Search Results

In part 2 of our SEO workshop series, you’ll learn everything you need to know about your shoppers’ intent — how to identify intent, and how to analyze intent to find new opportunities for your store. Our Wix SEO experts will help you understand the importance of your sites identity in making your products rank higher on search result pages. Read the Transcript Transcript: Advanced eCommerce SEO Speakers Liat Karpel Gurwicz, Head of eCommerce Marketing, Wix Mordy Oberstein, SEO Community Liaison, Wix 00:04 Liat: Welcome to our Wix eCommerce workshop. This week we're going to be talking about advanced eCommerce SEO. My name is Liat. I lead eCommerce Marketing at Wix. And joining me today we have Mordy. Mordy, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience? 00:22 Mordy: Sure. I'm the SEO Liaison here at Wix, which basically means that it's my responsibility to keep the SEO community abreast of what we're doing here at Wix, to evolve the platform for SEO—and in reverse, to keep Wix updated on the latest and best practices in terms of what's going on within the SEO industry. 00:41 Liat: Very cool. So you guys don't know this, but Mordy is a real SEO expert. It's a real privilege for us to have him here today. And you can ask him all the hard questions, please do. I will enjoy hearing him answer you guys. Mordy: Thank you. Liat: So on the agenda for today, we really want to talk about how you take your eCommerce content to the next level. Understanding the role of intent in SEO. Learning how to identify intent on the SERP. Using intent analysis as a means to find new opportunities. And finally, understanding what site identity is and why it even matters so much. And as I said, we'll be taking questions throughout the session today. And we will try and answer as many as we can. So without any further ado, Mordy, I'm going to hand over to you. 01:34 Mordy: So we're going to be talking about understanding the role of intent in SEO. And what I mean by intent is the reason why a searcher searches for something. And there's many reasons why the same query or the same keyword might mean different things. So it's a really hot and broad topic in SEO, it's a really important topic. So let's get started. At this point in the SEO journey, or in the SEO process, I'm assuming that you've already optimized your title tag, which [are] the titles that appear on the Google results page, product descriptions or service descriptions, product names and titles, page headers, link structure, meaning internal linking. And that means that you should be linking to the really important pages throughout your site—so if you've a blog post, let's say that talks about whatever it is that your product does, or your service does, you should be throwing links to your products into those blog posts, as they are in a natural way, so that Google can understand which of your pages are really, really important. And I'm assuming you've done things like alt text for images, and so forth. Even if you haven't done them yet, and it's a continuing process, this presentation assumes those things have been done. The question is, now what? I've done all the basic things. What do I do next? I've gotten into the ballpark. So, you know, how do I get onto the field? That kind of thing. And to do that, one of the ways to do that, and there's many ways to skin a cat in SEO. But one of the ways to do that is to reverse engineer the SERP. And that means to uncover user intent and to find new opportunities by doing that. I'll explain exactly what I mean by “reverse engineer the SERP”. So I think at this point, we have some questions to go over. 03:09 Liat: We do already have a few questions that we'd like to ask you before you dive into the details. So the first question that we have for you today Mordy is from Crystal. And she says, “I've been told that Wix websites rate low in Google. How true is this? And can it be bypassed?” Yeah, we're not going to take it easy on you today, Mordy. 03:32 Mordy: Oh, I like that question, by the way. I recently did a whole presentation about this on Semrush on the SEO tools. So let's go back to 2017. Google's John Mueller, who's Google's main advocate in the SEO community, was quoted as saying there is nothing preventing a Wix site from performing really well in search. And just maybe last week, the week before, I was having a whole conversation with John, who again, is Google Search advocate, about CMSs and about Wix in particular. And John said, you know, one of the things he sees is that the CMSs like Wix, in particular, do a really good job of handling the technical SEO aspects. And he likes that because it allows you as a business owner to focus on where he sees the lack, which is content. The main thing, the main, the most important thing you can do in terms of SEO is write really, really good and really targeted content. And Google was telling me look, we really see business owners, there's a gap there. And that's where the issue is. And you can use a platform like Wix, to not have to worry about those other technical things, so you can focus on creating great content. Now with that, we have an absolute plethora of advanced SEO tools, if you want to do more advanced things. Those things are totally open to you, but there's absolutely nothing preventing you [from] ranking when you use the Wix platform. 04:47 Liat: Amazing. So you guys all heard it from the experts. Now you just need to do the work to make sure that your store is ranking. So Mordy, someone else asks, “How long does SEO actually take to work?” 05:02 Mordy: Oh, that's a great question. There was a study, I think Ahrefs did a study on this, I can't remember exactly the timeframe they gave. But I think it takes six months to really start ranking. I don't want to put a timeframe or a number on it, but it's a long process. And think about it like dating. You wouldn’t get married after the first date, you wouldn’t ask Google to marry your website after the first day that it's up. Google needs to understand, and it takes time for Google to understand, what your what your site is, what it's doing, what these pages are, what the pages are trying to do. And as you're more active, as you're updating more content, as you're creating more content, and you're showing Google, hey, I'm alive, we're a live active site, those things will be helpful to you in terms of getting Google to crawl your site more often, in terms of getting Google to better understand your site. So it does take time. Just keep creating that content, keep doing the work, and slowly, but surely it will get there. 05:55 Liat: Right, yeah, it's definitely a long term effort. And I can say we ourselves are always investing in that long term goal. So you definitely want to take your time and put in the effort. So Justin wants to know, he says, “Google's description of my site has words that I did not add in my SEO Settings on Wix. Why?” 06:17 Mordy: That's a very good question. In fact, most of the time, Google won't use your own words. This is referring to the meta descriptions or the description that you see underneath the title in the results page. And studies have shown that most of the time, Google will create their own. Now, it's still a best practice for a few reasons, it's still a best practice to write those meta descriptions yourself. One, on the off chance that you do appear, you control the narrative. However, Google did say while meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, they do not determine how well you do or don't rank. One of Google's advocates, Martin Splitt said at one point that they do kind of look at it to get a general sense of what the page might be about. So back handedly, you're kind of helping Google better understand your page. Now, what's really important to also understand is where Google takes that content, when it rewrites the description, and is rewriting it based on the search queries trying to match the description to the search query itself. Google usually pulls it from the very, very top of your page. So when you're thinking about content, when you're writing content, and you want to consider what's going to happen as you appear on Google, consider that Google is going to pull those meta descriptions or rewrite those meta descriptions, usually from the top part of your page. 07:29 Liat: Gotcha. So I think you partially answered this. But Sweta is asking, “How does metadata help SEO?” 07:37 Mordy: Right, so there's metadata that has nothing to do with SEO that some people think has to do with SEO like meta keywords, those don't apply anymore. That's way back when Google was first getting started. The major factor in terms of metadata that you need to think about are your meta titles, or your title tags. And those are the titles that show up on the results page. Google does use that to get an understanding like any reader would looking at a title to understand what your page might be about. It's not going to necessarily move the needle one way or the other if Google gets a general understanding of your page. But it can and it does help Google better understand what your page is about. 08:17 Liat: Great. So Richard says that,“My product names don't tell you exactly what the product is, how do I not confuse Google?” 08:27 Mordy: So the product should at some point mention what the product is, the product name. For example, so I was looking at throw pillows the other day, and you have the name of the throw pillow, you know, Stars and Stripes throw. It'll say Stars and Stripes, and there'll be like maybe a space, or colon, say, throw pillow. So you can have the particular name of your product there, you can, you know, jazz it up a little bit. And then after that, maybe throw in a throw pillow, the name of the product. So Google does and that should be in an H1, usually, if it's on a product page. So that's really important for Google to understand what exactly it is because if we just put the fun name that you give your product, Google won't be able to really understand what it is. 09:07 Liat: Gotcha. So we're saying, you do want to be straightforward and specific, like alongside the branding and the fun, but make sure that you're actually including that product info in there. 09:15 Mordy: 100%. Yes. 09:18 Liat: Cool. So while we're talking about H1s, Assaf asks, “What is the difference between H1 and H2? And should we just put all the product information in H1?” 09:31 Mordy: That's the very essence. So SEOs will like that question. Okay, so there's different structures to your page. Think of it like a college essay. Maybe you have, you know, you have a title for the essay. You have the various headers, you have your H2s, maybe your H3s, it gives structure to your page, it helps Google, it helps your reader really understand what's on this page. So maybe the product name or the service name would be in the H1. You might have some content there. And then you have some H2s like, you know, shipping details or product specs or a product description. And then you might even have an H3. But you know, the H3 is meant more for your blog posts, even go to H4 and H5 and H6, you don't need to go crazy like that. But it does, it's really important to Google like it is for a reader, it gives your page structure. It tells Google okay, this page is about this, this section is about this, the next section is about this. And Google can look at those headers and say, okay, we understand what this page is more or less about without really having to understand every word. 10:31 Liat: Gotcha. Okay, great. So I think that for now, those are the questions. Let’s continue. 10:35 Mordy: Awesome. Those are really good questions. We're talking about intent—understanding intent, identifying intent. The question is, how do we actually understand what Google is showing us in terms of intent? How do we pick up the various intents that Google is showing us? And my clicker is not working. Now it is. So I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole with this. But in 2015, Google released its first machine learning property, called RankBrain. It's not exactly AI, it's technically machine learning. And there's a slight difference to it. You don't need to know all of the nitty gritty details about it because it's really interesting. But what you need to know are these things, RankBrain and the further developments Google has made along the way since then, have shown Google the ability to understand what exactly people are searching for. And Google kind of realized, you know what, for this very same keyword, one user might mean this, and another user might mean something totally different. And Google said, you know what we should do? We should show results that speak to both of those user intents, to both of those users. On the same results page. By the way, the SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. 11:41 Liat: Hang on Mordy, I'm getting some requests here from the audience. They're saying, “please, please, Mordy, this is complicated. Go slow”. 11:50 Mordy: Sorry, sorry. Okay. The Search Engine Results Page, which is basically the Google page, has many, many purposes, or is trying to cater to many different users. And users are searching using the same search term, but they might mean very different things. And since 2015, Google has been really good at figuring out the various meanings to a search. And I'll show you in a second exactly what I mean. But that means overall, that there's some very unexpected things that show up in the results, some very unexpected pages that you wouldn't think should really show up. And that also means there's some really unexpected opportunity. 12:29 Mordy: Here's a concrete example of this. So “buy life insurance” was the query I ran here. Now, five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, whatever it is, all you would get here are pages where you can buy life insurance. And it seems pretty straightforward. If I type in “buy life insurance”, don't you think I mean to buy life insurance? Well, the answer is no. Because the very first result, if you scroll past all of those ads, and you'll see why in a second, all those ads are there. If you scroll past all of those ads, the first result is how to buy life insurance, you can't actually buy life insurance on the very first result for this query. Now you know why people who sell life insurance want to advertise and get above that result. Liat: Right. Mordy: So the moral of the story is, commerce sites really need to create informational content, because it opens up a whole new set of doors for you. And that can increase your chances of ranking. Let me show you exactly what I mean by this. So let's take a look at the entire page one results page for “buy life insurance”. And what I’ve done here was I color-coded the results page for you. In red are all of the pages to talk about information, how to buy life insurance, where to buy life insurance, the best life insurance. And all the results in yellow are places where you can actually buy life insurance from—Geico and Allstate and all the other insurance companies. What you'll notice is, there are six slots for informational pages. And there are only four slots for commerce pages. In other words, if you're a commerce site, if you sell life insurance, for example, and you want to rank on the SERP here, on the results here, you only have four opportunities to do that. And no matter how amazing your content is, how great your page is, how amazing your website is, you are limited to just four slots, where if you have an informational page, you have six opportunities to rank. Now if you have both pages, now you have ten opportunities to rank. So the math kind of works to make sure that if you’re a commerce site, you do also have informational pages on your website, like a blog to make sure you capture the most opportunity possible. Also consider, and I know we've talked about ranking a lot in SEO, but consider who ranks first on this results page. Let's jump back for a second. If I want to buy life insurance, I have already done all the research. I know everything about life insurance. I know the whole spiel, and I go and type in “buy life insurance”, which is the first result? It's not Policygenius. I don't need that result. I'm going to skip over and to me, Geico was the first result. So when you look at your rankings, you look at your data, and you're trying to figure out what's going on, you have to really qualify things a little bit. And I'm saying this as somebody who used to work for a rank tracking software company. I know a lot about rank tracking. You have to really go to the results page once in a while and see what's happening there. Because you might rank number three or four, but you might be the first result for the users that you're targeting. So be careful about ranking, you should be thinking about it as ranking for the intent that you are targeting. Now, you sort of can have your cake and eat it too. You can have an informational, I'm sorry, you can have a transactional page, a commerce page, a product page, a service page, whatever it is, and add a little bit of an informational touch. What you see here is basically an FAQ, it is an FAQ. What did Allstate do here? They have a page where you can buy life insurance. And they added an FAQ to it. And then they told Google, hey, Google, you know what we have here, we have an FAQ here. It's called structured data markup. And it's basically code that you can add to your site. And I'll get to it, don't freak out because I said the word code. It's code that you can add to your site to tell Google really quickly so Google doesn't have to scour your page and figure it out themselves, what's on the page. Like, if you have reviews on the page, you can tell Google, hey, Google, there's a review on the page, there’s a product on this page. Here's all the information, we could also tell Google there's an FAQ on this page. And Google might, it's not a guarantee, but they might pull it into the result itself. If you jump back again, look at that result from Geico on the left. That's a really big, hefty piece of real estate that you're occupying. Because Google is pulling in the FAQ questions into these tabs. And when you expand the tabs, you see the answer. Now, how do you actually add this to your Wix site? It's pretty easy. There's a lot of free tools. Rank Ranger has one, Seoclarity has one, Merkel has one, you just need to Google “schema markup generator”, “schema markup creator”. And you'll find these free tools. All you do here—in this case, you hover over to the type of schema you want to create, I clicked FAQ Page, and you just fill in the fields, you put in your question, you put in the answer, and you're literally copying and pasting the content from your page. The tool will create the code you need. You just click copy, you go to the Wix Editor, you go to Advanced SEO, where it says structure data and it says paste your JSON LD code here. You paste your JSON LD code here. And that's it. And you've added FAQ markup to your pages. 17:31 Mordy: Now, all of this sounds really simple. I have to go to the SERP. I have to check the results, I have to see if there's information or results showing. And if I see that, I should probably create a blog post to try to target that. Really simple. But it's not that simple. Because there's multiple kinds of informational content. There's informational content where you can buy something. There's informational content where you can learn how to buy something. There's general FAQs, there's also comparison and reviews. And if you notice, I switch queries here, this is no longer “buy life insurance”, it’s “buy a laptop”, and you have a comparison of the other 15 best laptops and reviews. Why did I switch queries? Because this kind of informational content did not exist for “buy life insurance”, meaning for whatever reason, Google didn't think that this type of informational content is relevant. So what you really have to do is not to just see if there is informational content. Should I write a blog post? Should I write whatever I need to write in order to target that opportunity? But you have to break it down and see what exactly is Google showing, what type of informational content is there. By the way, I know I'm using more complex products like “buy life insurance” and “buy a laptop”. But I did a study back in 2018 about this. And I ran a whole bunch of queries. I did anything from “buy toilet paper”, literally “buy toilet paper”, which by the way, does show an informational result when I ran it last week, believe it or not, I promise you I'm not being facetious about this. For simple products, the first page of the Google results, 25% of the results are informational pages. When you go more complex, something like “buy life insurance” or “buy a laptop”, that number jumps up to 40%, meaning four out of the ten results that generally appear on page one of the results are not pages where you can buy something, even though the word “buy” was in the search term. Like “buy a laptop”—40% are informational pages. That number, and this is anecdotal, I haven't really done the study. If that number is gone up, and you saw it here with “buy life insurance”, right? The number now was 60%, or six out of ten results were informational, and only four were commerce pages. So there really is a real need to focus on informational content even if you're a commerce website. It also means you need to know your results and you need to check the queries, the search terms that are really important to you. Because you might think okay, I sell forks, I'll search for “buy forks”. What possible informational content can there be for buying a fork? Well, believe it or not, there were three results about buying forks, “the best flatware for 2021”, “buying guide to flatware”, “the eight best flatware silverware sets for 2021.” So believe it or not, there could actually be a nice amount of informational content that you might want to be able to target. But you need to know what your specific results page looks like. You can have a lot of opportunity, you can have a little bit of opportunity, you can have one type of opportunity, it all depends on your keywords that are important to you. So run these through Google, check it out and see what's there for yourself. By the way, doing this also points out the limitations to you. And limitations are really, really important because it can make your life much easier. For example, I searched for “buy dress shirt”. And what I got at the top are a bunch of ads, to the right of the main results are called PLAs—they’re Product Listing Ads. They're just more ads, there's a lot of ads here. Then there's this whole weird map thing Google is showing me and then if you go all the way down, there's a one little itsy bitsy organic result from Amazon. What happened here, that box I have highlighted in red for you. That's called a local pack. And Google thought, you know what, when you typed in “buy dress shirt”, we really think you want to actually go out even though it's a pandemic, and actually buy the shirt in a store. Now, Google could show this all the way at the bottom of the page, which it does sometimes, but showing it at the top means Google thinks that's the primary reason people have come here. They've come to the results page, they typed in this query to find a physical place to go and search for their shirts. Is that keyword really worth your time, if you don't have a physical listing? If you don't have a physical store? I'm not saying you can't win that keyword. I'm not saying you're not going to get traffic or you're not going to get conversions from that keyword. All I'm saying is if you have a whole bunch of things to do, in theory, that might not be the best place to start. Because Google's telling you, the main intent that people are coming here for is local, is to actually go to a store. 22:05 Mordy: Which by the way, it brings up the SERP features. SERP features are all these box things that you'll see anything but the actual organic results. I'm a big baseball fan. And I love the Yankees. And when you type in “Yankees”, you get above the fold, zero traditional organic results. You get a sports box, you get a knowledge panel to the right, you get a whole slew of actual articles from big name publishers. So understanding SERP features is a major part of doing SEO. And that's a whole lecture unto itself. But for our purposes, what you can do is reverse engineer those as well. So if I search for a new garage door, and I get this little slew of carousel images, it's called an image box, that kind of tells me something is oh, you know what? Google thinks that users—and Google's using machine learning to figure this out, so Google's pretty good at this—they want to see a whole array of visual images related to garage doors, they want to survey what are the various styles or sizes or options for garage doors. And that means on your page, if you want to rank, you should also try to rank a page here where you can show a lot of images about all the various garage doors that you sell. Maybe a collection page where you have a good page to target with this kind of keyword. And I've seen this a million times over. For example, if you search for like, “New York Yankees jersey”, and even though it's not a place where you can buy a New York Yankees jersey, it’s just, you know, about the Yankees and the history of their jerseys. Every single one of those pages has prominently featured very large images showing off those uniforms. Google put a big old image box on that results page. Whenever you see that image box shows up, that tells you there's an intent to view images. So try to cater to that somehow, if you can. Also, it means exploring other media formats. If you see a video box show up, a list of videos. First off, that tells you one thing right there, Google's telling you, users might not want to read anything you write, they might want to watch a video instead. By the way, seeing this, even if your page is ranking, you should go after the video because Google's telling you the user might not want to read a page. But even if you're not ranking for this particular keyword, and it's impossible to rank for every keyword you want to. There's so much content out there and Google talks about this, and there's only limited space on the results page. If you see that you're not ranking, maybe create a video and try to get onto the results page with your video instead. That's a great way to try to manipulate your way onto the SERP. Manipulate is a terrible word. At this point. I'm going to turn it back to some questions that we have. 24:36 Liat: Right. So Bradley is asking, “Is it realistic for a small business to organically rank on the first search page without a large budget? 24:47 Mordy: That's a really good question. It all depends. Everything in SEO depends. If you're creating a site and it's your first day out there, no, you're not going to compete with the big brands. And when Google wants something a little bit more authoritative, let's say for a health query, it's very, very hard to compete. It can be hard to compete in general. Again, think of it like a marriage. Google knows these sites, they have many, many pages. It's not about the budget per se, if they have a lot of links pointing to them, Google is very familiar with them. If you see you're having a hard time, that's entirely possible. It means you might want to try going after some long-tail keywords, or some long-tail terms, meaning those kinds of things happen for very broad terms you want to try to rank for “buy a laptop”, you know, there's Amazon and Best Buy and Overstock and eBay, it's very, very difficult. It's very true. That means you might want to go more specific, what's something unique about the laptops that you sell? Or whatever it is that you sell, find something unique that you do differently, that sets you apart, and go after that target audience. Because it's not about getting a lot of traffic, it's about getting the right traffic. 25:54 Liat: Right. Okay, that's really good advice. So Ashley is asking, “How do you do free keyword research? And you know, what would be the best way to start doing that?” 26:08 Mordy: That’s a really good question. So keyword research, I just want to say something about keyword research to start off with. Be careful with keyword research. Keywords have sort of lost their significance in a way. Google's not focused on keywords. Google understands synonyms. Google understands your page is semantically-meaning , Google understands what's on your page, whether you use the target keyword or not. What you should think about more is topics, right? What topics do I want to address? There's a topic that's really important for my business to address. I should create content for that. Now, there's a lot of ways you can do this, you can go to the Google results page. At the bottom of the page are related searches. And that'll help you see some other things people are searching for. There's sometimes a box called People Also Ask which shows other questions that are related to people looking at your query. There's a bunch of free tools out there, I think, I don't know if they still do or not, but Moz, their Keyword Explorer, offered some free access. Rank Ranger, their Keyword Explorer, just you know, Google Moz, Keyword Explorer, they might give you a couple of free searches every day. There's a tool and I like this tool a lot, it's called [Answer the Public], and it doesn't give you the traditional kind of keyword results that you're looking for, so the search volume and keyword difficulty and all that kind of stuff. But it breaks down the topics. It'll take a topic and show you all the questions people ask around that topic. And that'll give you some really great keyword ideas. And there's another tool, it's also very similar to that it's called, AlsoAsked, you can Google that one as well. 27:34 Liat: That's really great. So I love this event, Mordy. I'm kind of focusing on the topics and also focusing on the intents, right? Like, what are your customers really looking for, and then kind of trying to match those two to each other? 27:46 Mordy: Look, it's really hard if you're writing really well not to use the terms that Google naturally understands as what your content is about. 27:55 Liat: So in that way, actually, Google is making our lives easier, because you don't have to be so mathematical about the keywords, you just need to meet the content that people are looking for. 28:05 Mordy: Correct. And it's a best practice not to get too hung up on the keywords. 28:10 Awesome. So Adam asks, still on the keyword topics, “But then what makes a good keyword? And why are some more powerful than others? And how long should a keyword be?” 28:24 Mordy: Okay. So try to take all of them in order. What makes a good keyword? A good keyword is something—think about it like this, think about it as a match. People are searching for something and you offer something you want to be, you want to have the content available for what you offer, you offer something really unique. People are searching for things that are related to the unique thing that you offer, you want to make sure that you have the content to match that. A good keyword is a keyword that reflects what you offer, and that people who are interested in that will understand. You're going to want to target your audience with the content that you're writing, don't think in terms of the keyword per se, but think about, “What topics do I want people to come to my site for?” and create content for that. I think I'm skipping over one of them. But how long should a keyword be? So I think there's a little bit of confusion there. There's two ways to think about a keyword. One is a keyword that you enter into Google, that’s the search term, that's a keyword. And then there's the keywords on our page. Really don't think about it like the keyword people are entering, you want to have content on your page that matches up to that. So there's no length of a keyword because you're just writing content to match your user's intent. And there was one in the middle. There's a question in the middle. I totally forgot. 29:40 Liat: Yeah, so the other one was, “Why are some keywords more powerful than others?” 29:45 Mordy: So that depends what you mean. If you mean certain keywords get more more searches every month. Like for example, if you search for “buy a laptop”, that's a very high search volume keyword, getting probably thousands upon thousands of people searching for that every single day. However, there are keywords that are maybe, you know, less powerful in the sense of the number of people searching for them. But they may speak to what your business offers. For example, if you offer, you know, really slick, awesome, you know, cool artistic laptops. So when people search for cool artistic laptops, so that's not a keyword that'll get thousands upon thousands of searches every single day. But it's a keyword that can generate a lot of traffic to your site, where people will buy the product. And it's not about traffic, it's about making money. So a powerful keyword to me, is a keyword that helps you make money. 30:38 Liat. Right. So basically, sometimes going more niche or more specific, even though you might have less volume, you might end up ranking higher and finding the most relevant audience for your product. 30:51 Mordy: Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And Google, by the way, is encouraging you to go specific and go niche in a lot of different ways. I'm not going to get into it here. But that's the trend that Google wants to create. Align with Google, that's the best thing you can do. 31:05 Liat: Alright, cool. So I think those are the questions at the moment Mordy. 31:08 Mordy: Awesome. So let's get back. So where do we get started with content? Now we understand user intent, we understand how to, you know, get a better understanding of the various subcategories of user intent or of informational content. But there's, you know, there could be a couple of snags. How do you actually get started with content? It's really more than user intent, I don't want you to think of—okay, let me go and analyze user intent on the results page and that's how I'll start my journey of creating content. User intent, or analyzing user intent, the way we're talking about it, really fits into another, more broader and really more powerful thing, which I'll get to in a second. It's also not keyword research, which we just spoke about in those questions. Keyword research is not, it's really not a good place to start in terms of creating content. It's good at helping you maybe refine that process, or maybe refocus you, or maybe helping you find some new opportunities. But the one thing, the best place—the only place in my mind—to start with creating content, is understanding your user. And it's being empathetic. It's understanding what your users are going through, understanding what's bothering them, understanding what's helpful to them, understanding the situations that they find themselves in, and creating content to meet that need. That is the one place, you want to understand the user, and you want to create content for that. And if you want to refine that process and get ideas, understand that in more concrete terms, so then yes, you can go and you can look at [that] results page, and you can break down user intent, and so forth, and so forth. But it all starts with understanding the user. I don't want you to think this is where… It starts with user intent, it starts with targeting your audience by understanding yourself and understanding your audience and understanding the product that you offer, and how that fits in, or the service that you offer, how that fits in. And using things like breaking down user intent to help guide you a little bit along the way. And with that, we're going to turn it over once again, for some more questions. 33:04 Liat: So Shanika wants to know, “How do you go about targeting a specific audience?” 33:11 Mordy: That is like the million dollar question, right? To me, it starts with understanding yourself, like understanding your product. Every product has an identity, every business has an identity, every service has an identity that makes you stand out and makes you different [from] all the other people doing this. And understanding yourself and who, what is my product? What's its identity? What's my service? What's its identity? And saying, who does this speak to? What kind of person does it speak to? What problems might the person who's interested in this have? What problems does this solve? So you're understanding yourself, and you're understanding yourself in the context of understanding your audience, again, being empathetic and understanding where they're coming from, what their situation is, so that you can create the content to meet that. And so you can showcase your product and service in the context of helping people solve their problems. 34:03 Liat: Right. And I think here, like some of those other tips you gave before, in like, looking at other brands or products that are appearing in those search results and looking at the kind of content they're creating. You can also go and look at their social channels, see what their customers are talking to them about. Look at common questions your customers ask you. There are a lot of ways for you to get deeper into your customer mindset and really understand what you know, what's bothering them, or what do they need? 34:33 Mordy: 100%. 34:37 Liat: Cool, so Kwan is asking, “How can I optimize SEO for blogs? And does putting YouTube videos on my page help or hurt SEO?” 34:48 Mordy: In all likelihood, it probably helps and that's what your users were looking for. I mean, if you're speaking to your audiences, you know, who are visually impaired that maybe a YouTube video is not the best thing to show. But all things being equal, if you understand your audience, and it's helpful to them, then yeah, YouTube videos are great. In terms of optimizing your blog, so there are some basic things you can do like the page structure that I mentioned before—having a title [on] your page, using H2s, using H3s, bullet points, lists, tables, images, all these things to offer structure to your page to make it really easy. Think about [it] like this, whatever makes it really easy for a user to understand your content, also makes it really easy for a search engine to understand your content. And the best thing you can do is just write, I'll quote Google here, “write really helpful content for your users”. And you know, look, put effort into it. If it's a matter of writing, spending an extra hour writing, an extra couple of paragraphs, do it. Write something that's really authoritative, and really substantial. 35:53 Liat: Right. So Dale says, “My industry, which happens to be a florist, is very competitive online. So how do I actually get myself listed in the top searches?” 36:05 Mordy: So again, I mean, so if you're a local business, and you have a physical listing, or your service area, business, please make sure to set up a Google My Business profile. That's an absolute must, you won't, things like the local pack that I showed you, that map with the three listings, you won't be able to get into that unless you have set up a Google My Business listing. So please definitely do that and fill it out completely. There's a lot of features there, explore, do some research, there's all sorts of features you can take advantage of to really fill out that listing. And definitely do that. If you're competing in a really competitive industry, it's the same advice across the board, I'll say. Find the thing that you do better. Find the thing—10x it, find the thing that you do differently. Find the thing that differentiates you, find the thing that makes you stand out, and push that to the max. Target that, showcase that, be proud of that, put it out on social media, put out content, whatever you can do to promote that aspect of your business, do that. 37:01 Liat: Awesome. So I'm gonna say Dale here for talking about florists, definitely stuff that's super helpful is anything around how you're doing shipping and delivery. Maybe the kinds of bouquets or flowers that you're offering. Again, going back to what Mordy is saying, figure out like, what your specialty is, and focus on that. So Felicia wants to know, “How do you find your targeted audience?” 37:29 Mordy: That's a very good question. Firstly, like I mentioned before, it really starts from your own brand's identity—what do you do? Like what again, what differentiates you? And who does that speak to? Right? If once you understand who that speaks to, now you've sort of have a really good starting point, who is this helpful for? Well, there's your audience. And then you can do things like go to the results page, see what your competitors are doing. Do keyword research, investigate the questions that relate to the topics. Like if you go to, let's say, [Answer the Public], that's a free tool that I mentioned before, and you see all of the questions related to the one question you put in, you can really start getting a sense of: What's the profile of this person? What's the pain points of this person that I'm trying to target? And then take it from there. 38:13 Liat: Great. So we have one more question here. And that's from Alan, and he wants to know, “we're getting a decent amount of traffic. But I feel like nothing is converting or people are not adding products to the cart.” 38:30 Mordy: So that speaks to you know—SEOs love talking about ranking and traffic. And none of those things actually matter. What matters is, you know, dollars in your wallet or whatever currency you're selling in. That tells me off the bat without looking at the site, because I can't say without looking at the site, but most probably, you're getting the wrong traffic. You're ranking well. You're showing in the organic results. For people who are—you're not really speaking to, they get to your page and the product doesn't speak to them for whatever reason. That's what I mean, like if you have a million people coming to your site, and none of them are interested in buying your product, is it really worth having a million people come to your site? Versus hey, I can have 100 people come to my site and all of them are interested in buying my product. So it might mean refining your content offering and trying to target the people who will actually buy like your target audience, or finding your conception of your target audience. 39:25 Liat: That's great advice. So yeah, I would definitely dig in deeper there. I think try and talk if you can to some of the people coming to the site. Maybe add, like a live chat to your website so you can engage a little bit with the people who are visiting, and then try and understand, like, what's off there, what's not meeting their expectation once they're getting there. 39:44 Mordy: That could be, that could very well be a UX issue. This happens all the time because we make the site we think it's very intuitive. But I've heard examples of time and time again, when the user actually goes to the site and they try to buy something. There's a hitch that you didn't really realize was there because to you it all makes sense. 40:02 Liat: Right. So we do have other courses, go check out the eCommerce School about how to like optimize your product pages and optimize your store for conversion. That is definitely a whole different conversation. But I think Mordy gave you two great directions. So either you're bringing the wrong people to the site, or people get to the site and something on the site is not working. So try and figure out which of those two issues you're suffering from, for sure. Okay, great. So I think Mordy that's it for now. 40:30 Mordy: So actually, the last question is a great segue into this. Because, you know, you can bring traffic to your site, but it might not speak to what you're actually doing. And this speaks to some ways that you might be misusing all the knowledge that I've shared so far around user intent. Because it's a little bit again, more complicated than we've already made it. So I'm sorry to add more complication to it, but I'll explain it in a really easy to understand way. And it's all about understanding what site identity is, and why it matters so much. So first off, what is site identity? So site identity is pretty much like it sounds. It's when users or Google—in this case, we're talking about search engines—come to your site. It's their ability to understand what your purpose is. What is your site about? Who are you? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish with this site? Think about it like this. Imagine you walk into a doctor's office, and you show up, you go to the reception area, and you ask, can I see the doctor? And the receptionist says, “Absolutely. Would you like to see the doctor about your health problem? Or do you want to buy a new car?” Like, what? You sell new cars? You’re a doctor. You'd be very confused, like, what's going on here? Am I in the right place? Not only that, you might start to question how authoritative or how good of a doctor are you if you have to sell cars on the side. So when you don't have a strong topical focus, it confuses search engines just like it confuses people. It tells them well, I don't really know what your site is about. I'm not really sure what you're doing here. How am I supposed to rank you? And even if I can understand, you know, you're doing this and you're doing that, those two things don't align. Why are you doing that? Do you not understand? Are you not really understanding what you're supposed to be doing? Maybe your site's not really trustworthy. And if I'm, again, if I'm a search engine, why would I rank you? And if you don't think Google is doing that sort of complex thinking, it most definitely is. I and other SEOs have been tracking this since around 2018 when Google started doing this, but luckily for you, on February 8 2021, Google announced that yeah, we're doing this. Google said, we can tell you, we can tell rather, if you have a strong focus, if you have a good reputation around one content area or one topic. And SEOs will often complain, “Oh, an update came around, I lost all my keywords”. But when they dig into it, they'll start to realize, yeah, you lost all of the keywords around topic X but topic Y, you're fine. Because Google says, why are you writing about topic X, it has nothing to do with your site. And you don't really want to go that far. Because if Google's doing that, it's already raising red flags as a search engine. You want to stay focus on one topic. And one topic can be very, very broad. You can talk about SEO, and there's a ton of you what you could talk about SEO. But it's having a strong topical focus. And for content creation, it means you want to create content that Google thinks is really authoritative. And having a singular focus or a singular identity helps you be authoritative. Just like our doctor office example, it also in turn or the flip side of that means that Google says that you're trustworthy. If you're authoritative, that means I can trust you. And in order to do those two things—in order to be authoritative around a given topic, around the topic that you talk about in your website—you have to be disciplined. It means you have to stay focused on the topics that are important to you. So you might reverse engineer the SERP, you might take a look and say, hey, there's all this great opportunity to read all this informational content. But it might not speak to what you do on your site. If your site is about why reviews are terrible. And comparisons are terrible. And you're doing a comparison review because you see the chance to you know, grab that keyword, that clearly makes no sense. And that will confuse Google. And it'll impede Google's ability to rank you. If Google doesn't trust you, if Google doesn't think you're authoritative, it simply will not rank you. Obviously, you also have to be relevant to the keyword. I'm not saying no. But basically, what if you take anything away from what I'm telling you today—and it speaks to a lot of the questions that I'm hearing from the Q&A—I want you to think of your content and your website as your brand. Imagine a reader because they are not users, they're readers. They're real people, they have real feelings and they understand things. They're people and they come to your site, and they see a blog post that maybe you wrote. And it really doesn't have anything to do with your site. They look at the name of the site. They look at your homepage maybe, or they saw the description on the Google results page, and they understand what your website's about really quickly. You can really understand what a website's about very, very, very quickly. 45:08 Mordy: And they get to the page and they’re like, why did this website write this? What would it say about you as a brand? Does that come off as you have you know, you have it all together? Probably not. Does it come off as very authoritative? Not really. Do people want to trust you? Not really. By staying focused and by thinking of your brand, or your content as your brand and thinking, what perception will people walk away with after they come to my site and see my content, you'll automatically and naturally create the content that Google is looking for. You'll create content that's focused, you'll create content that's authoritative, and you'll create content that's trustworthy. So please think of your content as your brand. And think about the perception that users will walk away with from looking at your content because it's exactly what search engines are doing. By the way, since we're talking about writing a lot of content, it's really helpful to do audits at this point. And site audits can show you lots of different things, they can tell you, maybe you have a 404 page, those are the warning sections, the error sections, I mean. In the warning sections, they'll tell you a lot about your content. And this is one from Ahrefs, it's free, I don’t know if I will share the link, but you can Google it. It's a free site audit, it's really simple to use, they’ll walk you through it. And you can see, hey, maybe they're missing alt text. So alt text, by the way, is the text that describes your image. So it's for the visually impaired. So they have a reader, reading the page out loud. When they get to an image, it'll read what the image is about. Google uses that to understand images. It'll tell you if you're missing that, it'll tell you maybe you're missing, you're maybe your meta description is just, you know, too thin, there's not enough there or whatever it is. It'll give you a lot of information about the content that you're writing. And as I implore you to do if you're writing a lot of content, picking up on these things can be really helpful. Now, if you really get into writing content, and you take it to the nth degree, you might want to go with a tool that's really all about this, all about crawling your site and finding all of these problems. Personally, I use Deepcrawl for this. There are other tools that do a really prolific understanding or breakdown of what's on your page. For example, Deepcrawl will pull out and tell you, hey your page is too thin, there's not enough content there. Now, by the way, I want you to be careful because it might be a product page. And for this particular product, there might not be a lot of content that you can put there. Though, generally speaking, have a description, the specs, tables, all sorts of content you can put there. But take it with a grain of salt, make sure that the warning that they're telling you about actually makes sense. But they'll tell you, maybe you have duplicate titles, if you have a product page, or if you have—and then you have a product blog post, it's entirely possible that the title tag, the title, you're telling Google to show in the results page, is too similar. And that might confuse Google. It's too similar content. You might have duplicate content. Imagine this, you write a product page or service page, and you write a blog post about that product or service. It's highly possible that both of those pages rank on the results. When someone Googles something, they see your blog posts, and they see your product, your product page. If it's a commerce-focused query, do you really want your blog post showing up first? No, you really would much rather have your hey, you're happy with the blog post, but you really much rather have that product page show up first. So a tool like Deepcrawl will tell you when that might be happening. It'll tell you theoretically, when you have duplicate content. And I've totally done this. I wrote a blog post 10 years ago, I wrote a blog post last week, I didn't realize like the post that I wrote a long time ago is really similar to the one I just wrote. You might want to consolidate that, you might want to get rid of that old post, you might want to repurpose that old post. So a tool like Deepcrawl will crawl your site and find a lot of these issues for you. So to sort of sum it all up, I want you to think beyond purely transactional content if you're a product or an eCommerce website for your products or your services. Google has multiple intents that it's catering to. It's catering to people who are searching for multiple reasons. So take advantage of that. Know what's out there, and take advantage of that. Use the SERP to understand what Google wants. And don't get too hung up on the keyword research in this whole process. Really look at the SERP, look at—target your audience by understanding your users' pain points, and use that as a starting point, not keyword research. Your keyword research should maybe refine that process or find new opportunities. Give your informational content a topical focus that we talked about. Why? Because you need to create site identity with your content. And I think that sums it up for me. 49:57 Liat: Awesome. So we do have a few more questions for you Mordy. Let me pull them up. Okay. So Melissa is asking, “How can I stay on top of the ever-changing algorithm?” 50:13 Mordy: That's like the million dollar question. So yes, Google does release updates all the time. And Google, by the way, will say, there may be nothing you have done wrong with your page. And you may not rank anymore. It's just there's a lot of content out there, there's limited opportunity. And for whatever reasons, the pages that are ranking are perhaps more relevant, and you might not be able to do anything about it, depending on what your site is. Now, that said, if I can offer a best practice, and if I can talk about the overall trends of the major updates that have happened since 2018, it's to create nuance. Really, particularly for blog content, but also for your product pages, create really nuanced, really specific, really targeted content. Create content that comes off really authoritative, that Google really feels comfortable trusting, and that Google knows that you're an expert. Hey, look, if you're writing about a particular topic over and over and over and over again, and you're writing a lot of really great content, and your product pages are really in depth, there's a lot of information on there, from shipping to spec to whatever it is, Google’s going to look at that and say, that's a really authoritative website, I can really trust that website. They're an expert on their content matter. That's the general trend of where things are going. And that sort of future proof you from the algorithm updates. Of course, any given update at any given time, for any given keyword. Who knows, but in general, that's my answer. 51:34 Liat: Right. And also, I would add here, Mordy, is that all of this advice that Mordy's giving, and all of these best practices are an ongoing effort, right? Content is not a one time thing. Right? So you need to keep working on this all the time. Keep going back to the SERP, keep going back to the keywords and you know, keep doing the work. 51:54 Mordy: Imagine you're you're you're on the hunt, you're trying to figure out how do I best improve? How do I find new opportunities? And by the way, things are always changing in SEO, and the results pages are always changing. So definitely, there's no end, just keep at it. 52:08 Liat: So Richard is asking, “How do you encourage conversion or purchase from a site visitor on the site?” 52:16 Mordy: That's a really good question. Aside from making sure that your target audience is coming to your site, I will go back to what I talked about before with the UX. Look, it's really easy to mess this up. Because again, we are very familiar with the sites. But have somebody, it could be a family member, have somebody who's not familiar with your website at all, try to buy something. And do this multiple times and survey people and take back that feedback, and try to make that user experience really seamless. 52:44 Liat: Right. I agree. And like one of the things that I always point out to people is, you know, we sometimes forget in eCommerce, that, you know, people don't get to interact with you, your business or your store or your product. Right, they're really buying online. So you need to know that your website and your product pages have to do that work for you. So, imagine if somebody came to your physical store. You'd greet them, your staff would greet them, they get to see all your products, they pick them up, touch them, feel them, smell them, try them on, whatever it is. So when they're coming to your website, they don't get the opportunity to do that. So, make your pages work for you. You want to invest in images, you want to invest in product descriptions. Mordy said it before like, literally list all the relevant information that you need there, whether that's ingredients, sizes, charts, whatever it is that helps people understand what they're buying. I really love having reviews, especially customer reviews with images, like I know as a shopper, I look at those all the time, like I want to see, okay, great, the shirt looks pretty in the picture. But I want to see somebody who actually tried that shirt on, so now I know what it looks like on a real human being. So think about things like that, that can help your shoppers understand your products and what they're buying. And Mordy, JJ says, “How do you integrate SEO search with social media? Like Facebook or Instagram.” 54:17 Mordy: So as somebody who loves social media, it really works hand-in-hand, it really does. Look, you want people—you want Google to know that your site exists, Google to understand that you're, you know a player in the niche that you're in. And one way to do that is to get people talking about you. Google, by the way, not only tracks links, but it also tracks mentions—so mention your brand. So if you're out on social media, and you're sharing content, and you're showing yourself to be an authority and expert in whatever wonderful thing that you are within your industry, that will get people talking and people will create content and mention you—perhaps link to you. That’ll create buzz on social that can translate and spill over onto the web and that spillover, Google picks up on that 54:57 Liat: Amazing so Samantha says, “How do you make your website appear on the first page of Google search results, Mordy?” 55:07 Mordy: It's about targeting that content, going very specific. Again, if you're going to be very broad and try to bring in that huge audience, that doesn't necessarily work. To get to the top of the results page, you want to have targeted content, nuanced content, content that's very highly-detailed, highly-specific towards a very highly-specific audience. And I'll tell you, like, I'm trying to think when it was, maybe even a year ago, maybe less, Google started releasing this filter at the top of the results page. Let's use Google to show where to go on vacation. So Google will show a filter, fall, winter, spring, summer, and even though you will rank, you know number one for where to go on vacation, if a user has a particular season in mind, they're going to click on that filter. And they're going to go to a whole new results page about going away in the summer. So Google is pushing users to be more specific, and to go to more specific kinds of pages. So you should try to target the trend and try to write really specific, highly-targeted content. 56:07 Liat: Awesome. So actually, already, we're getting a repeating question from the audience that they would like you to please repeat the name of the auditing site that you recommended. 56:18 Mordy: Sure. So there's two—Ahrefs, they have a free site audit tool, and Deepcrawl, they don't have a free tool, but their tool is only about site audits. So Ahrefs has multiple things for SEO, they track your rank, they track your backlinks , and they do offer a site audit option. But in general, when the SEO tools do everything, that's great. And it's good up to a point. And it could be very good for your site. I'm not saying no at all. But if you want to go and take it to the professional level, that's what you're doing. That's what you're interested in. So then a tool like Deepcrawl is only about site auditing, and they offer a much more full and complete site audit. 56:59 Liat: Thank you. Sure. So Chris asks, “How effective is on-page SEO versus off-page SEO?” 57:08 Mordy: That's a good question. So just to explain, because people don't understand—on-page SEO means changing things to your content itself, like your title tags, or your titles themselves, your headers on the page, the content on your page. Internally linking, remember, I mentioned it before, you want to link to the pages that are most important to your website because that's a very strong signal to Google that, hey, this page is really important to this website. We're going to crawl it more often. And it helps us better understand the website. Off-page SEO generally means links. And I'll say this in general, the push—and it all depends on the market, in English links are less important. When you're talking about other markets where Google has a little bit less content. So those links become in general, more of a factor. But generally speaking, links are an indirect signal. That's Google saying, we don't really know what's on this page. We can't fully understand it. But so many people are recommending it by linking to it, so it must be good. But as Google gets better at actually understanding the content itself, it needs to rely less on indirect signals, like links. I'm not saying links are not important. They are very important. But content is always the most important thing. On-page is always the most important thing. Think about it like this: Is anybody coming to your website because you have a great backlink profile? No, they're coming to your site, because they want to consume your content. So your content is the product, always make sure that the content is in focus, and then worry about things like links. 58:38 Liat: Great. So we have one more question here also relating to links. So if you are doing links, what's the best way to develop backlinks for your site? 58:49 Mordy: So never ever, ever buy it. People will offer you to buy links. Never buy links, it's against Google's guidelines, it can get your site in a little bit of trouble or a lot of trouble. The best way to think about links is naturally. First off, the best way to create links is to write 10x content by running content that it's really helpful to people, really interesting to people, sharing them on social media, and getting links naturally that way. But you can also be strategic about it. Imagine you're a florist. And as I mentioned before, there are florists. And you do a lot of wedding work. Maybe there's some wedding venues or wedding halls that you often work with and say, hey, can I write a blog post about how to do the best flower colors for your wedding? I don't know. And write that post. And that will link back to your website. That's a natural way of offering some great content or just hey, wedding venue, I know we always work together. Would you mind listing me as one of your recommended florists? And you're building a natural backlink that way. But you know, the other thing is—don't worry about the number of backlinks. Google actually came out last week and said this even though it's been true for a long time, and everybody really knew it, but no one wanted to admit it. It's not the number of links, it's the relevancy of the links. In other words, if you're a florist and you have a car dealership linking to you over and over and over again, that's kind of like why, even though they may be the best, most authoritative website ever, you want other related venues like a wedding venue, a photographer, other florists, flower sites, you want them linking to you. So try to get links that are related to what you do. 1:00:19 Liat: Amazing. Thank you so, so much, Mordy. We really, really appreciate your time. Great advice. I know that people have really enjoyed the session, and we will invite Mordy to come back, don't worry. But we do have some other great news for you. Wix and Deepcrawl recently partnered to create this great eCommerce SEO guide . That's another resource that you can download and use to work on the SEO for your eCommerce sites. So please go ahead and do that. Please join our Facebook group, join our community, you can connect with each other as well as our team there. We both thank you very much for joining us today. And hope to see you again at our next workshop.

Wix and Semrush partner to give you insider tips on conducting a competitor analysis for SEO. You’ll learn how to identify your key competitors on Google, narrow gaps to boost site performance and optimize your organic traffic using advanced tools. Read the Transcript Transcript: Competitive analysis for SEO with Semrush Speakers Mordy Oberstein , Head of SEO Brand, Wix Liraz Postan, SEO Expert, LP Marketing Services Inc. 00:00 Mordy: Welcome to competitive analysis for SEO, brought to you by Wix in collaboration with Semrush. My name is Mordy Oberstein, I'll be your host today—or tonight depending on your timezone. Aside from being your host, I'm also the official SEO Liaison here at Wix. Joining me, or joining us, today is not only a dear friend of mine, she is the founder of LP Marketing Inc. She is the former director of SEO at Outbrain. She is an industry speaker. She speaks at all the SEO conferences from SMS to Brighton SEO. She's an international SEO and content consultant. She is—as she is here, a representative of Semrush at many, many, many webinars and she is considered an organic competition analysis expert which makes a great deal of sense as to why she's here today. She is Liraz Postan, hi Liraz. 00:56 Liraz: Wow, what an intro, I'm impressed. I didn't know everything about myself. 01:00 Mordy: I practiced all night. I forgot she has 13 years of experience in the SEO industry. Now I got it all. 01:07 Liraz: Oh, thank you. I thought I missed something. Really honored to be here. So I really hope that everyone will understand everything that we're going to talk about. And after this conversation, they will know how to do competitive analysis for their website. So I'm really, really honored to lecture everything that—all my knowledge away. 01:27 Mordy: Amazing. So before I hand the reins over to Liraz, and before I go through some of the procedures for this evening, or this afternoon or this morning, whatever time zone you're in, I don't know anymore. I want to talk about very quickly the importance of doing organic competitive analysis or competitive analysis for SEO. So obviously, it's really important to know who your competitors are on the Google results page or in SEO lingo—we call it the SERP, which stands for “search engine results page”, because you need to know who your competitors are. Because Google's really important. However, to me, personally, I find that competitive analysis, aside from being the starting point for doing really strong SEO, is also the starting point to offering up your brand identity, your brand presence on the results page. What do I mean by that? When you look and see what the sites Google is showing on the results page for the audience, for the users that you want to visit your site, when you see what content Google is putting in front of the very target audience that you want to come to your site, it gives you an idea of what's out there and where you might fit into this conversation, let's call it. Where do you fit in? Where is it possible for you to add added value, real added value, unique value to your target audience? So yes, while understanding your competitors on Google is really good for, you know, beating your competitors—we all want to beat our competitors, we get that—and finding new opportunities. It's also a really good place for you to start, and as ironic as it may sound, to start thinking about differentiating yourself from your competitors. Where can I be better than my competitors? Where can I offer the user, my target audience, something really unique. And that's really great for your audience, for your competitor potential consumers. And it's also that having that unique identity and the unique added value is also really great for search engines. But that's a very different conversation for a different time, hopefully. Okay. With that, I will now hand it over to my dear friend, Liraz. The floor is yours. 03:28 Liraz: Okay, cool. So I'm really honored to be here. And I want to get started with a competitor analysis. I personally have to say that I will not try to sell Semrush. Basically I’ll do everything, my best to share my knowledge of how I'm using Semrush, with just, let's say one hour of work, instead of doing just manual work, that can take me days and even weeks to do competitive analysis. So for me, it's my go-to tool, basically every single day, even a couple of times a day, this is my—I'm just doing everything on Semrush. From rankings to competitive analysis to site audits, it's my go-to tool. So let's get started. I want to understand, I want to explain what is competitor analysis. And why basically it is needed. First, hello, this is me, Liraz Postan. 13 years of SEO in the industry. I'm delighted to share my knowledge here today. I think it's a call for everyone that's basically working with Wix websites. I know how tremendously you need this knowledge in your toolkit, let's say. 04:35 Liraz: And I want to talk about it—what is competitive analysis? And why you basically need it. And how to get started. We're going to talk about each of the steps here in the presentation. And let's go and understand. Competitive competitive analysis means that you need to study your direct competitors, to see what's working for them, and how you can leverage it for your own strategy. Meaning, first I just need to understand who my competitors are. And then, I can just make a good assumption on how I can adjust my own strategy. Maybe I'm missing out on things. And maybe I can be inspired [by] things that they're doing. Because sometimes it can be, like, overwhelming. I have competitors. They're like huge brands, I don't know how to tackle it. But you can. If you're a small organization, and you have, you know, you don't need all this bureaucracy in the background, you can just launch things very fast. And so don't be afraid to just act. And so on a couple of the slides, I will show you how to act and how to create a proper strategy, and how to minimize your gap with your competitors. So why do we need it? First, we need to identify market trends and patterns. If all my competitors are doing something, and I'm not—well, it's a pattern. They're doing something and I'm missing out, I'm out, I need to understand what am I missing out [on]. And first of all, I need to understand if they ever recognize a trend, or maybe they're inventing a trend, I would want to see what they're doing. I would want to optimize our strategy. Basically, we need to optimize our strategy all the time, we have everything new here. In digital marketing, everything is new. Covid time is not the same as one year ago, it's not really the same, and it's not going to be the same one year later. And it's not going to be the same in two months from now. So we always need to adapt our strategy over and over again—or you need to close your opportunity gap between me and my competitors all the time. We need to understand how we can close our gaps and be, let's say, one step above them and whatever they're doing. So, let's first understand—who are my competitors? We have, let's say we're surrounded by competitors, right, we have lots of competitors. But let's try and tackle two of the types of competitors. We have direct competition, which are basically people that are selling a website, they're selling the same product as mine, pretty similar product. You can argue about the quality, you can argue who's doing it better, or which brand is better. But basically, it's the same product. And indirect competition, basically, it's a similar product than me, or basically they're serving a different country. Let's say I have bracelets that are just for the UK market, like really. On the bracelet, you have a UK map. But we have the same for Canadian bracelets. So these are the same product, but serving a different county. So basically, we're not competing with each other. It's not a direct threat. But I still need to take a look at what they're doing. Let's take an example. Nike, they have direct competition with Adidas, right? They're both serving the same product. Of course, we can argue who is better, which has the best shoe, the best running shoe. But in the end, this is what they're doing. They're creating running shoes for athletes for sports for people that want fashion. These are the same things. And they're basically serving the same countries as well. But if we look on the other side, we have bloggers, affiliates, we have different kinds of people or websites that are basically selling running shoes, but are not making them. But they're still my competitors on search results. So this is what I want to tackle. For example, if I'm going to look at the search results page, I'm going to have brands, I'm going to have bloggers, I'm going to have affiliate websites, I'm going to have Quora questions, I'm going to have People Also Ask—if you see this picture by Google. It's basically showing me what a user is asking about running shoes. I just chucked in, typed in running shoes as a query here. And this is what I came out with, like with the US search results. And I also have Wikipedia. And Wikipedia is also my competitor because sometimes Wikipedia is ranking first in live search, let's say living search term. And it's not you know—people are saying, oh man, how can I beat Wikipedia? You can, you can, this is a matter of—put your strategy in front and just do whatever you can and just beat the competition. So we have lots of different competition. Also this—images, Google Images. Like let's say for an eCommerce website, if I type in running shoes, and I go for Google Images, this is basically the user journey, right? They want to see first, what is the running shoe that they're going to buy. And they want to get some inspiration, if they're not really focusing on a specific brand. So they have all the options here. It's like a catalog. So if my competitors are basically doing really good work with their SEO images strategy, that's it, like I can rule this, I can rule this world. So we also need to understand how to tackle this strategy. And there are a lot of things that we can do in order to beat the competition. You can see here we have Runner's World, we can see Reebok, we have Nike, we have Under Armour, we have lots of brands that we didn't see even in the search results for the same query. So take a look at everything that you need to take in terms of beating the competition for your competitors. I think let's get to work. Let's see how it's done, right? Cool. So I took a Wix site, a really cool website, by the way, Coal and Canary, which are basically serving—they're creating luxury candles, really cool candles, great smells, great scents. And they're basically located in Canada. And this is the main market for them. So my research is going to be focusing on Canada—but not only. Okay, so basically this is what I did. I typed in on Google.ca: “luxury candles”. And in the end, I found these top three competitors: The White Company, Candle Delirium and Harvey Nichols. Well, if you look closely, some of them are not really my competitors, as The White Company is also selling bath products and things like that. And Harvey Nichols also sells bags and fashion. So they're not really my core competitors. So basically, I took Semush. If you want, we can go over to Semrush and just see, but I just took a snapshot, because I want to explain everything. So I took the Candle Delirium, which is pretty much the same product as Coal and Canary. And basically, I took here, I just typed in—this is all you need to do—just type in the domain name. And that's it, go to domain review. This is what you get, you get tons of data. And then you're going to ask me, oh my God, what is that? Yeah, exactly. This is the first time you're going to do it. And then it's going to be like super easy. Just going to type in the URL. And you go into the domain overview. And you see so many interesting things. You see that the organic traffic and Candle Delirium is getting, you see that the countries that they are serving, you see the Canada share is now really big, US is the main market. You're going to see the organic traffic that they're getting and the trend. You can see that, I don't know, from February, they have a little bit of decline in February 2020. They have a little bit of decline with their traffic. And you see they're putting some efforts with paid traffic, meaning Google Ads. So they're putting some, not much, but they're doing some Google Ads. Also the amount of backlinks, we're going to talk about backlinks in the presentation. Backlinks means how many sites are linking to my sites. Google sees backlinks as referrals, as a credit someone gives to my site. So we want more of these. The more backlinks we have, it means the more websites are linking to me, the more websites are recommending me, so we want more of these sites. And we also see that they're doing display advertising. So for me, not only Google Search ads, they're doing Google Display ads. Nice. So maybe, if I'm not doing it, maybe I will consider doing most of these things. And I also can see what are the top keywords that they are ranking for in Google. So if you take a look, we have here the—I don't know, “cactus flowers”, “Jonathan Adler”, supposed to be like a partnership or supposed to be like a specific category for candles, they may have done with them. “Cool lighters”, “boy smells”, “nest fragrances”, everything that can be really nice. They're ranking pretty nice. And here you can see the search volume—meaning how many people are searching for this specific query [on average] a month for Canada. Okay, specifically. So this is pretty nice. Here you can see the landing pages, meaning the pages the content that is ranking for these keywords. And I can take a look at this. And I don't know what to look at. I'm really not sure. So I'm looking at paid traffic. They’re running paid ads. What offer [does] their store want to promote? What is the text? What is the copy that they have on their ads? What [are] the images that they are displaying on their display media? Also, we want to check out the keywords that we just saw. What are the top keywords that are ranking? What is generating the most traffic for them? Because basically the traffic can assume to get more conversions at the end. Maybe if I'm not doing that, maybe I'm missing out on money. What is the average position that they have? If they're not really ranking, but they have tons of keywords that they rank, but they're not really ranking on first positions. So maybe they're not really generating this amount of SEO traffic, Google traffic, but maybe they're doing something different [to] others. We saw this partnership with Jonathan. Maybe it's something that I can do more [of]. Maybe it's something that I can think of a way to get influencers into my—I don't know, candles. 14:29 Liraz: I don't know, backlinks. How is their backlinks profile? Meaning, [are] there unusual links there? Is there something spammy there? If there's like huge PR, we need to understand and dig into their backlinks to better understand. We're going to do all of this together. 14:46 Mordy: Hey Liraz, can I ask you a quick question? So can I do this, I’m asking rhetorically, but can I do this on my own website? Plug in my own websites and see exactly what's going on here as well. 14:58 Liraz: Basically the domain overview—is just like you can type in any domain in the world. 15:02 Mordy: So if I wanted to see where I was ranking, or my organic traffic. And when it comes to backlinks, I just want to point out for everybody, you know, not all backlinks are equal. If you have—and you mentioned this—if you have a backlink from a site that's maybe a spammy site. That's not the best thing. We want to have backlinks from sites that are really high, authoritative sites, really reputable sites—and also really relevant to what you do. 15:26 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. We're going to see it together like what backlinks that they have, and we're going to recognize it. This is what I meant with backlink profile, basically, we need to understand what is the structure of it. And we need to understand what is the best content, we saw the landing pages that are ranking before. What is the best content? Is it blog pages? Is it category pages? Is it product pages? What is the main traffic that they're generating? If you're generating from blogs or articles and they have tons of traffic—and I don't even have a blog. So maybe it's time for me to start and write content, or hire someone to write this content for me and create a content strategy. And of course, also what kinds of blogs and products what kind of products that we're trying to sell? And what is their unique selling point? For them, we saw it’s luxury candles. How are they different from my other competitors or from me? And finally, we're going to talk about gaps—the keyword gap and the backlink gaps. And we're going to try and minimize the gap and see what are the opportunities for me to get. And this all can be done with just five clicks, which is amazing. Okay, so here we have, we're going to minimize the Zoom video. Okay, here we have the traffic analytics for Candle Delirium again. So I basically took a local competitor, which is Natura Soy. I went ahead and saw that Coal and Canary are soy blend candles. So I thought maybe that can be a really good competitor for them, also based in Canada. So Natura Soy, you can see totally, you can see their traffic share between them. You see that Candle Delirium is slightly a little bit bigger than Natura Soy. You can see also they have like the graph here how I chose like in certain terms of the trends of their traffic, you see that most of them you see Candle Delirium is in a little bit of decline. You see that Naturasoy has a little bit of take-off in January. And you see overall, they have like a little bit of a positive trend with their traffic. And you can see like, let's say like a snapshot from analytics, it's like the visitor duration here, you see they have really long duration visits. And the bounce rate is really good for those two websites. And also we can take a look at, one sec, under sources. Here we can take a look at Candle Delirium traffic, we can see both of them have similar direct traffic. Meaning people are looking for their brand name, which is really good. You see, they both don't have any referral traffic, which is interesting for me. They have good search, meaning SEO traffic and organic Google search traffic. You see here, only Natura Soy has some social traffic, which is interesting for me, because Candle Delirium probably isn't doing much on social. And paid traffic, only Candle Delirium is doing it. So this is something that is interesting for me to understand. Each of these competitors are doing something different in their strategy. And for me, this is a little bit interesting. Here, I put the traffic journey for Candle Delirium and Natura Soy. In a bit I will add in for this puzzle, my own site called Coal and Canary. So basically here you can see Candle Delirium, all the sources they have—Google.com, which is SEO content—SEO traffic, sorry—direct traffic, and the direct traffic for Natura Soy. You can also see Google paid, only from Candle Delirium. They're using Google.com and DuckDuckGo—which is a second search engine—and they are also doing Amazon. But here with Natura Soy, I have less traffic sources. I have this website, which is probably something that sells—probably an affiliate website for them. Or we have like Google SEO, and we have direct traffic. So this is pretty interesting. I will put in Coal and Canary. And let's see the whole picture. So basically, Coal and Canary is doing only SEO traffic and the Coal and Canary wholesale website. Which basically, I think—they might be missing out on things. They might be missing out on Google paid, they might be missing out on referral websites, on affiliate websites, they might be missing out on Amazon. So here you can take a look at many things that you can basically adjust. And now we can create the gap analysis with just a click, okay. So we go into the Semrush dashboard and we go into the keyword gap, which is—before we were here. We're just going into the keyword gap, inserting what we want in the domain name. This is me, this is the root domain for Candle Delirium. This is Natura Soy. And here we can just see how they overlap—meaning they have some shared keywords between them. We have some shared keywords that all of them are ranking [for] together. But you can see the tremendous opportunity they might have with just shared—with just missing keywords. So here basically Semrush is just telling you this is the top preferred opportunity for Coal and Canary. An amazing opportunity. 20:38 Mordy: Liraz. What do you mean by missing keywords? 20:41 Liraz: Huh? This is like this. So basically, all my competitors are ranking for my keyword, for these specific terms. And I don't rank for them. So that can be an opportunity for me. See here, “candle store near me”. They're all ranking for this. “Man candles”, “luxury candles”, “candle shop”, “luxury candle supplies Canada”, this is amazing money. This is money—money on the floor, guys. 21:05 Mordy: So these are keywords that you could be ranking for yourself, should you target them, in theory? 21:09 Liraz: Exactly. Let's say we have 23 missing keywords. See this is an amazing table for me, I'm always using it. So they all rank you for something, you can see their positioning here on Google. You can see that Candle Delirium is “luxury candles”, position six. And Natura Soy is not really there yet. But you can see that Natura Soy is ranking first on “wood candle” for example, and I'm not ranking on any of them. Sorry, I'm just taking a little drink [of water]. 21:38 Mordy: So while you're drinking, that doesn't mean that this website isn't ranking at all just means for these. These are the keywords I got you covered. These are the keywords that you have an opportunity, should you decide to start targeting them. I mean, that doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong, it just means that this might be a good place to focus next. 21:57 Liraz: Yeah, exactly. This is an opportunity for me, I can write content for this, I can maybe open new categories, I can do a lot more of this. Basically my competitors, my direct competition is basically ranking on these search terms. But I don't. And this is something that can help me adjust my strategy and build more content. Got it? Okay. Okay, so what do I do with this data, right? What do I do with it? Okay, action items, create content. First, we can create blog posts if I see something that is relevant to write a blog post about, for sure. Go ahead. Maybe you should open a blog. That's like a whole new deal. But maybe I can write a new post about something specific. Maybe I can create new category pages, new categories for products, maybe I can create new products, even new partnerships, new something. I can get influencers to partner with me and create a content marketing strategy around it. And the first—the second thing is just to optimize everything. We need to add more competitors to follow. Because we saw we have so many more competitors, that can be just, you know, one or two things that I want to check. We can create keyword research, and tracking and reporting all the time, and to track and see if my actions were okay. And if I got in and just keep optimizing your report about it. 23:19 Mordy: And this, by the way, because I saw somebody asked in the Q&A, this is a great way to build links, right? By building content, building really good content that people really enjoy that's really valuable, is a great way to get links as people will want to link to you. Imagine you did a study or you have a really nice guide to something. Well, somebody is talking about that in their blog posts or on their website, they'll link to your guide or link to your study or whatever content you create. And here's Liraz on backlinks. 23:48 Liraz: Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to add in. That's really great. Because if we have a partnership, let's say. That's a new way for you to get an influencer, let's say, with you and just to partner with you for a new line of products or something like that. That's a new way to get it viral, to get the word out there. Or if you write a good blog post that gets really good backlinks. That's amazing for you. 24:10 Mordy: Yeah, look, even a category page—we'll call it a collection page—where you have a lot of your products and if you have a really nice list of products and you have the best list of jeans in the whole world. So when someone was running a blog post about where to find the best jeans, they might link to your collection page. 24:29 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. Also you can see that they have like a search term for “man candles”, stuff like that. That's the whole new category page or collection page. 24:38 Mordy: It’s new for me certainly. 24:42 Liraz: Okay, so let's talk about the backlinks. Let's first understand what is a backlink? We talked about it briefly. Okay, so we have like, let's say a strong website, let's say an authoritative website, let's say New York Times. Okay, and I'm doing a PR and for me, the PR is really great and it's not really linking back to me, it just talks about me. So I would love when I'm creating a PR, I would just want the New York Times to link back to my sites. Okay, basically when I'm getting another website to link to my website, this is called a good backlink. But not all backlinks are equal—when again, those authoritative sites that can really link for me that they really have a connection to my niche, or either a PR or a brand or something that I want to put my brand out there. So when I get more of those backlinks to my site. So basically what I've done, I took all the competitors that I created, and basically compared them to Coal and Canary and saw what are the best backlinks that they have that they're not linking to me. So you can totally see that what is very—let's say—shouting, here is that they have coupon sites that are linking to them. A lot of your coupon sites, it's like here, you can totally see it. So I can totally assume that my competitors are doing tremendous work with coupon sites that are really sometimes—they're really, really good. And sometimes they have authority around them. 26:15 Mordy: Can I ask you a question, Liraz? Liraz: Yeah, sure. Mordy: How do you determine that authority? How do you know what to do to determine whether or not this is a great link, or this is maybe a link I should disavow somehow? 