How SEO agencies can drive client growth
How can SEO agencies accelerate client growth while driving greater revenue along the way?
Wix’s Mordy Oberstien and Crystal Carter are joined by the head of organic search at Connective3, Ben Barker, to discuss how to avoid getting lost in unattainable goals by focusing on achieving realistic incremental growth for your clients.
Buckle up as we hit the accelerator… on your clients’ growth on episode 95 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast!
Episode 95
|
July 10, 2024 | 45 MIN

This week’s guests
Ben Barker
With over 12 years’ experience in SEO, as Group Head of Organic Search, Ben oversees connective3's organic search offering including technical SEO, strategy and content. In his career, Ben has worked across a variety of different projects and verticals and has experience working on everything from SME's right through to global enterprise brands. His passion is creating and executing strategies that drive incremental value to businesses. He leverages his cross-channel experience and applies an ROI lens across all activity to ensure that he is driving profitable and sustainable growth for client brand.
Notes
Hosts, Guests, & Featured People:
Resources:
It's New: Daily SEO News Series
News:
No - Reddit Is Not Blocking Google Search
Google Zero Click Study Now At 58.5% In 2024
Google Search Console Working To Fix Search Performance Delays & Latency
Notes
Hosts, Guests, & Featured People:
Resources:
It's New: Daily SEO News Series
News:
No - Reddit Is Not Blocking Google Search
Google Zero Click Study Now At 58.5% In 2024
Google Search Console Working To Fix Search Performance Delays & Latency
Transcript
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 Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is oh so specific and oh so incremental, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.
Crystal Carter:
Hello, people of the internet. Incremental.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, I'm just talking nonsense. I don't know what that means.
Crystal Carter:
It's an interesting adjective. So yes, I guess so?
Mordy Oberstein:
Methodical. It's like saying you're methodical.
Crystal Carter:
Incremental, I think it's like small movements over time, I guess. And I guess that's life. Is that life?
Mordy Oberstein:
That's SEO and life, small movement over time.
Crystal Carter:
Life, life, life, life, life.
Mordy Oberstein:
Life is SEO.
Crystal Carter:
Sure. I'll take it. Fine. Yeah. What's up, podcast people? Let's go.
Mordy Oberstein:
Okay.
Crystal Carter:
Incrementally.
Mordy Oberstein:
Let's go incrementally into who the podcast is brought to you by, which is Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use the advanced permission settings in Wix Studio to assign the right team member to the right task for the right page at the right time. Because SEO success depends upon being as targeted as you can for your clients, as this week, our Wix Studio series focuses on being focused and targeted for incremental growth. How SEO agencies can separate the chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is when creating-
Crystal Carter:
Wheat.
Mordy Oberstein:
Huh?
Crystal Carter:
You sort the wheat from the chaff.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, but it's only if you're separating wheat. Let's say you're separating in like peanuts from the chaff.
Crystal Carter:
Peanuts have chaff?
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah. That little, that shell, the inner shell, like the soft shell.
Crystal Carter:
Okay. All right.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, that's chaff. How SEO agencies can separate the chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is, which is not just wheat, when creating an SEO plan for your clients, why you should even separate said chaff, and how it spurs client growth. And why SEO agencies often don't separate this chaff to begin with and how to avoid making the same mistake. To help us sift and winnow all of this proverbial chaff, Ben Barker, Group Head of Organic Search at connective3 will join us in just a few minutes. Plus we'll share a new tool that you can use to help you refine your rank tracking focus. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So join us as we place the flower that is your growth strategy for your clients through the SEO seed on this second episode of our Wix Studio series, AKA episode 95 of the SERP's Up Podcast. I don't know why I went with the whole chaff thing.
Crystal Carter:
I don't know, it was-
Mordy Oberstein:
But it's good. It's good. It's good a visual.
Crystal Carter:
Yeah?
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, in my mind it's throwing things up in the air and you're just separating out the good stuff from the bad stuff.
Crystal Carter:
Okay, cool.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, we're just going to go with it.
Crystal Carter:
Let's go with it. That is the theme of the show. Let's just go with it. It'll be fine.
Mordy Oberstein:
That's the theme of my life. Back to our life tips. Just for the audience, that's worked out for me about 50% of the time. You can look at that half empty or half full
Crystal Carter:
As you get older, I think you kind of realize it'll be fine. It'll be fine. I think I used to worry about a lot of things when I was younger that I do not worry about so much anymore.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, me too, like hair.
Crystal Carter:
And you figure it'll be fine.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, it'll be fine.
Crystal Carter:
It'll be fine.
Mordy Oberstein:
It's fine.
Crystal Carter:
Yeah.
Mordy Oberstein:
So what'll be fine is that this week, I had the lovely opportunity to chat with Ben, so we're going to dive into that. So here is my little chat with Ben Barker, Group Head of Organic Search at connective3.
