Trending topics for SEO in 2024

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahala for joining the SUP podcast. We're projecting out some group 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 incredible, the fabulous, the absolutely unparalleled, unequivocal, un... I don't have any more adjectives. The head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, Mordy Oberstein, and hello people of the internet. Thank you for that. Fantastic. Amazing, incredible, stupendous, fantastic-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, yeah. I guess that-

Crystal Carter:

I did fantastic twice.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I always do that by the way. How uncouth of me to not have another un to have added to that. Also, uncouth is a very underrated word.

Crystal Carter:

Oh. I think it's underused.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh. Don't underestimate it. You can under evaluate its importance in the English language.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's undefeated. Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not undeserving of whatever amount. Okay. The SURP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. But where you can also be a part of the future of website building with the all new Wix Studio. Explore how your agency can level up with the new customization abilities added to Wix Studio over at wix.com/studio. This as we take up the future of SEO in 2024. Not 2025, we're stopping in 2024 and that's it.

In this very special episode of the SURP's Up podcast live from BrightonSEO in the UK. The future is nigh as we blast backwards to the past in what is surely some sort of sci-fi time warp contradiction. That's why we're going backwards to go forwards. And if only I would tell you what I actually mean by that, because even I don't know at this point.

What I mean is, we're going back to September 14th to BrightonSEO in the UK where Crystal sat down with some well smart SEO folks, including our own Rebecca Tomasis, as well as Lidia Infante and Joshua George to discuss the future of SEO in a special live recording from the conference itself. So this episode was taped in front of a live audience. But alas, there was no laugh track. As Crystal and crew dived into how AI factors into the content creation process and then the SEO process, the impact of when Google does and doesn't get content right and the future overlap between SEO and brand.

So step into the wormhole, open up the door to the DeLorean and step into a traveling phone booth. Whatever your time machine preference is, as this special Brian SEO UK edition of the SURP's Up podcast takes you into the great unknown that is the very near future of SEO. That was a mouthful. What I'm trying to say is, Crystal went to BrightonSEO in the UK, sat down with the really smart people and recorded a live session of the SURP's Up podcast, and I wasn't even there.

Crystal Carter:

You were there in spirit, because we were using a lot of the fun things that we do across the podcast. A lot of the segments which we all came up with together.

Mordy Oberstein:

So my spirit was hovering over.

Crystal Carter:

I also put your on the deck for the podcast. I also put your Twitter handle, not mine, to make sure that if anybody had anything to say about it, they could tweet you and not me. So that's very important.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you, I do appreciate that. So we're going to cut to that. But before we cut to that, Crystal, why don't you tell us a little bit about what y'all covered at BrightonSEO?

Crystal Carter:

Yes. So we did a version of Going Going Googled, talking about SGE. We also talked about some predictive text. We also talked about people also asked. We talked about a few other things as well. So I hope you enjoy this collection of... I think it was really interesting. I'll tell you what, there were some great, great surprising answers that we got from our fantastic panel of the way that people are using some of these new technologies, and the trends that people are seeing there as well. So it was a really great panel. I'd expect a few magical moments across the podcast recording.

Mordy Oberstein:

So without further ado, here's Crystal and crew over at BrightonSEO in the UK.

Crystal Carter:

Hi everyone. It's short notice and it was quite a hike. So thank you all for joining us today. We are going to be doing the SERP's Up live podcast. I have some fantastic, wonderful, incredible guests who are joining us. We're going to be here for the whole time, so please, I hope you enjoy this. I am going to be calling to the stage today a wonderful collection of fantastic human beings.

First up is Mr. Joshua George, who is the founder of Click's Slice, which is a fantastic SEO agency based in London. He has over a decade of experience doing SEO as a consultant, and he ranks number one for SEO at London which is fantastic. And he also drove here in his McLaren. If you're parking near a McLaren, don't mess up his paint job. Okay, Joshua George, coming up to the stage. Thank you. Thank you.

And next up, we have Lidia Infante, who is the SEO extraordinaire over at Sanity, which is the headless CNS. And they are doing incredible things, and she is also a contributor for the Wix SEO Learning Hub. And is also an international SEO extraordinaire, and a speaker and fantastic. And she is a fellow Cardi B fan. Thank you Lidia Infante coming to this stage.

Next up is from my team at Wix. This is Rebecca Tomasis, she's an SEO expert who is currently managing the Wix blog. If you've entered into Google something that says like, "Oh, blog, what is blogging?" You will find Rebecca's handiwork there. Because the featured snippets that she collects are incredible. Some people do Pokemon, she collects featured snippets. She's incredible, she's fantastic, she's wonderful, she's Rebecca Tomasis.

And I should introduce myself. Obviously I am Crystal Carter, a lot of y'all know me. Hi everybody, hello friends. And I am the co-host of the SERP's Up SEO podcast, which I co-host with Mordy Oberstein who is not here today. However, throughout this podcast, if you have anything to say about the podcast, please do at him on Twitter. His Twitter handle is at Mordy Oberstein. If you're in the back, you can see his thing. So it's at Mordy Oberstein on Twitter. So if you have anything to say about that, please do at Mordy. We publish our podcast every Wednesday. So we published one yesterday, and we will be publishing one next week, and this will be out later on. So thank you all for joining us.

Okay, so we're going to get into a few of the features that we normally do on the SERP's Up SEO podcast. We do fun different things. And the first thing we're going to talk about, and these guys have not seen these slides, so we're all just winging it. But yeah. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to talk about generative AI. So how many people have heard about AI today at the thing? For those of you listening on the podcast, everyone's already heard about it. It's only 11 o'clock in the morning that we've all already heard about generative AI.

And the reason why is because we all know that Bing put out all of this stuff this year, and everybody went mad after ChatGPT blowing up last autumn. Bing introduced New Bing, and really, as they said, the CEO from Bing's search team said, we made Google dance. And after firing their shots, Google finally released their search generative experience, and they finally started putting in links which people are really excited about. And that's all well and fantastic.

But one of the sections that we do in our podcast is we ask, is this new? Is this actually new? How are we thinking that people are using this in new ways? So my first question is, is AI in search actually new? How new are you finding that the search generative experience and how new are you finding people experiencing generative search in this space?

Lidia Infante:

Technically it is newish, but not really. Essentially, machine learning has been used to train the Google algorithm since the dawn of time. And what I think has really triggered this big AI movement is actually making it available. Because we used to have AI driven SEO tools. For years there was Frase and Jasper, which used to be Jarvis, but probably Marvel sued them or something.

Rebecca Tomasis:

They did.

Lidia Infante:

So yeah, it's not really new. But it is available to everybody, so you don't have to be bought in and make an investment before starting to test it out. Also, the generative large language models are very much improved. That's the stuff that's new. Also, our panic about SEO dying, yeah.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Thank you.

Crystal Carter:

It's all something new. And how are you using AI in your new workflows? Joshua, if you're able to share on that?

Joshua George:

Yeah. So for us, we still have human content. I'm a massive fan of that. I sell it a lot on our discovery calls as well, and clients value that. So I don't think we'll ever get rid of completely using human writers. But we do use it for our blog briefs, it just speeds up a lot more time.

And that's currently how we use it at the moment. We haven't rolled it out properly in the whole agency yet. I'm still on the fence of it, because clients pay us a good amount of money to get them results so I'm going to be testing stuff on the site that... I have got an AI site that I'm playing around with testing strategies and see what's working, and that way I have my own data to make my own decisions on instead of seeing what someone says on Twitter, and just basing the whole thing on that basically.

