The SERP according to users, not just SEOs

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're bringing some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulously incredible, the fresh off her summer vacation, the one, the only, head of SEO Comms here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, everyone. Yes, my vacation was fantastic. I went to see Mariah Carey and she was amazing. She was everything that you would expect from Mariah Carey, which was no dancing at all, but fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Honestly, I know nothing about it. My mom was a big Mariah Carey fan. Now, I like some of her songs, but she doesn't dance?

Crystal Carter:

No, of course she doesn't dance. She's Mariah. Carey. What? Are you kidding me?

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. You don't dance? Does Beyonce not dance? Beyonce dances.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, Beyonce dances, but Mariah Carey has never. Never.

Mordy Oberstein:

I see. Okay.

Crystal Carter:

There's a couple of vintage videos, peak Mariah Carey, she was doing a couple of moves, but she was never throwing down, ever. She doesn't want to bust a sweat. It's just not happening.

Mordy Oberstein:

Max effort.

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

Minimal effort.

Crystal Carter:

Minimal effort. Maximum vocals, minimum effort. But she's amazing.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, that's a trade off. All right, cool. Nice. I did not see Mariah Carey this summer.

Crystal Carter:

No, but did you have a nice summer?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it was fine.

Crystal Carter:

Cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know, I feel like I'm at the point in my life where like summer, fall, winter, whatever other season, I'm missing one, spring. Spring, that's the fourth one, it's all the same.

Crystal Carter:

These are other seasons that happen?

Mordy Oberstein:

Whatever. It's all whatever. I like fall. I miss fall. I miss fall foliage. That I enjoy.

Crystal Carter:

That's true. Someone from the northeast of America, it goes hard. Fall, autumn, goes hard in New England. I remember I went to college in Ohio and autumn in Ohio is beautiful. It's gorgeous.

Mordy Oberstein:

Except in Cleveland.

Crystal Carter:

I wasn't in Cleveland, I was in rural Ohio surrounded by beautiful trees.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that's fine.

Crystal Carter:

Shout out to Kenyon College. Shout out to my alma mater on the Kokosing River in Gambier, Ohio, outside Mount Vernon. Shout out to central Ohio and Cowtown, Columbus, where I used to go back and forth.

Mordy Oberstein:

But no shout out to Cleveland, the mistake by the lake. I don't know why we're crapping all over Cleveland.

Crystal Carter:

I been to Cleveland once. I went to see the Cavs. It was fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice. That's basically, yeah, I went to Cleveland, it was fine. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by the City Of Cleveland, who wants you to visit there really badly. Wow. We're really going hard on Cleveland. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio.

Crystal Carter:

Where you can throw the hammer down.

Mordy Oberstein:

Where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also better understand user intent with our keyword research integrations with Semrush SE Ranking, and Wincher, look for in the SEO Dashboard inside of Wix Studio, as this week, we're minding the gap between SEO and actual searchers. The assumptions that SEOs may make about users that might not be true, the gap between how an SEO looks at search and how a user might look at search, and how searcher bias might impact your ability to garner clicks.

Neuroscientist turned marketer Giulia Panozzo will tell us how the SERP itself might lend to bias, plus we'll explore how marketers can deal with consumer bias. And of course we have the snappiest of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So grab some beams, boards and metal cords as we help you build a bridge to close the gap between the two sides of the river SERP on this, the 103rd episode, of SERP's Up. That only works, by the way, if you're building a suspension bridge. You don't need cords unless you're a suspension bridge. I'm an engineer.

Crystal Carter:

I'm a big fan of suspension bridges. They're pretty cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

But not suspension bridges in Cleveland.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know if they have any suspension bridges in Cleveland. Probably. There's probably at least one or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, they were, they're not built well. Anyway, the two can't stop.

Crystal Carter:

We love you Cleveland.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hello, Cleveland. The quotes final question. Which brings me to my point about bias, because Cleveland could be a one.... I haven't been there in 20 years. I've been there twice and both times were it's pretty neutral. But this brings the bias out. Cleveland brings out my biases and there's biases all over the SERP. For example, how we as SEOs look at the SERP, we might project that onto users. By the way, users don't look at the SERP the same way. We care about ecosystems, we care about where things are headed, what Google's doing. Things like plastering red all over the SERP or AI overview is telling you to eat glue. They eat at us as SEOs. The average usually are probably like, "Yeah, that's weird," and move on. How we think about Google and where Google is going and how powerful Google is and yada, yada, yada, we might be projecting a lot of that bias onto actual users and it might not be true. By the way, the reverse I think is also true.