So this is our second episode of our Wix Studio series. Wix Studio being a platform that helps digital marketers better manage your clients, projects and teams. All sorts of features such as reusable page assets and reusable widgets and apps and built-in AI code assistant to help you accelerate client growth and so forth and so forth and so forth, which is why this series is focused on helping agencies do just that, accelerate client growth and your own revenue along the way. To help us do this and understand how you can accelerate client growth, please welcome to the show Ben Barker, the Group Head of Organic Search at connective3.
Ben Barker:
Hi, Mordy. Thank you. Thank you for the intro. It's really, really nice to be here and I'm very much looking forward to chatting through everything with you today. Do you want me to give a little bit of background on myself?
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, so we're marketers here, so full pitch. Who are you and what does connective3 deal?
Ben Barker:
I've personally been working in SEO for probably twelve, thirteen years now, which is a very long time in the digital landscape. I think we've seen so much change over that time. I started back in the times when it was okay to go on forums and add random comments with links and style them-
Mordy Oberstein:
Hey, is that okay anymore? That's how I spend most of my day.
Ben Barker:
Yeah, I'm not sure if that's still cool or okay to do.
Mordy Oberstein:
It might be cool again with Reddit on the SERP.
Ben Barker:
Yeah, I mean, we don't know. To be fair, and this is a different topic, but I actually find a lot of results from Reddit are actually better than some of the results you get from Google for a lot of searches these days, but that's a kind of whole-
Mordy Oberstein:
A different can of wow. You just stepped on a landmine right there. We're going to just gloss right over that and keep going into your background.
Ben Barker:
I started out in SEO, started out doing a bit of link building as I've just mentioned. Well, some form of link building, and then I kind of moved into the more technical strategical side of it. And then maybe five or six years ago I did branch out into other channels as well, but SEO is my primary focus. That's my first love, if you like, and that's kind of where I spend most of my time these days. Connective3 were founded in 2019. They've seen huge growth over the last few years. We work with a variety of clients, really: E-comm, lead generation across finance, travel.
We do really good work with clients. I know that's kind of a bit of a cliche to say. If you look at our client retention rates, they're really, really strong. We've been working with some clients pretty much since we started the agency, or since the founder started the agency, sorry. So we've got a really strong track record and I think the key thing for us, which kind of feed into the topic of conversation today, I would guess, is that we're always looking for ways to show incremental growth. That is the really, really key thing, especially when it comes to SEO. As you know, Mordy, SEO is a bit of a black box. It's a bit of a dark art to a lot of senior stakeholders, especially within businesses that they know they need to do it, but they don't understand the why. And I think one thing that connective3 is really good at is helping them understand the why, and also connecting everything together. It's kind of in the name, but that's really, really what we do. That's just a bit of an intro from me.
Mordy Oberstein:
Look, that ties right in. I've always said SEO is for long-term stable growth. The trade-off to that is if you're looking to grow immediately right away and you see all those hockey stick graphs on social media, whatever, that's not actually what's going to look like. So let's lean into this. We spoke about this when we were deciding what to talk about and one of the things you mentioned I thought was really interesting, that sometimes agencies make the mistake where they're taking too broad of a stroke when they're looking to improve client growth. So let's maybe start, what do you mean by that and what do you mean exactly by honing in and incremental growth? What are we talking about?
Ben Barker:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a few different facets to it, but the main one that I'll kind of talk about maybe to begin with is probably how agencies would forecast. Because when you are speaking to clients or prospects I think, you're always going to have to put a forecast together. When I'm talking about broad strokes in the context of forecasting, and you may have seen this yourself in the past, I've definitely seen this because I've worked in-house and agency side, so I've kind of seen both sides of it, but you'll quite often get, "Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Client, here's your projected growth." And what the agency will have done is they will have looked in Google Analytics, they will have looked at previous year's data and they will just forecast a rough 10% growth on top of that, right? And whilst that's not necessarily wrong, what does that actually mean?
Because when we do forecast as an example, when I do or my team do forecast for organic traffic, you almost have to take it back to the base. You need a lot more context of how the business works and what they've done previously. So as an example, I used to work for a big retail brand and they would often run above the line activity, so TV activity as an example. Now the challenge comes in where when you come to forecast the year after, quite often you will see a big halo effect from the TV activity across brand and in some cases non-brand traffic. You can't use that then to forecast your projected growth because it is almost artificially inflated. What you have to do is you have to exclude any other marketing campaigns or anything outside of the normal growth of what you may see.
A lot of agencies don't tend to do that because they don't tend to dig into the context of, okay, what have you done previously and how has that affected your growth? So first of all, you need to strip it back to the basics. A, what growth would we get had we done nothing at all and the market grew the way it grew? So the market might grow by 5 or 10% year-on-year. That's fine. That's your baseline. Then what you need to do is you need to sort of figure out from that growth and what we want to achieve for you as our client, what areas, what products, what services, what categories are you looking for specific growth within? And do you also have any new products, services, or categories coming in this year? Because you need to then factor that in potentially.