Crystal Carter:

And people are saying a lot on Twitter. There's a lot on Twitter, a lot of things floating around and a lot of this is a brand new thing, and change everything that you are doing again.

Rebecca Tomasis:

But I find it takes so much testing to understand, is this going to make my work so efficient that sometimes you're like, "Well, I'm spending so much time testing this. Maybe in this time, I could've..." You have to be able to see I think the long-term benefit of the efficiency or scale, it will be able to bring you. Because it is new, and I think, like you said, the accessibility is new. So it's like, "I need to really take the time to test this and understand the impact."

Crystal Carter:

I think that the scalability point and how you're rolling out is really important. 'Cause I think that and the accessibility point is really important because yeah, Jasper's been around for ages. I know that Mike King, his team has been using AI for years and things like that. But when it's going mainstream, that means there's more competitors that are using it, which means if you want to be competitive, you have to think about how that works. And that's definitely changing the landscape of how people are interacting on search, and how people are creating content and things like that. I certainly see that.

And where do you all feel like having seen the last six months of ChatGPT really going big, and New Bing going big, and generative search coming to Google and Bard and all of that? Where do you think in six months' time from the next BrightonSEO, where do you think we'll be then?

Lidia Infante:

I think we are going to be a lot less scared and a lot more empowered to actually use AI not as a replacement of us and our work, but as an enhancer of us and our work. I use AI all the time in my workflows now, and I absolutely love it. It's accelerated my output and productivity massively. It's much easier for me to edit stuff to fit tone guidelines, and to make it just detect where did I spell the thing that I'm not supposed to spell that way in the way that's for the company? And you also mentioned, Rebecca, that it takes some investment in time to get it done. So what I try to do is I try to create templatable prompts that I can just reuse, reuse and reuse endlessly.

You were mentioning that you use them for content briefs. I use it somewhat for content briefs as well, but I use it more as an assistant of like, "Hello, go into the world of the web and tell me what are questions being asked about this?" Or I go, "Imagine that you are a product owner trying to find a new CMS. What are the questions that you're going to have to answer to your stakeholders?" Now you can feed it sources of truth so it stops making stuff up. Yeah. I almost am very proud that I said making stuff up instead of making (beep) up. I'm doing a really good job on those today.

Lidia Infante:

All right. So you feed it sources of truth, and you give it your own information of what you want it to base on. If you do really good prompting, you can recycle it forever. And I also really like using it for repurposing and content distribution. So I feed it some of my tweets. This is my tone of voice, this is how I speak in my tone of voice. Make me five tweets to promote this article. And that is a superpower. You go on a scheduler, and you have your content strategy distribution-

Rebecca Tomasis:

You can think consistency at scale also. And I think for me, I think sometimes I do need a blog post that's super unique and creative, and sometimes I'm like, "Please just follow this structure." And that's something that I can create within that first draft or something with AI, and there is the structure. And then okay, let's now put in the expertise and some of the creativity. But the meat or the bones is like, "Don't change this."

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right, right. And I think that people who are organized, like you were talking about your content briefs. If you're organized and you already have your content briefs, and you know how to structure a content brief and you know how to which content distribution points you want to hit, then it allows you to... You're already organized, it allows you to really, really work with that. I feel like you want to jump in here.

Joshua George:

Yeah, I was saying the same reason we're using ChatGPT, it all comes down to prompt. You put rubbish in, you're going to get rubbish out. So once you finalize and really narrow down what prompts actually work, it's pretty much just copy and paste. You just change out the niche. So yeah, we can produce blog briefs super, super quick now at scale. And I don't know how many briefs I'll do in a month at the moment. Loads. Don't tell me you didn't. Hundreds are what we're doing for our clients at the moment, and it's so much quicker. It makes it easier for our content team as well. Because when they're writing the content, they really know the anchor text to use and they know what page to link to.

And there's loads of like, "We're using ChatGPT and the custom parameters, prompt engineering." I literally just made a whole call from ChatGPT two weeks ago. Nine hours of video content. I'll be playing around with it so much. And yeah, it's game changing. So I'm personally excited for the future. I can't wait for AI to roll out. I know a lot of people are scared of AI. Like, "Oh, it's going to take my job, is a content writer going to die?" Nah, that's rubbish. There's been so many changes in the SEO industry, and our job as SEO is just that.

Rebecca Tomasis:

And I think also because that whole conversation, the AI content rank. And I know from my experience it still takes so much human optimization, and strategy, and testing, and going back into the article to get it to rank. That's the process anyway. And in the short term or even the midterm, I don't see any tool that's necessarily able to replicate that. Even if we can get to the point where it creates a perfect piece of content for intent and all of that, it still needs tweaking, right?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Next week, somebody's above you. What do I need to now do right?

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think that with the velocity, with great velocity comes great responsibility.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yes. And a lot of optimizations.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Wow, I have all this content, and now it needs to rank.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also sometimes it's like if you're moving really quickly, it's also really easy to make a mistake at a large scale. So if you make one mistake across all over the place, 50, 60 blogs or something, it's like, "Okay, I have to go and unpick all those 50, 60 blogs or whatever."

Rebecca Tomasis:

You used the wrong angle.

Crystal Carter:

Right, on every single one. So yeah, that's something to think about as well. And I think also you talked about all of the optimizations you have to make as somebody who is skilled with your skills. You still have to make sure that that works. And if there is a lot of people, if there are a lot of people who are putting out just straight from the machine onto... Quality is still going to rise to the top, and quality comes from skill, and that skill is something you cultivate.

Lidia Infante:

I have something to say. I think what this has really done is it's changed what is table stakes. So being able to produce content at scale used to be a competitive advantage. But it's not anymore. So what is a competitive advantage right now is surfacing the human within your content, the experience of the person that's writing the specific anecdotes. Their wisdom, rather Than just copycat content. 'Cause now everybody can do copycat content. Grab what's ranking on the search and regurgitate it is something that is table stakes for literally your mom. Your dad-

Rebecca Tomasis:

….without AI, right? We will regurgitate. Like, "Okay, this is what X ranks to be number one, and I need to write exactly the same thing."

Lidia Infante:

But we've had the resources to do-

Rebecca Tomasis:

To be number one, I need to write exactly the same thing.

Lidia Infante:

But we've had the resources to do it, and we needed the resources to do it. Now it's no longer needed. Right now, it's table stakes. So now to rise above the noise of what I imagine is going to be an increase of trash content running the web made by ChatGPT, it's going to be differentiation. And for me, differentiation is going to be human experience, and authority and personality.

Rebecca Tomasis:

So what I'm seeing now though with competitors is taking an article... And I actually talked to our editor, because I wanted her opinion on the content. Because at first glance, the expert tips are there, the sources are there, there's nice data, it's really well optimized and nicely structured. And then you go into the content and it's like, "Well, this was AI." I sent it to our editor and she's like, "This content is a train wreck." So I think this is also interesting to see people generating with... It's very obvious when you generate with AI, and then you're trying to force the expert quotes and everything in.

Lidia Infante:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

In Clueless they say, "Oh, she's a full on Monet." It's good from far away, but when you get up it's a hot mess.

Lidia Infante:

Gotcha, good.

Crystal Carter:

So it's something you need to think about, and making sure that you're maintaining that tone and maintaining that quality as you go along. We can absolutely talk about AI all day, as I'm sure many people are today. But we are going to get into our next section, which is fun with People Also Ask. People also ask sometimes referred to as a universal SERP feature. It is seen on almost every single search that you do on Google. And there are some fun questions that show up on People Also Ask, and we're going to go through a couple of them. So the first question that people also ask is where can we find mermaids? That's a question that people also ask.

