And I’m not the only one who thinks this way:
There are a lot of friendly people in SEO that I’m grateful to have met at this conference. Those of us who live down there don’t often get the chance to connect with each other at big events like this (at least not without an insane amount of travel).
Congratulations to James Norquay and the Prosperity Media team for organizing such a great event. You will definitely see me again next year.
To give you an idea of the event (and hopefully convince you to join me next year), here are my top tips.
Both times I have attended this conference, the Prosperity team has gone out of their way to hire top-notch five-star facilities.
Located in the heart of Sydney, both locations are easy to reach and are close to many attractions for interstate and international travellers.
You can also expect five star service from the venue staff and the food and drinks provided throughout the day exceeded my expectations. None of that undrinkable conference coffee here.
There are also a number of big sponsors (including Ahrefs, of course) supporting the event. We shared a stack of Our children’s books SEO for beginners and SEO for white hair with participants:
Not to mention the after party overlooking the port. It was a great place for people to hang out, enjoy a few drinks on Prosperity Media’s account, and engage in deep and interesting conversations. Just what a girl needs to get excited about knowledge graphs with Nik Ranger or helpful Google content updates with affiliates.
It was a fun day all round!
Some conferences have a vibe about them where you know you’ll be mostly surrounded by affiliate people, corporate people, or generalist marketers. The SEO conference in Sydney was not like that.
There were around 300 people at the event and I was pleasantly surprised by the wide range of skills and interests of the participants. I met with affiliate marketers, agency owners, internal teams, and division heads of corporate companies. There were also some non-SEO developers and WordPress specialists.
If you’re like me, chatting with other attendees during breaks or social events after the conference is where you learn some really interesting things! It’s honestly my favorite part of going to conferences.
My best SEO-related takeaway came from Georgia Tan, who shared some great things she’s working on with her team regarding “digital shelf optimization” for clients like Pepsico. It’s about going beyond Google or other search engines to optimize products for specific e-commerce platforms, marketplaces or apps where people shop.
I also learned some great non-SEO tips about living in Andorra and the digital nomad residency options available. Worth a look if you’re looking for a nomad-friendly place in Europe as your next base!
The speaker program delivered bombs of knowledge to every single attendee, regardless of SEO role or experience. It wasn’t the case that just one or two speakers were the favorites here.
The diversity of presentation topics hit the mark, and every attendee I spoke with walked away with new insights and actionable suggestions relevant to their role. This is how you know a conference has hit the mark with its lineup of speakers.
If you’re feeling a little FOMO, don’t worry; here are my favorite takeaways from each speaker that you can also walk away with.
| Speaker | Subject | Take away |
|---|---|---|
| Jes Scholz | From Search to Surfaces: Your Guide to Google’s Metamorphosis | Jes made a strong case for the sea change that research is on the brink of in the Gemini era. Google is moving away from using schema.org and its approximately 1,400 defined entities to understand content to closer to Gemini’s approximately 175 billion parameters. As a result, Google is retraining people to stop searching with just 2-5 words and instead perform longer, conversational, context-rich searches. |
| Jonas Grunfeld | Digital PR Trends for 2024 for Best Results |
Jonas shared three practical digital PR strategies.
I especially liked his take on how there are two types of linkable resources: content-based or experience-based (non-content-based). |
| NikRanger | Unlocking the hidden power of internal connections with machine learning | Nik’s speech was nerdy in the best way! He explained exactly how he uses machine learning to programmatically improve internal links on websites. You can test the model using the LinkBERT demo. |
| Sally Mills | SEO Automation: Reclaiming Our Time | Sally shared next-level tips on how to use AI to automate tasks like web scraping, redirect mapping, and mass transforming keywords and intents into topical maps. Lots of golden nuggets to make boring (but essential) processes more efficient. Check out her free automation scripts. |
| James Norquay | Affiliate and Ecommerce SEO Growth: What Works in 2024 |
James’ talk consisted of quick tips for 30 minutes straight. Some of my favorites include:
|
| Ana Luna, Benjamin Cleary + Georgia Tan (panel) | Moving the Needle: Enterprise-scale research campaigns | Georgia, Ana, and Ben answered questions related to SEO at the mid-market or enterprise level. There were some great insights for internal and corporate folks looking for ideas on how to implement their own strategies or get buy-in from non-SEO executives. |
| Tim Soulo | Keep your enemies close: How to do competitive intelligence with Ahrefs | Tim shared practical use cases for using Ahrefs as a competitive intelligence tool, including 3 metrics, 3 actionable tips, and 3 tools including my favorite, the portfolio feature. You can use it to compare a segment of a competitor’s site to yours, or track all your competitors in batches so you can get up-to-date competitor statistics whenever you need them. |
| Greg Gifford | How to be a local SEO superhero | Greg’s presentation was dynamic and full of useful tips for local SEO. I especially appreciated Greg’s tip on how to get links from hyperlocal, trustworthy churches, charities, and other organizations in your area. Local links like this tie into his advice to turn your blog into a local destination and a place that locals turn to for content about the area, not just your services. |
| Regan McGregor | Trust or Fail: Winning Over Users and Bots in SEO | Regan delved into all things EEAT with some great examples of how to do a detailed brand audit based on EEAT. My favorite tip was to use Google search operators like [example.com -site:example.com] to find brand mentions indexed on sites other than yours. |
| Aaron Taylor | The third pillar of SEO: interactions with users | I am inclined to pay particular attention to anything that combines SEO and UX. So Aaron’s talk about the impact of user interactions in SEO has a soft spot in my SEO heart. My best takeaways:
|
| Dejan Mladenovski | Programmatic SEO: a winning formula for scaling growth | What an energetic speaker to end the day! I loved Dejan’s advice on how to make the most of programmatic SEO. And it wasn’t about creating quasi-spammy, mass AI-driven pages on a large scale. I liked his tips on using APIs, programmatic next-level internal linking, and programmatic hreflang ingestion. My tip no. 1 is to only consider a programmatic SEO campaign for keywords and topics with 20,000+ searches per month if you want to see a return on your investment. |
Final thoughts
Good vibes, fun people and expert speakers. What do you still need?
With some top-notch speakers already secured for next year’s lineup, including Aleyda Solis, Kyle Roof and Cyrus Shephard, I encourage you and your team to join me at Sydney SEO Conference 2025.
See how much fun these people have? That could be you next year.
See you there 😉