What's your SEO maturity?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. [foreign language 00:00:14] For joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, fabulous, fantastic, the fantastical, that's not a compliment, head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello everyone. Fantastical, I'm not sure about that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Listen, all that means you're in a fantasy world. I mean, that could be a good thing-

Crystal Carter:

Like a mermaid. I would love to be a mermaid. That would be fun. I could be friends with dolphins or something. I love dolphins.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, you can hang out with my kids. In his mind, he's the first person to walk on Mars, so.

Crystal Carter:

They don't have mermaids on Mars.

Mordy Oberstein:

They don't have people on Mars either.

Crystal Carter:

But they definitely don't have mermaids. There's not enough ocean. There's not enough ocean.

Mordy Oberstein:

They found water. They found water on Mars.

Crystal Carter:

It was frozen though.

Mordy Oberstein:

Maybe there are tiny frozen mermaids.

Crystal Carter:

Those would be different creatures. Those would be different fantastical creatures, right? They would be ice fairies or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

In your mind, not mine. In my mind, it all makes sense.

Crystal Carter:

We need a GenAI to sort this out. We're like, "What would an ice-"

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, the GenAI will sort this out and not hallucinate more.

Crystal Carter:

Put it into one of those image generators and show me a picture of an ice mermaid.

Mordy Oberstein:

At some point during this podcast I'll go. We'll do that. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter search light each and every month, where you can subscribe to it one time and you'll get it each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also help your site mature with our native and built apps created together with the likes of Amazon, Google Tech Manager, Google Merchant Center, Bing, Microsoft, and so many more. Look for them in the Wix Dashboard and Wix Studio app markets. We're talking about maturity because, well, I don't have any, but also because we're talking about how site maturity factors into SEO, why knowing where the site is key to doing good SEO, why an SEO strategy without phases of site development is no SEO strategy at all, and how SEO the various status of site development looks a bit different.

Brainlabs' own Grace Frolich stops by to share how to assess site maturity from an SEO point of view, and we hop across to Wix Universe, which is also on Mars in a Frozen with the mermaids with our own product manager, Paz Dekel, to discuss how product maturity factors into future development. Plus, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So let the wine flavors seep through the oak barrels of your mind as we let SEO mature in casks of cognition on episode 82 of the SERP's Up podcast.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, that was like a sharp cave-aged introduction.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm getting notes of hints of self-righteousness and slight narcissism.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I can see the tannins as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what? Most wine, it's not aged in a barrel. It's aged in a metal vat.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I have a terrible thing. Anybody who's a wine aficionado and Marcus Tober, if you're listening to this, please close your ears now. But I have a general opinion that a bad wine is good by the third glass.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have a theory, by the way, that white wine doesn't matter, it all tastes the same.

Crystal Carter:

If it's really cold, you can't really taste very much. Although I do love a Chenin Blanc, and to be fair, I've had some pretty bad. I mean, I know just said that about bad wine Wine, but that was college. I know how to buy a good cheap wine. The price doesn't actually matter. Anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. So okay, let's get started with this. One of the biggest factors that should guide your SEO focus is where this site is currently at, and that includes where the business is currently at. This obviously comes into focus with, I don't know, a brand new website where let's say dealing with some of the more technical issues are going to come into a much stronger focus, but it really deals with any site at any point and anywhere in its stage of evolution. But it even goes beyond that for me. For example, with a newer site or even an older site where you're trying to break across different content verticals or into new content areas or content universes, since we're talking about Mars, there's a unique focus on gaining digital momentum in those cases and the buildup and the awareness of the buildup and therefore the authority around the topic, you're going to need to get that momentum and that buildup brings up a whole slew of new and different kind of SEO focuses and tasks.

In that case, by the way, they might not even seem like SEO tasks when you're doing that ramp up. A lot of it might be about getting some of the social media momentum, so you just get digital presence kind of thing. Anyway, all of this goes into what your SEO and content strategy for search should be. So that's why we're talking today about maturity, where the site is, where the ecosystem is, where the business is, so that you can better understand what you should be focusing on from an SEO point of view. Because again, it all depends on what matters now to the website.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And I think that it's really important that people understand you don't have to do everything all at once and nobody expects you to do everything all at once. And your brand and your website-

Mordy Oberstein:

My mother did, and it was really a hard part of my childhood.

