The International Search Summit is the only conference completely dedicated to international search marketing. The full day event is full of talks and insights on improving your online visibility and targeting markets around the globe, on one of three tracks: SEO, content marketing or paid advertising. Last Thursday, the team at Serps had the pleasure of attending the Search Summit in Barcelona. It also marked my first marketing conference, so it was a particularly special experience.
Making Inclusion the Default
The morning kicked off with Purna Virji’s ‘Make inclusion the default: tips to make your marketing more inclusive’. It highlighted the importance of paying attention to inclusivity, as 60% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that showcase diversity. Purna mentioned that often brands are afraid of FOMU: the fear of messing up, but you shouldn’t let this get in the way of taking steps to become more inclusive in their content marketing.
The talk included a wide variety of tips and considerations to think about when making your content more inclusive such as using sans serif fonts or writing at a 6th grade reading level, and always providing an explanation for jargon. As an international marketing agency, it’s important for us to realise that a user’s first language may not be English, so making sure that content is understandable is incredibly important.
Importance of Workflow
Next up, was Peter Myers and his talk on ‘Mastering pragmatic content-ops: Data-driven SEO localisation at scale for multi-regional sites. He emphasised the importance of making sure that your content is specifically tailored for the local market, even if other elements such as page structure remain the same. He also outlined a great workflow process, which is fairly similar to our own. So it was great to see our own processes reaffirmed.
Transforming the Content Process with AI
AI, of course, was a big talking point throughout the day, but this talk from Julie Franck and Mario Lenoci was particularly mind-blowing! They demonstrated 3 custom GPTs that they have created. One in order to create content from plans, another to get content recommendations and seasonality trends, and the final one using the Google maps API to act as a travel journalist.
The technology was far beyond anything that I have personally attempted with ChatGPT, but it was a fascinating look at what the future of content creation can look like. Their overarching message: AI is not about replacing but enhancing and allowing us to work at scale.
Reactive PR
Moving away from content marketing, Eirini Theodoridou’s session on ‘Utilising reactive PR to build links globally’, highlighted a less traditional way of link building. Reactive PR is about reacting to developing stories or hopping on current trends to position your brand as an expert commentator.
The importance here is about being flexible to leverage and opportunity and reacting quickly. It’s an interesting tactic that only has a short window, so it is not for every brand or client – but it was still interesting to consider who this technique could work for either current or future clients.
Personality Mapping meets SEO
Sarah Presch’s session ‘Big five personality mapping meets international SEO’ highlighted the developments of audience personas. Sarah explained that in the five factor model of personality testing (extroversions, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness) there are trends across nationalities. For example, latin cultures are generally more extraverted or the Dutch score higher on conscientiousness.
This knowledge can help you customise how you target consumers in a more accurate way to traditional personas as there are certain types of marketing that suit the personalities. E.g. Event based marketing or rewards is good for extroversion, whereas customer testimonials work well for agreeableness.
TikTok as a Search Engine
Next was a very interesting talk on TikTok SEO from Ciara Serrano Temprado. She talked about the move into using social media as a search engine, especially for discovering new products and looking at reviews. She then dived specifically into TikTok SEO and how to optimise your profile and your videos for both the FYP and the active search page.
Similarly to traditional search engine optimisation, keywords are important in your TikToks and their captions; however, as expected it’s more time sensitive especially if you’re targeting the FYP. Overall, it was a very insightful session on how search is developing.
The Future of Search
Finally the day ended with a panel on ‘The future of search: AI, privacy, rise of social. How to keep search relevant and revenue generating’. The panel had some really interesting and differing opinions on the development of ChatGPT and how quickly it will be adopted by all generations of internet users and whether it will mark the end of Google.
Overall, the conference was an amazing experience, full of fascinating insights for international SEO and content marketing. There were so many other amazing talks all happening around each other so it wasn’t possible to sit in on everything. However, you can check out Robyn’s roundup on the search summit to learn about some of the other sessions!
