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Are digital marketing conferences right for you? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter alongside Sparktoro’s VP of Marketing, Amanda Natividad, help you decide if you're ready to board the digital marketing conference train. Plus, the founder of Brighton SEO’s international conference series, Kelvin Newman, joins to discuss securing a speaking role at a conference. Still unsure if digital marketing conferences will pay off? Tune in this week as the experts help you decide on episode 101 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Are digital marketing conferences worth it? Are digital marketing conferences right for you? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter alongside Sparktoro’s VP of Marketing, Amanda Natividad, help you decide if you're ready to board the digital marketing conference train. Plus, the founder of Brighton SEO’s international conference series, Kelvin Newman, joins to discuss securing a speaking role at a conference. Still unsure if digital marketing conferences will pay off? Tune in this week as the experts help you decide on episode 101 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 101 | September 11, 2024 | 57 MIN 00:00 / 56:55 This week’s guests Amanda Natividad Amanda Natividad is VP of Marketing for audience research startup, SparkToro. In her spare time, she writes a marketing newsletter called the Menu (with over 15k subscribers) and teaches Content Marketing 201. She’s also a contributor for Adweek, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, and a former journalist. Amanda previously led marketing for Growth Machine, led marketing for Liftopia, built Fitbit’s B2B content program, and led content and communications for NatureBox. Kelvin Newman Kelvin Newman is founder of brightonSEO, one of the best search marketing conferences out there. What started as a tiny meet-up of SEO geeks has exploded into a massive event that draws thousands of attendees from all over the world. With his finger firmly on the pulse of digital marketing, Kelvin’s known for his down-to-earth approach and knack for making SEO both fun and accessible. He also founded Rough Agenda, an events company that puts on marketing & advertising events that people love to attend. Always up for sharing his knowledge (and maybe a few laughs), Kelvin’s a true legend in the SEO scene, inspiring many with his passion and expertise. Notes Transcript Transcript 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 pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is the keynote to our podcast. The one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hear ye, hear ye. Here I am on the podcast speaking about things and in a keynote kind of way. That's not what people say. That would be a terrible, terrible way to open a keynote. Hear ye, hear ye, conference attendees. Mordy Oberstein: With a bell from the 1700s. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That sort of thing. People would- Mordy Oberstein: It sounds like the plague is coming. Crystal Carter: I don't think people would be into that, especially like ... Mordy Oberstein: Unless it was a conference about plagues. Crystal Carter: No. Well, I mean, yeah, I guess so. But I think they would be more worried. They'd be like, "No, is it?" They would have the details and they would be more worried. I don't think that if you were speaking to epidemiologists that that would be the way to open your conference. Mordy Oberstein: Probably not. If it's a really niche audience. Well, anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can get all of your events, structured data markup on all of your event pages on both Wix and Wix Studio done for you automatically. It's all automated and it all happens that you haven't got to do anything. That's what makes it great because that's automated. As this week we're talking about, should I even go to a digital marketing or SEO conference or event? How do you even know what conferences to go to and are they even worth it? What should your goals be when going to a live digital marketing event? And so you want to go to an SEO digital marketing conference, but how do you justify the cost? SparkToro's VP of marketing, Amanda Natividad will join us in just a jiffy to help you decide if you should punch your conference ticket or not. Plus, the founder of Brighton SEO's conference series, Kelvin Newman stops by the chat about how to pitch to be a speaker at a digital marketing conference. Plus, we have your Snappies of SEO News and who you should be following a social media for more SEO awesomeness. So join us as we help you summit the mountain that is deciding on the pros and cons of the digital marketing conference world as we expose you to a conference information fest on this, the 101st episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Did I miss any generic conference suffixes there? I got summit, con, world, expo and fest in there. Crystal Carter: I mean, you- Mordy Oberstein: That's a work or art, by the way. Crystal Carter: It was the kind of thing that a pundit on a panel might say. Mordy Oberstein: Well done. Well done. Okay. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: So conferences are kind of costly, they can be. There's the trip itself, the flight, the hotel, the ticket for the actual conference, and does it actually make sense to go to a live conference? I don't pay for a webinar. I just kind of show up. What's the value of going to a conference? So please welcome to the show, the VP of Marketing over at SparkToro, which is a fabulous tool. I'm just going to say that I love that tool. Amanda Natividad, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Amanda Natividad: Hear ye, hear ye. I am here with my own cowbell of some sort. Crystal Carter: More cowbell. Mordy Oberstein: More cowbell. Crystal Carter: Always. Amanda Natividad: Thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we're so happy you're here. Crystal Carter: So pleased to have you on the podcast. Honestly, a great person to talk to about this topic. Mordy Oberstein: Because full pitch, you are about to run your own conference. Amanda Natividad: Yes. Yeah, this is going to be SparkToro's first in-person conference, and we're really pumped about it. I mean, before I was marketing to marketers, I had some experience in running conferences for the HR and benefits space, and then of course my boss, Rand Fishkin, who people here might've heard have ... Obviously had built up MozCon and everything. So we have very strong opinions about conferences and we're really excited about it. I think we're really trying to do something different, something fresh, but we're also trying to figure out how to not market it that way because every conference organizer says, "No, we're different. We're fresh, we're exciting." And everyone is different in their own way. But we're going to try to figure out, well, we'll tell you what's different, and we'll position the conference around that. And then hopefully you will agree that it is different and that you will want to come. Mordy Oberstein: Where can people find it? Amanda Natividad: Oh, people can find it on the SparkToro website, sparktoro.com/sparktogether. This is the day long Spark Together summit. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Link in the show notes. Crystal Carter: And I think the thing that really makes the conference is really the vibe. That's really, really what makes the difference between one conference or another, because people will have ... A lot of conferences will have speakers and they'll have expos, and they'll have exhibitors and they'll have merch, and they'll have things like that. But really the difference is when you get there, how it feels, which is very, very tricky to, I don't know, quantify or whatever, but I certainly know that your team, the team at SparkToro, I don't think I would be wrong in describing you small but mighty. I think you've discussed that your team, you keep it tight for a reason. And I think that one of the things I'm really excited for about the event is I've met you in person. I know you energy. I've met Rand in person, I know his energy, and I know that the kinds of things that you as a team prioritize and I think it's going to be a great event because you'll be able to bring that emphasis, that energy into a real life space. Amanda Natividad: Yeah, that's absolutely the hope. I mean, so I have been toying with the idea of positioning it around, this is like an executive retreat except everyone's invited. Crystal Carter: Right. Amanda Natividad: That's kind of the vibe we want. And so by that, that means, I guess I haven't had a ton of experience with this, but I've gotten to go to a couple of events that were like founders retreats essentially, where various founders have spoken vulnerably about their stories. Like, "Here's where I got to where I am today." Or, "Here's about this time that I sold my business, and it actually went really well. But here are all the steps that we took to make sure that we were giving our employees great compensation." Things like that, that not everyone talks about at a conference. So we wanted to encapsulate that, which is why it's a storytelling conference. That's another thing we say, where each speaker is invited, speakers that we've invited, we've chosen and we've asked them to share a story that they've never told before. Something vulnerable, something really candid that has some kind of really transparent detail that they've never shared. Because our belief is that that's how we best learn. We best learn through stories and we learn through other people sharing their experiences, warts and all. So we have that. And then the other piece is, especially because it's our first event, we're keeping it relatively small. We have a goal of getting to 200 attendees. I think at the time of this recording, we have 30 or 40 tickets left and a couple months to go. So fingers crossed we get there. And the other thing we want to do is because it's going to be small enough, we're also hosting this sort of mini mastermind session where we'll put people into small groups. We'll have facilitators run the hour or so, and invite people to share a business problem that they have, a marketing problem they have, and have the group kind of workshop it together. So that's kind of the retreat sort of aspect. Mordy Oberstein: I really like that storytelling. That sounds really, really interesting because I'll say this, I don't want to sound like a snob when I say this. I've been to a lot of conferences before over the many, many years, and at this point, my conference journey, I don't really enjoy the session so much. That's not why I'm going to a conference at this point. So hearing something like it's someone sharing something they never really told before, it's a little more vulnerable. I would actually be interested in hearing that because I haven't experienced that. And I think that when you're deciding to go to a conference, I think that's one of the things you have to think about is, where are you on the spectrum right now? Because younger me would a million percent want to go do all of the sessions and would gain value from all the sessions. Whereas older me, because I'm an old person ... I'm actually middle age, which is ... My back hurts, which freaks me out. Crystal Carter: You are lucky if it's just your back. I'm just saying. Mordy Oberstein: It's not just my back. Older me doesn't find that same value anymore. So if you think, "Should I go to a conference or should I not go to a conference?" I think that's the wrong question. It's like, where are you right now? What will you get out of a conference at this point in your career? Amanda Natividad: Yeah. You know what, added to that, you also mentioned this at the intro of the show about where we may be as an industry, or maybe not industry, but the average attendee is at is, there's a lot of great content on YouTube, a lot of really good webinars where people are sharing playbooks, tactics, and those are great. But I guess what I as an organizer think about are, well, you can get all that already on YouTube, other webinars, and I don't know if people are going to come to our conference because they want the best tactics. I feel like it's because of the experience as a whole. And the experience as a whole is going to sessions that you wouldn't see otherwise online. So that's the other thing. At Spark Together, we're asking speakers to share a story but only tell that story at our conference. And that's kind of it. And it's not going to be recorded. And we are also going to foster the networking aspects so that it's going to be a little bit easier for people to meet people. We're going to have it at a nice venue. All the things that you can't really do online. So I actually feel like it's more important than ever that conference organizers really try to double down on the experience as a whole or on the networking aspect. Or it could be anything, right? Maybe it's food, maybe it's like this is a luxury kind of conference, you're going to get like multi-course meals. I don't know. But I just made that up obviously. Crystal Carter: I think also one of the things that I really value, I go to a lot of conferences, I speak at a lot of conferences. I volunteer at the Women in Tech SEO conferences. I've spoken at those as well. We've exhibited at Brighton SEO on a few occasions. So I do a lot of conference stuff. The thing that I really enjoy about the in-person aspect of it is being surrounded by your peers I think is super, super important. I went to a conference right after the Content Goblins Verge article came out, and it was so much fun seeing people wearing Content Goblins and somebody with an inflatable alligator and that sort of stuff. That's great. And it makes you feel, I think a lot of times marketers can very often be the only one. They are the head marketer and they're the only marketer at their company. And even in larger companies, you might be the SEO or you might be the one person who's handling that particular aspect in there and you're not able to bounce things off. So even being in the audience and hearing the questions that other people are asking, you can go, "Oh, yes, I have been wondering about that, and I'm not the only, that's great." And so that feeling of connecting with your peers I think is really, really valuable. So I think you mastermind bringing people together for networking, that's a great aspect of it. I think it's really, really important to facilitate and make spaces for that. Amanda Natividad: Yeah, I'm excited about it. And Crystal, now I'm very curious to hear from you, since you go to so many conferences and in different capacities, I imagine you have a top three or five that you really, really like for various reasons. So maybe of three, let's say random, because I don't want to say, hey, force rank all of them, but what are some of the things that you love about some of your favorite conferences? Crystal Carter: So first of all, Amanda, this is my podcast and I asked the questions. Second of all, thank you. So yeah, so one of the things I like, I remember being at Brighton SEO San Diego for the first one and Mordy was there as well, and we had a great time. One of the things that I found that was so much fun was that I literally met people, I was walking by and I looked at somebody's lanyard and we had him on the podcast, Will was on the podcast. And I was like, "You're the SEO from the Mayo Clinic." And it was literally, I had a full fan girl experience because I am fascinated by the SEO of the Mayo Clinic. And I walked by and I was like, "Oh my God, you work on the Mayo Clinic. That's amazing." Similarly, when I was at MozCon last time, I was sharing data from Rick Steve's community blog, and I was like, "Yeah, the Rick Steve community blog, they've seen loads of this massive hockey stick from the discussions and forums feature on Google." And I heard a whoop from the crowd. And then in lunchtime, the community blog SEO from Rick Steve's was like, "That's my blog. That was me whooping." I got a picture with them. Do you know what I mean? Amanda Natividad: Yeah. Crystal Carter: You're making the face that I was making, which was like, "Oh my God." So I think that, and that's what I mean with that peer thing is that you meet people. I met the SEO team from Suzuki, and I have a Suzuki and I love my car. And I was like, "Oh my God." And they were like, "We told our boss that you were so excited about it…" So I think it's really fun to find those moments of connectivity within your industry. And I think that that can really help invigorate how you feel about what you do and help you to keep going with learning. You meet people who you've only met online and things like that. And Mordy, I can see you want to jump in as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You sit here, I work remotely. So you sit here, you think, I am this weirdo who's doing SEO stuff and there's no one else out there. I mean, you see people on social media, whatever, but that connection of like, "Oh, there are other people who are like me," does motivate you, and I wouldn't sell that short. It is a really, really, really important thing. I'm not saying that's going to be the thing that you're going to say to your boss like, "Hey, I'm going to go so I feel like emotionally reinvigorated." That's probably not what's going to sell them on spending all that money to send you. But for yourself, it's really important you come back, you're motivated, you feel connected to a whole community, and that has a lot of psychological value that I wouldn't discount. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you're also able to ask people, like whenever I speak, people come up to me and they're like, "Well, how did you do that? Tell me more about this." Or I have people who are like, "Yeah, I'm running..." So I talked about forums at my last MozCon. The guys from Houzz, which is a design website, they came and talked to me about their thing and what they're experiencing and lots of great stuff. I know people go and talk to Lily Rae about all the different things that she's doing. As a speaker, honestly, I got to chat to Britney Muller for ages at MozCon. Fan girl me was losing her mind, I'm not going to lie. And so I think that there are incredible opportunities to connect with people in a way that you cannot do online when you join an in-person event, and there's plenty of time to do that as well. And you're focused because you're there. You're not being distracted by additional activities and things like that. So yeah, I think that in-person conferences are really, really super valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Amanda, you were just at MozCon, right? Amanda Natividad: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so- Amanda Natividad: What was it like? Mordy Oberstein: I missed it. A little bit of a FOMO, but we were talking about it before we started recording, it was a great event. What for you made that an event that worked for you? Amanda Natividad: The experience as a whole was great. What were some of the highlights? The food was really good. They had some good treats. They had mochi donuts. I can't say that first. Crystal Carter: The donuts were phenomenal. Amanda Natividad: They were so good. Crystal Carter: I had four of those donuts. They were delicious. Amanda Natividad: Yeah. Oh, they were so good. Honestly, really not just saying this, but the photo booth that you guys had set up for headshots was such a standout for me because I was like, "Oh, I haven't taken a headshot in six years." And it's not something I'm going to pay for just because I don't know, I'm cheap or whatever. I guess personally, I don't think to like, "Oh, I'm going to get a professional photo of myself." I just don't think that way. So when I saw it, I was like, "I need to do this." And then the photographer that you had was so mindful about each person. He took his time with each person. He showed me how to fix my hair, which no one had ever showed me how to do because I get these flyaways, right? He was like, "Smooth them out." He was like, "Smooth out your hair." He's like, "Pull it into two sections, smooth it out, and then smooth it out again." I was like, "Oh, oh, the flyaway is gone." But no one had ever taught me that before. But that's a small thing. Those things matter because I, as an attendee, felt really special for five to 10 minutes. And I'm not a speaker there. I was there to just hang out. I felt so special, got to cross something off my to-do list. But the other thing that was really special for me was, well, meeting a bunch of speakers who I was previously friendly with, who I was finally meeting in person. That was great. But one key moment for me was I met someone who was a big fan of Rand Fishkin, and he was like, "Oh, I'm a fan of you too," or, "I like you," or whatever it was. We had a nice conversation and he mentioned, he was like, "Do you know if Rand is going to stay?" He's like, "It would mean the world to me to meet him, because he's the reason I got into SEO and stayed." And I was like, my heart. I was like, oh. I was like, "He's not staying after. I will make sure that you meet him." And this person was like, "Okay. And I'm like, "No, we'll find him." And then Rand came by eventually, and I was like, "Rand, come here. You have to meet this person." He came over and this guy was so sweet. He was like, "Could you sign my book?" And he came from, I think he traveled from Nicaragua and he brought his book with... His Lost and Founder book. And I was like, "Oh my gosh. He traveled with that for this in case he got to meet Rand." So of course Rand signed it. And then I was like, wait, I got to get into full.... I don't know what this is, like momager mode maybe. But I was like, "You guys should also take a picture." And I saw his soul leave his body. He was like... I think he even made that sound… Mordy Oberstein: Like that aura sound, the heavens have opened. Nice. Amanda Natividad: I took a picture. Let's take a couple. So I took a couple and he was shaking and it was the sweetest thing ever. And then at some point I could sense that he was blacking out and not saying anything. So then I was just like, "Rand, you are the reason he got into SEO and stayed." And then he finally snapped in. He was like, "Yes," and then was able to talk again. But it was the most adorable thing. And I started to cry because, just to see somebody who was also just so influenced by Rand and to finally to see on his face, "Holy crap, one of my professional dreams is coming true right now," to be able to witness that for someone else was incredible. I was crying. I was like, "Don't look at me." It was a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: So super hard contrast because that's a great story. That person didn't sell their boss on, I really want to get my book signed by Rand because I got inspired by Rand. There's no boss, unfortunately, who's going to say, "You know what? I'm going to fly from Nicaragua to Seattle. I'm going to put you at a hotel, pay for the conference. You got it." How would that person sell the conference? How do you sell it? Because all the things we're talking about are things, unfortunately, and I say unfortunately, that your boss probably doesn't care about. Crystal Carter: Dude, you're killing the buzz. Mordy Oberstein: I told you hard contrast. First off, you're expecting something different from me other than killing the vibe? Crystal Carter: This is our hundredth and one podcast, Mordy. No, I'm not expecting anything different. Amanda Natividad: Well, now, it's like, oh, the rain cloud just came on this beautiful story. But you're right. No, you are right. You can't tell your boss, "Oh, it would mean the world to me to maybe meet this one speaker who's been formative in my career." Sure, any decent boss would be like, "Oh, that's really cool." That's not a reason to expense this. I think that's when people say, right, because we... Rand did this survey several weeks ago maybe about why people choose an event, and the number one reason was the content, because I think it goes back to when you go to your boss and you're like, "Hey, I need to buy a plane ticket, get a hotel, but I can get a discount or I'll stay at a cheap hotel. I need to buy this ticket." Then it's like, okay, why are you going? And then you as an attendee, a person who wants to expense it, ultimately what you have to lean on is, well, the content's going to be really great. And I think it's figuring out what's unique about the content or speakers that you can position to your boss. So for SparkTogether, I might say, look, these are brand new talks of all these... Here's a speaker list. Look, some of these people are agency founders like us, or they are people who've built their audiences from scratch, and I really want to learn from them. But here are the people that are relevant to us and our business needs. Here's why I think they're relevant. They're also going to tell stories or give presentations. If your boss doesn't care about stories, they're going to give presentations they've never given before, and it's only for this audience and it's not going to be recorded, so I have to be there in person to learn all this. And they're going to tell all these stories and here's some examples. Someone once told a story about this multi-million dollar or million dollar content project that failed or near failed, and they had to fix it two days prior. I want to learn from that story. Or I'm going to learn from this person who they are an agency founder who had to meet some ridiculous, lofty revenue goal of, I think going from five figure ARR to going to over... or was it AR... Yeah, no, I think it was five figure ARR because it was small to get it to over 200K in three months. That's a ridiculous goal. So I want to learn from these people, and this is the only way that I can do it. I think that's one case you can make. Crystal Carter: I think also it can be extremely good value for money. If you think about an all day conference and you're going to all the sessions and you're hearing about all those different things, if you go to a good conference with good speakers, every single speaker is going to be giving you resources, links, stuff that you may not have considered. I'm thinking of, I watched Talia Wolf's talk at MozCon this year, for instance, and she was just like resource after resource after resource, link, link, link, link, link. And I was like, oh my God, if you've ever watched Aleyda Solis speak, she's like this one and that one and that one, and she'll give you a full play by play. Similarly, I think people underestimate the value of the exhibitors, but I've been to conferences, like MarTech conferences where I've seen stuff that I didn't even know existed. There were exhibitors there who were... And they're like, "This is my new stuff. This is my best thing." Because they spent money on the booth, they're doing the thing. So they're like, "This is my best thing that I have to show." And I remember seeing heat maps, but this is way, way, way, way, way back in the day. But I was stood there and they were like, "Yeah, we can track your eyeballs." I was like, "You can track my eyeballs?" I remember being blown away by this. I'm dating myself. But the exhibitors are able to show you stuff that you might not have even considered. They'll be giving away discounts on things, they'll be giving away things like that. And I think that if you were to think about how long it would take you to do CPD, that same kind of CPD over the course of a year or something, whereas how much you can get done in two days of all of those resources, all of that learning, all of that knowledge, those mastermind sessions you're talking about, the networking where you can meet other people who are connected to you, it can be very good value for money if you're thinking about it in that way. Mordy Oberstein: And just find that pain point. Every company is dealing with something. I don't know, AI overviews. How do we going to handle AI overviews? Well, so-and-so is speaking at whatever conference, and they wrote a whole bunch of articles about AI overviews. I would like to pick that... Mike King and Rand are going to be at the conference. I would like to pick their brains about AI overviews. So it's the sessions and who's going to be there that can help you solve business problems that you're currently facing because you're always facing some kind of thing. Amanda Natividad: Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, as you were saying that, I had an idea for marketing our conference. It's like, oh, I got to put a pin in that for later, because this is a really good idea because you called out Mike King and Rand Fishkin. And Mike King is speaking at SparkTogether. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Amanda Natividad: I was like, "Oh gosh, I need to write specific value props for each session and speaker, and then somehow send them to people." Anyway, sorry. That was weird. Mordy Oberstein: That's what we're here for. This is a brainstorm session. Crystal Carter: Yeah, anytime. Anytime you want to kick the tires. Amanda Natividad: Yeah, this is like a public brainstorm, right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: We should totally record actual brainstorm sessions. Then we would have the pinata idea for the conference, which is brilliant. Anyway, I'll tell you about that after the recording though. After the recording, Amanda Natividad: What comes out of the pinata? Is it going to be with stickers? Crystal Carter: Moving on. Mordy Oberstein: I think we have to move on. Amanda, where can people find you? Amanda Natividad: Oh, they can find me... Well, let's see. I'm mostly on LinkedIn nowadays. My personal site is amandanat.com, but mostly really go to Sparktoro.com, try out our audio research tool and consider coming to SparkTogether. We would love to have you. And I'll hug you in person if you're the hugging type. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. We'll put all the links in the show notes. Check out Amanda's and Rand's content on social media. It's really, really good. Those videos are great. I really enjoy them, the little ones that Rand's putting on LinkedIn. I even comment sometimes. I never comment on LinkedIn stuff. So big shout out for that, and thank you so much for joining us. Amanda Natividad: Thank you for having me. This so fun. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. So sometimes you don't want to attend a digital marketing conference. No, no, no. You want to speak at a digital marketing conference. But before that happens, you have to pitch to the conference and get that pitch accepted. And there's no one I can think of more qualified than the founder of brightonSEO himself to help you understand the best way to do that. So here's Kelvin Newman as he joins us for a little segment that we call Across the Wixverse. Oh, so before I get to Kelvin's little tips here, why am I calling it across the Wixverse because usually we talk to Wix folks about across the Wixverse? But in case you were wondering, we have been headlining brightonSEO for a good while now, the UK and- Yeah. And San Diego. So I kind feel like we're one big happy family. So it's across the Wixverse. Crystal Carter: There we go. There we go. Yeah, it's such a brilliant experience working with the brightonSEO team. Shout out to Kelvin and shout out to Andrea as well, and everybody there who does great work. Mordy Oberstein: They're really great to work with. So if you want to work with them and sponsor them as well, I'd recommend it. How's that for an endorsement? Okay. Anyway, enough of that. Here's Kelvin Newman on how to pitch to a digital marketing conference. Voiceover: Three, two, one, ignition. Liftoff. Liftoff. Kelvin Newman: Want to become a speaker at one of our events? Well, I wanted to share some practical advice on what we look for in speaker pitches. Now, first up, it's good to know that we get tons of speaker interest in brightonSEO. We could program a hundred tracks and still have more pitches than we have available slots, so it's quite competitive in that selection process. When we're choosing the talks, we tend to focus on speakers with advanced and practical knowledge that they're putting into their pitch. We also love working with new people too, so don't let a lack of experience put you off. In fact, actually sometimes being a first-time speaker can sometimes aid and help your application. We handle all of our pitches via a form that's up at brightonseo.com/pitch. We don't take pitches via LinkedIn or email. And by filling in that form, we get to know you a bit better, your background, your interests, and what we're most interested in, the potential topics for future events. So do spend some time thinking about that topic title as it's one of the key elements that we use when assessing pitches. We don't have a formal pitch timeline. If we like your submission, we'll reach out when we're planning the next event. We normally start planning about six months before the conference and invite people in waves as well. It's worth saying we only get back to successful speakers and we never fully decline a talk. So when we're inviting those speakers in waves, we like to have options if speaking starts to open up because people do and often have to drop out of events. And sometimes we can have people changing topics and all that kind of thing, so we like to have a bit of flexibility there. So we never formally decline a talk because a talk's always in consideration. We may indeed even roll your pitch forward to a future event as well. But if you don't hear back from us at that moment in time, you haven't been selected. Here's some practical advice as well in terms of what we're looking for in the talk topics themselves. We like them to be actionable. Our audience loves practical how-to information. So aim for takeaways like tasks, tools or recommendations that people can go and immediately put on their to-do list. Also try and make you talk specific. So the more specific the topic is the more likely it is to be chosen and reflect that in your pitch as well. So detailed titles and descriptions tend to win us over, so we like those. It's very clear what it's talking about rather than a big, broad topic. And usually the more detail there, the easier it is for us to understand what you're going to be talking about. And we also suggest that you avoid the basics. Our audience generally is not new to digital marketing. It's not new to search marketing measurement, web analytics and paid search and all that kind of thing as well. So generally speaking, aiming your talks at intermediate or maybe even advanced audience members is a good way of getting your talk selected. Yeah, no self-promotion. We avoid pitches that focus too much on your tool or your clients. A case study can occasionally be good, but make it about the audience, not you. Again, if you've done some particular research or it's a new piece of information or a research project, that can often be a nice thing to have in your pitch. And also be authoritative. It is really, really good if you know your subject inside and out. If you can demonstrate that here's a blog post I've written about it, here's a video, here's a previous talk I've done around that, that can often help you as well. And also keep the topic tight. Most of our talks are 20 minutes long. That is not a lot of time. We'll often get many pitches that look very good and potentially could be very, very good talks, but just the scope of what they're intending to cover is too broad for our particular program. So keep it tight, keep it the kind of thing that would definitely work in 10 to 15 minutes. Even though you've probably got 20, that will give you a bit more space to play with. And also, if you've spoken at lots of events before, rather than pitching again, I'd really encourage you to try and find a friend or a colleague, someone you know who's not spoken at an event before and mentor or encourage them to put themselves forward rather than applying for your 25th speaking slot. That's good karma as well. So yeah, if you've got an idea for a pitch, we will very soon be looking at the pitch ideas for our 2025 conferences. Go to brightonseo.com/pitch and get that submission in. Voiceover: 3, 2, 1, ignition, lift off. Crystal Carter: He's got some great insights there on first-time speakers. And I think that brightonSEO in particular, the UK edition is literally the biggest SEO conference in the world, and they are incredibly welcoming to first-time speakers. I remember the first time I spoke at brightonSEO, and they were really friendly. They have a whole program that supports first-time speakers. So not only are they welcoming to people, but also they have a presentation support. So they have a day in London where you can go and you can practice with somebody if you're not used to presenting. They also have a little group chat so that you can talk to other first-time presenters, and they also help you figure out your accommodation, all that sort of stuff. So they're really, really supportive. And I think that it's really, if you're looking to be a first-time speaker, it's good to look at conferences that welcome first-time speakers because they tend to also have that kind of support, which is really, really valuable and can help you move forward if that is a thing that you want to do. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and that's one of the great things about brightonSEO is their speaker line-up really is diverse and they do really have people you never really heard of before, which is I think unique for a digital marketing conference in general. I found it interesting, by the way, the focus on the title that he mentioned because you would think like, no, I'm going to have a description in there and it's really purposeful and it'll be really impactful and meaningful and yada, yada, and it might be. But I think you have to realize, maybe I'm reading between the lines here, Kelvin, by the way, thank you Kelvin for that submission. We shouldn't thank you yet. I would read between the lines of what he's saying. They're getting probably hundreds, maybe more of pitches and sifting through them as difficult. And having a headline like an article you're writing on your website, having a catchy headline is a way to pull that reader in, in this case the founder or the review board of the conference. You might think don't put such emphasis on the catchy title. I'll catchify it later once I get the pitch accepted, but maybe do it now so that you get their attention, and then have the very meaningful and prolific substantial description of what you want to talk about. Crystal Carter: And I think the other thing is so have a look at the, brightonSEO has their pitch form available all year round. It's really, really useful to give you the kind of idea for what somebody is looking for from any conference speaking pitch. So they ask you to send in your pitch title, the information. They also ask you to send in links to your social media profile. They also ask you to send in links to any talks that you've done or any articles that you've written, which basically helps them to realize how... Because it may be that you're a great SEO, you're a great marketer, you're a great agency owner, but maybe you're not big, maybe you don't have a huge following just yet, for instance. That doesn't mean that you don't have information to give. That doesn't mean that you don't have value to add. But if you've written an article somewhere, if you've done a webinar that you can share, if you've done a podcast that you can share, that's show don't tell, which is really, really, really valuable. And I think that sometimes with people who are like, "Oh, I want to do speaking." I'm like, "Cool. You don't necessarily have to go straight in on stage. You can demonstrate your expertise in a few other ways." And the blog could be on your own blog. The blog could be on LinkedIn. The blog could be wherever. It could even be a really good LinkedIn post. Let's say you write a really good LinkedIn post. Some people write whole essays on LinkedIn and let's say it went viral, or let's say you did one of those little carousel things. I know people who do really well with those as well. You can share those, for instance, to give people the kind of idea of how you do what you do, and that helps people to qualify you as a speaker, even if you haven't done speaking before. And if you can show that people are interested in what you're talking about, let's say a viral post or something that's got a little bit of, not necessarily attitude, but I guess personality can be really, really useful. Mordy Oberstein: I'll say also if you pitch and you don't get accepted, it's a numbers game to a certain extent. It's par for the course to not get accepted to multiple conferences. It's probably expected that you're going to pitch to 100 and get accepted to one kind of thing, so don't be too hard on yourself. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think also in terms of the numbers game, supply and demand. For SEO for instance, there's a lot of people that are going to be talking about keyword research. How are you talking about it in a different way, for instance? Almost every year, almost every time before brightonSEO Kelvin puts out a shout saying, "We need more technical SEO talks." So for instance, if you are somebody who is able to talk about technical SEO, you're probably more likely to get through than somebody who's talking about say content marketing because there's a lot of content marketing folks. And I think also the personality type of content marketers tends to be more like, "Yeah, let's talk about all the things," and technical SEO folks tend to be more like head down looking at a million spreadsheets, that sort of thing. So I think that when you're thinking about it, and this is I think what he was talking about with the talk title, try to find an angle that's unique. That if there's something that you feel that people aren't talking about, try to find that to talk about. It's certainly something that I try to do when I'm pitching, and it's certainly something that I think I've seen be really effective. Now, you don't want to go too far out in the weeds. You don't want to be pitching, I don't know, a JavaScript deep dive talk to a content marketing thing. If it's not positioned for content marketers, you don't want to be like, "Oh yeah, here's how you do Ruby on Rails." They're not going to care. But you want to make sure that maybe it's a unique angle on something that appeals to that audience, and that'll make a big difference. Mordy Oberstein: And again, build that out beforehand. I think a lot of the work that you're going to do for the pitch is done beforehand. So write an article, not about that exact topic, but adjacent to that topic. Build up that brand, your personal branding around that area in whatever topic you want to talk about so then when you go to pitch it, you have that cache of like, "Okay, I've done this before around this topic. I did an article here. I did an article there. I did an article here. Here's the next evolution of this topic that I'm going to do uniquely for you," but you have something you can kind of grab onto. Crystal Carter: Definitely make sure you have things that are adjace. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that's my new word, by the way. I use it all the time. Crystal Carter: I noticed this. Mordy Oberstein: It's because there's a podcast that I listen to. This is great. It's going off-topic for a second. There's a sports podcast that I listen to, and it's the announcer for the New York Yankees is a sports nut, okay? And I don't know, 10 years ago, they brought in a guy who does a hip-hop show on another radio station in the morning to do the afternoon show that they do, the sports show, to get the younger audience. And it's a whole big audience fight because the real sports nuts don't like him because he's not a real sports guy. It's great. Sal from Staten Island does not like Peter. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. Mordy Oberstein: But he uses that word all the time, and I stole it from him. Crystal Carter: Right, okay, okay. So you're picking up the lingo. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, from the cool people who happens to be another forty-year-old Jewish guy, so whatever. Crystal Carter: Hello, fellow kids. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Welcome to our podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Then there was another forty-year-old Jewish guy, Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry has a million years experience or whatever. He started when he was 14. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Crystal Carter: It's crazy. Barry, what? 14 years old, Fourteen-year-old Barry was like, "You need a website." Mordy Oberstein: Can I develop an app for you? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Here's some news about SEO. Crystal Carter: Right, straight in there. Straight in there, no flies on him. Mordy Oberstein: So by the way, in case you're new to our podcast, which, hi and welcome, this is the part we pivot into the SEO news by waxing poetic and/or trolling Barry Schwartz who does all the SEO news. Crystal Carter: And who is our co-host on It's New, which is a daily dose of little tidbits, little snippets of information on the latest SEO News. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. If you love SEO news, if you love this segment of the podcast, check out It's New on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. It's right there. You show up, you see Barry's face, see our faces, Greg Finn. Just click on that, get some daily news. Anyway, it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, one article for you this week, just one because it is a mouthful. This from Barry Schwartz over on seoroundtable.com, my interview with Google search liaison on the August 2024 core update. My interview not being my interview, but Barry's interview with Google search liaison, Danny Sullivan. I'm going to go into sports radio host announcer mode here with this. I have a bunch of comments to make. It's a great interview. There's a lot in there. There's way more than the true one that I can possibly put into the Snappy News, and I already feel like this section is not going to be so snappy at all. I'll link to the article in the show notes. Have a look at it. I'm pulling out some random quotes from Danny throughout the article. I'm just going to comment on them and try to be as forthright with my thoughts as possible in a productive way. Okay, where do I want to start? Let's see. Okay, Danny said, "Yes, we have increased the amount of social content that appears in search." He's talking about Reddit. "The social content is indeed helpful for many queries. It's not perfect, but we continue to improve on it, but it can be very helpful. It can be very helpful in some cases to hear from other people who are encountering health issues that are looking for support." So this obviously is a response to the whole Reddit's, I'll call it a snafu like Reddit here, Reddit there, Reddit everywhere. Danny said afterwards, "When Reddit is actually outranking the content that actually produced the original thought," which has happened. There's been a whole, I don't know, hoopla about that, and that's not good, but social content is great. I am somewhere in between on this. Yes, there are a lot of things where the social content can be really good. I think it's not diverse enough, meaning you don't have enough diversity in the forums, the diversity type of content. And as you'll see later, Danny does talk about more firsthand experience content that's not actually social. So I think the reality is somewhere in the middle there. So on the whole social thing, Danny was talking about, or Barry asked Danny about the hidden gems update, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Danny was talking about they want a little bit more content that's not just social, that takes things from a authentic human voice point of view, beyond social. So for example, Danny said, "One of the sites I saw on the feedback, I'm referring to the feedback form they sent out with the March update, it helps you understand if something was in a movie or a TV show that you want to buy, that's amazing," he told me. Sullivan added, "I would like to see us do better by them, and it's where we're trying to find a way to do better surface this kind of authentic human voice type of content." So Google is looking to move past pure social media for human voice, human experience content. I've talked about that a lot. The Reddit is a default. They don't have anything better. They are looking for actual longer form web content that is human voice or human experience-centric. I don't think it exists. Here's my sports radio critic voice coming in, to me, part of the problem with that is Google. I don't think Google is rewarding that kind of content enough. Meaning content creators are just going to follow what Google is rewarding. That's how the incentive cycle works. So if Google's not rewarding that kind of content, what incentive are you creating to produce that kind of content? And on the same front, I don't think Google's doing enough to actually explain what that means. And this is where I feel like there's a little bit too much of a critique about Google and what's going on with the algorithm, yada, yada, yada. I think Google is trying to get it right. I don't think they're trying to mess things over, like Danny said, because our goal is if you're doing good content, we wanted you to be successful. I think it's a hundred percent true. They want the best content to rank. It's in their best interest. It's in their best bottom line interest. So I think a lot of the narrative like Google's just nefarious, they're not. Getting this algorithm right is complicated. I'll get into it in a little bit in a second, because I have another quote that I want to get into. I'm actually going to end on that quote. They're not trying to get this wrong. They are trying to reward the best content. Part of the problem is si that I don't think people really understand what they're talking about. Danny said, as I've said several times on social elsewhere, if you know you're producing great content for your readers, that's your touchstone, your North Star, whatever you want to call it, if you're feeling confused about what to do in terms of rankings. Again, Google has been saying over and over again, do what's good for your readers. Do what's good for your audience. Maybe it's a little bit of a hot take. I don't think the vast majority of the web understands what it means to create good content. What does that mean? As a former teacher, someone with a master's degree in education, the pedagogical approach Google has here is non-existent. It's basically Danny, and I don't think it's Danny's job. Okay, I'm ranting now. I don't think it's Danny's job. Danny's job isn't to be a teacher about content on the web. You need to have some kind of content liaison to basically show you what does it mean to create really good content. Because what you basically have is insanity. You have basically people going through the quality readers guidelines and trying to reverse engineer that to get an understanding of what quality content is. That's not going to be successful. And at a certain point, what happens is when Google goes out there... And I think their intentions are good here. I think Danny is doing a great job with this. I just think it's not his job. But he goes out there and starts talking about create good content for your users, yada, yada, yada, it falls on deaf ears at this point because there's not enough context behind it. What does that mean pedagogically? What does it mean to create good content? And Danny has done, I think, a good job trying to show the best that he can in his limited scope there. He gives a couple of examples of some sites who requested," Hey, here's some feedback on the March update. Why did we lose rankings?" And he's offering, "Hey, well, maybe you should have because you didn't do this," or, "Your content is not as good because of X, Y, and Z." And that's really good stuff, but it's a little bit here, it's a little bit there, and it's just pedagogically you're not creating a knowledge scheme. So I think there needs to be a little bit of a shift. If Google's really serious about getting that content created that really has a human voice to it, they need to, A, incentivize the content by ranking such content, but they also need to actually show you what that actually means and what that actually looks like a little bit more in depth. And I don't think this Danny's job. I don't think it's fair for anybody to think that's Danny's job. That was a mouthful. Okay. One of the things Danny said I wanted to also talk about really, really quick is basically says if you move from first to second on the SERP and you lost traffic because of that, and you can lose traffic because of that, it doesn't mean we don't like you, meaning Google doesn't like you. You're ranking number two. That's great. But you might just not have the ability to earn as much traffic as you did before. I want to touch on that point because I think sometimes as SEOs we're like, "Oh, we'll get you ranking number one and we'll get you the traffic," and Google could just move you to number two and it's impossible to know why they moved you to number two. And it can mean a significant traffic loss and there could be nothing to do about it. So sometimes we think we have control over the system or it's clearly mapped out. It's not always like that. I just wanted to make that point. Okay. The last thing, I have a bunch of other ones. I feel like I've gone on too long a little bit already, but I just wanted to end off on this one. Danny was talking about some of the sites. Obviously the big narrative with this whole update was the recovery from the helpful content update in September 2023, yada, yada, yada. So Danny said, "I do think that some of those sites will continue to see good gains if they're good sites," meaning some of the sites that saw a bit of a rebound will continue to see good gains, if they're good sites and if they're "producing good content for people." "I hope that they continue to go that way," Sullivan told me. So I'm a little bit confused about that. If, and maybe again here, I'm sports analytics talk show host too much of a hot take mode right now, so maybe I'm reading too much into this. I just want to be forthright in saying that. Maybe I am reading too much into this. But if the website Danny is saying is good, they're doing a good job, then why weren't they already rewarded? Now, I do want to say that if Danny would've said, and he does say later on in the interview that it's a constant process. You can't get this right in just one update. We're going to work towards it, make continual improvements and we'll eventually get there. That, I buy. It is really hard to get an algorithm exactly where you want it to go with a super complicated algorithm obviously. And getting it exactly where you want to go is going to be super, super complicated. And I think as hard as it is, and if you lost rankings and you lost business, I don't blame you for feeling angry and I don't even blame you for screaming at me for saying this right now, because I can't imagine what you're going through. But I do think there was a little bit too much anger at Google for not just getting it right. It's not easy to get it right. It is easier said than done. That's said, that wasn't what Danny was really saying here. You're saying, "Yeah, I think they'll continue to get good gains." But look at the quote in the actual full context of the interview. It made me walking away feeling like, and this is again my speculation, Google is trying to do something with the algorithm. That to me is very clear. They have a very purposeful thing that they're trying to do. I don't know what it is, but it seems big. What it seems like to me is that Google realizes the web is undergoing a paradigm shift in ways that I'm not sure we even understand yet. And they're trying to align the algorithm to that shift, or they're trying to engineer the shift. Either one of those two options. Getting these sites that Danny's talking about up and ranking to the levels that they're "supposed to be" perhaps contradicts or is in conflict with the overall shift that Google's trying to make. And what it seemed like to me, and again, I'm really reading into this, what it seemed like to me Danny was saying was he wants those sites to improve. He thinks those sites should improve. He hopes they will improve. But there's something else in the algorithm that's currently going on that would preclude them from getting that full boost right now, because Google's got other goals in mind and it can't just engineer the algorithm to focus on improving these websites. So that I thought was interesting. Again, I thought it was a little bit of an internal contradiction. If you think these websites are great and then they're wonderful and they're writing the content that you're talking about, people should create and they should be ranking, which goes back to my earlier point. If you can't get those websites ranking the way that they should be ranking, you're fundamentally not creating the incentive cycle you need for what Danny was talking about, the hidden gems, that experience-based content, yada, yada, yada. And I see it in the algorithm updates. You'll see a couple of sites that do that kind of thing, and they do get rewarded. There are cases like that. But then you also see a ton of not like that. And it's like, okay, how do I create an SEO strategy, or a content strategy rather, where I don't know what it's going to be? Could be Google gets rewarded, Google doesn't get rewarded. It's hard to create a strategy based on something that's so not concrete. But again, kudos to Danny for talking with Barry. There's a lot of good stuff in there. The truth I think is always somewhere in the middle with all these things. Is Google getting it totally wrong? No. Is Google getting it totally right. No. Are there major problems? Yes. Have a look at the article. I've gone way too long for the Snappy News. I apologize for my speculation, but I'm going to call it the way I see it and offer my take. This is a podcast and that's what we do. And that's this week's Snappy News, or Not So Snappy News. Again, if you're looking for more news, check out It's New. It's not new anymore. It's been around for a little bit, but the news is new, so that's why it's It's New. Crystal Carter: I like it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's a good name. Anyway, which brings us to a new follower or rather a new person that you should be following on social media to get some more SEO and marketing awesomeness. This time we have Cheryl Draper for you. She used to be over at Moz and running MozCon, and now it looks like she's partnering up with Noah Lerner on a little SEO conference thingamajigger that's pending and forthcoming. That should be exciting. Crystal Carter: That should be really exciting. And she has so much experience. She recently posted that she's going to be collaborating with Noah Lerner, Sean Huber, Nick Leroy, to bring the SEO community together in San Diego around the Brighton SEO for a fringe event. And it should be really, really good. It's an SEO community bash called Brighton SEO Boardwalk Bash, which should be super cool. Cheryl is such a fantastic person. I was talking about conferences that nurture new speakers, and Cheryl and the team that she had there did some incredible work there. And I think that that's just part of the core of who she is, seeing someone who nurtures new talent and encourages people to do great things. And so I am under no doubt that she will be able to do some incredible things with her next endeavor and that the upcoming event will be really awesome. And it'll be great to see her because she brings such incredible energy to everything she does. Mordy Oberstein: So look for Cheryl on LinkedIn, and on X @CherylDraper. Link in the show notes. Yeah. Okay. So when's our flight to the next SEO conference now that we've clearly advocated that you should be going to SEO conferences? Crystal Carter: I'm just there for the swag. I'll be completely honest. Mordy Oberstein: Can I tell you one, time I showed up to a conference, it was Brighton SEO in the UK, and I didn't have enough room in my suitcase for swag. I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to go buy another bag to put all my swag." Is that wrong and silly? I don't care. Crystal Carter: Honestly. My recent one was the MozCon hat that I have, which a lot of people are like, "Oh my God, I love the hat. Mordy Oberstein: I love that hat. I'm jealous. Crystal Carter: Everybody loves that hat. People are like, "Where'd you get it?" I'm like, "Yeah, I know. It's a good hat." Mordy Oberstein: Yo, Moz people. Send me that hat. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I got it from the stat booth. I was like, "Yo, hook it up. But yeah, and we also have great swag. If you come and see us at Brighton SEO, we will be at Brighton SEO in the UK in Autumn. We will also be at Brighton SEO in San Diego in Autumn, and we will be at a number of other events with incredibly juicy, incredible, fantastic swag. So do come and check that out if you're in the vicinity. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we do a lot of live events, so come find us and take our swag. Crystal Carter: Yes. Yes. Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well that'll do it. Thank you for joining the The SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. Back next week with a new episode as we go into BotLogs, the Transformers Chronicle. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resource on the Wix Studio Learning up 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. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Amanda Natividad Kelvin Newman Cheryl Draper Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Rankix Wix App Sparktoro BrightonSEO News: My Interview Of Google's Search Liaison On The August 2024 Core Update Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Amanda Natividad Kelvin Newman Cheryl Draper Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Rankix Wix App Sparktoro BrightonSEO News: My Interview Of Google's Search Liaison On The August 2024 Core Update Transcript 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 pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is the keynote to our podcast. The one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hear ye, hear ye. Here I am on the podcast speaking about things and in a keynote kind of way. That's not what people say. That would be a terrible, terrible way to open a keynote. Hear ye, hear ye, conference attendees. Mordy Oberstein: With a bell from the 1700s. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That sort of thing. People would- Mordy Oberstein: It sounds like the plague is coming. Crystal Carter: I don't think people would be into that, especially like ... Mordy Oberstein: Unless it was a conference about plagues. Crystal Carter: No. Well, I mean, yeah, I guess so. But I think they would be more worried. They'd be like, "No, is it?" They would have the details and they would be more worried. I don't think that if you were speaking to epidemiologists that that would be the way to open your conference. Mordy Oberstein: Probably not. If it's a really niche audience. Well, anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can get all of your events, structured data markup on all of your event pages on both Wix and Wix Studio done for you automatically. It's all automated and it all happens that you haven't got to do anything. That's what makes it great because that's automated. As this week we're talking about, should I even go to a digital marketing or SEO conference or event? How do you even know what conferences to go to and are they even worth it? What should your goals be when going to a live digital marketing event? And so you want to go to an SEO digital marketing conference, but how do you justify the cost? SparkToro's VP of marketing, Amanda Natividad will join us in just a jiffy to help you decide if you should punch your conference ticket or not. Plus, the founder of Brighton SEO's conference series, Kelvin Newman stops by the chat about how to pitch to be a speaker at a digital marketing conference. Plus, we have your Snappies of SEO News and who you should be following a social media for more SEO awesomeness. So join us as we help you summit the mountain that is deciding on the pros and cons of the digital marketing conference world as we expose you to a conference information fest on this, the 101st episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Did I miss any generic conference suffixes there? I got summit, con, world, expo and fest in there. Crystal Carter: I mean, you- Mordy Oberstein: That's a work or art, by the way. Crystal Carter: It was the kind of thing that a pundit on a panel might say. Mordy Oberstein: Well done. Well done. Okay. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: So conferences are kind of costly, they can be. There's the trip itself, the flight, the hotel, the ticket for the actual conference, and does it actually make sense to go to a live conference? I don't pay for a webinar. I just kind of show up. What's the value of going to a conference? So please welcome to the show, the VP of Marketing over at SparkToro, which is a fabulous tool. I'm just going to say that I love that tool. Amanda Natividad, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Amanda Natividad: Hear ye, hear ye. I am here with my own cowbell of some sort. Crystal Carter: More cowbell. Mordy Oberstein: More cowbell. Crystal Carter: Always. Amanda Natividad: Thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we're so happy you're here. Crystal Carter: So pleased to have you on the podcast. Honestly, a great person to talk to about this topic. Mordy Oberstein: Because full pitch, you are about to run your own conference. Amanda Natividad: Yes. Yeah, this is going to be SparkToro's first in-person conference, and we're really pumped about it. I mean, before I was marketing to marketers, I had some experience in running conferences for the HR and benefits space, and then of course my boss, Rand Fishkin, who people here might've heard have ... Obviously had built up MozCon and everything. So we have very strong opinions about conferences and we're really excited about it. I think we're really trying to do something different, something fresh, but we're also trying to figure out how to not market it that way because every conference organizer says, "No, we're different. We're fresh, we're exciting." And everyone is different in their own way. But we're going to try to figure out, well, we'll tell you what's different, and we'll position the conference around that. And then hopefully you will agree that it is different and that you will want to come. Mordy Oberstein: Where can people find it? Amanda Natividad: Oh, people can find it on the SparkToro website, sparktoro.com/sparktogether. This is the day long Spark Together summit. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Link in the show notes. Crystal Carter: And I think the thing that really makes the conference is really the vibe. That's really, really what makes the difference between one conference or another, because people will have ... A lot of conferences will have speakers and they'll have expos, and they'll have exhibitors and they'll have merch, and they'll have things like that. But really the difference is when you get there, how it feels, which is very, very tricky to, I don't know, quantify or whatever, but I certainly know that your team, the team at SparkToro, I don't think I would be wrong in describing you small but mighty. I think you've discussed that your team, you keep it tight for a reason. And I think that one of the things I'm really excited for about the event is I've met you in person. I know you energy. I've met Rand in person, I know his energy, and I know that the kinds of things that you as a team prioritize and I think it's going to be a great event because you'll be able to bring that emphasis, that energy into a real life space. Amanda Natividad: Yeah, that's absolutely the hope. I mean, so I have been toying with the idea of positioning it around, this is like an executive retreat except everyone's invited. Crystal Carter: Right. Amanda Natividad: That's kind of the vibe we want. And so by that, that means, I guess I haven't had a ton of experience with this, but I've gotten to go to a couple of events that were like founders retreats essentially, where various founders have spoken vulnerably about their stories. Like, "Here's where I got to where I am today." Or, "Here's about this time that I sold my business, and it actually went really well. But here are all the steps that we took to make sure that we were giving our employees great compensation." Things like that, that not everyone talks about at a conference. So we wanted to encapsulate that, which is why it's a storytelling conference. That's another thing we say, where each speaker is invited, speakers that we've invited, we've chosen and we've asked them to share a story that they've never told before. Something vulnerable, something really candid that has some kind of really transparent detail that they've never shared. Because our belief is that that's how we best learn. We best learn through stories and we learn through other people sharing their experiences, warts and all. So we have that. And then the other piece is, especially because it's our first event, we're keeping it relatively small. We have a goal of getting to 200 attendees. I think at the time of this recording, we have 30 or 40 tickets left and a couple months to go. So fingers crossed we get there. And the other thing we want to do is because it's going to be small enough, we're also hosting this sort of mini mastermind session where we'll put people into small groups. We'll have facilitators run the hour or so, and invite people to share a business problem that they have, a marketing problem they have, and have the group kind of workshop it together. So that's kind of the retreat sort of aspect. Mordy Oberstein: I really like that storytelling. That sounds really, really interesting because I'll say this, I don't want to sound like a snob when I say this. I've been to a lot of conferences before over the many, many years, and at this point, my conference journey, I don't really enjoy the session so much. That's not why I'm going to a conference at this point. So hearing something like it's someone sharing something they never really told before, it's a little more vulnerable. I would actually be interested in hearing that because I haven't experienced that. And I think that when you're deciding to go to a conference, I think that's one of the things you have to think about is, where are you on the spectrum right now? Because younger me would a million percent want to go do all of the sessions and would gain value from all the sessions. Whereas older me, because I'm an old person ... I'm actually middle age, which is ... My back hurts, which freaks me out. Crystal Carter: You are lucky if it's just your back. I'm just saying. Mordy Oberstein: It's not just my back. Older me doesn't find that same value anymore. So if you think, "Should I go to a conference or should I not go to a conference?" I think that's the wrong question. It's like, where are you right now? What will you get out of a conference at this point in your career? Amanda Natividad: Yeah. You know what, added to that, you also mentioned this at the intro of the show about where we may be as an industry, or maybe not industry, but the average attendee is at is, there's a lot of great content on YouTube, a lot of really good webinars where people are sharing playbooks, tactics, and those are great. But I guess what I as an organizer think about are, well, you can get all that already on YouTube, other webinars, and I don't know if people are going to come to our conference because they want the best tactics. I feel like it's because of the experience as a whole. And the experience as a whole is going to sessions that you wouldn't see otherwise online. So that's the other thing. At Spark Together, we're asking speakers to share a story but only tell that story at our conference. And that's kind of it. And it's not going to be recorded. And we are also going to foster the networking aspects so that it's going to be a little bit easier for people to meet people. We're going to have it at a nice venue. All the things that you can't really do online. So I actually feel like it's more important than ever that conference organizers really try to double down on the experience as a whole or on the networking aspect. Or it could be anything, right? Maybe it's food, maybe it's like this is a luxury kind of conference, you're going to get like multi-course meals. I don't know. But I just made that up obviously. Crystal Carter: I think also one of the things that I really value, I go to a lot of conferences, I speak at a lot of conferences. I volunteer at the Women in Tech SEO conferences. I've spoken at those as well. We've exhibited at Brighton SEO on a few occasions. So I do a lot of conference stuff. The thing that I really enjoy about the in-person aspect of it is being surrounded by your peers I think is super, super important. I went to a conference right after the Content Goblins Verge article came out, and it was so much fun seeing people wearing Content Goblins and somebody with an inflatable alligator and that sort of stuff. That's great. And it makes you feel, I think a lot of times marketers can very often be the only one. They are the head marketer and they're the only marketer at their company. And even in larger companies, you might be the SEO or you might be the one person who's handling that particular aspect in there and you're not able to bounce things off. So even being in the audience and hearing the questions that other people are asking, you can go, "Oh, yes, I have been wondering about that, and I'm not the only, that's great." And so that feeling of connecting with your peers I think is really, really valuable. So I think you mastermind bringing people together for networking, that's a great aspect of it. I think it's really, really important to facilitate and make spaces for that. Amanda Natividad: Yeah, I'm excited about it. And Crystal, now I'm very curious to hear from you, since you go to so many conferences and in different capacities, I imagine you have a top three or five that you really, really like for various reasons. So maybe of three, let's say random, because I don't want to say, hey, force rank all of them, but what are some of the things that you love about some of your favorite conferences? Crystal Carter: So first of all, Amanda, this is my podcast and I asked the questions. Second of all, thank you. So yeah, so one of the things I like, I remember being at Brighton SEO San Diego for the first one and Mordy was there as well, and we had a great time. One of the things that I found that was so much fun was that I literally met people, I was walking by and I looked at somebody's lanyard and we had him on the podcast, Will was on the podcast. And I was like, "You're the SEO from the Mayo Clinic." And it was literally, I had a full fan girl experience because I am fascinated by the SEO of the Mayo Clinic. And I walked by and I was like, "Oh my God, you work on the Mayo Clinic. That's amazing." Similarly, when I was at MozCon last time, I was sharing data from Rick Steve's community blog, and I was like, "Yeah, the Rick Steve community blog, they've seen loads of this massive hockey stick from the discussions and forums feature on Google." And I heard a whoop from the crowd. And then in lunchtime, the community blog SEO from Rick Steve's was like, "That's my blog. That was me whooping." I got a picture with them. Do you know what I mean? Amanda Natividad: Yeah. Crystal Carter: You're making the face that I was making, which was like, "Oh my God." So I think that, and that's what I mean with that peer thing is that you meet people. I met the SEO team from Suzuki, and I have a Suzuki and I love my car. And I was like, "Oh my God." And they were like, "We told our boss that you were so excited about it…" So I think it's really fun to find those moments of connectivity within your industry. And I think that that can really help invigorate how you feel about what you do and help you to keep going with learning. You meet people who you've only met online and things like that. And Mordy, I can see you want to jump in as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You sit here, I work remotely. So you sit here, you think, I am this weirdo who's doing SEO stuff and there's no one else out there. I mean, you see people on social media, whatever, but that connection of like, "Oh, there are other people who are like me," does motivate you, and I wouldn't sell that short. It is a really, really, really important thing. I'm not saying that's going to be the thing that you're going to say to your boss like, "Hey, I'm going to go so I feel like emotionally reinvigorated." That's probably not what's going to sell them on spending all that money to send you. But for yourself, it's really important you come back, you're motivated, you feel connected to a whole community, and that has a lot of psychological value that I wouldn't discount. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you're also able to ask people, like whenever I speak, people come up to me and they're like, "Well, how did you do that? Tell me more about this." Or I have people who are like, "Yeah, I'm running..." So I talked about forums at my last MozCon. The guys from Houzz, which is a design website, they came and talked to me about their thing and what they're experiencing and lots of great stuff. I know people go and talk to Lily Rae about all the different things that she's doing. As a speaker, honestly, I got to chat to Britney Muller for ages at MozCon. Fan girl me was losing her mind, I'm not going to lie. And so I think that there are incredible opportunities to connect with people in a way that you cannot do online when you join an in-person event, and there's plenty of time to do that as well. And you're focused because you're there. You're not being distracted by additional activities and things like that. So yeah, I think that in-person conferences are really, really super valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Amanda, you were just at MozCon, right? Amanda Natividad: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so- Amanda Natividad: What was it like? Mordy Oberstein: I missed it. A little bit of a FOMO, but we were talking about it before we started recording, it was a great event. What for you made that an event that worked for you? Amanda Natividad: The experience as a whole was great. What were some of the highlights? The food was really good. They had some good treats. They had mochi donuts. I can't say that first. Crystal Carter: The donuts were phenomenal. Amanda Natividad: They were so good. Crystal Carter: I had four of those donuts. They were delicious. Amanda Natividad: Yeah. Oh, they were so good. Honestly, really not just saying this, but the photo booth that you guys had set up for headshots was such a standout for me because I was like, "Oh, I haven't taken a headshot in six years." And it's not something I'm going to pay for just because I don't know, I'm cheap or whatever. I guess personally, I don't think to like, "Oh, I'm going to get a professional photo of myself." I just don't think that way. So when I saw it, I was like, "I need to do this." And then the photographer that you had was so mindful about each person. He took his time with each person. He showed me how to fix my hair, which no one had ever showed me how to do because I get these flyaways, right? He was like, "Smooth them out." He was like, "Smooth out your hair." He's like, "Pull it into two sections, smooth it out, and then smooth it out again." I was like, "Oh, oh, the flyaway is gone." But no one had ever taught me that before. But that's a small thing. Those things matter because I, as an attendee, felt really special for five to 10 minutes. And I'm not a speaker there. I was there to just hang out. I felt so special, got to cross something off my to-do list. But the other thing that was really special for me was, well, meeting a bunch of speakers who I was previously friendly with, who I was finally meeting in person. That was great. But one key moment for me was I met someone who was a big fan of Rand Fishkin, and he was like, "Oh, I'm a fan of you too," or, "I like you," or whatever it was. We had a nice conversation and he mentioned, he was like, "Do you know if Rand is going to stay?" He's like, "It would mean the world to me to meet him, because he's the reason I got into SEO and stayed." And I was like, my heart. I was like, oh. I was like, "He's not staying after. I will make sure that you meet him." And this person was like, "Okay. And I'm like, "No, we'll find him." And then Rand came by eventually, and I was like, "Rand, come here. You have to meet this person." He came over and this guy was so sweet. He was like, "Could you sign my book?" And he came from, I think he traveled from Nicaragua and he brought his book with... His Lost and Founder book. And I was like, "Oh my gosh. He traveled with that for this in case he got to meet Rand." So of course Rand signed it. And then I was like, wait, I got to get into full.... I don't know what this is, like momager mode maybe. But I was like, "You guys should also take a picture." And I saw his soul leave his body. He was like... I think he even made that sound… Mordy Oberstein: Like that aura sound, the heavens have opened. Nice. Amanda Natividad: I took a picture. Let's take a couple. So I took a couple and he was shaking and it was the sweetest thing ever. And then at some point I could sense that he was blacking out and not saying anything. So then I was just like, "Rand, you are the reason he got into SEO and stayed." And then he finally snapped in. He was like, "Yes," and then was able to talk again. But it was the most adorable thing. And I started to cry because, just to see somebody who was also just so influenced by Rand and to finally to see on his face, "Holy crap, one of my professional dreams is coming true right now," to be able to witness that for someone else was incredible. I was crying. I was like, "Don't look at me." It was a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: So super hard contrast because that's a great story. That person didn't sell their boss on, I really want to get my book signed by Rand because I got inspired by Rand. There's no boss, unfortunately, who's going to say, "You know what? I'm going to fly from Nicaragua to Seattle. I'm going to put you at a hotel, pay for the conference. You got it." How would that person sell the conference? How do you sell it? Because all the things we're talking about are things, unfortunately, and I say unfortunately, that your boss probably doesn't care about. Crystal Carter: Dude, you're killing the buzz. Mordy Oberstein: I told you hard contrast. First off, you're expecting something different from me other than killing the vibe? Crystal Carter: This is our hundredth and one podcast, Mordy. No, I'm not expecting anything different. Amanda Natividad: Well, now, it's like, oh, the rain cloud just came on this beautiful story. But you're right. No, you are right. You can't tell your boss, "Oh, it would mean the world to me to maybe meet this one speaker who's been formative in my career." Sure, any decent boss would be like, "Oh, that's really cool." That's not a reason to expense this. I think that's when people say, right, because we... Rand did this survey several weeks ago maybe about why people choose an event, and the number one reason was the content, because I think it goes back to when you go to your boss and you're like, "Hey, I need to buy a plane ticket, get a hotel, but I can get a discount or I'll stay at a cheap hotel. I need to buy this ticket." Then it's like, okay, why are you going? And then you as an attendee, a person who wants to expense it, ultimately what you have to lean on is, well, the content's going to be really great. And I think it's figuring out what's unique about the content or speakers that you can position to your boss. So for SparkTogether, I might say, look, these are brand new talks of all these... Here's a speaker list. Look, some of these people are agency founders like us, or they are people who've built their audiences from scratch, and I really want to learn from them. But here are the people that are relevant to us and our business needs. Here's why I think they're relevant. They're also going to tell stories or give presentations. If your boss doesn't care about stories, they're going to give presentations they've never given before, and it's only for this audience and it's not going to be recorded, so I have to be there in person to learn all this. And they're going to tell all these stories and here's some examples. Someone once told a story about this multi-million dollar or million dollar content project that failed or near failed, and they had to fix it two days prior. I want to learn from that story. Or I'm going to learn from this person who they are an agency founder who had to meet some ridiculous, lofty revenue goal of, I think going from five figure ARR to going to over... or was it AR... Yeah, no, I think it was five figure ARR because it was small to get it to over 200K in three months. That's a ridiculous goal. So I want to learn from these people, and this is the only way that I can do it. I think that's one case you can make. Crystal Carter: I think also it can be extremely good value for money. If you think about an all day conference and you're going to all the sessions and you're hearing about all those different things, if you go to a good conference with good speakers, every single speaker is going to be giving you resources, links, stuff that you may not have considered. I'm thinking of, I watched Talia Wolf's talk at MozCon this year, for instance, and she was just like resource after resource after resource, link, link, link, link, link. And I was like, oh my God, if you've ever watched Aleyda Solis speak, she's like this one and that one and that one, and she'll give you a full play by play. Similarly, I think people underestimate the value of the exhibitors, but I've been to conferences, like MarTech conferences where I've seen stuff that I didn't even know existed. There were exhibitors there who were... And they're like, "This is my new stuff. This is my best thing." Because they spent money on the booth, they're doing the thing. So they're like, "This is my best thing that I have to show." And I remember seeing heat maps, but this is way, way, way, way, way back in the day. But I was stood there and they were like, "Yeah, we can track your eyeballs." I was like, "You can track my eyeballs?" I remember being blown away by this. I'm dating myself. But the exhibitors are able to show you stuff that you might not have even considered. They'll be giving away discounts on things, they'll be giving away things like that. And I think that if you were to think about how long it would take you to do CPD, that same kind of CPD over the course of a year or something, whereas how much you can get done in two days of all of those resources, all of that learning, all of that knowledge, those mastermind sessions you're talking about, the networking where you can meet other people who are connected to you, it can be very good value for money if you're thinking about it in that way. Mordy Oberstein: And just find that pain point. Every company is dealing with something. I don't know, AI overviews. How do we going to handle AI overviews? Well, so-and-so is speaking at whatever conference, and they wrote a whole bunch of articles about AI overviews. I would like to pick that... Mike King and Rand are going to be at the conference. I would like to pick their brains about AI overviews. So it's the sessions and who's going to be there that can help you solve business problems that you're currently facing because you're always facing some kind of thing. Amanda Natividad: Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, as you were saying that, I had an idea for marketing our conference. It's like, oh, I got to put a pin in that for later, because this is a really good idea because you called out Mike King and Rand Fishkin. And Mike King is speaking at SparkTogether. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Amanda Natividad: I was like, "Oh gosh, I need to write specific value props for each session and speaker, and then somehow send them to people." Anyway, sorry. That was weird. Mordy Oberstein: That's what we're here for. This is a brainstorm session. Crystal Carter: Yeah, anytime. Anytime you want to kick the tires. Amanda Natividad: Yeah, this is like a public brainstorm, right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: We should totally record actual brainstorm sessions. Then we would have the pinata idea for the conference, which is brilliant. Anyway, I'll tell you about that after the recording though. After the recording, Amanda Natividad: What comes out of the pinata? Is it going to be with stickers? Crystal Carter: Moving on. Mordy Oberstein: I think we have to move on. Amanda, where can people find you? Amanda Natividad: Oh, they can find me... Well, let's see. I'm mostly on LinkedIn nowadays. My personal site is amandanat.com, but mostly really go to Sparktoro.com, try out our audio research tool and consider coming to SparkTogether. We would love to have you. And I'll hug you in person if you're the hugging type. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. We'll put all the links in the show notes. Check out Amanda's and Rand's content on social media. It's really, really good. Those videos are great. I really enjoy them, the little ones that Rand's putting on LinkedIn. I even comment sometimes. I never comment on LinkedIn stuff. So big shout out for that, and thank you so much for joining us. Amanda Natividad: Thank you for having me. This so fun. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. So sometimes you don't want to attend a digital marketing conference. No, no, no. You want to speak at a digital marketing conference. But before that happens, you have to pitch to the conference and get that pitch accepted. And there's no one I can think of more qualified than the founder of brightonSEO himself to help you understand the best way to do that. So here's Kelvin Newman as he joins us for a little segment that we call Across the Wixverse. Oh, so before I get to Kelvin's little tips here, why am I calling it across the Wixverse because usually we talk to Wix folks about across the Wixverse? But in case you were wondering, we have been headlining brightonSEO for a good while now, the UK and- Yeah. And San Diego. So I kind feel like we're one big happy family. So it's across the Wixverse. Crystal Carter: There we go. There we go. Yeah, it's such a brilliant experience working with the brightonSEO team. Shout out to Kelvin and shout out to Andrea as well, and everybody there who does great work. Mordy Oberstein: They're really great to work with. So if you want to work with them and sponsor them as well, I'd recommend it. How's that for an endorsement? Okay. Anyway, enough of that. Here's Kelvin Newman on how to pitch to a digital marketing conference. Voiceover: Three, two, one, ignition. Liftoff. Liftoff. Kelvin Newman: Want to become a speaker at one of our events? Well, I wanted to share some practical advice on what we look for in speaker pitches. Now, first up, it's good to know that we get tons of speaker interest in brightonSEO. We could program a hundred tracks and still have more pitches than we have available slots, so it's quite competitive in that selection process. When we're choosing the talks, we tend to focus on speakers with advanced and practical knowledge that they're putting into their pitch. We also love working with new people too, so don't let a lack of experience put you off. In fact, actually sometimes being a first-time speaker can sometimes aid and help your application. We handle all of our pitches via a form that's up at brightonseo.com/pitch. We don't take pitches via LinkedIn or email. And by filling in that form, we get to know you a bit better, your background, your interests, and what we're most interested in, the potential topics for future events. So do spend some time thinking about that topic title as it's one of the key elements that we use when assessing pitches. We don't have a formal pitch timeline. If we like your submission, we'll reach out when we're planning the next event. We normally start planning about six months before the conference and invite people in waves as well. It's worth saying we only get back to successful speakers and we never fully decline a talk. So when we're inviting those speakers in waves, we like to have options if speaking starts to open up because people do and often have to drop out of events. And sometimes we can have people changing topics and all that kind of thing, so we like to have a bit of flexibility there. So we never formally decline a talk because a talk's always in consideration. We may indeed even roll your pitch forward to a future event as well. But if you don't hear back from us at that moment in time, you haven't been selected. Here's some practical advice as well in terms of what we're looking for in the talk topics themselves. We like them to be actionable. Our audience loves practical how-to information. So aim for takeaways like tasks, tools or recommendations that people can go and immediately put on their to-do list. Also try and make you talk specific. So the more specific the topic is the more likely it is to be chosen and reflect that in your pitch as well. So detailed titles and descriptions tend to win us over, so we like those. It's very clear what it's talking about rather than a big, broad topic. And usually the more detail there, the easier it is for us to understand what you're going to be talking about. And we also suggest that you avoid the basics. Our audience generally is not new to digital marketing. It's not new to search marketing measurement, web analytics and paid search and all that kind of thing as well. So generally speaking, aiming your talks at intermediate or maybe even advanced audience members is a good way of getting your talk selected. Yeah, no self-promotion. We avoid pitches that focus too much on your tool or your clients. A case study can occasionally be good, but make it about the audience, not you. Again, if you've done some particular research or it's a new piece of information or a research project, that can often be a nice thing to have in your pitch. And also be authoritative. It is really, really good if you know your subject inside and out. If you can demonstrate that here's a blog post I've written about it, here's a video, here's a previous talk I've done around that, that can often help you as well. And also keep the topic tight. Most of our talks are 20 minutes long. That is not a lot of time. We'll often get many pitches that look very good and potentially could be very, very good talks, but just the scope of what they're intending to cover is too broad for our particular program. So keep it tight, keep it the kind of thing that would definitely work in 10 to 15 minutes. Even though you've probably got 20, that will give you a bit more space to play with. And also, if you've spoken at lots of events before, rather than pitching again, I'd really encourage you to try and find a friend or a colleague, someone you know who's not spoken at an event before and mentor or encourage them to put themselves forward rather than applying for your 25th speaking slot. That's good karma as well. So yeah, if you've got an idea for a pitch, we will very soon be looking at the pitch ideas for our 2025 conferences. Go to brightonseo.com/pitch and get that submission in. Voiceover: 3, 2, 1, ignition, lift off. Crystal Carter: He's got some great insights there on first-time speakers. And I think that brightonSEO in particular, the UK edition is literally the biggest SEO conference in the world, and they are incredibly welcoming to first-time speakers. I remember the first time I spoke at brightonSEO, and they were really friendly. They have a whole program that supports first-time speakers. So not only are they welcoming to people, but also they have a presentation support. So they have a day in London where you can go and you can practice with somebody if you're not used to presenting. They also have a little group chat so that you can talk to other first-time presenters, and they also help you figure out your accommodation, all that sort of stuff. So they're really, really supportive. And I think that it's really, if you're looking to be a first-time speaker, it's good to look at conferences that welcome first-time speakers because they tend to also have that kind of support, which is really, really valuable and can help you move forward if that is a thing that you want to do. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and that's one of the great things about brightonSEO is their speaker line-up really is diverse and they do really have people you never really heard of before, which is I think unique for a digital marketing conference in general. I found it interesting, by the way, the focus on the title that he mentioned because you would think like, no, I'm going to have a description in there and it's really purposeful and it'll be really impactful and meaningful and yada, yada, and it might be. But I think you have to realize, maybe I'm reading between the lines here, Kelvin, by the way, thank you Kelvin for that submission. We shouldn't thank you yet. I would read between the lines of what he's saying. They're getting probably hundreds, maybe more of pitches and sifting through them as difficult. And having a headline like an article you're writing on your website, having a catchy headline is a way to pull that reader in, in this case the founder or the review board of the conference. You might think don't put such emphasis on the catchy title. I'll catchify it later once I get the pitch accepted, but maybe do it now so that you get their attention, and then have the very meaningful and prolific substantial description of what you want to talk about. Crystal Carter: And I think the other thing is so have a look at the, brightonSEO has their pitch form available all year round. It's really, really useful to give you the kind of idea for what somebody is looking for from any conference speaking pitch. So they ask you to send in your pitch title, the information. They also ask you to send in links to your social media profile. They also ask you to send in links to any talks that you've done or any articles that you've written, which basically helps them to realize how... Because it may be that you're a great SEO, you're a great marketer, you're a great agency owner, but maybe you're not big, maybe you don't have a huge following just yet, for instance. That doesn't mean that you don't have information to give. That doesn't mean that you don't have value to add. But if you've written an article somewhere, if you've done a webinar that you can share, if you've done a podcast that you can share, that's show don't tell, which is really, really, really valuable. And I think that sometimes with people who are like, "Oh, I want to do speaking." I'm like, "Cool. You don't necessarily have to go straight in on stage. You can demonstrate your expertise in a few other ways." And the blog could be on your own blog. The blog could be on LinkedIn. The blog could be wherever. It could even be a really good LinkedIn post. Let's say you write a really good LinkedIn post. Some people write whole essays on LinkedIn and let's say it went viral, or let's say you did one of those little carousel things. I know people who do really well with those as well. You can share those, for instance, to give people the kind of idea of how you do what you do, and that helps people to qualify you as a speaker, even if you haven't done speaking before. And if you can show that people are interested in what you're talking about, let's say a viral post or something that's got a little bit of, not necessarily attitude, but I guess personality can be really, really useful. Mordy Oberstein: I'll say also if you pitch and you don't get accepted, it's a numbers game to a certain extent. It's par for the course to not get accepted to multiple conferences. It's probably expected that you're going to pitch to 100 and get accepted to one kind of thing, so don't be too hard on yourself. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think also in terms of the numbers game, supply and demand. For SEO for instance, there's a lot of people that are going to be talking about keyword research. How are you talking about it in a different way, for instance? Almost every year, almost every time before brightonSEO Kelvin puts out a shout saying, "We need more technical SEO talks." So for instance, if you are somebody who is able to talk about technical SEO, you're probably more likely to get through than somebody who's talking about say content marketing because there's a lot of content marketing folks. And I think also the personality type of content marketers tends to be more like, "Yeah, let's talk about all the things," and technical SEO folks tend to be more like head down looking at a million spreadsheets, that sort of thing. So I think that when you're thinking about it, and this is I think what he was talking about with the talk title, try to find an angle that's unique. That if there's something that you feel that people aren't talking about, try to find that to talk about. It's certainly something that I try to do when I'm pitching, and it's certainly something that I think I've seen be really effective. Now, you don't want to go too far out in the weeds. You don't want to be pitching, I don't know, a JavaScript deep dive talk to a content marketing thing. If it's not positioned for content marketers, you don't want to be like, "Oh yeah, here's how you do Ruby on Rails." They're not going to care. But you want to make sure that maybe it's a unique angle on something that appeals to that audience, and that'll make a big difference. Mordy Oberstein: And again, build that out beforehand. I think a lot of the work that you're going to do for the pitch is done beforehand. So write an article, not about that exact topic, but adjacent to that topic. Build up that brand, your personal branding around that area in whatever topic you want to talk about so then when you go to pitch it, you have that cache of like, "Okay, I've done this before around this topic. I did an article here. I did an article there. I did an article here. Here's the next evolution of this topic that I'm going to do uniquely for you," but you have something you can kind of grab onto. Crystal Carter: Definitely make sure you have things that are adjace. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that's my new word, by the way. I use it all the time. Crystal Carter: I noticed this. Mordy Oberstein: It's because there's a podcast that I listen to. This is great. It's going off-topic for a second. There's a sports podcast that I listen to, and it's the announcer for the New York Yankees is a sports nut, okay? And I don't know, 10 years ago, they brought in a guy who does a hip-hop show on another radio station in the morning to do the afternoon show that they do, the sports show, to get the younger audience. And it's a whole big audience fight because the real sports nuts don't like him because he's not a real sports guy. It's great. Sal from Staten Island does not like Peter. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. Mordy Oberstein: But he uses that word all the time, and I stole it from him. Crystal Carter: Right, okay, okay. So you're picking up the lingo. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, from the cool people who happens to be another forty-year-old Jewish guy, so whatever. Crystal Carter: Hello, fellow kids. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Welcome to our podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Then there was another forty-year-old Jewish guy, Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry has a million years experience or whatever. He started when he was 14. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Crystal Carter: It's crazy. Barry, what? 14 years old, Fourteen-year-old Barry was like, "You need a website." Mordy Oberstein: Can I develop an app for you? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Here's some news about SEO. Crystal Carter: Right, straight in there. Straight in there, no flies on him. Mordy Oberstein: So by the way, in case you're new to our podcast, which, hi and welcome, this is the part we pivot into the SEO news by waxing poetic and/or trolling Barry Schwartz who does all the SEO news. Crystal Carter: And who is our co-host on It's New, which is a daily dose of little tidbits, little snippets of information on the latest SEO News. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. If you love SEO news, if you love this segment of the podcast, check out It's New on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. It's right there. You show up, you see Barry's face, see our faces, Greg Finn. Just click on that, get some daily news. Anyway, it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, one article for you this week, just one because it is a mouthful. This from Barry Schwartz over on seoroundtable.com, my interview with Google search liaison on the August 2024 core update. My interview not being my interview, but Barry's interview with Google search liaison, Danny Sullivan. I'm going to go into sports radio host announcer mode here with this. I have a bunch of comments to make. It's a great interview. There's a lot in there. There's way more than the true one that I can possibly put into the Snappy News, and I already feel like this section is not going to be so snappy at all. I'll link to the article in the show notes. Have a look at it. I'm pulling out some random quotes from Danny throughout the article. I'm just going to comment on them and try to be as forthright with my thoughts as possible in a productive way. Okay, where do I want to start? Let's see. Okay, Danny said, "Yes, we have increased the amount of social content that appears in search." He's talking about Reddit. "The social content is indeed helpful for many queries. It's not perfect, but we continue to improve on it, but it can be very helpful. It can be very helpful in some cases to hear from other people who are encountering health issues that are looking for support." So this obviously is a response to the whole Reddit's, I'll call it a snafu like Reddit here, Reddit there, Reddit everywhere. Danny said afterwards, "When Reddit is actually outranking the content that actually produced the original thought," which has happened. There's been a whole, I don't know, hoopla about that, and that's not good, but social content is great. I am somewhere in between on this. Yes, there are a lot of things where the social content can be really good. I think it's not diverse enough, meaning you don't have enough diversity in the forums, the diversity type of content. And as you'll see later, Danny does talk about more firsthand experience content that's not actually social. So I think the reality is somewhere in the middle there. So on the whole social thing, Danny was talking about, or Barry asked Danny about the hidden gems update, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Danny was talking about they want a little bit more content that's not just social, that takes things from a authentic human voice point of view, beyond social. So for example, Danny said, "One of the sites I saw on the feedback, I'm referring to the feedback form they sent out with the March update, it helps you understand if something was in a movie or a TV show that you want to buy, that's amazing," he told me. Sullivan added, "I would like to see us do better by them, and it's where we're trying to find a way to do better surface this kind of authentic human voice type of content." So Google is looking to move past pure social media for human voice, human experience content. I've talked about that a lot. The Reddit is a default. They don't have anything better. They are looking for actual longer form web content that is human voice or human experience-centric. I don't think it exists. Here's my sports radio critic voice coming in, to me, part of the problem with that is Google. I don't think Google is rewarding that kind of content enough. Meaning content creators are just going to follow what Google is rewarding. That's how the incentive cycle works. So if Google's not rewarding that kind of content, what incentive are you creating to produce that kind of content? And on the same front, I don't think Google's doing enough to actually explain what that means. And this is where I feel like there's a little bit too much of a critique about Google and what's going on with the algorithm, yada, yada, yada. I think Google is trying to get it right. I don't think they're trying to mess things over, like Danny said, because our goal is if you're doing good content, we wanted you to be successful. I think it's a hundred percent true. They want the best content to rank. It's in their best interest. It's in their best bottom line interest. So I think a lot of the narrative like Google's just nefarious, they're not. Getting this algorithm right is complicated. I'll get into it in a little bit in a second, because I have another quote that I want to get into. I'm actually going to end on that quote. They're not trying to get this wrong. They are trying to reward the best content. Part of the problem is si that I don't think people really understand what they're talking about. Danny said, as I've said several times on social elsewhere, if you know you're producing great content for your readers, that's your touchstone, your North Star, whatever you want to call it, if you're feeling confused about what to do in terms of rankings. Again, Google has been saying over and over again, do what's good for your readers. Do what's good for your audience. Maybe it's a little bit of a hot take. I don't think the vast majority of the web understands what it means to create good content. What does that mean? As a former teacher, someone with a master's degree in education, the pedagogical approach Google has here is non-existent. It's basically Danny, and I don't think it's Danny's job. Okay, I'm ranting now. I don't think it's Danny's job. Danny's job isn't to be a teacher about content on the web. You need to have some kind of content liaison to basically show you what does it mean to create really good content. Because what you basically have is insanity. You have basically people going through the quality readers guidelines and trying to reverse engineer that to get an understanding of what quality content is. That's not going to be successful. And at a certain point, what happens is when Google goes out there... And I think their intentions are good here. I think Danny is doing a great job with this. I just think it's not his job. But he goes out there and starts talking about create good content for your users, yada, yada, yada, it falls on deaf ears at this point because there's not enough context behind it. What does that mean pedagogically? What does it mean to create good content? And Danny has done, I think, a good job trying to show the best that he can in his limited scope there. He gives a couple of examples of some sites who requested," Hey, here's some feedback on the March update. Why did we lose rankings?" And he's offering, "Hey, well, maybe you should have because you didn't do this," or, "Your content is not as good because of X, Y, and Z." And that's really good stuff, but it's a little bit here, it's a little bit there, and it's just pedagogically you're not creating a knowledge scheme. So I think there needs to be a little bit of a shift. If Google's really serious about getting that content created that really has a human voice to it, they need to, A, incentivize the content by ranking such content, but they also need to actually show you what that actually means and what that actually looks like a little bit more in depth. And I don't think this Danny's job. I don't think it's fair for anybody to think that's Danny's job. That was a mouthful. Okay. One of the things Danny said I wanted to also talk about really, really quick is basically says if you move from first to second on the SERP and you lost traffic because of that, and you can lose traffic because of that, it doesn't mean we don't like you, meaning Google doesn't like you. You're ranking number two. That's great. But you might just not have the ability to earn as much traffic as you did before. I want to touch on that point because I think sometimes as SEOs we're like, "Oh, we'll get you ranking number one and we'll get you the traffic," and Google could just move you to number two and it's impossible to know why they moved you to number two. And it can mean a significant traffic loss and there could be nothing to do about it. So sometimes we think we have control over the system or it's clearly mapped out. It's not always like that. I just wanted to make that point. Okay. The last thing, I have a bunch of other ones. I feel like I've gone on too long a little bit already, but I just wanted to end off on this one. Danny was talking about some of the sites. Obviously the big narrative with this whole update was the recovery from the helpful content update in September 2023, yada, yada, yada. So Danny said, "I do think that some of those sites will continue to see good gains if they're good sites," meaning some of the sites that saw a bit of a rebound will continue to see good gains, if they're good sites and if they're "producing good content for people." "I hope that they continue to go that way," Sullivan told me. So I'm a little bit confused about that. If, and maybe again here, I'm sports analytics talk show host too much of a hot take mode right now, so maybe I'm reading too much into this. I just want to be forthright in saying that. Maybe I am reading too much into this. But if the website Danny is saying is good, they're doing a good job, then why weren't they already rewarded? Now, I do want to say that if Danny would've said, and he does say later on in the interview that it's a constant process. You can't get this right in just one update. We're going to work towards it, make continual improvements and we'll eventually get there. That, I buy. It is really hard to get an algorithm exactly where you want it to go with a super complicated algorithm obviously. And getting it exactly where you want to go is going to be super, super complicated. And I think as hard as it is, and if you lost rankings and you lost business, I don't blame you for feeling angry and I don't even blame you for screaming at me for saying this right now, because I can't imagine what you're going through. But I do think there was a little bit too much anger at Google for not just getting it right. It's not easy to get it right. It is easier said than done. That's said, that wasn't what Danny was really saying here. You're saying, "Yeah, I think they'll continue to get good gains." But look at the quote in the actual full context of the interview. It made me walking away feeling like, and this is again my speculation, Google is trying to do something with the algorithm. That to me is very clear. They have a very purposeful thing that they're trying to do. I don't know what it is, but it seems big. What it seems like to me is that Google realizes the web is undergoing a paradigm shift in ways that I'm not sure we even understand yet. And they're trying to align the algorithm to that shift, or they're trying to engineer the shift. Either one of those two options. Getting these sites that Danny's talking about up and ranking to the levels that they're "supposed to be" perhaps contradicts or is in conflict with the overall shift that Google's trying to make. And what it seemed like to me, and again, I'm really reading into this, what it seemed like to me Danny was saying was he wants those sites to improve. He thinks those sites should improve. He hopes they will improve. But there's something else in the algorithm that's currently going on that would preclude them from getting that full boost right now, because Google's got other goals in mind and it can't just engineer the algorithm to focus on improving these websites. So that I thought was interesting. Again, I thought it was a little bit of an internal contradiction. If you think these websites are great and then they're wonderful and they're writing the content that you're talking about, people should create and they should be ranking, which goes back to my earlier point. If you can't get those websites ranking the way that they should be ranking, you're fundamentally not creating the incentive cycle you need for what Danny was talking about, the hidden gems, that experience-based content, yada, yada, yada. And I see it in the algorithm updates. You'll see a couple of sites that do that kind of thing, and they do get rewarded. There are cases like that. But then you also see a ton of not like that. And it's like, okay, how do I create an SEO strategy, or a content strategy rather, where I don't know what it's going to be? Could be Google gets rewarded, Google doesn't get rewarded. It's hard to create a strategy based on something that's so not concrete. But again, kudos to Danny for talking with Barry. There's a lot of good stuff in there. The truth I think is always somewhere in the middle with all these things. Is Google getting it totally wrong? No. Is Google getting it totally right. No. Are there major problems? Yes. Have a look at the article. I've gone way too long for the Snappy News. I apologize for my speculation, but I'm going to call it the way I see it and offer my take. This is a podcast and that's what we do. And that's this week's Snappy News, or Not So Snappy News. Again, if you're looking for more news, check out It's New. It's not new anymore. It's been around for a little bit, but the news is new, so that's why it's It's New. Crystal Carter: I like it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's a good name. Anyway, which brings us to a new follower or rather a new person that you should be following on social media to get some more SEO and marketing awesomeness. This time we have Cheryl Draper for you. She used to be over at Moz and running MozCon, and now it looks like she's partnering up with Noah Lerner on a little SEO conference thingamajigger that's pending and forthcoming. That should be exciting. Crystal Carter: That should be really exciting. And she has so much experience. She recently posted that she's going to be collaborating with Noah Lerner, Sean Huber, Nick Leroy, to bring the SEO community together in San Diego around the Brighton SEO for a fringe event. And it should be really, really good. It's an SEO community bash called Brighton SEO Boardwalk Bash, which should be super cool. Cheryl is such a fantastic person. I was talking about conferences that nurture new speakers, and Cheryl and the team that she had there did some incredible work there. And I think that that's just part of the core of who she is, seeing someone who nurtures new talent and encourages people to do great things. And so I am under no doubt that she will be able to do some incredible things with her next endeavor and that the upcoming event will be really awesome. And it'll be great to see her because she brings such incredible energy to everything she does. Mordy Oberstein: So look for Cheryl on LinkedIn, and on X @CherylDraper. Link in the show notes. Yeah. Okay. So when's our flight to the next SEO conference now that we've clearly advocated that you should be going to SEO conferences? Crystal Carter: I'm just there for the swag. I'll be completely honest. Mordy Oberstein: Can I tell you one, time I showed up to a conference, it was Brighton SEO in the UK, and I didn't have enough room in my suitcase for swag. I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to go buy another bag to put all my swag." Is that wrong and silly? I don't care. Crystal Carter: Honestly. My recent one was the MozCon hat that I have, which a lot of people are like, "Oh my God, I love the hat. Mordy Oberstein: I love that hat. I'm jealous. Crystal Carter: Everybody loves that hat. People are like, "Where'd you get it?" I'm like, "Yeah, I know. It's a good hat." Mordy Oberstein: Yo, Moz people. Send me that hat. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I got it from the stat booth. I was like, "Yo, hook it up. But yeah, and we also have great swag. If you come and see us at Brighton SEO, we will be at Brighton SEO in the UK in Autumn. We will also be at Brighton SEO in San Diego in Autumn, and we will be at a number of other events with incredibly juicy, incredible, fantastic swag. So do come and check that out if you're in the vicinity. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we do a lot of live events, so come find us and take our swag. Crystal Carter: Yes. Yes. Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well that'll do it. Thank you for joining the The SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. Back next week with a new episode as we go into BotLogs, the Transformers Chronicle. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resource on the Wix Studio Learning up 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. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

The SERP’s Up SEO Podcast celebrates its 50th episode with a look back—and asks what’s next with SEO. Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter revisit the Top 10 Episodes from the last year in this compilation episode, featuring some of the greatest minds in the industry. How does duplicate content impact SERP rankings? What’s the difference between good and bad SEO content? How do you build an effective SEO team? Great conversations, hot topics, and expert SEO guests. It’s all here! From GA4 preparation to using AI writers and everything in between, SERP’s Up’s episode 50 gives you the quick hits on what’s relevant in SEO today and what’s changing. Back The best of 50 podcast episodes The SERP’s Up SEO Podcast celebrates its 50th episode with a look back—and asks what’s next with SEO. Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter revisit the Top 10 Episodes from the last year in this compilation episode, featuring some of the greatest minds in the industry. How does duplicate content impact SERP rankings? What’s the difference between good and bad SEO content? How do you build an effective SEO team? Great conversations, hot topics, and expert SEO guests. It’s all here! From GA4 preparation to using AI writers and everything in between, SERP’s Up’s episode 50 gives you the quick hits on what’s relevant in SEO today and what’s changing. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 50 | August 8, 2023 | 57 MIN 00:00 / 56:59 This week’s guests Dr. Pete I’m a cognitive psychologist and resident Marketing Scientist at Moz. My latest obsession is hunting the algorithm to find out what makes Google tick. Tom Capper Tom Capper is a Senior Search Scientist at Moz, working on the data and tools that feature in current and future Moz products. Before that, he was a consultant at Distilled for 8 years, and before that, he was a cook in a roadside grill. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahala for joining the SERP's Up Podcast where we're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the always on target, the always reliable, the always fantastic, the always on point, our own Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, fantastic people. We join you again for the 50th time. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it is delicious. Crystal Carter: It's the 50th time! What's the 50th anniversary? Is that the golden one or a platinum or something? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, what stone is it? They have different stones, right? Crystal Carter: I don't know. The big ones are nice. There's a diamond one and there's that sort of thing, but the in between is- Mordy Oberstein: It's our platinum. I'm making it up. It's our platinum episode. Crystal Carter: I can't remember. We should just Google it. But the thing that cracks me up about those things is that in-between, they're really random. They're like the paper, the styrofoam anniversary. And you're like, "What? This is not... Nobody wants a paper." They're very strange in between. Mordy Oberstein: Paper? Okay. Crystal Carter: I don't know it. The second one's a paper one. It's like what a comedown. What a comedown. Mordy Oberstein: That's terrible. Wow. Here's paper. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix where we not only have our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which you can subscribe to on a monthly basis over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also check out all sorts of SEO content from articles to our SEO monthly webinar series to this very podcast and all of the podcasts that make up this episode as you soon shall see. So check out all the great stuff we have over at the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. We say that because today's a very special episode. As Crystal said, the SERP's Up Podcast is 50 episodes old, which in dog years means we're 350, right? Crystal Carter: Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Good thing we don't go by dog years because- Crystal Carter: No, that is good. Mordy Oberstein: I'd be personally really old. Crystal Carter: Yeah, let's not get into those maths. I think we can just- Mordy Oberstein: No, no. We don't do math on this show. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: I don't do math, for the record. I don't do math. Crystal Carter: Listen, marketers are always like, "Yeah, marketing!" And then they're like, "Statistics," and you're like, "Oh yeah, cool. Yes." Mordy Oberstein: "Oh, yeah, that." They do data studies. Anyway. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Before we go any further, I just want to say thank you for listening to 50 episodes. That's awesome. Crystal Carter: It's really amazing. We've had so many amazing guests. It's been such an adventure. And thank you, Mordy, for being the best podcast buddy ever. Mordy Oberstein: Oh no, I'm not the best podcast buddy ever. You are the best podcast buddy ever. Crystal Carter: You are! Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. You are. Crystal Carter: No! Mordy Oberstein: Oh, stop. Crystal Carter: Now we've lost all the listeners. Everyone's done. They're done. Mordy Oberstein: I do want to shout out the listeners who are out there who listen every week or not every week or listen whenever they listen. I don't know how it works on a podcast. You can listen to 51. You can binge the podcast. Crystal Carter: The whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: But there have been people who have shouted out the podcast on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on social media. Folks have requested episodes and topics that we've included on the podcast. So really, thank you for interacting with us. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about the podcast and for being part of our little community. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. It's been really, really brilliant. It's really cool when people say, "Oh, I heard your podcast." I'm like, "Oh, shucks. Thanks." Thanks, guys. It's nice. Mordy Oberstein: It's really nice. It's legit a highlight for me when people do that. I do also want to shout out the folks behind the scenes that make this podcast happen. I feel like Episode 50 would be a good time to do that. So first off, Barr, you are the man. Barr is what makes this podcast happen each and every week, so thank you. Also, big shout out to the tech design and the design teams over at Wix and the entire Wix SEO Marketing team and well beyond, and a big thanks to Edge Media who produces the podcast. So Aaron and Jacob, you're legends, thank you. Crystal Carter: Thank you to everyone behind the team. We can't get it done without you. So yeah, thank you for everything that you've done this whole time, this whole time we've been podcasting. Mordy Oberstein: Big thanks to all the well-smart folks who have been a part of the podcast and contributed to it. And with that, what we'd like to do with this episode is to look back at some of the previous episodes. What we're going to do is take a look at the top 10 episodes by number of listens and explore some of the topics we took up there. But that isn't enough because there are some core SEO topics that are not in our top 10 of number of listens, so we're going to do a number of top 10 honorable mentions by topic that we thought we have to include in an SEO roundup podcast. Have to. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. What are we going to do without them? I don't know. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. But wait, I don't want to be accused of, "Oh, old, not new." So we brought on some of the folks from Moz who are going to be talking about some of their thoughts on the future of SEO and where things are headed and what they're excited about, so we have that for you as well. So join us as we look in the mirror of self-reflection with this, a very special 50th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. All right, let's just kick this off, shall we? Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Top 10. Again, this is by not top 10 we love, not our top 10 whatever. This is top 10 simply by the number of listens the episode has garnered, which by the way is completely biased just so you know because the longer the episode is out, the more listens it gets to, which is why, as I mentioned, we're also going to do the top 10 topics that we covered that we have to cover, that we have to show you and discuss in a clips episode. There was no good way to do this is what we're trying to say. Crystal Carter: We've picked out all the podcasts and we hope you really enjoy them and we want to pick out some of the top highlights from around the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: So up number one is actually number one, our first episode ever about homepage SEO and what you need to know about homepage SEO, and we had Ryan Jones talk about some of his tips on homepage SEO. Here's Ryan on optimizing your homepage. Ryan Jones: So when it comes to homepage, SEO, there's definitely been some cases where I've had some major wins, but also where I've made some pretty rookie mistakes too. I mean, I remember when I first came into the industry nearly seven years ago, my main kind of thinking was getting everyone to the homepage and then all these users will sort of magically go where they need to go. In reality, that just isn't the case at all. If you're not serving what the user actually needs, you're not going to rank and you're not going to make any money. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again, Ryan. It's a really good point. Yes, your home should be super optimized. You can have all the SEO ducks in a row, but if the experience of funneling users to the right places so that they can actually convert doesn't function well on your homepage, what good is all that? Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this was something that really stuck with me as a point is that with SEO, sometimes you're like, "Yeah, this is going to work," and then maybe it works differently from what you expect and that's absolutely something that you can learn from and as a good SEO, you'll be watching not just for the wins, but for the things that maybe didn't go as expected and how you can make that better for the next time. And he had some really nuanced opinions on that and shared some great experience around particularly the homepage, but I think also too your overall SEO approach. Mordy Oberstein: Up number two is from our Episode Number 18, all about eComm SEO. So we had Kristina Azarenko talking about internal linking and eComm, which is super important. Here is Kristina all about internal linking and eCommerce SEO. Kristina Azarenko: What I see that works really well is internal linking, and many people just focus on building external links only and they don't control them, but they forget about internal links that they have full control of. Internal links are super, super important. They help to show hierarchy of the website and also distribute authority properly. Plus, they help Google to faster discover and index or re-index internal pages of the website. And it's especially critical for eCommerce because especially if you have dynamic stock with products going in stock and going out of stock, you want Google to pick this up real quickly. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much again, Kristina. Internal linking is like the low-hanging fruit of all things SEO and particularly helpful for eComm where your pages are... You want to make sure that they're indexed because some of them are very, very similar. Crystal Carter: Internal linking can never be underrated. It helps with content clustering, it can help you get indented results. It can help Google to crawl and it also sends signals as to what's most important, and particularly if you're on a really large site, like an eCommerce site or an enterprise-level site, internal linking is such a good and straightforward win. Mordy Oberstein: Now, from Episode Number 4, we had Cindy Krum talking on and keywords, please, passé. Coming in at number three on our top 10 was our episode on doing keyword research the right way, which included a focus on entities. Here's Cindy. Cindy Krum: I think to rank well in search, in some cases we may have to go a little bit beyond topics that our website has a financial benefit for. So for instance, let's say that we are a site that allows you to adopt labradoodles. When we only talk about adopting labradoodles, Google knows that people who want to adopt a pet have more questions than just where to adopt usually. And so they are thinking about the next step of someone saying, "Well, I think I want to adopt a labradoodle" because that's how the normal process goes. You don't go, "I think I want to adopt. Let's do it today." You usually go through a research process and the more you can answer those questions and help users with their journey on the topic and not just try and sell them things, it seems like the more Google is going to count that as high-quality content, the more Google is going to understand the entity, the more Google is going to understand that you understand the entity, and you are going to have the requisite keywords clustered somewhat together or in a meaningful way that Google uses to determine if you are authoritative and an expert. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, thinking about the overall topic of authority and taking the user on a full journey and not just trying to sell to them is a great way to approach thinking about topics, entities, and keywords. Crystal Carter: Completely. There's so much more to just a keyword than the actual literal words. The context makes such a big difference and Cindy's has an ever-nuanced approach to that, and I think that as we move into a space that includes LLMs and a generative search, being more cognizant of entities is going to yield incredible results for SEOs that are taking this approach. Mordy Oberstein: Number four comes from Episode Number 29 where we spoke about a crazy little thing called ChatGPT and analyzed how it would impact not just SEO but the world, the worldwide web that is, with Ryan Laws. So here's Ryan Laws on AI as a force multiplier. Ryan Lewis: Who has the resources to vet billions of generated outputs almost every day at this point? You can't do it. So I can't say this is something I've solved at grand scale, not like programmatic SEO where you're publishing hundreds, thousands of articles at once, but we are working at a slightly smaller scale where we are basically having a human in the loop using generative AI as a force multiplier for their already great writing. So we basically think to get the most out of this technology, you need a subject matter expert who can review, who can structure, who can critically evaluate what is being generated from the generative AI, and that process is still faster than it would otherwise be. I think sometimes it's a lot more fun for the writer because you get to outsource parts of your thinking and it can even be better in some instances because it can recommend ideas that you might not otherwise have. It doesn't have the same kind of mental ruts and creative bottlenecks that humans do. But I think to your point exactly that having a person to evaluate, vet, and actually stand behind and be willing to put their name to a piece of generated content is absolutely crucial. Otherwise, yeah, we'll just very quickly descend into dystopian wild west if we're just all publishing the outputs of these models wholesale. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again, Ryan. It's a great point, the idea of using AI writers to help you scale but not replacing people seems kind of obvious, but I think it's something that's worth saying concretely and consciously. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. You should totally be thinking of this as amplifying your intelligence or articulating your intelligence or demonstrating your actual intelligence, but really you need to have some kind of intelligence to begin with. You need to have some kind of knowledge to begin with, and that's really when it works really well when you absolutely know what you're doing and then you use the AI to help you take it to that next level. Mordy Oberstein: Coming in at number five... I feel like Casey Kasem. I know I just dated myself with that reference, but coming in at number five is our interview with Jill Quick about how to prepare for GA4, which is already here. So here's how to prepare for what's already actually here. Take it away, Jill. Jill Quick: I don't think Google expected it to be as popular as it became and it swelled and we wanted more, and then we had an upgrade with classic Analytics around about 2007, and that was getting rid of the bike and giving you a moped, a scooter. So we had a little bit more with our data, we got a new user interface. And I'm saying this because we have gone through multiple interface changes. We've just forgotten it was so long ago. Now, universal Analytics where Mordy is super comfortable at the moment- Mordy Oberstein: Vert comfortable. Jill Quick: Yeah, this was 2011, 2012, and it is the equivalent of getting rid of the moped and the bike and giving us the keys to our very own universal analytics car. Now, the majority of people, we've had this car for over 10 years and you've either been the driver, the passenger, the engineer. I have met people that don't even know where the car is parked or who has the key, but you like the car. We know the car, it's comfortable, and again, it was free and you just kind of started a job, they gave you access and you drove away and got what you needed from it. With the transition to GA4, as Crystal mentioned, we had the very not necessarily best name of App and Web, and then they rebranded it to GA4 is the fourth version of that Analytics platform. And despite Google saying it's an upgrade, and it is an upgrade, but it's not an upgrade as in get rid of my crappy old car that could do with a wash and some reupholstering and give me a new one; they're taking away the car, setting it on fire this year so we can't have it anymore, and they've given us the keys to a helicopter. That is the equivalent shift that we have. Mordy Oberstein: The parable she uses about it being a different vehicle altogether, personally, was mind-blowing for me as a way of concretely understanding the difference between what I was working on and I loved so much and what I have now. Crystal Carter: Entirely. I saw her speak about this and was just like, "Yeah, I get that now." Mordy Oberstein: "That's it. I get it now." Crystal Carter: "I get it now." Mordy Oberstein: I've been trying to fit a square peg into a round hole this whole time. Crystal Carter: Right. And she's like, "Stop. Put it down. Try again." Just give it a complete different approach and it's absolutely what's required. Mordy Oberstein: Now, what would be a clips episode and not talking about AI and AI writers twice? That's what we do now. We talk about AI all the time. This time, before ChatGPT was even a big buzzword, we talked to Danny Richman in Episode Number 9 in what is our sixth most popular episode all about using AI writers the right way, and Danny talked about using it in a little bit of a different way than you might've thought. Here's what Danny had to say. Danny Richman: I think one of the most common misconceptions with that technology is that it was never really designed for writing long-form content and that isn't what it's best at doing. The areas where I found it most useful and surprising was three different categories. One is around classification, then transformation, and then in translation. So for example, let's imagine you're doing some keyword research for a criminal law firm and you are looking at all keywords that are searched for on Google that include the word conspiracy because you're interested in creating some content around the offensive conspiracy to murder or conspiracy to defraud, those kinds of offenses. Now, if you go and put a term like that into a keyword research tool, you're going to get a whole load of keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the area of criminal law and you're going to get UFO conspiracies, Princess Diana conspiracies. So one of the things you often have to do when you're doing keyword research is to filter out all the noise and just find the keywords that are relevant and applicable to the website you are working with. And that's one of the areas where a tool like GPT-3 really excels because you can very easily upload a whole load of keyword research data into a Google Sheet, and then using a very simple script, you can then get GPT-3 to classify all those keywords in a matter of seconds according to whether they are in the context of a criminal law firm. So that's something that would've taken just hours or days of work for somebody to have to do. Mordy Oberstein: To me, using AI as a way of classifying information is the way to use AI, and I think Danny is so on point, even all these months later, about how he's thinking about using AI and SEO. Crystal Carter: Totally. There's so many tasks that you can use AI to help you with and help you simplify, like arguing with spreadsheets or clustering a list of keywords into themes or taking data that you've gotten and making it more simple or cleaning up data like, "Please remove all of the cases of this and that and that." All of those things are really, really great and help you to save time so that you can do some of the more nuanced work using human intelligence. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of human and intelligence, we had Shelby Blackley and Jessie Willms over on Episode Number 2 talking all about good content and what is good content, and coming in at number seven on our most popular episodes of the SERP's Up Podcast is Jessie and Shelby's Episode Number 2, where they talked about, yeah, clicks are great, but if users aren't satisfied once they get there, what good is that? So here's Shelby and Jessie on the experience of the user. Shelby Blackey: Well, I think that the big thing about having a quality piece of journalism or having a quality piece of content is really focusing on three pillars: search intent, keyword research, and the actual reader experience and how they're immersed in the piece. When you think about search intent, it's very much like why people are searching these things, right? They're looking at what is the actual main purpose of the page. So to create a quality piece, you need to look at what's actually out there and what people are actually creating. If someone's looking up a specific keyword and they want an FAQ, how can you take that FAQ and take it an extra level? Is there a way to engage it? Can you add in schema? Is there an H2 subheading that you can add in? All of these will allow the readers to get what they need out of it. Jessie Willms: Right. So by aligning the search intent with the content that we end up creating, we can make sure that we really fulfill that request that people are making when they turn to a search algorithm or a search engine, I should say. Shelby Blackey: Exactly. And then you think about the keyword research behind it too, and we do so much around keyword research. Right, Jessie? Jessie Willms: Keyword research is the first thing that any news SEO will do when they are thinking about creating a new piece of content. We really want to first understand what it is people are looking for to understand the questions that we need to answer and the topics that we need to cover in whatever piece of content that we create. The other thing about doing keyword research as your first step is it helps inform not just what you cover but how you cover it. Like Shelby said, if you are doing keyword research and you see that other publishers are creating FAQs to answer these reader questions, then you know that this is in line with how readers want to consume this content. So a series of questions and answers is a really effective tool for creating that engagement with readers because it allows them to answer specifically the question that they're after, but also scan and skim over other questions that they might find useful. Mordy Oberstein: Intent, research experience. If you don't ensure you're giving the user targeted content and you're not actually fulfilling their needs, nothing else matters. Crystal Carter: I think people think that ranking is an indicator of what Google thinks is good, but ranking is an indicator of what Google thinks users think is good. So obviously, you have to put the users first. Mordy Oberstein: Users? That's crazy. Crystal Carter: I know. What do they need? What matters to them? What's actually good for them? They've got some great insights on that. Mordy Oberstein: At number eight is an episode all about learning SEO. Here, Luke Davis shared how he goes down the rabbit hole to learn more about SEO and perfect his craft. From Episode Number Six, take it away, Luke. Luke Davis: So I start with a Google search of the topic and basically fall down a rabbit hole of articles, videos and documentation. I tend to focus on reliable sources as they're often backed up by other articles as well. Being able to immerse myself in a subject and get to know every detail has been crucial in my understanding of many things related to SEO. If it's technical, I also like to test my skills on a demo site to see how things work, how things look, follow tutorials online or any courses that might be available. I did that recently when learning how to use a web framework called Astro, and that pushed me to pick up bits of JavaScript, which has always been my Achilles heel. It also involves breaking stuff and spending hours troubleshooting. So that kind of helps me learn what to do and what not to do and I like to think I'm much better for it. Mordy Oberstein: Using a demo site to test things out is an underrated practice in my opinion. Crystal Carter: There are so many people that I've talked to and said, "Oh, I haven't been able to practice SEO because I haven't got a job at an agency yet," or, "I don't have any clients yet." And I'm like, "Why are you waiting? Stop waiting. You can make a website right now. You can make a website right now. You can write content right now. You can distribute, you can do all of those sorts of things," that if you don't have your own site to do, I'm sure if you ask around to literally anyone, can I help someone with their website, a million people will give you an opportunity to try out some things. But also, having your own site, all of the best SEOs that I know have test sites, have multiple test sites where they test and try again and try again. So if you're sitting on the fence, just do it. Just do it. Mordy Oberstein: That's why I have BarrySEOmemes.com so I can troll Barry and test things out, two birds, one stone. Landing in at number nine is perhaps, I would say, our most important episode where we share how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice, and we had Himani Kanakria on to offer her take all about that. We're going back to Episode Number 5. Here's Himani. Himani Kanakria: It's not easy and advisable to trust any SEO advice that gets your way, especially today. These days, getting trapped into bad SEO advice is easier because any random post on any platform can get massive engagement. They talk about niche websites and then showcase how brilliantly they got great results without any solid proof of what strategy they use and how it was implemented. What you can do is verify if Google has any documentation around that advice or even you can ask any Google Search employee. I mean, I have asked John Mueller a lot, many times, and he has helped me with a lot of great advice, and even you can ask any industry thought leader as well. Mordy Oberstein: Verifying SEO advice with what Google actually says in their documentation? Crystal Carter: Woo! Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Amen to that. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Google documentation is incredibly invaluable and underused all at the same time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. And so many times when people were like, "Wow, you're so insightful," I literally just told you what's in the documentation. Read the documentation. They spend a lot of time on it. Lizzie over at the Google Search Console team at the Google Search team, she spends a lot of time making sure that it's really knowable and accessible. So yeah, always find your source, always check your sources. There's a lot of rumors around in SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Rumours, it's not just a Fleetwood Mac album. Crystal Carter: There you go again. Mordy Oberstein: Referencing myself. Oh, I'm doing the whole Casey Kasem thing. I might as well reference a musical album since we're here. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: All right, and wrapping up the top 10 of most-listened to episodes of the SERP's Up Podcast thus far because we've done 50 but there's 50 more coming, is our episode about duplicate content where we had Barry Adams share what he does and doesn't worry about when it comes to duplicate content. We're going back to Episode Number 17. Here's Barry. Barry Adams: There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, so just make sure all the pages on your own website are unique, are properly structured, well-targeted for specific topics and specific rankings. And don't worry too much about what other websites are doing with taking your content or scraping your content. Just focus on making sure your website is as good as it can be and that you have all the tools at your disposal to make sure your own content ranks and performs in Google Search results to its maximum potential. Mordy Oberstein: Yep, there is no such thing as duplicate content penalty and don't worry about sites. And scraping your content, definitely agree with that. Sites, they're going to scrape your content. These sites are so low-quality, so ridiculous. Don't worry about it. Crystal Carter: It's also one of the reasons why it's so important to make sure that you got your biographical entity sorted, that people know who you are, that you're confirming that who you are with EEAT signals across your website and that you've got good canonicalization set up and all of that sort of stuff. There's lots of signals that you can give Google that you are the authority for whatever topic you've created, that you are the authoritative voice for that piece, and Barry's got a really nuanced approach to that. And speaking of duplicate content, I've definitely said nuanced a few times in this episode, but it's at the top of my mind so there we go. Mordy Oberstein: Now, as I mentioned before, those are our top 10 episodes in order of number of listens, but we didn't talk about SEO reporting, we didn't even talk about SERP features, we didn't talk about Google updates. How could we not talk about these things if we're recapping SEO? So here's 10 more honorable episodes that we need to include that hit on some really core SEO topics. So it's, I guess, our personal topical list of episodes to include when doing a clip episode. Here we go from Barry to Barry. Barry Schwarz joined us for Episode Number 3 to talk about Google updates. So if we're doing a clip episode about SEO, we must talk about Google updates. So here's Barry Schwartz talking about which updates you should look up and know about. Barry Schwartz: So there's a bunch of Google updates that have happened over the course of, I don't know, two decades or so. Probably the most significant one that really sets the tone was the Florida update probably 20 years ago, like 2002, 2003. It really shook the SEO community. It was the first time where Google did an update where it basically said, "Hey, SEOs, stop trying to manipulate us. We know about you and our algorithms will detect what you're doing and you're no longer going to be able to fool us with easy SEO." And that really shook the industry a lot and it really set a tone for what was going to come next. Mordy Oberstein: The Florida update, little fun fact for you here. Thank you, Barry by the way. Fun fact about the Florida update, when the medic update came out, which was the August 2018 core update, the first of those really prolific core updates or the first was really the March 2018 core update, whatever, it doesn't matter, they wanted to call it Florida 2 because Pubcon was happening at the same time in Florida and that's where the first Florida update came about because it was at Pubcon when it came out in Florida. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. A little fun and history fact for you about updates that doesn't matter at all for SEO. Crystal Carter: I think it's really important to learn all the updates. I was at an SMX event and Barry Schwartz literally went through every single update and it was fantastic. Also, there were lots of slides with giant owls behind Barry, which was also amazing, but it's really important to... I'm a big fan of history and it's really important to learn history and study history because you don't know where you are if you don't know where you've been. Mordy Oberstein: Very true for SEO. Super true. If you don't understand what Google used to be able to do and what they're now able to do and what they're trying to do, it's really hard to contextualize what works and what doesn't work for SEO. Crystal Carter: Right. They're building on everything and building on everything, so pay attention, people. Mordy Oberstein: Now, no SEO conversation is complete until you talk about international SEO, which is exactly what we did on Episode Number 40 with the Aleyda Solis. So honorable clip number two, I'm calling them honorable clips, I don't know why. Honorable clip number two comes from Episode Number 40 and it's all about international SEO with the Aleyda Solis. Aleyda Solis: If you do really have the capacity and the resources, and if it is an important market for you, you should totally go ahead. And if it's a minimum effort too, you should definitely go ahead and do the extra mile and personalize because that can make a complete difference for it. So for example, back in the day, I am originally from Nicaragua, when I was living still in Nicaragua, and Nicaragua is such a small country, it's also a poor country so we were so very used to getting all of this marketing actions in TV even or in billboards or whatever that were so obviously not targeted at Nicaraguans because we actually speak... The way that we word things in Spanish, it's like in Argentina with the boss. So we put an accent at the end of each pretty much conjugation and the verbs, right? And we don't say, "Two," we say, "Boss." So we had a lot of these billboards and TV ads and whatever with the two, the two, and we were like, "Oh, this was just a generic ad for all Latin American people. Whatever, it's not for us." But then little by little, you could tell that they were making more efforts toward things to change things, and it was a minimum thing really pretty much to change up a couple of wordings, the rest was exactly the same, but at least they took care and this is actually really for us, right? The engagement and I think the connection with the brand or the offering increased. Mordy Oberstein: If you don't personalize content from market to market so that it actually speaks to those people, you are never going to come off... I hate, I don't know, stale, to use a word. I don't know, not good. Crystal Carter: See, and you've definitely read those websites where you've gone to them and you were like, "This is not..." I was on a website for somebody who manufactured rackets for tennis and their website, I was just like, "These categories don't make any sense. I don't know who translated this but I can't find anything on this because it doesn't make any sense." Mordy Oberstein: It's so obvious when that happens. So obvious. Crystal Carter: It's so obvious. Mordy Oberstein: Don't be that person. Don't be that person. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think you have a little bit of forgiveness if you've actually just clicked the Google Translate thing and you want to see if you can book this restaurant in Paris or something even though you're not in Paris, that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: Obviously. Crystal Carter: But yeah, if you're making the site and you actually want to appeal to the audience, show them that you care. Mordy Oberstein: Topic number three that we felt we had to include are SERP features because they're everywhere and they're all the time and they're dominated by them. So we must talk about SERP features, which is what we did Episode Number 11 with our friend, Kevin Indig. Here's Kevin Indig all about SERP features. Kevin Indig: For certain SERP features, absolutely. So there's some SERP features that you can "rank" in or be visible in, like image carousels, video carousels, featured snippets. People also ask about those kinds of things, but then there are others where you just, as a brand, sometimes you can bid, you can pay for being visible. In the case of the Google Flights search module for example, you can literally bid to be visible, but there are also some where you just can't do anything at all, like a Google knowledge card for example. And that's when the only thing you can do is just be aware that this happens in the search results and understand what the impact on your traffic could be. Mordy Oberstein: It's a really interesting point. Sometimes there's nothing to do. Sometimes there's a SERP feature there. There's no URL, there's no way you could show up. It's a direct answer and there's nothing you can do about it and the best thing you can do is just know that that's what's happening, and that's probably why you don't have as many clicks as you would've otherwise. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And you can make a call. You can say, "Do we try it for the SERP feature or do we just let go or whatever?" But these are things you have to think of, but it's also the reason why it's really important to check the SERP all the time. Mordy Oberstein: Al the time. If we're talking about SERP features and we're talking about checking the SERP, then we must talk about how you stay updated and looking and tracking changes on the SERP, which is what we did in Episode Number 20 with Lily Ray. So here's Lily Ray on what's been going on in the SERP and the changes she's seeing on the SERP. Take it away, Lily. Lily Ray: There's a lot of new accordions that they've been rolling out in the last year or two, so of course we see people also ask across the board for most queries these days. I know sometimes the tools show that it comes and goes, but really there's definitely been a big rise and people also asked in the last few years. But beyond that, Google's using that same kind of functionality to roll out across different types of accordions, so things like buy-in guides and things to know, for example. If you'd Google specific medical conditions or products that you might be reviewing, Google can show something like things to know or buying guides, and that's actually information taken from various different websites and kind of integrated into this accordion where you can learn about specifications about the product or different symptoms and treatments for medical conditions and things like that. Mordy Oberstein: All sorts of new accordions, it's one thing I see. There's all sorts of filters on the SERP, but the point is checking, looking and seeing, as Crystal mentioned before, what's happening and seeing, hey, not just what new feature there is, but what's the trend? What's happening trends-wise with the SERP features, very valuable in checking and seeing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it changes all the time, it changes every day, changes by device, changes by geo. So these are definitely important things to check regularly and know which SERPs are the most important ones for you. Mordy Oberstein: Now, here's a topic that doesn't belong on the list: enterprise SEO. We can talk about SEO and not talk about enterprise SEO, I feel like. However, when we talked to Eli Schwartz in Episode Number 20 about enterprise SEO, he gave a well-smart tip about how to stay hands on when you're not in a hands-on role, which is very important to talk about when we're talking about SEO. So here's Eli Schwartz from not Episode Number 20, sorry, Episode Number 33. I'll get it right. Episode Number 33 about how to stay hands on. Eli Schwartz: The other things I'll do is I'll do things that are out of my typical role as a consultant. So I'll coach new SEOs or I'll coach enterprise SEOs and help them understand and help work with them, really for my own learning, to understand how to navigate the challenges that they're working on as a part of their roles. So if they have a challenge with how do they get an engineer to do something, how do they understand the reporting they have? These aren't things that I get to do in my regular consulting, but these are things that I get to really learn and do from coaching. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting way, I never thought about it before, but the way that Eli's talking about it, but coaching other SEOs to stay hands-on. Really interesting. Crystal Carter: Yeah, mentoring is incredibly important, and also people who don't know will ask you questions and they'll be like, "But what is that?" And you're like, "It's a thing." And sometimes you realize that you actually don't know how to explain it. You've just internalized it. So the questions that you get from folks is really, really important and can be really helpful to helping you to just keep your toe in the water. Mordy Oberstein: Now, since we're talking about coaching and other people and the softer side of SEO, the softer skill side of SEO, we have to talk about communicating and building teams and how to build strong relationships with your SEO team and other teams in your organization, which is what we did in Episode Number 31 when John Mueller came on and talked about building a strong SEO team. So here's John talking about that. John Mueller: I think for SEO folks, this means you need to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people. You can't just be geeks that speak in canonicals amongst yourselves. You need to have at least one person who can converse fluently in pagination, developer, marketing, and manager talk. Mordy Oberstein: I mean, yeah, he's right. Sometimes I feel like we get lost in our little SEO bubble and we geek out on all the cool SEO stuff that we care about that no one else actually cares about, but we have to be able to break out of that SEO geekiness, for lack of a better way of putting it, to be able to communicate with other stakeholders and other teams. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because your team is wide. Of course, it's your core SEO team, but social folks are also to do with your team. The people who sign the checks are also the people in your team. The people who own the business are also in your team, and they need to know what's going on, and you need to have actionable, accessible information for them. Mordy Oberstein: Now, if you're talking about other stakeholders and other teams, that naturally speaks to SEO reporting, which is our next topic that we could not leave off of this list. If we're going to do a clip show, we're going to talk about SEO reporting because it's a major part of doing SEO. So we had Joe Hall come on during Episode Number 14 to share his thoughts about SEO reporting and KPIs. Here's Joe. Joe Hall: When trying to decide which is the right KPI for a client or project, I like to set it up in three different ways. I like to think about KPIs as either communication KPIs, strategic KPIs, or business KPIs. Communication KPIs are measurements. They communicate an idea and educate the client every time we talk about them. They're used to educate and inform about bigger ideas and things they need to focus on. I usually find these KPIs by talking to the client and asking them specifically what they're interested in. This is because these are the KPIs that they are already used to talking about and they are already familiar with. Mordy Oberstein: I love the fact that he uses education as a KPI and communication as one of his KPIs. Crystal Carter: Joe, he's a clever dude. He knows stuff. Mordy Oberstein: I will say, and no shade to our other guests, that was one of my favorite clips. Crystal Carter: I think that education should be absolutely front of mind for making sure that you have longevity and that you can respond when there are SEO changes, which there will always be, SEO changes. Mordy Oberstein: From one of my favorite clips to one of my favorite people, we spoke to Wix's own Head of SEO, Nati Elimelech, during Episode Number 24, all about SEO tools and building good SEO tools and what it means to create good SEO tools. And if we're talking about SEO, hey, we're SEOs, we love tools, how can we not consider talking about SEO tools on this clip show? So we did with Nati. Here it is, Nati talking about what it means to create a good SEO tool, Nati Elimelech: Give users the feature they want, then protect them from what they don't know or the ways they can misuse your features, and all the time, teach them how to use those features, teach them why those features are important and teach them when to not use those features. I think those are the main, main, main pillars of making a good SEO product. Mordy Oberstein: I think that focus on preventing misuse and protecting users from misuse is something that I will go out on a limb and say that the SEO tools that are out there should think about more. Crystal Carter: I think there's absolutely a sense of responsibility to our users that Nati and the rest of the Wix SEO team have to their core. It's a core tenet of how they approach creating SEO tools. Mordy Oberstein: They are a shining light. Nati is a shining light to all the other SEOs. Now, Crystal, you know what we haven't talked about yet at all? Crystal Carter: What haven't we talked about? Mordy Oberstein: We've done all these clips. We've done 27 of them I think so far if I haven't lost count. 28. We've done 28 and we haven't talked about local SEO at all. Crystal Carter: How did we not do that? Mordy Oberstein: We've gone all this time without talking about local SEO. Crystal Carter: Oh, gosh. Mordy Oberstein: How have we done that? We will rectify this right now because we are going to talk about local SEO. Claire Carlile joined us in Episode Number 15 to talk about reviews and local SEO. So here's clear Claire Carlile on reviews and a nifty little point you probably didn't think about. Claire Carlile: First of all, ask yourselves, are you ready? Is your business ready to start to get an influx of reviews? Is your product or service ready? Are there any preexisting issues because it might be a good idea to iron those out before you start getting negative reviews based on those. Mordy Oberstein: I love this. Before you're talking about optimizing, getting more reviews and more reviews and more reviews, being sure you're ready to take on reviews. If your product is not there yet and you're all about review strategy, those reviews are not going to be good. Crystal Carter: It's a hard pill to swallow sometimes. Sometimes I've had people who are like, "Oh, the reviews are bad." I'm like, "Have you seen it? Have you tried it? Have you been where the user's been? Because it ain't a good situation. We need to fix this situation because the reviews are sometimes the reflection of reality, so reality should be better." Mordy Oberstein: Which goes to setting priorities for SEO tasks, which is an episode we're going to do in the future. Don't worry, we're going to get to that, but it's really very, very important to prioritize the right way. Yes, reviews are incredibly important for local SEO. They're one of the big "ranking factors" of local SEO, but if you're not ready to get good reviews, then put that priority task at a lower priority for now and get back to it later. Now, we've ticked off local SEO. What's the other thing we didn't talk about yet, which I'm mind-blown. The last clip. We've done 29. Not 29, we've done 19. I am botching all the numbers today. Casey Kasem is rolling over in his grave. I said before we did 29. I'm like, "Wait." 19. Crystal Carter: Carson Daly's fine about it though. Don't worry. Mordy Oberstein: We did our top 10 episodes in terms of numbers and here's our top 10 topics. Content. We have not talked about content. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Basically at all. Bonkers absolutely, but we're saving the best for last. We're covering content. We're going to do it because SEO and good content, it's all one and the same. So we spoke to Erica Schneider on Episode Number 38 about how you create good content and how you do it at scale and how when you're doing it at scale, you don't lose that content quality. Take it away, Erica. Erica Schneider: You need to document your processes. You need to have goals, a mission statement, objectives. Everything that you do for your business when you want to be able to scale effectively and not fail and have everything fall apart is the same way that you should treat scaling your content operations so that you don't mess with your quality as you scale. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again, Erica. It's such a great point. You wouldn't go into a business and say, "I want to scale up this business" without a plan to make sure you maintain service quality or product quality. Walking into content should be the exact same way, exact same priority. Crystal Carter: And you need to make sure that you know that if you're going to go for quality or quantity or whatever your strategy is, that you know when you're going to reassess it, when you're going to revisit it, when you're going to take stock of your content strategy, that you have that plan planned out as well. A plan for when you will plan. Mordy Oberstein: A plan for the plan is always good to have. Crystal Carter: It's usually- Mordy Oberstein: I always do plan for planning, as crazy as that sounds, all the time. Yep. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's really important. Mordy Oberstein: So I got the numbers right now. Those are our top 20. Crystal Carter: 20. Mordy Oberstein: Got it? 20. Crystal Carter: And thank you to everyone else who did the other 30 episodes. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. There's so many. Please go check out all the great tips and all the great guests and all the great episodes. There's just so many of them at this point. There's 50, but we're not done because I said we have new. That was old and old is good, but we also want to have new material for you so we spoke to the folks over at Moz and we asked them, Hey, what are you excited about for SEO, the future of SEO? What are you looking forward to? So we spoke to Tom Capper and Dr. Pete over at Moz. Let's go to Tom first. Here's Tom on what he's looking forward to in SEO. Tom Capper: Hello, Tom Capper here, Senior Search Scientist at Moz. I think what I'm looking forward to most in SEO is Google and publishers and the SEO industry itself being pushed to engage with some of these questions that are coming up now about the content ecosystem on the web. I think mostly it's recent developments with large language models that are causing this. There's also some recent legislation in Canada that's relevant, but Google has sort of put out this invitation to contribute opinions to some new crawling standards and maybe allowing publishers to control what content is consumed by large language models. Bing is reportedly looking at revenue sharing so there's a lot happening in this space. I think on Google's side, they're recognizing here that despite their longstanding love-hate relationship with publishers, they do need them. They do need the content. They do need somewhere to send the traffic, and they've always recognized that they need to incentivize publishers to have fast and secure and mobile-friendly sites and so on, but perhaps now they're also recognizing that they're going to have to incentivize publishers to publish and to make their content accessible to Google, which is a new problem really. And then on the publisher and the SEO side of the table, this historic tactic we know so well of producing mounds and mounds of low-value content to rank for specific keywords, that is looking less valuable over time. First feature snippets, now these AI snippets, and soon, if not already, AI written content answering these questions as well so that this kind of content has become totally commoditized, a race to the bottom, increasingly hard to monetize. The publishers are going to have to focus on content that is valuable, unique, human, interesting, the kind of content that would've caused you to buy a magazine or newspaper in the first place. I don't know how all of this is going to turn out, but yeah, that's what I'm looking forward to. What I'm looking forward to is finding out. I think it'll be fascinating to watch this unfold over the next few years. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Tom. I'm with him. This goes back to our previous episodes on CTR and the future of search, and we talked about SGE and my Matlock content, which I'm not going to get into again, but I am looking forward to and I think what will happen is what he's saying, that those low-quality pieces of content just won't have the same opportunity anymore. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot of sage wisdom there in that piece and I think that we're living in an incredibly fascinating time for the web. There has been a few seminal moments, and I think that we're at a little bit of a watershed really in terms of how things are going to go. The rev share idea is very interesting, and the content quality and how people approach content quality is tricky because it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Google's saying, "Oh yeah, we'll scrape anything and we could potentially use that for our LLMs." On the other hand, the lower-quality stuff is going to be covered by the LLM, so where's the incentive for people to make the good quality content in the future? We'll see. It's fascinating. It's interesting. Mordy Oberstein: Now, what would be Moz without Dr. Pete? Crystal Carter: Dr. Pete! Mordy Oberstein: Dr. Pete, one of my favorites of all time. Love Dr. Pete. So honored to end, we're not going to end the podcast right after the recording, but to end the clips of Episode 50 with the one, the only, the mad scientist of Moz himself, Dr. Pete. Here's Dr. Pete on what he's looking forward to in SEO. Dr. Pete Meyers: Hey, all, it's Dr. Pete here. I'm the marketing scientist at Moz. So what am I looking forward to in SEO? A big one for me that it seems like it's taken a long time to come around is we say that it's not all just about individual keywords. It's not about vanity keywords and head keywords and what do you want to call them, but about clustering and topics and understanding things on a broader topical level. But what's frustrating sometimes is I don't think our workflows and our tool sets really reflect that yet. We have ways to group things and we kind of put volumes together and such as that, but I really think that as we mature as an industry and as Google and Bing mature as search engines, when we can start to understand concepts and topics and the opportunity of an entire topic, the gaps we have across a topic, the kind of content that reflects that topic, content that could reflect dozens or hundreds or thousands of keywords sometimes that we rank for into the very long tail without having to worry about those individual keywords, we're really going to come a long way because that's how people think. And I think as we get into large language models and "AI," that kind of topical understanding is getting richer, and we're seeing Richardson in Amuse and things like that. And so if we're still looking at these head terms, like, "Oh, I want to rank for best laptops," or what have you, we're missing a ton. And so to really understand that at a topical level in our tools and our datas and our report in a concrete way, I think it's going to be really amazing and give us great insights about what kind of content we should produce, what we're missing, the gaps we need to fill. So I don't know when that's coming yet. Of course, people like us are working on it, but I'm looking forward to that day and hopefully it's not too long in the future. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Dr. Pete. It is really interesting, the whole progression of how Google has been able to understand content a little more holistically and where that's going to go is super fascinating because it has huge implications on what's going be able to happen on the server, what's not going to be able to happen on the server. Fundamentally speaking, what Google is able to do and not able to do in terms of ranking and far beyond has entirely to do with how well it's able to understand content contextually. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think there's so many different ways that you can do that. You can add information onto the page, you can add information via meta tags, you can add information via structured data, you can sort out links, you can sort out lots of different things. So I think that it's important for people to consider all of the ways that Google is accessing their content in order to make sure that Google understands it well, and I think we're going to see a lot of remixing as he's hinting at, and that means that people need to understand where the core of the content lies, not just in keywords, but in the entity that's associated with the brand, with the content. Mordy Oberstein: Now with that, what we would normally do is roll right into the Snappy News, but this week, it's a special episode. Just clips, so no Snappy News. Sorry to Barry Schwartz who won't get any follow links this week. Next week, they shall return. And what we normally end off with is our Follow of the Week, but how could we have a Follow of the Week on a clip show with all these great people? Follow all of them, if you're not already, and all of our previous guests who we've had on the show from Rejoice Ojiaku, to Michelle Forton, to Debbie Chew, to Lazarina Stoy, to Garrett Sussman, to Olga Zarr, to Miracle Inameti, to Marcus Tober, to Patrick Stox, to Daniel K. Cheung, to Greg Durham, to Lucy Dodds, to Amalia Fowler, to Greg Finn, to Sarah McDowell, to Jeremy Moser, to Kelsey Jones, to so many people, Paul Andre De Vera. I could go on and on and on. Adriana Stein, Kyle Byers, Nikki Halliwell, Mike King, Britney Muller. So many people. Follow them all. I'm pretty sure I got everybody in there by the way there. Crystal Carter: Very impressed. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Not bad. I could do it in one breath. Should I start, like everybody, all 50, more than 50? I didn't miss people. Our Wix people across the Wixverse. We had Amanda Weiner on. We had Idan Segal on. Follow all these people. Crystal Carter: Follow them all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again for joining our Episode Number 50, and I just want to say thank you again one last time for listening to our podcast, for making our lives better by being part of our little podcast community, and we hope you're learning something from it. Please do reach out to us on social, on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I'm on Threads. I don't know, Crystal, if you're on Threads yet, but I'm on Threads. You can reach out to me there. If you want to offer feedback about the podcast, if you wanted to say hi, how's it going? We'd love to chat with you. If you want to request an episode and a topic that would help you do better SEO, let us know. We're there for you. Now, if you're going to miss us already, don't worry. We're back next week. We're back next week, Crystal. Crystal Carter: For more podcast fun. Mordy Oberstein: For more SEO podcasting, that's right. Crystal Carter: Episode 51. Mordy Oberstein: 51, our journey towards 100 continues, and from there to 1,000, and from there to episode a million. Crystal Carter: Episodes forever. Mordy Oberstein: Episodes forever. Thank you for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. If you're going to miss us, don't worry! As we said, we're back next week as we dive into scaling your local SEO efforts. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about seo? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. [00:02:24] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? [00:05:21] Top 10 Episodes [00:06:06] #1: Ryan Jones: Tip on Homepage SEO (Episode 1 ) [00:07:44] #2: Kristina Azarenko: Internal Linking and E-commerce SEO (Episode 18 ) [00:09:18] #3: Cindy Krum: Doing Keyword Research the Right Way (Episode 4 ) [00:11:48] #4: Ryan Law: AI as a Force Multiplier (Episode 29 ) [00:14:00] #5: Jill Quick: Preparing for GA4 (Episode 30 ) [00:16:48] #6: Danny Richman: Using AI Writers the Right Way (Episode 9 ) [00:19:24] #7: Shelby Blackey & Jessie Willms: What is Good Content? (Episode 2 ) [00:22:23] #8: Luke Davis: How to Learn SEO (Episode 6 ) [00:24:26] #9: Himani Kanakria: Difference Between Good SEO Advice and Bad SEO Advice (Episode 5 ) [00:26:24] #10: Barry Adams: Duplicate Content (Episode 17 ) [00:28:05] Top 10: Honorable Mention [00:28:38] #1: Barry Schwartz: Google Updates to Watch (Episode 3 ) [00:30:46] #2: Aleyda Solis: International SEO (Episode 40 ) [00:33:18] #3: Kevin Indig: SERP Features (Episode 11 ) [00:34:51] #4: Lily Ray: Tracking SERP Changes (Episode 20 ) [00:36:28] #5: Eli Schwartz: Enterprise SEO (Episode 33 ) [00:38:12] #6: John Mueller: SEO Teams (Episode 31 ) [00:39:32] #7: Joe Hall: SEO Reporting (Episode 14 ) [00:41:11] #8: Nati Elimelech: SEO Tools (Episode 24 ) [00:42:59] #9: Claire Carlile: Local SEO and Reviews (Episode 15 ) [00:45:13] #10: Erica Schneider: How to Create Good Content (Episode 38 ) [00:47:10] Focus Topic Guest: Tom Capper - What He Is Looking Forward to in SEO. [00:50:25] Focus Topic Guest: Dr. Pete Meyers - What He Is Looking Forward to in SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Ryan Jones Kristina Azarenko Cindy Krum Ryan Law Jill Quick Danny Richman Shelby Blackey Jessie Willms Luke Davis Himani Kanakria Barry Adams Barry Schwartz Aleyda Solis Kevin Indig Lily Ray Eli Schwartz John Mueller Joe Hall Nati Elimelech Claire Carlile Erica schneider From Moz: Tom Capper Dr. Pete Meyers Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Off on the right foot with Homepage SEO : Show me the money with eCommerce SEO The real deal with keyword research The ChatGPT episode Get ready for GA4 Is the SEO world ready for AI content writers? Uncommonly good content Back Learning how to learn SEO How to know good SEO advice from bad? How big of an SEO problem is duplicate content? The dreaded Google Update: When to worry Get going with international SEO SERP Features - Google's secret sauce How to adapt to changes on the SERP? What you need to know if you want to go Enterprise SEO Building your SEO team, the right way How to pick the right SEO tool for you? Removing the fluff from SEO reporting Building SEO momentum for growth The value of valuing reviews Other Previous Guests and Columnists From The First Fifty Episodes: Michel Fortin Debbie Chew Lazarina Stoy Garrett Sussman Olga Zarr Miracle Inameti Marcus Tober Patrick Stox Daniel K. Chung Craig Durham Lucy Dodds Amelia Fowler Greg Finn Sarah McDowlell Jeremy Moser Kelsey Jones Paul Andre De Vera Andrea Stein Kyle Byers Nikki Halliwell Mike King Brittany Mueller Amanda Wiener Purna Virji Christoph Trappe Idan Segal George Nguyen Chima Mmege Luke Carthy Rejoice Ojiaku Glenn Gabe Einat Hoobian-Seybold Adrian Stein Ann Smarty Judith Lewis Daniel Waisberg Annie Sullivan Alon Kochba Dan Shappir Jamie Indigo Christina Levasseur Rebecca Berbel Darren Shaw Amanda Natvidad Joy Hawkins Alli Berry Rebecca Tomasis Dan White Matt Southern Danny Goodwyn Loren Baker Roger Montti Brodie Clark Marie Haynes Chris Green Janet Machucuke Lidia Infante Chris Johnson Anu Adegbola Amanda Jordan Suganthan Mohanadasan Michelle Robbins Clay Kemp Sean Del Galdo Simon Schnieders Charly Wargnier Dana DiTomaso Nick LeRoy Lizzi Sassman Antoine Eripret Matt Matergia Ginny Marvin Ann Handley Kevin Gibbon Jason Brown Greg Gifford Elizabeth Rule Krystal Taing Crystal Horton Brian Freiesleben Caitlin Hathaway Gianluca Fiorelli Kavi Kardos Jamar Ramos Brandon Schmidt Casie Gilette Colt Sliva Giuseppe Caltabiano Veruska Anconitano Maddy Osman Melissa Fach Jess Joyce Anthony Barone Carolyn Lyden Jeannie Hill Henri Helvetica Arielle Phoenix Sam Oh Lirut Nave Jean Wandimi Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Ryan Jones Kristina Azarenko Cindy Krum Ryan Law Jill Quick Danny Richman Shelby Blackey Jessie Willms Luke Davis Himani Kanakria Barry Adams Barry Schwartz Aleyda Solis Kevin Indig Lily Ray Eli Schwartz John Mueller Joe Hall Nati Elimelech Claire Carlile Erica schneider From Moz: Tom Capper Dr. Pete Meyers Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Off on the right foot with Homepage SEO : Show me the money with eCommerce SEO The real deal with keyword research The ChatGPT episode Get ready for GA4 Is the SEO world ready for AI content writers? Uncommonly good content Back Learning how to learn SEO How to know good SEO advice from bad? How big of an SEO problem is duplicate content? The dreaded Google Update: When to worry Get going with international SEO SERP Features - Google's secret sauce How to adapt to changes on the SERP? What you need to know if you want to go Enterprise SEO Building your SEO team, the right way How to pick the right SEO tool for you? Removing the fluff from SEO reporting Building SEO momentum for growth The value of valuing reviews Other Previous Guests and Columnists From The First Fifty Episodes: Michel Fortin Debbie Chew Lazarina Stoy Garrett Sussman Olga Zarr Miracle Inameti Marcus Tober Patrick Stox Daniel K. Chung Craig Durham Lucy Dodds Amelia Fowler Greg Finn Sarah McDowlell Jeremy Moser Kelsey Jones Paul Andre De Vera Andrea Stein Kyle Byers Nikki Halliwell Mike King Brittany Mueller Amanda Wiener Purna Virji Christoph Trappe Idan Segal George Nguyen Chima Mmege Luke Carthy Rejoice Ojiaku Glenn Gabe Einat Hoobian-Seybold Adrian Stein Ann Smarty Judith Lewis Daniel Waisberg Annie Sullivan Alon Kochba Dan Shappir Jamie Indigo Christina Levasseur Rebecca Berbel Darren Shaw Amanda Natvidad Joy Hawkins Alli Berry Rebecca Tomasis Dan White Matt Southern Danny Goodwyn Loren Baker Roger Montti Brodie Clark Marie Haynes Chris Green Janet Machucuke Lidia Infante Chris Johnson Anu Adegbola Amanda Jordan Suganthan Mohanadasan Michelle Robbins Clay Kemp Sean Del Galdo Simon Schnieders Charly Wargnier Dana DiTomaso Nick LeRoy Lizzi Sassman Antoine Eripret Matt Matergia Ginny Marvin Ann Handley Kevin Gibbon Jason Brown Greg Gifford Elizabeth Rule Krystal Taing Crystal Horton Brian Freiesleben Caitlin Hathaway Gianluca Fiorelli Kavi Kardos Jamar Ramos Brandon Schmidt Casie Gilette Colt Sliva Giuseppe Caltabiano Veruska Anconitano Maddy Osman Melissa Fach Jess Joyce Anthony Barone Carolyn Lyden Jeannie Hill Henri Helvetica Arielle Phoenix Sam Oh Lirut Nave Jean Wandimi Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahala for joining the SERP's Up Podcast where we're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the always on target, the always reliable, the always fantastic, the always on point, our own Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, fantastic people. We join you again for the 50th time. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it is delicious. Crystal Carter: It's the 50th time! What's the 50th anniversary? Is that the golden one or a platinum or something? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, what stone is it? They have different stones, right? Crystal Carter: I don't know. The big ones are nice. There's a diamond one and there's that sort of thing, but the in between is- Mordy Oberstein: It's our platinum. I'm making it up. It's our platinum episode. Crystal Carter: I can't remember. We should just Google it. But the thing that cracks me up about those things is that in-between, they're really random. They're like the paper, the styrofoam anniversary. And you're like, "What? This is not... Nobody wants a paper." They're very strange in between. Mordy Oberstein: Paper? Okay. Crystal Carter: I don't know it. The second one's a paper one. It's like what a comedown. What a comedown. Mordy Oberstein: That's terrible. Wow. Here's paper. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix where we not only have our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which you can subscribe to on a monthly basis over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also check out all sorts of SEO content from articles to our SEO monthly webinar series to this very podcast and all of the podcasts that make up this episode as you soon shall see. So check out all the great stuff we have over at the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. We say that because today's a very special episode. As Crystal said, the SERP's Up Podcast is 50 episodes old, which in dog years means we're 350, right? Crystal Carter: Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Good thing we don't go by dog years because- Crystal Carter: No, that is good. Mordy Oberstein: I'd be personally really old. Crystal Carter: Yeah, let's not get into those maths. I think we can just- Mordy Oberstein: No, no. We don't do math on this show. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: I don't do math, for the record. I don't do math. Crystal Carter: Listen, marketers are always like, "Yeah, marketing!" And then they're like, "Statistics," and you're like, "Oh yeah, cool. Yes." Mordy Oberstein: "Oh, yeah, that." They do data studies. Anyway. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Before we go any further, I just want to say thank you for listening to 50 episodes. That's awesome. Crystal Carter: It's really amazing. We've had so many amazing guests. It's been such an adventure. And thank you, Mordy, for being the best podcast buddy ever. Mordy Oberstein: Oh no, I'm not the best podcast buddy ever. You are the best podcast buddy ever. Crystal Carter: You are! Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. You are. Crystal Carter: No! Mordy Oberstein: Oh, stop. Crystal Carter: Now we've lost all the listeners. Everyone's done. They're done. Mordy Oberstein: I do want to shout out the listeners who are out there who listen every week or not every week or listen whenever they listen. I don't know how it works on a podcast. You can listen to 51. You can binge the podcast. Crystal Carter: The whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: But there have been people who have shouted out the podcast on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on social media. Folks have requested episodes and topics that we've included on the podcast. So really, thank you for interacting with us. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about the podcast and for being part of our little community. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. It's been really, really brilliant. It's really cool when people say, "Oh, I heard your podcast." I'm like, "Oh, shucks. Thanks." Thanks, guys. It's nice. Mordy Oberstein: It's really nice. It's legit a highlight for me when people do that. I do also want to shout out the folks behind the scenes that make this podcast happen. I feel like Episode 50 would be a good time to do that. So first off, Barr, you are the man. Barr is what makes this podcast happen each and every week, so thank you. Also, big shout out to the tech design and the design teams over at Wix and the entire Wix SEO Marketing team and well beyond, and a big thanks to Edge Media who produces the podcast. So Aaron and Jacob, you're legends, thank you. Crystal Carter: Thank you to everyone behind the team. We can't get it done without you. So yeah, thank you for everything that you've done this whole time, this whole time we've been podcasting. Mordy Oberstein: Big thanks to all the well-smart folks who have been a part of the podcast and contributed to it. And with that, what we'd like to do with this episode is to look back at some of the previous episodes. What we're going to do is take a look at the top 10 episodes by number of listens and explore some of the topics we took up there. But that isn't enough because there are some core SEO topics that are not in our top 10 of number of listens, so we're going to do a number of top 10 honorable mentions by topic that we thought we have to include in an SEO roundup podcast. Have to. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. What are we going to do without them? I don't know. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. But wait, I don't want to be accused of, "Oh, old, not new." So we brought on some of the folks from Moz who are going to be talking about some of their thoughts on the future of SEO and where things are headed and what they're excited about, so we have that for you as well. So join us as we look in the mirror of self-reflection with this, a very special 50th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. All right, let's just kick this off, shall we? Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Top 10. Again, this is by not top 10 we love, not our top 10 whatever. This is top 10 simply by the number of listens the episode has garnered, which by the way is completely biased just so you know because the longer the episode is out, the more listens it gets to, which is why, as I mentioned, we're also going to do the top 10 topics that we covered that we have to cover, that we have to show you and discuss in a clips episode. There was no good way to do this is what we're trying to say. Crystal Carter: We've picked out all the podcasts and we hope you really enjoy them and we want to pick out some of the top highlights from around the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: So up number one is actually number one, our first episode ever about homepage SEO and what you need to know about homepage SEO, and we had Ryan Jones talk about some of his tips on homepage SEO. Here's Ryan on optimizing your homepage. Ryan Jones: So when it comes to homepage, SEO, there's definitely been some cases where I've had some major wins, but also where I've made some pretty rookie mistakes too. I mean, I remember when I first came into the industry nearly seven years ago, my main kind of thinking was getting everyone to the homepage and then all these users will sort of magically go where they need to go. In reality, that just isn't the case at all. If you're not serving what the user actually needs, you're not going to rank and you're not going to make any money. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again, Ryan. It's a really good point. Yes, your home should be super optimized. You can have all the SEO ducks in a row, but if the experience of funneling users to the right places so that they can actually convert doesn't function well on your homepage, what good is all that? Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this was something that really stuck with me as a point is that with SEO, sometimes you're like, "Yeah, this is going to work," and then maybe it works differently from what you expect and that's absolutely something that you can learn from and as a good SEO, you'll be watching not just for the wins, but for the things that maybe didn't go as expected and how you can make that better for the next time. And he had some really nuanced opinions on that and shared some great experience around particularly the homepage, but I think also too your overall SEO approach. Mordy Oberstein: Up number two is from our Episode Number 18, all about eComm SEO. So we had Kristina Azarenko talking about internal linking and eComm, which is super important. Here is Kristina all about internal linking and eCommerce SEO. Kristina Azarenko: What I see that works really well is internal linking, and many people just focus on building external links only and they don't control them, but they forget about internal links that they have full control of. Internal links are super, super important. They help to show hierarchy of the website and also distribute authority properly. Plus, they help Google to faster discover and index or re-index internal pages of the website. And it's especially critical for eCommerce because especially if you have dynamic stock with products going in stock and going out of stock, you want Google to pick this up real quickly. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much again, Kristina. Internal linking is like the low-hanging fruit of all things SEO and particularly helpful for eComm where your pages are... You want to make sure that they're indexed because some of them are very, very similar. Crystal Carter: Internal linking can never be underrated. It helps with content clustering, it can help you get indented results. It can help Google to crawl and it also sends signals as to what's most important, and particularly if you're on a really large site, like an eCommerce site or an enterprise-level site, internal linking is such a good and straightforward win. Mordy Oberstein: Now, from Episode Number 4, we had Cindy Krum talking on and keywords, please, passé. Coming in at number three on our top 10 was our episode on doing keyword research the right way, which included a focus on entities. Here's Cindy. Cindy Krum: I think to rank well in search, in some cases we may have to go a little bit beyond topics that our website has a financial benefit for. So for instance, let's say that we are a site that allows you to adopt labradoodles. When we only talk about adopting labradoodles, Google knows that people who want to adopt a pet have more questions than just where to adopt usually. And so they are thinking about the next step of someone saying, "Well, I think I want to adopt a labradoodle" because that's how the normal process goes. You don't go, "I think I want to adopt. Let's do it today." You usually go through a research process and the more you can answer those questions and help users with their journey on the topic and not just try and sell them things, it seems like the more Google is going to count that as high-quality content, the more Google is going to understand the entity, the more Google is going to understand that you understand the entity, and you are going to have the requisite keywords clustered somewhat together or in a meaningful way that Google uses to determine if you are authoritative and an expert. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, thinking about the overall topic of authority and taking the user on a full journey and not just trying to sell to them is a great way to approach thinking about topics, entities, and keywords. Crystal Carter: Completely. There's so much more to just a keyword than the actual literal words. The context makes such a big difference and Cindy's has an ever-nuanced approach to that, and I think that as we move into a space that includes LLMs and a generative search, being more cognizant of entities is going to yield incredible results for SEOs that are taking this approach. Mordy Oberstein: Number four comes from Episode Number 29 where we spoke about a crazy little thing called ChatGPT and analyzed how it would impact not just SEO but the world, the worldwide web that is, with Ryan Laws. So here's Ryan Laws on AI as a force multiplier. Ryan Lewis: Who has the resources to vet billions of generated outputs almost every day at this point? You can't do it. So I can't say this is something I've solved at grand scale, not like programmatic SEO where you're publishing hundreds, thousands of articles at once, but we are working at a slightly smaller scale where we are basically having a human in the loop using generative AI as a force multiplier for their already great writing. So we basically think to get the most out of this technology, you need a subject matter expert who can review, who can structure, who can critically evaluate what is being generated from the generative AI, and that process is still faster than it would otherwise be. I think sometimes it's a lot more fun for the writer because you get to outsource parts of your thinking and it can even be better in some instances because it can recommend ideas that you might not otherwise have. It doesn't have the same kind of mental ruts and creative bottlenecks that humans do. But I think to your point exactly that having a person to evaluate, vet, and actually stand behind and be willing to put their name to a piece of generated content is absolutely crucial. Otherwise, yeah, we'll just very quickly descend into dystopian wild west if we're just all publishing the outputs of these models wholesale. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again, Ryan. It's a great point, the idea of using AI writers to help you scale but not replacing people seems kind of obvious, but I think it's something that's worth saying concretely and consciously. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. You should totally be thinking of this as amplifying your intelligence or articulating your intelligence or demonstrating your actual intelligence, but really you need to have some kind of intelligence to begin with. You need to have some kind of knowledge to begin with, and that's really when it works really well when you absolutely know what you're doing and then you use the AI to help you take it to that next level. Mordy Oberstein: Coming in at number five... I feel like Casey Kasem. I know I just dated myself with that reference, but coming in at number five is our interview with Jill Quick about how to prepare for GA4, which is already here. So here's how to prepare for what's already actually here. Take it away, Jill. Jill Quick: I don't think Google expected it to be as popular as it became and it swelled and we wanted more, and then we had an upgrade with classic Analytics around about 2007, and that was getting rid of the bike and giving you a moped, a scooter. So we had a little bit more with our data, we got a new user interface. And I'm saying this because we have gone through multiple interface changes. We've just forgotten it was so long ago. Now, universal Analytics where Mordy is super comfortable at the moment- Mordy Oberstein: Vert comfortable. Jill Quick: Yeah, this was 2011, 2012, and it is the equivalent of getting rid of the moped and the bike and giving us the keys to our very own universal analytics car. Now, the majority of people, we've had this car for over 10 years and you've either been the driver, the passenger, the engineer. I have met people that don't even know where the car is parked or who has the key, but you like the car. We know the car, it's comfortable, and again, it was free and you just kind of started a job, they gave you access and you drove away and got what you needed from it. With the transition to GA4, as Crystal mentioned, we had the very not necessarily best name of App and Web, and then they rebranded it to GA4 is the fourth version of that Analytics platform. And despite Google saying it's an upgrade, and it is an upgrade, but it's not an upgrade as in get rid of my crappy old car that could do with a wash and some reupholstering and give me a new one; they're taking away the car, setting it on fire this year so we can't have it anymore, and they've given us the keys to a helicopter. That is the equivalent shift that we have. Mordy Oberstein: The parable she uses about it being a different vehicle altogether, personally, was mind-blowing for me as a way of concretely understanding the difference between what I was working on and I loved so much and what I have now. Crystal Carter: Entirely. I saw her speak about this and was just like, "Yeah, I get that now." Mordy Oberstein: "That's it. I get it now." Crystal Carter: "I get it now." Mordy Oberstein: I've been trying to fit a square peg into a round hole this whole time. Crystal Carter: Right. And she's like, "Stop. Put it down. Try again." Just give it a complete different approach and it's absolutely what's required. Mordy Oberstein: Now, what would be a clips episode and not talking about AI and AI writers twice? That's what we do now. We talk about AI all the time. This time, before ChatGPT was even a big buzzword, we talked to Danny Richman in Episode Number 9 in what is our sixth most popular episode all about using AI writers the right way, and Danny talked about using it in a little bit of a different way than you might've thought. Here's what Danny had to say. Danny Richman: I think one of the most common misconceptions with that technology is that it was never really designed for writing long-form content and that isn't what it's best at doing. The areas where I found it most useful and surprising was three different categories. One is around classification, then transformation, and then in translation. So for example, let's imagine you're doing some keyword research for a criminal law firm and you are looking at all keywords that are searched for on Google that include the word conspiracy because you're interested in creating some content around the offensive conspiracy to murder or conspiracy to defraud, those kinds of offenses. Now, if you go and put a term like that into a keyword research tool, you're going to get a whole load of keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the area of criminal law and you're going to get UFO conspiracies, Princess Diana conspiracies. So one of the things you often have to do when you're doing keyword research is to filter out all the noise and just find the keywords that are relevant and applicable to the website you are working with. And that's one of the areas where a tool like GPT-3 really excels because you can very easily upload a whole load of keyword research data into a Google Sheet, and then using a very simple script, you can then get GPT-3 to classify all those keywords in a matter of seconds according to whether they are in the context of a criminal law firm. So that's something that would've taken just hours or days of work for somebody to have to do. Mordy Oberstein: To me, using AI as a way of classifying information is the way to use AI, and I think Danny is so on point, even all these months later, about how he's thinking about using AI and SEO. Crystal Carter: Totally. There's so many tasks that you can use AI to help you with and help you simplify, like arguing with spreadsheets or clustering a list of keywords into themes or taking data that you've gotten and making it more simple or cleaning up data like, "Please remove all of the cases of this and that and that." All of those things are really, really great and help you to save time so that you can do some of the more nuanced work using human intelligence. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of human and intelligence, we had Shelby Blackley and Jessie Willms over on Episode Number 2 talking all about good content and what is good content, and coming in at number seven on our most popular episodes of the SERP's Up Podcast is Jessie and Shelby's Episode Number 2, where they talked about, yeah, clicks are great, but if users aren't satisfied once they get there, what good is that? So here's Shelby and Jessie on the experience of the user. Shelby Blackey: Well, I think that the big thing about having a quality piece of journalism or having a quality piece of content is really focusing on three pillars: search intent, keyword research, and the actual reader experience and how they're immersed in the piece. When you think about search intent, it's very much like why people are searching these things, right? They're looking at what is the actual main purpose of the page. So to create a quality piece, you need to look at what's actually out there and what people are actually creating. If someone's looking up a specific keyword and they want an FAQ, how can you take that FAQ and take it an extra level? Is there a way to engage it? Can you add in schema? Is there an H2 subheading that you can add in? All of these will allow the readers to get what they need out of it. Jessie Willms: Right. So by aligning the search intent with the content that we end up creating, we can make sure that we really fulfill that request that people are making when they turn to a search algorithm or a search engine, I should say. Shelby Blackey: Exactly. And then you think about the keyword research behind it too, and we do so much around keyword research. Right, Jessie? Jessie Willms: Keyword research is the first thing that any news SEO will do when they are thinking about creating a new piece of content. We really want to first understand what it is people are looking for to understand the questions that we need to answer and the topics that we need to cover in whatever piece of content that we create. The other thing about doing keyword research as your first step is it helps inform not just what you cover but how you cover it. Like Shelby said, if you are doing keyword research and you see that other publishers are creating FAQs to answer these reader questions, then you know that this is in line with how readers want to consume this content. So a series of questions and answers is a really effective tool for creating that engagement with readers because it allows them to answer specifically the question that they're after, but also scan and skim over other questions that they might find useful. Mordy Oberstein: Intent, research experience. If you don't ensure you're giving the user targeted content and you're not actually fulfilling their needs, nothing else matters. Crystal Carter: I think people think that ranking is an indicator of what Google thinks is good, but ranking is an indicator of what Google thinks users think is good. So obviously, you have to put the users first. Mordy Oberstein: Users? That's crazy. Crystal Carter: I know. What do they need? What matters to them? What's actually good for them? They've got some great insights on that. Mordy Oberstein: At number eight is an episode all about learning SEO. Here, Luke Davis shared how he goes down the rabbit hole to learn more about SEO and perfect his craft. From Episode Number Six, take it away, Luke. Luke Davis: So I start with a Google search of the topic and basically fall down a rabbit hole of articles, videos and documentation. I tend to focus on reliable sources as they're often backed up by other articles as well. Being able to immerse myself in a subject and get to know every detail has been crucial in my understanding of many things related to SEO. If it's technical, I also like to test my skills on a demo site to see how things work, how things look, follow tutorials online or any courses that might be available. I did that recently when learning how to use a web framework called Astro, and that pushed me to pick up bits of JavaScript, which has always been my Achilles heel. It also involves breaking stuff and spending hours troubleshooting. So that kind of helps me learn what to do and what not to do and I like to think I'm much better for it. Mordy Oberstein: Using a demo site to test things out is an underrated practice in my opinion. Crystal Carter: There are so many people that I've talked to and said, "Oh, I haven't been able to practice SEO because I haven't got a job at an agency yet," or, "I don't have any clients yet." And I'm like, "Why are you waiting? Stop waiting. You can make a website right now. You can make a website right now. You can write content right now. You can distribute, you can do all of those sorts of things," that if you don't have your own site to do, I'm sure if you ask around to literally anyone, can I help someone with their website, a million people will give you an opportunity to try out some things. But also, having your own site, all of the best SEOs that I know have test sites, have multiple test sites where they test and try again and try again. So if you're sitting on the fence, just do it. Just do it. Mordy Oberstein: That's why I have BarrySEOmemes.com so I can troll Barry and test things out, two birds, one stone. Landing in at number nine is perhaps, I would say, our most important episode where we share how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice, and we had Himani Kanakria on to offer her take all about that. We're going back to Episode Number 5. Here's Himani. Himani Kanakria: It's not easy and advisable to trust any SEO advice that gets your way, especially today. These days, getting trapped into bad SEO advice is easier because any random post on any platform can get massive engagement. They talk about niche websites and then showcase how brilliantly they got great results without any solid proof of what strategy they use and how it was implemented. What you can do is verify if Google has any documentation around that advice or even you can ask any Google Search employee. I mean, I have asked John Mueller a lot, many times, and he has helped me with a lot of great advice, and even you can ask any industry thought leader as well. Mordy Oberstein: Verifying SEO advice with what Google actually says in their documentation? Crystal Carter: Woo! Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Amen to that. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Google documentation is incredibly invaluable and underused all at the same time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. And so many times when people were like, "Wow, you're so insightful," I literally just told you what's in the documentation. Read the documentation. They spend a lot of time on it. Lizzie over at the Google Search Console team at the Google Search team, she spends a lot of time making sure that it's really knowable and accessible. So yeah, always find your source, always check your sources. There's a lot of rumors around in SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Rumours, it's not just a Fleetwood Mac album. Crystal Carter: There you go again. Mordy Oberstein: Referencing myself. Oh, I'm doing the whole Casey Kasem thing. I might as well reference a musical album since we're here. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: All right, and wrapping up the top 10 of most-listened to episodes of the SERP's Up Podcast thus far because we've done 50 but there's 50 more coming, is our episode about duplicate content where we had Barry Adams share what he does and doesn't worry about when it comes to duplicate content. We're going back to Episode Number 17. Here's Barry. Barry Adams: There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, so just make sure all the pages on your own website are unique, are properly structured, well-targeted for specific topics and specific rankings. And don't worry too much about what other websites are doing with taking your content or scraping your content. Just focus on making sure your website is as good as it can be and that you have all the tools at your disposal to make sure your own content ranks and performs in Google Search results to its maximum potential. Mordy Oberstein: Yep, there is no such thing as duplicate content penalty and don't worry about sites. And scraping your content, definitely agree with that. Sites, they're going to scrape your content. These sites are so low-quality, so ridiculous. Don't worry about it. Crystal Carter: It's also one of the reasons why it's so important to make sure that you got your biographical entity sorted, that people know who you are, that you're confirming that who you are with EEAT signals across your website and that you've got good canonicalization set up and all of that sort of stuff. There's lots of signals that you can give Google that you are the authority for whatever topic you've created, that you are the authoritative voice for that piece, and Barry's got a really nuanced approach to that. And speaking of duplicate content, I've definitely said nuanced a few times in this episode, but it's at the top of my mind so there we go. Mordy Oberstein: Now, as I mentioned before, those are our top 10 episodes in order of number of listens, but we didn't talk about SEO reporting, we didn't even talk about SERP features, we didn't talk about Google updates. How could we not talk about these things if we're recapping SEO? So here's 10 more honorable episodes that we need to include that hit on some really core SEO topics. So it's, I guess, our personal topical list of episodes to include when doing a clip episode. Here we go from Barry to Barry. Barry Schwarz joined us for Episode Number 3 to talk about Google updates. So if we're doing a clip episode about SEO, we must talk about Google updates. So here's Barry Schwartz talking about which updates you should look up and know about. Barry Schwartz: So there's a bunch of Google updates that have happened over the course of, I don't know, two decades or so. Probably the most significant one that really sets the tone was the Florida update probably 20 years ago, like 2002, 2003. It really shook the SEO community. It was the first time where Google did an update where it basically said, "Hey, SEOs, stop trying to manipulate us. We know about you and our algorithms will detect what you're doing and you're no longer going to be able to fool us with easy SEO." And that really shook the industry a lot and it really set a tone for what was going to come next. Mordy Oberstein: The Florida update, little fun fact for you here. Thank you, Barry by the way. Fun fact about the Florida update, when the medic update came out, which was the August 2018 core update, the first of those really prolific core updates or the first was really the March 2018 core update, whatever, it doesn't matter, they wanted to call it Florida 2 because Pubcon was happening at the same time in Florida and that's where the first Florida update came about because it was at Pubcon when it came out in Florida. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. A little fun and history fact for you about updates that doesn't matter at all for SEO. Crystal Carter: I think it's really important to learn all the updates. I was at an SMX event and Barry Schwartz literally went through every single update and it was fantastic. Also, there were lots of slides with giant owls behind Barry, which was also amazing, but it's really important to... I'm a big fan of history and it's really important to learn history and study history because you don't know where you are if you don't know where you've been. Mordy Oberstein: Very true for SEO. Super true. If you don't understand what Google used to be able to do and what they're now able to do and what they're trying to do, it's really hard to contextualize what works and what doesn't work for SEO. Crystal Carter: Right. They're building on everything and building on everything, so pay attention, people. Mordy Oberstein: Now, no SEO conversation is complete until you talk about international SEO, which is exactly what we did on Episode Number 40 with the Aleyda Solis. So honorable clip number two, I'm calling them honorable clips, I don't know why. Honorable clip number two comes from Episode Number 40 and it's all about international SEO with the Aleyda Solis. Aleyda Solis: If you do really have the capacity and the resources, and if it is an important market for you, you should totally go ahead. And if it's a minimum effort too, you should definitely go ahead and do the extra mile and personalize because that can make a complete difference for it. So for example, back in the day, I am originally from Nicaragua, when I was living still in Nicaragua, and Nicaragua is such a small country, it's also a poor country so we were so very used to getting all of this marketing actions in TV even or in billboards or whatever that were so obviously not targeted at Nicaraguans because we actually speak... The way that we word things in Spanish, it's like in Argentina with the boss. So we put an accent at the end of each pretty much conjugation and the verbs, right? And we don't say, "Two," we say, "Boss." So we had a lot of these billboards and TV ads and whatever with the two, the two, and we were like, "Oh, this was just a generic ad for all Latin American people. Whatever, it's not for us." But then little by little, you could tell that they were making more efforts toward things to change things, and it was a minimum thing really pretty much to change up a couple of wordings, the rest was exactly the same, but at least they took care and this is actually really for us, right? The engagement and I think the connection with the brand or the offering increased. Mordy Oberstein: If you don't personalize content from market to market so that it actually speaks to those people, you are never going to come off... I hate, I don't know, stale, to use a word. I don't know, not good. Crystal Carter: See, and you've definitely read those websites where you've gone to them and you were like, "This is not..." I was on a website for somebody who manufactured rackets for tennis and their website, I was just like, "These categories don't make any sense. I don't know who translated this but I can't find anything on this because it doesn't make any sense." Mordy Oberstein: It's so obvious when that happens. So obvious. Crystal Carter: It's so obvious. Mordy Oberstein: Don't be that person. Don't be that person. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think you have a little bit of forgiveness if you've actually just clicked the Google Translate thing and you want to see if you can book this restaurant in Paris or something even though you're not in Paris, that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: Obviously. Crystal Carter: But yeah, if you're making the site and you actually want to appeal to the audience, show them that you care. Mordy Oberstein: Topic number three that we felt we had to include are SERP features because they're everywhere and they're all the time and they're dominated by them. So we must talk about SERP features, which is what we did Episode Number 11 with our friend, Kevin Indig. Here's Kevin Indig all about SERP features. Kevin Indig: For certain SERP features, absolutely. So there's some SERP features that you can "rank" in or be visible in, like image carousels, video carousels, featured snippets. People also ask about those kinds of things, but then there are others where you just, as a brand, sometimes you can bid, you can pay for being visible. In the case of the Google Flights search module for example, you can literally bid to be visible, but there are also some where you just can't do anything at all, like a Google knowledge card for example. And that's when the only thing you can do is just be aware that this happens in the search results and understand what the impact on your traffic could be. Mordy Oberstein: It's a really interesting point. Sometimes there's nothing to do. Sometimes there's a SERP feature there. There's no URL, there's no way you could show up. It's a direct answer and there's nothing you can do about it and the best thing you can do is just know that that's what's happening, and that's probably why you don't have as many clicks as you would've otherwise. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And you can make a call. You can say, "Do we try it for the SERP feature or do we just let go or whatever?" But these are things you have to think of, but it's also the reason why it's really important to check the SERP all the time. Mordy Oberstein: Al the time. If we're talking about SERP features and we're talking about checking the SERP, then we must talk about how you stay updated and looking and tracking changes on the SERP, which is what we did in Episode Number 20 with Lily Ray. So here's Lily Ray on what's been going on in the SERP and the changes she's seeing on the SERP. Take it away, Lily. Lily Ray: There's a lot of new accordions that they've been rolling out in the last year or two, so of course we see people also ask across the board for most queries these days. I know sometimes the tools show that it comes and goes, but really there's definitely been a big rise and people also asked in the last few years. But beyond that, Google's using that same kind of functionality to roll out across different types of accordions, so things like buy-in guides and things to know, for example. If you'd Google specific medical conditions or products that you might be reviewing, Google can show something like things to know or buying guides, and that's actually information taken from various different websites and kind of integrated into this accordion where you can learn about specifications about the product or different symptoms and treatments for medical conditions and things like that. Mordy Oberstein: All sorts of new accordions, it's one thing I see. There's all sorts of filters on the SERP, but the point is checking, looking and seeing, as Crystal mentioned before, what's happening and seeing, hey, not just what new feature there is, but what's the trend? What's happening trends-wise with the SERP features, very valuable in checking and seeing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it changes all the time, it changes every day, changes by device, changes by geo. So these are definitely important things to check regularly and know which SERPs are the most important ones for you. Mordy Oberstein: Now, here's a topic that doesn't belong on the list: enterprise SEO. We can talk about SEO and not talk about enterprise SEO, I feel like. However, when we talked to Eli Schwartz in Episode Number 20 about enterprise SEO, he gave a well-smart tip about how to stay hands on when you're not in a hands-on role, which is very important to talk about when we're talking about SEO. So here's Eli Schwartz from not Episode Number 20, sorry, Episode Number 33. I'll get it right. Episode Number 33 about how to stay hands on. Eli Schwartz: The other things I'll do is I'll do things that are out of my typical role as a consultant. So I'll coach new SEOs or I'll coach enterprise SEOs and help them understand and help work with them, really for my own learning, to understand how to navigate the challenges that they're working on as a part of their roles. So if they have a challenge with how do they get an engineer to do something, how do they understand the reporting they have? These aren't things that I get to do in my regular consulting, but these are things that I get to really learn and do from coaching. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting way, I never thought about it before, but the way that Eli's talking about it, but coaching other SEOs to stay hands-on. Really interesting. Crystal Carter: Yeah, mentoring is incredibly important, and also people who don't know will ask you questions and they'll be like, "But what is that?" And you're like, "It's a thing." And sometimes you realize that you actually don't know how to explain it. You've just internalized it. So the questions that you get from folks is really, really important and can be really helpful to helping you to just keep your toe in the water. Mordy Oberstein: Now, since we're talking about coaching and other people and the softer side of SEO, the softer skill side of SEO, we have to talk about communicating and building teams and how to build strong relationships with your SEO team and other teams in your organization, which is what we did in Episode Number 31 when John Mueller came on and talked about building a strong SEO team. So here's John talking about that. John Mueller: I think for SEO folks, this means you need to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people. You can't just be geeks that speak in canonicals amongst yourselves. You need to have at least one person who can converse fluently in pagination, developer, marketing, and manager talk. Mordy Oberstein: I mean, yeah, he's right. Sometimes I feel like we get lost in our little SEO bubble and we geek out on all the cool SEO stuff that we care about that no one else actually cares about, but we have to be able to break out of that SEO geekiness, for lack of a better way of putting it, to be able to communicate with other stakeholders and other teams. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because your team is wide. Of course, it's your core SEO team, but social folks are also to do with your team. The people who sign the checks are also the people in your team. The people who own the business are also in your team, and they need to know what's going on, and you need to have actionable, accessible information for them. Mordy Oberstein: Now, if you're talking about other stakeholders and other teams, that naturally speaks to SEO reporting, which is our next topic that we could not leave off of this list. If we're going to do a clip show, we're going to talk about SEO reporting because it's a major part of doing SEO. So we had Joe Hall come on during Episode Number 14 to share his thoughts about SEO reporting and KPIs. Here's Joe. Joe Hall: When trying to decide which is the right KPI for a client or project, I like to set it up in three different ways. I like to think about KPIs as either communication KPIs, strategic KPIs, or business KPIs. Communication KPIs are measurements. They communicate an idea and educate the client every time we talk about them. They're used to educate and inform about bigger ideas and things they need to focus on. I usually find these KPIs by talking to the client and asking them specifically what they're interested in. This is because these are the KPIs that they are already used to talking about and they are already familiar with. Mordy Oberstein: I love the fact that he uses education as a KPI and communication as one of his KPIs. Crystal Carter: Joe, he's a clever dude. He knows stuff. Mordy Oberstein: I will say, and no shade to our other guests, that was one of my favorite clips. Crystal Carter: I think that education should be absolutely front of mind for making sure that you have longevity and that you can respond when there are SEO changes, which there will always be, SEO changes. Mordy Oberstein: From one of my favorite clips to one of my favorite people, we spoke to Wix's own Head of SEO, Nati Elimelech, during Episode Number 24, all about SEO tools and building good SEO tools and what it means to create good SEO tools. And if we're talking about SEO, hey, we're SEOs, we love tools, how can we not consider talking about SEO tools on this clip show? So we did with Nati. Here it is, Nati talking about what it means to create a good SEO tool, Nati Elimelech: Give users the feature they want, then protect them from what they don't know or the ways they can misuse your features, and all the time, teach them how to use those features, teach them why those features are important and teach them when to not use those features. I think those are the main, main, main pillars of making a good SEO product. Mordy Oberstein: I think that focus on preventing misuse and protecting users from misuse is something that I will go out on a limb and say that the SEO tools that are out there should think about more. Crystal Carter: I think there's absolutely a sense of responsibility to our users that Nati and the rest of the Wix SEO team have to their core. It's a core tenet of how they approach creating SEO tools. Mordy Oberstein: They are a shining light. Nati is a shining light to all the other SEOs. Now, Crystal, you know what we haven't talked about yet at all? Crystal Carter: What haven't we talked about? Mordy Oberstein: We've done all these clips. We've done 27 of them I think so far if I haven't lost count. 28. We've done 28 and we haven't talked about local SEO at all. Crystal Carter: How did we not do that? Mordy Oberstein: We've gone all this time without talking about local SEO. Crystal Carter: Oh, gosh. Mordy Oberstein: How have we done that? We will rectify this right now because we are going to talk about local SEO. Claire Carlile joined us in Episode Number 15 to talk about reviews and local SEO. So here's clear Claire Carlile on reviews and a nifty little point you probably didn't think about. Claire Carlile: First of all, ask yourselves, are you ready? Is your business ready to start to get an influx of reviews? Is your product or service ready? Are there any preexisting issues because it might be a good idea to iron those out before you start getting negative reviews based on those. Mordy Oberstein: I love this. Before you're talking about optimizing, getting more reviews and more reviews and more reviews, being sure you're ready to take on reviews. If your product is not there yet and you're all about review strategy, those reviews are not going to be good. Crystal Carter: It's a hard pill to swallow sometimes. Sometimes I've had people who are like, "Oh, the reviews are bad." I'm like, "Have you seen it? Have you tried it? Have you been where the user's been? Because it ain't a good situation. We need to fix this situation because the reviews are sometimes the reflection of reality, so reality should be better." Mordy Oberstein: Which goes to setting priorities for SEO tasks, which is an episode we're going to do in the future. Don't worry, we're going to get to that, but it's really very, very important to prioritize the right way. Yes, reviews are incredibly important for local SEO. They're one of the big "ranking factors" of local SEO, but if you're not ready to get good reviews, then put that priority task at a lower priority for now and get back to it later. Now, we've ticked off local SEO. What's the other thing we didn't talk about yet, which I'm mind-blown. The last clip. We've done 29. Not 29, we've done 19. I am botching all the numbers today. Casey Kasem is rolling over in his grave. I said before we did 29. I'm like, "Wait." 19. Crystal Carter: Carson Daly's fine about it though. Don't worry. Mordy Oberstein: We did our top 10 episodes in terms of numbers and here's our top 10 topics. Content. We have not talked about content. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Basically at all. Bonkers absolutely, but we're saving the best for last. We're covering content. We're going to do it because SEO and good content, it's all one and the same. So we spoke to Erica Schneider on Episode Number 38 about how you create good content and how you do it at scale and how when you're doing it at scale, you don't lose that content quality. Take it away, Erica. Erica Schneider: You need to document your processes. You need to have goals, a mission statement, objectives. Everything that you do for your business when you want to be able to scale effectively and not fail and have everything fall apart is the same way that you should treat scaling your content operations so that you don't mess with your quality as you scale. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again, Erica. It's such a great point. You wouldn't go into a business and say, "I want to scale up this business" without a plan to make sure you maintain service quality or product quality. Walking into content should be the exact same way, exact same priority. Crystal Carter: And you need to make sure that you know that if you're going to go for quality or quantity or whatever your strategy is, that you know when you're going to reassess it, when you're going to revisit it, when you're going to take stock of your content strategy, that you have that plan planned out as well. A plan for when you will plan. Mordy Oberstein: A plan for the plan is always good to have. Crystal Carter: It's usually- Mordy Oberstein: I always do plan for planning, as crazy as that sounds, all the time. Yep. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's really important. Mordy Oberstein: So I got the numbers right now. Those are our top 20. Crystal Carter: 20. Mordy Oberstein: Got it? 20. Crystal Carter: And thank you to everyone else who did the other 30 episodes. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. There's so many. Please go check out all the great tips and all the great guests and all the great episodes. There's just so many of them at this point. There's 50, but we're not done because I said we have new. That was old and old is good, but we also want to have new material for you so we spoke to the folks over at Moz and we asked them, Hey, what are you excited about for SEO, the future of SEO? What are you looking forward to? So we spoke to Tom Capper and Dr. Pete over at Moz. Let's go to Tom first. Here's Tom on what he's looking forward to in SEO. Tom Capper: Hello, Tom Capper here, Senior Search Scientist at Moz. I think what I'm looking forward to most in SEO is Google and publishers and the SEO industry itself being pushed to engage with some of these questions that are coming up now about the content ecosystem on the web. I think mostly it's recent developments with large language models that are causing this. There's also some recent legislation in Canada that's relevant, but Google has sort of put out this invitation to contribute opinions to some new crawling standards and maybe allowing publishers to control what content is consumed by large language models. Bing is reportedly looking at revenue sharing so there's a lot happening in this space. I think on Google's side, they're recognizing here that despite their longstanding love-hate relationship with publishers, they do need them. They do need the content. They do need somewhere to send the traffic, and they've always recognized that they need to incentivize publishers to have fast and secure and mobile-friendly sites and so on, but perhaps now they're also recognizing that they're going to have to incentivize publishers to publish and to make their content accessible to Google, which is a new problem really. And then on the publisher and the SEO side of the table, this historic tactic we know so well of producing mounds and mounds of low-value content to rank for specific keywords, that is looking less valuable over time. First feature snippets, now these AI snippets, and soon, if not already, AI written content answering these questions as well so that this kind of content has become totally commoditized, a race to the bottom, increasingly hard to monetize. The publishers are going to have to focus on content that is valuable, unique, human, interesting, the kind of content that would've caused you to buy a magazine or newspaper in the first place. I don't know how all of this is going to turn out, but yeah, that's what I'm looking forward to. What I'm looking forward to is finding out. I think it'll be fascinating to watch this unfold over the next few years. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Tom. I'm with him. This goes back to our previous episodes on CTR and the future of search, and we talked about SGE and my Matlock content, which I'm not going to get into again, but I am looking forward to and I think what will happen is what he's saying, that those low-quality pieces of content just won't have the same opportunity anymore. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot of sage wisdom there in that piece and I think that we're living in an incredibly fascinating time for the web. There has been a few seminal moments, and I think that we're at a little bit of a watershed really in terms of how things are going to go. The rev share idea is very interesting, and the content quality and how people approach content quality is tricky because it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Google's saying, "Oh yeah, we'll scrape anything and we could potentially use that for our LLMs." On the other hand, the lower-quality stuff is going to be covered by the LLM, so where's the incentive for people to make the good quality content in the future? We'll see. It's fascinating. It's interesting. Mordy Oberstein: Now, what would be Moz without Dr. Pete? Crystal Carter: Dr. Pete! Mordy Oberstein: Dr. Pete, one of my favorites of all time. Love Dr. Pete. So honored to end, we're not going to end the podcast right after the recording, but to end the clips of Episode 50 with the one, the only, the mad scientist of Moz himself, Dr. Pete. Here's Dr. Pete on what he's looking forward to in SEO. Dr. Pete Meyers: Hey, all, it's Dr. Pete here. I'm the marketing scientist at Moz. So what am I looking forward to in SEO? A big one for me that it seems like it's taken a long time to come around is we say that it's not all just about individual keywords. It's not about vanity keywords and head keywords and what do you want to call them, but about clustering and topics and understanding things on a broader topical level. But what's frustrating sometimes is I don't think our workflows and our tool sets really reflect that yet. We have ways to group things and we kind of put volumes together and such as that, but I really think that as we mature as an industry and as Google and Bing mature as search engines, when we can start to understand concepts and topics and the opportunity of an entire topic, the gaps we have across a topic, the kind of content that reflects that topic, content that could reflect dozens or hundreds or thousands of keywords sometimes that we rank for into the very long tail without having to worry about those individual keywords, we're really going to come a long way because that's how people think. And I think as we get into large language models and "AI," that kind of topical understanding is getting richer, and we're seeing Richardson in Amuse and things like that. And so if we're still looking at these head terms, like, "Oh, I want to rank for best laptops," or what have you, we're missing a ton. And so to really understand that at a topical level in our tools and our datas and our report in a concrete way, I think it's going to be really amazing and give us great insights about what kind of content we should produce, what we're missing, the gaps we need to fill. So I don't know when that's coming yet. Of course, people like us are working on it, but I'm looking forward to that day and hopefully it's not too long in the future. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Dr. Pete. It is really interesting, the whole progression of how Google has been able to understand content a little more holistically and where that's going to go is super fascinating because it has huge implications on what's going be able to happen on the server, what's not going to be able to happen on the server. Fundamentally speaking, what Google is able to do and not able to do in terms of ranking and far beyond has entirely to do with how well it's able to understand content contextually. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think there's so many different ways that you can do that. You can add information onto the page, you can add information via meta tags, you can add information via structured data, you can sort out links, you can sort out lots of different things. So I think that it's important for people to consider all of the ways that Google is accessing their content in order to make sure that Google understands it well, and I think we're going to see a lot of remixing as he's hinting at, and that means that people need to understand where the core of the content lies, not just in keywords, but in the entity that's associated with the brand, with the content. Mordy Oberstein: Now with that, what we would normally do is roll right into the Snappy News, but this week, it's a special episode. Just clips, so no Snappy News. Sorry to Barry Schwartz who won't get any follow links this week. Next week, they shall return. And what we normally end off with is our Follow of the Week, but how could we have a Follow of the Week on a clip show with all these great people? Follow all of them, if you're not already, and all of our previous guests who we've had on the show from Rejoice Ojiaku, to Michelle Forton, to Debbie Chew, to Lazarina Stoy, to Garrett Sussman, to Olga Zarr, to Miracle Inameti, to Marcus Tober, to Patrick Stox, to Daniel K. Cheung, to Greg Durham, to Lucy Dodds, to Amalia Fowler, to Greg Finn, to Sarah McDowell, to Jeremy Moser, to Kelsey Jones, to so many people, Paul Andre De Vera. I could go on and on and on. Adriana Stein, Kyle Byers, Nikki Halliwell, Mike King, Britney Muller. So many people. Follow them all. I'm pretty sure I got everybody in there by the way there. Crystal Carter: Very impressed. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Not bad. I could do it in one breath. Should I start, like everybody, all 50, more than 50? I didn't miss people. Our Wix people across the Wixverse. We had Amanda Weiner on. We had Idan Segal on. Follow all these people. Crystal Carter: Follow them all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you again for joining our Episode Number 50, and I just want to say thank you again one last time for listening to our podcast, for making our lives better by being part of our little podcast community, and we hope you're learning something from it. Please do reach out to us on social, on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I'm on Threads. I don't know, Crystal, if you're on Threads yet, but I'm on Threads. You can reach out to me there. If you want to offer feedback about the podcast, if you wanted to say hi, how's it going? We'd love to chat with you. If you want to request an episode and a topic that would help you do better SEO, let us know. We're there for you. Now, if you're going to miss us already, don't worry. We're back next week. We're back next week, Crystal. Crystal Carter: For more podcast fun. Mordy Oberstein: For more SEO podcasting, that's right. Crystal Carter: Episode 51. Mordy Oberstein: 51, our journey towards 100 continues, and from there to 1,000, and from there to episode a million. Crystal Carter: Episodes forever. Mordy Oberstein: Episodes forever. Thank you for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. If you're going to miss us, don't worry! As we said, we're back next week as we dive into scaling your local SEO efforts. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about seo? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. [00:02:24] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? [00:05:21] Top 10 Episodes [00:06:06] #1: Ryan Jones: Tip on Homepage SEO (Episode 1 ) [00:07:44] #2: Kristina Azarenko: Internal Linking and E-commerce SEO (Episode 18 ) [00:09:18] #3: Cindy Krum: Doing Keyword Research the Right Way (Episode 4 ) [00:11:48] #4: Ryan Law: AI as a Force Multiplier (Episode 29 ) [00:14:00] #5: Jill Quick: Preparing for GA4 (Episode 30 ) [00:16:48] #6: Danny Richman: Using AI Writers the Right Way (Episode 9 ) [00:19:24] #7: Shelby Blackey & Jessie Willms: What is Good Content? (Episode 2 ) [00:22:23] #8: Luke Davis: How to Learn SEO (Episode 6 ) [00:24:26] #9: Himani Kanakria: Difference Between Good SEO Advice and Bad SEO Advice (Episode 5 ) [00:26:24] #10: Barry Adams: Duplicate Content (Episode 17 ) [00:28:05] Top 10: Honorable Mention [00:28:38] #1: Barry Schwartz: Google Updates to Watch (Episode 3 ) [00:30:46] #2: Aleyda Solis: International SEO (Episode 40 ) [00:33:18] #3: Kevin Indig: SERP Features (Episode 11 ) [00:34:51] #4: Lily Ray: Tracking SERP Changes (Episode 20 ) [00:36:28] #5: Eli Schwartz: Enterprise SEO (Episode 33 ) [00:38:12] #6: John Mueller: SEO Teams (Episode 31 ) [00:39:32] #7: Joe Hall: SEO Reporting (Episode 14 ) [00:41:11] #8: Nati Elimelech: SEO Tools (Episode 24 ) [00:42:59] #9: Claire Carlile: Local SEO and Reviews (Episode 15 ) [00:45:13] #10: Erica Schneider: How to Create Good Content (Episode 38 ) [00:47:10] Focus Topic Guest: Tom Capper - What He Is Looking Forward to in SEO. [00:50:25] Focus Topic Guest: Dr. Pete Meyers - What He Is Looking Forward to in SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Will AI overtake the SERP? Find out as we explore the SEO fallout from Google I/O 2024. Google announced the official launch of SGE at its I/O 2024 event. What does this and the other Search-related announcements mean for SEO and the SERP overall? Tune in as Wix's Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share their insights on what Google I/O 2024 means for search marketers. It's a bonus episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast covering all the SEO implications from Google I/O 2024! Back What does Google I/O 2024 mean for SEOs? Will AI overtake the SERP? Find out as we explore the SEO fallout from Google I/O 2024. Google announced the official launch of SGE at its I/O 2024 event. What does this and the other Search-related announcements mean for SEO and the SERP overall? Tune in as Wix's Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share their insights on what Google I/O 2024 means for search marketers. It's a bonus episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast covering all the SEO implications from Google I/O 2024! Previous Episode Next Episode Special episode | May 15, 2024 | 28 MIN 00:00 / 46:34 This week’s guests Google I/O Google I/O is an annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California. The name "I/O" is taken from the number googol, with the "I" representing the "1" in googol and the "O" representing the first "0" in the number. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy win insights around what's happening in SEO, and boy, if something's happening in SEO right now. I'm already overseeing the head SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is Google, Google, Google focused, our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic, very enthusiastic introduction as we get into Google. Mordy Oberstein: Google. Mordy Oberstein: In case you don't know, so welcome to the bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast, where each year we go through what Google announced at Google I/O, in this case Google I/O 2024. Just to remind you, by the way, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also check out our brand new platform, Wix Studio, to help you manage your clients' projects and agency team members with far greater efficiency. Anyway, back to I/O. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Back to I/O. In case you didn't watch it before the keynote actually started, there was an improvisational musician who I'm told is very famous and very good. I don't know who he is. Crystal Carter: Okay, yeah Mordy Oberstein: I wrote to you on WhatsApp, Crystal, he looked like Joseph and took his Technicolor Dreamcoat and was sleeping on a bench in Bryant Park and kicked out of the house and decided that during the daytime, he'll spend most of his time yelling some prophetic visions about big tech by screaming the words Google, Google, Google, all day long. Crystal Carter: I'm not sure. I think they were trying to make it fun. I did a predictions video and I thought, "Oh, maybe it'll be less fun because they're trying to focus on..." They got competitors. OpenAI did a big drop the day before, and so I thought this was going to be like, "We're very serious, boom, boom," but there was a lot of music in Google I/O, including that introduction, including it was we're in the studio, blah, blah, blah. And then there was a musical number about, am I doing the AI right, which I was very surprised to see. So, it was a lot to take in. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just a boomer anyway, so don't listen to me, Google. Anyway, where do we even start? There was a lot. It was a two-hour keynote, which was very long. Crystal Carter: Very long. Mordy Oberstein: I guess for our podcast and purposes, the good news is that they didn't talk a lot about search, so not a lot to cover. We're starting off salty. Crystal Carter: They talked about Gemini a lot, and I think that the big takeaway that I got from it was essentially that Gemini is coming to everything. It's essentially powering everything all at once, and I don't think that we will see the end of that very, very soon. I think that they're just looking to build, and build, and build on that, and I think that that's very apparent that they're all on Gemini in all parts of the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? It made me kind of wonder, and this is maybe a hot take, I guess the show is all about hot takes to be honest with you, that they're realizing that the ecosystem where you're going to get information in the future is going to be less search and more closed AI systems like Gemini or OpenAI, ChatGPT, that kind of thing. And at minimum, they're seeing that their revenue possibilities are greater with those AI possibilities than it is with search itself, which is interesting to hear myself even say. Crystal Carter: Well, I think that they're noticing that this is where the market is going, that a lot of people are interested in having these kind of assistants and having these kind of assistants as part of their day to day, which I mentioned that musical number there was, "Am I doing AI right?" That sort of thing. It's like normal, everyday people. I think they were trying to go for that kind of vibe that Apple always has, which is like we have very sophisticated tech that's really, really easy for you to use. And I think that they were trying to go for that, and I think that in terms of search for SEO, I think there's a lot of implications here. And you said, "I can't believe you're saying that," and there's a lot of implications here, but it did not seem particularly search was at the forefront of their minds with this. So, they wanted to showcase how useful Gemini can be, how integrated it is to their system, how powerful it is, and how many different iterations they have across all of their systems. Mordy Oberstein: So, that's I think something to keep in mind with this kind of thing that a lot of it has to do with not where they're going to earn revenue in terms of adding AI capabilities to Gmail, which they talked about in the workspace. So, I think that kind of stuff, by the way, is really cool. I think it's really useful. I think it's one of the only real cases where the AI product is really useful and it gives them a leg up over OpenAI, because Google has a whole ecosystem where they can apply their AI technology directly, so Gmail, or whatever workspace you're using, or Google Docs, whatever it is, and OpenAI doesn't have that. You're stuck in just an OpenAI universe using it independently. So that's really an interesting, I guess, advantage that Google has. Crystal Carter: But I think they had lots of different iterations, so you mentioned the Gmail one, but they also talked about lots of personal assistance sort of things as well. So, they talked about you can train it on your needs, and I think that as you're saying, so OpenAI has standalone, and I think that when they launched New Bing and their Copilot tool, that's something they really struggled with. They were like, "You can only have Copilot, you can only have New Bing if you sign up to be on the Bing ecosystem." And I think what Google's trying to do is they're trying to double down on their user relationships, so that if you have an Android phone, you are also using Gemini, you are also relying on Google Photos, so you're searching your photos, you're searching with your videos, all of us, so that their attack is part of your day-to-day, so that you're essentially relying on it, which is a big shift. I think there's a shift. I think that's a big shift. Mordy Oberstein: There's that stuff, which I think is very practical and I think very useful and I think very direct, and then I think there's the other half of it, which is let's make sure we signal to the investors, so that our stock price is healthy, that we are competing with OpenAI and our technology is just as advanced, if not more advanced than theirs is. And I think a lot of what you saw yesterday or wherever you're listening to this at Google I/O was a lot about that. So for example, a lot of the things they did with DeepMind, I felt like, "That's cool. I'm not sure how practically valuable that is yet." I felt that way, by the way, with OpenAI's demo also, "Very, very cool, but I'm not sure what's the practical implication of that, so that it actually improves my workflow right now." Crystal Carter: My main takeaway from all of it was they kept saying, "You can upload this, you can have more tokens." They said you can upload like a - Mordy Oberstein: It’s like Chucky Cheese! Crystal Carter: They were saying something like you can upload... I can't remember what the number was, but it was huge, like a 1,500 slide PowerPoint... Or not PowerPoint, Google Slide deck or something like that. I was like, "Who is making this?" Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting, because I felt what they were trying to do with that kind of stuff was differentiate themselves from OpenAI. OpenAI is for everybody, for the lay person to use on their phone and whatever, and Gemini is for developers, and engineers, and it's very complicated and professional. That was a branding differentiation they were trying to do. Crystal Carter: But I think that the thing that occurred to me though is that when we think about SEO, they were saying, "You can upload all of this and we can search all of it, and you can upload all of that and we can search all of that." And they were talking about that from their tools point of view. Google very often... Google does not silo their tools. They will overlap the tools as we see with Gemini, you see with Google Lens, as we see with Google Translate, they pull all of these things together across the ecosystem through the efficiencies and it gives users to great benefit. So, what I think we should think about as an SEO, as somebody who's working with the website is, how is Google helping users manage data via their tools and how does that affect how the users are going to access data and expect to be able to access data on a website? And I think that the shift to me that I got out of this was that users... Sorry, website managers, SEOs, marketing teams, whoever's managing the website should be thinking about their website as a data center and should be thinking about how accessible their data is, which ways their data is arranged, whether or not it's held in certain repositories, in like a PDF, or whether it's held in videos. They're talking about searching via video, which I think is a really interesting development. And I think that that opens up a lot of stuff, because that's almost certainly going to be something that's going to make YouTube videos more searchable, for instance. And I think that that's something that's interesting for people who were self-hosting on their websites. And also I think that's interesting for that data point I mean, we're going to be... I think that going forward it's going to be more updated to take advantage, and I think that'll be interesting. Mordy Oberstein: And I think it's the circle to search where we saw them, we covered that on the news on this podcast a while back when they tested it. That stuff is fascinating. It's super cool technology and it really doesn't make searching for things much easier, but I guess let's talk about the elephant in the room, which is the elephant. There's an elephant in the room and oh my God, we're talking about an elephant. No, no, we're talking about SGE. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: So, Google announced that they're going to be rolling out SGE outside of labs in the US and beyond. It's the end of all organic traffic ever, or not. Crystal Carter: Again, again. Mordy Oberstein: I was surprised by the way, so I was surprised that if you think about what they announced in terms of the classic SGE itself, and I know there's more capabilities which we'll get to about planning and organizing information, but the actual how many stars are in the universe and you get an SGE answer, nothing actually changed. They announced at Indutech and in DEV4, it's just the same thing. They're sufficiently rolling it out, and I think that's extremely telling about how they think about SGE, and part of me feels like they announced it, and this is a hot take, they announced it, because they had to announce that the rolling it out, because what are you going to do with the thing? You're not going to implement it, and there's a loss in having it there. You have to expand it anyway, so you could ignore it if you want to. So, let's roll it out. Again, it's good for perception, it's good for the health of the company and the perception of the company, but how impactful is the real question? Will SGE really be on the SERP? Crystal Carter: I think really interesting. So one of the things they said, they said that they're going to put it in a side panel, which I've been fascinated with. We've talked about Google copying Microsoft's homework, and the Copilot has been in the side panel on desktop for months. And basically if you go and you search up, I don't know, the best Yankee baseball player or something, then you'll get the- Mordy Oberstein: Yogi Berra. Crystal Carter: … Yogi Berra and then you'll have on the side it'll be like, "Blah, blah, blah, Yogi Berra..." And it'll write that and you may or may not pay attention to it, but that's already in the side panel on thing and it's user experience of people, what people are used to, and I think it's interesting that they were planning to do that as well. So, I think we should see some parity, and I think also it might be worth thinking about people are trying to prepare for this SGE universe looking at how their rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out, how their bidding rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out. I think that's particularly important for folks who are in EU, folks who are outside of the United States where they haven't had the SGE in any form. And so, we're not here on green fields. There is something that we can look at to compare data in terms of impact, and I think that that's worth having a look at. Mordy Oberstein: And that's interesting. I was talking to Garrett Sussman on X about this where SGE has been outside of labs in the US for a while already, and I personally haven't seen anybody, "Oh, the sky is falling," yet. And that's one thing that Google didn't say. They didn't say, "Oh, people find the SGE answers useful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," which everyone's got to put that PR spin on it, but they didn't say how often people are actually expanding it and interacting with it, which if the numbers were high, I would imagine they would say, "Oh, 80% of our users when SGE has been offered are engaging with..." And they didn't. So, I do speculate about how much the SGE will actually be used by users, but let's assume for a minute, Crystal, that everyone 100% of the time engages the SGE. Does that mean is the end of content as we know it? Crystal Carter: Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting was that they were talking about talk as much as you want, ask as long as you want, go as complex as you want in terms of your answers. So, I think the example that they showed was, "I want to find a yoga studio that's walking distance from this place in Boston, and has good entry offers," or something to the effect. And they were able to filter out this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and I think that this is the domain of the long-tail. This is something that for long-tail queries and also for understanding the element of that, what users are looking for, which combinations of information users are looking for is something that is interesting. So, I don't think it's necessarily the end of content, but I do think that we'll have to think about user expectations. Users will expect to be able to have more complex information available on the website, and I think also we will need to be able to organize that information more clearly in lots of different ways they're accessible to Google. Mordy Oberstein: I'm a little torn on this one because on the one hand it seems like, "All right, let's slow down here." On the other hand, the way that Google presented it in the video that they did, if you saw after the presentation itself, they did a whole, I don't know, a PR-ish kind of video. It very much looks like, or I took it and perceived it as they're basically saying SGE is going to replace top level information, which is, okay, let's deal with that as it is. At the same time, I feel like, yes, they did tell Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land that's going for complex queries where they can offer unique value, but if you look at the examples that people have been sharing, it's not for that. So for example, Christine Schacker shared an example with me where they're running it for... I had to deal with the kidney stone, something around that. I'm like, "Okay, that's interesting, that's not very complex." If you Google that, you'll get your typical Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health rundown of symptoms and causes and treatment and whatever. And what I take this as is Google basically saying, "Hey, you know what? You all have done that 100 times over already, 1,000 times over, we don't need that anymore. So, we're just going to show that in the SGE, because SGE actually, and I do believe this, does it better if it's accurate, because it's much more as opposed to, let's say the Mayo Clinic, they have their article, and the Cleveland clinic has their article. If you sort of combine the best of those articles, that's better. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Or I think though that content's not dead is, for example, in this whole prolific they had about preventing or dealing with kidney stones, which is such a pleasant topic, they had a section on, for example, avoiding protein, because that will prevent having kidney stones for whatever reason. I'm totally botching what it wrote, because I know nothing about kidney stones. I'm not a doctor. “Damnit Jim, I'm not a doctor.” That's not how that goes, but anyway, so if I had kidney stones and I'm like, "Oh, wait a second, I can prevent this again by not eating whatever protein?" That summary's not enough. The second tier or second level or second depth content I'll call it, you still need to click, you still need to dive in. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: And what I think it means is that if a website... See, I was talking to someone, I talking to Mark Preston about this today actually, when we think about writing a content cluster, so we'll be like, "How to prevent kidney stones," and we'll talk about medicine on one page and we'll talk about diet on another page. We think it's very prolific, but when you think about it, it's still very top level. A real in-depth topic cluster would be a content cluster about protein, eating it, and the prevention of kidney stones. Like for example, one topic would be, what proteins do or don't? Another page would be, for example, I'm off the cuff here, how do you now substitute your diet to get the protein you do need without eating protein to prevent kidney stones? There's a whole topic cluster about just that one slice of preventing kidney stones, which no one's doing, because that's way too in-depth kind of thing, but I feel like if you want to be the URL that shows up in the section of the SGE, that talks about preventing kidney stones with a protein-less diet, whatever it is, then you need to write that content cluster and be known as that entity that talks about what? Not kidney stones, not diet and kidney stones, preventing kidney stones with a less protein diet. So, I think content's alive, but I think it's a very different model than we currently look at it. Crystal Carter: And I think that it's going to shift the way that people think about content. And I've been here with content projects as well, where sometimes you're writing the content that is the primer, that is the, "What are kidney stones? What are the things..." You're writing that primer content, but you might not necessarily even expect that to rank particularly. You need to have that as part of your ecosystem, you need to have that in order to have content cluster salience, you need to have that in order to make sure that you can link to yourself instead link to someone else. And for people who are already on your website to understand that you know what that topic is and that sort of thing, you might not necessarily exactly trend. And I think that that will change the way people think about things. I think also where we are able to pull out those unique pieces of content from users that we are speaking with, that I think is a real content opportunity. So, where we know there is a deep cut question that only we can answer, that's really important. So, I think that the tools that we use for keyword research are going to be really important as well, because Google knows which ones have the giant volume. And I've started using Bing a lot recently, and I use Copilot when I get stuck, but if I've been searching on Google, "How do I answer this question?" Searching on Bing, "How do I answer this question?" If I find that in between the two of them, I can't find anything, then it goes to one of the LLMs, I'll go to Bing Copilot, I'll go to ChatGPT, I'll go to something else because I'm like, "Clearly, I'm not getting what I need. Maybe you can point me in the right direction with either the right terminology or the right ideas, or maybe you can verify this confusing information that I have." So I think that those, to use a phrase that Google uses very often, those needle and a haystack things, sometimes Google can point you in the right direction or sometimes an LLM can point you in the right direction of what you should be searching for, so that you can do a better search, so that's useful. I think also in terms of content opportunities in this sort of SGE everywhere world, I think that the new is your friend, because like you said, some of that well-worn territory of what is a key of kidney stone or what is a search engine or the kinds of things that they clearly have in the militrap. They've got it in the militrap, they know what it is. That sort of content, I think that that's right for Picket in terms of SGE. But new content and new information leads to insights on new things that are happening are going to be going to be a good place for websites to think that it may even be the reverse of journalism that websites are going to need to employ journalists for their sector, for their vertical. Mordy Oberstein: It's definitely a constriction of content, but it's not the elimination of content. So, I feel like content's been out of control. It's been in need of a correction for a long time, and this might be that. Is it going too far? I do have a feeling that Google might be going a little bit too far and the ecosystem, it won't be healthy enough and creating enough content, but that's a different question for a different time. Crystal Carter: I also want to talk about what they didn't talk about. So, they didn't talk about Reddit at all, which is very surprised about. Mordy Oberstein: They know that the Reddit thing is only a crutch. It's only there because they need to have the first-hand knowledge. No one really wants the Reddit there. They just have nothing else. Crystal Carter: I wasn’t surprised, but there wasn't a whole lot in terms of e-coms. Normally they're all in e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, shoppity, shop, shop, shop. Mordy Oberstein: Because Amazon's not the competitor anymore. OpenAI is the competitor. Crystal Carter: That's why they said AI over and over. It's super cut of them saying AI often though. Mordy Oberstein: Google, Google. The whole thing is interesting. I think the most interesting thing is the thematic trends throughout the whole thing, that being one of them, or the fact that everyone's saying, "Oh, SGE is going to be the end of content, blah, blah, blah," but look at the other thing. Google announced. And by the way, I just want to say predicted this in our talk with Danny Goodwin on a previous episode about Gemini, I said Google's going to take the custom answer formatting that Gemini produces and bringing that to the SERP. And lo and behold, Google said, "We're taking an AI approach to the SERP, the layout and presentation of the SERP results themselves, here you go. And that to me... So on the one hand you have, "Oh, SGE is going to answer everything," but if that's the case, then why is Google also investing in having the SERP being formatted by AI to make it easier for you to explore the topic? Because they know that people don't just want the answer. There still is an exploration element, so they're going to invest in both. Big thing for me. Crystal Carter: Also, Google needs to be able to send people's websites in order for their revenue. Their ad revenue is a strong tool for them, so they need to be able to make sure that that ecosystem doesn't fall apart. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. One last thing we didn't cover, which we need to cover, and that's the trip planning and the menu planning, all the organizational stuff, which is interesting. Now, Google... We covered this also on the Snappy news before, but Google has been testing the trip planner for a while. So you type in, "Plan my trip to Philadelphia," and it says, "Don't go there." I'm just kidding. It plans out you're five days in Philly for you. And then if you want to create a low-carb daily menu plan for me that focuses on chicken and whatever, whatever, it'll create a menu plan for you. Again, "Oh, it's the end of these websites. It's the end of all the websites." I don't know. I got feelings about this. I'll give you my example. I put this on X earlier today. So, three years ago I got diagnosed. Is it a diagnosis? I don't know, with a fatty liver. I ate too much during COVID, I drank too much during COVID, and I watched too much Netflix during COVID. The Netflix part had less to do with the fatty liver part, and I completely changed my diet. I didn't go to Google. I didn't even think about going to Google and asking it, "Can you please plan a menu so I don't leave my children fatherless?" I went to a nutritionist and then when I had specific questions about what that nutritionist said, I started Googling, "Does this food..." She said, "Here's the criteria, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." "Does this food meet that criteria?" And I did Google that, so I feel like a casual trip or a casual diet plan you might search for. I went to a conference, I got an extra day in Philly, what should I do today? If I'm spilling 10 grand to take my family to LA or to San Francisco or to Philly for that matter, I am not saying, "All right, plan my trip for me and see you later. I'll just do whatever the AI says." Crystal Carter: So, I think it's really interesting that they chose the trip thing again as well, because they talked about the trip or planning a trip for when they were talking about MUM, when they were like, "Oh, we're multi-modal with MUM." They talked about the trip when they were talking about the Google when they originally announced Gemini and AI and stuff. So, they've talked about planning a trip for a few times, and one of the times that they talked about planning a trip, they got things wrong. So, I think it's interesting that they went back to this as a trope and as a use case, because planning a trip is really complex, as you say. So, it's interesting to use it as an example. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, parenthetically, they announced this whole multi-step search result reason, multi-step reasoning, which you mentioned before. I kind of feel like old, not new? Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff where I remember when they were like, "MUM is going to be the new thing," and MUM is now kind of in Gemini kind of. Mordy Oberstein: That's what MUM did. MUM did the multiple reasoning, parsing … Crystal Carter: But with AI. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's different, I forgot. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: With AI. Crystal Carter: I'm sure that MUM didn't have any AI to begin with. I'm sure that there wasn't. Mordy Oberstein: No, that's just machine learning, an inferior version of AI. Crystal Carter: Of course,. I think the next few months will be interesting. I think the international rollout of Gemini and all of the different elements that are associated with it will be really interesting, and I think it felt a little inconclusive overall. Overall, it felt a little bit work in progress rather than, "Here's the thing and here's exactly what we're doing." It felt a little bit work in progress and I was fascinated that there weren't as many hot takes as there normally are from Google I/O. Mordy Oberstein: No, I knew that. Crystal Carter: It kind feels a little work in progress, so we'll see. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting, all right. I guess we'll wait and see, and also the sky is not falling. Crystal Carter: No, not yet, but I do think if people want to do anything, then if you were to take any next steps out of this, I'd probably say shore up your knowledge panel. Mordy Oberstein: It's always a good idea anyway. Crystal Carter: True. Mordy Oberstein: I would say add a layer of topical depth to your website if you don't have it. Crystal Carter: Oh, that's good, so these are top tips. Mordy Oberstein: Two takeaways. All right, we did good. We have two takeaways for you. Two is better than one Crystal Carter: AI. Mordy Oberstein: Ai, Google. That'll do it for I/O, I guess. I/O you one for joining me today and spending your time with recording this, Crystal. I owe you one. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well, thanks. Joining us on this special bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? You literally don't have to worry. We're back tomorrow with a new episode about SEO and accessibility. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning about wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on Wix is SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rate rating on Spotify, please. So until next time, which is tomorrow, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Barry Schwartz Garrett Sussman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Barry Schwartz Garrett Sussman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy win insights around what's happening in SEO, and boy, if something's happening in SEO right now. I'm already overseeing the head SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is Google, Google, Google focused, our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic, very enthusiastic introduction as we get into Google. Mordy Oberstein: Google. Mordy Oberstein: In case you don't know, so welcome to the bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast, where each year we go through what Google announced at Google I/O, in this case Google I/O 2024. Just to remind you, by the way, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also check out our brand new platform, Wix Studio, to help you manage your clients' projects and agency team members with far greater efficiency. Anyway, back to I/O. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Back to I/O. In case you didn't watch it before the keynote actually started, there was an improvisational musician who I'm told is very famous and very good. I don't know who he is. Crystal Carter: Okay, yeah Mordy Oberstein: I wrote to you on WhatsApp, Crystal, he looked like Joseph and took his Technicolor Dreamcoat and was sleeping on a bench in Bryant Park and kicked out of the house and decided that during the daytime, he'll spend most of his time yelling some prophetic visions about big tech by screaming the words Google, Google, Google, all day long. Crystal Carter: I'm not sure. I think they were trying to make it fun. I did a predictions video and I thought, "Oh, maybe it'll be less fun because they're trying to focus on..." They got competitors. OpenAI did a big drop the day before, and so I thought this was going to be like, "We're very serious, boom, boom," but there was a lot of music in Google I/O, including that introduction, including it was we're in the studio, blah, blah, blah. And then there was a musical number about, am I doing the AI right, which I was very surprised to see. So, it was a lot to take in. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just a boomer anyway, so don't listen to me, Google. Anyway, where do we even start? There was a lot. It was a two-hour keynote, which was very long. Crystal Carter: Very long. Mordy Oberstein: I guess for our podcast and purposes, the good news is that they didn't talk a lot about search, so not a lot to cover. We're starting off salty. Crystal Carter: They talked about Gemini a lot, and I think that the big takeaway that I got from it was essentially that Gemini is coming to everything. It's essentially powering everything all at once, and I don't think that we will see the end of that very, very soon. I think that they're just looking to build, and build, and build on that, and I think that that's very apparent that they're all on Gemini in all parts of the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: You know what? It made me kind of wonder, and this is maybe a hot take, I guess the show is all about hot takes to be honest with you, that they're realizing that the ecosystem where you're going to get information in the future is going to be less search and more closed AI systems like Gemini or OpenAI, ChatGPT, that kind of thing. And at minimum, they're seeing that their revenue possibilities are greater with those AI possibilities than it is with search itself, which is interesting to hear myself even say. Crystal Carter: Well, I think that they're noticing that this is where the market is going, that a lot of people are interested in having these kind of assistants and having these kind of assistants as part of their day to day, which I mentioned that musical number there was, "Am I doing AI right?" That sort of thing. It's like normal, everyday people. I think they were trying to go for that kind of vibe that Apple always has, which is like we have very sophisticated tech that's really, really easy for you to use. And I think that they were trying to go for that, and I think that in terms of search for SEO, I think there's a lot of implications here. And you said, "I can't believe you're saying that," and there's a lot of implications here, but it did not seem particularly search was at the forefront of their minds with this. So, they wanted to showcase how useful Gemini can be, how integrated it is to their system, how powerful it is, and how many different iterations they have across all of their systems. Mordy Oberstein: So, that's I think something to keep in mind with this kind of thing that a lot of it has to do with not where they're going to earn revenue in terms of adding AI capabilities to Gmail, which they talked about in the workspace. So, I think that kind of stuff, by the way, is really cool. I think it's really useful. I think it's one of the only real cases where the AI product is really useful and it gives them a leg up over OpenAI, because Google has a whole ecosystem where they can apply their AI technology directly, so Gmail, or whatever workspace you're using, or Google Docs, whatever it is, and OpenAI doesn't have that. You're stuck in just an OpenAI universe using it independently. So that's really an interesting, I guess, advantage that Google has. Crystal Carter: But I think they had lots of different iterations, so you mentioned the Gmail one, but they also talked about lots of personal assistance sort of things as well. So, they talked about you can train it on your needs, and I think that as you're saying, so OpenAI has standalone, and I think that when they launched New Bing and their Copilot tool, that's something they really struggled with. They were like, "You can only have Copilot, you can only have New Bing if you sign up to be on the Bing ecosystem." And I think what Google's trying to do is they're trying to double down on their user relationships, so that if you have an Android phone, you are also using Gemini, you are also relying on Google Photos, so you're searching your photos, you're searching with your videos, all of us, so that their attack is part of your day-to-day, so that you're essentially relying on it, which is a big shift. I think there's a shift. I think that's a big shift. Mordy Oberstein: There's that stuff, which I think is very practical and I think very useful and I think very direct, and then I think there's the other half of it, which is let's make sure we signal to the investors, so that our stock price is healthy, that we are competing with OpenAI and our technology is just as advanced, if not more advanced than theirs is. And I think a lot of what you saw yesterday or wherever you're listening to this at Google I/O was a lot about that. So for example, a lot of the things they did with DeepMind, I felt like, "That's cool. I'm not sure how practically valuable that is yet." I felt that way, by the way, with OpenAI's demo also, "Very, very cool, but I'm not sure what's the practical implication of that, so that it actually improves my workflow right now." Crystal Carter: My main takeaway from all of it was they kept saying, "You can upload this, you can have more tokens." They said you can upload like a - Mordy Oberstein: It’s like Chucky Cheese! Crystal Carter: They were saying something like you can upload... I can't remember what the number was, but it was huge, like a 1,500 slide PowerPoint... Or not PowerPoint, Google Slide deck or something like that. I was like, "Who is making this?" Mordy Oberstein: That's interesting, because I felt what they were trying to do with that kind of stuff was differentiate themselves from OpenAI. OpenAI is for everybody, for the lay person to use on their phone and whatever, and Gemini is for developers, and engineers, and it's very complicated and professional. That was a branding differentiation they were trying to do. Crystal Carter: But I think that the thing that occurred to me though is that when we think about SEO, they were saying, "You can upload all of this and we can search all of it, and you can upload all of that and we can search all of that." And they were talking about that from their tools point of view. Google very often... Google does not silo their tools. They will overlap the tools as we see with Gemini, you see with Google Lens, as we see with Google Translate, they pull all of these things together across the ecosystem through the efficiencies and it gives users to great benefit. So, what I think we should think about as an SEO, as somebody who's working with the website is, how is Google helping users manage data via their tools and how does that affect how the users are going to access data and expect to be able to access data on a website? And I think that the shift to me that I got out of this was that users... Sorry, website managers, SEOs, marketing teams, whoever's managing the website should be thinking about their website as a data center and should be thinking about how accessible their data is, which ways their data is arranged, whether or not it's held in certain repositories, in like a PDF, or whether it's held in videos. They're talking about searching via video, which I think is a really interesting development. And I think that that opens up a lot of stuff, because that's almost certainly going to be something that's going to make YouTube videos more searchable, for instance. And I think that that's something that's interesting for people who were self-hosting on their websites. And also I think that's interesting for that data point I mean, we're going to be... I think that going forward it's going to be more updated to take advantage, and I think that'll be interesting. Mordy Oberstein: And I think it's the circle to search where we saw them, we covered that on the news on this podcast a while back when they tested it. That stuff is fascinating. It's super cool technology and it really doesn't make searching for things much easier, but I guess let's talk about the elephant in the room, which is the elephant. There's an elephant in the room and oh my God, we're talking about an elephant. No, no, we're talking about SGE. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: So, Google announced that they're going to be rolling out SGE outside of labs in the US and beyond. It's the end of all organic traffic ever, or not. Crystal Carter: Again, again. Mordy Oberstein: I was surprised by the way, so I was surprised that if you think about what they announced in terms of the classic SGE itself, and I know there's more capabilities which we'll get to about planning and organizing information, but the actual how many stars are in the universe and you get an SGE answer, nothing actually changed. They announced at Indutech and in DEV4, it's just the same thing. They're sufficiently rolling it out, and I think that's extremely telling about how they think about SGE, and part of me feels like they announced it, and this is a hot take, they announced it, because they had to announce that the rolling it out, because what are you going to do with the thing? You're not going to implement it, and there's a loss in having it there. You have to expand it anyway, so you could ignore it if you want to. So, let's roll it out. Again, it's good for perception, it's good for the health of the company and the perception of the company, but how impactful is the real question? Will SGE really be on the SERP? Crystal Carter: I think really interesting. So one of the things they said, they said that they're going to put it in a side panel, which I've been fascinated with. We've talked about Google copying Microsoft's homework, and the Copilot has been in the side panel on desktop for months. And basically if you go and you search up, I don't know, the best Yankee baseball player or something, then you'll get the- Mordy Oberstein: Yogi Berra. Crystal Carter: … Yogi Berra and then you'll have on the side it'll be like, "Blah, blah, blah, Yogi Berra..." And it'll write that and you may or may not pay attention to it, but that's already in the side panel on thing and it's user experience of people, what people are used to, and I think it's interesting that they were planning to do that as well. So, I think we should see some parity, and I think also it might be worth thinking about people are trying to prepare for this SGE universe looking at how their rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out, how their bidding rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out. I think that's particularly important for folks who are in EU, folks who are outside of the United States where they haven't had the SGE in any form. And so, we're not here on green fields. There is something that we can look at to compare data in terms of impact, and I think that that's worth having a look at. Mordy Oberstein: And that's interesting. I was talking to Garrett Sussman on X about this where SGE has been outside of labs in the US for a while already, and I personally haven't seen anybody, "Oh, the sky is falling," yet. And that's one thing that Google didn't say. They didn't say, "Oh, people find the SGE answers useful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," which everyone's got to put that PR spin on it, but they didn't say how often people are actually expanding it and interacting with it, which if the numbers were high, I would imagine they would say, "Oh, 80% of our users when SGE has been offered are engaging with..." And they didn't. So, I do speculate about how much the SGE will actually be used by users, but let's assume for a minute, Crystal, that everyone 100% of the time engages the SGE. Does that mean is the end of content as we know it? Crystal Carter: Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting was that they were talking about talk as much as you want, ask as long as you want, go as complex as you want in terms of your answers. So, I think the example that they showed was, "I want to find a yoga studio that's walking distance from this place in Boston, and has good entry offers," or something to the effect. And they were able to filter out this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and I think that this is the domain of the long-tail. This is something that for long-tail queries and also for understanding the element of that, what users are looking for, which combinations of information users are looking for is something that is interesting. So, I don't think it's necessarily the end of content, but I do think that we'll have to think about user expectations. Users will expect to be able to have more complex information available on the website, and I think also we will need to be able to organize that information more clearly in lots of different ways they're accessible to Google. Mordy Oberstein: I'm a little torn on this one because on the one hand it seems like, "All right, let's slow down here." On the other hand, the way that Google presented it in the video that they did, if you saw after the presentation itself, they did a whole, I don't know, a PR-ish kind of video. It very much looks like, or I took it and perceived it as they're basically saying SGE is going to replace top level information, which is, okay, let's deal with that as it is. At the same time, I feel like, yes, they did tell Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land that's going for complex queries where they can offer unique value, but if you look at the examples that people have been sharing, it's not for that. So for example, Christine Schacker shared an example with me where they're running it for... I had to deal with the kidney stone, something around that. I'm like, "Okay, that's interesting, that's not very complex." If you Google that, you'll get your typical Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health rundown of symptoms and causes and treatment and whatever. And what I take this as is Google basically saying, "Hey, you know what? You all have done that 100 times over already, 1,000 times over, we don't need that anymore. So, we're just going to show that in the SGE, because SGE actually, and I do believe this, does it better if it's accurate, because it's much more as opposed to, let's say the Mayo Clinic, they have their article, and the Cleveland clinic has their article. If you sort of combine the best of those articles, that's better. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Or I think though that content's not dead is, for example, in this whole prolific they had about preventing or dealing with kidney stones, which is such a pleasant topic, they had a section on, for example, avoiding protein, because that will prevent having kidney stones for whatever reason. I'm totally botching what it wrote, because I know nothing about kidney stones. I'm not a doctor. “Damnit Jim, I'm not a doctor.” That's not how that goes, but anyway, so if I had kidney stones and I'm like, "Oh, wait a second, I can prevent this again by not eating whatever protein?" That summary's not enough. The second tier or second level or second depth content I'll call it, you still need to click, you still need to dive in. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: And what I think it means is that if a website... See, I was talking to someone, I talking to Mark Preston about this today actually, when we think about writing a content cluster, so we'll be like, "How to prevent kidney stones," and we'll talk about medicine on one page and we'll talk about diet on another page. We think it's very prolific, but when you think about it, it's still very top level. A real in-depth topic cluster would be a content cluster about protein, eating it, and the prevention of kidney stones. Like for example, one topic would be, what proteins do or don't? Another page would be, for example, I'm off the cuff here, how do you now substitute your diet to get the protein you do need without eating protein to prevent kidney stones? There's a whole topic cluster about just that one slice of preventing kidney stones, which no one's doing, because that's way too in-depth kind of thing, but I feel like if you want to be the URL that shows up in the section of the SGE, that talks about preventing kidney stones with a protein-less diet, whatever it is, then you need to write that content cluster and be known as that entity that talks about what? Not kidney stones, not diet and kidney stones, preventing kidney stones with a less protein diet. So, I think content's alive, but I think it's a very different model than we currently look at it. Crystal Carter: And I think that it's going to shift the way that people think about content. And I've been here with content projects as well, where sometimes you're writing the content that is the primer, that is the, "What are kidney stones? What are the things..." You're writing that primer content, but you might not necessarily even expect that to rank particularly. You need to have that as part of your ecosystem, you need to have that in order to have content cluster salience, you need to have that in order to make sure that you can link to yourself instead link to someone else. And for people who are already on your website to understand that you know what that topic is and that sort of thing, you might not necessarily exactly trend. And I think that that will change the way people think about things. I think also where we are able to pull out those unique pieces of content from users that we are speaking with, that I think is a real content opportunity. So, where we know there is a deep cut question that only we can answer, that's really important. So, I think that the tools that we use for keyword research are going to be really important as well, because Google knows which ones have the giant volume. And I've started using Bing a lot recently, and I use Copilot when I get stuck, but if I've been searching on Google, "How do I answer this question?" Searching on Bing, "How do I answer this question?" If I find that in between the two of them, I can't find anything, then it goes to one of the LLMs, I'll go to Bing Copilot, I'll go to ChatGPT, I'll go to something else because I'm like, "Clearly, I'm not getting what I need. Maybe you can point me in the right direction with either the right terminology or the right ideas, or maybe you can verify this confusing information that I have." So I think that those, to use a phrase that Google uses very often, those needle and a haystack things, sometimes Google can point you in the right direction or sometimes an LLM can point you in the right direction of what you should be searching for, so that you can do a better search, so that's useful. I think also in terms of content opportunities in this sort of SGE everywhere world, I think that the new is your friend, because like you said, some of that well-worn territory of what is a key of kidney stone or what is a search engine or the kinds of things that they clearly have in the militrap. They've got it in the militrap, they know what it is. That sort of content, I think that that's right for Picket in terms of SGE. But new content and new information leads to insights on new things that are happening are going to be going to be a good place for websites to think that it may even be the reverse of journalism that websites are going to need to employ journalists for their sector, for their vertical. Mordy Oberstein: It's definitely a constriction of content, but it's not the elimination of content. So, I feel like content's been out of control. It's been in need of a correction for a long time, and this might be that. Is it going too far? I do have a feeling that Google might be going a little bit too far and the ecosystem, it won't be healthy enough and creating enough content, but that's a different question for a different time. Crystal Carter: I also want to talk about what they didn't talk about. So, they didn't talk about Reddit at all, which is very surprised about. Mordy Oberstein: They know that the Reddit thing is only a crutch. It's only there because they need to have the first-hand knowledge. No one really wants the Reddit there. They just have nothing else. Crystal Carter: I wasn’t surprised, but there wasn't a whole lot in terms of e-coms. Normally they're all in e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, shoppity, shop, shop, shop. Mordy Oberstein: Because Amazon's not the competitor anymore. OpenAI is the competitor. Crystal Carter: That's why they said AI over and over. It's super cut of them saying AI often though. Mordy Oberstein: Google, Google. The whole thing is interesting. I think the most interesting thing is the thematic trends throughout the whole thing, that being one of them, or the fact that everyone's saying, "Oh, SGE is going to be the end of content, blah, blah, blah," but look at the other thing. Google announced. And by the way, I just want to say predicted this in our talk with Danny Goodwin on a previous episode about Gemini, I said Google's going to take the custom answer formatting that Gemini produces and bringing that to the SERP. And lo and behold, Google said, "We're taking an AI approach to the SERP, the layout and presentation of the SERP results themselves, here you go. And that to me... So on the one hand you have, "Oh, SGE is going to answer everything," but if that's the case, then why is Google also investing in having the SERP being formatted by AI to make it easier for you to explore the topic? Because they know that people don't just want the answer. There still is an exploration element, so they're going to invest in both. Big thing for me. Crystal Carter: Also, Google needs to be able to send people's websites in order for their revenue. Their ad revenue is a strong tool for them, so they need to be able to make sure that that ecosystem doesn't fall apart. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. One last thing we didn't cover, which we need to cover, and that's the trip planning and the menu planning, all the organizational stuff, which is interesting. Now, Google... We covered this also on the Snappy news before, but Google has been testing the trip planner for a while. So you type in, "Plan my trip to Philadelphia," and it says, "Don't go there." I'm just kidding. It plans out you're five days in Philly for you. And then if you want to create a low-carb daily menu plan for me that focuses on chicken and whatever, whatever, it'll create a menu plan for you. Again, "Oh, it's the end of these websites. It's the end of all the websites." I don't know. I got feelings about this. I'll give you my example. I put this on X earlier today. So, three years ago I got diagnosed. Is it a diagnosis? I don't know, with a fatty liver. I ate too much during COVID, I drank too much during COVID, and I watched too much Netflix during COVID. The Netflix part had less to do with the fatty liver part, and I completely changed my diet. I didn't go to Google. I didn't even think about going to Google and asking it, "Can you please plan a menu so I don't leave my children fatherless?" I went to a nutritionist and then when I had specific questions about what that nutritionist said, I started Googling, "Does this food..." She said, "Here's the criteria, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." "Does this food meet that criteria?" And I did Google that, so I feel like a casual trip or a casual diet plan you might search for. I went to a conference, I got an extra day in Philly, what should I do today? If I'm spilling 10 grand to take my family to LA or to San Francisco or to Philly for that matter, I am not saying, "All right, plan my trip for me and see you later. I'll just do whatever the AI says." Crystal Carter: So, I think it's really interesting that they chose the trip thing again as well, because they talked about the trip or planning a trip for when they were talking about MUM, when they were like, "Oh, we're multi-modal with MUM." They talked about the trip when they were talking about the Google when they originally announced Gemini and AI and stuff. So, they've talked about planning a trip for a few times, and one of the times that they talked about planning a trip, they got things wrong. So, I think it's interesting that they went back to this as a trope and as a use case, because planning a trip is really complex, as you say. So, it's interesting to use it as an example. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, parenthetically, they announced this whole multi-step search result reason, multi-step reasoning, which you mentioned before. I kind of feel like old, not new? Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff where I remember when they were like, "MUM is going to be the new thing," and MUM is now kind of in Gemini kind of. Mordy Oberstein: That's what MUM did. MUM did the multiple reasoning, parsing … Crystal Carter: But with AI. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's different, I forgot. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: With AI. Crystal Carter: I'm sure that MUM didn't have any AI to begin with. I'm sure that there wasn't. Mordy Oberstein: No, that's just machine learning, an inferior version of AI. Crystal Carter: Of course,. I think the next few months will be interesting. I think the international rollout of Gemini and all of the different elements that are associated with it will be really interesting, and I think it felt a little inconclusive overall. Overall, it felt a little bit work in progress rather than, "Here's the thing and here's exactly what we're doing." It felt a little bit work in progress and I was fascinated that there weren't as many hot takes as there normally are from Google I/O. Mordy Oberstein: No, I knew that. Crystal Carter: It kind feels a little work in progress, so we'll see. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting, all right. I guess we'll wait and see, and also the sky is not falling. Crystal Carter: No, not yet, but I do think if people want to do anything, then if you were to take any next steps out of this, I'd probably say shore up your knowledge panel. Mordy Oberstein: It's always a good idea anyway. Crystal Carter: True. Mordy Oberstein: I would say add a layer of topical depth to your website if you don't have it. Crystal Carter: Oh, that's good, so these are top tips. Mordy Oberstein: Two takeaways. All right, we did good. We have two takeaways for you. Two is better than one Crystal Carter: AI. Mordy Oberstein: Ai, Google. That'll do it for I/O, I guess. I/O you one for joining me today and spending your time with recording this, Crystal. I owe you one. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well, thanks. Joining us on this special bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? You literally don't have to worry. We're back tomorrow with a new episode about SEO and accessibility. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning about wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on Wix is SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rate rating on Spotify, please. So until next time, which is tomorrow, peace, love, and SEO. 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Does user behavior impact rankings? What has the Department of Justice’s antitrust trial involving Google uncovered about user behavior and rankings? This week, Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter investigate how much Google directly utilizes user behavior to impact rankings and what that should tell us as SEOs. SEO Content Strategist at Search Engine Journal, Shelley Walsh, joins the show to cover the Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against Google and what was revealed there about rankings and user behavior. The verdict is in as we pass judgment on user behavior’s impact on Google rankings on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Does Google use user behavior metrics for ranking Does user behavior impact rankings? What has the Department of Justice’s antitrust trial involving Google uncovered about user behavior and rankings? This week, Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter investigate how much Google directly utilizes user behavior to impact rankings and what that should tell us as SEOs. SEO Content Strategist at Search Engine Journal, Shelley Walsh, joins the show to cover the Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against Google and what was revealed there about rankings and user behavior. The verdict is in as we pass judgment on user behavior’s impact on Google rankings on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 71 | January 24, 2024 | 49 MIN 00:00 / 49:18 This week’s guests Shelley Walsh Shelley Walsh is a digital consultant with over 20 years creative, marketing & tech experience. In the last 14 years, she has been published extensively across industry publications and spoken at many events online and offline. She works with SEJ as their SEO content strategist and as an SEO content consultant for brands in the UK and US to help them achieve measurable results. Shelley also produces The Pioneers, a series of interviews with influential people about SEO and the early days of the industry. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast to get some groovy insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the incredible, the absolutely unparalleled, uncompromising, but in a good way, head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. I hope everyone's having a fantastic web-based, digital, listening-to-a-podcast day. I hope the sun is shining and that you have nice snacks wherever you're listening. Mordy Oberstein: Well, if you enjoy rain, I hope that it's raining, and you're cozy under a blanket. Crystal Carter: Some people do enjoy rain. Mordy Oberstein: Some people do. Crystal Carter: Some people do. My kid likes rain. It's raining, and he's like, "Yay." And I'm like, "Let's go home." And he's like, "No, it's fun." And I'm like- Mordy Oberstein: Splash-in-puddle time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's true. That's true. This is it. This is it. You got to take the rough with the smooth. Mordy Oberstein: Without thinking it through like, "Oh, now my shoes are soaked." Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. People don't gauge how deep the puddle is. That's also a risk, that sometimes you think, "Oh, that's a little," and then it's like a lake. It's like a chasm. It's like some sort of abyss, and you've just plunged yourself into it. Mordy Oberstein: So I don't mind, that's fine. Let the kids get wet, whatever. But then when they get muddy and the mud is sucked to the shoes, that's my limit. That's when I'm done. Now I've got to clean that thing. Forget it. Crystal Carter: It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Mordy Oberstein: The children you have. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also grow your website if you're a lawyer. Insert many lawyer jokes here. Yep, LegalZoom and Wix have a partnership to help lawyers build their websites so that you can focus on what you do best. You might be asking yourself, "What does this have to do with me?" For this audience, probably not much, to be honest with you. But it's good to know anyway because it's got a lot to do with this week's topic, and that's user behavior and SEO. What does that have to do with lawyers? Well, we're going to explore the complex history and recent revelations around user behavior for SEO from Google's DOJ trial. Hence the Legalzoom thing. Now you get it? Now it makes sense. Back to the intro. We're going to explore the complex history and recent revelations of Google's DOJ trial and maybe set the record straight about how user behavior impacts rankings, such as, what has Google said about user behavior and how it impacts rankings? What's the role of machine learning in user behavior and rankings? Have the revelations from Google's DOJ trial changed how we should look at user behavior and rankings? What Google has said about the leaks from the DOJ trial around user behavior and rankings? To help us sort out the complications of user behavior and rankings, Search Engine Journal's own Shelley Walsh weighs in. We'll also have a look at Google's PAA box and what it says about behavior. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So tuck in your shirt, comb your hair, and be on your best behavior as a hard look at what's changed about user behavior and SEO is coming over for dinner tonight on this, the 71st episode of SERP's Up. Whoo, boy, I'm not feeling good, and that hurt my throat. Breaking the fourth wall. Crystal Carter: Breaking the fourth wall. Mordy Oberstein: I should have got a cup of tea. I don't do tea. Crystal Carter: I feel like, though, breaking the fourth wall is what this trial has been about. It's been really, really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, boy. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of juicy morsels coming out in the documents, and people have been watching it very, very carefully. And I think that it's some of the best information we've had- Mordy Oberstein: In a long time. Some of the coolest information, yeah. Crystal Carter: From Google about exactly some of the inner workings of how they do what they do. Mordy Oberstein: That said, it's a little bit of a hotbed of SEO controversy. So we hope, I hope at least, that as we go through this, we do not upset anybody on either side of this argument, but offer what's going on, offer our takes. But it's SEO at the end of the day, and it's just a healthy look at what's happening out there. So I guess we should take a look back at the history of all of this because ... Wait, even further, if this is your first gander at user behavior metrics, just so it's clear what we're talking about, we're talking about things like behaviors that users do on Google, like they click on a result, or how long Google stays on a page, like time on page, how many pages the user may have visited during that session. All this is tracked by Google Analytics or Google knows all of this. Or maybe you went to a page and you said, "Wait a second, I don't want that." And you went back to Google and clicked on something else. What was the last click of that session on the surface? These are all behavior metrics that Google is monitoring, and the question is, does that impact the ranking? So really crazy case, a certain URL or a certain result on Google, it's a whole bunch of clicks over and over and over again. Does Google say, "Hey, I guess we got it right, let's keep this ranking really high?" That would be user behavior playing itself out for rankings. And Google has said for a long time, "No, we don't look at things like that," because it sounds really simple, but it is really complicated. Because maybe, for example, you clicked on a result from Google, you spent one second on the page and you bounce back to the SERP. Does that mean it's bad? Or maybe you were Googling, "Is it raining outside?" Saw the answer is yes on the webpage. By the way, completely ignoring that Google tells you that on the SERP itself. Well, let's just pretend that Google didn't. You go to the webpage, it says, "It is raining outside," and you go back to do another search. That's called pogo sticking, by the way, in case you didn't know. Maybe that's good. Maybe that means the page was great. It told me the information really quickly. So user behavior metrics get really complicated really quickly, and they're messy, which is why Google's saying, "No, we don't use them." But SEOs have been saying for a long, long time, "No, no, no, Google has this data. They've got to be using this in some way." Bing says they do, which further puts that thumb on the scale, and maybe Google really is, despite the fact that they say no, we're not. Now, where it gets really complicated is that Google has said, "Well, we kind of do indirectly." So for example, Google trains machine learning properties like RankBrain on, or with rather, user behavior. If a user clicks on a page, and let's make a really simple case everyone always use, it's a recipe, and you go to the web page, and the recipe has no image. You bounce and you go to a page with an image. The machine learning is now trained in the fact that if it's a recipe, it needs to have an image. We're not going to rank you. So oversimplifying it, but that would be user behavior impacting rank, albeit indirectly. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that was interesting in this document, there was a document that was shared from the files that was an internal document about search, and it was like, "It's a 2016 Q4 search all hands." And one of the things they said was something around that response. So they said in this document, "We don't understand documents. We fake it." This is slide five in the document, and it says- Mordy Oberstein: So a little bit of context. So Google is being sued by the Department of Justice. I'm not getting into any of that. All we're talking about is some of the testimony, I don't know if there were leaks or that it's been published, whatever. There have been information or statements from that trial about how search works that have been covered by Seach Engine Land, SE Roundtable and SEJ and so forth. So we're talking about a leak that comes from a 2016 Google PowerPoint. Sorry, now we have context. Crystal Carter: So in PowerPoint it says, "We don't understand the documents. We fake it Today, our ability to understand documents directly is minimal." I should also caveat that this is from 2016, and in internet terms between 2016 and 2023 is a vast amount of time. Mordy Oberstein: To give you context on that, RankBrain came out in 2015. That was Google's first machine learning property. So you're talking a year after RankBrain. That's a long time ago. Crystal Carter: And between that, we've had tons of other algorithms that have come up, BERT, MUM and ELMo, I think as well, in there. Mordy Oberstein: And then there's also a MOM, and MOM's not really integrated yet, but only a little bit. So there's been a whole bunch of really advanced machine learning properties. Crystal Carter: But in 2016 they said, "We watched how people react to documents and memorized their responses." And they said, "We look at people." So they said, "Beyond basic stuff, we hardly look at documents. We look at people. If a document gets a positive reaction, we figure it's good. If the reaction is negative, it's probably bad. Grossly simplified, this is the source of Google's magic." And I think the other thing that's important to remember is that between that time and now, Google's got a lot more data from mobile users, from Chrome users, for instance. So Chrome users, they'll have more documents, or sorry, more information about how users are using things when they're logged into lots of Google properties and when they're logged into lots of Google elements. So I think that that's important to think about as well. But one of the things that Danny Sullivan talked about at Brighton was that they've always paid attention to users, right? Mordy Oberstein: So yeah, that's that point. That Google has said for a long time they've always used user behavior metrics in this way to train machine learning. So yes, it does. But what they're saying is that it creates a profile around the content and around the intent of the user. So they're not saying the clicks or the user behavior, whatever the metric they're looking at, and the Google actually, because of the DOJ leaks, has shown some of the metrics they might be using, like first click, last click, scrolling, that kind of thing. They're not using it to say, "This page that you got clicked on will rank." What they'll do is they'll say, "What was it about this page that seemed to entice the click that the user wants? And would that apply to other similar pages? If yes, this is a new profile for this kind of query and this kind of page." So it's creating a profile as opposed to saying the particular page will rank. So nothing's actually changed from the way Google's looking at this. They said, "Yeah." So when these leaks have come out, and there's been a whole bunch of them around user behavior, Google and what your target identity some like, "Yeah, that's nothing new. We've been saying this the whole time." SEOs have been, well, maybe not. Crystal Carter: Right. What I think is also interesting is that in this document they said, "We have to design interactions that also allow us to learn from users." And I think that this is interesting because we see a lot more filters on the search as well. So I think that I pay a lot of attention to SERP features, and certainly from a tech SEO point of view, being able to trigger SERP features and being able to get content to be more visible in SERP features is something that is very often a technical requirement. And that I find really, really interesting because those interactions can guide your content, your content creation, and the interactions that they create when they add more people also ask. When they add a filter, for example, when they add things like that, that gives us the guide to the kinds of signals and the kind of information that Google's looking for from users and for content. Mordy Oberstein: Ironically to your point, I'll try to pull it up here because I'm trying to remember exactly the phraseology, but that was, I believe, another leak from, I think it was Ben Gomes who said this. I don't remember exactly who it was, but there was a specific request to have more filters added to the SERP in order to incentivize users going to more result pages so that there'd be more ad impressions. Crystal Carter: So that's been very interesting about the whole thing. And I think that with regards to ads and search, if you talk to Google folks, they'll tell you that never the twain shall meet, the teams don't overlap that much between discussions of tactics and things like that. But having worked with a digital marketing team and a digital marketing agency where we did ads and where we also did search, the experience is different, but also you very often do see some overlap in terms of things. One of the things that comes to mind at the top of my head is Title Tag-ageddon, if anyone else remembers that is when Google started changing all the title tags. And everyone was like, "They're changing my title tags. What are we doing?" Well, in the ad world, they've been doing that with dynamic search ads for years. So you would give them a URL, and then they would write the title tag for the ad. And they were able to do that for years before Title Tag-ageddon. And so I think it's really interesting when we see that and when they're also talking about that the two things are interplaying. Mordy Oberstein: So AJ Kohn has a nice piece going through some of the various outcomes or leaks from the trial, and one of his recommendations was, "Well, make sure you get the click with how you structure your title tags," which plays into your point before. If they're rewriting them, how do you do that? That becomes, if Google's focusing on user behavior, getting that click from the title tag or from proper implementation of the title tag from a CRO point of view, would seemingly be, for lack of a better word, a ranking factor, which I guess is where the pain point or the controversy really emerges. You have SEOs who have seen a lot of the talk around Google, and we'll link to the show notes Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land covers extensively in multiple pieces. You can have a look at what's actually come out and what they're saying in specific around user behavior that we haven't covered here, because it's a lot. But SEOs are looking at all of these statements that Google is saying about user behavior, which again, Google is saying, "Old, not new, we're talking about training machine learning properties to create content profiling." But SEOs are saying, "Well, wait a second, maybe this actually means that we need to be focusing more on actual user behavior metrics. We've been right this whole time. We told you Google was using user behavior metrics, and we've been right the whole time." So for example, Cyrus Shepard, who has covered this really well on Twitter, so in a recent search engine journal piece, he said, "For predicting 2024 SEO trends," he's writing, "Well, I hate to say it, but in light of evidence pouring out from the US versus Google antitrust trial, it's become surprising and clear how much Google relies on user behavior data to shape actual web rankings." And he goes on. On the other side, just to present both sides of the argument before I weigh in, people like Glenn Gabe and even Barry Schwartz are saying nothing's really changed. Barry wrote, "The association between observed user behavior and search result quality is tenuous. We need lots of traffic to draw conclusions, and individual examples are difficult to interpret." And that's Barry quoting, I believe, Danny Sullivan, Google Search liaison. Crystal Carter: What it does for me is it brings up the old bounce rate argument. There's some people that are like, "Bounce rate doesn't matter. It's not important." Mordy Oberstein: That's the whole thing. Crystal Carter: There's some people who are like, "No, it's really important." And I think that all of those user engagement things, they do impact. And for instance, so site speed for instance, site speed is something that people say, "Oh, it's a ranking factor. It's not a ranking factor." But it's terrible for users. If I go to a website and it doesn't load, then I'm not going to go back. I'm not going to hang around. I don't want to sit there and wait for your page to load. I have other things to do. So I think that it's something that, I don't know, it's telling you things you already know, but I think it's also just making it more explicit, I guess. Mordy Oberstein: So I'll say two things on that. One is exactly that. From a practical point of view, you want users to click to your website, you want users to be happy on your website and stay on your website. So from a practical point of view, nothing should fundamentally change, even if Google is using user behavior metric, because that's what you're trying to do anyway, isn't it? Getting the user to click on the website and stay on the website and go to more pages on the website? So I'm like, "All right, great." I will say if you were to ask me, even to this day, if I really think that user behavior metrics are being used by Google in some of the ways, the very direct ways that some SEOs are saying, my personal opinion, and this is just me and many way smarter SEOs are going to argue with me, is no. And I'll tell you why I think the answer is no. I think it's a chicken and the egg problem for me personally. So let's say you have 10 results that rank on Google. The top result is going to get the most clicks anyway. So now you'll say, "Fine, Google will look at last click." You went to the first result and said, "No, that's not great." And you scrolled down to the page and you went to the eighth result. So now Google will rank the eighth result number one. Make this deal, oversimplify this. What if the 30th result's really the best? What user behavior is Google going to use for that? Because no one's going to page three. No one's even going to page two. So you'll say, "Okay, Mordy, Google will run algorithm updates, unofficial updates where they do lots of testing, and they'll take something that was ranking number 30. And they'll test it at number five, and then they'll see if it gets clicks." That's nice, but as someone who's been watching these trends super carefully for the better part of 10 years, most reversals like that last maybe, I don't know, two, three weeks at most. It's not enough time to train anything on anything, especially for most queries where the search volumes aren't astronomical. So you really don't have that data. So in which case, if you're going to use user behavior metrics, they're only going to help you with confirmation bias of what you already have in the top 10 to reshuffle the top 10. And even with the ranking shifts or the tests that Google's doing, I don't see how that's enough big of a dataset to what Barry quoted from Danny before to actually make an accurate decision. So why would they do that? Crystal Carter: So here's the thing. When I hear that, the thing that occurs to me is the importance of content diversity, and I've been talking about a lot of multimedia content at different conferences and stuff this year, partially because of this, because I think that Google puts more interactive elements on the page for people to interact with. So let's say you've got that one that's on ranking number 30. If the one that's ranking number 30 has a video, and I know there's been some stuff about video, we'll see how that all pans out in the next little while. Mordy Oberstein: No comment right now. Crystal Carter: Right. Or if it has an image or if it has some additional elements like, say, review schema where it's got little stars or something like that. Or let's say it's part of an eCommerce thing and it's got different filters, then Google's going to have more signals in order to measure that piece of content than it will on another piece of content that's maybe just text, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. And if you're using user behavior metrics, then sure, then that's certainly possible. But to apply that across the web, even with that dataset, to me, it still seems very, very limited because you still don't really know. Imagine all the pages that don't have a video that are there, so that wouldn't fall into that. And I think it just becomes very, very complicated to produce a lot of data. What is possible is what we said before, and what Google's been saying before the whole time, that I can look at what users are doing in the top 10 results, and I could say, "Hey, what's the profile here? What did the user really want? What did they get? What did they like, what didn't they like?" And then I can apply that profile to pages that are ranking number 30 and say, "Hey, does this actually meet the profile? It does. Maybe let's move that up and see how it goes." So I think that what Google's been saying the whole time of using it to create a content profile for machine learning makes total sense because that does tell people what's ranking number 30. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think this also goes back to the real importance of content quality and keywords in a sophisticated sense, but the real importance of content quality is that if you've ever run a thing with machine learning that garbage in, garbage out, you have to give it good data. So in terms of Google understanding your content, you have to give it good data that you know what you're talking about. So the quality of your content should reflect something that machines can actually get into. And we'll have to make sure you have a coherent piece of content that makes sense from start to finish, making sure that you have headings that are well-indicated to show what is the content priority, making sure that you've got technical things in the background to also add more elements, entities, et cetera, all of that sort of stuff. That's the real goal is to give them enough information about your content in order to make an informed decision about how people might interact with it. And the more signals that they have, then the easier it is for the bots to figure it out. Mordy Oberstein: Now, leaving aside your opinion of user behavior metrics, and again, I gave you my take, there's many takes, make your own decision. I don't want to put my thumb too heavy on the scale. I don't want to upset anybody. One person who has been doing a great job covering not just the DOJ but are ranking factors and what is a ranking factor, what's not a ranking factor for a good while now has been Search Engine journalist, Shelley Walsh. So we asked her, "Hey, you recently covered Danny Sullivan saying that Google's longstanding advice about how to approach things," like we said, "hasn't changed much, but some are saying that the DOJ's lawsuit against Google changed the way they see the role of user behavior in the algorithm. What's your take?" So here's Shelley's take. Shelley Walsh: What the antitrust lawsuit unearthed was that Google is measuring user interactions in four ways, of a mouse movement, clicks, scrolls, and whether the user enters a new query. This highlights how much emphasis Google does put on user signals. And why does Google do this? Because they know that the user is central to everything. So this is exactly what Google has been saying long-term, make pages for users and not search engines. The secret of SEO and certain visibility on Google is about building everything around the user. So if you can understand that SEO is structured around making it as frictionless as possible for a user to do what you want them to, then you understand the fundamental concept of how SEO works. And if you understand how a website works, how a search engine works and how users behave online, then connecting the user to the action is common sense. It's not complicated, but it's really hard to do this well. What underlines everything is a need to understand the intent of the user and then to provide the best experience. As I said in the article I wrote about Danny Sullivan, this is based on how easily the page can be accessed, how directly the page answers the query, how comprehensively the page answers the query, and how intuitively the page is structured. This isn't to say that if you build a page, they will come. Domain, brand authority, topical relevance, user signals and links all have an influence on ranking, which is all reflected in the antitrust lawsuit. So there's no one-size-fits-all approach to SEO, and this is what makes it such an exciting challenging space to work in. Think about what is a user's motivation and make it as easy as possible for them to consume that information. And if you're thinking about all the things I just said, then you are naturally going to encourage a reader to click on your link in the SERP, scroll down your page to read more and less likely to search again around the same query because they are satisfied. And this is all aligned with what the antitrust lawsuit has highlighted. I think there are many SEOs out there that have understood this for a long time, but it hasn't been widely discussed. So rather contrary to this being a new approach, actually it's just confirmed what a lot of SEOs knew all along. So what Danny has said with make pages for users, not search engines, is aligned with how good SEO has been practiced for years. But what I will say is in this age of rapid change, now more than ever it's definitely time to focus on what's timeless and that is putting the user front and center. So I hope this really answers the question of what has been suggested has changed about user signals hasn't really changed at all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Shelley. Make sure you give Shelley a follow over on Twitter at The Shelley Walsh, that's the S-H-E-L-L-E-Y, Walsh, W-A-L-S-H, link in the show notes. It's interesting. It's just funny to me to watch SEOs. I kind of feel a struggle with this whole thing. On the one hand, Danny selling one thing, the DOJ leaks maybe imply another thing. Is it really confirming that SEO's new the whole time? Is Google saying what they're saying that nothing's really changed, really they're accurate? But her point about just it doesn't matter to a certain extent is spot-on in a way. You want to do the things anyway, like we said? Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think people are hoping it would be juicier. I feel like we were hoping it would be like, "Yeah, what you really got to do is this or this." Mordy Oberstein: That's the God's honest truth. Crystal Carter: I think people were really hoping it would be a bit juicier, but I think that, yeah, I said it tells you what you already knew before, and she said the same thing. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I mean. I feel like if you were already in the camp that Google's using user behavior metrics, looking at clicks and time spent on page and pogo sticking and whatever, you're like, "Oh yeah, this is the proof right here." And if you are already in the camp like myself, if they're not using it, you're like, "Well, I don't see anything that's really indicative of saying that they are using it in the way that you're saying." So at the end of the day, nothing's changed. Crystal Carter: I think it's just the folks that struggle with the, this is a ranking factor and this is not a ranking factor and all of that sort of stuff. Chillax with that. Mordy Oberstein: Never. No. Crystal Carter: Pay attention to how users interact with your content. Pay attention to what's on the SERP because that also affects how users interact with your content. Pay attention to the quality of your content because that's what Google's paying attention to. Because I think one of the other things, there's a great article on SE Roundtable from Barry Schwartz, Kelsa Priest, and it says that the three pillars of ranking according to the DOJ documents, and it says the body, what the document says about itself. That's not a surprise. And what it actually says, the anchors. What the web says about the document, that's links from other websites, links within the document, links within the web page itself and user interactions, what users say about the documents based on their interactions. So these can include clicks, attention on a result, swipes on carousels, entering a new query. Again, I talk about media a lot, but one of the great things about having multimedia on your webpages is there's more parts of the webpage for people to interact with on the SERP, for instance. So if you have a recipe, for instance, there's the reviews, there are the images, there's videos, and then there's the video tab, and then there's different elements of that as well. So if Google's seeing that lots of people are interacting with your content in lots of different ways, then that's going to give them more signals, and that all works really well. I think also it brings to mind the real importance of long-tail with that sort of thing, because with long-tail queries, if it's that specific, users are more likely to actually click on it, because it's so specific, because it's so niche to exactly what they need. And so you're less likely to have competition with something that's been ranking for a very long time and has a lot of user data within Google's dataset. You're more likely to be connecting with something that has a new set of user data, particularly if it's niche and trending and all that sort of stuff, so you want to be- Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, if you're trying to target something niche, you need to be targeted and specific, otherwise they're not going to get the click. Crystal Carter: Yes, these are things we knew before. Mordy Oberstein: That's how it works, regardless of what Google's doing with it, which I think is nothing. Not nothing, I don't think it's direct. Sorry. Anyway, I don't want to stir the pot anymore on this. I feel like I've stirred the pot on this very ... If you're not in the SEO space, this is a very controversial topic, and I'm sure there are a bunch of SEOs muttering, "Mordy, you're wrong. You're just so wrong. You're dead wrong. I'm going to find you." Crystal Carter: Going to get you, get you, get you, get you. Mordy Oberstein: One way or another, we need to pivot. And what I wanted to do was take a look at how Google understands the concept of user behavior. So what I did was I went and I Googled "user behavior metrics DOJ trial," and I wanted to look at the PAA box. So guess what we're going to do now? Crystal Carter: Fun with people also ask? Mordy Oberstein: Fun with people also. We're going to have some fun. I know, Barry, fun with people also ask. So I Googled user behavior metrics DOJ trial, and it's on topic because that's what we were talking about before. And what I got back was, so the PAA box, the four questions that Google's asking you can expand and get an answer to, and a link to a website. So the people also ask box could be four initial questions. They are, what are the Filip factors? I don't know who Filip is, and I'm not sure why it's spelled wrong because they spell it with an F but Philip is spelled P-H. Anyway, why Google is facing DOJ in first major tech monopoly trial. Third question, what is the Google monopoly trial? And how is Google a monopoly company? I'll do one. Okay, wait. Crystal Carter: Can I be the thimble? Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Yeah, because I want to be the car. I like the car. That's a kickass car, by the way. Crystal Carter: It's very good. That's a good car. Mordy Oberstein: I hope they never change that in the new sets. Maybe they have. Great, okay. Crystal Carter: You can get different sets, I think. We've got a Star Wars one. You can be the Millennium Falcon. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's cool. We have another one with dinosaurs, I think, somewhere. Crystal Carter: I want a dinosaur Monopoly. Mordy Oberstein: I could be making that up, by the way. I ran another query. It's like something was missing from this. Let's play a game. What's missing from the people also ask box? I read another one and it said "SEO implications, Google DOJ trial." And the four questions I got back from that people also ask is, why is Google being taken to court? What is the federal case against Google? What were the results of the Google trial? And what practices are Google being accused of? What's missing? Crystal Carter: Anything to do with SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, nothing with SEO. And in the first one, user behavior metrics, DOJ trial, there was nothing about user behavior metrics. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Fascinating. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: Because now we're entering in the entity zone. Cue Twilight Zone music thing. What I think is going on here is that you have a larger entity, the DOJ trial, and a very, very niche entity, in one case SEO and in the other case user behavior metrics. And Google's like, "Forget that sub-entity, that's too niche. Let's just go with what we think you're really here for, which is the main entity, the DOJ trial. Here's four questions about the DOJ trial." Crystal Carter: Right. The other thing is, I don't know, sometimes I see this they've got CEO instead of SEO. Sometimes they think you've misspelled it. I also wonder how much they know exactly about it. But what I found is, why is Google in trouble with the US Department of Justice, and why is it bad is coming from Search Engine Land? Even though they are not giving you the direct reflection of your query in terms of keywords, they're giving you a source with an entity that they know to be related to SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's interesting. I wonder if we Googled it without the SEO or just Googled that question if you would get Search Engine Land showing up there. Crystal Carter: So I took out SEO implications of Google DOJ trial, and then I've got time showing up in it, in the PAA, and then still Search Engine Land is showing up in there. But it's interesting. But also there's also, Google knows that I just searched that. That wasn't a fresh search. That was a follow-on search, so Google has some more data on what I've been searching. Mordy Oberstein: They are loving search engine land for all these kinds of queries, it looks like. Crystal Carter: But I think also there's been a lot of SEOs who've been covering it, for instance, Covino. Mordy Oberstein: I know. One of the biggest places that it's been covered. But it is interesting, because I wonder if as an entity it says, I wonder if in the background, because what you're seeing on the SERP itself has no actual connection to SEO. You're not seeing the term SEO reflected in the four questions that Google's offering. But I wonder if what's shown on the SERP is not the full knowledge graph. Just because someone, for example, doesn't have a knowledge panel doesn't mean they're not in the knowledge graph. Just Google's not showing a knowledge panel or that person, let's say. It could be that in the background, Google knows there's an SEO subtopic or a subset around the DOJ trial, and it's saying, "Search Engine Land is very much a related entity to the trial because of the whole SEO connection." So we might not be showing that in the actual questions per se in the PAA box, but within the results that they're showing, it could be that the reason why Search Engine Land is doing so well within the PAA box for these kind of queries is because of the entity connections made. Crystal Carter: And I think also to come back to the user behavior conversation. SEOs have been very, very active and very, very fascinated and very, very engaged in this particular trial, because there's been so many leaks and so much information about search that we've never seen before directly from Google. And so I think that going back to the user behavior metrics, they used to talk about no follow links, no follow links and social no follow links, but Google have said, "We pay attention to social signals. If we're seeing that a piece of content is getting a lot of traction on social, then we will take that into account when we're thinking about whether or not a piece of content is good," because they also crawl and index social media accounts. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. Or crawling, for sure. Crystal Carter: So that goes back to the user behavior thing. It also goes back to when we were saying about the three pillars of SEO. According to the DOJ trial, they said about what the web is saying about it as well. Again, if they know that SEOs are talking about it and they know that Search Engine Land has been covering this a lot, then they'll use that to bring that into whether or not they show it in the PAA. Mordy Oberstein: Now, if you want to keep up on what's going on with the DOJ trial, you might want to head over to Search Engine Land where you'll often find Barry Schwartz covering the SEO news. But not the DOJ stuff, that's really been Danny Goodwin. Maybe we'll have Danny Goodwin in the news this week and not Barry? Nah. Maybe we'll have Danny also possibly, but definitely Barry. So here's this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Three articles for you this week, one from each of the major SEO news publications. This one from Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, Google Circle to Search, the New AI-Powered Search Gesture for Android. So Google has launched, on certain Android devices, this, I think, very unique, very cool way of accenting your search. I'll read what Matt wrote here. "A new gesture-based search method, Circle to Search, Google has developed a new feature for Android called Circle to Search that will change how people interact with content on their phones. With Circle to Search, users can," listen to this, "circle, highlight or tap text images or videos within apps to instantly search for related information without switching between applications." So basically you see, I don't know, you're on whatever app you're on the Google app, and a picture shows up of someone wearing really cool boots that you want. You circle the boots, and Google shows up in overlay with places where you can buy these boots. It's very cool. It's running. It's on only certain Android devices. It's launching, they say, globally on January 31st on the newest Pixel 8 phones, Pixel 8 Pro and Samsung's recently released Galaxy S24 series devices. Now, what I think is interesting about this is, I've been talking about this for a long time, the way we search, even with the SERP features like knowledge panels and also knowledge cards and people also ask and whatever, whatever search features. And the 10 blue links is not really, I feel, how people want to actually engage with search. They really want to be able to explore, go down different rabbit holes, go down different pathways, come out of those rabbit holes and go down a different one really, really seamlessly. And things like this, things like the way Google has shown or demoed its Gemini product and how it shows custom results for different types of information queries points to that idea that people do want a more immersive way of searching. I think keeping your eye on these sort of trends is very important. Next up from he who is Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google Ranking Teetering In and Out Over Weekends, Bug or Edge of Quality. There's been this chatter around the SEO industry that certain TLDs have been coming in and out of the rankings each and every weekend, so TLDs meaning dot-com, dot-org. But in this case you're more obscure ones like dot-media, dot-clinic, or whatever it is. Folks have seen in their search console data that the websites are losing rankings and traffic and impressions, whatever it is, however we want to look at it, whatever metric, each and every weekend. Google said there's no real bug going on here. However, as Barry points out in the article, it may have to do with the sites being what's called on the edge of indexing. That sounds so dramatic. I'm on the edge of indexing, meaning they're on the edge of quality, where Google's not sure whether or not to really keep or not keep the page in and out of the index and therefore rankings. The pattern does align to some volatility out there in the rankings that are being picked up by the SEO weather tool. So on the one hand you have a lot of SEOs saying, "Hey, it looks like there's some kind of bug going on here." Google's saying, "No, no, no. No bug here, but it could be that you just don't have the quality that you need." It is super, super weird. What would have to happen is you'd have to see if the same pattern is happening across all other kind of TLDs, like your more traditional TLDs, like your dot-orgs, dot-coms, dot, I don't know, dot-co-dot-uk kind of thing, whatever it is, all those your usual typical TLDs, if the same thing is happening or not. And then you would see, that's just happening across the web. It's the edge of quality, the edge of indexing. Or if not, if it's just those more obscure TLDs and it is some sort of issue, don't know yet officially. So maybe weigh in out there on the social media. You can weigh in where Barry has the forms and the link to the article on Search Engine Roundtable. Link to that in the show notes. Anyway, last up from, again, Barry Schwartz, but this time on the Search Engine Land. Barry here, Barry there, Barry is everywhere. "New research study asks if Google search is getting worse." The study that came out of Germany, I believe that took a look at review content, so product review content. Best microwaves and reviews of the best microwaves and whether or not from Google to Bing to DuckDuckGo, the search quality has improved. They looked at the results, they scraped the results for the entire course of a year to see whether or not the results are quality, not quality, if they're overly SEO'd or not. I found the results and the study overall interesting. A few takeaways from my end. They say that results are getting worse, but when they show the top spammy review spam websites, there are not very many in the list, and they list four of them, I think, in their chart there, two of them are Amazon, and one of them is YouTube, and then one of them is a legitimate review spam website. So I thought that was a little bit weird. They do say that it's a whack-a-mole kind of thing, that when Google has these updates, it does do a good job of getting rid of this affiliate review spam content from the research results, but they come back. I'm not so sure about that. Glenn Gabe has shown over time that a lot of these websites get killed off. Glenn also did point out, by the way, that the study was finished before a lot of the more recent updates have officially come out. One point that I thought was interesting was they talk about the level of content quality in the top ranking result pages for these product review queries. They say, by the way, that the quality of the content is not so great. I find that interesting. Now, the study conflates SEO with bad SEO, meaning there's SEO that's what we do, which is legitimate, great, good stuff that helps websites target their content more, that helps websites be found more, that helps websites speak to users and search engines in a much more, quote, unquote, better way with link spam, review spam, spam, spam, spam SEO. So it doesn't make a distinction in the study, which really irks me a little bit, but it does talk about the level of quality in the content at the top of the SERP not being so great, and I think that is an issue that we should talk about and discuss. We have discussed it. I'm not going to go into it in too great of length here. I talk about it in my article in the SEO Hub where I talk about the future of content, and we also spoke a little bit about it on our recent podcast with Jason Dodge and Nigel Stevens about emerging content trends. I'll link to those articles and podcasts in the show notes. But I do think that sometimes we, in the SEO world, our idea of what good content is and what good content actually is is a problem. I do think though there's an incentive problem, which I speak about in the article, which we talked about in the podcast, where is Google giving enough incentive for content writers and SEOs to abandon the typical content quality models and go to a little bit more of a nuanced model? What I mean is when you start, let's say you're reviewing best microwaves, so SEOs will be like, "All right. First thing we do is write what is a microwave?" Maybe get rid of that and be a little bit more nuanced in the content. I think it's a little bit of SEOs needing to adapt a little bit, and I think it's also a little bit of a Google trying to or should be showing results that are not doing that in the results a little bit more to cue the content and SEO industries to be, "Hey, you don't need to do that anymore." Because it is a little bit of a difficulty saying, "Hey, let's not do that anymore." But we do see that in the results, so why wouldn't I do that anymore if Google is ranking that? So it's up to everybody to do a little bit of a better job in offering a little bit better of a content experience, in my personal humble opinion. Now, I will address this here very quickly. There has been controversy around the search results being less quality overall, which is why this article is getting so much coverage because it is part of a larger narrative. I will say, I think that, when I say we I mean the entire web, underestimates the paradigm shift that has happened with content. Again, I speak about this in my article. We spoke of it on the recent podcast interview with Nigel and with Jason, but I do think we underestimate just how much the content sans have shifted and how difficult it is for a search engine like Google to adapt and to realign with user expectations and what the content picture and scenario actually is out there. So I do think yes, you're going to see some not great results coming out there near the top of the surface certain times or over-reliance, we'll say, in forums or this or that, but I think it's all par for the course. It's not easy to adjust. It's not easy to realign results to what's happening out there on the web at the same time. And it will take Google a little bit of time to perhaps get it right, but I do think Google will fundamentally get it right. I'm a believer. I'm an optimist. As much as it may surprise you, I am an optimist. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News. Thanks again, Barry. We appreciate you. You're the man. You're the man, Barry. Crystal Carter: Barry's great and Barry listens every week, and we really appreciate you listening every week. He's just tweeted us something that I haven't told Mordy about that I'm curious as to exactly what we asked. Mordy Oberstein: I saw that pop up on my phone while we were recording. I saw something like, "Oh yeah, @Mordy overseen Crystal on the web. So awkward." Crystal Carter: What are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Himself. He's talking about himself. Crystal Carter: We love you anyway, Barry. It's all good. Mordy Oberstein: But now we mentioned the L word. We're making him really feel awkward now. Crystal Carter: Oh, we adore you, Barry. We think you're so fantastic. You are- Mordy Oberstein: I do. Crystal Carter: ... just an absolute gem and a gift. Mordy Oberstein: I have a little stuffed pillow like Barry at night with a string on it. It reads news titles, SEO news titles with grammatical errors in them to me. Anyway, from trolling Barry just a bit on the official Wix SEO podcast, which is a whole new level of trolling, to be honest with you. By the way, make sure if you're not following Barry Schwartz, make sure you follow Barry Schwartz on whatever social media platform you consume @rustybrick on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Who isn't following Barry Schwartz? Follow Barry. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Sometimes I see Twitter people with a million followers and Barry only has 250,000. So those people. Crystal Carter: You should follow Barry. Mordy Oberstein: Obviously, but you know who you should also follow, which speaks to Barry because Barry often quotes him. I'll give you a hint. He's often quoted by Barry. He has two Twitter accounts and he loves Star Trek. He'll often go on Star Trek cruises. Crystal Carter: Oh yes, yes, I know exactly who you're talking about now. It is the one, the only Danny Sullivan. Mordy Oberstein: Danny Sullivan, what? We're not recommending you follow Danny's personal account, which you should follow, but we're also recommending you follow Danny's official account as Google search liaison over at SearchLiaison, don't ask me how to spell liaison, over on Twitter. I do know how to spell liaison. It used to be in my title L-I-A-S-I-O-N, liaison. I know French. Crystal Carter: Were you in the spelling bee? Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I know how to spell one complicated word. I'm the worst at spelling. Crystal Carter: I did a spelling bee, and I remember I got ukulele. Mordy Oberstein: That's a hard one. Crystal Carter: I was like, "That's Hawaiian." And they were like, "You still have to spell it. It's in the dictionary." And I was like, "Oh, no." So that didn't work out well for me. Mordy Oberstein: I've been to spelling bees, not for long though. "Mr. Oberstein, have a seat. You're embarrassing the entire school." Anyway, make sure you follow Danny because he's officially tweeting official stuff about official Google ongoing updates and all sorts of changes over on the SearchLiaison account. It's a super important account to follow. Crystal Carter: I think he spoke at Brighton in November, and it was fantastic, and he spent a lot of time trying to explain why he has to do so much explaining about search documentation and how they're really thinking about making things clear when they can. And they're really responsive, so he's really responsive to that stuff. If people message him and they're like, "This doesn't make sense," he tries to make it more clear and tries to answer questions as much as he can. Super nice guy and absolutely follow him for really, really interesting information about search. Mordy Oberstein: Your SEO life will live long and prosper if you follow Danny's account. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed. You know what's lived long and prospered? This podcast episode. Crystal Carter: It did. It was good. I enjoyed it. Mordy Oberstein: That's a very Vulcan answered. It was good. I enjoyed it. Green-blooded. I got my kids into Star Trek recently. Crystal Carter: Yeah? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Resistance is futile. Mordy Oberstein: Their future partners and spouses, whatever, will blame me. You have me to blame for the Star Trek. Crystal Carter: It's fine. They'll just meet a nice Trekkie. It'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: I hope so, for their sake. Crystal Carter: Trekkies are nice people. It's all good. Mordy Oberstein: I died alone because my father introduced me to Star Trek. Crystal Carter: As long as they watch Galaxy Quest as well. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, great movie. Great movie. You know what else is going to be great? The next episode of the podcast. Thanks 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 structured data markup do's and don'ts. Look for it wherever you can consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Shelley Walsh Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube SEO Resource Center Ex-Google Search head worried his team was ‘too involved with ads’ What Pandu Nayak Taught Me About SEO Why SEOs should watch content trends carefully The future of web content News: Google ‘Circle to Search’: The New AI-Powered Search Gesture For Android Google Ranking Teetering In & Out Over Weekends - Bug Or Edge Of Quality? New research study asks if Google Search is getting worse Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Shelley Walsh Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube SEO Resource Center Ex-Google Search head worried his team was ‘too involved with ads’ What Pandu Nayak Taught Me About SEO Why SEOs should watch content trends carefully The future of web content News: Google ‘Circle to Search’: The New AI-Powered Search Gesture For Android Google Ranking Teetering In & Out Over Weekends - Bug Or Edge Of Quality? New research study asks if Google Search is getting worse Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast to get some groovy insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the incredible, the absolutely unparalleled, uncompromising, but in a good way, head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. I hope everyone's having a fantastic web-based, digital, listening-to-a-podcast day. I hope the sun is shining and that you have nice snacks wherever you're listening. Mordy Oberstein: Well, if you enjoy rain, I hope that it's raining, and you're cozy under a blanket. Crystal Carter: Some people do enjoy rain. Mordy Oberstein: Some people do. Crystal Carter: Some people do. My kid likes rain. It's raining, and he's like, "Yay." And I'm like, "Let's go home." And he's like, "No, it's fun." And I'm like- Mordy Oberstein: Splash-in-puddle time. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's true. That's true. This is it. This is it. You got to take the rough with the smooth. Mordy Oberstein: Without thinking it through like, "Oh, now my shoes are soaked." Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. People don't gauge how deep the puddle is. That's also a risk, that sometimes you think, "Oh, that's a little," and then it's like a lake. It's like a chasm. It's like some sort of abyss, and you've just plunged yourself into it. Mordy Oberstein: So I don't mind, that's fine. Let the kids get wet, whatever. But then when they get muddy and the mud is sucked to the shoes, that's my limit. That's when I'm done. Now I've got to clean that thing. Forget it. Crystal Carter: It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Mordy Oberstein: The children you have. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also grow your website if you're a lawyer. Insert many lawyer jokes here. Yep, LegalZoom and Wix have a partnership to help lawyers build their websites so that you can focus on what you do best. You might be asking yourself, "What does this have to do with me?" For this audience, probably not much, to be honest with you. But it's good to know anyway because it's got a lot to do with this week's topic, and that's user behavior and SEO. What does that have to do with lawyers? Well, we're going to explore the complex history and recent revelations around user behavior for SEO from Google's DOJ trial. Hence the Legalzoom thing. Now you get it? Now it makes sense. Back to the intro. We're going to explore the complex history and recent revelations of Google's DOJ trial and maybe set the record straight about how user behavior impacts rankings, such as, what has Google said about user behavior and how it impacts rankings? What's the role of machine learning in user behavior and rankings? Have the revelations from Google's DOJ trial changed how we should look at user behavior and rankings? What Google has said about the leaks from the DOJ trial around user behavior and rankings? To help us sort out the complications of user behavior and rankings, Search Engine Journal's own Shelley Walsh weighs in. We'll also have a look at Google's PAA box and what it says about behavior. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So tuck in your shirt, comb your hair, and be on your best behavior as a hard look at what's changed about user behavior and SEO is coming over for dinner tonight on this, the 71st episode of SERP's Up. Whoo, boy, I'm not feeling good, and that hurt my throat. Breaking the fourth wall. Crystal Carter: Breaking the fourth wall. Mordy Oberstein: I should have got a cup of tea. I don't do tea. Crystal Carter: I feel like, though, breaking the fourth wall is what this trial has been about. It's been really, really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, boy. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of juicy morsels coming out in the documents, and people have been watching it very, very carefully. And I think that it's some of the best information we've had- Mordy Oberstein: In a long time. Some of the coolest information, yeah. Crystal Carter: From Google about exactly some of the inner workings of how they do what they do. Mordy Oberstein: That said, it's a little bit of a hotbed of SEO controversy. So we hope, I hope at least, that as we go through this, we do not upset anybody on either side of this argument, but offer what's going on, offer our takes. But it's SEO at the end of the day, and it's just a healthy look at what's happening out there. So I guess we should take a look back at the history of all of this because ... Wait, even further, if this is your first gander at user behavior metrics, just so it's clear what we're talking about, we're talking about things like behaviors that users do on Google, like they click on a result, or how long Google stays on a page, like time on page, how many pages the user may have visited during that session. All this is tracked by Google Analytics or Google knows all of this. Or maybe you went to a page and you said, "Wait a second, I don't want that." And you went back to Google and clicked on something else. What was the last click of that session on the surface? These are all behavior metrics that Google is monitoring, and the question is, does that impact the ranking? So really crazy case, a certain URL or a certain result on Google, it's a whole bunch of clicks over and over and over again. Does Google say, "Hey, I guess we got it right, let's keep this ranking really high?" That would be user behavior playing itself out for rankings. And Google has said for a long time, "No, we don't look at things like that," because it sounds really simple, but it is really complicated. Because maybe, for example, you clicked on a result from Google, you spent one second on the page and you bounce back to the SERP. Does that mean it's bad? Or maybe you were Googling, "Is it raining outside?" Saw the answer is yes on the webpage. By the way, completely ignoring that Google tells you that on the SERP itself. Well, let's just pretend that Google didn't. You go to the webpage, it says, "It is raining outside," and you go back to do another search. That's called pogo sticking, by the way, in case you didn't know. Maybe that's good. Maybe that means the page was great. It told me the information really quickly. So user behavior metrics get really complicated really quickly, and they're messy, which is why Google's saying, "No, we don't use them." But SEOs have been saying for a long, long time, "No, no, no, Google has this data. They've got to be using this in some way." Bing says they do, which further puts that thumb on the scale, and maybe Google really is, despite the fact that they say no, we're not. Now, where it gets really complicated is that Google has said, "Well, we kind of do indirectly." So for example, Google trains machine learning properties like RankBrain on, or with rather, user behavior. If a user clicks on a page, and let's make a really simple case everyone always use, it's a recipe, and you go to the web page, and the recipe has no image. You bounce and you go to a page with an image. The machine learning is now trained in the fact that if it's a recipe, it needs to have an image. We're not going to rank you. So oversimplifying it, but that would be user behavior impacting rank, albeit indirectly. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that was interesting in this document, there was a document that was shared from the files that was an internal document about search, and it was like, "It's a 2016 Q4 search all hands." And one of the things they said was something around that response. So they said in this document, "We don't understand documents. We fake it." This is slide five in the document, and it says- Mordy Oberstein: So a little bit of context. So Google is being sued by the Department of Justice. I'm not getting into any of that. All we're talking about is some of the testimony, I don't know if there were leaks or that it's been published, whatever. There have been information or statements from that trial about how search works that have been covered by Seach Engine Land, SE Roundtable and SEJ and so forth. So we're talking about a leak that comes from a 2016 Google PowerPoint. Sorry, now we have context. Crystal Carter: So in PowerPoint it says, "We don't understand the documents. We fake it Today, our ability to understand documents directly is minimal." I should also caveat that this is from 2016, and in internet terms between 2016 and 2023 is a vast amount of time. Mordy Oberstein: To give you context on that, RankBrain came out in 2015. That was Google's first machine learning property. So you're talking a year after RankBrain. That's a long time ago. Crystal Carter: And between that, we've had tons of other algorithms that have come up, BERT, MUM and ELMo, I think as well, in there. Mordy Oberstein: And then there's also a MOM, and MOM's not really integrated yet, but only a little bit. So there's been a whole bunch of really advanced machine learning properties. Crystal Carter: But in 2016 they said, "We watched how people react to documents and memorized their responses." And they said, "We look at people." So they said, "Beyond basic stuff, we hardly look at documents. We look at people. If a document gets a positive reaction, we figure it's good. If the reaction is negative, it's probably bad. Grossly simplified, this is the source of Google's magic." And I think the other thing that's important to remember is that between that time and now, Google's got a lot more data from mobile users, from Chrome users, for instance. So Chrome users, they'll have more documents, or sorry, more information about how users are using things when they're logged into lots of Google properties and when they're logged into lots of Google elements. So I think that that's important to think about as well. But one of the things that Danny Sullivan talked about at Brighton was that they've always paid attention to users, right? Mordy Oberstein: So yeah, that's that point. That Google has said for a long time they've always used user behavior metrics in this way to train machine learning. So yes, it does. But what they're saying is that it creates a profile around the content and around the intent of the user. So they're not saying the clicks or the user behavior, whatever the metric they're looking at, and the Google actually, because of the DOJ leaks, has shown some of the metrics they might be using, like first click, last click, scrolling, that kind of thing. They're not using it to say, "This page that you got clicked on will rank." What they'll do is they'll say, "What was it about this page that seemed to entice the click that the user wants? And would that apply to other similar pages? If yes, this is a new profile for this kind of query and this kind of page." So it's creating a profile as opposed to saying the particular page will rank. So nothing's actually changed from the way Google's looking at this. They said, "Yeah." So when these leaks have come out, and there's been a whole bunch of them around user behavior, Google and what your target identity some like, "Yeah, that's nothing new. We've been saying this the whole time." SEOs have been, well, maybe not. Crystal Carter: Right. What I think is also interesting is that in this document they said, "We have to design interactions that also allow us to learn from users." And I think that this is interesting because we see a lot more filters on the search as well. So I think that I pay a lot of attention to SERP features, and certainly from a tech SEO point of view, being able to trigger SERP features and being able to get content to be more visible in SERP features is something that is very often a technical requirement. And that I find really, really interesting because those interactions can guide your content, your content creation, and the interactions that they create when they add more people also ask. When they add a filter, for example, when they add things like that, that gives us the guide to the kinds of signals and the kind of information that Google's looking for from users and for content. Mordy Oberstein: Ironically to your point, I'll try to pull it up here because I'm trying to remember exactly the phraseology, but that was, I believe, another leak from, I think it was Ben Gomes who said this. I don't remember exactly who it was, but there was a specific request to have more filters added to the SERP in order to incentivize users going to more result pages so that there'd be more ad impressions. Crystal Carter: So that's been very interesting about the whole thing. And I think that with regards to ads and search, if you talk to Google folks, they'll tell you that never the twain shall meet, the teams don't overlap that much between discussions of tactics and things like that. But having worked with a digital marketing team and a digital marketing agency where we did ads and where we also did search, the experience is different, but also you very often do see some overlap in terms of things. One of the things that comes to mind at the top of my head is Title Tag-ageddon, if anyone else remembers that is when Google started changing all the title tags. And everyone was like, "They're changing my title tags. What are we doing?" Well, in the ad world, they've been doing that with dynamic search ads for years. So you would give them a URL, and then they would write the title tag for the ad. And they were able to do that for years before Title Tag-ageddon. And so I think it's really interesting when we see that and when they're also talking about that the two things are interplaying. Mordy Oberstein: So AJ Kohn has a nice piece going through some of the various outcomes or leaks from the trial, and one of his recommendations was, "Well, make sure you get the click with how you structure your title tags," which plays into your point before. If they're rewriting them, how do you do that? That becomes, if Google's focusing on user behavior, getting that click from the title tag or from proper implementation of the title tag from a CRO point of view, would seemingly be, for lack of a better word, a ranking factor, which I guess is where the pain point or the controversy really emerges. You have SEOs who have seen a lot of the talk around Google, and we'll link to the show notes Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land covers extensively in multiple pieces. You can have a look at what's actually come out and what they're saying in specific around user behavior that we haven't covered here, because it's a lot. But SEOs are looking at all of these statements that Google is saying about user behavior, which again, Google is saying, "Old, not new, we're talking about training machine learning properties to create content profiling." But SEOs are saying, "Well, wait a second, maybe this actually means that we need to be focusing more on actual user behavior metrics. We've been right this whole time. We told you Google was using user behavior metrics, and we've been right the whole time." So for example, Cyrus Shepard, who has covered this really well on Twitter, so in a recent search engine journal piece, he said, "For predicting 2024 SEO trends," he's writing, "Well, I hate to say it, but in light of evidence pouring out from the US versus Google antitrust trial, it's become surprising and clear how much Google relies on user behavior data to shape actual web rankings." And he goes on. On the other side, just to present both sides of the argument before I weigh in, people like Glenn Gabe and even Barry Schwartz are saying nothing's really changed. Barry wrote, "The association between observed user behavior and search result quality is tenuous. We need lots of traffic to draw conclusions, and individual examples are difficult to interpret." And that's Barry quoting, I believe, Danny Sullivan, Google Search liaison. Crystal Carter: What it does for me is it brings up the old bounce rate argument. There's some people that are like, "Bounce rate doesn't matter. It's not important." Mordy Oberstein: That's the whole thing. Crystal Carter: There's some people who are like, "No, it's really important." And I think that all of those user engagement things, they do impact. And for instance, so site speed for instance, site speed is something that people say, "Oh, it's a ranking factor. It's not a ranking factor." But it's terrible for users. If I go to a website and it doesn't load, then I'm not going to go back. I'm not going to hang around. I don't want to sit there and wait for your page to load. I have other things to do. So I think that it's something that, I don't know, it's telling you things you already know, but I think it's also just making it more explicit, I guess. Mordy Oberstein: So I'll say two things on that. One is exactly that. From a practical point of view, you want users to click to your website, you want users to be happy on your website and stay on your website. So from a practical point of view, nothing should fundamentally change, even if Google is using user behavior metric, because that's what you're trying to do anyway, isn't it? Getting the user to click on the website and stay on the website and go to more pages on the website? So I'm like, "All right, great." I will say if you were to ask me, even to this day, if I really think that user behavior metrics are being used by Google in some of the ways, the very direct ways that some SEOs are saying, my personal opinion, and this is just me and many way smarter SEOs are going to argue with me, is no. And I'll tell you why I think the answer is no. I think it's a chicken and the egg problem for me personally. So let's say you have 10 results that rank on Google. The top result is going to get the most clicks anyway. So now you'll say, "Fine, Google will look at last click." You went to the first result and said, "No, that's not great." And you scrolled down to the page and you went to the eighth result. So now Google will rank the eighth result number one. Make this deal, oversimplify this. What if the 30th result's really the best? What user behavior is Google going to use for that? Because no one's going to page three. No one's even going to page two. So you'll say, "Okay, Mordy, Google will run algorithm updates, unofficial updates where they do lots of testing, and they'll take something that was ranking number 30. And they'll test it at number five, and then they'll see if it gets clicks." That's nice, but as someone who's been watching these trends super carefully for the better part of 10 years, most reversals like that last maybe, I don't know, two, three weeks at most. It's not enough time to train anything on anything, especially for most queries where the search volumes aren't astronomical. So you really don't have that data. So in which case, if you're going to use user behavior metrics, they're only going to help you with confirmation bias of what you already have in the top 10 to reshuffle the top 10. And even with the ranking shifts or the tests that Google's doing, I don't see how that's enough big of a dataset to what Barry quoted from Danny before to actually make an accurate decision. So why would they do that? Crystal Carter: So here's the thing. When I hear that, the thing that occurs to me is the importance of content diversity, and I've been talking about a lot of multimedia content at different conferences and stuff this year, partially because of this, because I think that Google puts more interactive elements on the page for people to interact with. So let's say you've got that one that's on ranking number 30. If the one that's ranking number 30 has a video, and I know there's been some stuff about video, we'll see how that all pans out in the next little while. Mordy Oberstein: No comment right now. Crystal Carter: Right. Or if it has an image or if it has some additional elements like, say, review schema where it's got little stars or something like that. Or let's say it's part of an eCommerce thing and it's got different filters, then Google's going to have more signals in order to measure that piece of content than it will on another piece of content that's maybe just text, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. And if you're using user behavior metrics, then sure, then that's certainly possible. But to apply that across the web, even with that dataset, to me, it still seems very, very limited because you still don't really know. Imagine all the pages that don't have a video that are there, so that wouldn't fall into that. And I think it just becomes very, very complicated to produce a lot of data. What is possible is what we said before, and what Google's been saying before the whole time, that I can look at what users are doing in the top 10 results, and I could say, "Hey, what's the profile here? What did the user really want? What did they get? What did they like, what didn't they like?" And then I can apply that profile to pages that are ranking number 30 and say, "Hey, does this actually meet the profile? It does. Maybe let's move that up and see how it goes." So I think that what Google's been saying the whole time of using it to create a content profile for machine learning makes total sense because that does tell people what's ranking number 30. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think this also goes back to the real importance of content quality and keywords in a sophisticated sense, but the real importance of content quality is that if you've ever run a thing with machine learning that garbage in, garbage out, you have to give it good data. So in terms of Google understanding your content, you have to give it good data that you know what you're talking about. So the quality of your content should reflect something that machines can actually get into. And we'll have to make sure you have a coherent piece of content that makes sense from start to finish, making sure that you have headings that are well-indicated to show what is the content priority, making sure that you've got technical things in the background to also add more elements, entities, et cetera, all of that sort of stuff. That's the real goal is to give them enough information about your content in order to make an informed decision about how people might interact with it. And the more signals that they have, then the easier it is for the bots to figure it out. Mordy Oberstein: Now, leaving aside your opinion of user behavior metrics, and again, I gave you my take, there's many takes, make your own decision. I don't want to put my thumb too heavy on the scale. I don't want to upset anybody. One person who has been doing a great job covering not just the DOJ but are ranking factors and what is a ranking factor, what's not a ranking factor for a good while now has been Search Engine journalist, Shelley Walsh. So we asked her, "Hey, you recently covered Danny Sullivan saying that Google's longstanding advice about how to approach things," like we said, "hasn't changed much, but some are saying that the DOJ's lawsuit against Google changed the way they see the role of user behavior in the algorithm. What's your take?" So here's Shelley's take. Shelley Walsh: What the antitrust lawsuit unearthed was that Google is measuring user interactions in four ways, of a mouse movement, clicks, scrolls, and whether the user enters a new query. This highlights how much emphasis Google does put on user signals. And why does Google do this? Because they know that the user is central to everything. So this is exactly what Google has been saying long-term, make pages for users and not search engines. The secret of SEO and certain visibility on Google is about building everything around the user. So if you can understand that SEO is structured around making it as frictionless as possible for a user to do what you want them to, then you understand the fundamental concept of how SEO works. And if you understand how a website works, how a search engine works and how users behave online, then connecting the user to the action is common sense. It's not complicated, but it's really hard to do this well. What underlines everything is a need to understand the intent of the user and then to provide the best experience. As I said in the article I wrote about Danny Sullivan, this is based on how easily the page can be accessed, how directly the page answers the query, how comprehensively the page answers the query, and how intuitively the page is structured. This isn't to say that if you build a page, they will come. Domain, brand authority, topical relevance, user signals and links all have an influence on ranking, which is all reflected in the antitrust lawsuit. So there's no one-size-fits-all approach to SEO, and this is what makes it such an exciting challenging space to work in. Think about what is a user's motivation and make it as easy as possible for them to consume that information. And if you're thinking about all the things I just said, then you are naturally going to encourage a reader to click on your link in the SERP, scroll down your page to read more and less likely to search again around the same query because they are satisfied. And this is all aligned with what the antitrust lawsuit has highlighted. I think there are many SEOs out there that have understood this for a long time, but it hasn't been widely discussed. So rather contrary to this being a new approach, actually it's just confirmed what a lot of SEOs knew all along. So what Danny has said with make pages for users, not search engines, is aligned with how good SEO has been practiced for years. But what I will say is in this age of rapid change, now more than ever it's definitely time to focus on what's timeless and that is putting the user front and center. So I hope this really answers the question of what has been suggested has changed about user signals hasn't really changed at all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Shelley. Make sure you give Shelley a follow over on Twitter at The Shelley Walsh, that's the S-H-E-L-L-E-Y, Walsh, W-A-L-S-H, link in the show notes. It's interesting. It's just funny to me to watch SEOs. I kind of feel a struggle with this whole thing. On the one hand, Danny selling one thing, the DOJ leaks maybe imply another thing. Is it really confirming that SEO's new the whole time? Is Google saying what they're saying that nothing's really changed, really they're accurate? But her point about just it doesn't matter to a certain extent is spot-on in a way. You want to do the things anyway, like we said? Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think people are hoping it would be juicier. I feel like we were hoping it would be like, "Yeah, what you really got to do is this or this." Mordy Oberstein: That's the God's honest truth. Crystal Carter: I think people were really hoping it would be a bit juicier, but I think that, yeah, I said it tells you what you already knew before, and she said the same thing. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I mean. I feel like if you were already in the camp that Google's using user behavior metrics, looking at clicks and time spent on page and pogo sticking and whatever, you're like, "Oh yeah, this is the proof right here." And if you are already in the camp like myself, if they're not using it, you're like, "Well, I don't see anything that's really indicative of saying that they are using it in the way that you're saying." So at the end of the day, nothing's changed. Crystal Carter: I think it's just the folks that struggle with the, this is a ranking factor and this is not a ranking factor and all of that sort of stuff. Chillax with that. Mordy Oberstein: Never. No. Crystal Carter: Pay attention to how users interact with your content. Pay attention to what's on the SERP because that also affects how users interact with your content. Pay attention to the quality of your content because that's what Google's paying attention to. Because I think one of the other things, there's a great article on SE Roundtable from Barry Schwartz, Kelsa Priest, and it says that the three pillars of ranking according to the DOJ documents, and it says the body, what the document says about itself. That's not a surprise. And what it actually says, the anchors. What the web says about the document, that's links from other websites, links within the document, links within the web page itself and user interactions, what users say about the documents based on their interactions. So these can include clicks, attention on a result, swipes on carousels, entering a new query. Again, I talk about media a lot, but one of the great things about having multimedia on your webpages is there's more parts of the webpage for people to interact with on the SERP, for instance. So if you have a recipe, for instance, there's the reviews, there are the images, there's videos, and then there's the video tab, and then there's different elements of that as well. So if Google's seeing that lots of people are interacting with your content in lots of different ways, then that's going to give them more signals, and that all works really well. I think also it brings to mind the real importance of long-tail with that sort of thing, because with long-tail queries, if it's that specific, users are more likely to actually click on it, because it's so specific, because it's so niche to exactly what they need. And so you're less likely to have competition with something that's been ranking for a very long time and has a lot of user data within Google's dataset. You're more likely to be connecting with something that has a new set of user data, particularly if it's niche and trending and all that sort of stuff, so you want to be- Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, if you're trying to target something niche, you need to be targeted and specific, otherwise they're not going to get the click. Crystal Carter: Yes, these are things we knew before. Mordy Oberstein: That's how it works, regardless of what Google's doing with it, which I think is nothing. Not nothing, I don't think it's direct. Sorry. Anyway, I don't want to stir the pot anymore on this. I feel like I've stirred the pot on this very ... If you're not in the SEO space, this is a very controversial topic, and I'm sure there are a bunch of SEOs muttering, "Mordy, you're wrong. You're just so wrong. You're dead wrong. I'm going to find you." Crystal Carter: Going to get you, get you, get you, get you. Mordy Oberstein: One way or another, we need to pivot. And what I wanted to do was take a look at how Google understands the concept of user behavior. So what I did was I went and I Googled "user behavior metrics DOJ trial," and I wanted to look at the PAA box. So guess what we're going to do now? Crystal Carter: Fun with people also ask? Mordy Oberstein: Fun with people also. We're going to have some fun. I know, Barry, fun with people also ask. So I Googled user behavior metrics DOJ trial, and it's on topic because that's what we were talking about before. And what I got back was, so the PAA box, the four questions that Google's asking you can expand and get an answer to, and a link to a website. So the people also ask box could be four initial questions. They are, what are the Filip factors? I don't know who Filip is, and I'm not sure why it's spelled wrong because they spell it with an F but Philip is spelled P-H. Anyway, why Google is facing DOJ in first major tech monopoly trial. Third question, what is the Google monopoly trial? And how is Google a monopoly company? I'll do one. Okay, wait. Crystal Carter: Can I be the thimble? Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Yeah, because I want to be the car. I like the car. That's a kickass car, by the way. Crystal Carter: It's very good. That's a good car. Mordy Oberstein: I hope they never change that in the new sets. Maybe they have. Great, okay. Crystal Carter: You can get different sets, I think. We've got a Star Wars one. You can be the Millennium Falcon. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's cool. We have another one with dinosaurs, I think, somewhere. Crystal Carter: I want a dinosaur Monopoly. Mordy Oberstein: I could be making that up, by the way. I ran another query. It's like something was missing from this. Let's play a game. What's missing from the people also ask box? I read another one and it said "SEO implications, Google DOJ trial." And the four questions I got back from that people also ask is, why is Google being taken to court? What is the federal case against Google? What were the results of the Google trial? And what practices are Google being accused of? What's missing? Crystal Carter: Anything to do with SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, nothing with SEO. And in the first one, user behavior metrics, DOJ trial, there was nothing about user behavior metrics. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Fascinating. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: Because now we're entering in the entity zone. Cue Twilight Zone music thing. What I think is going on here is that you have a larger entity, the DOJ trial, and a very, very niche entity, in one case SEO and in the other case user behavior metrics. And Google's like, "Forget that sub-entity, that's too niche. Let's just go with what we think you're really here for, which is the main entity, the DOJ trial. Here's four questions about the DOJ trial." Crystal Carter: Right. The other thing is, I don't know, sometimes I see this they've got CEO instead of SEO. Sometimes they think you've misspelled it. I also wonder how much they know exactly about it. But what I found is, why is Google in trouble with the US Department of Justice, and why is it bad is coming from Search Engine Land? Even though they are not giving you the direct reflection of your query in terms of keywords, they're giving you a source with an entity that they know to be related to SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's interesting. I wonder if we Googled it without the SEO or just Googled that question if you would get Search Engine Land showing up there. Crystal Carter: So I took out SEO implications of Google DOJ trial, and then I've got time showing up in it, in the PAA, and then still Search Engine Land is showing up in there. But it's interesting. But also there's also, Google knows that I just searched that. That wasn't a fresh search. That was a follow-on search, so Google has some more data on what I've been searching. Mordy Oberstein: They are loving search engine land for all these kinds of queries, it looks like. Crystal Carter: But I think also there's been a lot of SEOs who've been covering it, for instance, Covino. Mordy Oberstein: I know. One of the biggest places that it's been covered. But it is interesting, because I wonder if as an entity it says, I wonder if in the background, because what you're seeing on the SERP itself has no actual connection to SEO. You're not seeing the term SEO reflected in the four questions that Google's offering. But I wonder if what's shown on the SERP is not the full knowledge graph. Just because someone, for example, doesn't have a knowledge panel doesn't mean they're not in the knowledge graph. Just Google's not showing a knowledge panel or that person, let's say. It could be that in the background, Google knows there's an SEO subtopic or a subset around the DOJ trial, and it's saying, "Search Engine Land is very much a related entity to the trial because of the whole SEO connection." So we might not be showing that in the actual questions per se in the PAA box, but within the results that they're showing, it could be that the reason why Search Engine Land is doing so well within the PAA box for these kind of queries is because of the entity connections made. Crystal Carter: And I think also to come back to the user behavior conversation. SEOs have been very, very active and very, very fascinated and very, very engaged in this particular trial, because there's been so many leaks and so much information about search that we've never seen before directly from Google. And so I think that going back to the user behavior metrics, they used to talk about no follow links, no follow links and social no follow links, but Google have said, "We pay attention to social signals. If we're seeing that a piece of content is getting a lot of traction on social, then we will take that into account when we're thinking about whether or not a piece of content is good," because they also crawl and index social media accounts. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. Or crawling, for sure. Crystal Carter: So that goes back to the user behavior thing. It also goes back to when we were saying about the three pillars of SEO. According to the DOJ trial, they said about what the web is saying about it as well. Again, if they know that SEOs are talking about it and they know that Search Engine Land has been covering this a lot, then they'll use that to bring that into whether or not they show it in the PAA. Mordy Oberstein: Now, if you want to keep up on what's going on with the DOJ trial, you might want to head over to Search Engine Land where you'll often find Barry Schwartz covering the SEO news. But not the DOJ stuff, that's really been Danny Goodwin. Maybe we'll have Danny Goodwin in the news this week and not Barry? Nah. Maybe we'll have Danny also possibly, but definitely Barry. So here's this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Three articles for you this week, one from each of the major SEO news publications. This one from Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, Google Circle to Search, the New AI-Powered Search Gesture for Android. So Google has launched, on certain Android devices, this, I think, very unique, very cool way of accenting your search. I'll read what Matt wrote here. "A new gesture-based search method, Circle to Search, Google has developed a new feature for Android called Circle to Search that will change how people interact with content on their phones. With Circle to Search, users can," listen to this, "circle, highlight or tap text images or videos within apps to instantly search for related information without switching between applications." So basically you see, I don't know, you're on whatever app you're on the Google app, and a picture shows up of someone wearing really cool boots that you want. You circle the boots, and Google shows up in overlay with places where you can buy these boots. It's very cool. It's running. It's on only certain Android devices. It's launching, they say, globally on January 31st on the newest Pixel 8 phones, Pixel 8 Pro and Samsung's recently released Galaxy S24 series devices. Now, what I think is interesting about this is, I've been talking about this for a long time, the way we search, even with the SERP features like knowledge panels and also knowledge cards and people also ask and whatever, whatever search features. And the 10 blue links is not really, I feel, how people want to actually engage with search. They really want to be able to explore, go down different rabbit holes, go down different pathways, come out of those rabbit holes and go down a different one really, really seamlessly. And things like this, things like the way Google has shown or demoed its Gemini product and how it shows custom results for different types of information queries points to that idea that people do want a more immersive way of searching. I think keeping your eye on these sort of trends is very important. Next up from he who is Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google Ranking Teetering In and Out Over Weekends, Bug or Edge of Quality. There's been this chatter around the SEO industry that certain TLDs have been coming in and out of the rankings each and every weekend, so TLDs meaning dot-com, dot-org. But in this case you're more obscure ones like dot-media, dot-clinic, or whatever it is. Folks have seen in their search console data that the websites are losing rankings and traffic and impressions, whatever it is, however we want to look at it, whatever metric, each and every weekend. Google said there's no real bug going on here. However, as Barry points out in the article, it may have to do with the sites being what's called on the edge of indexing. That sounds so dramatic. I'm on the edge of indexing, meaning they're on the edge of quality, where Google's not sure whether or not to really keep or not keep the page in and out of the index and therefore rankings. The pattern does align to some volatility out there in the rankings that are being picked up by the SEO weather tool. So on the one hand you have a lot of SEOs saying, "Hey, it looks like there's some kind of bug going on here." Google's saying, "No, no, no. No bug here, but it could be that you just don't have the quality that you need." It is super, super weird. What would have to happen is you'd have to see if the same pattern is happening across all other kind of TLDs, like your more traditional TLDs, like your dot-orgs, dot-coms, dot, I don't know, dot-co-dot-uk kind of thing, whatever it is, all those your usual typical TLDs, if the same thing is happening or not. And then you would see, that's just happening across the web. It's the edge of quality, the edge of indexing. Or if not, if it's just those more obscure TLDs and it is some sort of issue, don't know yet officially. So maybe weigh in out there on the social media. You can weigh in where Barry has the forms and the link to the article on Search Engine Roundtable. Link to that in the show notes. Anyway, last up from, again, Barry Schwartz, but this time on the Search Engine Land. Barry here, Barry there, Barry is everywhere. "New research study asks if Google search is getting worse." The study that came out of Germany, I believe that took a look at review content, so product review content. Best microwaves and reviews of the best microwaves and whether or not from Google to Bing to DuckDuckGo, the search quality has improved. They looked at the results, they scraped the results for the entire course of a year to see whether or not the results are quality, not quality, if they're overly SEO'd or not. I found the results and the study overall interesting. A few takeaways from my end. They say that results are getting worse, but when they show the top spammy review spam websites, there are not very many in the list, and they list four of them, I think, in their chart there, two of them are Amazon, and one of them is YouTube, and then one of them is a legitimate review spam website. So I thought that was a little bit weird. They do say that it's a whack-a-mole kind of thing, that when Google has these updates, it does do a good job of getting rid of this affiliate review spam content from the research results, but they come back. I'm not so sure about that. Glenn Gabe has shown over time that a lot of these websites get killed off. Glenn also did point out, by the way, that the study was finished before a lot of the more recent updates have officially come out. One point that I thought was interesting was they talk about the level of content quality in the top ranking result pages for these product review queries. They say, by the way, that the quality of the content is not so great. I find that interesting. Now, the study conflates SEO with bad SEO, meaning there's SEO that's what we do, which is legitimate, great, good stuff that helps websites target their content more, that helps websites be found more, that helps websites speak to users and search engines in a much more, quote, unquote, better way with link spam, review spam, spam, spam, spam SEO. So it doesn't make a distinction in the study, which really irks me a little bit, but it does talk about the level of quality in the content at the top of the SERP not being so great, and I think that is an issue that we should talk about and discuss. We have discussed it. I'm not going to go into it in too great of length here. I talk about it in my article in the SEO Hub where I talk about the future of content, and we also spoke a little bit about it on our recent podcast with Jason Dodge and Nigel Stevens about emerging content trends. I'll link to those articles and podcasts in the show notes. But I do think that sometimes we, in the SEO world, our idea of what good content is and what good content actually is is a problem. I do think though there's an incentive problem, which I speak about in the article, which we talked about in the podcast, where is Google giving enough incentive for content writers and SEOs to abandon the typical content quality models and go to a little bit more of a nuanced model? What I mean is when you start, let's say you're reviewing best microwaves, so SEOs will be like, "All right. First thing we do is write what is a microwave?" Maybe get rid of that and be a little bit more nuanced in the content. I think it's a little bit of SEOs needing to adapt a little bit, and I think it's also a little bit of a Google trying to or should be showing results that are not doing that in the results a little bit more to cue the content and SEO industries to be, "Hey, you don't need to do that anymore." Because it is a little bit of a difficulty saying, "Hey, let's not do that anymore." But we do see that in the results, so why wouldn't I do that anymore if Google is ranking that? So it's up to everybody to do a little bit of a better job in offering a little bit better of a content experience, in my personal humble opinion. Now, I will address this here very quickly. There has been controversy around the search results being less quality overall, which is why this article is getting so much coverage because it is part of a larger narrative. I will say, I think that, when I say we I mean the entire web, underestimates the paradigm shift that has happened with content. Again, I speak about this in my article. We spoke of it on the recent podcast interview with Nigel and with Jason, but I do think we underestimate just how much the content sans have shifted and how difficult it is for a search engine like Google to adapt and to realign with user expectations and what the content picture and scenario actually is out there. So I do think yes, you're going to see some not great results coming out there near the top of the surface certain times or over-reliance, we'll say, in forums or this or that, but I think it's all par for the course. It's not easy to adjust. It's not easy to realign results to what's happening out there on the web at the same time. And it will take Google a little bit of time to perhaps get it right, but I do think Google will fundamentally get it right. I'm a believer. I'm an optimist. As much as it may surprise you, I am an optimist. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News. Thanks again, Barry. We appreciate you. You're the man. You're the man, Barry. Crystal Carter: Barry's great and Barry listens every week, and we really appreciate you listening every week. He's just tweeted us something that I haven't told Mordy about that I'm curious as to exactly what we asked. Mordy Oberstein: I saw that pop up on my phone while we were recording. I saw something like, "Oh yeah, @Mordy overseen Crystal on the web. So awkward." Crystal Carter: What are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Himself. He's talking about himself. Crystal Carter: We love you anyway, Barry. It's all good. Mordy Oberstein: But now we mentioned the L word. We're making him really feel awkward now. Crystal Carter: Oh, we adore you, Barry. We think you're so fantastic. You are- Mordy Oberstein: I do. Crystal Carter: ... just an absolute gem and a gift. Mordy Oberstein: I have a little stuffed pillow like Barry at night with a string on it. It reads news titles, SEO news titles with grammatical errors in them to me. Anyway, from trolling Barry just a bit on the official Wix SEO podcast, which is a whole new level of trolling, to be honest with you. By the way, make sure if you're not following Barry Schwartz, make sure you follow Barry Schwartz on whatever social media platform you consume @rustybrick on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Who isn't following Barry Schwartz? Follow Barry. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Sometimes I see Twitter people with a million followers and Barry only has 250,000. So those people. Crystal Carter: You should follow Barry. Mordy Oberstein: Obviously, but you know who you should also follow, which speaks to Barry because Barry often quotes him. I'll give you a hint. He's often quoted by Barry. He has two Twitter accounts and he loves Star Trek. He'll often go on Star Trek cruises. Crystal Carter: Oh yes, yes, I know exactly who you're talking about now. It is the one, the only Danny Sullivan. Mordy Oberstein: Danny Sullivan, what? We're not recommending you follow Danny's personal account, which you should follow, but we're also recommending you follow Danny's official account as Google search liaison over at SearchLiaison, don't ask me how to spell liaison, over on Twitter. I do know how to spell liaison. It used to be in my title L-I-A-S-I-O-N, liaison. I know French. Crystal Carter: Were you in the spelling bee? Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I know how to spell one complicated word. I'm the worst at spelling. Crystal Carter: I did a spelling bee, and I remember I got ukulele. Mordy Oberstein: That's a hard one. Crystal Carter: I was like, "That's Hawaiian." And they were like, "You still have to spell it. It's in the dictionary." And I was like, "Oh, no." So that didn't work out well for me. Mordy Oberstein: I've been to spelling bees, not for long though. "Mr. Oberstein, have a seat. You're embarrassing the entire school." Anyway, make sure you follow Danny because he's officially tweeting official stuff about official Google ongoing updates and all sorts of changes over on the SearchLiaison account. It's a super important account to follow. Crystal Carter: I think he spoke at Brighton in November, and it was fantastic, and he spent a lot of time trying to explain why he has to do so much explaining about search documentation and how they're really thinking about making things clear when they can. And they're really responsive, so he's really responsive to that stuff. If people message him and they're like, "This doesn't make sense," he tries to make it more clear and tries to answer questions as much as he can. Super nice guy and absolutely follow him for really, really interesting information about search. Mordy Oberstein: Your SEO life will live long and prosper if you follow Danny's account. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Indeed. You know what's lived long and prospered? This podcast episode. Crystal Carter: It did. It was good. I enjoyed it. Mordy Oberstein: That's a very Vulcan answered. It was good. I enjoyed it. Green-blooded. I got my kids into Star Trek recently. Crystal Carter: Yeah? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Resistance is futile. Mordy Oberstein: Their future partners and spouses, whatever, will blame me. You have me to blame for the Star Trek. Crystal Carter: It's fine. They'll just meet a nice Trekkie. It'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: I hope so, for their sake. Crystal Carter: Trekkies are nice people. It's all good. Mordy Oberstein: I died alone because my father introduced me to Star Trek. Crystal Carter: As long as they watch Galaxy Quest as well. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, great movie. Great movie. You know what else is going to be great? The next episode of the podcast. Thanks 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 structured data markup do's and don'ts. Look for it wherever you can consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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Is social media good for SEO? What are the myths and truths when it comes to ranking signals and social media? Join Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein and learn how social media does and doesn’t impact Google rankings and what you should be doing as a result Christoph Trappe, Director of Content Strategy at Growgetter IO, shares his expertise in content distribution on social media with his top three ways to reach and engage audiences effectively. Lirut Nave, Head of Social Media at Wix.com, joins the show to help you understand how to balance the various goals you have for your activity across social media. What are the ties between Social and SEO? How can you widen your reach on social while keeping your branding in mind? It’s all here with episode #49 of the SERP’s UP SEO podcast. Back Does social media matter for SEO? Is social media good for SEO? What are the myths and truths when it comes to ranking signals and social media? Join Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein and learn how social media does and doesn’t impact Google rankings and what you should be doing as a result Christoph Trappe, Director of Content Strategy at Growgetter IO, shares his expertise in content distribution on social media with his top three ways to reach and engage audiences effectively. Lirut Nave, Head of Social Media at Wix.com, joins the show to help you understand how to balance the various goals you have for your activity across social media. What are the ties between Social and SEO? How can you widen your reach on social while keeping your branding in mind? It’s all here with episode #49 of the SERP’s UP SEO podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 49 | August 2, 2023 | 51 MIN 00:00 / 51:24 This week’s guests Lirut Nave Moving from the advertising world into high-tech, Lirut nave, Head of social media at Wix is leading the company’s brand efforts on social, to increase awareness and visibility across all main channels through an organic-centered strategy. Christoph Trappe Christoph Trappe is a globally known content marketer who helps companies move their marketing content from happening to performing. He authored a series of marketing strategy books including “Is marketing a good career?” and is currently content director at growth marketing agency Growgetter. Notes Transcript Transcript 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. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Christoph Trappe Lirut Nave Jean Wandimi Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter How to use TikTok for SEO keyword research SEO competitor backlink analysis Christoph Trappe Website Business Storytelling Podcast Growgetter News: OpenAI’s AI Text Classifier no longer available due to ‘low rate of accuracy’ Google Business Profiles Automated FAQs Feature Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Christoph Trappe Lirut Nave Jean Wandimi Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter How to use TikTok for SEO keyword research SEO competitor backlink analysis Christoph Trappe Website Business Storytelling Podcast Growgetter News: OpenAI’s AI Text Classifier no longer available due to ‘low rate of accuracy’ Google Business Profiles Automated FAQs Feature Transcript 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. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Do you have the need, the need for speed?! Today we're talking about performance (also known as How Fast is this Website?) and what it means for your rankings on Google. So, how big of a deal is performance for SEO, anyway? Mordy and Crystal do a deep dive discussing the importance of Core Web Vitals and site performance metrics in SEO today. There’s a lot of conflicting information about the role of performance in SEO. How do you reconcile Google’s own statements about “site speed” along with data from the industry’s tool providers on the impact of Core Web Vitals? Listen in as we parse it all for you so that you have a truer understanding of the role of Core Web Vitals in rankings and beyond. Annie Sullivan, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, shares the main steps towards improving Core Web Vitals: measure, analyze, optimize and repeat. Hear Annie’s take on identifying bottlenecks that could be impacting the website's performance. Catch up with Alon Kochba, Head of Web Performance at Wix, who discusses how the team helped improve performance across the entire Wix platform. Back Just how big of a deal is performance for SEO? Do you have the need, the need for speed?! Today we're talking about performance (also known as How Fast is this Website?) and what it means for your rankings on Google. So, how big of a deal is performance for SEO, anyway? Mordy and Crystal do a deep dive discussing the importance of Core Web Vitals and site performance metrics in SEO today. There’s a lot of conflicting information about the role of performance in SEO. How do you reconcile Google’s own statements about “site speed” along with data from the industry’s tool providers on the impact of Core Web Vitals? Listen in as we parse it all for you so that you have a truer understanding of the role of Core Web Vitals in rankings and beyond. Annie Sullivan, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, shares the main steps towards improving Core Web Vitals: measure, analyze, optimize and repeat. Hear Annie’s take on identifying bottlenecks that could be impacting the website's performance. Catch up with Alon Kochba, Head of Web Performance at Wix, who discusses how the team helped improve performance across the entire Wix platform. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 13 | November 16, 2022 | 41 MIN 00:00 / 40:39 This week’s guests Annie Sullivan Annie is a software engineer on Chrome's Web Platform team. She is passionate about building a better performing web for users across the globe. Her tenure as a Googler spans 17 years, with experience on the toolbar, docs, web search, and chrome teams. Annie currently leads performance metric development on Chrome. She lives in Michigan with her husband Doug and two sons, and enjoys tinkering with laser cutters, metal etching, and new cooking techniques. Alon Kochba Alon is the Head of Web Performance at Wix, leading all performance efforts across the company, making the web faster at scale. He also manages a back-end group which builds and maintains several critical core services. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo 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, Head of SEO branding at Wix, and I'm joined by our Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, fun internet people. Welcome to our internet podcast show. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you for joining us today. Crystal Carter: Thank you. It's a pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: We've really switched up that vibe on a dime. Wow. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you were like, "Yeah!" You didn't, it's like, " Hello." Mordy Oberstein: Hello, world. Crystal Carter: Hi. Hi. Mordy Oberstein: We're here to talk about... Hi. We're here to talk about SEO. Send in your questions to 1-800... Crystal Carter: SEO. 1-800. Mordy Oberstein: 1-800-SEO, right. That's not a real phone number, if you're- Crystal Carter: It's not. Please don't call 1-800 SEO. I don't know whose number that is, but if you get lots of phone calls. Mordy Oberstein: Can you imagine that person? "Hello?" "Yes, I'm calling in..." Crystal Carter: Dear sir, I would like to talk to you about this …. Mordy Oberstein: I would like to sell you links. Crystal Carter: Press one for hi daily. Press two. Mordy Oberstein: That's a good time to remind you that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where traffic thresholds for Core Web Vitals are a thing of the past. Wait, didn't we do this last week? We did, but it's super relevant for this week, because we're talking about web performance. So Google's Search Console not giving you the field data you so desire, use Wix's Speed Dashboard. Get field data built off user sessions from multiple browsers. No more guessing what your actual Core Web Vitals are with Wix's Site Speed Dashboard. If I was a better planner, I would've used that this week and just this week and a different one last week, because this week we're talking about performance. And last time I talked about Search Console and I should have plugged something about Wix and Search Console instead... Yeah, I'm a poor planner, it turns out, even though I think I'm a really good... I'm a good planner. I promise. Crystal Carter: You're great at planning. Mordy Oberstein: I know, I know. But this is the second time today. The audience does not know the first time that I have not planned well today. Crystal Carter: Do you know what? Sometimes it's just like that. Sometimes Mercury's in retrograde, or it's a full moon, or you just skip breakfast, or whatever it is and sometimes- Mordy Oberstein: Or it's Tuesday. Crystal Carter: And you just got to try again the next day. And sometimes it's just like that. That's okay. That's fine. Mordy Oberstein: I will try. I will do better tomorrow. Crystal Carter: Hey, hey, we believe in you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you for believing in me. Crystal Carter: Your SEO affirmations, there's actually an SEO affirmations Twitter account that I found today. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's like, "Hey, keep up the good work." I was like, "Oh, that's nice." Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I need that. Send it over right away. Crystal Carter: That's good. Mordy Oberstein: So great show today. This week we're talking about, well, we're performers talking about performance. Crystal Carter: We are talking about performance. And I'm so glad that you brought up that site Speed Dashboard, because I absolutely love it. And anybody who has a Wix account should absolutely check it out because- Mordy Oberstein: It is the only place in the world you're going to get that kind of data. Literally. I'm not making that up. Crystal Carter: Literally, literally. So there's field data, there's lab data. Lab data is when you run it through Lighthouse and it says what they can tell from their tools. Field data is information from actual users. And if you have a certain number of traffic, then if you go into Google Search Console, you can't see your field data. You can't see that information. But if you are a Wix user, then you can get your field data, whatever number of traffic you have. Mordy Oberstein: No traffic thresholds. Crystal Carter: No traffic thresholds. And it's not a third-party tool. It comes from the information that Wix is getting from people- Mordy Oberstein: Right from the browser. Crystal Carter: Right from the browser, from multiple browsers, not just Google. Mordy Oberstein: Multiple browsers, not just Chrome. Interesting. Fascinating. Oh, boy. Anyway, okay, so today's show, we're talking about performance, also known as, how fast is this website? Crystal Carter: And how does it all work with its network? And how's it all moving and shaken and not shaking? Not shaking at all? Mordy Oberstein: Well, hopefully it's not shaking. That'd be bad for performance. But we're going to finally settle, maybe hopefully, how big of a deal is performance for SEO, which TLDR? It's an enormous debate among SEOs filled with so much information and not a lot of nuance. So we're going to try to offer a more nuanced look at the impact of performance on SEO. We'll dive into things like Core Web Vitals. Are they as big of a deal as you think? Or maybe they're a bigger deal than you might think? How would that work? Anyway, Annie Sullivan, Senior Staff Software Engineer over at Google's going to stop by and talk about some common mistakes folks make. They make their sites slow down a bit. And we talk to Wix's own Head of Web Performance, the one the only Alon Kochba, the fellow who improved Wix's Core Web Vitals tenfold. And he's going to talk to us about how he approaches performance and where he thinks Google is headed when it comes to assessing faster loading for websites. And he's someone who talks to Google, so he's in the know. Hopefully, we'll get some secrets out of him, yeah? Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited about this episode, because we've got so many great folks joining us today and because- Mordy Oberstein: It's stacked. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we're pretty stacked. Annie is fantastic. I was on a Twitter space with her and she's super incredible and super, super knowledgeable. And I've had lots of conversations with Alon and how he thinks about the whole network of over 200 million websites that he's trying to make sure that are performing as best they can. And it's something that Wix is very enthusiastic about and rightfully so. And I'm excited to talk about this topic. Mordy Oberstein: Alon's super awesome. And, of course, by the way, we have your Snappy News and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Episode number 13 of SERP's Up is here. So performance, performance is super important. It's important for multiple reasons. But it's one of these areas, if you're listening to this podcast and you're trying to, if you are very familiar with the SEO space, you'll probably nod right along. If you're newer into the SEO space, it's something that you need to be careful of. There's a lot of conflicting information about the role of performance or speed and whatnot on SEO. And there's conflicting information coming out of Google itself at some times over the years, that they're doing it on purpose. It's different statements and different people over the years, right hand not talking to the left hand, I don't know, whatever it is. Or SEOs have different takes on it. And it's a really important issue that goes beyond just SEO. But it is also really important for SEO. But it does, I think, require a little bit more of a nuanced understanding of where performance fits into the larger SEO scheme. So I don't know, Crystal, to you, how important, let's throw it out there, how important is performance to SEO? Crystal Carter: Okay, so just for anybody who's not in this all the time, when we say performance, there's lots of things you could talk about for SEO performance. E-ranking could be considered performance. Or traffic could be considered performance. But when we talk about web performance, we're pretty much talking about web connectivity and how people connect to your website. So we're talking about how fast your website loads, how fast different parts of your website load, how your network connections are functioning so that your website performs well, when technically, people are visiting your website. Now, I think, and in my experience, this performance is really valuable for SEO in lots of ways. It can sometimes be a litmus test for other issues that you have across your website. Speed is a ranking factor. They've said that Core Web Vitals is a ranking factor. Security is a ranking factor. These things often overlap when you're making updates. So for instance, if you improve your security settings, it will often have an impact on your speed. It will often have an impact on your Core Web Vitals performance. So these are things that you should be thinking about. And generally speaking, when I've made Core Web Vitals updates, particularly for clients who, or websites where there is a significant amount of traffic, it has had some benefit to the overall SEO outcomes for that site. And because there's so many overlapping things, it can sometimes be difficult to understand whether it's because we improved the security, which also improved the Core Web Vitals metrics or whether it's because we improved the speed, which also improved the Core Web Vitals, or because the page is more interactive, because we didn't have third-party scripts on the page, that sort of thing. But generally speaking, the process of improving your Core Web Vitals will often improve the value of your website, overall. Mordy Oberstein: And if you look at the data some of the different tool providers have put out around the impact of Core Web Vitals on ranking, the data from across the board from multiple providers has been, "Nah, not too much," which is what a lot of SEOs may have expected. Some SEOs not. Somebody says, "Oh no, it's going to be massive and huge." But I think you're right. The way I look like it, that's not the question. The question is not, oh, how much is this particular metric that Google is measuring, your Core Web Vitals, how much are they going to meet in terms of ranking directly? To me, they're more representative of, like you said, of the site overall and not just from the search engine point of view, but from the user's point of view. So when you go to a webpage, to me performance is very much first and foremost is a conversion issue. If the website doesn't function right, if it's too slow to load, or buttons are moving around and you can't click anything, and nothing is working, people are not going to be able to add things to the cart. And they're not going to be able to enter their credit card, and not be able to give you their money, which is what you're trying to do with the website. And the health and performance of a website speaks to just how good of a website it is overall. So when you're asking, they go, "How important is it for SEO?" Super important, because it represents the technical health and it represents a conversion health of the website. You're asking about ranking for a particular keyword or a particular scenario? That's like a drop in the bucket, like a raindrop in the ocean of a kind of a question to me. Crystal Carter: Right. One of things that was great about Core Web Vitals metrics, and if you go to, Google has lots and lots of tools for Core Web Vitals and for understanding them. And I think it's web.dev is their page that has lots of... Web.dev has lots of information about Core Web Vitals and about understanding different things. If you're using Chrome, you can also right click and you can get a Lighthouse report and see different things about your website there. And there's lots of links within that. But the Core Web Vitals metrics are giving you a number for things that have always irritated everyone about websites. So cumulatively, I should just have just said classic one. Mordy Oberstein: The classic, it's so bad, too. Crystal Carter: And we all hate it when you go onto a website and you're like, "Oh, I'm going to click on this thing," and then it moves, because something else is loading. Nobody likes that. Mordy Oberstein: So cumulatively layout shift, there's CLS, if you're not aware. You know where you go to a website and the buttons are moving around, and you click on the wrong thing, and you add the wrong thing to the cart, and then you ended up paying for it? You're like, "Oh, my god, I hate this website." CLS measures that. And a CLS score of zero means that that's not happening at all, which is what you want. Crystal Carter: Right. And so what the Core Web Vitals metrics do and one of the reasons why it's so great to have that as a reporting thing is that you can say, "We have 17 pages on our website that have this issue." And if you're showing for that issue, then that means it's 17 pages that you can fix. And you can see that lots of users are having this issue, or not that many users are having that issue. And you can see how you can do it and you can show progress. So there's something called the CrUX report, which is a free thing that you can download. You can connect your website to it. And you can track your progress over time. And that will help you get better outcome for users, will help you to increase the conversion opportunities that you're talking about there. And I think that that is valuable for lots of parts of SEO. And also for instance though, one of the things that you get with Core Web Vitals metrics is they'll tell you about loading times. So for instance, they'll give you a metric that says that, "There are parts of your page that aren't loading properly. They're loading really slowly. They're taking a really long time to load." So most people, when they come to your website, are not seeing that giant picture that you have on your homepage. Or they're not seeing that video that you have on your homepage. So if you are having a discussion as an SEO, and I'm an SEO who's less aesthetically-minded than some other people, I'm like, "Tell me how beautiful Amazon is, because they rank fantastically." So if you're somebody who's having a discussion about, "Oh, should we have that beautiful video or should we have this SEO optimized copy," or whichever, you can use your Core Web Vitals information, you can use your page experience information to make those decisions more accurately. If most users aren't seeing that video, then you probably shouldn't have that video on there. It's not helping you. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Also, and again, it goes back to the earlier point about conversion, but there's also a branding side of it. If you're going to a page and things start loading... Remember, though, back in the day when we had dial-up internet? And five minutes after you loaded the page, and then something else loaded like, "Oh, oh, wait a second"? But the equivalent of that today is you go to a webpage and there's a video there and you're on the page one or two seconds, all of a sudden the video pops up. That doesn't make you look good. And that goes back to what we were saying before that Core Web Vitals or web performance, whether it's a ranking factor or... Well, I'm sorry. Let me rephrase that. It is definitely a ranking factor. But how big of a ranking factor is it? Is is a tiebreaker scenario? Many of the instances where Google has talked about it is like, "You have two pages. Relatively same content. Every SPO is all optimized the same way, but which one's faster?" "Well, it's a tiebreaker. We'll go with one's, a better performance." Leaving that aside for a minute, when you look at how a page performs, physically performs, and it's doing something like loading the video a minute later, like it's 1995, it's not what you want. Crystal Carter: It's not what you want. Mordy Oberstein: And Core Web Vitals therefore speaks to the overall health and experience of the website as a whole. So when you have Google back in the day saying, like Gary Illyish, Illyes Illyish, ish, ish? Crystal Carter: Gary. Mordy Oberstein: Gary, Gary from Google at one point said, "You could find it in an seoroundtable.com." I'm trying to find the link for you and put it in the show notes. Oh, speed is before Core Web Vitals. It was speed is a teeny, tiny ranking factor. And SEOs are debating this forever. No, no, it's a really big ranking factor. No, it's a teeny... Does it matter? Because it's so far reaching and so far speaking to what your website is that I don't think... Okay. Crystal Carter: And also, it's a question of users are using your website. So if I have a decision between sitting there waiting for a page to load for that long or doing literally- Mordy Oberstein: I see what you did there. I see it. It went right over my head for a second. And then it didn't. Crystal Carter: Right. Or literally doing anything else, I would rather do literally anything else. And so I will go back to the page that I know will load quickly. And I will not go back to the page that I didn't even see, because I left, because I wanted to do literally anything else. So these are the things that are important to think about. And I think that Core Web Vitals gives you incredible metrics to see that at scale, and to see that over time, and to see how you're performing there. So I think it's really valuable. In terms of speed, I've worked on projects where we've made speed optimizations and it's had incredible impact on conversions and on customer value, which therefore, has an impact on rankings, because you're more valuable to users and Google can see that. Mordy Oberstein: I will say on that last point, you've seen many SEOs debate this fact like, "Oh, I made a big speed improval." "Oh, that's not going to make a big impact. I've never seen a speed improve." There's more than one way to skin the cat in SEO. And you never know what's going to move the needle. And multiple things might move the needle. So I don't think it's the zero sum game that SEOs sometimes play. Crystal Carter: One point I did want to also bring up, so Core Web Vitals can be a little bit relative. So sometimes you see that there's not that much change, particularly in sectors around e-commerce, because they're really heavily tracked. But another good thing that Core Web Vitals does is it teaches you best practice. One of the things I see really, really frequently is that lots of people have tons of third-party scripts hanging around on their website that they're not using anymore. They used to use Hotjar and now nobody has access to Hotjar anymore. And they don't even remember when they had the account or something like that. You don't need those on there. You don't need those on there. That's potentially a data risk. And cleaning those out is good practice, and it's good for your Core Web Vitals, and it's good for your users, and it's good for your site, and all of those sorts of things. These are good habits to have. And I think the Core Web Vitals is a great element in an SEO atmosphere, because of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: And speaking of things you can do to improve your Core Web Vitals and the performance of your website overall, here's Annie Sullivan, Senior Staff Software Engineer over at Google, as we ask her, what are some common mistakes you see people making with their sites that negatively impact performance? Annie Sullivan: To me, the biggest mistake people make that negatively affects performance is not taking the right approach to understanding performance. Last week, Dan Shapir tweeted out, "Measure, analyze, optimize, repeat." And I couldn't agree more. Those four words sum up performance work so well. But I see a lot of people skipping over the measure and analyze steps and just going straight to optimize. When you do that, you're not going to make much progress. You need to start by measuring to get a baseline. You should have an idea of how fast your site is for real users and how fast you'd like it to be. We have recommended thresholds for all the Core Web Vitals metrics, if you're not sure. Once you've got an idea where you're at, the next step is analyzing to understand where the biggest bottlenecks are. If you're not sure how to identify bottlenecks, you'll want to read up on the critical rendering path in browsers. Your goal is to make the critical rendering path shorter. So you want to find the biggest things you can cut out of its way. Once you've analyzed a critical path for your own application and found where the biggest bottlenecks are, then it's time to optimize. The repeat part is important, too. Often, your optimization won't have the impact you expect. You'll need to measure to be sure. If it doesn't, then you'll need to do another round of analysis to figure out why. Then optimize again. Another aspect of repeating is finding ways to prevent yourself from reintroducing the bottlenecks you just removed. A lot of bottlenecks, like render-blocking resources are cleanly written out as Lighthouse audits. If you found a big improvement from a Lighthouse audit, you'd consider writing a test on your continuous build to ensure that audit doesn't start regressing in the future. It's so much fun to dig into performance bottlenecks and learn about what makes things slow. I can't wait to hear what you find. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Annie. And I just want to say, if you're looking to make improvements to your performance of your website, it can seem overwhelming. There's plenty of materials out there and a lot of the steps are not as complicated as it might seem. And yes, at a certain point you might reach your limits and it's okay to ask for help. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think Annie works with Google. Google's really been leading the charge with this. And one of the things that was great about when the Core Web Vitals information started coming through was that Google provided us with lots of information. There's lots of information about different methodologies. There's lots of tools you can use, both within Chrome, within Google Search Console, within tools like Lighthouse, tools like PageFeed Insights, things like that. So there's lots of great tools there. And what Annie was saying about analyzing your information is really, really valuable. And I think that it's really important to look not just at the metrics, but actually at the pages. For instance, I've had it before where I was working on a site and the person said, "Oh, I've been trying to fix the cumulative layout shift for ages and we've been having all this trouble." And I went into Google Search Console. I know I had a look at the trends, which pages were pulling up the same error. And I went to the page and I saw that the cumulative layout shift, it was very clear. They had their products in folders. And you would go to the page and all of the folders would show up where you could see all of them. And then they would all scrunch up into a burger menu straight afterwards. And I was like, "We need to pick one. We either need to put all of these at the bottom or we need to just go at the burger menu. But it can't be open and close, and open and close. That's ridiculous." And we did that and it fixed it. And we saw better results for users as well, because if you're a user and all you're getting is… Mordy Oberstein: Here's the content. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: No, it's not. Crystal Carter: So every page would just show that list on mobile, would just show the list of all of the categories rather than showing the actual products on the page. So it's better for users, because you've made that analysis. And also, she talked about testing afterwards. So that's really important, as well. So you make that change and then you monitor the results to see how users are actually engaging with that, if it's actually moving the needle, if it's actually making an impact. And then you refine and do it again. So she also mentioned Dan Shapir, who's a fantastic person to follow on the web performance space. There's some great people who are doing some great things in web performance. He's a great one, as well. So yes, I wholeheartedly agree with what Annie's saying about the test it again. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to tell you an amazing story. Okay. It's a story of millions of websites suddenly got hit by a bolt of lightning and became supercharged beasters. Okay, it's a little bit hyperbolic. And it's not really my story to tell. But it's a fascinating story. Crystal Carter: Wasn't that Thunderbolt? Mordy Oberstein: Inside joke. It wasn't Thunderbolt. Well, partially. But really, it's a fascinating story and the amount of work, dedication, ingenuity that went into improving Wix's Core Web Vital scores to make it at the point where it's a market leader, like 60% of our mobile sites in the US past Core Web Vitals it's incredible. And it was an incredible effort, honest, and personally, I just want to say I feel privileged to have been a small part of it back in the day to help advocate for driving these efforts and pushing these efforts in. But if anyone deserves the credit, it's people like Dan Shapir, who you just mentioned, who at the time was working at Wix and this man, Alon Kochba, Head of Web Performance at Wix. So join me and join Crystal as we go across the Wixverse to discuss with Alon how he and the team improve performance on many websites and where he thinks the future of web performance is headed. Audio: 3... 2... 1... We have ignition. Liftoff. Mordy Oberstein: How are you? Alon Kochba: Everything is great. How are you? Mordy Oberstein: Ah, we're good. Hanging out here. It's raining. It's a dreary day out here today. Crystal Carter: Somebody told me it was raining. I was very surprised that it was raining. I've never heard anyone talk about rain. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. I'm officially an old person now. I talk about the weather. Crystal Carter: Oh, I live in England. That's all they talk about. Mordy Oberstein: So today, we're not talking about the weather. We're talking about performance. We've been talking about performance, all of us. And Alon, I mean, I know you're going to brush this off. And you're going to dismiss what I'm about to say, but if you take a look at Wix's CrUX data, and the Core Web Vitals, and what we've done there, it's amazing. Our numbers have improved tenfold. And I'm going to credit you with doing it. Alon Kochba: It's me and a lot of other great people at Wix. And that's really been focusing on performance for a long time now. Mordy Oberstein: It's true. And again, not taking away from you, it's been an enormous team effort across the entire company. I would say we're a performance first company across the board. But I'm curious, now that we have you here and we're talking to you about this, and you've been such a backbone behind the efforts, just what has it been like to try to improve performance for millions of websites? What have you done, obviously, without going too much into the technical nitty gritty of that, but it's more like how have you approached it? Alon Kochba: So I think as the platform, we have an amazing opportunity where we're hosting millions of sites, like you said, and we're trying to solve a lot of technical challenges that a lot of site builders have, a lot of people have on their own sites, but do it at a massive scale. And it all starts with hosting and serving all your files from CDNs, and caching, and bringing everything close to the user. But it also has a lot of development teams building a lot of amazing products across of Wix that all need to tend with it. So basically, it's finding your opportunities and seeing how to go from there. Crystal Carter: And I think there's lots of different layers to it. So you talked about different security performance and things like that. So do you work just with teams within Wix to achieve some of that change? Or are you working with teams who are external as well to see some of that progress? Alon Kochba: So basically, I think a lot of things in Wix and a lot of those platforms, a lot of the things are up to us as a platform. And that means talking with a lot of development teams across Wix and pushing best standards internally. On the other hand, you have these things that are up to the user, because he can design his site however he wants. And at the end of the day, there are best practices and what kind of third parties you put on your site that can cause issues and how you design your pages. So it's basically split between both sides. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what makes it a little bit interesting when you're trying to approach improving a website. It's not just, okay, it's on the development side of it, but also whoever, the designer of the SEO, whoever's creating the website, it's sort of a partnership between the two. And it's a partnership, as you mentioned before, with multiple teams here at Wix. And if you're not Wix, if you're, I don't know, you're working in an agency, you're working with designers, you're working with the content teams, you're working with developers. It's sort of just like one giant effort, because everything impacts performance. How do you manage that? Particularly here at Wix, we have so many parts of the product. And all of it, theoretically, can impact performance. How do you manage all that? How do you set expectations? How did you go about setting the bar so that the teams, when they're developing whatever they're developing or developing with performance first? Alon Kochba: So I think at the end of the day, it's a numbers game. You can't fix everything. And they're always new performance opportunities. And you need to choose your battles. But we've been trying to first install all these guidelines and best practices across teams so it's in everyone's minds. And we've been trying to focus on the largest cases that handle the most sites and the most common use cases and working our way from there. Mordy Oberstein: Out of curiosity, if you can pick one thing, I don't know, what's one thing that you've done at Wix that you've seen that you can share, maybe that people can take away as a lesson for their own sites, that we've done that's really moved the needle in terms of performance? Alon Kochba: So I think at the end of the day, you really, first off, you want to serve your HTML as fast as possible. If the HTML is not fast, if it's not served from a server that's near your users, or in our case, everywhere, because we have users from a lot of distinct fundraise, you can't really succeed to performance if you don't have a fast TFB and fast FCPO, you'll have a very hard time passing Core Web Vitals. But then on the other hand, after the HTML arrives, you basically have your resources that are the LCP. And this has to do with how you build your site and what framework you're using. But go HTML. This is really the way to go today. Browsers are up to speed on a lot of standards and a lot of things can be built straight on the HTML. That's what we've been trying to do. Crystal Carter: And so I think that comes a little bit to how Wix is structured. So you were talking about HTML, but a lot of people think of Wix and they think of JavaScript. How do you manage the JavaScript from a performance point of view? Alon Kochba: So basically, all Wix sites are built on top of React. And we have a very extensive framework wrapping React internally. But React brings with it a lot of JavaScript dependencies. And that's something that we, like a lot of other companies, have been trying to avoid with a lot of best practices of preshaking, and lazy loading, and reducing bundle sizes. But we are looking forward at a lot of talk out there about little to no JavaScript solutions and alternative frameworks. In the past Wix was FLASH sites all over. And then we used the Angular. And these days we use React. And I think we do a great job of even exceeding the average React site. So yes, JavaScript arrives, but ideally JavaScript is there at least only for interactivity currently and not- Crystal Carter: Sure. And it's my understanding that the HTML is server side rendered. Is that correct? Alon Kochba: Yeah, so we use a server side rendering, but we also have extensive automatic caching for all our sites and CDNs. And we invalidate whenever something changes. For example, you buy your last product and the product needs to become out of stock, so something takes care of that for you. Crystal Carter: And that's super simple to set up right? All of those things. And making sure that all of those things work seamlessly so that every time somebody comes to my little blog, they can see exactly what they need to see, and that it loads properly, and loads correctly. That's super easy, right? Alon, you make it look super easy. Alon Kochba: Definitely. You don't even need to think about it. You built your site. You bought your domain. And you just get everything automatic. If you are using Velo, then there are cases where you need to turn it on manually, but. Mordy Oberstein: Right, which is smart, by the way, because if you have a custom code there maybe doesn't make any sense to have it cached that way, because who knows what you have on the website? Alon Kochba: Exactly. And we're a bit careful around custom code and caching. Crystal Carter: I think you talked about some of the things that are built in. And there's some fantastic things within Wix for performance that I absolutely love, that we have. WebP is one of the sort of defaults for images. I think you shared an image on Twitter recently that was talking about how many WebP images we have proportionally, which I think is amazing. Is there a reason why you chose that particular one as being the main image format for Wix? Alon Kochba: Yeah. So I think image formats are a very interesting area where a lot of people... JPEG and PNG have been around for tens of years and are not really as optimized as they should be. And WebP is really the alternative that currently is supported across all browsers. And you can see that a lot of companies and site builders are trying to move everything over to WebP. And we do that automatically. For order of our files are currently served as WebP, we automatically detect that the browser supports it or not. So that's great for users. I think with the LCP being three out of four times an image, you really need your images to be as small as possible and advanced modern image formats give you that. Crystal Carter: Right. And that reminds me of another thing that's built in that I think is awesome, is that you have an automatic image compressor built into the CMS, which I think is awesome as well. I know that on some of those CMSs you have to download an extra plugin to have something that does that. But we have that built in, which I think is really cool. Mordy Oberstein: It helps. Crystal Carter: It helps. It does help. I just wondered if you could also share with our team, I know that this is a bug bear for SEOs who log into Google Search Console and want to know what's going on with their Core Web Vitals. And there's a little sailing ship and you can't see. And it just says, "No." And there's a little sail ship that says, "You don't have enough traffic. Try again." Mordy Oberstein: It says, "You're not good enough. Get more traffic." Crystal Carter: "You're not good enough. Nobody comes to your website anyway." And you're like, "People come." And they're like, "No." So you get that little sailing ship and you get no data. And I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about the awesome solution that your team builds to help people to find some solutions for addressing Core Web Vitals that's in the WIX CMM. Alon Kochba: Definitely. So this is a product I love that we have, the Site Speed Dashboard that really... Well, I'll start from top. We collect real user measurements. That's just like Chrome does for their users, we do for all our users. That's what we use internally to find opportunities and improve. But this allows us to measure your Core Web Vitals in all browsers and show it directly to each user. So in your Site Speed Dashboard, you can easily see the LCP, the CLS, the FID for each day. So if you do a change, you can see it instantly. And you can do it with a minimal amount of traffic. Crystal Carter: Which is amazing! Mordy Oberstein: And it's why we plugged it in the beginning of the show. Alon Kochba: Sometimes you have more traffic and performance improves. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is true. Increase your traffic and it will increase your performance. Mordy Oberstein: So before we have to let you go, because I know your time is super sensitive, where do you think Google is heading with performance going forward? Because I don't think Google's already talked about IMP, responsiveness. The Core Web Vitals that we have now are not going to be the same. I don't think that was ever the intention for that to be a static thing. So I know you're in touch with Google. I know you work with them back and forth. Maybe you can share something that you're allowed to share that wouldn't get you in trouble. Crystal Carter: Exclusive! Mordy Oberstein: But would be juicy for the audience? Crystal Carter: You heard it here first. Alon Kochba: Unfortunately, I don't have anything that juicy. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. But directionally speaking, where do you see Google going forward in the future? Crystal Carter: Hypothetically? Alon Kochba: I think beyond hypothetically, I think Google are working hard to try to measure interactions better, which you talked about quite a bit with responsiveness and interaction to expand, which is something that we're heavily focused on. And you know what? I do have one juicy thing. Single-page navigations, so basically, Google has problems today measuring single-page apps. Basically, single page apps, like React, means you load one page and then you move to another page. You don't download the new HTML. You just redraw the things you need for the next page. And Google doesn't measure those today. So basically, Wix has a React app that uses single-page navigations. We have even faster navigations because of this, but no one measures them. And Google is trying to now measure single-page apps. And ideally, they will be pushing this into CrUX if this works well. And that will even the playing field a bit between single-page apps and multi-page apps. Crystal Carter: You heard it here first, people. Alon Kochba: But you heard it from ….. already and it's just initial work. Crystal Carter: You heard it here second, people. Mordy Oberstein: But it's still juicy. Crystal Carter: Still juicy. Amazing. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Alon. We really appreciate all that you're doing. I don't know what you're doing half the time. You're a mystery to me still. But we do really appreciate everything that you and the entire performance team does. Alon Kochba: Thank you very much and thank you for having me. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much, Alon. Alon Kochba: Bye. Mordy Oberstein: Again, thank you, Alon, for coming in. And definitely check out Alon on Twitter at A-L-O-N K-O-C-H-B-A. That's Alon Kochba on Twitter. Crystal Carter: He shares some great insights. Mordy Oberstein: He does. He's brilliant. I mean, he's smarter than I am, which, I guess, is not saying much, but hey, check it out. He shares a lot of great information on Twitter, really important, great data. So check it out, for sure, which brings us to our next little segment. As this episode slowly ebbs away, let's get snappily to it with this Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, let's jump right into this with something that was getting a bit of buzz in the SEO community from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, more from Google and AI content. It's about if the content is helpful. So there was a whole Twitter conversation going on about AI written content and Google's helpful content update within which Google's Danny Sullivan, their official Search Liaison, chimed in saying, "We haven't said AI content is bad. We've said, pretty clearly, content written primarily for search engines rather than humans is the issue. That's what we're focused on. If someone fires up 100 humans to write content just to rank or fires up a spinner or AI, same issue." He then went on to say, "So if you are an SEO trying to figure out how AI fits into being successful or not on Google, you're too focused on the tool, not the content. Is the content you're producing helpful, reliable, and people-first in nature?" So two things here. One, Danny Sullivan is absolutely right. Don't get lost. Is it AI written content? Is it human written content for yourself? Focus on is the content on your site high quality content or is it just bad? Two, and I want to take the liberty of reading in between the lines a little bit, if you'll indulge me. So the question that spurred this whole conversation on Twitter was, "Is the helpful content update specifically targeting AI content?" And what I think Danny's trying to tell us is they're targeting, they, meaning Google, targeting low-quality content? And included in that, is AI-written content, as a rule? I mean, sometimes it could be good in theory, but as a rule, AI-written content is low-quality content, particularly when it's long form. Maybe a product description will be different, whatever. I'm not getting into that right here and now. In other words, let's go back a step. Google has a problem. AI writers are prevalent. And they do create not the best content. So what do you think when Google launches a new algorithm that they're considering AI-written content? What do you think that Google's thinking? We have this big problem in AI-written content. We're developing new technology, new algorithms, new whatever. They're not considering AI content? They're not thinking about it or "targeting" it? That seems kind of ludicrous to me at best and negligent on Google's part at worse. Of course, which by the way, they're not doing. Obviously, they're not being negligent. Of course, AI-written content is part of the equation. It's part of the Google mindset, part of the Google intent, part of what they're doing. But is what they're doing, let's say in the helpful content update, specifically targeting AI content? Dennis Sullivan says, "No, it's targeting all bad content." But again, subsumed under all bad content, is as a rule, AI-written content. So we're just kind of splitting hairs here, aren't we? And that is my lesson for you today. Outside of, write good content for your website that is high quality and not written by AI. Sometimes the conversation around SEO within the SEO world are a little bit of a wormholes of hair splitting. Don't lose sight of the larger picture. Keep your eye on the prize. There are a whole bunch of other cliches about zooming out and keeping things in perspective. And with that piece of advice, that is this week's Snappy News. Before we duly depart, as is the custom on the SERP's Up Podcast and as very appropriate for this particular episode, we have somebody who you should be following on social media, who should be following this week, none other, formally known as Deepcrawl Lu Mar's own, Jamie Indigo. Crystal Carter: Jamie Indigo, she's a fantastic follow on social media. She has a big heart and a very, very big brain. And she knows lots and lots of things about technical SEO. And she's fantastic. So there's lots of stuff. She shares lots of things about JavaScript and about lots of other parts of SEO that are really worth digging into. And she's also very generous with her knowledge. So she's happy to share insights and answer questions, as well. So she's a great person to follow. Mordy Oberstein: And she actually wrote a lot about Core Web Vitals. I think there's a great article she wrote, if I remember correctly, back on Search Engine Journal, back in the early days of Core Web Vitals. So definitely have a look at that. I'll try to link to it in the show notes. She's written some amazing content about Core Web Vitals. She writes The Rich Snippets newsletter for Traffic Think Tank, so subscribe to that as well, which is not only just a conglomerate information from across the SEO world, but she has her own thoughts and insights in there. Definitely follow Jamie. She's also a master Dungeon & Dragons, from what I see on Twitter. I do not know Dungeon & Dragons, so I could be completely inaccurate here. But if that's your thing, then Jamie's your person, I think. Over at Twitter, it's at Jammer_Volts, so it's J-A-M-M-E-R_V-O-L-T-S. Link to it in the show notes. So check it out and give her a follow, which means thank you for joining us on this 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 SEO reporting. Look for it wherever you consume podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Annie Sullivan Alon Kochba Dan Shappir Jamie Indigo Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Advanced Core Web Vitals: A Technical SEO Guide Wix Performance News: More From Google On AI Content - It's About If The Content Is Helpful Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Annie Sullivan Alon Kochba Dan Shappir Jamie Indigo Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Advanced Core Web Vitals: A Technical SEO Guide Wix Performance News: More From Google On AI Content - It's About If The Content Is Helpful Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo 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, Head of SEO branding at Wix, and I'm joined by our Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, fun internet people. Welcome to our internet podcast show. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you for joining us today. Crystal Carter: Thank you. It's a pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: We've really switched up that vibe on a dime. Wow. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you were like, "Yeah!" You didn't, it's like, " Hello." Mordy Oberstein: Hello, world. Crystal Carter: Hi. Hi. Mordy Oberstein: We're here to talk about... Hi. We're here to talk about SEO. Send in your questions to 1-800... Crystal Carter: SEO. 1-800. Mordy Oberstein: 1-800-SEO, right. That's not a real phone number, if you're- Crystal Carter: It's not. Please don't call 1-800 SEO. I don't know whose number that is, but if you get lots of phone calls. Mordy Oberstein: Can you imagine that person? "Hello?" "Yes, I'm calling in..." Crystal Carter: Dear sir, I would like to talk to you about this …. Mordy Oberstein: I would like to sell you links. Crystal Carter: Press one for hi daily. Press two. Mordy Oberstein: That's a good time to remind you that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where traffic thresholds for Core Web Vitals are a thing of the past. Wait, didn't we do this last week? We did, but it's super relevant for this week, because we're talking about web performance. So Google's Search Console not giving you the field data you so desire, use Wix's Speed Dashboard. Get field data built off user sessions from multiple browsers. No more guessing what your actual Core Web Vitals are with Wix's Site Speed Dashboard. If I was a better planner, I would've used that this week and just this week and a different one last week, because this week we're talking about performance. And last time I talked about Search Console and I should have plugged something about Wix and Search Console instead... Yeah, I'm a poor planner, it turns out, even though I think I'm a really good... I'm a good planner. I promise. Crystal Carter: You're great at planning. Mordy Oberstein: I know, I know. But this is the second time today. The audience does not know the first time that I have not planned well today. Crystal Carter: Do you know what? Sometimes it's just like that. Sometimes Mercury's in retrograde, or it's a full moon, or you just skip breakfast, or whatever it is and sometimes- Mordy Oberstein: Or it's Tuesday. Crystal Carter: And you just got to try again the next day. And sometimes it's just like that. That's okay. That's fine. Mordy Oberstein: I will try. I will do better tomorrow. Crystal Carter: Hey, hey, we believe in you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Thank you for believing in me. Crystal Carter: Your SEO affirmations, there's actually an SEO affirmations Twitter account that I found today. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's like, "Hey, keep up the good work." I was like, "Oh, that's nice." Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I need that. Send it over right away. Crystal Carter: That's good. Mordy Oberstein: So great show today. This week we're talking about, well, we're performers talking about performance. Crystal Carter: We are talking about performance. And I'm so glad that you brought up that site Speed Dashboard, because I absolutely love it. And anybody who has a Wix account should absolutely check it out because- Mordy Oberstein: It is the only place in the world you're going to get that kind of data. Literally. I'm not making that up. Crystal Carter: Literally, literally. So there's field data, there's lab data. Lab data is when you run it through Lighthouse and it says what they can tell from their tools. Field data is information from actual users. And if you have a certain number of traffic, then if you go into Google Search Console, you can't see your field data. You can't see that information. But if you are a Wix user, then you can get your field data, whatever number of traffic you have. Mordy Oberstein: No traffic thresholds. Crystal Carter: No traffic thresholds. And it's not a third-party tool. It comes from the information that Wix is getting from people- Mordy Oberstein: Right from the browser. Crystal Carter: Right from the browser, from multiple browsers, not just Google. Mordy Oberstein: Multiple browsers, not just Chrome. Interesting. Fascinating. Oh, boy. Anyway, okay, so today's show, we're talking about performance, also known as, how fast is this website? Crystal Carter: And how does it all work with its network? And how's it all moving and shaken and not shaking? Not shaking at all? Mordy Oberstein: Well, hopefully it's not shaking. That'd be bad for performance. But we're going to finally settle, maybe hopefully, how big of a deal is performance for SEO, which TLDR? It's an enormous debate among SEOs filled with so much information and not a lot of nuance. So we're going to try to offer a more nuanced look at the impact of performance on SEO. We'll dive into things like Core Web Vitals. Are they as big of a deal as you think? Or maybe they're a bigger deal than you might think? How would that work? Anyway, Annie Sullivan, Senior Staff Software Engineer over at Google's going to stop by and talk about some common mistakes folks make. They make their sites slow down a bit. And we talk to Wix's own Head of Web Performance, the one the only Alon Kochba, the fellow who improved Wix's Core Web Vitals tenfold. And he's going to talk to us about how he approaches performance and where he thinks Google is headed when it comes to assessing faster loading for websites. And he's someone who talks to Google, so he's in the know. Hopefully, we'll get some secrets out of him, yeah? Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited about this episode, because we've got so many great folks joining us today and because- Mordy Oberstein: It's stacked. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we're pretty stacked. Annie is fantastic. I was on a Twitter space with her and she's super incredible and super, super knowledgeable. And I've had lots of conversations with Alon and how he thinks about the whole network of over 200 million websites that he's trying to make sure that are performing as best they can. And it's something that Wix is very enthusiastic about and rightfully so. And I'm excited to talk about this topic. Mordy Oberstein: Alon's super awesome. And, of course, by the way, we have your Snappy News and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Episode number 13 of SERP's Up is here. So performance, performance is super important. It's important for multiple reasons. But it's one of these areas, if you're listening to this podcast and you're trying to, if you are very familiar with the SEO space, you'll probably nod right along. If you're newer into the SEO space, it's something that you need to be careful of. There's a lot of conflicting information about the role of performance or speed and whatnot on SEO. And there's conflicting information coming out of Google itself at some times over the years, that they're doing it on purpose. It's different statements and different people over the years, right hand not talking to the left hand, I don't know, whatever it is. Or SEOs have different takes on it. And it's a really important issue that goes beyond just SEO. But it is also really important for SEO. But it does, I think, require a little bit more of a nuanced understanding of where performance fits into the larger SEO scheme. So I don't know, Crystal, to you, how important, let's throw it out there, how important is performance to SEO? Crystal Carter: Okay, so just for anybody who's not in this all the time, when we say performance, there's lots of things you could talk about for SEO performance. E-ranking could be considered performance. Or traffic could be considered performance. But when we talk about web performance, we're pretty much talking about web connectivity and how people connect to your website. So we're talking about how fast your website loads, how fast different parts of your website load, how your network connections are functioning so that your website performs well, when technically, people are visiting your website. Now, I think, and in my experience, this performance is really valuable for SEO in lots of ways. It can sometimes be a litmus test for other issues that you have across your website. Speed is a ranking factor. They've said that Core Web Vitals is a ranking factor. Security is a ranking factor. These things often overlap when you're making updates. So for instance, if you improve your security settings, it will often have an impact on your speed. It will often have an impact on your Core Web Vitals performance. So these are things that you should be thinking about. And generally speaking, when I've made Core Web Vitals updates, particularly for clients who, or websites where there is a significant amount of traffic, it has had some benefit to the overall SEO outcomes for that site. And because there's so many overlapping things, it can sometimes be difficult to understand whether it's because we improved the security, which also improved the Core Web Vitals metrics or whether it's because we improved the speed, which also improved the Core Web Vitals, or because the page is more interactive, because we didn't have third-party scripts on the page, that sort of thing. But generally speaking, the process of improving your Core Web Vitals will often improve the value of your website, overall. Mordy Oberstein: And if you look at the data some of the different tool providers have put out around the impact of Core Web Vitals on ranking, the data from across the board from multiple providers has been, "Nah, not too much," which is what a lot of SEOs may have expected. Some SEOs not. Somebody says, "Oh no, it's going to be massive and huge." But I think you're right. The way I look like it, that's not the question. The question is not, oh, how much is this particular metric that Google is measuring, your Core Web Vitals, how much are they going to meet in terms of ranking directly? To me, they're more representative of, like you said, of the site overall and not just from the search engine point of view, but from the user's point of view. So when you go to a webpage, to me performance is very much first and foremost is a conversion issue. If the website doesn't function right, if it's too slow to load, or buttons are moving around and you can't click anything, and nothing is working, people are not going to be able to add things to the cart. And they're not going to be able to enter their credit card, and not be able to give you their money, which is what you're trying to do with the website. And the health and performance of a website speaks to just how good of a website it is overall. So when you're asking, they go, "How important is it for SEO?" Super important, because it represents the technical health and it represents a conversion health of the website. You're asking about ranking for a particular keyword or a particular scenario? That's like a drop in the bucket, like a raindrop in the ocean of a kind of a question to me. Crystal Carter: Right. One of things that was great about Core Web Vitals metrics, and if you go to, Google has lots and lots of tools for Core Web Vitals and for understanding them. And I think it's web.dev is their page that has lots of... Web.dev has lots of information about Core Web Vitals and about understanding different things. If you're using Chrome, you can also right click and you can get a Lighthouse report and see different things about your website there. And there's lots of links within that. But the Core Web Vitals metrics are giving you a number for things that have always irritated everyone about websites. So cumulatively, I should just have just said classic one. Mordy Oberstein: The classic, it's so bad, too. Crystal Carter: And we all hate it when you go onto a website and you're like, "Oh, I'm going to click on this thing," and then it moves, because something else is loading. Nobody likes that. Mordy Oberstein: So cumulatively layout shift, there's CLS, if you're not aware. You know where you go to a website and the buttons are moving around, and you click on the wrong thing, and you add the wrong thing to the cart, and then you ended up paying for it? You're like, "Oh, my god, I hate this website." CLS measures that. And a CLS score of zero means that that's not happening at all, which is what you want. Crystal Carter: Right. And so what the Core Web Vitals metrics do and one of the reasons why it's so great to have that as a reporting thing is that you can say, "We have 17 pages on our website that have this issue." And if you're showing for that issue, then that means it's 17 pages that you can fix. And you can see that lots of users are having this issue, or not that many users are having that issue. And you can see how you can do it and you can show progress. So there's something called the CrUX report, which is a free thing that you can download. You can connect your website to it. And you can track your progress over time. And that will help you get better outcome for users, will help you to increase the conversion opportunities that you're talking about there. And I think that that is valuable for lots of parts of SEO. And also for instance though, one of the things that you get with Core Web Vitals metrics is they'll tell you about loading times. So for instance, they'll give you a metric that says that, "There are parts of your page that aren't loading properly. They're loading really slowly. They're taking a really long time to load." So most people, when they come to your website, are not seeing that giant picture that you have on your homepage. Or they're not seeing that video that you have on your homepage. So if you are having a discussion as an SEO, and I'm an SEO who's less aesthetically-minded than some other people, I'm like, "Tell me how beautiful Amazon is, because they rank fantastically." So if you're somebody who's having a discussion about, "Oh, should we have that beautiful video or should we have this SEO optimized copy," or whichever, you can use your Core Web Vitals information, you can use your page experience information to make those decisions more accurately. If most users aren't seeing that video, then you probably shouldn't have that video on there. It's not helping you. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Also, and again, it goes back to the earlier point about conversion, but there's also a branding side of it. If you're going to a page and things start loading... Remember, though, back in the day when we had dial-up internet? And five minutes after you loaded the page, and then something else loaded like, "Oh, oh, wait a second"? But the equivalent of that today is you go to a webpage and there's a video there and you're on the page one or two seconds, all of a sudden the video pops up. That doesn't make you look good. And that goes back to what we were saying before that Core Web Vitals or web performance, whether it's a ranking factor or... Well, I'm sorry. Let me rephrase that. It is definitely a ranking factor. But how big of a ranking factor is it? Is is a tiebreaker scenario? Many of the instances where Google has talked about it is like, "You have two pages. Relatively same content. Every SPO is all optimized the same way, but which one's faster?" "Well, it's a tiebreaker. We'll go with one's, a better performance." Leaving that aside for a minute, when you look at how a page performs, physically performs, and it's doing something like loading the video a minute later, like it's 1995, it's not what you want. Crystal Carter: It's not what you want. Mordy Oberstein: And Core Web Vitals therefore speaks to the overall health and experience of the website as a whole. So when you have Google back in the day saying, like Gary Illyish, Illyes Illyish, ish, ish? Crystal Carter: Gary. Mordy Oberstein: Gary, Gary from Google at one point said, "You could find it in an seoroundtable.com." I'm trying to find the link for you and put it in the show notes. Oh, speed is before Core Web Vitals. It was speed is a teeny, tiny ranking factor. And SEOs are debating this forever. No, no, it's a really big ranking factor. No, it's a teeny... Does it matter? Because it's so far reaching and so far speaking to what your website is that I don't think... Okay. Crystal Carter: And also, it's a question of users are using your website. So if I have a decision between sitting there waiting for a page to load for that long or doing literally- Mordy Oberstein: I see what you did there. I see it. It went right over my head for a second. And then it didn't. Crystal Carter: Right. Or literally doing anything else, I would rather do literally anything else. And so I will go back to the page that I know will load quickly. And I will not go back to the page that I didn't even see, because I left, because I wanted to do literally anything else. So these are the things that are important to think about. And I think that Core Web Vitals gives you incredible metrics to see that at scale, and to see that over time, and to see how you're performing there. So I think it's really valuable. In terms of speed, I've worked on projects where we've made speed optimizations and it's had incredible impact on conversions and on customer value, which therefore, has an impact on rankings, because you're more valuable to users and Google can see that. Mordy Oberstein: I will say on that last point, you've seen many SEOs debate this fact like, "Oh, I made a big speed improval." "Oh, that's not going to make a big impact. I've never seen a speed improve." There's more than one way to skin the cat in SEO. And you never know what's going to move the needle. And multiple things might move the needle. So I don't think it's the zero sum game that SEOs sometimes play. Crystal Carter: One point I did want to also bring up, so Core Web Vitals can be a little bit relative. So sometimes you see that there's not that much change, particularly in sectors around e-commerce, because they're really heavily tracked. But another good thing that Core Web Vitals does is it teaches you best practice. One of the things I see really, really frequently is that lots of people have tons of third-party scripts hanging around on their website that they're not using anymore. They used to use Hotjar and now nobody has access to Hotjar anymore. And they don't even remember when they had the account or something like that. You don't need those on there. You don't need those on there. That's potentially a data risk. And cleaning those out is good practice, and it's good for your Core Web Vitals, and it's good for your users, and it's good for your site, and all of those sorts of things. These are good habits to have. And I think the Core Web Vitals is a great element in an SEO atmosphere, because of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: And speaking of things you can do to improve your Core Web Vitals and the performance of your website overall, here's Annie Sullivan, Senior Staff Software Engineer over at Google, as we ask her, what are some common mistakes you see people making with their sites that negatively impact performance? Annie Sullivan: To me, the biggest mistake people make that negatively affects performance is not taking the right approach to understanding performance. Last week, Dan Shapir tweeted out, "Measure, analyze, optimize, repeat." And I couldn't agree more. Those four words sum up performance work so well. But I see a lot of people skipping over the measure and analyze steps and just going straight to optimize. When you do that, you're not going to make much progress. You need to start by measuring to get a baseline. You should have an idea of how fast your site is for real users and how fast you'd like it to be. We have recommended thresholds for all the Core Web Vitals metrics, if you're not sure. Once you've got an idea where you're at, the next step is analyzing to understand where the biggest bottlenecks are. If you're not sure how to identify bottlenecks, you'll want to read up on the critical rendering path in browsers. Your goal is to make the critical rendering path shorter. So you want to find the biggest things you can cut out of its way. Once you've analyzed a critical path for your own application and found where the biggest bottlenecks are, then it's time to optimize. The repeat part is important, too. Often, your optimization won't have the impact you expect. You'll need to measure to be sure. If it doesn't, then you'll need to do another round of analysis to figure out why. Then optimize again. Another aspect of repeating is finding ways to prevent yourself from reintroducing the bottlenecks you just removed. A lot of bottlenecks, like render-blocking resources are cleanly written out as Lighthouse audits. If you found a big improvement from a Lighthouse audit, you'd consider writing a test on your continuous build to ensure that audit doesn't start regressing in the future. It's so much fun to dig into performance bottlenecks and learn about what makes things slow. I can't wait to hear what you find. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Annie. And I just want to say, if you're looking to make improvements to your performance of your website, it can seem overwhelming. There's plenty of materials out there and a lot of the steps are not as complicated as it might seem. And yes, at a certain point you might reach your limits and it's okay to ask for help. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think Annie works with Google. Google's really been leading the charge with this. And one of the things that was great about when the Core Web Vitals information started coming through was that Google provided us with lots of information. There's lots of information about different methodologies. There's lots of tools you can use, both within Chrome, within Google Search Console, within tools like Lighthouse, tools like PageFeed Insights, things like that. So there's lots of great tools there. And what Annie was saying about analyzing your information is really, really valuable. And I think that it's really important to look not just at the metrics, but actually at the pages. For instance, I've had it before where I was working on a site and the person said, "Oh, I've been trying to fix the cumulative layout shift for ages and we've been having all this trouble." And I went into Google Search Console. I know I had a look at the trends, which pages were pulling up the same error. And I went to the page and I saw that the cumulative layout shift, it was very clear. They had their products in folders. And you would go to the page and all of the folders would show up where you could see all of them. And then they would all scrunch up into a burger menu straight afterwards. And I was like, "We need to pick one. We either need to put all of these at the bottom or we need to just go at the burger menu. But it can't be open and close, and open and close. That's ridiculous." And we did that and it fixed it. And we saw better results for users as well, because if you're a user and all you're getting is… Mordy Oberstein: Here's the content. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: No, it's not. Crystal Carter: So every page would just show that list on mobile, would just show the list of all of the categories rather than showing the actual products on the page. So it's better for users, because you've made that analysis. And also, she talked about testing afterwards. So that's really important, as well. So you make that change and then you monitor the results to see how users are actually engaging with that, if it's actually moving the needle, if it's actually making an impact. And then you refine and do it again. So she also mentioned Dan Shapir, who's a fantastic person to follow on the web performance space. There's some great people who are doing some great things in web performance. He's a great one, as well. So yes, I wholeheartedly agree with what Annie's saying about the test it again. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to tell you an amazing story. Okay. It's a story of millions of websites suddenly got hit by a bolt of lightning and became supercharged beasters. Okay, it's a little bit hyperbolic. And it's not really my story to tell. But it's a fascinating story. Crystal Carter: Wasn't that Thunderbolt? Mordy Oberstein: Inside joke. It wasn't Thunderbolt. Well, partially. But really, it's a fascinating story and the amount of work, dedication, ingenuity that went into improving Wix's Core Web Vital scores to make it at the point where it's a market leader, like 60% of our mobile sites in the US past Core Web Vitals it's incredible. And it was an incredible effort, honest, and personally, I just want to say I feel privileged to have been a small part of it back in the day to help advocate for driving these efforts and pushing these efforts in. But if anyone deserves the credit, it's people like Dan Shapir, who you just mentioned, who at the time was working at Wix and this man, Alon Kochba, Head of Web Performance at Wix. So join me and join Crystal as we go across the Wixverse to discuss with Alon how he and the team improve performance on many websites and where he thinks the future of web performance is headed. Audio: 3... 2... 1... We have ignition. Liftoff. Mordy Oberstein: How are you? Alon Kochba: Everything is great. How are you? Mordy Oberstein: Ah, we're good. Hanging out here. It's raining. It's a dreary day out here today. Crystal Carter: Somebody told me it was raining. I was very surprised that it was raining. I've never heard anyone talk about rain. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. I'm officially an old person now. I talk about the weather. Crystal Carter: Oh, I live in England. That's all they talk about. Mordy Oberstein: So today, we're not talking about the weather. We're talking about performance. We've been talking about performance, all of us. And Alon, I mean, I know you're going to brush this off. And you're going to dismiss what I'm about to say, but if you take a look at Wix's CrUX data, and the Core Web Vitals, and what we've done there, it's amazing. Our numbers have improved tenfold. And I'm going to credit you with doing it. Alon Kochba: It's me and a lot of other great people at Wix. And that's really been focusing on performance for a long time now. Mordy Oberstein: It's true. And again, not taking away from you, it's been an enormous team effort across the entire company. I would say we're a performance first company across the board. But I'm curious, now that we have you here and we're talking to you about this, and you've been such a backbone behind the efforts, just what has it been like to try to improve performance for millions of websites? What have you done, obviously, without going too much into the technical nitty gritty of that, but it's more like how have you approached it? Alon Kochba: So I think as the platform, we have an amazing opportunity where we're hosting millions of sites, like you said, and we're trying to solve a lot of technical challenges that a lot of site builders have, a lot of people have on their own sites, but do it at a massive scale. And it all starts with hosting and serving all your files from CDNs, and caching, and bringing everything close to the user. But it also has a lot of development teams building a lot of amazing products across of Wix that all need to tend with it. So basically, it's finding your opportunities and seeing how to go from there. Crystal Carter: And I think there's lots of different layers to it. So you talked about different security performance and things like that. So do you work just with teams within Wix to achieve some of that change? Or are you working with teams who are external as well to see some of that progress? Alon Kochba: So basically, I think a lot of things in Wix and a lot of those platforms, a lot of the things are up to us as a platform. And that means talking with a lot of development teams across Wix and pushing best standards internally. On the other hand, you have these things that are up to the user, because he can design his site however he wants. And at the end of the day, there are best practices and what kind of third parties you put on your site that can cause issues and how you design your pages. So it's basically split between both sides. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what makes it a little bit interesting when you're trying to approach improving a website. It's not just, okay, it's on the development side of it, but also whoever, the designer of the SEO, whoever's creating the website, it's sort of a partnership between the two. And it's a partnership, as you mentioned before, with multiple teams here at Wix. And if you're not Wix, if you're, I don't know, you're working in an agency, you're working with designers, you're working with the content teams, you're working with developers. It's sort of just like one giant effort, because everything impacts performance. How do you manage that? Particularly here at Wix, we have so many parts of the product. And all of it, theoretically, can impact performance. How do you manage all that? How do you set expectations? How did you go about setting the bar so that the teams, when they're developing whatever they're developing or developing with performance first? Alon Kochba: So I think at the end of the day, it's a numbers game. You can't fix everything. And they're always new performance opportunities. And you need to choose your battles. But we've been trying to first install all these guidelines and best practices across teams so it's in everyone's minds. And we've been trying to focus on the largest cases that handle the most sites and the most common use cases and working our way from there. Mordy Oberstein: Out of curiosity, if you can pick one thing, I don't know, what's one thing that you've done at Wix that you've seen that you can share, maybe that people can take away as a lesson for their own sites, that we've done that's really moved the needle in terms of performance? Alon Kochba: So I think at the end of the day, you really, first off, you want to serve your HTML as fast as possible. If the HTML is not fast, if it's not served from a server that's near your users, or in our case, everywhere, because we have users from a lot of distinct fundraise, you can't really succeed to performance if you don't have a fast TFB and fast FCPO, you'll have a very hard time passing Core Web Vitals. But then on the other hand, after the HTML arrives, you basically have your resources that are the LCP. And this has to do with how you build your site and what framework you're using. But go HTML. This is really the way to go today. Browsers are up to speed on a lot of standards and a lot of things can be built straight on the HTML. That's what we've been trying to do. Crystal Carter: And so I think that comes a little bit to how Wix is structured. So you were talking about HTML, but a lot of people think of Wix and they think of JavaScript. How do you manage the JavaScript from a performance point of view? Alon Kochba: So basically, all Wix sites are built on top of React. And we have a very extensive framework wrapping React internally. But React brings with it a lot of JavaScript dependencies. And that's something that we, like a lot of other companies, have been trying to avoid with a lot of best practices of preshaking, and lazy loading, and reducing bundle sizes. But we are looking forward at a lot of talk out there about little to no JavaScript solutions and alternative frameworks. In the past Wix was FLASH sites all over. And then we used the Angular. And these days we use React. And I think we do a great job of even exceeding the average React site. So yes, JavaScript arrives, but ideally JavaScript is there at least only for interactivity currently and not- Crystal Carter: Sure. And it's my understanding that the HTML is server side rendered. Is that correct? Alon Kochba: Yeah, so we use a server side rendering, but we also have extensive automatic caching for all our sites and CDNs. And we invalidate whenever something changes. For example, you buy your last product and the product needs to become out of stock, so something takes care of that for you. Crystal Carter: And that's super simple to set up right? All of those things. And making sure that all of those things work seamlessly so that every time somebody comes to my little blog, they can see exactly what they need to see, and that it loads properly, and loads correctly. That's super easy, right? Alon, you make it look super easy. Alon Kochba: Definitely. You don't even need to think about it. You built your site. You bought your domain. And you just get everything automatic. If you are using Velo, then there are cases where you need to turn it on manually, but. Mordy Oberstein: Right, which is smart, by the way, because if you have a custom code there maybe doesn't make any sense to have it cached that way, because who knows what you have on the website? Alon Kochba: Exactly. And we're a bit careful around custom code and caching. Crystal Carter: I think you talked about some of the things that are built in. And there's some fantastic things within Wix for performance that I absolutely love, that we have. WebP is one of the sort of defaults for images. I think you shared an image on Twitter recently that was talking about how many WebP images we have proportionally, which I think is amazing. Is there a reason why you chose that particular one as being the main image format for Wix? Alon Kochba: Yeah. So I think image formats are a very interesting area where a lot of people... JPEG and PNG have been around for tens of years and are not really as optimized as they should be. And WebP is really the alternative that currently is supported across all browsers. And you can see that a lot of companies and site builders are trying to move everything over to WebP. And we do that automatically. For order of our files are currently served as WebP, we automatically detect that the browser supports it or not. So that's great for users. I think with the LCP being three out of four times an image, you really need your images to be as small as possible and advanced modern image formats give you that. Crystal Carter: Right. And that reminds me of another thing that's built in that I think is awesome, is that you have an automatic image compressor built into the CMS, which I think is awesome as well. I know that on some of those CMSs you have to download an extra plugin to have something that does that. But we have that built in, which I think is really cool. Mordy Oberstein: It helps. Crystal Carter: It helps. It does help. I just wondered if you could also share with our team, I know that this is a bug bear for SEOs who log into Google Search Console and want to know what's going on with their Core Web Vitals. And there's a little sailing ship and you can't see. And it just says, "No." And there's a little sail ship that says, "You don't have enough traffic. Try again." Mordy Oberstein: It says, "You're not good enough. Get more traffic." Crystal Carter: "You're not good enough. Nobody comes to your website anyway." And you're like, "People come." And they're like, "No." So you get that little sailing ship and you get no data. And I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about the awesome solution that your team builds to help people to find some solutions for addressing Core Web Vitals that's in the WIX CMM. Alon Kochba: Definitely. So this is a product I love that we have, the Site Speed Dashboard that really... Well, I'll start from top. We collect real user measurements. That's just like Chrome does for their users, we do for all our users. That's what we use internally to find opportunities and improve. But this allows us to measure your Core Web Vitals in all browsers and show it directly to each user. So in your Site Speed Dashboard, you can easily see the LCP, the CLS, the FID for each day. So if you do a change, you can see it instantly. And you can do it with a minimal amount of traffic. Crystal Carter: Which is amazing! Mordy Oberstein: And it's why we plugged it in the beginning of the show. Alon Kochba: Sometimes you have more traffic and performance improves. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is true. Increase your traffic and it will increase your performance. Mordy Oberstein: So before we have to let you go, because I know your time is super sensitive, where do you think Google is heading with performance going forward? Because I don't think Google's already talked about IMP, responsiveness. The Core Web Vitals that we have now are not going to be the same. I don't think that was ever the intention for that to be a static thing. So I know you're in touch with Google. I know you work with them back and forth. Maybe you can share something that you're allowed to share that wouldn't get you in trouble. Crystal Carter: Exclusive! Mordy Oberstein: But would be juicy for the audience? Crystal Carter: You heard it here first. Alon Kochba: Unfortunately, I don't have anything that juicy. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. But directionally speaking, where do you see Google going forward in the future? Crystal Carter: Hypothetically? Alon Kochba: I think beyond hypothetically, I think Google are working hard to try to measure interactions better, which you talked about quite a bit with responsiveness and interaction to expand, which is something that we're heavily focused on. And you know what? I do have one juicy thing. Single-page navigations, so basically, Google has problems today measuring single-page apps. Basically, single page apps, like React, means you load one page and then you move to another page. You don't download the new HTML. You just redraw the things you need for the next page. And Google doesn't measure those today. So basically, Wix has a React app that uses single-page navigations. We have even faster navigations because of this, but no one measures them. And Google is trying to now measure single-page apps. And ideally, they will be pushing this into CrUX if this works well. And that will even the playing field a bit between single-page apps and multi-page apps. Crystal Carter: You heard it here first, people. Alon Kochba: But you heard it from ….. already and it's just initial work. Crystal Carter: You heard it here second, people. Mordy Oberstein: But it's still juicy. Crystal Carter: Still juicy. Amazing. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Alon. We really appreciate all that you're doing. I don't know what you're doing half the time. You're a mystery to me still. But we do really appreciate everything that you and the entire performance team does. Alon Kochba: Thank you very much and thank you for having me. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much, Alon. Alon Kochba: Bye. Mordy Oberstein: Again, thank you, Alon, for coming in. And definitely check out Alon on Twitter at A-L-O-N K-O-C-H-B-A. That's Alon Kochba on Twitter. Crystal Carter: He shares some great insights. Mordy Oberstein: He does. He's brilliant. I mean, he's smarter than I am, which, I guess, is not saying much, but hey, check it out. He shares a lot of great information on Twitter, really important, great data. So check it out, for sure, which brings us to our next little segment. As this episode slowly ebbs away, let's get snappily to it with this Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, let's jump right into this with something that was getting a bit of buzz in the SEO community from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, more from Google and AI content. It's about if the content is helpful. So there was a whole Twitter conversation going on about AI written content and Google's helpful content update within which Google's Danny Sullivan, their official Search Liaison, chimed in saying, "We haven't said AI content is bad. We've said, pretty clearly, content written primarily for search engines rather than humans is the issue. That's what we're focused on. If someone fires up 100 humans to write content just to rank or fires up a spinner or AI, same issue." He then went on to say, "So if you are an SEO trying to figure out how AI fits into being successful or not on Google, you're too focused on the tool, not the content. Is the content you're producing helpful, reliable, and people-first in nature?" So two things here. One, Danny Sullivan is absolutely right. Don't get lost. Is it AI written content? Is it human written content for yourself? Focus on is the content on your site high quality content or is it just bad? Two, and I want to take the liberty of reading in between the lines a little bit, if you'll indulge me. So the question that spurred this whole conversation on Twitter was, "Is the helpful content update specifically targeting AI content?" And what I think Danny's trying to tell us is they're targeting, they, meaning Google, targeting low-quality content? And included in that, is AI-written content, as a rule? I mean, sometimes it could be good in theory, but as a rule, AI-written content is low-quality content, particularly when it's long form. Maybe a product description will be different, whatever. I'm not getting into that right here and now. In other words, let's go back a step. Google has a problem. AI writers are prevalent. And they do create not the best content. So what do you think when Google launches a new algorithm that they're considering AI-written content? What do you think that Google's thinking? We have this big problem in AI-written content. We're developing new technology, new algorithms, new whatever. They're not considering AI content? They're not thinking about it or "targeting" it? That seems kind of ludicrous to me at best and negligent on Google's part at worse. Of course, which by the way, they're not doing. Obviously, they're not being negligent. Of course, AI-written content is part of the equation. It's part of the Google mindset, part of the Google intent, part of what they're doing. But is what they're doing, let's say in the helpful content update, specifically targeting AI content? Dennis Sullivan says, "No, it's targeting all bad content." But again, subsumed under all bad content, is as a rule, AI-written content. So we're just kind of splitting hairs here, aren't we? And that is my lesson for you today. Outside of, write good content for your website that is high quality and not written by AI. Sometimes the conversation around SEO within the SEO world are a little bit of a wormholes of hair splitting. Don't lose sight of the larger picture. Keep your eye on the prize. There are a whole bunch of other cliches about zooming out and keeping things in perspective. And with that piece of advice, that is this week's Snappy News. Before we duly depart, as is the custom on the SERP's Up Podcast and as very appropriate for this particular episode, we have somebody who you should be following on social media, who should be following this week, none other, formally known as Deepcrawl Lu Mar's own, Jamie Indigo. Crystal Carter: Jamie Indigo, she's a fantastic follow on social media. She has a big heart and a very, very big brain. And she knows lots and lots of things about technical SEO. And she's fantastic. So there's lots of stuff. She shares lots of things about JavaScript and about lots of other parts of SEO that are really worth digging into. And she's also very generous with her knowledge. So she's happy to share insights and answer questions, as well. So she's a great person to follow. Mordy Oberstein: And she actually wrote a lot about Core Web Vitals. I think there's a great article she wrote, if I remember correctly, back on Search Engine Journal, back in the early days of Core Web Vitals. So definitely have a look at that. I'll try to link to it in the show notes. She's written some amazing content about Core Web Vitals. She writes The Rich Snippets newsletter for Traffic Think Tank, so subscribe to that as well, which is not only just a conglomerate information from across the SEO world, but she has her own thoughts and insights in there. Definitely follow Jamie. She's also a master Dungeon & Dragons, from what I see on Twitter. I do not know Dungeon & Dragons, so I could be completely inaccurate here. But if that's your thing, then Jamie's your person, I think. Over at Twitter, it's at Jammer_Volts, so it's J-A-M-M-E-R_V-O-L-T-S. Link to it in the show notes. So check it out and give her a follow, which means thank you for joining us on this 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 SEO reporting. Look for it wherever you consume podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Why do some people think SEO is snake oil and whose fault is it that they do? Should you even care about SEO’s good name (Spoiler alert: Yes)? How can you help improve SEO’s reputation? Wix’s Mordy Obertein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss how the SEO community can overcome the sometimes shady reputation associated with the SEO industry and change the narrative. Founder of Zyppy SEO, Cyrus Shepard, joins the show to help evaluate if maybe part of SEO’s bad reputation is legitimate (or maybe not so much). Michael Lewittes, founder of Ranktify, chimes in on how SEO tools have accidentally helped drive the narrative that has tarnished the SEO industry's reputation and how emerging SEO tools are a remedy. Pull out your vinyls because, on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast, we’re setting the record straight. What’s done is done, but the future has not been written. Join us as it’s time to Terminate the lingering reputation from the early days of SEO this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Does SEO's reputation linger? Why do some people think SEO is snake oil and whose fault is it that they do? Should you even care about SEO’s good name (Spoiler alert: Yes)? How can you help improve SEO’s reputation? Wix’s Mordy Obertein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss how the SEO community can overcome the sometimes shady reputation associated with the SEO industry and change the narrative. Founder of Zyppy SEO, Cyrus Shepard, joins the show to help evaluate if maybe part of SEO’s bad reputation is legitimate (or maybe not so much). Michael Lewittes, founder of Ranktify, chimes in on how SEO tools have accidentally helped drive the narrative that has tarnished the SEO industry's reputation and how emerging SEO tools are a remedy. Pull out your vinyls because, on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast, we’re setting the record straight. What’s done is done, but the future has not been written. Join us as it’s time to Terminate the lingering reputation from the early days of SEO this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 70 | January 17, 2024 | 58 MIN 00:00 / 58:11 This week’s guests Cyrus Shepard Cyrus’ SEO research and insights have made him one of the most trusted voices in search today. Having started in SEO in 2009, he formerly led SEO and Audience Development at Moz and currently serves as Co-Founder of the US-based SEO consultancy Zyppy. Michael Lewittes Michael Lewittes is the Founder and CEO of Ranktify, a software solution that puts the power of authoritative content creation and search engine optimization right into the hands of users. A media industry veteran, who has held leadership positions at Hearst, News Corp., and NBC, Michael regularly advises retail companies and media corporations on SEO best practices and growth strategies. Last year, Michael served as a Facilitator at Google’s third Search Central Unconference, and he also edited both the media and SEO chapters of the Web Almanac. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast to project some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein head of the SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she with a sterling reputation. Nothing could sully of her. Nothing stands in the way of her and her wonderful reputation from here throughout the entire SEO industry. She actually does, legit. She's the head of communications here at Wix. It's Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. I'm also knocking on wood. I don't know if people can hear that, but knock, knock, knock, because- Mordy Oberstein: People love you. People love you. Crystal Carter: I know you. I love you too. We do our best. We try. We try. You have a fantastic reputation as well. We do our best. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. Crystal Carter: We do our best, we try to do the good things. Mordy Oberstein: I try. Crystal Carter: And try to just move on from the other things. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I just realized my motto, he tries. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. Where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight each, and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. But where you can also manage your reputation online with the integration we built with Trustpilot. Look for it in all the other great integrations and apps we offer inside of the Wix app market as today, in case you haven't realized we're covering reputation. But in this case, SEO's reputation or SEO's troubled reputation, does it still linger? Why every SEO needs to understand the history of SEO's reputation, as it can impact your bottom line. Does SEO still get a bad rep? And if so, is that fair? No. Fair. How the SEOs on planet Earth can heal our world for you and for me and for the entire digital space. The great Cyrus Shepherd of Zyppy SEO will stop by to take a look at how SEO's bad rep might or might not be our own fault, scandalous. Plus, we'll chat with Michael Lewittes about how the SEO tools have only added fuel to the negative fire that is SEO's reputation. Let's fill out a fire brimstone right there. So gather yourselves ye content goblins, because episode number 70 of the SERP's Up Podcast is going full jet on you with don't give a damn about your reputation because you're living in the past. It's a new generation. By the way. That was the theme song for 'Freaks and Geeks'. It was a great show. It only had one season and it was the most unbelievable show. I'm not even sure why it didn't get a second season. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I feel that way about 'Ugly Betty'. 'Ugly Betty' didn't have enough seasons for me. I absolutely love 'Ugly Betty'. It's America Ferrera, peak America Ferrera, and also Vanessa L. Williams being amazing. Mordy Oberstein: I feel that way about 'Friday Night Lights', which had five seasons, but I could have gone for 50. Crystal Carter: But sometimes they just get a little silly at the end. But then you're already committed, so you just keep watching anyway. Mordy Oberstein: No, it doesn't matter. It's all good. You got me. I'm in. Crystal Carter: Great, right. We're all good. We're all good. Mordy Oberstein: So let's talk about SEO and reputations. I think it's worthwhile to get a little, for those of you who don't know, let me get you caught up a little bit. So back in the day, a lot of, I'll call them SEOs, did a lot of practices in the past. And it looked as SEO as kind of a way to manipulate search engines, and it looked as if SEOs were a low quality service providers trying to manipulate you with all sort of these spammy practices to get you growth that may or may not have been long-lasting, generally not long-lasting. And it's developed with a point where the average person, and this is the way reputation, and it's a good lesson in brand marketing in general, the way reputation unlike Reagan economics does actually trickle down. That was too political for this podcast, but we're going to leave it in anyway. Reputation does actually trickle down. And the things SEOs were doing way back when did trickle down to a wider audience where the average site owner was like, "Well, maybe SEO is kind of eh. Do I really want to touch that?" A lot of it had to do with the focus on backlinks and the shady practices and those, I guess digitally unethical practice around link building. And I think that got further propagated by the tools inadvertently being so focused on link building. So just driving this whole link building thing. And people caught on to that, well, this isn't really the way we want to build a website, or we want to grow our website, or we want the kind of practices that we want to engage with to build a website. Why are you SEOs recommending this? This seems shyster-ish. And I'll end on this. Then you have major figures showing off these aggressive tactics and these less authoritative tactics showing, "Hey, here's how they work and they're great, and SEO should be done this way." And people do see this kind of thing and they're like, "Whoa, that doesn't look good. That's not ethical, that's not great." And then on top of that, just to further solidify SEO's bad reputation, you have major publications most recently, the Verge, which we'll get into, I am assuming a little bit. Saying that the things that SEOs have done over the years have ruined the way, which I think is a little bit hyperbolic. Or even not to take a shot here, but you even have the CEO of Shopify saying, "SEO is snake oil", and this is where we're at. Crystal Carter: There's a couple of things there. So I think that this trick does this and this trick does that, and that trick does this. Back in the day, pre Panda Penguin updates and things, pre that sort of stuff, I think those things did kind of work. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Keyword stuffing, whoever gets stuffed the most keywords wins. Crystal Carter: They kind of did work. And I think that it comes back to the real idea of a reputation. If you think about the reputation of let's say Dolly Parton, because everybody loves Dolly Parton. So let's say about Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton's reputation doesn't just come because of one thing she's done. It comes because of years of her doing good stuff and doing admirable stuff and being a pretty solid human. And everybody has flaws and everybody has ups and downs and things, but overall, the average, the taken as a whole, it's consistently pretty good. And I think that when you think about your reputation of your website, when you think about the reputation of an industry, people are trying to get quick wins, really quick wins without thinking about the long-term benefit sometimes or the long-term impact sometimes. And it might be that, let's say you were running a race and you were like, "Yeah, if I just push this person over, I'll get ahead." It's like, "Yeah, but then everyone will see that you're a terrible person." Mordy Oberstein: Right, yeah, that's exactly what it is. Crystal Carter: You want long-term goals. So you work and you practice and you build up your skills so that you can have that long-term goal. And I think that one of the things that's tricky is that a lot of people were relying on those super quick wins that don't actually contribute to the overall value of the whole. Because a quick win is, there are sometimes quick wins that are totally perfectly fine, but I think a lot of people were relying on those and partially because they were getting results. It's just like if you do a crash diet or something, you might see results straight away, but then in the long-term, you probably won't. So I think that a lot were relying on those things and not thinking about the long-term thing. And I think that part of the reputation has shifted, and I think there's been a lot of emphasis from Google on shifting towards better, more long-term SEO practices, because Google is 20 plus years old now, in the early days of Google people maybe didn't even know how this was all going to play out. So you do whatever works. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, no, look, I think back in the day, it was back in the day, and the whole web was really in its infancy. And I think that's why I think we want to do this episode, because if you are an SEO, you do need to be aware, especially if you're newer to the SEO conversation, you don't remember the good old days. It's something you need to keep in mind when you're talking to your clients. And even if you are not an SEO and you're listening to this podcast and you're trying to learn about SEO or you're interested in SEO and you see, you come across things that make it sound like SEO is not really a viable tactic. It's scammy. It's spammy. It's snake oil. Why you should ignore that and focus on the actual truth, which is SEO is a great way to grow your website, you just need to understand what is real SEO and what is a bunch of shysters putting stuff up on social media saying, "Look what I did." And to your point, I think one of the things that I'm not a big fan of going on, and if you do this, I am not trying to call you out. I apologize if I hurt your feelings. But if you go out there on social media and you start, "Here's a graph," with absolutely no context whatsoever, "Look at my success." And then you start talking about the aggressive tactics that you used in order to achieve this 'growth', I think it's a bad look overall. I think it's a bad look for SEO, I think it'd possibly a bad look for you. And I don't think it's really reflective of, it might have worked on this site in this situation, but I don't think it's reflective of what actually works on the web, especially long-term. And if you are somebody who's not an SEO and you do see these things, do not think this is what most SEOs are doing and what most SEOs talk about. Because what most SEOs talk about, and the core of the SEO community talks about is how to make websites better for people, how to make websites and content better for search engines, how to grow a website slowly and steadily and substantially. And I think that's why it's not fair, but if you're listening to this podcast and you're looking at all these things that are not great, that's not what SEO is really about. SEO really has, it's not fair because it has pivoted, many years ago, to being far more substantial and we need to weed this out from the narrative. Crystal Carter: I think it's a question of, there are a million types of cars available. There are a million types of suits available. There are a million types of anything available. There's lots of different types of SEOs. There are lots of different good SEOs. There are SEOs who are maybe improving or whatever. And the person that you're working with will have different tactics. However, if they've got demonstrable results and if they've got a solid reputation, and if you can look at their work and see that they're able to see long-term sustainable growth for their clients over time, then that's good. We have an article on the hub that talks about how to choose an SEO agency. One of the good ways is to, what's your oldest client? If they have a client that's been with them for years and years and years, that's a really good sign. If all of their clients turn over every three months or something, that's a terrible sign. And I think that who you are working with makes a really big difference in the end, even if you're taking SEO advice, we also have a podcast on taking SEO advice, look at the kinds of projects that they're working on and the kinds of gains that they're talking about. A solid SEO will be like, "Look at the growth that we saw over 18 months." That's a good amount of time. And then you can see some quick wins on tech SEO things, like if somebody was a really dire situation and then you fix something that was broken, then you can see some quick wins in that. But particularly with content and with some other things, it takes a little bit of time and it should take time. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure there are quick wins. We did a whole webinar with SEJ about quick wins, and there are things that you can do that are not very complicated that really do matter. They might not be quick in the sense that you might not see immediate results. Sometimes with a tech fix, I have no index the entire site, and now it's index. Quick win. But that doesn't mean those are aberrations for the most part. And if you are an SEO, and you are showing, "Hey, look at this quick thing, the quick traffic that I got," contextualize that. There are many things that should not be contextualized, but there are some things that should be, and in this case, if you're saying it's a super quick win, if you're on the social media showing this stuff, say, "This is kind of an aberration. This is not the norm." So the people who are looking at what you're showing don't be like, A, "That's what I expect." Or B, "Well, there's another SEO scammer again." Which brings me to my next point. We as the SEO community have a responsibility. I think Cyrus we'll probably talk a little bit more about this tangentially, but we have a responsibility to fix this reputation, I feel like, as a community to fix this bad reputation that we've had. Because you still have folks like The Verge writing pieces, like, 'The SEOs have ruined the world.' No, we haven't. Crystal Carter: We're not in charge of the web. Mordy Oberstein: It's completely unfair and unjustified. If anything, we do a lot to make the internet a better place, I feel like. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Well, regularly, I mean, the team from Google have said that they rely on us to say, "Oh, this isn't working in search. This isn't good on search." And I've seen people in our community say, "This isn't a great result for this." And sometimes it's for sensitive stuff, sometimes it's for general search quality, sometimes it's for other things like that, but it's something that people regularly do. And if you're somebody and you see something that's amiss on Google, then you can, you can speak to them and say, "I found this and this isn't good." And that's something that people regularly do. I think in terms of that Verge article that talks about the people that ruin the internet, which is giving us a lot of credit. A lot more credit than we have. I think that- Mordy Oberstein: How powerful am I again? Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And I think that they're talking about some of the content that people are making, and they had a similar article that was somebody who was saying, "Oh, I have to make all this content to sell my key chains on my website." And I'm like, "Well, that sounds like you have low quality products that you're trying to sell with low quality content, so maybe you should sell something else." And I think that that's not necessarily the fault of SEO, but what I would say is in terms of what we see on the SERP, SEOs are very often working in a reactive space. So very often Google will change something on the SERP, and then we need to respond in order to adjust the content to fit to that desire that Google's indicating. So for instance, if you have structure data stuff, you would respond. And so if Google changes the SERP so that the thing that's at the top of the SERP relies on structured data, then you have to go through and add structured data to your content in order to even be in the field of play. Sometimes, for instance, say you recently introduced an examples filter on the SERP. You might think, well, "Oh, hey, I have a page that has examples on it. I'm going to change that now. So the Google knows that this is a page that has examples on it." So very often we're reactive. So I think that in that response, in terms of ruining the internet, a lot of times we're responding to what we're seeing on the internet that people want to see videos, that people want to see examples, that people want. Mordy Oberstein: That's the incentive cycle. And it should be at this point, right? Google's moving towards very strongly, especially in how they're talking about satisfying users in a really substantial quality way, and we need to help facilitate that with the website that we're working with. It should all work in harmony. And I think that's why SEOs, we are stewards of the web to a very large extent. Which is why I think, and I don't want to come off holier than thou or on a soapbox or anything, but we do have a responsibility that we're talking about what we're doing with our clients, what we're doing with content, what we're doing with websites, to speak in a way that's mature and that speak in a way that shows we actually do care about the internet. We don't just care about getting as much traffic as we possibly can, and no matter how we do it doesn't matter. It's not a good look. To put it practically, long-term for us getting clients, the more we do that, the more it's going to propagate the lingering reputation that SEO is snake oil. Which inevitably, every SEO comes across a client that thinks that way. And it's also a crying shame that people who are looking into SEO as a way for them to grow their own websites on their own, look at them like, "Wait a second, maybe I shouldn't be investigating it." I think that's a crying shame too. Crystal Carter: So here's the thing. I've encountered this when pitching to clients, where somebody, he was a dev and he built his own website and he was great, but I'll tell you right now, it was a mess. It was full of issues, and they were making money and they were doing fine or whatever, but there was full of issues, there were a bunch of issues within. And he was like, "Oh, I can read the Google Webmaster Tools guidelines. I don't need you to do that for me," and stuff. I'm like, "Yeah, but I could clean my house really well, but I might have a housekeeper who does it better. One doesn't necessarily preclude the other." I don't have a housekeeper, I'd love one, but I don't. But anyway, he was very skeptical of the entire operation. And I think that the other thing that people get really skeptical of is the price tag. And she talks about this in The Verge articles, "Oh, they make all this money," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll tell you right now, one of the reasons why SEOs charge what they charge is because, again, PPC people do this as well. So PPC folks will charge depending upon how much the spend is. If somebody's spending a million pounds or a million dollars on ads, you're not going to charge them $500 a month, because the stakes are higher than that. So if they're spending a million dollars a month on ads, you're going to charge them something that's appropriate for the money that they're going to make on that. Because if they can spend that much on ads, they're going to expect a return of something appropriate. So you're going to charge them that. Similarly, one of the things that happens very often with SEOs is we can see all the analytics, so we can see the conversions that you are getting from the work that we're doing. So the fee will be appropriate based on what that is. And if you've got somebody, and I've done smaller projects for smaller folks, and loads of SEOs, all the good SEOs that I know do charity work and do work with special projects and work on things that they care about and things like that. And people aren't just out here like these, what is it? Pirates, mega maniacal pirates, she called us. So people aren't here for all of that stuff. People do plenty of charity things. But if you're seeing that somebody can make, I don't know, $3 million in a month or something over the work that you're doing, you're going to charge appropriately. And that's just reasonable. That's just reasonable. Mordy Oberstein: Got to eat. Crystal Carter: You got to eat. And also, it's not fair for you to not be paid appropriately for the value of your work, supply demand and the value. That's the value of your work. And the thing that's tricky about SEO, and here's the other thing, is that in terms of reputation is that there's a lot of, we talked about this previously as well, there's a lot of myths. They talk about Google as being a black box. There's a lot of misinformation around as well, but there's a lot of good information as well. And so I think that you also want to look at the things that people are referencing. If people are sending you to the Google documentation, then they probably know what they're talking about, because they actually read the Google documentation, which is freely available. That's important to think about as well. I think that we can forgive clients for being a little bit skeptical, but I think we also as SEOs have to spend that time illustrating the value and demonstrating the integrity of our work. Mordy Oberstein: Look, that overall mistrust. A little bit of mistrust is, it should probably be a little bit healthy, a little bit pressure sometimes can be healthy. But it's kind of created this niche market where you have, I've been approached many times about this, "I have an agency working on my website, could you make sure that what they're doing is actually good?" And that is bonkers. I don't take that kind of work. That is not what I'm into. I think I've done it once for a friend just to... Crystal Carter: A sense check. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's just a bad look. It propagates bad relationships. It propagates a bad reputation. It's an incredibly valuable niche market that I'm sure some SEOs are benefiting from. I'm not getting on anybody for taking the money and doing it. Fine. There's a need, go ahead. But it's not a healthy thing for the industry, and it really shows you where it's at by the way, that you have a niche industry of check my agency for me. Crystal Carter: And I think that a lot of times that has to do with trust. So I've had it before where we had a client come to us because they couldn't understand the reports and they couldn't understand what the people were doing for them. And I think that that comes back to client communication. You need to be able to explain what you do to the people that you're working for. If you're doing SEO for someone, you need to be able to explain what you're doing or at least the value. And you also need to be able to demonstrate the value. Because a lot of times, particularly if someone's on retainer, they might not see what you do every month, and it might not necessarily be evident to them. Obviously. If you make a bunch of blogs or something, then they can go, "Oh, okay, I can see that the blogs are on the website and there's some traffic to the blogs, and I can see that that's happening." But if you're doing alt texts on images and you're resizing the images to make them smaller, the images are going to look the same. They might not even notice it. If you're working on a back corner of the website, they might not see that either. So it's very important that you're able to illustrate what you're doing and you're able to explain what you're doing in order to keep trust so they don't go to somebody else and say, "What is all of this? I don't understand this report." Mordy Oberstein: By the way, if you do something that sounds fishy, the cases I've been approached has been about, "This doesn't sound right. They said this, but I don't know." The clients are not stupid. They know this doesn't make any sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that hiding behind jargon can be something that, I think we talked about jargon as well, but hiding the high jargon, not being available to help clients when you need them. Not being able to speak in business terms can build distrust. Because if you start talking about, oh, canonical backlink indexing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's canonical. Crystal Carter: If you start talking about all that stuff, they're going to assume that you're not giving them good value for money. And when things hit the fan, because not everything's going to be plain sailing on our website traffic. There's a lot of volatility on the SERP. I mean, we have update after update, over update on top of an update in the last couple of months, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we talked about with Greg Gifford back at Brighton SEO for our podcast there. Crystal Carter: And I think that it's going to be something that you need to, we talked about it with Greg, you need to be able to explain that stuff to them, and you need to be able to tell them how you're going to write it out. I always say that in terms of marketing, there's no mistake in being wrong. You can't predict the future. Sometimes stuff happens. But the problem that you have is if you don't have any more ideas, if you don't know how to get out of it, if you don't know what to do next, if you can't figure out what caused the mistake in the first place, that's when people get worried. And so you need to be able to be clear and articulate about what you're doing, why it went right, why it went wrong, all of that sort of stuff. And that, I think reduces some of the reputational issues. Mordy Oberstein: So let's then be clear and articulate, as controversial as it might sound about how much of SEO's lingering bad reputation is actually our fault. This gets a little scandalous. Anyway, here's Cyrus Shepherd to handle that. Cyrus Shepard: Hello, this is Cyrus Shepherd answering the question, how much of SEO's bad reputation is or is not legitimate? So I used to have a vice principal in high school, and he dealt with all the disciplinary actions, and he said that even though he only dealt with the same one or 2% of students time and time again, he did that all day long, all week long, all year long. And it tainted his perception of the entire student body. It made it seem like the entire student body was constantly getting in trouble, when in fact, 98% of students weren't doing that. And I think that's kind of the problem that the SEO industry has. If only 5% of SEOs are soiling Google's web results, if that's what the public sees, it makes it seem like all of SEO is comprised of bad people or illegitimate tactics. This is especially poignant this week when we saw a tweet go viral about stealing rankings using a very low effort technique. That tweet had 6.3 million views at the time of this recording, because people want to make money online. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the whole business side of search engine optimization. But when people make money online with no care for the end user or the consequences, it does give us a bad reputation. So I don't know how much of SEO's bad reputation is legitimate or not, but I do know there are a number of kind, hardworking, caring people who like doing good work, who like supporting artists, who like supporting creators, who like magical experiences on the internet. And that's who I would rather focus on and ignore the people making the internet a worse place. Let's celebrate the creators. That's all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Cyrus. Make sure you follow and look for Cyrus, who by the way, is the founder of Zyppy SEO. Say that one more time. A founder of Zyppy SEO. Is a great name, by the way, over at Cyrus Shepherd on X Twitter at C-Y-R-U-S-S-H-E-P-A-R-D link in the show notes. It's exactly right. I used to work for a property manager company way back when, and we were managed 3000 apartment units. But you heard from the same people over and over again, it always make it feel like we're the worst company. Everyone hates us. We're not good at providing housing for people. Crystal Carter: Always calling up about that one radiator. Mordy Oberstein: I know the radiator, it's a pressure from the boiler. It's not a lot you can do about it. It's like 5% of the universe you just keep hearing from over and over and over again. And I feel it's very much the same way with SEO. Most SEOs are amazing people. The Glenn Gaves, the Cyrus' of the world, the Lily Rays of the world, the Alidas of the world, the Barry Schwartzs, I guess are legit, not just great SEOs, but really wonderful people in general. But you do have this five, 10% of the universe, I think they're all on Reddit, but... Crystal Carter: They're going to come for you, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Who just propagate this old school, manipulate the search engine reputation, and it does, for whatever reason, kind driving this lingering reputation about SEO that to a certain extent as that Verge article illustrated, we just can't shake. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think that there are so many good folks, and there are so many good folks who are just quietly going about their business. You talked about a lot of high profile SEOs like Lily, et cetera, and they're great. They're wonderful, they're fantastic. And thank you so much Alida and Glen and Lily and Roddy and everybody for sharing all of the things you share. Mordy Oberstein: And Barry. Crystal Carter: And Barry for sharing all of the wonderful things that you share. However, I know tons, tons of in-house, SEOs, agency, SEOs, who just ride out every day just getting those results, getting those results- Getting those results and just quietly minding their business, but being really good at it. And I think that those folks are the folks who saved a bunch of businesses during COVID. Those are folks who help small businesses grow, who help people to avoid mistakes, who help people to discover new product lines that they didn't even realize that they could possibly do, because it's online. Mordy Oberstein: Look at ourselves, pat on the back, look at Nati Elimelech, Einat, Shira Amit I mean, all the people who are working on our SEO product tools at Wix are bringing SEO to literally millions of people who might not have known how to go about SEO or how to think about their pages from a search engine perspective. And now they are. So SEOs do amazing things, and that Cyrus is right. We should focus on that. Crystal Carter: If you're a good SEO, give yourself a round of applause. Mordy Oberstein: And a pat on the back and a gold star. But also, let's talk a little bit more about how the tools have played into the bad reputation for a minute as we shift gears from being positive very, very quickly. Crystal Carter: Very quickly, let's get back to the... Mordy Oberstein: Hey, it's my style. As we alluded to before, SEO tools for not any fault of their own have played a little bit of a role in the wider perception of SEO, in the ways that maybe SEO tools haven't really evolved from back in the days, the ways that maybe they should have. Which can maybe lead to overemphasis on some less than updated SEO practices that kind of maybe further sully our good name. The fact that SEOs may not have met the call for a tool revolution, although some tools really have, I'll call out Suganthan Mohanadasan with keyword insights, doing some amazing things and so forth. But one person who we were talking to at Brighton SEO, who is taking it very seriously, is the founder of Rank, which by the way is on a Wix site. Michael Lewittes, who is now going to join us to talk about the role of SEO tools in the future and how that can play a role in the further development of SEO's good name as we take a very special edition of Tool Time. So welcome to the show, Michael Lewittes, how are you? Michael Lewittes: It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Crystal Carter: We are so pleased to have you. It was an absolute pleasure to finally Meet you at Brighton SEO, and it is such a pleasure to have you here today. Michael Lewittes: Well, it was great to see you and Mordy too. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Did you know, by the way, so I've known Michael for a while, but I've never met in person. And he sends me a DM, "I don't want to freak you out, but I'm six foot eight. I know you can't tell by the Zoom calls." Michael Lewittes: Just so that when you meet me, you don't get like, "Oh, wow, he looks a lot smaller." And then you see that I'm actually six foot eight, I'm not six foot. Mordy Oberstein: I think five foot eight would be pushing it. Michael Lewittes: That's about right. Crystal Carter: I was literally rattling through my brain. I was like, "I don't remember you being that tall. Do I remember that?" I'm just trying to remember the things. Mordy Oberstein: Do you imagine if he was, and you didn't remember him being that? I'm like, "No. I always thought he was like five foot eight." Crystal Carter: I don't remember. Oh gosh. These are the things that rattle through your head and you're like, "Do I just be polite? Do I just keep going?" Yeah. These are the things. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so we were talking before about SEO's bad reputation and how the SEO tools, for lack of intention though, have I think in some ways helped propagate this or perpetuate rather this idea of SEO being a little bit on the spammy, scammy side because the tools really haven't fundamentally evolved like the industry has. See the exclusion, like I mentioned before, Keyword Insights, there are some tools that have, so I don't want to say no. But you founded it, Ranktify, and I think we've even had a few conversations about this. One of the intentions behind it has been about moving the needle, moving the bar, so that SEO tools align to what SEO is now. So by the way, feel free to pitch Ranktify and let's talk about that. Michael Lewittes: Well, all that said, 1-800. No. So the other thing is, and I'm not going to knock keyword research, it is important, but if you have a furniture store or if you're a news organization and you're writing about President Biden and these tools tell you, "Oh, wow, the competition's too tough." It's, you're never going to say, "Mrs. Biden's husband vetoed a bill yesterday." You could, but no one's going to search for that. And I was a journalist for 20 years and then became obsessed with SEO. And so the written word is very important to me. And also you have to see over the years, Google has definitely moved away from the easy tricks to really analyzing the content itself. Ed is really not just a concept for the quality graders, it's really for the users and the people who are generating the content. And so everything really has to exude this expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness. And so at a certain point, I had run another company, a content company, I had sold it, had some time. And one day it hit me, SEOs don't really care too much about creating content. And I get that, and reporters or people who are creating content don't want to spend their time SEO-fying content. So I started to think, well, it's really one and the same thing actually these days. It's about making content that's helpful. So forget about all the link building, forget about all the keywords, just concentrate on making the most robust authoritative piece on any particular topic. And that's why I created Ranktify at 1-800. I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: And that helpful thing, they tried to steer us in that direction and things. But I think helpful comes down to who wants to read this and why do they want to read it? And that's really what you should be considering when you're thinking about which content you're making really. Michael Lewittes: I have to say, a real pivotal moment, I'll name drop John Mueller here, but when I was running my other company and we were fact-checking celebrity gossip. And so the algorithm is an algorithm, it doesn't know people necessarily or their reputation or how well-connected they are in Hollywood. And I remember during one of those office hours, I said to him something like, "But our content really is much more authoritative than the people we're debunking." They're claiming George Clooney's getting divorced. And George Clooney is telling me he's not getting divorced. And yet we knew nothing about SEO practices at the time, so we were writing sort of maybe 40 words saying, "National Inquirer says this, we say this, and George Clooney tells us X." But the algorithm isn't going to pick up on just George Clooney tells us this. And one thing that John said during that office hours, he said, "Listen, you may be an expert on this topic, and you may have great sources, but you have to prove to your users why the story isn't true." And really that set us off when I was running that company on making everything transparent. So it wasn't anymore a source tells us, we were able to back up like George Clooney tells us this. And not only that, he was pictured yesterday in New York with his wife linked to that. So it's really important when you're creating content, forget about all that link building stuff. Forget about the keywords. Think about how you can prove to the user that you know more, that you are an expert on this particular topic, and take them through the steps so that they can, in a sense, given everything you told them, they create it themselves and go, "Wow, that's right. That's why it's better than X, Y, and Z." Mordy Oberstein: So first a question and then a statement. Question, was it true that Tom Cruise was engaged to a panda bear and was that denied by the panda bear? Michael Lewittes: He was not engaged. I have a great Tom Cruise story for another time, but not engaged. Lovely man. Lovely man. Also six footed. Crystal Carter: I was just going to ask you that. Mordy Oberstein: It was hard to judge that from the jumping on the couch. It looked like he was much shorter, but I was wrong. A statement, I totally agree with what you're saying. And I think that one of the things that I think does that or that helps you qualify whether or not a piece is actually helpful to the user is that whether or not you've really parsed that topic well enough. So a lot of times what you might consider to be a great piece of content, but a lot of that context doesn't exist, and that one point that you're making might be great. But as a piece overall, you haven't really parsed out the topic, what came first, what came next, what might happen in the future, and all the different zigzags that... In this case, let's talk about a news story that the news story kind of went about in order to be where it's at now. If that's not covered, then it might be great, but it's not helpful. Michael Lewittes: That's right. And one of the things is you have to just really be incredibly exhaustive. And another thing that sort of, John said, he was talking more about the layout of our website, but I think it pertains to content as well. It's, have a third party look at it sometimes, just a fresh pair of eyes, and are they going to walk away saying, "Okay, now I fully get all of this"? Crystal Carter: You mentioned keyword research and things, and I think that really keyword research should be used as a sense check. Not necessarily the end all be all of the thing. But if you're seeing that there's more search volume for this than there is for that, then you can say, "Okay, well people seem more interested in this somewhat than they are in that." That doesn't mean that you don't necessarily write for it on the topic. Michael Lewittes: That's right. You shouldn't be scared away from a topic because of the keywords. If this is what you do, or this is what you want to write about, go in full force. It's like pretty much everything in life. Like, "Oh, I know I'm never going to succeed at it, so I'm not even going to try." It's like... Crystal Carter: Well, that's ridiculous. Michael Lewittes: No, but you hear this, little kids- Mordy Oberstein: I never would've got married if that was the case. Crystal Carter: Well, I'll tell you right now, I'm not a good tennis player, but I really enjoy tennis, and if I keep it up for long enough, I'll be better than I was before. So that's fine. That'll be good enough for me. Michael Lewittes: That's right. That's right. And so taking that, so let's say there's a local community tennis tournament, you might win it. Crystal Carter: And that'll be a big day for me. Michael Lewittes: And it's not about Wimbledon. I always tell people, you don't need to beat the internet, you just need to beat your competitors. You don't- Mordy Oberstein: To go full circle on this, the tools as they're currently constructed, I say the tool very broadly, aren't conducive for that. Or they're conducive for, okay, let me look at the keyword. Oh no, it's hard. It's easy. It's got this search volume. As opposed to, here's a topic I know I need to write about, help me better understand what I should and should not be including in this topic, and how could I best go about being successful with this topic. That they're not geared and that's where I feel a lot of the tools, to no fault of their own, to a certain extent, are perpetuating this old school SEO outlook, which again, just sullies SEO's reputation to a certain extent. Michael Lewittes: And that's why I created this, because I wanted stuff that was robust for me as a reader and as a writer. I wanted to sort of create something where you can create your content, you think it's great. And then it may be, by the way. And you put into the tool, and we'll tell you really what the blind spots are, the things that you're missing that to make it more expertise, more trustworthy, more robust, more helpful. And I think the problem is a lot of these tools were created by SEOs who were not writers. And I think that's the big difference. I've written or edited, I thought it was 75,000, but when I started doing the math again with my kids, it's probably closer to 90,000 articles, in my career. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, Barry, is that you? Michael Lewittes: Yeah. No, it's crazy. So I did a column for the Daily News that ran seven days a week. We were there in the office five, and that was something like 10 articles a day. And then the content company that I ran for a decade, we were doing about 30 articles. When you start doing that, and then what I did for the New York Post and for Cosmo, and it just sort of, as you added it all up, it's like, "Oh my goodness, that's a tremendous amount." That's why I don't read anymore. I've done it enough. So I can tell you right away when I'm reading something like, "Oh, that's big," for instance, not the biggest deal, but take entertainment story like, "Oh, no, look what Taylor did now," first paragraph, and then the second paragraph gets into it. It's like, no, no, who, what, where, when and how, first paragraph, very simple. Mordy Oberstein: Taylor Swift ruins football her entire season by taking focus off of football and onto Taylor Swift. Hot, spicy take right there. Crystal Carter: But her jets, she's trying to bury- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that was a great SEO thing, you saw that? She had a whole thing where she was in trouble, I don't follow Taylor Swift. Crystal Carter: If you did follow her, you would need a private jet to do so. Michael Lewittes: Why do you have 13 written on your hand? But okay, continue. Mordy Oberstein: I don't understand the reference, by the way. Crystal Carter: That was a deep cut. Mordy Oberstein: Because I like Dan Marino? Michael Lewittes: By the way, another embarrassing story. Shortcut, friendly with her people, they invite me to a show. I get front row seats. My niece can't come. I'm there alone. Crystal Carter: At Taylor Swift? Michael Lewittes: A room of 13 year olds and a grown man. Mordy Oberstein: That's awkward. Crystal Carter: This is why I didn't go see Dua Lipa. I love Dua Lipa, but I did not go and see her because I was just like, "It'll just be children and I don't want to go and spend my time at a creche." Michael Lewittes: But I knew if I didn't show up clearly they would see that the tickets weren't picked up, they would see I wasn't in the front row. Run into a friend who's there with his daughter, and he says, "Oh, who are you here with?" And I'm like, "Alone." Mordy Oberstein: I like to go to Bob Dylan concerts because I miss my grandparents. Michael Lewittes: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, back to SEO. Michael Lewittes: SEO. Crystal Carter: SEO. Mordy Oberstein: So I've used Ranktify, it's a great tool, and I think that's one of the things that it does do, you put it really perfectly, it fills those gaps that you didn't even know existed. But there are tools that kind of do that, but they're very top level as opposed to actually offering you the specific details and the specific nuance that other people are covering or whatever it is. That you can have a better idea of, "Okay, this is where the topic is directionally, I need to start thinking about it this way." Crystal Carter: So I'm going to just jump in here and say, every time I see Michael, he goes, "Well, but wait, there's one more thing." Because when he showed me Ranktify, there were so many different sections to this, and I'd be interested to hear you just give the top levels of those quickly. Because I think that this is interesting for anybody who's creating content to think about the levels of content creation. You'll do your research, you get your ideas, and then there's other levels that you can do to add more to it. And whether that might be when you're creating the content, but it also might be when you're going back doing when your content refreshes, when you're looking at a content audit, that sort of thing. Yeah, it's a great tool. Michael Lewittes: Thank you. So there are a lot of functionality. And by the way, there's one more thing since I last saw you, and there may be by the end of this podcast. So we take you through a lot of things. Some of it is SEO, some of it is just good writing, but good writing dovetails into good SEO. So the first thing we do is we check your spelling and grammar, because a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes people will question the trustworthiness, may not be an issue for Google. Then we basically say, "Hey," again, I don't focus on keywords, but if you're missing the keyword in the H1 in the first paragraph, that's a problem. Crystal Carter: Yeah. It just makes your job harder. Michael Lewittes: Right. Again, going back to that example, if I were to even make it worse, like, "Oh, guess what celebrity did this," and you get to it, two or three paragraphs, by the way, I have seen that where they've buried it, honestly, three or four paragraphs below. Crystal Carter: That just makes people angry. Michael Lewittes: So we check the spelling, the grammar, the keywords, make sure that you have them where they need to be. We do check your anchor text so that it doesn't seem spammy, like click here. What we do is we actually tell you, you need to give context to what you're linking to, because think of it from the user side. I want to click on a link and know what I'm going to get on the other side. And I'll tell you, and I'm sure Google is picking up on this, there are a lot of places that do not even semantically similar stuff. They do tangential stuff. They'll say, "So-and-so showed up dressed like this," and then it's suddenly a gallery of people who wore blue, it's unrelated. So what we do is we try to help you and make sure that your anchor text is related. We'll tell you actually if it's unrelated, and then suggest how to make it better. From there, we check whether your content is unique or duplicate, where it's been, even if it's semantically similar, it doesn't have to be direct quotes. Who else has done this. And everything we do, by the way, is linkable, clickable, verifiable. So when we say it, we have these little blue bubbles underneath, where it came from. You click on it'll take you to that area and it will highlight it. And then I say, the biggest thing is we find all the missing facts and data that you haven't included in your piece, which to me are table stakes. I was talking to, I won't say the name of the publisher, but they were complaining. This goes more than a year ago. It's such a great example. They were saying, "Oh, our stuff is better than the New York Times, but because they're the Times they rank higher." I'm like, "Okay, what story do you think you should rank hiring with?" So it was when President Biden got his second COVID shot. So we throw it into the tool, we go through the spelling, the grammar problems, the anchor text, which was all over the place. And we get to the facts and I'm like, "Well, I see that New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, a bunch of other named reputable places are saying that Biden had COVID four weeks ago." And they were like, "Oh, but everyone knows that." I'm like, "Actually, maybe they do, maybe they don't. I forgot." And when you start seeing certain data points over and over again, that's table stakes. That's the kind of thing that Google will notice. Ooh, you dropped the ball. You have to mention certain things. So we find everything to give it in context and to help it become more robust. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. It's super cool. Check it out, ranktify.com Michael Lewittes: At 1-800. Mordy Oberstein: Michael, where can people find you? Michael Lewittes: Local saloon. No. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm saying, before nine o'clock, where could they find you? Michael Lewittes: Or seven o'clock. LinkedIn. There's a Ranktify and Michael Lewittes account, Twitter, the Facebook, all of it. We're across all social media. Mordy Oberstein: But we'll link all or at least one of your social profiles in the show notes. Michael Lewittes: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Well, thanks coming by and I'll talk to you out there in the ether. Michael Lewittes: Thanks so much. Good to see you, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Michael Lewittes: And you too, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: That's okay, I get it. Michael Lewittes: I started that way. Mordy Oberstein: Break it down, full circle. Take care, man. All right, so thanks again, Michael for stopping by. Definitely check out the Ranktify tool, a little plug for it at ranktify.com, and we'll link to it in the show notes. Very cool. Anyway, you know what's also really cool, Barry is very cool. When you think Barry Schwartz, I think, wow, that's cool. He's so cool. Crystal Carter: Obviously, obviously. The king of cool. Mordy Oberstein: Some people try really hard to be cool, but they end up not being cool. Barry doesn't try at all, but that makes them cool. Crystal Carter: Basically. Mordy Oberstein: So this of course means the part we wax poetic about Barry clearly means it's time for some snappy SEO news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news, two articles for you this week, both from Barry Schwartz from the newly beautifully designed Search Engine Roundtable. First up, Google, no such thing as perfect formula for ranking. This is not something very complicated, but it's based on a statement that Google's Danny Sullivan said, and I applaud Barry for covering these sort of things because it does help us be in the right mindset to how we should think about SEO. And what. Danny said was, "Hey, there's no perfect formula to follow that must be used to rank highly in Google search. It really all does depend on what the piece of content is, what the pages is, what the website is, what the users are looking for, what the intent is, what users need, what users want. There's no set checklist follow boom, boom, boom, boom, that guarantees ranking at all. It really does all depend on what you're trying to do, what users are looking for, what everything is all about. And it's a little bit more holistic than just a checklist in general, anyway." Which brings us to our second article, again from Barry on seroundtable.com. Google, author bylines don't help you rank better. Google doesn't check credentials. Now, this is based on an article from The Verge that was talking about SEO a little bit, and they made some interesting claims. It was an interesting article, I found it a little bit off center. I'm not getting into that here, but part of what they said was that Google looks at author bios and that's a ranking factor that helps you rank better. And Google's Danny Sullivan said, "No, not exactly." To quote Danny, "Author bylines aren't something you do for Google, and they don't help you rank better." He goes on to say, "This is something you do for your readers and publications. Doing them may exhibit the type of other characteristics our ranking systems find align with useful content." So I think this comes out as part of the whole or a consequence of the whole EEAT conversation, experience, expertise of authoritative and trustworthiness. Sometimes that conversation comes off like a couple of checklist items you need to do to show EEAT. We talked about this Lee Ray on the podcast previously, that is not the case. So one of these checklist items is be, oh, have an author byline, check. Got it. Now I have EEAT. When, again, EEAT is very holistic. It's a concept. It's really about the user experience and the content quality itself. Now, if I want to read into what Danny's saying a little bit where he says "Publications, doing them, meaning adding the author bylines may exhibit the type of other characteristics our ranking systems find align with useful content." I don't want to put words in his mouth, and I'm speculating a little bit here when I say this, I wonder what Google does is something like this. Yes, it's not looking at the author byline one to one, you have one, you rank better. But Google is assessing quality of a page in a little bit more conceptual, holistic way. And in assessing this quality picture, quality content, quality user experience, holistically if it's factoring in, what's there on the page, what speaks to the quality of the page and perhaps the user byline. I keep saying the user byline, the author byline. Perhaps the author byline, if Google does look and say, "Okay, holistically speaking, if we're going to assess quality, this does maybe say that there's a little bit greater sense of focus on quality and transparency on this page, and it may factor into the overall quality valuation, quality experience of that particular page." So it's not direct, it's not even indirect, it'd be like secondary, secondary, secondary, but in a very holistic way having the author byline in there might be part of the overall very holistic quality evaluation, quality experience, quality picture that Google's looking for. Either way it doesn't really matter. It's really good for users to have it there, so have it there anyway, which is what Danny is saying. There is also the argument, I'll bring it up very briefly, that having the author byline can create a semantic connection between the author and the topic being covered. I'll put that into English. So let's say for example, Barry Schwartz writes an article about SEO, not for Search Engine, seroundtable.com, but for a website that he doesn't usually write for. And Google might be able to say, "Oh, there's a connection here. We know who Barry Schwartz is, Barry Schwartz is Mr. SEO. He talks about SEO all the time. In fact, that's all Barry ever talks about, is SEO. He's writing an article on whatever website. This helps us better understand or contextualize that this article is about SEO. Or let's just maybe have greater trust in the fact that this article is going to be talking about SEO, because we know Barry, we know he talks about SEO, we know he talks about SEO in a really quality way. So here's Barry again writing an article on whatever website, we can make that connection and whatever that means for ranking is whatever it means." I don't think it means much. Maybe in some cases, I don't know. But leaving the ranking equation aside for a second, I do think, obviously that Google's able to make those semantic connections, is able to connect the dots. Oh, we know who this author is, especially when they're a well-known author. We know what they generally write about. We have a pretty good understanding of what this person, who this person is and what they tend to write about, and we now see them writing here. We're able to make that connection and whatever that means for rankings, probably not too much, in most cases, they're able to do so. That's the entity based argument for having author bylines on the pages. Again, the real main thing is that it does just make sense for your users. It builds trust and so far may keep them on the page longer, which can factor into things, especially you're following the DOJ trial and all that stuff. And again, it might align to the overall, be encompass in the overall quality picture of the page itself, which I think is maybe what Danny is alluding to. Anyway, that's it for this week's snappy SEO news Coming full circle, by the way, when I say wax poetic, I immediately think of wax paper and turning it into origami. That's my association to waxing poetic. Crystal Carter: Interesting. I think- Mordy Oberstein: Isn't that a weird association? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I don't know. I think of Walt Whitman. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That makes, that's a normal association. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: I'm like, "Oh, captain, my captain," and then 'Dead Poet's Society', and then- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, it makes total sense. My warped mind thinks, oh, wax poetically, let me turn wax paper into poetry. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right. That's cool. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. That's weird. Anyway. Crystal Carter: Thanks for sharing. Mordy Oberstein: Sure. You know who's not weird? Crystal Carter: That was your best pivot ever. Mic drop. That was your best pivot. Mordy Oberstein: You know who's not weird? Montse Cano, she's fabulous. She's always sharing great information about SEO on Twitter, SEO information you can rely on, not snake oil SEO information, but good, reputable SEO information. She's just also a shining light, a wonderfully nice, friendly, accessible person, which also further solidifies SEO's reputation as not being snake oil. So make sure you follow her on Twitter X at M-O-N-T-S-E-C-A-N-O, and we'll link to her profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. You absolutely can follow her, because she's wonderful. She's super smart and she's super kind- Mordy Oberstein: So nice. Crystal Carter: And she's really active in the community, so she does podcasts, she does speaking, she does writing. She just loads of great stuff, Mordy Oberstein: And she's active on social. It's like a good person to follow, because they're actually active on social. So give her a follow. That's what we're saying. I'm glad that we can help SEO with this reputation problems. Crystal Carter: Yeah. We all got to do our part, really. We all got to do our part to just try to make sure that people know that we're doing good stuff out there. Mordy Oberstein: I'm now immediately going to share a hockey stick graph on social media. Crystal Carter: Just with no context, and the hockey stick went from like zero to seven. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, that's a great idea. Just show the chart and literally tweet nothing but the chart. You, one time, they dared me to do something like that when AI was first coming out as a whole big thing. Like, "Oh, Mordy, just tweet AI with nothing," and I did. And I got tons of engagement. Crystal Carter: You literally wrote AI, ChatGPT, Bard. Mordy Oberstein: It worked. So thanks for that. I got a couple of nice comments and replies. It was wonderful. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Thank you. And thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into user behavior and SEO. What's changed? Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub wix.com/seo/learn Look to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, at 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. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Cyrus Shepard Michael Lewittes Montse Cano Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Zyppy SEO Ranktify What does good E-E-A-T even mean? News: Google: No Such Thing As Perfect Formula For Ranking Google: Author Bylines Don't Help You Rank Better; Google Doesn't Check Credentials Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Cyrus Shepard Michael Lewittes Montse Cano Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Zyppy SEO Ranktify What does good E-E-A-T even mean? News: Google: No Such Thing As Perfect Formula For Ranking Google: Author Bylines Don't Help You Rank Better; Google Doesn't Check Credentials Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast to project some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein head of the SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she with a sterling reputation. Nothing could sully of her. Nothing stands in the way of her and her wonderful reputation from here throughout the entire SEO industry. She actually does, legit. She's the head of communications here at Wix. It's Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. I'm also knocking on wood. I don't know if people can hear that, but knock, knock, knock, because- Mordy Oberstein: People love you. People love you. Crystal Carter: I know you. I love you too. We do our best. We try. We try. You have a fantastic reputation as well. We do our best. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. Crystal Carter: We do our best, we try to do the good things. Mordy Oberstein: I try. Crystal Carter: And try to just move on from the other things. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I just realized my motto, he tries. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. Where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight each, and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. But where you can also manage your reputation online with the integration we built with Trustpilot. Look for it in all the other great integrations and apps we offer inside of the Wix app market as today, in case you haven't realized we're covering reputation. But in this case, SEO's reputation or SEO's troubled reputation, does it still linger? Why every SEO needs to understand the history of SEO's reputation, as it can impact your bottom line. Does SEO still get a bad rep? And if so, is that fair? No. Fair. How the SEOs on planet Earth can heal our world for you and for me and for the entire digital space. The great Cyrus Shepherd of Zyppy SEO will stop by to take a look at how SEO's bad rep might or might not be our own fault, scandalous. Plus, we'll chat with Michael Lewittes about how the SEO tools have only added fuel to the negative fire that is SEO's reputation. Let's fill out a fire brimstone right there. So gather yourselves ye content goblins, because episode number 70 of the SERP's Up Podcast is going full jet on you with don't give a damn about your reputation because you're living in the past. It's a new generation. By the way. That was the theme song for 'Freaks and Geeks'. It was a great show. It only had one season and it was the most unbelievable show. I'm not even sure why it didn't get a second season. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I feel that way about 'Ugly Betty'. 'Ugly Betty' didn't have enough seasons for me. I absolutely love 'Ugly Betty'. It's America Ferrera, peak America Ferrera, and also Vanessa L. Williams being amazing. Mordy Oberstein: I feel that way about 'Friday Night Lights', which had five seasons, but I could have gone for 50. Crystal Carter: But sometimes they just get a little silly at the end. But then you're already committed, so you just keep watching anyway. Mordy Oberstein: No, it doesn't matter. It's all good. You got me. I'm in. Crystal Carter: Great, right. We're all good. We're all good. Mordy Oberstein: So let's talk about SEO and reputations. I think it's worthwhile to get a little, for those of you who don't know, let me get you caught up a little bit. So back in the day, a lot of, I'll call them SEOs, did a lot of practices in the past. And it looked as SEO as kind of a way to manipulate search engines, and it looked as if SEOs were a low quality service providers trying to manipulate you with all sort of these spammy practices to get you growth that may or may not have been long-lasting, generally not long-lasting. And it's developed with a point where the average person, and this is the way reputation, and it's a good lesson in brand marketing in general, the way reputation unlike Reagan economics does actually trickle down. That was too political for this podcast, but we're going to leave it in anyway. Reputation does actually trickle down. And the things SEOs were doing way back when did trickle down to a wider audience where the average site owner was like, "Well, maybe SEO is kind of eh. Do I really want to touch that?" A lot of it had to do with the focus on backlinks and the shady practices and those, I guess digitally unethical practice around link building. And I think that got further propagated by the tools inadvertently being so focused on link building. So just driving this whole link building thing. And people caught on to that, well, this isn't really the way we want to build a website, or we want to grow our website, or we want the kind of practices that we want to engage with to build a website. Why are you SEOs recommending this? This seems shyster-ish. And I'll end on this. Then you have major figures showing off these aggressive tactics and these less authoritative tactics showing, "Hey, here's how they work and they're great, and SEO should be done this way." And people do see this kind of thing and they're like, "Whoa, that doesn't look good. That's not ethical, that's not great." And then on top of that, just to further solidify SEO's bad reputation, you have major publications most recently, the Verge, which we'll get into, I am assuming a little bit. Saying that the things that SEOs have done over the years have ruined the way, which I think is a little bit hyperbolic. Or even not to take a shot here, but you even have the CEO of Shopify saying, "SEO is snake oil", and this is where we're at. Crystal Carter: There's a couple of things there. So I think that this trick does this and this trick does that, and that trick does this. Back in the day, pre Panda Penguin updates and things, pre that sort of stuff, I think those things did kind of work. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Keyword stuffing, whoever gets stuffed the most keywords wins. Crystal Carter: They kind of did work. And I think that it comes back to the real idea of a reputation. If you think about the reputation of let's say Dolly Parton, because everybody loves Dolly Parton. So let's say about Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton's reputation doesn't just come because of one thing she's done. It comes because of years of her doing good stuff and doing admirable stuff and being a pretty solid human. And everybody has flaws and everybody has ups and downs and things, but overall, the average, the taken as a whole, it's consistently pretty good. And I think that when you think about your reputation of your website, when you think about the reputation of an industry, people are trying to get quick wins, really quick wins without thinking about the long-term benefit sometimes or the long-term impact sometimes. And it might be that, let's say you were running a race and you were like, "Yeah, if I just push this person over, I'll get ahead." It's like, "Yeah, but then everyone will see that you're a terrible person." Mordy Oberstein: Right, yeah, that's exactly what it is. Crystal Carter: You want long-term goals. So you work and you practice and you build up your skills so that you can have that long-term goal. And I think that one of the things that's tricky is that a lot of people were relying on those super quick wins that don't actually contribute to the overall value of the whole. Because a quick win is, there are sometimes quick wins that are totally perfectly fine, but I think a lot of people were relying on those and partially because they were getting results. It's just like if you do a crash diet or something, you might see results straight away, but then in the long-term, you probably won't. So I think that a lot were relying on those things and not thinking about the long-term thing. And I think that part of the reputation has shifted, and I think there's been a lot of emphasis from Google on shifting towards better, more long-term SEO practices, because Google is 20 plus years old now, in the early days of Google people maybe didn't even know how this was all going to play out. So you do whatever works. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, no, look, I think back in the day, it was back in the day, and the whole web was really in its infancy. And I think that's why I think we want to do this episode, because if you are an SEO, you do need to be aware, especially if you're newer to the SEO conversation, you don't remember the good old days. It's something you need to keep in mind when you're talking to your clients. And even if you are not an SEO and you're listening to this podcast and you're trying to learn about SEO or you're interested in SEO and you see, you come across things that make it sound like SEO is not really a viable tactic. It's scammy. It's spammy. It's snake oil. Why you should ignore that and focus on the actual truth, which is SEO is a great way to grow your website, you just need to understand what is real SEO and what is a bunch of shysters putting stuff up on social media saying, "Look what I did." And to your point, I think one of the things that I'm not a big fan of going on, and if you do this, I am not trying to call you out. I apologize if I hurt your feelings. But if you go out there on social media and you start, "Here's a graph," with absolutely no context whatsoever, "Look at my success." And then you start talking about the aggressive tactics that you used in order to achieve this 'growth', I think it's a bad look overall. I think it's a bad look for SEO, I think it'd possibly a bad look for you. And I don't think it's really reflective of, it might have worked on this site in this situation, but I don't think it's reflective of what actually works on the web, especially long-term. And if you are somebody who's not an SEO and you do see these things, do not think this is what most SEOs are doing and what most SEOs talk about. Because what most SEOs talk about, and the core of the SEO community talks about is how to make websites better for people, how to make websites and content better for search engines, how to grow a website slowly and steadily and substantially. And I think that's why it's not fair, but if you're listening to this podcast and you're looking at all these things that are not great, that's not what SEO is really about. SEO really has, it's not fair because it has pivoted, many years ago, to being far more substantial and we need to weed this out from the narrative. Crystal Carter: I think it's a question of, there are a million types of cars available. There are a million types of suits available. There are a million types of anything available. There's lots of different types of SEOs. There are lots of different good SEOs. There are SEOs who are maybe improving or whatever. And the person that you're working with will have different tactics. However, if they've got demonstrable results and if they've got a solid reputation, and if you can look at their work and see that they're able to see long-term sustainable growth for their clients over time, then that's good. We have an article on the hub that talks about how to choose an SEO agency. One of the good ways is to, what's your oldest client? If they have a client that's been with them for years and years and years, that's a really good sign. If all of their clients turn over every three months or something, that's a terrible sign. And I think that who you are working with makes a really big difference in the end, even if you're taking SEO advice, we also have a podcast on taking SEO advice, look at the kinds of projects that they're working on and the kinds of gains that they're talking about. A solid SEO will be like, "Look at the growth that we saw over 18 months." That's a good amount of time. And then you can see some quick wins on tech SEO things, like if somebody was a really dire situation and then you fix something that was broken, then you can see some quick wins in that. But particularly with content and with some other things, it takes a little bit of time and it should take time. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure there are quick wins. We did a whole webinar with SEJ about quick wins, and there are things that you can do that are not very complicated that really do matter. They might not be quick in the sense that you might not see immediate results. Sometimes with a tech fix, I have no index the entire site, and now it's index. Quick win. But that doesn't mean those are aberrations for the most part. And if you are an SEO, and you are showing, "Hey, look at this quick thing, the quick traffic that I got," contextualize that. There are many things that should not be contextualized, but there are some things that should be, and in this case, if you're saying it's a super quick win, if you're on the social media showing this stuff, say, "This is kind of an aberration. This is not the norm." So the people who are looking at what you're showing don't be like, A, "That's what I expect." Or B, "Well, there's another SEO scammer again." Which brings me to my next point. We as the SEO community have a responsibility. I think Cyrus we'll probably talk a little bit more about this tangentially, but we have a responsibility to fix this reputation, I feel like, as a community to fix this bad reputation that we've had. Because you still have folks like The Verge writing pieces, like, 'The SEOs have ruined the world.' No, we haven't. Crystal Carter: We're not in charge of the web. Mordy Oberstein: It's completely unfair and unjustified. If anything, we do a lot to make the internet a better place, I feel like. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Well, regularly, I mean, the team from Google have said that they rely on us to say, "Oh, this isn't working in search. This isn't good on search." And I've seen people in our community say, "This isn't a great result for this." And sometimes it's for sensitive stuff, sometimes it's for general search quality, sometimes it's for other things like that, but it's something that people regularly do. And if you're somebody and you see something that's amiss on Google, then you can, you can speak to them and say, "I found this and this isn't good." And that's something that people regularly do. I think in terms of that Verge article that talks about the people that ruin the internet, which is giving us a lot of credit. A lot more credit than we have. I think that- Mordy Oberstein: How powerful am I again? Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And I think that they're talking about some of the content that people are making, and they had a similar article that was somebody who was saying, "Oh, I have to make all this content to sell my key chains on my website." And I'm like, "Well, that sounds like you have low quality products that you're trying to sell with low quality content, so maybe you should sell something else." And I think that that's not necessarily the fault of SEO, but what I would say is in terms of what we see on the SERP, SEOs are very often working in a reactive space. So very often Google will change something on the SERP, and then we need to respond in order to adjust the content to fit to that desire that Google's indicating. So for instance, if you have structure data stuff, you would respond. And so if Google changes the SERP so that the thing that's at the top of the SERP relies on structured data, then you have to go through and add structured data to your content in order to even be in the field of play. Sometimes, for instance, say you recently introduced an examples filter on the SERP. You might think, well, "Oh, hey, I have a page that has examples on it. I'm going to change that now. So the Google knows that this is a page that has examples on it." So very often we're reactive. So I think that in that response, in terms of ruining the internet, a lot of times we're responding to what we're seeing on the internet that people want to see videos, that people want to see examples, that people want. Mordy Oberstein: That's the incentive cycle. And it should be at this point, right? Google's moving towards very strongly, especially in how they're talking about satisfying users in a really substantial quality way, and we need to help facilitate that with the website that we're working with. It should all work in harmony. And I think that's why SEOs, we are stewards of the web to a very large extent. Which is why I think, and I don't want to come off holier than thou or on a soapbox or anything, but we do have a responsibility that we're talking about what we're doing with our clients, what we're doing with content, what we're doing with websites, to speak in a way that's mature and that speak in a way that shows we actually do care about the internet. We don't just care about getting as much traffic as we possibly can, and no matter how we do it doesn't matter. It's not a good look. To put it practically, long-term for us getting clients, the more we do that, the more it's going to propagate the lingering reputation that SEO is snake oil. Which inevitably, every SEO comes across a client that thinks that way. And it's also a crying shame that people who are looking into SEO as a way for them to grow their own websites on their own, look at them like, "Wait a second, maybe I shouldn't be investigating it." I think that's a crying shame too. Crystal Carter: So here's the thing. I've encountered this when pitching to clients, where somebody, he was a dev and he built his own website and he was great, but I'll tell you right now, it was a mess. It was full of issues, and they were making money and they were doing fine or whatever, but there was full of issues, there were a bunch of issues within. And he was like, "Oh, I can read the Google Webmaster Tools guidelines. I don't need you to do that for me," and stuff. I'm like, "Yeah, but I could clean my house really well, but I might have a housekeeper who does it better. One doesn't necessarily preclude the other." I don't have a housekeeper, I'd love one, but I don't. But anyway, he was very skeptical of the entire operation. And I think that the other thing that people get really skeptical of is the price tag. And she talks about this in The Verge articles, "Oh, they make all this money," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll tell you right now, one of the reasons why SEOs charge what they charge is because, again, PPC people do this as well. So PPC folks will charge depending upon how much the spend is. If somebody's spending a million pounds or a million dollars on ads, you're not going to charge them $500 a month, because the stakes are higher than that. So if they're spending a million dollars a month on ads, you're going to charge them something that's appropriate for the money that they're going to make on that. Because if they can spend that much on ads, they're going to expect a return of something appropriate. So you're going to charge them that. Similarly, one of the things that happens very often with SEOs is we can see all the analytics, so we can see the conversions that you are getting from the work that we're doing. So the fee will be appropriate based on what that is. And if you've got somebody, and I've done smaller projects for smaller folks, and loads of SEOs, all the good SEOs that I know do charity work and do work with special projects and work on things that they care about and things like that. And people aren't just out here like these, what is it? Pirates, mega maniacal pirates, she called us. So people aren't here for all of that stuff. People do plenty of charity things. But if you're seeing that somebody can make, I don't know, $3 million in a month or something over the work that you're doing, you're going to charge appropriately. And that's just reasonable. That's just reasonable. Mordy Oberstein: Got to eat. Crystal Carter: You got to eat. And also, it's not fair for you to not be paid appropriately for the value of your work, supply demand and the value. That's the value of your work. And the thing that's tricky about SEO, and here's the other thing, is that in terms of reputation is that there's a lot of, we talked about this previously as well, there's a lot of myths. They talk about Google as being a black box. There's a lot of misinformation around as well, but there's a lot of good information as well. And so I think that you also want to look at the things that people are referencing. If people are sending you to the Google documentation, then they probably know what they're talking about, because they actually read the Google documentation, which is freely available. That's important to think about as well. I think that we can forgive clients for being a little bit skeptical, but I think we also as SEOs have to spend that time illustrating the value and demonstrating the integrity of our work. Mordy Oberstein: Look, that overall mistrust. A little bit of mistrust is, it should probably be a little bit healthy, a little bit pressure sometimes can be healthy. But it's kind of created this niche market where you have, I've been approached many times about this, "I have an agency working on my website, could you make sure that what they're doing is actually good?" And that is bonkers. I don't take that kind of work. That is not what I'm into. I think I've done it once for a friend just to... Crystal Carter: A sense check. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's just a bad look. It propagates bad relationships. It propagates a bad reputation. It's an incredibly valuable niche market that I'm sure some SEOs are benefiting from. I'm not getting on anybody for taking the money and doing it. Fine. There's a need, go ahead. But it's not a healthy thing for the industry, and it really shows you where it's at by the way, that you have a niche industry of check my agency for me. Crystal Carter: And I think that a lot of times that has to do with trust. So I've had it before where we had a client come to us because they couldn't understand the reports and they couldn't understand what the people were doing for them. And I think that that comes back to client communication. You need to be able to explain what you do to the people that you're working for. If you're doing SEO for someone, you need to be able to explain what you're doing or at least the value. And you also need to be able to demonstrate the value. Because a lot of times, particularly if someone's on retainer, they might not see what you do every month, and it might not necessarily be evident to them. Obviously. If you make a bunch of blogs or something, then they can go, "Oh, okay, I can see that the blogs are on the website and there's some traffic to the blogs, and I can see that that's happening." But if you're doing alt texts on images and you're resizing the images to make them smaller, the images are going to look the same. They might not even notice it. If you're working on a back corner of the website, they might not see that either. So it's very important that you're able to illustrate what you're doing and you're able to explain what you're doing in order to keep trust so they don't go to somebody else and say, "What is all of this? I don't understand this report." Mordy Oberstein: By the way, if you do something that sounds fishy, the cases I've been approached has been about, "This doesn't sound right. They said this, but I don't know." The clients are not stupid. They know this doesn't make any sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that hiding behind jargon can be something that, I think we talked about jargon as well, but hiding the high jargon, not being available to help clients when you need them. Not being able to speak in business terms can build distrust. Because if you start talking about, oh, canonical backlink indexing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's canonical. Crystal Carter: If you start talking about all that stuff, they're going to assume that you're not giving them good value for money. And when things hit the fan, because not everything's going to be plain sailing on our website traffic. There's a lot of volatility on the SERP. I mean, we have update after update, over update on top of an update in the last couple of months, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, we talked about with Greg Gifford back at Brighton SEO for our podcast there. Crystal Carter: And I think that it's going to be something that you need to, we talked about it with Greg, you need to be able to explain that stuff to them, and you need to be able to tell them how you're going to write it out. I always say that in terms of marketing, there's no mistake in being wrong. You can't predict the future. Sometimes stuff happens. But the problem that you have is if you don't have any more ideas, if you don't know how to get out of it, if you don't know what to do next, if you can't figure out what caused the mistake in the first place, that's when people get worried. And so you need to be able to be clear and articulate about what you're doing, why it went right, why it went wrong, all of that sort of stuff. And that, I think reduces some of the reputational issues. Mordy Oberstein: So let's then be clear and articulate, as controversial as it might sound about how much of SEO's lingering bad reputation is actually our fault. This gets a little scandalous. Anyway, here's Cyrus Shepherd to handle that. Cyrus Shepard: Hello, this is Cyrus Shepherd answering the question, how much of SEO's bad reputation is or is not legitimate? So I used to have a vice principal in high school, and he dealt with all the disciplinary actions, and he said that even though he only dealt with the same one or 2% of students time and time again, he did that all day long, all week long, all year long. And it tainted his perception of the entire student body. It made it seem like the entire student body was constantly getting in trouble, when in fact, 98% of students weren't doing that. And I think that's kind of the problem that the SEO industry has. If only 5% of SEOs are soiling Google's web results, if that's what the public sees, it makes it seem like all of SEO is comprised of bad people or illegitimate tactics. This is especially poignant this week when we saw a tweet go viral about stealing rankings using a very low effort technique. That tweet had 6.3 million views at the time of this recording, because people want to make money online. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the whole business side of search engine optimization. But when people make money online with no care for the end user or the consequences, it does give us a bad reputation. So I don't know how much of SEO's bad reputation is legitimate or not, but I do know there are a number of kind, hardworking, caring people who like doing good work, who like supporting artists, who like supporting creators, who like magical experiences on the internet. And that's who I would rather focus on and ignore the people making the internet a worse place. Let's celebrate the creators. That's all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Cyrus. Make sure you follow and look for Cyrus, who by the way, is the founder of Zyppy SEO. Say that one more time. A founder of Zyppy SEO. Is a great name, by the way, over at Cyrus Shepherd on X Twitter at C-Y-R-U-S-S-H-E-P-A-R-D link in the show notes. It's exactly right. I used to work for a property manager company way back when, and we were managed 3000 apartment units. But you heard from the same people over and over again, it always make it feel like we're the worst company. Everyone hates us. We're not good at providing housing for people. Crystal Carter: Always calling up about that one radiator. Mordy Oberstein: I know the radiator, it's a pressure from the boiler. It's not a lot you can do about it. It's like 5% of the universe you just keep hearing from over and over and over again. And I feel it's very much the same way with SEO. Most SEOs are amazing people. The Glenn Gaves, the Cyrus' of the world, the Lily Rays of the world, the Alidas of the world, the Barry Schwartzs, I guess are legit, not just great SEOs, but really wonderful people in general. But you do have this five, 10% of the universe, I think they're all on Reddit, but... Crystal Carter: They're going to come for you, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Who just propagate this old school, manipulate the search engine reputation, and it does, for whatever reason, kind driving this lingering reputation about SEO that to a certain extent as that Verge article illustrated, we just can't shake. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think that there are so many good folks, and there are so many good folks who are just quietly going about their business. You talked about a lot of high profile SEOs like Lily, et cetera, and they're great. They're wonderful, they're fantastic. And thank you so much Alida and Glen and Lily and Roddy and everybody for sharing all of the things you share. Mordy Oberstein: And Barry. Crystal Carter: And Barry for sharing all of the wonderful things that you share. However, I know tons, tons of in-house, SEOs, agency, SEOs, who just ride out every day just getting those results, getting those results- Getting those results and just quietly minding their business, but being really good at it. And I think that those folks are the folks who saved a bunch of businesses during COVID. Those are folks who help small businesses grow, who help people to avoid mistakes, who help people to discover new product lines that they didn't even realize that they could possibly do, because it's online. Mordy Oberstein: Look at ourselves, pat on the back, look at Nati Elimelech, Einat, Shira Amit I mean, all the people who are working on our SEO product tools at Wix are bringing SEO to literally millions of people who might not have known how to go about SEO or how to think about their pages from a search engine perspective. And now they are. So SEOs do amazing things, and that Cyrus is right. We should focus on that. Crystal Carter: If you're a good SEO, give yourself a round of applause. Mordy Oberstein: And a pat on the back and a gold star. But also, let's talk a little bit more about how the tools have played into the bad reputation for a minute as we shift gears from being positive very, very quickly. Crystal Carter: Very quickly, let's get back to the... Mordy Oberstein: Hey, it's my style. As we alluded to before, SEO tools for not any fault of their own have played a little bit of a role in the wider perception of SEO, in the ways that maybe SEO tools haven't really evolved from back in the days, the ways that maybe they should have. Which can maybe lead to overemphasis on some less than updated SEO practices that kind of maybe further sully our good name. The fact that SEOs may not have met the call for a tool revolution, although some tools really have, I'll call out Suganthan Mohanadasan with keyword insights, doing some amazing things and so forth. But one person who we were talking to at Brighton SEO, who is taking it very seriously, is the founder of Rank, which by the way is on a Wix site. Michael Lewittes, who is now going to join us to talk about the role of SEO tools in the future and how that can play a role in the further development of SEO's good name as we take a very special edition of Tool Time. So welcome to the show, Michael Lewittes, how are you? Michael Lewittes: It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Crystal Carter: We are so pleased to have you. It was an absolute pleasure to finally Meet you at Brighton SEO, and it is such a pleasure to have you here today. Michael Lewittes: Well, it was great to see you and Mordy too. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Did you know, by the way, so I've known Michael for a while, but I've never met in person. And he sends me a DM, "I don't want to freak you out, but I'm six foot eight. I know you can't tell by the Zoom calls." Michael Lewittes: Just so that when you meet me, you don't get like, "Oh, wow, he looks a lot smaller." And then you see that I'm actually six foot eight, I'm not six foot. Mordy Oberstein: I think five foot eight would be pushing it. Michael Lewittes: That's about right. Crystal Carter: I was literally rattling through my brain. I was like, "I don't remember you being that tall. Do I remember that?" I'm just trying to remember the things. Mordy Oberstein: Do you imagine if he was, and you didn't remember him being that? I'm like, "No. I always thought he was like five foot eight." Crystal Carter: I don't remember. Oh gosh. These are the things that rattle through your head and you're like, "Do I just be polite? Do I just keep going?" Yeah. These are the things. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so we were talking before about SEO's bad reputation and how the SEO tools, for lack of intention though, have I think in some ways helped propagate this or perpetuate rather this idea of SEO being a little bit on the spammy, scammy side because the tools really haven't fundamentally evolved like the industry has. See the exclusion, like I mentioned before, Keyword Insights, there are some tools that have, so I don't want to say no. But you founded it, Ranktify, and I think we've even had a few conversations about this. One of the intentions behind it has been about moving the needle, moving the bar, so that SEO tools align to what SEO is now. So by the way, feel free to pitch Ranktify and let's talk about that. Michael Lewittes: Well, all that said, 1-800. No. So the other thing is, and I'm not going to knock keyword research, it is important, but if you have a furniture store or if you're a news organization and you're writing about President Biden and these tools tell you, "Oh, wow, the competition's too tough." It's, you're never going to say, "Mrs. Biden's husband vetoed a bill yesterday." You could, but no one's going to search for that. And I was a journalist for 20 years and then became obsessed with SEO. And so the written word is very important to me. And also you have to see over the years, Google has definitely moved away from the easy tricks to really analyzing the content itself. Ed is really not just a concept for the quality graders, it's really for the users and the people who are generating the content. And so everything really has to exude this expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness. And so at a certain point, I had run another company, a content company, I had sold it, had some time. And one day it hit me, SEOs don't really care too much about creating content. And I get that, and reporters or people who are creating content don't want to spend their time SEO-fying content. So I started to think, well, it's really one and the same thing actually these days. It's about making content that's helpful. So forget about all the link building, forget about all the keywords, just concentrate on making the most robust authoritative piece on any particular topic. And that's why I created Ranktify at 1-800. I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: And that helpful thing, they tried to steer us in that direction and things. But I think helpful comes down to who wants to read this and why do they want to read it? And that's really what you should be considering when you're thinking about which content you're making really. Michael Lewittes: I have to say, a real pivotal moment, I'll name drop John Mueller here, but when I was running my other company and we were fact-checking celebrity gossip. And so the algorithm is an algorithm, it doesn't know people necessarily or their reputation or how well-connected they are in Hollywood. And I remember during one of those office hours, I said to him something like, "But our content really is much more authoritative than the people we're debunking." They're claiming George Clooney's getting divorced. And George Clooney is telling me he's not getting divorced. And yet we knew nothing about SEO practices at the time, so we were writing sort of maybe 40 words saying, "National Inquirer says this, we say this, and George Clooney tells us X." But the algorithm isn't going to pick up on just George Clooney tells us this. And one thing that John said during that office hours, he said, "Listen, you may be an expert on this topic, and you may have great sources, but you have to prove to your users why the story isn't true." And really that set us off when I was running that company on making everything transparent. So it wasn't anymore a source tells us, we were able to back up like George Clooney tells us this. And not only that, he was pictured yesterday in New York with his wife linked to that. So it's really important when you're creating content, forget about all that link building stuff. Forget about the keywords. Think about how you can prove to the user that you know more, that you are an expert on this particular topic, and take them through the steps so that they can, in a sense, given everything you told them, they create it themselves and go, "Wow, that's right. That's why it's better than X, Y, and Z." Mordy Oberstein: So first a question and then a statement. Question, was it true that Tom Cruise was engaged to a panda bear and was that denied by the panda bear? Michael Lewittes: He was not engaged. I have a great Tom Cruise story for another time, but not engaged. Lovely man. Lovely man. Also six footed. Crystal Carter: I was just going to ask you that. Mordy Oberstein: It was hard to judge that from the jumping on the couch. It looked like he was much shorter, but I was wrong. A statement, I totally agree with what you're saying. And I think that one of the things that I think does that or that helps you qualify whether or not a piece is actually helpful to the user is that whether or not you've really parsed that topic well enough. So a lot of times what you might consider to be a great piece of content, but a lot of that context doesn't exist, and that one point that you're making might be great. But as a piece overall, you haven't really parsed out the topic, what came first, what came next, what might happen in the future, and all the different zigzags that... In this case, let's talk about a news story that the news story kind of went about in order to be where it's at now. If that's not covered, then it might be great, but it's not helpful. Michael Lewittes: That's right. And one of the things is you have to just really be incredibly exhaustive. And another thing that sort of, John said, he was talking more about the layout of our website, but I think it pertains to content as well. It's, have a third party look at it sometimes, just a fresh pair of eyes, and are they going to walk away saying, "Okay, now I fully get all of this"? Crystal Carter: You mentioned keyword research and things, and I think that really keyword research should be used as a sense check. Not necessarily the end all be all of the thing. But if you're seeing that there's more search volume for this than there is for that, then you can say, "Okay, well people seem more interested in this somewhat than they are in that." That doesn't mean that you don't necessarily write for it on the topic. Michael Lewittes: That's right. You shouldn't be scared away from a topic because of the keywords. If this is what you do, or this is what you want to write about, go in full force. It's like pretty much everything in life. Like, "Oh, I know I'm never going to succeed at it, so I'm not even going to try." It's like... Crystal Carter: Well, that's ridiculous. Michael Lewittes: No, but you hear this, little kids- Mordy Oberstein: I never would've got married if that was the case. Crystal Carter: Well, I'll tell you right now, I'm not a good tennis player, but I really enjoy tennis, and if I keep it up for long enough, I'll be better than I was before. So that's fine. That'll be good enough for me. Michael Lewittes: That's right. That's right. And so taking that, so let's say there's a local community tennis tournament, you might win it. Crystal Carter: And that'll be a big day for me. Michael Lewittes: And it's not about Wimbledon. I always tell people, you don't need to beat the internet, you just need to beat your competitors. You don't- Mordy Oberstein: To go full circle on this, the tools as they're currently constructed, I say the tool very broadly, aren't conducive for that. Or they're conducive for, okay, let me look at the keyword. Oh no, it's hard. It's easy. It's got this search volume. As opposed to, here's a topic I know I need to write about, help me better understand what I should and should not be including in this topic, and how could I best go about being successful with this topic. That they're not geared and that's where I feel a lot of the tools, to no fault of their own, to a certain extent, are perpetuating this old school SEO outlook, which again, just sullies SEO's reputation to a certain extent. Michael Lewittes: And that's why I created this, because I wanted stuff that was robust for me as a reader and as a writer. I wanted to sort of create something where you can create your content, you think it's great. And then it may be, by the way. And you put into the tool, and we'll tell you really what the blind spots are, the things that you're missing that to make it more expertise, more trustworthy, more robust, more helpful. And I think the problem is a lot of these tools were created by SEOs who were not writers. And I think that's the big difference. I've written or edited, I thought it was 75,000, but when I started doing the math again with my kids, it's probably closer to 90,000 articles, in my career. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, Barry, is that you? Michael Lewittes: Yeah. No, it's crazy. So I did a column for the Daily News that ran seven days a week. We were there in the office five, and that was something like 10 articles a day. And then the content company that I ran for a decade, we were doing about 30 articles. When you start doing that, and then what I did for the New York Post and for Cosmo, and it just sort of, as you added it all up, it's like, "Oh my goodness, that's a tremendous amount." That's why I don't read anymore. I've done it enough. So I can tell you right away when I'm reading something like, "Oh, that's big," for instance, not the biggest deal, but take entertainment story like, "Oh, no, look what Taylor did now," first paragraph, and then the second paragraph gets into it. It's like, no, no, who, what, where, when and how, first paragraph, very simple. Mordy Oberstein: Taylor Swift ruins football her entire season by taking focus off of football and onto Taylor Swift. Hot, spicy take right there. Crystal Carter: But her jets, she's trying to bury- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that was a great SEO thing, you saw that? She had a whole thing where she was in trouble, I don't follow Taylor Swift. Crystal Carter: If you did follow her, you would need a private jet to do so. Michael Lewittes: Why do you have 13 written on your hand? But okay, continue. Mordy Oberstein: I don't understand the reference, by the way. Crystal Carter: That was a deep cut. Mordy Oberstein: Because I like Dan Marino? Michael Lewittes: By the way, another embarrassing story. Shortcut, friendly with her people, they invite me to a show. I get front row seats. My niece can't come. I'm there alone. Crystal Carter: At Taylor Swift? Michael Lewittes: A room of 13 year olds and a grown man. Mordy Oberstein: That's awkward. Crystal Carter: This is why I didn't go see Dua Lipa. I love Dua Lipa, but I did not go and see her because I was just like, "It'll just be children and I don't want to go and spend my time at a creche." Michael Lewittes: But I knew if I didn't show up clearly they would see that the tickets weren't picked up, they would see I wasn't in the front row. Run into a friend who's there with his daughter, and he says, "Oh, who are you here with?" And I'm like, "Alone." Mordy Oberstein: I like to go to Bob Dylan concerts because I miss my grandparents. Michael Lewittes: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, back to SEO. Michael Lewittes: SEO. Crystal Carter: SEO. Mordy Oberstein: So I've used Ranktify, it's a great tool, and I think that's one of the things that it does do, you put it really perfectly, it fills those gaps that you didn't even know existed. But there are tools that kind of do that, but they're very top level as opposed to actually offering you the specific details and the specific nuance that other people are covering or whatever it is. That you can have a better idea of, "Okay, this is where the topic is directionally, I need to start thinking about it this way." Crystal Carter: So I'm going to just jump in here and say, every time I see Michael, he goes, "Well, but wait, there's one more thing." Because when he showed me Ranktify, there were so many different sections to this, and I'd be interested to hear you just give the top levels of those quickly. Because I think that this is interesting for anybody who's creating content to think about the levels of content creation. You'll do your research, you get your ideas, and then there's other levels that you can do to add more to it. And whether that might be when you're creating the content, but it also might be when you're going back doing when your content refreshes, when you're looking at a content audit, that sort of thing. Yeah, it's a great tool. Michael Lewittes: Thank you. So there are a lot of functionality. And by the way, there's one more thing since I last saw you, and there may be by the end of this podcast. So we take you through a lot of things. Some of it is SEO, some of it is just good writing, but good writing dovetails into good SEO. So the first thing we do is we check your spelling and grammar, because a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes people will question the trustworthiness, may not be an issue for Google. Then we basically say, "Hey," again, I don't focus on keywords, but if you're missing the keyword in the H1 in the first paragraph, that's a problem. Crystal Carter: Yeah. It just makes your job harder. Michael Lewittes: Right. Again, going back to that example, if I were to even make it worse, like, "Oh, guess what celebrity did this," and you get to it, two or three paragraphs, by the way, I have seen that where they've buried it, honestly, three or four paragraphs below. Crystal Carter: That just makes people angry. Michael Lewittes: So we check the spelling, the grammar, the keywords, make sure that you have them where they need to be. We do check your anchor text so that it doesn't seem spammy, like click here. What we do is we actually tell you, you need to give context to what you're linking to, because think of it from the user side. I want to click on a link and know what I'm going to get on the other side. And I'll tell you, and I'm sure Google is picking up on this, there are a lot of places that do not even semantically similar stuff. They do tangential stuff. They'll say, "So-and-so showed up dressed like this," and then it's suddenly a gallery of people who wore blue, it's unrelated. So what we do is we try to help you and make sure that your anchor text is related. We'll tell you actually if it's unrelated, and then suggest how to make it better. From there, we check whether your content is unique or duplicate, where it's been, even if it's semantically similar, it doesn't have to be direct quotes. Who else has done this. And everything we do, by the way, is linkable, clickable, verifiable. So when we say it, we have these little blue bubbles underneath, where it came from. You click on it'll take you to that area and it will highlight it. And then I say, the biggest thing is we find all the missing facts and data that you haven't included in your piece, which to me are table stakes. I was talking to, I won't say the name of the publisher, but they were complaining. This goes more than a year ago. It's such a great example. They were saying, "Oh, our stuff is better than the New York Times, but because they're the Times they rank higher." I'm like, "Okay, what story do you think you should rank hiring with?" So it was when President Biden got his second COVID shot. So we throw it into the tool, we go through the spelling, the grammar problems, the anchor text, which was all over the place. And we get to the facts and I'm like, "Well, I see that New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, a bunch of other named reputable places are saying that Biden had COVID four weeks ago." And they were like, "Oh, but everyone knows that." I'm like, "Actually, maybe they do, maybe they don't. I forgot." And when you start seeing certain data points over and over again, that's table stakes. That's the kind of thing that Google will notice. Ooh, you dropped the ball. You have to mention certain things. So we find everything to give it in context and to help it become more robust. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. It's super cool. Check it out, ranktify.com Michael Lewittes: At 1-800. Mordy Oberstein: Michael, where can people find you? Michael Lewittes: Local saloon. No. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm saying, before nine o'clock, where could they find you? Michael Lewittes: Or seven o'clock. LinkedIn. There's a Ranktify and Michael Lewittes account, Twitter, the Facebook, all of it. We're across all social media. Mordy Oberstein: But we'll link all or at least one of your social profiles in the show notes. Michael Lewittes: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Well, thanks coming by and I'll talk to you out there in the ether. Michael Lewittes: Thanks so much. Good to see you, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Michael Lewittes: And you too, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: That's okay, I get it. Michael Lewittes: I started that way. Mordy Oberstein: Break it down, full circle. Take care, man. All right, so thanks again, Michael for stopping by. Definitely check out the Ranktify tool, a little plug for it at ranktify.com, and we'll link to it in the show notes. Very cool. Anyway, you know what's also really cool, Barry is very cool. When you think Barry Schwartz, I think, wow, that's cool. He's so cool. Crystal Carter: Obviously, obviously. The king of cool. Mordy Oberstein: Some people try really hard to be cool, but they end up not being cool. Barry doesn't try at all, but that makes them cool. Crystal Carter: Basically. Mordy Oberstein: So this of course means the part we wax poetic about Barry clearly means it's time for some snappy SEO news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news, two articles for you this week, both from Barry Schwartz from the newly beautifully designed Search Engine Roundtable. First up, Google, no such thing as perfect formula for ranking. This is not something very complicated, but it's based on a statement that Google's Danny Sullivan said, and I applaud Barry for covering these sort of things because it does help us be in the right mindset to how we should think about SEO. And what. Danny said was, "Hey, there's no perfect formula to follow that must be used to rank highly in Google search. It really all does depend on what the piece of content is, what the pages is, what the website is, what the users are looking for, what the intent is, what users need, what users want. There's no set checklist follow boom, boom, boom, boom, that guarantees ranking at all. It really does all depend on what you're trying to do, what users are looking for, what everything is all about. And it's a little bit more holistic than just a checklist in general, anyway." Which brings us to our second article, again from Barry on seroundtable.com. Google, author bylines don't help you rank better. Google doesn't check credentials. Now, this is based on an article from The Verge that was talking about SEO a little bit, and they made some interesting claims. It was an interesting article, I found it a little bit off center. I'm not getting into that here, but part of what they said was that Google looks at author bios and that's a ranking factor that helps you rank better. And Google's Danny Sullivan said, "No, not exactly." To quote Danny, "Author bylines aren't something you do for Google, and they don't help you rank better." He goes on to say, "This is something you do for your readers and publications. Doing them may exhibit the type of other characteristics our ranking systems find align with useful content." So I think this comes out as part of the whole or a consequence of the whole EEAT conversation, experience, expertise of authoritative and trustworthiness. Sometimes that conversation comes off like a couple of checklist items you need to do to show EEAT. We talked about this Lee Ray on the podcast previously, that is not the case. So one of these checklist items is be, oh, have an author byline, check. Got it. Now I have EEAT. When, again, EEAT is very holistic. It's a concept. It's really about the user experience and the content quality itself. Now, if I want to read into what Danny's saying a little bit where he says "Publications, doing them, meaning adding the author bylines may exhibit the type of other characteristics our ranking systems find align with useful content." I don't want to put words in his mouth, and I'm speculating a little bit here when I say this, I wonder what Google does is something like this. Yes, it's not looking at the author byline one to one, you have one, you rank better. But Google is assessing quality of a page in a little bit more conceptual, holistic way. And in assessing this quality picture, quality content, quality user experience, holistically if it's factoring in, what's there on the page, what speaks to the quality of the page and perhaps the user byline. I keep saying the user byline, the author byline. Perhaps the author byline, if Google does look and say, "Okay, holistically speaking, if we're going to assess quality, this does maybe say that there's a little bit greater sense of focus on quality and transparency on this page, and it may factor into the overall quality valuation, quality experience of that particular page." So it's not direct, it's not even indirect, it'd be like secondary, secondary, secondary, but in a very holistic way having the author byline in there might be part of the overall very holistic quality evaluation, quality experience, quality picture that Google's looking for. Either way it doesn't really matter. It's really good for users to have it there, so have it there anyway, which is what Danny is saying. There is also the argument, I'll bring it up very briefly, that having the author byline can create a semantic connection between the author and the topic being covered. I'll put that into English. So let's say for example, Barry Schwartz writes an article about SEO, not for Search Engine, seroundtable.com, but for a website that he doesn't usually write for. And Google might be able to say, "Oh, there's a connection here. We know who Barry Schwartz is, Barry Schwartz is Mr. SEO. He talks about SEO all the time. In fact, that's all Barry ever talks about, is SEO. He's writing an article on whatever website. This helps us better understand or contextualize that this article is about SEO. Or let's just maybe have greater trust in the fact that this article is going to be talking about SEO, because we know Barry, we know he talks about SEO, we know he talks about SEO in a really quality way. So here's Barry again writing an article on whatever website, we can make that connection and whatever that means for ranking is whatever it means." I don't think it means much. Maybe in some cases, I don't know. But leaving the ranking equation aside for a second, I do think, obviously that Google's able to make those semantic connections, is able to connect the dots. Oh, we know who this author is, especially when they're a well-known author. We know what they generally write about. We have a pretty good understanding of what this person, who this person is and what they tend to write about, and we now see them writing here. We're able to make that connection and whatever that means for rankings, probably not too much, in most cases, they're able to do so. That's the entity based argument for having author bylines on the pages. Again, the real main thing is that it does just make sense for your users. It builds trust and so far may keep them on the page longer, which can factor into things, especially you're following the DOJ trial and all that stuff. And again, it might align to the overall, be encompass in the overall quality picture of the page itself, which I think is maybe what Danny is alluding to. Anyway, that's it for this week's snappy SEO news Coming full circle, by the way, when I say wax poetic, I immediately think of wax paper and turning it into origami. That's my association to waxing poetic. Crystal Carter: Interesting. I think- Mordy Oberstein: Isn't that a weird association? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I don't know. I think of Walt Whitman. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That makes, that's a normal association. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: I'm like, "Oh, captain, my captain," and then 'Dead Poet's Society', and then- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, it makes total sense. My warped mind thinks, oh, wax poetically, let me turn wax paper into poetry. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right. That's cool. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. That's weird. Anyway. Crystal Carter: Thanks for sharing. Mordy Oberstein: Sure. You know who's not weird? Crystal Carter: That was your best pivot ever. Mic drop. That was your best pivot. Mordy Oberstein: You know who's not weird? Montse Cano, she's fabulous. She's always sharing great information about SEO on Twitter, SEO information you can rely on, not snake oil SEO information, but good, reputable SEO information. She's just also a shining light, a wonderfully nice, friendly, accessible person, which also further solidifies SEO's reputation as not being snake oil. So make sure you follow her on Twitter X at M-O-N-T-S-E-C-A-N-O, and we'll link to her profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. You absolutely can follow her, because she's wonderful. She's super smart and she's super kind- Mordy Oberstein: So nice. Crystal Carter: And she's really active in the community, so she does podcasts, she does speaking, she does writing. She just loads of great stuff, Mordy Oberstein: And she's active on social. It's like a good person to follow, because they're actually active on social. So give her a follow. That's what we're saying. I'm glad that we can help SEO with this reputation problems. Crystal Carter: Yeah. We all got to do our part, really. We all got to do our part to just try to make sure that people know that we're doing good stuff out there. Mordy Oberstein: I'm now immediately going to share a hockey stick graph on social media. Crystal Carter: Just with no context, and the hockey stick went from like zero to seven. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, that's a great idea. Just show the chart and literally tweet nothing but the chart. You, one time, they dared me to do something like that when AI was first coming out as a whole big thing. Like, "Oh, Mordy, just tweet AI with nothing," and I did. And I got tons of engagement. Crystal Carter: You literally wrote AI, ChatGPT, Bard. Mordy Oberstein: It worked. So thanks for that. I got a couple of nice comments and replies. It was wonderful. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Thank you. And thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into user behavior and SEO. What's changed? Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub wix.com/seo/learn Look to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, at 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. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

How much bias creeps into an SEOs' daily habits? How does bias impact how effectively we target our audiences? Join hosts Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they dig into how biases influence SEO practitioners and the modern SERP with special guest Giulia Panozzo. This juicy episode is worth the squeeze, explaining why sometimes those quirky, negative headlines suck you in like a vortex or why autocomplete can deliver the celebrity gossip you’d never know to look for. Discover why understanding user journey and behavior is crucial for your brand’s success on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back The SERP according to users, not just SEOs How much bias creeps into an SEOs' daily habits? How does bias impact how effectively we target our audiences? Join hosts Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they dig into how biases influence SEO practitioners and the modern SERP with special guest Giulia Panozzo. This juicy episode is worth the squeeze, explaining why sometimes those quirky, negative headlines suck you in like a vortex or why autocomplete can deliver the celebrity gossip you’d never know to look for. Discover why understanding user journey and behavior is crucial for your brand’s success on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 103 | September 24, 2024 | 46 MIN 00:00 / 46:08 This week’s guests Giulia Panozzo Giulia is a neuroscientist turned marketer who leverages her academic background to explore what drives customers to trust and buy, and the biases that influence information processing and decision-making. She founded Neuroscientive, a consultancy and training venture to help businesses understand their consumers more effectively. Notes Transcript Transcript 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 not exactly one-to-one to compare to the March 2024 because, as I mentioned, you have to do the same thing each time and do the same exact methodology each time to have some kind of accurate picture. In this inherently I'm asking to do something different. There you could see, okay, there was more of the normal increase in volatility change that you would normally see with the core update, yada, yada, yada, yada. But what we can see is the drasticness of the rank volatility. Here, for example, looking at the top 10 results, one of the things we look at is the percentage of URLs that previously before the update ranked position 20, and now after the update ranked top 10. Back in March, during the March 2024 core update, 9.38% of URLs ranking top 10 after the update came from beyond position 20 before the update, which shows you, oh, wow, that's a pretty drastic swing. You were ranking 20, 25, 30, 40, whatever it was, beforehand, now you're ranking top 10? Basically the same number for the August 2024 core update, 9.51%. You could read the rest of the article for the rest of the data. The reason why the way that's significant is that the March 2024 core update was a reassessment of the algorithm helpfulness and the helpful content, blah, blah, blah. Seeing the August update running similar numbers should tell you that was a really big update. I'm going to try to keep this short because it's a snappy news and I've already gone too long. That's this week's Snappy News. Barry, we love you and your goatee. I'm just messing. Crystal Carter: We'll see you today. It's new. Mordy Oberstein: Right. By the way, and on this show, we've talked about the Yankees, we've created content, and we've trolled Barry, so I've checked off all my things. Crystal Carter: There we go. Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Crystal Carter: Perfect day. Mordy Oberstein: Perfect day. Well almost perfect. We have one more thing we'll make it perfect. We've given you a great follow of the week, and we're talking about biases and search and search psychology. That's a new area of search we need to coin. Search psychology. The person you need to follow is Garrett Sussman from I Pull Rank. He spoke about a lot of this stuff over at MozCon. He's @Garrett, G-A-R-R-E-T-T, S-U-S-S-M-A-N, Sussman over on X and on LinkedIn under the same name. But Garrett talks a ton about this. He reads a ton of psychology books and he pulls that into search. So it's Search Psychology by Garrett Sussman. Crystal Carter: I saw this presentation. It was fantastic. The deck is available on the Moz website, and you can check it out and I think you can buy the thing to watch it as well. But it's absolutely spot on. He talks about the psychology of search and he talks about biases and he gets all into it. Garrett is a great follow, not just for that, but also- Mordy Oberstein: And a great person. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's a great person and he really stays on top of the SEO news on behalf of the team at I Pull Rank. Shout out to Mike King and everybody else at I Pull Rank as well. They've got a great squad over there and they put out some fantastic content most recently, or most notably about the Google leaks. If you haven't read that, if you haven't checked out that, you should check that out. They've got some really good insights about AI overviews as well, which Mike has shared at some events that we've hosted at the Wix Playground in New York as well. Shout out to Garrett and the team at I Pull Rank and Garrett's a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely great follow. Always sharing information. He's an active social media person. He's got a great insights, but Garrett shares on social, is what you want. It's not what you want. Cleveland. I can't stop, I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: Oh, come. Mordy Oberstein: I only did it to go full circle. Sorry, Cleveland. We love you Cleveland. We love you. Crystal Carter: You biased, man. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there's my bias again. Crystal Carter: You're biased. Mordy Oberstein: I can't get out of it. Cleveland just leaned into it. They have, by the way, they have something cool commercial, they've leaned into it. Crystal Carter: There was one I saw, it was somewhere in Sweden I think, or something. It was for Cannes. They won an award at Cannes, and it was basically like, "Why would you come to this place? You can walk from one side to the other in five minutes, and everybody knows each other, and the food, it's just like normal food." Basically they just went the other way. They weren't talking about how exciting they were. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they've got some really cool stuff. Much like I'm crappy on Cleveland, they're a good example of leaning into it and actually using it to improve their reputation. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there you go. Mordy Oberstein: We love you, Cleveland. You've convinced me. On that happy note, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the gray area of the algorithm, Signs Google Might Or Might Not Love You. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or your rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Giulia Panozzo Garrett Sussman Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Neuroscientive News: Study: 96% Of Google AI Overviews Links Go To Informational Intent Pages Data providers: Google August 2024 core update was very volatile Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Giulia Panozzo Garrett Sussman Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Neuroscientive News: Study: 96% Of Google AI Overviews Links Go To Informational Intent Pages Data providers: Google August 2024 core update was very volatile Transcript 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 not exactly one-to-one to compare to the March 2024 because, as I mentioned, you have to do the same thing each time and do the same exact methodology each time to have some kind of accurate picture. In this inherently I'm asking to do something different. There you could see, okay, there was more of the normal increase in volatility change that you would normally see with the core update, yada, yada, yada, yada. But what we can see is the drasticness of the rank volatility. Here, for example, looking at the top 10 results, one of the things we look at is the percentage of URLs that previously before the update ranked position 20, and now after the update ranked top 10. Back in March, during the March 2024 core update, 9.38% of URLs ranking top 10 after the update came from beyond position 20 before the update, which shows you, oh, wow, that's a pretty drastic swing. You were ranking 20, 25, 30, 40, whatever it was, beforehand, now you're ranking top 10? Basically the same number for the August 2024 core update, 9.51%. You could read the rest of the article for the rest of the data. The reason why the way that's significant is that the March 2024 core update was a reassessment of the algorithm helpfulness and the helpful content, blah, blah, blah. Seeing the August update running similar numbers should tell you that was a really big update. I'm going to try to keep this short because it's a snappy news and I've already gone too long. That's this week's Snappy News. Barry, we love you and your goatee. I'm just messing. Crystal Carter: We'll see you today. It's new. Mordy Oberstein: Right. By the way, and on this show, we've talked about the Yankees, we've created content, and we've trolled Barry, so I've checked off all my things. Crystal Carter: There we go. Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Crystal Carter: Perfect day. Mordy Oberstein: Perfect day. Well almost perfect. We have one more thing we'll make it perfect. We've given you a great follow of the week, and we're talking about biases and search and search psychology. That's a new area of search we need to coin. Search psychology. The person you need to follow is Garrett Sussman from I Pull Rank. He spoke about a lot of this stuff over at MozCon. He's @Garrett, G-A-R-R-E-T-T, S-U-S-S-M-A-N, Sussman over on X and on LinkedIn under the same name. But Garrett talks a ton about this. He reads a ton of psychology books and he pulls that into search. So it's Search Psychology by Garrett Sussman. Crystal Carter: I saw this presentation. It was fantastic. The deck is available on the Moz website, and you can check it out and I think you can buy the thing to watch it as well. But it's absolutely spot on. He talks about the psychology of search and he talks about biases and he gets all into it. Garrett is a great follow, not just for that, but also- Mordy Oberstein: And a great person. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he's a great person and he really stays on top of the SEO news on behalf of the team at I Pull Rank. Shout out to Mike King and everybody else at I Pull Rank as well. They've got a great squad over there and they put out some fantastic content most recently, or most notably about the Google leaks. If you haven't read that, if you haven't checked out that, you should check that out. They've got some really good insights about AI overviews as well, which Mike has shared at some events that we've hosted at the Wix Playground in New York as well. Shout out to Garrett and the team at I Pull Rank and Garrett's a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely great follow. Always sharing information. He's an active social media person. He's got a great insights, but Garrett shares on social, is what you want. It's not what you want. Cleveland. I can't stop, I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: Oh, come. Mordy Oberstein: I only did it to go full circle. Sorry, Cleveland. We love you Cleveland. We love you. Crystal Carter: You biased, man. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there's my bias again. Crystal Carter: You're biased. Mordy Oberstein: I can't get out of it. Cleveland just leaned into it. They have, by the way, they have something cool commercial, they've leaned into it. Crystal Carter: There was one I saw, it was somewhere in Sweden I think, or something. It was for Cannes. They won an award at Cannes, and it was basically like, "Why would you come to this place? You can walk from one side to the other in five minutes, and everybody knows each other, and the food, it's just like normal food." Basically they just went the other way. They weren't talking about how exciting they were. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they've got some really cool stuff. Much like I'm crappy on Cleveland, they're a good example of leaning into it and actually using it to improve their reputation. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there you go. Mordy Oberstein: We love you, Cleveland. You've convinced me. On that happy note, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the gray area of the algorithm, Signs Google Might Or Might Not Love You. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or your rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Ashwin Balakrishnan is a B2B SaaS marketer specializing in organic growth, backlinks, and content SEO. He leads the marketing team at Optmyzr, where he hosts the Search Marketing Academy podcast. His personal backlink profile includes gaming, Lego, and electronic music. Ashwin Balakrishnan Head of Marketing, Optmyzr Ashwin Balakrishnan is a B2B SaaS marketer specializing in organic growth, backlinks , and content SEO. He leads the marketing team at Optmyzr, where he hosts the Search Marketing Academy podcast. His personal backlink profile includes gaming, Lego, and electronic music. Articles & Resources 2 Jan 2024 Content consolidation for SEO: How to revitalize duplicate and outdated pages 7 Mar 2023 The search marketer’s guide to creating better content 15 Sept 2022 Backlinks 101: What they are and why they matter Resources Ashwin Balakrishnan Backlink tracking template Optimize your link-building strategy with a downloadable free backlink tracking template. Turn competitor pages into opportunities and generate quality links. Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back Guide to SEO forecasting in Excel Make SEO predictions and set meaningful targets with the data-led approach set out in this guide. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this resource to: Identify the SEO results you’re likely to achieve Ensure strategy and tactics are aligned with your targets, and vice versa Create a compelling value proposition for SEO Nay Jackson LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram With over a decade of experience in digital marketing, Nay is known for her expertise in performance measurement. Her meticulous approach to SEO forecasting, paired with her proficiency with Excel, has consistently helped clients achieve accurate and ambitious targets. As the author of this guide, Nay shares her proven forecasting process, making it accessible to all SEO marketers, so they can effectively measure their work and demonstrate its value to clients. More about this topic Check out this webinar on the Wix SEO Hub blog for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Will sites still earn traffic from Google Search when SGE goes fully live? What does the future of traffic and CTR look like in the wake of Generative Experience and AI fueled search results pages? How will AI and SGE impact affiliate traffic? What kind of fallout is expected when AI can answer more and more queries without the user needing to click-through? Hosts of SERPs Up, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter share how they think Google’s AI chat experience will impact traffic from Google and who stands to benefit the most. Mike King of iPullRank chimes in with a look at the impact of SGE and AI on affiliate traffic, and how it may change how marketers may be looking to change their business model going forward. Mordy and Crystal invite Wix CRO Manager Amanda Wiener to talk about increasing your bottom line with pages that convert well and what that actually looks like. Tune into episode 45 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast as we take the future of organic traffic head-on. Back CTR from the SERP: The future of traffic Will sites still earn traffic from Google Search when SGE goes fully live? What does the future of traffic and CTR look like in the wake of Generative Experience and AI fueled search results pages? How will AI and SGE impact affiliate traffic? What kind of fallout is expected when AI can answer more and more queries without the user needing to click-through? Hosts of SERPs Up, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter share how they think Google’s AI chat experience will impact traffic from Google and who stands to benefit the most. Mike King of iPullRank chimes in with a look at the impact of SGE and AI on affiliate traffic, and how it may change how marketers may be looking to change their business model going forward. Mordy and Crystal invite Wix CRO Manager Amanda Wiener to talk about increasing your bottom line with pages that convert well and what that actually looks like. Tune into episode 45 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast as we take the future of organic traffic head-on. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 45 | July 5, 2023 | 54 MIN 00:00 / 53:46 This week’s guests Mike King An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Amanda Weiner Amanda Weiner is a CRO Specialist at Wix. She has worked in SEO and page optimization for the last 3 years. She is passionate about creating online experiences that put the user experience first, and in so doing, create pages that convert better and rank higher. Notes Transcript Transcript 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 pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, the fantastic, the marvelous, the absolutely unequivocal, the amazing, the fantastic, the wonderful Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thanks very much, Mordy. That was very kind, and nice, and very good. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Insert clip from Latka from Taxi. Thank you very much. Crystal Carter: You're welcome to save the day. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's great. By the way, if I sound different, I don't know if I do because I can't really hear myself talk, I have a terrible cold that I can't get rid of. Crystal Carter: This is very, very true. I've been hearing this cough for every day. Mordy Oberstein: Every meeting is me- Crystal Carter: Every meeting. Mordy Oberstein: ... packing my brains out. Crystal Carter: We've been planning what to do if Mordy doesn't make it, but he will. He will. It'll be fine. He's going to be fine. We're sending help. Mordy Oberstein: Share me a mint chocolate chip ice cream. That's my wish. Yeah, remember. From Spot from Star Trek too, remember. Anyway, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix for not only can you subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can level up your blog's SEO with our brand new-ish, was in Beta, SEO assistant. Audit your On-page SEO like never before, literally, because not only will we give you the foundations like it's a title tag optimize, on your headers optimize, alt text, and so forth, but will literally tell you if the page is indexed or not if you have your site connected to search console. Boom shaka laka laka, like it's NBA Jam 1998. Crystal Carter: It's an amazing tool. I cannot recommend it enough. It is so useful because it puts it all in a list. Not only can you check it off, but you can actually action it from the list. It's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. Just like NBA Jam 1998, which is a great arcade game. You got to optimize those title tags and meta descriptions because they can help you with your CTR. I mean, should there be any CTR in the future, gasp and cry me a river at the same time, because today, we're talking about the future of CTR. Will AI and SGE kill clicks from the SERP like raid kills roaches and all other sorts of hyperbole? Okay. Okay. Everyone chill. Today, we're taking a hard and mature look at the current state of web traffic, how Google's SGE might impact web traffic, and whether or not it's all good or all bad, or most likely, perhaps somewhere in between. Plus, SEO goat, Mike King, stops by to chat about AI and SGE and its impact on affiliate traffic. Since we're talking about CTR, let's make sure your pages actually do what they're supposed to do once folks land on them from the SERP. As we talk to Wix's very own CRO aficionado, Amanda Weiner, she'll join us as we go across the Wixverse. Of course, we have this snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social. In the spirit of Devo, you must click it as episode number 45 of the SERP's Up Podcast clears up all of this congestion and conjecture about SGE, and AI, and traffic from the SERP. You must click it. I feel like every time I optimize a page for SEO- Crystal Carter: Oh, I have various songs. There's the Beyonce song called Let Me Upgrade You. I sing that one. Missy Elliott has the song Work It. I sing, "Metadata, data. I read descriptions like blah, blah, blah." Mordy Oberstein: SEOs, we all have our little song we sing, get our head off as we optimize our way. Crystal Carter: Indeed. I have others. I have a whole, a Baby One More Time. Mordy Oberstein: A whole playlist? Let's just share it on Spotify with the world. Crystal Carter: It's not a playlist. They're originals. Well, not originals. Mordy Oberstein: There's original Crystal songs about SEO? Crystal Carter: No, not yet. Maybe there should be. Crystal Carter: Oh my god. Okay. People who are listening, tag us if you want to be in the SEO album. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, our SEO album. We're dropping it on a record label soon. Crystal Carter: Exclusive worldwide like Pit Bull and DJ Khaled. Another one. Mordy Oberstein: I would love to have a record. Which our guest today, Mike King, he's got records literally though. Crystal Carter: That's absolutely true. He does. He is indeed Mr. Worldwide, like he is indeed out there worldwide talking about SEO and making stuff happen. Mordy Oberstein: On Twitter, he is Mic King, M-I-C King. I like that. It's good. Yes, indeed. Okay. Just a quick refresher about SGE, Search Generative Experience, and why there's concern. Google IO 2023, which we had a whole podcast about, so we'll link to that in the show notes, Google announced its AI experience on the SERP, which is known as SGE, Search Generative Experience. What will happen is you're going to ask Google, "Hey, what's it like to hike," I don't know, "whatever canyon with kids and a dog?" Google will spin up a generative answer like ChatGPT would and give you a whole summary of what you need to know about hiking that canyon with dogs and kids. I'll tell you right now, it's easier to hike with the dog than the kids, having kids. Yes. At the same time, there'll be a couple of organic results sprinkled in there on the side. You can expand that and get some more organic results with more SGE breakdowns. But the question is, how is all of this going to impact clicks to websites if the main results or the traditional or organic results are going to be beneath this box? How are we going to get clicks? Everyone's wondering what that's going to be like. "Oh my goodness." Some people have gotten access to the SGE through the Search Labs at Google. Let us have a trial of. Some folks have been like, "Oh, no. CTR is going to die. No one's going to get clicks." Other people have been like, "Well, I don't think it'd be as bad as you might think it's going to be. I think it'll be just fine." That's what we're talking about today. That's where we're at. Crystal Carter: This is a conversation that SEOs bring up a lot in terms of zero clicks or click-through rates and things like that. This is the conversation that goes back a good couple of years to when featured snippets came through, which actually featured snippets started being a lot, lot more prevalent. Featured snippets, we think of as normal, but they weren't always there. When Google started putting that through, the number one ranking position would be underneath the featured snippet. People were like, "Well, what's going on?" From the days of position zero, this has been a conversation. I think that what we learn from the position zero situation, we can apply that to what we're seeing with SGE, is that being present in that top. In my opinion, being present in the search feature is a brand asset and is something that tends to be illustrative of a wider domain authority topic knowledge. For instance, if you're showing a featured snippet, which is also AI-generated and AI-enabled, if you're showing a featured snippet, people also ask, you're also going to show it knowledge panels. You're also going to show in lots of different parts of the search, for instance. That is going to give you a lot of visibility in front of consumers. That's going to show consumers, it's going to show users that you know what you're talking about with regards to that. If somebody enters a search generative experience search about going to a mountain with their children, and their dog, and their grandma, and everybody, and trying to get the whole family up the mountain top, then if they see you there and then they see you another time, they're not always going to use the search generative experience. I've used things for a while now. Sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's not. There's some topics where I don't even know where to start. I'm just like, "I don't even know what this is or how to get going with this conversation." Or, I've mentioned this before where I've tried to figure out what to do with Magic: The Gathering, for instance, and I went through some of the search results and there was so much. There was so much to read. I was just like, "I just need to answer this one question so I can play in my turn. Can you just answer this one question?" I think that when you have your brand showing up again and again and again in the search generative experience, then when they go to just do a regular search, they're going to look for you. They're going to find you and they're going to see you. When they see you there, they're more likely to click. I think that the nature of search will likely change, and I think the nature of clicks will potentially change. But at the end of the day, the brand visibility and the brand value that comes from being present within the generative search experience is going to be valuable as people use the web. Mordy Oberstein: I don't even know where to start with all of that. There's so much there to dive into. Someone hold my beer. I don't have a beer. Someone hold my coffee. Okay. Let's talk about the zero click thing really, really quick. By the way, the point you mentioned before... Okay. Actually, no. Let's start. My mind is overload right now. Let's start with the not always using the AI. We actually just covered this. When I say just, when we're recording on the EDGE of the Web news podcast that I do, which is a great way to keep up with the news. Check out that podcast. A little shout-out to Erin Sparks. There was an article on The Verge, I think it was, and they were basically looking for something around Ted Lasso. They used the SGE to get an answer and a summary of Ted. They just wanted to know what time was the show on, which is not the actual question because it's streaming... It's on whatever you want it to be on. But the point where they ask a very straightforward, "I just want the answer. I don't want that summary thing." Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. This is very similar to you. You did had a similar experience where you were... I'm trying to figure out the Yankees score or something. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Being updated, I should cover this also on the same podcast, being updated its AI to have more current sports scores. I was showing you how literally, it's like it doesn't make sense to me. Because you go to Bing, you type in Yankee score, it gives you a box with the answer. Now, I need it- Crystal Carter: Right, and it updates. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Now I want to go click on the chat experience and have it spit out the same answer that I already saw in far more time. I don't understand. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. I think that we're putting AI on lots of things that it doesn't always necessarily need to be on everything. There's lots of things that are just intelligent. Mordy Oberstein: Which is my point about the zero click thing at the same time, because when we did that, I think it's a very similar conversation. When Google started showing more direct answers, "How many home runs did Babe Ruth did?" There's telling you, "714." I don't want to go to a website for that information. I know SEOs took that as Google stealing my clicks, but is that really what happened? Or is Google just giving people what they want? When I search for the weather in New York City, I don't want to go to Google anymore. I just want to see a card on my phone. Crystal Carter: I have it on my watch. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the weather. We want to consume information super quickly and sometimes that's not the best... Conflict of interest aside, sometimes a website is not the best place to do that. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think there's a couple of things to remember there. Again, I say this all the time to SEOs, Google's mission is to organize the world's information. It's not to organize the world's websites. Websites are a great source of information. They're a fantastic source of information. They're a fantastic way to curate information. However, Google will give the information however they get it. I think one of the things that's tricky with LLMs in general is who owns the information? If somebody's done the research to find out, "Oh, they..." Somebody found some ancient stone and they finally translated that ancient language, and they did a full dissertation on the history of some ancient civilization and their ancient language and all of that sort of stuff, and then they publish their dissertation on a website or on wherever. Well now, that's just into the pot. Who owns that information? If somebody asks the question of, "What did that ancient tablet say?" Then the thing, she goes, "Oh, it says this." Then the person who spent all that time- Mordy Oberstein: It's a really good point because... I feel it's a separate point, but tangentially, I feel like with Google and search, we know the rules of the game. You don't want them to take good content, no index the page. But when the AI conglomeraters, for lack of word, came around, no one knew they existed and they were going around the web taking people's content. We didn't know the rules of engagement and they just took it. I do have a point of contention with that. I feel now, at this point, you know the rules of the game, you got to find a way to block them if you don't want it. I know Bing has actually talked about being able to block its AI from going to your website, which that does make good and healthy sense for the web, in my opinion. Crystal Carter: I think it'll be interesting because I think if that's the thing, is that when we compare this to featured snippets, for instance, so featured snippets will pull out extracts from your site. You make a list full- Mordy Oberstein: And Highlight them on the SERP and Blue. The exact thing they are looking . Crystal Carter: Right. They'll go to your website, they will call the good information, they will pull it out, they will put it on the SERP in the way that they want. If you have things at a big long table, they'll take it out of the table. They'll put the table on there in a way that fits with the beer. They do that all the time. They've done that for years. People have said before, they're like, "Hey, what about this? What about my..." You can say like, "No, if you can put a tag and that tag... It's like no snippet. Don't drop featured snippets from my site." People go, "Oh, okay, all right, fine." I think that that still comes to the same thing about that. Now with regards to the SGE, you get different kinds of results depending on the query. For instance- Mordy Oberstein: Shopping results. Crystal Carter: Right. The demo of Google IO, they showed an example of shopping and they showed the shopping- PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:14:04] Crystal Carter: ... Google I/O, they showed an example of shopping and they showed the shopping one coming all the way down and what's a good mountain bike, for instance. And they have like, "Oh, this one's good for this, this one's good for that, that one's good for this, and that one's good for that." But I think that part of the thing that's tricky at the moment is that there's a lot of, and they said this and we know this to be true, but there's a lot of duplicate content on the web. So that mountain bike is on 25 different websites. And so the SGE is able to sort of curate if they're able to do the same thing that Google Shopping does, which is to curate all of that information about where that bicycle is being sold. And then they'll offer the people who are selling them, and I think that this also comes down to making sure that you understand your brand's USP. Because at the end of the day, when people do click to your website, what is going to make them click? What is the thing that's going to make them actually come and seal the deal at your website? So lots of people sell mountain bikes, but I know that this one place that sells the mountain bikes gives a certain amount to charity. Or I know this one place that sells the mountain bikes, I'm already a member. I've already got a loyalty card or something with them, or I know that they can deliver to me locally or whatever it is. In order to get the click, you have to also understand your USP, make the click valuable to you and them. Mordy Oberstein: And let us say amen. This is such a good point and it's so overlooked and it feels so foundational. Let me think, walk through history, how I think we got here and why I think that actually makes sense. Google has been figuring out that, hey, when you search for best vacation, you don't actually want the super top level best vacation spots. You want best vacations in the winter with my kids, without my kids. Best vacation in the winter without my kids- Take that back. I don't know what I was thinking. Crystal Carter: You did that other mountain trip and you were like, "No, not this time. Next time we're not taking them." Mordy Oberstein: And Google's trying to figure out ways for them to filter you through in order to get you from best vacation to best vacation without my kids in the winter. And they've added, I actually have data from this, I'm not sure it's going to be out yet by the time we release this episode, but I have data from nozzle.io, great data that shows that relatively recently, like 2022, since 2022 basically, end of 2022, there's been a huge increase in unpaid URLs at the top of the SERP above the fold on the results page. Not organic results per se, but links like carousels. People also search for links, site links, all these ways to filter you through because Google realizes that they have to take you from the very general search to what you actually want and they need to give you the opportunity to refine the query. Crystal Carter: So, a few years ago, Redfish can do the whole report on zero-click searches and things like that. He said 62% of searches or 64% of searches are zero-click. And Danny Sullivan from Google responded with an article that said very similar to exactly what you're talking about, is that we roll out lots of helpful features to help people quickly find what they're looking for, including maps, videos, links to products, services you can buy directly, flight and hotel options, local business information, hours of operation, service and delivery. And so, through that, they've said in this, our search results page, which used to show 10 blue links, now shows on an average 26 links- Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Crystal Carter: ... websites on a single search results page- Mordy Oberstein: There you go. I didn't even know that existed. I totally forgot about that. Thank you, Nozzle. Thank you, Danny. Works perfectly. So I'll throw one more stat at you. CTR has not gone up commensurately. It's gone up a little bit since they've done this, but not a ton. When I say CTR, I don't mean too organic, I mean to any link above the fold. It's gone up a bit, but not a lot. Meaning the refinements working a little bit, but it's not very efficient. You're throwing a whole bunch of links at people to trying to get them to refine it, refine, refine it. But I think it's been a spattering of links, but it hasn't been truly effective in getting the user to where exactly they want to go. Crystal Carter: I'm interested in that actually because I'm just thinking about Google Business Profile, for instance. Google Business Profile, which Google has invested a lot in in the last few years and Google Maps generally, which they're investing a lot in. And also things like Google Hotels for instance. So, in terms of that, if I want to know if a business is open, previously I would've had to click onto their website to find their opening hours. Now I can see if they're open when I go to the SERP because it says Morty's Ice Cream Emporium is open from 9:00 AM to- Mordy Oberstein: We only serve mint chocolate chip. That's all we serve. Crystal Carter: And everybody wears Yankees jersey. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. It's like, "Is this heaven?" Crystal Carter: They just played Billy Joel's best song. Mordy Oberstein: And my kids are not there. Crystal Carter: And it's not on a mountain. Okay, so on Morty's Ice Cream Emporium, it'll say the hours are this, here's where it's located. Yes, they have mint chocolate chip ice cream because it has their menu on there. And it'll say like, "Is Morty's Ice Cream Emporium good for kids?" And they'll say, "No, we don't allow children in this place." No, I'm kidding. No, I'm kidding. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, we allow kids, just not my kids. Crystal Carter: Yeah, just not yours. I'm good. No, I'm kidding. So I think that there's also the case that they're putting a lot more information onto the SERP as well. So, for instance, sometimes they will export, if they look at the address, if it doesn't have a Google Business Profile for instance, they might just put the snippet underneath the search results. So, instead of the meta description, they'll put the extract of the rich snippet of the address onto the SERP. So I think that there are opportunities where sometimes they're helping the business by providing the information rather than providing something that you need to click on because you don't actually need to click to get the address, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: And that's exactly my point. Throwing up a bunch of links trying to refine it, whether those links are irrelevant or whether you don't want the link at all, it’s not efficient. What is efficient? SGE is efficient. I hate to say it if you're one, but it is efficient in helping the user refine and get exactly to where they want to go. And you see Google does that. They have it at the bottom of the SGE box, I want to call it the AI box. The bottom of the AI box, they have follow up questions. You can also expand the box to get a breakdown of the original answer that Google gave via the SGE with links associated with each one of those answers. Meaning it's just helping you refine, refine, refine way more efficiently than what's going on now. And I think it's really important to understand because it actually, I think makes sense for what users do want. And I think what's going to happen, let's get to the heart of the issue, I think traffic is going to go down. Crystal Carter: I think that we are going to see a situation where the way that people search and the kinds of content that people expect to see is going to change. Even now as I think about creating content, when you think about it, it's like what can we do that's unique? And I think that that's really important. There was, I mentioned it before, but Joe Hall has a great article about how to write better than ChatGPT. And one of the things that he talks about is having an actual opinion, having something actually unique. And I think that one of the searches that I'm starting to see a lot, I know that "Near me" for instance, was a search that used to show up a lot. But examples is something that I'm starting to see a lot, where there's like a query about X, Y, or Z with examples, for instance, so that people can know, can actually figure out how to do it, how to see it, how to implement it. And I think that I've certainly found that when I'm searching using LLMs, using generative search, that the kinds of queries that I ask are different because I know that it's like it's not just long tail- Crystal Carter: Yeah. It doesn't even need to necessarily make sense all the time, but it's able to understand and discern what I'm saying. And I think it's very similar to, obviously I've done a lot of research on visual search, but one of the things that I think is great about visual search, particularly using Google Lens and those sorts of things, is that you can search and find information about something that you can't name. And that's very difficult to do in traditional search. In traditional search, if I was just to type in, if I found a berry or something, let's say I'm camping on this mountain, I don't know why we keep talking about this mountain. And let's say we're in this mountain and I think that I can eat this because I foraging- Mordy Oberstein: Don't eat it. Don't eat it. Crystal Carter: Well, but I like foraging. So let's say I'm looking at this hedge, I'm like, "Oh, I think this is one of those. I think I could eat this berry." If I search it on Google Lens, I'm in the woods. I don't know what the name of this berry is. If I search it on Google Lens, they can tell me if this berry is a berry and I can see from the different things whether or not this is edible or whether or not there's something similar to it that is not edible. Mordy Oberstein: If it's red, it won't make you dead. Isn't that the berries? Crystal Carter: Raspberries are red. But I think that in a generative search sort of thing, if you're in a situation where you're like, "How do I play this game?" Or "I found this thing that has this, this and this. What is it?" Mordy Oberstein: You're not going to get an answer. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right. So if you were add that into a search, it wouldn't make any sense. If I were to Google red berry on a hedge, I'd just get a million different search results that wouldn't make any sense. It'd be like, "What are you talking about?" I'd be like, "I don't know." But what I find is that when I've done searches with generative search, generative LLMs, ChatGPT, et cetera, if I find something that I don't know and they give me an answer and I don't understand the answer, I can say, "I don't know what you mean. What does this word mean?" And they can go, "Oh, I mean this, this, and this." And I'm like, "I'm still not with you. Try me one more time." And so, you can do the refinements based on your understanding and based on your level of knowledge, which is something that is more efficient because I've definitely had it before where I've tried to search for things that were a bit complex and just gave up in the end. Mordy Oberstein: I'll throw another scenario. You search, and this is kind of when traffic is going to go down, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. I know it's a hot take and people have different opinions. This is just my opinion. But many times I've searched for something and I'm not very explicit because I don't know. And you run a search and you go to a website thinking, okay, maybe this is I. And it's not, and you leave. And then you go to another site, maybe that's it. And it's not, and you leave. Now, for that site, that's traffic. But is that real traffic? I say no. I say that's not actual... Unless you're working with the number of visitors to the page and this is how you get ads. Leaving that model aside for a second, that's not real traffic. And then my example, I don't know if I said on this podcast, but I know I said it on Twitter is Matlock. Back in the day when you were home from school, there was five channels with the bunny ears. This is before cable. That's all you had. And you had an antenna and you had the channels and there was five of them. And there was basically one o'clock in the afternoon, there was All My Children, General Hospital and Matlock. I was not watching General Hospital, I was not watching All My Children. The only other option was Matlock. So Matlock's numbers way up. All the sick kids at home who aren't watching soap operas, they're watching Matlock. Do people really want Matlock? Now, I do love Matlock. I have nothing against Matlock at all. Andy Griffith is great. It's a great TV show. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Google Matlock, it's awesome. Mordy Oberstein: But the numbers were inflated because there was nothing else. I couldn't find anything else. I feel that way with web traffic. I feel like the numbers are inflated because we're all googling this stuff, it's not exactly what you want, or there's nothing better, I might as well go with this. Crystal Carter: I think there's definitely a place for well-crafted, well-curated with a good user experience. I think there's definitely a place for content that has a good user experience, because the search experience, for instance, that one you were talking about with the baseball scores, that's not useful. That's not helpful. And content that doesn't just give you what you want but helps you discover new things as well, I think that that sort of thing I think is really valuable. I'm definitely, if I think about getting old school or whatever, the time I used to spend in the library, and don't get me wrong, I still go to the library as well, but in a library or a bookstore or something, one of the things that's nice about going to a library or bookstore or even a record shop or whatever is browsing. I've definitely discovered new music and stuff from just seeing something on a shelf that I thought looked interesting. And Amoeba Music in Los Angeles is a fantastic record store. It's absolutely incredible. And somebody said, "What is it?" I'm like, "It's the happiest place on earth. It's literally Disney." And they curate everything. And there aren't that many record stores around anymore. There aren't that many music shops or whatever. But it's worth visiting that place because they have highly curated, verified, really good stuff that you can't find anywhere else. And they also have live music and stuff like that. So they're adding a lot to the experience in order to make it good quality and- Mordy Oberstein: And that's what's going to happen with content. People are going to want, okay, I got the basics down. You give me the information about the mountain and the hiking. I need something niche, I need something specific. That overall traffic might be less, but it's going to be more targeted, more specific and going to be more intentional. And that's more high quality traffic in my mind. So I think that's what's going to happen. Crystal Carter: And more experiential as well. I think that's what the- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that's all, yeah. Crystal Carter: ... the experience and the EEAT is super important. Mordy Oberstein: That's what separates it out. Crystal Carter: And also, the examples, people asking for examples. So not only a website that says "This mountain is great to hike with children because I read it on six other blogs so that it's-" Mordy Oberstein: No, give me something the machine can't give me. Crystal Carter: Right. So I've hiked this mountain with my family in September and it was like this. I hiked it into January and it was like that. I hiked it in May and it was like this. Don't hike it in August because it's too hot. Mordy Oberstein: You want the information that says the book might say it's not really rocky, let me tell you, it was way rockier than that website said. Crystal Carter: Right. You're going to need some shoes. Bring appropriate footwear. Do not skimp on the footwear. PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:28:04] Crystal Carter: Shoes. Bring appropriate footwear. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: Do not skip on the footwear. These are things that are going to be really, really useful. And I think we've seen this in some web communities. For instance, mom blogs can be incredibly explicit about some of the ins and outs of early days with kids and stuff. And that kind of real world, real experience stuff is going to be really valuable. And I think that that is the kind of thing that will get you actual clicks. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's also really valuable? Whatever Mike King says is really valuable. Crystal Carter: It's true. Mordy Oberstein: Literally. Crystal Carter: It's true. It's true. Mordy Oberstein: I literally mean that. True. He's amazing. We did a webinar with him about AI and the future of SEO and web content. So definitely check that out. He was amazing. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: We thought to ask him about affiliates because affiliates, they really need that traffic. What's going to happen? Here's Mike King on the impact of AI and SGE on affiliates. Mike King: The impact on affiliate marketers for SGE, I think it's going to be pretty wide-sweeping as far as it's going to cut out a lot of the sites that are just about, let's do an article that's a list of 5 to 10 products that they're reviewing, so that they can put the links back to those products and then drive that affiliate revenue. I think that's going to drop a atomic bomb in the middle of that business model because as you're seeing already with the products, you can pull a formal query, and I think I did this one. It was like, what's the best microphone for recording in a New York City apartment? And it effectively generated me an article on that very specific use case. And the reality of it is that because of how generative AI's context windows work, it's actually going to be a better result for the end user because it's going to be very specific to that set of queries that the user made in successive order. And so it's going to be better than what you're getting out of affiliate marketers content because again, it's more specific. But the other aspect of it is, what's likely going to happen is affiliate marketers are going to make the switch to using generative AI for this. And so it's going to be one of those snakes eating its tail sort of things. And then Google's going to have to progressively get better at it by using structured data to then make their results better. And then it's just going to continue to be this cycle of like, well, how can we make it better? I think for the end user, it's going to be a overall better experience, but it's going to drive down affiliate commissions for these businesses. And then there's only going to be a handful of sites that remain. But again, because Google is going to put that front and center for users, I think over time more and more user behavior is going to be like, oh, I want to see the AI snapshot because it's going to give me exactly what I want. All in all, I think if you're in the affiliate space and that's what you're primarily doing, you're going to have to think about other types of content to support this more video content and things like that. Other formats that Google isn't in yet. But even so, it's only a matter of time until they get there. So really, it's just going to shift affiliate marketers into other channels. Mordy Oberstein: Mike always has something amazing to say. I think hands down, it's always super thoughtful and deep. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think he's very down to earth in the way that he talks about things. He speaks in plain English, but he is also talking about some very complex topics. He's been working in the AI space for years now and has some proprietary software around AI as well. So it's absolutely, absolutely worth following Mike and checking out more of his stuff because he just drops gems all day long. Mordy Oberstein: Truth. It's @iPoll rank on Twitter, we'll link to that in the show notes. Thank you again, Mike. We really appreciate you greatly. You're a treasure to the entire SEO community. Legit. Now, being that we're talking about clicks from the SERP, it's one thing to get clicks. It's another thing to have the people coming who are doing the clicking actually pay you the money and convert. Which is basically like you have to make those clicks mean something. So basically SEO without CRO is like Rocky without Adrian. It's like Arnold without Willis. It's like the A-Team without Mr. T. It's like Night Rider without the talking car. I could go on. So with that, let's travel across Wix first as we talk to our own CRO specialist, Amanda Weiner, about what you can do to make sure that your web traffic earns the thing that you're looking for, which is an increase in your bottom line. Speaker X: 3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: I'm with Amanda Weiner. Amanda, first off, thank you for joining us on the SERPS Up podcast. Amanda Weiner: Thanks so much for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Of course. You're one of our favorite people at Wix. Just like... Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Amanda Weiner: Do you say that to everyone? Mordy Oberstein: No. No. Crystal Carter: We don't. Mordy Oberstein: We had Nati Elimelech on, our head of SEO, and I told him the actual opposite of that. He's one of my least favorite people. Yikes, I'm just kidding. Nati and I are like brothers who fight a lot. To get us started. CRO, what does it mean to you? Amanda Weiner: Well, conversion rate optimization to me is actually just being super aligned with our users and understanding the intent that the user comes to the page with and providing them with the experience that fits them. For me, it's super connected to UX and everything that we do on our pages in order to make them user-friendly and usable. And in order to actually get your money, that's what you got to focus on. You got to focus on making sure that your page is usable in the most basic sense of the word. Mordy Oberstein: I love that because usually when you think of CRO, you're thinking, okay, I think of CTAs. How do I get conversions? How do I drive the user down the funnel? Not, how do I make this page actually usable so the experience is pleasant, logical, and efficient, which will then lead them to the conversion? Amanda Weiner: Yeah, it's definitely the biggest thing. Not to say CTAs aren't important, but for sure you need a page that hits the intent right. No matter what. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think hitting the intent is something that's really important. I was teaching some folks about competitor research and one of the things that you learn very quickly from competitor research is the folks that show up at the top or the folks that are meeting the intent straight away. If I look up a taxi firm in New York or something, I want to book a taxi. I don't want to see loads of pictures of your taxi drivers hanging out, having a lovely time. I don't want to hear about the history of your taxi firm on the homepage. When I get there, I want to see where I can book a taxi. Don't bury that information. And I think that that's important. That leads me on to a question that I think is a decent question. How do you decide what's a priority for users in terms of CRO when you're carrying out CRO optimization? Amanda Weiner: Like you mentioned yourself, it's super important, first of all to hit that intent right away, but also competitor research. We need to know what is out there, what is the other information that our users who are coming to our site are being bombarded with? Because we are assuming that our users are... They're smart these days. They're doing their research, they know what's out there and we want to make sure that we're providing them with the information that they're looking for, the information that's unique to us. We want to provide a proper proposition. We're giving some value here, and that makes us stand out. And even though it might not be the only element, for sure we want to provide them with an easy entry point into our funnel and a CTA that really stands out so that they know where to go. Users shouldn't have to look for where to go. You should be able to give it to them wherever they are. Crystal Carter: And I think with CTAs, people expect to be able to... They look for them. If I go to a hotel website or something, I want to see the Book Here, Book a Room, Start Your Vacation, whatever it is. I want to find that and I want it to be easy to find. I think sometimes people will add things into the top nav bar or something so that there's always a place where you can find a Book Now and it's fairly low-key. Even if you're on another page or something. Let's say you decide you want to book while you're reading some lovely blog. That blog really seals the deal for you. Then you can find that there. What considerations do you make when deciding on the prominence of a CTA? When do you just go like, yeah, this is a CTA page, book now? Or when do you roll it back? Amanda Weiner: Like many other things with SEO for example, it comes down to is there transactional intent on this page, or is it meant to be informational? If it's transactional, then the first thing people should see, it should stand out the most. It should be in the center of your page is that main CTA. No one should have to find it. People are coming with the intent to give you your money. You should let them do that. Now, if a page is meant to be more informational, then it becomes a little trickier. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't give them entry points. Sometimes information is that last key thing that they need in order to commit. And we should be sure that we're giving them entry points. We should be proud of our products and say, even if you're coming with this informational intent, "Hey, here's the product that can support what this information is providing." But of course, they're coming with intent to learn something, so it has to be a little more subtle. Maybe on the side, maybe as you said, just making sure they could find it in the header, maybe a slur. If we're talking about blog articles, a natural mention of our products in our blog articles, things like that. That can really help those people who are looking for the information also get to our products. Mordy Oberstein: How do you balance that, though? If I was in a courtroom right now, the other attorney would be all, "Leading." Which I'm not a hundred percent sure what exactly that means, but from watching enough Matlock, I'm pretty sure that I do. How do you balance all of that? Because I feel like when I'm thinking about CRO and I'm thinking about users, I think of my father. And my father is not computer savvy, but he's computer savvy enough to be highly, highly skeptical. And I think that in the age of the web right now, people are far more skeptical. I think they've caught on to us, kind of thing. "I know what you're up to. I know what you're doing." My wife is the same thing. "Oh, how do they know that I was just looking for something and now I get a Facebook ad? That's creepy." How do you balance out all of the skepticism and all of the cynicism and all of the concern that people have and push the conversion at the same time? Amanda Weiner: It's a great question and it's really a difficult thing that we grapple with a lot. Especially on things that are more informational, like blog articles, etc. I think there's a difference between putting a flashy banner that says Click Here, which is understandably sort of sketchy. And putting something that says, "Hey, you want to read about something vaguely related to websites. By the way, here's something that you can do to also create your own." Which is what we do here at Wix. Meaning, there's a way to put it in the text, to say we are adding value for you by showing you this product. And the key is that the user should believe that what we're offering is truly an added value. It's not just an annoying banner. It's really an added value that they could find. "Oh wow, how did they know? I was actually really curious now to create my own website. So nice that they added that little link there for me." Mordy Oberstein: Note to self: Remove blinking banner from website. Thank you. Okay, follow-up to that. How do you create a CTA in that sense? Because sometimes they're very Click Now! Buy! Buy Now! Do it now! And I always think of the Office of Dwight. Do it. Do it now. Do it now. And that to me are CTAs. And sometimes I feel like even when you don't mean to be pushy, they are pushy. Amanda Weiner: Yeah, also another good question. I think there's a lot of debate about this in the little CRO world that exists. Do you want to give that time-sensitive, "you need to do this now, you need to do it today"? Is that what gives the push? Or is it creating a CTA that makes you feel that you want something? There's a lot of directions that CTAs can go in and depends also on what's surrounding it. If we're talking about our product page, what does the H1 say? Whatever they H1 says, the CTA should be aligned with that. They don't live in a bubble, CTAs. It's important to remember that there's context, and it depends what are the other values and the other things that are elements that are happening on a page that can direct you toward what the content of your CTA should really be. Crystal Carter: I think it's very interesting to talk about some of the nuances there. There's a great article in the Wix SEO Hub about beginner's guides to CTAs, and they break it down into lots of different types. I don't know if you know, and I don't know if I've mentioned it on this podcast, but I recently went to see Beyoncé and when I was buying Beyoncé tickets- Mordy Oberstein: You did? Crystal Carter: Did I? Yeah. No, I did. Mordy Oberstein: You did not tell me this. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. I recently went to see Beyoncé, and when I was trying to get Beyoncé tickets to see Beyoncé, basically when you go onto the ticket thing, they'll tell you there's only a few left. Many people are looking at this. Six people have looked at these tickets recently. And sometimes you get this with flights as well, where they'll say there's only five seats left or there's only... And I think that- Mordy Oberstein: Amazon. Crystal Carter: Amazon, lots of people are... And you see this for- Mordy Oberstein: Three products left. Crystal Carter: Right. And tons of people are looking at this dress right now. You better get it now while it's hot because they might buy it and then you won't. And I think that they will vary depending on the type of product, depending on the type of customer expectations. So if it's something time-sensitive or if it's like, we only have so many of these things... PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:42:04] Crystal Carter: If it's something time-sensitive, or if it's like, "We only have so many of these things," then you can add in something that adds a sense of urgency as well, into those sorts of elements. So, it's interesting that you talk about the nuance and how it varies depending on the product and the product experience. Amanda Weiner: Yeah, for sure. And I'll just add here also, something that we do on our homepage, that everyone can see, is we have a little disclaimer under the CTA. Now, this isn't hardcore CRO best practice of you must have a disclaimer under CTA, but I do think that it's exactly what you're touching on here, Crystal, that there's something, it's that last minute thing that pushes the user over the edge. But again, it has to come within context, right? It has to be the right disclaimer, the right thing that you're sharing with them according to the product that you're offering or according to the page that you're on. Crystal Carter: Right. So like, "We have 15% off until Monday," just letting you know, until Monday. Mordy Oberstein: Monday is now. Crystal Carter: Right, Monday is now. You have 15% off until Monday. Mordy Oberstein: It's always Monday. Tuesday is also Monday. Crystal Carter: But that creates a thing. I think also we would be remiss if we said anything about CRO and we didn't talk about testing. I know for a fact that we test a lot of our CRO across the website. Mordy Oberstein: I get the emails. Crystal Carter: All the time. Like, "We tested this, and we put it in this color, we put it in this color blue, then we put it in light blue and we saw a different..." No. So- Mordy Oberstein: I love light blue. It's my favorite. It's my favorite CTA color. Amanda Weiner: It makes a surprising amount of difference, the CTA color. Mordy Oberstein: It does. It does. A blinking purple didn't work. That's why I made it. Amanda Weiner: Note to self. Mordy Oberstein: Note to self. Crystal Carter: I don't know if you can talk to us about some of your testing methods and your favorite things to test or ways to test? Amanda Weiner: Yeah, for sure. There are a couple different ways that we can test and that we do test here at Wix. I would say the most common testing method is a classic A/B test, where you make one change on a page and you expose 50% of users to one change and 50% of users to the old version. And then you see what happens. You give it some time and see how the users interact with that. Now, a lot of what we do here on our CRO team is thinking a lot about what's a worthwhile test, what's a test that'll move the needle? What's a test that we should be thinking about? Because when you think about it, you can run a test on every single tiny element on the page and everything makes a difference. And you can run endless tests like that. And there's a certain prioritization that has to happen there in that process. And I have to say that it's not always what you expect to move the needle that moves the needle. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Amanda Weiner: That's the beauty of testing, I think. Crystal Carter: And also, I've had it before where I've done CRO and I'm like, "Oh, this will definitely..., and it does nothing. It does nothing. And I'm like, "what?" Mordy Oberstein: But intuitively, it makes a lot of sense that it's going to be something. Crystal Carter: Intuitively you're like, "Guys, this is going to be amazing. My hypothesis is to the moon," and then nothing happens. Also, I think you say like 50% of users, it's interesting the way you can split out users as well. So it might be like users who've come from one website, or users who are on mobile, or users who are in a certain language, or that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: Right, geos can definitely make a difference. Amanda Weiner: Yeah. So we do that. We split our tests per device, per geo. Also, per like, is it someone who it's their first time to the page or not? Things like that. Those are the things that we think about. Mordy Oberstein: So I would be remiss if we didn't ask before we have to go, what is your favorite generic CTA? Amanda Weiner: The text you mean? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, like "buy now" or "click here," which is the best of the generic ones? Amanda Weiner: "Start free" is strong. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, start free. It's very existential, like "start free." Amanda Weiner: It's no commitment here. You just start for free. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes, yes. It's like, "You could start, it doesn't cost anything. I've told you all of the things you need to know. What's holding you back? Just go for it." Amanda Weiner: "Just do it." Mordy Oberstein: And buying or clicking on this thing will not lead to imprisonment. You'll be free. Crystal Carter: You'll be free. That's very similar to the Amazon's like classic "Buy now with one click." It's like, not only can you buy now, but also you're setting the expectation. You're explaining something about it as well. So you're adding the value proposition into the CTA in a couple of words. And I think you're right, when you hit that sweet spot, that's brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: Also, it could be really predictive, like if you're signing up to be part of the mafia, start free. How you end up is a totally different story. We don't know. "Start free." Crystal Carter: He’s a made guy!... and watch out for Fredo. Mordy Oberstein: Amanda? Poor Fredo. Amanda, where can people find you? Amanda Weiner: Ooh, I'm not a big social media person, but you can find me on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: All right, follow her. Follow here. Follow free. Follow free. Amanda Weiner: Follow free. Mordy Oberstein: Follow free. Amanda Weiner: No extra charge. Mordy Oberstein: Amanda, thank you so much for joining us. Amanda Weiner: Thank you so much. Speaker 1: Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So now that we know about getting clicks, you know what you should click on? You should click on the SEO news articles that Barry Schwartz puts out and also the folks over at SEJ and Search Engine Land which is also Barry Schwartz. Give him those clicks because those are always worth reading. But in the meantime, to wet your appetite, we'll just get into a little bit of the news with this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Universal Analytics is officially replaced by Google Analytics. More of that coming from Nicola Agius over at Search Engine Land. Yep, Universal Analytics is dead. It is no more. We are in a GA4 world now, good luck to us all. We have a bunch of resources for you on the Wix SEO learning hub where you can learn more about GA4 and how to use it, and so forth. Again, good luck to us all. Also gone or to be gone, Buy on Google. Boy, we're dropping life flies here. Put of the great Barry Schwartz, Google to shutter Buy on Google program in the U.S. This will happen on September 26th. The Buy on Google program let you check out without ever visiting the merchant site. You just checked out on Google. Hence, Buy on Google. This comes as Google is testing a new construct that takes you from Google right to the merchant's page, or rather their checkout page on the actual site. I believe Glen Gabe was commenting on Twitter about this. Do users really want that? Is that the right experience for them? He's not so sure. I am with Glen, good place to be. But if I am somebody who's buying, I'm a little bit old-fashioned when I buy online, I like to see the experience. I don't want to go right to a checkout page. I want to see the site, get a sense of things, have a little bit of context before I check out. So we'll see. Also from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable: Bing gains AI shopping features for a price match buying guides and review summaries. So basically via the sidebar feature on edge, you search for our product. Well, you don't search in the sidebar feature, you go to Bing, you search for our product, let's say, new wireless headphones. You go to the page that is selling the headphones, open the sidebar in edge and Bing may show you a prompt in the chat feature that will let you explore information about the product. So basically a buying guide, it's going over specs. So for headphones it would be specs like battery life, that sort of thing. You'll get a review summary and so forth. I love this. I think a more integrated approach to using the AI chat features is more powerful than just having the user enter a query initially, and that's their first exposure to anything. They're starting off with the query, getting an AI response. I feel like this integrated approach where you catch the user at the right moment, and then throw them into an AI chat experience is far more powerful. But that's just me. But it is super interesting. I really like what Bing is doing here. It's very cool. And that is this week's Snappy News. So again, make sure you go over and click on those articles from the show notes. Give those websites some traffic that we sent you, give all the SEO news websites that high CTR they deserve. Crystal Carter: It's absolutely worth it. Barry is the hardest working mountain in search, easily. Mordy Oberstein: It's not even close. Crystal Carter: Not even close. Mordy Oberstein: John Mueller or Aleda like number two? Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And when I say it's not even close... They do a tremendous amount. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know... Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Unbelievable. I don't even know how do they keep up? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But Barry's just a different level. Crystal Carter: Just thousands upon thousands- Mordy Oberstein: Somehow he manages. Crystal Carter: ... upon thousands, upon thousands upon thousands of articles Mordy Oberstein: Now who might help you find some of these articles? Always sharing some amazing things on Twitter, repurposing content, sharing content, shouting out content; Jeannie Hill. Speaker 2: Jeannie Hill. She's absolutely fantastic and she's so clever as well. Absolutely follow of the week. She's super friendly, super nice, and also just super, super clever. She's particularly good at machine learning sort of stuff and just super fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and she'll always share a really good article whether she wrote it or someone else wrote it. So it's a great follow because it's basically a curated feed of SEO relevancy. Also fellow Minnesotian, and I'm not from Minnesota, but there's so many... I made it sound like I'm from... I'm not from Minnesota. There's so many great SEOs out of Minnesota. I meant search crew and Nick Leroy, Susan, tons of great Minnesotan in SEO. Jeannie's another one. Speaker 2: She's fantastic. And she's got some great knowledge, particularly about Semantic search. And I remember being in a Twitter conversation with her about that. She's incredibly, incredibly clever and incredibly kind. And just a brilliant member of the SEO community. So shout out to Jeannie. Mordy Oberstein: So make sure you give Jeannie a follow over at Essential Skill, E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A-L S-K-I-L-L on Twitter. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. So make sure you click that follow button for Jeannie. Is there click-through rate for Twitter follows? Is that a thing? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: No, I don't think it's a thing. Not every click requires a CTR number next to it. Speaker 2: Doesn't it? No. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. I feel like I put my foot in my mouth with that one. Although Mark is like, "Yeah, it does." Crystal Carter: I like a green arrow. I'm not going to lie. I log in, seeing my little green arrow makes me happy. Mordy Oberstein: Clicks are up. Crystal Carter: Clicks are up. Mordy Oberstein: That's all you need to know. Clicks are up. It's almost like a Wall Street of SEO, you walk into like "What's going on?" "Clicks are up!" And you're good to go. Well, that'll bring us to the end of this week's podcast. 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 an all new episodes we dive into. Does Page experience still matter? Short answer, yes. Look forward, wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning of over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and our newsletter on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guested 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. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Mike King Amanda Weiner Jeannie Hill Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter IPullRank Guide to CTAs News: Universal Analytics is officially replaced by Google Analytics 4 Bing Gains AI Shopping Features For Price Match, Buying Guides & Review Summaries Google To Shutter Buy On Google Program In US Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Mike King Amanda Weiner Jeannie Hill Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter IPullRank Guide to CTAs News: Universal Analytics is officially replaced by Google Analytics 4 Bing Gains AI Shopping Features For Price Match, Buying Guides & Review Summaries Google To Shutter Buy On Google Program In US Transcript 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 pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, the fantastic, the marvelous, the absolutely unequivocal, the amazing, the fantastic, the wonderful Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thanks very much, Mordy. That was very kind, and nice, and very good. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Insert clip from Latka from Taxi. Thank you very much. Crystal Carter: You're welcome to save the day. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's great. By the way, if I sound different, I don't know if I do because I can't really hear myself talk, I have a terrible cold that I can't get rid of. Crystal Carter: This is very, very true. I've been hearing this cough for every day. Mordy Oberstein: Every meeting is me- Crystal Carter: Every meeting. Mordy Oberstein: ... packing my brains out. Crystal Carter: We've been planning what to do if Mordy doesn't make it, but he will. He will. It'll be fine. He's going to be fine. We're sending help. Mordy Oberstein: Share me a mint chocolate chip ice cream. That's my wish. Yeah, remember. From Spot from Star Trek too, remember. Anyway, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix for not only can you subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can level up your blog's SEO with our brand new-ish, was in Beta, SEO assistant. Audit your On-page SEO like never before, literally, because not only will we give you the foundations like it's a title tag optimize, on your headers optimize, alt text, and so forth, but will literally tell you if the page is indexed or not if you have your site connected to search console. Boom shaka laka laka, like it's NBA Jam 1998. Crystal Carter: It's an amazing tool. I cannot recommend it enough. It is so useful because it puts it all in a list. Not only can you check it off, but you can actually action it from the list. It's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. Just like NBA Jam 1998, which is a great arcade game. You got to optimize those title tags and meta descriptions because they can help you with your CTR. I mean, should there be any CTR in the future, gasp and cry me a river at the same time, because today, we're talking about the future of CTR. Will AI and SGE kill clicks from the SERP like raid kills roaches and all other sorts of hyperbole? Okay. Okay. Everyone chill. Today, we're taking a hard and mature look at the current state of web traffic, how Google's SGE might impact web traffic, and whether or not it's all good or all bad, or most likely, perhaps somewhere in between. Plus, SEO goat, Mike King, stops by to chat about AI and SGE and its impact on affiliate traffic. Since we're talking about CTR, let's make sure your pages actually do what they're supposed to do once folks land on them from the SERP. As we talk to Wix's very own CRO aficionado, Amanda Weiner, she'll join us as we go across the Wixverse. Of course, we have this snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social. In the spirit of Devo, you must click it as episode number 45 of the SERP's Up Podcast clears up all of this congestion and conjecture about SGE, and AI, and traffic from the SERP. You must click it. I feel like every time I optimize a page for SEO- Crystal Carter: Oh, I have various songs. There's the Beyonce song called Let Me Upgrade You. I sing that one. Missy Elliott has the song Work It. I sing, "Metadata, data. I read descriptions like blah, blah, blah." Mordy Oberstein: SEOs, we all have our little song we sing, get our head off as we optimize our way. Crystal Carter: Indeed. I have others. I have a whole, a Baby One More Time. Mordy Oberstein: A whole playlist? Let's just share it on Spotify with the world. Crystal Carter: It's not a playlist. They're originals. Well, not originals. Mordy Oberstein: There's original Crystal songs about SEO? Crystal Carter: No, not yet. Maybe there should be. Crystal Carter: Oh my god. Okay. People who are listening, tag us if you want to be in the SEO album. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, our SEO album. We're dropping it on a record label soon. Crystal Carter: Exclusive worldwide like Pit Bull and DJ Khaled. Another one. Mordy Oberstein: I would love to have a record. Which our guest today, Mike King, he's got records literally though. Crystal Carter: That's absolutely true. He does. He is indeed Mr. Worldwide, like he is indeed out there worldwide talking about SEO and making stuff happen. Mordy Oberstein: On Twitter, he is Mic King, M-I-C King. I like that. It's good. Yes, indeed. Okay. Just a quick refresher about SGE, Search Generative Experience, and why there's concern. Google IO 2023, which we had a whole podcast about, so we'll link to that in the show notes, Google announced its AI experience on the SERP, which is known as SGE, Search Generative Experience. What will happen is you're going to ask Google, "Hey, what's it like to hike," I don't know, "whatever canyon with kids and a dog?" Google will spin up a generative answer like ChatGPT would and give you a whole summary of what you need to know about hiking that canyon with dogs and kids. I'll tell you right now, it's easier to hike with the dog than the kids, having kids. Yes. At the same time, there'll be a couple of organic results sprinkled in there on the side. You can expand that and get some more organic results with more SGE breakdowns. But the question is, how is all of this going to impact clicks to websites if the main results or the traditional or organic results are going to be beneath this box? How are we going to get clicks? Everyone's wondering what that's going to be like. "Oh my goodness." Some people have gotten access to the SGE through the Search Labs at Google. Let us have a trial of. Some folks have been like, "Oh, no. CTR is going to die. No one's going to get clicks." Other people have been like, "Well, I don't think it'd be as bad as you might think it's going to be. I think it'll be just fine." That's what we're talking about today. That's where we're at. Crystal Carter: This is a conversation that SEOs bring up a lot in terms of zero clicks or click-through rates and things like that. This is the conversation that goes back a good couple of years to when featured snippets came through, which actually featured snippets started being a lot, lot more prevalent. Featured snippets, we think of as normal, but they weren't always there. When Google started putting that through, the number one ranking position would be underneath the featured snippet. People were like, "Well, what's going on?" From the days of position zero, this has been a conversation. I think that what we learn from the position zero situation, we can apply that to what we're seeing with SGE, is that being present in that top. In my opinion, being present in the search feature is a brand asset and is something that tends to be illustrative of a wider domain authority topic knowledge. For instance, if you're showing a featured snippet, which is also AI-generated and AI-enabled, if you're showing a featured snippet, people also ask, you're also going to show it knowledge panels. You're also going to show in lots of different parts of the search, for instance. That is going to give you a lot of visibility in front of consumers. That's going to show consumers, it's going to show users that you know what you're talking about with regards to that. If somebody enters a search generative experience search about going to a mountain with their children, and their dog, and their grandma, and everybody, and trying to get the whole family up the mountain top, then if they see you there and then they see you another time, they're not always going to use the search generative experience. I've used things for a while now. Sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's not. There's some topics where I don't even know where to start. I'm just like, "I don't even know what this is or how to get going with this conversation." Or, I've mentioned this before where I've tried to figure out what to do with Magic: The Gathering, for instance, and I went through some of the search results and there was so much. There was so much to read. I was just like, "I just need to answer this one question so I can play in my turn. Can you just answer this one question?" I think that when you have your brand showing up again and again and again in the search generative experience, then when they go to just do a regular search, they're going to look for you. They're going to find you and they're going to see you. When they see you there, they're more likely to click. I think that the nature of search will likely change, and I think the nature of clicks will potentially change. But at the end of the day, the brand visibility and the brand value that comes from being present within the generative search experience is going to be valuable as people use the web. Mordy Oberstein: I don't even know where to start with all of that. There's so much there to dive into. Someone hold my beer. I don't have a beer. Someone hold my coffee. Okay. Let's talk about the zero click thing really, really quick. By the way, the point you mentioned before... Okay. Actually, no. Let's start. My mind is overload right now. Let's start with the not always using the AI. We actually just covered this. When I say just, when we're recording on the EDGE of the Web news podcast that I do, which is a great way to keep up with the news. Check out that podcast. A little shout-out to Erin Sparks. There was an article on The Verge, I think it was, and they were basically looking for something around Ted Lasso. They used the SGE to get an answer and a summary of Ted. They just wanted to know what time was the show on, which is not the actual question because it's streaming... It's on whatever you want it to be on. But the point where they ask a very straightforward, "I just want the answer. I don't want that summary thing." Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. This is very similar to you. You did had a similar experience where you were... I'm trying to figure out the Yankees score or something. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Being updated, I should cover this also on the same podcast, being updated its AI to have more current sports scores. I was showing you how literally, it's like it doesn't make sense to me. Because you go to Bing, you type in Yankee score, it gives you a box with the answer. Now, I need it- Crystal Carter: Right, and it updates. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Now I want to go click on the chat experience and have it spit out the same answer that I already saw in far more time. I don't understand. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. I think that we're putting AI on lots of things that it doesn't always necessarily need to be on everything. There's lots of things that are just intelligent. Mordy Oberstein: Which is my point about the zero click thing at the same time, because when we did that, I think it's a very similar conversation. When Google started showing more direct answers, "How many home runs did Babe Ruth did?" There's telling you, "714." I don't want to go to a website for that information. I know SEOs took that as Google stealing my clicks, but is that really what happened? Or is Google just giving people what they want? When I search for the weather in New York City, I don't want to go to Google anymore. I just want to see a card on my phone. Crystal Carter: I have it on my watch. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the weather. We want to consume information super quickly and sometimes that's not the best... Conflict of interest aside, sometimes a website is not the best place to do that. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think there's a couple of things to remember there. Again, I say this all the time to SEOs, Google's mission is to organize the world's information. It's not to organize the world's websites. Websites are a great source of information. They're a fantastic source of information. They're a fantastic way to curate information. However, Google will give the information however they get it. I think one of the things that's tricky with LLMs in general is who owns the information? If somebody's done the research to find out, "Oh, they..." Somebody found some ancient stone and they finally translated that ancient language, and they did a full dissertation on the history of some ancient civilization and their ancient language and all of that sort of stuff, and then they publish their dissertation on a website or on wherever. Well now, that's just into the pot. Who owns that information? If somebody asks the question of, "What did that ancient tablet say?" Then the thing, she goes, "Oh, it says this." Then the person who spent all that time- Mordy Oberstein: It's a really good point because... I feel it's a separate point, but tangentially, I feel like with Google and search, we know the rules of the game. You don't want them to take good content, no index the page. But when the AI conglomeraters, for lack of word, came around, no one knew they existed and they were going around the web taking people's content. We didn't know the rules of engagement and they just took it. I do have a point of contention with that. I feel now, at this point, you know the rules of the game, you got to find a way to block them if you don't want it. I know Bing has actually talked about being able to block its AI from going to your website, which that does make good and healthy sense for the web, in my opinion. Crystal Carter: I think it'll be interesting because I think if that's the thing, is that when we compare this to featured snippets, for instance, so featured snippets will pull out extracts from your site. You make a list full- Mordy Oberstein: And Highlight them on the SERP and Blue. The exact thing they are looking . Crystal Carter: Right. They'll go to your website, they will call the good information, they will pull it out, they will put it on the SERP in the way that they want. If you have things at a big long table, they'll take it out of the table. They'll put the table on there in a way that fits with the beer. They do that all the time. They've done that for years. People have said before, they're like, "Hey, what about this? What about my..." You can say like, "No, if you can put a tag and that tag... It's like no snippet. Don't drop featured snippets from my site." People go, "Oh, okay, all right, fine." I think that that still comes to the same thing about that. Now with regards to the SGE, you get different kinds of results depending on the query. For instance- Mordy Oberstein: Shopping results. Crystal Carter: Right. The demo of Google IO, they showed an example of shopping and they showed the shopping- PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:14:04] Crystal Carter: ... Google I/O, they showed an example of shopping and they showed the shopping one coming all the way down and what's a good mountain bike, for instance. And they have like, "Oh, this one's good for this, this one's good for that, that one's good for this, and that one's good for that." But I think that part of the thing that's tricky at the moment is that there's a lot of, and they said this and we know this to be true, but there's a lot of duplicate content on the web. So that mountain bike is on 25 different websites. And so the SGE is able to sort of curate if they're able to do the same thing that Google Shopping does, which is to curate all of that information about where that bicycle is being sold. And then they'll offer the people who are selling them, and I think that this also comes down to making sure that you understand your brand's USP. Because at the end of the day, when people do click to your website, what is going to make them click? What is the thing that's going to make them actually come and seal the deal at your website? So lots of people sell mountain bikes, but I know that this one place that sells the mountain bikes gives a certain amount to charity. Or I know this one place that sells the mountain bikes, I'm already a member. I've already got a loyalty card or something with them, or I know that they can deliver to me locally or whatever it is. In order to get the click, you have to also understand your USP, make the click valuable to you and them. Mordy Oberstein: And let us say amen. This is such a good point and it's so overlooked and it feels so foundational. Let me think, walk through history, how I think we got here and why I think that actually makes sense. Google has been figuring out that, hey, when you search for best vacation, you don't actually want the super top level best vacation spots. You want best vacations in the winter with my kids, without my kids. Best vacation in the winter without my kids- Take that back. I don't know what I was thinking. Crystal Carter: You did that other mountain trip and you were like, "No, not this time. Next time we're not taking them." Mordy Oberstein: And Google's trying to figure out ways for them to filter you through in order to get you from best vacation to best vacation without my kids in the winter. And they've added, I actually have data from this, I'm not sure it's going to be out yet by the time we release this episode, but I have data from nozzle.io, great data that shows that relatively recently, like 2022, since 2022 basically, end of 2022, there's been a huge increase in unpaid URLs at the top of the SERP above the fold on the results page. Not organic results per se, but links like carousels. People also search for links, site links, all these ways to filter you through because Google realizes that they have to take you from the very general search to what you actually want and they need to give you the opportunity to refine the query. Crystal Carter: So, a few years ago, Redfish can do the whole report on zero-click searches and things like that. He said 62% of searches or 64% of searches are zero-click. And Danny Sullivan from Google responded with an article that said very similar to exactly what you're talking about, is that we roll out lots of helpful features to help people quickly find what they're looking for, including maps, videos, links to products, services you can buy directly, flight and hotel options, local business information, hours of operation, service and delivery. And so, through that, they've said in this, our search results page, which used to show 10 blue links, now shows on an average 26 links- Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Crystal Carter: ... websites on a single search results page- Mordy Oberstein: There you go. I didn't even know that existed. I totally forgot about that. Thank you, Nozzle. Thank you, Danny. Works perfectly. So I'll throw one more stat at you. CTR has not gone up commensurately. It's gone up a little bit since they've done this, but not a ton. When I say CTR, I don't mean too organic, I mean to any link above the fold. It's gone up a bit, but not a lot. Meaning the refinements working a little bit, but it's not very efficient. You're throwing a whole bunch of links at people to trying to get them to refine it, refine, refine it. But I think it's been a spattering of links, but it hasn't been truly effective in getting the user to where exactly they want to go. Crystal Carter: I'm interested in that actually because I'm just thinking about Google Business Profile, for instance. Google Business Profile, which Google has invested a lot in in the last few years and Google Maps generally, which they're investing a lot in. And also things like Google Hotels for instance. So, in terms of that, if I want to know if a business is open, previously I would've had to click onto their website to find their opening hours. Now I can see if they're open when I go to the SERP because it says Morty's Ice Cream Emporium is open from 9:00 AM to- Mordy Oberstein: We only serve mint chocolate chip. That's all we serve. Crystal Carter: And everybody wears Yankees jersey. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. It's like, "Is this heaven?" Crystal Carter: They just played Billy Joel's best song. Mordy Oberstein: And my kids are not there. Crystal Carter: And it's not on a mountain. Okay, so on Morty's Ice Cream Emporium, it'll say the hours are this, here's where it's located. Yes, they have mint chocolate chip ice cream because it has their menu on there. And it'll say like, "Is Morty's Ice Cream Emporium good for kids?" And they'll say, "No, we don't allow children in this place." No, I'm kidding. No, I'm kidding. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, we allow kids, just not my kids. Crystal Carter: Yeah, just not yours. I'm good. No, I'm kidding. So I think that there's also the case that they're putting a lot more information onto the SERP as well. So, for instance, sometimes they will export, if they look at the address, if it doesn't have a Google Business Profile for instance, they might just put the snippet underneath the search results. So, instead of the meta description, they'll put the extract of the rich snippet of the address onto the SERP. So I think that there are opportunities where sometimes they're helping the business by providing the information rather than providing something that you need to click on because you don't actually need to click to get the address, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: And that's exactly my point. Throwing up a bunch of links trying to refine it, whether those links are irrelevant or whether you don't want the link at all, it’s not efficient. What is efficient? SGE is efficient. I hate to say it if you're one, but it is efficient in helping the user refine and get exactly to where they want to go. And you see Google does that. They have it at the bottom of the SGE box, I want to call it the AI box. The bottom of the AI box, they have follow up questions. You can also expand the box to get a breakdown of the original answer that Google gave via the SGE with links associated with each one of those answers. Meaning it's just helping you refine, refine, refine way more efficiently than what's going on now. And I think it's really important to understand because it actually, I think makes sense for what users do want. And I think what's going to happen, let's get to the heart of the issue, I think traffic is going to go down. Crystal Carter: I think that we are going to see a situation where the way that people search and the kinds of content that people expect to see is going to change. Even now as I think about creating content, when you think about it, it's like what can we do that's unique? And I think that that's really important. There was, I mentioned it before, but Joe Hall has a great article about how to write better than ChatGPT. And one of the things that he talks about is having an actual opinion, having something actually unique. And I think that one of the searches that I'm starting to see a lot, I know that "Near me" for instance, was a search that used to show up a lot. But examples is something that I'm starting to see a lot, where there's like a query about X, Y, or Z with examples, for instance, so that people can know, can actually figure out how to do it, how to see it, how to implement it. And I think that I've certainly found that when I'm searching using LLMs, using generative search, that the kinds of queries that I ask are different because I know that it's like it's not just long tail- Crystal Carter: Yeah. It doesn't even need to necessarily make sense all the time, but it's able to understand and discern what I'm saying. And I think it's very similar to, obviously I've done a lot of research on visual search, but one of the things that I think is great about visual search, particularly using Google Lens and those sorts of things, is that you can search and find information about something that you can't name. And that's very difficult to do in traditional search. In traditional search, if I was just to type in, if I found a berry or something, let's say I'm camping on this mountain, I don't know why we keep talking about this mountain. And let's say we're in this mountain and I think that I can eat this because I foraging- Mordy Oberstein: Don't eat it. Don't eat it. Crystal Carter: Well, but I like foraging. So let's say I'm looking at this hedge, I'm like, "Oh, I think this is one of those. I think I could eat this berry." If I search it on Google Lens, I'm in the woods. I don't know what the name of this berry is. If I search it on Google Lens, they can tell me if this berry is a berry and I can see from the different things whether or not this is edible or whether or not there's something similar to it that is not edible. Mordy Oberstein: If it's red, it won't make you dead. Isn't that the berries? Crystal Carter: Raspberries are red. But I think that in a generative search sort of thing, if you're in a situation where you're like, "How do I play this game?" Or "I found this thing that has this, this and this. What is it?" Mordy Oberstein: You're not going to get an answer. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right. So if you were add that into a search, it wouldn't make any sense. If I were to Google red berry on a hedge, I'd just get a million different search results that wouldn't make any sense. It'd be like, "What are you talking about?" I'd be like, "I don't know." But what I find is that when I've done searches with generative search, generative LLMs, ChatGPT, et cetera, if I find something that I don't know and they give me an answer and I don't understand the answer, I can say, "I don't know what you mean. What does this word mean?" And they can go, "Oh, I mean this, this, and this." And I'm like, "I'm still not with you. Try me one more time." And so, you can do the refinements based on your understanding and based on your level of knowledge, which is something that is more efficient because I've definitely had it before where I've tried to search for things that were a bit complex and just gave up in the end. Mordy Oberstein: I'll throw another scenario. You search, and this is kind of when traffic is going to go down, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. I know it's a hot take and people have different opinions. This is just my opinion. But many times I've searched for something and I'm not very explicit because I don't know. And you run a search and you go to a website thinking, okay, maybe this is I. And it's not, and you leave. And then you go to another site, maybe that's it. And it's not, and you leave. Now, for that site, that's traffic. But is that real traffic? I say no. I say that's not actual... Unless you're working with the number of visitors to the page and this is how you get ads. Leaving that model aside for a second, that's not real traffic. And then my example, I don't know if I said on this podcast, but I know I said it on Twitter is Matlock. Back in the day when you were home from school, there was five channels with the bunny ears. This is before cable. That's all you had. And you had an antenna and you had the channels and there was five of them. And there was basically one o'clock in the afternoon, there was All My Children, General Hospital and Matlock. I was not watching General Hospital, I was not watching All My Children. The only other option was Matlock. So Matlock's numbers way up. All the sick kids at home who aren't watching soap operas, they're watching Matlock. Do people really want Matlock? Now, I do love Matlock. I have nothing against Matlock at all. Andy Griffith is great. It's a great TV show. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Google Matlock, it's awesome. Mordy Oberstein: But the numbers were inflated because there was nothing else. I couldn't find anything else. I feel that way with web traffic. I feel like the numbers are inflated because we're all googling this stuff, it's not exactly what you want, or there's nothing better, I might as well go with this. Crystal Carter: I think there's definitely a place for well-crafted, well-curated with a good user experience. I think there's definitely a place for content that has a good user experience, because the search experience, for instance, that one you were talking about with the baseball scores, that's not useful. That's not helpful. And content that doesn't just give you what you want but helps you discover new things as well, I think that that sort of thing I think is really valuable. I'm definitely, if I think about getting old school or whatever, the time I used to spend in the library, and don't get me wrong, I still go to the library as well, but in a library or a bookstore or something, one of the things that's nice about going to a library or bookstore or even a record shop or whatever is browsing. I've definitely discovered new music and stuff from just seeing something on a shelf that I thought looked interesting. And Amoeba Music in Los Angeles is a fantastic record store. It's absolutely incredible. And somebody said, "What is it?" I'm like, "It's the happiest place on earth. It's literally Disney." And they curate everything. And there aren't that many record stores around anymore. There aren't that many music shops or whatever. But it's worth visiting that place because they have highly curated, verified, really good stuff that you can't find anywhere else. And they also have live music and stuff like that. So they're adding a lot to the experience in order to make it good quality and- Mordy Oberstein: And that's what's going to happen with content. People are going to want, okay, I got the basics down. You give me the information about the mountain and the hiking. I need something niche, I need something specific. That overall traffic might be less, but it's going to be more targeted, more specific and going to be more intentional. And that's more high quality traffic in my mind. So I think that's what's going to happen. Crystal Carter: And more experiential as well. I think that's what the- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that's all, yeah. Crystal Carter: ... the experience and the EEAT is super important. Mordy Oberstein: That's what separates it out. Crystal Carter: And also, the examples, people asking for examples. So not only a website that says "This mountain is great to hike with children because I read it on six other blogs so that it's-" Mordy Oberstein: No, give me something the machine can't give me. Crystal Carter: Right. So I've hiked this mountain with my family in September and it was like this. I hiked it into January and it was like that. I hiked it in May and it was like this. Don't hike it in August because it's too hot. Mordy Oberstein: You want the information that says the book might say it's not really rocky, let me tell you, it was way rockier than that website said. Crystal Carter: Right. You're going to need some shoes. Bring appropriate footwear. Do not skimp on the footwear. PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:28:04] Crystal Carter: Shoes. Bring appropriate footwear. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: Do not skip on the footwear. These are things that are going to be really, really useful. And I think we've seen this in some web communities. For instance, mom blogs can be incredibly explicit about some of the ins and outs of early days with kids and stuff. And that kind of real world, real experience stuff is going to be really valuable. And I think that that is the kind of thing that will get you actual clicks. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's also really valuable? Whatever Mike King says is really valuable. Crystal Carter: It's true. Mordy Oberstein: Literally. Crystal Carter: It's true. It's true. Mordy Oberstein: I literally mean that. True. He's amazing. We did a webinar with him about AI and the future of SEO and web content. So definitely check that out. He was amazing. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: We thought to ask him about affiliates because affiliates, they really need that traffic. What's going to happen? Here's Mike King on the impact of AI and SGE on affiliates. Mike King: The impact on affiliate marketers for SGE, I think it's going to be pretty wide-sweeping as far as it's going to cut out a lot of the sites that are just about, let's do an article that's a list of 5 to 10 products that they're reviewing, so that they can put the links back to those products and then drive that affiliate revenue. I think that's going to drop a atomic bomb in the middle of that business model because as you're seeing already with the products, you can pull a formal query, and I think I did this one. It was like, what's the best microphone for recording in a New York City apartment? And it effectively generated me an article on that very specific use case. And the reality of it is that because of how generative AI's context windows work, it's actually going to be a better result for the end user because it's going to be very specific to that set of queries that the user made in successive order. And so it's going to be better than what you're getting out of affiliate marketers content because again, it's more specific. But the other aspect of it is, what's likely going to happen is affiliate marketers are going to make the switch to using generative AI for this. And so it's going to be one of those snakes eating its tail sort of things. And then Google's going to have to progressively get better at it by using structured data to then make their results better. And then it's just going to continue to be this cycle of like, well, how can we make it better? I think for the end user, it's going to be a overall better experience, but it's going to drive down affiliate commissions for these businesses. And then there's only going to be a handful of sites that remain. But again, because Google is going to put that front and center for users, I think over time more and more user behavior is going to be like, oh, I want to see the AI snapshot because it's going to give me exactly what I want. All in all, I think if you're in the affiliate space and that's what you're primarily doing, you're going to have to think about other types of content to support this more video content and things like that. Other formats that Google isn't in yet. But even so, it's only a matter of time until they get there. So really, it's just going to shift affiliate marketers into other channels. Mordy Oberstein: Mike always has something amazing to say. I think hands down, it's always super thoughtful and deep. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think he's very down to earth in the way that he talks about things. He speaks in plain English, but he is also talking about some very complex topics. He's been working in the AI space for years now and has some proprietary software around AI as well. So it's absolutely, absolutely worth following Mike and checking out more of his stuff because he just drops gems all day long. Mordy Oberstein: Truth. It's @iPoll rank on Twitter, we'll link to that in the show notes. Thank you again, Mike. We really appreciate you greatly. You're a treasure to the entire SEO community. Legit. Now, being that we're talking about clicks from the SERP, it's one thing to get clicks. It's another thing to have the people coming who are doing the clicking actually pay you the money and convert. Which is basically like you have to make those clicks mean something. So basically SEO without CRO is like Rocky without Adrian. It's like Arnold without Willis. It's like the A-Team without Mr. T. It's like Night Rider without the talking car. I could go on. So with that, let's travel across Wix first as we talk to our own CRO specialist, Amanda Weiner, about what you can do to make sure that your web traffic earns the thing that you're looking for, which is an increase in your bottom line. Speaker X: 3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: I'm with Amanda Weiner. Amanda, first off, thank you for joining us on the SERPS Up podcast. Amanda Weiner: Thanks so much for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Of course. You're one of our favorite people at Wix. Just like... Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Amanda Weiner: Do you say that to everyone? Mordy Oberstein: No. No. Crystal Carter: We don't. Mordy Oberstein: We had Nati Elimelech on, our head of SEO, and I told him the actual opposite of that. He's one of my least favorite people. Yikes, I'm just kidding. Nati and I are like brothers who fight a lot. To get us started. CRO, what does it mean to you? Amanda Weiner: Well, conversion rate optimization to me is actually just being super aligned with our users and understanding the intent that the user comes to the page with and providing them with the experience that fits them. For me, it's super connected to UX and everything that we do on our pages in order to make them user-friendly and usable. And in order to actually get your money, that's what you got to focus on. You got to focus on making sure that your page is usable in the most basic sense of the word. Mordy Oberstein: I love that because usually when you think of CRO, you're thinking, okay, I think of CTAs. How do I get conversions? How do I drive the user down the funnel? Not, how do I make this page actually usable so the experience is pleasant, logical, and efficient, which will then lead them to the conversion? Amanda Weiner: Yeah, it's definitely the biggest thing. Not to say CTAs aren't important, but for sure you need a page that hits the intent right. No matter what. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think hitting the intent is something that's really important. I was teaching some folks about competitor research and one of the things that you learn very quickly from competitor research is the folks that show up at the top or the folks that are meeting the intent straight away. If I look up a taxi firm in New York or something, I want to book a taxi. I don't want to see loads of pictures of your taxi drivers hanging out, having a lovely time. I don't want to hear about the history of your taxi firm on the homepage. When I get there, I want to see where I can book a taxi. Don't bury that information. And I think that that's important. That leads me on to a question that I think is a decent question. How do you decide what's a priority for users in terms of CRO when you're carrying out CRO optimization? Amanda Weiner: Like you mentioned yourself, it's super important, first of all to hit that intent right away, but also competitor research. We need to know what is out there, what is the other information that our users who are coming to our site are being bombarded with? Because we are assuming that our users are... They're smart these days. They're doing their research, they know what's out there and we want to make sure that we're providing them with the information that they're looking for, the information that's unique to us. We want to provide a proper proposition. We're giving some value here, and that makes us stand out. And even though it might not be the only element, for sure we want to provide them with an easy entry point into our funnel and a CTA that really stands out so that they know where to go. Users shouldn't have to look for where to go. You should be able to give it to them wherever they are. Crystal Carter: And I think with CTAs, people expect to be able to... They look for them. If I go to a hotel website or something, I want to see the Book Here, Book a Room, Start Your Vacation, whatever it is. I want to find that and I want it to be easy to find. I think sometimes people will add things into the top nav bar or something so that there's always a place where you can find a Book Now and it's fairly low-key. Even if you're on another page or something. Let's say you decide you want to book while you're reading some lovely blog. That blog really seals the deal for you. Then you can find that there. What considerations do you make when deciding on the prominence of a CTA? When do you just go like, yeah, this is a CTA page, book now? Or when do you roll it back? Amanda Weiner: Like many other things with SEO for example, it comes down to is there transactional intent on this page, or is it meant to be informational? If it's transactional, then the first thing people should see, it should stand out the most. It should be in the center of your page is that main CTA. No one should have to find it. People are coming with the intent to give you your money. You should let them do that. Now, if a page is meant to be more informational, then it becomes a little trickier. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't give them entry points. Sometimes information is that last key thing that they need in order to commit. And we should be sure that we're giving them entry points. We should be proud of our products and say, even if you're coming with this informational intent, "Hey, here's the product that can support what this information is providing." But of course, they're coming with intent to learn something, so it has to be a little more subtle. Maybe on the side, maybe as you said, just making sure they could find it in the header, maybe a slur. If we're talking about blog articles, a natural mention of our products in our blog articles, things like that. That can really help those people who are looking for the information also get to our products. Mordy Oberstein: How do you balance that, though? If I was in a courtroom right now, the other attorney would be all, "Leading." Which I'm not a hundred percent sure what exactly that means, but from watching enough Matlock, I'm pretty sure that I do. How do you balance all of that? Because I feel like when I'm thinking about CRO and I'm thinking about users, I think of my father. And my father is not computer savvy, but he's computer savvy enough to be highly, highly skeptical. And I think that in the age of the web right now, people are far more skeptical. I think they've caught on to us, kind of thing. "I know what you're up to. I know what you're doing." My wife is the same thing. "Oh, how do they know that I was just looking for something and now I get a Facebook ad? That's creepy." How do you balance out all of the skepticism and all of the cynicism and all of the concern that people have and push the conversion at the same time? Amanda Weiner: It's a great question and it's really a difficult thing that we grapple with a lot. Especially on things that are more informational, like blog articles, etc. I think there's a difference between putting a flashy banner that says Click Here, which is understandably sort of sketchy. And putting something that says, "Hey, you want to read about something vaguely related to websites. By the way, here's something that you can do to also create your own." Which is what we do here at Wix. Meaning, there's a way to put it in the text, to say we are adding value for you by showing you this product. And the key is that the user should believe that what we're offering is truly an added value. It's not just an annoying banner. It's really an added value that they could find. "Oh wow, how did they know? I was actually really curious now to create my own website. So nice that they added that little link there for me." Mordy Oberstein: Note to self: Remove blinking banner from website. Thank you. Okay, follow-up to that. How do you create a CTA in that sense? Because sometimes they're very Click Now! Buy! Buy Now! Do it now! And I always think of the Office of Dwight. Do it. Do it now. Do it now. And that to me are CTAs. And sometimes I feel like even when you don't mean to be pushy, they are pushy. Amanda Weiner: Yeah, also another good question. I think there's a lot of debate about this in the little CRO world that exists. Do you want to give that time-sensitive, "you need to do this now, you need to do it today"? Is that what gives the push? Or is it creating a CTA that makes you feel that you want something? There's a lot of directions that CTAs can go in and depends also on what's surrounding it. If we're talking about our product page, what does the H1 say? Whatever they H1 says, the CTA should be aligned with that. They don't live in a bubble, CTAs. It's important to remember that there's context, and it depends what are the other values and the other things that are elements that are happening on a page that can direct you toward what the content of your CTA should really be. Crystal Carter: I think it's very interesting to talk about some of the nuances there. There's a great article in the Wix SEO Hub about beginner's guides to CTAs, and they break it down into lots of different types. I don't know if you know, and I don't know if I've mentioned it on this podcast, but I recently went to see Beyoncé and when I was buying Beyoncé tickets- Mordy Oberstein: You did? Crystal Carter: Did I? Yeah. No, I did. Mordy Oberstein: You did not tell me this. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. I recently went to see Beyoncé, and when I was trying to get Beyoncé tickets to see Beyoncé, basically when you go onto the ticket thing, they'll tell you there's only a few left. Many people are looking at this. Six people have looked at these tickets recently. And sometimes you get this with flights as well, where they'll say there's only five seats left or there's only... And I think that- Mordy Oberstein: Amazon. Crystal Carter: Amazon, lots of people are... And you see this for- Mordy Oberstein: Three products left. Crystal Carter: Right. And tons of people are looking at this dress right now. You better get it now while it's hot because they might buy it and then you won't. And I think that they will vary depending on the type of product, depending on the type of customer expectations. So if it's something time-sensitive or if it's like, we only have so many of these things... PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:42:04] Crystal Carter: If it's something time-sensitive, or if it's like, "We only have so many of these things," then you can add in something that adds a sense of urgency as well, into those sorts of elements. So, it's interesting that you talk about the nuance and how it varies depending on the product and the product experience. Amanda Weiner: Yeah, for sure. And I'll just add here also, something that we do on our homepage, that everyone can see, is we have a little disclaimer under the CTA. Now, this isn't hardcore CRO best practice of you must have a disclaimer under CTA, but I do think that it's exactly what you're touching on here, Crystal, that there's something, it's that last minute thing that pushes the user over the edge. But again, it has to come within context, right? It has to be the right disclaimer, the right thing that you're sharing with them according to the product that you're offering or according to the page that you're on. Crystal Carter: Right. So like, "We have 15% off until Monday," just letting you know, until Monday. Mordy Oberstein: Monday is now. Crystal Carter: Right, Monday is now. You have 15% off until Monday. Mordy Oberstein: It's always Monday. Tuesday is also Monday. Crystal Carter: But that creates a thing. I think also we would be remiss if we said anything about CRO and we didn't talk about testing. I know for a fact that we test a lot of our CRO across the website. Mordy Oberstein: I get the emails. Crystal Carter: All the time. Like, "We tested this, and we put it in this color, we put it in this color blue, then we put it in light blue and we saw a different..." No. So- Mordy Oberstein: I love light blue. It's my favorite. It's my favorite CTA color. Amanda Weiner: It makes a surprising amount of difference, the CTA color. Mordy Oberstein: It does. It does. A blinking purple didn't work. That's why I made it. Amanda Weiner: Note to self. Mordy Oberstein: Note to self. Crystal Carter: I don't know if you can talk to us about some of your testing methods and your favorite things to test or ways to test? Amanda Weiner: Yeah, for sure. There are a couple different ways that we can test and that we do test here at Wix. I would say the most common testing method is a classic A/B test, where you make one change on a page and you expose 50% of users to one change and 50% of users to the old version. And then you see what happens. You give it some time and see how the users interact with that. Now, a lot of what we do here on our CRO team is thinking a lot about what's a worthwhile test, what's a test that'll move the needle? What's a test that we should be thinking about? Because when you think about it, you can run a test on every single tiny element on the page and everything makes a difference. And you can run endless tests like that. And there's a certain prioritization that has to happen there in that process. And I have to say that it's not always what you expect to move the needle that moves the needle. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Amanda Weiner: That's the beauty of testing, I think. Crystal Carter: And also, I've had it before where I've done CRO and I'm like, "Oh, this will definitely..., and it does nothing. It does nothing. And I'm like, "what?" Mordy Oberstein: But intuitively, it makes a lot of sense that it's going to be something. Crystal Carter: Intuitively you're like, "Guys, this is going to be amazing. My hypothesis is to the moon," and then nothing happens. Also, I think you say like 50% of users, it's interesting the way you can split out users as well. So it might be like users who've come from one website, or users who are on mobile, or users who are in a certain language, or that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: Right, geos can definitely make a difference. Amanda Weiner: Yeah. So we do that. We split our tests per device, per geo. Also, per like, is it someone who it's their first time to the page or not? Things like that. Those are the things that we think about. Mordy Oberstein: So I would be remiss if we didn't ask before we have to go, what is your favorite generic CTA? Amanda Weiner: The text you mean? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, like "buy now" or "click here," which is the best of the generic ones? Amanda Weiner: "Start free" is strong. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, start free. It's very existential, like "start free." Amanda Weiner: It's no commitment here. You just start for free. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes, yes. It's like, "You could start, it doesn't cost anything. I've told you all of the things you need to know. What's holding you back? Just go for it." Amanda Weiner: "Just do it." Mordy Oberstein: And buying or clicking on this thing will not lead to imprisonment. You'll be free. Crystal Carter: You'll be free. That's very similar to the Amazon's like classic "Buy now with one click." It's like, not only can you buy now, but also you're setting the expectation. You're explaining something about it as well. So you're adding the value proposition into the CTA in a couple of words. And I think you're right, when you hit that sweet spot, that's brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: Also, it could be really predictive, like if you're signing up to be part of the mafia, start free. How you end up is a totally different story. We don't know. "Start free." Crystal Carter: He’s a made guy!... and watch out for Fredo. Mordy Oberstein: Amanda? Poor Fredo. Amanda, where can people find you? Amanda Weiner: Ooh, I'm not a big social media person, but you can find me on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: All right, follow her. Follow here. Follow free. Follow free. Amanda Weiner: Follow free. Mordy Oberstein: Follow free. Amanda Weiner: No extra charge. Mordy Oberstein: Amanda, thank you so much for joining us. Amanda Weiner: Thank you so much. Speaker 1: Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So now that we know about getting clicks, you know what you should click on? You should click on the SEO news articles that Barry Schwartz puts out and also the folks over at SEJ and Search Engine Land which is also Barry Schwartz. Give him those clicks because those are always worth reading. But in the meantime, to wet your appetite, we'll just get into a little bit of the news with this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Universal Analytics is officially replaced by Google Analytics. More of that coming from Nicola Agius over at Search Engine Land. Yep, Universal Analytics is dead. It is no more. We are in a GA4 world now, good luck to us all. We have a bunch of resources for you on the Wix SEO learning hub where you can learn more about GA4 and how to use it, and so forth. Again, good luck to us all. Also gone or to be gone, Buy on Google. Boy, we're dropping life flies here. Put of the great Barry Schwartz, Google to shutter Buy on Google program in the U.S. This will happen on September 26th. The Buy on Google program let you check out without ever visiting the merchant site. You just checked out on Google. Hence, Buy on Google. This comes as Google is testing a new construct that takes you from Google right to the merchant's page, or rather their checkout page on the actual site. I believe Glen Gabe was commenting on Twitter about this. Do users really want that? Is that the right experience for them? He's not so sure. I am with Glen, good place to be. But if I am somebody who's buying, I'm a little bit old-fashioned when I buy online, I like to see the experience. I don't want to go right to a checkout page. I want to see the site, get a sense of things, have a little bit of context before I check out. So we'll see. Also from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable: Bing gains AI shopping features for a price match buying guides and review summaries. So basically via the sidebar feature on edge, you search for our product. Well, you don't search in the sidebar feature, you go to Bing, you search for our product, let's say, new wireless headphones. You go to the page that is selling the headphones, open the sidebar in edge and Bing may show you a prompt in the chat feature that will let you explore information about the product. So basically a buying guide, it's going over specs. So for headphones it would be specs like battery life, that sort of thing. You'll get a review summary and so forth. I love this. I think a more integrated approach to using the AI chat features is more powerful than just having the user enter a query initially, and that's their first exposure to anything. They're starting off with the query, getting an AI response. I feel like this integrated approach where you catch the user at the right moment, and then throw them into an AI chat experience is far more powerful. But that's just me. But it is super interesting. I really like what Bing is doing here. It's very cool. And that is this week's Snappy News. So again, make sure you go over and click on those articles from the show notes. Give those websites some traffic that we sent you, give all the SEO news websites that high CTR they deserve. Crystal Carter: It's absolutely worth it. Barry is the hardest working mountain in search, easily. Mordy Oberstein: It's not even close. Crystal Carter: Not even close. Mordy Oberstein: John Mueller or Aleda like number two? Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And when I say it's not even close... They do a tremendous amount. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know... Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Unbelievable. I don't even know how do they keep up? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But Barry's just a different level. Crystal Carter: Just thousands upon thousands- Mordy Oberstein: Somehow he manages. Crystal Carter: ... upon thousands, upon thousands upon thousands of articles Mordy Oberstein: Now who might help you find some of these articles? Always sharing some amazing things on Twitter, repurposing content, sharing content, shouting out content; Jeannie Hill. Speaker 2: Jeannie Hill. She's absolutely fantastic and she's so clever as well. Absolutely follow of the week. She's super friendly, super nice, and also just super, super clever. She's particularly good at machine learning sort of stuff and just super fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and she'll always share a really good article whether she wrote it or someone else wrote it. So it's a great follow because it's basically a curated feed of SEO relevancy. Also fellow Minnesotian, and I'm not from Minnesota, but there's so many... I made it sound like I'm from... I'm not from Minnesota. There's so many great SEOs out of Minnesota. I meant search crew and Nick Leroy, Susan, tons of great Minnesotan in SEO. Jeannie's another one. Speaker 2: She's fantastic. And she's got some great knowledge, particularly about Semantic search. And I remember being in a Twitter conversation with her about that. She's incredibly, incredibly clever and incredibly kind. And just a brilliant member of the SEO community. So shout out to Jeannie. Mordy Oberstein: So make sure you give Jeannie a follow over at Essential Skill, E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A-L S-K-I-L-L on Twitter. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. So make sure you click that follow button for Jeannie. Is there click-through rate for Twitter follows? Is that a thing? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: No, I don't think it's a thing. Not every click requires a CTR number next to it. Speaker 2: Doesn't it? No. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. I feel like I put my foot in my mouth with that one. Although Mark is like, "Yeah, it does." Crystal Carter: I like a green arrow. I'm not going to lie. I log in, seeing my little green arrow makes me happy. Mordy Oberstein: Clicks are up. Crystal Carter: Clicks are up. Mordy Oberstein: That's all you need to know. Clicks are up. It's almost like a Wall Street of SEO, you walk into like "What's going on?" "Clicks are up!" And you're good to go. Well, that'll bring us to the end of this week's podcast. 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 an all new episodes we dive into. Does Page experience still matter? Short answer, yes. Look forward, wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning of over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and our newsletter on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guested it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. 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