SGE & The SEO power of niche sites!

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha! Mahalo! We're joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some guru new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and joined by the incredible, the fantastic, the amazing, the marvelous, the spectacular head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Mordy Oberstein, how are you?

Mordy Oberstein:

I still have his cold, 12 months, months, brutal, ardent.

Crystal Carter:

We need Erin to play a little violin sound because I do genuinely feel some sadness for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's stuff in my nostrils that won't leave.

Crystal Carter:

Have you ever explained to a child about this? It's just like you need to go to sleep. They're like, "No, but my nose is stepped up." I'm like, "Hun, just lie on your side and it will all go to one side and then you'll have one clear one." This is what everyone does. Just wait for it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Doing the rest of the podcast with my head focused.

Crystal Carter:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're done. Thank you. SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Nasonex. Just kidding. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also leverage the power of SEO and content with both the Wix Blog and Wix Content Manager. Create content at scale and optimize it at scale to get traffic at scale, to increase your presence on the SERP as a niche site. Why niche site? Because today, we're talking about niche sites, the web, and SEO. That's right.

We're taking stock of what I think is increased stock in niche sites and SEO by talking about where niche sites fit into the new web, the opportunity niche sites present to users, how to set up your niche site to be an authority for SEO success and beyond. Plus, we have a special guest, Arielle Phoenix, to help us dive into what that all means and she'll share all that in just jiffy. We'll also take a deep pause as we take a deep thought into what content really is. That sounds mysterious. Of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, find your little corner of the web and get cozy. It's episode number 47 of the SERP's Up Podcast, carves out the niche that is niche site for SEO.

Crystal Carter:

That was very bespoke, very bijou, very targeted at a very specific market. Now here's the first question we should talk about. Is it niche or niche?

Mordy Oberstein:

I say niche.

Crystal Carter:

I also say niche, but this is because I am very continental. There are other people that say niche, which I find sounds too close to an itch for me personally, but to each their own.

Mordy Oberstein:

You say tomato, I also say tomato, and some other people say tomato.

Crystal Carter:

They're wrong. No.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're wrong.

Crystal Carter:

Anyway, okay. So, depending on whether or not you were thinking about a niche or a niche website, let's just get a little bit of few things straight. Let's talk about what we are actually talking about. So, in SEO, you use various tactics to make sure that your content is discoverable, make sure that people can find your content, make sure that websites can find your content, and you create content strategies around lots of topics that are related to whatever it's you do. So, sometimes what will happen, for instance, let's say you run a business where you have aquariums, right? Let's say you have an aquarium, but I don't know why I thought of that today, but that's the example we're going to go with.

Mordy Oberstein:

A giant or a little unit.

Crystal Carter:

No. Okay, so my aquarium is a place where all of the fish of the sea, well, maybe not all of the fish of the sea, but the ones that I was able to wrangle into my aquarium can come and hang out and have a really good time. I'm a big fan of wrasse. They're really fun at an aquarium. Also, clown fish. Clown fish are a good time at an aquarium. So, anyway, so it's an attraction aquarium. That's what I'm doing in my example. Anyway, so let's say I have this attraction aquarium, then I will probably want to make content around fish, right? Fish, the ocean, the sea, coral reefs, snapper turtles, all that stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fish sticks. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

I think that they wouldn't like that, anyway, so I might want to do that thing. What a niche site would do, flipping that on the other side is their aim would be to sell things around aquariums, for instance. So, maybe they would look at the market and they would say there's a big market for people buying aquarium stuff, for instance. Then they would say, "I'm going to make content that appeals to people that are buying that so that I can get traffic through that way." So there's a great article on ahrefs.com, which talks about how to create a niche website. Their question, they say, "What is a niche site?"

A niche said is any website that caters to a specific audience or topic. It can be about anything, health, business, relationships, food, travel, fashion, animals, or even more obscure all kinds of niche sites. In this one, they talk a lot about affiliate websites, which is what I'm talking about there. So, for instance, I looked up a niche site that I found, which was houseplants, houseplant.co.uk. You can guess what they talk about. They talk about houseplants almost exclusively.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was going to say they talk about fish.

Crystal Carter:

No, they don't. They don't. So, they talk about houseplants almost exclusively. What a niche site team would do is they would make sure that their content was very, very tailored for an affiliate one. They would make sure it was tailored, and they'd also make sure that they had links that went off to affiliate content that was related to their particular niche. So, if it was houseplants.com, they might have affiliate content that went off to houseplant products or houseplant services or houseplants may be on Amazon or other sites where you can get affiliate traffic.

