SEO for gates, paywalls and exclusive content

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 I'm joined by the amazing fabric, the incredible, fantastic... Is she behind a paywall? Is she not behind a paywall? Can you exit a... We don't know, we'll find out. The head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hi, I'm Crystal Carter. And yes you do. If you pay me five pounds, I'll chat to you, I promise, like $5, rubles, rand, what other currency is acceptable.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not a random joke, by the way. Dear audience, you will see why that joke makes sense in a few minutes because otherwise it is completely random. Makes absolutely no sense why I would say that.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Completely random. But that is why we're here today. We're here to talk about... What are we going to talk about Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

Not yet.

Crystal Carter:

Not yet. It's it exclusive?

Mordy Oberstein:

You have to first send in your email address and then-

Crystal Carter:

Oh wait, do we have to like and subscribe?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. There's so many hints of what we're talking about today already. But before we get to that, this SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where we've added two new reports to our Google Search Console analytics around search console performance over time and search console, average position reporting. Check out both of those reports in addition to the two other reports we already have for you within your Wix analytics, which has absolutely nothing to do with the concept that we're talking about today. Usually, I try to tie them in. But the writing of the outline for this podcast episode came out along with the release of the two reports. So I felt like, let's go with it.

Crystal Carter:

It's important for all SEO and actually a lot of standard SEO, it also applies to exclusive VIP gated behind a membership subscriber space as well. So there are lots of SEO overlap that you need to pay attention to.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, you know what? No, I got to pivot. I got to pivot.

Crystal Carter:

You got to pivot.

Mordy Oberstein:

These reports will come mightily in hand if, say you were to track organics performance for, I don't know, gated content.

Crystal Carter:

For gated content, for content that is behind maybe a login-

Mordy Oberstein:

Or some other paywall

Crystal Carter:

Or some sort of lead gen form. That sort of thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Correct. You can track your performance with these analytical reports because today, guess what we're talking about, SEO for content that's behind some sort of gate paywall or other sort of exclusivity that you're trying to use to possibly generate more leads for yourself.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

To be honest, that's why you're collecting those emails. That's not for the fun of it.

Crystal Carter:

This is it. This is it. And sometimes it's a question of being able to deliver somebody something that maybe is a big file. And so sometimes there's just a way of doing it that way.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. There's legitimate reasons other than the lead gen to collect the emails. But now that you have the email.

Crystal Carter:

I mean-

Mordy Oberstein:

Right? Now that we're here. We're talking all about SEO and gated content, when to get your content, how to handle the SEO considerations around gated content, and even how ChatGPT and AI writers plays into the gated content equation. Because no podcast episode is safe when we're talking about AI these days.

Crystal Carter:

Nope. No, the bots are here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Plus, we'll explore what some gated pages that our ranking well are doing so you can take away some lessons for your own pages. And of course, we have the Snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness out there on social media. So enter your name, company, and email address as episode number 32 of the SERP's Up podcast is now downloading. You don't really need to enter your email address or name or anything.

Crystal Carter:

No, you don't. Although, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can do that. And then whenever we drop the latest, most exclusive podcast, you can get it. It's not that exclusive at all. We're literally on all of the podcast networks that we're not exclusive. But as soon as it drops, you'll get an email in your inbox, which is a great service that we're happy to provide.

Mordy Oberstein:

So we're not using it for lead gen, we're using it because legitimately, we need to know where to email the newsletter too.

Crystal Carter:

So we're going to be talking today about gates, paywalls and exclusive content. And one of the things that I did as soon as I started looking at this topic was to go to the news people, the people who are managing news websites because they have been in this space for longer than anyone. Because one of the things that folks who are looking at news websites will say that is that they had to deal with a big shift because there was one point where the news was essentially where you got a lot of information. And then, with the advent of the internet, lots of people were getting information from lots of places. And so news folks had to find another way to manage their things and to make sure that they can pay their reporters and bills and all that sort of stuff.

So there's some fantastic people who are working in the news SEO space. Shout out to Barry Adams. Shout out to Shelby Blackley. Shout out to Jessie Willms over at WTF SEO. Basically, when I was looking at this topic, I find it really fascinating and there's a few things that we can think about. So there's paywalls, and paywalls are not necessarily a bad thing. One of the things that they talk about in WTF SEO is that the New York Times, for instance, was getting a lot of good activity out of their paywall. So they're generating millions of pounds every year based on their paywall because they make very, very good content, for instance. So they're able to charge a little bit of money for that. And so they're not necessarily a bad thing. You do need to manage them correctly. Google has a specific documentation about how you can make sure that you have structured data that supports your paywall content.

