How to shape an SEO campaign

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 grouping new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO branding here at Wix. And I'm joined by the incredible, fabulous, the amazing, the great, the good, the great and the good, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter

The present on the podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

No. I was like, you do the good, the bad. I'm like, no, no, no, can't say that.

Crystal Carter

That's a classic though.

Mordy Oberstein:

I will love the wa, wa, wa, but I'm not going to call you ugly. That'd be a horrible thing to say.

Crystal Carter

It would be a horrible thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, completely not true. No, that'd be horrible.

Crystal Carter

That would be not nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what I need to do? I need to have the thesaurus open when I do that intro. And next time, that's what I'm doing. Run through all the adjectives.

Crystal Carter

Fun fact, when I was a kid, I was sure that a thesaurus was a type of dinosaur because you have Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus. And when I saw thesaurus, I was like, that must be a kind of dinosaur.

Mordy Oberstein:

From the Jurassic period.

Crystal Carter

I found out that it was a book. And I was like, oh, okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's way less exciting.

Crystal Carter

I mean fewer teeth, absolutely. But it was probably more useful than a dinosaur, to be fair.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. Not to a five-year-old.

Crystal Carter

That's such a shame.

Mordy Oberstein:

My kids, two of them are in the dinosaur phase.

Crystal Carter

I love dinosaurs. Also, dinosaurs, when your kids are into dinosaurs, it's great because dinosaurs are unlicensed. So you can get your kid any kind of off brand dinosaur and they're like hooray. Whereas if they're into, I don't know-

Mordy Oberstein:

Jurassic Park.

Crystal Carter

Like Minecraft or Roblox or something, and then you get them something, they're like, this is not the main brand thing where it's like one T-Rex is the same as another T-Rex. It does not matter. So yeah, dinosaurs-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so true.

Crystal Carter

Fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

The only downside is pronouncing the names in the book. So you're reading the kid a book and you sound like an idiot, like chezasaurus.

Crystal Carter

What's it? Archaeopteryx. I think I've pronounced that correctly. I have no idea.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because they're also really into dinosaurs, but at a different level now. So I'll be reading the little ones book and the older ones will be like, "That's not how you pronounce it."

Crystal Carter

Oh, it's also when people are like, "Oh, a Pterodactyl is a dinosaur." I'm like, "No it's not."

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not. I know that. I know that now.

Crystal Carter

It's a flying wizard, I think you'll find, actually.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have been corrected numerous times. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Jurassic Park. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where our marketing dashboards let you have a bird's eye view of all your marketing efforts, track email campaigns, TLDR Google Search Console data, Google Business Profile Analytics, along with your marketing calendar. It's all inside the Wix marketing dashboard and it can help you manage your campaigns as today, we're talking about how to shape an SEO campaign.

Crystal Carter

How to shape an SEO campaign, and someone might say, and there it is.

Mordy Oberstein:

Little bit of titanium white here. There might be little clouds there. We're talking about how to focus your SEO energy as we discussed the different types of SEO campaigns, how to successfully manage SEO campaigns, and what often factors into things going wrong so that we can help you prevent things going wrong. Also, uSERP founder, Jeremy Moser, moseys on over to share his wisdom on running multiple teams with different goals for the same client when managing SEO campaigns. Plus we'll have a wee bit of fun with Google's also ask feature and of course with the snappiest of SEO news for you and who will should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So place the placard on the lawn and put on a derby hat, kiss someone's baby because episode number 36 of the SERP's Up podcast is campaigning for your SEO knowhow.

Crystal Carter

I see what you did there? I was like, like, "What is... Oh, okay." It was a whole journey for me, that metaphor.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is as political as I'll get on this podcast, but I like nothing about political campaigns except the derby hats. Why are those gone? Those the one thing, the little circle hats, those straw circle hats people used to wear back in, I don't know, the 1800s.

Crystal Carter

Oh yeah, I suppose that was a thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was a thing. It's gone. Those you got to bring those back. Those seem kind of cool.

Crystal Carter

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, yeah, I don't know, there's a lot to it. They're always interesting political campaigns.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's to put it mildly. Well, today we're talking as we quickly pivot it away from politics...

