Highlights & Learnings from International Search Summit, Barcelona 2022

Updated on: November 29, 2022
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The International Search Summit took place on the 17th November 2022 at the World Trade Center in Barcelona, Spain. Blogsaays Founder Saurabh Mukhekar attended this amazing conference & networking event. Blogsaays was the media partner for this event, along with many popular brands in the SEO & Digital Marketing space. The International Search Summit had 3 parallel tracks:

  1. SEO,
  2. Content & Outreach,
  3. Paid Search.

Saurabh attended all the sessions in the SEO track and enjoyed the wisdom shared by the SEO experts. Here are the highlights and takeaways from the #IntSS Barcelona 2022 event.

international search summit media partners

Pre-Event Party & Networking:

It's really fascinating to connect with industry leaders over networking. International Search Summit organized an amazing pre-event party at Club Soda, Barcelona, where we got an opportunity to connect with speakers and attendees over drinks.

  • Connect
  • Share
  • Celebrate

Such pre-event parties enable us to understand digital industry challenges and opportunities. Which will help attendees to clarify their goals and focus at the time of the actual event.

The People & Sessions at #IntSS Barcelona 2022

speakers at international search summit barcelona nov 2022

1) Kirstie Cartledge @kirstiehoskin and all other International Search Summit Organisers

We would like to thank Kristie & entire team of Webcertain for organizing this event so well and being such a wonderful host! She and the WebCertain Team coordinated everything like a pro. Kudos to everyone on the team especially Sanja Markovic, Gemma Houghton, Andy, David Sanchez, and Giuseppe Pezzullo.

international search summit

2) Kaspar Szymanski @kas_tweets - Ex-Googler, Co-founder of Searchbrothers - "Surviving SEO Disasters"

international search summit barcelona 2022

Former Senior Search Googler and SEO expert Kaspar Szymanski gave valuable best practices on how to avoid website migration disasters. He walked through three case studies from real life: A successful luxury retail shop, a leading travel price comparison service and an international medical website.

Kaspar talked about how they all lost nearly all their rankings for various reasons. In this session we learnt about which missteps precipitated and ultimately triggered the SERP debacles. After attending this session, we got great ideas on how to avoid an international SEO meltdown.

3) Corinna Vorreiter @msgriessbrei - Senior Digital Marketing Manager SEO at WEVENTURE - "Adventurous Client Requests vs Reality - SEO Case Studies"

international search summit barcelona 2022

Customers often have very specific ideas about their brand and website. Some would prefer to display no text at all, others would like to dominate the entirety of page 1 in the SERPs. Corrina gave us an insight into an agency's everyday life - from wild client requests and failures to international SEO measures that really work.

After attending session, we got to know about the things Digital Agencies must be clear with their clients before implementing the SEO & Marketing strategies.

4) Kevin Kapezi @KEVKDigital - Co-founder of Growthack Digital - "Merger, Acquisition or Restructure? Key considerations for International SEO"

international search summit barcelona 2022

When one is undergoing a business restructure, this can have a profound impact on their website. In this session, Kevin shared some example scenarios and explained what he has learnt from working on various websites of brands undergoing a business restructure.

He went through how to maintain brand equity and explain the challenges that businesses could face. We learned what success looks like for international SEO implementation, how to work with non-SEO stakeholders, how to consolidate content, website migration considerations, and a checklist of best practices.

5) Aleyda Solis @aleyda - International SEO Consultant, Founder of Orainti - "International SEO Audits"

Aleyda Solis is one of our favorite technical SEO experts. She shared lots of gems regarding multilingual versions of websites and doing International SEO.

She discussed questions to ask while implementing Hreflang configuration, Geolocation settings, and Content localization. We got to learn how to put together an international SEO audit and provide prioritized and meaningful international SEO recommendations to drive growth.

6) Ulrika Viberg @UlrikaViberg - Founder & Owner of Sweden-based SEO agency Unikorn - "Hreflang done right for International SEO"

Managing a large website over several languages can be a headache, but it does not have to be. In this session, Ulrika looked at what can go wrong when having faulty or poorly implemented hreflangs and how to fix those issues.

From passion, curiosity to agency owners, Ulrika shared some really important "hreflang" use cases and best practices for International SEO.

7) Fabrizio Ballarini @Pechnet - Organic Growth and SEO at Wise - "Using Ranking APIs to bridge gap between SEO & Affiliate Performance"

Fabrizio's session was an introduction to ranking APIs and scaling rank tracking in full automation with extra layers of data from Google Search Console and analytics. He shared great strategies to occupy the SERP area for your brand. We got to learn practical use case on how to leverage share of voice insights to run a portfolio of owned and affiliate websites.

8) Tevfik Mert Azizoglu @mertazizoglu - Senior Technical SEO at SEO Sherpa Dubai - "Creating your own SEO tools & SEO automation"

international search summit barcelona 2022

In this session, Mert talked about how you can create custom SEO automation that includes complex functionalities like crawling, data extraction, and building reports automatically by using those outputs. He also explained how non-coders can make their own mini SEO tools. Mert provided great tips on building automation tools help your content and SEO team to take great decisions in a small amount of time.

9) Gary Illyes @methode - Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google - "Ask Google Anything: Live Q&A with Google"

international search summit barcelona 2022

In this interactive Q&A session with Gary Illyes, audeince covered many of the hot topics facing international SEO. Gary took questions live from the #IntSS attendees.

One important concern among bloggers and SEO community is surrounding the use of AI writing tools and Google's helpful content update. Google had said that automated content is classified as spam by their system. Will AI content get penalized and sites will lose SEO ranking?

Gary clarified this by replying that Google doesn't hate AI-generated content per se. It is great if it's reviewed & fact-checked by human editors and valuable to users.

Saurabh Mukhekar and Garry Illyes Google search advocate

We got an opportunity to discuss with Garry in person, where we had an interesting conversation regarding major key factors, challenges, and upcoming trends every webmaster should follow. Garry shared some interesting stories like how the recent Solar Storm created a big problem in Google indexing systems and how they figure it out & fixed it. It was an insightful talk we had during our one-on-one conversation with Garry.

Post-Event Networking

Every conference ends with powerful takeaways & networking sessions, where we got an opportunity to ask queries and questions to subject matter experts. During this networking session, our founder got an opportunity to share his knowledge as well in the following trends :

  • SEO [expired domains strategies for backlinking]
  • Competitor Analysis,
  • Content Strategies,
  • E-commerce, and
  • Technical SEO queries.

Most of the attendees loved some of our practical advice to make their digital ecosystem more visible in SERP. We definitely made a great connection to upgrade our skills and share our experience to grow all together in this Digital exosystem.

That's, why we believe sharing knowledge for the betterment of others, is always fruitful

Summary

The International Search Summit, Barcelona 2022 was a great event for anyone in the SEO and Digital Marketing community! We give kudos to the entire WebCertain team for organizing this amazing #IntSS conference and networking event. A lot of learning happened in just one day by attending the live sessions from International SEO experts.

saurabh mukhekar Instss barcelona speaking

And furthermore, it was a great opportunity to network with like-minded people and expand our circle of professional connections. The food and drinks breaks and receptions had tasty savories and a good time to talk to other attendees. This is wonderful to lead to new business opportunities and forge long-lasting win-win relationships and grow successful together. We highly encourage you to register for updates for the next year's event and attend it to derive the full value of this amazing opportunity.

International Search Summit barcelona 2022

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