We are going to be joined today by someone who works very much in this space, very much in this niche site space, creating content that's designed to be commercially viable on the web, either through affiliate traffic or potentially through display advertising traffic. There's lots of different tactics and it's an interesting way to approach online content and it's something that I thought would be worth exploring.

Mordy Oberstein:

I remember it was a couple of years ago. So, say in the health space, you have your non-niche players like WebMD, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, harvardhealth.org, and you have niche websites. When you start looking at certain keywords, they're just dominated by... I call them the superpowers of the health space. But as you look at certain types of keywords and for certain types of topics, I remember looking at autism for example. Google realizes as a topic, it's a far more niche topic conceptually than, let's say, I don't know, blood pressure.

The SERP opens up, something like to the point where on your average top level head term for a health term, like a heart attack prevention, the entries dominated by 8 out of 10, if I remember correctly, were power players. But when you start opening up the SERP a little bit, half the SERP opens up to you as a niche site. I went through a couple hundred keywords doing this and you could just literally see the space for niche sites open up and blossom certain scenarios.

Crystal Carter:

I think where they thrive is with long-tail keywords, but a large volume of long-tail keywords. So, for instance, if you're thinking about autism for instance, autism has a spectrum of different situations, different scenarios, and each one of those is going to be its own set of keywords and there's going to be long-tail things for that. So, for instance, if you think about somebody who's on the autism spectrum, there might be a whole niche around being in the workplace as someone with autism for instance, and all of the different things that people might think about and might require, might consider, and might think about when they're writing those topics.

What some of the niche site might do would be to focus on all of those. Again, it has to do with having laser focus in terms of your keywords and expecting that maybe one individual keyword might not yield you loads of traffic, but that the cumulative volume of all of your long-tail keywords would give you highly focused traffic that's highly focused on your niche and therefore potential opportunities for revenue and for audience engagement.

Mordy Oberstein:

In some of these cases, before we get to Arielle, Google, I think what it does is profile verticals or profile niches. So, for example, it knows that the content around autism is far more varied, far less, let's say, clear cut than other areas of health content. It's profiled to realize that there's far more websites talking about, far more different perspective, and far more nuanced ways to realize that even for some of the more headier terms, we should be ranking some more niche content or more nuanced content, because the nature of the topic is far more nuanced and far more harder to pin down than just having your WebMD ranking for everything.

Crystal Carter:

I think the other thing that's great about looking at different tactics within the SEO community is that there's going to be a lot of overlap and a lot of things that you can learn from say somebody who's going all the way laser focused on a particular niche like you're saying within this autism space and who's, let's say, picking up on the fact that things are wider, that there's more opportunities for more diverse perspectives and approaches to search and content. So, there's things you can learn about that will also apply to some of the more broader topic players and will also potentially apply to bigger companies. There's a charity called Cancer Research UK. They're a niche charity and they're looking at that specific things around cancer and research in the UK.

So, they've got a long-tail sort of situation there as well. So, even if you're not working in a specific SEO industry or even if you're not generally applying all of the tactics, for instance, from a niche site approach or from a YMYL approach for instance, and looking widely at some of the ways that people are approaching SEO can be incredibly beneficial to how you get different results, get new results, and meet new audiences online. So, I'm really excited to be chatting about this today and I know that certainly when I've looked across some of these sites, I always learned something from them.

I think that the other thing we've seen a lot with niche sites is that from their approach, they tend to rely a lot on content velocity. So, they tend to rely a lot on getting a lot of content out in an interesting way. I know that there are content writers who lean a lot on AI, for instance, and it's interesting to see how they're using that. It's interesting to see what results they're getting. It's interesting to see what works, what doesn't work. So, I think it's interesting to see how people are approaching that overall.

Mordy Oberstein:

Long story short, if you are running a niche site, there's room for you and opportunity for you. So, let's dive into this. We asked Arielle Phoenix a whole bunch of questions about niche sites and SEO. So, let's take this one first. We asked Arielle the difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic traffic perspective, and here's Arielle Phoenix on that.

Arielle Phoenix:

What is the difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic perspective? Personally, I don't think there is much of a difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic traffic perspective because what we're doing is essentially the same thing. We're targeting keywords or search terms and optimizing them for search traffic. So, on page SEO, technical SEO, we're doing the same things that you would be doing for a non-niche site to gain Google's traffic or Bing or any search engine really, but the main player, of course, is Google.

What I will say though is not all niche sites are the same, and where the model generally was find long-tail keywords and create content for those keywords based on Google search engine. Now more people are looking at alternative search engines, because YouTube is a search engine and apparently TikTok is a search engine. So, focusing more on social traffic as opposed to just Google's search engine, because of course, of algorithm updates and various changes, SEO starts to look a bit shaky or fragile as a sole method, but for most of us, it is still the main method of traffic for our sites.

