Off on the right foot with Homepage SEO

[00:00:00] Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO. Podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up!

[00:00:14] Mordy Oberstein: 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, head of SEO branding at Wix, and I'm joined by our head of SEO communications, crystal

[00:00:27] Crystal Carter: Carter. What's up, people?

[00:00:30] Mordy Oberstein: Hello? What's going on here? Do you think that was too much like over the tops?

[00:00:34] Mordy Oberstein: Our first episode, like the whole SERP's Up Aloha Mahalo? I don't know. I kinda like it. I kind of feel like it's a little over the top.

[00:00:41] Crystal Carter: I feel like that's our brand, though, Mordy. Like, I feel like that's how we roll. Is that not? Isn't that what the people have come to expect from, like the Mordy & Crystal SEO thing?

[00:00:53] Mordy Oberstein: I say yes. I feel like, no, we're just, we're just gonna roll with

[00:00:56] Crystal Carter: it. I feel like if people showed up and we were like, this is the [00:01:00] SERP these are things.

[00:01:02] Mordy Oberstein: I feel like people with the people would be disappointed, but I want you to know that in a previous life, it needs to do an SEO podcast for, I literally, the entire point of the podcast was do everything, but.

[00:01:12] Mordy Oberstein: Hello, welcome to our show about backlinks. Would you like some backlinks, sir? No. Put the answer is no, and we don't, we don't buy links.

[00:01:21] Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Now you can dive deep into the world of SEO with our new SEO learning hub. By the way, that's a place on the web where this very podcast lives.

[00:01:33] Mordy Oberstein: It's wix.com/seo/learn. So look out for episodes of the SERP's Up podcast there or wherever you consume your podcast as well. Some great blog posts, webinars, and whatnot to help you learn about SEO. All of the things

[00:01:47] Crystal Carter: learn all of, of the SEO things. From the hub of the SEO things.

[00:01:52] Mordy Oberstein: The it's the hub of SEO.

[00:01:54] Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Not the SEO hub, the hub of SEO, the hub of SEO, the SEO hub of the [00:02:00] SEO, the SEO, the hub of the

[00:02:02] Crystal Carter: SEO optimizing. There

[00:02:04] Mordy Oberstein: we go. We also have PM machines there, Lord. So. Thank you for joining us. Our dear audience may have so much to cover today. First off, this is our first episode of the SERP's Up podcast.

[00:02:16] What is SERP'S UP About?

[00:02:16] Mordy Oberstein: And I just wanna quickly say, this is a podcast where anyone and everyone of your site owner, an SMB, an enterprise website, a seasoned SEO, a new SEO. This is a podcast where everybody can learn something about SEO. It's SEO

[00:02:29] Crystal Carter: for. That's exactly what we're trying to do here. We're bringing SEO to the people

[00:02:33] Mordy Oberstein: democratize

[00:02:34] Crystal Carter: SEO, all of the people with all the

[00:02:37] Mordy Oberstein: SEO, exactly.

[00:02:37] Mordy Oberstein: With all the SEO, with all the optimizations

[00:02:41] Crystal Carter: precisely. And I think that it's really important that, you know, I think we both spend a lot of time making sure that people can understand what's going on. There's no cloak and dagger, we're not trying to, we're not trying to overcomplicate things. We're trying to deliver the information as in, in an accessible and entertaining way for your SEO enjoyment.

[00:02:59] On this show we cover...

[00:02:59] Mordy Oberstein: I [00:03:00] exactly. Okay. So we're gonna kick off this show with a look at where you should be kicking your site off your homepage, right? It's literally called your homepage. It's the home of your website. We're talking, but SEO for your homepage, how your homepage directs the rest of the content on your site. Why is super important for Core Web Vitals and links and how to get.

[00:03:20] Mordy Oberstein: Going with your homepage the right way. We'll hear tips from in-house SEO, Ryan Jones, about what works, what doesn't work for your SEO on your homepage. We got a fun little game. We're gonna play with the nice little Google SERP feature. We'll give you a look at a great free tool that you can get some content ideas from, and we'll tap into a little SEO news and last.

[00:03:42] Mordy Oberstein: We'll tell you who you should be following out there in the SEO industry. So you can get some more SEO knowledge on your own. It's just some basic SEO awesomeness all throughout this podcast, just jampacked jam. It is jampacked by the way, I'm thinking, how are we gonna get this done in the amount of time [00:04:00] that we wanna get this on?

[00:04:00] Focus Topic of the Week

[00:04:00] Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, let's jump into it. Our focus topic of the week. It's SEO for. Homepage pretty

[00:04:08] Crystal Carter: precisely. So I think what we're gonna do first, just to make sure that everyone's on the same page about the homepage. Let's just start out with a super SEO question, which is what is a homepage. So when we talk about a homepage, we talk about the first page that users see when they arrive on your domain.

[00:04:23] Crystal Carter: So if your domain is is example.com for instance, in your homepage is what people see when they arrive on example.com. And these can vary from lots of different types of ways. There's a couple of different types of homepages that you can use a couple of different types of techniques. So I've seen some where they'll funnel people where like, for instance, if you go to some place like zara.com, that's a very top level domain, but they're a very complicated business with lots of different geos and lots of different markets that they work in.