So for instance, you need to say to Google in declaring your structured data whether or not it's accessible for free. So there's a property within structured data it says is accessible for free. And if it is not, then you say false. And that's something that you should consider when you're thinking about paywalls. And what kind of paywalls are there? Well, there's hard paywalls, which is essentially where you have to subscribe and pay for everything and callers can't access it and other people can't access it unless they either pay you or subscribe or join or whichever. There's soft paywalls where you essentially gate part of your content for a few articles for a month. So the Washington Post for instance, does this where you go onto their website and they're like, "You've got three free articles. There's your one. Thank you very much." Then the next time they're like, "You've got two left," that sort of thing. So that's a soft paywall.

And then there's combination paywall where you have a few paywalls that are free, a few pieces of content that are free and some that are gated. This often happens during big events. So for instance, The Financial Times generally gates a lot of their content. But during peak COVID, they had a lot of COVID data and that was freely accessible. This is a really good opportunity to get people to understand your brand and see the robustness of your reporting. So The Financial Times, their COVID reporting was really, really good. And so that made me think, well, maybe it is worth paying for that sort of thing. I didn't, but I could.

The thing that's important to think about is if you were trying to rank hard paywalls, all right, no. If you have an audience that is engaged and an audience that is your subscriber list and an audience that you are giving exclusive, exclusive content, then cool, go through the hard paywall. But if you're expecting to rank, then Google's not calling your site and other folks aren't being able to see it. One of the other challenges that a lot of people have discussed, this is something that Barry Adams and WTF SEO talked about and a few other folks talk about, is one of the things that's a challenge for paywall content is pogo sticking. So people will go to say, The New York Times, or they'll go to a website that has a paywall and they'll go, "I'm interested in this." And then they go, "Oh, I have to pay for it?" And then they go back to the SERP.

So that's something that you have to think about. And then the other thing you have to think about is that you might get fewer backlinks. And I looked at this. So thinking about news, again, I compared The New York Times to The Guardian, for instance. The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, they just say, "Please, would you contribute? Would you mind, so kindly?" And for instance, The New York Times has all a lot more organic traffic overall, and they have a lot more keywords overall. But The Guardian has 1.6 billion backlinks and the New York Times has, according to Semrush, has 967 million backlinks. And so that a thing to consider as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also, qualify your traffic data. Just because they're there, doesn't mean... They might have just came and left.

Crystal Carter:

Also, I think that you'll want to think about the value of that traffic. So if you have subscribed to traffic, then that value is potentially going to be more. So this is something to think about. So then we have gated content, general gated content. And this is something that folks who are big into their content marketing will use very strategically in order to add real deep value to their users and to engage their audience. And it's nice to think of this as part of your funnel. So I know that Semrush has some of their webinars where you have to log in, you give them their email address, they give you the webinar link, you give them one thing. And sometimes this is also a way to sort of satisfy content that's on school domains. So for instance, if you have your webinars hosted on a webinar platform and you have your website on your main platform, then it might be that you gate it so that you can direct them to the landing page. That's the appropriate page in a way that you're able to track.

Also, it's a way for you to build in your funnel so that somebody maybe gets one, you get their email and you're able to send them resources and then you're able to add more value on top of that. Gated content is great for things like white papers, for research, for eBooks, for media, webinars and things like that. And for those ones, you're going to want to optimize your landing page for instance. And yeah, it's a really interesting topic. A lot of people have written about it and it's something that I think is really fascinating.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's really interesting because you have so many things going. On the news side, the news side's a little bit different than your typical gated content because it's gated, let's say The New York Times, but Google needs to be able to crawl it and then index it.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Its own thing.

Crystal Carter:

Barry Adams wrote a great article recently called Best Practices for Paywalls and SEOs, and he talks a lot about that. So essentially, the bot needs to have free access in order to be able to call it and see the content appropriately. And there's lots of other things that news sites do. They have like RSS set up so that they're able to submit their content to Google in a certain way so that Google can read it that way as well. And there's lots of other things that they do there.