What you would then do is you quite often find that, in the sense of an e-commerce brand as an example, you might have 20% of your products which make 80% of your revenue. So therefore it makes more sense to do an initial forecast at least on the projected growth within those areas. So you would then take those categories and then everybody has a different process for forecasting, but you can take things like search volume, click-through rate sessions, et cetera, et cetera, average transaction value. And then you can sort of build a forecast based off specific growth for those categories. Now, I'm not saying you'd only do those categories, but that's where you would start. And then what you would do is say, "Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Client, we've built this forecast for you on your specific or your key services products areas," and then you can almost do a secondary forecast then for everything else.
What that then means is that you're not just presenting your client with an overall number that says, "We're going to give you 15% growth. We haven't really specified whether it's brand or non brand. We haven't really told you what categories." I think quite often what happens is really awkward conversations will come about maybe six to nine to twelve months later in that if you don't do that, you may have grown their traffic by 10 or 15%, but it may be via kind of lower relevancy informational type content. So they may not actually be making more money from that traffic, which is a problem because SEO isn't just about driving traffic. SEO or organic as a kind of channel, it does many different things. It is informative. That's what we need to do. It is a direct response channel. It is a brand retention channel, and it's even a brand awareness channel to a degree.
You kind of have to think about all of those things and you have to factor that in when you're your forecasting because otherwise, like I said, you can end up having a conversation down the road whereby you may have increased traffic significantly, but it might be from lower relevancy blogs, which actually... Or not lower relevancy blogs, sorry, but it might be from a lot of informational traffic that just isn't relevant in the context of driving sales or leads or revenue for the business, and therefore that makes the investment that they've made inorganic. They kind of look at that and go, "Well, what have we just paid you for for the last twelve months?
Mordy Oberstein:
Exactly, which is why you have to figure out what are their goals, where is the business even at? Are they at a point where they're able to convert yet? Are they still at a stage where they're still building up that awareness? Really understanding where the business is at and also where the products are at. I'm a big sports nut, so let's imagine for example, I don't know, tomorrow LeBron James retires. He's not, but let's just say he did. Maybe he should, I don't know. And you sell LeBron James' shoes, so imagine you have to figure out the predicted demand on that product, which may go down if LeBron retires. It may not. I have no idea if it would or wouldn't, but you would need to figure that out and that's not easy.
Ben Barker:
No, it's definitely not. Definitely not. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It's trying to be as specific as we can with the information that we have. SEO isn't as... Head of PPC may be common sense, but it's not in some cases as black and white as PPC. I'm not saying PPC is black and white. There's a lot of complexity to it, but when you are forecasting for PPC or anything like that, it's a lot easier in a lot of ways because you have the data there. You can take previous data, you can see what keywords convert, you can see how users interact via different ads, et cetera. Whereas with SEO, we kind of have to just take the information that we have, and in some cases that will include paid data, sure. But yeah, you're absolutely right in that sense. You almost have to figure out and guesstimate. It's almost best guess in terms of how you think the demand for that will go. And then you obviously can factor that into the work that you are doing and then that feeds then back into the overall numbers.
Mordy Oberstein:
So how do you separate all that out? It's a lot of separating chaff from whatever the opposite of chaff is. I don't really know, but the good stuff, the peanut. How do you do that?
Ben Barker:
Our team internally built a really, really good tool for us to use, actually. You can plug keywords into it and you can categorize the keywords. So your inputs are essentially keyword, search volume, category. So in the context of what you've just said about LeBron, your keyword might be LeBron James' shoes, category would be basketball, and then your search volume would be whatever your search volume is. Once you've populated that, we basically run the tool and what it does, it does a few things. It'll pull where you are versus other competitors within the search results, and then it effectively presents you with almost a chart to show you where you are versus your competitors. We do often, or we do always actually input competitors into there as well. So we can put specific competitors in there, and what it does is it shows you where you are in the context of that landscape.
Now because you are using specific keywords that you're really wanting to target across your categories, what that then means is that it gives you an output which is effectively almost your projected or available traffic for those keywords. And what we tend to then do is we would start by building the forecast around that specifically because we know that those keywords are really important to the business, so therefore the search... Obviously your actual traffic in real terms is usually different than what the tool outputs, but again, the tool outputs what it outputs based on search volume and click-through rates, et cetera.
So it really depends on your inputs, but generally that's a really good place for us to start because we can then present that back to the client and show them actually, "We've really focused on your key areas, your key categories. This is what we believe the available traffic is." What I tend to do on top of that is I'll run the tool and then we'll have a look in GA4 and sort of see how that fares up in terms of what traffic they've actually had over the last twelve months as an example for those key categories versus what we have available. And generally you can then build out a pretty good baseline from there. That's how we do it.
