Is SEO part of marketing?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing us with groovy new insights round what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I am joined one of the best, most fabulous, most proficient marketers on the planet you can possibly find. She's brilliant. She's a fabulous marketer. She is our head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

I'm going to have to increase the fee for the introductions that you give me because-

Mordy Oberstein:

Just Venmo me later.

Crystal Carter:

... it's getting ridiculous. Right. Okay. Will do. I will do.

Mordy Oberstein:

$1 per compliment.

Crystal Carter:

Very kind of you. You're not so bad yourself there, Mordy. You're fantastic as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

As you have told me many times when people compliment you, Mordy, just say thank you, which I have a hard time doing.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. It's good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Jamar Rainwell's called me out on Twitter was like, "Can you take a compliment?" I'm like, "Nope."

Crystal Carter:

Which is why it's so good on your birthday... Which everyone should know that his birthday is in February-

Mordy Oberstein:

March.

Crystal Carter:

So-

Mordy Oberstein:

But no-

Crystal Carter:

Oh sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

... Not March. It's make up a month. What doesn't exist? Marchtober. My birthday is in Marchtober.

Crystal Carter:

Mordy's a Pisces. Anyways, so Mordy's a Pisces. When his birthday comes up, make sure that you shower him with compliments and appreciation because he absolutely hates it. So it does two things. It tells him you appreciate him and also irritates him to no end, so-

Mordy Oberstein:

Can I say, so you were at a conference when it was my birthday. You went around to all the conference people had them wish me and they thought they were doing a great thing, and it was making me nuts. What do I do now?

Crystal Carter:

Mordy was like, "No, stop. No, really no stop." And I was like, "No, keep going."

Mordy Oberstein:

Best is Barry Schwartz who just writes thank you with the period for everything. Happy birthday, Barry. Thank you. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, searchlight over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also dive into our suite of marketing tools and inbuilt integrations. Or you could bring your own as you can add scripts to your Wix website and pull in tools like Hotjar and far beyond, do marketing the way you want to with Wix. As today, I ask, is SEO part of marketing? I've been teasing this the entire intro because we're going to get into it. It's the age-old question. Is SEO part of product? Is it part of IT? Is it part marketing? If you're wondering, is there a place for you and SEO, I think this is your episode because today we're asking is SEO marketing?

Is it beyond marketing? Do you need to be a good marketer to be a good SEO? What's the difference anyway? Who actually caress? And to help us work our way through this, we have our first, second time guest, one of our personal favorites, the one the only Barry Adams, who'll be buying just a few minutes to join us as we dive into SEO and marketing. We'll also get into some hard decisions, decisions, decisions. How does SEO inform product decisions? Kristal Audain will share her outlook. Plus we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So grab your place card and hope for the best as episode number 53 of the SERP's Up podcast welcomes you to the reception and tells you which table you are sitting at.

Crystal Carter:

This is a great discussion because it comes up a lot. So I've heard a lot of people discuss this, Areej AbuAli has discussed this as well. So whether or not SEO sits in development with the dev teams or whether or not it sits in marketing. Some people think that it's just at a more strategic level, and I think that not to start too soon with the SEO platitude, but it kind of depends. I think it absolutely depends on your business, but I'm sure we'll get into that. But I think one of the reasons why this comes up is because there's a lot of overlap. And the reason why I say it depends is because what's going on in your business will cause some of the reasons why it might overlap.

So for instance, if there's lots of technical fixes that are needed, then your SEO might want to sit more with the tech team, more with the dev team. If it's more a content thing, they might want to sit more with a marketing team, that sort of thing potentially. But because SEO as a discipline is so vast, I think this is where some of the challenges arise. So I'm really excited to get into this with our guest, Barry, who's absolutely somebody who's worked with lots and lots of teams around SEO and around marketing and around other things as well to discuss this in more detail.

Mordy Oberstein:

So cue dramatic music, because the founder of Polemic Digital, SEO legend himself, Barry Adams is here right now with us. Hey, Barry.

Barry Adams:

Hey Mordy. Hey Crystal, how are you doing?

Crystal Carter:

We are very, very pleased to have you here on the podcast. We've both spent some good amount of time with you at conferences and things around the world, so it's a real pleasure to have you here on the podcast today.

