Yesterday (August 29th, 2024) was the inaugural Hive MCR conference at the New Century Hall in Manchester covering all things SEO and digital PR. Our Head of SEO, Sanjay and Performance Director, Malcolm were in attendance along with approximately 300 other digital marketeers from across the north to get the latest news from industry peers and listen to a range of talks and panel discussions.
Jono Alderson – Going Over The Edge
Anyone who knows Jono knows that he speaks very fast when he is passionate about something and in this instance, where he discussed the benefits of using Cloudflare, Jono crammed a ton of knowledge into his time on stage.
Covering how web technologies evolved from servers to the Cloud to the Edge, the many aspects of both the free and $20 tiers of Cloudflare and the power of Service Workers, and soon-to-be Cloudflare Snippets, we got a real flavour of how Cloudflare could be used to accelerate technical SEO and The Web in general.
Some key takeaways were:
- 1200×675 is the minimum image size for Google Discover.
- Cloudflare Zaraz allows third-party tools to be loaded, modified and cached in the Cloud.
- Cloudflare Snippets looks to be a laser focused and hyper-efficient version of Service Workers.
- We are not far from WordPress in the Cloud which can be seen in the WordPress Playground.
Jono also regularly uses the word “automagically” to describe something super complicated to achieve but works with a toggle of a checkbox. As anyone who has played with Cloudflare before knows, a lot of really cool stuff can be done “automagically”.
Hana Montgomery – How The World Is Going To Affect Your Digital PR Strategy
From experience, early-stage digital PR can be an exciting tornado of crazy ideas, eagerness and excitement. Hana’s talk does a fantastic job of grounding digital PR and ensuring that the necessary due diligence is done to minimise failure by monitoring what is going on in the world.
Hana explained how various situations, world events and trends could disrupt plans including:
- Environmental issues such as forest fires or droughts.
- Current world issues such as over tourism.
- Political agendas and key events such as the upcoming UK budget or US elections.
- Stock market trends.
Her main takeaway was the need to plan for every eventuality and get ready to pivot if the news shifts.
Billie Geena Hyde – SEO & Accessibility: A Love Story
Billie has been an advocate for web accessibility for many years and gave an excellent talk regarding how we should and can expand our auditing to cover accessibility.
Billie covered the upcoming European Accessibility Act (June 2025) that will affect anyone servicing or selling goods to the EU and gave insights into core accessibility issues and tools to help us audit and improve the websites we work on.
Key takeaways included:
- Zoom in to 200% to see how the page layout shifts or breaks. Ideally, you should still only be able to scroll up and down, not left and right.
- Ensure the page loads meaningful content when JavaScript is turned off.
- Use HTML elements such as <navigation> and <footer> to define the structure of a page within the code.
- Use the keyboard to navigate your site. [Tab] through your navigation. Can you interact with the core elements of the page, or do you simply get jumped from main navigation to footer?
- Run your site through a screen reader such as NVDA if you are running Windows or Orca if you are using Linux. (example tools added by Malcolm)
- Use tools such as Axe Dev Tools and a colour contrast analyser to get a better understanding of your website’s accessibility.
Louise Ali – How To Never Be Irrelevant
Battling against a few technical difficulties, Lou gave a great talk about relevance in digital PR and the underlying causes of the many completely irrelevant campaigns that still occur regularly within our industry. Link volume KPIs!
She discussed how she maps out a client’s topical knowledge using EEAT principles, and how that feeds into campaign ideation to ensure everything has a tangible hook back to the client’s topical niche.
Lou also gave some excellent examples of what not to do, including “sleep advice from a vape specialist whose only qualification is he has fallen asleep in the past” and the lengths that casino and gambling sites will often go to for a perceived high domain authority link.
Luke Carthy – 10 Simple Yet Powerful SEO & CRO Wins For eCommerce
Luke once again gave a powerful and passionate talk about commonly overlooked CRO activities that are a massive win for eCommerce SEO. As with Billie and accessibility, Luke highlighted the need for us as SEO experts to step outside of our sell-defined boundaries to in effect do what is best for the client.
“Key decision-makers don’t care about rankings or keywords,” was one of Luke’s openers – and rings as true today as it has for many years. Luke explained how SEO experts need to get better at attributing our efforts to making money, a theme that came up several times in talks and the interwoven panel discussions.
Some solid nuggets from Luke were:
- Audit your site search. How does it perform with synonyms? How many results does it display for key terms? Should you consider making additional landing pages based on highly searched terms?
- You can push data into GA4 around the number of products displayed to get a quick overview of products in category. You can then decide whether the category page should be more navigation or is pointless.
Always great to hear Luke talk as he brings a certain energy that was much needed as we headed into the evening.
Steve Paine – Trends And Highlights Of Women’s Fashion SEO
Lastly, but by no means least, Steve Paine from Sistrix presented an update on the women’s fashion sector, a subject that Sistrix regularly covers using their massive visibility data set. Lots of great insights into movers and shakers in the industry which will be covered in an upcoming Sistrix post.
Steve also went into some initial detail regarding the August Core Update and a new feature of Sistrix, which is launched but is available, allowing us to see which keywords trigger Google AI Overviews.
Lastly, he gave a live update on how many of their 2,000,000 tracked keywords currently triggered an AI Overview now that Google has rolled them out to the UK, US and India. As of 8pm on 29th of August 2024, 2% of queries were returning AI Overviews and the number was rising.
Closing Thoughts
Our closing thought regarding Hive MCR is that Charlie did a fantastic job of pulling together the conference. The venue was perfect for a single track event and has plenty of growth potential. The food that was laid on was very impressive – nothing like being served an artisan mini burger while listening to an excellent talk!
We had a great time, came away with a few new things to look at and will be returning to Manchester for the next Hive MCR. We hope to see more of you there.