Crystal Carter

We're talking about SEO campaigns, we're talking about SEO campaigns. So we are talking about how to shape an SEO campaign, why they matter, what I even mean when I'm talking about SEO campaigns. And essentially, when I think of an SEO campaign, I mean that of something that's like a sprint or a chunk of dedicated work for a strategic goal. So a lot of times with SEO, you might be generally maintaining your general visibility across the website or for technical SEO, you might be generally maintaining the technical integrity of the website as you go along a sort of webmaster, website maintenance sort of situation. And for content, you might just have a regular program of content. We publish two blogs a month or something like that. But sometimes you will have a campaign, a dedicated campaign for a particular strategy where you have a strategic core to the things that you're doing.

And this will apply to businesses of all sizes. And I generally break these up into three types of SEO campaigns. You have your sort of launch, which is where you're trying to launch a brand or a product or a new season or something. And this will generally include things like content creation, UX elements, like you might add a new feature to the website or something like that. And else you might think about strategic links and PR and that sort of thing. But the general goal of it is to make a big splash in one shot with lots of stuff happening and getting lots of traffic and attention to the website at once. And you might think about lots of different ways to do this.

Another type of SEO campaign might be seasonal. So this is still a sort of time sort of thing, but it's more about making a big splash at the right time. So it might be that you're trying to do something for the holiday season or you're trying to do something for the vacation season, or you're trying to do something for an awareness day for instance. I know that there are some companies where they know that on a certain awareness day, they're going to get a lot of traffic, they're going to get a lot of things coming through. And so you need to get things going there. Another thing you might want to think about is a sort of competitive positioning campaign. So this might be a little bit more of a long-term thing. But I've definitely used this campaign particularly for local... The times I've used it was for a local SEO campaign.

So there was a particular keyword and we needed to do general SEO across the whole website, but we also had a particular campaign focus on a particular keyword and a particular sort of SEO positioning that was the local name or the name of the location and lawyers or whatever. So we were like, we need to own that SERP. And we did a targeted campaign, pushing lots of different things to their, back links and content and general static page optimization around that. And essentially, you are going hard on this particular term or this particular effort until you have washed out the competition. So it's a big splash until you've washed out the competition.

And these are all really interesting things and there's various different ways that you can approach it. One I saw recently was a good one from Crystal Horton who was talking about a campaign that they did across the local SEO to sort of get a lot of more visibility for an HVAC company that had been in business for 17 years. And again, they'd been online for ages doing online stuff, but they looked up and they were like, we need to be more competitive in this particular space. And Crystal and her team went all in on this particular element and they got some great results. So she recorded that three weeks that they had two weeks later they were number one on Google, and then they were booked out for three weeks straight, generating over $100,000 in revenue. And that's the kind of impact that a campaign can have is that if you target your campaign in the right space, you can get a big impact that achieves your strategic goals and has general value to your overall SEO activity.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a lot of times you are actually doing a campaign without realizing it. The mini campaigns. For example, if you're, hey, you know what, there's a a topic that yeah, we're kind of ranking, it's like page two, page three, why don't we beef that up? Why don't we focus in on that? So that functions, it might not be a full-blown campaign, but it functions very much like a campaign does. So if you're listening to this podcast, "I never done an SEO campaign before," well maybe you have just a micro.

Crystal Carter

Right, right. And I think also that if you're looking at that, so let's say you have this sort of, we are ranking 25 and you're like, "We could totally get this." And this is something that I've done before. So we had a client and it was off season and they were at a theme park and it was the offseason. So it was winter and most of their traffic was coming in the summer. And then I'm like, "Hey, we're ranking 30 now, but I bet we can get ourselves up too much more competitive by the time the summer rolls around." And so we started pushing and pushing and pushing on this particular set of keywords around vacation rentals and stuff like that. By the time the summer came around, we were already up there.

The other thing that happens, if you're planning to do a particular targeted mini campaign is it's a really good opportunity to get some of the other social and the other digital channels involved. So if you know that you're going to be emphasizing, let's say, I don't know, National Dog Day or something like that because you're a pet store or something, and let's say National Dog Day is four months away and you know we're going to go after this keyword, then you can say, "Hey, social media team, we are planning to do this and this on the SEO side. Can you promote these blogs that we've got coming on, on social? Can you promote it? Can we do that?"And your sales team will probably be like, "Oh, hey, we could also do a little sales promotion, 50% off on dog collars or something at the same time as well." It's like, cool. Now we've got three channels that are all hitting that. And you say to your newsletter people who are constantly looking for content because you got to fill those newsletters, "Hey, we're getting some graphics done, we're getting this done."

