Does social media matter for SEO?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. [Hawaiian 00:00:10] for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein and the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fantastic, the absolutely incredible, the always on target, always insightful, always everything you could ever want out of an SEO podcast partner, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Ah shucks. You're a great podcast buddy too. Thanks.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're my podcast buddy, Crystal.

Crystal Carter:

Buddies. I once worked on a thing and I had an accountability buddy and I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." Like a personal trainer for whatever the project you're working on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, really? The only time I had a buddy was in swim class in camp, day camp, back in the day. They have a buddy.

Crystal Carter:

To make sure you don't drown?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. But my buddy could not swim, so I'm like, "If I drown, I feel like this is not going to end well for me, because that buddy's not going to be my buddy."

Crystal Carter:

Did he have a whistle or something? Was he able to be like, "He's drowning! Help someone! Someone help him!" That would've been useful. Buddies always reminded me of cubby holes. That's another thing from that time of life.

Mordy Oberstein:

Buddy is very kindergarten-esque.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Definitely, definitely, definitely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sure.

Crystal Carter:

But it's not kindergarten-esque?

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP's Up podcast, which is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight, which comes out every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also create all sorts of custom media, from images to banners to videos, and then schedule them for social media posting, all without ever having to leave Wix. It's socialicious. They love social.

Crystal Carter:

All channels everywhere, all the time.

Mordy Oberstein:

All the new emerging social media platforms, whatever that is. That's a whole hot mess for another time.

Crystal Carter:

Oh gosh. Yeah, entirely. Entirely. Everyone's like, "Twitter! I have a new Twitter thing!" And everybody rushes over to it and then they're like, "Oh our servers crashed."

Mordy Oberstein:

As we're recording, there's another one of these new Twitter things and everyone's like, "Oh, we got to go." I'm not going anywhere. I tried that. It didn't work out well.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

If everybody ends up over there, I'll go there too.

Crystal Carter:

Sure. Sure. Sure. I think for the moment-

Mordy Oberstein:

But until then-

Crystal Carter:

... most people are just doing their best on LinkedIn. It's like, "What's going on?"

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great title. Who are you? I'm doing my best on LinkedIn.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Sometimes you got to do that. You got to go where the people are. I want to be where the people are. That one. That thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is LinkedIn. Which by the way, in case you haven't realized, we're talking about social media today and SEO. Does social media impact SEO? What's true and what's not true. When it comes to social media and organic search, we'll dive into the unexpected impact social has on your SEO. And it's not just links, because that's the expected part. How social media helps the research stage of any SEO campaign, and social media and its relationship to the old EEAT. Plus, the great Christoph Trappe of Growgetter and far beyond joins us to give us his top tips for distributing social media content effectively across all social media channels. And we'll travel across the Wix-verse to speak to Wix's own head of social media, Lirut Nave, so that you can learn how to create a well-balanced social media presence for you and your brand. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO news and who should to be following on social for more SEO awesomeness.

So, polish up your social media profile picks and put on your finest social media attire as episode number 49 of the SERP's Up podcast brings your social media presence to the great SEO dance in the sky.

Crystal Carter:

That was quite the intro. And with that, with that, let's get into this. Yeah, we're talking about social for SEO and how social effects SEO. Essentially the way I like to think about this is that when we're doing digital marketing, when we're doing SEO, we need to think about it from an omni-channel approach. That's because we are not just optimizing for search engines, we're optimizing for user discovery. Users use social media, so social's important for SEO because users are there. In fact, recent research from We Are Social and Meltwater shows that globally 30% of time online is spent on social media platforms, and in some countries this can be even higher than 30%. So, this is something that we absolutely need to be thinking about if we want to make sure that our content is being visible and that we are serving our clients and our projects and our teams really, really well. But it's not all just cat pics and sharing videos and doing dances on TikTok and all of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Here's what I ate for dinner.

Crystal Carter:

I'm the queen of that. I’m sorry….if I have a lovely meal. People need to know about it. I take pictures of my burritos all the time. But I think that people are also using it for search. For instance, when we're talking about the burrito, I'm very often found on Instagram looking up the actual pictures that they have for the restaurant that I'm thinking of going to. I want to see whether people had a good time at the restaurant, whether people are wearing formal wear at this place, or whether it's a casual dining situation. Because a lot of times on a website you might just get pictures... on the website, you might just get the beauty shots of the plates of food and you might not be able to get an idea of what the whole place is like. This is something that's useful there.

In fact, on Facebook there's something like 1.5 billion searches a day that are happening on Facebook. On Pinterest there's around 2 billion searches that are happening every day. And we all know that TikTok has become a really important tool, not just for search discovery for users, but as Abby Gleason pointed out in her recent article, people are also using TikTok for keyword research.

Abby's somebody who's a big fan of trending topics in SEO and getting things that have zero clicks... I was on a podcast with her recently and she was talking about how, whenever someone says, "Oh, this has zero clicks. This keyword has zero clicks," she says, "Yeah. ChatGPT had zero clicks as well in October, November last time. Imagine how many clicks it actually was getting at the time." So, this is something that can be really useful. The thing about social is social can be very quick to respond to some of those trends, so it's a really good place to think about that.