Users come with their own biases, and a topic that we as the SEO working on a website might see as neutral, users don't. For example, jeans. The way I as a boomer look at jeans and the way that my children look at jeans, are entirely different. The jeans that I would find nice to wear, my kids would look at what absolute utter disdain. Depending upon who the audience actually is, you might want to be careful of which thumbnail you show. For example, if your main audience of the website are boomers like myself, don't show the cool jeans with the ripped things and the whatever's and whatever's. I'm not buying those. But if your target audience are my kids, then you should show all the rips and the this and the that with the jeans. That's what my kids want. Because the audience is not neutral. But you as an SEO might look at it like, "Yeah, it's jeans, it's neutral, whatever," but it's not. Both us, the SEOs and the searchers, have different biases that we need to be aware of is what I'm saying.

Crystal Carter:

I think also the way that we use the internet as marketing professionals, as SEO professionals, is different. I've seen people talk on this previously and there's an old piece of data, this is the only study I could find, from 2012, way back, speaking of old. This is a fast company, and it was a study that was talking about how advertising and marketing professionals are not normal. They were saying that on Facebook for instance, and a gain, this is-

Mordy Oberstein:

Wait, we're not normal?

Crystal Carter:

We're not normal. We think of ourselves as normal, but we're not normal. For instance, on Facebook it was saying 71% of this, and again, this is way back in the day, but I think this probably still holds true in different platforms now. 71% of advertising marketing professionals say they pay attention to brand posts in their Facebook feed all of the time versus 23% of the general population. As for Twitter, 92% of advertising marketing professionals use Twitter to follow brands they like and 33% of the regular population does. If you say, should brands put more effort into interacting with consumers via social media, 63% of marketing professionals say yes, 23% of the general population say yes.

When we're searching, we think that we're putting ourselves in the same place as the searcher but we're not. We have different perspectives, we have a different understanding of how search works, and we have a different understanding of those sorts of things. I think that that really goes to the fact that not only do you need to experience the user journey to get to your content, to find your content online, to see how it is on Google, but as you're saying, people also need to engage with real people and see how real people are seeing that content because they're going to see it differently from the way that we do as marketers, even as business owners online, it's so important.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so prevalent in the SEO space in particular because of the changes on the SERP. We look at a change on the SERP, like, "Oh, look at that. Google added the line over there with the thing and the accordions and whatever. All this is going to change. This is going to change the organic game forever." And users are like, "I didn't even notice that."

Crystal Carter:

Right. I remember doing some user research, we were doing an audit for a company and I was talking to someone from the company about where they get their information from. I said to them, I was like, "Okay, so what blogs do you read?" She was like, "Oh, I just read Google." I was like, "What?" I was like, "What are you reading on Google?" She's like, "You know, Google." I'm like, "But what?" That's like saying, "What books do you read?" "I read the library." What do you mean? There are books in the library? You don't know if you're reading Chaucer or Toni Morrison. "No, I just read the library." But people don't recognize.

Similarly on your phone, there's the Google app and there's the Chrome app and they have a different experience. And I know people who don't have the Chrome app and just use the Google app. My aunt just uses the Google app, and I think that it's really important for people... Glenn Gabe is a real big advocate of getting user groups. If you're trying to figure out how people are experiencing either the user journey from the SERP to your website or your website itself, but to have people who are just regular folks actually try to complete a task, try to buy a thing, try to get to your content, starting from zero and getting to your content. Because you will just assume, "Oh yeah, they'll know how to do that." No, they won't. They will not. You need to test.

