How to know good SEO advice from bad?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding. Here at Wix and filling in for our head of SEO communications, crystal Carter, is Wix's own head of SEO editorial, George Nguyen.

George Nguyen:

How's it going, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that was like the whole build-up, hey, Mahalo. And then, Hey Mordy. Hey George. How's it going?

George Nguyen:

I have big shoes to fill. Crystal, she brings her own energy and our listeners might not be used to me. So I hope I'm stepping into it, treading lightly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ah, I understand. I understand George. That's totally fine.

George Nguyen:

Yeah. Easing into it. Yeah. Crystal has fans. I don't want to upset those fans. You know how fans can get? Crystal's fans?

Mordy Oberstein:

Crystal has rabid fan base.

George Nguyen:

Yeah. It's like Crystal fans and then a little bit further down the list K-pop stans is what I'm really afraid of on the internet. And then way down there is the rest of the SEOs.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, don't worry George. Crystal's fans are going to love you. We all love you. There's one thing you should remember, George and that's the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we now automatically create image site maps for our product event and forum vertical pages with more page types coming soon.

All right, we've got a jam-packed episode. You ready for this? I'm ready for this. George, are you ready for this?

George Nguyen:

I'm so ready. Because I actually have something to say. Sometimes I shy away from things, but I feel like I have a lot to say here.

[00:01:31] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to try to dramatize the whole intro then.

George Nguyen:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. They will try, but after this episode, they won't succeed in pulling the wools over your eyes. That's right. In this episode, we're covering how to know good SEO advice from bad as an inspiring SEO. This episode is a must listen, because I will personally tell you when I started in the SEO world, I took on some bad SEO advice. And I can see that other SEO vets they're nodding right along, you know exactly what I'm talking about. When you got into the industry there was some not-so-great SEO content that you thought was maybe true, possibly true. And then it wasn't. So we'll dive into how to sift through the noise with a bonus piece of SEO advice from the one and the only Himani Kankaria.

Also, did you catch when Google doesn't show the number of results at the top of the SERP? If you didn't, well we'll tell you when it happens and more importantly, why that actually matters. Plus you always wanted some snappy SEO news so we're going to give you some snappy SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness. Sit back, relax, and take it all in because the SERP's Up podcast begins now with a look at how to know good SEO advice from bad.

[00:02:50] Focus Topic of the Week: Good SEO Advice vs. Bad

George Nguyen:

Good advice results in positive outcomes, such as getting closer to your business goals, be a greater search visibility and traffic. Cha-ching. Bad advice though, it costs you, which may be more evident over the long run. It sets your visibility back and that hinders your business goals. Ultimately though, SEO miseducation analyst tactics are totally avoidable even in local SEO. And not being able to succeed just because you don't know the difference or you don't know what guidance to apply, that's the ultimate missed opportunity.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, George, I love the fact that you did your own sound effects like cha-ching.

George Nguyen:

I love that.

Mordy Oberstein:

You bring your own set. You're like the guy from Police Academy.

George Nguyen:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice George. A nice addition to the SERP's Up podcast my friend.

George Nguyen:

Yeah. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So this is a topic that's really close to my heart. I really love SEO education, I'm a former teacher. So it really speaks to me. There's so many ways to know that the content that you're looking at is maybe not the greatest. So I'm going to start off by, here's my top, top piece of advice for you. If you're reading something and it's not nuanced, it's an absolute and to quote Star Wars only Siths speak in absolutes. That's probably not the best advice to listen to.

So it's a good lesson by the way, for your own self, right? It's a difference between being authoritative and trustworthy and not being authoritative and trustworthy is being nuanced. Even if it's beginner content.

So at a minimum, you need to let your users know the layers of information that are still left to be explored. Because you can't possibly cover everything. You can't possibly offer the ultimate advice about anything in just one piece of content. If you SEO advice, that's telling you 50% of the time you should be doing this, but doesn't put a caveat of it depends or as a general rule spend 50% of your time, might be a good way to allocate your resources. Then at most the take that you're reading or listening to or watching is overreaching because there is no yeah, X amount of time you should be doing this in the absolute sense. Any absolute, always needs to be qualified. And that's so true in SEO. So if you see something like that, that's not doing that maybe take pause for a minute and think into it a bit.