26:24 Liraz: So first, here, you can see the authority score— AS means authority score—also Semrush has these bubbles that can also explain everything to you. But here, you can have the authority score, I just filtered it from the highest to the most low authority score. And here you can see, of course, bing.com. Of course, they have like a huge authority website. It's from 100, let's say. So this grade shows me what is a good website. And also you can take a look at the website itself. If the website itself, let's say, for those coupon pages, if those websites, you see that they're not really generating any content for them, it's like a clean website, doesn't really look good. The mobile is not really responsive. You see, like all these pop-ups coming in and destroying your experience. Okay, so you're going to understand yourself, it’s a spam website. And we want to disavow or remove them. If we can just contact the website owner and say, hey, can you not link me? But be nice. Okay, what do I do with this data? I have all these backlinks. What do I do with that? ACT—I want to earn backlinks. I want to earn partnerships. Partnerships can bring me lots of natural backlinks, I don't need to go to a lot of effort and just getting, those coupon sites, which are very good coupon sites, not the examples. Maybe you can see in the other slide that they're not really as authoritative. Affiliates partnerships, there are really good affiliate websites and publishers that can basically publish and promote your candles, anything that you're doing. And work on your brand name. Also do PR, put your brand out there. So, when you're doing your PR work, this basically can give you some more authoritative websites that can link back to your website. So what should I do? Spy. I'm so sorry. Well, you can spy on your competitors. You can create a site audit campaign on Semrush. Just create a Site Audit—I will just show you in a bit what it looks like. Just crawl your competitors, you can take a look at what are they missing out [on]. They probably have bad broken links, they have content that they're not taking care of, content that is not generating any traffic for them. And this is how it looks on Semrush. Basically, I put down just a screenshot on how site audits may look. And it can give you all the grades that you need. Basically slow pages, 404 pages, like error pages that they're not doing right. If they're doing okay with their crawlability, site performance, internal linking, all of that can give you—you know, if the site pages of your competitor is important for them, so they might take care of them. But if something is not really performing well for them, it's not the niche that they will need to take a look at, so you can see what they're not focusing on. So if something is broken and they don't really care about it, it's something that you can take in and take advantage of. Oh, I can take hold of it. Let's say if I have a backlink for them that is broken. I recognize a link. Someone is linking to their website and it's broken—you can totally contact the other website and say, hey, I saw this link is broken, you're serving a bad experience. Why are you not linking to me? I serve the same product and my link is not broken. So this is something that you can totally do as a strategy. 30:00 Mordy: Also really good as you can see, when you do a crawl, you can do a crawl on your own site and do this in reverse. But if you're crawling, you see, hey, you know, this site is ranking for this keyword, and the crawl comes back saying that page is thin—meaning there's not a lot of content there. That's a really good opportunity to say, you know what, I bet you if I create a much better, a higher-quality page, I bet you I could rank for that page, because this page is ranking and it's thin. So all these are different ways you can find opportunity. And also I find if you do it in reverse, look for problems on your site, that might be why you're not ranking. If the other side has really prolific content and your content is a little bit thin. So it might be worthwhile to, you know, spruce up that page a little bit. 30:40 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. Basically, Site Audit is an amazing tool that gives you everything that you need to know—all the problems and all the good things that are happening on your website. So it's something that I just set up like a daily crawl. And that's it, like I get in my mail alerts, hey, this page is broken. Oh, okay, I'm going to fix it. So just to be alert of everything that's happening on your website, and others. So we want to minimize the gap, right? We want to create the content and the keywords, you find the keyword gap, and we want to create better content. And then we don't want to copy their content, for God's sake. We don't want to make content that is thin content, as they are doing. No, we want to do it better than them. We want to be more sophisticated. And we want to be able to serve better experiences, even. And I can design a better landing page. I don't know, this is why I use Wix, right? Like I want to design my best website. And I can do it like that. I don't need the other developers just designing everything for me, I can do it like that. And this is the main experience that I want to choose. Also, if your website is [going] very slow—so make sure you're serving the fastest selling pages. And also, we want to tackle the broken backlinks. So we talked about it. If we see something that is broken on the backlink that is linking to my competitors, I'm gonna reach out and ask for them to link to me. We serve the same product. We don't have any broken pages. Just link to me, I’ll give you the best experience. So yeah, basically all this manual work can take you weeks, right? So all this competitive analysis can take you, I don't know, like 30 minutes. So when you're doing everything, and you're busy with your own business, and you're doing other business strategies, you know, you don't want to waste your time. This is why I use Semrush every day for site audits, for competitive analysis. Just like five clicks, I swear to God. Okay, so this is just for a summary. This [tracks] my competitors over time for staying ahead, right? Final words—analyze competitors, look for ideas, trends, and more. Close the gap, we need to make use of every opportunity we see. And you know, Semrush is just marking, highlighting top opportunities for you. So it should be very easy for you to identify it. And we need to create 10x value content for our ranking, to outrank our competitors. So just think of that as something that always needs to be on the back of your mind—do competitive analysis once a month, and you're done. That's great for you. And that's it. If you have any questions, DM me on Twitter, I'm there, and I'll be happy to answer anything that you have in mind. 33:28 Mordy: Liraz, that was absolutely amazing. Yeah, thank you for sharing that, loving the great questions in the Q&A and in the chat. One question I wanted to ask you about is—Semrush is a wonderful tool. And I personally use it all the time. There are other tools. And then you know, not every tool is for everybody. So definitely take that into account and make sure you find the tool is right for you. But also, you know, one of the things that I do and I use Semrush and use a bunch of tools, is I always end up going to the SERP itself and looking at what's there with my own eyes. 34:01 Liraz: This is how I started my slides. 34:04 Mordy: So it's important, I think to remember that, while you want to do things at scale, and you want to do things with ease, you're going to need the tool to do that. But even if you are doing that, it's always really important, I think, to go and take a look at what the results page actually looks like. What are the features that are there? What other—are there other ads, local packs, direct answers? What kind? What does this—get a feel for what's there. Take a look at it, take a look at the competitors' sites themselves. Always take a look at the competitor’s site. What's their user experience like? How does their page look? How does it feel? How are they structuring their content? All of these things are very holistic, but they're really important. And no matter what you do, the best practice is always, yes, use a tool—and always check things out at the same time on your own so you can get a real qualitative understanding of what's actually out there. So I know there's a bunch of questions about—do I have to use Semrush to do this? No. No, you certainly can go and see who your competitors are. And even if you do use Semrush, which I highly recommend, or another tool—it's very important to check that out on your own and see what it actually looks like. Anyway, every SEO will tell you this. I myself, when I look at my competitors, or I want to see how Google's changing, I always take a look at the actual page itself. 35:21 Liraz: I think the best tool is your eyes. The best tool. Like, really, you can identify everything that a bot can, you know, just something that you need to keep in [the] back of your mind. But it just simplifies my work. And I work with other tools as well. But it just simplifies my work. 35:37 Mordy: So I wanted to ask you—when you see a site, because you mentioned before that they're doing paid advertising, whether it be display advertising, or whether it be the actual advertisements on the Google results page itself. Does that mean that you should do that necessarily? What does that mean? Forget my organic content, there's ads there, how do you go about that? And let's say I don't want to spend on ads. 36:01 Liraz: If you don't want to spend on ads, that's perfectly fine. We're just going to see if my competitors are investing more in paid ads and not doing any SEO. So that's something for me to understand. Maybe that's an opportunity for me to tackle more SEO traffic, and just you know, but of course, you know, I'm not a really big fan of Google Ads, I must say I know, as an SEO person. It’s just like, I’m sorry, but it's so expensive. And you can just basically tackle everything with SEO and just like a content strategy, evergreen content that sticks. And it's the best experience that everyone is looking for—not a landing page with, you know, click an ad. The buying intent is different. With SEO, you get a really good buying intent. You’re not clicking on ads. If you search something, and then you click from your own will on something that can give you the best answer to what you asked for. 36:56 Mordy: That's really a different intent almost, right? Like, you see, I don't think—you know—don't be scared if you see an ad at the top of the Google results page, at the top of the SERP. Because people know that it's an ad, even though Google is pretty good at hiding it sometimes. It does still say “ad” there. And people in general are suspicious of ads. Like I myself, I don't think I ever click on an ad. 37:17 Liraz: Yeah, me too. So the two of us. 37:21 Mordy: I think that's about knowing your users or knowing your audience. Are they an audience that's predisposed to using ads? Whatever that demographic might be? Or are they not? And if they're not, then you don't have to worry about it. And of course, organic traffic is always considered more trustworthy, organic sites are always considered more trustworthy. I wanted to ask you about links, because I think links are really complicated. You know, it's a little bit tricky how to get links. Google has a lot of guidelines for how not to go about getting links, I think it'd be worthwhile to bring that up. You should not pay for links, ever. Liraz: Nope. Mordy: So if somebody is trying to sell you links, run. It's against Google's guidelines. 38:01 Liraz: I think everyone is getting those spammy emails, right? Hey, I sell guest posts, and that's like spam. 38:11 Mordy: It’s even against Google's guidelines to—hey, you know what, I'll pay you to, you know, write a guest post, and I'll write a guest post for you, and we'll exchange links. Now, there's certain ways that you can go about doing this naturally, right? Making a natural connection. Yeah, it's fine. Like, you know, yes. If I say, imagine I have a friend who's a photographer, and he does photography and events at weddings. So the wedding halls that he works at might listen on their website and give him a backlink. Because they want—when someone searches for “best wedding venue”, they also want to know about photographers and caterers, so they'll have a list of recommended photographers. So if you approach that website and say, hey, wedding venue site, how about you put my link with your other photographers, I work here all the time with you. They may say yes. And that's a great way to make a natural, organic connection to get a backlink. 39:01 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. There are a lot of natural ways to get a backlink. Also, if you can have a roundup with panelists, I call it, let's say, ego-bait articles. There are a lot of good strategies around backlinks. And you can earn them naturally. You can create viral content, you can create infographics, you can create a video and place it on your website that can be super, super educational and informative. And something that can be real-time marketing also really works. So a lot of ways to get good backlinks and backlinks that would stick with, you know, not something with no-follow, things like that that don’t go right. 39:40 Mordy: So that's really important to be aware of, by the way. If you get a link from let's say, Entrepreneur or Forbes.com. Google doesn't follow those links, meaning Google doesn't really crawl those links or consider those links towards your backlink profile. They don't consider that to be a full recommendation. Because there's so many of these websites giving out those links. It's not the same power. Which is another point I want to bring up. Not every link has the same power. For example, if you are a shoe store, and you have a link from, I don't know, from NASA. Well, NASA’s a bad example, they’re in high demand. But if you have a link from a business that has nothing to do with you, versus—and they’re a really big website—versus a link from a website that may not be as big of a website or, you know, have a strong domain authority or authority score. Even though they may not be as authoritative, if they're more relevant to what you do, Google might count that link [as] being far more valuable. In fact, Google just came out this week, and said, hey, we don't actually care about the number of backlinks, what we care about is the relevancy of the backlinks. So having 100 backlinks from a site has nothing to do with your business, versus a site that has, you know, a lot to do with your business. And having only five or six links in there might actually be more valuable. 40:53 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. And this is supposed to be your strategy, just start getting those connections—those real connections—to get these backlinks to your site. 41:02 Mordy: Of course, the best way to get backlinks is content. Which brings me to the content gap you talked about before. So you see that my—hey, myself and my competitor, there are a bunch of keywords they're ranking for that I don't have content for. Maybe I'll create a blog. And I'll start trying to target those topics. It's always important to think not just about the keyword itself, but think of keywords like topics you should cover. So for example, if you see—if you're a shoes website, and you see there's a lot of keywords about boots that you're not ranking for, don't try to rank for that particular keyword necessarily. But maybe you want to create a lot of content around boots that you don't have, whatever it may be. But where do you start? Because there could be a lot of gaps. 41:45 Liraz: So, okay, so a lot of people are ignoring the, let's say, if we have like a keyword gap, if we see a low volume, like 10 searches average [in the] US, some people might ignore it. You know, just like, oh, it's not really good, right? Mordy: No one's really searching for that. Liraz: Yeah, it's okay. But guess what, if you focus on these little wins. These are sometimes—they can be like a sale, like every visit can be a sale through your website, and you're missing a lot of money. So you just need to identify the buying intent. If there is a keyword that is crucial for business, “best shoes for a woman after maternity”. I don't know, I just like, I don't know, really. If someone is looking for that, she is looking to buy a shoe after she gives birth. And that's it—like you have it—this is your sale in your pocket. So just think of the business. Think of what can give you some conversions, and focus on these search terms. 42:48 Mordy: Yeah, that really goes back to what I was trying to say before in the intro. Think about where you fit into this, if there's, you know, again I’m gonna go with my shoe store example. If you're a shoe store, that's something really unique and really valuable. So see where you can capitalize on that. And, you know, I know we think about keywords and traffic, but not all traffic is equal. Let's take the pandemic, for example, imagine last March [2020] at the height of the pandemic, and I am a travel site. I might rank number one for all the keywords in the world, but no one's traveling. Liraz: Mhmm, exactly. Mordy: So traffic, and even with traffic, right, let's say bring people into my site. But maybe they're not people who are going to buy from me, at all, ever. So I know it may be enticing to go after a keyword or topic—again, you have to think about keywords topically—that has a lot of searches around it each month. But sometimes it makes sense to go after those keywords that are more about where you're going to get sales from. And also, it pays to diversify your keywords a little bit. In other words, Google is a little bit volatile, right? Well, more than a little volatile. And one day you might be winning with X keywords. And there's nothing you can do. Google says, “Hey, you know what? It just might be that you're just less relevant, or the topic has changed, or intent has changed.” All the things have changed that are really beyond your control. If you have another set of keywords that you can rely on to bring in traffic and optimize those a little bit more and up your traffic from those, that's a new way you might be able to pivot and stay agile, because Google is a changing environment. 44:20 Liraz: Exactly. You might be surprised that some keywords are just like—people are looking for informative questions. Like you can look for, I don’t know, for running shoes. For just an example. This is not the case, but just for an example. And people, users are just looking for what is a running shoe? Mordy: Correct. 44:37 Liraz: Oh, absolutely correct. But I did a study on this in 2018, if I remember this correctly. For more complicated products, something like technology—buying a laptop or buying insurance. 40% of the top 10 results, meaning four out of 10 results were not sites where you can buy that product. There are sites where you can learn about buying that product. Fast forward to now, and some of those pages have shifted to being 60%—meaning six out of 10 results are about learning how to buy a laptop or learning how to buy insurance. And that does apply to simple products. I know you might laugh at this, but check this out. If you search for “buy toilet paper”, there are one or two informational results about this, I promise you. When I checked this out two weeks ago—so we might go there now and not see it. But that just goes to show you that if you have a blog, even if you're an eCommerce site, you can bring in so much traffic by going and talking about informational things. That brings me to maybe my last question or last topic, 10x content. What is that? And how do you create that? 45:44 Liraz: Wow, I think the best practice for this is just to identify the niches, like small bites of everything. Like, let's say, let's stick with the running shoes, right? If I'll stick with the “10 best running shoes for” etc, etc. I'll go and drill down for the least searchable search terms I want to rank first for this. I don't want to compete with Forbes, I don't want to compete with super affiliates—that can be really impossible for me as a smaller website. So I'm going to tackle the least—let's say 10 searchers, 5 searches, 50 searches per month. That can be amazing for me, because really, there’s not a lot of user websites that are writing about this topic, and I can just easily rank. But I'm also looking at what search results are there in the first place. So you will see huge publishers that are ranking for this even if they don't have the specific content talking about this specific niche. So I’m going to let it go because I will not be able to outrank them. So always look at what's ranking, and don't go for the highest competitive search terms, because it's going to be like a long-term strategy for you. If you want a quick win, try and tackle the least searchable search terms for that. 47:03 Mordy: Correct. And it really goes back, you know, SEO, it's also called search marketing. And there's a marketing element to this. And that's really to be able to have empathy to understand your users, your target audience, really understand what they're looking for, what is their situation? And what would they want out of that content—and then provide that for them. And provide it really. I know content is the hardest thing because it takes time, it takes energy. But if you put the time and you put the effort in—it's a little bit slow going in the beginning, so don't get discouraged. But if you keep doing that you really understand your target audience, you can really create some amazing content. 47:37 Liraz: But don't forget conversion. That is great and can create an amazing lift, but nothing that will do any good. They will just go to other brands that you're mentioning, or you know, just eventually won't buy anything. Just remember to put CTAs, to put calls-to-action, to serve fast pages (loading time), create the best experience, the best design. It's your users, there are your guests in your home, make them feel comfortable. This is always something that you need to remember. 48:05 Mordy: And that's why Google always says—their advice is always to create great content for your users. And that's really true. 48:11 Liraz: It is, it is, it is. 48:15 Mordy: So the last question I want to bring up is keywords. And it's a really hard topic, believe it or not. How strongly do you focus on keywords when you create content? Or will you go after— you see there's a competitor and you see what they're doing? And you see what you're doing? And you see maybe there's a gap? Or maybe there's room for improvement? Or maybe there's a new opportunity here for you? How do you think about keywords? Do you put your keyword everywhere? I know you don't. 48:41 Liraz: Basically, if I'm going to, let's say I’m writing a brief to my writer to write something for me, I will never give them my, let's say my true keywords or something like that. It should go naturally. If the post is not really talking about my topic, it will mention my keyword anywhere. If they’re naturally talking about it, it's gonna be there. Google is smarter you know, it's not like, you know, like 13 years ago, 12 years ago, this is what I used to do. Yeah, I was a spamo website. Like if you asked my mom what I was doing for my career like, yeah, she's spamming Google. This is exactly what I was doing—density, you know, calculating things and everything. But today, Google is super smart. It doesn't really need everything. It doesn't really need to know the exact keywords that you're placing. So I would just tell my writers to just write naturally. Yes. I will just optimize a little bit—page titles, headings if I need to add, but not over-optimize ever. 49:42 Mordy: Right? I mean, I’ll end on this point. Look, if you're writing content, it's really good content. So what other words are you going to use besides the words that describe what you're talking about? Liraz: Exactly. Mordy: Yeah, so write naturally, think about what you're writing, and we're going to end it with this. Liraz, thank you so much. This was so informational and so enjoyable to talk to you. 50:06 Liraz: Thank you, it was my honor. 50:07 Mordy: Have any questions? Please. I'm on Twitter @MortyOberstein . For questions about Wix and SEO, I am Wix’s SEO liaison. So please reach out to me. And I really appreciate you coming, spending some time with us and learning a few things about SEO. And oh, this is just the first in a series of webinars. Keep an eye out for more SEO webinars and another webinar next month. Thank you so much, everybody. 50:30 Liraz: Thank you. Have a good day. Mordy: Bye bye.

Wix and Mangools partner to give you insider tips on conducting keyword research for your site. You’ll learn how to choose the right keywords for your business and use them strategically across your site. Read the Transcript Transcript: Keyword research for SEO with Mangools Speakers Matthew Kaminsky, Product Marketing Manager, SEO Education, Wix.com Maros Kortis, CMO, Mangools 00:00 Matthew: Welcome to our keyword research for SEO Webinar. My name is Matthew, I am on the SEO Marketing team here at Wix. And my goal here at Wix is to help all of you. My focus is on SEO education. So I'm here to help all of our users learn more about how to do SEO, and how to improve your visibility on search engines, whether it be Google, eBay, Amazon, Bing, all the above. And a big part of that is keyword research. So tonight, we have partnered with Mangools, which is a fantastic keyword research tool. We are going to talk all about how to do keyword research. So I am going to turn it over to Maros. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. 00:51 Maros: Hi, everybody, wow, thanks a lot for the introduction, Matthew. I’m really happy to be part of this. And I hope that after seeing this webinar, you guys will be all set to do keyword research on your own in order to skyrocket the organic traffic of your website. Alright then, let's get started. Well, there are tons of websites created every day. Many people just put some, you know, keywords on them and wait for a miracle to happen. Yeah, most of the time, nothing will happen. And those websites won’t probably get a single click from organic search. And that's why you should do keyword research, if you don't want to end up like that. Keywords are basically the gateway that leads people to your website. In other words, to your business. It's not only about SEO. I would say that keyword research is a business thing, because you'll find information about your niche, about what people search for, and who your competitors are. Take the three [of them] and you have the basic pillars of business success, right? Yeah, well, from the technical point of view, keywords are any words or phrases we use to type into search engines to find information on the internet. So yeah, that's pretty straight [forward]. Well, now let's answer the questions why, how and when to do keyword research. As I already mentioned, keyword research is one of the most important tasks if you want to reach people with your website. So basically, that's why you should do it. How to do it? Well, we are about to find out in the next [few] minutes. But no worries. It's not rocket science, and when to do keyword research? Basically, anytime you are creating a new website, or starting with a new niche or optimizing your existing content, so it's like you can do it every time— 03:19 Matthew: So it’s never too late to do keyword research. 03:25 Maros: Exactly. Matthew: Great. Maros: Alright. Well, before we dig into how to do keyword research, I'd like to stress the fact that SEO keeps changing. And this is caused mostly by Google, and their algorithm updates. Their goal is to show the best possible results. And that directly affects how we do keyword research. While, let's say 20 years ago, it was mostly about putting the keywords everywhere and as many times as possible. Nowadays, it doesn't work just like that. Now you have to focus on quality content, cover the search intent and that exactly means doing these three steps: Finding keywords Analyzing them Using them on your website And today we are going to cover all three. So how to find the keywords or where to find the keywords. It's really connected to knowing your niche. I always say that when you know your niche, you’ll have great initial keyword ideas. Let me show you a quick example. Let's say you have a blog about hiking. I think that you don't need to be a genius to know that one of the keywords you want to rank for is like “hiking” or “hiking trails” or something similar. But the problem [with] such keywords, we call them short-tail or fat head keywords, is their high competition. You know, many websites want to rank for the website, for the keyword, sorry. But if you dig deeper, you'll find out that keywords such as “best watch for hiking” or “best hiking shoes” and you know these long keywords are super relevant keywords for your audience. And that brings me to the next example. As you can see here it's an example for the keyword “shoes.” So let's say you have an affiliate website about shoes, most probably you won't be able to rank for the keyword “shoes.” And if you would, the search intent behind this keyword is a bit different. As you can see, the ranking websites are local stores selling shoes, and of course many eCommerce websites say selling shoes. So if you have an affiliate website about shoes, no that's not the right keyword for you. So to sum up, there's a clear difference between those one word search terms such as “shoes” and so-called long-tail keywords. Typical long-tail keywords such as “the best running shoes for kids”, as you can see on the chart. Typical long-tail keywords usually consist of three or more words. It has a lower search volume, but usually also lower competition. That means that it’s more specific and then leads to higher engagement. So the conversion rates of those keywords are usually higher. Why? Why am I saying this? Long-tail keywords represent an ideal start for your website, if you can rank for the most competitive terms with the highest search volumes. So, but yeah, don't forget, when you optimize for long-tail keywords, you will rank for many other related long-tail keywords. So at the end of the day, their overall potential is higher. A very important thing I want to mention here is that you don't have to focus only on long-tails. If you find the short-tail, one word search term that is relevant and you can rank for it, then don't hesitate a second. Just go for it but we'll talk about it later. 07:50 Matthew: Okay, so it doesn't mean just because you choose one specific keyword for a page on your site, it doesn't mean that it won't rank for other keywords. But because this is a keyword that you chose as your focus keyword, so in this case, “best running shoes for kids”, it could still rank for “running shoes” and “shoes.” But no matter who's searching for those, the main keyword that we're trying to rank number one for is “best running shoes for kids.” Maros: Exactly. Matthew: Fantastic. And can you choose—how many keywords should you choose, when you're choosing to focus on specific keywords? 08:30 Maros: Well, usually, you have like one focus keyword, but it really depends on the type of the page. Like let's say if you write a blog, that will be about “best running shoes for kids”, then this will be your focus keyword. But if you optimize the content very well and your website is optimized well, then Google or even other search engines will understand that your content is relevant to even more keywords. So you should display for those keywords too. 09:06 Matthew: Okay, so what happens—this is a great question from Fabian, “What happens when two pages on your site focus on the exact same keywords?” 09:15 Maros: Yeah, well, that's a mistake. You should avoid it. There's a term for this. I guess, it's keyword cannibalization. So yeah, pick one and redirect the second to the first. As always, make sure that you target one keyword only with one landing page. 09:41 Matthew: Alright, great. Thank you. 09:47 Maros: Alright, then now the question is, where to dig deeper, where to find those keywords? There are many options to find great keyword ideas. You shouldn't stick only to keyword tools or or Google Keyword Planner. There are many other ways to find great keyword ideas. One of them is Google search. I mean, in Google search, if you know how to use it, you can find tons of great ideas. It has Google Autocomplete, as you can see on the pictures. Then you have the People Also Ask section searches related to, and so on. So really, Google search is a great place. And then of course, your Google Search Search Console is full of great data. Competitors, do not forget about competitors. It's also a great idea. And then yeah, specific stuff, such as Reddit or Quora, or other forums that are related to your niche, to the market. And, of course, YouTube or Amazon, if you have an affiliate website, usually you are selling stuff, you are pointing to Amazon to get the commission. Well, Amazon is basically a big search engine. Likewise, YouTube is a video search engine so yeah, you will find tons of keywords [with] these tools. 11:15 Matthew: Amazon is great. Also, for eCommerce websites, if your site is built around an intent to sell. Amazon is a place it's the search engine for finding—people go to Amazon because they want to buy something. So if you're selling something, Amazon's a great place. All these tools that you mentioned. They're all free. That's surprising. So I mean, I know Mangools is a great product, but it does cost money. Do I need to have expensive tools like Mangools to do keyword research? 11:50 Maros: Well, you know, you'll find a lot of ideas, even with the free options. But to be able to analyze those keywords, like to see their search volumes, keyword difficulty and other data. I guess it's worth the money to invest to buy tools. You know, there are tons of keyword research tools starting from a few dollars to really expensive ones. Try them and find out what fits your needs. But yeah, I definitely would recommend investing this money because [it] will return. 12:30 Matthew: For sure. But definitely, at least at the beginning, starting out and using these different places to generate ideas is fantastic. And it doesn't cost a cent. Maros: Exactly. Matthew: Great. 12:48 Maros: Alright. Cool. Now we are getting to the next part, which is dedicated to how to analyze the keywords. So if we have already found keyword ideas, the next step is to analyze them. I'll be honest, I've [written] a couple of keyword research guides saying that there are three most important aspects of keyword research. And then my teammate Vlado came up with The Tripod Rule in one of his guides. And I think that's the best way to describe how keyword analysis works. Anyways, you'll find many guides written by Vlad on our blog. And by the way, he is with us today on the live chat, ready to answer your questions together with guys from our Support team. So give them Hell, seriously. No, I'm just joking. But yeah, they will answer everything you need. So, The Tripod Rule . What's The Tripod Rule ? The ideal keyword must be popular, so it has high enough monthly searches. Then it has to be rankable. That means it has a reasonable keyword difficulty for a website. And relevant—that means the search intent matches your content. Why a tripod? Because, you know, it stands steady only if all the three legs have good ground. So a quick example. If you have a keyword that has a high search volume and low difficulty, but it's not relevant to your content, Google will not show your page for the keyword. Likewise, if the difficulty is low, and the keyword may be irrelevant, but there's no search volume, you will get no traffic so it's kind of useless. And if the search volume and the relevance are okay, but the difficulty is too high. You won't be able to outrank your competitors. So basically, at the end of the day, you won’t show [in] the highest positions. So that's why it's called The Tripod Rule . Cool. If there are no questions [on] this, I would like to go through everything that I just said in a real live example. 15:23 Matthew: Before—actually, I do have a good question that a few people have asked, “What do you mean by difficulty in terms of keywords?” 15:30 Maros: Sure. That's a good question. We'll get to that. It's like—really in two minutes. So we'll show you that on a real example. Alright, well, let's say we have a coffee blog, and we plan to write a new blog post. Yeah, when I was finding out what to include in this case study, I was really working with a lot of stuff, with a lot of keywords. But I'll be honest, I love coffee. Guilty as charged. So that's basically why I chose this topic. So yeah, if you write about coffee, you'll probably know that there are many coffee recipes, and one of them is v60 coffee recipe. So let's say we are going to write a blog post that will be about brewing an amazing cup of this type of coffee. Alright, to do this, we'll just take the keyword and type it into KW Finder. 16:38 Matthew: KW Finder is part of Mangools, it's part of your system? 16:41 Maros: Yep. Exactly. Mangools is a suite of five SEO tools, and KW Finder is included. Good. 16:53 Matthew: Wow, that's a lot of information. 16:57 Maros: Yeah, we'll go one-by-one. And of course, we'll answer the question about the keyword difficulty. I just get this, it's best to show it as an example. Alright, then. Alright, so on the left part of the screen, we can see related keywords that are connected to our main keyword. Then we start to do it—the v60 coffee recipe. We'll start with the search, which is the average monthly search volume. So it's the first leg of our tripod rule. And then we have the KD, which stands for the keyword difficulty. Keyword difficulty will tell you how hard it is to rank for this keyword [in] the highest positions, on the first search engine results page. So that's basically what keyword difficulty stands for. In KW Finder, we have it from a scale—from zero to 100. So yeah, the lower it is, it is easier to rank for that keyword, the higher it is, it will take a lot more work to get to it. Cool, when it comes to the right part of the screen, we'll get [to] it later. So let's focus on the last part. As I already mentioned, we have a lot of keywords here. It can be hundreds. Sometimes it can be just a few. It really depends on the keyword you start with. And yeah, but let's be honest, no one wants to see keywords with low search volumes and high keyword difficulties, right? To narrow down our research, we can use various filters. That means that we can filter the results as we want. We can set a lot of parameters. But I don't recommend [using] all of them at once because there [are] too many. And you can accidentally skip keyword ideas you might be interested in later. So for now, we want to see only keywords that have like a low difficulty, 30 is low. I will show you why. And of course we want to include the main term, right? The v60. So yeah, we click on the set filter. And yeah, now we have a bunch of keywords. That should be our target. 19:46 Matthew: Like if I'm a new site, and I'm just starting out, targeting a keyword difficulty below 30 would be a good place to start? 19:54 Maros: Yeah, everything below 30 is really easy or possible. But you know, do not take the keyword difficulty as the only metric. If it's easy to rank for, it doesn't matter that you will just write a mediocre blog post and you will rank for it. You know, it's not that easy. There are many, many other aspects, your website has to be really well optimized from the on-page SEO point of view, you know, technical stuff, the website should be up and running, no errors. And of course, the content should be in-depth. Really quality one. And yeah, last but not least, you will always need quality backlinks. So keyword research is just a part of it. But keyword difficulty always gives you a great hint [to] whether this keyword is a is a go for it or or don't go for it at all, you know? 20:55 Matthew: Yeah, I think—and if I can add one thing, I think people like you just said, people kind of like to overthink the keywords a lot and say that, you know, they're so focused on which specific keywords to include. But ultimately, it's important that you're creating valuable high- quality content that people want to read, that you or your business are an expert on. So if you're going to write an article about a v60 coffee recipe, make sure it's the best, highest-quality v60 coffee article out there, because if it has everything that your potential customers are looking for in the article. It doesn't matter exactly which keywords you use. If it's creating value for your ultimate reader, they're going to click through and they're going to—you're going to see that page rise. But this is a great way to see what are people really interested in when they look for v 60 coffee. What types of keywords are they looking for? And that and that way you can create the best content. 22:01 Maros: Yeah, exactly. Even you know, at the end of the day, if you write a post that has a low quality or your product landing page has a low quality, then it's not about the keyword difficulty anymore, you know, so it won’t help just like that. Yeah. Okay, cool. Now we have the filtered results. And the keyword we started with—”the v60 coffee recipe.” As you can see, its search volume is around 200. And the keyword difficulty is 30, which is kind of good, but you know, slightly above 200 searches per month is not that good. But what we can do here is to sort the results by their search volume. Once we do this, we can see a really intense, interesting keyword. Yeah, the first one, “v60 recipe”, we have almost 2000 searches per month, and the keyword difficulty is even lower, it is only 27. So it's like kind of a green zone for this. And now, I guess we can move to the right part of the screen to find out detailed information about the keyword difficulty, and also about the search volume. This will help us to double check whether we covered the first two legs of our Tripod Rule correctly. Just to recap, our keyword has solid search volumes, almost 2000 and the keyword difficulty is easy, 27 out of 100. If you're not sure about what score of keyword difficulty is high or low, just click on the icon and you'll see the ranges which is high, which is you know, super-low but the tags are colored so it should be pretty easy to spot the right difficulty for you, even without reading the actual number. Alright, when it comes to popularity, the search volume. I think that it's always great to check long-term data. You know, we have data from like five years ago, and this will help you to find out any seasonality or long-term popularity of those keywords. And if the keyword you are about to pick is a trending topic. In this case, it looks like it's a trending topic, so good for us. When it comes to seasonal keywords, I guess a typical example is the Christmas period, or any other holidays when there are specific terms searched in this period. But I guess there are many keywords that have their own seasons. So that's why I would recommend to check these charts. So you can prepare your content right on time. 25:33 Matthew: So we've covered the difficulty part of the tripod. We’ve passed this—keywords passed the test. We've covered the popularity. Now, how do you understand if this keyword is relevant? How do you get to that part? 25:49 Maros: Yeah, well, that's actually the third leg of our tripod. But to find out whether the keyword is really relevant, we have to check the results of the search, so-called SERP results. I’d say that the SERP analysis is kind of a final part of keyword research. And you should never skip it. Firstly, you can better evaluate the keyword difficulty by looking at the authority of ranking websites. And secondly, it helps you to discover the search intent behind the keyword. So you can say whether the keywords [are] truly relevant to your content or not. Since I don't want to overwhelm you with too many metrics, I'll focus only on the relevancy. Basically, the only way to find out is to check the actual search results, as I already mentioned. And you have two options for that, you can go directly to Google search and type the keyword into the search form and check the results one by one. Or you can benefit from tools that include these results. You can see the results in the SERP overview over here in KW Finder. But if you click on this button, Analyze SERP. It will open [the] SERP Checker in a new window. And it's basically a tool that is designed for SERP analysis. 27:30 Matthew: SERP. If people don't understand what that stands for—it is the search engine results page. That's the page after you search for a term on Google. And you click enter. It's the page that shows all the results. 27:41 Maros: Yeah, good thing that you mentioned it, sorry, I forgot to explain the abbreviation. Alright, then, yeah, as you can see, the results. It's kind of transformed the results from the KW Finder over here to the SERP Checker. So on the left part, it's basically our SERP. And over here, you can see the URLs of the ranking websites, and of course, the titles. This is a great hint to find out whether we are targeting relevant keywords or not. On top of that, you can check loads of metrics to evaluate the website's authority and popularity. But as I already mentioned, I don't want to overwhelm you with too many metrics at once. So I'll just focus on the relevancy now. And when I mentioned that, you can either go to Google search directly or use tools such as SERP Checker, I mentioned this. When you click on the Snapshots tab, you'll actually see the SERP. It's like this, these are the results for the keyword. So yeah, to do the analysis here, all we need to do is take a look on the ranking website. As we can see, the first website is definitely about a v60 recipe, right? The second website, yeah, we have five v60 recipes by some baristas, I guess. Then, we have videos. Yeah, those videos are all v60 recipes. And then we have other webs—. Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, exactly. All those websites are about v60 recipes. So I'd say that we picked the right keyword. 29:51 Matthew: Your blog post on v60 recipe. This is a great keyword to target because it looks like all the other articles are talking about the same subject. 30:05 Maros: Exactly. Well, it can happen, it could even happen that the results over here will be totally different. Let's say, I don't know, an eCommerce website selling gadgets to prepare the v60, it can happen. If this is the case, then go back to KW Finder, try another keyword and do this again and again until you find the right keywords with the right search intent for your type of content. Yeah, well, when doing SERP analysis, there's one more thing I wanted to mention. As you can see, besides the usual website, usual results, you can see some other stuff such as YouTube videos, then we have People Also Ask and so on. These so-called SERP features [appear] pretty often. I bet that you can see them every day when googling something, you know, product carousels, Google Ads, Featured Snippets, Maps and so on, I could continue for minutes. There are many of these things. Why am I talking about this? It's because they kind of influence how people behave in the search results. In other words, they have a slight impact on how people behave. So you can check this little metric on the top, which kind of measures the impact of those SERP features on the organic search results. If there's a Featured Snippet on the top, I guess the websites below will not get that many clicks, as if it wasn't there, right? So what I'm trying to say is that—don't look at those SERP features as threats. They are opportunities for you to make your content even better and more appealing and possibly get even more organic traffic. In our case, including a video is basically a must, you know, can you imagine creating a blog post an article when you are talking about some recipe and you will not include the video. I guess not. Yeah. 32:33 Matthew: I was just going to ask that, because there's a video snippet showing, does that mean, I should make a video? And of course, I mean, it makes sense. If that shows up in the search, that means that Google has understood that people who search this term are probably wanting to watch videos on this. So if you can adapt the blog post to a video later on, that'll help. And before we continue, someone asks, are we going to show how to implement these keywords into a blog post? Yes, once we finished walking through the product, I'm gonna take a look at Maros's blog and we're gonna implement it on a Wix site. So hold on just a minute, and we'll get there soon. Great. 