Secrets from the Chiang Mai SEO Conference - Speakers & Agenda

[00:02] renowned event in the industry it sold out over 1,000 tickets in just 23 hours this year which is especially impressive when you consider it's in a fairly random City in the middle of Southeast Asia 2023 was the first time I wasn't

[00:17] speaking at the conference so it meant I got to sit back in the crowd soak up of knowledge bombs and drink far more than I ever should have if you can hear by this video I'm going to be giving you a rundown of what went down what the

[00:30] speakers had to say and everything else that happened at this year's

[00:46] CMO the format for this year's event was slightly more organized than it has been in previous years and we started off with the conference workshops which were at the main venue for the event you would go in Pre register for your badge

[01:01] and then choose between one of two talks that was happening on Monday and Tuesday so those two talks each day but they would happen at the same time and you you would want to go to for example on

[01:13] Monday you would have to choose between kazra Dash's talk on website recovery or between Julie Adams talk on website content so both talks obviously had their own criteria and credibility I end up going to see ker talk because he's my

[01:27] friend and I thought I'd support him it was great everyone really enjoyed it until the fire alarm went off the end which literally meant that kazra had set the building on fire then we had the workshop and masterminds on Wednesday

[01:40] which ended up being either you were invited to the Mastermind which was an invite only session by Matt digity or you paid a hundred bucks to go to Kyle roof's workshop with a special guest of Cory turberg Gerber Mr topical Authority

[01:55] himself then we had the conferences on day one and two with an afterparty hosted by a hats on day two on Friday however they still did not give us a free bar despite rinting us for credits

[02:09] this year and then we had various surrounding community events throughout surrounding community events throughout the week from a motorbike ride event to the week from a motorbike ride event to a cannabis event to muai fighting to all

[02:21] sorts of stuff that was happening there was sports events there was Esports events there was everything for everybody there was even a women in SEO meet which I thought was amazing and of course the first person

[02:34] who actually was presenting on stage at the conference on Thursday was digity himself the king made a comeback after a 4-year Hiatus off stage the conference

[02:46] had finally made a return the presentation wasn't exactly that much actionable stuff there wasn't a ton of case studies or things like that it was more a presentation filled with Nostalgia of how the conference had come

[02:58] to be how all of had ended up being there and digity himself had been able to generate tens of millions of dollars from this industry in personal wealth and most of that was as a result of the people that were in that room with us so

[03:12] actionable stuff but it was a great and awesome way to open the conference that really set the stage for everything that was about to come the first person to really bite their teeth into the SEO was the first actual presenter on stage and

[03:26] that was Kyle rof Kyle is the king of SEO testing everybody knows he is the top SEO nerd and he really really delivered with one of the most impressive talks I've ever seen in person you can tell that Kyle has spoken

[03:40] at hundreds of conferences by now because his talking game and his audience engagement levels are off the charts he was by far the most engagement based talk that I've seen throughout the conference uh periods that I've been to

[03:54] in this industry so starting off Kyle is famous originally for his lauram Ipson ranking it's experiments and he is back and doing it again proving that it is and doing it again proving that it is still ranking in 2023 and he was ranking

[04:07] for some pretty interesting local and National based queries and he'd been ranking for months and months at a time despite the recent Google Al updates experiments that were essentially disproving search engine journals recent

[04:22] ranking signals research paper essentially saying that they didn't really do any testing or research and that it was basically all based on opinion of the SEO team and that he literally did testing to disprove and

[04:35] research was saying I thought it was amazing then he talks about there being specific ranking zones on the page and that Google is going to give preferential treatment the higher you put up content within the code and that

[04:50] he showed that there was various methods to actually hide and cloak content people thought that Google didn't even read Google are reading them and then over complicating your SEO and that it's just an algorithm you should always keep

[05:06] it based on maths and science based approach and that all this Artistry is more kept for the higher levels of Enterprise level SEO where you can get this Authority and this budget to play with where most of these sites and most