Crystal Carter:

Really hard. Then you can't do everything all at once. Your goals will be different in the first iteration of your website from what they will be later on. If you're somebody who's an established player, for instance, if you're Salesforce and you're writing content about CRMs, you are established, right? Not only that, but you have a corpus of content that you can reference in your own documentation. So if you write an article about, I don't know, lead generation or whatever it may be, you can reference yourself multiple times throughout your content. However, if you are a brand new challenger in the market necessarily, one of the problems you might have is that actually you're going to have to need to reference some of your competitors, which is like, ah, what do I do there? And that's going to have a different approach to once you're further down the line, because those have different challenges because let's say you are Salesforce and you've written about CRMs for 20 years or 15 years, then you have to worry about cannibalization, duplication, things like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Staying there.

Crystal Carter:

Staying there, all of that sort of stuff. If you're brand new, then you're really just trying to get on the board, really. You're trying to get content out there.

Mordy Oberstein:

And win any way you can. Just get something going.

Crystal Carter:

Right. You've got to get on the board, you're trying to get points on the board and stuff. But really, I think in the early days, there's quantity and quality, but quantity is really important in the first element. Of course, you want to make sure you've got quality, of course.

Mordy Oberstein:

But you need to show you're alive.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. And whereas I think that once people get further on, you're really refining for that quality as you get further down the line.

Mordy Oberstein:

I had somebody ask me the other day, "Send me the best keywords. Send me the best keywords." The best keyword on the planet? I don't know. We were talking about this, the term Google is probably the best keyword with the most search volume. You mean what's the best keyword for your site and business right now? I can send you a list. And a year from now, that should not be the same list. It should be a different list. And to that point, I think when you're developing an SEO strategy, I like to include phases of development. Phase one, we're going to focus on this. In a year from now, we're going to enter phase two. And in phase two, we're going to now focus on this. And ultimately, we're going to enter phase three. And in phase three it's going to look very, very different. Phase three is going to be more about maintenance because we'll have all the rankings, and now we're going to have to go fend off and fight off all the upstarters who were like us two years ago from doing what we already did.

So when you're creating an SEO strategy, you should be thinking about where you want to ultimately go and the various stages of the site's development until you get there and creating a sub strategy for each one of those phases.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think we talked to someone recently who was talking about building up their brand and how they started, and they just went in full pelt straight away. And that's definitely one strategy to do that. And yeah, you need to think about how you're going to phase that. What happens after you get to that mountaintop? You don't want to plateau, you want to keep going. And I think we sometimes use the metaphor of training or going to the gym or whatever. If you have not gone to the gym, you've never particularly done any exercise or whatever, and you're starting from nothing, right? The way that you are going to get yourself into shape is going to be very different from somebody who runs a marathon every year.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. I first start with fork to mouth.

Crystal Carter:

So if you're somebody who runs marathons regularly and what you want to do is you want to shave down your time, right? You want to go from being good to being great, that is a very different training path than from somebody who just wants to actually be able to complete the marathon in the first place, a very different training path. But you have to be able to get through that first training path first before you can get to the point where you're trying to shave down a couple of minutes or a couple of seconds and things like that. And you might need different tools. You might need different support. You might need-

Mordy Oberstein:

I was going to say that, you're getting different people, right? To take your example, if you're hiring, let's say a team of trainers to help you, if your team consists only of the first phase, then when you get past that, well, you're just stuck, damn, with your SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Right, precisely. And I think that with SEO, very often the case where you might need to rethink your tools, the tools that you use or your squad, you might think, "Okay. Well, now we've got a lot of content, what we need now is somebody to help us do a lot of distro, or we need somebody to help us get a lot of backlinks to this content, or we need somebody to help us now to organize this content better with the technical infrastructure because now we have so much content that now we need to move around. Maybe we need to think about our site search. Maybe we need to think about our navigation, maybe we need to put things into pillars or that sort of stuff." Whereas when you have nothing, if you have a blog of it, if you're starting with a blank slate, like I said, you want to get some points on the board in that-

Mordy Oberstein:

And totally from way of thinking and operating, completely different. It's not even close to being the same thing. And that's like if you're planning out these phases of site maturity and SEO development, you should also be thinking of the staff that if you're in an agency, you need to be thinking about the staff that you're going to need and the resources you're going to need in order to pull this off. That should factor into it. If phase two is going to include breaking into five new content verticals, you're going to need a heap of a lot of content. So if your team's not structured for that, now you have to think, "Okay, maybe we need to outsource that. How much is that going to cost? Can we afford that?" Because one phase should lead into the next phase. So if you're in phase one and it's going to lead to phase two, if phase two is not feasible from a resource point of view for you, that should affect how you go about phase one. And maybe you need to pivot and rethink phase one.