[00:04:48] Crystal Carter: So if you go to their page, they will filter you to whatever market you're in, for instance, if you go to some place like Virgin, for instance, they do lots of things. So virgin.com covers space, travel and [00:05:00] phones and broadband and holiday vacations. Lots of, lots of different things. So if you go to their page, Because they have so many different brand affiliations, they will filter you to lots of different things as well.

[00:05:12] Crystal Carter: Another one that I looked at was fandom. They've got one where they just have like all the links, they just put all the links on their homepage and that's another way to do it as well. So there's lots of different ways you can think about a homepage, but it's essentially the first page people arrive at on your domain and it can impact a lot of the wider, uh, experience of your site.

[00:05:28] Crystal Carter: And when we talk about homepage SEO, we mean the SEO that is targeted. On the homepage and making sure that your homepage is doing what it's supposed to do from an SEO point of view, this can be reviewing your copy, looking at your content structure, looking at your linking, but it can be a lot, a lot, lot more.

[00:05:43] Crystal Carter: So that is what we mean when we're talking about that.

[00:05:47] Mordy Oberstein: Homepage SEO but that's no, but that's really the beauty of this. And we'll get into all of this. There's so many different ways you can take as you take us from a technical point of view, looking at things like corporate vitals and your performance.

[00:05:58] Mordy Oberstein: I'm sure you're gonna get to in a few minutes, [00:06:00] you can look at this from a linking perspective because, uh, everyone's linking to your homepage. Uh, I fundamentally look at the homepage as like the place that sets the pace for the rest of your website. There's your website needs to have an identity, not just for your users, but also for search engines and really well more importantly for your users, but we're talking about search engines right now, but it's the same thing.

[00:06:18] Mordy Oberstein: the same thing, but you need to have an identity and your homepage really is like, this is where you have an identity. This is where you tell search engines and you tell people what you tell the whole world. This is who I am. This is what I do. And I I'll tell you I've looked at thousands of home pages.

[00:06:34] Mordy Oberstein: And once I did like a, a, a listing of how often, or which home pages I was able to understand what the heck the site actually did just by looking at the homepage, I will tell you it was a 70, 30 split and 70%. I didn't understand what the site did just from the home. Right. And that's a major problem for your users.

[00:06:52] Mordy Oberstein: That's a major problem for, for search engines obviously, but once you, a once you're able to pin down that [00:07:00] identity on the homepage. I feel like it sits you up for success with the rest of your site, cuz now, you know, I, what, what sort of falls into the, the four qubits of my blogs periphery? Like what can I talk about on my blog?

[00:07:11] Mordy Oberstein: What shouldn't I talk about on my blog? Yeah. Now that I have an identity on the homepage, I can sort of have a sense what fits and what doesn't. So there's so many ways to slice your homepage, but to me fundamentally, it's like, it's your identity. I know you're gonna take us to a totally different place.

[00:07:25] Mordy Oberstein: Why your pocket is, is so awesome.

[00:07:27] Crystal Carter: To be honest, I think that like, it, it is the same thing. Like, you know, you're talking about the identity and the identity can also have to do with your technical framework. So the identity can be how you connect with your users. For instance, if your homepage is really optimized for mobile, then that tells your users that we understand that you're using this page on your mobile.

[00:07:43] Crystal Carter: We understand that you need to be able to access this content. On the go, um, you know, uh, for instance, like there's, there's, I've worked with a lot of leisure clients, um, and in the leisure, leisure industry,

[00:07:55] Mordy Oberstein: leisure, leisure, potato, pat, potato .

[00:07:58] Crystal Carter: And, and, and for those [00:08:00] folks, like people are on their people are in their cars, they're searching, you know, where can I go today?

[00:08:04] Crystal Carter: People are in their, you know, you don't take most people. Don't take a full PC on vacation with them. Um, and then Marty's like, I do, I do it all the time. Now, again, .

[00:08:14] Mordy Oberstein: Um, if my desktop I'm schlepping box full tower, I need a full, the old school monitor, like really right. Bulky monitor. And I,

[00:08:25] Crystal Carter: and so I think that making sure you've got the technical framework that sets that up.

[00:08:29] Crystal Carter: Is absolutely part of your homepage or part of your homepage experience and part of your overall experience.

[00:08:33] Mordy Oberstein: So, yeah. So what do you mean by that? Cause that's like a really important point. Like when you say like getting your technical framework set up, because I know we obviously getting your content writing for your identity and for, and certain people understand what you're doing and surgeon to understand what you're doing is sort of a self-evident point that people don't do it.

[00:08:47] Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. But when you talk about like the technical framework, cause I know you brought up Core Web Vitals when we were talking about this, like people don't think about. As being unique to a homepage.

[00:08:56] Crystal Carter: Yeah. So there's a couple of things. So from the identity point, you literally, [00:09:00] you literally explain your identity and your structured data on your homepage.