George Nguyen:

Absolutely Mordy. And if I could just piggyback on what you said there, building on a little bit. This is actually why, if you were venturing into the SEO space and you're running across the line, which is our unofficial slogan in the industry, “it depends”. It grates on you after a while to keep hearing a non-answer. It depends. But really “it depends” is not the answer. People are giving you, what they're telling you is it's a nuanced answer and that they're lacking the information that they need about you and your business and you and your goals to actually provide you with a relevant answer. So that's why “it depends” is kind of a thing. But this is great advice from you, Mordy, especially for the content creators among us who are trying to get out SEO best practices and how they create their content's a huge deal.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is so true George. By the way, I think that's kind of why you see so much because people don't want to get into that “it depends” all the time or that's not a way to really market yourself. And that is hard from a marketing point of view that I think it lends into this idea of lack of nuance and lack of accuracy in terms of growth expectations and over promising in SEO, right? I mean, you've probably seen tons of that.

George Nguyen:

Yeah. So this is just going to help you in general, identify when somebody's trying to pull the wool over your eyes I suppose. Think about what the underlying motivations are here. This is going to be a running theme. So we're going to bring it up again. But timelines, growth expectations, over promising is super easy in every field, but look at your competition. What is your goal here within not just your business goal, but even more specifically, if you're thinking about ranking for a specific keyword and you really think that this is what you want to build your content around, what's going to get you to that next stage of your business. Look at who is already ranking in those top positions for what you want to rank for.

Was that competition built in a day? Was it built in the timeline that maybe you're reading on some blog or some consultant is telling you is reasonable? Does it look like it's reasonable? If it clearly took months to research and organize the content and you're seeing advice that guarantees it and all the effort that is required is your credit card to buy 8 trillion backlinks for $4.99. If it was that easy, the rankings would be absolute chaos. Every time you go to do a search, you would just see a totally different set of results. So even from that basis you know, well, things take time and we're going to get into a little bit more of how you can check for validity a bit later on, but I'm holding onto that. Mordy, do you have anything to add here?

Mordy Oberstein:

But what's funny about that is that you see so many cases of things like you go on YouTube, you type in how do I do SEO and you see something like rank number one. Let me tell you a little secret about SEO. There are certain cases where it's probably going to be impossible for you to rank number one. I always use the case of heart attack prevention. It's a really hard keyword to rank for. There's so much authority and nuance that goes into that keyword and Google tends to rank Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and Harvard health. Are you one of those three websites? No. Then you're not going to rank number one for that keyword. And that's fine. There are things you can do to get traffic around that topic without ranking number one for that.

So this idea of over-promising is very rampant and it's something I totally agree, just steer away from. And to me, I think that spills over to a lot of the things you read around SEO studies. 'Cause they've come up very authoritative, but they also kind of oversell in a similar way sometimes where you'll see I did this or the study shows this and that means you will get this kind of growth and they show some kind of graph and this crazy amount of growth that happens after you implement the tactic that their study shows that was successful for them. But a lot of the times, again, you need to take context and nuance into that.

Again, if they're doing a case study, well, is your site in the same situation as that site, like you mentioned before, possibly not? And even if it's a kind of study where we analyze 5 million URLs or 5 million result pages and here's the data, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you know what's funny, and I have a bone to pick about that's with the SEO world a little bit. Have you ever read a thesis paper from a grad student or a Ph.D. student, George?

George Nguyen:

Yeah, a few times.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. So after the abstract, what's the first thing they always start off with?

George Nguyen:

Table of contents.

Mordy Oberstein:

A great answer. That and the limitations of the study.

George Nguyen:

The methodologies.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, methodology and limitations.

George Nguyen:

That's what I always look at. The sample size and things like that. Those are extremely important.

Mordy Oberstein:

All those kind of things. And they're telling you, we only looked at this, we didn't look at that. We looked at this many, but not that many. And that's really important information. Not because, oh, this study must not be good. There are limitations. That's a silly way to look at it. It's really important information because it tells you how to use the data in the study. Where are the limits of this data? Where is this data appropriate to apply it to? Where is it inappropriate to apply it to?

George, let me ask you another question. What information do you never see in an SEO study? Would it be the limitations?