Rebecca Tomasis:

There were actual answers?

Crystal Carter:

No, don't look at the answers. Y'all are supposed to look at the... They're looking at the answers. Okay, so do you have any ideas before we could find mermaids? Rebecca, you can't say because you looked.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I already know.

Lidia Infante:

I can find mermaids in the documentary that you shared with me on Netflix.

Crystal Carter:

That's true, there is a mermaid thing-

Rebecca Tomasis:

It's what? People wear the tails, right?

Lidia Infante:

A fantastic documentary. MerPeople I think it is.

Crystal Carter:

MerPeople, it's fantastic, it's wonderful.

Lidia Infante:

So she recommended it to me. I wasn't going to watch it, but now I'm very happy with it.

Crystal Carter:

It's amazing. If you have nothing to watch on Netflix, watch MerPeople, it's fantastic.

Joshua George:

Do we have the age group of people who also-

Crystal Carter:

No, they don't get out of ages.

Joshua George:

What?

Crystal Carter:

I literally entered mermaids into Google, and they were like, people also ask. And Google has tons of these. If you enter Google mom, they're like, "Who is Google's mom?" And it's like, "No, that's not the question to ask." Y'all, that's not it. But yeah, where do you think you find mermaids?

Joshua George:

Well, we have that joke we say in the SEO industry. The best place to hide a dead body is on page two, 'cause nobody looks there, it's perfect. The mermaids are going to be on page two.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. So Atlas Obscura is actually answering this question legitimately. They're saying that you can find mermaids in Japan. They're also saying that you can find mermaids in Florida, and that you can find mermaids in Vermont. So I think that's fascinating that there is a place-

Lidia Infante:

Is there sea in Vermont?

Crystal Carter:

There is not. I think Vermont is landlocked. But apparently there's mermaids there, so that's interesting.

Joshua George:

Probably.

Crystal Carter:

Our next question from People Also Ask is vibranium the strongest metal on earth? And this is a serious question that people are asking. And the thing I find you're-

Rebecca Tomasis:

Vibranium, is it from a Marvel-

Lidia Infante:

Yes.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly, exactly.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Is it Thor's hammer?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, no. No, that's not vibranium.

Lidia Infante:

What they have on Wakanda.

Crystal Carter:

Captain America's shield is vibranium.

Joshua George:

I'm sorry too, I don't want any Marvel.

Crystal Carter:

You don't want any Marvel?

Joshua George:

I don't watch Marvel.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, okay. So Google here is being very interesting, because Google is not just telling them no, that's a dumb question. Google is saying identified in 1781, Tungsten is the strongest pure metal on earth. And this is from-

Lidia Infante:

In the real world.

Crystal Carter:

In the real world.

Rebecca Tomasis:

So it's basically just saying you are an idiot, this-

Crystal Carter:

Kind of.

Joshua George:

Wouldn't it be better if Google just said, "Hey, are you okay?"

Rebecca Tomasis:

It's a website that might say, "Are you better?"

Crystal Carter:

So yeah. So this is from a blog called what are earth's mightiest fictional metals? So again, they're trying to help people, to slowly guide them towards reality.

Rebecca Tomasis:

But are they very expensive? How can they be expensive if they are fictional?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's in the movie. Okay, so anyway.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I don't know.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, so our next one. So our next people also ask is, what are the five types of unicorns?

Rebecca Tomasis:

No.

Crystal Carter:

This is a very important question that people are asking.

Lidia Infante:

It's a very important question

Crystal Carter:

Why is this important?

Lidia Infante:

So my first website, I made it when I was six years old, on FrontPage. Obviously as a six-year-old, I was very interested in unicorns.

Crystal Carter:

Of course.

Lidia Infante:

So it was basically a bundle of images of unicorns that I had been downloading from Google Search, which was my hobby when I was six. Go on Google Search and look at unicorns.

Crystal Carter:

Of course.

Rebecca Tomasis:

So obviously a lot of people's hobbies.

Lidia Infante:

So since then, every time I learn a new technology to make content, I try it out with a unicorn website.  I have six websites in-

Joshua George:

Yeah, you should know this inside out then.

Lidia Infante:

So if they're saying five, because there's many different classifications-

Crystal Carter:

Okay, let's get to that.

Lidia Infante:

If they're saying there's five, it's 'cause they're using the elements type of classification.

Crystal Carter:

Of course.

Lidia Infante:

This is going to be like water, sand, ice, fire, electric unicorns. But you can classify them by color, or by whether or not they will give you magic.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, all right. Okay, so that's a thorough... You should really be ranking for this to be honest.

Joshua George:

She probably is. We don't even know.

Crystal Carter:

She's probably a low-key unicorn queen. Okay, so this is from mombooks.com, and they're saying that the seven types in the world today, that is what they're saying in the world today. There are mountain jewels, water moons, woodland flowers, desert flames, ice wanderers, storm classic, shadow knights. I know you all didn't think you were coming to talk about unicorns, but we're here, we're enjoying it, et cetera, et cetera. But these are the kinds of things that people are seeing on People Also Ask.

Lidia Infante:

The only thing….

Crystal Carter:

The thing I find fascinating about this is that Google is not only placating these kinds of questions, and they say it's a mythical creature, y'all. This is a mythical creature, the unicorns are mythical. But they also give you more questions. So they're also saying why is it called a unicorn? And they're saying, where can I find a unicorn? Location, where can I find a unicorn?

Rebecca Tomasis:

Again, in Vermont.

Crystal Carter:

Again in Vermont. Apparently, Vermont-

Lidia Infante:

Oh my God.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

... it's a super magical place where we should all be looking for unicorns and mermaids. So my question here is this. With regards to People Also Ask, are y'all making content for some of these questions that are terrible questions? Are y'all engaging with these?

Joshua George:

Hell yeah.

Crystal Carter:

You are?

Joshua George:

Absolutely, to build relevancy. So when you carry out a search for anything, those people also ask questions. It's questions that relate to the topic of what you just searched for. So Google already deems those topics relevant to that search term. So if you build out content around that, link it back to the page you're trying to rank, you increase your page's relevancy.

Lidia Infante:

Even if it's a dumb question?

Joshua George:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Joshua George:

Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I didn't know about the-

Joshua George:

I wouldn't say unicorns, other stuff.

Rebecca Tomasis:

There are a lot of repetitive things also, right?

Joshua George:

Yeah, it's on there.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Why should I start a business? That's a very bad example, but I'm not going to necessarily directly answer every question. But I think in terms of intent and what people are looking for, and I think they're super insightful. And they got a lot longer, some queries now, it's like...

Lidia Infante:

Yeah.

Joshua George:

When you click, you get more as well. They expand-

Rebecca Tomasis:

And then you're down a warren hole of...

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lidia Infante:

I only use PAAs to look at what the content journey is going to be. What is my audience interested in? But where I'm currently at, I'm trying to sell expensive software to enterprises. So if the question is dumb, it's probably not for my audience.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. But it's a question of sometimes there'll be people... Maybe it's a question of competition. Maybe most people are going to be like, "That's a silly question, I'm not going to answer that." And so maybe if you get in there and address it, maybe not directly. Maybe not put it as the header, but low-key address it. Maybe you're more likely to show instead of mom books.com on something about unicorns.

Though the other thing I find also really interesting is that on the right here I have name, origin. Why is it called a unicorn location? Where can I find a unicorn? And then there were other questions as well that come up there. So we're starting to see more of these query-based questions that are popping up on the SERP. I recently was on Google, and got to the bottom of the page. And I saw instead of related searches, it had the query, and then it had a knowledge panel looking thing about... You've seen this as well, about the question, and then another question and then another question. Do you think we're going to see more of this going forward? Yeah.