Mordy Oberstein:

I mean, yeah, that's a great point. Most of the foundational things you're doing are the same across whatever site for the most part, right?

Crystal Carter:

Sure, sure. Absolutely. I think it's the similar thing too, and I guess it has to do with your objectives. A lot of folks that I know who work in niche sites and particularly the community around niche site SEO on Twitter, anyway, focus a lot on traffic that yields results and focus a lot more on traffic that yields results in a monetary way. So, maybe there's that to think about, but yeah, she's absolutely right that the core tactics, the core methodology is very similar. I think it's interesting that she's talking about additional search engines as well because that's certainly something that we've seen across the general SEO landscape as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

For sure. So, let's go a little bit deeper with this and let's go into what's the current environment on the SERP for niche sites? Here again is Arielle.

Arielle Phoenix:

I think this is going to vary a lot depending on the age of the site and how well somebody's built out their brand and the backlink profile and all of those things are going to come into play. But as an industry or as a sector, I think it's become very competitive over the past few years. I've only been in the space for a few years, but at every six month interval, it's changed dramatically. So, with the competition, and of course, many of us who are in this space, we don't just have the one site.

We have multiple sites and we're constantly coming up with new niche ideas and throwing sites up. So, the landscape is very, very competitive. The SERPs for niche sites, again, it's going to vary, because for some of us or for some sites, you're going to have solid growth trajectory. Others are going to be tracking sideways and others are going to be dropping out of the SERPs and being replaced by higher authority or better quality in some cases sites.

Mordy Oberstein:

So this the vision between, I call them the super authorities of the SERP and niche sites have always been a weird balance. People have always accused Google of defaulting to big name brands, because they're buying so many ads, that thing. I think what it has a lot to do with it and I think this is where niche sites can carve their space out, is that Google really trusts those big sites. It's not like, "Oh, they're a big site, therefore we rank them." It's that they're a big site, therefore we really understand and know them and therefore can trust them. If you can somehow do that as a niche site, you could also rank. Obviously knowing where Google is looking at things like, hey, heart attack prevention is the keyword.

Trying to rank there no matter what, it's just Google's going to default to .govs like the NHS or the CDC. There isn't a lot you can do there with that, but that doesn't mean that you can't build up that same kind of authority in a way and rank for media keywords you thought you really could. Now this wouldn't be a conversation about niche sites if we didn't get into AI or in the Google case, SGE, search generative experience. So, here's Arielle on how the future is shaping up for niche sites, especially considering the advent of Google's SGE. Take it away, Arielle.

Arielle Phoenix:

For many people, the future looks bleak. Personally, I don't think, although I know we are just at the beginning of AI. This is the tip of the iceberg and it's definitely going to improve. SGE at the moment is not that great, and I'm going to explain. We are at the very beginning of it and it handles many queries well. So, it does a good job and it's going to continue to do a good job of things like best products and product roundups and give the searcher probably a better experience than a niche site's review post because it's going based on all the information it has and it's summarizing it, which is essentially what we would be doing, but it's got that data in real time.

So, there are going to be types of content and queries that it makes very little sense for niche sites to focus on doing because SGE is just going to do a better job. Where we will shine or where a niche site can shine is in the space where they have genuine product experience. So, if you have the product and you've done the YouTube video and you've got the T-shirt to prove this is your experience, then you have a chance of doing better in that particular topic. But I think the focus on the long-tail, the basic answer queries, which SGE is already doing a good job fulfilling, those are probably short-lived or going to be short-lived for now.

As I said, it's not that great and people do still need to a lot of the time click in to see the actual article if the SGE has not done a sufficient job, but we will notice that there is a dip in traffic in those types of posts. If we've got a variety of posts on our site, we'll definitely notice that those basic answer query type posts are going to be just dropping in traffic. But as I said, there are many different types of content, and for me personally, I'm not focusing so much on those answer query type posts. There are many different methods that you can use to create quality content that is going to be useful to the reader and more useful than the question with an extended answer to gain that long-tail traffic.

So, really delving into content that allows you to be a bit more creative that's multi-leveled in many ways and that allows you to also add videos and really things to enrich the post in a way that the search engine or this SGE can't do. I think that's always been the case, but because long-tail was such an easy game to play, it was very, very easy to again, create lots of content for those queries and I guess do enough posts where you could generate enough traffic to your site to earn a good amount of income.

