Ahrefs Evolve SEO conference Singapore 2024

I was thankful to attend Ahrefs Evolve SEO conference Singapore 2024. Ususally I walk away from the conferences like this feeling invigorated and full of knowledge and motivation. I take notes so I can refer back to and relive how I felt back when. Trying to trigger that same motivation and mindset.

Basically, I believe in taking notes so I can refer back to and refresh my memory of the event. Below is a recap of all the speakers and key takeaways

Day 2 of Ahrefs “Evolve” Singapore conference

Jason Hennesy

• now owns law firms
• 2 sales people on the team with a 60k a month KPI
• Got fiest client and grew from there.. printed a book, mailed it out, got a client, created a case study

0 - 1m

Be greatful for the mistakes you make, of which there are many.

1 - 5m

Hire the right people build scalable systems define your company culture balance profit and reinvestment competing for top talent mastering delegation

You are your number 1 constraint

How are you slowing your business down?

Itemise your time.. Can you pay someone to do these tasks for you?

4 folder system for email.

1. immediate
2. do later

Position your self as a leader

• get a coach, just like when you where growing up, you had a coach.

5 - 10m

• Build a leadership team, hire a COO.
• Maintain profits
• Standardize process
• Hr, legal compliance
• Scaling marketing and sales
• Vivid vision - 3 year vision. Go to bevely hills hotel. Do vision there. Hire copywriter and Designer to bring the vision to life.

10 - 20m

• leadership team is doing all the work.

Culture Vs Performance

add picture of matrix here

20 - 100m

• Outsource genius bring in experts to audit your shit.

Patrick tech SEO - What i learned from auditing 1000 websites

Minor Tech SEO issues

• redirects - you can keep redirects for upto 1 year
• h1’s - multiple h1’s are allowed
• duplicate content - not a massive issue because google will just choose one of the pages.
• core web vitals and mobile friendly - such a minor ranking factor.
• redirect chains under 5 hops arnt an issue
• underscores and dashes in url makes no difference
• mixed content issue can be solved with htaccess snippet to upgrade insecure assets

Things you should do

• pages not indexed, get them indexed so they can give you some ROI
• internal links
• redirects
• hreflang - there can be massive issues around this
• Javascript issues / content not seen by ghe DOM
• IndexNow lets you ping changes (you get notified within seconds )

cloudflare workers ket you update pages before they are served to uses. Cloudflare Edge SEO + AI = Patches.

Marcus Ho - inbound marketing

the quality of leads - how do you get more high quality leads

• awareness, consideration, conversion

  account based marketing (abm)

• How to go after the high quality accounts?
• Where are they?

the tradional approach to marketing no longer works. (more, more, more)

ABM - align all your marketing channels and choose accounts to persue

• one on one abm
• abm lite
• one to many abm

How to select the best Accounts to persue?

If i was in IT id try win google as a client.

• persona research
• what are the pain points when buying

Target, awareness, consideration, decision, purchase

Engage the right way.

• ebooks
• wine tasting night

Install apollo.io pixel on your website to see what companies have visited your website.

• accounts that visited your website
• reach out via email or run google display ads just for them

ABM Tools

Charlotte Ang

• Monetized a rentalorry business
• Started traffic bees
• now promoting Piklego on tiktok

why you should care about tiktok

• tiktik want to be a search engine
• for Gen z tiktok is the search engine
• tiktok search results is like google
• tiktok analytics is similar to google
• product search is a thing in tiktok
• videos are showing on google search

How to optimize for tiktok search

• use href to look for topic ideas
• plan subtopics with suggestions from tiktik
• include a 5 second hook in your videos
• include a text hook
• include a visual hook, anythink simple as long as it catches the users attention.
• optimize on feed seo (captions, video description, 2 - 7 hashtags ) so that tiktik understands the video better
• post your video through creative search insights. Creator search insights shows you all the popular tiktok topics
• accessing analytics
• reply to comments with your keywords

Performance marketing - Robert Lai

Focus on the 98% of users that dont click.

The biggest con is google getting us to spend money on our own brand name

Youtube is still the most undervalued platform.

Long term investors always win over short-term investors

The history of KPI’s on the web for marketers

• Clicks
• Converions,
• Revenue,
• Profit
• Customer equity.

Balancing ROI with brand Growth - not everyone is ready to buy.

Principle to performance branding

Data driven creativity

• add a little Background music to your static ads to stop people scrolling briefly. This will give you some metrics on the user.

ads are trying to marry someone right of the bat

Fery Kazona - Digital PR that gets links

How to sell DPR.

