Day 2 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.

ARTHUR: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I'm here with Michael and Rob and we're back from day two of the Chiang Mai SEO conference.

MICHAEL: How did you find day two? Um, day two was good. Day two was good. I'm struggling. I think we noticed in the conference that every second person was coughing and sniffling. Oh, it was relentless. It was really bad. I think I've been, I know I've been struck down. So my thoughts might be a little bit cloudy, but I'm going to try to play it through.

ARTHUR: I think, I think day two, day one was better. Yeah. Just, I think the content and the speakers were more interesting to me.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. Yeah. Look, I sort of, it started off with a bit of chat about like mindset and thinking bigger. So somebody who's like gone public with this company, which is all cool and stuff, but from us, we're looking for SEO tidbits, you know? So for me, SEO tidbits was, Steve Toth today was the, I guess the gold when it came to that sort of stuff.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, there was a couple of SEO speakers. So we had BB Raven who spoke about outreach and link building and outreach and how to, I guess, leverage AI with outreach. And it was interesting, but it's stuff that I already kind of knew. She kind of talked about how to be more creative with outreach to kind of break through the noise and She gave some examples of different prompts you can use. So for example, I'm an expert in the field, you know, write me an intro, blah, blah, blah, tailored to whoever you're trying to hit with your outreach, which I thought was pretty cool. But outside of that, it's all stuff that I've kind of really covered. building for a long time. I'm sure it was useful to a lot of people there.

ROB: Like her outreach is quite unique. Very, very tailored.

MICHAEL: And the style of the messaging is very quirky.

ARTHUR: But I think that's good because we all know we get hit by, you know, hundreds of emails a week, cold emails. So it's really hard to cut through the noise. So I guess you have to be creative and different to get the person's attention. Otherwise they're not going to open your email. So, um,

MICHAEL: And her approach is really related to trying to get free links largely because like a lot of SEO campaigns just involve reaching out and paying people for links. Where she is focusing I guess is being interesting and unique and zany and wacky to stand out to people who will then look into what she's talking about and hopefully get her a free link. So it's I guess a different approach to link building.

ARTHUR: I'll tell you what, she got the most questions after speech presentation. But moving on, we also saw Michael Suski, Michal Suski, sorry. So we actually interviewed him this week. He came here and we had a chat about his presentation, which was all about the challenges of generative AI and taking control of the output. So, we won't go into too much detail about that because we will have an episode dropping very soon. So, keep an eye out for that one.

ROB: There's some interesting quotables there, like copper neighborhoods, not keywords.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Because in the SEO world, you know, having done it, well, personally, I've been in it in some way, shape or form since the late 2010s. Keyword research and mapping has always been the thing. And keywords, people are obsessed with keywords. What's my ranking for this keyword? What's my ranking for that keyword? It's gone long beyond that now and it's around keyword themes. Yes. You shouldn't be so obsessed with, am I ranking for, you know, plumber, Walkham Hills? Yeah. It's, are you ranking for the keyword themes that bring you business? Yeah. Which is not really that groundbreaking, but cover neighborhoods, not keywords was a cool theme. And we'll hear from him as Arthur said in his own words.

ARTHUR: So I think he also talked about like, The output is only as good as a prompt. And we kind of talked about that yesterday. I think a lot of people said and mentioned that this week, but yeah, a lot of people will be lazy or kind of cheap out. And if we're talking about credits, they don't want to waste too many credits generating content. And I guess his whole angle is, you know, why not spend a bit more and get something infinitely better rather than cheaping out and having to spend your time trying to fix it. So yeah. Their tool is more expensive than the competitors, but you know, they basically, what I just said, you know, they will run multiple outputs and provide you with better content that you don't have to waste time editing.

ROB: Speaking of credits, credits seem to be the meme of this conference. There's Ahrefs credit memes every day.

MICHAEL: Ahrefs were the whipping boys. They were the butt of many jokes or conference. They still wanted their shirt.