Mordy Oberstein:
So how do you do, let's say for example it's a case where the brand's not ready to convert yet? So for example, let's go with the LeBron shoes just for a minute. They need to rank for LeBron James sneakers or buy LeBron James sneakers and they're not anywhere near that. They just started six months ago. So how do you filter out and refine like, okay, you need to get this money, you need to rank for this, but there's probably five or six preliminary steps that you need to do beforehand. Do you map all of that out and tell them that? How does that look for you?
Ben Barker:
Yeah, absolutely. It is a really, really great question. The kind of approach that we tend to take would be, obviously you've got your LeBron sneakers, trainers, however you want to frame that. Obviously that would be assumed to be a really, really high volume, high intent, really competitive keyword. So like you just said, if we're a new business, you ain't going to rank for that keyword in six months. It's just not going to happen realistically, if you look at the kind of competition of the market. Now in some rare cases it may happen, but chances are it probably isn't. So what you then have to do is say, "Okay, well how else can we get relevant traffic to our website for these types of keywords?" The process that we take I guess, is we would kind of do some research around what are the kind of secondary or tertiary search terms, categories, et cetera that people may be searching for that aren't directly LeBron sneakers.
Then you would effectively look at the way that we would manage this with the client is we would say, "Okay, we're not going to rank for this keyword in six months. We'll be really, really honest with you." And again, I'm sure there'll be other people out there that will promise the earth and say that you can, but again, that's a different conversation. We would sort of say, "What we can do though is we've identified these types of opportunities around the topic of this particular product, and therefore what we'll do is we'll build you a content strategy which will almost eventually support ranking for that keyword."
So if you think about LeBron sneakers as your head term, and again, if we think about that in the context of let's just assume that he is retiring, that's why he's selling them, you can then build content around queries related to that. So is LeBron James retiring? Again, this is just examples, but when is LeBron James retiring? And then you can almost build content around that and you can talk about his career and then you can almost feed that back in.
So it's almost like head term is at your top and then underneath you have an almost, I don't like using this word because in SEO terms it always sounds really shady, but almost like a network of supporting content, which then feeds back into EAT and things like that, which then Google will obviously look at and go, "Okay, we can see that you guys aren't just trying to push this to show sales. We can see that you actually know what you're talking about on this topic." So therefore eventually maybe twelve months, maybe eighteen months or whatever, you will have a really good shot at ranking for those keywords because you've actually put the effort and the time into building up a really authoritive hub, which actually shows what you're talking about, that sort of thing. So that's how we would frame it. It would almost be your short to medium term tactics would be that effectively, building that content network and the informational area of it.
Mordy Oberstein:
When I do this for clients, so what I like to do, if I have a client who's very long-term minded, they know where they're at, they know where they need to go, so I'll build up the SEO plan or the SEO proposal in phases. Phase one is X and phase one will take six months and you're going to focus on X, Y, and Z. Phase two will be this, and phase three will be that. Which maybe is not the best way to nab the client, if you want to put it in those terms, because it's not an easy... It's a long process.
There's multiple phases of it, and each phase is probably usually very intricate and very involved, which kind of can be a little bit of a turnoff, but I generally feel laying it out that are mapping it out there so they understand what's going to happen, what the expectations are after phase one is it's usually not earning a lot of money, kind of sets up the client for success. And for the longer term relationship to feel like, okay, I'm with you, I understand you, and I'm willing to pay you for the next six months, seven months, eight months, whatever it is to do this, because I know where we're going and where the map is.
Ben Barker:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think again, that sort of feeds into one of my other points around incrementality, which effectively is how you manage stakeholders within a business, which you've kind of hit the nail on the head there in that you have a really clear plan. You've laid that out. I think one of the things that, again, at certain areas where I think collectively as an industry we probably should be better at is you need to manage the people outside of your immediate contact. So again, coming from an in-house perspective, I had a pretty generous budget that I could spend on or invest, and SEO is an investment channel. A lot of senior stakeholders think, oh, SEO is free traffic. It's not free traffic because you either in some way or another have to pay for that, whether it's hiring headcount, whether it's-
Mordy Oberstein:
I'm not working for free, are you?
Ben Barker:
No, I'm definitely not. I love my job, but yeah, I don't think I can do it for free.
Mordy Oberstein:
Got to feed my family.
Ben Barker:
Yeah. It's an investment channel, so that's your first step. So there'll be a period of time where you are paying us to do a job for you, you're probably not going to see a return maybe for six months, maybe nine months, maybe twelve months. However, and again, it's kind of a new thing that I've started saying which some people kind of understand, is that SEO is almost like investing, so it does compound over time. So year one, you might break even, you might be a little bit less. Year two, you might be 10% off. Year three, you might be 15% off. And if you think about even if you factor in, if you're an agency and you work with a client for two, three, four years, obviously over years and over time your fees may increase, but it won't increase to the level where it will outweigh the returns that they get.