George Nguyen:

Yeah. Sometimes some people are good enough about pointing out that due to the way click stream behavior works, those kind of studies, they'll generally tell you, more reputable data providers will tell you how their data works. But oftentimes the methodology and stuff, sometimes it's there, but it's not something that they really want to tell you about. Oh, we interviewed 80 marketers.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. We looked at a hundred million keywords, but what kind of keywords? Where'd you get the data from? What was the data period and how might that impact what you're looking at? So you could throw big numbers at something, it sounds impressive, but it may not actually be anything that you can apply to your particular situation. And again, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of great people doing great work and great studies and great data providers out there and you'll notice, and that's my point, is that they'll generally tell you what they did, how they did it and some of the really good ones will tell you the limit. I looked at these keywords, but that's a problem because. And that's a key indicator when you're looking at an SEO study of whether or not that's good SEO advice or bad SEO advice.

George Nguyen:

Sometimes it'll even tell you how to use that data or how not to use that data. They'll just be like, this is purely contextual and correlation doesn't mean causation. It could be these other factors. One classic example is oh, people say pages with low bounce rate rank well. Well it's probably the opposite. Pages that rank well for other reasons have low bounce rate. So just think about that.

But while we're talking about this focus, right? We're not just focusing on the nitty-gritty details of a study. You really want to look at the other components of what the advice is really telling you. Does it take into account search intent. Does it take into account you're vertical because this goes back to the heart of “it depends”. Because my business selling, I don't know let's say action figures is going to be totally different from Mordy's... I'm really trying hard not to make a really cheap potshot joke here at Mordy. Mordy's business of selling designer sunglasses, right? I'm going to go with something classy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Great shot at me George. That's why you're my best friend because you take really bad shots at me.

George Nguyen:

It was disciplined here not to take a pot shot. But the goals, the audiences are different. Mordy's probably going to sell way more sunglasses in summer. As where for me, it's not going to be a seasonal thing.

But let's get into this advice here. So I'm going to go through a more tangible example for you about search and 10, your vertical specifically. So my fiance, who's an online personal trainer and nutrition coach asked me if she should try to rank for the term vegan bodybuilding as she's building out her business plan.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is your fiance a bodybuilder?

George Nguyen:

She is a bikini competitor. So yes she is a bodybuilder.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's awesome. Wow.

George Nguyen:

Yeah, I know I used to be super into it, but now I don't do anything. 

Mordy Oberstein:

Now you SEO. We don't need exercise.

George Nguyen:

Yeah. Yeah. SEO is all-consuming. Trying to reach some balance here just like you listeners. Trying to find it in myself. But she thought that because no services were listed on the first page of results that the competition would be low. And looking at the SERP, the top results are educational resources like about how to have a vegan lifestyle, listicles of prominent vegan bodybuilders. The related searches is even just a grid of vegan ingredients, which is literally just a grid of vegetables and fruits. It's not that fancy.

Clearly not aligned with her objective of marketing her services though. And I'm not saying she got this advice from somewhere. It was just a thought that she had. So maybe you're having the same thought. Oh yeah, nobody... My business is ranked for that. Maybe Google doesn't think that your business should rank for this because if it did then possibly yeah.

But it's different because if you're an established brand, you might be able to generate that kind of demand. But if you're not, you have to think, you have to know how your audience searches and you have to know what is the most effective shield against bad advice for this kind of thing. Which our objectives are. Take it a step further to reconcile how your audience searches as in what terms they use and how Google serves them the results. And we're talking about search intent here. To not only help you avoid inappropriate advice that you might be getting from people but also spot potential opportunities to gain more traffic. If there is an opportunity there and like, oh, your customers are definitely searching for this. Maybe it's a super long tail thing and there's no competition. That's an opportunity.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a really good point because look, even in the best article or the best webinar or podcast, like this podcast, no matter what they do, no one can predict or understand exactly how it's going to apply to your situation. So as someone consuming this content, you need to think and stop for a second. This sounds wonderful. And it might be wonderful, but how is it applied to me and my site? And while it might be great advice for one site, because of the way you're saying intent is on the SERP right, on the Google results page, Google could be showing one thing and then you're really doing something else. And it may be great advice for the site doing something different than you, but for what you are doing for that keyword, it may not be applicable really at all.

And that's up to you as someone consuming the advice to not get caught up in what they're saying, to be able to make that break, stop, drop, and think. Stop, drop, and think does this work for me even though it sounds really, really, really good? That's a good point, George.