Barry Adams:

Thank you. Thank you very much. But I may be in the wrong room. Because I hear that I'm in the room with marketers. I mean, I'm not a marketer. What am I doing here?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I set that up, right. It's okay. A little bit of background. First off, Barry likes to say that I get him drunk at conferences and it's all my fault, which it is.

Barry Adams:

Every time I'm hung over, Mordy, I blame you, every time.

Mordy Oberstein:

As well you should. And for all other things, you should just blame me. But I know that we might have a little bit of a different of opinion here about where SEO fits in and out. Spoiler alert, I think at the end of this we're going to conclude that there's all sorts of ways that you can fit into SEO, which is great because SEO is for everybody at the end of the day. By the way, and I did set up Crystal as a great marketer to sort of put her on my camp to start off, which I feel is horrible

Barry Adams:

You're stacked the deck today Mordy, you're stacked the deck today. You're cheating.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm putting my thumb on the scale, but I do think that there's a large overlap between SEO and marketing, and I'm wondering if you disagree.

Barry Adams:

I definitely disagree. I mean, I have been doing SEO for, well, probably way too long, to be entirely honest. In-house for about of 15 years, agency side and now freelance. I think my touchpoint with marketing in all those years have been fairly minimal. Most of my work has been focused on what you would call development or product. And in recent years, a lot of it has been focused on editorial, working with journalists and editors when it comes to publishing and writing content optimized for visibility in SERP's, and none of those would ever come close to marketing.

In fact, in some of the circles that I work in, especially in publishing, marketing is seen as a dirty word because it has a very different connotation in the news industry. Marketing is monetization, marketing is the commercial side. It's selling ads and content partnerships, and that's not what the dev team nor the editorial teams really want to worry themselves with. Now, I do agree there are aspects of SEO that are what I call marketing adjacent. But at its core, I don't think that most of what SEO does is marketing, because SEO is very process driven. I think it's more of a product discipline or even a project discipline than it is a marketing discipline.

Mordy Oberstein:

So if I could counter-

Barry Adams:

Please do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Say, pull my gloves off, and then slip on the brass knuckles. No, just kidding.

Crystal Carter:

Mordy, you'll not stand a chance.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're not brass. They're gold.

Barry Adams:

We have met Mordy. You do realize there's a significant size difference.

Mordy Oberstein:

So what do my favorite things about going to conferences, after so many years of talking to people and then you finally meet them in real life and then you realize I am a short person, and everybody is taller.

Crystal Carter:

To be fair, Barry's taller than most people.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's true.

Crystal Carter:

So, there's also that.

Mordy Oberstein:

But right now we're sitting down on Zoom, so we're all the same height.

Crystal Carter:

On Zoom, everyone's the same.

Mordy Oberstein:

Everyone is the same. No, but in all serious, I definitely understand where you're coming from and I definitely agree, and I think it's one of those things where we're going to end up saying, well, there's different ways to look at it, and all of them are great ways to look at it. I came into SEO from the content side, I got into SEO because someone asked me, Hey, could you write content for our company that ranks? And I'm like, sure. How do I do that? And a lot of the things that I ended up doing over the years when I was at Rank Ranger, I was managing their blog, was a lot of content strategy focused on SEO. So finding opportunities to rank, finding opportunities to pivot the brand, finding opportunities for expansion, and all of those things are very, very heavy on the SEO side.

But at the end of the day, I'm also going to be talking to a lot of marketers. I'm going to talk to brag. Okay, great, you're writing this content, but does the tone fit the brand? How does it position the brand? That kind of thing. So there's a lot of SEO work, but because it's very heavy on the content side, you're going into content marketing. Now we're talking the pivoting to other channels. Now we're talking about brand marketing. And I feel that a lot of the work I've done over the years has very, very, very easily slid into marketing. And especially because I think what some of the things Google's done on the...

Mordy Oberstein:

... marketing, and especially because I think some of the things Google's done on the algorithmic side around quality and content have kind of united content marketing and SEO closer than ever before. So, hah! Take that.

Barry Adams:

I'd love to disagree but I can't really. But what you just portrayed is definitely part of SEO and I don't dispute that. I do think there is a very big part of SEO that is, like you said, marketing adjacent, has some overlap. But there's an equally big part, if not a bigger part, that has nothing to do with marketing. And I think calling that marketing by saying all SEO is marketing, you're doing a disservice to both marketing and to SEO as well as to the dev side, tech side, product side, editorial side that the other aspects overlap with.