But additionally, Google actively ranks content from social media. If you look at keyword rankings for things like Facebook, like Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, there are 900 million keywords that are ranking that are from those domains that are ranking online. People will search for something, and if there isn't a page on a website, they may very well get sent to a Facebook page that talks about this. I've had this happen a number of times, where someone was having an event at a place, or someone is having some sort of promotional sale or offer, and the only thing I could find was a Facebook post about it and Google was showing that.

Additionally, it's also driving lots of sessions. Stats that I pulled up from Semrush have said that there's something like 7.5 billion sessions that are going to social media content across the web. Not only that, but also they will show links from social media posts on Google. If you post on Twitter a lot, then you might have a Twitter carousel. I mean, I say this, but Twitter is changing daily with what they do and don't show on the site.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hourly. Hourly.

Crystal Carter:

Hourly. Historically speaking, it was the case that if you posted on Twitter a lot, you might get a Twitter carousel on Google and the links that you share from your Twitter posts are live. So people can click on them from Google. Additionally, if you look up a featured snippet in terms of EAT or EEAT, it's very often that you'll get information from LinkedIn about individuals. If you say something like, "What is Crystal Carter known for? Is Crystal Carter good at SEO?" You might actually get a featured snippet that is from a LinkedIn reply. I've seen this from multiple people as well, where actually the information for the featured snippet comes from LinkedIn. So, Google is linking those two.

And John Mueller has said, when asked, I think it was at a Google meetup, Google Hangout session, that LinkedIn can be a source for Google to route some of their EEAT understandings of your biographical entity. This is something that's really, really useful.

My point is that, when we're thinking about search, I'm not saying that you should necessarily as an SEO be trying to take over the social media accounts, but it's worth coordinating with your social media accounts to understand what they're posting and to be strategic about the kinds of language that you're using in your posts and the kinds of content, and how it supports each other as you're optimizing for user discovery via search, via social, via multiple channels.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. One of the reasons why I think social has maybe not become such a prominent part of the SEO dialogue is because it is true. The number of followers that you have, your reach, all those kind of things, those are not ranking factors. They don't come into the ranking equation at all. There might be a correlation to a big brand doing well with search and also having a great social media account, but that's just correlation not equaling causation. But that doesn't mean that social media as a concept is not a major part of SEO. For example, the Twitter box that you mentioned is a big part of reputation management. If you have, for example, a website talking smack about you and the ranking number like seven or eight on the SERP. If you start tweeting a lot and you get the Twitter box to show up there, it'll knock those results off of the SERP.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. This is important. And also, if you're thinking about your brand for instance. I love the situation where you have your website, and I've had it before where I have clients and they were big on social. They were not so big on organic, but they were working towards that. That's why they got me involved. But they were big on social. And you take the social media... You can take your social handles and you can add them into your same as schema markup. So, on your scheme of markup about your organization, you can say, "We are also on YouTube, we are also here, we are also there." Google can see those and it will help them to understand that, okay, yeah, maybe this website has 500 visits a month or something, maybe it's a new domain, but this entity has been on YouTube for seven years and they've got 7 million followers. So actually, this is useful. This is important.

It also is really useful if you have a name that is varying on different platforms, or if you have a name that's really common. It can help to make sure that people know that you are that person and that you are connected to that person. It also means that when people Google you, you get what I love, which is when the SERP is like, "It's all me." It's so amazing to me. It's like you get the website, the YouTube, the Pinterest, the Facebook, the Instagram, all of those things. So that if you have other people who are trying to find you, they can definitely find you and you don't have other pieces of content popping up in a SERP that should be yours. You should own that SERP entirely.

Mordy Oberstein:

You should control your name, your brand name, your personal name. You should control that SERP and social media is the way to do that. It goes back to what you were saying before. The knowledge panel does pick up social media profiles. For example, "Oh no, I'll never get a knowledge panel. I don't have a Wikipedia page." Not true. Google will look at LinkedIn, for example, as one of the primary sources of it understanding who you are and pulling that in as your description in the knowledge panel.

By the way, it's a little bit different now because the format of a knowledge panel could sometimes be different. Now they have the cards. But when it was the traditional picture, name, maybe website, social profiles, description, whatever it was... For example, Tom Brady, the famous NFL player, retired NFL player, the URL that Google would show in his knowledge panel back in the day was not a website, it was his Instagram.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. Because it's probably a place where he was really active. And there's some places where something happens and the celebrity, or whoever it is, makes a statement on Instagram.

Mordy Oberstein:

Google definitely knows what your social profiles are and when it's a primary part of the site, or the brand, or the person's identity.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. And this is, I think, one of the reasons why it's really important to you. Again, I don't think that you should be taking over your social media platforms from your social media managers. They know what they're doing. They are following all of the algorithms. They know all of the things for all of that stuff, and it's a very different skillset. There's a little bit of overlap with general things, but it's a very different skillset, and we will be talking about more of that later. But what is important is making sure that you have good link hygiene and good consistency across your social media platform. It's worth, and I've done this a few times, it's worth doing an audit of your social media platforms just to make sure that your about page, on Facebook for instance, is actually linking to your actual URL.