33:17 Maros: Okay, yeah, actually, one more thing, when you create a great video and put it on YouTube, there is even a chance that you will rank with the video in the search results too. So it can really happen that your blog post will be somewhere over here and also your video so you can get like more visits, more clicks at the end of the day. Alright, then, well, that's it, we got all three legs of The Tripod Rule covered. Our keyword has a solid search volume, a low keyword difficulty and it's relevant. Alright, once we are done with the research, there's one one thing I recommend doing—we should always keep track of our research. That means that we should save our keywords into some kind of a list. We can do this directly in KW Finder, just when we click on this little star next to the keyword. Yeah, this keyword is for our blog post—v60 recipe blog post. The keyword list is saved. You can go back to the keywords anytime. Yeah, well this will help you to keep your research organized. I would say that creating a separate list for each blog post you're going to write or each landing page or each product page is a great idea. It will just keep things organized. And yeah, well, when you have everything set and optimized, don't forget to track the positions— organic keyword positions of your website. So called rank tracking. There are many tools for this. You can even use SERP Watcher when you just click on the track keywords and it will do the job for you. Cool. And one last thing for me before Matthew is [on] the stage. If you don't know where to start with the keyword research, like at all—which keywords to start with. It's always a great idea to find out what works for your competitors. In this case, just go back to the SERP overview and KW Finder. Pick one of the ranking websites, these are our competitors. Just click on the three dot menu and choose the option Show Keywords. These will actually load up the best keywords these websites already rank for in Google search. Of course, our keyword, “v60 recipe” is included. This is just another great source of inspiration for your keywords. So feel free to play with it. We have a ten-day free trial. And as far as I know, there will be a special offer sent out to all of you in the follow-up email, right? So that's all from me. But don't go anywhere. Matthew is going to show you as he has already told you. He’ll show you how to use the results of the keyword research we just did on a real website. Matthew, the stage is yours. 36:57 Matthew: Alright, so I'm going to take over. But before I do, I can see on this list, a few people have asked, “Do I need to pick just one keyword for this blog post?” And yes, while one keyword should be your focus keyword, you can use a lot of these keywords throughout the content of your blog posts, like I wrote down just now, “v60 brewing guide”, “v60 coffee”, “v60 pour over.” While they may rank for those keywords, eventually, it will help Google to understand that there's a link to your site. And even though we have v60 recipes, our focus keyword, what we'll do is use those other ones throughout the content. So let me show you what I mean. So I'm going to share my screen. Alright, and you should be able to see that I created a blog for Maros—The Artisan Coffee Blog. And I have a post here that we started writing, that we went over the keyword research for today. And I'm going to edit it. So let's go to our dashboard. And you can see here when I click on Blog, I'll go to my Published Posts. And I'll go right into the posts here. And you can see I've started writing the content a bit. But now that we have done our keyword research, I want to optimize this content a bit. So our main focus keyword is v60 recipe, right? So, I'm actually going to change the title of this article to V60 Recipe, because the title is the most important part. And the main places you should use your focus keyword are in your title, which automatically is tagged as your H1, your first heading in the blog. And then I'm going to go over here into the SEO panel. Okay. And the SEO panel allows us to edit the URL slug, which is the last part of the URL of the blog posts. So same thing here, what I'm going to do is—I'm going to change my URL to v60 recipe. And be sure if you're going to change a live link to do a redirect to make sure that Google, if anybody goes to the old link, they'll end up at the new link. You can click to learn more about that. And also the SEO title and SEO description. So by default, Wix Blogs will automatically take the title of your blog post and add it as the SEO title and SEO description. You'll see it'll take a lot of the text from the actual post. And that's just to make sure that there's always content there if you forget or you don't have time to optimize each and every blog post. Or if you don't prioritize, and you only choose specific ones. That means that there will always be something for Google to read because it's not a good signal if you just have this empty. But we should optimize this text. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to do “v60 recipe.” And I'm actually going to add just the name of the site. Maros, artisan, coffee. And you can see there's a little preview of how it looks at the top. And then, I'm not going to do this now, but I'm going to edit the SEO description. And I'm going make sure that I use the phrase “v60 recipe” as part of the context, and I'll also use some of the other keywords. 40:41 Matthew: “This is the best brewing guide for pour-over v60 coffee.” Now, I'm doing my best not to put as much “v60” as possible, because I don't want to do keyword stuffing. I don't want to overuse this keyword. But you can see I'm over the character limit. But just we had a really nice— there we go, you should best practice is to do a lot more. But just because we don't have a lot of time left, I'm going to leave that as is for now. And, another great thing to use is—to provide a little structure, you can use the headings, you can use your heading two and heading threes to tell Google that these are the sections of your posts that provide a little more context. So we can add more relevant keywords as well to our headers. But another great thing to do is to add at the bottom some hashtags, it's a great way also to signify that there's importance to these words. So I made all the changes, I'm going to update my post, and that's it. That's a great way to use our keywords and blog posts. And what I'm going to do is show you another quick tool here in our Marketing and SEO section. And in the SEO Tools, we have our SEO Patterns, which is a great way to apply a pattern to all of your different SEO titles and descriptions depending on the page type. So in this case, because we're talking about blogs, I'm going to keep doing that. And I'm going to go into the Blog Post Patterns. And what you can see here is Search engine and social media. That's where I'm going to go in and edit that. Now you can see here, I had to add the name of the site manually. But if I want to make sure that every blog post has the name of our site across all the SEO descriptions, I can just do that here. So I'm going to add the line like I did before. And then I'm going to click add a variable. And then we'll take the site name. And make sure that it's the site name. In this case, I didn't update the site name here, but that's what it will pull. So make sure we update the name, and then Save. And now if I have a blog with hundreds of blog posts, all my pages will be updated properly with the host name and the site name in the SEO title. You can do the same thing for SEO descriptions. This is a really powerful tool and it saves a lot of time. So I am going to pass it back. I think we have some time for a few more questions. If you want to take over the screen again, Maros. Let's see if we can answer some questions live in the chat. I think this is a question that comes up a lot, especially in Wix we have our SEO Wiz which, as part of the process, you have to choose three keywords. And I think a lot of times people think that that's the only keyword that you can choose, those are the three keywords that you have to stick with for the whole site. Is that true? Do I have to just pick three keywords and I'm done? Or should I have multiple keywords for my site and different pages? 44:25 Maros: Well, yeah, I mean, the ideal scenario is to have like, one focus keyword for one landing page. So if you have more landing pages, make sure that or blog posts in this case, make sure that each of them targets different keywords. So at the end of the day, like, it's like a tree of content. So you know, you have to have pillar content. Like, let's say if we are talking about like guides, you will have like one ultimate guide that targets, I mean, like a main keyword, such as “coffee recipes”, let's say. And then you can have like tons of other blog posts, talking about the specific recipes, targeting those specific long-tail keywords. 45:19 Matthew: Okay, so the process of using The Tripod Rule , we should use for all of our pages, and every single every time separately. Wow, great. It's fantastic. So I know we talked about blogs in this—we used the main case study of a blog. But can this process work for all types of pages? Like, if I have a store, for example? How would I apply this to my product pages? 45:47 Maros: Well, basically, it's the same, the only difference is that when you have like thousands of product pages, there are some kind of automatic tools that will fill up the title tags and those meta descriptions. But in this case, you are targeting the product keywords, you know, transactional keywords. So always make sure that the search intent behind those keywords is that people [are] using this keyword in Google or any other search engine—they want to buy the goods so you have… Yeah, well, basically, it's the same, you have to check the relevancy, you have to check the search volume. I mean, if you have a great-selling product that nobody looks for, nobody searches for—I mean, it can be kind of useless. You know, unless it's analyzed, it's something you know, we don't know about, and it's gonna be the next huge thing. 46:51 Matthew: I see a lot of people are saying that there's a lot of work to do. And yeah, it is a bit of a time investment. How long does it usually take? So someone does keyword research and optimizes, you know, and I saw somebody mentioned that it took them a few weeks, you know. Initially they did optimization, and their ranking went down, and then it went back up again, over a few weeks. How long does it take to actually see results from this keyword research effort? 47:19 Maros: Well, if I would say any exact exact time period, I would be lying. It really depends on the state of your website, there is also the so-called Google Sandbox, which means that Google tries to understand your content, tries to find out whether your website is trustworthy, that you can use this time to optimize your website as best as possible. But as I said, like SEO is not only about keyword research, you know, there’s on-page factors, off-page factors, you know, link building, but keyword research itself, it doesn't have to take, you know, weeks or days. You can do keyword research for one blog post in a few hours. The longer part—is to create great content, you know, unique content, in-depth content that will rank. So yeah, but telling an exact time—no, this will be a lie. But you know, keyword research pays off. SEO is a long-term process. So it's like, yeah, you can overcome or fool it by doing Google Ads, if you know, for product pages or eCommerce, it's normal. I mean, the difficulty from an SEO point of view is insane. But when you are writing blogs and this kind of stuff, it will eventually pay off. 49:01 Matthew: Yes, and it's true. It's so true keyword, SEO is, is a marathon it's not a sprint, it's an ongoing effort. It takes a lot of time. It's a lot of investment. And it is free, technically. But it's not like you're running search ads. Someone asked, “Should I do search ads as well as keyword research?” I think they both have their own different reasoning. Search ads are great because like you see, they show up right away at the top. But it's like running water, opening your sink. When you turn on the water and you turn on your campaigns and you're paying Google, the traffic will flow and you'll get traffic to your site, really fast. But the minute you stop paying the traffic stops. So with SEO, while it does take a bit more time to climb the rankings and eventually get to number one. It's really hard to move away from the first page, it's over time, it'll be a great investment for you and for your site. And that will ultimately result in more purchases, more visitors to your site that will, maybe more leads depending on what your site is about. So it's really great. And let me see if there's anything else that we want to cover. I think that's it. Thank you so much again Maros for coming. I think everybody learned a lot. It was really interesting, and we hope that we will collaborate again in the future. 50:38 Maros: Well, thanks a lot for having me. It was a lot of fun. And yeah, I think I think we should make something more of this. 50:47 Matthew: Definitely. Alright. Well, thank you very much, everybody, and we will see you at the next SEO webinar. Have a great day, evening, wherever you are in the world.

Learn all about Core Web Vitals in this 1 hour webinar featuring Dan Shappir, Performance Tech Lead at Wix.com, and Dikla Cohen, Web Ecosystem Consultant at Google. Find out how Wix prepared for the new Google page experience and gain expert advice on optimizing your site’s performance to ensure excellent user experience. Read the Transcript Transcript: Understanding Wix high performance and CWV scores Speakers Dikla Cohen, Web Ecosystem Consultant, Google Brett Haralson, Brett Haralson, Community Manager, Wix Dan Shappir, Performance Tech Lead, Wix 00:02 Brett: Hey everybody. Welcome. Welcome to this Wix performance webinar. I'm your host, Brett Harralson. And let me tell you, we have a jam-packed session in store for y'all. This is going to be a fantastic lineup. Today we're talking about how to optimize for Core Web Vitals. This is amazing. So let me introduce our guests real quick. And then we're going to jump into it. So first Dikla is joining us from Google. She is amazing. And she is also a web ecosystem consultant and she focuses on supporting Google's top partners. She helps them achieve exemplary user experiences, speed and business growth through leveraging cutting edge web technologies, and of course, the latest Chrome web capabilities. Dikla, I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for joining us. And joining us from Wix is Dan, most of you in the Partner community know Dan, he's lurking and answers a lot of your real technical questions. He's been focusing on optimizing sites on Wix, specifically for speed. And most of you know, Dan, Dan's the man. And I'm so glad to have both of you here. This is exciting. So here's what we're going to talk about. We're going to start with Dikla. And she's gonna walk us through navigating through Core Web Vitals, and then we're gonna switch tracks. And Dan's gonna specifically talk about what he's been doing to prioritize performance at Wix. And he wants to talk about also addressing performance myths, and also performance best practices. So let's kick this off. Dikla, let's talk a little bit—if you will tell, us about Core Web Vitals and welcome. 01:38 Dikla: Thanks, Brett. Hi, everyone. And it's great to be here. Thank you, Brett for that introduction. I’m Dikla, I'm a web eco system consultant at Google. And I'll talk to you a bit about Core Web Vitals. So before we delve in, let's talk about what's at the core of Core Web Vitals, excuse the pun. And that is, of course, user experience. And user experience is not something that is easy to always measure. And we've recognized three pillars of user experience that are quite distinct from one another, starting with loading, when is something happening? Is it happening? Am I seeing, on the page, what I want to see? After that we have interactivity, is the page responsive? And is it responding in a timely manner? So as quickly as possible, of course. And then visual stability, is it delightful to view the page? Are things jumping around or not? And so forth. As I mentioned, this is not an easy challenge. And therefore, we've created Core Web Vitals, we've defined Core Web Vitals and these three metrics at that. And the first one is LCP, (Largest Contentful Paint). Then we have FID (First Input Delay). And then we have CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). You can see the different thresholds here. And to ensure you're hitting this target for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page load. Now, and one scenario, which you might have already encountered [with] Core Web Vitals is through this announcement by Google search, announcing that a new signal that combines corporate vitals with our existing signals for page experience, will be launching. And in fact, it has already started. So the gradual launch has started in mid-June, and it will continue till the end of August. Now let's talk about each metric. So first, we have LCP, this measures the render time of the largest content element, whether it's an image or text. And if we look for instance, at the top right corner here [for] example, the evaluation continues until the user interacts with the page. So usually, that will be for the first view, the first initial view of the page. In the beginning, you can see we recognize just a bit of text because that's what’s [on] the page but eventually, when the page fully loads, what is recognized as the Largest Contentful Paint is the image there and rightfully so. And the time it takes for that image to load will be reported as the Largest Contentful Paint. Next, we have FID (First Input Delay). This measures the time from when a page from when a user first interacts with the page until the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. So we've all been in situations where we've clicked on something on a page, nothing really happens, it takes some time. That is obviously not the best user experience. And we look here at when the page—the browser is free to respond to the first user interaction, and that will be represented by FID. And then lastly, CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). This is the sum of the strongest cluster of shifts. And this is in order to measure different shifts that are happening [on] the page, which is obviously not a very delightful user experience. So we've all encountered situations where we go to a website, and then some button or image or ad appears, and it shifts the content of the page. And those shifts clustered together capped at five seconds is what will be counted towards TLS. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to visit the different web dot dev links shared here, you can, of course, just visit web dot dev and see all the resources we have there. And you'll get more information regarding each metric. Now there are different tools that measure Core Web Vitals, some of which you might already be familiar with, some maybe not. We have Lighthouse, we have CrUX (Chrome User Experience report), we have PageSpeed Insights which actually is a combination of Lighthouse and CrUX in a way. We have the Google Search Console, Chrome Dev Tools, the Web Vitals Chrome extension, so there's quite a few of them. And each one of them offers a distinct value in order to optimize your user experience. 06:32 Dikla: One thing which is worth noting is that some of them display lab data, some of them display field data, and some of them display both. Lab data is data that is measured on a specific environment, while loading your page. And it is what a user is likely to experience in that environment. This is great for debugging. And this is great for, let's say you have a certain UI change you want to make and you want to understand what is the impact that change has on performance, you can look at the lab data before and after. And get immediate feedback on the impact of that change. On the other side, you have field data field data, also known as real user metrics. It comes from what your users are actually experiencing in the field. This is being collected from actual users visiting your website, this can be collected by you and this can be collected, for instance, Google collects and publicly shares this data from CrUX, the Chrome User Experience report. This is data that is anonymously collected from opted-in users, and it shows what experience they are having on your website. This is the bottom line. This is what you should be looking at when you assess the experience of your website. If you have any questions, and I'm sure you already do, you probably will have more questions as you learn more about Core Web Vitals. As I mentioned before, there's all the web dot dev links and resources already shared. And of course, there's also the Core Web Vitals FAQ. And it is a great place to visit and understand more. The first question here is, unsurprisingly, where does the corporate vitals data that search considers come from? And this comes from CrUX, which I've already mentioned, so [for] real user data, you can use the Search Console Page Experience report. To understand more, as I said each tool is a bit different. The user experience report, for instance, allows you to look at groups of URLs that are grouped together according to the type of page. So that's very useful. And lastly, I want to mention Wix and the great investments and progress they've made in regards to performance at large and [with] Core Web Vitals specifically. Whether it's by evolving the infrastructure as can be read in this beautiful case study published recently, or by making performance data more accessible to users by creating the Site Speed panel for the Partners. Dan will speak about this a bit later. And as a result of this investment, we're seeing really great improvements in Core Web Vitals, you can see this throughout the last year. The number of origins having good Core Web Vitals, has significantly improved for Wix websites. You can check this out at the new Core Web Vitals Technology Report. And let's hope this continues to rise. I'm sure it will. Dan will tell you more about that. And that's it for me. Thank you very much. And Brett, back to you. 10:20 Brett: Thank you. Thank you so much for that Dikla. Before we switch, and I'm really excited to hear specifically from Dan about what Wix has really done here. I did want to ask you a couple quick questions, if I can rapid fire just a couple at you here. Just for clarification, how is it determined if a page passes or fails the Web Vitals assessment? 10:43 Dikla: Yes, so this is calculated at the 75th percentile over 28 days, as mentioned from the CrUX data. So according to that, if a page hits all three Core Web Vitals, then it passes the Web Vitals assessment. 11:04 Brett: Thank you for that. And I know there's a lot of other questions. And I'll try to come back at the end and save those. But I have two more burning questions specifically for me now, you were showing us and we were talking a little bit about site speed tools and measuring tools such as I think a couple of those—there was Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights. I've seen this a few times from some of our Partners’ conversations. And they discussed the difference in the varying results between some of these tools. Can you tell us a little bit about why that may be? 11:38 Dikla: Yeah, that is a great question. So each tool is different, right? And there are various things that can influence the results you're seeing. So the first thing, of course, is the lab data versus the field data, which we've mentioned, right? So that is easily the biggest thing that will create change, just because lab data is running in a very specific environment, whereas field data is for all your users. But even if you're looking just at lab data, for instance, then you will have different results. Sometimes that can occur if the environment is different, right? So if you're running Lighthouse on PageSpeed Insights, or you're running Lighthouse on Chrome Dev Tools, that will give you very different results, because those are different environments. And if you're running it on your own laptop, then you're going to see what the page is currently displaying rather than the Lighthouse run on PageSpeed Insights, which is like an anonymous user opening the page for the first time. Whereas for field data, while it may all come from CrUX, it can differ if you're looking at the whole origin data, which is what you'll see on the Chrome User Experience report, it will be the whole origin data and it will be per month. And if we're looking at PageSpeed Insight, it can be both the origin and the specific page data. And that will be the last 28 days as opposed to a month. And then we have the Search Console report which again shows a bit—clusters together different page types. So each of these tools gives something else and has different insights. And therefore the results may change. 13:32 Brett: Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm sure that just cleared up a lot of questions out there. So thank you, I'm going to rapid fire one more Dikla. And then we're going to jump to Dan and learn specifically about what Wix is doing to optimize here. But since the Core Web Vitals has launched, we've seen changes and updates to the metrics. So my question is, will that continue being the case? 13:54 Dikla: Yes. So Core Web Vitals are meant to be dynamic. So as I mentioned, measuring user experience is a challenge. And we are always aspiring to improve and be better at that. And sometimes that means we will have to make changes to the metrics. Those changes in the past have been communicated. And we will continue to communicate them in advance so that users can properly prepare for those changes, and hopefully, will just get better and better. 14:33 Brett: Thank you so much Dikla. And it's an honor to have you here. And I know we'll probably have some more questions towards the end. But before we do that, let's segue here into Dan. Dan, you've been a busy guy, and tell us a little bit about what you've been doing to prioritize performance at Wix. 14:54 Dan: Thank you, Brett. And thank you Dikla. That was a lot of great information. And hi everybody. Well, yes, as we've seen in Dikla’s presentation, having good performance is very important for the success of a website. It's important in order to get good engagement for the website, to get a low bounce rate. And as we've now learned, it's also important for SEO. And as a result, at Wix, we're investing significant effort and resources into improving the performance of all websites hosted on our platform. In fact, improving performance is a top priority across the entire company, and involves every part of our organization. And as a result of that, many of you are experiencing noticeable performance improvements in your websites without needing to make any changes on your end. That said, it's important to emphasize that different Wix websites do experience different levels of improvement. I'd like to say that improving performance is a journey, not a destination. And there's always more work that can be done. And it's the reality that some aspects of our offering are further along than others. But we're working very hard to push all these aspects along. So one great example of the effort that we've put in is that we've essentially re-architected and effectively rewrote much of what we call the viewer component of our platform. The viewer is that thing, that aspect of our platform, which takes the data from our servers, and uses it to render the websites, the HTML and the CSS that you view, when you visit the Wix website. What we've done is that we've moved a lot of the computation from code that used to run in the browser, onto our fast servers. That had two great impacts. First of all, it reduced the amount of JavaScript that we need to download down to the browsers, it reduced it by up to 80%. And the second thing is that it offloaded a lot of the computational effort, which is especially important for visitors who are using lower-end mobile devices, which as we know, are becoming the de facto way in which most people access the web. Another thing that we've invested a lot of effort and resources into is our infrastructure. We've created and structured more data centers around the globe, we now have numerous data centers all around the world. So whenever you need to visit to hit one of our servers, you will have a server that's closer to where you are, involving fewer hops, which means a faster response. And as a side benefit, it also means better uptime for Wix, because we just have more data centers that we can share across. We are also much smarter about our use of CDNs. First and foremost, all static assets that are used in Wix websites are delivered through CDNs. CDNs, for those who don't know—that stands for Content Delivery Networks. This is a network of servers around the world that essentially cash requests and then respond really quickly, because they're usually really close by to your actual visitors, wherever they are in the world. So all the static assets, as I mentioned, are now delivered from CDNs. So that includes the media, images, videos, it includes the scripts, the CSS, etc. And now also most of our HTML is also served by CDNs. And finally, last but not least, we've really enhanced our processes to promote performance. And what I mean by that is that it's not enough to make all of these improvements just in order to ensure that performance gets better. You also need to continuously watch out [to ensure] performance does not degrade, that it doesn't regress. And the way that we've gone about that is that we've put in processes in place, so that every time we make a change to our code, it actually checks this change. 19:25 Dan: There's an automated process that does a performance test on this change, and compares it to the current result. And if we see a degradation, well, that stops the process, and that change cannot be rolled out. In addition to that, the same as Google monitors sessions and collects the data into their CrUX database. We also monitor all sessions, all Wix sessions also obviously anonymously. We do it by the way from all web browsers, not just from Chrome and this data is also updated to our own servers, which allows us to monitor performance all the time. So that if somehow some degradation, like made it out, something, like, slipped through the cracks, we recognize it really quickly, and are usually able to resolve it before anybody, any one of you actually even notices it. So these are all things that we've done in Wix to ensure that we can provide the best performance that we can. 20:30 Brett: And Dan, I just want to point out one thing real quick, you're getting a lot of praise here, Wix is getting a lot of praise. And I know over the past few weeks or so, specifically, from Partners, they're noticing incredible speed enhancements, you've got some fans here that are attending, and a lot of people are saying, Lauren, her desktop, scores are near perfect. A lot of people are really appreciating this, because it has really changed the game for them as far as speed. So I just want to make sure that the sentiment is said to you, huge thanks to Wix, you're killing it. And you have some fans. 21:06 Dan: Thank you very much, Brett, we greatly appreciate it. So first of all, do keep the responses coming in, both the good and the bad. If you're still running into performance issues, like I said, you know, your own, your personal mileage may vary it, you know, depends on our components. Because as I said, you know, we're making a lot of advancements, but we can't advance everything at exactly the same rate. And also the choices that you make have [an] impact on the performance of your site. And we'll discuss this further along. Before we do Dikla already showed a graph similar to this, it's essentially from the same source. It's from the HTTP Archive, which is based on, it utilizes CrUX data. So this is from a Google tool or Google sponsor tool, actually. And it shows the performance data that Google actually collects, again, from Chrome sessions, for Wix sites and for info sessions of other CMSs. And as you can see the light blue line, that's us. And you can see that over the past year, we've improved by five fold in terms of the ratio of sessions that are good or green for all Core Web Vitals. That means that five times as many sessions, Wix sessions on Wix pages, actually, Wix URLs now get good Core Web Vitals. All three of them, CLS, LCP and FID for the 75th percentile, which ensures, according to what Google has said, the highest possible ranking boost, but even more importantly, from my perspective, a better experience for the people who visit these sites. Now, before we actually go into what you can do, in order to improve the performance of your websites and get the most benefit from all the enhancements that we're making, I do want to address a couple of myths and misconceptions that I encounter when I discuss Wix performance with various Partners, customers, designers, etc. So, the first myth is that well, that you can't improve the performance of a Wix website, that really, you know, only Wix can do it and you're stuck with what you have. And the reality is that the decisions that you make while designing and putting content on your website have a significant impact on the performance of the site. As you all know, Wix is a very flexible platform, you have almost unlimited freedom in what you can do, in terms of the structure and content of your website. And the decisions that you make definitely have a significant impact on the performance of a website. The next myth that I want to address and one that I unfortunately see a lot. I recently saw it again is that you guys need to optimize the images before you upload them onto Wix. For example, one thing that I recently saw somebody write is that you should resize the images, the width and the height to be as small as possible and match exactly the size that you intend to use on your webpage. And that's totally incorrect. In fact, it's essentially the opposite. We automatically optimize images and we do a really good job of it. We worked really hard to ensure that we deliver the minimal amount of information but provide the best possible experience to your visitors. So if I go again to that example of resizing the image, you should, in fact, upload the largest image in terms of width and height that you can get. And we will automatically on our servers, resize it and clip it exactly to the needed size of that particular session. And consequently, we download only the bits, the pixels that are actually needed for that particular session. So you get the optimal usage of data while providing the best image quality. Another example of the things that we do is that we automatically transform the image format into WebP, which is a new, relatively new image format, originally from Google now effectively supported by almost all browsers. 25:53 Dan: So we verify that the browser actually supports it. And if it does, then we deliver the image using that format instead, which reduces the image download size by approximately 20%. There is a difference that you can make by, you know, choosing between JPEGs and PNGs. But we'll get to that later on in my presentation. Another myth that I see is that animations are bad for performance. And if your performance is bad, you should remove all the animations from your website. Again, that's not correct. If you've got, for example, parallax animations going on, they have no bad impact on your performance. The one thing that you should watch out for, is for excessive use of reveal animations. And by that I mean, if the stuff in the initial view is automatically animated when the person visits your website, because the problem with that is that say your header flies in from the right, then until the movement of that header ends, then effectively, you could say that the page hasn't finished loading, because the visitor can't actually read the content of that header text until the animation finishes. So do take into account that if you've got a lot of reveal animations going on automatically as the page loads, you're effectively increasing your load time. And finally, the last method I want to touch on is that large videos are bad for performance. That's really not the case of videos that use streaming, which means that they are delivered really efficiently over the network and they start playing as soon as a little bit of them arrives, you know, like the same as you experience when you watch videos on YouTube. You don't need to download the entire video in order to watch it. So it's really efficient in that regard. And in most cases, it won't have an adverse impact on your performance. And now, we can finally move to the heart of my presentation, which are the things that you can do to get the most out of your Wix website in terms of performance and Core Web Vitals. So I'm going to start with almost the simplest thing, like the basic component of any Wix, of any website, not any Wix website, any website, really. And that is text. You know, it's the text to a great extent that makes the website because the text is what tells your visitor, you know who you are, what your website is about, what they can do on your website. And there are a couple of things that you can do with text to ensure good performance. First and foremost, just make sure that you have some meaningful content, text on the initial viewport, or sometimes referred to as above the fold. That's the initial area of the page that is visible before your visitor scrolls. So I've seen pages that have just an image or maybe even a gallery, and until the visitor scrolls down, there's nothing for them to read. That's from my perspective, that's bad experience. First of all, text usually loads faster than images. But beyond that, I want to know who you are before I decide whether I even want to scroll within your website or not. Also, we usually recommend limiting the number of fonts and font weights that you put [on] the site. First of all, I have to say that from my own perspective, excessive use of fonts can make a site look unprofessional and unappealing. But beyond that, in some cases, text will not actually be visible until its font downloads, the font that it uses, finishes downloading. So if you're using a lot of fonts, it will take longer for all the fonts to download, and therefore it will take longer for the text to appear. One thing that's really Wix specific, you've got this feature where you can upload your own custom font. And we've seen situations where people accidentally upload the same font multiple times, and then use the various fonts that they uploaded, even though it's the same font, multiple times, and that results in the same font, being downloaded multiple times to your visitor’s browser, which isn't great for performance. Now, we are working on having a systemic solution to this, to automatically prevent this from happening. But until we finish implementing it, please be aware of it and try to avoid uploading the same font multiple times for the same website. 30:50 Dan: And another important thing, you know, seems kind of unrelated necessarily to performance—is to ensure good contrast with your text. But let me give you a quick example. Suppose you have white text on top of a dark image on top of a white page background. Well, what happens is that even if the text loads before the image, the visitor won't see the text until the image loads, because it will just be white text on top of [a] white background. Now we work really hard to load images as quickly as possible. But still, like I said before, text usually loads faster. So you know, try to think how you can ensure good contrast in all conditions. And last but not least, avoid text in images. And what I mean by that is not text that's overlaid on top of images, that's perfectly fine. I mean text, that's actually a part of the image itself. That is embedded in the image. It's bad for performance, because until the image loads, there's no text. But it's also really bad for SEO and accessibility. Because search bots and also screen readers just don't see this text. So yeah, it's not good and you should definitely strive to avoid it. Media is the other like, big thing with modern web sites, and by media, I mean, images, videos, and whatnot. So one thing to look out for with images especially, is to check and watch out for extra large downloads. You know, if an image file is tens of kilobytes, or hundreds of kilobytes, there's one thing, but if it's a couple of megabytes, that's another. Now, I'm not talking about the size of the image that you upload onto Wix. I'm talking about the size of the image that actually gets downloaded. There are various tools that you can use to check that like the Chrome Dev Tools that's built into the browser, the Network tab, or the Web Page Test tool, there are other tools as well, if you've got really large downloads, that can be detrimental to performance. I mentioned before that we optimize images for you. That being said, and without going into too many technical details, because I just don't have the time for it. You should just take it as a given that you should prefer JPEGs over PNGs, where applicable. That will result in (usually) smaller downloads for the same size and almost the same quality of images. Usually it's indistinguishable. There are certain situations where PNGs are required. For example, if you need transparency, because for example, you're using parallax or something like that, in such cases, you just have to go with a PNGs. But when you can, definitely do [choose] JPEGs. As I said, the image size, the download size of the image will be smaller, and your users or visitors usually won't be able to tell the difference. [The] thing is and this is interesting that SVG or shapes, as they are referred to in our Editors are actually better than both. So for example, if you can get your logo as an SVG, for example, if you're using the Wix Logo [Maker], then definitely do [choose] an SVG and SVG is smaller, it's sharp from the get go. It remains sharp when the visitor lets zooms in or zooms out. It's always sharp. And like I said, it's usually much smaller than any other image format. Generally, avoid GIFs. I mean, there are, you know, certain cases. For example, if you've got this really tiny animated thing, like an arrow pointing down, but again, watch out for the extra large download, you'd be surprised. But if it's, if you're looking to create some sort of animated effect, just avoid GIFs. Use a looping video instead, just put in a video, configure it to run in a loop and just use that instead. I've seen websites that download a 12 megabyte GIF, and it's just bad for performance. So, you know, in most cases, you should definitely strive to avoid them. 35:20 Dan: Another Wix specific thing, when you set an image as a strip background, you can actually also specify the background color behind the strip, if you make—behind the image, if you make the image partially transparent, that color shows through. But even if you don't make that image transparent, it turns out that this color has value. You can set it by clicking on that tiny fold on the left corner, top corner. And the reason is that that color will show up briefly, while that image loads, potentially, especially over slower connections. So if you specify a color that matches the primary color, the background color of the image, that will result in a better visitor experience, because I have seen situations of like this jarring transition where the primary color of the image is green but somebody set the strip background color to pink, and it creates this really jarring transition. And it also can have a detrimental impact on performance measurement tools. I want to talk about mobile, because the majority of our visitors based on all the data that we collect, something like 70% of the people, even over 70% of the people who visit Wix websites, use mobile devices. So it's really important to have good performance on mobile. So if you're using the regular Editor, the Wix Editor, don't forget to go into the mobile Editor and to verify that your pages look good on mobile. We worked really hard on the automatic creation of the mobile view. But you know, it's still, it's your website, and you know, best. So do go into the mobile Editor, make sure that everything is properly organized there, and that your site looks good on mobile devices. One of the cool things about the mobile Editor these days is that you can both add and hide content specifically for the mobile. So you can hide some stuff that you only want to show on the desktop that's potentially less important because you know, what can we do? Mobile has less screen real estate, so you need to be more targeted. And you can add stuff. So for example, you can hide the less important content and magnify the more important content and make it easier to view on those smaller screens. You can also maybe reduce the number of items in galleries or feeds or repeaters. I've seen mobile pages that are 30 screens long. I mean, who expects a visitor to scroll down through 30 screens of the mobile device, you know, it probably means that the page is probably too long. And there are no free lunches, the more stuff that you put on the page. You know, we try to do things like lazy loading, we're working on making it even smarter. But again, no free lunches. Anything that you put on a page has a certain cost. That accidentally made it into the wrong slide. We'll fix it later. But—so those are the things that I wanted to say about mobile. In addition, there are several general suggestions that I'd like to make. Dikla actually showed a screenshot of our new Site Speed panel in the Wix dashboard for your site. We were really happy that this panel was also shown in the recent Google I/O Keynote. And it's a really useful tool. It has two parts. On the top part you see data from the field that we collect from actual Wix site sessions, live sessions, and we compare you based on that data to other sites within your domain. And the bottom part actually shows data that we retrieve from Google PageSpeed Insights. So it's essentially the same lab data that you would see if you ran Google PageSpeed Insights on that same website. 