SEO & PPC: With our powers combined...

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, the fantastically, hey, it's SEO, it's PPC, it's all good, head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello everyone. Hi. Thank you for joining us today on the SERP's Up Podcast. It is a perfect day for a podcast. The weather is fine, the water is nice. Welcome. Join us.

Mordy Oberstein:

Did ChatGPT write that for you? It's a little poem. Like write up poem for the podcast?

Crystal Carter:

No, not precisely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, did I insult you then?

Crystal Carter:

Not quite. ChatGPT definitely has better spelling than I do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Lily Ray went on on Twitter talking about how she is going to, fashion recommendations from ChatGPT and how it was all messed up. So I replied back, "Which should be more reliable for fashion recommendations, ChatGPT or me?" To which John Mueller replied back, "This is the case for AI."

Okay. Well the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. Surprised you there, right? Where you can use Wix's AI to help you get the max out of Facebook and Instagram ads. Drive your business forward with Facebook ads. With Wix, boost sales, generate leads and drive traffic to your site with paid Facebook at Instagram campaigns powered by Wix's smart algorithm. By the way, I literally read that from a landing page. I had literally no idea that existed until I was planning this episode out. I am ashamed. There is so much about Wix I don't know about, but I have a problem with PPC that the second you mention it I black out.

Crystal Carter:

There's a lot of things to think about and it's also changing a lot. So I did a lot of PPC about a year ago. It is almost completely changed in that time. But there's still a lot of things that overlap and they're used, to think about.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is what we're going to be talking about today. What a coincidence. We're talking about Facebook ads because, well, not because I don't have any clue about PPC anymore. I used to actually manage PPC campaigns, but believe it or not, back in the day. But as you mentioned, everything's changed and I am out. We're talking about it because we're talking about SEO and PPC campaigns. They can coexist, I think. Can SEO PPC share intelligence and data? How does quality content for SEO factor into PPC? And how do you manage conflicts between the two disciplines? You ignore the PPC, you go with the SEO. Problem solved. Done. Just kidding.

And to help us navigate this wild and weird world of PPC, we have a very, very special guest for you. He's the CMO and partner over at Cypress North, the host of one of the best, if not the best digital marketing podcasts out there, an all around sweet fellow, a wearer of flannel, the one the only the only
Greg Finn, is going to join us in just a bit.

We'll also dive into how different search engines handle ads on their search in different ways. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Ready, set, click. Click again and again. Oh my God, we're a click bot. Episode number 34 of the SERP's UP Podcast is bidding for your attention.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, it is. Yes it is. So yeah, today we're going to be talking about SEO for PPC campaigns. This is something that I've spoken a little bit about at an event called PPC Live, which is a great event if you're looking to learn more about PPC in London.

And essentially, one of the reasons why I think it's really interesting is they really often go together for a lot of different websites. It tends to be a sort of go-to add-on if you're doing activity. And one of the reasons why it's useful, from my perspective, is because it can provide you a little bit of control with regards to visibility. So your PPC can sometimes give... The rules of engagement are very, very clear. You put in the money, you get some visibility. With regards to it, with regards to SEO, we can be a little bit more complex. It can be a few more wheels within wheels to move. So it's something that can be useful while you're building up your brand, it can be something to help you shape it. But I'm sure we'll get into it a bit more with Greg, who will talk to us more about how you can add in PPC campaigns and how you can include PPC more and what you do.

Mordy Oberstein:

So because I again, check out on everything PPC and because he is an all around great guy, Anna, aware of Flannel and C M O and co-founder, you got the co-founder part right, of Cyprus North. Please welcome, put your hands together for the host of the Marketing O'Clock Podcast, one of the best digital your marketing podcasts out there that you should be listening to after you finish this one. Welcome, Greg Finn.

Greg Finn:

Wow. Thanks for the margarita here. I'm going to be catching a wave here on SERP's Up. Really happy to be here, y'all. Love the podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much. The feeling is absolutely mutual. It's fantastic. Thank you for joining us.

Greg Finn:

And I'll make sure I don't black out on these margaritas. But I can make Mordy black out. PPC, PPC, PPC.

Mordy Oberstein:

What would happen? It's like Old School. You ever see that movie with Will Ferrell, the Bass, James Carville, and he said the most intelligent things and then he wakes up, he was like, "What happened?" He has no idea he said anything intelligent. That's how I feel.