What I see really, really, really, really often is that the domain is on HTTPS and the link on the Facebook is on HTTP, or the domain is on www and the link on the Facebook is not on www. Or the name on the Facebook page is slightly different from the name that's actually in your schema markup or something. Or the address isn't exactly the same, which is something that's really important for local SEO. So, if you're thinking about places where you have your domain name, your business name, your address, maybe even links to who your founders are, make sure that all of those things are consistent with what is on your webpage and what is in your schema markup. And if you're doing local SEO, for instance, and you're doing citations across local SEO, make sure that they're consistent across all of those. Because very often on local SEO citations, they will also be referencing your Facebook page, for instance. Because people know that that's part of the local experience and that Facebook geographically clusters people and that sort of thing as well.

So, make sure that you got very consistent information across all of your social media platforms. Because think about how much traffic you're getting from all of those links. You're going to be getting a lot, so make sure that those things are consistent. And it will also help you to concentrate the information, the traffic, and also concentrate the data so that you're not splitting it into direct traffic, for instance, because it's gone to a 301 that had to go to a thing and all that sort of stuff. So, make sure that you've got good consistency across your social media profiles. That will help you, that'll help users, that'll help Google, that'll help all of the things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And there's the classic example, by the way. If you have the links set up the right way and you're sharing links across, not just in the bio itself, but across social media and posts and tweets and whatever; it's a great way to get links. I've had that a gazillion times with my social media bio, people clicking on the link in there, whatever website I have at the time, I change it every once in a while; and getting traffic that way and getting links that way.

But I also want to harp back on something you mentioned earlier about Abby Gleason and using social media as a keyword research tool, especially on emerging topics or when vernacular is changing. I'm a late '80s, early '90s kid, so the way I would phrase things or the catchwords I would say are not what the people today are using. If you're out of touch, you're going to be using vernacular that's just not what people are searching for. And while that may have traditional search volumes, it may not continue to have quality search volumes, because the vernacular is changing, the topics are changing. And social media is a great way to have... if not specifically doing a research through social media, but having your finger on the pulse of, okay, where are things at is equally important.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, entirely. And I think that it can sometimes mean that you are able to connect with new audiences. It can also mean that you're not missing things that could be great opportunities for you. For instance, the corn kid was a big trend for a while, a few months back and stuff. If you were a corn business, that's your time to shine. I've been to a corn husking festival in Ohio years and years ago. That's a perfect time to get some content out there.

I think that what's going on in social is really, really useful for lots of things. It tells you what your audience is interested in, so you can see which things are really appealing to your audience and can give you ideas about different content that you can make. It can also give you potential opportunities for where you might want to get back links, or where you might want to build partnerships. If you're finding that a lot of the people that are following you are, for instance, say, interested in certain topics or are tagging lots of events in social media, then you can say, "Hey, we should be at this event, because our audience is really interested in this event, or they're really interested in this cause," for instance. It might be that you look on your social media and you see that people are really, really interested in environmental issues, or other social issues. That's been something that's been a big trend across social media, is people being more invested in social issues. And that's something that you can get data for to back up whether or not it's something that you as a business should be investing in in terms of content or positioning when you're thinking about your online presence.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll tell you, if there's a keyword research tool that's telling you there's not a lot of search volume around a particular topic and you go to social and it's all over the place, I would trust the social more then with the SEO tool. I'll give you a great example. You know the whole TikTok, Fruit Roll-Up, ice cream thing? You know what I'm talking about, right? No?

Crystal Carter:

No. No, I don't.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know. We're so old. You take a Fruit Roll-Up and you put ice cream in it and you wrap the ice cream in the Fruit Roll-Up and I guess it gets crunchy and you eat it together. Supposedly it's delicious. I don't know. Let's say I have a blog about food trends for boomers. Food trends for boomers.

Crystal Carter:

I'm not a boomer, by the way.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm a boomer. It's fine.

Crystal Carter:

Do not. I'm not a boomer.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to lean right into it. I'm a boomer. I literally went to Google. I'm like, "What is this Fruit Roll-Up, TikTok thing I keep hearing about?"

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's an opportunity for you. You might say, "Okay, I'm on social, I see the TikTok, Fruit Roll-Up, ice cream thing. That's not my audience." Yeah, it is. You just have to spin it the right way.

Crystal Carter:

Right! I think one of the other things that search marketers are able to do that we are able to add to the social melee as it were, is that sometimes on social it can be a bit chaotic. Sometimes something's trending and you have no idea why. And you try to get in there and there's some people who've just gotten into the hashtag and they've just started posting other stuff that's related to the hashtag. I've seen people. I've seen posts on Twitter, on other things, where I can see that this is trending and I have no idea why. Why is this trending? I don't understand.