Book a meeting (establish hold my hand mentality) or just checkout with form on website. (establish self service mentality) Your not selling leads, your selling links.

Campaign workflow must be like a production line

• onboarding
• ideation
• research
• etc
• etc

Fery outlines all the importance steps of his process for DPR. I found it to fast to take live notes.

Intro Meeting

• short
• show case studies

  Never promise just so you can sell

Training

• eloomi training system

Aleyda Solis - SEO Success

SEO is not deed, even in the volatility of 2024. We just need to change the way we think. Google prioritises brand. Google does not favour large brands over small brands.

its not just about content.. Recourses, webinars, free tools, table data etc

How to address Brand Challenges?

• Start with Whats the brand strategy?
• whats the unique selling proposition?
• dont try to rank for cheap if your brand is not cheap.
• is your brand recognised as an entity in google knowledge graph
• full organisation schema - listing all the founders
• create content to satisfy queries on social media

Tim Soulo

A history of ahrefs Dimitri, started with the problem of pdf files search and hosting

ahrefs crawl the web almost as fast as google

Features of Ahrefs

• Search intent
• Keyword growth
• site explorer
• content changes - compare metrix on pages going up and down
• page cannibalisation and low ranking pages
• reports - create custom reports
• AI content helper - it tells you how well your page is covering topics, suggestions for title tags and meta descriptions.
• page / website categorisation - see what category of website links to you

Day 1 of Ahrefs “Evolve” Conference Singapore 2024

Key Takeaways from Day 1 conference. Mind blowing Day, Great array of speakers with really well structured talks.

Ryan Law - AI content

AI generated content is not the answer. Many, Sass companies dropped in rankings based on Jake Wards Tweet about copying content using AI.

• AI Plagaries
• Its biases
• hallucinates
• it leaks data
• its hard to copywrite

You cant build a brand with AI content

An LLM will focus only on the most probable next word.

Ranking for a bunch of low commercial intent keywords is not a good way to introduce your brand.

Everyone wants to use AI to write content but know one wants to read it or edit it.

Your competitors can generate AI content too.

AI is good for

• when there is a well documented dataset
• objective answer
• people cant add value

Ai Does not do well with deep topics

• subjective answer
• not well documented
• people can add value
• core content

Most backlinks will be earned by Deep Content

Experimentation is critical for Original Content Surveys can be used to create brand new information that never existed before - this content performs well in linkedin.

If you have an assumption about the world. Test it, Experiment and Write about it.

People use AI as they are cost focused

Digital Assets

• build free tools
• video content
• invest in design UX
• Experiment with content formats, downloadable pdfs, tables

Write about your experiences

Victor Karpenko - how to find growth Gaps

Try Ranking for keywords in different languages, its often easier then ranking for the english terms. Google removed localization feature. Use bing webmaster links to see all competitor backlinks Ahrefs has the biggest database of links Is it worth trying to rank for a keyword? Or will you need to spend too much on backlinks? Its all about the anchors / text balance (SEO 2012 principle) Use Ahref for competitor analysis

What is the best SEO course?

Watch ahrefs like you watch netflix

Watch tv shows on your competitors

Nik Ranger - Getting traffic through click through rate optimization

ctr - directly reflects user engagement and interest

Why we are winning clicks, why we are losing clicks

PageRankNS - Nearest Seed - measures the importance of your page the way your pages are linked together Does google consider your pages to be an authority?

Navboost - uses clickstream data to identifyu and reward hight quality content. Google uses user engement signals when deciding to apply navboost or not

Andy - Keyword Clustering

Group keywords into lists

Solving keyword cannibalisation

• consolidating categories
• reducing crawl budget
• reduce content cannibalisation

Crawl budget is only a issue for websites with 20,000 pages plus

Content Fragmentation

Break up well ranking posts into multiple articles

Where do you go when you have no DA

• subreddits
• people ask the same question on reddit time and time again
• cluster all the common questions together
• create content based on all the common reddit questions

Reddit insights

a free tool that well help you cluster content on reddit

Cyrus Shepard

Hacker news is a good resource that google employees read Google uses content quality rating (humans rating content quality) scores to program their machines learning.

How to recover from HPC

Google is going after your short term business model. If your model was long term, you where safe. Sites that tanked did not use personal nouns as much as sites with personal nouns. More personal content outperformed non personal content. “I experienced such and such” Sites with Content add popups tanked compared to sites with less intrusive ads. Original imagery for your site is a factor in quality content.

What is search engine first content?

Human focused anti SEO update uncle harry (knows nothing about seo) vs A buncch of SEOs Internal linking wont save your site if your doing the search engine first approach Sites with old dates didnt tank. Because seos are always updating the dates on articles to revitalize them. Sites tanked that where Changing Page titles often.