But what you shouldn't do is not think about the maturity of the site as it goes through stages, plan out one thing and then realize, "Oh, we should never have done that because we can't actually fulfill the full spectrum of what this actually means." So it's way too labor-intensive in the end.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Also, I think it's important to remember that content maturity and website maturity can happen for a single post as well, right? It might be that you think to yourself, "Okay, we need to have a post on this topic." Right? And maybe you don't have loads of time to go full pelt onto this topic in the first instance, but you want to get something on there. Okay. So you get something on there and maybe you don't even expect it to rank particularly, you just need it to be indexed. And then you can come back to it and maybe you're like, "Okay, in two months we're going to come back to this. We're going to add some more facts and figures. We're going to add some more stats. We're going to add some more expert stuff." Cool, great. Then maybe you get more resources for different media types, and then you can go back and immature that.

So again, because your website is a living document, and so you have time. You have time. So don't just think that it's a set it and forget it situation. If you have an article, if you have piece that you think could do with being more robust, go back, make it more robust and that's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

You can even plan that out to begin with. I had a case recently where they're using a resource to funnel the audience to a different piece of content. It's a very long resource. It's a master resource. And they're trying to be a little bit aggressive in how they leverage that piece to push you to the other piece where they really want you to go to for whatever reason. And they're relatively not a new website, but they're new to creating content, and they don't have a lot of... I hate to use the word authority, but they don't have a lot of authority. They don't have a lot of oomph to their digital presence. So I'm like, "You know what you should do? This piece should go through multiple phases of maturity. I don't know how Google's going to see you here. You're really trying to break in. I wouldn't be very aggressive in trying to push the user to the next piece." Yet Google might say, "Hey, wait a second, it's an informational piece of content, but we see a commercial intent in here. Are you trying to fool us?"

Let Google do its thing. Let's see if it ranks well. Let's see what we need to do to get a ranking. And once the piece is established, then go back and then be a little more aggressive and see what that does to the rankings. Probably not much at that point. So you could probably be a little bit more aggressive in how you're funneling users from that piece to the other pages that you want to actually ultimately get the user on.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And I think that that testing, that iteration is really important to how you progress with your maturity of your site. Because it might be that you look at a piece of content and you go, "This is as far as this is going to go."

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what my wife says about me. "That's as far as your maturity is going to go. I accept it."

Crystal Carter:

You might say that this is where the train stops.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's 12. That's about it.

Crystal Carter:

So I think that there's that and you might say, "This is as far as that's going to go. We'll take this this far and this will serve that purpose. And this next part will take us to the next piece as well." But yeah, the testing and the iteration is super important to understanding the maturity and seeing what things you need to do with that. Because sometimes it might be that you publish two pieces of content that are kind of similar, but maybe from a different perspective, for instance, and maybe Google likes one more than it likes the other and so-

Mordy Oberstein:

You could understand one one way, another one a different way.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So then you think, "Okay. Well, we'll consolidate these two. We'll take the bits that Google likes and we'll put that into the main one that it likes more." For instance. And that might be a way that you do that or it might be that... In terms of maturity, another thing that could happen is that you can get more technical expertise. So it might be that your site has more capabilities now. So let's say your site now has the ability to add in FAQ schema or has something like that. I had a client before. And people, don't at me about the FAQ schema. FAQ schema is still useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not for real anymore.

Crystal Carter:

It's still a thing, people. It's not massive, but if it's useful, use FAQ. Anyway. So let's say you have more technical capabilities in your team, then that's great. That means that now you can use different formats and you can use different technical tools to make your content more mature. I also want to talk about clients, client maturity. So your relationship with your clients can also mature and can also-

Mordy Oberstein:

It should mature. Not they can, they should mature.

Crystal Carter:

They should, right? Right. So on Moz, they've got a great article, it's a couple of years old, but I think that it's still solid. So it's from Heather Physioc. I hope I've said that right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, Physioc.

Crystal Carter:

Physioc, yes. And she's got a great chart that talks about search capabilities, maturity model, and she talks about client culture and stuff. And she says that in that sense, you go from chaos to culture. So you start with spammy, outdated and harmful behavior. And I've definitely had clients who come to me and they're like, "Yeah, we had somebody help with the SEO." And you go through their backlink profile and it's just wow.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what it's like? I don't know if you had this experience, but I have a kid, and hopefully he's not listening to this podcast, but he's a little bit of a mess. He likes to make a mess. It's everything, right? He's in the kitchen, it's a mess. It's a mess. And it's his personality. It's good. We love him. But to get him to not make a mess, you can't be like, "Don't make a mess." You have to start very small. When you're done making eggs and the oil spilled up, take a paper towel, wipe down the counter over here just a little bit. And you start with that and you zoom in. It's the same thing with a client, okay? I had someone come over like, "Yeah, here's my website." It was built for PPC. It was a giant multi-page landing page built literally for PPC. All right, all right. Let's do this first. Let's scale back this. Let's work on this and then let's keep going.