One of the things that people can do from a search marketer point of view is, if you can see that it's trending and it's really hard to figure out what's actually going on, you can write some content that explains what it is if it's relevant to your audience. Obviously, if we are talking about the Fruit Roll-Up example, if my business is like, I don't know, headphones or something, then maybe I shouldn't be talking about the Fruit Roll-Up thing. But for instance, if I was a food business, if I was an ice cream parlor for instance, I might want to talk about that particular trend and then say, "Hey, maybe we're going to try out this new thing tomorrow. Come and check it out."

Mordy Oberstein:

There's so many ways these things are relevant to you that you don't even realize. For example, to go back to the Fruit Roll-Up one real quick, importers. It became a whole big thing of importing Fruit Roll-Up into your country.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just to meet the craze. What happens on social media is, I hate to put it this way, is life in a weird way. Not really, but kind of. There's so many outcomes and impacts that you may not really be aware of initially that can really help you drive a content strategy.

Crystal Carter:

And I think sometimes people think, they're like, "Oh, the links..." One of the things we both... People who ignore social media when they're doing SEO will be like, "Oh, well the links don't count. The links are no follow links, so they don't count."

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Right. Another one.

Crystal Carter:

I'm just like, "Y'all, first of all, Google have said that they take no follow links as hints," is what they've said. Second of all, if people are clicking on them, if people are clicking on the links-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what you want.

Crystal Carter:

If users are clicking on the links, I don't care if it's follow, no follow. I care that users are clicking on them. Because no follow, follow, that's not what pays the bills. Getting users to engage with your content, to maybe convert on your website, that's what pays the bills. That's what's going to actually get you actual value. So, making sure that you're getting your content seen in the right places, making sure that people know that your brand is relevant to things that they find relevant via social media, via other channels, via wherever they are, is really, really valuable. And I think that, yeah, social media is something that is absolutely a part of everyone's day to day. As I was saying, people spend 30% of their time on social media, so we should absolutely be thinking strategically about how we engage with that for our search activity.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, speaking of links and follow, no follow, which by the way is one of my pet peeves about how we think about links, because links are fundamentally about traffic. But leaving that aside, specifically about the no follow or follow, Google has said, by the way, that if you share content on social media, it will help your content get indexed quicker.

Crystal Carter:

Yes! I've done this all the time. I've said this before. I say this all the time. When people are saying, "Oh, this page isn't getting indexed," well, one of the things we... We recently did a webinar with Patrick Stox, and Patrick Stox was saying that they did some stats on content that has links or doesn't have links. And he was saying most content has no links. Not no follow, not do follow, just no links at all. So I'm sorry, but if Google is seeing that 3 million people have shared a page, and let's say that it's all no follow links, do you think Google's going to ignore that? No way.

Mordy Oberstein:

They officially came out that they do that. But also, the way I think about social media real quick, because we have to get to Christoph, is I look at social media and SEO like the brand marketing of SEO. You can't really pinpoint one action and what exactly it'll mean for your SEO. Just like in brand marketing. One positioning, one messaging and what that impact is. But aggregated all together, all that momentum, all of that energy, all of that cadence, all of that oomph, does have a real impact on SEO. I'm glad Google, I think it was last May, actually talked about that from an indexing point of view, because that's an actual thing you can point to. But I think there's so many aspects where having a strong social media presence seeps its way into SEO. That even if you can't pinpoint exactly where it is or exactly how it's going to do it, that you shouldn't ignore it.

Crystal Carter:

No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Mordy Oberstein:

And with that, since you're talking about social media and now you're so invested in social media and now you're all gung ho about social media, how do you distribute your content across social media effectively?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. How do we do it? How do we do it? We need some help.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. We need help. Christoph, help us. Here's Christoph Trappe all about his top tips on distributing content across social media effectively.

Christoph Trappe:

SERPers, Christoph Trappe here, director of content strategy at your growth marketing partner, growgetter.io. Let's talk about the three top ways to distribute content on social media. Top three ways in my opinion of course. But let's get started here.

The first one is use tidbits from existing content. You see a lot of people, all they do is they share their blog posts. And I do that too. Here's my latest blog post. But it's not like people are sitting there going, "Oh my goodness. Did Christoph publish a new blog post? That's the only reason we follow him on social media." The same is true for many brands. Instead of just pushing out links, share tidbits from an article, share sections from an article, try a LinkedIn newsletter with the content, turn it into a podcast. I mean, the options are endless nowadays. Turn it into a YouTube short, turn it into a TikTok. You may have heard now people search, younger generations, younger people I guess, search on TikTok instead of searching on Google. So, turn little bitty pieces into additional content assets that you can then share on social media. Still share links here and there, still ask people to do certain things, but have a good mix. That's my number one tip.

Number two is kind of what you guys are doing right now with me. Quote other people. Interact with them. Because guess what I'm going to be doing? I'm going to share the podcast episode. And depending what you say, what your tips are, I might talk about that on my social media channels. Most everybody that gets quoted does that. So when you quote people in your social media content, in your articles, on your blog, whatever it might be, those people share that content as well. From a distribution perspective that's really helpful. It's also helpful, of course, because they actually give you a unique perspective, so it's not just you talking nonstop. I really like that. Quote people, tag them, engage them, interact with them, and they will actually help you have your content go further.