But it's true. I used to manage PBC campaigns. It was kind of like, I'll throw a word at you, a broad match modifier, huh?

Crystal Carter:

Oh, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

See? I know the PPC.

Greg Finn:

If you have Microsoft advertising campaigns, they just turned it a broad match last week, so be careful.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay. This is it. And I'm interested to hear you talking about Bing, jumping straight in with the Bing Microsoft advertising suite because I'm guessing a lot of people are going to be more interested in that, now that we have new Bing, Bing 2.17.

Greg Finn:

Yeah. And actually, Microsoft advertising is a really great tool obviously for people that do PPC. But it's also got kind of a really unique currently, I guess, elements that you can leverage that Google doesn't at the moment, where you can see all of your search query data. And when you're doing SEO and when you're putting things together, it's great to see those trends and the volume that's out there. But obviously, that is all kind of well and good and Google Trends, Keyword Planner, whatever tool of your choice is great, but Google sort of limits what actually comes through in those keywords. But Microsoft advertising doesn't. So you can see your full suite of keywords that you're showing for what works, not only hypothetically what that volume looks like, but what's actually converting. And then pick and choose some of those good ones for your SEO campaigns.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that that's one of the greatest things about doing a PPC SEO combo is that you can use lots of different data sets. So if you know more about, if you have good SEO keyword research, good PPC research, you can sort of pick and choose which one would be best for a PPC campaign, which would be best for a more different funnel approach, for instance, that you might take for an SEO. And yeah, you can compare different tools because again, you say you get different data from Microsoft and you get different data from Google. You also get different data from the teams behind the paid campaigns and the teams behind the search campaigns. So the team behind the page campaigns will call you all the time, asking you to get involved, whereas it can be the other way when you're on search for instance.

Greg Finn:

Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I'm assuming from the search you're talking about like SEO specifically. Absolutely. And there's also quite a bit of insight that you can get from, whether it be Google Ads or Microsoft advertising. And so what even some of the search engines think about your content, whether you have something like a dynamic search ad where you just put out a certain section of your website, an entire website, and you kind of see what Google, in this case, would say, or Microsoft, always got to include them, especially now, what kind of terms they're matching for and what they think your page is about. Sometimes that's just a good temperature check to be like, yep, a search engine really does think that this page is what I thought it was about, or maybe you start pulling on some different model numbers or things like that, that you know might want to work in the copy more and things of that nature.

And then even on the shopping side, the feed, that's sort of a gray area sometimes. So where the feed, if you're retail, if that sits under the ads team or an organic team let's say. And there's no better way to see what a search engine thinks about your products than by looking at those search query reports for your product data. You don't have terms that you put in, you just put the feed up and see what happens. And that's again, a great way to see what a search engine thinks about it and how you can modify that to try to drive more of the free listings and the paid. So there's a ton of data in each one of these platforms that can help you in obviously, the platforms themselves and in your SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you're going to have to work together at some point inevitably because if, for example, I've seen a bunch of cases like this... By the way, parenthetically, I want to just point out historically speaking, the keyword research data we as SEOs have had comes from the ads side of Google. Keyword Planner is a Google Ads tool, it's not a SEO tool. I mean we use it as a SEO tool. Essentially, it's a paid search tool.

But anyway, you're going to definitely have to work together. I've seen cases where sites are bidding on their own branded terms and they're killing their organic rankings by pushing the organic URL down the page below the fold in some cases because they're bidding on themselves. You mentioned Google Merchant. You're going to have to figure out where to work together, where either the PPC side is impacting organic or organic isn't going the way you thought it would go and maybe now you need to pay to play.

Greg Finn:

Yeah, especially now as well with some of the new products that are rolling out. The biggest one is Performance Max, where it's devoid of data. The data exists, you just can't get it and you don't get to tell it where to bid. So there's a new feature where you can stop bidding on your own brand, but at the same time, if you are just putting your website out there and Google thinks that it can make a sale on a competitor's term or a competitor now is showing up for you where they didn't mean to before, you might see a drop in organic traffic because they didn't mean to. They just said, Performance Max, I'm going to fire this up. And then all of a sudden SERP's Up is outranking Marketing O'Clock because you are running ads you didn't even know on that.