And you have to really take it step by step by step to get them because what happens, I think when you start doing that is they start seeing like, "Oh, wait a second. Maybe I'm a mess." And then once they've bought into the idea, "Maybe I'm actually a mess." Now you can start going.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So Heather talks about you go from chaos to absent, where basically they just don't have anything, to tactical. And what you're talking about is the tactical sort of thing. It's like, "Okay, so we are going to go through these processes. This is how you do this." That sort of thing. And once they figure out the process, once they get it, you can move on to strategic stuff of like, "okay, great, we've got the bases covered, now let's do some strategy. Let's be competitive, let's get involved." And then with practice, she's saying, you're expected. So before they do stuff, they know to come to you to talk to you about their SEO. So they're like, "We're thinking of doing this, what do you think?" "Call Heather. Call Mordy before we do this thing." They're getting into that. And then on this maturity model, I think this is great. She talks about culture. So here she says, "SEO is part of the client's marketing DNA, dedicated resources and processes, knowledgeable, committed to learning more." That sort of stuff.

And that's where you're training them. They're the integrated, you're even in the C-suite where you're talking to the MDs and they understand that SEO and being valuable for users as articulated on search is really, really important. And once you've got that kind of relationship with a client, really you're flying. And a lot of the content, technical and other SEO stuff will fall into place once you've gotten to that sort of level. So yeah, there's tons of different layers to it, and I think that for anybody who's feeling like they're in the chaos stage, be patient.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll get there eventually.

Crystal Carter:

It will get there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, my kid now knows if I cook in the kitchen and I make a mess, they're not going to be happy. So I'll do it anyway. Well, at least he knows we're not going to be happy about it. Speaking about SEO maturity and site maturity and business maturity and how to deal with all this stuff, we talked to Grace Frolich, who is a contributor to Wix SEO and an SEO consultant over at BrainLabs. We asked her, how do you assess the maturity of your site and how does that play into what SEO activity you engage in? Take it away, Grace.

Grace Frolich:

When we talk about a website's maturity, what we really want to know is how developed it is and how it performs within its industry or its vertical. And we can determine that by auditing a site based on a set of criteria or a framework. An example that I like to use is a taste test. Let's say you own a pizza restaurant and you want to know how you stack up against other pies in your city. So you try a bunch of different pizzas and critique them based on a set of criteria. That could be things like a pizza's taste, the texture, the sauce to crust ratio, and so on. Those results will show you which pizzas are considered the best based on your criteria, and it shows you how your pizzas compare to other pizzas. Based on your scores, you can make improvements where your pizza didn't do as well.

So similarly, think of a maturity audit like a rating system where each criteria is given a score from one to five, where five is considered the best in class. Things you would look at here are a site's technical compliance, how your content performs compared to competitors, how your link profile looks compared to competitors and so on. You would score each of these areas and the results from that gives you an idea of what is considered good or mature within your industry. From the results, you can make improvements in areas where you underperformed. Now this is great because it gives you a view of all different areas of your site so that you can then prioritize that based on the results that you see.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much for that, Grace. Don't forget to give Grace a follow or a connection, whatever you call it on LinkedIn. We'll link to her profile in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, and I think that what she was talking about, about the audit relative to your competitors is really, really important. The industry is young, right? There's sometimes where... For instance, with the AI market, for instance, in the last year or so, there've been a big explosion of people working in that space, but there were people who were there further along. And so there's going to be different levels of content maturity around that topic because the topic for the mainstream anyway is fairly new. And so I think that it's really important to think about your maturity relative to other folks. If the market is very young, then that will change the expectations for users in terms of content, in terms of the way the site is, et cetera. And I think it's like when new social media platforms show up, it can be the barrier for entry is a little bit lower.

So for instance, I think when Instagram first showed up, you could pretty much just post pictures and that was what you could do. And so people who were able to do that did well. But now there's reels and there's videos, and there's pictures, and there's this, and there's stories, and there's all that sort of stuff. So if you did the same thing that you were doing when the platform was brand new, you wouldn't be as impactful as somebody who's able to do that now. So understanding relative to the rest of the industry is super important as part of your maturity audit.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I mean, that's part of a good SEO, understanding where you are relative to what's already ranking, obviously just to do copy and skyscraper or whatever. It's not what I'm saying. Anyway. I'm a big believer that one thing in life should lead to the next thing in life. And actually we, on this podcast, have talked about that in terms of brand marketing, where you are as a brand and how you position yourself as a brand, the next thing you do should be based on where you're at now and should all logically flow together. I don't remember what episode it was, Crystal, but I'll try to remember and we'll link to it in the show notes. Now, I see you racking your brain. You don't remember either. I don't remember any of the episode numbers, by the way. We talked about keyword research. I have no idea what episode number that was.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know what number it was, I just-

Mordy Oberstein:

Four.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, that's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Four is a good number because you expect to say three, but it's not, you say four.