George Nguyen:

You're in marketing. When we're talking here, you're obviously looking to market your business and you're trying to build hype here, but don't fall victim to somebody else's hype if it isn't specific enough to your business, if it doesn't ultimately tie back to that because otherwise, why are you doing this?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Okay. And something else about that, that just made me think about this, that sometimes, cause we're talking about market or sometimes when people are running SEO content, it's important to understand who they are and what they're doing and why they might be writing it. I'm not saying there's an ulterior motive. That's not what I'm trying to get at. But someone who's really into site audits. They just love site audits. They breeze... And there are people like this. And when you sometimes talk to them, they are so overzealous about site audits that the context of all the other things that are going on in that particular moment for you.

And so while you are reading this article from them and they're saying site audits, like the most important thing ever for any website, you must do this, or everything else is completely worthless, And you start here and end here. Take it all with a grain of salt. That might not be the best outlook for you and where you're at with your business and with your website. So something to be careful of when you're reading something from an enthusiast around one particular strategy or one particular area of SEO is to realize that's their jam. But that doesn't mean that has to be your jam all the time, also. So much jam.

George Nguyen:

Everything is a nail to a hammer essentially is what we're saying here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Basically.

George Nguyen:

Yes. Mordy, let's take a pause here before we really think about the next thing. And what is your jam?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

George Nguyen:

In terms of SEO. What is my jam? If I had to define myself in a space, I'd say definitely more education. SEO is the subject matter, but education is the jam across whatever that is for me. And so what does that really mean? It means content. Content creation, not necessarily the technical side. I don't do too much of that at all, but that's what my jam is. What is your jam?

Mordy Oberstein:

My jam. I love the algorithms. I love reverse engineering what Google's doing on the server, reverse engineering algorithms. I love content, and reverse engineering. I like reverse engineering. You can get that. I like reverse engineering. What's working, what's not working with content. So yeah, I have my jam. I spread out from my jam. I don't do link-building. I really don't like link-building. That's the only thing I really don't like.

So when I do read advice around SEO, I do take it as, okay, that's a really great strategy but does that work for me? Because sometimes, it could be a great strategy, but does it work for you? And that's also a legitimate thing. You know, what's also legitimate? Getting more great SEO advice from other great SEO besides for George and myself.

[00:17:32] Focus Topic Guest: Himani Kankaria

So with that, here's Himani Kankaria talking about how she got advice before Google released its spam hunting algorithm beast known as Penguin, which would obviously penalize the heck out of your website if you were doing spamming link building practices. And here's how it saved her sites. Here's the best advice that Himani Kankaria has ever received.

Himani Kankaria:

Who remembers the time when we used to do, say 200 or 300 directory submissions in a day? So I'm talking about that pre-Panda and Penguin era. In 2010, I was responsible for link-building activities. And there were a lot of directory sites where I used to see two radio buttons, which said buy a link or exchange a link. And I asked my boss, "Why are we not selecting those radio buttons?" And honestly, I was blessed with one of the best SEO advices. He said, “Himani, If you want to play a long game, never think of exchanging links or buying them, see how you can earn them rather than owning them." It was my first boss and because I was very new to the industry, I blindly followed him. And within two years, I mean you won't believe I saw Panda and Penguin updates ruined the existence of those directory sites. And I'm very thankful to him for such a piece of gold advice he gave to me. I still believe in earning the assets of the website organically. And honestly, we are surely doing great there.

But it's not easy and advisable to trust any SEO advice that gets your way. Especially today. These days, getting trapped into bad SEO advice is easier because any random post on any platform can get massive engagement. They talk about niche websites and then showcase how brilliantly they got great results without any solid proof of what strategy they used and how it was implemented.

What you can do is verify if Google has any documentation around that advice, or even you can ask any Google Search employee. I mean, I have asked John Mueller a lot, many times, and he has helped me with a lot of great advice. And even you can ask any industry thought leader as well. They are very humble to reply, but it's just that we have to beware of asking stupid questions. So before you listen to any advice, please look at who is giving you that advice. I have my own bunch of people whom I know personally and follow on Twitter and LinkedIn for SEO advice. And they have gained my trust by sharing proof of what they have done, said over the years, and why.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Himani. There's definitely great advice. One is don't buy links, please. Don't buy links. Someone offers you it might sound enticing. Don't buy those links and always check out Google's documentation. Just today, the day of this recording, I found a gem that people were talking about something on Twitter. I looked at the documentation around it and there was something I didn't even realize like, wow, that is a gem that I didn't know, just by reading Google's own documentation in their own guidelines.

