Key takeaways from the Women in Tech SEO Festival 2023
The Women in Tech SEO Festival returned to London on Friday 3rd March and showcased 10 inspirational female guest speakers. All of whom shared invaluable insights into the evolving world of SEO, as well as their personal experiences in a well-documented male-dominant field.
Automotive Transformation Group were excited to be sending a selection of our female Managed Service colleagues to the festival to further develop their knowledge of SEO trends. So, in celebration of International Women’s Day 2023, we thought what better day is there, to share with you our key takeaways from such an empowering and motivating event?
Our key takeaways are as follows:
Information Architecture is a MUST for not only achieving SEO success, but for being able to deliver your consumer an optimised, enjoyable experience. Labelling and organising the content on your website will allow users to easily access the information they’re looking for, as well as increase the visibility and discoverability of your site. SEO Strategist at Re:Signal, Yagmur Simsek, shared with us some great tips on how to regularly audit your IA, to ensure maximum efficiency. These tips included analysing crawl data, tracking clicks, evaluating the site’s language and examining URL structure.
Syphaiwong Bay, Founder of Assonance, addressed the art and science of creating and automating content in a meaningful way. As technology evolves, automation and AI technology are becoming more and more popular, but it’s important that we maintain our human touch where possible to ensure we are providing our audience with the right information at the right time and in the right way. SEO experts should use automation in a way that minimises repetitive tasks to allow for more creative thinking time, rather than automating the content itself. Bay shared with us the value of analysing sources carefully to ensure we don’t mislead our audiences; automating the creation of rich snippets to maximise user experience and the use of infographics. All are designed to give you more time to plan more compelling, dynamic content.
Consumer experience should be at the top of any agenda, which is why Chima Mmeje (SaaS Content Strategist at Zenith Copy) prioritised both the audience’s core needs and the price justification of your products as the top points to consider when building a topic cluster. Retailers should utilise the power of the ‘Best X’ keyword when researching options as well as the use of demonstration videos to help users determine if a product is right for them as quickly and efficiently as possible. Downloadable offers like templates, calculators and checklists all help to deliver an informative user experience inspiring consumer loyalty.
As technology evolves, our understanding of image SEO is evolving too. It’s no longer okay to just add an alt tag to your imagery. Machines are ‘seeing’ your website visuals so, like Myrium Jessier, SEO Trainer at Pragm, we think it’s important your images are in an optimised and compressed format, tailored to the device your using, making them as interpretable and as readable as possible. This will help to reduce the load time, a key concern for consumers, and ultimately contribute towards your SEO success.
Marketing teams often struggle to get the investment necessary for wider marketing initiatives. Bethan Vincent, Managing Partner at Open Velocity, emphasised the importance of doubling down on ROI research as part of any presentation. Knowing your figures, your purpose and your initiatives inside and out are the key to presenting your case with confidence, which is ultimately what a marketing team needs to secure the budget and buy-in they need.
We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone involved in creating such an informative and engaging event. Our SEO colleagues had a great time collaborating, and networking with so many like-minded women and were inspired to hear just as many positive stories from female leaders within the male-dominated STEM sector.
If you’d like SEO guidance from a member of our Managed Service team get in touch here. Alternatively, if you’d like to see more insights from the automotive and technology industries, head on over to our LinkedIn company page.