So, I definitely think for the long term, I don't think SGE cancels niche sites out completely. I don't see that. I know many people have their opinions on that, but I don't see that happening if the niche site owner can identify the different types of content that can work in a way that the SGE can't. In some cases, some sites are just going to fail because they've been built on that long-tail keyword model, but there's still a huge opportunity to use the content creation or the keyword targeting model to build your brand and get ahead of this SGE AI curve.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I'll be honest with you, if you're running a niche site, going all in on the AI seems like, "Wait a second, your entire unique value or unique value is the fact that you're not AI, is that you have the actual experience, you are the actual expert. You are able to deep dive into the topic the way that most people, let alone most AI writers can't do." So I feel if you are a niche site, no, leverage the fact that you have that expertise and that experience and go full on into that as a way of combating what's inevitably going to be a world filled with the same content spun up by the same AI writers.

Crystal Carter:

I think that what she's talking about there is absolutely on the money on being able to show that you have reviewed the product well, that you have the YouTube video to go with it, that you're able to add value. This is something that applies not just to niche sites, but to all sites. I think it's something that Google has been trying to nurture within the SEO space for ages with their product review updates. Then with them, they just started calling it the review update and they're basically wanting actual examples and actual real life evidence that you engage with the product to know what you're talking about there.

When I think of good niche sites that I have used where it's somebody who's reviewing specific products that I'm looking to buy, for instance, and they've gone into it in depth, I'm like, "I want a cordless vacuum cleaner." There's somebody who's like, "Have I got a website for you?" They're going into all the cordless vacuum cleaners and all of the different things that they do and they've got all the different videos.

She's absolutely on the money, but the people who are creating content strategically for their niche are going to do well, because I think that the SGE is going to be very much like featured snippets. You don't see featured snippet on every single SERP. Cyrus Shepherd’s talked about how often you see SGE on the SERP. It's not all the time. So, I think the long-tails will still add value, as she said. As she also pointed out, you also need to enrich the content with additional value.

Mordy Oberstein:

Especially because when you do that, you're building up your brand, which is a very unique thing to do, especially in a world that's filled with the generic content that's already out there, let alone the generic content that AI is going to put out there. Now, we're talking about niche sites. We have to talk about the question, which is how to create authority as a niche site so that you can compete with the bigger players. Ooh, scandalous and probably the most important question in my mind that we've asked Arielle. Here's what she had to say.

Arielle Phoenix:

Again, personally, I still take the approach of topical domination or topical authority. The topical domination is more covering the topic in depth, so not leaving anything. Previously, we would try to find gaps in the topic where you have the high traffic, high authority sites going for specific topics, and then you find your way in where they wouldn't bother touching those topics. But with topical domination, you're covering everything. So, every related question, every entity around the subject, and then moving on to another silo that links to it, but that's also covered in depth. So, I guess once upon a time, you could do a small niche site where you just focus on the topic and make 50 or so articles.

I think now you need to make these micro topics and do the same thing, but hone in on that micro topic and then relate that to another micro topic and then use that to bolster that key topic that you would've just made 50 articles around in the past. So, still taking that velocity or that high velocity approach with content, but using that as the foundation to build your brand upon. But then using things like YouTube as a separate entity, so focusing on YouTube and allowing them to support each other and other social channels. Of course, you do have to find the social channels that work for that niche.

You don't have to go and build a Twitter or LinkedIn for everything, but you do want to build that social proof and focus on EAT once you've got that strong foundation, but that's just my approach. That's what I'm doing to compete with the bigger players, having a solid content base, pairing that with a solid social base, mainly YouTube, and then focusing on the EAT. So, that is the guest post and the link building efforts. As taboo as that does still seem to be, we know the huge sites have a huge backlink profile, so going deeper in on the content and the internal linking, making sure that the site as an entity is as strong as possible, and then going in with the social media, the outreach, building things like link magnets if possible in your niche building applications, things that really build the brand, and of course, focusing then on the EAT.

So, ensuring that there is an actual entity behind it and everything is connected, so it is a reputable source or at least appears to be when facing those bigger players. So, yeah, that's my take. That's my approach in the ever-changing niche site space, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts and thanks for having me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I really liked what she had to say there. It's similar to what I've always talked about when people ask me about targeting zero search volume keywords. Okay, let's assume that no one's searching for this. Okay, there's no value. No, there actually is value because you're building up authority around that topic. You need to start slow. You need to start from somewhere, and starting from these micro topics and then building out from there is just the logical sequence of how you build trusted authority with a search engine who doesn't until that point know who you are.

Crystal Carter:

Right, precisely. Sometimes you can even drive traffic by creating the traffic with what you're doing and what you're talking about. Then I think she also talked a lot about clustering keywords, and she talked about YouTube as well. She's got a great YouTube video about keyword clustering, keyword clustering tools, and how she works that into her general method, so that's definitely worth looking at.