Great places to get some great SEO advice other than of course our own SEO hub over at wix.com/seo/learn is learningseo.io from Aleyda Solis. Amazing resource. There's seoroundtable.com, which I start off my day reading that from Barry Schwartz. It's a great place to keep up to date with what's happening in the SEO world. And last but not least The Moz Blog. It's a great blog that really was a flourishing Moz community. This has kind of scaled back on that a bit, unfortunately, but the blog itself is absolutely phenomenal. Check out The Moz Blog as well. George any ones you want to add in real quick off the cuff?

George Nguyen:

Yeah. It depends on really what your jam is, right? You can't not mention Search Engine Land as a news publisher for both PPC and SEO and Barry Schwartz the owner of Search Engine Round Table works there as well. So they have a great format in terms of why marketers should care, especially if you're at agencies and you're not an SMB necessarily, but you're working at an agency. It's definitely written content for you. There's other places if you're looking for data for tracking, Semrush. But keep in mind who these publications serve, everybody's trying to sell you something, right? So think about that when you wade into it, but they are reputable.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep. A hundred percent. And we can have a whole podcast episode just about who and what you should read, but we don't have time for that because

[00:22:16] Is This New?

on this podcast, we give full credit. We don't give partial credit, but we give full credit and full credit here goes to Amos Zimmerman over on our social media team who asked Mordy, George is this new?

Speaker 4:

Oh, I'm sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is what new? George, you know when you Google something and way at the top, it says about 1 million gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds.

George Nguyen:

Yeah, yeah. Impressive.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right? Which we don't really pay attention to.

George Nguyen:

'Cause you can't verify it.

Mordy Oberstein:

It just looks cool. So many results so quickly. Well Amos, who we give full credit to, because again, on this podcast we give full credit, pointed out that when you search for something like best mystery books, depending upon what country you're in, you get a series of bubble filters. A series of filters at the very, very, very top of the SERP above everything else that lets you refine your search query with options like for teens. So mystery books for teens, for kids, for criminals. Guess what Google does? By the way, that's true, they actually had for criminals I'm pretty sure.

George Nguyen:

Mystery books for criminals. Educational resources for criminals.

Mordy Oberstein:

How could I plan my next scheme? By the way, when you click on one of these filters, you go to a whole new service. So if you're a criminal and you're looking for mystery books for criminals, you get taken to a whole new results page about just mystery books for criminals. Which must be a very niche set of authors. Anyway, guess what google doesn't show when it shows these series of filters, these bubble filters at the top of the results page? Did you guess it? That's right, it doesn't show the about 4 million gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds. Amos saw that it's gone. Poof.

George Nguyen:

I know it's weird.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah it's weird.

George Nguyen:

It's weird because it's a classic at this point, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

And you also think-

George Nguyen:

But are you going to miss it?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm putting words in your mouth, I was like who cares.

George Nguyen:

Yeah. It's just kind of a, who cares type thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

But by the way, not only is it gone with this particular instance that Amos found, but any time Google shows a carousel at the top of the results page, it's also gone. So Google Steelers roster, they're a football team, you Google their roster, you get a carousel of all the players on their team, little sliding carousel there. Or Google Tom Hanks movie, and you get a carousel, of all Tommy's movies. I call him Tommy we're on a first-name basis. So you get a whole carousel of all of Tommy's movies, but you don't get the about 4 trillion bazillion gazillion results in 0.52 seconds. George, Amos. I'm really sorry. The verdict is not new. This is not new.

George Nguyen:

Not new?

Mordy Oberstein:

I thought it was by the way, I ran it by Crystal and she's like, "No, no, I'm pretty sure that's old." So it's not new. But, it's still really important.

George Nguyen:

It is. Any changes, telling of a larger trend usually.

Mordy Oberstein:

And in this case, what is that larger trend? So I'm going to tell you, this is really important to know, because it's a great way to understand how the SERP works. I'm just going to run through this as quickly as I can. It's super complicated, but I'm going to try to make it as simple as I possibly can. Are you ready?