[00:09:03] Crystal Carter: Like you literally say we are this corporation, we were founded by these people. Um, you know, our address is here. Our phone number is here. Our email address is here. So all of that stuff is literally, um, built

[00:09:14] into

[00:09:15] Mordy Oberstein: the technical framework. Right? You can add tructure data to your home page. I basically said like, this is, this is our, this is who we.

[00:09:19] Crystal Carter: Literally like this is our literal identity. Like this is our, our, our V A T number. This is our tax number. Like this is,

[00:09:25] Mordy Oberstein: this is who we are, which is super important. Cause structured data, whether or not it's not a, an official ranking factor, but at the end of the day, structuring structured data can a create, help the knowledge graph build on itself.

[00:09:36] Mordy Oberstein: And. Structured data, which means that Google understands that this entity and that entity like your website and you as an individual are connected. Right. It also is theoretically, I know Google said that they don't look at it to understand a page unless it's one of their supported schema. Theoretically, they could look at it and save themselves some resources and understand content.

[00:09:57] Mordy Oberstein: I know that's a bit of a debate

[00:09:58] Crystal Carter: among EOS and it's, it's not [00:10:00] necessarily a ranking factor, but it is a visibility factor because there's certain parts of the SERP that you are not eligible for, unless you have sort of structured data on it. And that, and those parts of the SERP rank higher than the plain blue links.

[00:10:11] Crystal Carter: So like , so it's not, it's not a, it's not a ranking factor. I don't wanna get into ranking factor

[00:10:16] Mordy Oberstein: things. Let's not, I was gonna say, let's knock go.

[00:10:18] Crystal Carter: I'm not gonna go. I'm not gonna go down that, that garden path, but it does affect like how you understand. And also like, particularly for the structured data that goes on your homepage though, organization, your local business, your corporation structured data.

[00:10:28] Crystal Carter: You can also, um, use it. Pull the entities from various different places. So for instance, let's say you're, you were really big on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or TikTok or whatever. And then you got a website which happens a lot. Then you, when you go onto your homepage on your website, you can put same as more.

[00:10:47] Crystal Carter: Do you oversee TikTok? And then Google will understand that, where that, where you have like, you know, 5 million followers on. And you're a big cheese on TikTok that those users also will want to find you on your, on your website.

[00:10:59] Mordy Oberstein: [00:11:00] Right? So you're basically telling Google that this TikTok account and this homepage, this website.

[00:11:06] Mordy Oberstein: Are connected or, yeah, they're connected. And there's code that you could inject called structure data that, that tells Google this

[00:11:11] Crystal Carter: really, exactly that they're the same entity they're made by the same person. Um, you know, like you've got, you've got a podcast and you've got, and you've got the information about you and you've got information about the podcast and they can understand that you are the person that does the podcast and they can connect all of those

[00:11:23] Mordy Oberstein: information.

[00:11:23] Mordy Oberstein: And it's really the perfect place for it because the homepage again is your identity and you're connecting out to other, and there's, it's really important for you especi. In this age of SEO to make con help Google make the connections between different entities. And we say entities, I mean, anything from who you are, who your site is to your social media accounts, all of these various entities to help them sort of get a really clear understanding of what this website is and who you are, kind of thing.

[00:11:46] Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think when you think about an entity, it's like, it's like the idea of like, you have Jennifer Lopez and you have JLo. Google understands that both of those people are the same. That's the same. If somebody answers in JLo in a search bar, they're looking for Jennifer Lopez, it doesn't matter. Or, or if [00:12:00] somebody misspells Jennifer with one N or two Ns, they understand that they mean the same.

[00:12:04] Crystal Carter: Entity exactly. Um, another one is like ladybug and lady bird in England. You say lady bird in, in America, you say ladybug, but if I wanted to know about lady bugs and there was good content, that was, that was written literally for Ladybird. Then that's the, that's a whole nother that's a whole, oh yeah, we can go to this whole we're often.

[00:12:20] Mordy Oberstein: I really wanna talk about Core Web Vitals and, and the home, because by the way, Core Web Vitals is a ranking factor on desktop and on mobile. And if you don't know what it is, they're basically currently speaking, there are three metrics that Google measures, how, how your page is performing. It's. Um, CLS like, you know, when you go to a webpage and you are mobile in particular, you start seeing buttons moving around.

[00:12:41] Mordy Oberstein: So Google's measuring that. Google's measuring F I D how interactive, how that first, how quickly you can make that first interaction on a webpage. And of course they're measuring LCP, which is how quickly the largest content full, the largest thing on your page. It's usually a giant heater image. Load. So Google's measuring performance in three different ways to see if your site offers a [00:13:00] good experience to users.

[00:13:01] Mordy Oberstein: And your home rate is really important for this.

[00:13:03] Crystal Carter: Your homepage is really important for this because, so when Google's measuring cumulative layout shifts, CRS, they're measuring how things jump around. First of all, for users, I hate that. Like I. I cannot stand. If I go on a website and I try to click something and I end up clicking something else and then I have to go back and blah, that sucks.