[05:20] of the people in SEO need to be focusing more on this mathematical and scientific based simple Al also simple based approach the next talk was by Robert nich who is one of the most highlevel polish seos out there he is one of the

[05:35] earliest adopters of AI and has been using various large language models to dominate serps in different languages with large level spamming and and content generation for years at this stage his presentation was very

[05:49] interesting now Robert is not a native English speaker and he was quite nervous about speaking in English during this presentation however he delivered one of the highest level AI presentations I have ever seen he talked essentially

[06:02] about how AI is the future we need to all be staying up to date with the AI technology that's going to affect your business so if your business is in video in image in content in SEO in links and all of this kind of stuff

[06:17] there's going to be various SE various AI tools and advancements that are going to be very relative to your business and that you're going to be wanting to stay that your game and your business is the highest level possible in especially in

[06:31] comparison to competitors who could potentially have an advantage over you if they Implement these Technologies far faster and more effectively than you are then he started talking about how we canem start embedding models to create

[06:43] stylized and templated content so essentially what that means is currently you can take a pre-existing model something like open llam something like llama 2 which is meta's open-source large language model

[06:57] and you can embed data into it so for example you could scrape and download your entire website's content embed that into your model and you would now have a model that is pre-trained on your website content and thus can create

[07:11] styliz and template to content specifically similarly or within re within reason similarly to your content and finally he went through loads of very very high level AI tips that I'm not going to be able to share with you

[07:23] want to be revealing his secrets and number two a lot of them are going to go over a lot of people's heads any anyway the next person was Chi can now Chi went into a lot of detail around being an affiliate and how you can maximize your

[07:38] talked about was you're focusing on Evergreen niches this basically means that a lot of Affiliates tend to jump on Trends or hype trains they scale very very fast and then they descale very

[07:51] very quickly because they're 99% rise and then 99% drop off happens and that affiliate careers are shortlived because they don't have this Evergreen and Longevity based mindset that can lead to offers generating them millions of

[08:07] dollars for years to come rather than in a very short amount of time also that lot of people over because it can very quickly jump them into new tax brackets which can then lead them to having far larger tax bills than they're used to

[08:22] expenditure people are not about at tracking their finances all sorts of things happen it's better it's focus on every niches Next Step she talking about speaking to people building relationships shopping around different

[08:36] offers comparing different offers telling other offers that you're they've given you an exclusivity agreement on so that you can get higher that you should be focusing on that you would be doing as a normal business you

[08:49] finally she talked about doing due diligence and Research into the programs promoting because too many Affiliates get burned by the various offers and that end up just going out of business or essentially exit scamming a lot of

[09:05] under their Banner Over the various years next up was one of two sponsored talks now I only got to see this sponsored talk and it was by Tim solo I that there was going to be some controversy in it and boy oh boy was

[09:21] there some controversy now the very first thing that he did was open up the stage by saying that it's going to cost us some credits to listen to his talk which in the room it was a lot funnier than some of the people who are sharing

[09:33] it on Twitter and arguing about how he was kind of taking the piss out of their customers don't worry he kind of was but he was doing it in a very light-hearted and funny way um and I thought it would actually delivered in a in a pretty

[09:46] kind of talked about the reasoning behind yep the search engine that ahf's bought one of the one of the things that I thought that ah did a very bad job on was actually the reasoning of why they had been investing this you know 5050

[10:00] $60 million into their search engine I think it's far beyond that now in the first place and essentially that a lot of it was actually that they can use a lot of the data and the scraping and this new ability from the search engine

[10:12] back into ahhs and it does sort of make sense yes would I be more happy if they just spent that $60 million on the tool in the first place probably however I'm thinking and implementing a lot of the

[10:25] stuff that they're getting out of this search engine into AHS and it allow them to have a different set of bots which means that a lot of The Blocking of a HF spot is kind of thrown out the window unless you go and update that those Bots