39:56 Dan: If you're using Velo on your pages, especially If you put in like, a site level script, which effectively impacts all pages, then you may, there's a good chance that you will need to enable manual caching for your pages. That means going into the Page Settings, going into the Advanced Settings, and then enabling Manual Caching and specifying the longest possible duration that's appropriate for you. What that does is that it ensures that the HTML of the page gets cached into a CDN for quick delivery. If you're not using Velo, then in the vast majority of cases, we will do this automatically for you. But if you are using Velo, then you know, we can't really know what you're doing in your Velo code on the server. So we can't know that we can safely cache your content and for how long. So that's the reason why you may need to enable manual caching. By the way, when content is cached into a CDN, you don't have to worry about outdated content being delivered. Because the instant you, let's say, for example, publish a new version of your site, we automatically push that update to the CDN to replace the previous version. Be careful of excessive use of marketing integrations. And by that I mean stuff like Facebook Pixels or the Google Tag Manager. I mean, you know, obviously, they're required, you know, they serve a purpose, you're running marketing campaigns, for example, but make sure to only add those marketing integrations that you actually use. And once you're done with them, please remember to remove them. It's very easy to forget them there to just leave them there, because the page will keep on working but they do have a bad impact on your site performance. Surprisingly so sometimes, I've seen Wix pages where a marketing integrations account for half the loading time of the page. It's that significant. In general, if you're using videos, I would recommend to use the Wix Video Player rather than external video players, because with external video players, we actually need to download those external video players. And for example, the YouTube video player is something like half a megabyte of a download of JavaScript. So just you know, not the video, just the player, it's pretty heavy. So in general, when you can [choose] using the Wix Video Player over the one of the external video players. I already mentioned this before, there are no free lunches, the more stuff you put on a page, the heavier the page becomes, the longer it takes to load. So if you've got really long pages, please consider splitting them into several shorter pages. For example, maybe you can move an FAQ off of the main page. Or maybe you can move, you know the blog, just have a link to your blog, but actually put the blog on some other page instead of the homepage. Again, it's up to you. It's your content. If it needs to be there, then it definitely should be there. But again, be aware that there's a cost to everything that you put on your page. Lightboxes and animated galleries can be detrimental. The reality is that the way in which Core Web Vitals are measured, and the page experience ranking in general can ding you for using lightboxes, for example. Because think about it, your content appears and then a few seconds later, a lightbox appears so effectively from the perspective of Core Web Vitals, your page really hasn't finished loading until that lightbox is displayed which creates an extra delay. Also, lightboxes often get in the way of the main content on the page, which is not great. So yeah, if you're running like a special promotion, you know, it makes sense to use a lightbox. But definitely don't put your primary content like “the who you are” in a lightbox. Put it within your page itself. And don't use lightboxes and automatically animated galleries unless they bring actual benefit to your web page or website. 44:49 Dan: And my final tip is it's so easy within Wix to duplicate either a page or even the entire website. So you can duplicate your site, and then run it through a performance testing tool, comparing the score of your current site to the replicated site. you can use our Version Releases and A/B test. Currently, you know, the A/B test, you won't be able to get separate performance data for the A/B test. But you can, let's say, create a duplicate of your page, use one version for a while and see how it impacts your site speed. And then use another version and see how it impacts your site speed. Or, again, use one of those lab tools for immediate results, you know, go which way you want. Before I conclude my part, and everybody, you can see that I really like to talk and get into the details. I just want to mention that you can follow me on Twitter, I'm fairly active there. I tweet about Wix related stuff about performance related information. I also try to occasionally write stuff on Facebook, so feel free to reach out to me there. But Twitter is where I'm most active. And I tried to follow back. So yeah, you know, hit me up there. And with that, Brett, I conclude my part. 46:20 Brett: So, Dan, I just want to say thanks so much. We have a lot of questions, and I'm gonna rapid fire three to you. But I do want to say thanks so much. And what's so amazing about this, Dan is I love that you're able to come here and show this and talk about some of these numbers and show the performance efforts that's been done at Wix to really, really move the needle. And everybody's seeing this. And I you know, it's funny, because you know, you and I spend time together, and we talk behind the scenes, and we get excited about what's coming. But to actually see it, right? And get to have these numbers and show the graphs. 46:55 Dan: First of all, it will be excellent if you can link to this presentation. But I do want to mention that most of the stuff that's here, and you know, hopefully all of the stuff that's here is available in more detail in Knowledge Base articles, many of which are linked to from the new Site Speed panel. So you can, you know, all our users can just go into the Site Speed panel, they will find links to various Knowledge Base articles about performance, and they expand on a lot of the information that I've provided here. And we're working hard to ensure that they contain all the information. 47:33 Brett: Amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dan. So let me throw a few questions out here. Here's one that we wrote down, “The new Site Speed dashboard is displaying that my site's performance is good. But I'm seeing a low score in the initial view in the Google PSI. Why is that?” 47:57 Dan: So as I mentioned, the Site Speed dashboard actually has two parts. The top part, which you see initially when you load it, and then the bottom part that you actually need to scroll down to. So if you're looking at the bottom part, then that should actually show you the same scores for desktop and for mobile, that you're getting from PSI. Because effectively the values that we put there, we just send your site over, your page over to PSI, the homepage of your site over to PSI, run PSI on it, and then just put the data there. Now, as Dikla mentioned, you know, there can be fluctuations in your scores, because of you know, the web and the internet, you're not operating in a vacuum. So you may want to run both PSI, multiple times, and maybe also do a refresh within the Site Speed panel, just to see how the scores jump around a little bit. But overall, that bottom number should actually be the same. Now the top number, or the top values that you see, as I mentioned, those are actually collected from the field. So those are actually the performance numbers that we get from sessions of real people who are visiting your website. And those may or may not match the numbers that you get from PSI because as Dikla mentioned, PSI just runs, loads the site while measuring it in this one particular environment. That environment may be similar, or maybe very different from what your visitors actually have. Now, if it's different, then your users might get, you know, either better or worse experience than what you may see in PSI. Now, what actually determines at the end of the day, again, as Dikla explained, what actually determines [it] at the end of the day, is the actual experience of your visitors. That [is] what counts for the success of your website in terms of the Google ranking. And more importantly, in terms of whether or not your visitors engage with the site and don't bounce, because when I visit your site, I don't really care what your PSI score is, I care what my experience is. Now you can use your PSI as an indicator, your PSI score, you can look at what you're currently getting, make some changes, and see whether it's improving or degrading. And based on that you can kind of draw an inference of what may happen when you deploy it in the field. But that's more or less the value of those lab tests. 50:46 Brett: As always, Dan, a very thorough and precise answer. Dan: And that's a nice way to say that I'm— Brett: Very well-versed. No, no, no, very well-versed. This is an amazing, amazing panel, we have here. Dikla, I want to toss one to you. Earlier, while you were presenting, there was a little side conversation that a lot of the attendees were having regarding some of the extensions for Core Web Vitals. My question to you is, and I think actually Ryan asked this, “Is there a recommended one?” 51:25 Dikla: Well, there's only one official one from Google. It is in the Chrome Store. It's from Addy Osmani, [who] is a senior engineer for the Chrome platform. And I think we'll be able to share a link later with the recording. So we'll do that. But yeah, there's one from Chrome. You can also find more details on the Chrome GitHub page. 51:56 Brett: Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much for that, Dikla. Dan, I've got another one that I want to throw at you. So here's a question. “Google Search Console is showing me that some of my pages have ‘needs improvement’, or it's even poor CWV? How will that impact their search ranking?” 52:20 Dan: Ask Dikla, she won't be able to answer either. Look at the end of the day, ranking is up to Google. And what I can say and what I'm allowed to say is based on what Google has said, that Google ranks primarily on stuff like content and, and authority and stuff like that, you know, content is king, people like to say in SEO. And that's the case, at the end of the day, Google wants to show you the things that you want to find. The Core Web Vitals as part of the page experience signal, that's just one of hundreds of signals that are an input into the Google search engine. So if you're in a very competitive field, then it can be—sort of you can think about it as a sort of a tiebreaker. If you've got a certain quality of content, and your competitor has more or less the same quality of content and authority, then that page experience signal can be a tiebreaker. And within it, the performance can be the deciding factor. Now what Google has said in the recent Google I/O, and that's all the information that I can give, because, you know, I don't work for Google. So I don't know what happens inside search. What they have said is that if they look at each one of these three metrics independently, and so you, for example, if you've got good FID, but poor LCP, you'll still get a ranking boost for potentially, get a ranking boost for FID, but not for LCP. So first of all, each one of them is taken independently. And what they've also said is that if you get a poor value for a particular metric for one of these three Core Web Vitals, then you won't get a boost for that particular metric. If you get a Yellow or Needs Improvement, you will get a partial boost for it depending on how close you are to the good part. And the boost plateaus when you reach Good. So once you reach Good, you will get the maximum possible boost for that particular metric, and it won't improve anymore. But like I said, from my perspective, actually the most important thing is that good-performing sites have good engagements. You know, if people get to your site, but then bounce because performance is poor, you know, what's the point? But that's what I can say about it. 54:54 Brett: I think that I think that's interesting. And it was another question I think that was asked as well. “Specifically Is there a PSI score that someone would shoot for to rank well on Google? Is there like a number, a gauge? What do you recommend?” 55:12 Dan: Again, PSI and Dikla, and jump in if she wants, but PSI in and of itself is not a ranking signal. As Dikla explained what Google uses to impact—as a ranking signal that impacts potentially, your rank within Google is the actual experience of actual visitors to your website, as collected into the CrUX database. Not PSI. PSI can be an indicator of you know what you may expect. So for example, if you don't get enough traffic yet, if you haven't published it, then you won't actually make it into CrUX, you only make it into CruX if you have sufficient traffic. So you can use PSI lab scores as a sort of an indicator of what you might expect to get. Mostly though, I would use PSI as a means to see whether you're improving or regressing. So you can look at the score you're getting, make some changes, and see if you're able to push that score up. Now, how will that score correlate to what your users will actually experience? I don't know. It depends. I mean, you know, if your users are primarily coming, let’s say from Canada, where they generally have really fast connections, and people usually have fairly fast mobile devices, a lot of iPhones. Then it might be that your mobile scores will actually be dramatically better than what you might see in PSI, like two times better, three times better. Who knows? 56:50 Brett: Well, that makes sense. That makes sense. Dan, that makes a lot of sense. But I wanted to interject, Dikla, did you want to add to this? 56:57 Dikla: Yeah, I know what Dan is saying, in general about lab data is very true and we discussed it before. As for ranking, I can't comment. And also I don't know. But yeah, so also, as Dan mentioned, again, the bottom line here is to improve the user experience. And that's definitely something that's worth doing and looking both at lab and field data. 57:26 Dan: I have to mention that, again, everything that I said that's kind of related to ranking is not based on any special information that Google, you know, gave us because they haven't. It's all based on my understanding of public information that Google has released, for example, in the context of the recent Google I/O conference. 57:49 Brett: Well, I can say that this has been incredibly jam-packed with amazing info, some awesome tips. Both of y'all are absolute rockstars. I can't thank you enough for coming and sharing all of your information. I think we should probably do this weekly, I’m volunteering both of you, I'm just teasing, I'm teasing. But this has been incredible, incredible. So I want to say thank you on behalf of me, and I know the Partners that love this and everybody else that really want to optimize their sites and be awesome and get found and be successful. So huge thanks to both of you. I want to say thank you.

Wix and SEOClarity partner to give you insider tips on creating a content strategy around SEO for your site. Hosts Matthew Kaminsky , from Wix SEO Education, and Mark Traphagen, Vice President for product marketing and training at SEOClarity, as they walk you through their best practices. In this webinar, we'll cover: Industry best practices for building a content strategy Discovering content opportunities through keyword research What types of content can support your SEO efforts Read the Transcript Transcript: Content strategy for SEO Speakers Matthew Kaminsky, Product Marketing Manager, SEO Education, Wix.com Mark Traphagen, VP Product Marketing and Training, seoClarity 00:00 Matthew: Hello, and welcome to our Wix SEO webinar, Content Strategy for SEO. I'm Matthew, and I'm a Product Marketing Manager for SEO Education here at Wix. I'm here joined by Mark Traphagen, who is the VP of Product Marketing at seoClarity. Alright, let's go ahead and get started. Mark, welcome. Thank you for joining us. 00:21 Mark: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be with you and with your audience today. All the people in Wix world, greetings, it's good to be with you. 00:31 Matthew: We're really excited to have you. Everybody, we have a treat in store for you. This is going to be a great presentation. Mark is a master at content strategy, specifically around SEO. So I'm going to turn the reins over to Mark. Let's get started. Throughout the presentation, if you have any questions, feel free to ask. We will also do our best to answer any common questions throughout the presentation. So take it away. 01:02 Mark: Terrific. Thank you, Matthew. First of all, I am Mark Traphagen, and I'm Vice President of Product Marketing and Training—my title is way too long—at seoClarity. Basically, I'm helping our clients on one of the world's leading SEO platforms to get to know us better, to get to use us better, and let the world know about what seoClarity does. We're very excited to be here today and excited to have this opportunity to share a little of what we've learned working with thousands upon thousands of sites all over the world over the last 12 years. We’ve helped them grow their content, grow their traffic, get the audience that they want and need—to grow your business, or whatever it is that you're trying to do with your Wix site. What we're going to be focusing on today is something that, at seoClarity, we call the content lifecycle. As website owners, we all know we have to build content. It's one of those essential things that we are going to do—not only for our users and our audience, which should be our first concern—but particularly here, we're talking about SEO. Search engines feed off of the content on your site. But often, we tend to get very isolated in that and think of content as, “What’s the next blog post I have to write? What's the next page that I should fill out?” I want to take a broader view today and lead you through thinking of your content in terms of a life cycle. Let's dig in and describe what we mean by that. We've seen on typical sites, after analyzing a lot of sites over time, a pattern that tends to repeat itself over and over again, where initially the site plants some content. You're getting started, and you think about the initial things you want to rank for. So you build some pages around that, you build some content—that's the planting stage. You get it out there. And if you've done your job well and your site is set up well, and it's optimized for SEO as a good Wix site is, then it begins to attract some traffic and attention over time. It starts to grow. You get excited because you're finally starting to get some traffic. It’s coming up there. Maybe you get so excited, you think, “We've done it! We did SEO, we did content, we're done.” Then what happens is, inevitably, it starts to decay. The search world asks, “What have you done for me today? What have you done for me lately?” There's always something new, something more relevant. There's always new content out there being produced, and the search engines never tire. They're constantly looking for what's the best, what's the latest, what's the most relevant. So you can't let this cycle happen to you. Instead, this is the overview of where we're going today. I'm going to give you a series of steps for each of those parts that we showed you before—planting, growing, and even the decay cycle that inevitably happens. So over time, this is your goal. You're still going to have these waves of planting, and then growing, and then seeing some decay. But with this webinar, you'll know what to do to build this over time. Even though it might come in waves, with a little bit of up and down, seasonality, and other things—this is going to be an upward climb. That's what we're looking to build today out of this content lifecycle. Let's dig into each of the stages of that, and let me show you what we advise our clients to do—what we've seen over the years that builds content success, builds traffic, audience conversions, the things that you're seeking. So, the planting stage, as we said, is getting content on your site. It's where you start. It comes up again and again, because there are always new areas of content. Maybe you've branched out into a new service, a new product, or new area of knowledge that you want to cover. So you begin to build content out around that, and that’s the seeding part. We call it seeding because you never get any plants in your garden if you don't plant the seeds, and your content pages are those seeds. So, the more seeds you plant in your garden, the more plants you’re going to have at harvest time. It’s a simple formula. You could say very simply that more content equals more opportunities. Now, I want to be very careful here and jump right in and say, that does not mean building content for content’s sake. You may have seen some outdated SEO advice like that—just build as much content as you can, you need more pages, and you constantly need new pages. That's not the thing you should be concentrating on. It’s very much more important to always be building quality content that's relevant for your audience, that's well constructed and shows authority, expertise, and trustworthiness. These are the things that Google is getting better and better at sussing out and looking for. You want to make that your concentration. But it's still undeniable that, over time, the more content you have, and the more focused content segments and pieces you have, the more opportunities you're creating for people to find you—and the right people to find you. That all starts with keyword research. Now, that's beyond the scope of this webinar, we're not going to go into detail on that. Wix has tremendous resources that Matthew and others can share with you about how to do keyword research properly. But it all starts there. It still starts there. I know some SEOs will say keyword research is dead. That’s because Google is getting more sophisticated about thinking about things topically. But it still starts at the root. Keywords are the basic words that people use to search, and they are the best clues that you have initially, to what content you should be creating. So, look up those resources and educate yourself on keyword research. That's your starting point. That's all I'll say for now. Another important part of that, I think, is to always think like a marketer. Even if you're a content marketer, or you're an SEO, you can't stop thinking like a marketer in general, which means you have to know your audience. Again, we're not going to go in depth on this—this is a whole other topic that we can provide resources for. But this is just good old marketing 101. First of all, who are my customers? They’re the people who already are interested in whatever my site is about. 07:07 You can find out through surveys, you can find out through analysis of traffic on your site, search queries on your site—there are all kinds of ways to find that out. Next, what are my potential audience? Who do I want to reach? What are they like? What are their hopes, fears, dreams, needs? Those are all the things that are going to inform you, along with your keywords, on your content—and the tone it should have, the level of expertise, and all of those things that make that content highly relevant to your audience. But another place you can go to discover things is the SERPs themselves, the search engine results pages. You go to Google and just type in the main keywords that you want to rank for, and see what Google is ranking. It's one of your best clues. That doesn't mean you should copy exactly what the highest ranking pages are doing, but they will give you an idea of the kind of quality, coverage, comprehensiveness, all these things. Google also provides some wonderful clues sometimes in the search features. One of the best ones that they've given us in many years is People Also Ask. They're showing us actual questions that people have put into Google, that Google sees as relevant to the topic. For example, “what is insurance fraud?” is the query that we typed in. “Can you go to jail for insurance fraud?” Somebody’s a little worried there. 08:29 All these are a little fraught with angst here, but when we’re talking about a topic like insurance fraud, it's going to be in that direction. That gives you a clue even to the tone and type of content that you want to be producing. So, do some actual research on the SERP to find out what kind of content you should be producing. And then, topical coverage. Think in terms of topics moving from the keyword level, to the topical level—the higher level. What are the main topics that we want to rank for? Not just keywords. And how can we cover those comprehensively? Here's an example. This is our blog, but we've structured it at seoClarity now as a resource center. You can see on the left that we have all types of content. You can even select based on the SEO level that you feel you're at, or based on the type of content. I show this to show that we've worked hard over the years, not just to produce all the different kinds of SEO-related content that we think we should be producing, but also to group it into topics and to think about it. Okay, we've covered this topic of the content marketing lifecycle, but what else is related to that? What else is somebody who's interested in that also going to want to learn about or see? So you start to think topically. Then you're ready to move into the planting stage. Our strategy there is to feed the content that we've been producing. You've probably heard this advice before, but it bears saying content is not build it and they will come. You've got to prompt it, you’ve got to feed by promoting via social media, newsletters, partnering. I mean, what I'm doing today—very bold-faced—me partnering with Wix to do this webinar is promotion. It's getting you to know that seoClarity is out there. Maybe you'll go after this and check out our blog and our resource center and learn more about SEO. That's all part of content promotion. It's not direct SEO, but it gets you noticed. It may start to get your content noticed, people may start to link to it, and that makes Google pay attention to you. Another more directly content, slash SEO-related tactic that we promote very heavily at seoClarity is this idea of topic clusters. Once you begin to get a certain amount of content on your site—and you see what people are interested in, what they respond to, and what performs for you—you'll start to get a better idea of the main topics of your site. And those you want to think of as your pillars. A pillar topic is a high-level topic for you. You want to have at least one really good page that’s maybe a little bit longer in content and more media rich, that covers that topic at a high level, but very comprehensively. And then you start to think in terms of—you do some research. Remember those People Also Ask questions? What are specific things within that topic that people want to know? Instead of just adding those all onto that super long article, build those out as their own satellite pieces of content. None of those by themselves are going to get as much traffic. But together, they are targeting an individual segment of your audience and they’re highly relevant to that. Let's look at an actual example of how that would work. Let's say you're a site in the travel field, and your big topic is vacation homes. We’re going to want to have a pillar page, a main content page that covers the topic of vacation homes. Just general information about it, and the main things people would want to know. But then you start to think about it. What are other things that people are wanting to know about, and asking about? It might be things like, “how to buy a vacation home” or “how to rent vacation homes”, “how to find vacation rentals”, “how to rent a beach house for a weekend.” Maybe you can get a little more specific there. “Can you rent a house for a single night” is very specific. But you start to see that people want those types of things, and if that's what they're looking for, Google is more likely to send people to a page that you have specifically about that, than to your general vacation homes page. Then, you want to interlink all of these back to that main page. Over time, Google and other search engines begin to see—this is a comprehensive site. This is a site where anything you want to learn about vacation homes and vacation home rentals or buying vacation homes—this site’s got it covered. So that's the idea of a topic cluster. Again, it's one of the best strategies we've ever seen for growing traffic with your content over time. 13:21 Matthew: Okay, so question In this case, if it's a travel company or a travel agency, maybe the pillar page would be about vacation homes? That would be the topic and then you have all the different types. Can you just do one topic as, like, your main blog? Michelle's asking, “Would a pillar page work as a whole blog? Or is it better to have multiple topics on your blog, or throughout your site?” 13:44 Mark: Yeah, I mean, blog versus site pages, you know—that's a great question. Our advice on that, from a structural standpoint, is your main topic pages—your pillar topic pages—should be high level in your site navigation. So try to create them as actual pages and link them, if you can, from your main navigation. As few clicks away—because, you know, a blog is structured to be the latest at top and your older content gets pushed further and further and further down. One way to indicate to the search engines that this is a main topic is to take these pillar topic pages and make them main resource pages, again, as high in your navigation as you can. Now the other pages, the satellite pages—they can be blog posts, they can be universal pages, whatever you want them to be—as long as you interlink them. Each of these pages you see here, how to buy a vacation home, how to find vacation rentals, would be linked to my main topical vacation homepage. And then, as much as possible—you don't want to over-clutter or overburden your main page. But for the most popular ones, the most relevant ones, link back to them. Maybe at the bottom. Like other things you've seen on web pages. Where other topics you might be interested in—[like] how to buy a vacation home, how to rent a vacation home—link back to those. 15:14 Matthew: In Wix Blogs, we have a great feature that's Other Related Posts, where when you pick up one blog post, you can link to other posts [at the bottom] that are on your blog. That's a great way to do this sort of interlinking, and it's built right into the product. That's perfect. 15:27 Mark: Please take advantage of that. You will be amazed over time, if you do that, the effect that it will have on your traffic. Because Google wants to send people to sites that are comprehensive about a topic, not just the individual query that they had. But if Google says like, you've got this covered well, we're more confident—because people that are just searching for vacation homes, they have these other questions, too. And if they can find that information on your site, that's even more useful. Okay, and “how to find homes for rent by owner”—don't want to leave them out too. Alright, the next stage is the growth stage. This is exciting. Now we want to grow our content, which means we want to use the content that we already have. And we want to say, how can we expand the traffic for that and the audience for that? How can we get more bang for our buck out of that content? Two strategies here. The first one—one's negative and one's positive. The negative one you’ve got to do, and we call that pruning. Obviously this metaphor comes out of horticulture—planting, growing, decay—as we're talking about here. So over time, if you've ever grown trees, you know that as they age they will begin to have branches or even some types of plants that are not productive. They're dying out, and they're actually sapping energy from the tree. A good tree manager will come in, and will be willing to cut off those dead branches, so that the tree will be healthier. It can produce new branches and new traffic. That's what you want to do. So let's talk about a basic strategy for that. I'm going to go through this a little bit quickly, but remember, this will be recorded and you can get this later. You can come back and find all these. We use the acronym ROT here for this pruning stage. So what is ROT? Well, first step, the R in ROT is redundant content. Looking for redundant content—what is that? That can be duplicate content. As you start to build a lot of content on your site, it's gonna happen. You're gonna discover over time that you have pages that are virtually the same. They're about the same thing, for the most part. Maybe they even have a lot of the same phraseology, a lot of the same content on them. Sometimes it even turns out that they actually are identical, but maybe you have two different titles on them or you're trying to rank for different keywords. This is confusing to search engines. There's no penalty for it. Except for the fact that you're probably not going to get as much traffic because the search engine feels a little uncertain about, you know, which page really is the page for that. Kind of related is cannibalization . People mean different things by cannibalization. At seoClarity, we talk about it in terms of—cannibalization is where you have a page and you can literally see—if you're tracking your rankings over time and you can you have a tool that shows you which URL on your site is ranking for a keyword—you can see that Google flip flops back and forth. Google seems to be uncertain. Sometimes it ranks this page, sometimes it ranks that page. You don't want to cause that kind of confusion to search engines. So the fix here—you can go and do some research and learn about these techniques if you don't know them. The first two are a little technical. There are ways to redirect the one page to the other so that if somebody goes to that page, they actually end up on the page that you prefer for them to end up on. You can use canonicalization to tell the search engine which page is the important page for that keyword or that topic. You can merge the content, just bring it together. If there are good elements from both, make one page that merges the best of each. Or redo the lesser page. Change it, make it significantly different so that it will rank for a different keyword. The second is outdated content—second of the ROT [acronym]. Outdated is just what it sounds like. It’s old content. A lot of your old content over time will just be outdated beyond repair. By beyond repair, I mean where you look at it and you realize there's nothing we can do to update this. If you can update the page, fantastic. Do that. And by the way, update does not mean just changing the date on the page. Google is wise to that—that doesn't fool anybody or it doesn't fool the search engine. Update means literally updating the content to bring it up to date and make it more relevant. That can be a good strategy. If you say like, we're an iPhone website, and nobody cares about iPhone 4 anymore, that doesn't get much traffic. The fix is, if it can't be updated, kill it. 19:48 This is a hard thing if you invested so much work and time into your content. Everybody hates to kill content, but think of that tree again, and cutting off those dead branches. It really is going to make your site healthier for SEO in the long run. And then finally, trivial content. By trivial here we mean it's not working for you. For whatever reason, it's just not. You look at your analytics and you say this just never drove any traffic, it never got attention. It's not earning any links. And maybe you've tried a few things. You tried to improve it, grow it, and for whatever reason, it's just not performing. Again, if you’ve given it every chance, kill it. You’ve got to be willing to prune your non-performing content if you can't improve it. However, there are ways—this is more positive now, in the growth stage—to take advantage of high performing content and get even more out of it. We call that splicing. You may know, again, in the world of horticulture, the world of plants, splicing is a technique—especially with fruit trees—where you graft a branch from one kind of variety of a fruit onto another and you produce a whole new variety. You get something new out of it. That's what we're looking to do in this splicing stage. So, splicing simply means figuring out where, on a really high performing piece of content, there may be opportunities to split off parts of that content into its own pages—its own blog posts, whatever—that will perform better overall than what the page is doing now. We recommend, just as a rule of thumb—you don't have to follow this religiously—we recommend to clients that anything where a page is ranking for 3x the average keywords ranking per page for your site is a candidate for splicing. Let me go quickly through a formula. Then I'll show you how you can work that out to determine that. But what you're going to do here is, you need to get the count of your ranking keywords from Google Search Console. Is Google Search Console integrated into Wix, Matthew? 21:58 Matthew: It is. If you use our Get Found on Google tool—it's also known as [SEO Tools]—if you complete the first step, and you use the Connect to Google button, it will create an account in Search Console automatically for you and automatically index your homepage. So you may already have the data there and you didn't even realize it. All you have to do is go into Search Console using your account that you connected to, and you'll have all this information in there, waiting for you to play around with and to check out. 22:31 Mark: Terrific. Another advantage of being a Wix user. So many things are set up automatically for you. It's just there, and you can do it. That's awesome. So you're going to get your count of ranking keywords—I'll show you how to do that in a moment—and you're going to get your count of ranking URLs. That means the URLs and keywords that Google is actually using to send traffic to your site, or at least showing in search. It may not be sending traffic to your site. These are at least showing on search result pages. And you're going to divide one by the other. That will give you your average number of keywords ranking per page. Let's show you how you do that in Google Search Console. So, in Google Search Console, you're going to want to go to the Performance tab. First, go to queries. Queries are your keywords. Queries are the things that Google sees your page is relevant for. It's putting them into search. Then you scroll to the bottom of that page, and you'll see a number down here. It says rows per page, and it shows you how many rows you've got. This is a personal website of mine, and I've got 1000. Numbers in Google Search Console are always kind of rounded, and that’s okay—for this purpose, that’s perfectly okay. So I have about 1000 keywords that my little site—that Google says I rank for, that I show up in search for. You write that number down: 1000 keywords. Next, for the URLs, we're going to go to the Pages tab under Performance. Same thing, go to the bottom, get that last number, 62. So, I have 62 pages that Google is showing in search results for me. Now I take those numbers and say: 1000 keywords that I'm ranking for, divided by 62 URLs that Google has indexed. That comes out to 16 keywords per page average. Using our rule of thumb—about 3x—I want to go back and look for any pages that have about 50 or more ranking keywords, or about 3 times that average. Those are good candidates for splicing. The main takeaway here is just simply any pages on your site that you start seeing, from your SEO information, rank for a lot of keywords—splicing is going to be your strategy. So how do we do that? How do we splice? Well, first of all, you identify the keywords. You can do that from Google Search Console. You focus specifically on the URL of the candidate page, and you find the keywords that aren't ranking well, that are still relevant for you. You're going to have some keywords that are ranking on page one. Those are terrific. Dig down a little deeper, and you find all these keywords that [are], you know, ranking position 27, something like that. But boy, it’s still a good keyword for us. It's still relevant. So what do I do here? Create a new piece of content centered around that keyword. Focus on it. Google is seeing that your present page is relevant for that keyword, but it's not ranking it. It's not really ranking it high enough for it to get traffic. That means you already have the relevancy. Google wants to rank you for that. Give them a page. Specifically build out a great page around that keyword, and then interlink it. As we said before, use that topic clustering strategy, with an existing piece, and sit back and wait a little bit. I bet you'll begin to see you moving up on that keyword ranking. Splicing is such a great, great strategy. We use it all the time. Alright, let's finally move on to the last stage. The sad one. Sad but inevitable in any lifecycle is decay. No matter how good a piece is, almost inevitably over time it's going to start to fall off in traffic and intention. What do you do with that, when something starts to decay? There's only one tactic here, and that is refresh where you can. So let's talk about refreshing. 26:34 As far as finding what to refresh, [here’s a] good place to start. This is back in Google Search Console, again. We're looking at our pages that we're ranking for. I've dug down here now. If you look on the right hand side, where it says position, you see these are all now 12, 13, 14. Generally, that means we're on the second page. There's a lot of variance these days, but generally we think of the first page of Google as having 10 links on it, or 10 sites that rank. So these are doable. These are almost there, you know. They're almost to the first page, which means maybe a little bit of work, of improving some of the things that we talked about already in this webinar, applying that, going in and just spicing up the content a little bit, adding more to it, making it better, more comprehensive, finding opportunities to interlink with other relevant content on your site, all those techniques. These are good candidates. You could drive these up to page one, and start getting some traffic from them. So that's refreshing. Also look for—and you can find this in Google Search Console, again—keywords or pages you have that have high impressions, but low click through rate. So something [where] a lot of people are looking for that thing, but they're not clicking on yours. One of the things that you can do is try to improve your meta description, the little description that Google includes [in] the first 2 or 3 lines after a search result. As you may know from experience, they don't always show the one that you put in and your code into your site. But they often do if it's well written, if it's very well descriptive of the page. You can't get too salesy in it—you can't say things like, “click here, please!” But give a little bit of enticement so that people are interested, because not everybody clicks on that first result. People do scan through the page, and they look at those little descriptions to get an idea of like,which of these should I click on first? So little things you can do to improve that click through rate. 28:35 Matthew: We have a few people who went into their Search Console, and they said they can see the pages, but they can't see the position column. You add it at the top of the page, right? When you're looking at that report? 28:49 Mark: Exactly, there's options that you can have to show which columns to show. Look at the top of that page, and you'll see different things you can click on to show if you want to just include position on that report. Good question. Matthew: Great. Mark: So finally, some ways to refresh. Okay, I know what pages I want to refresh. How do I do that? The simplest and most direct way? Expand the text. Do some keyword research and maybe include some more relevant keywords on the page and talk about those. Don't just throw keywords on the page. Those keywords are clues, like, “Oh, we should expand a little bit here and talk a little bit more about these related areas.” Look at the SERP again, as we said before, the search results page and see if something's changed. Maybe you got behind. Maybe you didn't realize the whole topic had shifted in some way. And other pages have moved on, but you didn't. You didn’t get a clue. Find that out. Then, of course, you know, build it into one of your topic clusters. If that page is on page 2 in Google, but it's kind of orphaned, is there a topic cluster that you can include it in to make it more relevant, more visible? So [those are] all things that you can do in that. Over time, I call it the “lifecycle lifecycle,” because we talked about the content lifecycle, or the lifecycle of a particular piece of content. But it's a way of life, it's maybe a “lifecycle lifestyle.” You want to develop this regular thing of seeding new content, feeding it, to make it begin to get some traffic and to grow the audience that it has. Being willing to prune from time to time, go back and cut out the dead non-performing or conflicting content. Where you can, splicing and taking off high-performing content that's ranking for a lot of keywords, and splitting off to more targeted long tail keywords in their own pages on your site. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. We see time and again, our clients who do this have this upward cycle over time where they're growing their traffic and their relevance. And that's your goal. So thank you so much for being a part of this. Here are the places where you can learn more and follow us. 30:58 Matthew: Alright, awesome. That was a fantastic presentation. Thank you so much. So we tried to answer as many questions as we could throughout the chat. But I do have a couple that I think I'd like to add to this. Somebody else asked early on—they provide a service, they have a few clients that provide the same service in the same geographical area. How can they differentiate their content in order to rank? If they're targeting dentists in Boise, Idaho, or you know, something? It's a very small, niche topic. And it's a very small targeted area. What can they do to kind of differentiate themselves in terms of content? 31:42 Mark: Yeah, that's a great question. Part of that is a local SEO question. We actually have a division called Local Clarity that deals with that. So local SEO is not my specialization. There's places where you can learn more about that. But from a content standpoint, this can actually be easier than you think, simply because it's a great, like—I love that you use dentists because I happen to have a friend who's a dentist in Charlotte, who's built a tremendous SEO presence in the Charlotte, North Carolina regional area with his content optimization. Because he noticed if you go to most dental sites, there's either very little real content—like real, useful educational content. Or if it's there, you can tell instantly they bought this content somewhere. It's a paragraph or two, or they had some paid writer who doesn't really know anything about dentistry just, you know, slap up a few words on a page. When you see that kind of thing in your niche, just by creating better content—by spending some time and thinking about, what are the most important educational things that my dental clients might want to know about, and being the best in your industry. It's actually easier to do content optimized ranking on a localized niche like that. Because you're not competing against huge medical sites or something that are global or nationwide. If you've done your local SEO work, Google knows you're focused on that particular area. So you're only competing against the other dentists in Charlotte, in this case, like my friend. He just looked at their sites and said, I can do better than that, and just took it one by one and caught that project. So I think from the standpoint of what we're talking about today, [the] number one advice I would have is actually go look at the other sites in your niche in that local area. And do better than them. You can do better. 33:44 Matthew: That's always—you have to take a look at what your competitors are doing. We actually did a great webinar together with Semrush on competitor analysis. So I highly recommend you take a look at that webinar that we did. It's on the Wix.com YouTube channel . We got another question. Throughout the presentation, a lot of people have been asking about different keyword tools or different free tools. Are there any tools that you recommend? Or even want to demo? Wink, wink. 34:16 Mark: Funny you should ask. Yeah, this is Spark, our free content optimizer tool. You're seeing it on the left there. This is actually a page on our own website, and it's a Chrome plugin. You can install it for free, use it for free for life. All the information there is yours. But this is also really great for competitive research—not just learning about your own site, but going out and looking, when you start to see, like, what are the sites that are ranking for a keyword I am [also ranking for]? And what are they doing differently than I am, that I should maybe be thinking about doing? It's a great tool for doing that kind of research. So it's not a keyword research tool, per se—that's a component of it—but it’s more of a great tool for analyzing both, how are my own pages doing? from a very simple level, and, how are my competitors' pages doing?. So I'll just walk quickly here through some things you can see this way. Right at the top, you see the page that I'm on right now. It tells me how many keywords I am ranking for, and the top keywords. This isn't a very aged page, it hasn't been around very long. So right now, it's ranking for just one keyword, “SEO for travel industry”. That's a really great keyword for us. That’s good to see. A quick on-page summary, like really basic information about the HTML structure of your page, or a competitor's page that you're looking at. So you can see right off the bat, what's the title that Google sees? What's the meta description that Google sees? All this kind of information A quick usability audit, which is looking at possible technical problems that might be on that page that you might want to think about getting fixed, that might be preventing it from getting indexed, or [are causing] Google to have a hard time understanding that page. A little bit of the backlink information on the page. We draw that from Majestic SEO. We get a firehose feed from them—all of their information, great information on that. You can even do a relevance analysis. This gets you inside some of our tools that enterprise level businesses pay thousands of dollars for. So you can put in a keyword here. Gosh, we wanted this page to rank for this keyword. Put that in there, hit Analyze, and we'll tell you what you should be adding to this page if you want to rank for that particular keyword or topic. And some basic information is useful. 36:41 Matthew: Teresa actually asked, “Don’t we have this info that this extension is providing on Wix?” Yes, you do have some of this information for your site, but this is a great way to see what other sites are up to. If you see another page that's ranking ahead of you for a keyword that you want to rank for, you can easily open this extension and see, okay, what's their meta description? What are the top words on their page? Who's backlinking to them? So you can kind of see what's going on in other pages. Of course, you can see your H1, you can see your meta description in the Editor. But this is a great way to kind of spy on the competition and understand what's going on outside of your site. 37:25 Mark: And our user base, the people that use the Spark tool and love it, consistently tell us that's their number one usage. Just spying on their competitors. They typically have some of this information already on their own pages. So it's a great way to do a quick comparison and see what they're doing. And this is really cool—this is giving you top level analysis from something that enterprise clients pay thousands of dollars to get in much more detail. But we can do high level topical analysis. Looking at the page that you're looking at right now in your browser, we can tell you, here are the keywords that search engines most likely see as relevant for this page. That might give you some ideas [of] where you want to maybe include more of that or talk more about that on the page. Beef that up. All these are ways that you're going to want to use that refresh strategy, or that growth strategy, that we talked about—where you're trying to expand the relevancy of your pages, get them to rank better, [and] get more traffic. If you look up “spark seoClarity” on Google, you'll find it. It's also linked from the webinar. So absolutely free. Try it out and have fun with it. 38:42 Matthew: Yep. And afterwards, when we send out an email to everybody with the link, we’ll also send a link to the extension, as well. Mark: Perfect. Matthew: Let's ask a few more questions. Someone asked about, “At the end, you showed the lifecycle lifecycle, and how you want to keep going. How long does that take for a lifecycle like that to go? What's the timeframe?” 39:12 Mark: I can give the most familiar SEO answer to that, Matthew. What is it? You know what it is? Matthew: It depends. Mark: It depends, exactly. Which is a horrible cop out answer. But in so much of SEO, it really is true. So what that's going to depend on is your marketplace that you're in. And a number of factors. It's also going to depend on your own resources. How quickly can you build content? How quickly can you pivot? How quickly can you apply the steps? In general, the more time that you can give to those steps that I showed you—going through plant, grow, decay, seeding, feeding, refreshing, all those things. The more times you can go through that over the course of a year, generally, I think the quicker that cycle is going to go. Because Google moves slowly. SEO is a process where you're seeding. That's why I think the horticulture metaphor is so good, because you’ve got to seed in the spring to get a harvest in the fall. And you’ve got to think of Google in that way. But the nice thing is scalability. So, in the beginning, it's going to be slow, and the cycle is going to be long. And the benefits are going to be long coming. But keep doing it, don't give up. Over time, especially as you have more and more to work with, because you've been applying these steps, you're going to see that you're going to begin to scale and it will become quicker. Google gets more confident about your site, gets more confident that it knows what it's about, that it's good, that it's relevant, that it's useful to the Google audience, etcetera, etcetera. You're going to find that cycle cutting down over time. So I can't give you any one size fits all answer. In most cases, though, you're looking at—over a period of months, at least. I would say every few months, try to come back, at least, and revisit and do the pruning, and the splicing, and those kinds of steps, that will then be refreshing. 41:16 Matthew: Yep, that's a great point. SEO is a marathon, it's not a sprint. With every change, you might not see the effects of that change for a while. So it does take time. Have patience. And that actually is a great thing you just mentioned about Google and helping Google understand your site better. Someone asked, “Does buying Google Ads help Google understand and help your site rank better at all?” It's not really related to content, but still might be a good way for— 41:48 Mark : That’s a good question. Okay, I can answer this one. It does not depend. The answer is emphatically no. And I truly believe this. And not just because Google—Google takes every opportunity they can when this question comes up to say, no, no, it's like absolute separation between ads and things. Now, I know a lot of us probably don't trust Google or say it's a huge, mega corporation. Why would we trust what they say? You don't need to just go with what they say. To me, it makes absolute sense that they keep that separate. And here's why. Google's organic search industry—its website search, organic search—is one of the most valuable things on the face of the earth. It's driven one of the largest businesses ever known. It's created untold billions for Google. That's the goose that lays the golden egg, along with the ads. So it's the thing that drives the ads. But if Google search was ever to be—all of that runs on trust. We use Google because we trust it. We trust that we're getting truly organic search results. That the algorithm has our best interests at heart. I guess I link this to my feeling about conspiracy theories in general. The bigger the organization, and the bigger the conspiracy theory—which I think you know, [the idea] that buying ads helps your organic ranking, I think it's a conspiracy theory, because there's no proof of it—the bigger the conspiracy, the more certain it is that it's going to be leaked. It's going to get out eventually. And that's the reason why I don't think it happens, because it would just take once. If somebody leaked out, you know, and somebody escaped from Google headquarters with the evidence and said, yep, you buy enough ads and we send a message over to organic to rank these people higher, that would be the end of Google. Matthew: Yeah. Mark: And so that's why I believe them when they say that. 43:43 Matthew: And also, I mean, there is a place for Google ads in your marketing strategy. It is a great way to generate traffic fast. But, ultimately, Google ads are like a water faucet. When you have it on, and you turn it on, and you're paying Google, the traffic flows. But the minute you turn off the campaign, the traffic stops. But that doesn't happen with SEO. With organic, it does take a longer time to build up. But it is higher quality, and it's more sustainable. You know, even though this process does take time, and the lifecycle does take time, and energy, and effort, you'll see you'll reap the benefits by getting really quality traffic. 44:25 Mark: Another thing, if I may quickly, that the ads are useful for, from an SEO standpoint, is paid ads are a great way to test out keywords. Before you invest in building a piece of content—with all the expense and time that takes—test out a paid ad landing page. If it's working in paid then it's probably worth investing in for organic, and building and optimizing for organic on that. Because with ads, you get very fast feedback—not the kind of feedback you get from organic. So testing is worth spending the money, especially on a new site, to begin to test the waters and see what it might be worth trying to build out organic strategy around. 45:08 Matthew: Fantastic. And going on that, especially if you're a new site, a few people have mentioned that they're just getting started. They’re not sure how to do this for a brand new site, or they're a one man band, a small team, they don't have a lot of resources. How can they go about creating this content? How can they go about creating a content strategy, if they don't have the time to write or don't have the time to do all this stuff that we talked about? 45:35 Mark: Yeah, boy, I feel for you. I know, it's a tremendous dilemma. I wish I could give you an easy answer for that. Because you've got to find—if you want to drive organic traffic, it's gonna be a great source of traffic for you over time—you've got to make [time]. It's like anything else in your business. If you're running a business, you don't have time for anything. Everything is urgent. So, if you had a store, you’d say, ah, stocking the shelves takes so much time. I don't have time for that. I've got to do accounting, I've got to do this and that, and I’ve got to do that advertising. If you don't put any product on the shelves, you're going to go out of business. So at some point, you've got to build some time and priority into this. It's okay to start slow. Like I said, in the beginning, even just my dentist friend—he's in the same boat that you are. So go out and build a few good pieces of content around your most relevant topics, and do it better than your competitors are doing it. And that's the place to start. And then the lifecycle that I showed you, I'm giving you a vision for the future. Because if you plant the seeds, even if you plant a few seeds, and slowly start to grow them, you're going to get, over time, the content library that you can begin to apply those things to. And make those more efficient, make them do more for you over time. So I wish I could tell you how to find more time. That's another miracle for another miracle worker. 47:13 Matthew: Yeah, I mean, also—getting started, you can just do an hour a week. You can set aside time to write a few things here and there. And then over time, it will build up. It’ll become a snowball. And once you see it work, and you see the results, you'll find the time. You'll want to do it. Once again, thank you, Mark. And thank you to all of our Wix users for coming out today. And have a great day. 47:43 Mark: Thank you, Matthew, and thank you Wix, and everybody that came.

See the latest advanced SEO features in action. Watch a demo from Wix SEO Product Manager Dana Jaffe and discover how to make these new professional tools work for your website. Read the Transcript Transcript: New advanced SEO tools webinar Speakers Edu Giansante, Head of Community, Wix Dana Jaffe, Product Manager, SEO, Wix 00:00 Edu: Are we live now? Can you see us? Okay, we should be live now. Is it live? Yeah, we're live. Finally, thank God. Oh my God, guys, this is reality, this is going live for real. We had some issues with YouTube and we had to use the backup code for them. But it worked. We're finally live. I'm really sorry for the eight minute delay. But I'm glad that we're here and that we can finally see you, talk to you, hear you. And we're ready to present something really exciting with SEO. And I'm right here on stage. Dana, join me, Dana Jaffe, she's an expert in SEO at Wix, she works in the product team. And I'm glad that this worked guys, seriously, like today, it was a challenge. Like we had some issues, I think with some servers at YouTube. And finally, it's all sorted. My name is Edu Giansante, I'm Head of Community at Wix. And I'm seeing a lot of comments from people all over the world. I see people in Ireland, in the UK and they're grabbing their cup of tea because I know it's four o'clock now, it's time for tea, and everyone else might be grabbing their own beverages. I'm hoping you guys are all good, still happy to be here with you. And really again, as I said, apologies for the delay. So without further ado, I want to introduce you to Dana and Dana, please take it away. 01:19 Dana: Hello, everyone. It's really good to be here with you today and live. I hope that some of you were already with us at last year's webinar. And I'm very excited to show you what we've been up to in the last year. So let's get started, Edu, right? Edu: Sure. Yeah, go for it. Dana: Okay, so before we jump in, I just want to briefly introduce myself. So as Edu said, my name is Dana, I'm leading the SEO product team here [at] Wix. And we're in charge of helping you guys help your clients better succeed on search engines. And today, we'll cover many of our new and exciting releases. We'll start with URL customization for blog posts and product pages. We'll talk some more about our structured data markup capabilities and the new features that we have there. We’ll talk about bot log reports, robots and additional meta tags. We'll also have a sneak peek at our upcoming release, which is very exciting. And we'll have some answers and feedback. Yes. 02:22 Edu: Amazing. I love that. Guys, make sure you send your questions. We have people in the chat to help you with questions in between. But obviously, if there are questions that are relevant to ask Dana during the presentation, I will throw them in here so she can answer. So yeah, go ahead Dana. 02:38 Dana: Great. Okay, so let's start with something that I know many of you have been waiting for for a long time. And it's URL customization for blog posts and product pages. And what does it actually mean? It's the ability to customize the default structure of either the product pages or blog posts that you get by default with Wix. So you know, when you work with either the Wix Blog or Wix Stores, you get the default structure of that product dash page or post, and so on. And from now on, you can customize that to meet your site or business needs. You can edit the prefix, you can remove the prefix, you can add a suffix, you can do basically whatever you want. And I can share that we're also working on more and more ways to customize the URL with more cool and useful variables. I do want to remind you guys that URLs are very delicate and crucial. So make sure you don't make any unnecessary changes and that all of the changes that you're making—you make them very, very carefully. As you know, and if your site is already live, and then you make changes to your URL structure. Chances are that both visitors and bots that used to have links to your site now have broken links, because the URLs are no longer valid. This means you need to handle 301 redirects to redirect them from the previous URLs which are broken to the new ones. And the cool thing about this feature is that we handle everything automatically for you. All you need to do is keep the checkbox on and the redirects will be added automatically, including fixing any loops that might have occurred. So it's really cool and recommended to use. Edu: Nice. Dana: So now I'll show you [what] it looks like and how you can get to it with some cool examples. So in your site's dashboard, go to Marketing and SEO and then to SEO Tools. That's the screen that you'll see. Click on SEO Patterns. And then you can choose the relevant page type. In this example, we'll go for product pages. Here you have all of the different settings that you can customize on the page type level for products. Choose page URL, and then you see the default URL structure that you get with Wix. So in this example site I'm selling toys for kids. So I want to change the product dash page prefix to be slash toys. So once I do that, this checkbox will appear. It will offer to automatically redirect everything from the previous structure to the new slash toys one. After clicking Save, you will get this pop-up making sure that you are approving all of the changes that are about to be made, because they will be made immediately on the spot. And after you click Confirm, everything will be applied. So that's an example of how to use the URL structure feature. I hope you guys are as excited as I am about this one. 05:25 Edu: This is amazing. This is actually a game changer. I love the fact that it's so simple and straightforward. This is awesome. 05:32 Dana: Yes, I like it too. Thank you Edu. And you can also do exactly the same thing for your blog post pages and soon for more and more page tags in Wix. So stay tuned. And moving on to structure data markups capabilities. But before we dive in, just to make sure we're on the same page, what are structured data markups in the first place? So they are pieces of code added behind the scenes of the HTML on your site. And they're there to basically better explain to the search engine bots, what the content is on the page. What does it include? Think of it as a better way of communicating with these bots using a dictionary that they already know, you can explain to them. So hi Google, this page, for example, includes a recipe that is the code that you're seeing here on the right. And it takes X minutes to prepare these, these are the calories of this recipe and so on. And the cool thing about the structured data markup capability is it's not just giving search engines more context of the content on the page. Later, you can have these pages appear as rich results on the search results page. Like the example you see here for again, the recipe, which is very cool, very useful, and can increase your conversion, your CTR in search results. So in Wix, the cool thing is that we take care of many structured data markups for you automatically. We add it to your product pages or event pages, your blog posts, your booking services, pages, and many, many more. But for now, you can also control these markups that we add automatically for each of your page types. You can add more than one, you can add your own, and so much more. And let's see some examples of what you can do with these new capabilities before we show an actual example. So first, you can switch the default markup for your blog posts. So you can choose between article, news article and a post, which is very cool and very useful for blog users. You can add additional markup to any of your pages. But I do recommend to do it only when it's relevant because search engines are very, very sensitive to faulty data. So I wouldn't risk it and only use it when it's highly relevant to the content of your pages. And if you see the markup that we gave you by default, and you want to make a change, you want to add something, to remove something, you can convert it to a custom markup and basically use it as a template to get started and just make your own changes, save it and it will be immediately applied. So let's see an example. So this feature as well can be found in SEO Patterns. But instead of the page URL card, you just need to click on the structured data markup one. If you click on the product markup or again in the product example here, you'll see the default markup that you get from Wix. It includes basically the code that we're adding for you. So everything is here for you guys to see. And a quick brief explanation and also a link to learn more on the schema and the logic that is implemented behind it. This is of course, just a demonstration of an example of how it can look when it's being shown as a rich result in Google. If you want to make changes to the presets, you can click on the Convert to custom markup [link]. And it will open this new model, you can name your schema, you can make your changes, add variables that are relevant. And once you apply this, the previous Wix schema will be automatically hidden because we don't want to have two schemas of the same type. It doesn't make any sense. And your schema will be automatically applied. So that's one example of how to use this cool new feature. 09:17 Edu: This is excellent. Dana, there was a question that came up here actually more and more. So I want to ask here because I feel it's relevant. Will this be available for Editor X anytime soon? 09:26 Dana: Already [is]. 09:29 Edu: Oh my God. There you go. Great news. Great news. Alright. 09:35 Dana: Great. So let's talk about bot log reports. And again, I want to make sure we're all on the same page. So what our bot log reports or you might know it as log data analytics. So think that every time either bot or human requests to access a page on your site, we keep a row in our databases with this information. Which page did the bot ask to access? Was the response successful or not successful? And so on. What’s the date? What’s the time? And by analyzing this data, you can really understand how bots interact with the website. Are there any issues? Are there any errors? And if you really learn how to dive deep into these reports, you can also identify opportunities, and we'll talk about that later. So we have several reports. And each report can help you answer a different set of questions. For example, which bots are actually crawling my website? And [at what] frequency? And which pages of my site are being crawled the most? And are there any HTTP errors that the bots are encountering, while crawling my website? And when I say HTTP errors, I think the most common famous one is the 404, the infamous one to be more exact. I'm sure it happens to all of you, when you try to access a page and you [see] “page was not found 404 errors”. That is probably the worst thing that can happen from the search engine’s perspective, because like once it happens, chances are that this page won't show up high in search results again. So we want to prevent that from happening. And of course, to prevent that from happening to the site visitors as well. We don't want them to encounter any errors. So let's take a look at some examples of how to interact with these reports. So you can find them in your site's dashboard, Analytics and Reports under the Reports tab, if you scroll down, you'll get to the Marketing and SEO section. And the bottom three reports are at the bot log reports. So the first one is Bot Traffic over Time. So when you open it, you can see in this example, in the last 30 days, each day, which bots crawled your website and in how many hits you had from each bot, which is super, super interesting. So you can see in this example, we pre-filter the top four bots, which are Yandex, Bing, Google Desktop, and Google Mobile. And of course, if you want to take a look at all of the bots that are crawling your website, you can just remove this filter and then you'll get like a very, very high level view of all the bots that are crawling your website. Of course, you can add, similar to other Wix Analytics reports, which I hope you guys are familiar with because they are very, very cool and valuable. You can add filters, you can change the dimension looking at by week or month instead of day, you can look a bit back. And it's very, very cool. And also similar to the other analytics reports, you can download the report, you can subscribe to it to get updates, you can take a look at the about this reports app to get more tips and insights on how to use these reports. Very, very cool. 12:41 Edu: Amazing, Dana, there are some questions. I mean, some of them were from the prior part of the presentation. But I kind of feel that we should ask them now because people were kind of catching up with your talk. So one of them is will it be possible to add different JSON specific markups to each post, for example, how to, recipe and so on? 13:02 Dana: That's a great question. It will be possible. It's not possible today. But we're working on it. It's in the oven. It will be possible. 13:09 Edu: Nice. Love that, love that. That's great. And there was another question that I feel again, since I'm stopping you already, why not—can the schema be added to dynamic pages as well? 13:22 Dana: Currently only using the Velo API, but we're also working on that and [it] will also be available. 13:28 Edu: That's super. Love that, love that. Cool. Alright, keep going. 13:32 Dana: Great. So moving on to the next bot log report. And that's the bot traffic by page. And this one is very interesting. I've hidden the names of the pages here because that's a real site. But here you can see some kind of a histogram that tells you which of your pages are being crawled the most. And same here you can add filters, you can change the number of pages that you want to see. This can really give you an indication of which of your pages are more successful, or have the potential to be successful. So it's really, really interesting and insightful. You can also view this report in a table format, if you want, like a different viewer to download it and then make an Excel or Google Sheets analysis on top of that. And the last one, which is kind of my favorite, I'll tell you is that response status over time. So when you get here, you can see for each day, how many—either hits or unique pages, you can choose the measure that got a response code that wasn't a success. Meaning either a 404 or a 500, which is a server error or a 301 redirect, meaning how many times a bot accessed the page and was redirected to another page. That's not an error, but it is something that's worth tracking. But the 404s are what should be, I think, the most interesting and if you take a look at the table view, you'll be able to see for each page, the response that it got, how many hits, when it started and when it ended. So you can track the latest issues that you have and act to fix them by adding a 301 redirect, obviously. So there are many more things and we don't have much time. But there are many more things to do with these reports. I encourage you to check our Knowledge Base articles about this and ask us questions in the Community later. So we'll be able to answer you guys. 15:25 Edu: That's amazing. I'm loving this. Guys keep coming [with] questions. I'm trying to pull them up here, as you ask. There's a lot of comments coming in. So if I'm not able to put it here for Dana to answer live, maybe we can do it at the end. But also, there's the Support team making sure that the questions get answered in the live session, in the chat. So we've got you covered, so you're fine. 15:49 Dana: Great. So moving on to robots, and custom meta tags. So meta tags, just again, to make sure we're all on the same page, are snippets of code that better describe the content of the page or HTML tags added to the HTML. They're not visible on the page itself. Yet, they do give, as we said, search engines more information on what the page includes. And one of the most important meta tags is the robots one. Robots basically includes instructions for search engines on how to interact with the page when it's being crawled. So you can tell the bots to not index this page, so it won't show in search results. You can tell them to not follow links on the page, to not index images on this page, and many, many more [instructions]. And now, you have full control over these robots meta tags, what you used to have up until now with Wix is the famous slogan, right? Remember it, the index, no index, so it's still there. And it still works, it’s still there, it is completely correlated with the feature you see here. But this one has another and more and more directives, for more advanced users, like your guys’ purposes. So you can customize this robots meta tag for both individual pages by going to each page’s SEO Settings panel, or for specific page types all at once, if you want to save some time, using SEO Patterns. And let's see an example. So again, if you go to SEO Patterns, to Products and open the robots meta tag, you can choose which directory you want to turn on. By default, they're all off. So search engines can freely crawl all of your product pages without any issues. Then you can of course, select one, click Save. And I do remind you guys that if you're having second thoughts or regretting any ones that go back to default, you always have the Reset to Default button that you can use and reset to the default settings. So, robots meta tag is just one example of a meta tag and there's so much more. And as you know, we've been working very hard in providing you the best grounds to succeed when it comes to SEO. So we added all the meta tags that we find valuable and important. But if you feel that there is a mistake, or think that there was a mistake that you would like to add that is not supported by default, then you can easily do it using the custom meta tag feature. So when you’re in SEO Patterns, again, expanding the additional Meta Tags section, you can click the Add New Tag [option]. And this will open a small window in which you can add the tag in. So similar to the other features that we talked about today, you can add it to both individual pages or to all of your pages of the same type at once using the great SEO Patterns tool. 18:39 Edu: I love that. There's a question that's kind of related to that, that Marcus has actually left here. Let me just make sure I've pulled it up for you, it is a question around customizing meta tags for dynamic pages. Is it possible to do that? 18:54 Dana: So there are very specific meta tags that you can customize for dynamic pages at the moment, the relatively basic ones, but similar to the structured data capabilities, we're also working on allowing everything you see here for dynamic pages as well. 19:08 Edu: Nice. I love it. Thank you. 19:13 Dana: Yes. Okay, so now is the time for a sneak peek at our upcoming release, which I personally find very, very exciting. So soon, we will be launching a new tool which is basically a consolidation of many tools and capabilities that we have, and it will be called SEO Settings. And as you saw, you can customize settings for individual pages at site level, at page type level using SEO Patterns. But from now it will all be consolidated under one tool and it will be your go to place to see all of the SEO settings that you have defined for all of the pages, for all the page types and to see all of the pages at once which is extremely valuable. The editing experience will be easier and, in the future, we will also support importing all of the SEO settings using CSV and also exporting it. So there is a lot to wait for. And I do want to show you some screens if that's okay. 20:10 Edu: Wait, wait before you share the screen, because this is actually a big, big game changer. I'm already excited with everything that we have shared to date, which is amazing. And now you're telling us that there's an ability to have all of this in one single page in the near future where we can control everything. 20:24 Dana: That's exactly why I’m telling you. 20:27 Edu: We didn't script that actually. I just said that out loud, improvised. That's amazing. Really, like I'm super excited, because I love this fact that we're like making lives easier for everyone. And this is extremely good, guys. This is actually big, big. So tell us Dana. Can you show us what it looks like? 20:44 Dana: Yeah, I want to show you the screen and I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback, guys. So when you go to SEO Tools, and what used to be SEO Buttons will now be SEO Settings. And the general SEO Settings for the site level that used to be here will not be there anymore, but inside SEO Settings. So once you click on SEO Settings, you will see a prettier version of what we have today for both SEO Patterns, editing by page type, or setting your site preferences. These are the global, general settings that used to be in the main page. And once you click on any of them, let's continue with the product example, you'll have two tabs. The first one—Customize Defaults, which was which was previously known as Patterns, it will include all the settings that we just talked about today—page URL, structured data markup, robots meta tag, additional meta tags, and of course, the search engines and social media, which is like the relatively basic section. So it will all be here. But when you click Edit by Product, you'll get this very cool table with all of your product pages, and a high-level view of the settings that you've defined for them. And if you click on one of them, the settings panel of that individual page will open. So you'll be able to edit everything in the same place. Yes, I hope you guys like that. And we hope to release it very, very soon. We're working on that. And we also have many more exciting features and releases. We're thinking about you guys and your needs all the time. And I can't wait to come here again and tell you about the next thing we have planned for you. 22:31 Edu: This is so good Dana. I'm actually over the moon here. I'm trying to get all the comments, but I've thrown one here for you. Diana is saying oh, thank you, it's such a pain to wait for each page to load. And Erica, thank you, this is really, really good. And I love the fact that this is really like thinking like, what would make our Partner's life easier? And that's how I'm pretty sure you put yourself in their shoes to understand how we can solve it for you? You know, on the level that will make sense for you. That's amazing. 23:02 Dana: I can tell you that that's exactly what we have in mind. These are exactly the sentences that we're saying when we have our meetings and defining what we're going to do and how. So how can we make everyone’s lives a bit easier when working with us? So that's exactly it. 23:16 Edu: This is so good. I love that. That's great, guys. That's amazing. Amazing. Well done again. And I want to make sure obviously, we had some questions coming in and I was trying to kind of go through everything. Just a lot going on in the chat here with a slight lag and then trying to keep on track and hear what's going on with that. So guys, if you have questions, throw them here in the comments. We have a few minutes for questions before we wrap it up. But obviously if it gets to a point where like you didn't get your question answered, or you have like maybe follow-up questions after you try this out, go to the Community, so you can ask it there. I'm pretty sure there’s a ton of people who will be willing to help. I'll make sure to ping Dana from time to time and tell her hey Dana, get someone from your team here to help us because this question needs attention. So feel free to throw your questions there as well. So we have two places for Community—Forum and we have the Facebook group. If you're not there yet, I'll put the links up soon enough here. But yeah, it's time for questions, guys, time for questions. Let's see what's coming [in] here. Actually a lot of good comments again. So Phedra Digital say, “Best Wix Partners live webinar ever.” Yay. Dana, this is awesome. Thank you for the sneak peek. Oh, let's see Derek, “That's great information.” Thank you. My God. There’s a lot of good compliments here. There you go, Killian is asking, “Will the SEO Settings be available for dynamic pages?” I think we kind of answered that, right? 24:39 Dana: Yes. Not at the first phase. But yes, it's definitely in the plans. 24:44 Edu: Alyssa is saying, great job excited to see the new releases. Yes. We're super excited. Yes, yes. Let's see. Oh my God. It's a lot of thank yous. They're thanking you again for the time. Okay, Danny is asking a question here, “Any tools upcoming for FAQ schema?” 25:04 Dana: So FAQ schema can basically be added to any of your static pages using the structured data markup capability because you can paste whatever code you want there. But I wasn't planning on telling you that but another bit of a spoiler, we are working on better and easier ways for adding schemas to your sites and I'll keep it there, I think. 25:33 Edu: You need to keep asking so you can get more from her. I love it. That's so cool. That's so good. Actually, yeah, more amazing things like MNF Web Solutions, super with a little boom. Yeah, that's amazing. Let's see what else Oh, hold on, there's someone else. So Jeff is asking, Can we add the ads dot txt or no app ads dot txt, as well? 26:00 Dana: It's already available using marketing integrations. 26:03 Edu: Amazing. Oh my God, this is like, you got everything like so prepared. Like it's almost like as if we're planning for the questions to come in and you knew all the answers. Like you're really good at this Dana. Thank you. Okay. Let's see what else guys, feel free to keep sending the questions. I'm trying to keep track of things but it's just so many are popping up and I have a slight delay because I'm using the streaming and opening up the live feed here at the bottom. So forgive me if there's like a few seconds delay here from my end. Jessica White is asking, “Can bots crawl FAQ?” 26:40 Dana: Bots can crawl all of the pages. Basically. There is no limitation. 26:46 Edu: Okay, let's see what else here oh my God, there's a ton of questions here, how much time do we have left here? Can we get someone in the backend here like the director telling you in my ears here how much we have left? Because I have so many questions. I will keep asking them if you guys don't stop me. I'll keep going and you guys let me know. Okay, Wix Trainer is asking me to explain, I see him a lot, “Any new features to send SEO reports to clients? Can you do something around that?” 27:18 Dana: So yes, we have it in our plans. Once we finally finalize our 2022 plans, I'll be happy to share some more information on timelines. But as I said, guys, we have you in mind, we have your needs in mind. So we're planning that as well. 27:39 Edu: Amazing. Love it. Love it. It's so good. Oh, my God. Okay, so it looks like we're actually five minutes over time. But we had a delay at the beginning. So I'm assuming like, we're actually still on time. So we're still okay with that. But let me see if there's more questions. Let me ask the director here in the backend. DJ guy, do we have more time? Are we good to go? Can we keep going and ask Dana more questions? Okay, yes, we can. We've got the green light from our DJ in the backend, the director, and the producer’s thing. Yes. Okay. Let me throw more questions. Yeah. Dana has all the answers. I know. I know. MNF is telling you this in the chat. Hold on. Let me see. What else can I pick here because I lost track here with things. Feel free to ask again. In case I missed it because maybe it was thrown to the bottom. And then I have to read it again. But let's see. Ah yeah, Kelena, you thought about everything in here. She did. Okay, so Simon has a question, “What's the future for multilingual SEO?” 28:43 Dana: That's a great, great question. So currently, you can customize the SEO settings for your secondary languages, for your static pages, for your site pages, meaning we also plan on allowing that for other page types during 2022. We will also be improving our Sitemaps to better support multilingual sites. And again, I know it sounds like a cliche, but we really have you guys in mind, and we really want to do what's best for you. So we're working on that. 29:12 Edu: Nice. That's super cool. That's super cool. Yeah. Okay. So Simon, sorry, I missed your question. Because I know someone said that. And thanks again for bringing this up. Because it's hard to scroll up. So happy days. That's good. Yeah, so Vinita was asking this question. So yes, we answered Simon, so we got it. We got him. Yes Simon! Okay. Let's see what else, okay, so, gosh, it's coming. So Ralph is just saying yay, yay. Thanks, Ralph. Yay for Simon hare, yay for Dana too. Amazing and, okay, so we answered this integration of ads, the ads dot txt. We get that question already. So I'm trying to keep track of things here. It's really hard. I need my producers in the backend to help me otherwise it's gonna be super tough to get through. Okay, are there okay, Diana is asking this question. Are there any plans to add Google Image detected keywords to Media Manager? Google now uses AI to pull keywords based on an image instead of an alt text. I didn't know that, I'm learning with you. 30:20 Dana: Yeah, so it’s something that we are discussing these days. I do not have a final answer yet, but I'll be happy to update once I do. 30:29 Edu: Okay, that's good. Okay, cool. So guys, now we've officially completed the 30 minutes, because we were eight minutes late. And now it's 38 past whatever time you're in. So I want to really thank you again, then for being on top of everything that's going on in the SEO world. I mean, you know this better than anyone, and thanks for, you know, really thinking about how Partners are working and how to make their lives easier. I hope this has been helpful for you guys. And I hope you liked all the sneak peek, because that was like, we actually even got like more than we initially anticipated. So that's really good. Thank you again Dana, thanks for your time. 31:02 Dana: Thank you guys so much. And again, please leave your feedback in the Community and ask us questions. We really want to hear from you. We really want to improve for you guys. Thank you for having me, and I look forward to the next one. 31:15 Edu: Yeah, thank you so much. And thank you everyone for their time. Thank you everyone who stuck around even with the slight delay we had and thanks for being awesome and for, you know, keeping this Community vibrant as usual, it's been like this forever. So thank you again, thank you again. It's really good to be here. I'm thankful for you guys. So have a good end of day or beginning of day for you. Bye.

Author: Miriam Ellis Successful multi-location local SEO is exactly what it sounds like: multiple businesses working together to elevate themselves and the overarching brand’s visibility in search results. That means keeping records of branch/franchisee data, responding to reviews, updating holiday hours, managing social accounts, and more—for each location the brand has. With a little bit of organization and communication, you can lead this effort and bring in more traffic to your locations—both in-person and online. Over my 10+ years of experience in local SEO, I’ve found that the most successful multi-location brands may approach their strategies differently, but they all follow the five steps I’ll explain in this blog post. While you’ll start these steps in order, you’ll need to revisit them regularly to ensure that workflows don’t fall victim to the many moving parts inherent to SEO for multi-location chains and franchises. Let’s get started. 01. Collaborate with location managers 02. Collect and organize branch information 03. Delegate responsibilities between headquarters and local branches 04. Leverage your locations to diversify ranking keywords 05. Analyze performance for red flags and winning strategies 01. Collaborate with location managers When launching a local SEO campaign for a multi-location brand, your first task is to acquire the contact information of everyone that will be involved in the project so that you can broadly communicate how this collaboration will benefit their branch/chain/location. Getting genuine buy-in from stakeholders at each branch of the business becomes so much easier when you kick off with an email like this: Hello [branch or franchise manager]! This is Miriam Ellis from [X agency/X department]. I’m coordinating with everyone at the company for our local SEO campaign. With some work and your cooperation, your branch on X street should start seeing better rankings, more positive reviews, and more customers/sales from this campaign. I’m writing to let you know that over the next X weeks/months, you’ll receive a few emails from me requesting some basic details about your branch. With your help, we’ll meet our deadlines, and you’ll be playing a big part in achieving important goals that should bring meaningful benefits to your branch. Thank you so much for the collaboration, and please reach out to me if you have any questions. While this may seem obvious to some, it’s easy to overlook alerting people to a collaborative effort—which can leave participants feeling out of the loop. It can become much more difficult to secure a location manager’s cooperation if they’re not already aware and involved as you kick off your campaign. This first step is easier for chains (as opposed to franchises) because a single department or agency is responsible for all marketing activity across the brand. It’s harder for franchises, not just because you need all the necessary contact information , but because you should make an effort to ensure that each franchisee is on board. If you’re working with franchise owners, request that the franchisee write back to acknowledge receipt of your message (in your initial outreach email). If you don’t hear back within a reasonable timeframe, write again or pick up the phone. This approach will limit communication gaps and delays later on in the project. Regardless of the particular multi-location business model, teamwork supports effective local search marketing in two key ways: The overall website authority , recognition, and reputation built by the brand benefits each of its branches, both in terms of rankings and conversions. The individual reputation of each branch contributes to the overall online (and offline) reputation of the brand, while also acting as a key source of content opportunities and assets for the brand in the form of pages, listings , social profiles, etc. Busy branch managers and franchisees understandably want to know, “What’s in it for me?” when asked to invest time in a local SEO campaign. That’s why you need to communicate the benefits of participation early on and build a sense of allyship around the project. Pro tip : When it comes to multi-location local SEO, you will have many stakeholders. Account for potential delays by setting very generous deadlines for yourself and everyone involved. While some participants may respond to each of your requests fairly quickly, others will require multiple forms of outreach and lots of follow-up before they deliver. It’s reasonable to predict that the more people you involve, the more time you should allot to benchmarking progress as the work goes forward. 02. Collect and organize branch information Create a spreadsheet and make a column for the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and any other significant contact information for the point of contact at each branch of the business. Next, create columns for each of the following headings and outreach to each point of contact to fill in all of these fields: Business/branch name Address Phone numbers (including branch numbers, toll-free numbers, and after-hours phone or text hotlines) Fax number Hours of operation (including holiday hours) Business email address Social profile links Business website landing page URL for the branch X number of photos of the branch X number of videos of the branch Branch years in business Payment forms accepted List of main products/services offered by the branch List of amenities offered at the branch (accessibility, parking, curbside service, late-night dining, etc.) Other information you need specific to the campaign If you’re doing local SEO from the ground-up for a multi-location business, this is the minimum information you’ll need from each branch to engage in competitive analysis , local listing development, and landing page content creation . Refine this sample list based on your campaign’s objectives. Pro tip : Don’t skip verifying the name, address, phone number, and hours of operation of each branch with a person at that location. Clean and accurate contact data is the foundation of successful local search marketing. Seasoned local SEOs have a backlog of scary stories about engaging in work for ineligible businesses at fictitious locations, wasting time publishing inaccurate phone numbers, or mistakenly distributing data about non-existent suite numbers because a business owner wrongly believed adding such elements to their address would help their SEO. 03. Delegate responsibilities between headquarters and local branches Now we come to one of the key points of determination in a multi-location SEO campaign: how much control will each branch have over its marketing? Whether the business you’re optimizing is a chain or a franchise, you need to communicate all opportunities, permissions, and responsibilities clearly to your location managers/point of contact to avoid confusion, delays, and detriment to the overall brand. Ask and answer all of the following questions: Who is responsible for writing and managing the content on the branch’s website landing page? Is a central department directly managing all the pages and creating all of their content, or are they receiving some (or all) of the content from point people at each branch? Alternatively, are branch managers or franchisees given CMS permissions to manage their own pages? Who is responsible for SEO? Are branch managers tasked with doing their own keyword and link research, or are they provided with lists of keywords to target and backlink opportunities to pursue for their assets? Alternatively, is raw content delivered by branches to a centralized SEO team for editing and optimization? What safeguards will you implement to ensure that an overall SEO strategy exists for the brand so that optimization actually increases opportunities to appear in search results (rather than being duplicative)? Who is responsible for creating and managing the local business listings for each branch? Who is responsible for acquiring and responding to reviews , and for analyzing review sentiment? Who is responsible for managing the social media assets for each branch? (i.e., Is each branch allowed to develop and maintain its own social profiles, or does a main social team handle that for the entire brand?) What is the support workflow within the brand when things go wrong with a branch’s online assets? Who can a branch manager turn to when problems occur on pages, listings, reviews, etc.? Answers to all of these questions paint a picture of the marketing structure for your multi-location business. There are risks and benefits of tight, centralized brand control versus a more cooperative approach across the organization. ​ Pros Cons Centralized brand control (e.g., corporate headquarters controls the main marketing for all locations) Streamlined workflows Permissions, brand voice guidelines, etc. don’t need to be shared More cohesive messaging Less SEO work for the local branch’s staff Brands may overlook local talent at each branch More work for the corporate SEO team Cooperative marketing with franchisees/location managers Branch employees may have insights into what their local audience responds to More work for the local branch’s staff The corporate SEO team must keep track of all permissions and communicate brand guidelines Potential for poor management by participating branches (i.e., If a branch neglects its online presence, it can negatively affect the entire brand) Pro tip : Keep updated records of all login information and other permissions—regardless of whether you adopt a centralized or collaborative SEO approach. Employees get new jobs, branches relocate (or close), and these day-to-day events will send you scrambling for emails, usernames, and passwords to manage digital assets (like local business listings) unless you keep excellent records. 04. Leverage your locations to diversify ranking keywords Brands with multiple locations present an SEO challenge (because of how search engines handle duplicate content), but it is also an exciting opportunity to diversify the number of terms your business ranks for. Multiple surveys over the years routinely indicate that a major reason customers patronize local businesses is that they are looking for unique experiences. If your various branches feature offerings that are unique to the locality, then you can bake authentic diversification into both your content and SEO strategy simply because you have different things to promote. But what about when offerings are homogenous across a chain or franchise? How can you diversify your content, local business listings, and social profiles? Try some (or all) of these best practices: Improve the diversity factor of each location’s website landing page. Include customer reviews associated with the branch, exterior and interior photography of the location, staff interviews and photographs, written driving directions, customer interviews/testimonials, awards, and proofs of community engagement by local staff (at a local event or charity initiative, for example). Improve the uniqueness of local listings by diversifying non-primary categories. The guidelines for representing your business on Google stipulate that all locations of your brand should share the same primary category . However, you can parse up a large number of different secondary categories amongst several of your locations that are near each other. This SEO tactic can help the overall brand rank in the local results for more search intents than a single-location business ever could. Meanwhile, unique photos, reviews and owner responses, GBP Posts , questions and answers, and descriptions can further differentiate one listing from another. Diversify social media profiles for each branch. This is best accomplished through a collaborative approach. No amount of localization can replace the lived experience that branch staff can bring to making local social connections. For example, staff at a branch location in San Diego is on the ground, understanding city culture, weather, history, and events that are all unknown to the SEO department at the corporate headquarters in Albuquerque. You can research towns and cities, but it’s hard to scale the hometown feeling that so many local customers value. Where possible, make the most of the talents and lived experiences of branch staff to tell social stories that resonate. Pro tip : Pay close attention to Google’s guidelines to understand the number of listings your brand is eligible for. For example, service area businesses may be allowed multiple locations, but should not set a service radius of more than about two hours driving time. Google sometimes overlooks this guideline for franchises that are uniquely owned and registered, because customers cannot contact branch A to speak with someone at branch B (for example, if two branches of the same septic company are in the same town, but run by different franchisees, Google may not require adherence to their guideline on this). Study the guidelines and revisit them on occasion because they are frequently updated. 05. Analyze performance for red flags and winning strategies An example of the Google Business Profile dashboard. Source: Search Engine Land. Finally, good, sustainable local SEO depends on setting up three forms of analysis for each branch: Professional-level analytics (like Google Analytics or paid SEO software) Access to Google Business Profile Insights for each branch for more detailed information about actions users take on business listings (like clicks-to-site, clicks-to-call, and clicks for directions) Sentiment analysis software (like Sprout Social or GatherUp, for example) for capturing social mentions and assessing review language Working in concert, these three must-haves support your ability to analyze individual branch performance. If, for example, your branch in Burlington experiences a sudden drop in clicks-to-call, or your Boise branch receives multiple negative reviews, or the community surrounding your Billings storefront begins a hashtag about your brand, you need to know that these things are happening so that you can assess the situation (and potentially take action). Pro tip : In multi-location SEO, there is no such thing as being too detail-oriented. There have been well-known cases in which a lack of quality control at individual locations has led to branch closure and overall negative brand impressions, as well as bad press. Ongoing analysis provides you with the necessary business intelligence to keep all branches performing well. Multi-location local SEO: More locations, more opportunities Multi-location SEO is both more complex and richer in opportunity than optimizing a single location. Communicating the benefits that all participants can enjoy (if you’re successful) is a good way to get buy-in, and organizing people and data will be key. Beyond this, today’s array of SEO tools make it possible to keep an eagle eye almost everywhere at once to ensure maximum ROI from your work, and if you can bring the local knowledge and talents of branch managers and franchisees into the mix, you should have a winning combination! Miriam Ellis - Local SEO Subject Matter Expert at Moz Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com . Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Krystal Taing Local search engine optimization (SEO) can help businesses, such as restaurants, attorneys, retailers, and contractors, attract customers by increasing their online visibility and generating more interest in their products or services. Over 90% of consumers searched online for local businesses in 2020, according to a survey conducted by BrightLocal. This just goes to show that, perhaps now more than ever, local SEO can make or break a business. So, if you’re not optimizing for local search, you might miss out on thousands of potential customers who want to shop in your area. Optimizing for local search typically involves: Maintaining your Google Business Profile (GBP) Review management and responding to reviews Using the right keywords in location pages, review replies, and social media content Managing directory listings across sites relevant to your industry (such as Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc.) Below is our overview of local SEO and how you can put it to work for your business. Along the way, we'll cover: Why local SEO is important The differences between traditional and local SEO Google’s local search algorithm Why local SEO matters for Google’s 3-pack Local SEO tips and tactics Local beyond Google Trends in local SEO Why is local SEO important? Local SEO is essential for businesses with physical locations that want to attract more customers. For example, a pizza chain with hundreds of locations across the country wants to show up any time a consumer searches for, say, “pizza delivery.” With this search query, Google’s local search algorithm kicks in, as it assumes local intent by the searcher, and serves up the top-rated pizza parlors near the searcher. Local SEO is also important for service area businesses , like plumbers, for example: A plumber may want to optimize for search queries like “emergency plumbing services.” Service area businesses like these serve a particular region, but not at their business address. By optimizing their online presence for local search (i.e., local SEO), these businesses can position themselves to appear in front of potential customers when they need them the most. Some other industries that commonly rely on local SEO for their visibility include: Retail Restaurants Financial services Hospitality and leisure (i.e., hotels, amusement parks, etc.) Automotive (i.e., dealerships and repair services) Health and wellness Key differences between traditional and local SEO Although companies use both to strengthen their conversion rates, local SEO is quite distinct from the broader SEO that most people think of. Traditional SEO is the process of improving your rankings in organic (unpaid) search results on search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. Some traditional SEO practices include link building, content creation , keyword research, and more. This more general branch of SEO primarily targets online customers, regardless of their location. For example, an eCommerce store specializing in gaming laptops may use the keywords “gaming laptop 2022” and “best gaming laptops” within its content as a way to increase its relevance and, therefore, rankings. For that same reason, the store may also commission freelancers to write multiple blog posts analyzing trends in the gaming laptop industry. This content may help potential customers reach a decision about the right gaming laptop to buy, and, when they are ready to purchase, they might choose the eCommerce store that helped them make the decision. On the other hand, local SEO is the process by which companies try to optimize the online visibility of their brick-and-mortar locations (or their service-area business ). Local SEO explicitly targets customers searching for services and products near them. It revolves around search queries with local intent, such as “restaurants near me” and “gaming computer store San Francisco.” Search engines, like Google, have gotten so good at interpreting search terms that they can now infer local intent even if the query does not explicitly include “near me.” In addition, users also see local search results differently than non-local search results: Local search results typically include a map and the "local pack" of business listings. While it’s important to understand what distinguishes local SEO, one is not mutually exclusive to the other—in fact, local businesses should be well versed at both for the best results. Together, organic search and local SEO drive 69% of website traffic (according to a study by digital marketing agency Milestone), with organic search contributing 46.5% and local accounting for 22.6%. The same report also revealed that: Local and organic SEO drive 67% of website revenue. Local is the best performing channel with 3.93 pageviews per session—the highest pageview to session share percentage compared to other channels. Local traffic exploded in popularity and revenue generation between January 2020 and June 2021—the local share of traffic and revenue increased by 52% and 33%, respectively. Here's a breakdown of the differences between traditional organic and local SEO: ​ Traditional SEO Local SEO Target audience Online customers from anywhere Local customers Search terms Keywords Keywords and local components like “near me” and “near [location]” Devices Desktop, mobile devices Mostly mobile devices SERP appearances Traditional results and search features Google Business Profile and map locations Search intent To find relevant information, products, services, etc. To find relevant services, products, and locations nearby as soon as possible Conversions Website clicks and online purchases Website clicks, route planning on maps, offline purchases, and phone calls Conversion rate Only high for top results Very high for results in the Google local pack since customers want to buy as soon as possible Suitable for eCommerce stores, SaaS businesses, etc. Brick-and-mortar stores, service area businesses Google's local search algorithm It’s impossible to identify every factor in Google’s local search algorithm—Google keeps the specifics under lock and key. However, Google has told us that local search results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance: Google defines relevance as how well a local business profile matches the searcher’s query. Distance: Google defines distance as how close the business is to the searcher or search query. For example, “flower shop near me,” and “flower shop in Chicago,” would generate different results (unless you're in Chicago). Prominence: Google defines prominence as how well regarded and popular a business is. This includes “information that Google has about a business, from across the web, like links, articles, and directories.” Google says it does its “best to keep local search algorithm details confidential, to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.” Still, we can take some clues from what Google does publish and leverage insights from the many industry experts who test the local search algorithm with every update to better understand what Google is looking for. Here are some best practices to improve your local rank, and, more importantly, build trust with your customer: Keep your local listing accurate. Ensuring that your business details, such as address and phone number, are accurate and consistent across all networks not only improves proximity search rank (ranking based on your closeness to the user performing the search), it also helps customers find you in the real world. Complete your local profile. Filling out all applicable fields on all local business directories gives customers a more complete picture of your business while improving proximity search rank. One thing to pay close attention to is your primary business category . This refers to the most specific categorization of your service or business. Google offers nearly 4,000 categories, so choose carefully. Focus on your local ratings and reviews. To increase the likelihood that your business ranks well, maintain high customer ratings and respond to reviews. This can also help to influence the audience’s decision on which business to choose. Keywords in your Google Business reviews may also affect your local SEO. To that end, encourage customers to leave detailed reviews. The more detailed a review, the more information Google has for ranking your business or service. When it comes to ratings, try to stay above four out of five stars—Google may automatically filter out companies with average ratings lower than four stars for queries that include the word “best.” Note: Different platforms (i.e., Yelp, Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.) have different review solicitation policies—be sure to follow the relevant policies for the platforms you’re using. Implement on-page local SEO. Aligning your site with Google's idea of relevant, quality content can help determine where local pages, and the associated listings, rank in local search. Accessibility considerations are also crucial to the basic health of a website. A fully JavaScript site that a bot couldn’t crawl won’t pass accessibility tests either. Note: Wix’s infrastructure is based on server-side rendering, allowing search engines to fully read Wix site content. Why local SEO matters for Google’s 3-pack Local SEO greatly impacts your position in Google’s 3-pack (also referred to as the “local pack”), the three local businesses that Google sees as best matching the user's search intent. This is important because local 3-pack listings are typically the first thing potential customers see on the SERP for local searches. An example of Google’s local 3-pack results. The better your local SEO is, the more likely you'll appear in Google’s 3-pack when customers nearby your location search for relevant queries. Showing up in Google’s 3-pack can give you a lot of exposure since it gives potential customers necessary details for making purchasing decisions, such as proximity, average ratings, and clear calls-to-action. Here are a few things you can do that may help you break into the local 3-pack for relevant queries: 01. Optimize your Google Business Profile First, you need to optimize your Google Business Profile by: Completing every section Choosing accurate primary and secondary categories Making sure that your business name is identical to the name you use on your signage Indicating your regular and holiday hours Monitoring and responding to the Q&A section of your profile, where users can ask questions about your business. You can also proactively ask frequently asked questions and answer these as the business owner. Posting events, offers, announcements, and products on your Google Business Profile 02. Improve your review response rate Make sure you reply to all of your reviews, even if they're negative . The higher your response rate, the more likely it is that you'll appear in the local pack results. 03. Add high-quality photos of your business and products The more pictures you have of your business and what customers can expect when they patronize it, the higher your chances are at showing up in Google's 3-pack. Add new photos to your Google Business Profile from time to time to showcase specialties as well as local relevance. Tips to improve your local SEO Below are some tried-and-true tactics that can help search engines increase their understanding of your business, which can ultimately mean more local visibility. On-page SEO signals Help Google crawl and index your local web pages with clear on-page SEO signals throughout your website, blog, and social media profiles. Here are a few optimizations to keep in mind when writing about your business: Content: Create keyword-rich blogs, videos with transcripts, and other content for your site, Google Business Profile, review responses, and social media accounts. Structured data: Structured data is a way of describing your website so search engines can understand it better. Use Schema.org to mark up your content with code that search engines can easily process. Note: For Wix users, local business markup is automatically added to your site’s homepage when you add a business name and location to your account. Store locations and local pages for multi-location businesses: If your business has more than one location , create subpages and location-specific content for each location. Highlight how long each location has been in business and add events specific to particular locations. Ulta Beauty’s store locator. A great example of this is Ulta Beauty , which has a locator showing all of its locations mapped across North America. It also has pages for each store, showing specific details and services offered. An individual location page for an Ulta Beauty store. Citation building for local SEO Local citations (mentions of your business) on prominent regional and industry sites (like Yelp, Avvo, Tripadvisor, etc.) can help establish your business to search engines and users. You should also include accurate business details, such as your address and website, on your social accounts as well. Local beyond Google Google tends to overshadow other platforms—after all, it dominates 83.4% of the search engine market (as of July, 2022). However, that doesn't mean you should neglect other search platforms, such as Bing or Apple Maps. Apple Maps is especially important because of its growth over the past few years. Apple may also release its own search engine , which would make Apple Maps even more relevant. As for Bing, it's the second-most popular search engine in the world and even offers the ability to pull your business data directly from your Google Business Profile. If you are interested in managing your presence and business on Bing Places, you can get started here . As mentioned above, directory sites (e.g., Better Business Bureau, Yelp, etc.) and social media platforms can also add to your online presence and enable you to reach potential customers in more places. Trends in local SEO In addition to understanding Google's local ranking factors, you also need to understand trends in local SEO if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. Here are the top local SEO trends of 2022: 01. The rise of non-branded search Non-branded search for brick-and-mortar businesses continues to grow, with searches like “coffee near me” or “grocery store near me” up by as much as 23% from 2019 to 2020, according to a study from Uberall . For customers conducting non-branded searches, proximity, immediacy, and convenience are top priorities, with brand being a secondary consideration. Non-branded “near me” searches grew by 23% from 2019 to 2020 In light of this trend, it has become more important for local businesses to optimize for non-branded search queries to attract more new customers or even returning customers. Adding content that highlights the products and services you offer to your listings and pages is a great first step to capturing more non-branded traffic. 02. “Near me” searches got time sensitive As of 2022, “near me” searches are no longer just about place, but also about things and time. Google has noted an increase in “near me” searches for very specific services and items , such as “where to get a facial near me” and “diving gear near me.” The same study also revealed an explosion of queries that combine local intent with time sensitivity. In the last two years, Google has seen: Over 900% growth in mobile searches for “[service or product] near me today/tonight”—for instance, “affordable hotels near me tonight” and “open houses near me today” Over 200% growth in mobile searches for “open” and “now” and “near me”—for instance, "restaurants open near me right now" The hours listed on your Google Business Profile determine whether you will display for these time-based searches, so it’s important to keep your hours updated . 03. Google infers local intent Google has also started inferring local intent in specific keyword phrases, such as “where can I buy [product]” or “[latest movie].” To see this in action, search any popular movie title and you'll see movie theaters showing it nearby. Inferred local intent for "Top Gun." You can review your search insights in Google Business Profile to monitor which terms are leading to a local result. From this list, identify the most relevant terms so that you can begin incorporating them into your listings and content to help influence your rankings. Local SEO is an investment in your business’s online reputation Local SEO is a long-term game—hacks won't suffice. To get into your local Google 3-pack and attract the customers you deserve, you need to stay on top of best practices and local SEO trends. You also need to avoid the following mistakes: Leaving listings neglected or unclaimed Ignoring reviews and your online reputation Stuffing keywords into your business name and/or content Inconsistency with your business name, address, and other information that may be important to potential customers Just like traditional SEO, building up your local search visibility requires long-term dedication and patience. Start small and make sure to track how your key business metrics change as a result of your optimizations—that way, you can tell when something is working or when it might be time to try a new approach. Krystal Taing - Global Director of Pre-sales Solutions, Uberall 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. Twitter | Linkedin

On May 24, Google Search advocate Daniel Waisberg presented a live webinar where he gave insights into how to use Google Search Console to identify and fix issues that will help you optimize your website to succeed in Google Search. He also discussed how to leverage Google Trends to understand traffic patterns and benchmark your own data against industry trends. Explore webinar highlights and learning resources Meet your hosts: Daniel Waisberg , Search Advocate, Google Daniel is a Search Advocate at Google, working on the Search Relations team. He educates and inspires the Search community, and works with the engineering team to develop new capabilities. Before joining Search, he spent 6 years in Google Analytics, focusing on data analysis and visualization. Twitter | Linkedin Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | Linkedin Webinar highlights and learning resources Optimize content with insights from Google During the conversation, Daniel explained that SEOs should consider optimizing content using Google’s live data about the kinds of content that are in high demand across their networks. The top resources which were mentioned were Question Hub and Google Trends. Question hub Question Hub is a tool that provides a series of questions which are not answered on Google search results. It uses aggregated data from search results to provide content recommendations. Google explains that the tool is designed, “to identify content gaps online” which can be instrumental in making SEO gains. Google Trends Google Trends shows the trending topics that people are searching for and gives anonymized data on the growth or decline of user interest in a given topic. The geographical filters and related queries function provide additional insights and inspiration. Through Question Hub and Google Trends, Google gives you the opportunity to access their primary information to satisfy the needs of users. Creating content in this way is great for SEO and your business overall. Increase visibility with structured data Structured data is a means of giving Google and other search engines standardized information which can be used to create Rich Results in the SERP. Daniel shared two resources to help SEOs improve their visibility with structured data. Rich Results Gallery For those interested in using structured data to appear in Google’s Rich Results, the Rich Results Gallery is a fantastic tool. As well as showcasing all of the Rich Results which Google uses on the SERP, there are links to the the documentation for each result and examples of valid markup . In the session, they explained how you can use the Wix SEO Tools to create and modify structured data and how Wix’s built-in SEO defaults are enabled to support rich results for all users. Rich Results Testing Tool With the Rich Results Testing Tool you can validate your code in real time to identify any issues with regards to your structured data implementation. This tool is specific to Google, so it will show you what is eligible for their Rich Results, and give you previews of what the content may look like in the SERP. Pairing this with the Google Search Console Enhancements report can help you address issues with structured data that is eligible for Rich Results. Improve performance with Google Search Console Daniel explained that Google identifies three drivers on the web: users, publishers, and Google. He explained that as Google sees it, the users are looking for information, publishers are making information, and Google is trying to organize the information from publishers for users. According to Daniel, Google Search Console sits between the publishers and Google to help publishers to create better content for users. Google Search Console enables website owners and publishers to improve performance in a number of ways: Alerts and checks As a Google Search Console user, Google will send you an alert to let you know when there is a new issue on your website. These notifications can help you address issues as they arise and make changes before they cause disruption. Daniel reminded us that site owners should log in to GSC regularly to monitor overall performance because notifications will not continue if the issue gets worse. So having an SEO plan can help your overall performance. Fixes and validation If you have an issue you can make changes to your page by using tools for Coverage Status, Page Enhancements, View Crawled Page, and Test Live URL. Each of these elements will give you further details on how to address your errors. Once you have corrected the issue, you can click Validate Fix, and GSC will update you when they have checked the page and registered the improvement. Monitor and optimize In the Performance Report you can understand your performance on topics, queries and more. This data can help you to create new content or improve content that you already have. In the session, they discussed how Wix site owners can connect directly to Google Search Console to get indexed and access some of these tools for their sites. Additional resources from Google Search Console Google Search Console Training from Daniel Waisberg Google Search Console Query Analysis Data Studio Template Additional Wix resources for Google Search Console Connect your Wix website to Google Search Console in one click Understanding Google Search Console Errors Understanding Your Wix Sitemap

Join our webinar as Marcus Tober, Head of Enterprise at Semrush, gives insights on how to create effective content for different keyword intents—so you can drive organic traffic, attract the right audience and address their needs at every stage of the customer journey. You’ll learn the types of keyword intent and how to use them to find the right opportunities for your site. Check out the webinar deck Read the Transcript In this webinar, we'll cover: Keyword intent and its role in your content strategy Using keyword intent to leverage the customer journey Competitive analysis of keyword intent to improve visibility Meet your hosts: 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. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: The power of keyword intent for organic success webinar Speakers Marcus Tober, Head of Enterprise, Semrush Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix 00:03 Mordy: Hi there. Welcome to harnessing the power of intent for your SEO. My name is Mordy Oberstein and I’m the head of SEO branding at Wix. And we have a wonderful little webinar for you. Before we go around the horn and I introduce our crew to you for today's webinar, I just want to go through the quick format. We're going to start off. Well, we're going to start with a little bit of a sneak peak and surprise for you. We'll get to that in a moment. We're going to start off with Marcus Tober from Semrush, presenting all about user intent. We'll then have a short little panel discussion where we dive into what Mark has talked about, and then we'll be taking questions from you. So if you notice there's a Q and A section in the Zoom setup, throw all of your questions into there at the end, we'll get to as many as we possibly can. 00:49 Mordy: And also have some moderators trying to help you out throughout the webinar. There is no such thing as a silly question. So please, whatever questions you have, we’d be happy to get as many as you possibly can. So do not censor yourself in terms of the content that you ask around keyword intent and how to leverage that. Now let's go around the horn. Today, we have with us, the Head of SEO Communications at Wix, Crystal Carter, and Marcus Tober, who is an absolute legend. He's working at Semrush on their enterprise product. I will just say this, Marcus is one of the founding fathers of SEO in my mind because he started to create enterprise SEO tools. One of the first people to do that. Crystal, Marcus, thank you for joining us. 1:36 Crystal: Thank you for having me. 1:37 Marcus: Yeah. Thanks for having me too. 1:39 Pleasure, Crystal, what do you do here at Wix? 1:44 I am the head of SEO communication. So I communicate about SEO. 1:50 Mordy: What you’re literally doing here right now. 1:52 Crystal: Oh my gosh. Look it, we're doing it right now. And one of the great things about the role is that I get a really good opportunity to talk to fantastic people like Marcus and, to talk about fantastic tools like Semrush to folks at Wix. And, I'm really excited to hear more about that today. 2:10 Mordy: Definitely getting into that and Marcus, I know you're over at Semrush. You want to share with us what you do there. 2:16 Marcus: Yeah, I'm heading the Enterprise Solutions department. So I just joined Semrush in January, but actually the goal is to build great solutions on top of Semrush, which already is like the perfect foundation, especially towards larger enterprise companies. Yeah. It's super exciting. 2:33 Mordy: It is and Semrush is an absolutely fabulous tool, which is why before we get into the actual deep-diving into the keyword intent around SEO, [we] have a little bit of a surprise for our Wix folks here. [I’m going] to share my screen really quickly. Cause I'm happy to say that coming soon, in the near future, in the dev world, when you were developing a tool, the near future is well relative. There is going to be a Semrush integration, right in Wix for your Wix sites, you'll have a new way to access keywords and deeper metrics around keywords in your initial SEO setup. So when you’re setting up your Wix site and you go through your SEO setup checklist, one of the steps in there is choosing keywords to focus on for your website. In the near future, you will have an implant form connection to Semrush, which you can see in the screenshot here that will give you access to keyword suggestions from Semrush directly. 3:35 Mordy: Now what's amazing is that Semrush has a fantastic algorithm, which they recently updated around this to offer you the best solutions or the best keywords that align with what you want to do for your website. So what you would do is you would type in the topic that your website deals with. In the example here, we have hip hop. You can choose a region. For example, here, we're showing the southern part of France, and you get all sorts of keywords relevant to that topic and to that region and you get all sorts of metrics like the search volume, how many people on average or in general are searching for that particular term each and every month in that region? What is the trend? Is that, are people searching for that keyword or that topic more often? Is that a hard keyword to rank for? And what we're going to get into today— what is the intent behind the keyword? Is it an informational keyword, a commercial keyword? And if you're confused about what that might mean, well, that's why Marcus is here. So I'm going to throw it over to Marcus. Look for this soon inside of the Wix platform, very excited to have Semrush inside of Wix and the keyword intent part of the equation that our users will be able to have access to. So Marcus, how does keyword intent work for search? 4:50 Marcus: Yes. I'm super excited to talk about keyword intent because that's the topic I really like to talk about because so many people talk about keywords and rankings and is my landing page optimized and all these kinds of things. But often they do not understand that the searcher has different intents, especially throughout the whole customer journey. And keyword intent is really one of the most important, like segments that you should use to create a good content strategy, to look at your success, to even analyze the competition because not every competitor based on the customer journey is a competitor in that sense. Alright. Yeah. I mean, Mordy like announced me, but I'm Marcus Tober heading Semrush Enterprise Solutions unit and I'm an SEO with some 22 years [experience]. Yeah. What is keyword intent? Why is it important? So keyword intent is the notion of when, what people expect to find when they use search engines. 5:51 Marcus: And it's a concept that Google kind of like made more popular in 2016 already, like many years ago when they said like, “Hey, we have a concept we call micro-moments. And because we, as a search engine, we want to deliver the best results based on, hey, I have things like, I want to know moments or I want to go moments, I want to do, I want to buy.” And this is a concept that Google kind of like made like public. And based on this, Semrush has built the keyword intent, which is very important because it is a good reflection of where people are and what people look for in the whole customer journey. But let me explain a couple of more details about the keyword intent in general. So the first one is informational. So this is the very broad one. When, when people look for a specific question or general information, it could be like, typically a question such as like, “how to tie a tie?” “What are capers?” Or,”who is singing at the Superbowl?” 6:51 Marcus: This is something you can really multiply because whenever people have some sort of problem, they open Google and they do a search. And this is typically informational searches. But informational searches can be also a little bit more specific. People may search for, “what is keyword intent” or “the definition of SEO” or “how to build a website”. And this is something you should keep in mind because informational searches are really like important, you know, how to start getting more insights from your customers and how actually to start being more visible in the whole customer journey. Then there are navigational keywords. When you look at navigational keywords, you often think of just brand searches. But this is not true when the searcher has a certain intent to find a specific website or physical location or certain thing like a login page. This is often when searchers are maybe not in the know, or maybe too lazy to kind of go to the website and just, you know, go to this specific page. 7:46 Marcus: So for example, “eBay login” has a very high search volume or “Facebook login.” So these are typical informational searches, but it could also be like, like Obama's Twitter account and so on. This is something we also define within our keyword terms. Then we have commercial intent when people search for a specific brand or a specific service, but also like for typical comparisons or best of searches, typical listicle pages. So like “iPad air” versus “iPad mini” or “armless office chairs” and all that stuff. So this is important because there's one last segment, which is transactional because this is even closer to the transaction. When people already have decided like, “hey, I know now I want to buy an iPad air and not the iPad mini.” I'm going to search for like, “iPad air.” So I put “for cheap”, or I put “2020” because I don't want to buy the newest one. 8:42 Marcus: I want to buy like an older one or where to buy a kayak. But transactional searches are not just for like purchasing products. They’re also like there for completing actions. So if you do not like sell products, but offer services or offer something else, it could also be like a download or new construction homes. So please keep this in mind. And if you look at all the whole, like segmentation of keyword intent, we could also take a look at like how keyword intent places an important role from the customer journey perspective. Because if you look at it from a funnel perspective, like awareness and interest, they have like the highest search volume. So it means like in this area, people are very unsure what they actually really want. If it's like a certain product, if it's like something else or if it's just general information. 9:33 Marcus: And this is something where we see now in the segmentation, like informational searches have the highest search volume. Then you have commercial searches more like the interest and consideration phase. And then we have to transactional searchers who are much closer to the transaction. And often companies, they mistake the segmentation by okay, transaction searches they deliver the highest conversion rates. We are trying to focus from the content perspective, primarily on transactional searches, but they will miss out the majority of searches the consumer or potential consumer does. 10:11 Marcus: Because in that moment, when you are in awareness/interest phase, this is where you have more search volume. And this is where if you do not get the customer, it's more like, it's more unlikely that you get the sale in the end. So let me give you one example. So think about the user and the intent, right? So, you know, we are here in a Wix webinar. So people search for, “how to build a website.” So many people search it every month because they want to know, and if Wix want to be relevant for, “how to build a website”, they can't just have their landing page with a purchase button like here, see the prices and, you know, let's go and create your website. It's like people have different kinds of searches. And in this list, it's going, what you are going to get in a new CMS in Wix very soon, like different types of searches with different intents and “how to build a website” is a typical informational query. 