Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Our first two Search Central Live events in Asia this year have been wrapped up and we finished looking back at what we've learned and what we can do better.
Search Central Live Jakarta 2024
On July 25, 2024, we were delighted to host 335 people in Jakarta for talks from Googlers and, for the first time in Indonesia, community lightning talks! The Google talks focused more on the foundation of Search with topics such as how Search works (the longer version), a talk about quality and updates, AI and Search, Search features, analyzing traffic drops with Search Console, and tips for ecommerce and large sites.
The community talks were more varied and covered a wide range of topics:
| Title in Bahasa | Title translation | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| Meningkatkan SEO Video dengan VideoObject Markup | Improve Video SEO with VideoObject Markup | Hans Christian Ferdinand |
| Jangan Kejar Traffic! | Don't Chase Traffic! | Farhan Dwi Sarjono |
| Skill Penting Untuk Setiap Praktisi SEO Agar Berhasil Dalam Project | Important Skills for Every SEO Practitioner to Be Successful in Projects | Eki Riandra |
| Kreativitas dan SEO: Duet Dinamis agar Website Memikat | Creativity and SEO: A Dynamic Duet for an Attractive Website | Rio Burhan |
| Memiliki Website yang Bertahan di Era "AI Overview" | Having a Website that Survives in the Era of "AI Overview" | Ilman Akbar |
Overall, people were very happy with the event. They loved the lightning talks and the Google presentations, however also had some suggestions for future events; highlighting three:
- More lightning talks: People want to hear more from their peers. From our perspective this is doable, since we've received way more pitches for lightning talks than we expected. However, at the same time, people also want more Googler's talks.
- More technical talks: Going more technical is not a problem for us and something we'll consider for upcoming talks, however we need to ensure that everyone can enjoy these talks, and that it can be actionable and relevant. If we let Cherry talk about the deeply technical details of Google News, Gary might fall asleep.
- Varied location: Indonesia is unbelievably and wonderfully large, and thus people have to travel long distances to get to a location. One suggestion was that we could organize events in Indonesia in multiple locations, or at least vary the location instead of just hosting the event in Jakarta every year. We heard you loud and clear and we're going to look into the feasibility of these suggestions.
We hope to see you again next time we're in Indonesia!
Search Central Live Bangkok 2024
We packed 310 people in the ballroom on August 9, 2024, for the first Search Central Live in Thailand (previously in 2019, we hosted a Webmaster Conference event in Bangkok).
Like in Jakarta, we had talks from Googlers about various foundational topics such as how Search works (the longer version), a talk about quality and updates, AI and Search, and managing multilingual sites, and we also had a very hands-on talk from our very own Daniel Waisberg about Google Trends for SEO, and making data available and useful at scale.
Our Search Central Help Community Product Expert, Weerayut Chalaruk, gave a talk about analyzing traffic drops with Search Console. The talk was well received with lots of positive mentions in the post-event survey.
So what did we learn in Thailand? Well:
- More everything! More time, more events, more frequency, more topics, and more speakers! Hard to argue with that.
- More Q&A: People LOVE Q&As, and this feedback came up in both Jakarta and Bangkok. We'll see how this might be feasible at future events, bearing in mind that we run on a rather tight schedule. We're also exploring ways to collate and prioritize live questions with the hope to make the Q&A better for everyone.
- A recommended reading list or things people should know pre-event: This is an interesting idea we hadn't considered in the past. While it's more common to have reading recommendations for workshops, we can see how that might be helpful for other events as well. If you promise to make time to read items on the list, we promise to explore this option. Pinky swear!
Next, we're going to Malaysia and Taiwan for our last two SCL events in Asia this year, and we are so excited! If you speak Mandarin, there's still time left to apply for the Search Central Live Taipei 2024 event.
It's been super nice to meet all of you in Jakarta and Bangkok, thank you for coming to spend a wonderful day with us! We hope you had a good time and we hope to see everyone again soon!