Rebecca Tomasis:

No, because I think it also directly links, which we started to see a lot of last week, is especially on some of our big strategic keywords was Reddit threads ranking. Ranking high, ranking five, four, out of nowhere. And I think it's all related, because a lot of these questions are the very insightful questions people ask on Reddit. So I think there is obviously a huge connection between, again, what people are really looking for, and what they're really looking for is the experience. Somebody who's actually, I don't know, seen a unicorn or-

Lidia Infante:

The human. The human instead of the SEO, right?

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah. I think they're really trying to tap into that. And that complaint of it. If this is a machine delivering me an answer, it's not useful and... Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

That's really interesting. I think also, do you think that with SGE for instance, and with ChatGPT, and Bard, and New Bing and all of that stuff. When you go to New Bing for instance, they're like, "Write as many characters as you want." Enter whatever question you want. And I find that when I'm doing a query in one of those tools, that I will structure my query differently from how I would enter it into Google.

In Google, I'm going for lowest common denominator terms, and I'll just be like, "Unicorn with pink wings," or something. Then I would just enter that so that I would get that thing. Whereas in ChatGPT, I might even just speak it into it and I say, "Where can I find a unicorn backpack that has pink wings, and orange stripes and et cetera, et cetera?" And so it'll be much, much longer. Do you think that these queries are responding to the more conversational tone that people are having with search engines? Do you think that's even a trend?

Lidia Infante:

Well, then we see a bit of a swap to a more conversational tone in search. When voice search happened and we were all thinking that voice search was going to be... What was it, 17% of those searches?

Crystal Carter:

No, I never thought that.

Joshua George:

I never use it. I've never searched with my voice ever.

Lidia Infante:

I only use my Google Assistant to put jams on when I'm cooking.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, okay.

Lidia Infante:

I have seen conversational tone come in and out of search in different ways. So when I started in PPC, my very dark past, I was carrying PPC strategies for several countries, and these countries have adopted digitalization and the internet and become proficient in buying online at different stages in different ways. And you could see that the less digitalized a country was, the more likely I was getting this conversationally written queries.

Crystal Carter:

Interesting.

Lidia Infante:

Then we swapped onto a generic, very broad, very top of the final query as they matured. And then we swapped to long tail questions from the get go, instead of doing generic, mid-tail, long tail. The fact that it's coming back, and I felt like it came back a little bit when we were all talking about voice search and people were trying it, it changed our relationship with searching a little bit. I wonder if we are having a similar change in our parasocial relationship with search engines.

Crystal Carter:

I think certainly with... Rand Fishkin recently published an article about how people use ChatGPT, and they were talking about a lot of the words that people are using and people are saying please.

Joshua George:

I say please all the time. I even say hello.

Crystal Carter:

I use ChatGPT for that.

Joshua George:

It's a waste of characters as well.

Crystal Carter:

I use ChatGPT to save me from Google Sheets. I literally am like, "Google Sheets was mean to me. They told me my code didn't work. And they're like, "Here it is." I'm like, "Thanks, Chat." So yeah. And Bard, Bard also will get upset. If you're not nice to Bard, Bard will be like, "I'm sorry, I'm an AI generated tool and I will not answer any more questions." And I'm like, "Bard, what?" I'm sorry, not Bard, Bing. Bing does that, or whatever. And they're just like, "You can cope with a question," and they're like, "No, I can't, I'm an AI." Stop being so fragile.

Lidia Infante:

Pass the baby.

Crystal Carter:

So yeah. So people are saying please, people are saying the thing. And also, I think that there's a certain amount with some of the generative conversational search things, there's less judgment. I think I remember I got some insurance documents, and they sent me the terms of the insurance documents. And I was like, "I don't know what this means." And I put that into Chat and I was like, "ChatGPT, what does this mean?" And they were like, "Oh, it means this, and this and this." And they use this term, and I was like, "I don't know what that term means. What does that term mean?" And they were like, "Oh, it's like this."

So you can just be honest about what you don't know, or you can just be honest about what you actually need in a different way than if you were to, I don't know, ask someone. And they were like, "Well actually, how come you didn't know that?" Or that thing. So I wonder if that doesn't change as well, people's relationships to that. And maybe it'll change people's relationships to brands as well.

Lidia Infante:

Well, that's why I got into marketing at all to begin with, because I was studying psychology, 'cause I'm curious about people, but then if you ask people to test and self-report, you're going to lie. They're going to lie to look good, they're going to lie to be liked, or they're going to lie to agree.

And then I had this little side marketing job doing PVC, as well as studying psychology. At the time, you could see all of the queries. I could literally see what my parents in their postcode were searching for.

Crystal Carter:

Oh my god.

Lidia Infante:

I was searching for, because they were really excited that their daughter had a job. So yeah, the privacy of your own home, of typing out whatever you want without judgment is huge.

Rebecca Tomasis:

And I think it could potentially change how people are relating to brands, because I think a lot of people are adopting chatbots on their brands as well, which could give you lots more details on the kinds of content that people actually need but maybe are afraid to ask directly for, and that thing. So yeah, I don't know. We'll see how these things pay out.

Joshua George:

Yeah. Yeah, and going to be interesting. It's like when you go into a website, you have a search bar, you can search for whatever you want. Might not even exist, but no one's looking at it and you can get away with saying things wrong, asking stupid questions and no one can judge you. Yes, that was-

Lidia Infante:

Everything you type is on someone's analytics.

Joshua George:

I know now, yeah.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah, I got to say.

Joshua George:

When I was younger, I did not know that. And yeah, I think using AI for chatbot stuff is literally the same trend as the search box.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's very interesting. Cool.

Lidia Infante:

When we have to search for something stupid. My husband and I split. Now you look stupid to the algorithm, of course. Or something embarrassing, or something that we definitely should not be asking any search engine. We take it in turns, because we don't want the algorithm to judge us.

Crystal Carter:

I think also it's one of those things like site search. Site search is always such a goldmine of things that people are looking for that maybe you don't have, or things that people are not understanding. And you're like, "We totally have that on the website," but people can't find it and that thing. So I think that it'd be interesting to see how those things work as people adopt more native AI-powered chat conversations and things like that.

Okay, so now we're going to talk about another section called Going, Going Google, which is looking at a few Google trends. So this one is one that I've seen recently. I was very pleased with myself 'cause I spotted it on the SERP and I was like, "Oh, I found this." And Barry reminded me that it is not new, that Brody Clark had actually found it two hours earlier or something, so unlucky there.

But this is mentioned in... So I was looking at Santa Monica Pier, and I found this entry. And this was not the first entry, it was further down, for Pacific Park, which is the amusement park on Santa Monica Pier. And you'll see it says, "Mentioned in AAC animals, mentioned in travel awaits, mentioned in other things as well." I don't know if y'all have seen this or how you feel about this.

Rebecca Tomasis:

For me, it's a little bit... Because like this, I don't... As an SEO, I don't necessarily control... This now is like taking the SERP beyond what I can influence and optimize it. Now, I got to take... Anyway, we're having those conversations. But now, I really need to talk to digital PR. Now, I really need to talk to the affiliates team. Now, I really need to... It's That whole world of ORM, and it's... My number one thought was, how do I manipulate it?

Joshua George:

Straight away, yeah.

Rebecca Tomasis:

How do I get in there?

Lidia Infante:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Because it's a question of who else is ranking for your brand, or who else is ranking for that mention in that brand?