But the keyword clustering is a really great way to organize all of that content for Google because you are helping Google to understand what you're doing with your backlinks or say your site map and things like that and your hierarchy within your site, but also the way that you're linking your site and the way that you're connecting the content that you're creating will also help Google to understand what you're doing and help them to serve it on search result pages in a way that's really effective.

I think that that is absolutely important to making sure that the content that you create is valuable to users, is discoverable by Google. So, when you're making lots more content around micro topics that Google can see the actual bulk of your content and that you have that topic authority and then it's really easy for them to access the whole stack.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. You have to really think of it very holistically. You don't look at your pieces of content as individual pieces of content. It's one piece feeds the next piece, which feeds the next piece, which feeds the next piece, which creates a corpus. Content is a corpus, and you need a corpus of content. Thank you again, Arielle, for all of that amazing content. Definitely be sure to check out Arielle on Twitter, @ariellecpx. That's @A-R-I-E-L-L-ECPX on Twitter and ariellephoenix.com. Be sure to look in the show notes for the link to her site. Now, speaking about content and SGE and niche sites filling a void on the web, I like to go a little bit deeper into that. I spoil it a little bit on our episode with Mike King around CTR and SGE on the SERP.

When I was talking about your content being Matlock, which I'm not going to go into that again. If you listen to that episode, you'll understand what I mean by it. Your content is Matlock. If you don't know who Matlock is, don't worry, ask your grandmother. So, let's dive in a little bit deeper as I'd like to talk about what the heck we mean when we ask that your content might not be as desirable as you might think it is and what that means in terms of SGE and CTR and traffic and clicks and the role of niche sites in all of this as Crystal and I share a deep thought. Okay, let me repose a question to you. So, you spin up content, you create content, it's content.

Let's just leave it at that. It's content. You now expect rankings and you expect traffic and you expect conversions, but consider what we just talked about in terms of niche sites and their ability to go into micro topics and to really offer experience and to really offer expertise around really specific nuances within a larger area of the web. When you spin up content and you expect traffic, is that expectation really realistic?

Crystal Carter:

I mean, there's a reason why SEOs exist, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. To ignore John Mueller on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

And Barry Schwartz, to be fair.

Mordy Oberstein:

To ignore Barry Schwartz on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. But we exist for a reason because there's lots of people who did that and got nothing. They were like, "Oh, I put up content, and just nothing happened." Sometimes it needs guidance, sometimes it needs help. Sometimes it needs...

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, let's say it gets the help. You've optimized all the things. Does it still deserve traffic? Just because it ranks, does it deserve traffic? That's what I'm really asking, I guess.

Crystal Carter:

No, I wouldn't say so. No, no. Google doesn't owe you anything. You could do your best, but Google doesn't owe you anything. Also, the clicks, the ranking, all of that, that's all a reflection of user value. Even if users are going to your site and they're not getting value, then they're not going to come back and Google won't rank you so well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and just because you rank really, really well doesn't mean the content is really, really good. It could just be there's nothing better.

Crystal Carter:

This is absolutely true. It could also be that maybe that search term was the search term for a while, but maybe nobody's searching it anymore. I don't think anybody's worried about who Jean-Claude Van Damme's girlfriend is right now or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was just Googling that the other day.

Crystal Carter:

Maybe people were Googling that back in the day when he was like that dude or whatever, but right now, nobody's particularly interested.

Mordy Oberstein:

What angle is Jean-Claude Van Damme's leg when he does a roundhouse kick? Is it 123 degrees?

Crystal Carter:

Maybe it was when he was doing pirouettes. Wasn't he a ballet too as well?

Mordy Oberstein:

Something like that. Yeah. I was watching a video about this recently. Actually, it's random. Just don't ask me why. When I say we, I mean I think the web has gotten to a point where we think, "Okay, this ranks or this should rank. It's good enough to rank, and therefore it deserves traffic." I'm not sure that that equation is entirely accurate. What I think is in many, many, many more cases than you would like to think is that the reason why a page would get traffic or a URL would rank is because there's nothing better. I think that there's an enormous shortage of content on the web.

When I say shortage, I mean of good content. There's no shortage of content. There's a shortage of good content. What I think that AI and SGE is going to bring it to focus is that question, is the fact that just because in the past you've had traffic doesn't necessarily mean... I know this is a hot take, and I know SEOs are not going to be happy to be saying this. ... in terms of mathematical logic imply or demand that that traffic continue forever.

Crystal Carter:

Right. It might just be that nobody ever tried to tip you off a castle. It might be that nobody else tried to write that content. I sometimes find that I see content that's ranking number one, and then I go to check at the search volume up for it and it's not getting any traffic anyway. You're like the king of nothing. So, that happens too.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you know what SGE is to me? It's a giant Local Pack. It's a giant Local Pack.

