A Round-Up Of WTSFest 2023

Last Friday I was lucky enough to attend WTSFest 2023. It’s the annual conference organised by the Women In Tech SEO community. This was the 4th year this conference has run, and the biggest yet. Over 400 attendees came together at The Barbican in London, to enjoy 10 excellent speaker sessions, along with plenty of time to meet and chat with peers.

It was my first time attending this particular conference and my first in-person event in some time. I was definitely nervous but excited for a day of SEO goodness. My nerves were soon banished, thanks to the great organisation and the incredibly friendly attendees, who had come from all over the world to attend this event.

The Structure Of The Day

We were in the Barbican Theatre for all the speaker sessions. A really great space, with very comfortable seating (hooray, no backache!)

The sessions were split into 4 different themes across the day.

• Analyse
• Advance
• Innovate
• Empower

It was a single-track event, so we all got to watch every session. No FOMO. I loved this, as I hate going to a conference when there are multiple sessions I want to catch running at the same time.

Even better for me, each session was only 20 minutes and breaks were regular. This was an ideal structure, which meant every speaker got my full attention.

I’m going to provide a very brief summary of each session, but I highly recommend following each of the speakers on LinkedIn, as they’re all incredibly talented and insightful. If you’re lucky, they may even share their slides at some point.

You can also purchase a recording of the day’s sessions over at the WTSFest site, so once the video is available, you’ll be able to watch them all.

I apologise for the quality of the images. My phone decided that it was going to pick that day to crash constantly.

Analyse

Information Architecture Audit For SEO Success – Yagmur Simsek

Yagmur kicked off the day’s sessions with some really great tips on auditing the information architecture of a website and creating an effective IA for a good user experience and to enable easier crawling and indexation.

Creating And Automating Content In A Meaningful Way – Syphaïwong Bay

Syphaï delivered a brilliant and funny talk on holistic content creation, combining both the technical and creative aspects required to be a good content writer.

Syphaï also provided useful advice on gathering sources and creating content that is actually helpful.

The Six Keywords To Prioritise When Building A Topic Cluster – Chima Mmeje

Keyword research can be a slog and is rarely an SEO professional’s favourite task.

Chima managed to make it sound interesting again, whilst sharing expertise on creating topic clusters and the keywords that should form the basis of each.

Advance

Going Down The Image SEO Rabbit-Hole – Myriam Jessier

Myriam gave us a great summary of their most recent SEO fixation, distilling their trip down the image SEO rabbit hole into a really useful and entertaining session covering multiple aspects of optimising images on the web.

Getting Executive Buy-In Throughout Your Career – Bethan Vincent

Most SEOs will have experienced the difficulty of getting buy-in from management and the c-suite at some point in their careers. Bethan shared their experience and how to create persuasive arguments for SEO to gain that senior buy-in.

Innovate

Neuroscience In Search – Giulia Panozzo

I was very excited about this session, as neuroscience in a topic that fascinates me.

Giulia studied neuroscience before becoming a search marketer. Her session covered many of the psychological and behavioural factors that impact the customer journey, and how understanding these can help you create better user journeys that improve traffic and conversions.

Natural Language Processing For SEOs – Josephine Haagen

A bit of knowledge of Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be very beneficial as an SEO. Google’s search incorporates the BERT language model to help it better understand search queries and return relevant results.

Josephine studied NLPs before ever entering the SEO world, and gave a great overview of how they work, their strengths, and their limitations. They also shared tips on optimising content for NLPs but warned that we must never write for search engines.

Data Storytelling – Lazarina Stoy

Presenting data in a way that is accessible, meaningful, and interesting for different audiences can be tricky.

Lazarina gave a great presentation on creating reports and presenting data in ways that provide the different members of an organisation with what they need, and in a memorable way. The core of this was using stories to share that data and make it compelling.

Empower

Levelling Up Your SEO Career – Helen Pollitt

Helen is a very entertaining speaker. Her session on how you can choose the direction of and level up your SEO career had us all laughing.

She shared tips on identifying what it is you like to do, how to build a role around that, making the case for your role in your current organisation, and finding new roles that will help you develop and reach your goals.

Standing In Your Confidence – Leyla Okhai

The final talk of the day was delivered by Leyla, who founded an organisation called Diverse Minds UK. She does a lot of work and speaks on equality, mental health and confidence.

She talked to us about confidence, the misconceptions about women’s confidence, and why companies with more diverse management and employees statistically perform better financially and in terms of retention and productivity.

Besides the 10 sessions, the day was expertly compèred by Hannah Smith, and of course, none of it would have happened without the organiser and Women In Tech SEO Founder, Areej AbuAli.

The day was so perfectly organised, everything was thought of and included, and I learned so much. It was wonderful just to be surrounded by industry peers, all there to learn and share.

I cannot wait until next year, and who knows, maybe I’ll even apply to speak.