So I think that's one of the things that really could hinder some organic performance is the fact that you may not have had people showing up for your brand. People might not be meaning to advertise for your brand, but now there they are above their organic results. And as we've seen with Favicons coming through and site names and all that, ads typically don't look less organic results with each one of these changes that Google puts out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, we're going to talk more about that later by the way, because on the Bing side, it's bonkers. But anyway, I think that's where sometimes you run into a problem though. People look at it like, I'm on the SEO team, you're on the PPC team, but I will tell you, your CMO or your growth manager does not look at it like that. They see the website and they see the sales and they see the revenue. And I think sometimes we think there's a conflicting mindset between SEO and PPC. But I think there's a lot of overlap that we don't focus on enough. Wondering what your experience is with that as somebody who's sort of straddling both of these worlds at the same time?

Greg Finn:

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, the goal is to get business from a search engine and to get it as profitably as you can. That's everybody's goal. And in many cases where you have those good organic rankings, you can use that, have teams work together and bid more conservatively for some of those paid plans that you've got going on. And then the nice thing is that SEOs should love is that if there's a problem or you're struggling with ranking on specific terms, that's where paid can come in and really help each other out. I don't see it as a competitive aspect whatsoever. More so. How can we together get to the goal that we're looking to get to.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I've absolutely seen this before, particularly if there was an algorithm adjustment that maybe caught you by surprise. Sometimes paid can swoop in and help out with that. I've seen that happen before. But also it can be useful to give you intelligence on maybe why a page isn't performing the way you might expect it to. Because sometimes you put it through Google Ads and Google Ads gives you some feedback. They're like, actually this page has a low relevance score, or actually, this page is showing up for searches that aren't relevant. So maybe you should have another look at some of those keywords that it's showing up for when we read it with our machine learning tools.

Also, sometimes it's a case where it might pull up certain parts of the page as being more important than other parts of the page, like when it's doing creating ads. So that can be useful as well. I'd be interested to talk to you about machine learning and PPC. One of the things I find interesting is that SEOs seem a little bit surprised sometimes when Google gets more involved with the sort of machine learning and more maybe is changing around title tags and changing around different things like that. And I know that that's something that they've been doing in PPC a lot. I don't know how you feel about the machine learning that's come into PPC.

Mordy Oberstein:

Get off my lawn.

Greg Finn:

The machine learning from something like ChatGPT and what we see with some of these auto applied recommendations and recommendation scores are light year's difference. A lot of what is kind of now really baked into the platforms really benefits the ad platforms. If you were just to say like, "We've got these recommendations, we're going to auto apply them," for the most part, those will really tank your performance. I think the big thing is now with APIs for something like ChatGPT, how can that be used to be able to say, let's help build these responsive search ads or let's go out there, can we make some sort of image. If we upload a basic picture, can we turn it into something majestic and turn it into a DSA or something like that? So I think that's really the exciting part. Now that there are more APIs coming out, you're never going to have something do it for you, but just to be able to refresh, hit things and be able to get you 70% of the way there or at least get started is really an exciting thought.

Mordy Oberstein:

While we still have you, I want to make sure we touch on one more topic a little bit more in depth. We just talked about content algorithms and one of the things that I love focusing on is the quality of a page. Literally, I'm looking at my screen, I'm diving into the product review update and what pages are doing way back, I'm going to the way back machine and saying what were they doing before the update and now during the update and what happened historically with the page and what does it mean for content quality? Does what content quality means for me as an SEO mean the same thing for you as someone on the PPC side?

Greg Finn:

No, it doesn't. So I would say that on the PPC side-

Mordy Oberstein:

You're saying you don't need quality content?

Greg Finn:

No, you do, but it's more important to really be relevant. You need to hit the right person with the right message, sending them to the right place at the right time. So for a lot of times, that might be something where on the SEO side you might build something like a skyscraper type style hub that's got everything going on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Whoa, whoa. What kind of person do you think I am?

Greg Finn:

And on the PPC side, you might match those terms up a little bit more because people might not know you. They're looking, you don't want to keep that scent trail high there. So you match whatever query is in the ad and an ad group and you send them to a landing page that talks about that specifically and then you spin up a secondary landing page for a variation of those terms so that you have a good quality score. So I think you still want to have quality, but it's less EEAT, or however many Es y'all have right now, and it's a little bit more about really hitting relevancy on the nose on it.

