Last week I just did SEO IRL in Toronto which is organized by Steve Toth . Steve has been running the seonotebook.com for 5 years in a row and it is a must-read SEO newsletter. I was fortunate to have him as a guest on the Affiliate BI podcast (see here) but putting that aside, I assumed his event would be awesome.

I can say he put in as much effort and quality into this SEO conference as he does for every newsletter.

Quick notes

My quick SEO notes

I'm studying SEO in far more detail in the past 2 years than I've done in the past 10 years. I feel my SEO game is getting better but only because of a few things such as attending events like SEO IRL but more importantly, the networking. I'm lucky the Affiliate BI podcast has opened the doors for getting to ask all my SEO questions to amazing guests. This event just reinforced some of my SEO believes even more:

  1. Bottom of funnel content is king (BoFu)
  2. Forum content, is BoFu content, is also king
  3. Creativity is the currency needed for success in the future
  4. Use AI in anyway you can to get an edge and save time
  5. Your sites need to productize themselves and can't be just information sites with sameness

So let's get started!

Fery Kaszoni

MD of Search Intelligence Limited

Fery Kaszoni has a digital PR agency called Search Intelligence Ltd based in the United Kingdom.

I’ve had Fery as a guest twice on the Affiliate BI podcast (see most recent EP here). As much as I think Fery does a great job of inspiring people to come up with amazing digital PR ideas, I believe his concepts can be transferred into just content production.

His examples of how he can use multiple data sets and combine them to produce a new story, well the story is really the heart of that piece of content.

All I know is if you want amazing links, check out Search Intelligence and use code JOHN1000 to get 1k GBP off on your first link building campaign.

https://search-intelligence.co.uk/

Shiv Narayanan

Founder and CEO of How to SaaS

After Shiv Narayanan finished his presentation, I had this uneasy feeling in my stomach like I had just stolen $1000s for something I should have paid more for. The SEO IRL ticket early bird was under $100 CAD and the value I got from Shiv was unreal.

The first thing he said is that CMOs today need to approach their job differently. They don’t just need to do the marketing work and point the finger at everyone else when sales or finance don’t do their part. A good CMO will care about everything from customer successto the entire sales funnel.

He started off talking about T-Shaped vs C-Level Marketer where the C-Level aims to connect the dots with other functions of the business. This is exactly what Ben Austen from Find.co was talking about in our previous podcast episode I recorded with him, that is revops in affiliate marketing.

He says the new CMO role looks like this:

  • Brand builder
  • Sales leader
  • Marketing connects to product
  • Financial standards

I’ve got even more notes which I took down as ideas pertaining to StatsDrone but for the first time in a long time, I feel like I know exactly what I need to do for StatsDrone.

I’m just pumped and excited that the stuff I’ve been studying at a high level for the past 2 years looks to be true. Thank you!

I’m def going to check out his books and his article on the C-Level Marketer.

Bibi Lauri Raven

Bibi The Link Builder

I’ve known Bibi for maybe 5 or 6 years in different SEO groups and I’m proud to see what she has done for herself and carved out a unique niche within SEO which isn’t just link building but unreal outreach.

I wish I could take all the iGaming affiliate managers in a room, have them write outreach emails and have Bibi ripping their emails to pieces in front of a whole class on a giant screen.

I learned something really interesting about not just outreach itself but the messages you want to send when doing outreach.

My key takeaway comes from some experience. In the past, I’ve done some outreach emails talking to affiliate prospects talking about their pain pointsabout tracking stats and how much time it takes.

This is a correct action that Bibi technically advocates but when I look at her complete checklist of outreach strategies, I realize that this plan I should be pivoting. I need to zero in on a pain point and one that my competitors don’t cover.

Max Geraci

Head of R&D, Senior Semantic Specialist Studio Makoto

When Max started talking, I knew that my business partner, Darrell Helyar, was either going to get tired or not follow it. The talk was very technical and I’m going to first share the bio from the SEOIRL site.