Crystal Carter:

I can see what you mean.

Mordy Oberstein:

Imagine it's 2003. I don't know if that's accurate or not.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Beforehand, there was no Local Pack. There's no three listings of a local business. When you search pizza near me, you had to go click on Yelp and run through all the listings there. Then all of a sudden, the Local Pack comes on the SERP and all of the organic results you have your typical 1 through 10 traditional listing, I don't say it becomes irrelevant or becomes less relevant. All things being equal, is that bad? Was that bad for the web? Was that bad for the users? Was that bad for businesses?

Crystal Carter:

It was different. I've been chatting about this a little while. Everyone's like, "Oh, SGE is completely new. AI and the search is completely new." Featured snippets have been run by AI and machine learning the entire time, the whole time. Featured snippets have been run by AI the entire time. It's been around for years. The image search, visual search with Vision AI has been around for years. All of these things have been around for ages. Yeah, like you're saying, it's different, but all of them are pulling from ranking content. So, the content has to rank in the first place before it can be considered for this new and shiny and fantastic feature.

What we see is that the things that rank in SGE are also ranking in your needs SERP. So, what we see is the thing that ranks for the featured snippet or is included in the featured snippet, because sometimes featured snippets include content for one thing and content from another thing, content from another thing, they're all ranking content from the regular plain old blue link SERPS. So, that's important to think. I think also your Matlock scenario is really important. If you look at Internet Live Stats, startling statistics, in 2004, the number of websites according to Internet Live Stats was 51 million websites. Then by 2010, six years later, there were 206 million websites online. So, essentially, your Matlock thing is the same. That's a fourfold increase.

Mordy Oberstein:

Something's going to have to stop ranking or stop getting traffic at some point. My Matlock case, just for reference, there's a TV show back from the late '80s, early '90s called Matlock with Annie Griffith. When you were home sick as a kid, say a 10-year-old, you're watching The Price Is Right. Then at a certain point, there's nothing on, just Matlock. There was no cable. I'm dating myself here. There was no cable. There was five channel with the bunny rabbit ear antennas, and you were either watching General Hospital, which is soap opera, which I was not watching, or Matlock.

So, Matlock had great numbers in the early afternoon because there was nothing else. That's my parallel with content. Maybe your content is getting all that traffic because there's nothing else. There's no other paradigm, but SGE brings in a new paradigm, which by the way, I think niche sites are built for SGE for two reasons. One is Google's trying to be a little bit more specific as the entire point of SGE to refine what people are looking for and they want to offer very refined, very specific results. That's one. The second is there's an explore feature or an expand feature within Google's SGE where it takes the SGE summary. So, it takes the five lines of SGE, of an AI content that they wrote. It breaks it down per line and it shows organic results per line, which are inherently going to be very specific.

So, SGE in my mind is built for niche sites who may not have been able to capitalize on the SERP, who might now be able to capitalize on. I would love to see, thought, SGE rolls out in full a year later. Are the big players losing traffic and are niche sites increasing in traffic? That would be fascinating to see.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's really interesting because I think the reason why niche sites are going to do well out of this or could potentially do well is because of the way that you talk to a generative search experience. So, on a generative search, I am much more likely to write a very, very long-winded query. On a Google SERP, a standard traditional search, I'm probably going-

Mordy Oberstein:

Three words.

Crystal Carter:

Three words, right? I'm going to say TV on now.

Mordy Oberstein:

Van Damme leg kick.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Van Damme leg kick. Whereas let's say, "What kind of ballet did Jean-Claude Van Damme do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?" or whatever it may be So you'll get right into it, or you might even describe something that you don't even know the name for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

The answer is the ballet where you get a roundhouse right to the face.

Crystal Carter:

I think that Arielle was talking about niching down and getting right into not just writing that one topic, but writing up, but making sure that your website represents an entity and that everything revolves around that entity and you're covering every different way to discover that entity and discover that information. Again, that works really, really well with a generative search experience because it's a situation where you're going to ask a question and then you're going to delve into it and delve into it and delve into it and delve into it more and more and more and more and more. I think I've discussed this previously, but one of the best ones I've had was I was trying to figure out what to do with my houseplant.

My houseplant is dying. What do I do with it? It kept giving me lots of results from the same houseplant website. Now I'm like, "Okay, that's a good place to go for information about this houseplant because they have all of the information about that. So, why would I go to some other website? I'd go to that one."

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly. You really build that trust, that branding. By the way, how was that houseplant?

Crystal Carter:

It's better. It's better actually. I took some advice. I put it in a north facing window. I gave it some more water. I haven't repotted it, but she's doing okay. Thanks for asking. That's so kind.

