Friday, December 16, 2022
We spent the past few weeks busy (and excited!) hosting Search Central Live events in Singapore and Tel Aviv! We've missed you since our last Webmaster Conference in early 2020 and it's so great to see you again in person.
Search Central Live (formerly known as Webmaster Conference) is the flagship event series created by the Google Search Central team. Our goal is to bring Search talks to your locations in your languages and to provide a venue for you to meet with the Search team, other Google teams, industry experts, and others in the Search and SEO community.
The highlights
One of the best ways for us to decide where to focus our efforts is by interacting with you, and in our events we usually get loads of questions from the audience. We've heard people asking about Search Console specific features or issues, crawling for big sites or getting pages indexed quickly, and Javascript SEO. We take these questions and improve our documentation to clarify them, and we try to create new content based on what you're struggling with.
Fortunately, we had lots of Googlers mingling with the attendees and taking questions at the panel discussion. Many of our coworkers don't get a chance to learn directly from users, they're busy writing code! These events are also an opportunity for them to get to know you and learn first-hand how you use our products and what are your challenges.
In Tel Aviv, for example, we had around 20 engineers from the Search Console team in the room listening to the attendees' feedback and taking notes; they also hosted a booth to answer questions from SEOs and website owners. We're really excited to see what they're going to do with those notes!
It's hard to put this in raw numbers, especially with hundreds of attendees across two locations, but our post event surveys show a very high satisfaction. In addition, we've seen social media posts suggesting that folks enjoyed themselves. Here are a few examples:
- Singapore
- Tel Aviv
And we especially love the post from the Singaporean team Impossible with 22 takeaways! We are extremely happy to have hosted and spent time with the attendees.
The learnings
The Search Central Live events are popular, but that popularity also means that we can't accommodate each and every one of those who want to join. We are thinking about ways to solve this challenge, either by expanding the size of the events, by increasing the number of locations, or by repeating locations. However, we love seeing that folks want even more.
We also heard our attendees' feedback: more topics. This one is easier to solve and we're already thinking about the new topics we want in our bags. Thank you for leaving feedback; it helps us shape future events.
The future
The idea behind these events is to bring search conferences to places that don't get as much conference love. We can't promise anything yet, but we're definitely thinking about what the next year holds for Search Central Live and we're already exploring which regions and languages we can cover.
Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the Search Central blog to stay up-to-date about future events! Meanwhile, if you have any questions or suggestions, drop us a note on our Search Central Help community. If you're hungry for more Search Central Talks, check out our lightning talk playlist.