Massimiliano Geraci is an SEO specialist and researcher with a strong academic background, combines expertise in Natural Language Processing and SEO automation, having developed the popular EntitiesChecker tool and Stacking.Cloud platform, which have significantly impacted entity-based SEO practices and cloud-based site deployment.

Here is what I personally got out of Max. He was talking about 2 concepts that search engines are looking for references of content that they know should be within a topic. He also stated they are also looking for signals of uniqueness and originality.

What’s the first thing you think of when it comes to signals of uniqueness?

If you said BoFU then you are correct!

BoFU is Bottom of Funnel content and this is exactly what user generated content is all about.

Think about forums, social media and Reddit. This content makes anything fresh but adds a unique spin where you might not get that anywhere else.

Thank you Max!

AI & The Future of SEO panel

With Michael King, Sara Taher and Sam Oh

There were some great discussions and points so I’ll summarize some of them instead.

  • Make your brand part of the conversation (Michael King)
  • ToFu is boring (Sam Oh)
  • Creativity is needed for SEO (Sam Oh)
  • Google isn’t going away but people are using TikTok as part of their search (Sara Taher)
  • Chat GPT does good snippets (Sam Oh)
  • Use AI to analyze your content (forgot who said this)
  • Tool suggestions: Taskaid, There’s an AI for that, Octoparse
  • More demand on video as a means of combating AI (Sam Oh)

My own personal notes, why don’t affiliate programs add a self-attribution field when affiliates signup? Hmmm. Don't ask me why this thought came into my head but affiliate programs take note!

Based on what they all said about BoFu content, it made me think that paid forum postersactually might be a more valuable form of content producer.

Sara said something I still believe to be true that despite how much AI is around, experts writing the content will become more important.

Vaibhav Kakkar

CEO Digital Web Solutions Started Rankwatch

Tools to monitor your backlinks, RankWatch his agency is Digital Web Solutions.

Link velocity calculator to determine how many links you should be building and understands this against your competition.

He mentioned a tip to use AI tools to generate meta titles and descriptions to make them more clickable. I'm assuming you'd want to do this and test this for CTR in your Google Search Console.

One tip I wrote that that I personally didn’t want to forget it to think about what is your content missing? Add to your content once a month and always try to be making improvements.

Steve Toth

CEO & Chief Strategy Officer, Notebook Agency & SEO Notebook

If you follow Steve Toth’s newsletter called SEO Notebook, you’ll know he tries to deliver solid SEO tips anytime he can.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stevetothjr_seonotebook-seoirl-activity-7249769325987799040-ywtI?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

I’m just going to do some bullet points of some of the tips and cool bots he’s made.

  1. CTR Benchmarker
  2. Use PDF opportunities for search content
  3. Trending topics on autopilot
  4. 1 minute SEO audit
  5. Spy on your competitor’s content strategy
  6. Research next question in the searcher’s journey
  7. Lazy keyword researcher
  8. Client-specific GPTs
  9. Email deliverability grader - done every Tuesday (hello affiliate managers!)
  10. Steve bot: he made a bot to answer frequently asked questions on his social accounts!

Michael King

Founder & CEO of iPullRank

I’ve heard of Michael King quite a few times but I’ve not gone into detail on his content or social media sites. I’ve seen ipullrank.com quite a few times but I didn’t know what to expat.

Michael just went super technical in a super cool story telling kind of way. It just made me think, why is Google the way it is today. When you have a deeper understanding of how Google works, you should be changing your content and marketing strategies as best as you can.

I was overwhelmed by the content because he went fast and the content was high level so here are some points.

  • Social media signals are real
  • Information gain: personalization of content
  • Authorship is now very important
  • Build your pages for better UX including accordion or jump links

Some of these points were summarized in one of his articles here:

https://ipullrank.com/vector-embeddings-is-all-you-need

Oh, Michael said some more Google leaks coming soon. Just follow the guy already.

and one last shoutout to the first Ukrainian link builder Victor Karpenko who's running SeoProfy and the First Legal SEO conference and new connections Alex Savy and Oleg G. (Galeev) and Brock Murray. I do question if all other SEO conferences are legal.

If you made it this far