[00:13:18] Crystal Carter: The other thing is, is that if you have a homepage, that's doing that a lot. Then you have to think about the fact that a lot of your traffic is going through your homepage. Now, the, when Google's. Pulling pulling out your overall score for your page experience, um, and whether or not your site overall passes a page experience, a metric, they will pull the data for 75% of page views across your site.

[00:13:40] Crystal Carter: If most of your site, or if a lot of your traffic is going through your homepage and your homepage is underperforming, then that then the performance of your homepage will, will contribute to a lot of that

[00:13:49] Mordy Oberstein: score for your, but disproportionately.

[00:13:51] Crystal Carter: Exactly for a lot of your, your site overall. So it's very important.

[00:13:55] Crystal Carter: So optimizing your homepage can help you go really far with regards to your overall core [00:14:00] web vitals performance.

[00:14:00] Mordy Oberstein: So, so it's really, there's a point. People don't talk enough about, right? If most of the traffic is coming through your homepage and Google is measuring in it's real field data, it's really looking at actual how users are actually experiencing your.

[00:14:15] Mordy Oberstein: And if they're experiencing it on the homepage, then that's what Google's counting. Then that's the place to really focus on your performance and make sure you have it optimized.

[00:14:22] Crystal Carter: Exactly. And it's not just, and it's not just the incoming traffic. It's also the internal traffic as well. So it's like all the page fees across the site.

[00:14:28] Crystal Carter: So if people are going from one page to another, to another, to another, and they're very often gonna go back to the homepage yeah. To get back to, to, to find the main thing they saw the first time.

[00:14:36] Mordy Oberstein: And it's the same thing with links by the way. Right. So most of the page, most of link to is going to be your homepage.

[00:14:43] Mordy Oberstein: And if your homepage is really garbage, right? If you don't know, and I hate to say it that way, but if people can't understand what your page is about who you are, what you do, it doesn't look nice. If it's not well constructive, it's not well organized. People are not gonna wanna link to

[00:14:55] Crystal Carter: it. And also that you'll, you'll also be wasting the, the, the, uh, I'm gonna say [00:15:00] it.

[00:15:00] Crystal Carter: I'm gonna say link juice, the link juice you're wasting, you're spilling your link juice all over the floor. So so if you've got, so if you've got, if you got this juicy link from like, from something that's relevant, right? So let's say you're doing, I don't know, lemon meringue pies. You're like, you've got a shop that sells lemon meringue pies, and you've got a link from lemon, meringue Pie Gazette Right. And it's got 300 da , um, then, then, and then they get to your homepage and you don't have anything that says lemon meringue pies. You just have, like, I don't know, pies generally, or I don't know, whatever. Then Google's not gonna be able to understand that end users. Aren't gonna be able to understand the relevance of that link.

[00:15:38] Crystal Carter: Like why that page is linking to you. If it's just like a general sort of like artsy thing about pies or something, or thousand percent, then it's not gonna you're you're not, you're wasting that.

[00:15:49] Mordy Oberstein: So we can go down that wormhole as a whole separate thing again, but we, I wanna end off on one point about this conversation around homepage before we get to our special guest Ryan Jones and see what he has to say about homepages.

[00:15:59] Mordy Oberstein: But [00:16:00] I, I just wanna say, when you talk, when you think about a homepage, it's really important to look at how Google thinks about your homepage in your vertical. So let's say something like a medical, you sell medical equip. So you're gonna have con you're gonna have content on there that obviously describes what you do and what you're selling.

[00:16:14] Mordy Oberstein: And you'll probably have a bunch of access points so that you can actually get people to buy the actual product. What I would venture to say that Google probably wants you to contextualize that, to offer some information maybe in FAQ to sort of contextualize the medical equipment that you're selling.

[00:16:29] Mordy Oberstein: Who is it for? Who is it not for? What are some things you should know before you actually go ahead and purchase this? You want take a

[00:16:35] Crystal Carter: look particularly for medical stuff. Like homepages are like you, like, if you're doing anything in a Y M Y L, which is your money or life, anything that's like really serious grown up stuff, basically like, okay, if you're doing anything around that, then, then your homepage really needs to be top notch.

[00:16:49] Crystal Carter: So if you look at someone, someone who's got a really good medical homepage is Pfizer, and you need to be able to demonstrate. Your expertise, authority and trust. So, you know that you've got, like, for instance, in, in the UK, you [00:17:00] see pharmacy, there's like a pharmacy, um, badge that shows up for, particularly for things, SSL things you wanna be able to like, you know, Dr.

[00:17:07] Crystal Carter: Grace Jones , um, for instance, verify this, like we have all these credentials, we have backed up all of this and, and like things like your registered with the relevant health authorities and they'll fine. Um, they, if you're in a medical vertical and your homepage is not super topnotch, then you're definitely missing a trick

[00:17:24] Mordy Oberstein: there.

[00:17:24] Mordy Oberstein: And that's exactly the point different verticals Google's gonna think of your homepage is needing different things. So it makes sense to go see what's out there and ranking on thes and see, okay. How does Google think about the homepage? What does it want? What does it expect out of a homepage for whatever it is?