ROB: Yeah, I mean, you wanted that shirt too. So did I. So did I. You were quite sad when you thought someone stole yours.

ARTHUR: Oh, you know what? They're still the best SEO tool out there and we're on a legacy plan and we haven't really played around with the new features and I'm sure they're super useful and we'll still keep using them.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And Arthur will announce our new Ahrefs sponsorship soon. Very soon, very soon. No. Steve Toth was just dropping actionable bomb after bomb after bomb. Yeah. Which is his notebook is a great newsletter to subscribe to, SEOnotebook.com. Each week he shares a little tip that he's using in the SEO world. And this preso was just him up there, I guess, rapid fire moving through them. So I thought this for today had the most actionable meat and sort of interesting stuff.

ARTHUR: Yeah. He's got a lot of like sheets and stuff that you can use to automate certain things. I've got a lot of notes here. I'm still trying to kind of decipher them because they're a bit of a mess.

MICHAEL: Well, one I liked was, let's say you take an article that you've written and you can use a prompt in ChatGPT to analyze the article against the helpful content guidelines or other Google guidelines, product review guidelines sort of thing. and see how you're addressing those guidelines with that article. So that's just a cool way of using AI that I hadn't personally thought of.

ARTHUR: What about bookmarklets, which I haven't used in the past?

MICHAEL: Rob, I reckon that's Rob's realm there.

ROB: Yeah, actually, that's what I had written down as well. Yeah, it looks like something really interesting. You can have a whole JavaScript code and then it does like a whole function.

ARTHUR: It's basically like a bookmark that you pin. Essentially, yeah. Yeah. That's JavaScript. And you can do things like copy all the content from a word, a webpage, sorry, in one button, one click. Yeah. Or like, or bolded words in the SERP.

MICHAEL: Bolded words. Yeah.

ROB: Open this page in web archive.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And so he uses ChatGPT to write the actual JavaScript. So bookmarklet, like it's where you put JavaScript in the URL link section in a bookmark in the browser. Yes. And it will just load that JavaScript in browser. His example was pull out all the bolded words in a SERP and then he'll write content around that to try and go after featured snippets. So if you search a keyword and then pull out all the bold words, it means that's what Google's considering relevant for that initial keyword. And then yeah, he goes after featured snippets. He says it works really well. Yeah. Sounds pretty cool. Um, the other thing I thought was cool was he increasing dwell time on the site, um, by let's say you have an article, you feed it into chat GPT and say, write a first paragraph for this article. That's super compelling. So like, maybe uses intrigue or something like that to get the person to want to keep reading it. And he says that by doing that, he's seen across, he's used it now to do it for all the articles on his site. He says that it increases dual time like, you know, session length on the page, which is great UX signals going back to Google. That was a bit of a theme of the conference, I would say is, and with chats we've been having with people is UX user engagement signals. Yes. Massively. Massively, which is, you know, something that people suspect and stuff. I don't know how much Google quantify that, but like all of the SEO community very much into user engagement and, you know, having positive user engagement signals. What would be another theme of the conference if you guys had to… Oh, AI? Yeah. Obviously. AI in general, but like, what about AI? Like, for me, the prompts is a big one, like… Clusters. Clusters is another theme, yeah. Prompts, like… Yeah, massively. Not all prompts are equal. Like, you only get out what you put in with AI. So, iterating on your prompts, improving them and not being tied up with your budget and thinking that, you know, just chuck it in chat GPT, I'll get great results. It's more about… spending the time using the tokens or whatever.

ROB: Not cheaping out basically. Refining your prompts. I think Bibi mentioned using multiple large models. I don't think you need to do that. To refine your copy. It's a lot of work.

MICHAEL: It seems like overkill. Clusters, yeah, so the theme of like topical maps and content and all that, which I guess, yeah, going beyond traditional keyword research mapping, definitely a theme. What are your main takeaways? What are you going to go back and implement in your world of SEO after attending this conference?

ARTHUR: Bookmarkless is probably the first. I'm just going to start using AI smarter and better, really. I'm pretty, I guess, I've been pretty lazy with my prompts. So I'm just going to implement all the stuff that I learned.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Spend a bit more time, I guess, thinking about, so building like a, like a knowledge, knowledge graph kind of, you know, giving, feeding information into it before I start prompting it to write content and then, you know, using it to expand content and using it for all the ways that we found like internal linking and things like that. So there's a lot there. I need to kind of go through all my notes and probably go through all the presentations again once they're uploaded because there was a lot there to take in and then yeah,

MICHAEL: Start using it, really. We've sort of alternated between using Surfer and Page Optimizer Pro over the years. I tested Surfer, you know, quite a bit in the past and then like the AI content writing and all of that. I want to go back and have a real good look at how good that is at the moment. You know, seeing a lot of case studies on results achieved with it looking pretty good.

ARTHUR: Well, everyone was talking like that they use Surfer and achieved amazing results. Yeah. There's all the search console graphs of the clicks and impressions going up and up and up after surfer optimizations. So unless they're lying, it looks like it works really well. Yeah. I mean, I'll still use page optimizer pro, but yeah. Why not use both? Yeah.

ROB: Rob. Yeah. There's a lot of. actual content things. For example, what Kyle mentioned is Lauren Ibsen, that I want to run through our own internal tool. I guess kind of see the theories I've had in the past one or two years and kind of see if they're correct or moving in the right direction. Yeah, I mean, I actually tried it out last night and a few theories have come up already. So, no, it's really interesting.

MICHAEL: Especially around the content side. Little bit of secret planning you got going on over there. There's a lot.

ARTHUR: Keep your eyes peeled. I'm looking forward to having some drinks tonight.

MICHAEL: I don't know. I'm feeling very uneasy. You'll be fine. I'm coughing and sickness.

ARTHUR: I think have a beer or two and you'll be fine and you'll be rubbing shoulders with all the SEO elite down the road.

MICHAEL: Maybe. Well, maybe on that note, let's wrap things up overall. reckon it's worth coming here if you're an SEO.

ARTHUR: Absolutely. This would be the best SEO conference on the planet. So if you're an SEO and you're interested, definitely come down here. You'll meet a lot of cool people. You'll learn a thing or two, but it's about the networking and just, you know, a lot of, like you said, a lot of the secret content you'll learn away from the actual conference, speaking to people at drinks and events and workshops and stuff like that.

MICHAEL: So that's exactly it, isn't it? Like conference content, not too bad. Most of it. Yes. It's the chats you have at random where you pick up way more nuggets.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And I mean, Chiang Mai is a cool city. Great coffee culture, as we found out.

ROB: Yes, I love the coffee culture.

ARTHUR: Great food, cheap in comparison to Australia. So it's a good little junket, as you like to call it.

MICHAEL: And we've been to a couple of junkets. We've done like traffic and conversion summit. We've done some of the Australian ones. Like they're very broad in their focus, but if you're in SEO, whether it's SEO on your own site, client SEO or in affiliate marketing, that sort of stuff, this probably can't be beaten in terms of like the gathering of people from all different walks, tools, vendors, link building companies, big affiliates, and yeah, the conversations you have, the people you meet, there's just going to be, even if it's one or two nuggets that you take home, well worth it, in my opinion. Agreed. Yeah. That being said, don't know if we'll be back next year. Probably done it this year. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. They did announce that 2024 is going ahead. So this one sold out in like 20 hours.

ARTHUR: That was a secret. You weren't supposed to say that.

MICHAEL: No. There's a URL that can only go to cool people. But it's going ahead next year. We might be here and we might not be here. Yeah, it sold out super quick last time. So if you are interested, subscribe, keep your eye on it, all that sort of stuff. And until then, happy SEOing.

ROB: Happy SEOing.

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