The final tip in the top three from my perspective is to always try different content types. this is very different from just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what works. What I'm talking about is to actually hop on current trends and just ride them for a while. You can change and you can stick with it. I'll give you an example. I hopped on the live streaming and I started live streaming The Business Storytelling Show way back when, and also with the new Growgetter podcast. That's being live streamed. And I'm still on that trend, because in my opinion it does work. Then I turned my shows into a podcast.

Another trend that didn't work as well was web stories when they first came out. I thought they could help with SEO. And they do help a little bit, but not as much as just written content, quite frankly. But I did maybe 60 to 80 web stories early on to really kick the tires on that strategy, and then I used that content in other places too, like TikToks and whatnot.

So, try different things, see what works, and go from there. Those are my top three tips. Use tidbits, quote people, hop on trending content assets that work.

Mordy Oberstein:

I loved all of that, Christoph. I loved all of that. Amen to all of that. Especially the point about sharing... No one's waiting for you to share your next blog post. I love that. When I share this podcast, I try to offer a little bit of information in there so that you're at least getting some... you at least learn just a little bit, or you got clued into something just a little bit just by reading the tweet so that I feel like I earned your click.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not like, "Hey, here's my blog post. Here's our podcast episode. Go ahead and read it, click on it, tweet it."

Crystal Carter:

I think the other thing that I really took from that was the testing things. You mentioned this a little bit as well, was that you test something, you'd give it a try. If it doesn't work, that's fine. Leave it, let it go. I saw someone who was a social media manager who was saying that one of the things that you learn as a social media manager is that a lot of posts don't work. You just have to test them and try again. And I think that SEOs will do this as well.

But I think that sometimes it's really useful to build on the knowledge that you're getting from the different things. We were talking about TikTok and we were talking about other channels as well. But if you're seeing that you get some good traction on the social media posts, then great. Then maybe repurpose that into a blog. If you're seeing that you're getting some good traction on a blog, absolutely repurpose that into some social. And yeah, you're right, not the whole thing maybe. Maybe break it up into a thread and make sure that it's native to the platform. Make sure that it makes sense for that platform. Don't just like copy-paste the same thing from one thing to another, because they're different audiences, which is worth thinking about.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I'll tell you, I'm experimenting on LinkedIn now with different content forms, seeing what works, what doesn't work, and it's learning curve.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

For sure it's a learning curve. And that's fine. That's all part of it. Lean into that.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I've worked with Christoph as a podcast guest and he is incredibly organized with how he does that content distribution piece. And yeah, really pleased to get his insights, because he absolutely is dropping some fantastic gems there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. And Christoph, thank you in advance for sharing this, like you mentioned. We always appreciate a good share, as any marketer would, but make sure you follow Christoph on Twitter @CTrappe. It's @C-T-R-A-P-P-E. We'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes. Make sure you check out christophtrapp.com. Tons of content there around social media, around marketing, around content. And he's got his own podcast called The Business Storytelling Podcast, so check that out as well. We'll link to all of that in the show notes, so you can go ahead and click on it and check out all of what Christoph is up to.

Okay. Now it's time to combine three of my favorite things: mint chocolate chip ice cream, baseball, and single malt scotch. No? Not time for that.

Crystal Carter:

I wasn't ready for that.

Mordy Oberstein:

No. No?

Crystal Carter:

Now I'm envisaging having single malt scotch with mint choc chip ice cream.

Mordy Oberstein:

Watching baseball.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. No, the choc chip and the whiskey, that doesn't work.

Mordy Oberstein:

Works for me. It all goes.

Crystal Carter:

Does it?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Oh, totally. You start with a shot, you watch an inning, you bring out the ice cream, you have another shot-

Crystal Carter:

Oh, okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

... you have some more. You don't take a bite and then take a shot. That wouldn't work.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, okay, okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I mean, you could do it. You could do it.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. This is how we're planning your next birthday party.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. I love celebrating birthdays. Just kidding, by the way. My three favorite things in this context would be social media, SEO, and brand marketing. Because SEO and social sort of touch on all of that stuff. To help you balance all of these things, i.e. SEO, social media, and brand marketing, because managing all of that on a social media account and considering all of that on a social media account and dealing with all of that on a social media account; it's a lot of things to consider.

Crystal Carter:

So many.

Mordy Oberstein:

So many things to consider, and who better to get a grasp on all of it than she who has a grasp on all of it? Our own head of social media, Lirut Nave, is here as we're traveling across the Wix-verse.

Speaker 4:

Three, two, one, ignition. Lift off. Lift off.

Mordy Oberstein:

Welcome, Lirut. How are you?

Lirut Nave:

I'm great. How are you?

Mordy Oberstein:

Good. So glad that you can join us today on this fine, lovely... What is it? Morning? Afternoon? Who knows? Afternoon-ish.

Crystal Carter:

Time means nothing. Time is everything.

Mordy Oberstein:

The only time we care about today is when we schedule our social media posts. Oh.

Lirut Nave:

We love social media posts.

Mordy Oberstein:

First off, Lirut, just tell people what you do here at Wix. Because I know in the intro we gave your title, but I don't think it does justice to what you do at Wix.