So then you can take an SEO focus and you can expand it out to a wider campaign and get a lot of good traction. The benefits of this is that users are everywhere, and SEO is really about connecting with users. So users are everywhere. If they see you on email, they see you on social, they see you on wherever. And maybe they might not remember, they're like, "I knew there was this pet store that was doing something for dog day, I can't remember what it was." And they'll Google it. And if you've got the stuff on your website and you've got the stuff on your Facebook and you've got the stuff on your Google business profile that says, "Hey, we are the place for National Dog Day" or whatever, then they'll find you. So all of those little bits of information will all filter in to users so that you're in the forefront of user's mind around this particular campaign or particular keyword.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's a really great point because one of the benefits of creating things as in campaign form is that it helps you organize things. I don't know if I really need to do it as a dedicated campaign, but if you're trying, especially in a larger organization, if you're trying to organize teams who tried to organize focus, in and of itself, it's a great way to create internal focus within your team and with other teams. And I think one of the things you hit on there before, which is really, really important is that we want to have X done by X date.

Crystal Carter

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

So there are basic things that go into setting up a, I'll call it a functional, as opposed to a dysfunctional SEO campaign. And one of them is having clear goals, having clear timelines, having clear ways of understanding which pages are important to. Goals, timelines. I'm going to say pages, what are your important pages? What are your important keywords? And then how am I going to track this?

Crystal Carter

Yes, yes, yes. So here's another example. I remember I had a client and they had a regular event. Because this is the other thing, you have I think it's a little garden furniture-

Mordy Oberstein:

I love garden furniture, by the way. It's is my favorite kind of furniture.

Crystal Carter

Particularly if you live in a seasonal place. So you have garden furniture. So if you have something that's particularly a seasonal campaign or something like that, it's like your garden furniture. You know you have it, you know you're going to use it every year. You need to figure out what you're going to do when it's not time for you to use it, whether you're going to put it in your shed or your garage or whatever it is. And then when it rolls out, you need to make sure that it's ready to go. So this is something that I've done before. So that timeline, the pages, et cetera, I had a client who had a regular Halloween event. And so way in the summertime I'm looking at and I'm like, okay, we have this Halloween page, this Halloween page, that page, this page, that page and that page.

And we know that by the time Halloween rolls around, we need to have those pages up scratch, updated, working good, working well, all of that sort of stuff. Cool. So we had that sort of stuff. So by the time Halloween came, everything was optimized, everything was redirected, everything was here, here, here, here, here. So when they were ready with their full marketing campaign, the SEO was right at the top, right at the top, ready to go. And that timing, that focus, et cetera. And it also helps you set priorities. You can say, "Hey, we're doing this in November." And they'll be like, well we have this. We are doing this November. We have this and this setup." I'm once again asking for your support. We need support.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you don't, you're getting a horse's head in your bed.

But that part of it, it's the summertime now. By the time Halloween rolls around, my greatest piece of advice to you, if you're working with a campaign style of anything particular with SEO campaigns, is turn on that type A part of your personality and dig deep to find it and turn that switch on. Because all of that, all of those type A kind of skills come into play when you're working on an SEO campaign. I feel like I'm running through a checklist today. What are your goals? How are you going to reach those goals? What do you need to do in order to get there? What are the problems that are going to happen along the way? The best part of being a type A personality here is anticipating what's going to go wrong along the way, particularly when you're working with other teams. What are the roadblocks going to be? What are the dependencies going to be? And what are the timings on those dependencies going to be?

And understand that that's going to be problematic and that's going to have to be reshaped. And having another, if you're real type A, you'll have a secondary route when things go wrong to figure out, if you're not going to go that way-

Crystal Carter

Plan B.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have a plan B to go ahead and do this. Because unless you plan this thing out, like it's nobody's business, this campaign is not going to work, especially when it's complex and it's involving other types of pages, other types of teams, other types of stakeholders, you have to be able to, in minute detail.

Crystal Carter

And that planning gets you buy-in. Right? That planning gets you money.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. No one's going to buy into this plan of yours if they don't understand how it's going to work, when it's going to work. And they really believe that it's going to work because they've seen the stages of development.