Crystal Carter:

Right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Crystal Carter:

Right. Four can be confusing for aforementioned reasons of things. You see?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, four is confusing. Also, if you're playing golf, it's a whole different meaning to it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a whole minefield. It's a whole thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. All right. So five. Episode five. Anyway. I think that's also true for product as well. And to help us see the truth about product development, we're going across the Wix verse with our very own product manager for SEO, Paz Dekel.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey Paz, welcome to the podcast.

Paz Dekel:

Hello. Thank you. Happy to be here.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much for joining us.

Mordy Oberstein:

So tell us a little about yourself. What do you do? What do like? What's your favorite color? What's your favorite number actually? What's your favorite number? Is it four?

Paz Dekel:

My favorite number is seven. I don't know why.

Mordy Oberstein:

Seven?

Paz Dekel:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

People like three, seven. It's a whole Plato thing with numbers.

Paz Dekel:

Really?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Seven is one of those big numbers.

Paz Dekel:

Also, lucky number seven.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. See? I always say lucky number 13, but whatever. Okay.

Crystal Carter:

They don't put 13s on elevators. That's a whole thing. There's no floor there.

Mordy Oberstein:

This goes to show you how stupid humanity is, but okay.

Crystal Carter:

Sorry?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, "What floor am I on?" "Oh, you're on the 14th floor, but it's really the 13th floor. We don't want to tell you the 13th floor because you might have some bad luck."

Paz Dekel:

So maybe I'll turn my lucky number to foursome. No, no. Hi, I'm Paz. I've been working at Wix for over five years. I've worked in different companies, different products. I'll try everything. Really like Wix, really like its product. And I'm here at SEO now.

Mordy Oberstein:

And now you're here on the podcast. Now we're going to talk about how you look at product maturity and how that factors in. So when you're thinking about taking the product to the next level, how much or in what way does where the product currently is factor in? How does the product maturity all play a role in your roadmaps?

Paz Dekel:

Yeah. So I think it has a several way to look at product maturity and how I'm going to decide what I'm going to do next. So the first thing we talk before is actually different user types that I have, right? I have new users that just came to Wix and built the first website. They need a very, very easy setup to understand what they're doing. And we have partners and agencies that are super... I forgot the word.

Crystal Carter:

Experienced.

Paz Dekel:

Experienced, exactly and they know what to do and have thousands of sites. So I need to understand in my product, this is a new product or this is a mature product. Who is my user that I want to solve this problem right now? If I want to focus on one of them or to find a wide solution. So I need to look at my user type. Also, if I think about users, I need to understand that in the beginning of the product, when I have a brand new product, I don't have any information about my user. I don't have data, I don't have how to... He used the product. In the past, I was a product of Wix Hotel, which we did a deep integration with a third-party app called Hotel Runner and this was a new app that we wanted to replace the old Wix Hotels. And then we didn't have any user that tried it. We didn't have any data. So we did a usability interviews to understand if the product that we build are clear enough for them and they understand what they're going to do.

Once we have the product release and we have users, we can know what are the pain points right now, which opportunities we have, where do we need to improve? So it's really important as a product, first of all, to look at your users to understand who they are and what they need. And it depends if the product is at the early stage of it or already very mature.

Crystal Carter:

I think the way you talk about users is so important because the journey for the user will totally affect how you discuss it. And I think that it is completely different. If you've invented something completely new and nobody knows what a Furby is or something. I'm dating myself by saying that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Furby. Holy crap.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Okay. So I'm dating myself. But if nobody knows what it is, then you have got a very different thing. Or if you think about the iPhone, for instance, when the iPhone first came out, they had to explain, oh, it does this and it does that, and it does this and it does that. And now they just have just people having a good day. On their advertising it's just people taking pictures, jumping about or whatever. Everybody knows that it does this and it does that and it does this and it does that, but they're just trying to make you engage in the brand equity and engage in the brand vibes really at that stage. So where you are now, how often do you go through and study how users are currently using your product?