[00:17:36] Mordy Oberstein: My website offers, that's a, you know, pro tip right there. Yeah. With that for some more pro tips, check out that. We have in-house SEO specialist, Ryan Jones telling us what's worked for him. And what has it worked for him for his homepage?

[00:17:55] Ryan Jones: Uh, so, so when it comes to homepage SEO, uh, there's, there's definitely been some [00:18:00] cases where I've had some major wins, but also where I've made some pretty rookie mistakes too. I mean, I remember when I first came into the industry nearly seven years ago, my main kind of thinking was getting everyone to the homepage and then all these users will sort of magically go where they need to go in reality that.

[00:18:18] Ryan Jones: Isn't the case at all. I mean, if, if you're not serving what the user actually needs, you're not gonna rank and you're not gonna make any money. One of my biggest homepage wins actually came about by reducing the traffic to the homepage. So. Initially analyzing the site, we found that around 60% of our organic traffic was arriving at the homepage whilst this isn't necessarily an issue for some people, especially returning users.

[00:18:43] Ryan Jones: Uh, it can be a huge issue for others, especially when your, your site's hard to navigate as well. Luckily for me, there was some pretty good gains to make in terms of increasing the authority via back links and, and targeted internal links, uh, to some other pages. Uh, over time, we managed to see [00:19:00] the, the homepage slowly leave the SERPs for a whole bunch of keyword and other pages arrived in its place that obviously increased revenue, conversion rate and all the other magic metrics you wanna see in the green as an SEO, kind of seems ironic to say that one of my biggest homepage wins came about by reducing traffic to the homepage.

[00:19:19] Ryan Jones: But, but there we go. I. When we come to failures as well. One of my biggest failures is, is more of a learning based failure, to be honest. Uh, but this came from focusing. Like purely I'm building back links to other pages rather than looking at their homepages and opportunity. When I was pretty early on in my career, like talking zero to six months, I used to fill out all these HARO requests and specifically requests that if they were gonna link, could they link to a, a category page or, or another money page instead of the homepage, the obvious answer was.

[00:19:53] Ryan Jones: You know, no. Why, why bloody hell would I do that right over time? I've, I've learned that one of the best tools at my [00:20:00] disposal is internal links and I can use the homepages authority to push that authority through, to, to all the pages on site. Obviously this involves having a, a really clean site architecture, but that that's a completely different topic for a, a completely different podcast.

[00:20:22] Mordy Oberstein: Brilliant. Thanks Ryan. You can find Ryan on Twitter at Ryan Jones, SEO that's at Ryan Jones. SEO on Twitter were linked to his Twitter profile in the show notes, but that was really interesting points about his, I always, when people talk about their failures and successes, particularly the failures, I always learned more from the failures than from the successes.

[00:20:38] Mordy Oberstein: Wonder where you took away from that one, crystal.

[00:20:40] Crystal Carter: I think the thing I found really interesting was how much he talked about navigation. I think that navigation via the homepage is super, super important. And I absolutely agree with what he was talking about there. So he said that internal links were a really big win.

[00:20:51] Crystal Carter: The homepage is a really great place to add internal links that are high priority. Sometimes I think about like, if you were to think about your website as a supermarket, um, in your suit, in [00:21:00] your supermarket, you have things that are normally there, like bread and milk, cheese, rice beans, that sort of things.

[00:21:04] Crystal Carter: Your homepage, for instance, let's say your homepage is like the fruit like with like the seasonal. Like the seasonal fruit and vegetables that shows up there. So, so on your homepage, you can put, like, these are the things that are in season now, and you can drive traffic to those pages, find internal links.

[00:21:18] Crystal Carter: Um, and if you were to think about it like a restaurant, then you can also, like, if you have new blogs, new content, new jobs, new, new events, new, whatever, then that's like a specials board, like in a restaurant where you can say, we need you to see this stuff now because it's fresh. It's new it's here today.

[00:21:31] Crystal Carter: Um, it might not be here tomorrow. But it's here. Well, your blog probably will be, but this is new stuff. So on your homepage, you can add feeds for new blogs, new, you can add feeds for new jobs, whatever your vertical is, you can add stuff that's seasonal. So for instance, like you on your homepage, you aren't gonna want, like, I don't know, 4th of July stuff all the time, but you will want it when it's near, when on the 3rd of July, for instance.

[00:21:51] Crystal Carter: So these are things that you, you want to think about how you, how you position, which internal links across your site to drive them to the important content now. [00:22:00] And, and, and when you.

[00:22:02] Mordy Oberstein: And, and linking to your pages, you're linking internally to your other pages is such an easy win. It has such a major impact on how Google understands your site and how it ranks things on your site.

[00:22:10] Mordy Oberstein: So it's like, literally, like Ryan mentioned, like low hanging fruit. So speaking of low hanging fruit, I have no idea what that has to do with anything. Um, but we're moving on. We're moving on. That was a bad example of pivoting. I got a, I got a good, the first time the beta, my existence is pivoting from segment to segment, by the way,

[00:22:30] Mordy Oberstein: People also ask it's one of the most common features on the Google SERP and it Google gives you four questions, generally, sometimes two, sometimes three that relate to your initial query. So for example, if you were to, uh, ask is McDonald's good, Google would offer you a box that contains these four questions.