Mordy Oberstein:

A hundred percent. Because I find as an industry, we're so quick to draw conclusions out of things. Whether it be a Google update or a change on the SERP or whatever it is, we're like, "Oh, that's what's going on." I find by the way, the point of the library, the zero-click thing to me is that. We're like, "Oh, Google is steering people away from websites and blah, blah, blah, yada, yada." Maybe part of that's partially true. Whatever. I'm getting into that part of it. But there's a broader point that I think we as an industry have whiffed on. Google's not doing that. They didn't pull out of a hat like, "Oh, that's content consumption trends that we're observing. Let's steer into that," and we missed the trees for the forest, like, "Oh, Google's stealing the traffic." That's how we look at it as SEOs, where if I were to look at it from a broader perspective, I'm like, "Wait, wait, wait a second. Content trends themselves have shifted. Maybe I should be aligning the content on the websites that I'm working on to those content trends more closely."

Crystal Carter:

Right,. I think also it's a question of in terms of content trends, stop being basic. There's some stuff-

Mordy Oberstein:

Hello Cleveland.

Crystal Carter:

No. But I just feel like, so there's things like people will say, "How can I get links or how com I'm indexed? Martin Schmidt was like, "Maybe Google doesn't think your content's that great and that's why you're not being indexed." I think that if you were making super basic content, if I look up how far is it from the earth to the moon, that's just knowledge.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I don't want to go to a website for that anymore.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I just need to win the bet. I just need to win the bet, I just need to win the argument, I just need to confirm that fact because my kid asked me or whatever. I just need that information. If you're making basic content that's basic that isn't really adding anything to the conversation, then there is so much more content online right now than there was 10, 15 years ago, even five years ago, so you to have a reason for letting people get to your site. I sometimes describe SEO as the job of making it so that search engines can read your content and so that users want to read your content. Those two things. If nobody wants to read it, not going to. Google can tell that nobody needs to read this because this is just the same stuff that we've got rehashed out 25 times already with pictures and videos and a how-to, an FAQ and a thing thingy thing. They already have it, then they don't need you to make it in that-

Mordy Oberstein:

A million percent.

Crystal Carter:

... format, so you have to be unique.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the ultimate bias though, because we look at the whole thing like, "People are going to go to Google and they're going to find the content and they're going to want to come to my... That's the ultimate SEO bias. I'll give you a good example of how that's not true anymore, and I think a lot of has to do with apps. I was at my sister's house and everyone had an app. They pulled up the app, I'm like, "Oh, what is that?" It's like, "Oh, it's called The Score and it's how I track sports now." It's great because you can pick the teams that you want to follow.

I'm looking at the Yankees, the Knicks, the Steelers and the Rangers. It's all the information that I basically get. I get notifications pop up. If I want to see what's going on, go to the app, click on Yankees, there's everything I need to know right there. I don't have to go scouring the web. If however, they're like, "Oh, that's interesting, that guy get on the injured list, let me go." I'll go to Google like, "Oh, Louise Hill, injured list." I'm starting from the app, the top level information that's there, and I'm only going deeper when something piques my interest already. In other words, I'm only going to Google when I have a specific reason to extend my journey from the app. I think SEOs don't realize that.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I think that understanding that as part the content ecosystem, there are more than just websites that you're competing with is super important. The app, for instance, is something to think about. I think that there are businesses who are like, "Oh yeah, I'm competing with the people in my neighborhood." It's like, you're not. You're competing with people in your neighborhood, you're competing with the people online, you're competing with all of that. Again, there's also the conversation that they're having a lot around Twitter. I've heard a lot of people talk... I'm sorry, not Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. A lot of people talking about content there that it's not even that it's an influencer necessarily that is the thing anymore. It's the information. People will follow sourdough and they'll follow sourdough content, and they don't even remember who told them the recipe.

They don't even remember. They'll say, "Oh, this, I saw this thing online." No reference to who it was. But if it sticks. The time of recording, demure is going around all over the internet. There's this person, Jules, I can't remember their last name, but Jules is fantastic and keeps saying about demure, and has gone really in on that and has branded this idea of just being low-key. Not being basic, being classy or whatever, but not being extra, as it were. They've put a stamp on that in a way that means that they're constantly in the algorithm for that topic without necessarily being branded. Other people are picking it up, but they are essentially the epicenter of that content. I think that people have to about the content ecosystem, the conversation of their content ecosystem. For instance, if you were to think about the Yankees or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

I am thinking about the Yankees.

Crystal Carter:

You're literally wearing a Yankee shirt right now. I know you're thinking about the Yankees. What were you thinking about? He's thinking about content, the Yankees, trolling Barry. These are the things.