Lidia Infante:

It seems like an authority thing. 'Cause if you're looking for Santa Monica Pier, you're maybe looking for things to do. And things to do in Santa Monica Pier might be a common follow-up search-

Things to do in Santa Monica Pier might be a common follow-up search-

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Lidia Infante:

That people are making. It changes the perceived intent of the serve. Typically, when you're doing a what to do type of search, you're looking for lists of people, your brands you trust.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Lidia Infante:

Here, they're showing you the thing to do, validated by the brands you might trust.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Rebecca Tomasis:

This is what I see, the queries that I'm looking at. The mentioned in, you see the brands. And then you click and it opens up, and then it's like, Wix was mentioned in dah dah dah. And generally obviously the connection is like, these are the brands we understand to be closely related with this kind of topic, right? So in that sense, we can manipulate it.

Joshua George:

I think this is good though.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah?

Joshua George:

Think SEO is coming from a big change. At the moment, I think we're quite lazy with what we do. To rank page a bit of content, bit of backlink.

Rebecca Tomasis:

We know this works.

Joshua George:

This is more of a holistic approach, right? You can't just do this, you can't just do link building. You need to be acting on social media, do some PR and that gets better results to the clients at the end of the day.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Joshua George:

The ones who don't want to adapt are the ones that are going to lose out.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Okay. A hundred percent.

Crystal Carter:

I think it kind of keeps brands, it's going to keep brands honest about how they're approaching their brand relationships and things like that. The other thing, I think the thing that's worrisome, so I see where you're like, oh, this is great. So as a user, I think this is great. Because as a user, I'm definitely looking at multiple websites if I'm going to be doing a thing. So if I want to go to Santa Monica Pier, yeah. I'm like, oh great, I can hear more details about this. So I think that that's Google answering that user journey. They know that you're going to search around for stuff.

As a brand, I share your, Ah, what about this? Because what if somebody says something that... What if, I don't know, the people could say something else. So there's potentially some worrisome things there.

Joshua George:

Yeah. You got to bury it.

Crystal Carter:

No, no, we don't want to bury it. No, but I think you have to... But I think it does mean that SEOs need to think more about how they're balancing their brand relationships overall. So as you're saying, talking to PR, talking to acquisition or talking to affiliates, talking to different teams to help bring that up.

Lidia Infante:

It's all brand, brand, brand. Especially when you're on the product end of things. You and I are in a very similar space, if not competitors. And people are looking for the concept. When they're looking for informational, they're looking for best keyword, whatever when they're looking to buy. But if you're looking for best keyword, whatever, you're not going to rank for it. And you really need to be speaking to all of the people who are creating those lists to be included. Otherwise, you're not going to be there. And being included if you're not actively talking to them is all about being top of mind for the journalist that's writing it. So a lot of the SEO work that's coming, it's going to be very brand related. Watching out for your brand serves, watching out for EAT now.

EAT, yeah. Another “E”.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how this relates to where does that rank? Are you ranking in that position? If you're AZ animals, are you ranking number...? If Pac Park is number seven, are you now number eight? How's it going to affect the click-through rate on that? So I don't know. I'm interested, I'm curious. I'm watching the space.

The next one that I want to talk about is perspectives. Perspectives has a similar sort of thing. Perspectives, I have mixed feelings about this because I generally see this when it's a news item, so it'll be like a news thing that's happening. Coco Gauff recently won the US Open. Triumphantly. She was amazing, any other tennis fans. She was fantastic. And when you look at Coco Gauff, again, not at the top, but after the news you see perspectives. And it's like people putting in their 2 cents about what happened at the US Open, for instance.

So we have, thanks to Coco Goff from Roxanne Jones, we have Roger Federer wishing her well. And then we have just generally related, I think it's the other person who won the US Open as well. So I think that this is a similar thing. Have you all seen perspectives pop up with things or do you find it helpful as a user? Do you think it will be helpful to users?

Lidia Infante:

I don't find it helpful as a user, but I think it's pointing you at what I've been saying since I sat down here. It's about people.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Lidia Infante:

People, people. The human perspective is what we are seeking right now. I feel validated. I don't use it.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I agree, but I've been thinking about it like, there are levels of human perspective that's valuable and not. This is fairly valuable, but you could... Something, I don't know. To go back to the Reddit thread, if you Google how to start a blog and that Reddit thread on how to start a blog is not helpful. So again, it's like quality content, or really answering the question. Does that make sense? This is where I struggle with it a little bit. Like the quality of the results for it

Joshua George:

Sounds like, I've seen it. I never use it. I don't see the value in this at all. It pulls in...

Rebecca Tomasis:

Maybe the CNN one.

Joshua George:

Then you can just go directly onto CNN and read that article.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah, that's true.

Joshua George:

I don't get it. It's pulling information from Twitter. Twitter. What is it? Is it like a combination of all social media platforms? Is it pulling... I think it's messy. I don't know how it uses...

Rebecca Tomasis:

I think it's telling us you need to be on everything as much as possible.

Joshua George:

Coming back to brand, just being different platforms and stepping away from SEO and doing other stuff.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think it's definitely pulling in omnichannel elements there. It'll be interesting to see if this one sticks, because Google sometimes drops different features.  So it'll be interesting to see if this one sticks. I've seen mixed value from it. A lot of times it seems to repeat some of the news items. And we already have Twitter carousels. We already have news carousels. So it's interesting.

And I think also I would expect it to show up for things where there's kind of a debate. So for instance, I'm from Devon and in Devon... Or I'm not from Devon, I'm from California. I live in Devon. And in Devon we have the cream tea and the correct way to put ….

Rebecca Tomasis:

Jam on it.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Cream's first.

Crystal Carter:

It's cream first.

Rebecca Tomasis:

So my parents are from Devon, but I like it the Cornwall way..

Crystal Carter:

It's controversial. This is my whole point. So if you look up how to do a cream tea, they just put an answer, which is incorrect. And really they should be having...

Rebecca Tomasis:

The discussion.

Crystal Carter:

The discussion of this back and forth about where we do a cream tea, although we all know it's first. Because you obviously put the butter on your toast first before you put the jam on. So why would you put the cream ..

Rebecca Tomasis:

But the cream is the best part. It needs to be on the top.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, we'll agree to disagree.

Lidia Infante:

I wonder if perspective is also coming from a place where Google sees that they're losing some share of search to TikTok and to Instagram.

Personally, whenever I need to care for my plants, which are alive by some miracle of, I don't know. I look it up on TikTok, because I don't want to read how to report it. I want to see it. Because I will mess it up if it's just written instructions. So for that, for DIY, for recipes, I'd rather search on TikTok. But if I go on Google and I get TikTok results, then I keep searching on Google while consuming on TikTok.

Crystal Carter:

I think they're definitely trying to mix it up. I think they're trying a lot of things to see what sticks. And I think TikTok is a challenger for them at the moment. Bing is obviously a challenger for them and from a sort of development point of view. So I think they're trying out lots of different things to see how that works. And I think perspectives is one.

Joshua George:

Don't you feel like they're losing their focus on what they're made to do? Search. Coming back to users, if you want to learn to make a lasagna dish or whatever, you want to see someone doing that. If you Google how to make lasagna, you'll get a blog post, like, turn the oven on. That's not a great user experience.

Lidia Infante:

Well the blog post will be.. my grandmother used to make lasagna every day.

Joshua George:

I'd still rather watch the video on TikTok. Same example, five best restaurants in Brighton. You'll get a TikTok, it'll show the restaurant, show you the meal. You just watch the whole thing in a minute and you know exactly what's going on.

Lidia Infante:

When you go to a restaurant-

Joshua George:

It's way better.