[10:37] been blocking to also block yakbot as well he also then delivered a ton of new released or are going to soon come out for a and gave some really big reasons why some of the Legacy users should now upgrade to the new accounts because you

[10:51] are getting a lot of value out of these new features as well now next up to talk was Kevin indig I only got a little bit of his present a so I asked a couple of other people to fill in some of the gaps so I hope I got all of this right

[11:05] however again his presentation a lot of this presentations in the conference was talking about how essentially AI is the future he was talking about a how AI is the future even in Enterprise SEO a lot of the higher end of the market a lot of

[11:18] incorporate it don't want to use it don't want to even talk about it but it is the future and it's going to be taken over their Market especially he's also talking about how we want to be spending a a lot of time developing your prompts

[11:31] he's spent countless hours on a individual prompt to fine tune what it is saying so that it will get the best possible output for the task that he is be doing the same he then gave some examples of some of those best prompts

[11:45] thinks they are the best prompts I'm not going to be sharing them here if he publish them by his own accord go ahead and follow him he's all then he's then testing the different model outputs depending on on your prompt so don't

[12:00] just put it into chat GPT and see what it says put it into Claude put it into Bard put it into all these other different AI chat Bots and tools that and then see what their output is see which one has the best possible output

[12:12] for the different scenario and prompt that you are using next up we had Mr Chris Holton now I can't really talk about Chris's presentation because of what was inside of it it was super super super black hat and thus I'm not going

[12:26] video as he didn't want anybody recording it even taking presentations of what was involved next up we had Dom Wells now Dom's a really interesting guys so anybody who remembers me running dfy

[12:41] links I sold it to Gary Wilson who then sold it to Dom Wells who then ipoed on sold it to Dom Wells who then ipoed on the NASDAQ with get me links as part of the portfolio that is on folio so Dom is the CEO and founder of arolia which is

[12:54] now a NASDAQ leading investment company that mostly invests in digital assets and SEO related companies so thought it was very very interesting to see a traditional investment based

[13:07] mindset coming into the game he's essentially saying do not buy any content sites the game is too risky AI is making so many advancements Google's messing everything up and SG will change the game so he is not buying content

[13:20] sites instead he's mostly buying agencies so he's buying service based agencies and heavy cash flow based businesses most most of those being service related industry related businesses so things like link Building

[13:33] Services content Services any agencies that run specifically in any Industries like healthc care lawyers um and things like that and then finally he was talking about not using your own capital and cash flow because there are plenty

[13:47] of investment opportunities and investors out there that are looking for opportunities all you need to do is have a convincing enough offer to convince them to actually invest in your next up we had BB Raven AKA BB buts now

[14:02] BB is a very white hat traditional link Builder who has built a insane number of very high-end very high quality links over the years using a variety of methods nowadays she mostly runs an agency that is focused on building high

[14:17] quality High Authority links for free via guest posting and Link bait so high presentation was very colorful to say the least she started off by talking about how you need to simplify your tool stack she literally just uses three or

[14:31] four tools to get the entire job done and then she started talking about how she uses everything generally within the same tool suit which is pitchbox from scraping to delivering emails to confirming and Publishing the content

[14:43] she just uses a couple other tools like Google Sheets and ahfs for some metrics and some research then she talks about building your ideal targets list so trying to find uh targets that your competitors have trying to find ideal F

[14:58] targets that you're trying to get links from that are within Google's link graph and then building link bait pieces to attract those links and building Links at those link bait pieces to try and attract more links to them the entire

[15:11] bait that you want to try and rank that link bait that it's more likely to get you're probably going to need some links to rank the link bait so you're going to so a lot of the time most people are just building link bait to naturally

[15:26] acquire links link that BB goes the method of trying to create link bait and then actively trying to create links to that link bait via Outreach as well and talking about customizing your Outreach templates stop talking corporate speak

[15:40] the person that you are trying to outreach to at the end of that email and next up we have Steve Toth Mr SEO notebook himself now I'm not going to be able to reveal much of what Steve said because he gave so many specific tips