Paz Dekel:

Constantly. This is part of my work to do user interviews and to look at data all the time and to see how they behave and how they use the product, how much they return to a specific... For example, SEO, it's ongoing work. You can do the SEO and you need always improve it. So you want the user to come back and do additional things. So the user is always in my first priority. We also have the support that has tickets and has feature requests that gives us... And also here, it's divided into different user types because we have feature requests from big partners. They want to do bulk action on the many, many website. And we have the small business they want just to get found on Google very easily. So the user will always be in my first priority.

Mordy Oberstein:

Question for you. So when I used to work at Rank Ranger, it was a niche SEO software and I think they got bought up by Similarweb. So one of the things that I used to focusing on when going to do work, I used to have a heavy input on the product, was product identity. Because you're in a market where there's so many SEO tools, they all do very similar things. And how do you make the product's identity stand out and differentiate itself? I find that similar to brand identity, do you have a certain brand identity? And then when you're building that brand identity, or in this case a product identity, you build one thing. And then when you're thinking about building the next thing, what you built previously leads you to where the next step is. SEO is just one part of a much, much, much, much, much wider product, do you really feel like there's a product identity for the sub tools within Wix?

Paz Dekel:

Definitely. I think SEO is a great example for that. If you look a few years ago, people won't come to Wix due to their SEO reputation. We had-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why I have a job actually.

Paz Dekel:

We had a very bad reputation. So the first thing that we did was to align our product with a competitor in the industry to have the wizard, to have the panel, to have the settings. And once we did all of that and we really improved our SEO, I think now we can say that we are leaders in the industry right now.

Mordy Oberstein:

We could say this. By the way, great job.

Paz Dekel:

And now we can have advanced product that no one else had because we did all the basics and the infrastructure that we needed. And now we can have advanced integration with big SEO partners like Semrush or SE Ranking or site inspection.

Mordy Oberstein:

And Google is a-

Paz Dekel:

And Google.

Mordy Oberstein:

Throw some names out there at you. Overall.

Paz Dekel:

No, but I think it's also part of the maturity of the product. In the beginning, we didn't have a good enough product. We need to build all the basics just to be aligned with the industry. And now we can dream big and think about what we want to do with the product. And it's also changes the whole strategy. The long-term strategy in the beginning was to do all the basics so we can have the same thing as our competitors. Now we can, oh my God, okay, what we can do next to be amazing.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also in that space, once you start getting buy-in from both your users and also your wider team, that people are engaging with this product, people are doing well with this product, does that give you more opportunities to think bigger?

Paz Dekel:

Definitely. Once they see that they're using the product, for example, the Wizard is amazing. All of the user types, use the Wizard because we help them. And then we can think of that and think bigger. Okay, we can use that. They have the basic now. They're got to a position where they connected to Google. Now I can help them to do the advanced SEO for them. So we needed them to use the basic in order to do advanced features.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it's really cool because when the products develops, it opens up so many new doors, in my opinion. So for example, in our case, if you go back to when we first started this whole SEO journey and it's 2019, if you were to go to Semrush and say, "Hey, Semrush, let's partner up." Semrush would be like, "What? What are you talking about?" But as the product matures, right? And as the product develops and as you're able to mature the product, you're also able to open up all sorts of new doors that you didn't even think about could even be there. Semrush being inside of Wix is a testimony to the fact that Wix did some really cool stuff with SEO where Semrush is like, "You know what? We should be there too."

Paz Dekel:

Yeah, definitely. And I think another thing is look at the whole industry, for example, AI, and you see the whole world goes to AI and then you say, "Okay, how can I use AI in our product?" This is also changes the decision that I'm making and the strategy of the product because there's something so big outside that you want, "Okay, let's use it. Super cool. Where can I help the user with that?"

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. But if you didn't have the basis of having the SEO tools there, you couldn't add on a layer of AI and add on a layer of AI to what? The nothing.

Paz Dekel:

Exactly. You need to have the basics for the first thing in order to get better.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Speaking of throwback podcast, we have another podcast about doing SEO basics.

Mordy Oberstein:

What number?

Crystal Carter:

I don't remember what number it is. But I think that if you do the basics well, I think people forget that... I quote her all the time, but my mom always said common sense ain't that common. And if you're able to do the basics really well, then it gives people confidence that you're able to do complicated things well as well. So if you think about a brand like the Gap or whatever, they specialize in pretty simple stuff. They're like, "We do T-shirts, we do jeans, we do regulars." And people are like, "Great, and you do those really, really well." So when they say, "Oh, we want to do something else." People go, "Oh, okay." You focus on quality and you can focus on doing something that people really appreciate and really leaning into that. And I think that can view a lot of... Yeah, like Morty was saying, opens a lot of doors.