But if you really want to get into the details, I cannot recommend enough Barry's article, Best Practices for Paywalls and SEO. There's also the article, WTF SEO, they have two articles on new SEO paywall strategies. They have a part one and a part two where they go into it as well and they talk about lots of different strategies. It's really fascinating and it's something that we might see a little bit more of. I think you hinted at this a little bit, but I think it's something that people might want to be considering when we're thinking about a space where the nature of content is changing because of the AI space.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, let's just dive into that I guess at this point, because that's a point you illuminated to me about. I thought it was a great point that AI writers, whatever you want, the ChatGPTs of the world are built on scraping content and then spitting that out. And if you don't want to lend your voice to that, if everybody else is doing it and I don't do it, am I then left out of the equation or do I say, "Do I not be part of this," and just differentiate myself? That is a very top level brand content strategy, SEO everything kind of question.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And there's no simple answer to that, but one of the things you might want to consider is, you know what? Let's not let them crawl this.

Crystal Carter:

So a lot of the chatGPT for instance, is using Common Crawl as one of their data sources, for instance. And I had a look in web archive and you look at web archive and you see the common crawls that they've done, it doubled between 2020 and 2021. And chatGPT, their data has taken extensively up till 2021. So there has been an influx in data coming from then. And what we're seeing with some of the AI image generators, for instance, they're scraping Getty Images and we can tell because when they generate images, it still has the Getty Image watermark on it.

So a company like Getty Images for instance, might think, well, we might potentially want to block that crawler. But then when we have AI search, if you think about new Bing, if you think about Google's proposed Bard situation, then it might be that you're less visible on those search engines. So I think that your brand point is really important because if you think about someone like The New York Times, they have an established name, they have an established brand and they can say, "Hey, subscribe to us, you're going to get really good stuff. It's going to be really good." And a lot of people from doing this with Patreon and YouTube and stuff because they're like, this takes me a lot of time and effort to create. If you want it, pay me a fiver a month and I'll give you really great content and you'll enjoy it. And lots of people make a living out of that, and lots of people make great content out of that. So I think it's something lots of people should be considering of lots of different business styles.

Mordy Oberstein:

The New York Times is literally a great example. I was at Semrush's Global Marketing Day and one of the people I was on a panel with, she was actually presenting, was from the New York Times. And she was going through their strategy around they want to show the value how complicated and hard it is to get good news and get good reporting. What you have to do as a reporter to be accurate, to be novel, to get this information and that because it's so hard, that's not something that should be free necessarily, you should pay for. And that's a very much a brand decision for them. And that's something where I think your SEO value may contradict the brand if you're now not going to show up when Bing does an AI chat, now you're not going to be cited by Bing like, okay, because as a brand, don't care.

Crystal Carter:

It's a very interesting business proposition because, and I think that this is why a lot of folks are saying that a combination paywall or a combination of gated and free stuff works really well. So if you think its social media, there's something that people talk about. They talk about a thirst trap, which is essentially where you have a celebrity or something and they generally post things about, "Hey, look at me, I'm on set" or whatever. And then every now and then they post an amazing picture where they're just looking very sultry or they're giving it blue steel or whatever. And people call it a thirst trap.

Essentially, what you'll need to do is have a few things that are maybe a pillar post or maybe a high traffic thing or something that gets a lot of attention on search. And then maybe be more selective about the kinds of content that you keep back for your team. And I think this is something that we see with newsletters. Newsletters is something that's changing as well. There's people who are like, you can pay to be on my newsletter. And people pay to get a high quality newsletter.

And I think that in a space where we're going to see a high volume of content coming from ChatGPT, because literally I could create something without even typing. I could talk into my phone and say, "Make me an article about something," and then it could spit something out. And I think in a space where we're seeing a lot of volume, quality is going to be equality based on brand recognition, based on entity, based on trust, is going to be a big difference. And I think that people will be interested in potentially paying for that, potentially being in a community where that's available. And in order to manage that, we'll have to think more strategically about it. And I think that people who are building up their mailing lists are going to be more resilient to that. People who are building up their communities are going to be more resilient to that going forward.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I think, by the way, leaving the gated side of it alone for just one second, in an AI era, one of the things that's going to be important is being recognized as someone with differentiated content. Meaning if there's a mass influx of generic-ish kind of content out there, you as a brand being known when your site shows up on the SERP and there's three other sites with you above the fold, you might think, well, I'm not ranking number one, I'm not ranking number two, I'm number three or four. But in a world where that brand differentiation is going to be a thing, people might skip over one or two because they know that's whatever, but you are known for your great content and then click. It's going to become, if I can make a prediction, that service association two brands as having great content is going to become a thing going forward.