Lidia Infante:

You look it up on Instagram to see what you're going to order. I don't know, am I only one who does this?

Joshua George:

No, I do.

Crystal Carter:

I think though, folks succeed when they have a mix of intents and things like that. So one of the ones, I'm not a Daily Mail reader, particularly.

Lidia Infante:

Promise?

Crystal Carter:

I'm not. However, one of the things that they do, one of the things that they do really well when they were the first folks to do this, and then I've seen more people do it since, but they do a TLDR three bullet points of the article. As soon as you get on the article, they're like, lasagna sales are up. Everybody loves the marinara. And Lydia says it's great. They'll hit you with the three main points from the article. And then you can get into the deep dive of it and you know there's going to be a million pictures and you know there's going to be... They rank really, really well for lots of stuff because they're able to hit that, I've got five minutes, I need that top information.

Lidia Infante:

Yeah, time is value.

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. So I've got five minutes, I can get some value out of this and I can also bookmark it for when I do have time to deep dive into it. I know there's going to be pictures, if I just want to look at pictures. There's going to be a link to a video if I want to watch a video, that sort of stuff as well. So I think that when you're able to hit multiple points in an efficient way, I think that that's what they're trying to do. I think that that's what good blogs, good content folks are doing as well. So I don't know.

Lidia Infante:

That's something that I've done with AI, with the assist of AI to have it read my blog and be like, okay, give me the five key takeaways in bullet point form. You can ask it to go on a specific markup. And then plug it directly onto a headless CMS and then you A/B test it. Is this working better for my user or is it not? Right? And if it is, I do it on scale, and then review for the thesis that have the most traffic. If it's not good or better, I remove it.

Crystal Carter:

Right? These are things you can test, you can see, you can see how they're working for folks to get the best value.

Lidia Infante:

See the challenge is just putting the user at the center.

Rebecca Tomasis:

So I think a secondary challenge right now though is even though we know we're in a stage where Google is testing a lot of things, it's also a question of we all want to be the first to understand it and be able to optimize for it. And know what to do. But if next week, it's disappeared again. And it was like, okay, so we were tracking where we are mentioned, we were tracking what kind of things were coming up here, we were tracking what social media is coming up on these perspectives. And it's really a question of how do we go for this? But at the same time-

Lidia Infante:

And should you?

Rebecca Tomasis:

We can't go for this because....

Lidia Infante:

What's the return as well?

Joshua George:

Like Threads, right? Instagram release Threads literally just copied Twitter, should I invest time in Threads now, is it going to blow up in five years time?

Crystal Carter:

You just don't know what's going to be here and what's going to ….

Crystal Carter:

Right. Or it's like, web stories, web stories. They were like, yeah, web stories. And to make a web story was a total pain, and then it's just not really a thing. So I don't know, you don't always know what's going to hit. But I guess that's the thing that's exciting about being an SEO.

Lidia Infante:

You need to chill and focus on strategy. Because if you're chasing everything, you're going to lose your mind.

Crystal Carter:

I agree.

Okay. The last one I wanted to talk about is, so on Google, if you click the little three dots, you can get more about this search result. I find this fascinating and I think this sort of sits in the same sort of area as the two things we've seen before, which is essentially where, so if you click on a webpage, it'll like, about this source. And it will quote you Wikipedia.

So here it says DeviantArt, and says DeviantArt is this. And it was created by this, and it has headquarters in Los Angeles, et cetera. And that's from Wikipedia. And then they'll have a section that's in their own words and it'll say, DeviantArt is this, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And sometimes it will have links to other things as well. If you don't have a Wikipedia page, then they'll just say, we couldn't find any third party sources, but this is what it says on the website. And it will just quote some stuff from the website. Now this is currently in beta, but I think this is an interesting evolution, and I think it's an interesting perspective to get an idea of what Google thinks of your brand.

Lidia Infante:

So excited. I love this feature so much.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, so what do you love about it?

Lidia Infante:

I love that through this feature, I got to get budget for several projects.

Joshua George:

Nice.

Lidia Infante:

By showing this to leadership. This feature is absolutely awesome. It shows you what page Google has chosen within your site, as what you say about yourself. So I've been trying to get a knowledge panel for the longest time. Now I have one. But someone that had one for a long time was Lazarina Stoy, who's an amazing human SEO.

Crystal Carter:

She's fantastic.

Lidia Infante:

Yes. So what I do is I try to reverse engineer her stuff. So I go Google Lazarina Stoy about this source on her personal website, and I noticed that her, in their own words, was coming from, not her homepage, but a page that she made that says, who is Lazarina Stoy? And then it made me look at my own thing and look up in their own words, where's Google pulling my, who am I? It was using the homepage, it was using a specific paragraph that I didn't really want them to use that one.

So what I did is I kind of restructured my homepage and I rewrote that specific paragraph. And it worked. And now Google understands me better and I have a knowledge pile. And then I did the same thing for my company, for Sanity. I went on, and we've called ourselves many things. When you're trying to position your brand, you will go through phases. We've been a structured content platform, we've been content is data. We've been the unified content platform. We've been a composable content cloud. Finally, we are embracing that we are a headless CMS, but we've been spoken about throughout the web as headless CMS.

Crystal Carter:

It's not uncommon for longstanding brands though.

Lidia Infante:

Yeah. And for us it's super common. So throughout the site we've called ourselves many things. It's very inconsistent. I go on about the source and I know that they're using a short introduction to Sanity as the page where they're pulling what we're saying about ourselves. So I went in there and Google was highlighting structured content platform.

And I'm like, no, that was like three positionings ago. So I went in there, changed it to headless CMS, and I've seen us grow in rankings for headless CMS, headless, and CMS related queries by positioning myself as clearly a headless CMS. I'm saying it, others are saying it, therefore I am. I rank, therefore I am.

And then we don't have a Wikipedia page. We have one in Norwegian. Which obviously is not getting a lot of traffic. And I'm working on getting us a Wikipedia page in English so that we can get trusted sources on the section in there. But I also dived into the trusted sources in there, in the docs. Because they link you to what are our third party trusted sources. And it's not just Wikipedia, it's also Crunchbase and some others. But they are not actually using it. The only thing that's pulling up on the third party is Wikipedia. I have a Crunchbase profile that's in my same as schema. So it's not hard to find. And Google's not pulling that.

So yeah, this is my story with this feature. I love it. I love it.

Joshua George:

I love it as well. Because if you look at this, it's telling you why it ranked. Because it featured here, here. And again, it's another example of Google saying backlinks are super important. Although don't build it because they're not going to help you.

And even like EAT, it's predominantly based on link based signals. People think it's just adding an author on your page. It's really not. You just say where you've been featured and again, it's a backlink. Yeah, I think with all that whole AI content coming out, backlink's going to get more and more impactful in algo. They're really the number one ranking factor, in my opinion anyway, besides content user metrics.

So yeah, I love this. Because you can manipulate backlinks, you could build them at scale. And you mentioned you featured on Crunchbase, wherever these websites, like Forbes, you can pay to get featured there. And I think that's going to be the big difference. Who has the higher quality links because they're seen as more credible brand, they have more authority in the space. And they'll have bigger about the source mentions that no one else can have. Wikipedia you can pay to create a Wikipedia page as well. So yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting times.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I think it relates also to how you build your content, how you cluster your content, what you write about, how you connect it to your domain. The schema that you build to reinforce this is what my brand is an authority in. And I think it's also Google making all of those connections for the user. I think it's super, super important.