Mordy Oberstein:

Of course. Now, since we're talking about AI, I'm sure there's some AI news this week because there's always some AI news or not. Either way.

Crystal Carter:

There are bots.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Come on, Barry. Light my fire. Barry Schwartz has been roll this week with a few hotly contested SEO issues. So, cue up some sappy soap opera music because it's about to get dramatic in here. First Barry Schwartz over at search engine round table, Google details, SEO guidance for content syndication partners. So, in a nutshell, the practice for years has been to use the canonical to tell Google, which is the real original article. So, you're syndicating content. Let's say you're Reuters. You're syndicating to ABC News, to CNN, to MSNBC, whatever it is. How do you know? How does Google supposed to know which is the real source, which is the real original article?

By using the canonical tag pointing back to the original article, which has been difficult to get done because you have to get that done in an agreement with the syndicated partners. What are the chances that they actually want to tell Google, "Hey, don't rank us. Rank the original partner"? That aside, a few months ago, Google said, "We'll make it different. We're going to say, now you should use the no index instead of the canonical tag." Meaning if you want to rank and not your syndicated partners tell the syndicated partners, just apply a no index tag so they can't rank and only you can rank. So, you would need to get that into an agreement, which would be very, very difficult. There's a lot of back and forth. Was the guidance really that all along so forth and so forth and so forth?

I don't want to get into any of that. The point is many SEOs feel stuck here to rock in a hard place and would like to see a different approach again, because you need to now tell the syndicated partners, "Hey, you need to apply a no index tag here." You're not going to rank at all, which again, if I'm, let's say MSNBC or ABC News, I want to rank. So, why would I agree to that? Google's Danny Sullivan did say he would take that feedback and bring it to the team, which is not always lip service. I know people sometimes feel that's lip service. It's not. I could say at Wix, we've done that many, many times. We've taken feedback from the SEO community, brought that to the team, and then made a product improvement.

So, I would take that as a legitimate offer of, "Hey, I'm going to go bring that to the team. Let's see if we can figure that out." So maybe there will be something coming down the pike that would make syndication a little bit more advantageous from a ranking point of view. The point is, if you are going to syndicate your content, there are some hard conversations that you're going to need to have about the benefits of syndicating and the monetary gain you get from that versus the ability to rank and the monetary gain you would get from that. But wait, Barry was not done there. From search engine land, Barry goes, "Google's Core Web Vitals INP issues email is causing concern."

So a few weeks ago, Google added INP, Interaction to Next Paint, which will replace FID, First Input Delay as one of the three Core Web Vitals Come March 2024. With that, Google started setting out the notifications. You have an issue for INP from search console. The issue is that the web is currently working to align with the new guidelines. So, for example, we at Wix have been working way before Google actually announced INP would be in the Core Web Vitals with Google to see what makes sense, what doesn't make sense when it comes to tracking websites and INP. So, for example, we've been working on this for a long time and now 83% of our website's mobile in the US pass INP, but the issue is that this is not coming due until March and really nothing changed on the website.

Only that changed that Google brought INP into search console is now sending out notifications, but the website has been the same the entire time. So, if thing's been okay with the website, then there's really nothing to worry about. At the same time from a ranking point of view, nothing is changing until March 2024. Even with that, this is where Barry really went off in his weekly news recap on Search Engine Roundtable, which we'll link to, where Barry was saying, "Hey, look, there was a whole bunch of hype around Core Web Vitals that are ranking the first time around when Google initially integrated this into the algorithm and that didn't really pan out. There really wasn't any significant ranking impact as a result. In fact for many websites, there was literally zero.

Nothing actually happened as a tiebreaker scenario." Barry was saying, "Hey, why are we trying to make this a big deal again, from a ranking point of view? You're now sending these issues out via email to websites. Website numbers are going to freak out and start prioritizing an INP from an SEO point of view." But that's not really the right thing to do because you're talking about a small issue within a small issue because a ranking impact is really, really minimal for Core Web Vitals. Now you're just talking about one of the Core Web Vitals. So, Barry was saying, "Hey, I think these emails are harmful because they're going to make people freak out and start prioritizing what might not be an SEO priority to begin with."

That's not to say that INP is not important. It's super important from a user experience point of view. When your users get to the page, they should have a really seamless, fast integrated experience that doesn't hold them back from doing what they want to do. But the point about rank, I would have to agree with Barry about. The point is, if you've got these emails, nothing about your site actually changed. All that changes is Google's now sending the emails out. You don't know the significance of the INP issue. It could be a very small little thing that you need to change, right? But Google doesn't tell you that in the email, so take it slow. From a ranking point of view, none of this matters until March 2024, and even then, it's a very, very, very, very small issue most likely.

