Giuseppe is a global marketing leader with 20+ years' experience. He excels in crafting content and marketing strategies for SaaS enterprises. Recognized as 2-time influential European B2B marketer, he has an MBA from SDA Bocconi and is trained in M&A at London Business School. Giuseppe Caltabiano VP of Marketing at Rock Content Giuseppe is a global marketing leader with 20+ years' experience. He excels in crafting content and marketing strategies for SaaS enterprises. Recognized as 2-time influential European B2B marketer, he has an MBA from SDA Bocconi and is trained in M&A at London Business School. Articles & Resources 11 Jul 2024 Visual content marketing 101: Build your audience and distinguish your brand with images 6 Mar 2024 How to craft the perfect SEO content brief: The elements you need to include 5 Oct 2023 When to use AI and when to use freelancers to write your content 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

People trust other people. Study after study has shown that people trust the content in reviews over what the brand says. That’s why Mordy and Crysta discuss the importance of encouraging user-generated reviews and their role in SEO. When talking about reviews for SEO, the focus is on user-generated reviews. This podcast investigates why getting reviews is crucial and how it impacts your organic visibility. From how reviews might affect ranking in the Local Pack to where reviews appear across the Google SERP and throughout the Google ecosystem, this podcast episode gives you a comprehensive understanding of the role reviews play in organic search. Get actionable advice from Claire Carlile of BrightLocal to encourage user-generated reviews and learn what marketers and business owners can and should be doing with them. It’s time to generate some understanding around user-generated reviews today on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back The value of valuing reviews People trust other people. Study after study has shown that people trust the content in reviews over what the brand says. That’s why Mordy and Crysta discuss the importance of encouraging user-generated reviews and their role in SEO. When talking about reviews for SEO, the focus is on user-generated reviews. This podcast investigates why getting reviews is crucial and how it impacts your organic visibility. From how reviews might affect ranking in the Local Pack to where reviews appear across the Google SERP and throughout the Google ecosystem, this podcast episode gives you a comprehensive understanding of the role reviews play in organic search. Get actionable advice from Claire Carlile of BrightLocal to encourage user-generated reviews and learn what marketers and business owners can and should be doing with them. It’s time to generate some understanding around user-generated reviews today on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 15 | November 30, 2022 | 34 MIN 00:00 / 33:31 This week’s guests Claire Carlile Claire Carlile is BrightLocal's Local Search Expert. Her work at Claire Carlile Marketing, where she helps businesses of all sizes make the most of the local search opportunity, allows her to provide real-world skills and expertise to what BrightLocal does. 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 putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the infallible, the illustrious, I don't have any other adjectives, Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Hello there SEOs and internet people and friends and colleagues and wonderful people listening to the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: I reversed it there. I put your name first and then your title. Crystal Carter: Oh, yes. Mordy Oberstein: On accident. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. That's okay. Mordy Oberstein: I realized midway through, I'm like, "I forgot your title." Crystal Carter: Remix, that's all right. Mordy Oberstein: We're all about the titles. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes. No, we're talking about reviews today, not titles. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my mistake. Crystal Carter: Different topic. Mordy Oberstein: I'm looking at the wrong podcast deck. Crystal Carter: Different one. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: We'll talk about titles another time. Mordy Oberstein: I'm with the program. I'm with the program. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: I'm with the program. Crystal Carter: Have you left a review of it? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, don't forget to leave a review because we're talking about reviews. But anyway, we're not there yet. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we have an entire suite of amazing reporting insights from bot logs to blog traffic, to user behavior to eComm analytics. If you're using Wix and you're not digging into all that Wix Analytics has to offer you, then you're missing out and that's not a sales pitch, that's truth. Crystal Carter: It's just facts, people. Mordy Oberstein: It's just facts. Crystal Carter: Just facts. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, great show for you. Today, as Crystal mentioned, we're talking about reviews. The wonderful, hard to garner user reviews and their role. Crystal Carter: That's right, that's right. I mean, five stars for you for that intro, Mordy, I would just like to say five star. Mordy Oberstein: Rate this intro. Thank you for rating this intro. Crystal Carter: I should rate every segment. Mordy Oberstein: I rank number one in the local pack for intros near me. Anyway, we're talking about user reviews and their value in SEO, repurposing reviews, wear review snippets, show up in the Google ecosystem because they're kind of all over the place, plus BrightLocal's Claire Carlile stops by to share her strategy to get people to leave you those ever powerful reviews. We'll also dive deep into aggregate review pages. Thin, not thin. Great, not great. We got a deeper thought for you all about aggregate review pages and if they have any real value for your website. And as always, we have the snappiest of news for you and who you should be following on social or more SEO awesomeness. Episode 15 of the SERP's Up podcast is off the tarmac. I like off the tarmac. It's good, right? Crystal Carter: Off the tarmac. Mordy Oberstein: I was writing that for the intro. It's like one of the only parts of this podcast, little behind the scenes that I script out. Off the tarmac, that's how we're going to do this. Crystal Carter: That's right. Mordy Oberstein: Leave a review for the end part of the intro there, off the tarmac. Five starts if you liked it. Crystal Carter: Four and a half. Mordy Oberstein: Four and a half. Okay. I feel, by the way, this is the episode we could shamelessly plug, please leave a review for the podcast, wherever you're listening. Crystal Carter: Oh my God. Please leave review. Please leave a review of the podcast. Wherever you enjoy podcasts, please leave us a review. Mordy Oberstein: I enjoy podcasts in my ears. Where do you enjoy them? Crystal Carter: Yes, that's true. Also ears, ears are good. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Five star review for ears. This got off the rails already. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: User reviews. What are we talking about Crystal? Crystal Carter: Okay, so when we're talking about reviews, today we're talking about user rated reviews, getting them what we think about them, why they matter, why they're important. When Google talks about reviews, they also have their product review updates, which are not around user generated reviews. They're more about the content that people make when they say, "Oh, I've got this blog and I've reviewed this pair of headphones or something." That's a different kind of review. Today what we're talking about are user generated reviews and basically we're talking about how you can think about them. Now, Google gets really involved with user generated reviews in a few different ways. Probably the most relevant to most people who are listening to this podcast is in Google Business Profile. And Google Business Profile, they actually have some good information about how to manage user generated reviews. So they say, remind customers to leave reviews. Let them know that it's quick and easy to leave reviews. You shouldn't necessarily incentivize, but it's good to remind people that it's there. So you can say, leave a link and at the bottom of your email that you send out to them after they've completed a transaction. Or you can say, leave a link at the bottom of your email footer, or you can put a little sticker on your door that says, review us on TripAdvisor, or review us on Google Business Profile, that sort of thing. Reply to reviews to build customer trust. That is absolutely great advice and it's a really good way to make sure that users know that if they leave a review that you are someone who's going to be engaging with them. They also say value all reviews. So again, not every review is going to be five stars. Some of them are going to be four and a half, some of them might be a little bit lower. And basically, you just want to make sure that you're checking in on all of those reviews. One of the great things about reviews is that they show up not just in Google Business Profile, but they can also show up on products. They can also show up for your shop overall, for instance, if you're working on Google Merchant Center. And if you're using things like TripAdvisor or RevU or Trustpilot or things like that, you might also see reviews there. Facebook will also give you review information and things like that. But reviews offer a great amount of social proof for the value of your company and the value of your services. And so making sure that you're thinking about how you're getting those reviews and how you're managing those reviews can be really, really important to moving the needle both with ranking and also with building your brand. Mordy Oberstein: That's amazing. I don't know where to start with this first off. Yeah, the thing for me about reviews you've comprehensively covered in a minute, which is amazing in its own right, that gets a five star review right there too. You get a five star review and you get a five star review. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: But reviews show up everywhere in the ecosystem. So we're probably going to get and talk about ranking factors and where that comes in to Google ranking you in local packs and the local finder and how reviews factor into all of that. But leave that aside just for a second. Reviews are so important obviously to your business because there's social proof that what you offer is good. By the way, great point that not all the reviews are going to be 100% five star reviews. And that's actually a good thing because when I see all five star reviews, I think fake reviews. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly, exactly. And sometimes the one star reviews are nothing to do with whether or not something is good. Sometimes it's like, "Oh, I gave this laptop one star because I spilled yogurt all over it and it didn't work after that." It's like, I think that's user error. That they didn't necessarily- Mordy Oberstein: I was not happy with the quality of the packaging and wrapper. You know what I'm doing with the wrapper? I'm throwing it out anyway. So I don't really care. Crystal Carter: So I always check the top reviews and I always check the bottom reviews as well. And if the bottom reviews I'm like, ah, that's not going to apply to me, or oh, okay, I'll take that into account or whatever, then that's fine. But yeah, absolutely, pay attention to those. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, if you're looking like, oh, I do have negative reviews, if that's the negative review that you're getting and someone's going to look at it, which I do, I think everybody kind of does, if it's a nothing burger, it's a nothing burger. Don't fret. But reviews show up, they're in structured data markup, they're kind of everywhere. And it's one of the things that Google, because again, Google wants to show you that what you're getting is, as a user, is a quality result. And it's one of the easy ways that Google can clearly show the user that what we as in Google are offering you is great. So Google uses those reviews. So they're just everywhere. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. And if you look up your business and your business name, you'll often see multiple websites that are showing the reviews and you'll often see different things are either going there. And the point that Google was talking about, about responding to reviews is really important because it shows that you're present and that you're engaging with your customers. And even if there's a nothing burger review, even if you're like, "Thank you very much for your insights, we'll take that to the team" or something, that's better than nothing. I've seen conversations where a customer wasn't happy about something and the company came back and said, "Well, we've adjusted this or we've improved that." And the person said, "Oh, thank you." That can be really good and that can help build trust. And that can also show any potential customers that if something does go wrong, you're the kind of business that will help them to address it. So I think that reviews are something that is really useful for businesses of all sizes. And certainly, as a reviewer, I've spoken a lot recently about how I am a level six Google Guide, now. I have stock. I'm just saying. Anyway, as a level six Google Guide, one of the things that I find really important is to make sure that I review businesses that I think are really, really valuable that I really enjoy. And even sometimes if I wasn't able to make a purchase at the place, but I had a great experience at the place, it's something that I really, really value. And I've seen with clients when I've been working client side that when they have more reviews, they seem to see more visibility on local pack. And this is something that's been a little bit of a debate amongst SEOs as to whether or not that affects Google Business Profile rankings. But what I've seen from working with clients is that when they have more reviews, they get better traffic to their website. But what I've also seen is that sometimes, as a user, if I'm looking for something, sometimes the reviews will show up in the search. So if I'm searching for maybe vegan donuts and the website or the profile for the bakery doesn't have vegan donuts, but there's a review that says vegan donuts, sometimes it shows up on there. And again, there's some debate about whether or not that's something that there's some debate about whether or not other people have seen that. But I've definitely seen that in the wild. Mordy Oberstein: I've definitely seen the local pack pulling in reviews, snippets into the local pack. So Google is taking those snippets of reviews would mean like when we say reviews are everywhere, it's not the stars, it's actual the words that people are leaving and throwing it into the local pack. So curious if Google, another value of reviews is, does it give Google semantic understanding of what you do and who you are? I don't know. It's a little bit hard to do that because the reviewer doesn't necessarily leave that kind of wording in the review. It might say this was great. So that's not going to be semantically relevant. But many times they do. Crystal Carter: Well, what's interesting is as a Google Guide, this I think is really important that people think about and people engage with the Google Guide system. There are millions of people doing the Google Guide system. And basically what Google Guides does is when you leave a review, you get more points as a Google Guide. So you can move up to level seven if you have more words in your review. Also, if you add a photo to your review, they say, what is this? Is this a hamburger? Is this a hot dog? Is this a pizza? Which part of the menu is that? So Google Guides people, Google guides their Google Guides to leave the kinds of reviews that they expect to see, particularly in Google Business Profile reviews. So I think that when you are thinking about the kinds of reviews you might be getting and you are thinking about the kinds of reviews, you might be... What did they say? They said recommending or reminding. Reminding people to leave. Then also you want to think about how Google is actually guiding people through that review process. Sorry, if I can say one more thing. But during the last year I've been talking a lot about visual search and Google has been using a lot of the images from Google Guides for their visual search thing. So for instance, if you take a picture of a hamburger and you put near me, then Google will search their Google Guides photos and the reviews that they've had from Google Business Profile to surface content that's from businesses that serve that kind of thing. So thinking about making sure that you have things that are review worthy and you have imagery that is review worthy within your establishment can also help you to increase the kinds of reviews that you get for your business. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. And all of that information, whether it be simply because people are leaving that information other people are looking at, or Google is in the Symantec web, is using it to sort of contextualize and understand who you are, what you do and how well you do it is super important. You might want to think about when you're asking people to leave reviews, to sort formalize it in a way or construct it in a way where you're sort of guiding them towards leaving a more specific kind of review. So if let's say it's a restaurant, put it in, let us know what you thought of the restaurant, the service, what was your favorite dish? And then people will tell you, "Yeah, I really enjoyed this," whatever, whatever dish that you have. You're trying to nudge them along to be a little more specific in that review, which is a better quality to review and offers a little bit more teeth of semantically for Google to grab onto. But I want to jump back really quickly to the whole ranking factor thing. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Our reviews are ranking factor. Now I know there's a bunch of debate as you mentioned about it. But on the side that says that reviews do, and just keep this in mind, the local pack when you search for pizza near me and there's a big box there and there's one, two, three businesses listed in there, is a separate algorithm than the normal Google algorithm. I want to say normal, the general Google algorithm. If indeed reviews are a part of that, that's a major thing because you're only talking about three listings in there. And if reviews are a major factor, it's not something to ignore. Is it not, first off, what do you lose? Secondly, if it is, it's a major part of getting visibility online and it's not just random people saying reviews are a ranking fact. There's people like Darren Shaw who we'll talk about more later, Joy Hawkins. And there's studies. For example, Joy Hawkins recently did a study, we'll link to it in the show notes. I think Barry Schwartz over at SE Roundtable covered it, maybe on Search Engine Land showing that businesses that have more than 10 reviews tend to rank better than businesses less than 10 reviews in the local pack. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And Darren Shaw shared, he has an article on the Wix SEO hub, why Google reviews are important for local businesses. And he shared a report from 2001 about local pack ranking factors and he found that reviews contributed 17% of the time to ranking in Google Business Profile. Mordy Oberstein: It seems like there's, not say a consensus, but there's a broad understanding by a lot of really smart local SEO folks that reviews factor in. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And as you say, it's a good thing to do anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. It's like what do you lose? With that though, we did talk about how you actually encourage people to leave you those reviews because it's a little bit awkward. I don't want to ask them. How do you actually go about doing that? So for you, for your review health, we have local search expert over from BrightLocal who's one of the major local SEO platforms. She the one, she's the only Claire Carlile and she's here to help you understand how you can encourage people to write reviews. Take it away Claire. Claire Carlile: So we use reviews as consumers to help us decide which product, which service, which organization or which business to choose over another. So as a business or an organization, we're probably going to want to encourage people to leave reviews. So here are a few things to think about. 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. So you can have a look at your existing review corpus. So say for example, you might look at Google Business Profile reviews, have a little look at the place topics that Google is pulling through for your business and then work out what those are saying about you. If you've got phrases like professional service or very thorough, then that's great. If you have got place topics like disgusting or dirty, then you could probably do with having a little look at those and dealing with those before you get a big influx of reviews. And then you need to think about where you're actually needing those reviews. What type of reviews on what type of sites are you trying to target? So we can think about what shows in our Google Business Profile. Well, first of all, we've got Google Reviews. But secondly we also have sometimes reviews being pulled in from other platforms, say for example Facebook or it could be niche specific review sites in your vertical. So also have a little look for your brand name in Google and have a look to see what is on page one and page two in terms of reviews for your business. You might need to target reviews in those places as well. And don't forget, we might want first party reviews, but we probably will, that we can use as testimonials across all sorts of pages on our website. We can use them on our marketing materials, our social channels, and we can use them to display in our bricks and mortar establishments. And if we're trying to get reviews for a particular product, if we get reviews just for that product, we can use them to mark up our product schema to get some nice visibility in the serp. So number three, what makes a good review? Well, in my mind, an ideal review is positive I sentiment because obviously that's what we would like and it's rich in terms of content. So it uses the name of the service or the product and it uses any of the attributes that you'd like to be associated with your business. Ideally, it would have photos as well if possible. So number four, we actually need to ask for reviews. If you're going to leave it to chance, it's likely you're going to get fewer reviews. And also the ones that you do get could quite possibly be negative because it does seem to me that it's people that have an extreme experience of a product or service or business that tend to leave those reviews. So if you ask everyone, then you are more likely to get a fair balance of the reviews. Now, how and where? Well you need to make it easy and you need to offer options. It does depend on the type of service or product you're providing on the journey of the customer. So make sure that you're asking the right people at the right time and you should automate the process where possible. But try and incorporate some customer service feedback and input before you send out the review request. So say for example, you have had lots of people staying at your hotel for the weekend, you know that perhaps some of them had some issues, then why don't you deal with that first before you blanket send out a generic email to all of those people. You need to make sure that those are personalized for the people that you are sending them out to. And then finally, we need to monitor and reply because new and potential customers are going to read your review responses. So this is your chance to let them know that even if a review might be a bit negative in sentiment, that you are actually a good business and it's also your chance to turn an unhappy customer into a happier customer. And don't forget to use those reviews for business intelligence. Positive and negative themes, positive and negative sentiment can all be pulled out to help feed into your business to fix and improve your products and services. Don't just make the review process just ticking boxes. And then bonus tip, monitor your competitor review corpus. The place topics are an easy place to monitor. What are the positives of people's experiences and what are the negatives and how can you use that information to help you plan your own product and service delivery as well as your marketing materials? Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Claire. That was really amazing and I totally agree. You definitely want to make the process frictionless. You want to make this easy and smooth and fun, for lack of a better word. Don't offer them money or gifts and exchanges against Google guidelines, but you want to make it as nice of experience as possible. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think yeah, add some joy to it. The other thing that she also talked about, which I think is something that I've definitely seen is display your reviews. So this is something I've seen in a few different ways and something I always recommend is there's an app for instance called Elfsight that allows you to show your reviews on your website. There's also, sometimes you can embed your TripAdvisor reviews or your Trustpilot reviews or whatever on your website. And very often, in my experience anyway, if you display your reviews on your website, you're much more likely to get more reviews for your website or your business when you do that. I highly advise making a reviews page where you showcase the collection of reviews of various different things. Mordy Oberstein: Which goes back to repurposing reviews. It's a great thing. I don't know if we actually mentioned it. We didn't, oh my goodness. But repurpose your reviews. Put them in tweets, put them on this page or that page, here, there and everywhere. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. So yeah, Claire talks about displaying them in your business, online, all over the place. It's absolutely true. You should totally do that because sometimes it brings more reviews. Somebody says, "Mordy who is working at the register was super helpful to me the other day." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he was super helpful. He's a very helpful fellow. Crystal Carter: And somebody's like, "Yeah, he was really great." Mordy Oberstein: Handsome too. Reviews beget reviews. And speaking of reviews, ever get to a page that reviews a product? Say it reviews the best microwaves and it has heard just a quick list of various products i.e. microwaves, with maybe their price and star rating. Google seems to hate them these days, but do they have value? Here's a deep thought on aggregate product review pages. By the way, I feel like we're going to have a little bit of a debate here. So I'm just going to ring the bell right here, ding, ding, ding. Crystal Carter: Oh, it's on Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: It's on, because I hate these pages. I was talking to Rebecca Berbel from over at Oncrawl and we're like, "Yeah, we hate those kind of pages." I mentioned we're going to cover this. She's like, "Yeah, I hate." She's also a big content person. But you'll like them. So let's start with that. Crystal Carter: So I like these pages because I don't having to go to 25 different pages to see what's going on. I like a page where it's like best microwaves or something and then I can see 20 different microwaves and they're like review, no cost, et cetera. And I can compare them very, very quickly. I like that. I can get in, if I see the reviews, a general trend of the reviews and I can go off and get more details after I've made a short list. Mordy Oberstein: I get that and I get the idea, okay, you go to a page and say it again, best microwaves and all they have there is 20 of these boxes to have the name of the product, the picture of the product, the rating, and a whole bunch of affiliate links for themselves. So that to me, I guess is why part of the, I guess bias that I have against these pages. Because I know what's going on here. You're just trying to get your fund. I am all for affiliates. Do not take me the wrong way. I am all for affiliates earning their keep, but I also feel it should be value to the user and I understand why somebody will look at that as value. And I think the lesson we're going to walk away from this is different intents, different strokes for different folks. You have to know your audience and there might be an audience for this, although Google doesn't seem to think so. But anyway. Crystal Carter: Maybe I'm an army of one, who knows? But I think also maybe there's room for both. So maybe there's room for putting a TLDR of the reviews at the top in say a table for instance, and then maybe get into the details further on that sort of thing. Because for those of us with short patience, short attention spans, I want the Cliff notes. Mordy Oberstein: I'm all for that. But as a content snob, I want to know that you put some kind of effort into this and you actually... Because, okay, what tells me that this rating that you put there is not just because that's the affiliate link giving you the most money. It's the content. You've contextualized that rating you went through and you told me all the great things and all the bad things and all the mediocre things about this microwave. And now I feel like, okay, I can trust that four star rating. So I challenge you. Crystal Carter, how do you know that that four star rating, five star rating is good unless you see some contextualization around it? Crystal Carter: Here's my question, here's my counter question. How is this different from the Google shopping page? You go to a Google shopping page and you type in best microwaves, they give you a list of a bunch of best microwaves, they give you a list of best ratings, they've got all the star ratings there and you can scan through all of those and those are all links going off to somewhere. And I'm just like, how is this different? Mordy Oberstein: Counterpoint. When you go to Google shopping, you're going to actually buy the thing. You've already researched the thing, you already know what you're doing. You just kind of need a general understanding of what you're looking at. When you're looking for best microwave, it's an informational commercial, whatever intent, you're looking to learn more. And you just listing the product and a picture with affiliate links and a rating doesn't teach me anything. Crystal Carter: I don't want to learn about microwaves, I just want hot food. Mordy Oberstein: You're missing out. Crystal Carter: I don't want to spend three years reading about the ins and outs of microwaves. Mordy Oberstein: That a good point, though. That I agree with you, right? Because a lot of these things that are ranking for best microwaves, these product review pages, they have buyer guides, they're really kind of prolific and they're really good. But sometimes, let's say I've already read one in those pages and I'm diving a little bit deeper. Now I just want to go back, I want to get a quick review of what I looked at or what was there. I don't want all of that. Maybe you make a good point in the sense that you ever go to a recipe page, you all have, and there's like 400 words, 4,000 pages to scrolls, folds, just to get to the recipe. Crystal Carter: I went for a walk in the park and the leaves were falling and the colors were amazing and there was a butterfly. And this butterfly really reminded me of my grandmother. Mordy Oberstein: Meat Loaf. It reminded me of Meat Loaf. Not the food, the musical artist. At one time in a meatloaf contest, I had a wonderful tuna sandwich. So here's my recipe for the best tuna fish a sandwich. Crystal Carter: I would do anything to get to the end of that review. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes tuna fish sandwiches in the mirror may appear closer than they are. But I agree, there kind of needs to be a balance there. And I hope we don't get to that point. And I think perhaps there's different intents within best microwaves that maybe Google can do a better job of catering to. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But I still hold dear to the truth that, or my truth at least, that as a whole, aggregate review pages don't offer much value except to a small minutia of people on this planet called Crystal. Crystal Carter: I think there's a place for both. And I think that Google's getting pretty good at being able to drill down into that. So for instance, if the deal breaker on the microwave is whether or not it's pops popcorn really well, for instance, if I want to know what is the best microwave for doing Orville Redenbacher for instance, because I don't like burnt popcorn, it's the worst. Mordy Oberstein: I love burnt popcorn. Crystal Carter: Burnt popcorn makes your whole house smell. I do not like that. Mordy Oberstein: Round two, ding, ding, ding. Crystal Carter: I like perfectly popped popcorn. And I don't wasting kernels either. So for instance, if that's something there, then if I Google best popcorn for not wasting kernels. Google is getting very good at catering to those of us who have a short attention span and to click and to get through things. They're very good at getting to the highlighter section. So they'll highlight the section, they'll highlight the text within a longer form review. Now you're not going to get that kind of detail about whether or not this particular microwave is really good at popping popcorn so that you don't have any kernels left, for instance, in one of those aggregate reviews. So I think Google's getting better at sort of addressing the needs of people who just want the TLDR, people who want to wax poetical about microwaves, whichever. Mordy Oberstein: I think this is a good case where, we talked about this before in the previous podcasts where we had George fill in for you, you were on vacation and we talked about multiple intents on one page. I think this is a good case where you can cater to multiple intents of one page. And you see the pages that do this well, they'll have a table up top where they'll go through all the information that you want. But underneath that, and I think it's important that the table's on top Google, if you're listening, hi John, to have the deeper information underneath it. Now, as a second point, I understand about the burnt popcorn and it does stink up the house. I am with you, but it tastes so much better. And sometimes I will freely admit I burn the popcorn on purpose just a tad. And I'm so like on eggshells, is my wife going to get angry at me that I made the entire house smell like burn popcorn. But I do it anyway. Crystal Carter: Honestly, Mrs. Oberstein, I don't know what you're having to go through these days. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes I wait for her to be asleep to make popcorn just for no reason. Crystal Carter: Does the popping not wake her up? Mordy Oberstein: She sleeps through everything. I am on the opposite. I wake up at every single little noise. Okay, TMI, for all the listeners at this point, which brings us to our next segment. I'm just going to quickly pivot because I think there's no smoothness to this pivot. Do not rate this pivot. Let's get to the snappy news. Here's the snappy news. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google Documents Search Ranking Updates As Systems, Labels Live Or Archived Notable Algorithms. In a nutshell, Google came out and released an official list of its ranking systems, emphasis on systems. Feel like William Shatner, systems. Versus algorithms as some of the things are pre or meta algorithm, for example. Google uses machine learning like BERT, to better understand what the heck it's looking at. That's meta-algorithmic. That sounds super snazzy. Meta-algorithmic. The better Google can understand something, the better can apply relevancy, which is a ranking factor, which is kind of by focusing on the ranking factors per se is not the way. This is not the way. If you look at the doc Google created, you can sort of see the split as specific algorithms like the one that shows local news content in the top stories carousel. Those are called systems, as in the local news systems, or the helpful content system or the freshness system. Whereas, the properties that work at the metal level just have names, for example, BERT or MUM or neural matching. There's no system attached to the name. So little bit of a way for you to see the kind of split there and little trick there in my honest opinion. Anyway, we'll link link to both Barry's coverage and the actual doc from Google in the show notes is definitely worth giving it a read through if anything, but to refresh yourself. Refreshing. And that is it for this week's Snappy News. Tis was the snappiest of news. Again, it's always great to keep up what's going on in the ins and outs of the SEO industry. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you did that news like a bat out of hell. Mordy Oberstein: Back with the Meat Loaf. Love that. Wow, that was full 360 right there, Crystal. Five stars for you. You get a gold star, five gold stars. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You're welcome. I was a former teacher. I'm not easy giving out the gold stars. Very hard to a gold star for Mr. Okay, mainly because I didn't buy stickers. Yeah, well. It's their loss, anyway. This brings us to our last little part of the show. We make sure that you have access to more great people where you can find more great information. And we mentioned him before, but he is the godfather of local SEO, in my opinion. He's Darren Shaw over at Whitespark, @DarrenShaw_ on Twitter, @D-A-R-R-E-N-S-H-A-W_ underscore on Twitter. And Darren is fabulous about local SEO information. He's considered one of the supreme authorities on local SEO. Crystal Carter: You come to me and you ask me about reviews near me. Mordy Oberstein: Come the day of the daily grand opening. That's why I'm not in the pack. It's a grand opening. No one knows you exists yet. Crystal Carter: My cannoli business is needing to be- Mordy Oberstein: I love cannolis. I love cannolis. I miss them so much. Crystal Carter: I love cannolis. I don't know why- Mordy Oberstein: What are we talking about, again? Oh, Darren. Crystal Carter: Darren. Not the Godfather. Well yes, the Godfather. So Darren's amazing. He's written a really great article on the Wix SEO Hub. I mentioned it earlier, but you check it. He also writes some amazing articles just generally and normally does, I think he tends to do an annually, an annual report on local SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. Where at Whitespark, they put out an annual report, I'm pretty sure it's annual, going through what matters on local SEO. Crystal Carter: Really valuable. I've spoken at Whitespark Local Search Summit, which is a great event and has some fantastic SEOs speaking at it, including myself. But also like lots of other people. So do check that out if you see it happening. And also, I think they have an archive around where you can look through some of the information there. So there's some great stuff there, talking about reviews, talking about other things that you could do for a local business to rank and perform and drive people both online and in store. Mordy Oberstein: His Twitter feed is just fabulous. He's obviously a great person, but he is also offering great SEO information on his feed. So definitely check out Darren Shaw, wherever he is. He's also on Mastadon, by the way. I should have looked it up. He is on Mastadon. If you are Mastadon, Darren Shaw is there. He helped me- Crystal Carter: He's also on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: On LinkedIn, yes. I don't know about Facebook, having TikTok. But those are, Mastadon and LinkedIn and Twitter, he is there. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the vital need for an all channels approach to SEO. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SER? Check on all the great content and webinars on the Wick SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. And very appropriate for this show, 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 Claire Carlile BrightLocal Rebecca Berbel OnCrawl Darren Shaw WhiteSpark Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub How Much Does Review Recency Impact Google Local Pack Rankings [Case Study] How Google reviews can transform your business More intents more problems: SEO for multiple user intents News: Google Documents Search Ranking Updates As Systems; Labels Live Or Archived Notable Algorithms A guide to Google Search ranking systems Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Claire Carlile BrightLocal Rebecca Berbel OnCrawl Darren Shaw WhiteSpark Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub How Much Does Review Recency Impact Google Local Pack Rankings [Case Study] How Google reviews can transform your business More intents more problems: SEO for multiple user intents News: Google Documents Search Ranking Updates As Systems; Labels Live Or Archived Notable Algorithms A guide to Google Search ranking systems 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 putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the infallible, the illustrious, I don't have any other adjectives, Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Hello there SEOs and internet people and friends and colleagues and wonderful people listening to the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: I reversed it there. I put your name first and then your title. Crystal Carter: Oh, yes. Mordy Oberstein: On accident. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. That's okay. Mordy Oberstein: I realized midway through, I'm like, "I forgot your title." Crystal Carter: Remix, that's all right. Mordy Oberstein: We're all about the titles. Crystal Carter: Yes, yes. No, we're talking about reviews today, not titles. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my mistake. Crystal Carter: Different topic. Mordy Oberstein: I'm looking at the wrong podcast deck. Crystal Carter: Different one. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: We'll talk about titles another time. Mordy Oberstein: I'm with the program. I'm with the program. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: I'm with the program. Crystal Carter: Have you left a review of it? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, don't forget to leave a review because we're talking about reviews. But anyway, we're not there yet. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we have an entire suite of amazing reporting insights from bot logs to blog traffic, to user behavior to eComm analytics. If you're using Wix and you're not digging into all that Wix Analytics has to offer you, then you're missing out and that's not a sales pitch, that's truth. Crystal Carter: It's just facts, people. Mordy Oberstein: It's just facts. Crystal Carter: Just facts. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, great show for you. Today, as Crystal mentioned, we're talking about reviews. The wonderful, hard to garner user reviews and their role. Crystal Carter: That's right, that's right. I mean, five stars for you for that intro, Mordy, I would just like to say five star. Mordy Oberstein: Rate this intro. Thank you for rating this intro. Crystal Carter: I should rate every segment. Mordy Oberstein: I rank number one in the local pack for intros near me. Anyway, we're talking about user reviews and their value in SEO, repurposing reviews, wear review snippets, show up in the Google ecosystem because they're kind of all over the place, plus BrightLocal's Claire Carlile stops by to share her strategy to get people to leave you those ever powerful reviews. We'll also dive deep into aggregate review pages. Thin, not thin. Great, not great. We got a deeper thought for you all about aggregate review pages and if they have any real value for your website. And as always, we have the snappiest of news for you and who you should be following on social or more SEO awesomeness. Episode 15 of the SERP's Up podcast is off the tarmac. I like off the tarmac. It's good, right? Crystal Carter: Off the tarmac. Mordy Oberstein: I was writing that for the intro. It's like one of the only parts of this podcast, little behind the scenes that I script out. Off the tarmac, that's how we're going to do this. Crystal Carter: That's right. Mordy Oberstein: Leave a review for the end part of the intro there, off the tarmac. Five starts if you liked it. Crystal Carter: Four and a half. Mordy Oberstein: Four and a half. Okay. I feel, by the way, this is the episode we could shamelessly plug, please leave a review for the podcast, wherever you're listening. Crystal Carter: Oh my God. Please leave review. Please leave a review of the podcast. Wherever you enjoy podcasts, please leave us a review. Mordy Oberstein: I enjoy podcasts in my ears. Where do you enjoy them? Crystal Carter: Yes, that's true. Also ears, ears are good. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Five star review for ears. This got off the rails already. Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: User reviews. What are we talking about Crystal? Crystal Carter: Okay, so when we're talking about reviews, today we're talking about user rated reviews, getting them what we think about them, why they matter, why they're important. When Google talks about reviews, they also have their product review updates, which are not around user generated reviews. They're more about the content that people make when they say, "Oh, I've got this blog and I've reviewed this pair of headphones or something." That's a different kind of review. Today what we're talking about are user generated reviews and basically we're talking about how you can think about them. Now, Google gets really involved with user generated reviews in a few different ways. Probably the most relevant to most people who are listening to this podcast is in Google Business Profile. And Google Business Profile, they actually have some good information about how to manage user generated reviews. So they say, remind customers to leave reviews. Let them know that it's quick and easy to leave reviews. You shouldn't necessarily incentivize, but it's good to remind people that it's there. So you can say, leave a link and at the bottom of your email that you send out to them after they've completed a transaction. Or you can say, leave a link at the bottom of your email footer, or you can put a little sticker on your door that says, review us on TripAdvisor, or review us on Google Business Profile, that sort of thing. Reply to reviews to build customer trust. That is absolutely great advice and it's a really good way to make sure that users know that if they leave a review that you are someone who's going to be engaging with them. They also say value all reviews. So again, not every review is going to be five stars. Some of them are going to be four and a half, some of them might be a little bit lower. And basically, you just want to make sure that you're checking in on all of those reviews. One of the great things about reviews is that they show up not just in Google Business Profile, but they can also show up on products. They can also show up for your shop overall, for instance, if you're working on Google Merchant Center. And if you're using things like TripAdvisor or RevU or Trustpilot or things like that, you might also see reviews there. Facebook will also give you review information and things like that. But reviews offer a great amount of social proof for the value of your company and the value of your services. And so making sure that you're thinking about how you're getting those reviews and how you're managing those reviews can be really, really important to moving the needle both with ranking and also with building your brand. Mordy Oberstein: That's amazing. I don't know where to start with this first off. Yeah, the thing for me about reviews you've comprehensively covered in a minute, which is amazing in its own right, that gets a five star review right there too. You get a five star review and you get a five star review. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: But reviews show up everywhere in the ecosystem. So we're probably going to get and talk about ranking factors and where that comes in to Google ranking you in local packs and the local finder and how reviews factor into all of that. But leave that aside just for a second. Reviews are so important obviously to your business because there's social proof that what you offer is good. By the way, great point that not all the reviews are going to be 100% five star reviews. And that's actually a good thing because when I see all five star reviews, I think fake reviews. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly, exactly. And sometimes the one star reviews are nothing to do with whether or not something is good. Sometimes it's like, "Oh, I gave this laptop one star because I spilled yogurt all over it and it didn't work after that." It's like, I think that's user error. That they didn't necessarily- Mordy Oberstein: I was not happy with the quality of the packaging and wrapper. You know what I'm doing with the wrapper? I'm throwing it out anyway. So I don't really care. Crystal Carter: So I always check the top reviews and I always check the bottom reviews as well. And if the bottom reviews I'm like, ah, that's not going to apply to me, or oh, okay, I'll take that into account or whatever, then that's fine. But yeah, absolutely, pay attention to those. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, if you're looking like, oh, I do have negative reviews, if that's the negative review that you're getting and someone's going to look at it, which I do, I think everybody kind of does, if it's a nothing burger, it's a nothing burger. Don't fret. But reviews show up, they're in structured data markup, they're kind of everywhere. And it's one of the things that Google, because again, Google wants to show you that what you're getting is, as a user, is a quality result. And it's one of the easy ways that Google can clearly show the user that what we as in Google are offering you is great. So Google uses those reviews. So they're just everywhere. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. And if you look up your business and your business name, you'll often see multiple websites that are showing the reviews and you'll often see different things are either going there. And the point that Google was talking about, about responding to reviews is really important because it shows that you're present and that you're engaging with your customers. And even if there's a nothing burger review, even if you're like, "Thank you very much for your insights, we'll take that to the team" or something, that's better than nothing. I've seen conversations where a customer wasn't happy about something and the company came back and said, "Well, we've adjusted this or we've improved that." And the person said, "Oh, thank you." That can be really good and that can help build trust. And that can also show any potential customers that if something does go wrong, you're the kind of business that will help them to address it. So I think that reviews are something that is really useful for businesses of all sizes. And certainly, as a reviewer, I've spoken a lot recently about how I am a level six Google Guide, now. I have stock. I'm just saying. Anyway, as a level six Google Guide, one of the things that I find really important is to make sure that I review businesses that I think are really, really valuable that I really enjoy. And even sometimes if I wasn't able to make a purchase at the place, but I had a great experience at the place, it's something that I really, really value. And I've seen with clients when I've been working client side that when they have more reviews, they seem to see more visibility on local pack. And this is something that's been a little bit of a debate amongst SEOs as to whether or not that affects Google Business Profile rankings. But what I've seen from working with clients is that when they have more reviews, they get better traffic to their website. But what I've also seen is that sometimes, as a user, if I'm looking for something, sometimes the reviews will show up in the search. So if I'm searching for maybe vegan donuts and the website or the profile for the bakery doesn't have vegan donuts, but there's a review that says vegan donuts, sometimes it shows up on there. And again, there's some debate about whether or not that's something that there's some debate about whether or not other people have seen that. But I've definitely seen that in the wild. Mordy Oberstein: I've definitely seen the local pack pulling in reviews, snippets into the local pack. So Google is taking those snippets of reviews would mean like when we say reviews are everywhere, it's not the stars, it's actual the words that people are leaving and throwing it into the local pack. So curious if Google, another value of reviews is, does it give Google semantic understanding of what you do and who you are? I don't know. It's a little bit hard to do that because the reviewer doesn't necessarily leave that kind of wording in the review. It might say this was great. So that's not going to be semantically relevant. But many times they do. Crystal Carter: Well, what's interesting is as a Google Guide, this I think is really important that people think about and people engage with the Google Guide system. There are millions of people doing the Google Guide system. And basically what Google Guides does is when you leave a review, you get more points as a Google Guide. So you can move up to level seven if you have more words in your review. Also, if you add a photo to your review, they say, what is this? Is this a hamburger? Is this a hot dog? Is this a pizza? Which part of the menu is that? So Google Guides people, Google guides their Google Guides to leave the kinds of reviews that they expect to see, particularly in Google Business Profile reviews. So I think that when you are thinking about the kinds of reviews you might be getting and you are thinking about the kinds of reviews, you might be... What did they say? They said recommending or reminding. Reminding people to leave. Then also you want to think about how Google is actually guiding people through that review process. Sorry, if I can say one more thing. But during the last year I've been talking a lot about visual search and Google has been using a lot of the images from Google Guides for their visual search thing. So for instance, if you take a picture of a hamburger and you put near me, then Google will search their Google Guides photos and the reviews that they've had from Google Business Profile to surface content that's from businesses that serve that kind of thing. So thinking about making sure that you have things that are review worthy and you have imagery that is review worthy within your establishment can also help you to increase the kinds of reviews that you get for your business. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. And all of that information, whether it be simply because people are leaving that information other people are looking at, or Google is in the Symantec web, is using it to sort of contextualize and understand who you are, what you do and how well you do it is super important. You might want to think about when you're asking people to leave reviews, to sort formalize it in a way or construct it in a way where you're sort of guiding them towards leaving a more specific kind of review. So if let's say it's a restaurant, put it in, let us know what you thought of the restaurant, the service, what was your favorite dish? And then people will tell you, "Yeah, I really enjoyed this," whatever, whatever dish that you have. You're trying to nudge them along to be a little more specific in that review, which is a better quality to review and offers a little bit more teeth of semantically for Google to grab onto. But I want to jump back really quickly to the whole ranking factor thing. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Our reviews are ranking factor. Now I know there's a bunch of debate as you mentioned about it. But on the side that says that reviews do, and just keep this in mind, the local pack when you search for pizza near me and there's a big box there and there's one, two, three businesses listed in there, is a separate algorithm than the normal Google algorithm. I want to say normal, the general Google algorithm. If indeed reviews are a part of that, that's a major thing because you're only talking about three listings in there. And if reviews are a major factor, it's not something to ignore. Is it not, first off, what do you lose? Secondly, if it is, it's a major part of getting visibility online and it's not just random people saying reviews are a ranking fact. There's people like Darren Shaw who we'll talk about more later, Joy Hawkins. And there's studies. For example, Joy Hawkins recently did a study, we'll link to it in the show notes. I think Barry Schwartz over at SE Roundtable covered it, maybe on Search Engine Land showing that businesses that have more than 10 reviews tend to rank better than businesses less than 10 reviews in the local pack. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And Darren Shaw shared, he has an article on the Wix SEO hub, why Google reviews are important for local businesses. And he shared a report from 2001 about local pack ranking factors and he found that reviews contributed 17% of the time to ranking in Google Business Profile. Mordy Oberstein: It seems like there's, not say a consensus, but there's a broad understanding by a lot of really smart local SEO folks that reviews factor in. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And as you say, it's a good thing to do anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. It's like what do you lose? With that though, we did talk about how you actually encourage people to leave you those reviews because it's a little bit awkward. I don't want to ask them. How do you actually go about doing that? So for you, for your review health, we have local search expert over from BrightLocal who's one of the major local SEO platforms. She the one, she's the only Claire Carlile and she's here to help you understand how you can encourage people to write reviews. Take it away Claire. Claire Carlile: So we use reviews as consumers to help us decide which product, which service, which organization or which business to choose over another. So as a business or an organization, we're probably going to want to encourage people to leave reviews. So here are a few things to think about. 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. So you can have a look at your existing review corpus. So say for example, you might look at Google Business Profile reviews, have a little look at the place topics that Google is pulling through for your business and then work out what those are saying about you. If you've got phrases like professional service or very thorough, then that's great. If you have got place topics like disgusting or dirty, then you could probably do with having a little look at those and dealing with those before you get a big influx of reviews. And then you need to think about where you're actually needing those reviews. What type of reviews on what type of sites are you trying to target? So we can think about what shows in our Google Business Profile. Well, first of all, we've got Google Reviews. But secondly we also have sometimes reviews being pulled in from other platforms, say for example Facebook or it could be niche specific review sites in your vertical. So also have a little look for your brand name in Google and have a look to see what is on page one and page two in terms of reviews for your business. You might need to target reviews in those places as well. And don't forget, we might want first party reviews, but we probably will, that we can use as testimonials across all sorts of pages on our website. We can use them on our marketing materials, our social channels, and we can use them to display in our bricks and mortar establishments. And if we're trying to get reviews for a particular product, if we get reviews just for that product, we can use them to mark up our product schema to get some nice visibility in the serp. So number three, what makes a good review? Well, in my mind, an ideal review is positive I sentiment because obviously that's what we would like and it's rich in terms of content. So it uses the name of the service or the product and it uses any of the attributes that you'd like to be associated with your business. Ideally, it would have photos as well if possible. So number four, we actually need to ask for reviews. If you're going to leave it to chance, it's likely you're going to get fewer reviews. And also the ones that you do get could quite possibly be negative because it does seem to me that it's people that have an extreme experience of a product or service or business that tend to leave those reviews. So if you ask everyone, then you are more likely to get a fair balance of the reviews. Now, how and where? Well you need to make it easy and you need to offer options. It does depend on the type of service or product you're providing on the journey of the customer. So make sure that you're asking the right people at the right time and you should automate the process where possible. But try and incorporate some customer service feedback and input before you send out the review request. So say for example, you have had lots of people staying at your hotel for the weekend, you know that perhaps some of them had some issues, then why don't you deal with that first before you blanket send out a generic email to all of those people. You need to make sure that those are personalized for the people that you are sending them out to. And then finally, we need to monitor and reply because new and potential customers are going to read your review responses. So this is your chance to let them know that even if a review might be a bit negative in sentiment, that you are actually a good business and it's also your chance to turn an unhappy customer into a happier customer. And don't forget to use those reviews for business intelligence. Positive and negative themes, positive and negative sentiment can all be pulled out to help feed into your business to fix and improve your products and services. Don't just make the review process just ticking boxes. And then bonus tip, monitor your competitor review corpus. The place topics are an easy place to monitor. What are the positives of people's experiences and what are the negatives and how can you use that information to help you plan your own product and service delivery as well as your marketing materials? Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Claire. That was really amazing and I totally agree. You definitely want to make the process frictionless. You want to make this easy and smooth and fun, for lack of a better word. Don't offer them money or gifts and exchanges against Google guidelines, but you want to make it as nice of experience as possible. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think yeah, add some joy to it. The other thing that she also talked about, which I think is something that I've definitely seen is display your reviews. So this is something I've seen in a few different ways and something I always recommend is there's an app for instance called Elfsight that allows you to show your reviews on your website. There's also, sometimes you can embed your TripAdvisor reviews or your Trustpilot reviews or whatever on your website. And very often, in my experience anyway, if you display your reviews on your website, you're much more likely to get more reviews for your website or your business when you do that. I highly advise making a reviews page where you showcase the collection of reviews of various different things. Mordy Oberstein: Which goes back to repurposing reviews. It's a great thing. I don't know if we actually mentioned it. We didn't, oh my goodness. But repurpose your reviews. Put them in tweets, put them on this page or that page, here, there and everywhere. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. So yeah, Claire talks about displaying them in your business, online, all over the place. It's absolutely true. You should totally do that because sometimes it brings more reviews. Somebody says, "Mordy who is working at the register was super helpful to me the other day." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he was super helpful. He's a very helpful fellow. Crystal Carter: And somebody's like, "Yeah, he was really great." Mordy Oberstein: Handsome too. Reviews beget reviews. And speaking of reviews, ever get to a page that reviews a product? Say it reviews the best microwaves and it has heard just a quick list of various products i.e. microwaves, with maybe their price and star rating. Google seems to hate them these days, but do they have value? Here's a deep thought on aggregate product review pages. By the way, I feel like we're going to have a little bit of a debate here. So I'm just going to ring the bell right here, ding, ding, ding. Crystal Carter: Oh, it's on Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: It's on, because I hate these pages. I was talking to Rebecca Berbel from over at Oncrawl and we're like, "Yeah, we hate those kind of pages." I mentioned we're going to cover this. She's like, "Yeah, I hate." She's also a big content person. But you'll like them. So let's start with that. Crystal Carter: So I like these pages because I don't having to go to 25 different pages to see what's going on. I like a page where it's like best microwaves or something and then I can see 20 different microwaves and they're like review, no cost, et cetera. And I can compare them very, very quickly. I like that. I can get in, if I see the reviews, a general trend of the reviews and I can go off and get more details after I've made a short list. Mordy Oberstein: I get that and I get the idea, okay, you go to a page and say it again, best microwaves and all they have there is 20 of these boxes to have the name of the product, the picture of the product, the rating, and a whole bunch of affiliate links for themselves. So that to me, I guess is why part of the, I guess bias that I have against these pages. Because I know what's going on here. You're just trying to get your fund. I am all for affiliates. Do not take me the wrong way. I am all for affiliates earning their keep, but I also feel it should be value to the user and I understand why somebody will look at that as value. And I think the lesson we're going to walk away from this is different intents, different strokes for different folks. You have to know your audience and there might be an audience for this, although Google doesn't seem to think so. But anyway. Crystal Carter: Maybe I'm an army of one, who knows? But I think also maybe there's room for both. So maybe there's room for putting a TLDR of the reviews at the top in say a table for instance, and then maybe get into the details further on that sort of thing. Because for those of us with short patience, short attention spans, I want the Cliff notes. Mordy Oberstein: I'm all for that. But as a content snob, I want to know that you put some kind of effort into this and you actually... Because, okay, what tells me that this rating that you put there is not just because that's the affiliate link giving you the most money. It's the content. You've contextualized that rating you went through and you told me all the great things and all the bad things and all the mediocre things about this microwave. And now I feel like, okay, I can trust that four star rating. So I challenge you. Crystal Carter, how do you know that that four star rating, five star rating is good unless you see some contextualization around it? Crystal Carter: Here's my question, here's my counter question. How is this different from the Google shopping page? You go to a Google shopping page and you type in best microwaves, they give you a list of a bunch of best microwaves, they give you a list of best ratings, they've got all the star ratings there and you can scan through all of those and those are all links going off to somewhere. And I'm just like, how is this different? Mordy Oberstein: Counterpoint. When you go to Google shopping, you're going to actually buy the thing. You've already researched the thing, you already know what you're doing. You just kind of need a general understanding of what you're looking at. When you're looking for best microwave, it's an informational commercial, whatever intent, you're looking to learn more. And you just listing the product and a picture with affiliate links and a rating doesn't teach me anything. Crystal Carter: I don't want to learn about microwaves, I just want hot food. Mordy Oberstein: You're missing out. Crystal Carter: I don't want to spend three years reading about the ins and outs of microwaves. Mordy Oberstein: That a good point, though. That I agree with you, right? Because a lot of these things that are ranking for best microwaves, these product review pages, they have buyer guides, they're really kind of prolific and they're really good. But sometimes, let's say I've already read one in those pages and I'm diving a little bit deeper. Now I just want to go back, I want to get a quick review of what I looked at or what was there. I don't want all of that. Maybe you make a good point in the sense that you ever go to a recipe page, you all have, and there's like 400 words, 4,000 pages to scrolls, folds, just to get to the recipe. Crystal Carter: I went for a walk in the park and the leaves were falling and the colors were amazing and there was a butterfly. And this butterfly really reminded me of my grandmother. Mordy Oberstein: Meat Loaf. It reminded me of Meat Loaf. Not the food, the musical artist. At one time in a meatloaf contest, I had a wonderful tuna sandwich. So here's my recipe for the best tuna fish a sandwich. Crystal Carter: I would do anything to get to the end of that review. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes tuna fish sandwiches in the mirror may appear closer than they are. But I agree, there kind of needs to be a balance there. And I hope we don't get to that point. And I think perhaps there's different intents within best microwaves that maybe Google can do a better job of catering to. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But I still hold dear to the truth that, or my truth at least, that as a whole, aggregate review pages don't offer much value except to a small minutia of people on this planet called Crystal. Crystal Carter: I think there's a place for both. And I think that Google's getting pretty good at being able to drill down into that. So for instance, if the deal breaker on the microwave is whether or not it's pops popcorn really well, for instance, if I want to know what is the best microwave for doing Orville Redenbacher for instance, because I don't like burnt popcorn, it's the worst. Mordy Oberstein: I love burnt popcorn. Crystal Carter: Burnt popcorn makes your whole house smell. I do not like that. Mordy Oberstein: Round two, ding, ding, ding. Crystal Carter: I like perfectly popped popcorn. And I don't wasting kernels either. So for instance, if that's something there, then if I Google best popcorn for not wasting kernels. Google is getting very good at catering to those of us who have a short attention span and to click and to get through things. They're very good at getting to the highlighter section. So they'll highlight the section, they'll highlight the text within a longer form review. Now you're not going to get that kind of detail about whether or not this particular microwave is really good at popping popcorn so that you don't have any kernels left, for instance, in one of those aggregate reviews. So I think Google's getting better at sort of addressing the needs of people who just want the TLDR, people who want to wax poetical about microwaves, whichever. Mordy Oberstein: I think this is a good case where, we talked about this before in the previous podcasts where we had George fill in for you, you were on vacation and we talked about multiple intents on one page. I think this is a good case where you can cater to multiple intents of one page. And you see the pages that do this well, they'll have a table up top where they'll go through all the information that you want. But underneath that, and I think it's important that the table's on top Google, if you're listening, hi John, to have the deeper information underneath it. Now, as a second point, I understand about the burnt popcorn and it does stink up the house. I am with you, but it tastes so much better. And sometimes I will freely admit I burn the popcorn on purpose just a tad. And I'm so like on eggshells, is my wife going to get angry at me that I made the entire house smell like burn popcorn. But I do it anyway. Crystal Carter: Honestly, Mrs. Oberstein, I don't know what you're having to go through these days. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes I wait for her to be asleep to make popcorn just for no reason. Crystal Carter: Does the popping not wake her up? Mordy Oberstein: She sleeps through everything. I am on the opposite. I wake up at every single little noise. Okay, TMI, for all the listeners at this point, which brings us to our next segment. I'm just going to quickly pivot because I think there's no smoothness to this pivot. Do not rate this pivot. Let's get to the snappy news. Here's the snappy news. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google Documents Search Ranking Updates As Systems, Labels Live Or Archived Notable Algorithms. In a nutshell, Google came out and released an official list of its ranking systems, emphasis on systems. Feel like William Shatner, systems. Versus algorithms as some of the things are pre or meta algorithm, for example. Google uses machine learning like BERT, to better understand what the heck it's looking at. That's meta-algorithmic. That sounds super snazzy. Meta-algorithmic. The better Google can understand something, the better can apply relevancy, which is a ranking factor, which is kind of by focusing on the ranking factors per se is not the way. This is not the way. If you look at the doc Google created, you can sort of see the split as specific algorithms like the one that shows local news content in the top stories carousel. Those are called systems, as in the local news systems, or the helpful content system or the freshness system. Whereas, the properties that work at the metal level just have names, for example, BERT or MUM or neural matching. There's no system attached to the name. So little bit of a way for you to see the kind of split there and little trick there in my honest opinion. Anyway, we'll link link to both Barry's coverage and the actual doc from Google in the show notes is definitely worth giving it a read through if anything, but to refresh yourself. Refreshing. And that is it for this week's Snappy News. Tis was the snappiest of news. Again, it's always great to keep up what's going on in the ins and outs of the SEO industry. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you did that news like a bat out of hell. Mordy Oberstein: Back with the Meat Loaf. Love that. Wow, that was full 360 right there, Crystal. Five stars for you. You get a gold star, five gold stars. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You're welcome. I was a former teacher. I'm not easy giving out the gold stars. Very hard to a gold star for Mr. Okay, mainly because I didn't buy stickers. Yeah, well. It's their loss, anyway. This brings us to our last little part of the show. We make sure that you have access to more great people where you can find more great information. And we mentioned him before, but he is the godfather of local SEO, in my opinion. He's Darren Shaw over at Whitespark, @DarrenShaw_ on Twitter, @D-A-R-R-E-N-S-H-A-W_ underscore on Twitter. And Darren is fabulous about local SEO information. He's considered one of the supreme authorities on local SEO. Crystal Carter: You come to me and you ask me about reviews near me. Mordy Oberstein: Come the day of the daily grand opening. That's why I'm not in the pack. It's a grand opening. No one knows you exists yet. Crystal Carter: My cannoli business is needing to be- Mordy Oberstein: I love cannolis. I love cannolis. I miss them so much. Crystal Carter: I love cannolis. I don't know why- Mordy Oberstein: What are we talking about, again? Oh, Darren. Crystal Carter: Darren. Not the Godfather. Well yes, the Godfather. So Darren's amazing. He's written a really great article on the Wix SEO Hub. I mentioned it earlier, but you check it. He also writes some amazing articles just generally and normally does, I think he tends to do an annually, an annual report on local SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. Where at Whitespark, they put out an annual report, I'm pretty sure it's annual, going through what matters on local SEO. Crystal Carter: Really valuable. I've spoken at Whitespark Local Search Summit, which is a great event and has some fantastic SEOs speaking at it, including myself. But also like lots of other people. So do check that out if you see it happening. And also, I think they have an archive around where you can look through some of the information there. So there's some great stuff there, talking about reviews, talking about other things that you could do for a local business to rank and perform and drive people both online and in store. Mordy Oberstein: His Twitter feed is just fabulous. He's obviously a great person, but he is also offering great SEO information on his feed. So definitely check out Darren Shaw, wherever he is. He's also on Mastadon, by the way. I should have looked it up. He is on Mastadon. If you are Mastadon, Darren Shaw is there. He helped me- Crystal Carter: He's also on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: On LinkedIn, yes. I don't know about Facebook, having TikTok. But those are, Mastadon and LinkedIn and Twitter, he is there. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the vital need for an all channels approach to SEO. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SER? Check on all the great content and webinars on the Wick SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. And very appropriate for this show, 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

Veruska is an SEO consultant that works at the intersection of SEO and localization to help companies enter non-English-speaking markets. She follows a culturalized approach to SEO and localization, leveraging cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and data. Veruska Anconitano International and Multilingual SEO Consultant Veruska is an SEO consultant that works at the intersection of SEO and localization to help companies enter non-English-speaking markets. She follows a culturalized approach to SEO and localization , leveraging cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and data. Articles & Resources 7 Jan 2025 Omnichannel marketing for search algorithm resilience 5 Dec 2023 How to use implicit search intent for multilingual SEO 29 Aug 2023 Exploring implicit search intent for better SEO 9 Nov 2022 Why cultural relevance is the key to international SEO success 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

Marcus Tober is a leading global SEO specialist and speaker, named a top 8 Online Influencer in Digital Marketing and EU Search Personality of the Year 2016. He previously founded and led Searchmetrics, a global search experience platform, and joined Semrush as Head of Enterprise in 2022. Marcus Tober Head of Enterprise, Semrush Marcus Tober is a leading global SEO specialist and speaker, named a top 8 Online Influencer in Digital Marketing and EU Search Personality of the Year 2016. He previously founded and led Searchmetrics, a global search experience platform, and joined Semrush as Head of Enterprise in 2022. Articles & Resources 23 Aug 2022 Keyword intent: What you need to know about how customers search 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 SEO toolkit for Wix web design Make SEO an integral part of your web design process effectively and efficiently with this toolkit. 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 SEO toolkit for designers to: Analyze your audience, their user journey and what your competitors are doing in search Follow a comprehensive checklist for a successful website launch, from the research phase to post handover Access a set of free SEO tools Learn to elevate your SEO with a guide to Wix’s built-in optimization features and their functionality Understand SEO terminology at a glance with a handy glossary Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Crystal Carter is an SEO & digital marketing professional whose previous clients include Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. She hosts SEO webinars and podcasts and her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush, and more. More about this topic Watch this webinar on designing Wix sites with SEO in mind 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

How this SEO successfully optimized 500 sites and counting “Working on Wix is a huge source of competitive advantage for my SEO business. The investment they continue to make in SEO is like being on a winning bet.” 100% Increase in organic traffic for The Geekside 10.2K Keywords ranked for Barbulianno Design 70% Increase in sales for CO2 Radical Every SEO client comes with unique business challenges. Relying on Wix’s SEO tools gives this search marketer more time to solve them. Find out how Tom Nelan helped three very different clients crush their growth goals. The business Originally a lawyer, Tom first became fascinated with SEO when he built his wife a website for her Japanese translator business . In 2017, he went on to formally study SEO at the Digital Marketing Institute of Ireland, where he graduated in the top 1% of his class. Needless to say, he immediately put his newfound skills to work and helped his wife’s website climb to the top of the SERP. Tom officially launched his own business, SEO for Wix , in 2018. In order to connect with potential clients, he joined the Wix Marketplace and was paired up with his own customer success manager. From there, his business has gone from strength to strength. Now a Top 25 Wix Partner globally, Tom has worked on 500 Wix sites and counting. With hundreds of five-star reviews, he has happy clients everywhere from Switzerland to Singapore. Tom Nelan, Founder of SEO for Wix Skyrocketing sci-fi sales exceed The Geekside’s expectations 100% increase in organic traffic over 3 months 6.3K keywords ranked 67% increase in sales over 1 year The SEO challenge Specializing in everything from Harry Potter to Stranger Things, The Geekside is a sci-fi merchandise store based in the UK town of Skipton. They got in touch with Tom because they had a problem: their brick and mortar store was thriving but their online presence was in the doldrums. Their website traffic simply wasn’t living up to expectations, and realistically there were only so many customers they could attract through their shop window. The solution Tom got to work by identifying some site design improvements that could help Google better understand what The Geekside’s website was all about. As it was built on Wix, the business owner was able to make these edits themselves with minimal fuss. With these changes implemented, Tom dove straight into the more technical SEO tasks on his to-do list. As an online store with more than 700 products to optimize, this kind of painstaking work would typically set a project back by several days or even weeks. However, Tom decided to rely on Wix’s best-in-class default settings and then apply his own SEO logic at scale, which cut the project’s timeline by more than 50%. “Take a page title for example,” describes Tom. “You can insert that as a value that goes in for each of the 700 products. So Harry Potter will be one value on the Harry Potter page, but that appears as Star Trek on the Star Trek related page. With Wix, you can do that in bulk and put in the relevant keywords across the board, all with just a couple of clicks.” These time-saving features give Tom—and his clients—an edge in today’s marketplace. “If you can save one day's worth of time, you can pass those savings along to your customers. It just makes being a Wix SEO that bit more competitive in challenging times. You can come back to the client with a quote that's surprisingly decent from their point of view.” The results Within 3 months, Tom’s SEO work paid off with a huge increase in online visibility for The Geekside’s online store. Now ranking for 6.3K keywords, the website experienced a 100% increase in organic traffic which in turn led to a whopping 67% increase in sales. Barbulianno Design brings in unprecedented profits 10.2K keywords ranked 6.9K organic traffic 70% increase in profits over 1 year The SEO challenge Barbulianno Design is a UK-based homeware business that showcases sustainable brands and artisan furniture makers. The website creates revenue through affiliate links, so attracting high levels of traffic is critical in order to turn a profit. When Tom arrived on the scene, Barbulianno Design was a blank slate SEO-wise. The first thing he noticed was the website wasn’t fulfilling the “Expertise” requirement in Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. Specifically, the site’s About page wasn’t telling a clear story about who the business owner was and what the business offered. The solution Tom advised his client how to tailor the website’s design and content in a way that search engines would understand, before getting to work on the site’s technical SEO. After conducting thorough keyword research, he got the site owner’s buy-in on which keywords to optimize for. As always, Tom advised against a “scatter-gun approach”, as he routinely explains to clients that their site can’t be all things to all people. “We ended up with a nice final list of keywords, and then it was just a matter of putting those in all the little places that you can put keywords in Wix. There's so many if you know where to look,” Tom explains. The final task Tom undertook was backlinking. When explaining to clients how this helps Google understand their site, he uses the metaphor of how neural pathways work in the brain. “When you're talking to business people every day, you have to bring it back to a language that they can understand,” he recommends. The results Following on from Tom’s SEO work, Barbulianno Designs experienced an X% uplift in organic traffic and was named Etsy Affiliate of the Month for its popularity. “I could see serious growth very soon after Tom optimized Barbulianno Design,” shares the business owner, Vanja Barbul. “Google has become our number one traffic source. Profits increased by 70% in the first year and by a further 120% the following year.” Transforming CO₂ Radical from a niche product into a top seller 25% conversion rate $100K traffic value The SEO challenge Founded by two medical professionals in 2021, CO₂ Radical is a groundbreaking product that provides real-time air quality updates to its users via smartphone. The monitor provides a crucial service as it protects against toxic particles that can lead to the spread of infections like COVID-19. Of course, the SEO challenge that comes with marketing highly innovative products is that no one is searching for them—yet. Tom was well aware of this fact when the owners of CO₂ Radical reached out to him. Their website had been getting trace amounts of traffic, but nowhere near what they had hoped for given how much time and resources they invested in getting their new product off the ground. The solution While they had plenty of content on their website, Tom recognized it wasn’t telling their company’s story as clearly as Google needed it to. With his design and content recommendations implemented, Tom put his keyword research into practice and used Wix’s SEO tools to insert high-performing phrases in all the right places. “After you optimize the site, you have to take your hands off the wheel and give Google time to get to grips with your improvements,” Tom notes. “In this case, it happened quickly. They were very, very happy clients.” The results Tom successfully turned an extremely niche product into the highest earner of all the Wix sites he’s ever worked on. CO₂ Radical’s website now boasts a 25% conversion rate which is nearly 9 times higher than the industry benchmark. Learn how smart SEO features on Wix can help you deliver higher KPIs in less time, and explore our SEO Learning Hub for the latest insights from industry experts. 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. 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

Google’s Local Pack is filled with secrets… Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back in action to identify the hidden gems of Google's Local Pack. In this episode, our hosts are joined by the VP of Solutions at Uberall, Krystal Taing. Together the crew helps you uncover the range of possibilities offered within the Local Pack. Prepare to pack your brain full of knowledge, as this week; you’ll learn the ins, outs, and in-betweens of the Local Pack on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Things you never knew about the Local Pack Google’s Local Pack is filled with secrets… Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back in action to identify the hidden gems of Google's Local Pack. In this episode, our hosts are joined by the VP of Solutions at Uberall, Krystal Taing. Together the crew helps you uncover the range of possibilities offered within the Local Pack. Prepare to pack your brain full of knowledge, as this week; you’ll learn the ins, outs, and in-betweens of the Local Pack on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 78 | March 13, 2024 | 51 MIN 00:00 / 51:10 This week’s guests Krystal Taing Krystal Taing is the Global Director of Pre-sales Solutions at Uberall. She is a Google Business Profile Platinum Product Expert and faculty member at LocalU. She helps brands at managing hybrid customer experiences. 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'll put you on 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 very local, the very locally oriented, the very near-me Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, hello, internet people. We are here live and people have looked up directions to how to get to the SERP's Up SEO podcast and they maybe mapped it out, maybe- Mordy Oberstein: SERP's Up podcast near me. Crystal Carter: SERP's Up podcasts near me, also- Mordy Oberstein: Podcast, podcast, SERP's Up New York, New York podcast, podcast. Crystal Carter: And top podcast in your local area, all of those sorts of things. These are important things to think about because you- Mordy Oberstein: Obviously. Crystal Carter: You don't want a podcast that's not in your local area. Mordy Oberstein: My favorite, and obviously we're talking about local SEO today if you haven't figured that out, is when businesses name themselves 'Near Me', their actual business name is Dentists Near Me. Crystal Carter: For people who are not complete SEO nerds, this is something that SEOs are just like, "Oh yes, this is gold dust," when they see that in the strip mall next to the Little Caesars, and there's Dentists Near Me and on the wall that is like, "Oh, I must tell other SEOs about this." Mordy Oberstein: And people are like, "Why are they called Dentists Near Me?" And all the SEOs are like, "We know why." Crystal Carter: We all know why. Mordy Oberstein: For the older people out there, it's the equivalent of naming your business AAAA whatever, so that you show up first in the phonebook. Crystal Carter: It's a real thing. Triple A or AA taxis, Aardvark. Mordy Oberstein: Aardvark. Crystal Carter: How many businesses are called Aardvark? That was a thing. Mordy Oberstein: Why do people love that animal so much? Crystal Carter: Also, I feel sorry for young people who've never felt the weight of a full yellow pages. Mordy Oberstein: And when you got them both delivered, the white pages and you had to schlub those inside, you'd need a wheelbarrow. Crystal Carter: Oh, man. And people would be like, "Can you find something?" And you'd be like, "Well, let me just pull this out." Mordy Oberstein: And it made that sound as you opened it up like thump. Crystal Carter: Right, and then also there was always the case where somebody would've ripped out the page that you actually needed. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, see that, yeah, that's classic. Crystal Carter: But also, sorry, we will get to an actual thing, I'm sorry, we've got a guest who's waiting who's fantastic, but the actual thought of just having everyone's phone number and address in a white pages. Mordy Oberstein: That's scary, right? Crystal Carter: That's crazy, right? Mordy Oberstein: And you had to opt out. Crystal Carter: You could find anybody, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's not like they asked you, you had to opt out. Crystal Carter: And you would just see it in like public phone booths, there would just be a public phone booth and there would be a booth that had everyone's first name, last address, phone number available to any person who walked by. Mordy Oberstein: What could go wrong? Crystal Carter: Simpler times. Mordy Oberstein: Right, simpler times. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by simpler times and by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight on wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also up your local SEO game with our Uberall app integration, which means today we're diving into local SEO and in specific the hidden secrets of the Local Pack, the less known but equally awesome features in the Local Pack, things you didn't know helped you appear in the Local Pack, and how the Local Pack functionality has changed relatively recently and what it might mean to help us dig up the secret layers and levels of the Local Pack. Uberall's VP of Solutions, Krystal Taing, will join us in just a jiffy. Plus, we'll help you unlock the gems, offered a nifty little SEO app inside of Wix. And of course, we have your snappies of SEO news, who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So plug in your console or put those weird little goggle things down that everybody has and hop down a pipe with a man eating plant popping out of it as episode 78 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you find the secret levels of the local back like you are a plumber in a 1985 8-bit video game. Oh, by the way, that plumber is near you. Crystal Carter: Great. He also has a great dinosaur. I always like Yoshi. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's great. Yeah, but we're just- Crystal Carter: On Mario Kart, I'm Yoshi, that's me. Mordy Oberstein: I'm pre-dating, I'm going a bit 8-bit, I'm pre-dating Yoshi. It wasn't even a thought yet. Crystal Carter: Oh, come on, Yoshi's iconic. It wasn't really a party until Yoshi showed up. Mordy Oberstein: Truth by the way. So to catch everybody up real, real, real, real, real quick, the Local Pack is that big box that shows up at the way, way, way top of the Google results page when you search for a pizza near me. And it has a big map and it has the listing of these businesses, and you can go to the web, you can get directions, and it appears above the organic results, and it essentially makes the organic results, the actual Google normal results, kind of irrelevant for local queries like pizza near me. And to help us wade through the waters and maybe find the extra life of the Local Pack, please welcome to the show Krystal Taing. How are you? Krystal Taing: Hello, hello. Thank you much so much for having me. I will say, unlike a yellow page book, you cannot rip a page out of the Local Pack, so it's exciting to talk about. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, but maybe we could rip a page out of your Local Pack playbook. Krystal Taing: Yes, yes. I love that. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about this topic that I am just overly passionate about, which is just local. Mordy Oberstein: I wish we still called it the Snack Pack, which was another name for the Local Pack, because Snack Packs are also puddings and pudding is amazing. Krystal Taing: Yes, yes. That's what I think, Snack Pack of pudding. So I think we can still call it, we can bring it back 2024, it's a New Year. Mordy Oberstein: Vanilla Snack Pack or chocolate Snack Pack? Krystal Taing: Chocolate, chocolate. Mordy Oberstein: I was always a vanilla Snack Pack person. I'm generally a chocolate person over vanilla, but not for the Snack Pack. Krystal Taing: Oh, I was actually a tapioca, but that wasn't one of the options. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you're just a weirdo at that point. Krystal Taing: Yes, I am, I am. Crystal Carter: So snacks aside, so Krystal is the Global Director of Pre-Sale Solutions at Uberall, and you are also a Google Business Profile gold certified absolute... What is it, what's your actual qualification on the things? Krystal Taing: Way too many words, but it's a Platinum Google Business Profile Product Expert. But like I said, way too many words. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but you don't just get that out of nothing. I've been in the Google Business Profile Q&A questions and stuff, and Krystal's answering questions in there. Krystal's deep in the weeds. She's like, "No, you got to do this, you got to do that. You got to do all of this sort of thing." So we're so pleased to have you here. Also, Krystal wrote our introduction to local SEO. She knows all of the things about Local Pack. Mordy Oberstein: And we did a webinar together. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and a fantastic webinar with some great stuff there. So it's super important, and one of the reasons why Local Pack is so important is some of the things that you get from it. So just looking at this quote from your recent discussion about the local SEO ranking factors, one of the quotes you said is that businesses that rank in the 3-pack typically get 88% additional clicks in driving directions, 76 more clicks on call and 76 more clicks to website according to your recent Uberall study. That's mega. Krystal Taing: Yeah, yeah, it's insane. Crystal Carter: Right? Krystal Taing: There's definitely a lot more engagement when you're at the top of that Map Pack or 3-pack or result. I will say there's a lot of changes now. So there's not just the ability to rank in the 3-pack, there's the ability for your photos or videos or posts or other elements to rank so there's more opportunity, but being at the top really makes a difference in the amount of customers that have eyes on you. Crystal Carter: And so when we think about that, I know that there's a few different elements that can affect what puts you at the top for which queries and things, I don't know if you're able to share a couple of your favorite ways to do that. Krystal Taing: Yeah, I'll say my favorite is probably the most boring, but it is what has been the truest since the existence of GBP or GMB or Google Places whenever it started is just complete and accurate detail. Google wants information, they are going to reward businesses that have complete profiles. And the reason why they reward businesses that have all of their information, all of their images, videos, content filled out is because more searchers engage with those types of businesses. So ultimately they want to create a good experience for their customers, they want Google searchers to feel engaged with the content, and so they're going to surface those businesses that have complete data. So it's one of the things that's like if Google gives you a field to promote something about your business, fill them all out, fill it all out to the best of your ability as a business. And really that's one of the most core elements is you can strategize later about content and strategy and promotional material and that kind of stuff, but really getting started is completing your entire profile. Crystal Carter: Right, right. It's like the SATs, it's like answer all the questions. Mordy Oberstein: Right, put your name there, right? Crystal Carter: Right. Make sure you- Krystal Taing: Exactly. Crystal Carter: Answer all the questions, you have to get involved. And I think some of the things people will sometimes go, "Oh, I don't need to add that attribute that says that we have delivery or that we are wheelchair accessible or that we're this set or the other," but that's not true. You absolutely do need to. Mordy Oberstein: Especially if you're selling wheelchairs in which you should probably. Krystal Taing: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, I always remind businesses that Google isn't just creating this field for fun, they have access to a ton of data, a ton of user behavior data. So when they roll out something like a small business attribute on Google, they didn't just pluck it from the sky and said, "This is part of our calendar this month, we want to pull it." It's typically because they have a lot of search data that says users want to support small businesses, and so we need to surface this somehow and make it easy for businesses to engage. Same thing with dogs available at restaurants, do you know how many searches there are for that? So that became another attribute that was available in the last couple of months. Yes, I'm sure there's lots of Googlers that love dogs and they just want to show it on profiles, but a lot of this is because users want this information, Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, it also just makes you look more robust and complete. And if you're looking at other profiles and comparing them like, "Well, how come they have all those shiny little icons and emojis and whatever and that one doesn't? That doesn't seem right." Krystal Taing: Exactly, exactly. That's the thing, it's not only do you want to show up, but then once you show up, users need to make a decision and you need to give them all of the information they need to make a decision. So if you've got, to your point, shiny little icons and fun videos and additional content, it's a lot easier to make a decision than one that's missing hours or the photo is super blurry, or it doesn't say, to your point, that they don't accept reservations or those types of things. You're missing potential opportunity by not filling out that data. Crystal Carter: So here's another contentious one that I hear about the GBP things. What about posts? What is your stance on posts? How important do you think that is to helping businesses listing to perform on the Local Pack? Krystal Taing: So I don't know if you were just stalking my LinkedIn, but I did just actually make a post about Google posts because I continue to see more and more prominence of posts throughout the search experience. So these don't just display on your profile, there are different places that they display whenever users are searching on Maps, whenever they're discovering businesses on mobile. There's a lot of different ways that Google is adding these, and I think Google really likes it because it's unique and rich content. It's images, it's videos, it's promotional details, and the fact that the LinkedIn posts that I included, there's an entire section on Maps called nearby events and deals. It's like Google must have information that people want events and deals about businesses, and this is how they're choosing to surface it. Businesses that add posts, the offer posts, the event posts, these are going to now get surfaced in addition to your business data. So there's a lot of opportunity, and from my perspective, if Google is adding posts in different parts of there, that means they're relevant and that they're going to help impact your business from a ranking perspective. So I am all gung ho on posts. Crystal Carter: If people aren't aware of what posts are, if you have a Google Business Profile thing, sometimes they refer to them as updates so it'll say add an update in the backend for your business, and you have an option where you can add text, it's up to 1500 characters, you can add photo to it, and then you can add a link, you can add a button that goes to a link directly to somewhere in your site and you can add for booking or order online or buy or learn more or sign up. And you can schedule these things using other tools to disseminate information and when people look at your business, they show up at the bottom. I'm so glad to hear you say that because I've definitely seen this work for clients to see an uplift to sort of add new life into a sort of existing standard listing. So yeah, I'm glad to see that they were saying this is still a valuable and interesting thing going forward. Mordy Oberstein: Let's backtrack in the funnel just a little bit before you get to the GBP profile, perhaps you're getting to that profile from the Local Pack, and I think we look at the Local Pack and be like, "Okay, pretty straightforward. There's the name of the business, there's reviews there, whatever," but there's a lot more in there and there's sort of these little hidden Easter eggs or tidbits. I wonder if you can maybe talk about what's in the Local Pack that you may not be aware of is actually in the Local Pack? Krystal Taing: Yeah, there's so I would say two things really to pay attention to. So one of the things that we touched on already were attributes. So Google's got all of these, kind of think of them if you're familiar with more organic tags for your business, these are just features and functionalities that you offer. This is, to your point, are you wheelchair accessible? Do you offer delivery? But then there's other things like as a restaurant, do you serve vegetarian food? There's oftentimes these are going to be surfaced based on the search query. So if a user searches like 'vegetarian food near me', if you have that as an attribute, it's going to then be surfaced in the Local Pack on your business when normally it may not show, Google is associating that to the search. So attributes are a huge one. The other thing that is growing in prominence are videos. So Google is really leaning into short form video content and they've started ranking this very, very high. So if you've got a video on your profile, whether a user loaded it or you as a business, it'll start displaying in the Map Pack and position two next to your images. For different industries, not all industries are showing it that prominently, but I would definitely double down on videos on your GBP profile because they really have an impact. And again, to your point, when you're making a decision about a business, if it's a restaurant or you're going to a salon or something, if you are able to see a quick 10, 15 second video of what it looks like inside and you don't have to wonder if this is going to be a good experience, that's huge in terms of impact for customers. Mordy Oberstein: There's so much in there and I think if you're an SEO who's not so in the local space and now you have a client that is in the local space or you're a local business yourself, Google something, Google 'pizza near me', Google 'doctor office near me', Google all sorts of different things, all sorts of things show up if I Google pizza near me, I get Joe's Pizza, which I hear is completely overrated by the way, it's in fact most famous pizza place in New York City. I'm like, "Yeah, New York City style counter slice shop," it gives a description of the business in there and the next one's like counter for slices and pizza and calzones, or if you Google 'doctor office near me', I get all the 'accepts Medicaid'. Krystal Taing: Exactly, there's a lot of additional content there. What I also, to that point, is as an SEO or an agency doing searches on different surfaces is really important. So what do you see on desktop on search, desktop on Maps, mobile search, mobile Maps are all different and they all highlight different elements. And again, Google does that based on user behavior and what they think users want to see on different journeys. So I am a huge advocate for making sure you're doing those searches yourself because they do show you what Google is surfacing to customers during those times. Crystal Carter: So that touches on another point. So in terms of Local Pack, and so in your Uberall study you talked about personalization and I think that that mobile versus desktop thing is going to affect that personalization. So for instance, if Joe's Pizza Shop, if you're in Times Square and Joe's Pizza Shop is also in Times Square, and if you search near me, then literally it's near you, right? Krystal Taing: Exactly, exactly. Crystal Carter: So footfall might potentially affect that. So how important is it that you localize your test searches as well? So if you're an agency and if you're, say, an agency in Philadelphia and your client is in New York and you're testing the 'near me' and they're like, "I'm not seeing I myself on the thing," and you're like, "But I am," how much does the localization affect the Local Pack result? Krystal Taing: Yeah, that's a really great question. So the distance of the business from where the search is taking place is a huge impact and it's a huge ranking factor. So to your point, that happens all the time. It's like, "Hey, I googled my own business and I'm not showing up." The first question is, what was your search and where are you located? Everyone's going to have incredibly different searches, especially if you're on mobile and if your location services are activated, or maybe you're doing a search and you're saying, "I'm planning a trip and I'm going to Chicago, but I'm currently in San Diego." Even if I search for pizza restaurants Chicago, my results are going to be very different from someone that is physically located in Chicago. There's a lot of plugins that allow you to kind of maybe spoof your location where you can say, "Put me in this area," but it's just important to know that that is going to impact your search results unless you are at the exact same place that someone's searching. Google, especially for a near me or local search, they're going to adjust the results based on businesses that are nearby. Crystal Carter: Okay. So I think that in that regard, when people are thinking about maybe, and this is interesting because I always like the sort of intersection of IRL stuff and online stuff, so for instance if you were maybe a business that was outside of Times Square, but you wanted people to Google you or maybe it might be that that's where you put your sign flipper person, is it a place that would drive more searches? I mean, is that something that people should think about, like driving searches from certain places that are nearer them? Am I spit-balling too much there? Krystal Taing: No, no. I mean, I think a lot of businesses think that. It's also one of the challenges Google has with spam is because location is so impactful from a ranking perspective, that's a great example, people want to rank in downtown New York, but they might be located an hour outside, but based on your business, people might be willing to travel an hour outside. So that's where you do have to get unique. You do need to understand how users are searching for you, where they're located, and then understanding how you stretch your visibility. Oftentimes that's where you layer on the on-page elements, that's where you layer on back link strategy and those types of things because you probably are competing with a business that is located in downtown or is located in Times Square and that can be a challenge to businesses. But I think the most important thing is making sure that you're ranking where you're located first really, really well, you're really well optimized, and then you can start expanding that. In some cases, I've seen businesses actually relocate their offices because it can be a big challenge. Mordy Oberstein: It's a real challenge. It could be a really, really big problem. Krystal Taing: Yeah. And especially for service-based businesses. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say that. Krystal Taing: So again, you think of an attorney where someone is willing to travel quite far or maybe they're doing some of their services virtually, so it's fine that they're an hour outside, but guess what? They want that downtown clientele. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. If I'm looking for a lawyer or an accountant, I'm not going to the accountant's office, I don't care. Krystal Taing: Yeah, exactly. Crystal Carter: So you brought up service level businesses, and I know that particularly on Google Business Profile, let's say you were somebody who was based in Long Island, but you were able to service people who were in Manhattan for your service where you're like, "I'll drive to you, it's fine, it's not a big deal. I will come to collect your dry cleaning," whatever it is. So what are some of the things that affect service area businesses for Local Pack? Krystal Taing: Yeah, I think the biggest thing to understand is that physical address where you originally create your business, which can be hidden, it doesn't have to display, is still from a location perspective where Google's going to rank you. And so I think a lot of times people think they add in these service areas because there are zip code cities, regions you can add to your service area, Google just uses that to draw an outline on the map, but it doesn't mean they're going to start ranking you in those addresses or in those areas. And that's what is a challenge for service-based businesses where you have to kind of really expand. You are a little bit more limited. Of course if you're a business that can show your address, that's always going to be helpful because sometimes hiding your address does limit where you can rank. But I think that's the most important thing to know is you are going to rank from a location perspective where your original business address is and sometimes that's your home even if the address is hidden. Crystal Carter: So I have another one, I have another one because I love Local Pack, I love local. Okay, so the other one is reviews. So I've seen it sometimes, for instance, you mentioned like vegetarian food, I don't do dairy but I do like donuts, so I'm like vegan donuts, where are vegan donuts? And I sometimes see that you get a highlight that says, "Oh, I had great vegan donuts here," that's a review, but isn't necessarily in any of their information. And so to my mind, reviews are very important, certainly as a user I find reviews to be very important. How impactful do you find reviews for Local Pack rankings? Krystal Taing: Yeah, that's another good point. I will say when you're building out a GBP profile, Google is controlling to a point everything you can publish. Reviews are one of the areas where it's kind of like freeform content. And when we talk about this, this is the review content a user leaves. As a business owner, you should respond to all reviews, Google wants to see that and they're going to reward you if you're responding to all reviews. They don't necessarily care what's in that content because you can spam it with whatever you want, you don't need to worry about adding keywords to that. But Google really values user-generated content, they kind of trust it more than what a business says, it's a little bit more unbiased. So as much as you can encourage users to be more specific in their reviews, saying things like, "We'd love to hear your feedback about our vegan donuts," can kind of put that in their mind to leave those keywords in the reviews to be a little bit more specific. If you are a business and you're asking for reviews, whether that's via email, text message, those types of things, if you can prompt it or ask for more detail, that's going to be valuable because Google does, they pull these out, they're called justifications, but it's really Google is justifying to users why they're showing your business for that query. And if you don't have vegan in your category, you don't have it in your image tag, you don't have it on your website or your menu, they need to basically tell users why they're seeing this business and it's because multiple users left a review and they talk about vegan donuts. It is a source of information that Google's mining. So huge, huge impact in terms of content in your reviews. Mordy Oberstein: Let me switch gears a little bit. I want to ask you a question. I don't know if you know, I'm asking you, I don't put you on the spot, but a while back or somewhat a while back... Let me rephrase this, Google's constantly changing how the Local Pack functions. It used to be back in the day it was a map and then a very small rectangle-ish kind of map, or an actual rectangle, not rectangle-ish, and then underneath there were the three listings and it had the reviews and it had directions or whatever it was. Now on desktop at least you have the results on the left-hand side, a much bigger map on the right-hand side, and there's all sorts of functionality. If you hover over the map, the results disappear. If you hover over a pin now, you'll get a little call-out with the reviews and some images from the location. Has that changed anything in terms of what you see happening in the Local Pack? Are businesses affected by that change at all, or is it just business as usual? No pun intended. Krystal Taing: I'll say I haven't seen too much impact from businesses, but what I have seen probably for the last four to five years is a transition in user behavior where a lot more searches are beginning on Maps. If you look back pre-2020, 90% of all business views on Google started on desktop. And I even know for myself, I will just go to Maps and instead of doing a search on Google search, I just zoom in and then I click around and I might put some keywords in or some filters. But I like that from a discovery perspective a lot more. So I think, and this is a complete assumption, I think Google sees that and they're trying to merge these experiences because users like to engage a little bit more and I think Maps gives you that more than a search result. Mordy Oberstein: It makes a lot of sense because you see, by the way, Google started testing out AI or an SGE kind of experience in Maps. And I think by the way, that makes a lot of sense to have there because I find jumping from one query to the next query to the next thing inside of Maps, a pain in the rear end. Krystal Taing: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Crystal Carter: I know that you're a big fan of categories, you've got your categories on Google Business Profile, which effects, which queries you show up with on the Local Pack. And I think that that also is reflected on Google Maps. So I think that that's one of the things I think is so interesting about Local Pack, local et cetera, is that there's a whole ecosystem around it. So for instance, I was recently in Switzerland and we went to one town and literally nothing was open and it was like, "Okay, I want a coffee. How am I going to find a coffee?" And then I looked at this other town and I was just generally hovering for cafes and then open now, and a bunch of them showed up. And so I just headed to this general area because I found that because it has all of these filters. So that goes back to the things that you're thinking of, and that also goes back to people going to Maps first because I don't know what any of the restaurants are called, so I couldn't possibly search for one. And sometimes they might call it a cafe, sometimes they call it a restaurant, but I just want a coffee. So I think that that goes to sort of how people can show up with those. Do you find that people need to make the same optimizations? Are the optimizations exactly the same for Maps as they are for Local Pack? Or do you that people need to make additional specific considerations for Google Maps? Krystal Taing: So there's not necessarily anything different. It's more about understanding how Maps works. I will say Maps is not a separate entry point for businesses, you still create your GBP profile and that's what's reflected on Maps. However, Maps does have different types of integrations. So you think of searching for fuel stations or petrol stations, there's oftentimes when you're going to see the prices, that is not connected to Google Business Profile, that's a complete separate Maps integration. Same thing with movie times. So it's good to be aware, but there's things you can't control. I will say one of the things with Maps in the discovery process is there are different levels at your zoom where businesses will show. And this is one of, I think, the most common questions I see, they're like, "How come my map pin doesn't show when I'm on Maps?" But you have to zoom in maybe two levels closer and you will see a map pin that is a slightly different ranking on Maps than it is on GBP search, on the search result. So that typically is prominent. It's a lot of different elements like reviews. It's similar elements to the search result, but it's not the exact same and there's not an exact science yet really about that. But that is the most common thing I see is businesses will only show at certain zoom levels on Maps. And then Google has come out and they did the branded map pins through ads, which I think a lot of businesses have taken advantage of because they realize how many people are going directly to Maps. So I think Google's offering that to businesses too. Mordy Oberstein: With that, I don't want to put a pin in it, but where can people find you, near where? Krystal Taing: They can search for Krystal Taing near me. But yes, absolutely, feel free to connect with me. I think I've been on LinkedIn a little bit more frequently than on X/Twitter just because my Twitter algorithm these days, I don't know, it's a little bit weird. I'm still on Twitter, feel free to DM me, but definitely LinkedIn, I've been active there. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing, and definitely check out Uberall. Krystal Taing: Yes, please do. Mordy Oberstein: And for the Wix users, check out the Uberall app, which we're going to discuss in just a minute. Thank you so much, Krystal and Crystal. I can't believe I only just made that joke now. Crystal Carter: Yes, thank you. Krystal Taing: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, always a pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: Great. Definitely make sure you give Krystal Taing a follow. I really do feel like disappointed in myself for not making more Crystals jokes because there were so many Crystals on the call. Crystal Carter: I mean, hey, the whole conversation was full of gems, so it's all good. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you crazy diamonds. Anyway, shine on you crazy diamonds, a little Pink Floyd for you there. Okay, so as you mentioned earlier, we gave a little hint at an app that can help you with local SEO, but it really does a lot more than local SEO stuff, it helps you actually distribute content for a local business. So here is our segment called Tool Time as we dive into, guess what, the Uberall within the Wix app market. So I'm going to say maybe a year ago, I'm not good with time, Uberall added an app into the Wix app market, and if you forgot Krystal, not our Crystal, the other Krystal, Krystal Taing works for Uberall. Okay, so Wix has an integration, a partnership with Google Business Profile, and one of the feature requests that we had was can we upload, as both Crystals were talking about, Google posts from Wix to the Google Business Profile and with our partnership with Google, you can, but with the Uberall app. Crystal Carter: You can. Mordy Oberstein: You can. And not only that, you can also upload posts across social networks like Facebook, X, Instagram, I'm running out of social profiles, all the kind of social profiles you want to share content. So if you're a business that you're working with, as I say, a Facebook page, and you want to upload the same post that you added to Google posts you want to put on the Facebook page, you can use the Uberall app as basically a content distribution app for local businesses, which is cool. Crystal Carter: This is super important I think because with local businesses it's very often the case that local businesses are particularly active on social media. So if you're able to keep those channels going and those channels full of new information in an efficient manner, that's super valuable. So I mean, I don't know about y'all, but we have a local moms group, we have local parent groups for schools. I know that there's people who are like, "They didn't pick up the bins today. What's going on?" There's people who have spotted in Poughkeepsie or whatever, and those local recommendations carry a lot of weight. So if you have presence on there and you are in the local groups, you're able to post into local groups, you're able to post onto local Facebook accounts, local channels there that can give you some incredible, incredible reach and people will vouch for you. People will be like, "Yeah, I used that painter decorator. They were really great, they made my shed look fantastic." I keep talking about sheds these days. But yeah, I think it's a great tool and it's really, really, really useful for- Mordy Oberstein: Distributing content as a local business is super important. So if your clients are a local business, they may not always have the budgets to start running social media ads or Google ads, so having that organic social cadence and social presence can be a big factor for a local business so it definitely makes sense to do that and the Uberall app can help you do that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think like Krystal talked about events for instance, because events take place in a local place that can also help to connect. Mordy Oberstein: Events are local? Crystal Carter: Yes, they're in a place with a geographical location, and so that's really good for connecting your business to that particular geo and things like that. So yeah, I can't recommend enough getting involved with citations and listings. It's also a good way to get back links. Citation links don't necessarily cater the same weight as an organic back link, but they are still links as in they still get crawled and still drive traffic, can drive traffic to your website. Mordy Oberstein: They drive traffic for sure. Crystal Carter: And can still help Google to understand where the important parts are of your website. So absolutely get involved with citations and sometimes those sites will rank higher than your business in other parts of the web so it's worth making sure that you're getting involved with those, particularly in a local space. Mordy Oberstein: Now do you know who we like to cite when we're talking about the SEO news? I'll give you a hint, his name rhymes with Larry and his last name rhymes with Schwartz, well is Schwartz, it's Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Quartz, Quartz. Mordy Oberstein: Quartz, damn. God, how did I know not...? I was spitballing, I was like, "Damn, you don't have a rhyme," but Quartz. Crystal Carter: Crystal knows all about the gems here. We're talking about crystals. Mordy Oberstein: You know why? Because nothing rhymes with Oberstein so I don't have any good last name rhymes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know, I don't know. I was on the phone and sometimes when I explained my name on the phone they're like, "Oh, can you spell your name?" I'm like, "Yeah, it's Crystal like the glass," and then one time I said, "And Carter like the trolley," which is like- Mordy Oberstein: The trolley? Crystal Carter: They were like, "What are you talking about?" As soon as I said it, you know when you say something and you're like, "That is silly." Mordy Oberstein: You should be like, "Carter like that Stallone movie," which is a remake of another movie. Crystal Carter: Get Carter, Get Carte. Mordy Oberstein: Get Carter, Carter. Crystal Carter: Originally with Michael Caine. Mordy Oberstein: Michael Caine, yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, "Blow the fricking doors off," or whatever. "I could blow the bloody doors off," I think that's what he says. Mordy Oberstein: People really don't like the Stallone movie. I liked it, I don't know why people don't like it, I thought it was good. Crystal Carter: It was all right it was kind of like gritty late '90s, early '90s kind of cinematography. But you know who really loves Sylvester Stallone movies? Mordy Oberstein: Barry. And you know who's Gritty? Barry. So here's the Snappy news with Barry and other people who cover the SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Oh, do we have some news for you this week? Oh man, where do I even start? I guess we'll start with Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land. Okay, Barry writes, "Google releasing massive search quality enhancements in March 2024, core update and multiple spam updates." At the start on March 5th, Google said that they have released the March 2024 core update and then a bunch of spam updates along with it. It's a lot to parse out and to digest so let's just take it, and I'm going to try to break it down as honestly as I possibly can because there's a lot to this. Okay, so per Barry Schwartz, "Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product Search at Google told Search Engine Land that the update will help reduce unhelpful content in Google by 40%. We expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low quality unoriginal content in search results by 40%." That is a big, big number because this is a big, big update. Google is saying that multiple systems are being updated and tweaked and released during this update, is going to take them weeks upon weeks to actually roll out. Chris Nelson from the search quality team of Google is quoted by saying that it's a more complex update than our usual core updates, and that's why it's going to take so much time with so much rank fluctuations and so forth. Don't be scared, don't be scared. Part of this is the helpful content update is now going to be a part of the core update. Google will no longer announce iterations of the helpful content update being updated, instead, it'll be part of the core algorithm like Panda was pushed into the core algorithm and it'll just be part of the core algorithm updates, which would be part of why this is taking so long and why there'd be so many rain fluctuations. Now, I initially thought, well, if the helpful content update becomes part of the core update, then the helpful content update kind of becomes diluted a bit by the other call it elements within the core update that weigh in and decide what should or should not be impacted in terms of rank. I think I'm wrong, I think I was wrong, I think I'm right now. I think when instead is happening is that the helpful content update is getting a very, very prominent role in the core update itself. If you go back to what Barry wrote earlier in the article, which I quoted before, but I'll quote it again here just to remind you, Barry said, "Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product Search at Google told Search Engine Land the update will help reduce unhelpful content in Google search by 40%," meaning Google's targeting low quality, unhelpful content trying to reduce it by a massive percentage, 40%, that's an insane percentage. So just let that resonate for a minute. And I think what's happening is not what I originally thought, which was okay, the helpful content update will be integrated into the core algorithm and as a result it'll be a small fish in a large pond and it'll have a diluted effect. I think the opposite. I think Google's trying to make a very massive move here by saying that the helpful content will, unlike let's say Panda, which was out for a while, by the time it got moved into the core, it already kind of did its thing, that's not the case with the helpful content update. The helpful content update is a rather new update and it's not being integrated like, "All right, its impact is already there, we're moving on to other technologies and other parts of the algorithm that'll help us do new things like bird," that's not the case like it was back, in my opinion, with Panda. In this case, the helpful content on that is new and novel and wouldn't be what I would expect to be integrated into the algorithm right now, although Glenn Gabe has predicted it will go into the algorithm way, way, way, way in the past, and he's right obviously because they are integrating into the algorithm, but I'm not surprised that they're integrating it into the core algorithm, I'm surprised that they're doing it now, being that this algorithm update is not old, it's new, or it's new-ish for an update for an algorithm it's pretty new. And I think it's going to have a massive role in the core algorithm and that the other elements of the core algorithm are going to adjust to it, not that the helpful content is going to adjust to the core. And I think that's why it's going to take weeks for this to roll out, like Google is saying, and that's why there's going to be a lot of fluctuations because they're not just putting the helpful content update into the core and letting the helpful content update sort of adjust and integrate in a mesh and become like a stew into the core, they're re-aligning the core to align with the helpful content update. That's my theory. Again, say it very clearly, that's my theory. I don't know for sure that that's happening, but that's what makes the most sense to me, and I'll tell you why. Because Google has a perception problem, it has a real problem with the search results and it also has a perception problem. And Google has to, A, create the impression that is going to be making a seismic shift or a seismic change on the SERP and to what it's showing on the SERP so it's making this announcement. But it can't just make an announcement and not have any backbone to it, any substance to it, they actually have to make it an actual move. What's the actual move? Is the actual move to integrate an algorithm that already exists, the helpful content update, into the core algorithm, in which case the helpful content update would essentially be diluted as it aligns with the other elements in the core algorithm rather. Is that the move? That's not really a move, that's not going to change anything. What would change something would be integrating the helpful content update into the core algorithm and giving it a place of prominence, that would be a seismic shift and a seismic change. And again, what's really interesting about that is that the helpful content is a learning algorithm and it's relatively new, has it learned enough to have such a role? If I am correct, which I think I'm correct, but who knows for sure? Only Google does. Along with this, if that wasn't enough for you and that was a mouthful, Google is releasing a few spam updates. There's the March 2024 spam update, which includes a bunch of things. First off, it includes going after what they call scaled content abuse, basically programmatic content even for example AI content, which you're just building tons and tons of this garbage, thin, unhelpful, ridiculous content to try to rank. Google's saying, "Yeah, we're going to go after that with this update. We're also going to release lots and lots of manual actions to go after the site." And that leads us to Barry's other article from Search Engine Round Table where Barry writes, "Google unleashes manual actions galore after search spam policy updates." Google has gone hog wild releasing manual actions according to some, like Glenn Gabe, there's been at least that we know of around 1400 manual actions sort of enough to maybe train an algorithm in my personal opinion. But okay, Google has gone after these websites, and Glenn, thank you for sharing a couple of examples on this so I can see it where it's just absolute pure AI garbage, it's the entire website, there's really nothing of actual value there, the website is just trying to manipulate Google into ranking the content, it's not actually trying to target users, provide users with anything of value. And Google has killed off these websites with manual actions. So that's one part of this whole spam update bonanza. Going back to Barry's Search Engine Land article, we're just bouncing from Barry to Barry here, there's two other elements of the spam targeting. One is expired domain abuse, which is now going to be considered spam officially. Basically, you have an old domain, you buy the domain, that domain, let's say it was very strong reputation for years and years and years about selling bicycles. You're like, "All right, I'll capitalize on the authority that this domain has, and I will start writing content about all sorts of nonsense that I want to target, not about bicycles at all. And I'll sort of trick Google into thinking that, "Hey, this is still that same old website, that same old domain with all that great authority and money, whatever, whatever, all those back links but I'm writing a bunch of garbage content,"" that's going to be considered spam and Google's going to go after that. Along with parasites or Google calls site reputation abuse. That's basically where I go, "Hey," I don't know, "Sports Illustrated, because you would never do anything like this, let me buy some space rather on your website, and you'll host my articles on your website. So I'll write about the power of whatever, I don't know, magic pill, magic bean that I'm selling, and I'll host it and I'll pay you, Sports Illustrated," just as an example, "To host this on your website, and I will get the authority of Sports Illustrated for my ridiculous content." So that is going to be considered abuse, and Google is going to go after it. Google said, "Such content ranking highly in search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website." Google said that this doesn't include all types of advertorial articles on websites, Google said that, no, sometimes that's actually fine, right? Not all third party content is a violation in this way. It's only when it's hosted with what Google says is, "Without close oversight and is intended to manipulate search ranking." So Google said, "Many publications host advertising content that is intended for their regular readers rather than to primarily manipulate search rankings, sometimes called native advertising or advertorial. This kind of content typically wouldn't confuse readers or regular readers of the publication when they find it on the publisher site directly or when arriving at it from Google search results." So I'll give you an example, Search Engine Journal hosts advertised articles, paid articles, and they're usually from an SEO tool, I think, well, Wix Studio, we've done one-on-one about how you can use Wix Studio to manage clients and manage your SEO team, yada, yada, yada. It's in line with what Search Engine Journal talks about, which is SEO, digital marketing, so those articles align and they clearly say it's an ad announcement, it's paid so you know that it's paid, but topically the content makes total sense. Sure, it makes sense that Semrush would write a paid article on Search Engine Journal because what Search Engine Journal talks about and what Semrush does are pretty much very much the same thing, so that makes sense. It's when you would have, let's say, some kind of medical magical pill having a sponsored article on Search Engine Journal, that wouldn't make any sense, that would be confusing, and that would be basically to manipulate all sorts of stuff. So that's out. So a lot of updates, a lot of things going on. It's going to take weeks for this to roll out. We'll see if my theory is true. Let me know on Twitter, or X, whatever you want to call it, if you think that you like my theory, if you hate my theory, I'd love to hear from you. I think it's a really interesting conversation. I think the stuff is fascinating in the sense that you get to really kind of see and theorize about how Google's functioning. But of course, it's also terrifying because algorithm updates can be just terrifying. But it'll take weeks to roll out, don't freak out, don't change things on your website because you see fluctuations, things go up, things go down, there are reversals within algorithm updates. So wait, it takes time, be patient and don't freak out. That's my best advice for you. And that's this week's snappy news. Boy, is he gritty, huh, that Barry? Crystal Carter: I bet he also likes climbing stairs. I bet that's also a thing that he's into. Mordy Oberstein: Climbing stairs? Yeah, totally, yeah. What's that, true grit? Another movie, Barry's True Grit. Crystal Carter: True Grit, that's not a Stallone movie. Mordy Oberstein: No, not a Stallone movie at all. It was another movie, talking about movies. True Grit was with, I'm pretty sure it's a remake, but it was with- Crystal Carter: Wasn't it originally John Wayne? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, I'm not that old. I'm old, but I'm not that old. It was with The Big Labowski, Jeff Bridges. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But the first one, I don't remember who was in the first one. I'm pretty sure it was- Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, the original one, yeah, it's John Wayne. Mordy Oberstein: John Wayne? Didn't see it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I've never seen it. I just know- Mordy Oberstein: Ask me if I've ever seen a John Wayne movie ever. I think I've seen one because my grandfather liked John Wayne a lot. Crystal Carter: I don't particularly remember ever seeing one, but I live on Earth, so I've heard of him. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sure we've seen them, like the Channel 11 Sunday afternoon matinee. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if we're going westerns, I watched all the spaghetti westerns. Yeah, I watched all them. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah, hands down for me. Womp womp womp. Crystal Carter: Love that. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us obviously to our follow of the week, literally logical progression of this, which is a local SEO superstar. She does all sorts of studies and they're freaking awesome, I love them, keep doing them. Joy Hawkins from Sterling Sky. You can find Joy on X Twitter, whatever you want to call it at Joyanne, J-O-Y-A-N-N-E-H-A-W-K-I-N-S. Well, that's a long one, JoyanneHawkins on Twitter, on X, whatever it is. She's part of local university. She runs Sterling Sky. She puts out all sorts of amazing content around local SEO. So please, please, follow her and Joy, keep doing those local SEO studies that Barry often covers, because I think they're fascinating. Crystal Carter: Yeah, Joy is fantastic. She's also really active on video platforms as well, so sharing content that way as well. And she's going to be speaking at Mascon this year, so yeah, I'm speaking there, last year I spoke and I referenced one of her studies because it was brilliant, and she was in the audience and she was like, "Yeah, do y'all see that study? It's right here." And I was like, "Yeah, Joy, tell the people, tell them all." Yeah, so she's speaking this year, and I cannot wait to see her speak because she's like wicked smart. It's like- Mordy Oberstein: I didn't know you did a Boston thing. Crystal Carter: That's a local joke because for local people in Boston, they'll know that. I literally only know that from Goodwill Hunting, but I've never actually been to Boston, but she's wicked smart, that's true, that is true. And so, yeah, follow Joy, she's great. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like Boston had a good baseball team. They're the worst, the Red Sox. Crystal Carter: I do not endorse that comment. I have no dog in that fight. Mordy Oberstein: No. Oh, really? I thought you would support me in this. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Sports rivalries get heated. I'm not- Mordy Oberstein: I think they're fun. If you're listening, you're a Boston Red Sox fan, I would say I apologize but as a Yankee fan, I don't, but I still love you. I still love you. Crystal Carter: See, again, that's some local knowledge there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, see, it's all about local, yeah. There's a lot of local rivalries in sports, particularly New York where I'm from, and Boston. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is absolutely true. I mean, I guess I'm kind of a Raiders fan, and they just have rivalry with everybody. They're just like- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you know who's a Raider fan? Glenn Gabe is a Raider fan. Crystal Carter: Boom. I think they're the only football team I've ever gone to see. I saw them at the Coliseum back in the day. Mordy Oberstein: Back in the day, back in the day when John Madam was the coach? Crystal Carter: I can't remember who was the coach. Mordy Oberstein: He was, I think, before in the '70s. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, not that. I don't go that far back, damn. Mordy Oberstein: Honestly, I don't know. I don't want to... No. Crystal Carter: We digress. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I think at this point we've gotten all the rails too far, so 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 the practical value of understanding entities for SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub or wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources on the Wix SEO learning at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Krystal Taing Joyanne Hawkins Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Wix Uberall App Introduction to Local SEO Getting Started with Local SEO News: Google releasing massive search quality enhancements in March 2024 core update and multiple spam updates Google Unleashes Manual Actions Galore After Search Spam Policy Updates Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Krystal Taing Joyanne Hawkins Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Wix Uberall App Introduction to Local SEO Getting Started with Local SEO News: Google releasing massive search quality enhancements in March 2024 core update and multiple spam updates Google Unleashes Manual Actions Galore After Search Spam Policy Updates 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'll put you on 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 very local, the very locally oriented, the very near-me Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, hello, internet people. We are here live and people have looked up directions to how to get to the SERP's Up SEO podcast and they maybe mapped it out, maybe- Mordy Oberstein: SERP's Up podcast near me. Crystal Carter: SERP's Up podcasts near me, also- Mordy Oberstein: Podcast, podcast, SERP's Up New York, New York podcast, podcast. Crystal Carter: And top podcast in your local area, all of those sorts of things. These are important things to think about because you- Mordy Oberstein: Obviously. Crystal Carter: You don't want a podcast that's not in your local area. Mordy Oberstein: My favorite, and obviously we're talking about local SEO today if you haven't figured that out, is when businesses name themselves 'Near Me', their actual business name is Dentists Near Me. Crystal Carter: For people who are not complete SEO nerds, this is something that SEOs are just like, "Oh yes, this is gold dust," when they see that in the strip mall next to the Little Caesars, and there's Dentists Near Me and on the wall that is like, "Oh, I must tell other SEOs about this." Mordy Oberstein: And people are like, "Why are they called Dentists Near Me?" And all the SEOs are like, "We know why." Crystal Carter: We all know why. Mordy Oberstein: For the older people out there, it's the equivalent of naming your business AAAA whatever, so that you show up first in the phonebook. Crystal Carter: It's a real thing. Triple A or AA taxis, Aardvark. Mordy Oberstein: Aardvark. Crystal Carter: How many businesses are called Aardvark? That was a thing. Mordy Oberstein: Why do people love that animal so much? Crystal Carter: Also, I feel sorry for young people who've never felt the weight of a full yellow pages. Mordy Oberstein: And when you got them both delivered, the white pages and you had to schlub those inside, you'd need a wheelbarrow. Crystal Carter: Oh, man. And people would be like, "Can you find something?" And you'd be like, "Well, let me just pull this out." Mordy Oberstein: And it made that sound as you opened it up like thump. Crystal Carter: Right, and then also there was always the case where somebody would've ripped out the page that you actually needed. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, see that, yeah, that's classic. Crystal Carter: But also, sorry, we will get to an actual thing, I'm sorry, we've got a guest who's waiting who's fantastic, but the actual thought of just having everyone's phone number and address in a white pages. Mordy Oberstein: That's scary, right? Crystal Carter: That's crazy, right? Mordy Oberstein: And you had to opt out. Crystal Carter: You could find anybody, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's not like they asked you, you had to opt out. Crystal Carter: And you would just see it in like public phone booths, there would just be a public phone booth and there would be a booth that had everyone's first name, last address, phone number available to any person who walked by. Mordy Oberstein: What could go wrong? Crystal Carter: Simpler times. Mordy Oberstein: Right, simpler times. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by simpler times and by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight on wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also up your local SEO game with our Uberall app integration, which means today we're diving into local SEO and in specific the hidden secrets of the Local Pack, the less known but equally awesome features in the Local Pack, things you didn't know helped you appear in the Local Pack, and how the Local Pack functionality has changed relatively recently and what it might mean to help us dig up the secret layers and levels of the Local Pack. Uberall's VP of Solutions, Krystal Taing, will join us in just a jiffy. Plus, we'll help you unlock the gems, offered a nifty little SEO app inside of Wix. And of course, we have your snappies of SEO news, who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So plug in your console or put those weird little goggle things down that everybody has and hop down a pipe with a man eating plant popping out of it as episode 78 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you find the secret levels of the local back like you are a plumber in a 1985 8-bit video game. Oh, by the way, that plumber is near you. Crystal Carter: Great. He also has a great dinosaur. I always like Yoshi. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's great. Yeah, but we're just- Crystal Carter: On Mario Kart, I'm Yoshi, that's me. Mordy Oberstein: I'm pre-dating, I'm going a bit 8-bit, I'm pre-dating Yoshi. It wasn't even a thought yet. Crystal Carter: Oh, come on, Yoshi's iconic. It wasn't really a party until Yoshi showed up. Mordy Oberstein: Truth by the way. So to catch everybody up real, real, real, real, real quick, the Local Pack is that big box that shows up at the way, way, way top of the Google results page when you search for a pizza near me. And it has a big map and it has the listing of these businesses, and you can go to the web, you can get directions, and it appears above the organic results, and it essentially makes the organic results, the actual Google normal results, kind of irrelevant for local queries like pizza near me. And to help us wade through the waters and maybe find the extra life of the Local Pack, please welcome to the show Krystal Taing. How are you? Krystal Taing: Hello, hello. Thank you much so much for having me. I will say, unlike a yellow page book, you cannot rip a page out of the Local Pack, so it's exciting to talk about. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, but maybe we could rip a page out of your Local Pack playbook. Krystal Taing: Yes, yes. I love that. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about this topic that I am just overly passionate about, which is just local. Mordy Oberstein: I wish we still called it the Snack Pack, which was another name for the Local Pack, because Snack Packs are also puddings and pudding is amazing. Krystal Taing: Yes, yes. That's what I think, Snack Pack of pudding. So I think we can still call it, we can bring it back 2024, it's a New Year. Mordy Oberstein: Vanilla Snack Pack or chocolate Snack Pack? Krystal Taing: Chocolate, chocolate. Mordy Oberstein: I was always a vanilla Snack Pack person. I'm generally a chocolate person over vanilla, but not for the Snack Pack. Krystal Taing: Oh, I was actually a tapioca, but that wasn't one of the options. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you're just a weirdo at that point. Krystal Taing: Yes, I am, I am. Crystal Carter: So snacks aside, so Krystal is the Global Director of Pre-Sale Solutions at Uberall, and you are also a Google Business Profile gold certified absolute... What is it, what's your actual qualification on the things? Krystal Taing: Way too many words, but it's a Platinum Google Business Profile Product Expert. But like I said, way too many words. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but you don't just get that out of nothing. I've been in the Google Business Profile Q&A questions and stuff, and Krystal's answering questions in there. Krystal's deep in the weeds. She's like, "No, you got to do this, you got to do that. You got to do all of this sort of thing." So we're so pleased to have you here. Also, Krystal wrote our introduction to local SEO. She knows all of the things about Local Pack. Mordy Oberstein: And we did a webinar together. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and a fantastic webinar with some great stuff there. So it's super important, and one of the reasons why Local Pack is so important is some of the things that you get from it. So just looking at this quote from your recent discussion about the local SEO ranking factors, one of the quotes you said is that businesses that rank in the 3-pack typically get 88% additional clicks in driving directions, 76 more clicks on call and 76 more clicks to website according to your recent Uberall study. That's mega. Krystal Taing: Yeah, yeah, it's insane. Crystal Carter: Right? Krystal Taing: There's definitely a lot more engagement when you're at the top of that Map Pack or 3-pack or result. I will say there's a lot of changes now. So there's not just the ability to rank in the 3-pack, there's the ability for your photos or videos or posts or other elements to rank so there's more opportunity, but being at the top really makes a difference in the amount of customers that have eyes on you. Crystal Carter: And so when we think about that, I know that there's a few different elements that can affect what puts you at the top for which queries and things, I don't know if you're able to share a couple of your favorite ways to do that. Krystal Taing: Yeah, I'll say my favorite is probably the most boring, but it is what has been the truest since the existence of GBP or GMB or Google Places whenever it started is just complete and accurate detail. Google wants information, they are going to reward businesses that have complete profiles. And the reason why they reward businesses that have all of their information, all of their images, videos, content filled out is because more searchers engage with those types of businesses. So ultimately they want to create a good experience for their customers, they want Google searchers to feel engaged with the content, and so they're going to surface those businesses that have complete data. So it's one of the things that's like if Google gives you a field to promote something about your business, fill them all out, fill it all out to the best of your ability as a business. And really that's one of the most core elements is you can strategize later about content and strategy and promotional material and that kind of stuff, but really getting started is completing your entire profile. Crystal Carter: Right, right. It's like the SATs, it's like answer all the questions. Mordy Oberstein: Right, put your name there, right? Crystal Carter: Right. Make sure you- Krystal Taing: Exactly. Crystal Carter: Answer all the questions, you have to get involved. And I think some of the things people will sometimes go, "Oh, I don't need to add that attribute that says that we have delivery or that we are wheelchair accessible or that we're this set or the other," but that's not true. You absolutely do need to. Mordy Oberstein: Especially if you're selling wheelchairs in which you should probably. Krystal Taing: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, I always remind businesses that Google isn't just creating this field for fun, they have access to a ton of data, a ton of user behavior data. So when they roll out something like a small business attribute on Google, they didn't just pluck it from the sky and said, "This is part of our calendar this month, we want to pull it." It's typically because they have a lot of search data that says users want to support small businesses, and so we need to surface this somehow and make it easy for businesses to engage. Same thing with dogs available at restaurants, do you know how many searches there are for that? So that became another attribute that was available in the last couple of months. Yes, I'm sure there's lots of Googlers that love dogs and they just want to show it on profiles, but a lot of this is because users want this information, Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, it also just makes you look more robust and complete. And if you're looking at other profiles and comparing them like, "Well, how come they have all those shiny little icons and emojis and whatever and that one doesn't? That doesn't seem right." Krystal Taing: Exactly, exactly. That's the thing, it's not only do you want to show up, but then once you show up, users need to make a decision and you need to give them all of the information they need to make a decision. So if you've got, to your point, shiny little icons and fun videos and additional content, it's a lot easier to make a decision than one that's missing hours or the photo is super blurry, or it doesn't say, to your point, that they don't accept reservations or those types of things. You're missing potential opportunity by not filling out that data. Crystal Carter: So here's another contentious one that I hear about the GBP things. What about posts? What is your stance on posts? How important do you think that is to helping businesses listing to perform on the Local Pack? Krystal Taing: So I don't know if you were just stalking my LinkedIn, but I did just actually make a post about Google posts because I continue to see more and more prominence of posts throughout the search experience. So these don't just display on your profile, there are different places that they display whenever users are searching on Maps, whenever they're discovering businesses on mobile. There's a lot of different ways that Google is adding these, and I think Google really likes it because it's unique and rich content. It's images, it's videos, it's promotional details, and the fact that the LinkedIn posts that I included, there's an entire section on Maps called nearby events and deals. It's like Google must have information that people want events and deals about businesses, and this is how they're choosing to surface it. Businesses that add posts, the offer posts, the event posts, these are going to now get surfaced in addition to your business data. So there's a lot of opportunity, and from my perspective, if Google is adding posts in different parts of there, that means they're relevant and that they're going to help impact your business from a ranking perspective. So I am all gung ho on posts. Crystal Carter: If people aren't aware of what posts are, if you have a Google Business Profile thing, sometimes they refer to them as updates so it'll say add an update in the backend for your business, and you have an option where you can add text, it's up to 1500 characters, you can add photo to it, and then you can add a link, you can add a button that goes to a link directly to somewhere in your site and you can add for booking or order online or buy or learn more or sign up. And you can schedule these things using other tools to disseminate information and when people look at your business, they show up at the bottom. I'm so glad to hear you say that because I've definitely seen this work for clients to see an uplift to sort of add new life into a sort of existing standard listing. So yeah, I'm glad to see that they were saying this is still a valuable and interesting thing going forward. Mordy Oberstein: Let's backtrack in the funnel just a little bit before you get to the GBP profile, perhaps you're getting to that profile from the Local Pack, and I think we look at the Local Pack and be like, "Okay, pretty straightforward. There's the name of the business, there's reviews there, whatever," but there's a lot more in there and there's sort of these little hidden Easter eggs or tidbits. I wonder if you can maybe talk about what's in the Local Pack that you may not be aware of is actually in the Local Pack? Krystal Taing: Yeah, there's so I would say two things really to pay attention to. So one of the things that we touched on already were attributes. So Google's got all of these, kind of think of them if you're familiar with more organic tags for your business, these are just features and functionalities that you offer. This is, to your point, are you wheelchair accessible? Do you offer delivery? But then there's other things like as a restaurant, do you serve vegetarian food? There's oftentimes these are going to be surfaced based on the search query. So if a user searches like 'vegetarian food near me', if you have that as an attribute, it's going to then be surfaced in the Local Pack on your business when normally it may not show, Google is associating that to the search. So attributes are a huge one. The other thing that is growing in prominence are videos. So Google is really leaning into short form video content and they've started ranking this very, very high. So if you've got a video on your profile, whether a user loaded it or you as a business, it'll start displaying in the Map Pack and position two next to your images. For different industries, not all industries are showing it that prominently, but I would definitely double down on videos on your GBP profile because they really have an impact. And again, to your point, when you're making a decision about a business, if it's a restaurant or you're going to a salon or something, if you are able to see a quick 10, 15 second video of what it looks like inside and you don't have to wonder if this is going to be a good experience, that's huge in terms of impact for customers. Mordy Oberstein: There's so much in there and I think if you're an SEO who's not so in the local space and now you have a client that is in the local space or you're a local business yourself, Google something, Google 'pizza near me', Google 'doctor office near me', Google all sorts of different things, all sorts of things show up if I Google pizza near me, I get Joe's Pizza, which I hear is completely overrated by the way, it's in fact most famous pizza place in New York City. I'm like, "Yeah, New York City style counter slice shop," it gives a description of the business in there and the next one's like counter for slices and pizza and calzones, or if you Google 'doctor office near me', I get all the 'accepts Medicaid'. Krystal Taing: Exactly, there's a lot of additional content there. What I also, to that point, is as an SEO or an agency doing searches on different surfaces is really important. So what do you see on desktop on search, desktop on Maps, mobile search, mobile Maps are all different and they all highlight different elements. And again, Google does that based on user behavior and what they think users want to see on different journeys. So I am a huge advocate for making sure you're doing those searches yourself because they do show you what Google is surfacing to customers during those times. Crystal Carter: So that touches on another point. So in terms of Local Pack, and so in your Uberall study you talked about personalization and I think that that mobile versus desktop thing is going to affect that personalization. So for instance, if Joe's Pizza Shop, if you're in Times Square and Joe's Pizza Shop is also in Times Square, and if you search near me, then literally it's near you, right? Krystal Taing: Exactly, exactly. Crystal Carter: So footfall might potentially affect that. So how important is it that you localize your test searches as well? So if you're an agency and if you're, say, an agency in Philadelphia and your client is in New York and you're testing the 'near me' and they're like, "I'm not seeing I myself on the thing," and you're like, "But I am," how much does the localization affect the Local Pack result? Krystal Taing: Yeah, that's a really great question. So the distance of the business from where the search is taking place is a huge impact and it's a huge ranking factor. So to your point, that happens all the time. It's like, "Hey, I googled my own business and I'm not showing up." The first question is, what was your search and where are you located? Everyone's going to have incredibly different searches, especially if you're on mobile and if your location services are activated, or maybe you're doing a search and you're saying, "I'm planning a trip and I'm going to Chicago, but I'm currently in San Diego." Even if I search for pizza restaurants Chicago, my results are going to be very different from someone that is physically located in Chicago. There's a lot of plugins that allow you to kind of maybe spoof your location where you can say, "Put me in this area," but it's just important to know that that is going to impact your search results unless you are at the exact same place that someone's searching. Google, especially for a near me or local search, they're going to adjust the results based on businesses that are nearby. Crystal Carter: Okay. So I think that in that regard, when people are thinking about maybe, and this is interesting because I always like the sort of intersection of IRL stuff and online stuff, so for instance if you were maybe a business that was outside of Times Square, but you wanted people to Google you or maybe it might be that that's where you put your sign flipper person, is it a place that would drive more searches? I mean, is that something that people should think about, like driving searches from certain places that are nearer them? Am I spit-balling too much there? Krystal Taing: No, no. I mean, I think a lot of businesses think that. It's also one of the challenges Google has with spam is because location is so impactful from a ranking perspective, that's a great example, people want to rank in downtown New York, but they might be located an hour outside, but based on your business, people might be willing to travel an hour outside. So that's where you do have to get unique. You do need to understand how users are searching for you, where they're located, and then understanding how you stretch your visibility. Oftentimes that's where you layer on the on-page elements, that's where you layer on back link strategy and those types of things because you probably are competing with a business that is located in downtown or is located in Times Square and that can be a challenge to businesses. But I think the most important thing is making sure that you're ranking where you're located first really, really well, you're really well optimized, and then you can start expanding that. In some cases, I've seen businesses actually relocate their offices because it can be a big challenge. Mordy Oberstein: It's a real challenge. It could be a really, really big problem. Krystal Taing: Yeah. And especially for service-based businesses. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say that. Krystal Taing: So again, you think of an attorney where someone is willing to travel quite far or maybe they're doing some of their services virtually, so it's fine that they're an hour outside, but guess what? They want that downtown clientele. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. If I'm looking for a lawyer or an accountant, I'm not going to the accountant's office, I don't care. Krystal Taing: Yeah, exactly. Crystal Carter: So you brought up service level businesses, and I know that particularly on Google Business Profile, let's say you were somebody who was based in Long Island, but you were able to service people who were in Manhattan for your service where you're like, "I'll drive to you, it's fine, it's not a big deal. I will come to collect your dry cleaning," whatever it is. So what are some of the things that affect service area businesses for Local Pack? Krystal Taing: Yeah, I think the biggest thing to understand is that physical address where you originally create your business, which can be hidden, it doesn't have to display, is still from a location perspective where Google's going to rank you. And so I think a lot of times people think they add in these service areas because there are zip code cities, regions you can add to your service area, Google just uses that to draw an outline on the map, but it doesn't mean they're going to start ranking you in those addresses or in those areas. And that's what is a challenge for service-based businesses where you have to kind of really expand. You are a little bit more limited. Of course if you're a business that can show your address, that's always going to be helpful because sometimes hiding your address does limit where you can rank. But I think that's the most important thing to know is you are going to rank from a location perspective where your original business address is and sometimes that's your home even if the address is hidden. Crystal Carter: So I have another one, I have another one because I love Local Pack, I love local. Okay, so the other one is reviews. So I've seen it sometimes, for instance, you mentioned like vegetarian food, I don't do dairy but I do like donuts, so I'm like vegan donuts, where are vegan donuts? And I sometimes see that you get a highlight that says, "Oh, I had great vegan donuts here," that's a review, but isn't necessarily in any of their information. And so to my mind, reviews are very important, certainly as a user I find reviews to be very important. How impactful do you find reviews for Local Pack rankings? Krystal Taing: Yeah, that's another good point. I will say when you're building out a GBP profile, Google is controlling to a point everything you can publish. Reviews are one of the areas where it's kind of like freeform content. And when we talk about this, this is the review content a user leaves. As a business owner, you should respond to all reviews, Google wants to see that and they're going to reward you if you're responding to all reviews. They don't necessarily care what's in that content because you can spam it with whatever you want, you don't need to worry about adding keywords to that. But Google really values user-generated content, they kind of trust it more than what a business says, it's a little bit more unbiased. So as much as you can encourage users to be more specific in their reviews, saying things like, "We'd love to hear your feedback about our vegan donuts," can kind of put that in their mind to leave those keywords in the reviews to be a little bit more specific. If you are a business and you're asking for reviews, whether that's via email, text message, those types of things, if you can prompt it or ask for more detail, that's going to be valuable because Google does, they pull these out, they're called justifications, but it's really Google is justifying to users why they're showing your business for that query. And if you don't have vegan in your category, you don't have it in your image tag, you don't have it on your website or your menu, they need to basically tell users why they're seeing this business and it's because multiple users left a review and they talk about vegan donuts. It is a source of information that Google's mining. So huge, huge impact in terms of content in your reviews. Mordy Oberstein: Let me switch gears a little bit. I want to ask you a question. I don't know if you know, I'm asking you, I don't put you on the spot, but a while back or somewhat a while back... Let me rephrase this, Google's constantly changing how the Local Pack functions. It used to be back in the day it was a map and then a very small rectangle-ish kind of map, or an actual rectangle, not rectangle-ish, and then underneath there were the three listings and it had the reviews and it had directions or whatever it was. Now on desktop at least you have the results on the left-hand side, a much bigger map on the right-hand side, and there's all sorts of functionality. If you hover over the map, the results disappear. If you hover over a pin now, you'll get a little call-out with the reviews and some images from the location. Has that changed anything in terms of what you see happening in the Local Pack? Are businesses affected by that change at all, or is it just business as usual? No pun intended. Krystal Taing: I'll say I haven't seen too much impact from businesses, but what I have seen probably for the last four to five years is a transition in user behavior where a lot more searches are beginning on Maps. If you look back pre-2020, 90% of all business views on Google started on desktop. And I even know for myself, I will just go to Maps and instead of doing a search on Google search, I just zoom in and then I click around and I might put some keywords in or some filters. But I like that from a discovery perspective a lot more. So I think, and this is a complete assumption, I think Google sees that and they're trying to merge these experiences because users like to engage a little bit more and I think Maps gives you that more than a search result. Mordy Oberstein: It makes a lot of sense because you see, by the way, Google started testing out AI or an SGE kind of experience in Maps. And I think by the way, that makes a lot of sense to have there because I find jumping from one query to the next query to the next thing inside of Maps, a pain in the rear end. Krystal Taing: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Crystal Carter: I know that you're a big fan of categories, you've got your categories on Google Business Profile, which effects, which queries you show up with on the Local Pack. And I think that that also is reflected on Google Maps. So I think that that's one of the things I think is so interesting about Local Pack, local et cetera, is that there's a whole ecosystem around it. So for instance, I was recently in Switzerland and we went to one town and literally nothing was open and it was like, "Okay, I want a coffee. How am I going to find a coffee?" And then I looked at this other town and I was just generally hovering for cafes and then open now, and a bunch of them showed up. And so I just headed to this general area because I found that because it has all of these filters. So that goes back to the things that you're thinking of, and that also goes back to people going to Maps first because I don't know what any of the restaurants are called, so I couldn't possibly search for one. And sometimes they might call it a cafe, sometimes they call it a restaurant, but I just want a coffee. So I think that that goes to sort of how people can show up with those. Do you find that people need to make the same optimizations? Are the optimizations exactly the same for Maps as they are for Local Pack? Or do you that people need to make additional specific considerations for Google Maps? Krystal Taing: So there's not necessarily anything different. It's more about understanding how Maps works. I will say Maps is not a separate entry point for businesses, you still create your GBP profile and that's what's reflected on Maps. However, Maps does have different types of integrations. So you think of searching for fuel stations or petrol stations, there's oftentimes when you're going to see the prices, that is not connected to Google Business Profile, that's a complete separate Maps integration. Same thing with movie times. So it's good to be aware, but there's things you can't control. I will say one of the things with Maps in the discovery process is there are different levels at your zoom where businesses will show. And this is one of, I think, the most common questions I see, they're like, "How come my map pin doesn't show when I'm on Maps?" But you have to zoom in maybe two levels closer and you will see a map pin that is a slightly different ranking on Maps than it is on GBP search, on the search result. So that typically is prominent. It's a lot of different elements like reviews. It's similar elements to the search result, but it's not the exact same and there's not an exact science yet really about that. But that is the most common thing I see is businesses will only show at certain zoom levels on Maps. And then Google has come out and they did the branded map pins through ads, which I think a lot of businesses have taken advantage of because they realize how many people are going directly to Maps. So I think Google's offering that to businesses too. Mordy Oberstein: With that, I don't want to put a pin in it, but where can people find you, near where? Krystal Taing: They can search for Krystal Taing near me. But yes, absolutely, feel free to connect with me. I think I've been on LinkedIn a little bit more frequently than on X/Twitter just because my Twitter algorithm these days, I don't know, it's a little bit weird. I'm still on Twitter, feel free to DM me, but definitely LinkedIn, I've been active there. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing, and definitely check out Uberall. Krystal Taing: Yes, please do. Mordy Oberstein: And for the Wix users, check out the Uberall app, which we're going to discuss in just a minute. Thank you so much, Krystal and Crystal. I can't believe I only just made that joke now. Crystal Carter: Yes, thank you. Krystal Taing: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, always a pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: Great. Definitely make sure you give Krystal Taing a follow. I really do feel like disappointed in myself for not making more Crystals jokes because there were so many Crystals on the call. Crystal Carter: I mean, hey, the whole conversation was full of gems, so it's all good. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you crazy diamonds. Anyway, shine on you crazy diamonds, a little Pink Floyd for you there. Okay, so as you mentioned earlier, we gave a little hint at an app that can help you with local SEO, but it really does a lot more than local SEO stuff, it helps you actually distribute content for a local business. So here is our segment called Tool Time as we dive into, guess what, the Uberall within the Wix app market. So I'm going to say maybe a year ago, I'm not good with time, Uberall added an app into the Wix app market, and if you forgot Krystal, not our Crystal, the other Krystal, Krystal Taing works for Uberall. Okay, so Wix has an integration, a partnership with Google Business Profile, and one of the feature requests that we had was can we upload, as both Crystals were talking about, Google posts from Wix to the Google Business Profile and with our partnership with Google, you can, but with the Uberall app. Crystal Carter: You can. Mordy Oberstein: You can. And not only that, you can also upload posts across social networks like Facebook, X, Instagram, I'm running out of social profiles, all the kind of social profiles you want to share content. So if you're a business that you're working with, as I say, a Facebook page, and you want to upload the same post that you added to Google posts you want to put on the Facebook page, you can use the Uberall app as basically a content distribution app for local businesses, which is cool. Crystal Carter: This is super important I think because with local businesses it's very often the case that local businesses are particularly active on social media. So if you're able to keep those channels going and those channels full of new information in an efficient manner, that's super valuable. So I mean, I don't know about y'all, but we have a local moms group, we have local parent groups for schools. I know that there's people who are like, "They didn't pick up the bins today. What's going on?" There's people who have spotted in Poughkeepsie or whatever, and those local recommendations carry a lot of weight. So if you have presence on there and you are in the local groups, you're able to post into local groups, you're able to post onto local Facebook accounts, local channels there that can give you some incredible, incredible reach and people will vouch for you. People will be like, "Yeah, I used that painter decorator. They were really great, they made my shed look fantastic." I keep talking about sheds these days. But yeah, I think it's a great tool and it's really, really, really useful for- Mordy Oberstein: Distributing content as a local business is super important. So if your clients are a local business, they may not always have the budgets to start running social media ads or Google ads, so having that organic social cadence and social presence can be a big factor for a local business so it definitely makes sense to do that and the Uberall app can help you do that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think like Krystal talked about events for instance, because events take place in a local place that can also help to connect. Mordy Oberstein: Events are local? Crystal Carter: Yes, they're in a place with a geographical location, and so that's really good for connecting your business to that particular geo and things like that. So yeah, I can't recommend enough getting involved with citations and listings. It's also a good way to get back links. Citation links don't necessarily cater the same weight as an organic back link, but they are still links as in they still get crawled and still drive traffic, can drive traffic to your website. Mordy Oberstein: They drive traffic for sure. Crystal Carter: And can still help Google to understand where the important parts are of your website. So absolutely get involved with citations and sometimes those sites will rank higher than your business in other parts of the web so it's worth making sure that you're getting involved with those, particularly in a local space. Mordy Oberstein: Now do you know who we like to cite when we're talking about the SEO news? I'll give you a hint, his name rhymes with Larry and his last name rhymes with Schwartz, well is Schwartz, it's Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Quartz, Quartz. Mordy Oberstein: Quartz, damn. God, how did I know not...? I was spitballing, I was like, "Damn, you don't have a rhyme," but Quartz. Crystal Carter: Crystal knows all about the gems here. We're talking about crystals. Mordy Oberstein: You know why? Because nothing rhymes with Oberstein so I don't have any good last name rhymes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know, I don't know. I was on the phone and sometimes when I explained my name on the phone they're like, "Oh, can you spell your name?" I'm like, "Yeah, it's Crystal like the glass," and then one time I said, "And Carter like the trolley," which is like- Mordy Oberstein: The trolley? Crystal Carter: They were like, "What are you talking about?" As soon as I said it, you know when you say something and you're like, "That is silly." Mordy Oberstein: You should be like, "Carter like that Stallone movie," which is a remake of another movie. Crystal Carter: Get Carter, Get Carte. Mordy Oberstein: Get Carter, Carter. Crystal Carter: Originally with Michael Caine. Mordy Oberstein: Michael Caine, yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, "Blow the fricking doors off," or whatever. "I could blow the bloody doors off," I think that's what he says. Mordy Oberstein: People really don't like the Stallone movie. I liked it, I don't know why people don't like it, I thought it was good. Crystal Carter: It was all right it was kind of like gritty late '90s, early '90s kind of cinematography. But you know who really loves Sylvester Stallone movies? Mordy Oberstein: Barry. And you know who's Gritty? Barry. So here's the Snappy news with Barry and other people who cover the SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Oh, do we have some news for you this week? Oh man, where do I even start? I guess we'll start with Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land. Okay, Barry writes, "Google releasing massive search quality enhancements in March 2024, core update and multiple spam updates." At the start on March 5th, Google said that they have released the March 2024 core update and then a bunch of spam updates along with it. It's a lot to parse out and to digest so let's just take it, and I'm going to try to break it down as honestly as I possibly can because there's a lot to this. Okay, so per Barry Schwartz, "Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product Search at Google told Search Engine Land that the update will help reduce unhelpful content in Google by 40%. We expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low quality unoriginal content in search results by 40%." That is a big, big number because this is a big, big update. Google is saying that multiple systems are being updated and tweaked and released during this update, is going to take them weeks upon weeks to actually roll out. Chris Nelson from the search quality team of Google is quoted by saying that it's a more complex update than our usual core updates, and that's why it's going to take so much time with so much rank fluctuations and so forth. Don't be scared, don't be scared. Part of this is the helpful content update is now going to be a part of the core update. Google will no longer announce iterations of the helpful content update being updated, instead, it'll be part of the core algorithm like Panda was pushed into the core algorithm and it'll just be part of the core algorithm updates, which would be part of why this is taking so long and why there'd be so many rain fluctuations. Now, I initially thought, well, if the helpful content update becomes part of the core update, then the helpful content update kind of becomes diluted a bit by the other call it elements within the core update that weigh in and decide what should or should not be impacted in terms of rank. I think I'm wrong, I think I was wrong, I think I'm right now. I think when instead is happening is that the helpful content update is getting a very, very prominent role in the core update itself. If you go back to what Barry wrote earlier in the article, which I quoted before, but I'll quote it again here just to remind you, Barry said, "Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product Search at Google told Search Engine Land the update will help reduce unhelpful content in Google search by 40%," meaning Google's targeting low quality, unhelpful content trying to reduce it by a massive percentage, 40%, that's an insane percentage. So just let that resonate for a minute. And I think what's happening is not what I originally thought, which was okay, the helpful content update will be integrated into the core algorithm and as a result it'll be a small fish in a large pond and it'll have a diluted effect. I think the opposite. I think Google's trying to make a very massive move here by saying that the helpful content will, unlike let's say Panda, which was out for a while, by the time it got moved into the core, it already kind of did its thing, that's not the case with the helpful content update. The helpful content update is a rather new update and it's not being integrated like, "All right, its impact is already there, we're moving on to other technologies and other parts of the algorithm that'll help us do new things like bird," that's not the case like it was back, in my opinion, with Panda. In this case, the helpful content on that is new and novel and wouldn't be what I would expect to be integrated into the algorithm right now, although Glenn Gabe has predicted it will go into the algorithm way, way, way, way in the past, and he's right obviously because they are integrating into the algorithm, but I'm not surprised that they're integrating it into the core algorithm, I'm surprised that they're doing it now, being that this algorithm update is not old, it's new, or it's new-ish for an update for an algorithm it's pretty new. And I think it's going to have a massive role in the core algorithm and that the other elements of the core algorithm are going to adjust to it, not that the helpful content is going to adjust to the core. And I think that's why it's going to take weeks for this to roll out, like Google is saying, and that's why there's going to be a lot of fluctuations because they're not just putting the helpful content update into the core and letting the helpful content update sort of adjust and integrate in a mesh and become like a stew into the core, they're re-aligning the core to align with the helpful content update. That's my theory. Again, say it very clearly, that's my theory. I don't know for sure that that's happening, but that's what makes the most sense to me, and I'll tell you why. Because Google has a perception problem, it has a real problem with the search results and it also has a perception problem. And Google has to, A, create the impression that is going to be making a seismic shift or a seismic change on the SERP and to what it's showing on the SERP so it's making this announcement. But it can't just make an announcement and not have any backbone to it, any substance to it, they actually have to make it an actual move. What's the actual move? Is the actual move to integrate an algorithm that already exists, the helpful content update, into the core algorithm, in which case the helpful content update would essentially be diluted as it aligns with the other elements in the core algorithm rather. Is that the move? That's not really a move, that's not going to change anything. What would change something would be integrating the helpful content update into the core algorithm and giving it a place of prominence, that would be a seismic shift and a seismic change. And again, what's really interesting about that is that the helpful content is a learning algorithm and it's relatively new, has it learned enough to have such a role? If I am correct, which I think I'm correct, but who knows for sure? Only Google does. Along with this, if that wasn't enough for you and that was a mouthful, Google is releasing a few spam updates. There's the March 2024 spam update, which includes a bunch of things. First off, it includes going after what they call scaled content abuse, basically programmatic content even for example AI content, which you're just building tons and tons of this garbage, thin, unhelpful, ridiculous content to try to rank. Google's saying, "Yeah, we're going to go after that with this update. We're also going to release lots and lots of manual actions to go after the site." And that leads us to Barry's other article from Search Engine Round Table where Barry writes, "Google unleashes manual actions galore after search spam policy updates." Google has gone hog wild releasing manual actions according to some, like Glenn Gabe, there's been at least that we know of around 1400 manual actions sort of enough to maybe train an algorithm in my personal opinion. But okay, Google has gone after these websites, and Glenn, thank you for sharing a couple of examples on this so I can see it where it's just absolute pure AI garbage, it's the entire website, there's really nothing of actual value there, the website is just trying to manipulate Google into ranking the content, it's not actually trying to target users, provide users with anything of value. And Google has killed off these websites with manual actions. So that's one part of this whole spam update bonanza. Going back to Barry's Search Engine Land article, we're just bouncing from Barry to Barry here, there's two other elements of the spam targeting. One is expired domain abuse, which is now going to be considered spam officially. Basically, you have an old domain, you buy the domain, that domain, let's say it was very strong reputation for years and years and years about selling bicycles. You're like, "All right, I'll capitalize on the authority that this domain has, and I will start writing content about all sorts of nonsense that I want to target, not about bicycles at all. And I'll sort of trick Google into thinking that, "Hey, this is still that same old website, that same old domain with all that great authority and money, whatever, whatever, all those back links but I'm writing a bunch of garbage content,"" that's going to be considered spam and Google's going to go after that. Along with parasites or Google calls site reputation abuse. That's basically where I go, "Hey," I don't know, "Sports Illustrated, because you would never do anything like this, let me buy some space rather on your website, and you'll host my articles on your website. So I'll write about the power of whatever, I don't know, magic pill, magic bean that I'm selling, and I'll host it and I'll pay you, Sports Illustrated," just as an example, "To host this on your website, and I will get the authority of Sports Illustrated for my ridiculous content." So that is going to be considered abuse, and Google is going to go after it. Google said, "Such content ranking highly in search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website." Google said that this doesn't include all types of advertorial articles on websites, Google said that, no, sometimes that's actually fine, right? Not all third party content is a violation in this way. It's only when it's hosted with what Google says is, "Without close oversight and is intended to manipulate search ranking." So Google said, "Many publications host advertising content that is intended for their regular readers rather than to primarily manipulate search rankings, sometimes called native advertising or advertorial. This kind of content typically wouldn't confuse readers or regular readers of the publication when they find it on the publisher site directly or when arriving at it from Google search results." So I'll give you an example, Search Engine Journal hosts advertised articles, paid articles, and they're usually from an SEO tool, I think, well, Wix Studio, we've done one-on-one about how you can use Wix Studio to manage clients and manage your SEO team, yada, yada, yada. It's in line with what Search Engine Journal talks about, which is SEO, digital marketing, so those articles align and they clearly say it's an ad announcement, it's paid so you know that it's paid, but topically the content makes total sense. Sure, it makes sense that Semrush would write a paid article on Search Engine Journal because what Search Engine Journal talks about and what Semrush does are pretty much very much the same thing, so that makes sense. It's when you would have, let's say, some kind of medical magical pill having a sponsored article on Search Engine Journal, that wouldn't make any sense, that would be confusing, and that would be basically to manipulate all sorts of stuff. So that's out. So a lot of updates, a lot of things going on. It's going to take weeks for this to roll out. We'll see if my theory is true. Let me know on Twitter, or X, whatever you want to call it, if you think that you like my theory, if you hate my theory, I'd love to hear from you. I think it's a really interesting conversation. I think the stuff is fascinating in the sense that you get to really kind of see and theorize about how Google's functioning. But of course, it's also terrifying because algorithm updates can be just terrifying. But it'll take weeks to roll out, don't freak out, don't change things on your website because you see fluctuations, things go up, things go down, there are reversals within algorithm updates. So wait, it takes time, be patient and don't freak out. That's my best advice for you. And that's this week's snappy news. Boy, is he gritty, huh, that Barry? Crystal Carter: I bet he also likes climbing stairs. I bet that's also a thing that he's into. Mordy Oberstein: Climbing stairs? Yeah, totally, yeah. What's that, true grit? Another movie, Barry's True Grit. Crystal Carter: True Grit, that's not a Stallone movie. Mordy Oberstein: No, not a Stallone movie at all. It was another movie, talking about movies. True Grit was with, I'm pretty sure it's a remake, but it was with- Crystal Carter: Wasn't it originally John Wayne? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, I'm not that old. I'm old, but I'm not that old. It was with The Big Labowski, Jeff Bridges. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But the first one, I don't remember who was in the first one. I'm pretty sure it was- Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, the original one, yeah, it's John Wayne. Mordy Oberstein: John Wayne? Didn't see it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I've never seen it. I just know- Mordy Oberstein: Ask me if I've ever seen a John Wayne movie ever. I think I've seen one because my grandfather liked John Wayne a lot. Crystal Carter: I don't particularly remember ever seeing one, but I live on Earth, so I've heard of him. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sure we've seen them, like the Channel 11 Sunday afternoon matinee. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if we're going westerns, I watched all the spaghetti westerns. Yeah, I watched all them. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah, hands down for me. Womp womp womp. Crystal Carter: Love that. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us obviously to our follow of the week, literally logical progression of this, which is a local SEO superstar. She does all sorts of studies and they're freaking awesome, I love them, keep doing them. Joy Hawkins from Sterling Sky. You can find Joy on X Twitter, whatever you want to call it at Joyanne, J-O-Y-A-N-N-E-H-A-W-K-I-N-S. Well, that's a long one, JoyanneHawkins on Twitter, on X, whatever it is. She's part of local university. She runs Sterling Sky. She puts out all sorts of amazing content around local SEO. So please, please, follow her and Joy, keep doing those local SEO studies that Barry often covers, because I think they're fascinating. Crystal Carter: Yeah, Joy is fantastic. She's also really active on video platforms as well, so sharing content that way as well. And she's going to be speaking at Mascon this year, so yeah, I'm speaking there, last year I spoke and I referenced one of her studies because it was brilliant, and she was in the audience and she was like, "Yeah, do y'all see that study? It's right here." And I was like, "Yeah, Joy, tell the people, tell them all." Yeah, so she's speaking this year, and I cannot wait to see her speak because she's like wicked smart. It's like- Mordy Oberstein: I didn't know you did a Boston thing. Crystal Carter: That's a local joke because for local people in Boston, they'll know that. I literally only know that from Goodwill Hunting, but I've never actually been to Boston, but she's wicked smart, that's true, that is true. And so, yeah, follow Joy, she's great. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like Boston had a good baseball team. They're the worst, the Red Sox. Crystal Carter: I do not endorse that comment. I have no dog in that fight. Mordy Oberstein: No. Oh, really? I thought you would support me in this. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Sports rivalries get heated. I'm not- Mordy Oberstein: I think they're fun. If you're listening, you're a Boston Red Sox fan, I would say I apologize but as a Yankee fan, I don't, but I still love you. I still love you. Crystal Carter: See, again, that's some local knowledge there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, see, it's all about local, yeah. There's a lot of local rivalries in sports, particularly New York where I'm from, and Boston. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is absolutely true. I mean, I guess I'm kind of a Raiders fan, and they just have rivalry with everybody. They're just like- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you know who's a Raider fan? Glenn Gabe is a Raider fan. Crystal Carter: Boom. I think they're the only football team I've ever gone to see. I saw them at the Coliseum back in the day. Mordy Oberstein: Back in the day, back in the day when John Madam was the coach? Crystal Carter: I can't remember who was the coach. Mordy Oberstein: He was, I think, before in the '70s. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, not that. I don't go that far back, damn. Mordy Oberstein: Honestly, I don't know. I don't want to... No. Crystal Carter: We digress. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I think at this point we've gotten all the rails too far, so 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 the practical value of understanding entities for SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub or wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources on the Wix SEO learning at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. 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

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

Is there a difference between enterprise SEO and SMB SEO? Yes, there is, but it’s probably not what you think it is. Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein sit down with Wix’s own Matt Matergia, Vice President of Global Strategic Sales, to discuss the challenges of navigating the enterprise space. They also welcome guest Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO, who discusses how SEOs can ensure that they’re staying hands-on and sharp at their craft. Walk with us into the enterprise this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back What you need to know if you want to go Enterprise SEO Is there a difference between enterprise SEO and SMB SEO? Yes, there is, but it’s probably not what you think it is. Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein sit down with Wix’s own Matt Matergia, Vice President of Global Strategic Sales, to discuss the challenges of navigating the enterprise space. They also welcome guest Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO, who discusses how SEOs can ensure that they’re staying hands-on and sharp at their craft. Walk with us into the enterprise this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 33 | April 12, 2023 | 40 MIN 00:00 / 40:26 This week’s guests Eli Schwartz Eli Schwartz is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy. A growth advisor and consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the internet's top sites. Matt Matergia Matt works with some of Wix’s largest channel partners. With over 10 years of experience in the digital marketing and SaaS industries, Matt knows what it takes for digital service providers and software companies to successfully serve small businesses’ online needs. 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, the Head of SEO branding at Wix, and I'm joined by someone who is good, Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communications here at Wix. Totally got you by surprise at that one. Crystal Carter:: You did. I thought you were going to be like, "Ooh." Mordy Oberstein: Nope. Someone who is good. Crystal Carter:: That was a good note. Thanks for just... Yes. Also, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: So, the context for this is, and I guess you'll see our recording schedule and I'll hint at it. Yesterday was Barry Schwartz's birthday. Happy birthday, Barry. Crystal Carter: Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to Barry rested break. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But by the time he hears it's going to be weeks after his actual birthday, but Barry- Crystal Carter:: We should also wish him happy birthday when this comes out. Mordy Oberstein: We should. So, Barry put out a Tweet saying, "I wish there was some kind of automated AI that would automatically reply back to when people wish you happy birthday on Twitter with, 'Thank you.'" So, you could have gone on Twitter and wrote an entire spiel to Barry like, "Barry, we love you. You're amazing." He would literally reply back to everyone, "Thank you." Period. Crystal Carter:: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: So, that's where I got my intro to Crystal this week. Crystal Carter:: There you go. Thank you. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Period. Crystal Carter:: Full stop. End of sentence. Mordy Oberstein: Full stop. End of sentence. Crystal Carter:: Moving on. Mordy Oberstein: All right, please. Moving on. Period. Thank you. Period. Do you know who Barry Schwartz is? By the way, Barry Schwartz, I call him the Godfather of SEO. He has been covering the SEO news for literally forever. He has SERoundtable.com, news editor at SearchEngineland.com. He is a huge asset to the industry. So, please follow Barry Schwartz and read his news content. You will learn a tremendous amount about SEO. And he's a great follow on Twitter because he is, as much as he denies it, he's a real character. Crystal Carter:: He also has a weekly video roundup, which is sponsored by Wix. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. Crystal Carter:: So, yeah, check that out. That's a really good watch on a Friday morning while you're having your cup of coffee. It's a good way to keep up on point. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. You can see Barry wearing a Wix hat. This episode is sponsored by Barry. No, just kidding. Crystal Carter:: No, it's not. Mordy Oberstein: This podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can filter through all of your pages with the Wix site inspection tool. Literally, filter through them because they now have filters. So, you can filter through up to 2000 pages of Google Search Console, URL inspection, API data to look at the indexation status of the specific types of pages on your site, or filter according to indexation status. Or filter according to a whole bunch of other different ways, because it's Wix making it easier for you to work at scale, which is a large part of... Crystal Carter:: I just wanted to chime in and just say I love it. I love that feature so much. I'm sure Daniel Weisberg from Google might be listening, but it's better than Google Search Console because you can search for a word that might be in your URL, it might be in the page title. You can search by that. You can filter by rich results. You can see that all on one table. I literally love it so much. Mordy Oberstein: Same here. Crystal Carter:: They announced that there was a filter and I lost my mind. It's brilliant. Check it out, please. Mordy Oberstein: You can now search for pages by the keyword in the URL, by the words in the URL. There's a million ways to now organize your data. Crystal Carter:: And on Google Search Console, you have to do three clicks or a redjects or a thing to find the thing. It's like, what? Just let me search for- Mordy Oberstein: Before you even finish the whole word that you type in, it's already pulled it out for you. Crystal Carter:: Yes, I love it. I literally love it. Mordy Oberstein: It is amazing. Which is a large part of doing SEO at scale, which is a large part of enterprise SEO, which is what today's episode is all about. No, it's not a Star Trek convention. It's the enterprise, but it's enterprise SEO. Or SEO for enterprise, however you want to phrase it. Crystal Carter:: Engage. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, thank you. Engage. Thank you. Make it so. Today, we are looking at what you should expect when working SEO at the enterprise level. How enterprise SEO does and doesn't differ from "regular SEO." What skills come into focus when doing enterprise SEO? And we have someone who has become synonymous with enterprise SEO stopping by to talk about how you can do enterprise SEO and still be hands on. Eli Schwartz, the author of Product-Led SEO is stopping and by to share his thoughts and his insights. Plus, we're going to talk to vice president of Global Strategic Sales at Wix, Matt Matergia, who's going to stop by with us to chat all about what it means and what you should know when talking to enterprise level clients. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Beam me up, Scotty, because episode number 33 of the SERP's Up podcast is taking on the enterprise. Crystal Carter:: I'm like, more Star Trek jokes. Honestly, please. Mordy Oberstein: Endless. Did you know by the way, that he never, Kirk never said Captain Kirk, William Shatner of Star Trek, never said, "Beam me up, Scotty," ever on the show or the movies? Crystal Carter:: Who said, "Beam me up, Scotty"? Mordy Oberstein: No one. Crystal Carter:: Leonard Nemoy? Mordy Oberstein: No one said it. He said something similar to it. Crystal Carter:: That's not rational. Mordy Oberstein: Fascinating. Crystal Carter:: In a sense it's futile. I know. I can literally just spat out things. Mordy Oberstein: Endless. Endless. We'll know we've gone too far when we break out into William Shatner impersonations. Okay, so. Crystal Carter:: Okay, wait, wait, wait. Who's your favorite Star Trek captain? Mordy Oberstein: Kirk. Crystal Carter:: Kirk. Mordy Oberstein: Kirk. It's absolutely. Crystal Carter:: Come on. Mordy Oberstein: First of all, I grew up on Kirk in the movies. It's very nostalgic for me. Crystal Carter:: I'm sorry. So, it's a close tie between Janeway and Picard, and all Sisko. Mordy Oberstein: Janeway is wonderful. I think the number two for me is Picard, followed by Janeway, followed by a Sisko, followed by it doesn't matter anymore. Crystal Carter:: I put Kirk pretty low on the thing. People, listeners, listeners, listeners to this podcast of who I know the Treking community is a lot, chime in. Tell us who's your favorite captain? Who's your favorite captain? Mordy Oberstein: There is no competition. We've gone too far. There is a bias. There is a bias in SEO. If I can go out on a limb here, people will think local SEO was simple because it's SMBs, and enterprise SEO is complex because it's huge in large organizations. That I don't think is the truth. Certainly not in the way that the perception of many of us think it is. Local SEO can in fact, by the way, be enterprise. Right? Think, I don't know, you're doing local SEO for Taco Bell. Crystal Carter:: Yeah. Dairy Queen. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Crystal Carter:: Pret a Manger. Mordy Oberstein: We listed all these companies. Papa Johns. Forever. Crystal Carter:: People who have multiple locations. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That is what we're trying to say. Also, by the way, small websites have their own complications and SEO at the enterprise level might not be as complicated as you think the way you think. Sure, they might have lots of pages. More pages than a typical SMB. But is that fundamentally what makes enterprise SEO more complex? Let's find out. Crystal Carter:: Make it so. Mordy Oberstein: Make it so. Engage. I think there's this general thought around enterprise SEO where it's more paid ads, therefore it's more complex. That's what enterprise SEO more complex words to me, and being at Wix at the enterprise level, why at SEMrush also is very enterprise. To me, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb here, we could talk to Nick Wilson about this on another podcast. What makes enterprise SEO complicated is the sheer size of the company itself, not the size of the website. Crystal Carter:: Yeah. I think it can be a little bit of both and I think it can also be the difference between a tugboat and a cruise ship. If you need to move a cruise ship through a space, you have to move it all at once and you have to do a lot of planning. It's going to take a lot of planning in order to make sure. If you've got a tugboat or a canoe or whatever and you need to leave the harbor, you just go. Mordy Oberstein: You untie the boat, you throw on your little captain's hat. Crystal Carter:: Right, exactly. Let's talk about captains. Lots of stuff about captains, right. So, you can get yourself on your little ship and you can sail away into the blue. Mordy Oberstein: Someone put on the Styx Come Sail Away right now. Crystal Carter:: I was thinking of Enya, Sail Away. Anyway. So, if you're sailing out, it's not a big deal. Yeah, you can do that and you can be nimble. It's not a big deal because you can say, oh, you know what? I'm just going to post that blog. You could be nimble. If you are moving an entire unit, then you have to plan and that planning can take a long time. So, if we're talking about the cruise ship metaphor, because I love a folksy metaphor, if we're talking about that you need to tell the harbor master, you need to tell the people who look after the harbor, I'm moving my ship. Right? I'm getting out of this dock and I'm moving my ship. They're like, okay, we need to clear the way, we need to do these things. Mordy Oberstein: Sign these forms. Crystal Carter:: Right. There's things you have to do in order to engage that. On an enterprise level, if you want to do things, there's lead time. You have to take lead time into account, and sometimes that lead time can be months. Sometimes that lead time can be even longer than that. So, when you're thinking about your SEO and you're thinking about SEO implementations, particularly like tech SEOS implementations. If you want to address some tech debt for instance, that's in your website stack. Or if you want to create a new asset on your blog or create a new asset for the digital asset or something. You have to think about the fact that there are wheels within wheels within wheels, and you have to be able to move as a unit. You can't think of yourself in a siloed space because you're part of a larger unit. Mordy Oberstein: You know what it's like, to use another analogy? Let's say you want to get ice cream. You hop in the car, you get ice cream. Now, let's say you have 10 kids. Now go try to get ice cream. Crystal Carter:: Right, right, right. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: You have 10 different people with 10 different considerations and it's at the enterprise level. So, you might think, wow, let's target this keyword. Make it a really simple case. Target this keyword, engage. Then someone says, the brand manager says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is not on brand for us." But the SEO, the traffic. That's not what the brand does. There's so many different teams with so many different considerations, who have a voice and a legitimate voice on what you do and what you don't do. Navigating all of that, extremely complex. If you were to ask me, if I'm doing SEO with scale already and I want to move to the enterprise level. Or I'm not doing SEO with what I want to go into enterprise. The greatest skill I think you can have is being able to navigate different relationships, considerations, compromising, planning. That back and forth with other people comes much into focus, uniquely so, in enterprise SEO. Crystal Carter:: This is something that Eli Schwartz talks about. He says you need to make friends with everyone. I think also you need to have your ears to the ground about where things are moving. I was on a recent discussion with the women in tech SEO crew, talking about their state of technical SEO report that they put out with ERA digital. We were talking about enterprise SEO and we were talking about how you get things implemented. One of the consensuses that we came to was that timing is everything. If you know that a team is moving on an initiative across your company, and this also applies to smaller businesses as well. But let's say that you're working for a theme park or something and the theme park has a new ride that they want to promote. And you have an SEO thing that you want to get done and you've been trying for months to get it done. If you can position the SEO tactic, the SEO implementation that you want as a benefit to this other initiative that's coming down the pipe, which you know that the company has momentum on, then you're more likely to get that sign off than if you just have something random that's like a thing that you think is a good thing that's best practice that will generally help the website. If you have something that works with the timing of the company, that's really useful to think about. And thinking about budgets allocation, thinking about when your company signs off marketing plans, for instance. If the marketing plans are signed off in October and you show up with this great idea in December, they've already signed it off and they're midway through and you need to think about that as well. So, I think there's a lot of wheels within wheels and finding out is really helpful. Mordy Oberstein: That goes back to your point about the boats, or in my case, the kids and the ice cream. If you want to successfully navigate that slow moving ship, it means that you have to be almost a type A personality to a certain extent. If that's not you, by the way, then make sure there's somebody on your team who that is them. Because you need to know in advance, be able to plan it in advance and predict the various scenarios that will play out. If this happens, we're going to have to do that and now I'm going to know these five different things and set up meetings with these five different people, and have that all planned out. So, before you even get to the doc, or before you even offer the kids, hey, let's go for ice cream, you need to have a plan of how that's going to happen and what that's going to look like. Crystal Carter:: I know that for instance with Wix there's a logo maker tool, which the team put together, and that took a little while to put together, but it's a fantastic tool. It's a fantastic tool for users in lots of ways and adds a lot of user value for users for instance. Putting that together and getting all the moving parts and getting everyone together to make that happen is something that's really valuable. I think also when you're in an enterprise team, and even when you're in a smaller in-house team or an agency as well, being prescient, being aware of who the gatekeepers are. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Very much so. Crystal Carter:: Can be really, really, really useful. I don't mean gatekeepers as in like boo, you can't come in, but I mean people that are facilitators. Being conscious of who those people are and identifying them and being able to see who that works, because it might not even be the people that you would normally on paper assume. It might be that there's somebody who manages the diary for the CEO or manages the diary for the CMO or something. If you don't speak well to them, you will not get a meeting. It might be that might be the person that you need to think about. It might be that it's not necessarily the person who is the team lead, but it's the project lead who's actually driving some of the decisions and things. So, be aware of those so that you can get your implementations met. Also, when you're thinking about your SEO implementations, I think it's also important to tie them into the team's priorities. If they don't fit in with the team's priorities, then it's going to be very difficult to get signed off. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's another thing that really has to align priorities. Also, because in my experience you could only, and I think you understand this also, we've experienced this both, where you're going to have overlap. People have their own priorities and your priorities are going to overlap. Sometimes your priorities align and you work together, and sometimes your priorities are the same and it means cannibalization. Crystal Carter:: Right. So, you've got to think about that. I think from a keyword research point of view, from an enterprise, that's definitely something that people should think about. If you're working on a big domain, and one of the things that's tricky with enterprise domains is that not only do you have your main domain, but you very often will have your knowledge base or whatever. You'll very often have support docs, help docs and things like that. You may also have a lot of old content. So, if you're working on a website, if you've gotten to an enterprise level, chances are the domain is a little bit older and is going to have a lot of webpages. It might be that there are pages from way, way, way, way, way back. Mordy Oberstein: You talked about this in a previous podcast, you have to be careful with those things also because if you pull off the wallpaper, sometimes the wall crumbles. Crystal Carter:: Right. Precisely. I think that when you're looking at your keyword research, you should also be looking at how to make sure that you're not overlapping with yourself. I think we talked a little bit about keyword cannibalization, which I think is a challenge for enterprise SEOs. One of the tools that I found recently that's really useful is a keyword gap analysis tool, Semrush. Mordy Oberstein: Pretty cool. Crystal Carter:: Which is supposed to be for they're looking at competitors. But it's actually really, really useful for looking at your own content and finding the gaps in the existing content you have, so that you can create some complimentary rather than competitive content. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So, different folders compared to each other, different sub-domains compared to each other, that kind of thing. Crystal Carter:: Precisely. It's a really, really good tool that you can look at for your own. So, if you compare all of those different things and then you can see untapped, picked from the untapped. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Where it's overlapped and you're just going to end up killing their page, people are not going to be happy. Don't do that. Yeah. Crystal Carter:: Yeah. It may even mean you have to work harder to make your content rank and perform and engage and all of that sort of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Or if you are going to do that, you need to sync up to make sure that everyone's aligned in all the resources and all of the SEO juice are going to one place, for lack of a better word. Now, if you're doing keyword research, that's great. You're at the enterprise level, you're doing keyword research. Are you really though? Are you that hands-on? Is it all strategies? Should you be hands-on? Probably, yeah, but how do you remain hands-on at the enterprise level when you're so busy? All these big pages and big things and different meetings and different teams. Oh my goodness. To help us answer that, Product Led SEO's author, Eli Schwartz, is here to tell us how to remain hands on when working at the enterprise level. Eli Schwartz: Figuring out how to stay hands on an SEO when you're working at an enterprise level is no easy feat. By the very nature of the job, your job is more likely to be focused on meetings, architecture, strategy, diplomacy, politics and all things that are the furthest thing from hands-on. As a consultant, this is even more challenging for me because I'm not hands on. I'm not working within a company. I don't really get to look at the source code of anything. I don't see Jira tickets. I'm barely in Slack conversations. When I am in, these are the conversations that I'm invited into. So, I have to find other ways to be hands-on. I'll do things like work on my own projects, launch pages, break pages. I recently launched a new website with Wix, and when I forwarded my website over from WordPress over to Wix, I intentionally 404ed pages to see how long they would still be in the index. Spoiler, it's been about two months and they're still in the Google index. So, if you do a site query on my site, EliSchwartz.co, you're still going to find webpages that are 404ed and they're still in the Google index. So, I do things like that to stay really on top of the real hands-on part of SEO. The other things I'll do is I'll do things that are out of my typical role as a consultant. I'll coach new SEOs or I'll coach enterprise SEOs and help them understand and help work with them, and really for my own learning to understand how to navigate the challenges that they're working on as a part of their roles. 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. Coaching isn't necessarily the part of consulting that I might earn the most from or I might focus the most time on, but it actually is for me the most rewarding because I am getting my hands dirty. I am learning things and I am navigating challenges, and it keeps me up to date with existing issues around SEO. For example, most of my larger clients are very, very unlikely to ever get hit by a Google algorithm update. They aren't going to get penalties, they aren't even doing things that are big enough and important enough to get the attention of Google. However, with some of the coaching projects that I work on, those are smaller sites. Those will be the kinds of things where they are seeing changes from Google algorithm updates and they need to message that to executives. They are seeing things and they need to message to counterparts across the company, how do we go ahead and fix this? That's the primary way that I'll get most of my hands-on access and really stay up to date. Of course, I'm sure other people are recommending and I would totally agree with that, read blog posts. Be on Twitter, be on LinkedIn, be a part of conversations. But the one extra piece I do is when I hear these things and I see these conversations, I go ahead and try to test it on my own. But this is something that I am very proactive about. How do I stay hands-on rather than just staying high level? Mordy Oberstein: Thank you very much, Eli. Don't forget to check out Eli's book, Product-Led SEO. A little plug for Eli. Hey, if somebody's coming on the podcast and they have a book, we have to plug the book. Crystal Carter:: Plug the book. Mordy Oberstein: Plug the book. Crystal Carter:: That's what you do. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like I'm like Jay Leno or something. I have a guest on, I'm plugging the book. Crystal Carter:: Some shameless self-promotion but not self-promotion. Something that's just- Mordy Oberstein: Marketer's going to market. That's how it goes. Crystal Carter:: This is it. This is it. Mordy Oberstein: Respect. Crystal Carter:: Resistant is futile. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good point and it's a good point at the enterprise level and in general. If you want to get hands-on experiences with SEO and you're like, I don't know, I don't have a local SEO client or whatever it is, I don't have an eCommerce. So, try to spin up a mock site. Try to get your hands on. Take that extra initiative. If you're sitting at strategy meetings all day long, great, start a podcast. Create a podcast website. Run that website. Do something with it, not just a test. Actually run something. Create a blog, run that blog, do the work read. Keep your hands dirty in the SEO by being a little bit proactive and spending a little bit of time on, even if it's a small website, it's something tangible. Crystal Carter:: Yeah, yeah, it's so true and the best SEOs do this all the time. I hear people who are like, oh, I did this course but I need to get some SEO experience and I need to get a job somewhere. Or I need to get a thing somewhere. I'm like, you don't need anyone's permission to do SEO. You can just do SEO. You can start a website right now and you can do SEO. You can start creating content. You can start doing content optimization. You can start thinking about your content and that sort of thing on things like Medium, on things like LinkedIn, on things like that. But do SEO. And then I think really nice working on enterprise level, John Sehada is also somebody who does this a lot. Barry interviewed him recently, or there's a video interview of Barry and John talking about this as well. John's like, oh yeah, I did this, I did that, I did this, I did that. Barry was like, I literally love how in the weeds you are. The best SEOs are doing this all the time. I know somebody who is an enterprise SEO who works for a major fashion label. She's like, oh yeah, we've been experimenting on this project with AI content and seeing how that performs and that sort of thing. I think that if you want to learn how to do SEO, doing is the most important thing. Because SEO in theory is great and you can learn a lot of stuff from reading blogs, but until you put the content into, until you set it live, it's not really active. You have to set it live and you have to see how Google responds, how people respond, how the internet responds to your content. Mordy Oberstein: This goes to a point John Mueller made a while back a couple years ago, where someone's talking about creating a test site. John's like, well. John, the search advocate over at Google. You don't usually put the same kind of effort into a test site as you do a real site, so it's hard to really see how things would actually work and play themselves out. The real thing is the real thing. Now, sometimes in enterprise SEO, you work in-house. Sometimes, however, very often actually, you consult at the enterprise level when doing SEO. Which means you have clients, which means you have high stake clients who have big budgets and big expectations, on my. To ease our anxiety around this, we're going to talk to someone who knows a thing or two about how to talk to big name brands or running big budgets with big expectations. Our very own vice president of Global Strategic Sales at Wix, Matt Matergia stops by as we go across the Wix verse. Speaker 5: Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift-off. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the show, Matt. Really nice to have you here. Matt Matergia: Pleasure to be here. Mordy Oberstein: I'm kind of excited to pick your brain. Enterprise level clients. When you're talking to SEO, not SEO, just purely in abstract, not connected to any vertical, what goes through your mind when you have to deal with a, say, a complicated SEO? I'm sorry, a complicated enterprise. We're not doing SEO. A complicated enterprise client. Matt Matergia: You can't get off of the SEO. Mordy Oberstein: It's like a drug. Matt Matergia: So, all right. I think SEO doesn't matter what you're talking about with an enterprise client, right? It all comes back to understanding their business and understanding the problems that they're having and how their business works. In the sales world, we talk about discovery, right? Discovery is basically understanding who you're talking to, where they are in the organization, what their goals are, what their problems are, what opportunities you can gain out of this. So, we always say good discovery leads to good opportunities, and that's Sales 101, right? But that is really understanding clients and understanding their business. Crystal Carter:: What's your process for getting that level of understanding that helps you to create an effective relationship between yourself and an enterprise client? Matt Matergia: I would say base level, it's curiosity. Crystal Carter:: Okay. Matt Matergia: It's curiosity and asking good questions. Mordy Oberstein: You and John Mueller. So, we did an episode on building the good SEO team, and we asked Google's John Mueller, what are the traits of a good SEO team? He said curiosity. Matt Matergia : All right. Mordy Oberstein: Great minds. Matt Matergia: Yeah. Wow, what a level I've set myself at. Mordy Oberstein: That is, right? You've reached. We all aspired to each level of John. You have just said we've been trying for this, what, how many episodes? Like 33 episodes? And you've been here for five minutes. Matt Matergia: Yeah. Well, I'm honored. I think maybe we should just end this right here. Mordy Oberstein: Somebody's got another meeting to go to. Crystal Carter:: I would say also when you're working with clients who are enterprise or are part of a larger organization, in my experience, timelines can be something of a challenge or can be something that needs to be managed anyway. Have you found that to be the case as well? Matt Matergia : Yes, of course. Timelines, budgets, and also what is driving the timeline is usually it's the process on the other side. It's that decision making process that you need to understand, because we all have maybe a timeline in our head of the ideal process that we want to go through. But if you don't understand what's going on the other side and the business case that they need to make, the people that they need to get involved, the approval that they have to get, then those timelines, it's expectation versus reality. There can be some huge gap between what you're expecting the timelines to be and what they might be expecting. Which goes back to curiosity because you need to ask the questions to understand what that process is going to be. Crystal Carter:: Right, and I think that that's part of building a relationship with someone from a team like that. And that's a healthy relationship because you don't want to be pressuring someone. How come you haven't responded to this email when they don't have the capacity to get back to you straight away. Or they've got some other things that are going on around or that sort of thing. So yeah, I don't know if you can talk more about that. Matt Matergia: Well, I was joking. We had a sales kickoff in New York, I guess it was two months ago now, but I was joking with the team because we were talking about building trust and where you need to get with your main stakeholders and the sales process. We were talking about breaking the cell phone barrier. We were saying if you don't have your main contact cell phone and you don't have the right to be texting, calling, whatever, and you don't have that relationship, forget it. You're not closing the deal because you haven't established trust. Right? I made that up, breaking the cell phone barrier, but it goes back to trust really. Mordy Oberstein: I don't have your number so I kind of... Matt Matergia: We don't have a good relationship. Mordy Oberstein: We're not there, huh? Oh man. I really misassessed this whole relationship. Matt Matergia: I'll Slack it to you. We're on Slack. Mordy Oberstein: Oh okay, we're on Slack? Okay, so Slack is not... Wait, what if you're in a group Slack together with them, so it's a cross company Slack? Matt Matergia: Actually, that is definitely a good sign, right? When you have something like a joint Monday board or a joint Slack channel and now you're bringing in all the players. I feel like now you're starting to work on actual implementation or getting to the actual project, for sure. Mordy Oberstein: So, you're really trying to integrate with that person as much as possible. Matt Matergia: Yes. Yeah, definitely. Crystal Carter:: I think from an SEO point of view, the process of building trust with your clients is very similar whether they're enterprise or whether they're a smaller scale. I think when you have that level of trust, when you think about timelines, sometimes it might not be the right time for whatever it is that you're doing. But if you have a level of trust where they've got you on speed dial, they've got your number, they've got all your information, they know that you're solid and stuff. Then you were talking about opportunity as well, then they're able to connect with you when they need you for whatever it is, and you're able to fulfill whatever it is that they need. Matt Matergia: It's expectation setting. It's been a long time since I've worked selling SEO to enterprise clients, and I'm sure in a decade. But sophistication of the marketing teams, I'm sure it has improved or let's hope. But a lot of the partners that I'm working with today, they're working with small businesses. You think, all right, I'm going to invest money in SEO and overnight I'm going to show up on Google first page because you have a unscrupulous SEO agencies that are always saying that, right? So, part of the way that you can build trust is also that you do proper expectation setting. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, a great positive or bonus is that when this person you've made contact with, whether it be you have their home phone number, their children's names, whatever it is that you have, if they go to another company, I've seen this a gazillion times, if they like you, they'll bring you into that company. Which means that you've not lost the other client. They don't necessarily get rid of you because your POC is gone and you've gained a new client, because your POC is now in a new company. And you know that person's children's names and you're on a first name basis, and you go to the country club. Whatever it is that you do together. Matt Matergia: I feel like CMO turnover is the bread and butter of marketing agents. Mordy Oberstein: You're like, all right, let's see. When you intake a new client, I wonder what's their churn rate going to be here at their own company? Matt Matergia: Yeah. Like, all right, every two years I can just hit the. Mordy Oberstein: This guy's great. I love this person. He just brought me 10 clients just by himself moving around. Matt Matergia: Exactly. Crystal Carter:: I think there's also, talking about churn, sometimes when there's new team, let's say you're working with an account or you're working with a team, sometimes when there's a new company or a new team member, sometimes they're like, we want to clear out. We want to get new contacts and things like that. Have you got any advice for how to establish good relationships with talent incoming management? Matt Matergia: Yeah. In the sales world, we look for signals. Signals could be maybe a company has raised money or maybe they had a change in strategy. But certainly a signal could be new leadership coming in. Because 100% whether they're going to come in and bring existing vendors and existing relationships, or they're going to look for new ones, they're going to 100% make changes and they're going to want to make those changes usually within the first 90 to 180 days. So, specific to how do I establish those new relationships, I don't think it's any different necessarily than just establishing relationships in general. But I think looking for those buying signals is very important, and having your finger on the pulse to know what's going on to be proactive in those situations is important. Crystal Carter:: In my experience, also having your act together also helps. So, if you have a well-oiled machine and you're like, this is our report that we do every month and this is our thing that we do every month, then when the new person comes in, you've got all that stuff for them to see and the transition is easier. I don't know if you find that that's useful from a sales point of view as well? Matt Matergia: Everybody wants to look good. So, if you are the facilitator of that person looking good, then you've just earned their trust, right? 100%. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter:: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of looking good, if people wanted to look good and follow you out there on social media, where can they find you? Matt Matergia: I am MTerg on Twitter. M-T-E-R-G. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, and we'll link to that in the show notes. Matt Matergia: I'm not as active as either of you, but I am there. Crystal Carter:: But you're on LinkedIn as well, yes? Matt Matergia: And on LinkedIn. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. LinkedIn's great. I go there once in a while. I visit. Not like TikTok. I don't even know what that is. Crystal Carter:: That's not true. Marty has a very active TikTok where he does lots of dances, too. Mordy Oberstein: Dancing and I fall downstairs. That's what I do. On purpose. Or some people can like it, laugh at me. I just hurt myself. Anyway, forgetting that rabbit hole, Matt, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate you sharing your expertise and experience with us and look forward to seeing you around the virtual office, because we're not in the same office. We're not in any office together. Matt Matergia: Nope. One day I'll get to Tel Aviv. Mordy Oberstein: One day I'll get to Denver. Matt Matergia: Yes. Look forward to that. Crystal Carter:: Fantastic. Matt Matergia: Thank you both. It's a pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: Three, two, one, ignition. Lift-off. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Matt. I've had numerous conversations over the years with Matt. Super nice guy, super friendly, super accessible, and one of these people who you walk away feeling like they know way more than they let on kind of thing. Crystal Carter:: In a good way. Mordy Oberstein: In a good way. I mean it in the best way possible. Some things that I'm not going to let on that I do know, well maybe I will, that you'll soon know, if that makes any sense whatsoever. I'm not sure. As I pivot into the snappy news. Crystal Carter:: And now, with the snappy news and news from Bing, they have announced that their new Bing has increased the number of conversations that you can have with Bing chat from 15 up to 20. You can also have a total of up to 200, which is an increase from 150. They've also explained that they are adding in image and video search, which will make it a lot easier for you to have a bit more information there. And that they're adding local grounding to give better results for local search. Also in local search, if you are using Bing places, you might also be interested to know that they have improved their location recognition API to include something called local intelligence, which allows you to create territories and to do better local SEO via Bing. They're also adding more information about demographics and continuing to build and grow. We reported last week that the March core algorithm update had completed. However, in the early days of April, we are starting to see a lot of movement around there, to the point that Barry Schwartz reported seeing early signs of a Google search algorithm update on the third. A lot of people were saying that they have seen some reversals and a lot of changes early in the month. So, if you have a website that you're looking after, have a look at those results and see if anything has changed. Picking up on the AI news from Google, they continue to roll out Bard in a testing framework, so more people are reporting that they're getting access to Bard. They also announced recently during a podcast with the New York Times that they are also testing Bard in Gmail. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, discussed some of their approaches to innovation and responsibility, and also discussed and denied that he ever issued a code red as part of their approach to AI. Finally, news from ChatGPT is that ChatGPT has been disabled for users in Italy, reported by Christie Hines in Search Engine Journal. It seems that OpenAI did not in properly inform users that it was collecting personal data. This may have been in contravention with GDPR. And as such, they have now blocked access to ChatGPT for Italian users while they tried to make adjustments to potentially reestablish the ground rules for use in that area. This brings into question some potential challenges for how generative AI tools like Chachi PT, Bard and New Bing may approach this privacy space going forward. That's all for today's SERP's Up podcast snappy news. Mordy Oberstein: Coming back now from the snappy news, always good to have news. Crystal Carter:: Always good. Have we reached the final frontier of our podcast? Mordy Oberstein: It was the undiscovered country of SEO enterprises. Crystal Carter:: That's very fair. Mordy Oberstein: A little Star Trek Six reference for you there. All right. I feel like we're spanning generations, we keep this podcast going on any longer. But before we do lead the part, we need to talk about who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness, and this week we have a great follow for you, Paul Andre Devera, also known as Dre. An absolute character who you may not realize specializes in enterprise SEO. Crystal Carter:: So, he is living my podcast sound effects dreams because he has a fantastic podcast and webcast called The SEO Show. Do check the out on YouTube and on all of your best channels. He is somebody who drops the air horns that go. He just drops them in the middle of whatever he's doing and it's amazing. He has a lot of fun with his podcast and with a lot of his web stuff, but don't let the fun fool you. He's so smart and so strategic about the things that he does. I was on a recent discussion for Majestic, where we were talking about enterprise level SEO. The amount of sense he was talking, the amount of clarity that he has about how to approach enterprise SEO is phenomenal. He's super intelligent and really engaging, and a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: I've had numerous conversations with him. I've interviewed him. He is so on the ball and his take on SEO is so accurate and it's real. You're not getting the influencer flop. You're getting a real take from him. Again, like the SEO Video Show, the production value is off the chain. Little plug from myself, beginning of each show I do the SEO joke. So, if you want to hear me do an SEO joke, check out Dre's show. Marketers going to market. Crystal Carter:: Yeah, he's got a fantastic theme song as well. Which I thought that he'd done it himself, but he didn't do it himself. I wish he had, but there we go. Mordy Oberstein: He's over on Twitter at Paul Andre, that's P-A-U-L-A-N-D-R-E. Paul Andre on Twitter. We'll link to it in the show notes so you could follow him, check him out across all of his platforms, especially on YouTube and his SEO Video Show. And that's it. That's all we got. Crystal Carter:: That's it. We've reached the final frontier. We have- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you made that joke already today. Crystal Carter:: Did I? Can I not do it again? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You can pick it again. Crystal Carter:: Oh, come on. Mordy Oberstein: Another Star Trek joke. Crystal Carter:: Oh, an insert Star Trek joke here. Mordy Oberstein: Live long and prosper, everybody. Thank you for joining us on the SERB'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 SEO on PPC with our powers combined. Look for wherever you could consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO loading app over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning at, you guessed it, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Eli Schwartz Matt Matergia Paul Andre De Vera Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Enterprise SEO Tips Product Led SEO Eli Schwartz SEO Consulting State of Technical SEO 2023 The Searchlight Newsletter News: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Talks Bard & The Future Of Search Seeing Early Signs Of A Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update Maximizing Sales Team Efficiency with Location Intelligence Bing Preview Release Notes: Image & Video Search Exploring Italy’s ChatGPT Ban And Its Potential Impact Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Eli Schwartz Matt Matergia Paul Andre De Vera Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Enterprise SEO Tips Product Led SEO Eli Schwartz SEO Consulting State of Technical SEO 2023 The Searchlight Newsletter News: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Talks Bard & The Future Of Search Seeing Early Signs Of A Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update Maximizing Sales Team Efficiency with Location Intelligence Bing Preview Release Notes: Image & Video Search Exploring Italy’s ChatGPT Ban And Its Potential Impact 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, the Head of SEO branding at Wix, and I'm joined by someone who is good, Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communications here at Wix. Totally got you by surprise at that one. Crystal Carter:: You did. I thought you were going to be like, "Ooh." Mordy Oberstein: Nope. Someone who is good. Crystal Carter:: That was a good note. Thanks for just... Yes. Also, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: So, the context for this is, and I guess you'll see our recording schedule and I'll hint at it. Yesterday was Barry Schwartz's birthday. Happy birthday, Barry. Crystal Carter: Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to Barry rested break. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: But by the time he hears it's going to be weeks after his actual birthday, but Barry- Crystal Carter:: We should also wish him happy birthday when this comes out. Mordy Oberstein: We should. So, Barry put out a Tweet saying, "I wish there was some kind of automated AI that would automatically reply back to when people wish you happy birthday on Twitter with, 'Thank you.'" So, you could have gone on Twitter and wrote an entire spiel to Barry like, "Barry, we love you. You're amazing." He would literally reply back to everyone, "Thank you." Period. Crystal Carter:: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: So, that's where I got my intro to Crystal this week. Crystal Carter:: There you go. Thank you. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Period. Crystal Carter:: Full stop. End of sentence. Mordy Oberstein: Full stop. End of sentence. Crystal Carter:: Moving on. Mordy Oberstein: All right, please. Moving on. Period. Thank you. Period. Do you know who Barry Schwartz is? By the way, Barry Schwartz, I call him the Godfather of SEO. He has been covering the SEO news for literally forever. He has SERoundtable.com, news editor at SearchEngineland.com. He is a huge asset to the industry. So, please follow Barry Schwartz and read his news content. You will learn a tremendous amount about SEO. And he's a great follow on Twitter because he is, as much as he denies it, he's a real character. Crystal Carter:: He also has a weekly video roundup, which is sponsored by Wix. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. Crystal Carter:: So, yeah, check that out. That's a really good watch on a Friday morning while you're having your cup of coffee. It's a good way to keep up on point. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. You can see Barry wearing a Wix hat. This episode is sponsored by Barry. No, just kidding. Crystal Carter:: No, it's not. Mordy Oberstein: This podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can filter through all of your pages with the Wix site inspection tool. Literally, filter through them because they now have filters. So, you can filter through up to 2000 pages of Google Search Console, URL inspection, API data to look at the indexation status of the specific types of pages on your site, or filter according to indexation status. Or filter according to a whole bunch of other different ways, because it's Wix making it easier for you to work at scale, which is a large part of... Crystal Carter:: I just wanted to chime in and just say I love it. I love that feature so much. I'm sure Daniel Weisberg from Google might be listening, but it's better than Google Search Console because you can search for a word that might be in your URL, it might be in the page title. You can search by that. You can filter by rich results. You can see that all on one table. I literally love it so much. Mordy Oberstein: Same here. Crystal Carter:: They announced that there was a filter and I lost my mind. It's brilliant. Check it out, please. Mordy Oberstein: You can now search for pages by the keyword in the URL, by the words in the URL. There's a million ways to now organize your data. Crystal Carter:: And on Google Search Console, you have to do three clicks or a redjects or a thing to find the thing. It's like, what? Just let me search for- Mordy Oberstein: Before you even finish the whole word that you type in, it's already pulled it out for you. Crystal Carter:: Yes, I love it. I literally love it. Mordy Oberstein: It is amazing. Which is a large part of doing SEO at scale, which is a large part of enterprise SEO, which is what today's episode is all about. No, it's not a Star Trek convention. It's the enterprise, but it's enterprise SEO. Or SEO for enterprise, however you want to phrase it. Crystal Carter:: Engage. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, thank you. Engage. Thank you. Make it so. Today, we are looking at what you should expect when working SEO at the enterprise level. How enterprise SEO does and doesn't differ from "regular SEO." What skills come into focus when doing enterprise SEO? And we have someone who has become synonymous with enterprise SEO stopping by to talk about how you can do enterprise SEO and still be hands on. Eli Schwartz, the author of Product-Led SEO is stopping and by to share his thoughts and his insights. Plus, we're going to talk to vice president of Global Strategic Sales at Wix, Matt Matergia, who's going to stop by with us to chat all about what it means and what you should know when talking to enterprise level clients. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Beam me up, Scotty, because episode number 33 of the SERP's Up podcast is taking on the enterprise. Crystal Carter:: I'm like, more Star Trek jokes. Honestly, please. Mordy Oberstein: Endless. Did you know by the way, that he never, Kirk never said Captain Kirk, William Shatner of Star Trek, never said, "Beam me up, Scotty," ever on the show or the movies? Crystal Carter:: Who said, "Beam me up, Scotty"? Mordy Oberstein: No one. Crystal Carter:: Leonard Nemoy? Mordy Oberstein: No one said it. He said something similar to it. Crystal Carter:: That's not rational. Mordy Oberstein: Fascinating. Crystal Carter:: In a sense it's futile. I know. I can literally just spat out things. Mordy Oberstein: Endless. Endless. We'll know we've gone too far when we break out into William Shatner impersonations. Okay, so. Crystal Carter:: Okay, wait, wait, wait. Who's your favorite Star Trek captain? Mordy Oberstein: Kirk. Crystal Carter:: Kirk. Mordy Oberstein: Kirk. It's absolutely. Crystal Carter:: Come on. Mordy Oberstein: First of all, I grew up on Kirk in the movies. It's very nostalgic for me. Crystal Carter:: I'm sorry. So, it's a close tie between Janeway and Picard, and all Sisko. Mordy Oberstein: Janeway is wonderful. I think the number two for me is Picard, followed by Janeway, followed by a Sisko, followed by it doesn't matter anymore. Crystal Carter:: I put Kirk pretty low on the thing. People, listeners, listeners, listeners to this podcast of who I know the Treking community is a lot, chime in. Tell us who's your favorite captain? Who's your favorite captain? Mordy Oberstein: There is no competition. We've gone too far. There is a bias. There is a bias in SEO. If I can go out on a limb here, people will think local SEO was simple because it's SMBs, and enterprise SEO is complex because it's huge in large organizations. That I don't think is the truth. Certainly not in the way that the perception of many of us think it is. Local SEO can in fact, by the way, be enterprise. Right? Think, I don't know, you're doing local SEO for Taco Bell. Crystal Carter:: Yeah. Dairy Queen. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Crystal Carter:: Pret a Manger. Mordy Oberstein: We listed all these companies. Papa Johns. Forever. Crystal Carter:: People who have multiple locations. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That is what we're trying to say. Also, by the way, small websites have their own complications and SEO at the enterprise level might not be as complicated as you think the way you think. Sure, they might have lots of pages. More pages than a typical SMB. But is that fundamentally what makes enterprise SEO more complex? Let's find out. Crystal Carter:: Make it so. Mordy Oberstein: Make it so. Engage. I think there's this general thought around enterprise SEO where it's more paid ads, therefore it's more complex. That's what enterprise SEO more complex words to me, and being at Wix at the enterprise level, why at SEMrush also is very enterprise. To me, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb here, we could talk to Nick Wilson about this on another podcast. What makes enterprise SEO complicated is the sheer size of the company itself, not the size of the website. Crystal Carter:: Yeah. I think it can be a little bit of both and I think it can also be the difference between a tugboat and a cruise ship. If you need to move a cruise ship through a space, you have to move it all at once and you have to do a lot of planning. It's going to take a lot of planning in order to make sure. If you've got a tugboat or a canoe or whatever and you need to leave the harbor, you just go. Mordy Oberstein: You untie the boat, you throw on your little captain's hat. Crystal Carter:: Right, exactly. Let's talk about captains. Lots of stuff about captains, right. So, you can get yourself on your little ship and you can sail away into the blue. Mordy Oberstein: Someone put on the Styx Come Sail Away right now. Crystal Carter:: I was thinking of Enya, Sail Away. Anyway. So, if you're sailing out, it's not a big deal. Yeah, you can do that and you can be nimble. It's not a big deal because you can say, oh, you know what? I'm just going to post that blog. You could be nimble. If you are moving an entire unit, then you have to plan and that planning can take a long time. So, if we're talking about the cruise ship metaphor, because I love a folksy metaphor, if we're talking about that you need to tell the harbor master, you need to tell the people who look after the harbor, I'm moving my ship. Right? I'm getting out of this dock and I'm moving my ship. They're like, okay, we need to clear the way, we need to do these things. Mordy Oberstein: Sign these forms. Crystal Carter:: Right. There's things you have to do in order to engage that. On an enterprise level, if you want to do things, there's lead time. You have to take lead time into account, and sometimes that lead time can be months. Sometimes that lead time can be even longer than that. So, when you're thinking about your SEO and you're thinking about SEO implementations, particularly like tech SEOS implementations. If you want to address some tech debt for instance, that's in your website stack. Or if you want to create a new asset on your blog or create a new asset for the digital asset or something. You have to think about the fact that there are wheels within wheels within wheels, and you have to be able to move as a unit. You can't think of yourself in a siloed space because you're part of a larger unit. Mordy Oberstein: You know what it's like, to use another analogy? Let's say you want to get ice cream. You hop in the car, you get ice cream. Now, let's say you have 10 kids. Now go try to get ice cream. Crystal Carter:: Right, right, right. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: You have 10 different people with 10 different considerations and it's at the enterprise level. So, you might think, wow, let's target this keyword. Make it a really simple case. Target this keyword, engage. Then someone says, the brand manager says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is not on brand for us." But the SEO, the traffic. That's not what the brand does. There's so many different teams with so many different considerations, who have a voice and a legitimate voice on what you do and what you don't do. Navigating all of that, extremely complex. If you were to ask me, if I'm doing SEO with scale already and I want to move to the enterprise level. Or I'm not doing SEO with what I want to go into enterprise. The greatest skill I think you can have is being able to navigate different relationships, considerations, compromising, planning. That back and forth with other people comes much into focus, uniquely so, in enterprise SEO. Crystal Carter:: This is something that Eli Schwartz talks about. He says you need to make friends with everyone. I think also you need to have your ears to the ground about where things are moving. I was on a recent discussion with the women in tech SEO crew, talking about their state of technical SEO report that they put out with ERA digital. We were talking about enterprise SEO and we were talking about how you get things implemented. One of the consensuses that we came to was that timing is everything. If you know that a team is moving on an initiative across your company, and this also applies to smaller businesses as well. But let's say that you're working for a theme park or something and the theme park has a new ride that they want to promote. And you have an SEO thing that you want to get done and you've been trying for months to get it done. If you can position the SEO tactic, the SEO implementation that you want as a benefit to this other initiative that's coming down the pipe, which you know that the company has momentum on, then you're more likely to get that sign off than if you just have something random that's like a thing that you think is a good thing that's best practice that will generally help the website. If you have something that works with the timing of the company, that's really useful to think about. And thinking about budgets allocation, thinking about when your company signs off marketing plans, for instance. If the marketing plans are signed off in October and you show up with this great idea in December, they've already signed it off and they're midway through and you need to think about that as well. So, I think there's a lot of wheels within wheels and finding out is really helpful. Mordy Oberstein: That goes back to your point about the boats, or in my case, the kids and the ice cream. If you want to successfully navigate that slow moving ship, it means that you have to be almost a type A personality to a certain extent. If that's not you, by the way, then make sure there's somebody on your team who that is them. Because you need to know in advance, be able to plan it in advance and predict the various scenarios that will play out. If this happens, we're going to have to do that and now I'm going to know these five different things and set up meetings with these five different people, and have that all planned out. So, before you even get to the doc, or before you even offer the kids, hey, let's go for ice cream, you need to have a plan of how that's going to happen and what that's going to look like. Crystal Carter:: I know that for instance with Wix there's a logo maker tool, which the team put together, and that took a little while to put together, but it's a fantastic tool. It's a fantastic tool for users in lots of ways and adds a lot of user value for users for instance. Putting that together and getting all the moving parts and getting everyone together to make that happen is something that's really valuable. I think also when you're in an enterprise team, and even when you're in a smaller in-house team or an agency as well, being prescient, being aware of who the gatekeepers are. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Very much so. Crystal Carter:: Can be really, really, really useful. I don't mean gatekeepers as in like boo, you can't come in, but I mean people that are facilitators. Being conscious of who those people are and identifying them and being able to see who that works, because it might not even be the people that you would normally on paper assume. It might be that there's somebody who manages the diary for the CEO or manages the diary for the CMO or something. If you don't speak well to them, you will not get a meeting. It might be that might be the person that you need to think about. It might be that it's not necessarily the person who is the team lead, but it's the project lead who's actually driving some of the decisions and things. So, be aware of those so that you can get your implementations met. Also, when you're thinking about your SEO implementations, I think it's also important to tie them into the team's priorities. If they don't fit in with the team's priorities, then it's going to be very difficult to get signed off. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's another thing that really has to align priorities. Also, because in my experience you could only, and I think you understand this also, we've experienced this both, where you're going to have overlap. People have their own priorities and your priorities are going to overlap. Sometimes your priorities align and you work together, and sometimes your priorities are the same and it means cannibalization. Crystal Carter:: Right. So, you've got to think about that. I think from a keyword research point of view, from an enterprise, that's definitely something that people should think about. If you're working on a big domain, and one of the things that's tricky with enterprise domains is that not only do you have your main domain, but you very often will have your knowledge base or whatever. You'll very often have support docs, help docs and things like that. You may also have a lot of old content. So, if you're working on a website, if you've gotten to an enterprise level, chances are the domain is a little bit older and is going to have a lot of webpages. It might be that there are pages from way, way, way, way, way back. Mordy Oberstein: You talked about this in a previous podcast, you have to be careful with those things also because if you pull off the wallpaper, sometimes the wall crumbles. Crystal Carter:: Right. Precisely. I think that when you're looking at your keyword research, you should also be looking at how to make sure that you're not overlapping with yourself. I think we talked a little bit about keyword cannibalization, which I think is a challenge for enterprise SEOs. One of the tools that I found recently that's really useful is a keyword gap analysis tool, Semrush. Mordy Oberstein: Pretty cool. Crystal Carter:: Which is supposed to be for they're looking at competitors. But it's actually really, really useful for looking at your own content and finding the gaps in the existing content you have, so that you can create some complimentary rather than competitive content. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So, different folders compared to each other, different sub-domains compared to each other, that kind of thing. Crystal Carter:: Precisely. It's a really, really good tool that you can look at for your own. So, if you compare all of those different things and then you can see untapped, picked from the untapped. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Where it's overlapped and you're just going to end up killing their page, people are not going to be happy. Don't do that. Yeah. Crystal Carter:: Yeah. It may even mean you have to work harder to make your content rank and perform and engage and all of that sort of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Or if you are going to do that, you need to sync up to make sure that everyone's aligned in all the resources and all of the SEO juice are going to one place, for lack of a better word. Now, if you're doing keyword research, that's great. You're at the enterprise level, you're doing keyword research. Are you really though? Are you that hands-on? Is it all strategies? Should you be hands-on? Probably, yeah, but how do you remain hands-on at the enterprise level when you're so busy? All these big pages and big things and different meetings and different teams. Oh my goodness. To help us answer that, Product Led SEO's author, Eli Schwartz, is here to tell us how to remain hands on when working at the enterprise level. Eli Schwartz: Figuring out how to stay hands on an SEO when you're working at an enterprise level is no easy feat. By the very nature of the job, your job is more likely to be focused on meetings, architecture, strategy, diplomacy, politics and all things that are the furthest thing from hands-on. As a consultant, this is even more challenging for me because I'm not hands on. I'm not working within a company. I don't really get to look at the source code of anything. I don't see Jira tickets. I'm barely in Slack conversations. When I am in, these are the conversations that I'm invited into. So, I have to find other ways to be hands-on. I'll do things like work on my own projects, launch pages, break pages. I recently launched a new website with Wix, and when I forwarded my website over from WordPress over to Wix, I intentionally 404ed pages to see how long they would still be in the index. Spoiler, it's been about two months and they're still in the Google index. So, if you do a site query on my site, EliSchwartz.co, you're still going to find webpages that are 404ed and they're still in the Google index. So, I do things like that to stay really on top of the real hands-on part of SEO. The other things I'll do is I'll do things that are out of my typical role as a consultant. I'll coach new SEOs or I'll coach enterprise SEOs and help them understand and help work with them, and really for my own learning to understand how to navigate the challenges that they're working on as a part of their roles. 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. Coaching isn't necessarily the part of consulting that I might earn the most from or I might focus the most time on, but it actually is for me the most rewarding because I am getting my hands dirty. I am learning things and I am navigating challenges, and it keeps me up to date with existing issues around SEO. For example, most of my larger clients are very, very unlikely to ever get hit by a Google algorithm update. They aren't going to get penalties, they aren't even doing things that are big enough and important enough to get the attention of Google. However, with some of the coaching projects that I work on, those are smaller sites. Those will be the kinds of things where they are seeing changes from Google algorithm updates and they need to message that to executives. They are seeing things and they need to message to counterparts across the company, how do we go ahead and fix this? That's the primary way that I'll get most of my hands-on access and really stay up to date. Of course, I'm sure other people are recommending and I would totally agree with that, read blog posts. Be on Twitter, be on LinkedIn, be a part of conversations. But the one extra piece I do is when I hear these things and I see these conversations, I go ahead and try to test it on my own. But this is something that I am very proactive about. How do I stay hands-on rather than just staying high level? Mordy Oberstein: Thank you very much, Eli. Don't forget to check out Eli's book, Product-Led SEO. A little plug for Eli. Hey, if somebody's coming on the podcast and they have a book, we have to plug the book. Crystal Carter:: Plug the book. Mordy Oberstein: Plug the book. Crystal Carter:: That's what you do. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like I'm like Jay Leno or something. I have a guest on, I'm plugging the book. Crystal Carter:: Some shameless self-promotion but not self-promotion. Something that's just- Mordy Oberstein: Marketer's going to market. That's how it goes. Crystal Carter:: This is it. This is it. Mordy Oberstein: Respect. Crystal Carter:: Resistant is futile. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good point and it's a good point at the enterprise level and in general. If you want to get hands-on experiences with SEO and you're like, I don't know, I don't have a local SEO client or whatever it is, I don't have an eCommerce. So, try to spin up a mock site. Try to get your hands on. Take that extra initiative. If you're sitting at strategy meetings all day long, great, start a podcast. Create a podcast website. Run that website. Do something with it, not just a test. Actually run something. Create a blog, run that blog, do the work read. Keep your hands dirty in the SEO by being a little bit proactive and spending a little bit of time on, even if it's a small website, it's something tangible. Crystal Carter:: Yeah, yeah, it's so true and the best SEOs do this all the time. I hear people who are like, oh, I did this course but I need to get some SEO experience and I need to get a job somewhere. Or I need to get a thing somewhere. I'm like, you don't need anyone's permission to do SEO. You can just do SEO. You can start a website right now and you can do SEO. You can start creating content. You can start doing content optimization. You can start thinking about your content and that sort of thing on things like Medium, on things like LinkedIn, on things like that. But do SEO. And then I think really nice working on enterprise level, John Sehada is also somebody who does this a lot. Barry interviewed him recently, or there's a video interview of Barry and John talking about this as well. John's like, oh yeah, I did this, I did that, I did this, I did that. Barry was like, I literally love how in the weeds you are. The best SEOs are doing this all the time. I know somebody who is an enterprise SEO who works for a major fashion label. She's like, oh yeah, we've been experimenting on this project with AI content and seeing how that performs and that sort of thing. I think that if you want to learn how to do SEO, doing is the most important thing. Because SEO in theory is great and you can learn a lot of stuff from reading blogs, but until you put the content into, until you set it live, it's not really active. You have to set it live and you have to see how Google responds, how people respond, how the internet responds to your content. Mordy Oberstein: This goes to a point John Mueller made a while back a couple years ago, where someone's talking about creating a test site. John's like, well. John, the search advocate over at Google. You don't usually put the same kind of effort into a test site as you do a real site, so it's hard to really see how things would actually work and play themselves out. The real thing is the real thing. Now, sometimes in enterprise SEO, you work in-house. Sometimes, however, very often actually, you consult at the enterprise level when doing SEO. Which means you have clients, which means you have high stake clients who have big budgets and big expectations, on my. To ease our anxiety around this, we're going to talk to someone who knows a thing or two about how to talk to big name brands or running big budgets with big expectations. Our very own vice president of Global Strategic Sales at Wix, Matt Matergia stops by as we go across the Wix verse. Speaker 5: Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift-off. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the show, Matt. Really nice to have you here. Matt Matergia: Pleasure to be here. Mordy Oberstein: I'm kind of excited to pick your brain. Enterprise level clients. When you're talking to SEO, not SEO, just purely in abstract, not connected to any vertical, what goes through your mind when you have to deal with a, say, a complicated SEO? I'm sorry, a complicated enterprise. We're not doing SEO. A complicated enterprise client. Matt Matergia: You can't get off of the SEO. Mordy Oberstein: It's like a drug. Matt Matergia: So, all right. I think SEO doesn't matter what you're talking about with an enterprise client, right? It all comes back to understanding their business and understanding the problems that they're having and how their business works. In the sales world, we talk about discovery, right? Discovery is basically understanding who you're talking to, where they are in the organization, what their goals are, what their problems are, what opportunities you can gain out of this. So, we always say good discovery leads to good opportunities, and that's Sales 101, right? But that is really understanding clients and understanding their business. Crystal Carter:: What's your process for getting that level of understanding that helps you to create an effective relationship between yourself and an enterprise client? Matt Matergia: I would say base level, it's curiosity. Crystal Carter:: Okay. Matt Matergia: It's curiosity and asking good questions. Mordy Oberstein: You and John Mueller. So, we did an episode on building the good SEO team, and we asked Google's John Mueller, what are the traits of a good SEO team? He said curiosity. Matt Matergia : All right. Mordy Oberstein: Great minds. Matt Matergia: Yeah. Wow, what a level I've set myself at. Mordy Oberstein: That is, right? You've reached. We all aspired to each level of John. You have just said we've been trying for this, what, how many episodes? Like 33 episodes? And you've been here for five minutes. Matt Matergia: Yeah. Well, I'm honored. I think maybe we should just end this right here. Mordy Oberstein: Somebody's got another meeting to go to. Crystal Carter:: I would say also when you're working with clients who are enterprise or are part of a larger organization, in my experience, timelines can be something of a challenge or can be something that needs to be managed anyway. Have you found that to be the case as well? Matt Matergia : Yes, of course. Timelines, budgets, and also what is driving the timeline is usually it's the process on the other side. It's that decision making process that you need to understand, because we all have maybe a timeline in our head of the ideal process that we want to go through. But if you don't understand what's going on the other side and the business case that they need to make, the people that they need to get involved, the approval that they have to get, then those timelines, it's expectation versus reality. There can be some huge gap between what you're expecting the timelines to be and what they might be expecting. Which goes back to curiosity because you need to ask the questions to understand what that process is going to be. Crystal Carter:: Right, and I think that that's part of building a relationship with someone from a team like that. And that's a healthy relationship because you don't want to be pressuring someone. How come you haven't responded to this email when they don't have the capacity to get back to you straight away. Or they've got some other things that are going on around or that sort of thing. So yeah, I don't know if you can talk more about that. Matt Matergia: Well, I was joking. We had a sales kickoff in New York, I guess it was two months ago now, but I was joking with the team because we were talking about building trust and where you need to get with your main stakeholders and the sales process. We were talking about breaking the cell phone barrier. We were saying if you don't have your main contact cell phone and you don't have the right to be texting, calling, whatever, and you don't have that relationship, forget it. You're not closing the deal because you haven't established trust. Right? I made that up, breaking the cell phone barrier, but it goes back to trust really. Mordy Oberstein: I don't have your number so I kind of... Matt Matergia: We don't have a good relationship. Mordy Oberstein: We're not there, huh? Oh man. I really misassessed this whole relationship. Matt Matergia: I'll Slack it to you. We're on Slack. Mordy Oberstein: Oh okay, we're on Slack? Okay, so Slack is not... Wait, what if you're in a group Slack together with them, so it's a cross company Slack? Matt Matergia: Actually, that is definitely a good sign, right? When you have something like a joint Monday board or a joint Slack channel and now you're bringing in all the players. I feel like now you're starting to work on actual implementation or getting to the actual project, for sure. Mordy Oberstein: So, you're really trying to integrate with that person as much as possible. Matt Matergia: Yes. Yeah, definitely. Crystal Carter:: I think from an SEO point of view, the process of building trust with your clients is very similar whether they're enterprise or whether they're a smaller scale. I think when you have that level of trust, when you think about timelines, sometimes it might not be the right time for whatever it is that you're doing. But if you have a level of trust where they've got you on speed dial, they've got your number, they've got all your information, they know that you're solid and stuff. Then you were talking about opportunity as well, then they're able to connect with you when they need you for whatever it is, and you're able to fulfill whatever it is that they need. Matt Matergia: It's expectation setting. It's been a long time since I've worked selling SEO to enterprise clients, and I'm sure in a decade. But sophistication of the marketing teams, I'm sure it has improved or let's hope. But a lot of the partners that I'm working with today, they're working with small businesses. You think, all right, I'm going to invest money in SEO and overnight I'm going to show up on Google first page because you have a unscrupulous SEO agencies that are always saying that, right? So, part of the way that you can build trust is also that you do proper expectation setting. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, a great positive or bonus is that when this person you've made contact with, whether it be you have their home phone number, their children's names, whatever it is that you have, if they go to another company, I've seen this a gazillion times, if they like you, they'll bring you into that company. Which means that you've not lost the other client. They don't necessarily get rid of you because your POC is gone and you've gained a new client, because your POC is now in a new company. And you know that person's children's names and you're on a first name basis, and you go to the country club. Whatever it is that you do together. Matt Matergia: I feel like CMO turnover is the bread and butter of marketing agents. Mordy Oberstein: You're like, all right, let's see. When you intake a new client, I wonder what's their churn rate going to be here at their own company? Matt Matergia: Yeah. Like, all right, every two years I can just hit the. Mordy Oberstein: This guy's great. I love this person. He just brought me 10 clients just by himself moving around. Matt Matergia: Exactly. Crystal Carter:: I think there's also, talking about churn, sometimes when there's new team, let's say you're working with an account or you're working with a team, sometimes when there's a new company or a new team member, sometimes they're like, we want to clear out. We want to get new contacts and things like that. Have you got any advice for how to establish good relationships with talent incoming management? Matt Matergia: Yeah. In the sales world, we look for signals. Signals could be maybe a company has raised money or maybe they had a change in strategy. But certainly a signal could be new leadership coming in. Because 100% whether they're going to come in and bring existing vendors and existing relationships, or they're going to look for new ones, they're going to 100% make changes and they're going to want to make those changes usually within the first 90 to 180 days. So, specific to how do I establish those new relationships, I don't think it's any different necessarily than just establishing relationships in general. But I think looking for those buying signals is very important, and having your finger on the pulse to know what's going on to be proactive in those situations is important. Crystal Carter:: In my experience, also having your act together also helps. So, if you have a well-oiled machine and you're like, this is our report that we do every month and this is our thing that we do every month, then when the new person comes in, you've got all that stuff for them to see and the transition is easier. I don't know if you find that that's useful from a sales point of view as well? Matt Matergia: Everybody wants to look good. So, if you are the facilitator of that person looking good, then you've just earned their trust, right? 100%. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter:: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of looking good, if people wanted to look good and follow you out there on social media, where can they find you? Matt Matergia: I am MTerg on Twitter. M-T-E-R-G. Mordy Oberstein: Nice, and we'll link to that in the show notes. Matt Matergia: I'm not as active as either of you, but I am there. Crystal Carter:: But you're on LinkedIn as well, yes? Matt Matergia: And on LinkedIn. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. LinkedIn's great. I go there once in a while. I visit. Not like TikTok. I don't even know what that is. Crystal Carter:: That's not true. Marty has a very active TikTok where he does lots of dances, too. Mordy Oberstein: Dancing and I fall downstairs. That's what I do. On purpose. Or some people can like it, laugh at me. I just hurt myself. Anyway, forgetting that rabbit hole, Matt, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate you sharing your expertise and experience with us and look forward to seeing you around the virtual office, because we're not in the same office. We're not in any office together. Matt Matergia: Nope. One day I'll get to Tel Aviv. Mordy Oberstein: One day I'll get to Denver. Matt Matergia: Yes. Look forward to that. Crystal Carter:: Fantastic. Matt Matergia: Thank you both. It's a pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: Three, two, one, ignition. Lift-off. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Matt. I've had numerous conversations over the years with Matt. Super nice guy, super friendly, super accessible, and one of these people who you walk away feeling like they know way more than they let on kind of thing. Crystal Carter:: In a good way. Mordy Oberstein: In a good way. I mean it in the best way possible. Some things that I'm not going to let on that I do know, well maybe I will, that you'll soon know, if that makes any sense whatsoever. I'm not sure. As I pivot into the snappy news. Crystal Carter:: And now, with the snappy news and news from Bing, they have announced that their new Bing has increased the number of conversations that you can have with Bing chat from 15 up to 20. You can also have a total of up to 200, which is an increase from 150. They've also explained that they are adding in image and video search, which will make it a lot easier for you to have a bit more information there. And that they're adding local grounding to give better results for local search. Also in local search, if you are using Bing places, you might also be interested to know that they have improved their location recognition API to include something called local intelligence, which allows you to create territories and to do better local SEO via Bing. They're also adding more information about demographics and continuing to build and grow. We reported last week that the March core algorithm update had completed. However, in the early days of April, we are starting to see a lot of movement around there, to the point that Barry Schwartz reported seeing early signs of a Google search algorithm update on the third. A lot of people were saying that they have seen some reversals and a lot of changes early in the month. So, if you have a website that you're looking after, have a look at those results and see if anything has changed. Picking up on the AI news from Google, they continue to roll out Bard in a testing framework, so more people are reporting that they're getting access to Bard. They also announced recently during a podcast with the New York Times that they are also testing Bard in Gmail. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, discussed some of their approaches to innovation and responsibility, and also discussed and denied that he ever issued a code red as part of their approach to AI. Finally, news from ChatGPT is that ChatGPT has been disabled for users in Italy, reported by Christie Hines in Search Engine Journal. It seems that OpenAI did not in properly inform users that it was collecting personal data. This may have been in contravention with GDPR. And as such, they have now blocked access to ChatGPT for Italian users while they tried to make adjustments to potentially reestablish the ground rules for use in that area. This brings into question some potential challenges for how generative AI tools like Chachi PT, Bard and New Bing may approach this privacy space going forward. That's all for today's SERP's Up podcast snappy news. Mordy Oberstein: Coming back now from the snappy news, always good to have news. Crystal Carter:: Always good. Have we reached the final frontier of our podcast? Mordy Oberstein: It was the undiscovered country of SEO enterprises. Crystal Carter:: That's very fair. Mordy Oberstein: A little Star Trek Six reference for you there. All right. I feel like we're spanning generations, we keep this podcast going on any longer. But before we do lead the part, we need to talk about who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness, and this week we have a great follow for you, Paul Andre Devera, also known as Dre. An absolute character who you may not realize specializes in enterprise SEO. Crystal Carter:: So, he is living my podcast sound effects dreams because he has a fantastic podcast and webcast called The SEO Show. Do check the out on YouTube and on all of your best channels. He is somebody who drops the air horns that go. He just drops them in the middle of whatever he's doing and it's amazing. He has a lot of fun with his podcast and with a lot of his web stuff, but don't let the fun fool you. He's so smart and so strategic about the things that he does. I was on a recent discussion for Majestic, where we were talking about enterprise level SEO. The amount of sense he was talking, the amount of clarity that he has about how to approach enterprise SEO is phenomenal. He's super intelligent and really engaging, and a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: I've had numerous conversations with him. I've interviewed him. He is so on the ball and his take on SEO is so accurate and it's real. You're not getting the influencer flop. You're getting a real take from him. Again, like the SEO Video Show, the production value is off the chain. Little plug from myself, beginning of each show I do the SEO joke. So, if you want to hear me do an SEO joke, check out Dre's show. Marketers going to market. Crystal Carter:: Yeah, he's got a fantastic theme song as well. Which I thought that he'd done it himself, but he didn't do it himself. I wish he had, but there we go. Mordy Oberstein: He's over on Twitter at Paul Andre, that's P-A-U-L-A-N-D-R-E. Paul Andre on Twitter. We'll link to it in the show notes so you could follow him, check him out across all of his platforms, especially on YouTube and his SEO Video Show. And that's it. That's all we got. Crystal Carter:: That's it. We've reached the final frontier. We have- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you made that joke already today. Crystal Carter:: Did I? Can I not do it again? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You can pick it again. Crystal Carter:: Oh, come on. Mordy Oberstein: Another Star Trek joke. Crystal Carter:: Oh, an insert Star Trek joke here. Mordy Oberstein: Live long and prosper, everybody. Thank you for joining us on the SERB'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 SEO on PPC with our powers combined. Look for wherever you could consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO loading app over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning at, you guessed it, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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