And I want to hit back to something you mentioned before about having different forms of content is at times putting out the blog post or the articles and then at time is doing a gated piece. One thing that I think works really well, and I think you'll see companies, Semrush does this lot, where they'll do a state of search. Remember I wrote a state of search for them 2022. And what we did was we put out a few sections that we thought were really interesting and that was free. And it was a regular blog post. It wasn't thin, it was a good couple of pages. Or if you wanted to really dive into the whole thing, then you go behind the paywall. So you got the best of both worlds. You got the organic whatever out of it, juice for lack of a better word, but you also got that ability to show up behind a paywall to get the leads, which is the other part of it.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And this is something that you see a lot of people do with extract. So I used to do a lot of work with the food industry, so you'd have somebody who'd written them an amazing book. I know that Mordy is apparently the chef du jour on the General Tso's chicken. And so let's say he's got his book on how to make these amazing meals, what you would do is you'd have one recipe that you feature in one magazine and you say, "This is an extract from this book." And it's that sort of thing. This is a great recipe. And it's just in the same way that you have singles that you released from your album and then you have the whole album. You want to make sure that... I say as if I released an album. I'm like, yeah, last week.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have the good songs and the crap songs.

Crystal Carter:

I didn't say it.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, but sometimes as you won the whole album, you want to feel the album. I really like to feel the album with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I always like to feel the album.

Crystal Carter:

What's that Marvin Gaye song, the album, what's going on? It's actually pretty much a whole album.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, there's themed albums like The Who's Quadrophenia is a whole theme of an album.

Crystal Carter:

It's a whole album. If you listen to one at a time, you don't get the same experiences if you listen to the whole thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, this is true. I'm being facetious.

Crystal Carter:

Music podcast later. One thing that I think people should be considering now in the AI era is thinking about whether or not you have the kind of content that people would be willing to pay for.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right.

Crystal Carter:

If you needed to, is your content good enough Where if you were like, "I'm charging for this now," and people would be like, "Yeah, okay."

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great sniff test. That's a great sniff test.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, would you pay for this? It's like, yeah, I would, this is really good. I would like. And I've seen people who've had things that they, or communities or something they have and they're like, "I'm putting buy me a coffee thing on that." And I'm like, yeah, I will buy you a coffee because I value this so much that I want to make sure that you're able to continue making this content for me because I really, really value it. I think it's really good.

Mordy Oberstein:

We might end up turning the engine on its head a little bit from going from volume to focus audience, but it's a whole different conversation for a different time. One thing I do want to bring up really quickly is that gated content or areas that are segmented off without having immediate access apply more often than you think.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So there's a lot of pages, forums, for example are like this, membership. So you may not realize, we're talking about gated content. I don't have any gated content, I don't have any blog posts or eBooks or whatever. But there could be many pages on your website that if you started thinking about, wait a second, they actually are gated. I didn't even realize it.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Wix has a tool that allows you, if somebody wants to comment on your blog, you can make it-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, that's what I was thinking.

Crystal Carter:

... That they're a member. And this has benefits for a couple of reasons. So this means that you'll have less spam.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was going to say keep the riffraff out.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So it means you'll have less spam in your comments because spam in your comments can bring down the quality of your content. For instance, it also means that you are able to engage your mailing list, for instance. So it means that if you open up your comments and that people have to subscribe or whatever in order to comment, then that means you're going to be on a mailing list just from people being able to comment. I've seen content which has very little SEO optimization on the actual page itself, but is ranking for hundreds of keywords because it has a very engaged comment section, like a recipe site in particular that I know, because it's like, "Best recipe ever," in the comments, like seven times. And that's really useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Don't go to your recipe now and start leaving comments for yourself. Please don't do that.

Crystal Carter:

SEOs are going to SEO, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry, just had to say that. Now since you're talking about using gated content to get email addresses to get leads, we thought it may make sense to offer you some tips about how to do that most effectively. And to do that, we brought Amalia Fowler over and she's going to talk to us now about how to get max value, even max leads out of gated content.