[00:22:49] Mordy Oberstein: Least. When I looked at it, these four questions who knows what it contains now but it had one. What's good about, McDonald's not much two. Why should you not eat McDonald's and question number three. [00:23:00] Is it healthy to eat? McDonald's no question number four. Does McDonald's have a good reputation. And when you click on any one of these four questions, Does an expandable tab expands.

[00:23:11] Mordy Oberstein: Cause that's what expandable tabs do. And it reveals an answer that comes from a web page. So you get an answer right there on the Google results. It gives you a little snippet of content giving you the answer. Like it was a healthy McDonald's one word. No. And then it has a URL that you can read more information that would help you answer this question.

[00:23:30] Mordy Oberstein: So here's a little fun segment that we have called fun with people. Also ask.

[00:23:40] Fun with People Also Ask

[00:23:40] Mordy Oberstein: So this week, Crystal's going to grill me to see if I'm as smart as Google. Okay. Which is so not even a contest, take this every way you want.

[00:23:52] Mordy Oberstein: and it's gonna see if I can actually answer the questions that Google has and the people also ask [00:24:00] feature for the query Yankees. Cause I'm a baseball. Yes.

[00:24:04] Crystal Carter: All right. So Mr. Mr. Wardy Stein is Mr. Yankees, uh, loves Yankees. So we are gonna start with, uh, the query. So the query I entered into Google is Yankees, um, which interestingly enough is very different from the query Yankee.

[00:24:15] Crystal Carter: Um, so you can check that out on your own. Um, but, um, we're gonna go through that. So the first question is who is the most famous Yankee.

[00:24:24] Mordy Oberstein: So I know what Google's gonna have there. It's gonna say babe Ruth, and it's gonna be O paragraph about babe Ruth, but the truth is that's not true. Yogi bear is the most famous Yankee because people know all of his yogis, like, um, it's getting late, early out there, or when you can learn, you can, you can learn a lot by observing.

[00:24:42] Mordy Oberstein: No, what is it? You can observe a lot by watching, sorry. You couldn't observe a lot by watching, right? So in at least in America, there's all these yogis. So I feel Yogi be is more famous, but I know Google's gonna give the answer of Bei.

[00:24:53] Crystal Carter: This is very interesting because they've actually, so this says who's the most famous Yankee.

[00:24:57] Crystal Carter: And then they said best Yankee of all time by [00:25:00] uniform number. Is what he re returned. So zero is, is Adam Octa or

[00:25:07] Mordy Oberstein: Adam Ottavino like that's he's ever on the Yankees. He was there for one year. He was terrible.

[00:25:12] Crystal Carter: Exactly. Number two, Billy Martin, or sorry, number one, Billy Martin, number two, Derek Jeter. So that's a very interesting, that's a very interesting, this is going

[00:25:19] Mordy Oberstein: by the numbers.

[00:25:20] Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's the result then it's gonna go Gehrig Ruth Mantle, uh, um, uh, DiMaggio. Yes. Who's six who's number six. Oh, wait. Seven is mantle eight is Berra. Why am I blanking on six Jo I'm blanking, Jo. Or so Joe Torry! Yeah. You know why I'm blanking because he was a manager, not a player. Oh, blanking it. Okay.

[00:25:48] Crystal Carter: Very interesting.

[00:25:48] Mordy Oberstein: All right. Okay. So I'll give you by the way, just cause to show you that Google in these answers can give you the wrong answer sometimes. Right? which by the way, is an opportunity. If you are writing content about the Newin is, and you write, write the [00:26:00] right answer and see if you get in there, cause this one is totally wrong.

[00:26:02] Mordy Oberstein: Right. Okay. Next question.

[00:26:04] Crystal Carter: Yeah. Okay. So next one. So the next one is why are the Yankees so popular?

[00:26:08] Mordy Oberstein: Because they're the best. They won the most championships of any sport in the us.

[00:26:13] Crystal Carter: So the Wikipedia arguably the most successful professional sports team in the United States, the one 19 American, uh, league things, 40, 40 American pennants, 27 world series, blah, blah, blah, Yankees,

[00:26:23] Mordy Oberstein: Yankee.

[00:26:23] Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So I'm the smartest Google in that one.

[00:26:25] Crystal Carter: Okay. Next one. How did the Yankees get their name?

[00:26:30] Mordy Oberstein: They got, they were originally . They were originally from Baltimore. Then they moved to New York who came the Highlander. They became the Yankees. I don't know what made them become the Yankee. It's just kind of a nickname people gave them, I think.

[00:26:42] Mordy Oberstein: And they just adopted it. Do you know, what's

[00:26:44] Crystal Carter: interesting. It says NY history.org says no definitive answer exists. So you're, I don't know is kind of correct. Interesting, amazing. But there's no, but there's speculation. It brought from the civil war connotation of the Yankees and, uh, and in that the team played north of their [00:27:00] counterparts, the New York giants.

