I Snuck Into The CMSEO Conference Room And "Stole" Their SEO Data Points

I follow Steve Toth for a lot of SEO knowledge. The guy knows his stuff and is a great teacher. His SEO Notebook is something you need to subscribe to if you’re working with SEO on a regular basis.

Last week, Steve took part in the CMSEO conference - one of the more popular events amongst the SEO community, and clicked a bunch of pics - data that helped me get a picture of where SEO experts are focussing their energy in the coming year.

I really want you guys to subscribe to Steve’s Newsletter, so I won’t be sharing a lot of the data, but just three key points that you absolutely need to know, so here we go!

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Leverage Your Own Audience. First-Party Data = Greater Traffic Value

Ross Hudgens from SiegeMedia shared some interesting numbers on what content is helping them rank better.

Something Ross mentioned that was crazy to me was how using your own data points to create resources increased your traffic value in Google’s eyes.

First-party data has always been useful in creating content for your business because the resources come from real-world insights that your organization has collected and experienced.

This insight builds on Google’s EEAT principles as well - your personal experiences and consumer data should drive your knowledge sources and shareable media. Topical authority and authenticity still play pivotal roles for SEO in 2025

This means you would have to do a lot of the grunt work, and not just copy data from the “The State of ________ in 2024/25“ study report that some enterprise would have paid their consultant upwards of six figures to push out.

It has to be your data, even if the sample size is small. Work done into building that trust needs to be there.

Creating Guides and Whitepapers? Make Sure You Have Data To Back Them

Another snapshot from the conference showed Ross discussing how Data backed resources did almost 50% better than their other media and creatives

The quick takeaway is that if you’re creating infographics or whitepapers, you’d better make sure to include data that supports your claims.

This again builds into the trust factor for Google. There’s a few ways I’ve seen this work:

• Create media from your own data, packaged into shareable formats

• Build original creatives by curating data from Trusted data sources (Ex., Gartner, G2)

But whatever you do, just don’t blindly brand someone else’s data as your own. SEO penalties are a real thing.

Write Blogs Like You Write Sales Copy

This one was really interesting. Ross also suggests that the best way to convert prospects on your blogs/articles, while also ranking for Google - is to write blogs like to write Ad and Sales copies.

Ross here discusses the APPB format for sales copies, but you could also use AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)

The main takeaway is to not Shakesphere-ize your articles. Copywriting is a whole art on its own, and I’m not sure if I’m the right person to be lecturing you on this.

But yeah, structure your articles like a good sales landing page, and it not just helps in conversions, but also for SEO. Isn’t that interesting :)

Steve goes into a lot more detail on the notes he took from CMSEO this year, so be sure to check out SEO Notebook whenever you can.

Alrighty, then, I’ll see you guys tomorrow :)