“Is Google evil?” and Other Secret Things World-class SEO Experts are Talking About at YoastCon

Three digital marketing experts from Scandiweb had the opportunity to join hundreds of other experts and attend the SEO conference “YoastCon” 2019. The 2-day conference took place in the charming Dutch city of Nijmegen, February 7-8th. Organized by Yoast, creators of the popular WordPress plugin, YoastCon has been around as one of the top SEO conferences in Europe since 2015. The never-ending battle of SEO experts vs Search Engines continues in full swing, however in broad strokes the main information sought by search engines remains by and large unchanged. And so does our task as SEO experts – answer the following questions about a site to the search engines in the most efficient way possible:

• Where is it?
• What is it?
• How important is it?

YoastCon offered presentations from world-class speakers, as well as workshops to put the newfound knowledge into practice. Here are some of our favourite speeches and takeaways:

The “Inbound Marketing” Playbook

Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of SEOmoz and author, was one of the top speakers at the conference. He has been in the SEO industry for a long time and thus knew to name the traffic acquisition trends that were in place some years ago and how they have changed now. For example, did you know that YouTube actually has found a way to block outgoing traffic from their site – they cut off descriptions to avoid making links visible in the Default View?

Advanced link building – content is king

WhiteHat SEO expert Kristopher B. Jones is convinced that links remain a primary Google ranking factor and their quality is definitely more important than quantity. Kristopher showed some advanced link building techniques, that are definitely worth a try. For example, one rather adventurous and daring one – to replace your competitor’s broken links with your own. Publishing conducted research or hosting even a small tool or widget on your site can become a game-changer when it comes to link building.

Why is your content not earning links?

James Brockbank shared some of the common reasons why content might not be earning links and showed some real life cases of both success and failure. Before even launching the content campaign, it should be made sure that the content is new and unique, for a wide enough audience, and that the timing is right.

SEO in 2019/2020 – the important role of rich snippets

As for SEO trends for 2019/2020 – content quality will continue playing its main role as a ranking factor for Google, rich snippets (schema) are already proven to be super important too. Have you seen any recipe pages, that do not have rich snippets on the first pages of Google recently? Try searching for “lasagna recipe” and you will find out!

The YoastCon Experience

Overall, YoastCon 2019 was 2 days of SEO goodness. The controversial question “Is Google evil?” remained unanswered, though, as even representative from Google could not give a concrete answer to it (jokingly, of course). However, as pointed out by Joost de Valk, the founder, and CPO at Yoast, “2019/2020 will be a great year in SEO…”.

Let us help you:

Interested in more SEO conference insights? Need help with SEO for your eCommerce store? You’ve come to the right place! Scandiweb is the most certified Magento agency in the world with more than a hundred experienced coders and more than a decade of experience under its belt. We’re here to help, so if you have any questions – drop us a line at [email protected] or check out our SEO services page.

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