Crystal Carter:

And I think a lot of your targeting will affect whether or not you have something that's of quality to the person that clicks on it, so that you said the right person at the right time. The targeting that you set up to make sure that you are sending them to the right information at the right time is going to help you a lot there.

Mordy Oberstein:

So with that, we talked about this in the previous episode of the podcast, would you recommend having separate pages for your SEO and PPC campaigns? So no indexing for example, the page you're using for your PPC and doing your own, one thing on the SEO side and one thing on the PPC side?

Greg Finn:

Let me throw my SEO hat on quick.

Mordy Oberstein:

It depends.

Greg Finn:

It depends. If you've got a great page, I would just say that the majority of sites out there don't have phenomenal pages for both, right? You really needed to capture that demand on PPC as you're paying for it. And with SEO, you probably want to again, bake in some of those EEAT metrics and really be helpful. And on the PPC side, you can almost push harder to get that conversion, especially if you're in something like a B2B SaaS or something of that nature.

So I would say that there are probably 30% of people that have good enough landing pages, but I'd say 70% of people should be testing landing pages, testing calls to action. It's one of those things where, unlike SEO, you can really dictate the spend, the clicks, you can run reports, you could run experiments, you could run tests. And you should be trying that, not just going to your homepage or something of that nature.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. And that's kind of what we said. So let's end this on a high note where you agree with what we said in the previous episode, didn't contradict it because I was a little worried there for a moment.

Greg Finn:

No, I completely agree with that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Greg, where can people find you?

Greg Finn:

People can find me, @GregFinn on Twitter and like you said, we've got a show, Marketing O'Clock, it comes out every Friday. It's just a new show and you can keep up with us there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Definitely check out the show. It features great people such as yourself and some great knowledge from people like Barry Schwartz and Glen Gabe over on the podcast. I just want to point out that I think I'm pretty sure I beat out Barry for an award.

Greg Finn:

Yes, we haven't made the awards yet, but there's a physical award that will be coming out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, there's actual physical? I cannot wait. I'm stoked. I'm going to put it right here next to my little desk here, which you can't see because I have a virtual background right now. But this desk right here. I'm going to put it there. Thank you so much, Greg. Again, don't forget to check out the Marketing O'Clock Podcast. It's a great podcast if you want to keep up with everything that's going on in the digital marketing space, from SEO to PPC, to all the other digital marketing stuff that we don't actually talk about here on this podcast.

Greg Finn:

Thanks for having me. I had a blast. Hang 10.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Again, thank you, Greg. Now, as I mentioned earlier, or hinted at earlier in the show, different search engines handle different ads in different ways. Some, you might argue are better, some you might argue are worse. But they are most certainly different, and ads by the way, are a huge part of the ecosystem we know as the SERP, or SERPs, because we're talking about multiple search engines, not just-

Crystal Carter:

Search engine results pages.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pages. And by the way, I'm just like, for example, in 2021, which is the first set I saw, I should have probably found 2022, but I was being lazy, Microsoft raked in like eight and a half billion dollars. That's Microsoft, not Google. Microsoft. Eight and a half billion dollars from search advertising. So ads are a big deal to the search engine. It's literally why they have a search engine so they can have ads. I'm not saying that's what they're doing on every SERP to get you to an ad, but it is a source of revenue. It's how they exist, how they function. Anyway, right now we're going to go do a little fun segment that we call So Many Search Engines. So here is the PPC version of So Many Search Engines.

I was talking to Owain Lloyd-Williams, who does a lot of work with Baidu in China.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah, I saw that interview.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. And he was showing me the Baidu SERP. And one of the things that struck me was, you know you go to Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo and the ads are generally on top or on the bottom or on the top and the bottom. But with Baidu, they're everywhere. You get an organic result or get a result, ad, organic result, ad. And it's very, very difficult to realize when it's not separated that way, what's actually an add or not. So my point by the way to that was when I spoke to him, sometimes we as SEOs complain about how the way Google goes about ads, so aggressive with ads, the grass is always greener on the other side because it could be worse. It could be Baidu.

Crystal Carter:

Sometimes it's useful to have an ad. Sometimes I've definitely been on something and I was like, "I saw that ad for that thing," and I can't remember where it was. I can't remember what it was I was looking for that triggered that ad, but I would like to find that thing again. And I don't know what it's called because it was just this random kitchen gadget or something that I saw.