[00:27:00] Crystal Carter: Interesting. Very interesting that you, your, your, I don't know. Okay. Last one last. Do the Steinbrenner own 100% of the Yankees. No. Stein writer initially owned less than half of the team. He bought out. Many of his partners eventually owning 70% of them, but that

[00:27:17] Mordy Oberstein: is not 100%. No one owns all the baseball team.

[00:27:19] Mordy Oberstein: That's a lot of awesome. I, I did good. I did good. Right. I think he did pretty good there. I did good. And Google actually did pretty good for the most part, except that first question, which by the way, like you see, like, just so you know, like just, if you're, if you're running a blog about the Yankees, those are four great questions.

[00:27:36] Mordy Oberstein: You could have a blog post about on your own.

[00:27:38] Crystal Carter: Yeah, very interesting. And I think also like the thing about the, so if you look up Yankee, you get a completely different, completely different people. So ask. So it's really important to remember that like that this is the achieving as well. Those are different entities.

[00:27:50] Crystal Carter: So Google understands that the Yankees is a baseball team and a

[00:27:54] Mordy Oberstein: Yankee is a nomenclature referring to. The north or right Americans in [00:28:00] general. I don't even know how to answer that one.

[00:28:01] Crystal Carter: Right. Civil wars, blah. So there, so their questions are what is being, being a Yankee mean? When did the, when, where did the term Yankee come from?

[00:28:08] Crystal Carter: Totally different Yankee in the civil war. And then it says, what do you call a southerner? So I don't know why. All right,

[00:28:15] Mordy Oberstein: moving on, moving on from now. Check this pivot. Speaking of people also asked speak, do speak of it. I will speak of it. Also asked by Mark Williams-cook is a fantastic tool that takes the questions from the people.

[00:28:36] Mordy Oberstein: Also ask boxes on Google exports and it helps you see what questions your audience might be looking for answers for,

[00:28:44] Tool Time

[00:28:44] Mordy Oberstein: which is why it's tool time on the SES up podcast.

[00:28:58] Mordy Oberstein: What is. [00:29:00] AlsoAsked and how does it work? So

[00:29:02] Crystal Carter: also asked is it's a great tool. And again, um, we said, it said Mark Williams-Cook, um, and it essentially creates a tree. So for instance, for the queries Yankee, it'll give you the seed query and then it will spread out. So it'll give you those four first initial queries, and then it will expand the next four

[00:29:17] Mordy Oberstein: for each, right?

[00:29:18] Mordy Oberstein: Because when you like, when crystal opened up that box, when she, who was the best New York Yankee, when she clicked and opened the answer, Google loaded new questions related to the one that you just clicked on. Right. So what the tool does, it says, okay, when you open up this one, here is the four new questions that Google now showed on the SERP, so that now, you know, not just the first four questions, but now, you know, the four new questions that Google loaded.

[00:29:45] Mordy Oberstein: Once you opened up one of the questions I. Go ahead.

[00:29:50] Crystal Carter: So the thing that's great about the tool is that it essentially gives you a bird's eye view of this, of this rabbit hole. Right? So, so if you're on the SERP you're actually trying to do this manually, then you have to click and click and click and click and click

[00:29:59] Mordy Oberstein: and [00:30:00] they, and then write down the questions that are, that are keep coming up so that you can answer em on your website, which makes

[00:30:04] Crystal Carter: sense.

[00:30:05] Crystal Carter: And they don't actually go in order. So the four questions. So if you do it on the SERP, when you click who's the best Yankee, then four questions will pop down the bottom, but the other three questions will still be there.

[00:30:13] Mordy Oberstein: And it's all very, yeah, it's chaos. It looks visually chaotic. completely.

[00:30:18] Crystal Carter: So, um, AlsoAsked gives you, gives it to you a very clear, very easy to read sort of tree, uh, query tree, which helps you to, or to think about blog topics, log headers, FAQs insights on your customer journey, and also can help you with things like feature snippets, because I think a lot of people don't realize, but featured snippets and, and people also.

[00:30:35] Crystal Carter: And a few, a few other sort features very often fit into each other. Yeah. So if you can rank for people also ask you are increasing your chances of ranking for a featured snippet as well. So, so it's a really great tool for,

[00:30:47] Mordy Oberstein: for it's just great. It's a great tool. Check it out. AlsoAsked.com a link to in the show notes, but you there's, it's a freemium models.

[00:30:54] Mordy Oberstein: You can try it out for free. Go ahead and give it a try. What you'll basically get are a series of [00:31:00] questions that are pulled from what Google thinks people are asking. Which will give you some great ideas to write about for your own website. Yeah.

[00:31:07] Crystal Carter: And it's also written the way that people write questions.

[00:31:10] Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's really, it's a great, great tool, which why we're featuring it here on tool time on the SERP's Up podcast.

[00:31:16] Mordy Oberstein: Now we'd be remiss if we left you off without two more things. One is some news and then two is some places where you can learn more about SEO. So with that, let's get to some snappy news.

[00:31:37] Snappy SEO News

00:31:37] Mordy Oberstein: Snappy news, steppy news, steppy news, big stuff this week, bringing out the big guns with an update to Google's latest, greatest, and most awesomeness machine learning property MUM, which is 1000 times more powerful than Burt, whatever that means. Well, it does mean that it can understand content in all new ways.