George Nguyen:

That preface helped.

Mordy Oberstein:

I try. I do try. Okay. This is a great way to understand how the SERP works because there are all sorts of features that can show up for any given search query. So you can have a feature snippet or a big old image pack also known as the image box show up, but there isn't room for all of these things on the actual results page, because you have to show actual results sometimes. So Google has a bidding system. In this case, carousels of Tom Hanks movies or whatever outbid that little line that says about four gazillion trillion results in 0.52 seconds. That's all that happened here. Google has a bidding system and said, we can't fit all this information as one spot. What's more important? We think the carousel all of Tom Hanks movies, when you search for Tom Hanks movies, is more important than us telling you how many results we have in about how many seconds.

George Nguyen:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

So that's really interesting. Right? Right? Come on.

George Nguyen:

It is interesting. But then we're also losing an element of transparency. Are we ever going to really verify? Probably somebody could verify this with computer program, but it just seems like if you've been following Google for a long amount of time that every time something disappears or changes you end up wondering, do we know as much about how the company works, about how the search engine works as we used to? So in some ways we know more than ever because it is being transparent. In other ways, things are getting taken away or there are more features on the search results that mean that people don't have to click through. And so when you see even a minor thing taken away, there's that shadow of like, oh, is this not a trustworthy move? In this case, I'm like better results is better results. So I'm okay with it.

Mordy Oberstein:

In this case, yeah, essentially what's happening here is Google's saying, we like to be transparent about how many results we have and how quickly we have them. Also, it's nice to show how powerful the search engine is. It does show a level of transparency, but they're saying we don't have space for both the carousel of all of Tom Hanks movies and this thing. We think the better result for the more useful information for the user is Tom Hanks' movies and his carousel, not the how many results in how many seconds.

But this idea of bidding and how SERP can just bid each other out can have real implications. And it can have a real impact on your organic traffic. I'll give you an example. Take the query, get New York City bagels. When I searched for this, the first thing I got was a featured snippet that lists the most iconic places in New York City to get a New York City bagel. And then Google showed me a local pack that gave me three listings, and three bagel shops, along with their reviews and addresses that I might be able to go and buy a bagel at.

Which is weird, by the way, when you think about that. Because you would think the local pack with all of the listings where I can actually buy a bagel should show first for get New York City bagel. But what I think is happening here with this kind of weird query is that Google is bidding on the two features. There's the featured snippet telling me all the classic places to get this bagel. And then there's the feature that's telling me all the places near me right now where I can actually get a bagel that I'm most likely to go get the bagel from, and they're bidding each other out.

Why do I think that the very first thing Google started off was not the actual place where I'm most likely to buy? Search intent. I think there's such a strong intent not to find whatever bagel store is right near you so you can actually buy the bagel. Which is what you would normally do. If I was buying pizza, I wouldn't want a whole information of the best pizza places in the entire New York state or the entire New York City. I would just want the places where I can buy a pizza right near me right now. But not so with New York City bagels, George. By the way, George, have you ever had a New York City bagel?

George Nguyen:

I have, but I've never bought it myself. It's been delivered to me. So I question the legitimacy because it was not special.

Mordy Oberstein:

But by the way, the fact that you would even do something like have it delivered to you is exactly what I'm talking about here. What am I talking about here? There's such a strong intent, not to find whatever bagel shop is in proximity to where you are searching from. But because New York bagels are such a thing which is why somebody like you in Rhode Island is going to have them ordered to you. Because they're such a thing, Google realized that the intent here is that people are looking to learn more about the iconic places to actually go out and seek that really genuine New York City bagel. Google [inaudible 00:30:06] people will actually travel and go far away to these iconic New York City bagel shops and ignore the local bagel shop, even though it's still in New York City, but it's not more in the iconic places. They'd rather have that information first. So Google's bidding system put the actual places near you second and the iconic places first.

So if you're a local place, less visibility, less chance someone's going to find you and less chance of someone actually visiting your local bagel place from the local listings on the results page, because Google's bidding system put that SERP feature second, boom. That's why the about 4 million trillion results being taken away matters.

George Nguyen:

But I want to introduce a ripple here just for-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh I love ripples.

George Nguyen:

... listener engagement. Oh yeah. Ripples. Ripples are great. If you're in New York city and I really hope somebody in New York City is listening to this. Why don't you open up an incognito window and type in, Google it, get NYC bagels and hit us up on Twitter. Mordy, what's your handle?