Lirut Nave:

Sure. My team manages all of the social media for the brand, for wix.com's channels, everything. All the content that you see going live on social media from Wix that is not just paid ads, but actually brand content. This is what we're in charge of: strategy, creative, also some promotions.

Mordy Oberstein:

Amazing.

Crystal Carter:

Can I just say, Lirut is being incredibly humble right now. The channels that she manages, this is not a little Facebook page. There are millions of people that she's talking to daily.

Mordy Oberstein:

Millions and millions. Millions and millions.

Crystal Carter:

It's immense. If you go to the Wix Facebook page, we're talking something like 4.6 million followers.

Lirut Nave:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

If you go to the Twitter page, it's like... I'm sorry, hang on. Give me-

Mordy Oberstein:

Probably half a million, I believe.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. This is what I'm talking about. The reach that you have from these channels is immense. And I think that there's some great things that people can learn from you from managing channels like Facebook, like Instagram, like Twitter, like TikTok. I know that the Pinterest account has something like 10 million views a month, or something to that effect. It's big.

Lirut Nave:

It's crazy. But it kind of runs by itself.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Sure, sure. Sure.

Lirut Nave:

Its own entity.

Crystal Carter:

I think also... We have our main Wix channels, but just while we're here, to anyone who's listening, there are additional channels, particularly on Twitter and other ones as well. For instance, Wix Help as well. These are also channels that are run via... So if you have a help question, on Twitter @WixHelp. They will help you.

Lirut Nave:

Help is like a support channel basically. Anybody who comes to Twitter and has a question about the product, Wix Help is your-

Mordy Oberstein:

I've literally done it. I've literally gone on Twitter, "Hey Wix, I don't know how to do this. How do you do that?"

Lirut Nave:

Yeah, the support team is doing an amazing job.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're awesome.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that comes to a really good question. When you're running a channel this big for a brand, Wix has like 200 million plus users around the world, how do you manage that channel? Because obviously it's very difficult to speak to 4.5 million, 5 million people or whatever, every day with the same message. How do you decide what to put out when or on which channel, on which platform?

Lirut Nave:

First, it's optimistic. We're not actually speaking to 4 or 5 million. Let's put it into context. The organic reach that content for brand has is fairly low, so we need to actually make a great effort to reach the big numbers. But it's more about the audience that we at Wix are talking to rather than the audience that we have following us on social. Because sometimes people... maybe they become less relevant as user, maybe we have potential users that are interested in our content, they're not followers. And today really on social, not only followers get your content, especially because we do promote it to the relevant people. So yeah, I think this is how we're looking at it.

But it's a lot of technical managing. We have to post, the channel needs to keep going. Every channel has its own best practices. You want to be able to produce enough content that's versatile enough, but not too much so the algorithm doesn't get tired of you and you get decent engagement also.

A lot of it for us is really about making database decisions as we go. When something goes live, after a week or so we let it run. What are the numbers? If it's not working and we keep doing the same thing, we're not going to be favored by the algorithm to show our content more. So it really is, if you've tried a piece of content or kind of content once or twice and it's not working for you, you really need to let it go. It's nothing personal, it's just people probably don't favor that information, or the way you framed it or the way you presented it to them is the wrong way to approach them and the relevant audiences for us. So, we do a lot of conclusion making on the go.

Mordy Oberstein:

With all that content that you're doing, and one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you, is because there's so many different topics that come up at Wix. For example, we have the SEO learning hub, which this podcast is a part of, and we're producing a ton of content. But if you were to show and put out all of the content that we're doing all the time, Wix would end up coming off Semrush. It'd be like an SEO company. And we're not like. SEO is a huge part of what we do obviously, but it's one part of what we do and there's a million others. There's eComm, there's design, there's DEJ. How do you balance all of it so that you showcase what we are doing, but at the same time manage the brand overall the right way.

Lirut Nave:

We're talking to a lot of teams to get information about the different products, the different priorities that we want to talk about at Wix. We also say no to a lot of teams and content that comes our way. We can talk only about SEO, but when you do it in the right amount and you put SEO maybe once a month or twice a month and you have design posts and you have user showcase and features... We're such a big company with so many products that you can talk about, so the work is easier that way for us. Because we do have stuff to talk about and it's not like we need to force one content.

Also, once you set up an identity for what the brand is on social, it's very hard to step out of that, so you want to make sure not to do it from the beginning. You want to be balanced. You need to look at the plan as a whole. On a macro level, what are you posting a month? Are you overdoing something? And also remember the audience for each platform and how you're speaking to them, because our following and the people we target and are able to target on each platform, it's a little bit different. Right,  we're going to be able to target based on actual interests and job. And so, if we have a post about SEO, we can reach these people. We can't do the same necessarily on TikTok, for example. And we want to take into account that maybe our following there is slightly younger, so how do we tailor the message? If it's an SEO message, how do we tailor that message on Instagram? What formats work best on Instagram? Maybe images work better than video. They don't, but... And then on TikTok, how do we want to talk about it?