Amalia Fowler:

Gated content. It's one of those things people think is really easy to do, but so many things can go wrong. And this is especially true if you're not paying attention to the little things that matter. And a lot of what matters actually happens before the user even accesses the content itself. One of the first ways to get maximum value out of gated content is to make sure that you not only know who you're speaking to, but also where they are in their user journey. What content is going to appeal to them? What pain point are you helping them overcome? What motivation are you tapping into and how does everything you are putting together speak to that, but also fit into the larger user journey?

Once you know who you're speaking to, you've got to make sure that your value proposition is clear. If I cannot immediately understand what I am going to receive for giving you my information, then you're not going to get me to fill out a form. I need some incentive. This is because filling out a form is an information exchange. One sentence that I've heard, and I don't know who said it originally, is that information is the currency of the internet. And I find this to be so true. I know, the average user knows, that a business is going to get value from my information, from my name or from my email. So the value that they're offering in return has to be proportional.

The more a business wants from someone, the more they have to give in return. This is especially true if you're going to ask for a phone number and if you've made that a mandatory field and you don't want to fake number in there, you have got to make the gated content worth the person's while of giving you that level of information. After all of that, finally, the content itself needs to be super high quality and deliver on your promise. If it's not high quality, why is it gated? It should be relevant, clear, actionable, unique, and much like the content we write on blogs or on webpages, it also needs to solve a problem, that initial problem that you've understood from understanding your audience.

The risks are higher with gated content than with content that users access for free because they've given you their information and the law of reciprocity dictates that they get something of value in return. So if somebody doesn't feel like they've received value from the content or submitting their information was a waste of time, then you've probably lost them at a point in the journey where you really want to be nurturing them. To get maximum value from your gated content, you've got to make sure that you know who you're speaking to, your value proposition is clear, that your form asks for proportional information and that the content is actionable, unique and relevant to the user. This is how you get somebody going, "Oh man, that was really worth it," as opposed to going, "Oh crap, now I need to change my phone number."

Mordy Oberstein:

That last line is gold.

Amalia Fowler:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Gold. When you're putting something behind a gate and people are entering their personal information, i.e. their email address and their name, you feel vulnerable as a person. And now you're in a very precarious spot as a brand because the goal is not to get the email address. I think people think, got my email, I have succeeded. The goal is to use that email address effectively. So now you have the email address. Now you're going to email them all about your product and your newsletter or whatever you're going to email them about and they see your brand, like those SOBs, those are the people I gave them my... How do I get out? I don't want nothing to do with them, which is not what you want, not what you want.

Crystal Carter:

It's not what you want, it's not what you want. And she's like, you got to change your phone number. This is the thing. If I gave my email address, I don't want to give it to somebody who I trust. It's about trust. If you're gating the content and you're telling me that this content is gated, it needs to be good. Like she says like, oh my gosh, if it's not good, why is it gated? Facts, big facts. And I think that nobody wants to get onto an email list for a bunch of junk. However, if you get onto someone's mailing list and they're sending you good stuff, good quality things like, "Hey, we think this will help you. Hey, we think this is good. Hey, you asked for this ebook. We also have this other thing that you might be interested in," or "Because you signed up for this webinar, we also have this other thing you might be interested in." That's great. Like you said, it's not about getting the email address, it's about having the opportunity to build a relationship.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, yes, thank you.

Crystal Carter:

And what she was saying was that it's high risk because if you don't deliver, then yeah, you can burn that bridge and that's awful. You don't want to do that. So you want to make sure that yeah, it's good quality when you gate something and it's good quality when you're creating it. I remember working with somebody who was a client and they were really into, look, get this brochure downloaded. The brochure was six pages and had very little stuff and they were like, "How come no one's downloading the brochure?" I was like, "It's not a good brochure." And also, they wanted a phone number for it. And I think that's something to remember as well. Be careful with the data that you're asking for. There's no reason for them to ask for a phone number for you to download a PDF. None. And yet, they were trying to do this. And I was like, "Guys, no, don't do that. Ask for what you need." I've had it before where people are like, "What's your first name and what was your dog's name?"

Mordy Oberstein:

You don't need any of that. Why do you need to know any of that? It's super annoying. Super annoying. And also, be careful. They read it. It's an amazing asset you created and they love you now, and they gave you the email address and they're glad, and then they get 400 emails from you the next day. It's a relationship, everything is all part of the funnel. You can't be good at one spot, you need to be good at all of the spots.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. It's like if somebody opens the gate to your house and you welcome them in, you don't want to. . , you welcome them.