What is unhelpful content

• low brand visibility
• monetised
• poor ux
• low effort
• unpersonal

Hunan images is good content shift from link building to brand building

Are you willing to cut your shoes in half for your content?

Amanda King - Future Proofing Search

• Google says they have been an AI company since 2016

• Its expensive to run AI oveview for google

• Stop thinking in keywords
• Google is looking for the intent in the query

Good Practices

• FAQ questions on product pages
• consolidate the micro blog articles if they are all about the same thing
• think outside the blog folder
• sometimes a simple sentence is the solution
• internal linking is can be a secret weapon.
• Use Hotjar and see how people are reacting

NAP

Brand optimization, entity optimisation

• name
• address

• phone

• do the entity recognition work
• do the knowledge Graph

the content is your client product not the website

Google has lots of products - ensure your brand is consistant throughout those channels

Chat GPT - Bernard Huang

will seo be replaced by AI

Its the Sea of sameness vs information gain.

What is information gain?

Information Gain is like the main engine for Google Search

Information gain is a concept from information theory and machine learning, particularly in the context of decision trees. It measures the effectiveness of a feature in classifying data by quantifying how much uncertainty or entropy is reduced when a dataset is split based on that feature. Key Concepts:

Entropy: A measure of disorder or uncertainty. In decision trees, entropy is used to quantify the amount of impurity or randomness in a dataset. Information Gain: The reduction in entropy after splitting a dataset based on a specific feature. The higher the information gain, the better that feature is at classifying data.

Formula:

The information gain is calculated as the difference between the entropy of the dataset before and after the split:

Information Gain=Entropy before split−Entropy after split Information Gain=Entropy before split−Entropy after split

Example:

Suppose you are building a decision tree to classify whether someone will buy a product (Yes or No) based on their age. If you split the dataset using the “Age” feature, information gain tells you how much the uncertainty about the buying decision decreases after the split.

** In Decision Trees: **

When constructing a decision tree, algorithms like ID3, C4.5, or CART use information gain to choose the feature that best splits the data at each node. The feature with the highest information gain is selected, as it is the most informative for predicting the target variable.

Notes continued

• information changes.
• topical authority changes.
• subtopics change.

Google is constantly doing an A/B test. causing fluctuation in search results. How uses react to your content? Google cares so much how users react to content.

How llms work?

• llms work well with short form content.

• Long form content llms are shit.

  Google problems

• lots of new websites to analyze
• now there is more content output with AI (what is google to do?)
• google is limited on enagement testing due to search results page only having 10 spots
• google does not understand documents
• Chatgpt is better for search as its better at interating context
• Searches are losing trust
• the sea of sameness in content search results

Google is using reddit to combat the sea of sameness. Google is trying to fix its search reults by seving better content. (Reddit) Google is using reddit to help it understand Context?

Google states it has reduced irrelevant content by 45%

Entitity SEO

• google has a knowledge graph for every topic

Takeaways

• Create content with more entity coverage then you competitors
• If users like the content google will serve it

Lily Ray

How google search works by Mario Fisher

Ai overviews are live - SGE, its shit when released but improving. Ads in AI Overview AI overview will not be in search console

Ziptie is an seo tool you can use to get insights on where google is getting its info from Favicons 48 x 48px - remember your favis.

Google updates. the last few weeks have been volatile tweaking the dials with site reputation abuse

HCU recovery has been small

Google doesnt like SEO Driven Patterns. Like city/location pages with no real content on it.

Information and affiliates sites lost there place in google search and forum sites have seen a huge rise. Reddit has seen the highest growth.

The Rick Steves forum from the travel site is doing well in google search.

The rise of forums - karmalyzer is a helpful forum analyzer tool.

Google Discover is volatile and unpredictable

• understand entities
• capitilize on trends
• good for recipe sites

Recover from coreupdate oct 23

• noindex old pages
• consolidate content
• optimize robots
• get rid of old irrelevant content and the traffic came back

Ahref vp of marketing at ahref - Sam Oh

Video converts better

When your website traffic tanks youtube can save your business Use keyword explorer for ranking videos on youtube

the algorithm

• determind by core users and casual users behaviviour

  reducing dropoffs

  give content dont just ask people to describe without giving them something first dont tell users the video is ending

Core content

Ahrefs Created a free seo course on youtube which they use as there core content.

know your audience, know what they want

• Be creative, not just an seo
• Use interesting concepts such as $1 vs 1000 backlink
• I tried a 1 star airline / service video
• Just keep publishing
• All the audience want is tactics