And if it does, to be fair, you're probably pricing it incorrectly. You can still make good money as an agency or a consultant and your client can still make great money as well, as long as assuming everything is priced correctly. I think that's the key thing. And another thing, again from an in-house perspective, and coming back to the budgets and stuff like that that I was talking about earlier, if I wanted to spend budget on something, it was my budget to spend. I held the purse strings, if you like, but I would still have to justify that internally to other stakeholders because they would need to understand what I'm doing, because that investment obviously affects the profit and loss.
One thing that I would encourage and urge anybody in SEO to do is to try and be great friends or build good relationships with your finance contact. Because they're generally the people, if you get them on side, you will be in such a good place. So internally at my previous place, I actually had a really good relationship with the finance team. They were fantastic. They didn't understand the nuance of SEO or what we were doing, but if you can explain it in really simple terms, they're like, "Yep, okay, fine. We're totally cool. We understand this investment. We understand that we're going to see a loss for a few months, but based on what you've said we should start seeing some improvement in the backend." So your finance people are absolutely paramount.
And as well, I think your contacts, like your chief technical officers, your technical directors, because ultimately again, if you get sign off and work with the client, but then all of a sudden you've got a load of tech work, your CTO or your tech contact doesn't really understand the value of what you are trying to do. So if you send recommendations off the back of an audit for example, but you don't actually monetize those things, they're going to look at it and go, "Well, I've got all of this stuff to fix over here. Why should I fix this? Because you've not told me how much this is worth, so I'm just going to put this in a list somewhere and it's going to stay there."
Mordy Oberstein:
That's why if you're listening to this podcast, you listen to regularly, we have an episode on site maturity and understanding why and where the site is at, and why that's so important. It's really understanding where the business is at, the maturity of the business and maturity of the website and understanding that one thing compounds to the next thing and it compounds to the next thing, and that what you're able to do with each phase of site or business maturity differs, but it all compounds and adds up to itself. And you really understand where it's supposed to end up and result will actually be, and realizing that what's possible at what stage of the site's evolution and what naturally should come next as it naturally evolves.
Before time kind of slips away with us here, once you've understand the forecast, you understand what you're going to do with the business and what you will want to focus on, how do you know where to start exactly? What's your rubric look like? Okay, I understand the forecast, where we want to go, what we're going to end up doing, but where do you start and how do you decide where to start?
Ben Barker:
Do you mean in terms of if I pick up or the agency picks up a client, what do we prioritize?
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, I've got five keywords I think are the money keywords that business is ready to ring for now that we can really start focusing on. Let's assume for a second, let's make it difficult, all five keywords are the exact same search volume.
Ben Barker:
Yeah.
Mordy Oberstein:
Where do you start and how do you start?
Ben Barker:
Yeah, it's a good question. First thing I would do would be to actually validate the keywords. So when I say validate the keywords, I don't mean that I would take them from the client and say, I don't really believe what you are saying here is actually right for you. But what I would do is I would take that away and we would do some research around it and actually see, okay, we do things that analyze the search results. Because quite often you'll find that clients want to rank for keywords more from a vanity perspective, just to be there because the competitor's there. But actually in real terms, when you look at those results and the quality of those results, it doesn't really feel like it's a transactional place, if of course it is a transactional keyword. Assuming it would be.
I think first of all, you would validate those five keywords, so you would make sure that actually it would be worth our time to focus on these. And again, we would send relevant traffic that would convert in the context of search results and how that looks. Then I think beyond that, assuming again all five are the same, you kind of from an... And I think this is what can kind of trip a lot of people up, is that you may take all five of those keywords and go, "Yeah, no worries. We can focus on all of these keywords at once and we'll get you some great results." Again, that isn't the case. So I think where you need to then look is to apply a more commercial lens. "Okay, Mr. or Mrs. Client, you've given me these five keywords that relate to these categories. What is a conversion worth across each of these categories for you?"
What you might find is that four out of five of those keywords, again, this is just a bit of W data, but it might be worth $25 per conversion, but then one keyword might be worth 150. So assuming that all of those keywords are the same search volume again, but even if they weren't, in fairness, I would always look at what value each of those categories would drive. And for me, that's probably how I would determine where the focus would be. And then beyond that, in terms of how you would prioritize work and where you would look to start would really be, it differs. It's the classic SEO answer, but it really would depend on the state of the website.
You might have a website that's really technically sound, but actually their content is really lacking, so then your content would be the focus area. You might have a website which actually has really great content, but their technical isn't great. So in terms of how you would feed that through into the strategy would really depend on the state of the website, the state of the content and those sorts of things probably where I would... And the backlinks, of course. Again, they might have really good content, they might have really strong tech, but actually they might not be doing too much from a digital PR perspective to actually draw in those backlinks and coverage, so therefore you would probably start there as a point.