Mordy Oberstein:

They were a great dinner guest for the first course. Once the dessert came out, they were destroying everything, throwing plates and all sorts of whatnot. So thank you, Amalia. Look for Amalia out in there on Twitter @AmaliaEFowler. That's A-M-A-L-I-A-E-F-O-W-L-E-R. We'll link to that in the show notes. And big shout out to RicketyRoo, where she's a senior PPC manager. So good folks over there, the RicketyRoo agency, Blake, Amanda, a lot of good folks over there.

All right. Now, there are plenty of sites or plenty of pages rather, that have some great gated content that rank well. But we thought, well, even more great reason to go have a look at what's ranking that is behind the gate and look why is that ranking, even though it's behind a gate or what's happening there and what's not happening there, and what could we learn for ourselves and our own gated content. So welcome to the gated version From the Top of the SERP. Just kidding, again, it's not actually gated.

Crystal Carter:

No. You don't have to give us your email in order to read this part of.. Read? Listen to this part of-

Mordy Oberstein:

Listen. Or you could read it, I guess. We have a transcript on the-

Crystal Carter:

There's a transcript because we like to add value for our users.

Mordy Oberstein:

See? And that's not behind a gate either. Only the newsletter is behind the gate. But again, how are we going to email it to you-

Crystal Carter:

If we don't have your email?

Mordy Oberstein:

We don't have your email address. We're not prophets.

Crystal Carter:

We like to do combinations. We have the complete guide Wix SEO, as written by one Mordy Oberstein. And if you go to that website, you can have it as a webpage, or you can enter your email and we'll email it to you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And you can download it and do that thing that you do with whatever you download. So there's a bunch of keywords we were looking at, that bring up gated content. For example, I was looking at state of marketing reports. So marketing reports about the state of marketing. And the second result is from HubSpot, and it's gated. And interesting by the way, the result after that is Semrush. They have a state of content marketing 2023. And that used to be behind a gate. And that's an interesting strategy by the way. For the first, let's say month or so, I don't remember the exact time, they had it behind a gate or they had a very limited version that was not gated. And then they had the full version that was gated. And then eventually, after that... which makes so much sense because after a while, it's not about the leads at that point, it's about the ranking. So switch it up.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right, right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And now the whole thing is there and you can download it if you want to. But you don't have to, you can read the whole thing. So that's one cool strategy. And the HubSpot page is you just have to download the thing. It's a data marketing report. It's a little outdated, Google, some 2022. But okay, leave that aside. What they do is they have a little paragraph about the content and then they have download the free report. What I would say with them is they're known for this kind of thing and a lot of that topical authority and links back into them ranking for this particular keyword.

Crystal Carter:

They're trusted for what they're known for. So people know, hey, if I give them my email address, they're not going to spam me with a bunch of stuff or any of the things that they do send me are probably going to be relevant to the thing that I'm interested in and it's not a big deal. I know where they are. I can find the information again, et cetera, et cetera. So these are a prime example of... And then also these, again, Amalia talked about the funnel. These are teams that have a marketing funnel that includes the data content as part of the funnel, or they're using it strategically to support that funnel. Because sometimes it might be that if you have something that's maybe a high ticket item that maybe you're not going to get a lot of people who are buying that 7,000 pound or $7,000 thing all the time, but you might get people who want to know about it, for instance.

So if you had a luxury car or something that had a special kind of engine, you might have somebody who wants to know more about those kinds of engines, like a USP. And it might be that you can have a gated piece of content or the state of electric vehicles, for instance, that sort of thing. And that will give you potential leads. And you might not even expect to see a big return on it straight away, but it's about building trust in the long term. So it's interesting to see that ready for that and building their relationships.

Mordy Oberstein:

And by the way, one of the things that they have, by the way, you start to fill out your name and whatever, that they have a little percentage completed icon so that you're not like, "Oh my God, how much more information do I have to give to get this." But again, there's a lot of things you can do. You can still rank and be behind a gate. It is possible. I know you were looking for a bunch of keywords also.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. So one of the ones I found, we talked a lot about the New York Times. One of the things I found, and this goes back to what you were saying about how sometimes you think about gated content, but not everything we think of gated content is a hard gate or whatever. So cooking.nytimes.com is a recipe website. They have one piece of content called old fashioned beef stew, and it ranks for 400 number one keywords according to Semrush, for instance. So they rank for beef stew. According to Semrush, they're getting 27,000 bit's traffic every month from that. They rank for beef stew recipe, for instance. And if you go into their website, then if they have the article, but if you want to continue reading the article, you have to log in.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. That's another great strategy.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So the thing that's interesting about this is that this is also dealing with some of the changes that we're seeing around the way the web is. The web is becoming a lot less anonymous. And so if you log in, then the website will be able to track the analytics because when you log in, you're also agreeing to certain analytic conditions, like cookies, et cetera, et cetera.

