, Michal, friend of the show. Yeah, I was going to say, I can't wait. Craig Campbell, we've spoken to before. Steve Toth. I like his newsletter, SEO Notebook. So I'm interested to hear what he has to say. And I've forgotten who else is speaking tomorrow, to be honest. RBB. Oh, yep, yep, yep. LinkBuilder. LinkBuilding. As we know, everybody loves LinkBuilding and talking about LinkBuilding, so that'll be a good one. So yeah, we'll let you know how it was in the next update.

ROB: But until then, happy SEOing. Happy SEOing. See you tomorrow. See ya.

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