[[00:31:55] Mordy Oberstein: So if you remember, Google gave an example around preparing for a hike and it showed that MUM would break down and parse the word, prepare in all sorts of ways, from training for the hike to gear for the hike. And so. And since then, we've all been waiting for the moment where MUM would be further integrated into the Google algorithm.

[00:32:13] Mordy Oberstein: So per a blog post Google release, and as covered by surgeon and journals, Matt Southern link in the show notes, quoting the article from SEJ Google's algorithms can understand when sources agree on. Same fact as Matt puts it, Google's multitask unified model. MUM algorithm is now capable of identifying when multiple high quality sources agree on the same fact.

[00:32:36] Mordy Oberstein: This update to MUM is [00:01:00] part of a more significant effort to improve information literacy across the web. So specifically here, what Google's doing is going to be using MUM to see if the call out and the featured snippet has a consensus. So for example, Say I search for how big is the sun compared to the moon?

[00:32:55] Mordy Oberstein: So you currently this, when I search for it, you get big, bold texts that shows up above the rest of the snippet of content and above the, and the feature snippet that says 400 times, meaning the moon is 400 times smaller. The sun is 400 times bigger than the moon. Then of course you get the rest of the content and the featured snippet and the URL.

[00:33:13] Mordy Oberstein: Google's going to be using MUM to see if there's consensus around those callout snippets, in this case, consensus around the fact that the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon. The reason why I'm covering this now for you here, even though, by the time you hear this news, it might be on the older side.

[00:33:32] Mordy Oberstein: Ish is because it's huge. It's a huge insight to how MUM works and [00:02:00] I wanted you to know about it. So yes, MUM can parse things and break things down, like preparing for a hike into all different sorts of intents and subtopics. And that's amazing, but what's amazing here is that it could pull it all back together.

[00:33:51] Mordy Oberstein: Unite, what it sees out there on the web to create all new understanding in this case, the understanding is when there is a consensus around a topic that it can there for show in the lead call out of a feature snippet. So boiling it all down for you here, what's important for you to recognize, I think is, with machine learning super important to align with how the machine learning sees a topic.

[00:34:16] Mordy Oberstein: And how it thinks that topic should be handled. So you want to do on your site, what you see Google doing with its machine learning. If Google's machine learning properties. In this case, MUM thinks about a topic in one way, align with that topic because that's how machine learning works. Anyway, with that, that is the snappy news [00:03:00] for this week on these SERP's Up podcast.

[00:34:39] Mordy Oberstein: last up for today and last up each week on the SERP's Up podcast,

[00:34:49] Follow of the Week

[00:34:49] Mordy Oberstein: we wanna help you learn more about SEO world by following the leaders in the SEO world. So this week we have none other who better to start this off with.

[00:34:59] Mordy Oberstein: Then Wix's own head of SEO. Mm-hmm Nati Elimelech who you can find on Twitter at @Netanel N E T A N E L. We will link to it. The show notes, but he's a great person. First off you can find him. He's did a whole bunch of webinars. He did a whole webinar. He did with Deep Crawl. I'm going through some technical SEO stuff.

[00:35:21] Mordy Oberstein: There's Wix SEO unfiltered re explains what Wix has done around SEO, but he is always out there on Twitter asking questions, putting thoughts out there. It's a great account to follow actually.

[00:35:32] Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that he's got a really good understanding of making sure that, that the CMS works for users.

[00:35:39] Crystal Carter: I think one of the things that I've, I've found in working with Nati and his team and the way he runs this team is seeing how people respond. I'm like, oh, there's this new, cool thing that's happening [00:35:00] in SEO? Oh, this is really interesting. And like the response from Nati, um, and from Inot. So whenever I have this conversation is, but how does it help the users?

[00:35:56] Crystal Carter: How is it good for users? How is it good for. How does his help users do better SEO? And that is essentially how he approaches SEO. That's how he approaches Twitter. And that's the kind of content that he shares. That's the kind of content that he advocates for. And those are kind kind of conversations that he advocates for as well.

[00:36:10] Crystal Carter: Yeah. And, um, he's got some great insights and some great perspectives

[00:36:13] Mordy Oberstein: on that. Yeah. I mean, look, there's only maybe two other people on the planet that I can think of who are doing SEO the scale, that Nati does that's where he is literally auditing millions of websites. So you figure a dude, like that's gotta have some unique insights, which he does also some bad jokes.

[00:36:28] Mordy Oberstein: Ignore the bad jokes on Twitter. but keep the SEO insights he's @Netanel on Twitter. I think that's it. Crystal. I think, I think we've managed to get through the first episode we have casted a pod. Success. Great. Well done. Yes. So thank you for joining us on the [00:36:00] SERP's Up podcast. Are you gonna miss us not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode, as we'll dive into creating great content for users and for bots, look for wherever you can consume your podcast on or aforementioned SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn, looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content we have on the Wix learning hub at you guest at wix.com/seo/learn until next time.