And we're moving away from being able to just put cookies on everything, track whatever we like, any honest person. We're moving away from that. And so having content, any sort of, you have to log in first space allows a brand to get permission from that person in order to track the activity on the website, which sometimes is people being cheeky. Sometimes it's people being like, "I'm going to follow you around so that can sell you this lawnmower 25 times," even though you already bought the lawnmower. Oh my gosh, sometimes it's those people. But sometimes it's also just a case of making sure that you're able to make content that the people that are coming to your website are actually... So if you're seeing that lots of people are going to that beach, maybe you should make more about that sort of thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And that's a great point by the web itself is becoming a little bit more less anonymous for a variety of reasons. I think users want that. I think obviously, the websites want it because the state of analytics is just, the whole reason there's a GA4 is because of this. And again, you need to make sure that when you're doing this sort of thing where you're having a login that you let Google know this is how the content is accessed. So you have structured data, is accessible for free kind of thing. You need to let them know what this content is so that they know how to handle the content and they can make sure they can actually crawl and read the content.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And if you do that well, as this piece of content is doing, like I said, they're ranking for hundreds of keywords, best recipe for beef stew. So they're not suffering by managing their content.

Mordy Oberstein:

That is the moral of this story. You do not need to suffer just because you have decided to put your content behind some kind of gate.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you're taking anything away from this segment, you can absolutely do this.

Crystal Carter:

You can absolutely do this.

Mordy Oberstein:

There are many ways.

Crystal Carter:

There are many ways, and there's people who can support you. As I said, the space with news publishers, they're doing amazing stuff in this space, a great place to start. And you can experiment really, really easily. So for instance, like I said, Wix has a membership space which will allow you to gate some things and gate other things, allow you to put a price tag on some things. And it can also do it with certain tools as well. So it might be that you have, for instance, there's certain courses as well that you can add a paywall to, and you can use certain tools to help you do that sort of thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

A course is another great case of you're going to have gated content, but you want to rank, like I have a free course on this, or you want to make sure that you rank for that. And again, I think with gated content kind of behind a paywall, you can get creative with how you go about doing this, what you show, when you show it, how you change it, what you're asking for. You can get really, really creative with all this stuff.

Crystal Carter:

One of the things that news publishers do a lot, particularly if you have a hard paywall, or not necessarily a hard paywall, but maybe a free paywall or something like that, is it makes the headline that much more important. You need to lure people in.

Mordy Oberstein:

Don't go too crazy.

Crystal Carter:

Don't go too crazy, but you need to make sure that you're making it seem enticing. The telegraph always trends on Twitter for different things and then like, that's interesting. And then I click it and they're like, "You have to pay to be on the telegraph." And I'm like, "Oh my gosh." So your content distribution strategy should also help you to build your brand in order to increase the possibility that people are more likely to pay for whatever it is you're offering.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now, speaking of news publishers who are not behind a paywall, most of the SEO news publishers are not behind a paywall. In fact, if you were to put it behind a paywall, that would probably be a very bad idea because all of the great news publishers are not behind a paywall. So think about what your competitors are doing when you're putting your content behind a paywall. Because if you're going to get the same thing and you don't have to enter an email address, I'm just going to do that.

So here's this week's snappiest of SEO news from all the SEO news sites that are not behind a paywall. Okay, now it's time to panic. Just kidding, just kidding. The March, 2023 core update is now complete for are some of the data that the folks over at Semrush had me review, the update was far more impactful than the previous core update back in September, 2022. I'll link to Barry Schwartz's full write up over at Search Engine Land in the show notes.

Now, here's a fascinating one. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land again, Google Maps can attack fake phone numbers and photos and remove them. So when the evildoers of the web known as spammers throw their phone number onto a user contributed photo, Google said they can tell and remove it. The question of is this enough to fight spam, which Barry raises in his article is always a loaded one when it comes to local. Just the other day, Jason Brown showed how spammers are using ChatGPT to create fake reviews. Bet you didn't see that coming. I can't even.