Mordy Oberstein:

@MordyOberstein.

George Nguyen:

I'm geochingu, G-E-O-C-H-I-N-G-U. Let us know. Do you get that first, for me, it's a featured snippet from timeout.com about that list of best bagels, because maybe if you're actually in New York, the proximity will change and you'll just get the bagel shops. I'm curious.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh. That is interesting. I like that.

[00:31:24] Snappy News

That is interesting.

Speaking of interesting, you know what else is interesting? Some snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Big news from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Quote, Google expands enhanced product experiences to more e-commerce sites, releases new search console reports. So oi plain terms, you no longer, this is big, need to submit your products to Google via Google merchant center to be shown within Google shopping results. This is actually huge because all you need to do now, according to Google is have product structured data markup, and you'll be eligible for Google to pull in your products into Google shopping, which means all of those carousels on the main SERP that Google shows with products in them that come organically from Google shopping, well now you're theoretically eligible for those too, which is amazing.

Google also added reporting in search console so you can more easily spot issues with your structured data for products. For Wix users, please note what you have to do in order to be eligible here. Nothing. Literally nothing. We create product structure data for you. So literally you have nothing that you have to do for all of your products to be eligible for Google shopping. How is that? Oh right. Article number two, a little PSA of sorts also from Barry Schwartz. But this time from Search Engine Round Table, because it's not enough for Barry to have one SEO news site, he needs two. Quote, Google review guidelines now prohibit incentivizing removal of negative reviews. Simply if you're offering a gift card or sorts to have folks remove their negative reviews from your Google business profile, this is now a violation of Google's guidelines. Proceed carefully, please. And with that, that is this week's snappy news.

It's always snappy with that snappy news. Hey George?

George Nguyen:

So crisp.

Mordy Oberstein:

So crisp, so snappy. Before we leave, before we depart from this show, George, thank you for filling in for crystal this week.

George Nguyen:

No, yeah, I hope I did well. I hope come back.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well I'll grade you.

George Nguyen:

Can I come back?

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll send you a grading system later.

George Nguyen:

I'm coming back next week.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know, Crystal's still away next week. So George is coming back, but then we'll send you the grading system.

[00:34:10] Follow of the Week

But before we leave today, we of course want to leave you with some awesome person from the SEO industry who does awesome things and shares awesome things on Twitter that you could follow to gain more SEO awesomeness. This week of our follow the week is Lily Ray. You know Lily, George.

George Nguyen:

I do know Lily. She's a wonderful person. I'm [inaudible 00:34:31] seen as many of her speaking sessions and engagements as possible and let me tell you one of the highlights of following her beyond what she talks about in terms of SEO. And this is still kind of SEO related, but she does a lot of searches for queries that are related to her clients. And I'm just like these are off the wall queries. Some of them are kind of adult product type stuff. I remember there was something kind of in there, forgive me if I'm framing this incorrectly Lily, but some of those are just hilarious to me what the results are. And that's kind of one of my daily guilty pleasures, the distractions of SEO Twitter, I guess.

Mordy Oberstein:

She does put out a ton of information about what she's seeing on the results page. And it's really, really helpful information actually. And it is really funny too sometimes. Which is why you need to follow her on Twitter at @lilyraynyc, speak of NYC, @lilyraynyc on Twitter. And aside from all the webinars and podcasts and conferences she does, she shares so much of her thought process around SEO. And again, what she's seeing out there happening on the results page, she's always sharing and it's always good stuff. Make sure to give Lily a follow and learn from her yourself.

George Nguyen:

Yeah, I would say that her jam, like we talked about our jams earlier, I would say her jam is definitely expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, EAT and your money, your life content. So if you're working in those verticals where authority, trustworthiness are second to none, definitely worth the follow.

Mordy Oberstein:

Definitely worth the follow. And speaking of jams, she's also a DJ on the side. So jamming is so applicable to her. Check that out. 360 George.

George Nguyen:

Wow, that was so organic. It's so easy.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was organic. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Like what you heard? Well, go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or rate us on Spotify. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all-new episode as we dive into more intents, and more problems. SEO for multiple user intents. Should you care? Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO learning up here at Wix at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content, and all the webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.