Mordy Oberstein:
In a nutshell, you have to qualify. There's no way around qualifying it, whether it's the SERP, wherever their ongoing SEO practices aren't really qualifying, are those actually effective? You have to qualify everything. There's no way around it.
Ben Barker:
Yeah, absolutely. And again, the beauty of that is you've qualified those five keywords, you know what each of the conversion is worth based on the keywords. Again, you then feed that into your forecast because you know what that conversion's worth. So you can use that data in your forecast then as revenue data, and then that means that your forecast looks a lot better. Because when your client asks you to justify it, you can talk them through it really clearly rather than just saying, "Oh, I had a look at your numbers. You saw 10% growth last year, so I've given you 20% growth this year. There's no real thought behind it, but that's what I thought. That's what felt good to me-"
Mordy Oberstein:
10% is always a good number. It feels safe.
Ben Barker:
Yeah.
Mordy Oberstein:
It's one of those safe numbers. It's enough growth, but it's safe.
Ben Barker:
Definitely.
Mordy Oberstein:
With that, where can people find you if they want to ask you questions about your SEO refinement strategy?
Ben Barker:
I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. I'm also more than happy for people to drop me an email. And also c3 or connective3, we run a couple of events as well, which I think-
Mordy Oberstein:
yeah.
Ben Barker:
... really great thing. So we have an event in the UK called Up North, which is coming up in the next month. So yeah, basically there. And I'm also going to be doing more speaking as well, so hopefully people will see me on the speaking circuit very soon.
Mordy Oberstein:
Good for you, man. All right, so we'll link to all of those links in the show notes. Ben, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with us.
Ben Barker:
Oh, thank you very much, Mordy. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Mordy Oberstein:
All right, well, talk to you soon.
Ben Barker:
Yeah, I'll speak you soon. Thank you.
Mordy Oberstein:
Ben is a great guy. Make sure you give him a follow. Connective3, they do great stuff. If you're ever at BrightonSEO in the UK, they're always there with their team. They're great fun. They have great swag, by the way, so make sure you check them out when you visit BrightonSEO.
Crystal Carter:
Yeah, they're a great team. I've met them at some other events as well, and they're always a lot of enthusiasm and always really interested in what's going on. So yeah, great team.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah. Now speaking of getting a little specific with your SEO, and I have said many things about rank tracking, many of them not great, but one of the things that you might want to do is get a little bit more specific with how you rank track. So we're going to show you a little tool that can help you do that as we go tool time on SERP's Up. So the folks over a Pro Rank Tracker created a little app in the Wix at Market called Rankix, and I didn't even know about it. They happened to let me know after the fact that they created the thing, and I had a look at it. I've worked for SEMRush in the past, I've worked for Rank Ranger in the past. I've worked for many folks who track rank, and I like rank tracking and I do rank tracking, but I also have some spicy things to say about rank tracking.
So I go, "All right, let me see what this is because I'm very spicy about my rank tracking," and I saw them like, "Oh, this is great." And I'm not saying that literally because it's in the Wix app market and I'm being paid to say that. I'm saying that because it not only tracks your rank on Google, it tracks it on Bing, it tracks it on Amazon and it tracks it on YouTube. I'm like, "Oh, snap. I thought I was going to get your typical watered down version of a rank tracker, which is your typical water down version of actually a good SEO tool in general, that's a spicy take on rank tracking, and it's not. It's actually like omnichannel rank tracking and it's really helpful."
I actually use it on my podcast because I integrated YouTube created RSS feed where you can pull in... They didn't create RSS feed, let me rephrase that. They created the ability to pull in your podcast RSS feed and it automatically uploads and creates YouTube videos for your podcast. And I did that for a podcast that I run. I'm like, "Oh, this is great. Let me track the rank. I want to track the and how do I track the rank of this? I don't pay for a YouTube rank tracker." Well, now I do in RankiX.
Crystal Carter:
Nice. And I think it's such a good tool for people who are working across multiple channels, as I think most people are these days. I think there's very few teams who are doing SEO, who are doing audience management, audience growth management specifically just on one channel. And that's a primary, that's a great example of how people can use multiple tracking across multiple things because it is going to affect your Google visibility because Google is putting YouTube all over the SERP. So for instance, if you go to the video tab, nine times out of ten you're going to get a YouTube video unless you specifically search for TikTok, and then you'll see a TikTok video. But yeah, I think that it's super useful to be able to have visibility on that. And anybody who's working in the e-commerce space, if you're selling on Amazon, knowing where you rank on Amazon is going to be incredibly useful.
Mordy Oberstein:
Don't just throw stuff into rank and expect to get anything out of it. You have to be a little more specific on what you're trying to get out of it. I appreciate what the RankiX app did here. For example, if you're using one of your all in one SEO tools, sometimes the rank tracking abilities will be a little bit thin as opposed to the specific rank tracking tools, which are a little bit different. I like what RankiX did here because it kind of brought a little bit of that more in-depth functionality and more nuanced functionality or insights to the app.