So sometimes it's useful to have ads, if they're appropriate, if they're ads that make sense. But I think that it can be tricky if it's in a situation where people are expecting to see organic results and they're not sure if they're organic results. I think sometimes this happens in Maps. So for instance, you get the sponsored listings in Google Maps and they're not necessarily, it's just whoever was able to spend money that month rather than whoever is the best recommended and things like that. So I think that it kind of brings in the importance of adding in additional rich elements to your website, things like reviews and things like images and good title tags and stuff like that. So that even if there are ads mixed in whatever ecosystem you might be in, that your content still looks good and is able to be considered appropriately, especially when it's a very, yeah, there's some ads. Yeah, there's some mechanic stuff. Yeah, it's all kind of mixed up. Because a lot of times people can't tell.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's really hard. Back in the day, Google had an ad label, was highlighted in yellow, then went highlighted to green, then it had no highlight. Now it doesn't say ad anymore, it says sponsors. I think it actually makes it stick out a little bit more, between you and me. But I was actually looking at Bing, right? I'm like, let's go to Bing and see how they handle ads. I'm like, where are all the ads? Where are all the ads? I don't see any ads. That is so weird. How are they making money? Till I realized they have a very, very, very, very faint ad label in very light gray that kind of matches, into the meta description. And I didn't even notice that there were ads there.

Crystal Carter:

And you're somebody who watches the SERP all the time.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm good at looking at these things and finding these things and it took a real minute to realize what it was. And I think, by the way, that's problematic because I do want to know when it's an ad as a consumer so I can make a choice. And I always feel like good marketing is bring up the user to the point where you're letting them be autonomous to make a choice. And I feel in this particular case that it goes a little bit too far. But again, you understand why they're doing it because they have to earn the revenue. It's just you want to know when the content is there because it deserves to rank there or when the content is there because somebody paid for it to be there.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And sometimes that is a signal like that we believe so much in this brand that we put some money behind it. We believe so much in what we're doing that we put some money behind it and we really want to be here for your consideration. And so sometimes that might play into your deciding process. So I think that, yeah, it's absolutely important to think about. I'm looking on Amazon right now and the reason why I bring up Amazon is because e-commerce searches in the US anyway are predominantly starting on Amazon. And I looked up leopard print dress because I'm a big fan of leopard print and I've gone full Carole Baskin in the last few months. I think she was right. Let's just be honest, wearing leopard print all the time, it just makes me happy. So there we go.

Anyways, so I was looking up leopard print dress on Amazon and they have a similar sort of thing. So they've got their sponsored ads mixed in with their other ones and it's very subtle. So they have a little thing that says sponsored and a little eye next to it, but they look very much the same as the other content. And they have it mixed in for both the top section. It's like results. And then they have four star styles and it starts with a sponsored ad. And they've got other styles and they've got sponsored ads in with that. So more results and it goes with an organic, an organic and then three sponsored ads for instance. So they're all mixed in with them. And then when you go into it, there's sidebar advertising and there's going to be more advertising underneath as well for you to consider it as part of your process. And I think that for this one, mostly the sponsored ads are relevant, which is good. Although, one of them's a skirt. And I don't want to skirt, I want a dress.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, I'm someone who loves Amazon. I like shopping on Amazon. I don't have to leave my house because I don't like shopping, and I don't leaving my house either. So it's two birds in one stone, I guess. One of the things I do notice about Amazon's ads is that yes, they kind of do blend in, but they are generally super relevant and I do generally like them because they're usually a cheaper version of the same product that I'm looking for. It's like, oh, that's awesome. It's like a T-shirt, instead of $18 I'm looking at, it's $7. You know what? I don't care that's not a brand name. That t-shirt's for my six-year-old kid. You know what he's going to do with that shirt? He's going to rip it, destroy it. I am going to buy the cheaper version.

So I do appreciate Amazon's ads in there. I'm not against ads at all. I will tell you a hack that I do on Facebook. I don't like Facebook, but if I'm looking for a product, I will start Googling that product. Inevitably, one of those will show up in my Facebook feed. I will purposely click on it so that my Facebook feed becomes inundated with ads about that product. I don't have to go looking around, the ads are coming right to me. My shopper stuff, I kid you not.