It's just when you want to be an authority in a lot of things, it's more tricky.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think it can be interesting. I think it's also interesting that it also shows up for particular articles. So for instance, if an article has been ranking for a while, it'll say this page was first indexed at this time. And this is what we know about this page and this is what we know about this source as well. So it can be really great for helping to validate the sort of quality of both your brand rep positioning and your entity positioning, but also a particular piece of content and things.

I love it. I love that you're using it as proof. That's one of my favorite things. People are like, oh, we're doing this. It's like, yeah, but look what Google says. Look what it says on this earth, because it says something different. So, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

... look what it says on the SERP, because it says something different. Yeah, that's fantastic. I think I found it a really fascinating feature. I think the first time I saw it was on Better Homes & Gardens, and then I was like, "I love this. We need more of this." Yeah, I think we all agree that it's something that goes along with Google's general sort of E-E-A-T, evolution, and all of that in the SERP, which I think is even more important in the age of AI. Have you all responded much to the experience thing? Have you added more experience as well to your strategies, as well as the expertise, authority and trust]?

Joshua George:

Yeah. We just try to make our clients the authors of everything we publish on the site, and just leverage their name at whatever. Hair transplant clinic in Turkey, so that the doctor writes it. We write it, but put it under the doctor, and we try and get it in all the content the best that we can. But other than that, there's not much you can really do. I've got 10 years of experience in every update, 11, 12, 13.

Lidia Infante:

I think the E in experience is not exactly going in that direction. The way that I see it, when you talk to a subject matter expert, and they're excited about it and they get passionate, and you're probably going to have these experiences here at brightonSEO. If you approach anyone, they speak about their subject of expertise in a very specific way-

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Lidia Infante:

... with excitement, with love and with anecdotes. They're so excited to share their silly little anecdotes with you. I have shifted to not only talking about best practice, but the specific anecdotes that my subject matter experts have. That's something that I cannot really get anywhere else, and it's really hard to insert afterwards. It feels a little bit unnatural. What I've been doing is I interview my subject matter experts, and I've briefed my ghostwriter to not eliminate anecdotes, to actually highlight them, and use storytelling of their personal experience. Yeah, I've incorporated it. I love it. I think it makes for better content, more human content.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I think for us, also, it's a positive on several fronts, because for us, the experience, this use of a product, we are a product-led company. It's making that double connection of like, "This is a user that has used our product for this intent," and then also then to take them down the funnel. Yeah, it's really... we have to think of product more. Yes.

Crystal Carter:

I think you're also starting to see things like the bubble that's for examples on Google. People will say... I don't know, "Cat, umbrellas." They'll be like, "Oh, what examples of cat umbrellas." People want to see the pictures of the cat. I literally just invented a product. I don't know if the cats need umbrellas, but there we go. Anyway. Okay. Now predictive text. Okay, so what do we think we have here? If you type in SEO, the first thing you get is SEO is dead.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I love this one. Look at the second one.

Crystal Carter:

Well-

Lidia Infante:

Don't look at the second one.

Crystal Carter:

Look at the second one. Don't look ahead.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I'm so sorry. I'm very new to this.

Crystal Carter:

Don't look ahead, agree or disagree?

Joshua George:

No.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Disagree.

Joshua George:

Disagree.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, so this is something. The interesting thing I found out about this was that the total number of entries for SEO is dead was 105 million.

Joshua George:

Wow.

Crystal Carter:

That's how many research results there are for SEO is dead. A lot of people who are checking the pulse on SEO all the time, and I think we can all agree that SEO is not dead. Okay, so next one, SEO is ruining the internet. Are we ruining the internet?

Lidia Infante:

Yes.

Joshua George:

I agree.

Lidia Infante:

Literally.

Crystal Carter:

What?

Joshua George:

I do agree this one.

Crystal Carter:

What? Why do you agree?

Lidia Infante:

I would qualify it. I would-

Crystal Carter:

Are you saying it depends? Is that what you're saying about this?

Lidia Infante:

Yeah.

Joshua George:

It depends.

Lidia Infante:

I think the flood of shit content... I didn't want to say shit. Sorry.

Crystal Carter:

You've now said it three times

Lidia Infante:

I was doing so well. I think the flood of bad content to the internet, it's definitely our fault. The fact that myths that we're old about, "You need this many characters to run. You need this many words," have separated us from what the user actually wants. We have low-key ruined the internet. Now when I look for, "I want to buy a coffee maker," and how do I know that this person is not making money to sell me the specific coffee maker? I just want a reliable opinion-

Rebecca Tomasis:

But I need a coffee maker. Who cares who makes money off the fact that I need a coffee maker?

Lidia Infante:

Yes, but you want to-

Rebecca Tomasis:

... if the coffee maker works for me. I don't know for me... and maybe it's an age thing, so I put... but for me, what I find more value, if I'm looking for a coffee maker, even though I know maybe somebody is being paid to recommend that coffee maker, you're giving me a list, you're giving me a choice, and I can do my own research. Somebody on the internet recommending how many reviews of those you would need to read. Somebody likes this one, and somebody likes that one-

Joshua George:

Yeah, right.

Rebecca Tomasis:

... and somebody likes this one. There are a million coffee makers, give me 10, or give me 10 in this price budget, or give me 10 unique coffee makers, and 10 classy. You know what I mean?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Lidia Infante:

This is a case of dummy's better than perfect, and I am like, "My coffee maker needs to be perfect."

Rebecca Tomasis:

No, but wait, not coffee makers. We live in a world of so much choice and again, so much information on the internet-

Lidia Infante:

Overwhelming.

Rebecca Tomasis:

... for me, I actually appreciate that... I don't know that it's so straightforward, "Here are 10 coffee makers, go and choose one."

Joshua George:

I agree. SEO is definitely ruining the internet.

Crystal Carter:

No.

Joshua George:

But it's Google's fault. If you ask Google, "What is the best coffee machine?" You have to read a, "Coffee machines were created by this guy," and then you don't care about that. But if you just say, "This is the best machine," you're never going to rank, you'll get no traffic.

Lidia Infante:

Right.

Joshua George:

You have to put in all this waffle to build your relevancy up.

Lidia Infante:

Right.

Joshua George:

They should have... instead of basing the algorithm on links and content, it should be more brand signals early on, and that would then leverage the better brands, and better results at the top, and you don't have to …

Rebecca Tomasis:

The expertise, the E-E-A-T. Yeah.

Joshua George:

E-E-A-T. Again, that's influenced by links though.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

I think it has to do... we have to work with what we've got. I think Gus was at dinner, and he was wearing a shirt that said, "Bots are users too." That's the thing is we have to talk to the bots, and the bots need certain things. You have to put in those things to do that. You have to balance what the bots need with what the humans need. It's just, we're doing our best, is what I think.

Lidia Infante:

I think we've also used... we've become gatekeepers of the quality of websites, on a technical level, and SEOs have done a lot of advocacy for faster websites and more accessible websites. Even though we output bad content sometimes, we are making a more sensible web ecosystem, which by the way also helps the planet.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. This is good. You'll be pleased to know that there are only 550... 595,000 people that think that SEO is ruining the internet.

Rebecca Tomasis:

But maybe it doesn't matter because SEO is dead.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, so next up is SEO... oh, SEO is a long-term strategy. Would you agree or disagree?

Joshua George:

Both.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Never ending.

Joshua George:

I'm in the middle. It can be short-term strategy as well.

Crystal Carter:

I think-

Lidia Infante:

It's a waterfall. The waterfall, when it starts running, it pours, then it keeps pouring.

Joshua George:

I say it's long-term as in it compounds, right? With more links we have more content-

Lidia Infante:

Right. Yeah, exactly.