Mordy Oberstein:

If I could somehow unite all three of those as the one activity, that'd be like heaven.

Crystal Carter:

Just sat at Yankee Stadium writing a blog-

Mordy Oberstein:

Trolling Barry with content.

Crystal Carter:

... about trolling Barry. I think that it's a question of being part of the conversation and staying part of the conversation across multiple channels, including your website, of course. I think that the great thing about a website is it's yours and you can curate the content, you can concentrate your content, and people can connect with it and pull all of it together. Because there's strands everywhere. I think that you were talking about that journey of you're on the app, you're over here, you're over there. Sometimes that's exhausting. Sometimes that's exhausting and you just want-

Mordy Oberstein:

One place. Yeah, totally.

Crystal Carter:

... one place. You want one place. And that's something we tried to do with the Wix SEO Hub, without tooting our own horn too much. But it's one of the reasons why we put that together, we have podcasts, we have webinars, we have articles, we have resources that you can download, we have decks that you can look at. We have all of these different things all in one place so that however you like to learn, you can get that information in one place. When I find places like that, when I find places online like that, I've always so relieved.

Mordy Oberstein:

Totally. Absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's really important for people to think about being that kind of resource for their clients, for their content when they're thinking about how to bridge that gap between the SEO and the everything.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll say two things on this. One is Sourdough would be a great name for a rapper.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Mordy Oberstein:

That'd be amazing. That might be the most brilliant thing I've ever said in this podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Dude, I think that's your new rapping name.

Mordy Oberstein:

The second thing is the point you're making, by the way, I think Rand Fishkin ran data on this. I'll try to find the post on LinkedIn somewhere. LinkedIn is horrible at finding this stuff post facto, and link it in the show notes, if I can. No promises. But he was talking about, and this again, goes to that bias that SEOs have. Google is the strongest channel for search traffic. Don't focus on social. You're not getting traffic from there. But what you're not realizing is that they see the thing you wrote on social and now they're Googling it. It started with social, it started where your community is, and it moved over to Google, but there's just a lack of attributions and you can't track it. You don't know how that happened. I think that speaks to the thing you're talking about, there's another huge bias in SEO, speaking of bias from SEOs, there's also bias within users and the SERP itself can contribute to this. So we asked the founder of Neuroscientive, Giulia Panozzo, how the SERP itself contributes to user bias. Here's Giulia.

Giulia Panozzo:

Bias impacts our judgment and decision-making and it is unavoidable because as individuals, we come with previous experiences and beliefs that skew the way we process information and make decisions. After all, if we all have the same beliefs, experiences, and even the same brain wiring, then we would all perceive everything in the same way and make the exact same choices probably. However, bias can be experienced even before we consciously process the information that we're faced with, and it comes into play potentially in every area of our life, including when we search. Because when we do that, we are driven by a need. We're onto a quest that normally sees us with limited time and limited attention.

That is not to say that we don't allocate the proper time to searches or the proper attention, but realistically, with the amount of searches that we do every day and the amount of results that we get, we cannot possibly analyze every single result in order to choose the very best one, so we tend to navigate the search tasks with our existing biases, whether we are or aren't aware of it. The SERP contributes to user bias because it tends to reinforce it, and it does so by pushing elements that are known to capture the attention and to aid decision-making when there is a sea of options. There are a number of biases that are known and exploited. I talked about a number of them throughout my career, and it is still not exhaustive.

While the aim of search engine is probably to help users find the results weekly, it can actually backfire because it might not consistently provide the best result for the user or even be ethical sometimes. The most obvious example is when we see negative headlines being awarded primary spots in the SERP. We know for sure that users sent to click on something that's shocking or negative because it's just in our nature to have this over-attention to the negative. There was a study by SEO Clarity a couple of years ago, showing how negative headlines produce significantly more clicks than their positive or neutral counterparts, which really drives the point home.

