Tuesday, May 10, 2022
We organized the first Search Central Virtual Unconference Japan on April 5, 2022 to facilitate a discussion and networking platform for the SEO, Search and publisher community, in Japanese. This is part of the global Search Central Virtual Unconference event series.
The event was lively, with more than 100 participants of different backgrounds and professions managing websites of different types and sizes. We were happy to see many ideas exchanged, experience shared, and feedback provided.
There were 9 discussion sessions orchestrated by about 15 facilitators! And here are some of the things we learned from these sessions (ordered by event schedule):
- Traffic drop case studies: It’s cool to see participants sharing their insights about traffic fluctuation experience. Many factors can cause this, and participants shared their tips to manage it. Noticeable themes revolve around creating an environment for open and constant communication between internal stakeholders, focusing on users and the business main objectives beyond just SEO, and balancing between deeply understanding technical details versus analyzing things from a larger view or from other perspectives.
- Page experience and Core Web Vitals feedback: There were many feedback submissions and product requests, such as a PageSpeed Insights API and Search Console URL grouping. We passed them on to the relevant teams. We also heard many interesting insights, such as image optimization difficulties and other tools people use to measure page experience on top of Search Console.
- Webspam and Search quality feedback: We passed on regional query feedback to the Search Quality team. We learned that among others, hack pages are still a prominent issue that participants come across. There is also an opportunity for us to align expectations on what is considered as webspam.
- AdSense Policy feedback: We collected feedback and insights for the AdSense policy team, such as increasing awareness about Confirmed Click and invalid traffic.
- Search Experience Optimization: The term "Search experience optimization" could mean different things for different people. There were many tips and techniques shared, such as analyzing users’ intent, focusing on users that match business’ objectives, using data to back up analysis and optimization, designing customer’s journey from beginning to end, optimizing for business with different lead time, and more.
- Search Console feedback: Lots of great feedback and product requests were collected for the Search Console team, especially regarding the Search performance report, API, Index coverage report, Crawl stats, and page experience report.
- Women in SEO session: Many participants shared their views and experiences, and we heard how difficult it still is to combine working in SEO with having a family as a woman in Japan.
- Optimization of crawling and indexing on large-scale sites: Large-scale sites face different challenges, such as handling many URL parameters, monitoring crawl budget, or managing user generated content. At the same time, it’s great to see so many ideas and tactics shared to solve and workaround these challenges.
- Content Marketing and SEO: This session was not only about creating content, but also about how to deliver or present it, such as for a snippet or Discover. Discussions went beyond text-based content to images and videos. They also cover discussions about evaluation metrics and goals setting.
This event is our first Search Central Virtual Unconference in a local non-English language! We were really delighted to see how rich the discussions were and how open and engaged everybody was. From the post event survey, it appears that participants have enjoyed the event and found it useful. We would like to thank all facilitators and participants for making this event a vibrant and successful one. We hope to bring more events like this to Japan and to other languages both online or offline in the future!