Paz Dekel:

Definitely. I think another thing that it's important to understand in the product maturity it's on the developer side. Because once you get bigger, you have technical debts suddenly, and you need to think in scalability mode. Okay, so I need to build something that I can build on that. And the beginning of the product, you don't think of, I need to create it some way that it would be easy to get a lot of users. So sometimes you need to go back and improve performance, enhance the infrastructure that it is. So it's also something that you need to think of as a product that sometimes when you are already mature, you need to go back to the code and change it a little bit so it'll fit the product needs for the future.

Mordy Oberstein:

So if people wanted to pick your brain and ask you all about product development questions, where could they find you? TikTok?

Paz Dekel:

I have LinkedIn-

Mordy Oberstein:

LinkedIn.

Paz Dekel:

And Twitter. Yeah, they can definitely write me there.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, so we'll link to those profiles in the show notes. Paz, thank you so much for coming on.

Paz Dekel:

Thank you so much for having me.

Mordy Oberstein:

See you around the proverbial office.

Mordy Oberstein:

You just like product sometimes. Development runs on from one thing to the next thing. Sometimes when you're writing something like a news headline around SEO, the words just run on a little bit. A little bit too much sometimes. You ever see that out there?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Sentences as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sentences, yeah. But in specifically titles to SEO news articles.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a certain charm to that as a tactic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and also lack of grammatical maturity.

Crystal Carter:

I didn't say that.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, Barry told people to unfollow me on Twitter. He put out a tweet, "If you want to make me happy, subscribe to my YouTube channel. If you want to make me unhappy, follow Mordy."

Crystal Carter:

That's not exactly telling people to unfollow you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Why?

Crystal Carter:

I mean, technically speaking.

Mordy Oberstein:

So good.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, it's in the neighborhood.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so good. It was like, I appreciate controlling. It was really good. I also appreciate really good SEO news and no one does the SEO news as good as Barry. So here's the Snappy SEO News.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Could somebody please pass the salt? Because I'm feeling salty. Second thought, you don't want to pass the salt because I'm already feeling salty. We just add more salt to my overall saltiness. Either way, from Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land, Google AI overviews launch in the UK. So until now, the only folks who have been able to access the SGE, the Search Generative Experience, are the folks living in the US. Now, Google is testing what Danny says is a small slice of SGE to a small slice of logged in users in the UK. At the same time, there have been reports that Google might start charging for using the SGE. Which is interesting because I'm not exactly sure that SGE is at the point where people would actually pay for it. I'm highly skeptical of that. And this comes from a report that was earlier in the week about SGE going perhaps premium. Very skeptical about this.

To me, it feels like Google has the SGE, it's not really sure how to monetize it. How do they get the ad revenue from the SGE that they're currently getting without the SGE? Oh no, perhaps we can't. Then maybe we should just charge for it. It feels to me like they're still a little bit all over the place with how to implement this and keep up with the AI wars or the AI race and at the same time, actually earn revenue, which is the point of what Google's trying to do. I don't know. Just my very salty take, which brings me to my next salty take from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine around here. But Google explains why it shows Reddit and forum threads in search so often, and this comes as friend of the show, friend of SEO, defender of SEO, Lily Ray, pointed out that Google is showing discussions and forums, basically Quora and mostly Reddit results at the very, very top of the SERP for very, very much YMYL queries. Your money, your life kind of queries such as weight loss.

And instead of getting results from the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Health or Johns Hopkins or whoever it is, you're getting information from some random schmo on Reddit is the contention. And it's a bit of an issue. And I will say that I am a little bit not thrilled with this as somebody who has family members who have eating disorder or have had eating disorders in the past. This is something that's a little bit close to my heart. So if I'm feeling a bit salty about this, that's why I just want you to know that. I don't see how this is really beneficial for the user. I know Danny Sullivan got into a back and forth with Lily Ray about why Google does show this and why they don't show, what they're trying to do. And Danny did say that he would report this onto the wider team that maybe this shouldn't actually be what should be showing up here.

I dove into this a bit and some of the results, the first results I got was actually from Quora, and the post within that forum thread was basically one of these unsponsored organic listings where the person is peddling their own product. In this case, weight loss pills. That is certainly not what somebody who is susceptible to getting wrong or misusing information found online, maybe a teenager with an eating disorder should be seeing. And I know there's a back and forth with Danny and Lily about what users want and what users are looking for and blah blah, blah. Again, this is a very salty Mordy because I'm a little bit upset about this. I don't care what users want, how's that? What I do care about is what's responsible for that person who may misuse the information and then harm themselves, which is why we have a YMYL category among the Google results, your money, your life category, because there is a obligation to ensure that folks are getting information that will not harm them.