If user signals are what drives the algorithm, which is always a reason for debate, but it is a valid claim if the final aim is to help the user, then it's a circle that feeds itself because the more we interact with those results, the more we are being served with them. Another thing that contributes to bias is the over-personalization of results. We are now accustomed to having everything at our fingertips, and Google has been trying to simplify our experience, but in the end, the fact that we get everything catered to what we previously searched for or even showed interest in other platforms, amplifies these eco-chamber and makes us lazy, preventing us from using our critical thinking to evaluate other options, which eventually contributes to confirmation bias, which in itself is a huge problem because it's when people just tend to favor information that confirms their existing beliefs.

Another element that we see awarded on the SERP is authority. You can say anything about the domain authority not impacting rankings, but there was a Verge article that they ran as a test, and it was basically everything that the guidelines tell you not to do. They were using keyword stuffing, they were making up their experts, and they were even acknowledging that they were trolling Google. And it is currently sitting in third position for best Printer 2024 after CNET and the New York Times in the UK, so this tells us something. So yes, I mentioned that Google is awarding these bias-inducing factors, if you will, and you can see some connections between their messy middle report and the guidelines for enhanced results.

The messy middle report for those who are not familiar with it, was this massive behavioral economic study which isolated six of the most common cognitive biases driving purchase behavior in users. These were category heuristics, authority bias, scarcity bias, power of now, power of free, and social proof. Some of them align very well with the guidelines to get rich snippets or based on the carousel for example. Adding schema for offers, for reviews, deliver information, which as I understand are now being made mandatory on shopping listings, and this in turn translates to more real estate, more visual space on the SERP, again awarded. This brings me to the final aspect, which is the fact that everyone's trying to stay in the game doing exactly the same thing.

We're all scrambling for more space on the SERP, being visible on the carousel, using scarcity messaging to get CTRs, adding reviews, and it's becoming overwhelming to discriminate for users. Too much of anything at the end of the day makes you long for something else. When everything seems to be equal, what do we rely on? Likely the first satisfactory result. A combination of what is relevant to our query and what we recognize first because we are familiar with a brand or because they are authoritative in their space. Because this discerning as a user is a hefty task on top of the initial task, which is the search itself, and having the same results over and over produces fatigue so we just want to be over with it as users. Surely all of the choices we have are available if we search hard enough, but the SERP, in an attempt of making search more efficient, is actually impacting the visibility of diversified options so that's how it contributes to bias.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Giulia. Make sure to give Giulia a follow over on LinkedIn, I'll link to her profile in the show notes. That's like the ultimate bias. You think, "Okay, it's a top result, top five results, those must be the best pieces of content out there." If it's on page two, it must not be good. When in reality, that's not necessarily true.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Sometimes it's worth remembering that there is a lot going on the SERP, so what is on page two might just be that it's got a more nuanced writing style or something, it might be that it doesn't show for some of the SERP features because these days, depending on which SERP you're looking at, there's shopping, there's ads, there's local pack, there's PAA, there's discussions and forums, there's related searches. There's tons and tons of different SERP features that are showing up there and it might be that maybe a piece of content that is relevant to you isn't necessarily eligible for that SERP feature. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's not relevant for you, but it might mean that because of all those SERP features, that because it's such a busy SERP, it's pushed down a little bit. I think that we're starting to see more people, I don't know, searching again or following some of the refinements and things like that, which do guide bias.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, the refinements for sure. There's no way around it. Again, you might think, okay, this filter is filled to the top of the SERP or wherever the refinement filter is, like, oh, that's what I need. It's not. Because again, I think the important, if you're a person listening to this podcast, you're not an SEO. Anytime you're trying to target a product at a particular, I'll call it user base or demographic, it's a law of averages. They're trying to get the best for the most amount of people, but you might just fall out of that demographic and nothing to do about it.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I think also sometimes it's a question of in terms of guiding bias, predictive text, for instance, the predictive search.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Totally does. And also-

Mordy Oberstein:

When you see it pops up, by the way, is like a controversy all the time and politics and this thing and that thing. Everyone gets all upset. The auto complete is probably the most controversial thing on the internet from Google point of view, outside of the whole monopoly thing.