In that regard, I don't think SEO is unique. If you talk to UI/UX developers, the designers for example, they don't like to be boxed in either. They're not marketing. They're not design. They're not product. They're all of those things and none of those things. So, I think we need to try not to box SEO into, "Oh, SEO is marketing," or, "Oh no, SEO is product." SEO is SEO, and it has a lot of different touchpoints and it needs to have the freedom to spread out in a process-focused way throughout organizations so that every part of the organization that has a role to play in SEO has the right processes in place to facilitate that and to help make websites a success in search.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry, I brought you on to have a Royal Rumble, but I completely agree with everything you just said.

Crystal Carter:

I think it comes down to also thinking of SEO, thinking of marketing, thinking of whatever as a tool for achieving your goals. So, to offer another journey, I studied marketing. So, I studied CIM, the Chartered Institute of Marketing. I did all of that stuff and I learned about PEST analysis and I learned about SWOT analysis and I learned about the cash cow and the star and all of that sort of stuff, all of this classic old school marketing stuff. And I apply that to SEO things. I was reading something and they were saying, "Oh, you need to be looking at technical considerations and political...." I was like, "That's a PEST analysis. That's a PEST analysis. There's a diagram for that that somebody made years and years ago."

And it's the same thing. You do that in SEO. You do need to look at those factors when you're making your assessments and things like that. And it's a tool for it. And I think that when you think of these things as a tool for achieving your goals overall, I think that's when it works really well. Probably the biggest example that I've seen recently of SEO and marketing working really well together is the Barbie movie SERP. So, I don't know if people have seen this, but if you Google the Barbie movie, the marketing team have worked with the actual SERP and the whole SERP turns pink and sparkles. And that-

Barry Adams:

I loved that. I absolutely loved it. I was googling Margo Robbie, Ryan Gosling, and they all just show up as big sparkly pink SERPs. It was fantastic.

Crystal Carter:

It's fantastic. And that's a fantastic example of marketing and SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, it sparkles! If you do Oppenheimer, does the whole thing blow up?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. I don't know. I don't think that they've taken the whole thing into consideration, but I think that when you see those things work really well, they work really well. And I think it's a question of, again, thinking of these things as a tool in order to achieve your goals. And you mentioned editorial teams and the business arm and things like that, and sometimes there's a bit of overlap. Sometimes that makes sense. The ad team, that's going to help the editorial team pay the bills as well. But I think that, yeah, like you said, people don't want to be boxed in, but people want resources to be able to execute the things that they want. So, do you find when you're working with marketing teams that being able to speak their language helps you to achieve your goals?

Barry Adams:

That's a very good question. I'll be honest, it's been a while since I've actually worked with a marketing team specific in SEO. I work with audience growth teams. I work with development and product teams. Marketing teams, yes, I think sometimes marketing teams, it helps when you cast it in a certain format and sell it as a process or a part of what they have budget and sign off for. But it also informs me when I start talking with prospective clients or other businesses that I have an understanding of where they see SEO fit in, because it tells me how far along in the SEO journey they actually are. And I'll be entirely honest with you, when I see that SEO is seen as part of marketing or even online marketing or digital marketing, I'm a little bit worried because it means that they're probably not as far along as they think they are.

It is very much a cross-disciplinary effort. And if you box it into one thing, "Oh, that's marketing," then I like, "Right, okay, we might need to change some habits here." Because in those scenarios, in my experience, it tends to be very difficult to get them to release resources on the product dev side, because that's not part of the remit and it's only about the onsite content and it's about the link building efforts and all of that stuff. I'm like, "Yeah, but if we need to make technical changes to the website, we're sort of hindered. We're sort of boxed in there."

Mordy Oberstein:

It's funny because that's how we operate at Wix, because we have an SEO team that's under marketing. They're a growth marketing team. And then we have SEO on the actual product side. And one of the nice things is that we work really well together, and it really is a cross-company endeavor, and SEO isn't boxed in.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that your point about marketing team maturity is absolutely clutch, certainly when you're talking about a very granulated marketing team. So, they'll all sit maybe under the overall umbrella of marketing, but there'll be a growth team and a UX team and a whatever. And like you were saying, that's a sign that somebody has thought about the journey here.