For example, and this is not often or easily found in some of the all in one tools, I could see my rank for yesterday, I can see the rank for the week, month, in one table. And that helps me get a general sense of like, okay, yes, I'm ranking number one now. Yes, I'm ranking number one last week, but last month I was 25. That's an act. Okay, cool. And I can easily dive into that and see the actual trend. So being able to get a little bit more a nuanced or detailed view of the trend itself is really helpful.
Crystal Carter:
And also it gives you an idea of the volatility overall of the SERP. So if you know that you go up and down maybe, and I've had this before with clients and projects and stuff where there's a couple of key players and you sort of keep swapping back and forth of who's number one or who's in the top three set, and it's really useful to know how tight that is because for some verticals you can swoop in, you can move to number one, and your competitors won't notice particularly, and you could just take that traffic and have that traffic and enjoy it. And for some other verticals, as soon as you move to number one, they will do something on their website. And as soon as you move to number one, the other competitor will do something on their website. And you need to know whether or not you're in a super competitive space where they are also doing the SEO and they are also mindful of that traffic. And being able to see the trend over time will give you some really good insights on that.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yep, there's a lot of cool stuff in there, like the YouTube thing on the YouTube tracker, they give you the volumes for the keywords that you're tracking. Really helpful to understand because you're otherwise just shooting into the dark. So yeah, it's a great tool. Check it out, it's in the Wix at market, just search for RankiX. We'll link to it in the show notes here, so you can just find it, add it to your Wix account, and it's really super helpful.
Crystal Carter:
Yeah, and I think also it's a freemium tool and the free one, so if you're a small business for instance, and you got one website that you look after, it's great because you get lots and lots of really good insights on the one website. If you want to expand into something a bit more, they have a paid plan that's really reasonably priced and it's all available within your Wix platform. So yeah, highly recommend. I was really impressed when we had a look at it.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, really impressed and thanks for mentioning that it's a free. Man, totally forgot about that, but yes, it is. So you should use that. Now, you know who's very incremental in how he approaches SEO? One small change at a time for Barry Schwartz.
Crystal Carter:
I mean, that's true. I would say that. Or sometimes not many changes. Search Engine Roundtable's been going for a long time. I think it's a good thing.
Mordy Oberstein:
So that's one small step for Barry, one giant leap for SEO kind, as we leap into this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, we're going for a three for from seroundtable.com and the great Barry Schwartz. First up, Google Search Console working to fix search performance delays and latency. Back on July 2nd, Barry Schwarz started reporting, "Hey, looks like Search Console data is delayed." Barry was showing the last update to se roundtable.com Search Console data was 50 hours ago, and then 90 hours ago the next day, which Barry said it might be a record. I saw that get up to 95 hours. As the days progressed, Google did. We did start to see that Google was catching up. Barry reported a few days later, "It looks like Google's catching up, but there was a significant amount of time where your Search Console data was not being updated, which happened to coincide with reporting time for a lot of SEOs, which made this a little bit frustrating."
Again, Barry started to report later on in the week that things were catching up, Google was starting to refresh the data. What I am seeing now and what I've seen people talk about across social media say, "Hey, we're back. My Search Console was last updated two hours ago." If yours is not, you might have a problem. It's good to know that this has happened. This does happen from time to time. It's happened in the past. No one is perfect, nothing is perfect. So just makes sense to keep an eye on social media when these things kind of happen or just go to seroundtable.com because Barry will report it. Just so you know, hey, wait a second. Maybe my data's not as fresh as I think it is and I didn't notice.
Anyway, okay, continuing with seroundtable.com, Google's Zero-Click study now at 58.5% in 2024. A study done by Rand Fishkin who's done historical analysis on the number of zero click search, meaning where users go to Google and they don't click on anything. And that could be for a variety of reasons. They might Google Yankee score and Google tells them the Yankee scores, so there's nothing to actually click on, which is a contentious topic in the SEO world. I personally think a lot of that is just content consumption trends changing. I think we've talked about it on this podcast before, like, forget Google. I don't even need to go to Google to see the Yankee score. I get a notification pop on my phone every morning. So there's a lot to do with content consumption trends in my opinion, and not Google being nefarious, trying to take away traffic.
In this study, Rand shows 58.5% of searches are zero click. It needs to be qualified because around 21% of the time, that zero click is just people not clicking at anything on that search and then trying a new one. So someone might search for, buy a laptop, don't like any of the results, and then search for, cheap laptops, and maybe click on something there. So that's being counted as a zero click search. 37% of the sessions ended with nothing, meaning either the user walked away, said, "Oh, I don't want any of this, or I found it from somewhere else, or I did whatever." Or they found the answer right on the result page, like when you Google, what's the weather right now? And don't want to stick your head out the window and want Google to tell you the answer. Part of this was, and the reason why I'm covering this from scroundtable.com is because Barry's the only one who got this right.