And really get people where they are. Because if you present the information the wrong way, you're really going to lose them. And it also looks like you don't know what you're doing, because you're speaking to them in the same way. So sometimes, even if we have one piece of advice on SEO but we build it differently for each channel, it looks more interesting to the audience, it works better, and we're able to talk about this topic in the long run and have more pieces without it sounding and feeling like we're really repeating ourselves and only talking about this.

Crystal Carter:

And I think there's a lot of considerations that I hear there. There's a lot of talking about testing, talking about audience segmentation, talking about targeting. I'm interested in the testing element. You said sometimes something doesn't work and you have to let it go. When you create a post or a few posts, what is the criteria that you set for knowing if something worked or not? Because I think that sometimes people think that it's just shares, or just likes, or just views or something. And that may or may not be the case for every type of social content. So how do you know, yes, this was good?

Lirut Nave:

We have a benchmark for each channel obviously, and we also have a benchmark for SEO specific content. Because I wouldn't necessarily compare SEO content into some kind of a website showcase or design, because people react differently to it and maybe comment differently. But also, we have our KPIs. For us on social at Wix, we're focusing on brand perception, on awareness. It's not acquisition campaigns. We're looking mainly at reach, at engagement. Video views now is a very big thing. For example, we used to look very closely on engagement, but engagement rates dropped on social for brands. Really dropped. Right now actually reach and video views and average watch time is something that we're putting much more focus on and much more importance on when reviewing our content, and slowly you build your benchmark.

You can do it right off the bat. I can't tell you, "Okay, we have maybe 50K reach, organically is great." Maybe this is for my brand. Maybe for yours it's something completely different. You need to post a few pieces of content in order to understand what the right benchmark is for you and what you would consider success. But I can tell you these are the metrics we're mostly focusing on at the moment.

Mordy Oberstein:

How do, with that, measure brand? I'll tell you something I'll do on my personal social account. There are times I know there are people who just look. They don't interact, they don't engage. They're there. And I want to make sure that they see my content in a certain way. I might put a tweet out there, let's say, that I don't expect to get clicks, I don't expect to get retweets, but I know people are going to see and that's going to position myself a certain way. Do you do that? How do you do that? How do you measure that? Because again, no one's actually interacting, so now what?

Lirut Nave:

But reach is a big thing and reach is just how many people viewed your content without any kind of interaction. If you used to be considered less valuable, actually for brand it's a very big thing, because it's exposure to the name, to the content that you're doing, to the value that you're giving users, potential users.

We take it as a very big sign of success of the content, but it needs to be also who did we reach? If we are promoting this to someone that's irrelevant, the reach is not going to do much for us. So yes, you maybe cannot measure brand in direct acquisition way that you would conversions. Next day someone sees our post, we have a new user. Maybe that's not the way. But we are able to say that if we hit the right target audience and we're being very specific in our targeting and we have a good reach, then this content is working good for us and we're getting brand visibility on social.

Crystal Carter:

Speaking of brand visibility and content working really well, one of my favorite social moments in the history of Wix social media was Taylor Swift. Her tickets went on sale at Ticketmaster and the Ticketmaster website crashed. One of my favorite moments... I don't know, Lirut, do you want to talk about it? I don't know if I should spoil it.

Lirut Nave:

I can talk about it a little bit, although it wasn't my team. But this was just like... This for us is more of a real time marketing opportunity. We had these campaigns already made about site stability and crashing and the video was there. And when they saw the content about the Ticketmaster crash, basically it was just a perfect opportunity to run this campaign all over again without actually... They didn't even directly talk about it. They didn't change anything. It was really all about the timing; reaching the right people at the time that something like that is trending and is being talked about really worldwide. I think it was a really super smart move.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. There were millions of people, so it's got millions of views. There were lots of people going, "Oh my gosh, Ticketmaster should have been on Wix, because then they wouldn't have crashed," and all of that sort of stuff. I think that you were saying that this was an acquisition campaign that they ran at the same time.

Lirut Nave:

It was a campaign that we had and then once this happened and we flagged it to the right team, they're like, "Okay. You know what? We have this perfect opportunity. We don't even need to create something from scratch. We had this list. Just run the campaign again." And it's funny, because you didn't say anything about Ticketmaster, anything about Taylor Swift, but people got the reference..

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the best, when that happens. When they get it on their own.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think also it's a really good example of how social can work across teams and to highlight values of the business. Like you said, that was something that was already core to the business. We'd already created the campaigns, all of the assets, et cetera. And with acquisition you have an opportunity to use your social posts to increase your reach to the audiences, you were saying to new audiences, potentially targeting certain audiences. I don't know if they did, but they could have potentially been targeting people who've also followed Ticketmaster.

Lirut Nave:

Exactly. I'm giving them the credit. I'm sure they did.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think ending off on a win is a great place to end off. Lirut, where can people find you?

Lirut Nave:

Where can they find me?

Crystal Carter:

What's your social handles?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's a social handle?

Lirut Nave:

Listen, since I'm in social, my social is a bit-

Mordy Oberstein:

Shoemaker's kids go shoeless.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Never trust a bald barber.

Lirut Nave:

When it becomes work and it's your work passion, it's really hard to keep that passion also in your spare time. You come home and you're like, "Should I post? No, I'm tired."