Barry Adams:

Yeah. But at the same, and let's be honest, a lot of small businesses don't have those sort of resources. They might have one person responsible for the whole website. And I work with those sorts of businesses as well, in which case you have to adjust expectations and be almost more of an educational resource rather than a transactional resource. Where you teach them the good habits. You teach them what the long-term pathway is. And I always have the same advice for all clients that always... I get asked a lot, "What do we need to do in the long-term to become successful in search?" And I say, "Hire in-house people who have the mandate to do that." If you don't commit internal resources for it and you're always going to be relying on external agencies and consultants, you're never really going to develop that specialty and that internal focus that you need.

And that's a business decision for a company to make, how important they see search as a channel, whether or not they want to invest in that. And I also think it's a perfectly valid decision not to keep relying on external resources because there's other channels that are more important to you, be that a B2B channel or some other channel that drives revenue for your business, but it needs to be an informed business decision. But in terms of the aspect of marketing versus product versus tech or whatever you call it, I also feel very, very strongly that SEO is one of those very rare disciplines where pretty much anyone can be successful regardless of your background, and that we should be welcoming to people from all kinds of different walks of life into our industry because of the incredibly wide and varied skillset that is useful for SEO.

So, I have an almost allergic reaction to people saying, "Oh, that's not SEO." Because I used to be, in my earlier days of SEO, I was part of an SEO community that everything that wasn't on onsite, like link building, wasn't seen as SEO. And I sort of rebelled against that because I felt then that no, you need to do more than just the onsite stuff to be successful. You need to do something in brand marketing, link building, PR, whatever you call it, to help your website succeed. Now, well, that's not something I'm good at because I think to be a good marketer and a good digital PR person, you need to be a people person.

You need to like people. I don't like people generally, so give me a computer any day of the week. But I do realize it's part of the whole SEO ecosystem and it needs to be recognized. As I say, everybody has their role to play. Everybody brings something strong and unique to the table. I don't think we need to be exclusionary and very focused on specific niches and say, "Oh, if you don't do that, you're not an SEO." It's like, "No." Pretty much anything that a person can be good at can be useful for SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry, you're like Meat Loaf, because you took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to ask how you felt the fact that SEO is so dynamic and it's so broad and it can't be boxed in impacts someone coming into the industry, someone just trying to find a career in SEO, but you kind of answered my question. And that's sort of, I guess, the practical implication of this discussion. Does it matter? Who cares if it's marketing or not marketing? I think the answer, it does matter. Because if you look at it as just marketing or just IT or just whatever you want to pigeonhole SEO, it does set up a barrier to entry like, "Oh, I can't do SEO because I'm coming from this angle," or, "I can't do SEO because I'm coming from another angle." No, the answer is, you can do SEO. Especially in today's market, I feel like SEO has become far more specialized than it was back in the day when there only was an SEO generalist.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think also, you know when you're talking about different channels as well, when we say... I'm a big advocate of omnichannel marketing, and again, I've been fascinated by the Barbie movie campaign. I think there's a lot of old school marketing going on there. There's a lot of billboards just everywhere. I've never seen so many...

Crystal Carter:

Going on there. There's a lot of billboards just everywhere. I've never seen so many billboards in recently. And I think that when we think about that, even if you, as an SEO, aren't on the team that's handling the billboards, for whatever it is, or maybe buses or something, even if you're not doing that sort of thing, it's worth having a good relationship with them so that they have some SEO in mind, so that they make sure that they put the website on the billboard as well, so that they make sure that they put the website on the side of the bus as well, so that you are using terminology on the page that reflects what they've put into the newspaper print ad, for instance.

Barry Adams:

But also, for example, that you have a webpage or set of pages dedicated to showing the billboards that you have, like have big images and downloadable images for that and let people download wallpapers and all that sort of stuff. So that when people search in Barbie billboard in Google, your web pages show up first so that you are in control over that particular part of the narrative.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's so many times that's actually happened when you see an in-person ad or a non-digital ad and you go, "Okay, I need to Google that now and get more information about it." That's, I guess, the point, SEO is not the only, or head of SEO likes to say, SEO touches everything, including billboards. Billboard optimization.

Barry Adams:

Billboard optimization. We're going to be rebranding SEO for the 15th time.