Crystal Carter:

And we'll totally include things like... I just started typing in is nail polish, and then the things I got is nail polish remover acetone, is nail polish flammable? I'd never even thought about that, whether nail polish was flammable or not. I'm guessing it is because it's very fumey. Is nail polish bad for your nails? That's another one that comes up. But sometimes I've seen the predictive text put people on blast things where I was like, "I didn't even know something happened." You type in some celebrity's name and they're controversy with so-and-so and you're like, "Oh my God, I didn't even realize that was that." And so it guides bias and I think that people have sometimes taken umbrage with this. I think Google's had a few controversies about that. But yeah, I think it's definitely something to consider how people are doing things. It's worth, if you're marketing to people, to understand the kinds of bias that your users are going to be coming up against as they go on their search journey.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let's keep diving into this whole idea of the biases a priori notions that your user base are coming with. Because it goes beyond SEO. Just look at how consumers feel about generic versus name brand medications. Second is Tylenol. It's got to be a million times better than the CVS brand. There's so much bias, so much bias out there. Let's talk about or discuss how to deal with those biases as we go the great beyond. Why would you spend another 20 bucks on Tylenol? Making that number up. I don't know what the actual number is. It's the same thing.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Sometimes I find myself buying the branded thing when I don't recognize or don't know the other folks, or don't trust them in some way. For instance, if there's a supermarket, and let's say I'm at Walmart, and Walmart has the Walmart own Tylenol or whatever, and I can't remember what the actual chemical in the Tylenol is, if it's-

Mordy Oberstein:

SSC, emotive. Something SSC..

Crystal Carter:

I can't remember what it is. Let's say it's like it's aspirin.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm an engineer, not a doctor.

Crystal Carter:

Let's say it's aspirin. Aspirin is the actual chemical, isn't it? Or whatever it is. Let's say-

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to Google it.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Let's say Walmart has their own brand off-brand aspirin or whatever, and then there's the branded like Bayer Aspirin or something. If I know Walmart, then I'm like, "Yeah, okay, I'll get the the Walmart aspirin," because I'm like, "Well, I know them. I've had some of their other stuff before, it's probably fine," et cetera, et cetera. If I look at-

Mordy Oberstein:

Aminofen.

Crystal Carter:

It's science. You see? SERP's Up isn't just SEO, it's also science.

Mordy Oberstein:

Science and engineering.

Crystal Carter:

And engineering. So much today.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's just science.

Crystal Carter:

I think that there's a level of trust that you have that you have with that. Similarly online, there's all these discount things that are popping up everywhere. There's tons of discount products that are popping up everywhere. And there're unbranded. There're unbranded sponges or a brush or a laptop case or a lamp for your phone or that sort of stuff. TikTok Shop is full of these things and they have no brand. They're just like cheap thing. Temu is full of this stuff. Wish had all of this stuff. Amazon thrives in a lot of unbranded things. But the thing that Amazon does, and this is the same with that Walmart one, is that it's wrapped in Amazon. And to a certain extent, I trust that if I buy something on Amazon that yes, it will arrive, and if there's a problem, they will deal with it, to a certain extent.

Whereas in other places, you have some of those elements where it's just the Wild West. If you're on someone's website and they haven't spent the time to establish trust, we haven't spent the time to demonstrate that they have good customer service, they haven't spent the time to demonstrate that they have good client reviews, they haven't spent the time to demonstrate good case studies, they haven't spent the time to show you that they care about this product, that they have taken photos of this product, that they're illustrating the product and how it all works and things like that, and you don't know them, then you're less likely to buy from them in that space. I think that this is how you get around some of those biases is you just have to confront them head-on. Because if you're a small business, then people are going to come with a certain amount of bias to your business and that, I don't know, you stranger danger, kind of bias.

And you have to confront those things. You have to answer all their questions, you have to illustrate that you know what you're doing, you have to show, I've got this certificate, I've done this, I've done that. Here's the photos of the people that have enjoyed the work that I've done, that sort of thing. I feel like that's really important. I think that it might seem daunting, but you don't have to do it all at once, you can build up as you go. I think that with those kinds of things, it's worth taking the time to start with warm leads. I know somebody who's starting a business as a barber and he's just training as a barber and he's doing great and he's doing absolutely fantastically, and he's trying to build up his client base. I'm like, "Okay, well you need to get lots of people in the chair and you need to get lots of photos of the stuff that you've done so people can see that you're good at doing barbering, and that's something that you can build up."