Crystal Carter:

I find it the other way around. So I treat my Instagram feed a little bit like Vogue magazine. I'm not buying anything in Vogue Magazine, I just like the pretty pictures. I just like the outfits, I think they're cute. I like seeing the outfits and the looks and all of that. But I'm not buying anything. I'm not buying Gucci, I'm not buying Ferragamo, I have no Louis Vuitton. This is not happening for me. But I like looking at the picture. So I go on Instagram and they're like, oh look, Ferragamo has a new collection. And I'm like, "Oh, they do?" And they're advertising at me and I click on it and I look through all of their collection and I buy nothing. And then I go back to my Instagram feed and then they show me some others. So I'm like Louis Vuitton, and I'm not buying any of it, I'm just looking.

Mordy Oberstein:

Window shopping? What is that called when it's on the internet?

Crystal Carter:

When I was doing PPC, I called those folks looky-loos. So we had a campaign that we were running, it was around apparel, it was around clothing and we were running around 24 hours a day. But we looked at it and we saw that we had a lot of clicks between midnight and 3:00 AM, and none of them bought anything. This is just the equivalent of digital drunk dialing. And so those people are looky-loos. And I'm like, "We are cutting off those ads. Y'all can look on your own dime." You're not looking on mine.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's great. Love that.

Crystal Carter:

And we increased. Our cost per acquisition or whatever improved dramatically because we weren't appealing to those people who aren't actually buying.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're like me, they're just looking for something. I do eventually buy something, but I buy in a store, but that's a whole different thing. Don't go by me, I'm a weird shopper.

Crystal Carter:

And here's another example. So I looked up leopard print dress on YouTube and if you're not aware, YouTube is one of the second... It's like generally most ads, put it is the second biggest search engine on earth, in the world. And I looked up leopard print dress and the organic results are how to style a leopard print dress, how to layer a leopard print dress, how to wear leopard print dresses. The ad that I'm getting is from Cisco, which is best class hardware and software to protect your business network.

Mordy Oberstein:

YouTube is a mess. I will tell you when my kids are watching YouTube on the TV, it's less of a problem on the device, but on the TV, they get most ridiculous ads that are completely inappropriate for them. It's like a problem. It's problematic, which is weird by the way, because I'm about to say coming back to the traditional search engine, Google, one of the ways that I see them differentiating themselves and how they handle ads is one, is they are generally very, very relevant, very, very accurate, which is weird about the whole YouTube thing.

But they also do a lot of cross advertising. So you have PLAs and image search, for example. You have map ads, you have local pack ads, you have product listing ads on the SERP for products. There's all different types of dynamic ads in all sorts of places, one of which is YouTube. It's just sometimes the YouTube ones are less accurate I find than other platforms. But Bing doesn't do this the same way. Other search engines don't. Google is very deliberate and very unique in how they place their ads in all parts or all subsections of search.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And they will create dedicated channels for it. So for instance, on the leopard print dress, the SERPs and around apparel, they've invested a lot around clothing and around shopping. So they've got sponsored ads that show up on the main SERP. Then they have their dedicated channel, their Google shopping channel, which gives you another row of ads, another bit of organic, another opportunity to engage with that content if you have a high intent for purchasing that. Similarly, I mentioned the ones for Google Maps, they also have a dedicated ad feed for that. They also have one for hotels, for instance, and travel and that sort of thing as well. So Google Travel has that as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's really good.

Crystal Carter:

And they're filtering it by intent. It also allows advertisers to focus by intent. The thing for SEOs to think about is how they interact with those ecosystems. And sometimes, you can work together. So for instance, Google Merchant can give you a lot of good information about how your products are being read online, generally. I was looking at an account the other day and Google Merchant was flagging it for excessive capitalization is what they were being flagged for.

Mordy Oberstein:

That is problematic right there, all that-

Crystal Carter:

Right. So that's an accessibility issue that also looks a little bit spammy. And so Google Merchant is flagging them for that. That's going to be something that they should pay attention to, just generally for search and also for their ads as well. So think about how your content fits into those ecosystems and if there's other opportunities for that. Similarly, for Google Merchant, there's also like the Google Merchant API, I think it's content indexing API, that allows you to show up in Google Merchant. And that's something that also helps your content generally perform better.

Mordy Oberstein:

And look, where Google is placing ads and how they're placing ads, if you're in SEO, for example, the classic example I think of is image search. There's so many PLAs in image search, which goes to tell you that Google knows that when people go to images in image search, they're sometimes have a commercial and transactional intent. That's why they're throwing those images in there. So if you have images for your products or whatever it is that you're doing, you don't have your blog post in image search, have the actual product page image. People are actually looking for actual purchase intent in image search. That's why Google's showing ads there.