Crystal Carter

Right. And if you show up to with a full Gantt chart and a full research things, like I've researched this and not only will we do this, will we do that. I had a campaign that I was running with a client for a coffee client or something, and it was something they'd never done before. But I looked around and I could see that in the particular audience, there was a gap here that they could fill with if they did this, this, this, this and this. And I had a full Gantt chart, like how do we get from here to here in this time? And I was like, we need this, this, this, this, this and this, all of that sort of stuff. And they'd never done it before, ever. But because it was so clearly, meticulously articulated.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also known as meticulated.

Crystal Carter

Because it was so clearly laid out, they were like, "Yeah, I get that. I can see that." Because that's the other thing is people can't always see everything unless you lay it out really clearly.

Mordy Oberstein:

And especially true when we're talking about SEO campaigns, so seasonality finally, everyone knows Black Fridays coming around, we're going to ahead. But sometimes these campaigns are over the span of a year or two years. And then, I've been involved with things where we're trying to grow, let's say a blog long term, and there's many things that go into that, many, many things like the brand awareness, the authority, the back links, the way we're breaking into the niche, all of these different kind of factors. And those are very, very slow, long-term kind of things. And you have to have a long-term plan in order to strategize to the point where you understand that these are the things that we're going to need to do and these are the creative ways we're going to go about doing it. Because otherwise, you won't even know how to get started with the thing.

Crystal Carter

And I think the other thing that you're mentioning is a few things about managing internal stakeholders, because for a long term campaign like that, you need to keep people enthused. You need to keep people in your team on board with what you're doing. So being able to report, "Hey, we've made these green shoots. Hey, we improved by 10%. Hey, we improved by 50%. Hey, we've got more of this moving forward." That's going to help you keep people engaged in the campaign over a long-term process, which again, can very often happen with SEO, if you're planning a whole content thing, a whole knowledge base thing. The initial sort of like, yeah, we launched sort of thing. How do you keep that going?

Mordy Oberstein:

How do you keep that going? That's really the thing. You launched the new product, launched a new blog, but then it fizzles out. I've seen a gazillion times.

Crystal Carter

Right. So you need to pump it. These new, not skateboards, surfboards, they're like aqua foil surfboards or something, and people can surf backwards. I was at the beach and I saw somebody, I was like, is that man surfing backwards? And they're these different... Anyway, they pump them. It has to do with what I understand.

Mordy Oberstein:

Remember LA Gear pumps and Reebok pumps. Anyway, now I'm totally dating.

Crystal Carter

Yes. So basically they pump their legs and then they can just keep riding on the wave and they ride on the momentum underwater. But you have to keep-

Mordy Oberstein:

You have to keep momentum.

Crystal Carter

You have to keep momentum and you have to keep pumping your thing so that it stays front of mind.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's really my top thing, where do SEO campaigns go wrong? Is that you lose that momentum, which we're going to talk about in a separate podcast altogether, which it's a little teaser for that. But keeping that momentum, or the lack thereof is one of the big reasons why SEO campaigns fail. I'll say other than that, unrealistic expectations, unrealistic timelines. Because you might get the initial buy-in like, wow, that sounds super awesome, let's do that. But it's completely unrealistic. And once people realize that that's unrealistic, you lose credibility. And once you lose credibility, you have no hope, or very little hope. I shouldn't be so doomsdayish.

Crystal Carter

Yeah, I think that being able to forecast what you can expect from the campaign is really useful. Being able to set expectations before you get going is really important in your campaign. And being able to demonstrate how it's adding value to not only the specific campaign pages for instance, but also to the wider website or digital presence of the brand is really, really useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's where that planning comes into play because setting those expectations, you're going to theoretically very often get pushback. Why can't we move more aggressive here? And you need to be able to say, "Well, let me show you the plan, and here's why. If you're more aggressive, it won't work. It will fail." So they go hand in hand, setting the realistic expectations, and the keyword being realistic, depends on your ability to plan the thing out, to show why that's realistic.

Because most of the time, other stakeholders are going to want to be more aggressive because that's their job. You have to realize their job is to push you to be more aggressive to grow the company. So if you're going to say, okay, and with SEP, it's very, very important in my opinion, to be realistic. And if you're not, it's usually coming down. If you're not successful in that, it usually comes down to showing a failure to show what the planning stage is and why this is realistic.

Crystal Carter

And it can be very, very tempting to be like, "Yeah, it's going to be the best thing since sliced bread."

Mordy Oberstein:

No, don't because it will not. Six months from now you will see hockey stick growth.

Crystal Carter

Right, it'll be fine, it'll be fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Slow incremental growth in a strong, significant, slightly aggressive way is where do you want to go?

Crystal Carter

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Realistic.

Crystal Carter

These are the things, like lower your expectations, people.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what I told my wife. Now, doubling back on what we're talking about, your point about your dealing with multiple teams, getting multiple buy-ins, having the multiple teams support you, if you're in the position where you're managing those multiple teams, that is tricky because different teams have different goals and different KPIs and different priorities. So to help us navigate that, we have the founder and CEO of uSERP, Jeremy Moser is here to talk to you about how do you manage multiple teams with different goals when running both an SEO and content marketing campaign or whatever kind of campaign simultaneously, at the same time, for perhaps the same client. Here's Jeremy.

Jeremy Moser:

The biggest keys I've found in managing multiple teams across SEO and content marketing is pulling the wisdom from both teams and really utilizing that across the board to make decisions. So for example, if you're running two campaigns around SEO specifically, and then content marketing as well, which aren't super interchangeable but often related, the content marketing team will have really powerful insights into the types of content that consumers engage with the most. And so these insights are super valuable from a direct SEO perspective as you can understand what people like, what they engage with and what's actually converting for the brand. Meaning it becomes way, way, way easier to focus your SEO efforts on real data and not just kind of keyword search volume estimates or other shiny objects like that. So the key to managing multiple teams like this with differing goals is to treat them less as two teams, but as two key functions of the same end goal.

So that both are aligned in how they can achieve those rankings, but also create content that people genuinely want to engage with. And so things that can help are typically appointing representatives from each team so that all voices are heard, outlining clear goals and KPIs across both teams early on is really key. And then obviously, creating a workflow that everyone adopts where you can outline stages, who takes ownership and all of that. Content marketing teams are really, really good at capturing and creating new ideas and understanding what resonates with ideal customers. And SEOs are really great at helping that content get traction.

So systemizing your approach with a good workflow ensures that each team's really able to focus on what they do best and they can move the needle together rather than trying to do something that's a little more of a disjointed approach where content is then stuffed for SEO at the last second. We've all been there, SEOs, or pure SEO content has then tried to be published directly on socials and falls flat. So I recommend highly getting both teams as integrated as possible so that you can get the best outcome.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks, Jeremy. And thank you Jeremy for that. It is super complicated, isn't it?

Crystal Carter

So complicated. So complicated because everybody wants to do what's best for them. But it's also important to remember that we're a team. We need to move as a team and that we'll get better results as a team.

Mordy Oberstein:

And every organization needs that person. They need that person, able to keep in mind the whole team, not just my team. I am so guilty of this. I am all about at Wix, I am not like the SEO. What is good for the SEO. I'm saying to somebody, a little insight into me, I'm somebody who needs to be reined in and Mordy, there's a whole company, there's not just SEO. And you need that person. I appreciate that, though. As somebody who's not always the best at that, I appreciate having that person to rein me in and show the wider goal.

Crystal Carter

Yeah. And I think that it's, I don't know, we talk a lot about sports or whatever, it's better to get a ring. The whole team gets a ring than one person is like the MVP.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. It's not about personal stats in sports unless you're playing golf, which is not a real sport. It's about championships. And as a Yankee fan, I don't want to say championship, I say championships.

Crystal Carter

Mordy's feeling a little bit emboldened because it's the starting of the season.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's the start of baseball season, we're recording this, and I am worried about the championship, let alone the championships.

Crystal Carter

It's fine, it's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's problematic.

Crystal Carter

It's all good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thinking of things that are not problematic, I don't know, that's not a pivot at all. But we have to get off the Yankees before I really just go down into an entire sports wormhole. Talking about talking about SEO campaigns, I thought it would perhaps be both helpful and aligned if we had a look at how Google's people also ask box at four questions that when you expand them, you get an answer to that question with the URL to explore more from that website and how it can help with your e-commerce campaigns, or maybe your seasonal e-commerce campaigns.

Crystal Carter

Indeed, indeed, indeed, indeed, indeed. This is the time to think about it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. So here's some fun with people also ask. So in this particular case, I thought it would be interesting to go take a look at what Google is doing around the keyword summer sales on clothes.

Crystal Carter

Very interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. If I'm running a campaign around summer sale for my clothes that I'm looking to buy, you can see how much I shop for clothes and know about clothes shopping.

Crystal Carter

Okay. So one of the questions is, what date is best to buy clothes? That's a terrible question.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is not a question you should use.

Crystal Carter

It's a terrible question. A better question is what is the best time to shop for summer clothes?

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great question.

Crystal Carter

That's a great question. Now I think the best time to shop for summer clothes is May. That's what I think.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think October for the next year, because they're on sale again because it's obviously, so you buy a year in advance. That's where the type A personality comes in.

Crystal Carter

Mordy, I don't think you understand. Some people put on a winter coat, and so you might not even fit the clothes.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't do this because my kids are growing and I don't... By the way, as much as I joke, I am the one who buys the kids clothes.

Crystal Carter

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

So this is very pertinent for me. I don't do that. What I try to do is before the season starts, because I order online and then you want to make sure you have time to return it, in case that things don't fit. So yeah, April, May, I just bought now for the summer. So it's late March, early April, but I bought it because it was a holiday coming up, so I wanted to get them clothes for that. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. Normally, I would buy it in the clothes end of April, early April because it gets hot early here.

Crystal Carter

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

The point is the question is very on target because if you're trying to target your audience with your summer sale campaign, all right July. July. Maybe it needs to be earlier because people are going to be shopping earlier.

Crystal Carter

Right. Now here's a very interesting thing, and this is a great use for people also ask, and I use this a lot when I'm trying to figure out whether or not we should go for a keyword or whether or not we should create some content around a certain, whether there's a content opportunity there. And I'm looking at the answer that they have for what is the best time to shop for summer clothes. And I think it's a terrible answer.

Mordy Oberstein:

What is it?

Crystal Carter

The answer that they've got is August is when you find bathing suits.

Mordy Oberstein:

It makes no sense. August, it's all over.

Crystal Carter

August is when you buy and find the best bathing suits, summer clothes and sandals on sale as summer starts to come to a close. That's a terrible answer.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's my point from earlier. But no one's doing that except crazy people like me. I don't even do that.

Crystal Carter

And the one that they're linking to there is best times to go shopping on Investopedia. Now if I am somebody who is selling summer clothes and I would like to create some content around summer clothes, to me that is an opportunity because I can do better than that with a piece of content that actually answers the question and is actually dedicated to that answer. And if I am in that niche where I sell summer clothes, let's say I'm Tommy Bahama.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know who that is.

Crystal Carter

They make good Panama hats and shirts for summer things.

Mordy Oberstein:

They have baseball shirts?

Crystal Carter

No, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know.

Crystal Carter

Come on now. Okay, anyway, so let's say I have sell resort wear or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

Resort wear.

Crystal Carter

Yeah. So let's say-

Mordy Oberstein:

Welcome to Fantasy Island.

Crystal Carter

I can look at that and I can go, not only am I in that vertical, but also I can answer that question better and I'm more likely to rank for that. The other thing that's really useful for seeing if those things are good is so you click through to that article and check when it was written. So I'm looking at that and I can see that that was written in April, 2022 or it was updated in April, 2022.

Mordy Oberstein:

I will tell you a trick with that. What you should really do with that piece of content is go the way back machine and see if it was really updated or not because a piece might be years old and all they did was write updated 2022. If you think I'm joking, I have seen this a thousand times.

Crystal Carter

When people say it say top tips for 2023 and they've changed nothing.

Mordy Oberstein:

If all they changed was the title tag, the H1 and the little line after the author's name and it says updated in, and you could go the way back machine, you could see literally nothing else has changed.

Crystal Carter

Right. So this comes to the fact that Google thinks about recency when they're talking about, when they're trying to show which content where.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is a factor.

Crystal Carter

So if you're seeing that you're closer to the vertical, that your domain has better vertical authority and you can see that you can write something more recently and you can write something that more directly answers the question, then that is a sign that maybe you should actually put together that content and there's an opportunity there.

Mordy Oberstein:

1000%. At the same time, again, I'm looking at these questions by the way. So my idea with people also ask, I like to thematically take a look away, what's the message? What message people also ask are you trying to send me? And when I look at the questions, all four questions are... Here are the four. I know I have different questions than you because we're in different countries. But mine are when summer clothes go on sale, what month is cheapest to buy clothes, when clothing goes on sales, what is summer clothes season? All of the questions, all four questions have to do with when. When, when when. Which means people are really interested in when. It also means that when is probably a really complicated question. Meaning, so you might think, oh I know when is best, Mordy and Crystal said they shop in May. So May must be best. Maybe it is for us. Maybe it's a really complicated question that depends very much on what it is you're selling, your target audience. Maybe you're selling it to the elderly and they're planning this out in January.

Crystal Carter

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Whatever it is, it means to me that all four questions are all about when the running your summer clothes campaign, means that you need to do some real research. You're probably going to do well if you go beyond the four questions here and do some actual research.

Crystal Carter

You could do something around how to plan your summer wardrobe and when's a good time for sales? When's a good time to buy? When's a good time to buy ahead? When's a good time for resort wear or something like that? You could really get into that. And if you could-

Mordy Oberstein:

Have you tried Tony Bahamas resort wear?

Crystal Carter

Tommy. Tommy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Tommy, sorry. Sorry Tony.

Crystal Carter

I don't know if there's someone called about Tony.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's got to be a guy named Tony Bahamas.

Crystal Carter

We should find him on Twitter.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to ask him about his resort wear. Well, speaking about resort wear, you know what there's no resort wear in, the SEO news. I guarantee you there is no SEO news. This week about Tony Bahama and his resort wear.

Crystal Carter

Tony Bahama.

Mordy Oberstein:

Tony Bahama and his resort wear. Hi, I'm a boomer.

Crystal Carter

Bermuda, Jamaica, ooh, I want to take you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bermuda, Bahama, Tony.

Okay, well with that going completely off the rails. Here's this week's Snappy News. I'm going to go buy a Hawaiian shirt now. I feel like I want to go buy a Hawaiian shirt. I used to own a really nice Hawaiian shirt, it's my favorite shirt. And I own zero Hawaiian shirts now.

Crystal Carter

I'll tell you who does wear, who has a few Hawaiian shirts is George. And I'll tell you what, George is very dapper in his Hawaiian shirt-

Mordy Oberstein:

They look very nice.

Crystal Carter

He wore it to MozCon, and yeah, it's a good shirts, it's a good shirt. I'll tell you another type of resort wear shirt I always like is the Havana shirt. The ones with the lines and the lines on the side and the pockets.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love that. Yes.

Crystal Carter

There's a little bit of that. I'm also very like, what is it? Buena Vista Social Club, I love that look.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a very '50s kind of look.

Crystal Carter

That sort of cabana shirt or Havana shirt with the flat cap.

Mordy Oberstein:

Love that. That's great. Speaking of shirts, it reminds me, I need to order a new Yankees jersey. I need a Yogi Berra jersey. Anyway, an away Yogi Berra. It doesn't matter. As I tried to prevent going down a baseball wormhole yet again, this by the way folks, now that is baseball season, Crystal's probably cringing and oh my God, here come all like the decks and everything with baseball. It is coming.

Here's who you should be following for more social awesomeness for around SEO this week, our follow of the week is Re:signal's Kevin Gibbons. Re:signal, by the way, have a great newsletter. Kevin and team focus on predominantly on e-com SEO.

Crystal Carter

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is why I thought this makes sense because when I hear SEO campaign, I automatically think seasonality, automatically makes me think of e-com, which automatically makes me think of Kevin and the Re:signal team, all the people over at the Re:signal team.

Crystal Carter

Re:signal are great. They've provide some fantastic resources and everyone I've met from there has been super, super clever and super kind and just wonderful. So yeah,-

Mordy Oberstein:

They had a great event recently also. I did not attend. I wanted to attend because I have serious FOMO looking at it on Twitter.

Crystal Carter

Fantastic event. And yeah, they're a great team. So yeah, do follow Kevin.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do follow Kevin, sign up for their newsletter. It's @KevGibbo on Twitter, we'll link to that in the show notes as well, which brings us to the end of our podcast.

Crystal Carter

I'm so sad.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not sad because I'm campaigning for you to listen next week.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right. That was a swing and a connection, home run, pivot.

Crystal Carter

Yes. Oh yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the crack of the bat. The sweet sound of the crack of the bat. Have to move on. Anyway, 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 at the new episode as we dive into harnessing SEO for lead generation. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all 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. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.