Mordy Oberstein:

Have you all seen the Barbie movie?

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay.

Barry Adams:

Not yet, but that's because I've been flu-ridden and I don't want to spread germs in the movie theater, but I want to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer, ideally back to back.

Mordy Oberstein:

Back to back. That's my goal.

Barry Adams:

I'm just not sure which I want to see first.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly what, I want the contrast of life.

Crystal Carter:

I've been told that you should see Barbie first. I've heard on the radio that if you see Oppenheimer first, it's like...

Barry Adams:

Yeah, I think that in the back of my head, I want to see Barbie first and then go straight into Oppenheimer to come down from the hyper Barbie experience.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the time you walk out, you're balanced and have a well-

Barry Adams:

Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well centered outlook.

Barry Adams:

Well, Barbie will make me feel good about life and the world and then Oppenheimer will make me feel like nothing ever matters and everything's going to die, so will come out as a perfectly balanced person in the end.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Like therapy, basically.

Crystal Carter:

Like a well-balanced marketing team.

Mordy Oberstein:

You become optimized. It's movie optimization.

Crystal Carter:

Entirely.

Barry Adams:

Mind state optimization.

Mordy Oberstein:

There we go.

Barry Adams:

MSO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry, where can folks find you?

Barry Adams:

Well, I'd like to say Twitter, but who the hell knows what it's called?

Crystal Carter:

X now.

Barry Adams:

Yeah, I'll be entirely honest.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're recording the day after Twitter decided to rebrand. So by the time this episode comes out, we don't know what Twitter will be.

Barry Adams:

Yeah, find me on x.com/badams. No, I'm on LinkedIn. That's actually probably one of the most reliable-

Mordy Oberstein:

There we go.

Barry Adams:

Channels. I have my own newsletter, SEOforgooglenews.com, and polemicdigital.com is my consultancy website.

Crystal Carter:

And almost certainly at an SEO conference near you, because Barry Adams gets to the places and tells the people the things.

Barry Adams:

They keep asking me to come back, Crystal, and why would I say no? It's nice. Nice to see people and hang out and go on stage and talk. Yeah, it's lovely.

Mordy Oberstein:

And be taller than most of the other people there. We get it.

Barry Adams:

Well, not if you go to conferences in the Netherlands, I'm slightly below average height there.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why don't go, I don't want to feel too bad about myself.

Barry Adams:

We do enough to make that happen already, don't we, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's inherent. If you have a question about SEO and news related websites, definitely look for Barry on all of those locations. We'll link to all of his profiles and all of his websites in the show notes. Barry, thank you so much for coming on and offering your perspective on where SEO fits in.

Barry Adams:

Thank you very much for having me. It's been a blast.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right. Thank you very much, Barry. Again, again, I cannot repeat how amazing Barry is. Please give him a follow on whatever social media platform you so choose to follow people on. So as SEO straddles multiple areas of the digital world, from marketing to tech, and beyond as we already discussed, we wanted to explore how SEO might impact your product decisions. Whether you're creating something as complex as a SaaS product or spitting up an ebook, how should SEO impact your product decisions? And to help us, we asked Kristal Audain, the PM at Groundworks, how she factors SEO into her decisions, as we launch a brand new segment, first time ever on the SERP's Up Podcast, and we're calling it Decisions, Decisions, Decisions.

Kristal Audain:

Hey, Mordy and Crystal. So as a product manager, where my primary product is websites, well not just one, but 19 different websites, SEO definitely plays a role in my product decisions every single day. It's actually pretty cool though because our scrum master is a former SEO, our head of data is a former SEO, our senior director of product ran SEO for a while, and then as a product manager, I am a former SEO as well. So SEO is definitely top of mind when it comes to our team. But also working directly hand in hand with our head of SEO and our technical SEO, making sure that everything that we do as far as development wise, features and benefits on the site, any new dev work that we do doesn't play too hard with our Core Web Vitals.

Making sure LCP stays pretty firm. It's actually one of our QA process items that we have for everything that we put out there to make sure that PACE performance stays peak and on top of things. Also looking at our content team for that on page keyword targeting, making sure that they have exactly what they need as far as layout, any blocks that they need, any new features that they need that might help them do their job a little bit better, we're on top of that. As well as talking to them about new things that we're putting out to make sure it's helpful to them.