So he's getting his friends to sit in the chair, he's getting his friends to do that sort of stuff, so he can build that up. And as you go on, more people will see, oh, this is good, this is fine. All of that sort of stuff. That really helps. If you're a bigger business and you have big budgets, deep pockets or whatever, then you can scale this more quickly. You can do a free trial, you can be freemium. That's one of the reasons why people do freemium so they can get good reviews so they can get a lot of people replying. Similarly, when people launch a book on Amazon or something, they will launch their book and they'll make it free in Kindle for a few weeks or a few months and stuff, so that they can get a bunch of reviews. I think that you can balance bias by building trust with a reciprocal offer in some ways.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, there's basically two ways to deal with it. One is basically you're saying to confront the bias or to deal with the bias in some way, shape, or form. That can mean basically whatever barrier the bias is creating, you need to get rid of that barrier. There's multiple ways you can do that. You know what's a great example? Starbucks would be a good example of this, they'll never do it, but Coors is a great example of this. I don't know. I'm trying to remember. 20 years ago, craft beers started becoming a really big thing. A really, really big thing. As it grew, the big companies, the Budweiser of the world started to really take note of the fact that there's a threat in the industry, in the market, because of the craft breweries.

What they did was, by the way, they tried to hijack the distribution methods of those craft breweries because the big brands, I forget how it all works out, they own the distribution of beer in America. Crazy thing. But what Coors did, probably among other things, was they created their own craft brewery. They have, what's it called? Blue Moon. Blue Moon is Coors. It's their craft offering and they hide the fact that it's really Coors. Or it's like, yeah, it's hidden enough. The hardcore beer drinkers like myself, I know that's Coors, I'm not going for Blue Moon. Blue Moon's fine. Didn't go for it, but it did capitalize. Oh, Blue Moon, Craft Brewery. I know craft Breweries are coming a big thing, I'm going to buy that and not buy the Coors. They steered into the skid. That's how they dealt with the consumer bias.

I think, by the way, Starbucks would do well to deal with this because Starbucks is getting a reputation of being too corporate among other issues that Starbucks has, like just being too expensive and their coffee not being good. Their ground coffee is good in the bags. I like that. I don't like their in-store coffee. But one of the biases that they're dealing with is the fact that, hey, wait a second, you come off as corporate. If I have two cafes in front of me, one is Starbucks and one's Pacino's Local Cafe, I'm just going to walk into Pacino's because it's local. Because in that case, local does seem like higher quality and the big brand doesn't seem like higher quality. I think Starbucks should pivot and they should create a sub-brand that's divorced from the actual brand of local-ish kind of coffee houses.

Like what Coors did with Blue Moon. The other way, I think, to deal with it is just completely cut it off. I saw a thing, I think on CNBC, but basically, you know the front end of a pharmacy, they have the snacks and the, I don't know, all the other stuff that they sell? It doesn't do well. Just cut it. If it's a part of your product offering where consumer buys basically, I'm not here for that, that's not going to be good here. I'm going to get it cheaper somewhere else. It may not be true, but I think what CNBC said was basically people feel like whatever the front end of the pharmacy is offering, I will get cheaper somewhere else, which may or may not be true, I don't know. But if that's a bias and it's not your main business offering, or you'll spend more money trying to deal with the bias, then just cut it and pivot.

Crystal Carter:

I think that that's definitely something worth thinking about and I think that you need to spend time looking at what it is. It can be painful. It can be painful to-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the biggest thing, diagnosing it.

Crystal Carter:

... digging into what people are biased about for your business, for your product, for what you do. I think that it's really, really important to do that because if you're going to do big cuts, that's a big deal. If you're going to cut something, that's a big deal. You need to dig into why are people biased about this? Why is this a challenge for us? If you're going to pivot or you're going to create a sub-brand, if you're going to do whatever, you have to think very deeply because that's quite an investment about how you're going to do that and why it is. I think when you're trying to figure out whether or not you need to do this.

Because people do this with websites all the time. People are like, "We to we have a new brand, do we need to do a new website for this new sub-brand or do we need to keep it on the same domain?" When you're trying to decide between those things, you have to think about, well, how is it being on this domain going to affect how people think about this new brand? How is it being on a separate domain going to affect how people think about the brand? Will it help us with the positioning? All of that sort of stuff. I think that you have to dig deep and make some tough decisions on that, and I think that while you're looking at that, you really have to look at the data very, very objectively. Very objectively, to get something that's something of value.