[15:55] experiments sheets tools even even his new gscore summarization experiments away that you had to literally be there to get most of the information and be to get most of the information and be there to get the

[16:26] the funniest presentation of the entire conference in fact in my opinion he was way funnier than the MC who is apparently a comedian himself Craig glaswegian humor that delivered massively for the event he gave a lot of

[16:41] examples of black hat tricks that were still working he talked about old school black hat tactics that never died and he talks about plenty of domain name tricks talk to you about was how he got his knowledge graph and his knowledge panel

[16:55] in the right side for his name if you go ahead and Google cray Campbell or Craig Campbell SEO you'll see that he comes up in that right side effectively Craig became an actor for a time being so that he could get that knowledge panel on the

[17:07] right side and he ended up getting an IMDb profile and all sorts of accreditations in various movie and TV series which led to a hilarious story about him actually achieving that but I thought it was a great example of using

[17:21] some additional creativity in a more black or gray hat world to achieve the end result that he wanted to and I'm sure you could effectively sell that to clients for10 or $220,000 as a service that only took him a few hours and a

[17:34] couple hundred the closing presentation of the conference is by sarus Shepard who's the former head of SEO for MZ and one of the most well-respected people in the white hat industry however he opened up very very fast by saying that

[17:49] actually he's not really a white hat and he does not class himself as a white hat and then actually none of the Google crowd speak to him anymore after he talked about Google Go's recent antitrust and anti-competitive lawsuits

[18:01] and behavior in general he used to be very good friends with the people at Google and literally none of them talk to him anymore because of his outspoken nature about the company I don't blame him I think that the Google Engineers

[18:13] are way too purist and elitist about a company that has obvious ethical and moral implications and concerns that have been exposed by the US government have been exposed by the US government in recent years and months so Cyrus

[18:25] essentially became a quality rater so everybody's probably heard of the quality rated guidelines by now in SEO Cyrus signed up to B1 it doesn't pay very well but he spent a lot of time going through the training and actively

[18:39] being a quality rater to seeing what it says now he can't share a lot of information however what he did share is that when you get to rate these specific sites it's not just a very simple 1 to 10 rating there is a whole Matrix Matrix

[18:55] of what is actually reviewed and what Google wants you to look at from the the quality of the content to the relevancy of the content to all sorts of additional facts about the domain and it is sitewide they are not generally

[19:08] reviewing Pages they're reviewing how good sites are and they're marking specific Pages based on those scores but in general it is a sitewide application and it is training Google's machine learning algorithms so that they can

[19:23] effectively rate it as a quality rer would of obviously there's going to be some except in some outliers in terms of how how a machine learning algorithm advancements in technology I'm not sure how well that data will prove to be in

[19:37] the coming years and months but currently a lot of it is based on literally quality raters people at home who are just as clever as you and I they are not cheap vas who are underpaid and and essentially you know slave labor and

[19:51] you have to be doing it consistently there is a minimum 15 minutes per week of work or you get banned from being being a quality rater and your work contract is revoked and then finally we had all of the amazing community and

[20:05] side events and meetups as well as the closing party for a hats everybody at the conference was super friendly everyone I spoke to had a great time everyone learned a lot and everyone had a lot to implement into their own

[20:18] projects businesses or potentially new opportunities and new JVS with the people there I want to give a big shout out to all the speakers I want to give a organized events including Jonathan keush and James Oliver for organizing

[20:31] big shout out to all the sponsors who didn't go above and beyond in terms of pitching and delivered a really authentic experience and ah HFS could have given us a free bar but they're too cheap with the credits and that's it

[20:46] thank you for watching I've been Charles float you can follow me on Twitter _ you can connect with me on LinkedIn just my name Charles float you can get all of my free and premium SEO training at Charles flat training.com

[20:58] and don't forget to like subscribe tick that notification Bell for every video that I upload and make sure to comment if you have any questions about the conference or the speakers or any videos you would like to see next