Speaking of the great AI in the sky, Bard's team is getting beefed up. Per reports, Google is pulling folks from the Google Assistant division to work on Bard. I always think it's fascinating who Google pulls over for different projects. Not that I know the entire roster over at Google, by heart. I'm into Google, but they're not the Yankees. But it's more interesting to see what types of folks Google is moving over from what team. So for example, the VP of Google's e-com efforts got pulled into the Bard team, right? Fascinating. Some kind of e-com element coming to Bard, possibly. Who knows? Anyway, you can see the full writeup from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal in the show notes.

And finally, also from the great Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Bing Chat, they feature ads shaking up the ad free experience. Oh no, right? No, wrong. Good thing. What? It means Bing is focusing on having clicks from its AI experience. You can't run ads and then not have people click. No one will run an ad with you. So ads means focus on clicks, as crazy and ironic as that sounds. It's really healthy for the web, my experience or my opinion rather, and completely ironic again when you think about it, Bing by the way, is I think very publisher focused with its AI experience. Matt reports that they're thinking about a hover experience from the AI chat for the sighted links showing more links from that website. I really do think Bing looks at the AI chat experience as an accent to, not replacement of websites. And I think Bing will be one of the forces out there to force other search engines to think the same way. And with that, that is the Snappiest of SEO news.

Wasn't it great to get that SEO content that wasn't behind a paywall? What an inappropriate time to have a paywall.

Crystal Carter:

That would be inappropriate.

Mordy Oberstein:

It would be really inappropriate.

Crystal Carter:

Inappropriate. Although, there are definitely some people who have unique insights.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's true. So for example, you can super follow Barry Schwartz on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. And Marie Haynes has two versions of her newsletter, for instance. So she has one that gives you the top level and then they have another one that adds a lot more detail and a lot more nuance and a lot more information. And that sets up premium pay list.

Mordy Oberstein:

So yes, there is SEO news out there that is behind a gate that is worth paying for. I don't personally super follow Barry, but if I were to, I probably would be very satisfied just knowing Barry. So I recommend super following Barry. Hear that Barry? Super follow. Send Barry your sheckles.

Crystal Carter:

So you're going to super follow Barry?

Mordy Oberstein:

What I'm doing now is I want to see if Barry's really listening this far into the episode.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. We'll see if he's listening because yeah, Barry is an absolute legend.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry's an international treasure.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed. He's coming to London.

Mordy Oberstein:

He's coming to London. I was shocked.

Crystal Carter:

I know. He's coming to London.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you don't know who we're talking about, Barry Schwartz, who almost all the SEO news articles that we do on this show come from Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:

All the SEO news comes from Barry Schwartz.

Mordy Oberstein:

He's written something like 30,000, 40,000 SEO news articles. So it's incredible. Anyway, so as time ebbs away on us this week, Crystal, who should we be following for more SEO awesomeness?

Crystal Carter:

I'm going to throw an international follow in for this week. So this is a follow from someone called, please forgive me if I've mispronounced your name, but Antoine Eripret. It's a French name, so it might be Eripret. Who wrote a really great thread on gated content and SEO. I think he's originally French speaking, but it says that he lives in Spain. And he wrote a really great thread all about gated content and SEO and about interstitials and all of these sort of technical things.

And he talks in this thread a lot about the sort of accessible for free things that you need to do and a lot about some of the other elements that you can add in to see. So he gets into some of the technical details of paywall content. And he generally shares great content. He's an SEO for something called Liligo, and he shares some great content. He's got a good follower base of folks and he is really interested and curious about SEO topics. So yeah, follow him. Although I believe he's French speaking, he publishes lots of things in English as well. So yeah, just a shout out to an international SEO person.

Mordy Oberstein:

Amazing. So if you're looking to follow, @antoineripret over on Twitter, link to it in the show notes and that'll do it for us this week.

Crystal Carter:

That's it. Did you get your email address? Did you send me your email address?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. But please don't spam me, I will unsubscribe. If only you could unsubscribe from people emailing you.

Crystal Carter:

Sad about right now to spam your email address or to spam your email with lots of random things. I can't decide what I should spam your email about. Maybe about spam. Maybe I should just send you literal pictures of spam over and over again.

Mordy Oberstein:

That doesn't sound kosher to me. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into what you need to know if you want to go enterprise SEO. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review over at iTunes, and or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO.