Be gone SEO myths!

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 putting 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 am joined by the always true, the always accurate, the never mythological head of SEO branding here at Wix. Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

What do you mean I'm mythological? I'm a mermaid. I didn't tell you I'm from-

Mordy Oberstein:

But you are real.

Crystal Carter:

...mermaid mythology?

Mordy Oberstein:

You're the most real person I've ever met.

Crystal Carter:

I'm telling you, I'm a mermaid and I like to swim in the sea and it's amazing and it's sparkly and everything's good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Merman. To quote Zoolander, one of my favorite movies of all time.

Crystal Carter:

It was mermazing.

Mordy Oberstein:

So good. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also find your true SEO competitors with the SE ranking app inside of Wix. Look for it today inside of the Wix app market.

Why do I say true SEO competitors as opposed to just SEO competitors? Because so much about what you hear about SEO is not true. Today, we are set to set the record straight. We are busting SEO myths like a backup dancer busts a move. Does word count matter? Are LSI keywords real? Do I really need strong DA? We're kicking in the door on these SEO myths and more. And we will be joined by the great Andi Jarvis who shares how he convinces clients and others to break free of their SEO and marketing misconceptions. Plus, we'll dive into Google's perspectives feature to see how the search engine is trying to find accuracy and harmony on the SERP. Plus, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness across social media. So sit back as we take a saw to Pinocchio's nose of SEO lies as episode number 55 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you find your SEO truth.

Take a saw to that nose, Pinocchio. Your nose is coming off in this episode.

Crystal Carter:

Coming in hot.

Mordy Oberstein:

Liar. That little liar, Pinocchio.

Crystal Carter:

He's always making stuff up and acting like he's not going to get caught. You ain't slick, Pinocchio. We know what's going on.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know how you know he is a real boy? Because he's lying all the time. My kids always lie.

Crystal Carter:

Kids are like, "No, I didn't do that." I'm like, "It's obvious."

Mordy Oberstein:

"Did you eat the cookies?" "No, I didn't eat cookies.

Crystal Carter:

You're covered in cookie dust. You're covered in the residue. It's all over your hands. I know a story of someone who made up a baddy, a villain or something, who did all of their things. So they'd be like, "Oh, who ate all the cookies?" "Oh, it was Billy Butlin." "What?" He was this fictional person. Doesn't exist, but apparently gets up to all sorts of shenanigans.

Mordy Oberstein:

Lovely child.

Crystal Carter:

Lovely child.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know who else is full of shenanigans? A lot of the people talking about a lot of SEO stuff. SEO, for whatever reason. Whether it be just how SEO used to work back in the day and the notions that never evolved from that. For whatever reason, there's been this fostering of many SEO myths within the SEO sphere. We hear them all the time. People propagate them, Google ranks them. And we felt it was our duty to sit back, talk about, some of these more common SEO myths.

I'll say this off the bat. We can never ever hit all of the SEO myths in one show because there are just too many.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So many.

Mordy Oberstein:

So many of them. And before we dive in, I want to thank one of our listeners. Brindle Blanca reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, "Hey, I was wondering about content length. Is that a ranking factor?" And I'm like, "Oh, no. It's not a thing. In fact, Google just came out again for the 800th time and Barry Schwarz covered it on SEO Roundtable for the 800th time. How the length of your content is not an actual ranking factor. Here you go."

And then she said, "Hey, it'd be great if we went through some of these myths on the podcast. I love your podcast. If you could go through some of the myths and break them down for us." I'm like, "That's an actual brilliant idea. We are going to do this episode."

So now we are like a radio show. We take requests.

Crystal Carter:

First time caller, long time listener.

Mordy Oberstein:

There you go. Ding. We appreciate you reaching out, Brindle. Loved the idea, so we're doing it right here, right now. Let's get into breaking down some mess here. Where do we start? I have a list here.

Crystal Carter:

You have got a list here. It's a big list.

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll start with word because that's how this whole episode got started. Based on word count. People think, for whatever reason, that Google looks at the number of...

Now I just want to say things on the outset. If you believe some of these myths, and you're new to SEO or you're not an SEO, you are not to blame.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I was just going to say that actually. I think that SEOs can be forgiven, partially because Google doesn't tell everyone. Some people describe it, the ranking factors, as a bit of a black box sort of thing. And so it's a bit of a power vacuum, or a knowledge vacuum anyway, where you don't know all of the things. So people are looking at correlation and they're assuming a causation and things.

So there are some people who deep dive into some of the patents that you know... Rest his soul, Bill Slosky spent a lot of time going through a lot of patents trying to figure out and unpack and reverse engineer a lot of that stuff, and I think that Glenn Gabe picked up a little bit of that mantle recently. But I think that's one of the reasons why some of these myths become more prevalent is because we don't have necessarily a gospel of all of these things.

There is a good piece of documentation within the Google documentation about their ranking systems, but it doesn't necessarily go into every single detail of every single algorithm. And even today, as we're looking at how the SGE works in AI on Google. They've said. Sundar Pichai has said, "I don't know. I don't know all of the things that it does. It's AI." So it's working with new information, it's taking a new data, all of that sort of stuff. So some of it they know, some of they don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Every SEO who's been around for a long time will tell you this. When they first started in SEO, they're researching, reading blog posts, trying Googling, getting information, and you don't always know who to trust. We actually have an episode about how do you learn SEO, and how do you sift through bad SEO advice versus good SEO advice. We'll link to that in the show notes. And oftentimes you're reading articles that are... You don't realize they're not actual experts. Or they may be experts in one area of marketing, but talking about SEO and don't really understand SEO.

For example, if you Google LSI keywords and SEO, a lot of the top ranking content are basically titles like LSI keywords, how to find and use them to improve your SEO. What are LSI keywords and do they help with SEO? They don't, and they're not a thing. And you who are new to SEO, or you're a business owner, or you're whoever you are listening to this podcast. Welcome. And you might be Googling LSI keywords in SEO. You see it, you've heard about them, and you're not necessarily getting results and saying... No, not a thing.

So you are not to blame. I don't know who is and we don't care. What we do care about is breaking down the myth, so let's start with word count.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Many people have talked about this idea that Google's looking at your content. Let's say a blog post. And they're saying, "Oh, it's above 2000 keywords. It is good now because you checked the box. You've hit the number." And the truth is, and Google has said this many times, and Barry on the SEO Roundtable blog as covered it many times, there's no set number they're looking at.

In fact, it varies. If I'm searching for how do I tie my shoe, I'm probably not looking for War and Peace. I just want a quick little snippet of "Hey." And that's probably what's going to rank. Who invented the tying of the shoe and the full history of tying of the shoe? I'm probably looking for a much longer piece of content. So it depends.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I've read the quality rater guidelines. They don't talk about that. They don't say, "You got it. Oh, everything has to be over 500 words. Everything has to be over this, that or the other." And John Mueller has said, and he said again, and he said many times. One quote that he has is, "From our point of view, the number of words on a page is not a quality factor and not a ranking factor. So just blindly adding more and more text to a page doesn't make it better. Be exact. John."

Thanks, John.

Mordy Oberstein:

As Crystal mentioned to me before the show, we're going to get into a lot of pithy John Muellerisms on this episode.

Crystal Carter:

Some of my favorite moments from John. Completely honest, and he's completely right. We have pages on the hub, which we didn't necessarily intend to rank. We just have them. So we have a video collection for instance, just so it's easy for users to find them. And it literally just says how to do this, and there's a video, and there's a link to a larger article. We don't expect them to rank. Google's ranking them anyway. I can canoncalize them. Google's ranking anyway because they wanted to. And it's just because sometimes you don't need a big long thing.

I saw one. My favorite, it was a featured snippet. I was talking to Darth Na on Twitter about this. And he was like, "Who's got a good example of a short one?" The best one I found when I was doing some research for a... It was a veterinarian's app, and I was looking at research of this. And a competitor of the company that I was researching for, they were ranking for do male cats have nipples? And this page was the ranking for them.

Mordy Oberstein:

Important question.

Crystal Carter:

Apparently lots of people are asking this question. They were ranking for it, getting tons of traffic, and I think it was under 200 words.

I think a lot of times people will say, "Oh, it should be around 500 words for a blog." But part of that is that's how long it takes to cover that topic. If it's going to take you a little bit of time to actually cover a topic, well then yeah. You are going to need to actually do the work to cover the topic. If you can cover the topic in 250 words, cover the topic in 250 words.

Do male cats have nipples? Yes or no or whatever it is. I can't remember what the answer was.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll Google it now.

Crystal Carter:

But whatever it is, yes or no. And then maybe a little bit of explanation and keep it moving. That's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's it. So bottom line, word count is not a ranking factor. You should write the amount of words that you need to address what your audience wants out of your content. And that could be five words, it could be 5 million words. I don't know the answer, only you do.

Let's move on to LSI Keywords. It's like the bane of a lot of SEO's existence. So LSI keywords are basically... Think of it like synonyms. So let's say my page is about air conditioning installation. So the idea of LSI keywords is that by having other words related to installation, like air conditioning repair, air conditioning maintenance, air conditioning... I don't know another word for that. Renovation.

Crystal Carter:

Or home cooling-

Mordy Oberstein:

Right.

Crystal Carter:

...or something like that. They're semantically relevant.

Mordy Oberstein:

HVAC repair, HVAC installation.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

That Google will now have a more contextual understanding because of all these related, synonym keywords, and they'll understand that your page should rank for air conditioning repair.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Google has said, I don't know like a gazillion times, it's not a thing.

Crystal Carter:

So another funny...

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not a thing. I don't have anything better for you outside of the fact that LSI keywords or LSI has been around. Semantic indexing has been around since the '80s.

Crystal Carter:

Right. This is one that people got confused about. So people started calling it LSI keywords and things like that. And I think that this is something that people have gotten confused about because the idea of talking about not just the literal keywords, but things that are in the general vicinity of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Topically related.

Crystal Carter:

Topically related. That is a good thing to do, and that is a... That will give you better writing. Will give the user a better reading experience. And I think they're essentially confusing it with semantic generally.

Mordy Oberstein:

Semantic.

Crystal Carter:

Semantically related content. So Semrush has a great article titled What are LSI Keywords and Why They Don't Matter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. So you do want to build topical relevance. Wait, let's talk English. You want to create context.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

And when you're writing for a user, a person, you want to have contextual knowledge imparted so they understand what you're talking about. So if you're talking about air conditioning repair, you might also talk about heating system repair because heating and air conditioners are topically related. If you're talking about tables, perhaps you want to talk about chairs because they're topically, semantically, contextually, related.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Exactly. These are going to make sense. If you're talking about a record player, you might also talk about music. These things make sense. They go together.

Mordy Oberstein:

You talk about Bob Dylan? You're going to talk about harmonicas. LSI keywords, not a thing.

Crystal Carter:

Not a thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

So if you see it out there, ignore it.

Crystal Carter:

And to quote John Mueller on this one, "There is no such thing as LSI keywords. Anyone who's telling you otherwise is mistaken. Sorry."

Mordy Oberstein:

Is he really sorry?

Crystal Carter:

I don't think he is.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't think he's really sorry. I think sorry was sarcastic.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's a sorry, not sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Can we move on now to DA?

Crystal Carter:

DA? Oh, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

DA and poor Moz. DA is a metric called domain authority that Moz, which is an SEO tool, created. And what it basically does, it's a score that tries to mimic how Google might perhaps understand how authoritative a website is.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is not a metric that Google uses. It is a simulation based on their algorithms. Not Google's algorithms. Moz' algorithm and how they're trying to determine the balance of things like rankings and backlinks to say how authoritative is this website.

Basically, it's a representation. If you go to a website and you're like, "Oh, wow, this is a really great website. They really know what they're talking about this topic." DA is a way for you to simulate understanding that without visiting a million websites.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So it's a shorthand. It's a helpful shorthand. It's something like... If you think about something like BMI. BMI is a nonsense metric. BMI is... They go, "You're this tall, you weigh this much, you are overweight and you're underweight and you are appropriate weight."

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. So Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the day probably had a terrible BMI because he was so muscled up.

Crystal Carter:

Terrible BMI. Exactly. So it's a bit of a garbage metrics, but it is as a shorthand. As a helpful shorthand before you get into the details. It's a helpful shorthand to help you keep it moving.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. It's a very top level kind of thing. And all the different SEO tools have their own version of it. Ahrefs has DR. Semrush has AS, which is authority score. So every tool has their own version of this, but what you'll generally see out there in the ether of SEO talk is DA. And people will say to you, "I would like to sell you high DA authority links."

Crystal Carter:

Right. And the thing about that is that... Another quote from John that it's a helpful metric. But to quote from John, "Google doesn't use it at all. Not at all." So it's really important to bear that in mind.

And also, one of the things he points out in the... There's an SEO Roundtable article where he talks about it and well... Sorry, where someone's recording him talking about it. And we can guess who that is who's recording it. And when he is discussing it, he says, "Again, they all have different metrics. So you don't know exactly how Ahrefs is measuring that. You don't know exactly how Moz is measuring that. You don't know exactly how Semrush is measuring it." So maybe treat it in the same way as your BMI. Treat it as a tracker to track progress to see if there's some movement in how they're measuring it. So if you see it go up in whatever way, maybe that's a sign that good things are happening. If you see it stay the same, that could be a sign that things are changing. It could be the sign that things aren't changing.

But one of the things that's really tricky about DA is that a lot of these tools have a really tricky way of measuring subdomains. So you can see someone who's using something like... I saw a soccer club. And there was a soccer club and they had signed up to, I don't know, soccerclub.com and they got their own little subsite as part of that. So it was amazingsoccerclub.soccerclub.com or whatever it is. I'm sure there's some website called soccerclub.com. Anyway, according to all of these tools, this tiny little soccer club had a DA of 97. Why? Because the domain of soccerclub.com, which has all of these other subdomains, has tons of back links from various different things across the domain. So sometimes...

Mordy Oberstein:

They're all very link heavy anyway. All of these.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. So there's lots of different factors that can misconstrue how those things are. So don't stress yourself out about it.

And I've heard Barry Schwartz talk about it before. When you're talking about getting backlinks and things. Don't necessarily worry about the DA of something.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, don't. It's all about relevance of the website to what you're doing. And not only the website or the webpage is linking to you. It's way more about relevance than it is about DA. Honestly, if you're an SEO professional and you're working with thousands of sites. You're looking at thousands of sites, and you'd really need a top level understanding real quick about what this website... Where are they at? Then DA is for you. If you're not that person, don't even think about it. Trust your gut when you go to a website. This looks like a good website to you, they're running good content, they're trustworthy, they're authoritative. That's probably way more effective than DA.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Chill.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, let's try this one. Big name websites always beat smaller niche websites. And there's a ton of myths around this one. There's myths within myths within myths around this one. One myth is that Google automatically ranks big name brands above smaller niche websites. Or another myth that falls under this umbrella is domain age is a ranking factor. How old your domain is. So if my domain is 1 million years old, 1 billion years old, it'll beat out Crystal's website because Crystal's website is only 1000 years old.

Crystal Carter:

Again, I think this is something that comes from a little bit of confusion. Because this goes back to page rank, which is one of Google's oldest algorithms, and it was very much linked to links.

Mordy Oberstein:

Links.

Crystal Carter:

So some of the earliest information about SEO will be links. Links are really important. Don't get me wrong, links are important. It's how... When Google crawls from one page, they'll find a link. They'll crawl to another page, they'll crawl to another page, they'll crawl to another page. But it is not the only thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, my gosh. It's like a myth within a myth within a myth. Wow, that's a lot of mythology. That's how you use the word mythology. I understand that. You understand that.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that it's very much something that is super valuable. Getting links is good, but it's not all about it. And it can definitely make a big difference. But part of that isn't just because of the link itself. Part of that can have to do with how often the page that you're getting the link from is being crawled.

For instance, if you get a link from a news publisher. They're publishing hundreds of articles a day, they're going to be getting crawled really regularly. That means you're more likely to have your link be discovered, you're more likely to be seen by lots of people, you're more likely to have traffic come to your website. There's lots of things that are going to be a causation of getting that link.

So it's super important, don't get me wrong. But it's not everything,

Mordy Oberstein:

No. And Google's talked about it more recently than not trying to downplay the importance of links. John Mueller's gone on record a bunch of times saying links are not the be all end all. Barry's covered SEO Roundtable a bunch of times that Google's downplaying. Google says, "Links are not as important as you think they are because of all of this."

But going back to domain age, that is not a ranking factor. If you have a great website. And I think this comes about from something that does make sense a little bit. If you've got an amazing website. You sat there, you planned the whole website out, you wrote 4 million blog posts, and then you launched the website. It's going to take Google a little bit of time to realize that you have an amazing website. And a website that it's already familiar with. They're already familiar with it, so that's going to rank already. Meaning domain age is not a thing.

In fact, Google said about that, "No, not a thing at all." What is a thing though is Google being familiar with the website, understanding the website, and trusting the website. So obviously a website that's around for a while has accrued trust. And if you're a new player on the block, Google doesn't know you yet. But once Google realizes that you have awesome toys at your house, Google's going to be over there all the time trying to hang out with you.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Precisely. So, yeah. There's a lot of, again, contributing factors on this. So you're going to have more links. They're going to have more data on the kinds of traffic that normally goes to your website because they've been sending traffic to your website for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years or something. They're going to know the kinds of questions that you're able to answer. They're going to know the kinds of content that you have on your page. Most of your pages will probably be indexed by the time they've gone through all of these many years of seeing your content. Things like that. They're also going to have a lot of things that are already stored in their cache. All of that sort of stuff is going to... There's lots of things that they already know that they can bring to the table. And I think that there's ways that new domains can definitely make a big splash, and sometimes that can include a mix of marketing activity, including other channels outside of organic.

But another fantastic quote from John. Someone asked, "Does domain age still matter in today's SEO in comparison to domain versus subdomain?" And John Mueller said, "No, domain age helps nothing."

It helps nothing. So I think it's just really important to remember that you've got every chance in the world. I posted recently that in tennis, you show up on the match and you've got just as much chance as the other person in winning. And recently at Wimbledon, somebody who was unseeded won the women's Wimbledon. And somebody who was not ranked number one, who went up against the number one ranking men's tennis player at Wimbledon, and won. If you've got good content, then there's no reason why your new content can't do well if you send lots of signals and make sure that Google knows. That has lots of ways of knowing what you're about and what you do and all of that sort of stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

So by the way, on the subdomains versus subfolder. You kind of alluded to it a second ago. We did an episode about that a little while ago. There's, again, too many myths to get into. There's a whole bunch of myths around that. Check out that episode. We'll link to it in the show notes. We also covered duplicated content penalties. That's also a myth on another episode. We'll link to that in the show notes.

Let's do one more. Okay, let's do... This is one of my favorites. Low code to HTML ratio.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, no. Don't get him started.

Mordy Oberstein:

I see that all the time. I've been asked about this a gazillion times. Basically, a lot of the SEO tools, when they run an audit, they have a category or a warning called low code to HTML ratio. Meaning you give a lot of... Or is it low HTML to code ratio? I don't even know anymore. I think I got it backwards. It's basically saying you have a lot of code on the page, but not a lot of content. And Google will not rank you well. I've talked to John about this. It's not real.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

In fact, John has called on the SEO tools to please take that out.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think this is one of the things where when you... You need to use your brain. You need to use your noggin actually.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just because you added a bunch of JavaScript functionality to your page does not make it spam. Because that's where this myth comes from. Back in the day there was a lot of janky code added onto websites. I keep using that word because you've used it and I've love it, and I've stolen it, and I've made it my own, Crystal. My word now. You can use it, but it's my word.

Crystal Carter:

You jacked it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I did. I'll mail you a check.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Back in the day, people would add all sorts of stuff to their page, and a lot of... It was a practice a lot of spammy pages would do. So that's where this whole thing of having a lot of code to a low text or HTML ratio came from. But today, in the world of JavaScript, you can have all sorts of carousels and expandable tabs and functionality animations that would add a lot of code to your page, and it does not mean that it's spammy. It just means that you like functionality and interaction on your webpage.

Crystal Carter:

This is what I'm saying. Use your brain. Look at the page and go... If you see a wording like that. Sometimes, for instance, I get people... This is another one where people are looking at schema markup, and they go into a Google Search Console and it says, "You have a warning for this." And I don't have that information on that page, so that's not necessarily relevant to me. It's like, "You haven't included reviews." I was like, "This product doesn't have reviews." It's a warning. And people are like, "What do I do?" And I'm like, "Nothing." Are you going to put reviews on there? Okay, you can look at whether or not you can add reviews to your website. Or if you're not going to do them, don't worry about it. If you are going to do it, great. That's great. Reviews are great. But don't freak out about every little thing.

Look at it. Look at it with your eyes.

Mordy Oberstein:

If I'm not mistaken, I think it was Ahrefs who did this. They went through and said, "We're taking a bunch of these warnings out because they're really not relevant anymore."

Crystal Carter:

Right. So have a look, and if you see that on there... I'll be honest. I would normally have a look at the low text to what's it called or whatever. I have a look just to see. And if I can see that everything's working fine, everything's good, everything is functioning as it should, then I'm probably going to set that warning to ignore. I'm going to redo my audit and keep it moving.

Mordy Oberstein:

Move on. We're going to have to move on because, again, there are so many myths. If you feel like there's a myth that we didn't cover that you still have a question about or think, "Hey, your audience should probably know about that myth, and you should tell them that's a myth." Then let us know. Reach out to us on social, comment. We'll cover it on a future episode. Maybe we'll do round two or then maybe a round three. Again, we can probably do a round four or five also. So let us know.

Crystal Carter:

Too many.

Mordy Oberstein:

Anyway. With this, if you're working with clients or you're working with anybody and they may have all sorts of SEO myths. Or even just marketing myths because there's probably a whole episode we could do about marketing myths in general. How do you convince them to abandon those misconceptions and even often unreasonable expectations that come along with those myths? We spoke with Andi Jarvis, and here's his take on how to help your clients, your folks, abandon misconceptions and have reasonable expectations.

Andi Jarvis:

Hi, my name is Andi Jarvis. I am the strategy director at XMO Marketing. I should point out that I am not, and I repeat, I am not an SEO. But hopefully I can help with this SEO question because it's not really an SEO question. It's an SEO PPC, whatever marketing, topic. How do you convince clients and stakeholders to abandon misconceptions and unreasonable expectations about the marketing thing that you want to get through?

So firstly, let me start by telling you how not to do it. Because if you are on social media, you will know that a lot of the time arguments these days are held by one camp shouting at the other camp, hoping that the other camp is going to accept that they are wrong and the first camp's opinion's correct. But weirdly, life doesn't work like that, does it? Because the Camp B who are being shouted at are standing there going, "I don't understand why they're shouting that because they're wrong." And then they shout their opinion back. And all that happens is you just end up with two idiots shouting at each other, banging heads like rutting bison instead of actually trying to move things forward.

So you don't ever convince anyone to change their mind by basically just telling them they're wrong. Because effectively, when you say that, what people tend to hear is that I'm stupid. You say, "Oh, you're wrong." They hear, "I'm stupid." It's just a cognitive bias. So you have to walk people through and you have to use a language they understand.

So the first thing I would say is stop talking about the technical part of your discipline because nobody cares. You care, that's why you have that job. Because you are great at SEO and PPC, graphic design, web design, whatever it is. That's why you've got that job. The person you're talking to, if you're talking to a boss or a director or whatever, they really don't care. Tell you what they do care about. Often it's money. Something starting with a pound sign or a dollar sign or a Euro sign or whatever sign it is. That often bothers people at the top of an organization. So if you want to get them to believe in the thing you are doing, and you want to get them to understand about the thing you're doing, you have to speak to them in their language, which means that you have to talk to them about the financial impact.

"Ah, but Andi. It's SEO. It's quite hard to quantify the impact." PPC, they go, "Well, give us one. ROAS is eight, so we'll give you eight back. Yay." that's why PPC gets the investment. SEO can be quite different. Web design, good graphic design, can be really difficult to quantify. Advertising. You want to do traditional advertising. I hate that phrase. But if you want to do that, you say, "We need to spend this upfront and we hope that it might deliver this in a little bit of time." That's quite difficult to do. So sometimes you have to go to history. Past performance can sometimes be an indicator of future performance.

Sometimes, and I know this is a dirty word in marketing, you can go to academia. Because amazingly, people have been studying marketing since the 1950s. And most of the problems like recessions and interest rate cuts, inflation going up, this has all happened before. It might be the first time it's happened to your generation, but this has all happened before, and there is loads of great evidence as to why you should carry on doing the thing you're doing. So look at the past and sometimes use that as a way to guide the future.

Ask a lot of questions. Ask lots of questions before you start telling people anything. Ask them questions to understand what they're worried about, and then they can then take that and go... You can then go, "Right. Okay, if you're worried about this thing, here's how we can help you." So rather than just going, "SEO." And people are going, "I'm not listening." You can go, "Oh, you have this problem. Here's how we can help with that."

Unreasonable expectations are slightly different, but I think that starts by right at the beginning. Good planning, scope of works. That type of thing that they call it in IT. What are we going to do? What do we think the impact's going to be? Don't over promise to get the budget, because these two things often work together. "Oh, yeah. We can do all of this if you give us the budget." You don't get the budget, then it looks like you're making it up. Be honest, talk their language, and that should help you. Hope that helps.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much for that, Andi. Really appreciate you contributing to the podcast and see you around at some of the conferences out there in the upcoming months. By the way, you can follow Andi over at Andi Jarvis. That's at A-N-D-I J-A-R-V-I-S. Andi Jarvis. Follow him. He is fantastic, if you haven't realized that already.

But it's a great point, by the way. As a former teacher, I'll say this. If you're trying to educate people and engage them, you have to educate them. You can't speak at them, you can't try to berate them, you can't try to make them feel bad about it. You have to really be conscious of giving them the tools to make their own decision autonomously, so that hopefully you lead them to the correct decision that they'll make autonomously.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also to understand why they might have had that information in the first place. Where did they get that from and why was it so convincing to them? How can you help them to... Because if you can understand how they got that information or how they came to that conclusion, then you can help them to unpack it a little bit.

So again, like we were talking about. "Oh, everybody thinks that backlinks are the most important thing." Well, there'll be a reason why they thought that. So again, it'll have to do with page rank. It'll have to do with lots of the emails that they're getting all the time and the way that... Maybe some of the things they've been reading. So bridge that gap and be respectful of people who are curious and trying to learn.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly. So you want to foster real learning experiences. You don't want to just win the argument. I think that's what it all comes down to at the end.

Okay. With that, so Google has been trying to do some of their own truth searching. Fundamentally speaking, Google does a lot of truth searching. Their whole business model is based on showing you the most accurate, most relevant results possible. But the truth is hard. I feel like somebody has said that before me, but I'll take that as my own saying. My own idiom. And to help Google get at the multiple layers of truth that are out there, Google has launched a little new feature on mobile called perspectives. So what we're going to do is take a look at the direction that Google is going in with this new perspective as we take a directional look at the SERP as we are going Google.

And it's Going, Going Google. It's out of here. So back at Google I/O. I'm terrible with time. When was that? May?

Crystal Carter:

May, I think? I think it's May.

Mordy Oberstein:

March.

Crystal Carter:

One of the M months.

Mordy Oberstein:

Something with an M. It was an M Month.

Crystal Carter:

50-50 chance there.

Mordy Oberstein:

March.

Crystal Carter:

We could look it up, but we're not going to.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I'd rather just say it's March. I'm pretty sure it was March, actually. So they announced a little feature called perspectives, and what it basically is. When you go search on mobile in the US, I'm not sure if it's in any other market, you get a little set of filters up top. You can look for images, shopping, news, and one of those little filters in the little carousel up top is called perspectives. And Google helps you try to get perspective, and they try to offer you all sorts of different angles and takes on that topic.

So for example, if you search for something like, "Are the Beatles a good band?" You'll hopefully get some perspectives from whatever sources helping you understand the multiple takes. That's a complicated question. Are the Beatles good? I don't know. It depends. Historically speaking, they were really significant. Do I enjoy their music? I don't know. Sometimes I do. I used to be a bigger Beatles fan than I'm now.

Crystal Carter:

They're a mixed bag. They've got... They have some...

Mordy Oberstein:

They are a mixed bag. That's a good way of putting it. They are a mixed bag.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, they got a mixed bag. Some of their stuff...

Mordy Oberstein:

That's our perspective.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is our perspective. You might want someone else's perspective. And what Google's basically doing is showing you a tab full of perspectives. And it's interesting because...

Okay, let's break one down. I searched for "Is Aaron Judge good?" Aaron Judge is a baseball player. Aaron Judge, for some context, holds the American League Home Run record in a single season with 62 home runs in a season. That's actually the real home run record because the people who broke it beforehand were on drugs. Steroids. So in my mind, "Yeah, he's got the real record." But anyway, you break it down. Is Aaron Judge good? And it tries to give you a lot of social media stuff like Reddit threads, some Twitter stuff, there's a bunch of YouTube stuff, and it's interesting.

And with any relatively new product, you're always going to have some kinks to work out in the system.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think what you're looking at now. We're recording this. There are still kinks in the system. A lot of it is outdated. It's months old. Nine months old. Which is great for the Beatles, right?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Are The Beatles a good band? Yeah, that question has been going on since the '60s. So I don't care if it's nine months ago or nine years ago, that perspective is still going to be the same. But on things that are more current event related. Because you can have a great season and the next season not be a good player.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

What happened before? Not in Aaron's case. Aaron's wonderful. But nine months is a long time.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Yeah, and also what good is can change.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. So yeah. Okay. That's been a little bit of a hangup of mine. Let's take the Beatles one. If I were to ask you, "Are the Beatles a good band?"

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I would think there's multiple... Or let me ask... Let's take it a different way. Who's the best Beatle?

Crystal Carter:

Who's the best Beatle?

Mordy Oberstein:

Who's the best Beatle?

Crystal Carter:

It's not Ringo.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. Well, let's not be offensive here. But yeah, it's definitely not Ringo.

Crystal Carter:

Not Ringo. Bless his heart, but it's not Ringo. And I don't know. I think that all of these things will depend on the songs that connect with you and things like that. You might not even... I'm not even sure if I would agree with that as a question because you can't Beatle on your own. It's not like you can show up...

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that's great. So that's one perspective. Then you have... Maybe there's... You break it down in terms of songwriting. When you say who's the best Beatle, does best mean in terms of songwriting out of all of them? Does it mean who had the best career? What does best mean? How do you break down the entity in the context of best? And there's multiple ways to break it down, but you're not really getting an entity breakdown.

Go back to Aaron Judge, a baseball player. If I'm asking whatever baseball player is the best. Is it best at offense, best at defense, best at promoting themselves? What does best mean? How do you break down the entity according to best? So there's multiple ways to break down an entity, but you're not really getting an entity breakdown. You're just getting a social source. Twitter or YouTube.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So for instance, Glenn Gabe did a really big deep dive on the perspectives panel. The only thing that... I think where they're trying to make up for the nuance is with volume, so having lots and lots of perspectives, for instance, on it. But I feel like that creates noise.

So for instance, Glenn showed the example of best gaming chair perspectives. And then it's just lots of YouTube things, lots of people writing about what's the best gaming chair, and lots of things from Reddit about what the best gaming chair is. And to my mind, that's the same as just going onto one of these platforms and trolling through all of the things to find it.

And I think that the trickiness of wading into some of those forums and trying to curate it is that those forums tend to be a bit raw and they tend to be a bit difficult to wrangle. So if you're trying to organize that information, which never wanted to be organized in the first place-

Mordy Oberstein:

Good point.

Crystal Carter:

...you're going to get some complex results. And I think that part of the reason why they're leading on this perspectives tab is in order to counteract the amount of AI content that we're getting. So the perspective stuff is more raw human. "Ah, this chair was terrible." Which did they tell you? The chair that I'm sitting in right now, the review for it, where someone was like, "Is this a hobbit chair? I would not wish this chair on my worst enemy." And I was like, "My guy. That's some strong experience. Strong feelings about a chair. Very strong feelings."

Mordy Oberstein:

That guy really likes chairs a lot.

Crystal Carter:

He was really upset. The chair is fine. It's a chair. And so I think trying to curate those things, they're trying to bring those perspectives literally into the SERP because I think they expect for there to be a lot of AI content coming from more traditional publishers. So I think they're trying to balance that-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great point.

Crystal Carter:

...kind of content on the web so that you can see the more curated content and you can see more, "Yeah, this is how I feel about this."

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And Google knows that there's a trend out there that people are looking towards social media for information because you trust people versus search engines kind of thing. So they're trying to incorporate that into the search engines, so that you feel the search engine is a place where you can go to get that trust.

I think directionally speaking, that's what this segment Going, Going Google is all about, it makes total sense. I feel like we're at the beginning of a technology, or the beginning of the product rather. And I think it has a tremendous amount of value. I think they just got to take it to the next level. Spice it up a notch. Kick it up a notch.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think...

Mordy Oberstein:

Look forward to that, actually.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. We'll see how it all plays out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now to see how it all played out in the SEO news this week, which always plays out itself with some sort of drama. Let's dive into this week's Snappy News.

Snappy News. Two for you this week, both from he that is Barry Schwartz over at SEORoundtable.com.

First up, Google's search language mashing systems released two weeks ago. So a few weeks back, it turns out Google released an update that better matched the language being searched for and the actual results on the results page. I will tell you, as an expat, I search in English and would often get the language of the country I'm in, especially in Google Discover. Which by the way, I'm not sure it's part of this update or not. I've seen it with folks I consult with and their sites, and it can be a very big deal if the wrong language shows up for your sites. If you have a site and you have pages in multiple languages, and let's say somebody's searching in, I don't know, Mexico. But they're searching in English and the Spanish version comes back. Highly unlikely that you're going to get a click because I don't want the Spanish version. I don't speak Spanish, I just happen to be on vacation in Mexico. So Google getting this right can be a very big deal, and it's nothing to sneeze at.

Also from Barry Schwartz, and also from SEORoundtable.com, and also nothing to sneeze at. Google, August 2023. Broad core update finished rolling out. It is done. A little bit longer than usual to finish this update. Now is the time to go and look at any changes in your ranking trajectory and see what is what. It's hard to do during the update itself because there's always a little kick at the end that could reverse what you initially saw during the outset of the core update. So now is the time to go in and see what, if anything, has changed. Hopefully for the better.

And with that, that is this week's Snappy News.

So snappy, so informative, so much news. I actually love covering news.

Crystal Carter:

We know you do.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love news. I love the SEO news. I don't like regular news. I don't listen, watch or do anything with regular news anymore.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

But SEO news, I'm all about the SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Read all about it, people.

Mordy Oberstein:

Read all about it. You know what else you should be reading all about is Pedro Dias, who is our follower of the week.

Pedro Dias is an SEO OG. Former Googler, major SEO OG, technical SEO, and SEO product manager. Founder of multiple companies, I believe. He's over at Pedro Dias on Twitter. That's P-E-D-R-O D-I-A-S on Twitter. So check out Pedro.

Crystal Carter:

Pedro is great. He's a super knowledgeable SEO who's been working for ages, and is a very good follow if you want some clear no nonsense SEO stuff that is not full of myths.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why he's our... Literally why he's our follow of the week.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

We sat down. Who is somebody who does not tolerate myths? And it's Pedro.

Crystal Carter:

Pedro Dias. Pedro speaks...

Mordy Oberstein:

Zero tolerance policy for myths. SEO Myths.

Crystal Carter:

Right. He's speaking some truth where he can. So, yeah. He's a great fellow. Nice guy. Funny as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

So definitely follow Pedro.

Mordy Oberstein:

Beat my butt at cornhole over at Brighton.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, he did. I was there.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like I got hoodwinked. I got hustled.

Crystal Carter:

You got hustled?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, because he's like, "Oh, I never played a cornhole before." And he was like, "All right." And we go over and 1, 2, 3, 4. Boom, boom, boom. I'm like, "You never played cornhole before? Yeah, right."

Crystal Carter:

I saw it. That was pretty devastating. I don't know how you came back from that, Mordy. It was pretty conclusive.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I'm still down on myself ever since then. Really shook my confidence.

Crystal Carter:

You'll live to cornhole another day.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what I'm thinking. I'm like, "I have to." I've been practicing my cornhole game.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, okay. Oh, right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now I'm ready.

Crystal Carter:

I didn't realize there was a rematch.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. In my mind there is.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I haven't talked to Pedro about it, but we should.

Crystal Carter:

We'll see.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Well, with that, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to set SEO priorities. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning hub over at wix.com/seo/learn.

Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars we have over 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.