Part of the data that Rand showed, which is really interesting, is that he looked at a breakdown between the US and the EU in Google search behavior and showed in May there were fewer searches on mobile in the EU and the US, not on desktop, and a nice little drop off there. Some speculation was, oh, that might be because of the AI overviews that rolled out at the same time. That really would dominate the above the fold landscape on mobile. Maybe folks didn't like that, moved on from Google search. The issue is that the AI overviews didn't roll out in the EU, so it wouldn't explain the EU data. Rand did actually amend that in the post that he has on SparkToro. I'll link to that post in the show notes as well, so thank you Rand for doing that, and thanks for Barry for the great coverage.
Okay, last up again from the Barry, from the SE round table. This one, there's no practical difference about this story. I just thought it was interesting. No, Reddit is not blocking Google search. So folks started looking at Reddit's robots.txt file. It looked like, oh, Reddit is blocking all the search engines, but that might just be what you and I see. Because Pedro Dias did some investigation, you run reddit.com through the Google Rich results test, you can see what Google is really allowed and not allowed to access within Reddit from this robots.txt file. And it looks fine. It's totally fine. You can see it right there, it's in the article. I'll link to it in the show notes. Our robots.txt is for search engine. It shows what they're allowing and disallowing, and it would seem that Google is allowed to go ahead and crawl reddit.com, which makes sense because they're paying for the data.
As Barry points out, it would be insane to think that Reddit is blocking Google and because they're paying for the data and they get a lot of traffic from there. So good job Pedro Dias and I think it was somebody else, Pedro Dias and Ryan Siddle for realizing that's what was going on. But it was just an interesting little moment in time in the SEO space. Like, wait a second, is there hope? Reddit is gone from the SERP because they're blocking Google? But no, no. It turns out that that's not what's going on. What they're actually showing Google is something different from what we're seeing when we access the robots.txt file the way we usually do. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News.
Thank you so much, Barry, for each small incremental and sometimes leaping article that you write. And to all the SEO news coverage folks, appreciate your coverage that we feature here. Again, going to pitch, if you're looking for news, you are a SEO news junkie, check out It's New, where we cover the SEO news each and every day, except for Fridays, and Saturday and Sunday on the Wix SEO hub. It's right there at the very top with Barry Schwartz himself, or you can look forward on Barry's YouTube channel also. You know who offers great incremental substantive SEO advice and tips? Our follow the week, Chris Long.
Crystal Carter:
Chris Long. Chris Long is great.
Mordy Oberstein:
We've been doing this podcast too long to only be featuring Chris now. That's crazy.
Crystal Carter:
Chris Long is great. He has these fantastic little deep dives that he does on the LinkedIn where he goes into... He will go into a crawl or he'll diagnose some problems on a website or something like that, and it's really rad. I really appreciate the level of geekery that he gets into. Basically, it's just a lot of good tools, a lot of good insights, a lot of good data, and he really goes into it. I've heard him speak at MozCon and he was fantastic there as well. Also, a super nice guy, super personable, and just really into the craft. I think that he's the kind of person that's an SEO. An SEO's SEO, like somebody who really enjoys SEO and really enjoys the investigative data led insights part of it, and I think that's really cool.
Mordy Oberstein:
Yeah, absolute great follow. Really thoughtful, very thoughtful advice and information about SEO. Definitely give Chris a follow over on LinkedIn and on X @gofishchris. Great, because he works at Go Fish Digital, the Go Fish Chris.
Crystal Carter:
Yeah.
Mordy Oberstein:
Go fish yourself some SEO insights, Chris. That out, huh?
Crystal Carter:
You'll thank us. Promise.
Mordy Oberstein:
I like fishing. You like fishing?
Crystal Carter:
I don't eat fish anymore. I appreciate the fishing community. In California, you get these really long piers and people go night fishing.
Mordy Oberstein:
Ah, I think they say they come out.
Crystal Carter:
Yeah, they bring - for mackerel and people just hang out on the pier. They bring a boombox.
Mordy Oberstein:
It's a great time. It's like baseball. You could sit there and not actually do anything for a long time.
Crystal Carter:
Yeah, I think it's cool and people just seem really happy. I think it's also cool that they're hanging out and then they've just got a bunch of fish they can eat for... I think that's awesome. I think it's really cool. And yeah, I've seen it and in Southern California there's lots of really long piers. They're really cool. And people put glow sticks on the ends of their fishing lines, which is cool.
Mordy Oberstein:
Oh, that's cool. I haven't gone fishing in a long time. I used to love fishing. It's just quiet. I like quiet, and we're quietly going to pivot out of the podcast. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast but not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to pitch to SEO clients as our Wix Studio series continues. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning app at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.