Joshua George:

... that's more long term, but some clients... I've had clients come on board for one month just gone, but they've got loads of results in that one month.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joshua George:

We had a client, one of the biggest clients in the UK called Humax Direct. They sell Freeview boxes.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Joshua George:

They had things from Independent, Telegraph, every mass... Argus, all these massive companies.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Joshua George:

They had no H1 Tech, no Title Tech, nothing. I just came and like, "Yeah, put that there." Boom, top of page one, organic revenue through the roof.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Joshua George:

They're like, "Yeah, I think we're happy now." Short-term strategy, you're winning. See us next year.

Crystal Carter:

I agree. It's definitely been the case where you get a client and they're like, "Yeah," and you're like, "There are easy wins here. You can definitely-

Joshua George:

I love this. I love it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Lidia Infante:

They're so fun. They love you afterwards. They're like, "Yeah, definitely works for us."

Joshua George:

"So clever."

Crystal Carter:

Good. I think we say it depends. Is that an, it depends?

Lidia Infante:

No, it's both. It's both.

Joshua George:

It's both. It's both.

Lidia Infante:

It compounds, but it can have short-term wins impact.

Joshua George:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. We have 42 million people that agree, or that are running content that says that SEO is a long-term strategy.

Rebecca Tomasis:

That would be the SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Last one, which you'll be very pleased to know, has the most search results of... coming in at 394 million search results. SEO is important. Agree, disagree. I can guess.

Joshua George:

If you like money, yes.

Rebecca Tomasis:

I like my job.

Lidia Infante:

Basically, yeah. What do you think, is SEO important? Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Agree. We agree. Everybody agrees.

Rebecca Tomasis:

If we raise our standards, then we raise the standard of the internet, right? Maybe that's our shared responsibility with Google, to-

Crystal Carter:

We make the world a better place. That's how, "We are the world."

Rebecca Tomasis:

Somebody said, "You don't do brain surgery." It's not the end of the world.

Lidia Infante:

Yes.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Oh, great. That's fine.

Crystal Carter:

I heard somebody who said-

Lidia Infante:

"This is my email in an emergency." What emergency?

Crystal Carter:

I heard somebody who was like, "It's PR, not ER." I was like, "You know what? That's honestly... it'll be okay. It's fine. We can optimize that page later," and stuff. But I certainly think that it can be a challenge sometimes pointing out... advocating for SEO in a space where sometimes... I don't know, PPC is seen as a big win, or maybe the team doesn't quite understand SEO, or maybe they got burned by... that's... if you-

Joshua George:

Yeah, I hear that all the time.

Lidia Infante:

That is so common. There's been such bad actors, doing bad jobs, that have put people off SEO. We have a brand problem as an industry. People still think content creators, or the content teams still are worried that you're going to make them write very long things that are not good for the user, or... and I heard this in 2023. Do I need to include any misspellings of the keyword?

Crystal Carter:

No.

Lidia Infante:

Do not.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Wow.

Joshua George:

I hear those same questions, that I do all the sales calls at the agency now, and it's like, "I've been burnt in the past. I've worked with this guy, he told me this," and half of my job on the sales calls is just convincing the person that by the way, you search for a keyword, we rank, you booked a call with us. But it does work by the way.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Lidia Infante:

Yeah.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah.

Joshua George:

You've got here. It does work. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of people that aren't even doing SEO properly as well. We actually work with a client in Brighton. We met them yesterday before I was speaking, and they've been working for a big agency in London... I'm not going to name, for four or five months, and they built no backlinks whatsoever-

Rebecca Tomasis:

Right.

Joshua George:

... and they haven't even implemented all the findings from the audit they'd done.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Right.

Joshua George:

It's just how do people get away with that? Then when that client goes to a good agency... not saying we are, there's other good agencies out there as well. You're already at a disadvantage. You have to then convince the person that-

Lidia Infante:

Yeah.

Joshua George:

... you are good at what you do and you are different.

Crystal Carter:

I think trust is so important with clients, and with working with projects and things, because if you don't have... I've seen working agency side... I remember we walked in, and we did an audit of a site and I was like, "This is wrong, and that's wrong, and this is wrong, and that's wrong." We were pitching, we were prospecting for this client, and the guy who ran their website, who had been doing their SEO and dev stuff, where they'd be like, "Oh yeah, the devs doing the SEO." He just sat there with his arms folded the whole time, and was not bothered. Then after we finished our audit, he kept the client.

Joshua George:

Yeah.

Rebecca Tomasis:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

We didn't get the client, but they trusted him implicitly. Broken things, fixed things, whatever, they trusted him immensely. I think that if you don't have the trust of the client, then it's very difficult to convey that SEO is important, that SEO matters to get the budget sign off, and things like that. You have to be transparent, open.

Joshua George:

Is it hard sell though? You're saying, "Hey, pay me two grand a month, for seven months. No guarantee, but you might rank number one." It's difficult. We actually only introduced recently offering PPC alongside SEO, a blended search approach.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Joshua George:

You get the instant results in the ads, and you get more long-term strategy with the SEO as well. It works really well, and so much easier to sell.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, and I think also that PPC layering can be really useful with testing things, and with also shoring up different parts of the SEO, if there's algo shenanigans and you're like, "But we need this content up here."

Rebecca Tomasis:

But the best is when they're like, "Well, we're going to drop this spend, and let's see if organic picks it over." Then you don't even need to think about it, and you're like, "It will." Then it does. Wow. It's like the best... no offense.

Lidia Infante:

Then you can move that budget to 100 words that you're not-

Rebecca Tomasis:

If you think about it, it's not necessarily about cutting that budget unpaid, right? It's like let's move it to something else, where it'll have more ROI-

Lidia Infante:

Or experiment with different PPC types of content, to see if they're going to actually deliver customers.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Lidia Infante:

If they do, you'll go and make it for organic, ta da.

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. Exactly, so you can create content on video for instance, instead of... let's say you were promoting blogs on PPC, if you cut that PPC spend, you could spend that producing videos, then you can add that to the et cetera, all of it, and just make it all work, and all of that sort of stuff. Yeah.

Lidia Infante:

It's 3D chess.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. This is the thing. It's a lot of strands. There should be one here that says SEO is complicated, and you should pay people to help you with it, and things.

Yes, finishing up with that, this has been SERPS UP Live. If you like SERPS UP, we talk about this kind of thing with all fantastic, wonderful people. Y'all have all contributed to our many things that we've done, so thank you very much for joining us in this beautiful, incredible room. Thank you so much to Lidia for being here and sharing her incredible insights. Thank you so much to Joshua for being here, sharing her incredible insights. Thank you so much to Rebecca for being here. Thank you all. Enjoy your lunch, and have a great, BrighonSEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

We hope you enjoyed Crystal's session with Rebecca, with Lidia, and with Joshua. We'll link to all of their social media profiles in the show notes. There's no SEO news today, because this is a different little version of the SERPS UP Podcast. Little teaser, we are going to do more live conference recordings of the SERPS UP Podcast in the future, so look out for that. That's a warning. Look out for that.

Crystal Carter:

Find us at a conference near you doing some fantastic SERPS UP information. We hope to get some fantastic guests. We may very well do at our next one as well, so if you see us live, come and check it out. Say hello-

Mordy Oberstein:

Say hello.

Crystal Carter:

... and yeah, get yourself into the real life podcast experience.

Mordy Oberstein:

With that, thank you for joining the SERFS UP Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with the new episodes, we dive into keyword cannibalization. Is it real? It is, but there's more to it. We'll dive in, look forward wherever you consume your podcast, 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 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 and love, and SEO.