And also looking at URL structure, that's something we're taking a look at right now to make sure that our users can utilize our sites in the best way, UX is important, but also that we are giving them what they need in order to target those keywords that they need without cannibalizing themselves by having resource articles and glossary terms and service pages trying to target the same keyword more than once. So working hand in hand with our SEO team and head of content on that to make sure that we're good to go across the board.

So I would definitely say that SEO is top of mind in my day-to-day. We used to sit in marketing and report to the CMO. Now we're over in IT, but we are definitely still on a daily basis having those conversations, making sure that whatever they need, we can get into our sprints, and just nurturing that relationship across the board. So SEO and content and product can work together, it doesn't have to work in silos. We can be friends and work across the aisle without much of an issue, especially when you have so many SEOs on the team of either former or current, putting it all together.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Kristal, for that. Make sure you follow Kristal over @SEOKristal. It's @S-E-O-K-R-I-S-T-A-L on the Twitter. It's a great point, kind of speaking to what Barry was saying before, we were talking about this whole time, that there's so many things that SEO touches, SEO considers, that border on SEO. That if you don't consider SEO into the decision making process, relate to whatever product that you're touching, whatever product you're developing, you're missing out.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, and I think it's really interesting that she described her team as being very SEO rich in terms of knowledge, that they will all be considering the SEO potential of every decision because they all have a grounding in SEO knowledge. And again, this also ties in a little bit with what Barry was saying about making sure that there's the education piece, that everyone has a base level knowledge of how search works and why certain things matter and what things should be prioritized in order to make sure that the SEO is baked in. And I think that when you have that, it makes a lot of the decisions a lot more streamlined, and it sounds ideal and it sounds like they think about it a lot.

Mordy Oberstein:

And the thing is, when you don't consider SEO into the decision process from the outset, it gets messy, and you're either faced with two decisions. One is you don't consider the SEO aspects, or you have to go back and work them in and that could be a little bit messy. So let's just say for example, you're working on, I don't know, an ebook, you have a landing page built around the ebook, and the landing page doesn't think about SEOs, a really simple classic example. And you've used a lot of the language from the book itself on the landing page, but that doesn't really jive with what you need to do from an SEO point of view and now you have to take one style, which is very much like a branding and marketing messaging, and integrate it with an SEO content strategy. And sometimes when you do that, it can be not harmonious or not seamless, but that's what you're left with now because you didn't consider SEO early on in the process when you're considering, okay, what's going into the ebook? What are the various assets? And where does SEO come in?

Crystal Carter:

Right, and the worst case scenario you get is when nobody's considered it, nobody's thought about it, and then the thing launches.

Crystal Carter:

Is when nobody's considered it, nobody's thought about it, and then the thing launches, and then it's a complete catastrophe from a search point of view because no one spoke to an SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly, which is why you need, when you're deciding on what to do for a product, decide on SEO first, or SEO at the beginning, maybe second. Could be third.

Crystal Carter:

First. First people.

Mordy Oberstein:

First. Fine, SEO is first, no matter what.

Crystal Carter:

Always start with the SEOs first.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, forget like even the product, just SEO. On what, we don't know. It doesn't matter. Just SEO, first. That's all that matters. Okay, again, big thanks to Crystal and make sure you're putting your SEO decisions, prioritizing your SEO decisions early on in the product stage, and now, you know what's a really important thing to consider into your process, that's a really important decision to make about your SEO?

Crystal Carter:

What could it be?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's to follow the news every day because you never know what's going to be in there, and it gives you a nice little directional understanding of where things are heading, what's coming down the pike, and how the ecosystem is changing. So, decide on SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

I agree. Let's decide on some SEO news. Let's get into some snappy...

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, we should make it snappy.

Crystal Carter:

I think so.

Mordy Oberstein:

We could make it snappy too. We decided on this. It should be snappy. All right, let's snap to it with some snappy SEO news.