The last thing you should really just understand is that this is something that the web itself is really aligning to, which is why I think people were upset. Hey, we're working towards aligning to your new guidelines. Why are we now getting emails that we're not there yet? Of course, we're not there yet, but again, many, many websites are there and should be fine. Again, for example, on the Wix site, 83% of mobile sites in the US already passed INP and we're not even anywhere close to March. Okay. Moving on, some AI news for you, again from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Just call him the monopoly man. He's got a monopoly on the SEO news. Barry writes, "Google expands Bard to more countries, more languages, and adds new features."

So Bard is now available in more geolocations and there's a whole bunch of new features. For example, you can now listen to the prompt, which is great for accessibility. You can adjust the tone of the response, so how formal you want the response to be, how long you want the response to be and so forth. This comes, by the way, as Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern reports, "Is ChatGPT getting Dumber?" Usage drops as users complain. So, basically people are saying, "Hey, I've been using ChatGPT for a long time, and it seems to be the responses are not as good as they used to be." OpenAI said, which I very much align with, that nothing's really changed. It's probably noticing more and more issues as you use it more and more often.

I totally agree with that. I don't think anything actually changed the... Why would the AI get dumber? It's only getting more refined and more refined and more refined. This goes back to what we've been saying on this podcast for a very, very, very long time. The technology is super cool and it is super amazing and it is super innovative and it is beyond words. But when you get past that and you're talking about actual usage in real life situations, there are gaps in this technology. So, now as a web, we've gotten past the initial wow factor and we're actually starting to use this thing in real life cases. We're like, "Wait a second, maybe this isn't as good as we thought it was, because you're looking at it from two different perspectives, the wow factor versus actual integration to your consumer base."

So I don't think the AI has gotten any dumber. What I think, as OpenAI points out, is that you're starting to notice more and more flaws and thinking maybe this isn't as good and maybe we can't use it across the board the way we thought we could, which I hate to say this, but if you listen to the podcast regularly, we told you so. By the way, some of the data sources are showing a 10% drop-off in ChatGPT usage. Pulling Barry Schwartz back in on Twitter, he was talking about the hype is starting to wane. I think he ran a poll from Gary Sterling over at Search Engine Roundtable, showing that SEOs are using it significantly less often. The point is in marketing, there's all these things that come around in cycles, super hype things.

I don't think AI is hype per se, as I've mentioned on the podcast many, many times. I think it's a great tool. It's not going anywhere, but that initial, "Oh, my goodness. This is amazing. It's a panacea for all things," I think that was hype. I think the web is starting to come out of that, and I think hopefully that will result in more mature adoption of the AI technology. With that, that is this week's not so snappy news. Always so snappy with that snappy news. Hey, Crystal, I always feel like coming back like a news show. Have a great weekend, Crystal.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, yeah, I had a great, great weekend. I'm planning to go-

Mordy Oberstein:

All right. Okay, here where the weather is... I always wanted to be a news anchor. Not never. Anyway, I always found that news anchor thing so plastic, not my thing.

Crystal Carter:

Fair enough.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey, Sue, of course, Bob. Anyway,

Crystal Carter:

I feel like you'd be more of a radio show guy for that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Definitely more of the afternoon drive home radio station for hard rock radio station thing. Speaking of music, by the way, it's time for our follow of the weekend. He's a very musical person. If we're talking about SGE, we're talking about the future of search as we talked about niche sites, who else could our follow of the week be than our previous guest, Mike King over @iPullRank on Twitter. That's I, the letter I, not the number I, the letter I. Just like what? The letter I-P-U-L-L-R-A-N-K, iPullRank.

Crystal Carter:

iPullRank, yeah. Mike is great. Mike is a fount of SEO knowledge. He's been SEO and thinking about AI for ages. We had him on a webinar talking about ChatGPT and AI content writers. He's got so much knowledge about the relationship between machine learning and entities and search and how that all works. So, he's a fantastic follow. He's also really, really engaged with the community and very much a pillar of the community. So, absolutely follow him. He's a fantastic follow.

Mordy Oberstein:

Must follow, I feel like.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely must follow. He is great at translating that information that's really complex in a really eye level way, which is fabulous.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, and do check out the webinar. He dropped some fantastic, fantastic information there.

Mordy Oberstein:

The webinar with him and Ross Hudgins about AI content writers and SEO and the future of the web, we'll link to in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Everybody who joined it said it was fantastic. So, please, please do join along. Enjoy it, find it on YouTube, all of that stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice. Well, we've come to the end of this road. I'll see you niche week. I've been holding that for like 20 minutes.

Crystal Carter:

Niche road will we take?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, niche. It doesn't work. Doesn't work. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with new episodes. We dive into repurposing your audio and video content for search. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.