Mordy Oberstein:

In that case, you can't find her. She's a mystery.

Lirut Nave:

Listen, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay.

Lirut Nave:

I wouldn't trust my other social to be as exciting. Yeah. It's all mom life and-

Crystal Carter:

Aww.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's exciting.

Crystal Carter:

Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Lirut Nave:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Our pleasure, and we'll see you around.

Lirut Nave:

Thanks.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye.

Speaker 4:

Three, two, one, ignition. Lift off. Lift off.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Lirut, and definitely look for Lirut on LinkedIn and connect with her there. You know what pops on my social feed quite often?

Crystal Carter:

What's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Is Barry Schwartz and his sharing of the SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, I bet he does.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's quite, quite often there all the time. And Barry's very efficient and relentless with the In Case You Missed It post. Which, by the way, I appreciate, because I'm in a different time zone, so I see a lot of the In Case You Missed Its. I actually do appreciate those, Barry, if you're listening to this.

Crystal Carter:

Thanks, Barry.

Mordy Oberstein:

With that, let's dive into this week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Two quick little ones for you this week. The first one comes from Search Engine Land's Danny Goodwin. He writes, "OpenAI's AI text classifier no longer available due to low rate of accuracy." Danny writes, "The AI text detector launched in January is meant to evaluate whether text was generated using AI. It failed." He quotes OpenAI as saying, "As of July 2023, the AI classifier's no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. We are working to incorporate feedback," and so forth and so forth and so forth.

The reason why I'm including this here is that AI is amazing, does amazing things. I personally use and love the AI image generator inside of Wix. AI can help you do a lot of things, it can help you do things faster, but AI at the same time is an emerging technology. And in this case, in OpenAI's case in this particular product, it didn't work. So there might be things that AI looks like it can do, but in the end it won't be able to do, or maybe won't be able to do yet. So, point of caution. If you're using AI, which you should be, just make sure you're using it responsibly. Because again, it is a new and emerging technology. What looks like might work might end up not working, as it was in this case.

Article number two from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. Google Business Profile's automated FAQs feature. Google's Business Profile is rolling out a feature that will help you automatically create an FAQ based on your Google Business Profile details that you've entered and your website. Barry writes, "Those automated FAQs can be configured by type of automated FAQs. You can specifically tell Google which information it can create FAQs from, such as hours, appointments, contact information, and so forth." My point with this one is, there is already an FAQ section inside of the Google Business Profile. It's called Q&A. And in the Q&A your customers can ask questions and you can reply. You however can also ask questions and reply to your own questions. You can essentially create an FAQ on your own. This may take time to roll out, the automated FAQ option. You may not want an automated FAQ option. But know that Google does see value in there being an FAQ inside of the Google Business Profile, which is why they're releasing an automated version of it. But know that you already have a version of this with the Q&A feature.

So, Google's basically telling you, "People are not utilizing the Q&A feature maybe the way that they should be, so we're going to help you here with the automated FAQ." In the meantime, might as well utilize the Q&A section that already exists. And that's this week's snappy news.

Always snappy, always newsy.

Crystal Carter:

Always snappy and newsy. And lately always full of AI.

Mordy Oberstein:

Always full of AI, but some weeks not.

Crystal Carter:

Some weeks not.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like the flow of AI is slowly, slowly slowing down.

Crystal Carter:

We'll see. We'll see. We'll see.

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll see. By the way, before we duly depart, we have to get into who you should be following for more SEO, and in this case content marketing and social media marketing, awesomeness. Crystal, who's this week's follow of the week?

Crystal Carter:

This week's follow of the week is Jean Wandimi. She's a content marketer and a wine aficionado, so she's got a wine blog.

Mordy Oberstein:

Got my vote.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, indeed. She also has lots of great content on YouTube about creating great content. She has a lot of really accessible information that's really useful for freelancers, those doing DIY. She's got an Instagram account. She's constantly sharing useful tips of how you can improve your content writing and content creation and be more strategic and more programmatic, I guess you would say. But not programmatic with a capital P, but more programmatic like have a system. Have a system for how you make your content. So yeah, she's a great follow. Do check her out. And yeah, she's great.

Mordy Oberstein:

Give her a follow over @Jeanwandimi on Twitter, @J-E-A-N-W-A-N-D-I-M-I. Of course we'll link to her profile in the show notes, so you don't have to spell on the fly. Because that doesn't make much sense. But I do it anyway.

Crystal Carter:

O-N T-H-E F-L-Y.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is it T-I-M-E T-O G-O?

Crystal Carter:

Y-E-S.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh. Great. I used to love doing this with my wife and my kids, because they don't know how to spell. But now they know how to spell, so I can't do that anymore.

Crystal Carter:

Oh no.

Mordy Oberstein:

They know everything. They're like AI, my kids. They know everything. All the things I don't want them to know, they know. Well, with that happy note, 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 a new episode as we dive into... Not telling. I'm not telling you what we're diving into. It's a very special episode next week. That's all I'll say. Surprises. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, or on our SEO learning hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more but SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.