Snappy news. Snappy News. Snappy News. Oh boy, it's here. Burberry Schwartz over on search engine land, Google releases August 2023, broad core update. So Google actually, prior to this at some point, John Muller over the course of the summer said, "Yeah, well kind of expect one to come." So here it is, the official release of the August 2023 broad core update. Generally speaking, the updates take around two weeks to complete. My recommendation to you is to wait for it to completely roll out. Google will announce when it's done rolling out before you start freaking out about anything, because at the very tail end of updates, there's often another set of fluctuations that occur and they can reverse what you saw at the very beginning of the updates. So we saw great wins in the beginning. Don't get over joyous, those can reverse by the time the update is over. If you see ranking losses at the beginning of the update, don't freak out. Those can reverse. By the time the update is completely finished out, wait until the update's finished before you really get either super happy or super upset about it.

Also, this is a really tricky one because your rankings most likely happen off the wall, up and down, back and forth, in and out. Well, not in and out, up and down, over the course of the last month, if not more. If you look at the SEO weather tools, whether it's summer sensor or MozCast, you'll have noticed that there has been an insane amount of rank volatility. Rank has been moving more than ever before. My personal opinion. I don't think I've ever recalled a period where some of the tools are just showing such a high level of rank movement up and down for such a long period of time. Meaning, usually before an update you might've seen a little bit here, a little bit there, maybe more than normal, but when the update comes, you're like, "Oh wow, this update's really moving by rankings around." You might've been seeing that for the past month or so, so it'll be hard to see the exact impact of the update, at least at the onset of it.

It's been a really weird time. The bones in my body tell me this is going to be a big one. I'm recording this at the early onset of the update, so I could be wrong. I could be right. Just my gut tells me it's going to be a big one. Again, we've seen the weather tools, the summer sensor for example, showing incredible amounts of very, very unusually long sustained periods of incredible rank volatility, of rank instability on the Google results pages. That coupled with the fact that there's just so much going on in the ecosystem now between AI content, SG, everything is sort of changing at the moment. My gut just sort of tells me this is going to be a big one. I guess we'll have to wait until the update completes its rollout to really see. May the force be with you and with us all, and that is this week's Snappy News.

I'm really glad we decided to do that. Snappy SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, I definitely felt like a decider in that process, which is always something that is important to me.

Mordy Oberstein:

I always decide to see what Barry has to say.

Crystal Carter:

He's got some good news.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sometimes, not the greatest news, but sometimes important news nonetheless, like, "Oh, no big update. Ah, freak out."

Crystal Carter:

That's a song, isn't it, by Chic, isn't it?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, it's. "Ah! Google Algorithm Update Freak Out!"

Crystal Carter:

That's what I always think of every time there's a Google algorithm update, I think what we need right now is a little bit of disco. That's what's required.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey, but beyond now you know what I think about when I hear about all the various SEO topics that are out there. I think of Jackie Chu who is a follow of the week. It's at Jackie Chu over on Twitter, this's at J-A-C-K-I-E-C-C-H-U, on the Twitter. She's the SEO over at Uber, and she talks about all sorts of SEO topics and no matter where you are coming from into the SEO ecosystem to the SEO industry, she's got something to say for you, which is why she's our follow of the week this week.

Crystal Carter:

She's a great follow. She speaks at a select few conferences and whenever she does, it's always such a treat because she has a really wide marketing knowledge and when we're talking about marketing and SEO and where they overlap and that sort of thing, and she has a great grounding in both. I think she started in, I think doing YouTube way back in the day and she's now working at Uber and does some great stuff there, and she's got a really good grounding in a wide range of marketing skills and knowledge.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like today's episode is like the Mr. Rogers of SERP's Up podcast episodes, "So no matter where you are, no matter who you are, you are special and you have a seat at the SEO table just because of who you are."

Crystal Carter:

I feel like I could put on my cardigan, get out some comfortable shoes, put my shopping down...

Mordy Oberstein:

I need some comfortable shoes.

Invite the mailman over.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And then just as a grown adult, just play with some puppets in my house by myself.

Mordy Oberstein:

As we ride the trolley to the land of SEO make believe.

Crystal Carter:

I really did love Mr. Rogers. That was really good...

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, good.

Crystal Carter:

That that was a good time of day. Like you had Sesame Street, you got Mr. Rogers, your Reading Rainbow. Just like wholesome. Just some wholesomeness.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a whole different wormhole. That's not our podcast. That's a different podcast somewhere out there, I guess is a Mr. Rogers podcast. Thank you for joining this SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with the new episode as we dive into the power of SEO fundamentals, we're pour the fun back in SEO fun-damentals. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content, all the great webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes, oral rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace of love and SEO.