And I don't think Google's doing a good job of presenting information that will not harm the most vulnerable of the population here. So I would like to see a change. I usually do put my thumb on the scale on this podcast about these things, but again, it's an issue that's a little bit close to my heart and I'm feeling a little bit salty and I do think that it should change. And I'm not saying that Google is to blame. Oh, no. It's hard to get these things right. There's a balance here. It takes time for Google to refine what it made the change to add more forum content. It is a process and yes, we should be patient with it. And Google has been welcoming to the feedback and that is a very important thing. And a very good thing is something that I actually praised Danny Sullivan on Twitter the other week for about taking the feedback and bringing it to the team. So that is a very good and healthy thing, and I'm not saying that anyone is to blame in particular.

Again, I do understand that it is a process of refining these things and getting it just right and it is way harder to get it right than I think we give Google credit for. But I really do think that in this case, the forum content should not rank at all. It's certainly not above the CDC or Harvard Health or the Mayo Clinic and so forth. Again, I'm being a little bit too salty, I apologize, but it's an issue that is close to my heart, so I'm a little bit salty about it. And that is this week's very salty Snappy SEO News.

Always, of course, make sure to give Barry a follow on his YouTube channel, we should link it on the show notes just for him. So you subscribe to his YouTube channel because Barry does a lot of good stuff on YouTube.

Crystal Carter:

And sometimes he wears his Wix hat.

Mordy Oberstein:

He sometimes wears a Wix hat. It looks like a Raiders hat actually.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I've got one of them too. They're great. It's a great hat.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't have one, but I'm a Steelers fan, so I don't need to look like I'm a Raiders fan, so that's fine by me.

Crystal Carter:

Raider Nation.

Mordy Oberstein:

Raider Nation. It's true. Well, it was true until they moved to Las Vegas. But anyway.

Crystal Carter:

Still, Raiders are just the Raiders all the time. It doesn't matter where they are. The Raider Nation will just follow them. It's all west side kind of area.

Mordy Oberstein:

Mainly because the Raider Nation didn't even realize Oakland, Las Vegas. Is there a deck? What happened?

Crystal Carter:

It's like Oakland, L.A, Las Vegas. They're all pretty much-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, it's right there. It's all good.

Crystal Carter:

LA and Las Vegas are like...

Mordy Oberstein:

It's one giant black hole.

Crystal Carter:

Of Raider Nation.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, the Raider has the black hole. Yeah, whatever. I'm leaning into the whole Raider Nation thing. We know we should also lean into our follow of the week. You should lean into it, but you should follow her over on X and Twitter, whatever you want to call it, and it's Melissa Popp from the RicketyRoo crew @poppupwriter on X. That's at P-O-P-P-U-P-W-R-I-T-E-R. If you can't spell it out as you're listening to this, check out the show notes and just click the link. It's way easier. Melissa Popp on X. She's awesome.

Crystal Carter:

She's awesome, she's fantastic, and she's been working in the content space for a long time and works with a lot of great clients and is able to guide them through the process. And I think that that's really important. I think when you've got clients and you're with them for the long haul and you're planning to be with them for the long haul, I think if you can help them see the vision of you're starting off here, you're a diamond in the rough, but you're going to be... We can get you shining brightly or whatever. I think that that's something that's really important and I certainly-

Mordy Oberstein:

And bright like a diamond.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I certainly get that if you're somebody who can see that potential, that works really well, and I absolutely get that from Melissa all the time.

Mordy Oberstein:

She's brilliant. Someone who can take a content strategy and show you like, "Hey, here's where you to start. Here's where you should end off." And understand all the phases of maturity in between the two. So definitely give her a follow. We love her. You will too. Yeah, do that. Do that.

Crystal Carter:

Do that. That's a good thing to do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the mature thing to do.

Crystal Carter:

That's what adults do.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what adult they hear like, "Oh, there's a great resource here? I will go get that free great resource and follow Melissa."

Crystal Carter:

Right. I will do that. I will not dither. I won't procrastinate.

Mordy Oberstein:

I won't dally.

Crystal Carter:

I won't dally. I will not lollygag either. People lollygag. It's a thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a willy-nilly word.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, it's the kind of thing that someone might do if they were up to shenanigans, I think.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm always up to shenanigans. I don't lollygag.

Crystal Carter:

That's not true. I always enjoy. I have-

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm mature.

Crystal Carter:

I'm mature. I'm an adult, really.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm an adult.

Crystal Carter:

We're SEO adults. Definitely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, that's already an oxymoron. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with the new episode as we dive into when you should not follow best SEO practices. When not doing the best SEO practice is actually the best SEO practice. Scandalous. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources 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.