Now, onto other things, new things, other things I guess, maybe ad related things. Who knows? Because the world of SEO news is just always so changing and there is always so much about ads. Now I feel pigeonholed. We're going to have to discuss an ad related topic in the SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

Or you could do an advertisement. This is an advertisement for the SEO news, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

You're advertising SEO news.

Mordy Oberstein:

You’re advertising. When we do the SEO news, it's basically advertising, free advertising for Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:

We love you Barry. Thank you for all you do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you, Barry. So without further ado, here's this week's version of the Snappy News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two in the bag for you today, both from he who was known as Sir Barry, Knight of the SEO Round table. I can't remember if I made that joke before because both these articles are from Barry Schwartz over at SE Round Table.

Anyway, number one, Google, April 2023 Reviews Update Rolls Out, Expands To Cover Reviews About Products, Services, and Things. This is super interesting to me because I've long suspected the product review update was never meant to be just for product reviews, but was meant to learn how to profile that genre of content. I have tweeted this out, I don't know, a year and a half ago. So I have the tweet to prove it. Well just call me Elijah because I'm an SEO prophet. The product review update is now the reviews update, which means the acronym has gone from PRU to RU. Fascinating. And as such, it applies to all review content. So blogs that review the best places to travel or the best lawyers a throw your life savings away at, sorry, I can never help making a good lawyer joke, are all included in this update. My prediction in the future, it will expand or elements of this algorithm will be included in the core algorithm.

Also, super cool to note how confident Google is in understanding content. Because identifying a website like the Wirecutter, which is all about product reviews, is relatively easy. With the topical expansion, Google has to dig more through the weeds to find applicable pages, which it feels it can. So that's super cool.

Also, from Knight of the SEO Roundtable, that is just how I'm going to refer to you from now on, Barry, Google Removes Video Thumbnails In Search Results When Video Is Not Main Content. So Google had two formats for video thumbnails, one with a thumbnail to the left of the title description and so forth, and one to the right. The one the right is no more. And it's because the format where the video thumbnail is, was, to the right is for cases where the video is not the main content of the page. So now, only URLs where the video is the main content will show with a thumbnail, to the left, reiterating what Beyonce has always known to be true, to the left, to the left, everything you own in the box to the left. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News.

With the news out of the way, and so much of the news coming from the PPC side, if you go to seroundtable.com or Search Engine Land or Search Engine Journal, so much of the news for search marketers is actually about PPC, for me to the point of annoyance. But for many people, to the point of it being helpful. So we've thought what a great person for the follow of the week than none other than Google's own Ads liaison, one of my favorite people in the wider digital marketing industry, Ginny Marvin.

Crystal Carter:

Ginny Marvin. Absolutely. She is the Google Ad Liaison. And she is somebody who speaks really, really openly to folks on online, which is really, really useful to help people learn more about what's going on in the ad space.

Mordy Oberstein:

She's just a sweet person. She used to be the editor over Search Engine Land and the SMX events and all my interactions were incredibly pleasant. So she's a great person to follow, @AdsLiaison on Twitter and her personal account is @GinnyMarvin. Ginny with a G, G-I-N-N-Y-M-A-R-V-I-N. We'll link to both profiles in the show notes. She's an amazing resource, she's incredibly helpful. If you have questions and problems or whatever is related to your PPC, as it pertains to Google, like I wouldn't ask her about Bing. We owe you much thanks Ginny. First off, thanks for managing Barry all those years over at Search Engine Land and now, thank you for helping with the PPC side of the Google Search experience, and that brings us to the end of this show.

Crystal Carter:

That brings us to the end of the show.

Mordy Oberstein:

I hope it really paid off for you.

Crystal Carter:

That was good. I hope had a high return on investment.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh, nice. I'm not going to say it wasn't as good as my pun because I don't want to say that.

Crystal Carter:

You didn't say it.

Mordy Oberstein:

But almost there, I think. I'm going to get into some much trouble.

Crystal Carter:

More optimization.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. I'm sorry. No, no, no. It's all good. Thank you for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into where SEO meets content marketing. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn a little 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 on iTunes or a rating on Spotify or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.