Women in Tech SEO Fest 2024: The Best One Yet?
Ellie Brett
Posted 12 March, 2024 by Ellie Brett in Events
Women in Tech SEO Fest 2024: The Best One Yet?
This year the stars aligned for the Women in Tech SEO Fest as it took place on International Women’s Day, or March 8th 2024. This is the first time International Women’s Day has fallen on a Friday whilst the WTSFest has existed.
The event took place in the Bishopsgate etc.venues. The conference is an opportunity for women to learn, network and have fun. It’s split into four overarching topics, Analyse, Advance, Innovate and Empower, and each section was split into 2-3 talks.
Analyse
This year’s Analyse section had three talks, brought to us by the wonderful Grace Frohlich, Stevy Liakopoulou and Rasida Begum.
Grace did her talk on integrating SEO and PPC. She spoke about how the two areas of digital marketing are like long-lost twins, with similar goals but often treated as two separate entities. She suggested sharing keyword opportunities and creating a plan for keywords both teams want to target to create an integrated approach.
Stevy’s talk was about creating a video e-commerce strategy. With more and more customers relying on social media when purchasing a product, having a targeted video strategy can be important for increasing sales. Video formats are one of the most common, and there are several things to consider when creating a strategy. For example, treating thumbnails as rich snippets and making sure all videos have closed captions.
Rasida spoke to us about how to get buy-in from senior management by using transactional figures to show how important a fix is. I’m sure all SEOs have struggled with this in the past, and it was interesting to learn a new calculation to show what the financial risk is of not fixing errors on a website.
Advance
The Advance section was split into two sections and brought to us by Emma Russell and Joyann Boyce.
Emma’s talk focused on the changing landscape of e-commerce SEO during a technical recession. She used examples from recent studies and surveys to show how consumer behaviour changes in times of economic crisis and what e-commerce companies should focus on.
Joyann spoke about why using bias in AI helps make AI more inclusive. She gave examples of why relying on the internet to teach AI tolerance and equality is generally a bad idea. She explained that in order to create inclusive images AI tools should be fed more specific queries which align with your business.
Innovate
The Innovate section was split into three, with talks from Sophie Gibson, Billie Geena Hyde and Veruska Anconitano.
The first talk in this section was by Sophie, who spoke about the <head> section of a page and the importance of making sure it’s correctly ordered. She explained the purpose of the <head> and the ideal order of it to improve site speed.
Billie spoke to us about accessible technical SEO. She explained the importance of making sure websites are accessible when making technical recommendations and that the functionality of a page should not only work from a technical SEO standpoint but an accessible one as well.
Veruska used language models to introduce the concept of user-centric search experiences. She focused on how important this is when marketing across countries which speak different languages and showing how the economic landscapes of different countries can mean websites should have different metadata depending on geographic consumers’ search behaviour.
Empower
The final section of the day was all about Empowerment, with talks by Talia Loderick and Helen Pollitt.
Talia spoke about financial wellbeing. With the ongoing cost of living crisis, making sure you’re financially secure is becoming more important. She advised on how to track finances properly, why it’s important to know what you’re spending and why you should still spend a small amount of money on yourself.
Helen spoke about the current SEO job market and how the skills learnt as an SEO can be used across a variety of other job roles. She emphasised that search engines aren’t the only role with an algorithm and how knowing how to target search guidelines can be used across other algorithms, such as social media.
Conclusion
This year’s conference was excellent, perhaps the best WTSFest we’ve attended here at Screaming Frog. Areej and the WTSFest team worked hard to make sure everyone could have a great experience, from the quiet room so people could take a break, to making sure all dietary needs were met.
From when we first walked into the conference hall and saw a full breakfast spread, to the incredible talks, and to the wonderful women we spoke to at the event, this conference will be one we’ll be speaking about for a while.
We want to give special thanks to Areej and the WTSFest team for putting on a truly excellent conference.
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