Mordy Oberstein:

But you also have to understand where users are flowing. If the users are flowing a certain direction, the biggest thing you should not do is fight it. Meaning the users flowing in a certain direction, their bias is flowing in that direction. If they're thinking, "Okay, small business is not going to be quality here," do things that show your quality. Have the reviews up, have the whatever up. Don't do things that are like, no small business is good here. Don't fight that bias. You'll never, ever win doing something like that.

If it does mean pivoting, if it does mean rebranding, if it does mean cutting your loss on something, or by the way, if it means, "Well, we won't get a lot out of it, we'll get something decent out of it," that's fine too, by the way. I personally think, for me, I'm only speaking for myself, like generic brand cereal. I'm always like, "Nah, it's never going to taste good. It's never going to be the right thing." But I'm picky about my cereal. Many people probably are not, because you see the generic brands all the time, they're way cheaper. You won't get me, but that's fine because you might get a ton of other people. You really have to slice and dice it.

Crystal Carter:

Also sometimes it's a question of being bold in who you are, being bold in your brand positioning, being bold in your statement. You mentioned Coors, and when you mentioned Coors, for instance, the first thing that I thought of was that van Damme campaign.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know that. Claude? Jean-Claude?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Let me just make sure that it's... There was a thing that Coors wasn't cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was not cool, but yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And the Jean-Claude van Damme one was basically, he was super uncool. He was there looking really, really uncool, on a mountain. And it was so uncool it was cool, basically. It was hilarious.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like that. That's cool.

Crystal Carter:

And so he really just confronted it head on, and there's a few businesses that I've seen do that, and they're just like, "Yep, that's what we do."

Mordy Oberstein:

That's where they lean into it. Whatever it means to lean into it, lean into it. That's the only way you're going to deal with it. What's cool, by the way,? Barry's cool. Super cool, coolest guy I ever met. Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:

Barry Schwartz, the guy.

Mordy Oberstein:

So cool he could sport a goatee and it's 2024. That is so uncool it's cool.

Crystal Carter:

It's very cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

Very cool. Like a 1990s baseball player, here's Barry Schwartz and this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two articles for you both from Barry Schwartz. What's new? First from seoroundtable.com. Study, 96% of Google AI overviews links go to informational intent pages. It is what Barry's saying, heard data from Mark Traphagan over at SEO Clarity. The links inside of the AI overviews predominantly go to informational pages. I'm sick about talking about AI overviews, so I'm just going to say, if you want to see more, click on the link on the show notes, I'm moving on.

Anyway. Is that wrong? Whatever. Onto the core update, the August 2024 core update, Barry covers some data from the data providers, which I sent him. I'm covering Barry covering me. That sounds incredibly narcissistic. The title, Data Providers, Google August 2024 core update was very volatile. Barry, you have a way with words. Yes, it was very volatile. All core updates are very volatile. All right. No, but all in all seriousness, similar web in Semrush sent over a bunch of data to Barry. I do the data roundup for Semrush.

I pull the data, while I ask for a data pull, they sent it over and analyze it, and then I send it to Barry, and then Barry puts into an article and everybody's happy. I'll pull the curtain back. This is one of the harder updates to pin down because, here's how the tools do this. What they do is they take a data period before the core update as the baseline. You have to do the same thing each time because what we do is we compare one core update to the next core update because it's all relative so you have to have something to compare it to. But if you're going to compare them, then you have to do the same thing each time.

But the problem here was, if you recall, I think we covered it here, there was an incredible amount of rank volatility for an extended period of time before the core update rolled out, which meant the baseline period that using the data was incredibly volatile. If you look at, for example, the rank volatility change comparison chart that I sent to Barry in the article, you can see that compared to the March 2024 core update, the August 2024 core update was super tiny. In fact, for many verticals, food and drink, game health, jobs and education, the amount of volatility was significantly less.

In fact, I'll pull the curtain back a little bit more, some of the verticals were more volatile before the update than during the update, which is I don't think I've ever seen that. Getting this data right was very, very, very difficult. I actually did ask Semrush to pull a data pull from way, way, way before, it's no