11:04 Marcus: And if you want to be relevant for informational queries, there are certain things you should understand that people are looking for structured content. They look often for lists. People have gotten very lazy. They don't want to read long texts. They want to have like structured content, like step one, two, three, or they want to have like, like frequently asked questions, like structured content in that kind of sense, because they want to learn very quickly how to build a website. And then like, I dunno, like how to learn or these kinds of things. And this is what Wix actually did. And if you look at all these different types of queries, for the commercial query, “website builder”, you have a much higher search volume, then all the informational queries like “how to build a website.” And then you have your navigation queries, like “Wix website” with a decent search volume as well. 11:55 Marcus: And this is interesting because if you look at, and it's not just to please Crystal and Mordy here, it's because what Wix really actually did here is gave credit, what's called a holistic content landing page. So it means based on the different types of searchers’ intents, that people want to learn how to build a website, people want to understand how all these steps work. People really want to kind of like understand what Wix is offering in terms of product. They created one like holistic connected experience. And the interesting thing is, again, so the intent of keywords is really dominating like what Google is showing, because Google is very much like—I mean, Google's mission is to discover the best content, right? So Google really wants to make sure that websites are [not] ranking that just have keywords on their page, or like use the keyword and title text. 13:00 Marcus: So it's, it's really important that the searcher, in the end really finds as fast as possible, what it was intended to look for. So if you look at the commercial intent website builder, and the informational intent, “how to build a website”, you even see that the results look very different. Whereas on the commercial intent side, you mostly have like really product pages because, because Google understands, this is like a searcher that wants to build a website. And I mean, there are lots of like free, but also lots of really good commercial services. So Wix ranks you on number one. And if you look for the informational intent, ‘how to build a website”, you see the first one is, is a feature snippet. You have point one, two, three, four, five, six on how to create a website. That's often like, like a good intriguing piece for the user to see, okay, this is maybe even answering a question or I want to know. 13:51 Marcus: And also Wix is ranking on number one here, but we have like two different intents. If you look at the rest of the results, this is really interesting is if you just purely look at the rankings, Wix is the only website that is able to rank for both, for the commercial and for the informational query. Everyone else is different. On the left side here for the website builder, the commercial intent we primarily have product offerings like GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, et cetera. And on the right side, for the more informational intent query, we have mostly content pages like long form content pages. So you see here now, it's not just the case that you can only rank for one intent. If you create a holistic experience, you can cover the customer journey on a much broader scale. So the customer who comes to your website can learn. 14:46 But at the same time, once he has learned enough, he can even convert on your website, which is actually super cool and not very common. To get a little bit more background in terms of the distribution of keywords by intent, based on our study that we made just recently informational queries, the majority of queries people do. If you look at them, commercial and transactional queries, commercial queries are 10% transactional, like almost 20% and navigation elected minority of just 10% here. So keep this in mind, because if you create content, you should always make sure that you cover enough of like informational intent as well, because this is where we can capture a lot of search volume, which brings me to search volume by intent. So search volume by intent means—we at Semrush measure like how many people search on an average basis, on an annual basis, per average, certain keywords. And if you look at informational intent, it's still in the majority with 53% of all searches on our last keyword database. Then you have here like commercial, which is now in the minority with 8.5% in terms of search volume, because it's often like long-tail queries. It's like, “best iPad air online” or “best iPad deals for cheap” or something like this. So super close to the transactions or lower search volume, then you have transactional queries—16% and navigational queries here with 21% compared to the 10% we had before. And the reason is very simple because if you have like, lots of brands, like if people just search for brands like Wix or Nike or Facebook or whatever, this is typically trading the high search volume, which makes up this 21% here. So yeah, that brings me to a good point because informational searches, they represent a majority of searches and yeah, I mean, there's something that's actually really cool what Google is doing. 16:47 Marcus: There's a website Think with Google. It's like a blog that Google on a regular basis is publishing studies and really like pretty good insights. There was one study about the purest consumer where Google gave some pretty interesting insights about growth in certain areas for mobile searches and for this webinar, I think that's really cool because these numbers are from like 2017. So they're not from today, but important is about the growth. So the growth between like within the two year timeframe, and if you look at this, even small decisions are research like “best umbrellas” within two years had a 140% growth or “best travel accessories” had 110% growth or “best toothbrush” over a 100% growth, which is interesting. So people become more aware of how I can use our search engines to like help me in making my decision. I don't need to go into like a physical location that was before the pandemic. 17:51 Marcus: So I can just use a Google search and look at like certain websites that do give me some good options for like best and then product. And if you then look at mobile searches that have like underscore ideas that they also have grown within a two-year timeframe of over 55%, that's really like everything like “bathroom remodel ideas”, “gender reveal ideas”, “graduation party ideas.” And this is interesting because it's growing fast. And if you look at these different types of queries, look at this, and this is something you're going to get very soon in your preferred CMS. So if you look at this, so you get the search volume and you get the intent, and this is interesting because you see like best and then product, it's typically a commercial query. So like I said, much closer to the transaction, but often with like decent search volume, but informational queries, all the ideas stuff this has, as you can see here, very high search volume. 18:53 Marcus: And if you are, for example, a bathroom store that sells bathroom accessories, you know, sinks and bathtubs and whatever you really need to think about, what does the user search like much, much more before he's even considering a certain product and bathroom remodel ideas would be a perfect idea if you are like a shop to create as content. To kind of like get interested potential consumers on your website, and like really try to help the user to find good information, like how to remodel the bathroom. And you, of course you can like advertise your products and try to make like a good upsell here. So this is really like how you should think about the customer journey. So knowing this, this is not just the only thing that you get as [a] benefit. If you think about keyword intent and kind of like how you can like create targeted content. Often, if you create content for the different types in the customer journey, you also have like much more improved conversion rates on your transactional pages. 20:02 Marcus: So look at Wix’s homepage that is able to rank for informational, commercial or navigational queries. So by creating more holistic content, you can improve the conversion rates and you can kind of like reduce the bounce rates as another pretty good benefit here. Sure you also create more page views because like, if you have like, not just one piece of content for the whole customer journey, you maybe even produce more pieces of content because you know what is searched more in the informational stage and searched more in the transactional stage. If you're like a shop, you can create more content, you can even create more page views. Then your answer boxes, which [are] pretty interesting. So think about the example that I was showing like with Google search results, featured snippets or like these answer boxes that are often below organic. 20:53 Marcus: This is something you can trigger. If you, for example, have FAQs on your page and you use the schema.org integration for the FAQ markup. So it can even trigger these answer boxes, which increases your screen equity within Google search. Sure the next benefit is to reach a wider audience. Why? Because if you are like purely focused on like selling your products or services, that moment when you also create like informational content doesn't mean like everyone coming to your page is becoming a customer, but you can increase your brand awareness. You can increase the customer happiness. And maybe at some point, the person that like visited your page for like bathroom remodel ideas is going to remember your brand coming to your website at a later stage. And sure of course, much more traffic. So how can you do this? 21:47 Marcus: Like in our Keyword Magic tool in Semrush, it's quite simple. The magic tool works in a way that it's like a pivot table. You have an idea. So this one is for “coffee roaster”, and then you see all the results and next to the results, you see the intent, which is actually quite cool because you can filter very quickly, like certain things. Like if you want to create a piece of content, you should focus on informational queries. If you are a shop and you want to understand what kind of keywords do users need—users search to be like more ready for the purchase. You should filter by transactional or by commercial intent, which is cool. So—which you can do here. The next one, which I really love is you can filter by questions. Why? If you really want to understand what keeps your potential consumer up at night, what are they searching? 22:41 Marcus: What are the questions that you can very easily filter by questions only? And for each question, you have the volume and intent, which is cool because here—I had “coffee roaster” as a very broad term before and now people, I mean, I can see people search for “how to roast coffee beans” or “what is a blonde roast coffee.” So this is really cool because if you are a coffee roasting company, like maybe a physical location, like somewhere, or maybe you sell roasted coffee online. If you now create content that incorporates all these like questions, you can not only trigger these answer boxes or featured snippets. You can also get customers to your website because they're interested in something way before they even make a purchase. As you see here for example, “is dark coffee stronger?”. Hey, just great content, answer the question. 23:35 Marcus: And maybe you have a happy customer for life. And like I said, you can also filter by other intents. So this is informational, this is commercial intent. Do you see here? These queries are a little bit different and there's one also one cool thing in Semrush. We do also have like, intents that tend to [be] like informational and/or commercial. So we do not have a binary thing, like only informational, only commercial. Often keyword queries are even like tending towards like informational or commercial. That's something we even offer in that kind of sense, which is actually really cool. And if you are very serious about the business and you want to, you know, sell your products or services researching what people search, researching what people kind of search throughout the customer journey is actually one of the most important things you should do to create content. 24:30 Marcus: Yeah. And then, I mean, there's one other cool thing. Like I said, you should really think about the customer and what keeps them up at night, doing the whole, like journey, how to research product. So here is this example for guitar. And I know many friends that wanted to play a guitar that had in mind to play guitar or played the guitar in their youth. And they might search for things like “how to tune a guitar”. So if you are a guitar shop and you're selling like, good entry level, but also like super expensive electronic guitars, I don't know. The thing is you shouldn't only focus on like, like guitars in that moment, or if you are like a physical location, Google knows, for example, also where the searcher is when people search for where to buy a guitar, this is transactional intent, but this is really close to the transaction you see 1000 people searching versus “how to tune a guitar”, 18000 people searching. So it would be a much better thing if you are an expert anyway, and you have a guitar shop or guitar website, and you know how to tune a guitar and many other things around this topic, you should create the content. If you're an expert who will appreciate your content anyway, because Google is looking for like expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the EAT concept. And that would be even a pretty good idea to have that content on the website. 26:11 Marcus: Yeah, let's continue here. Like I said, you can even search for different intents in this moment here, it's like informational and transactional, but there's one other thing I wanted to cover at the end is the keyword difficulty, which you're also going to get in Wix's backend very soon. And it's cool. Why? Because if you know that there's like high search volume on many different keywords, but the difficulty [is] potentially very high to kind of like compete for high search volume topics. You can even use the keyword difficulty at that moment. Easy to start with some more easier to kind of like entry level keywords. Yeah. So we're almost at the end on my presentation, at least. So it's important that you get the foundations right. So the keyword intent mapping is very important for you, that new content strategy that you know, that based on the customer journey, you provide the relevant content. 27:17 Marcus: Please do not try to have holistic content for every kind of topic. You should not try to kind of like create “how to tune a guitar” and have the products on the same page. You can have the products on a page, but you should not create a shop page with only like a large amount of content and hope that you can cover everything at the same time. So please be very diligent on what is necessary for informational and for commercial, transactional content. So get your foundations right. So for informational searches, again, these are typically queries where people search for a specific question or general information. This is something you should really leverage to grow your brand awareness by for example, providing proposed or other sorts of informational, educational content, I should definitely include FAQs on your page. Please do not forget to use schema FAQ mark-ups. 28:12 Marcus: And this will really help you to kind of like attract the top of the funnel traffic. Then for navigational queries even if you think like, okay, when people search for my brand or when people search for, I dunno something along my brand, like, I dunno like the login page or some other page, please be aware of that. It's very easy to optimize branded queries, but often at the same time, these large brands or brands in general have an issue to understand like, okay, there's some sort of queries people have around my brand, but you have to, your page is not optimized, maybe an affiliate or some someone else is going to outrank you even for these more navigational queries. So please also consider navigational queries in your keyword and content strategy. And it's again, easy to rank for them if you are the brand anyway. Then we have, again, commercial queries. 29:09 Marcus: This is what people typically use if they want to investigate a certain brand or service or products. This is something you should use in your content strategy when you, for example, create product comparisons or typically listicle pages. Listicle pages are not just for products. It could be also around like [the] “top 10 destinations in Germany” or “the best electric family vans” or something. So it's, it's really like more longer form content where people expect somewhat in-depth information, but really closer to the product. Then we have transactional queries. This is typically where searches already know what they want. They know maybe even where they want it. And this is even something that's highly like recommended to also run PPC ads at the same time, because this is really what Google typically says as one plus one equals three, because if it's very close to the transaction, you should have a good content strategy to have like good organic rankings. 30:14 Marcus: But at the same time, you can even capture like good traffic close to the transaction through PPC. This is my last slide. So why? I mean, I'm a data guy, so I can talk about that kind of stuff like for hours, but Google just recently made a core date. So on May 25th, they started, and I think two weeks later, Danny Sullivan announced they finished with the core date, but the core date has different influences. And I thought like, let's take a look at what kind of keyword intent had the highest influence, the highest volatility doing the Google core update. So I took a pretty long timeframe between May 25th and June 21st. And interesting is really that informational queries here, they had the highest volatility. So from my perspective, I can only imagine that, especially on the informational side, it's higher search volume. 31:15 Marcus: It's often that there's a much larger variety of different offerings that Google really try to readjust what are the best sources. I definitely have seen that for many keywords, but typically brands have good rankings who will now start to rank like more informational sources. I definitely have seen on many high search volume, like really shorter terms and Wikipedia, again, like gain rankings and YouTube at the same time, which is very interesting for transactional and commercial queries. We also had a pretty high volatility and maybe to explain volatility super quick. So volatility means that in my case, more than 50% of the rankings shifted during the timeframe of May 25th and June 21st, more than 50%. This is what I consider right here, volatility. And then the last one—navigational, they even also have a pretty high volatility of 40%. Even if you think like when people search for brand or for certain actions that they want to complete, and they know what actually the result they're looking for, even there at a 40% volatility, why is it important? 32:25 Marcus: So first it's important for you to know that there's constant change at Google. So even if you create content, you see that your competitors, they’re outranking you, and you're maybe not even found on the first page of Google because of the volatility. And if you make a good job and if you kind of like have experts or even expert content, if you maintain the content, like create the assets, maybe create like videos even create what people really want—based on like the high volatility is always good chance that on a regular basis, even with like a big update Google is going to consider you a much more important source and you will start ranking on the first page or even like in the first couple of rankings. Yeah. Thank you very much for the time and the attention. I know that sometimes the topic, I'm going too fast through all the slides, but that's why we have the Q and A now, and I'm really looking forward to all the questions. Thank you. 33:29 Crystal: That was really great. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed all of it. And I love seeing the whiz round with all of the Semrush stuff. Cause Semrush is such a great tool. There are so many parts of it. I have a question Mordy. Do you mind if I jump straight in? Okay. So you talked a lot about search intent and you shared the example from Wix using— obviously you talked a little about search intent, but you shared the example from Wix talking about ranking for a few different kinds of intent on the same page. One of the things that I thought was great about that example was that the formats, was that for the different kinds of intents, there were different, the content was formatted differently. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that and maybe you could talk a little bit about how Semrush also segments for that within the tool. 34:28 Marcus: Yes. 100%. I mean, the thing is that Google is pretty aware of what the user wants. And nowadays people are very, like, they don't have like a high attention span, so they want to get to the results super fast. So Google even like sends the user very often to the paragraph they're looking for, if you have a long page. And what I found really good, what Wix did is, so you've seen, like there were different types of assets. So often they had like images to explain certain things. You had like lists, especially when people look for structured content and they want to have a list like a step-by-step guide or some sort of like bullet point list. This is something you should provide. And you can use information in Semrush in a way that you look at different SERP features that Google is triggering. 35:17 Marcus: So for example, when you look at the keyword, we also show you in Semrush, there are like image results, video results, there are related questions. So there are direct answer boxes. So there's a lot of like rich information in Semrush that gives you—just looking at the keyword a good of what kind of results are triggered. You know, of course, if you want to create content, you can't just like, like start to produce the content. You really have to understand what does the user want? And often it's maybe something different you have in mind. Right? So with, in living in the Tik TOK, like era, now I would say people need short form content. They need it super fast. And if you only provide long form content then just purely text, that's maybe even something where you're missing out your potential future consumer. 36:15 Marcus: So you have to really think about what kind of format you are using. I mean, we all know that Google is very good at machine learning. They announced this MUM concept, I think [it was] last year, right? Where Google is able to kind of like create the connections between different sorts of asset classes, between like videos and images and texts that Google understands, like the relationship between all of them. So that means like, if you're missing out, because you only provide, I dunno, only images or only texts, only video, and the user has some different, like expectations. You're maybe not being considered anymore as like the best ranking. 37:00 Mordy: Yeah, really. What's really interesting about what you're talking about. What you're saying right now is, and it goes back to this stat that you share, that most of the searches being done, and the volume of searches being done is around informational keywords. So how to do something, the best ways to do something. And you have Google getting really smarter as you mentioned. And that means that how Google understands what someone's looking for, even within the intent of informational, let's say, for example, it's around car insurance. So you have things like, I had to buy car insurance—”which policy should I buy”, “comparing different car insurance policies”, all sorts of informational content. And I think that as Google gets smarter at what it's able to do and how it's able to break down a topic, let's say the topic of car insurance and all the different information—types of informational content that is possible for a person to be looking for that Google's going to be getting better at showing those different pieces of content. So it's not just enough to know, yeah, I need to create informational content, but what kind of informational content should I be creating? Should I be creating a how to guide or a comparison or whatnot. I’m wondering what you thought about that. 38:06 Marcus: I mean, this is really, like a good point, you know, often I have tunnel vision. I'm an eCommerce website. I know, like I have good products, I have good prices, but I have tunnel vision on what the user actually wants, and this is where keyword research looking at the intents like brings a little bit outside to this, like bubble, because people often have any different touch points until they make a purchase right? So Google made lots of studies and they definitely found a high correlation that the more expensive a product is, the more it kind of like, really is valuable and at the same time, expensive the more searches you make. And they had one really cool study for a family that booked a family vacation [at] Disney World a couple of years ago. There was a study and they found out that they made more than 100 searches around the whole topic, like booking this family vacation at Disney World—to in the end, like make the purchase, which is really interesting because they looked up like, “what kind of point of interests are there are?”, “what kind of hotels are there?” 39:15 Marcus: They looked at things they can do in the area. So it wasn't just like one search and they made a purchase. They made over a hundred searches, which is something people often forget that when they create content. Often, I mean, this is really interesting. I was in a board meeting, not that long ago where [it] was asked, like, okay, I mean, we have all these like pages here, but the conversion rate is so low. It was about listicle pages with low conversion rate. But so what do we do with these pages? You know, so because often the decision-makers, they just look purely at certain KPIs, I don't know, conversion rate or deals or whatever. They don't look at like how the customer journey works. And if you start to get the customer very early in the customer journey, you can do something with these people. You can create more brand awareness about your products and people may come back, but to a different page. So then it's more like a problem of attribution. And you know, and that's something that's why I put in this, this guitar example here, because if you just purely sell like guitars in your online shop, but you don't write about how to kind of like tune a guitar or how to, I dunno, select the best one or you're missing out like a big audience. 40:26 Crystal: Yeah. And I think you mentioned expertise, authority, and trust, and that kind of content builds trust. If they know that you know how to tune a guitar, then you probably know about other stuff. So it's worth building that in. 40:40 Mordy: Well, yeah, I'm just going to say it's a good point. Just forget search engines for a minute, but you're your own users, when they come to your site, they find you, whatever keyword they show up at your website and they see that you've covered the bases all around, whatever is around guitar, buying a guitar, playing, that creates one is the funnel is messy, which is really Marcus. What you're saying, people just don't go, okay, well, I have the informational content. Now I'll go and buy it. It's really the research. And you think about yourself, your research, you go in and you go out, you come back, you think about it for a week. You percolate about it and you come back, you, maybe you buy. No I'm going to research more. That's what you know. So the funnel is messy. And at the same time, if you're able to show the user that at each point during their journey, you have the answer to their question—they're far more likely to buy from you. 41:30 Marcus: We do have a lot of questions. 41:33 Mordy: I was just going to say, I want to take some questions before we get into the questions actually about the particular insights that Marcus shared. There were, I noticed there were a lot of questions about the integration. So I'm just going to share my screen really quickly again, and quickly answer some questions or try to answer some questions that I saw about the integration with Semrush that is upcoming. Don't know why that's not loading. Okay. So for starters, the Semrush integration that you're going to have inside of Wix is free. You do not have to pay for it. There's a certain amount of searches you'll have per day. I don't remember the exact quota off the top of my head, but it should certainly be enough to help you get set up. So I'll just run through a quick example. Let's say on your homepage, you want to talk about— 42:15 Mordy: You know, I don't know, microphones for podcasting. That's what your website does. You might want to search for “microphones podcasting” and see what kind of keyword options that Semrush gives you, how often people are searching for those terms related to podcasts, microphones, how difficult it is to rank, and obviously the intent, or you might want to compare that to well, “USB microphones”. Maybe people don't search for “podcast microphone”. They don't call it that, they just search for “USB microphone”. So you can run another keyword search inside of Wix using Semrush data and see, okay, well only 10 people are searching every month for “podcast microphone”, but a million people, just making this number up, are searching for “USB microphone” and it's, you know, a medium difficulty to rank. So that's oops, apologies. That's the kind of data that you'll have inside of there. Now Semrush offers a freemium model. 43:09 Mordy: So you can go from here and you'll have access to do this from the Wix dashboard or go into Semrush proper. So Semrush is an independent SEO data platform, they have a free trial and recommend you check it out. After the free trial expires, by the way, there is a freemium model where you can keep exploring keyword and all other types of data [and] information through their freemium model. So yes, you'll have the access, the initial access to the foundational information inside of Wix, you will be able to use Semrush's freemium model that they offer in general, inside of the actual Semrush platform, which you'll have access to via the Wix platform where you can explore the keyword data and the possibilities a little bit more. So I just really wanted to share that before we get into the actual questions related to the webinar that Marcus just presented to us. Let me have one quick, second, I’ll pull up my questions. I apologize. I don't remember them all by heart. So let's start with the first question maybe let's start with is, what's a good example of how a small business can target users with keyword intent? That’s a really great question. 44:20 Marcus: I mean, the first question, is that, is it a, like a physical business, like with the physical location? So that's important because people that not only search for near me, like, I don't know, “best guitar store near me”, or “best hair stylist near me”. Also Google without the usage of near me, Google knows the location, especially on your mobile phones. So just people searching for “guitar store”, the near me information is important. So if you are a small business and you have a physical location, you should be sure that you use address information on your page. You should use schema.org, like to make sure that Google understands you’re, like in a certain location. And that's actually super easy. So then if you, if you also offer like services outside just a certain area, you should create content, like really based on what we have presented before. You should think about the customer journey from the beginning. 45:21 Marcus: If you sell flowers, you should think about, I mean, if you're not like sending your flowers to all states in the US or like internationally, you should think about like what people search for more broadly in your area. But let's say you ship on a broader scale internationally, even you should really start at the top, like, what are people searching? What are their pain points in the customer journey? And this is how you sort of start like a keyword strategy. You should not start writing just content right away for the search first keywords, because for Google, it's all about a connected topic. So this is semantically related. So that means if you even make proper keyword research and you start writing lots of different types of pages, it's often a case of these things belong together. 46:09 Marcus: That's what I, that's what I call it, holistic content that you put things together maybe as, an extreme, like, you know, like how in a certain order. And then of course, if you sell products or services or whatever, you should really try to understand, like how can you come to the point that like leading the user towards a certain product or service makes it make sense. Two things, I mean, I've seen companies being incredibly successful, creating a good blog, becoming an authority in a certain space without even like super promoting all their products, that it was just natural content they created because all of the expertise and they really created like a good brand around all [this] like informational [and] educational content without the necessity of like hyper promoting the product, that's maybe even the better thing to do. So this is something. 47:01 Marcus: And then there's one thing I really have to talk about because of maybe lack of expertise or lack of time, like really thinking about SEO. Often people try to create good content, even like good people, they try to like underestimate the complexity and the time they need to spend on things like researching instructional content. And they often believe like, okay, if I have like just a few hundred or maybe a few thousand words, that will be good enough, but content is something you really have to care about. You have to maintain, you have to update the content on a regular basis producing one thing once and pushing it online. And it's not enough. So if you really want to be relevant in a certain space, you have to make sure that you maintain and update the content on a regular basis. That you add information,that you add kind of like refresh the content when something is outdated. So this is really important. That's something people often underestimate. So content is really an investment. So that’s—I mean it, and if you do it right then, I mean, look at Wix’s homepage ranking for many different terms, high search volume terms, this is something that you will earn over time when, when you do right. 48:14 Crystal: And I think you mentioned pain points there a few times. And I think for small businesses, that's a really good one to think about. So for a small business, you're very close to your customers for a very, a lot of the time. And it can mean that they ask you the same question a lot. And so, you know, their pain points, they tell you, 48:32 Marcus: This is really a good point. I, seriously, I mean, all the small businesses, especially ones that have like, maybe like a direct connection to the customers because they go to your shop or because you do customer service, like yourself, you should write everything down. This is like the best source is your customer, you know. It’s not just Google keyword tool, or like Semrush magic keyword tool. It's not, it's like your customer's the best source. And that means that like, I mean, I've seen it in the medical space, to the best content is written by doctors, right? Not by someone writing about some sort of like sickness, it's like doctors, they can write about this stuff. And it's the same in every other industry. 49:15 Crystal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you can use that information as your seed for your wider keywords to make sure that, so the information that you get from your customers, you can use as the seed, where for your keyword research to get like really extra top-notch content. 49:32 Mordy: I'm sorry, let's go to a question. Sorry. From Lizzie Jane, if we go with speaking keywords, by the way, if we go with the common keywords, does that mean we are basically joining millions of people offering that keyword. So how do we stand out from competitors using common keywords? It's a very good question. Crystal, I'm going to throw it to you first. 49:54 Crystal: So what I would say, as a small business, if you're a small business, I think the easiest thing to do is to go to Google and enter in that keyword. So for instance, we've been talking a lot about guitars. So let's say it was a guitar shop. You would enter “guitar shop”. There are millions and millions of guitar shops all over the world. And if you go to Google, they will actually filter you. And they will start to ask you more questions about that. Same thing happens within the Semrush tools. So you enter “guitar shop” and there will be smaller terms within that. And what you want, ideally with keyword research, you want to be a big fish in a small pond. So you need to find the best pond for yourself and also the most relevant pond where all of the fish are your friends now. 50:35 Crystal: So you want to make sure that you've got keywords that work. So you want to filter it down a little bit more so that you're not just saying “guitar shop”, let's say “guitar shop in your town”, or like “vintage guitar shop” or like you know, “great value guitar shop.” Let's say you sell really reasonably priced guitars, but just know what is the special thing about your business and try to tailor your keyword to go with that and make that your sort of core term. That's what I would say. 51:03 Mordy: You can't get around your own identity and what you do and what you offer that is the foundational core of everything. Should I, I'm sorry, Marcus, go ahead. 51:15 Marcus: I just wanted to make a reference. I mean, when people are interested in running, they also do not start to run the marathon the next day, right? So they start slow. I mean, they do training and they maybe start like with like a three-mile run a week later. So this is really how you should see content as well. You should not start with high search hyper-competitive keywords, you should start small and see like the progress then kind of like become better over time. 51:41 Mordy: There's always this question out there in the SEO world, there's a zero search volume keyword, right? Meaning no one's searching for this, there's no such thing as that really. Should I bother writing about it or targeting that topic? In my opinion, you could tell me if you disagree is yes, you need to, it's a search engine with your audience as well. You need to build trust. They need to understand this is who you are. This is what you do. This is the content that we can rely on you for. And if you start off writing for those longer tail longer kind of more specific kind of topics and keywords, you slowly build up that trust. You build up that authority. You build up that expertise in the eyes of your users and search engines, and then you can write and rank for a more competitive keyword. So I most definitely would disagree with zero search volume, don't write about it. No start, maybe start there, that's a good place to get going and build up your, your authority and your EAT as we like to call it. So a quick question, should I be creating content to target every intent Google shows on the SERP for all of my keywords? Very ambitious. Crystal, you’re shaking your head. 52:54 Crystal: I would say not, not everything all at once. And Marcus used Wix as an example, and Wix is actually really good at this. So topic clusters are something that people talk about. So think about your topic. What if you look up, if you look up like blogging or blogs or things like that, Wix has like some blogs on blogging and blogs on 120 different ways to make a blog, different blog topics. So you're covering lots of different parts of the intent. I would say one of the things that's great about SEO is that like, and Marcus talked about this before. It's not a one-shot deal. You can write your blog now, and then you can go back and you can add stuff in later. So like maybe it's “best guitars” [or] “best electric guitars” and maybe the Fender Stratocaster is the best one right now. 53:40 Crystal: Then maybe like this other one makes this great new upgrade. And actually it's not the best anymore. And you can go back and you can update that and make the new guitar, the best guitar, or, you know, different laws will change or other things will change and you need to update it. And that's great. Google loves that because they already know your page. They already know that it was good content. And then you can say that you've updated. And then they know not only was this good before, but oh my gosh, they're keeping on top of it. And it looks great. And it's, you know, it's still good. So this is, this is something that people are looking after. So I think—don't do it all at once. Like Marcus said, like it's, you know, it's a marathon, not a sprint, like get in there, do a bit now, do some more and just keep going. 54:23 Marcus: Yeah. I mean, I think this is really like how we should do it, right? I mean, you should, if you start with like keywords with the lowest search volume and less competition, it's also like super exciting to see your content showing up. It's also something that's like pretty motivational. And what you said, like updating content is one of the things that I've seen most companies struggling with, because it's like, if you don't see it anymore, it's like out of your mind. And if you see content creation as a business, you only think about new content and I've seen companies be most successful when they do maintain and care about content that wasn't even created like a couple of years ago. But like you said, with the Fender Stratocaster, they updated and then maybe they can kind of like be the most relevant source, you know? 55:13 Crystal: And I think we talked about formats as well. Another good way to look at, to change the intent or to add intent to a webpage is like—let's say you had a webpage that was all about how to tune a guitar. And it was a written bit of content. And you talked about the SERP volatility there with different intents. So one of the things that changed in the last algorithm was there was a lot more video that was present. So let's say you had this blog that was written about how to tune a guitar. You could go back to that blog and add a video about how to tune a guitar, and then you would be adding more intent and you'd be able to show it more features. And it would still be the same blog and would still have that ranking stuff, but you'd be able to satisfy customers and it, and it in a different way, which is what it's all about really. 55:55 Morfy: And that's, by the way, a great way—if you want to understand how Google is looking at intents, if you Google something for like “how to play guitar” and you see those images and videos and all sorts of different kinds of media formats, and you know, that Google looks at this, and say, “hey, the intent here is for the person—if you're creating content, well, they want video content, or if they're searching ‘how to make meatloaf’, they want an image there.” So look at what Google is doing. That'll help you clue you into what the wider intent is. So Barbara Danielson asks, “how can I, this is right up Marcus’s alley, right? How can I find out what people who find my site are searching for?” 56:32 Marcus: I mean, just this really where you can like fully use like the full spectrum of Semrush. So if you put in your landing page, Semrush will tell you for what kind of keyword queries any [of your] pages [have] already [been] found, for what kind of search volume and what your ranking is. So this is really a pretty good starting point. And from there, you can start to look at your competition and do the same. So what I often do is—so if I think about one keyword, so for example, “how to tune a guitar”. I take the first ranking and I click on the rankings on the keywords that this page also ranks for. And it's often like hundreds, or maybe sometimes thousands of keywords. So out of one seed keyword, looking at [the] landing page that ranks the best I see what are the keywords this page is also ranking for. 57:19 Marcus: Then I can look at intent again. I see, okay. Top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. So this type of research is very important because otherwise people get stuck with just the word, a keyword, but in the end, it's like [a] topic, which is much broader and more holistic. So and if you don't know what your page is already known for, you can also go, I'm not having access to Semrush. You can also go to Google Search Console and take a look there because Search Console also gives a lot of pretty good information for free. 57:51 Mordy: So I want to get to one more question, we’re going to squeeze this one in. I think it's a really good question from Anna about keyword ideas and searches. Isn't this just a reflection of us being in the pandemic for two years, and now the trend around whatever keyword will massively change as people go back to normality. 58:11 Marcus: I mean, I totally see where this question is coming from, especially during the pandemic. I mean, all these like websites like Pinterest, or like, or other DIY pages, they really kind of like had a huge growth and especially in searches and popularity, but I do believe like, like the laziness and the knowing that Google is going to provide me [with] any answer I want really. I mean, seriously, people are not going to go away from like idea searches or, best of searches because they know that Google or maybe another search engine as well does a pretty good job in organizing information for me. So that's why I don't think it's going back to normality and you can always use like Google Trends to kind of like challenge, like, “hey, is this really going away?” You can use Google Trends to see if there's like a decline in searches. And I doubt that idea searches in general are going to decline in the future. 59:11 Crystal: And I think also people, you know, Google is a, you know, it's a, it's a two way thing. So, so Google will serve results. And they'll say, “we have this result for you.” And people will say, “I don't like that.” Or people or people will say, “well, I really, really like all those Pinterest searches or I really like having lots and lots of videos for that.” And Google sees people like this, we’ll give them more of that. And I think like within the last year, for instance, Google got much better at understanding video. So they're able to auto add chapters at different sections since you do different parts. And so that will change where things show on the SERP. And that will cause volatility further down because like previously they were only able to index certain text in a certain way, and now they can read videos in a different way as well. So as the technology changes that also can affect different rankings and things, which is another reason why it's good to have a mix of content in your content. 1:00:06 Mordy: Yeah. And content is constantly changing and it's people the way people look for content and what they're looking for very slowly sometimes, but it's constantly changing. I think back and I’ll end on this point, you know, 20 years ago, people were searching for music. They were searching for CDs, right? How many people are searching about CDs or cassettes anymore at this point? Right? 1:00:24 Crystal: Only to sell them. 1:00:26 Mordy: What do we do with them? I found a whole bunch of CDs here. I don’t know what to do with them. But the way people look for things, what they're looking for, it's going to change over time. And that's just the way content is. On that happy note, thank you so much for joining us. And Marcus, by the way. Thank you. That was amazing and wonderful. I really appreciate your time. Crystal as well for us. We're back again next month with another webinar for you. We’re talking about your homepage and SEO for your homepage. That’ll be Crystal and myself. You can look for more SEO content on wix.com/seo/learn. That's wix.com/seo/learn. Learn more and more about keywords and intent and all sorts of great SEO information and check out our next upcoming webinar. You'll also get an email with this webinar recording as well. So not to worry. Thank you everybody. 1:01:21 Mordy: Thank you so much. And thank you, Marcus. 1:01:23 Crystal: Thank you Marcus. Bye bye.

August 23, 2022 Updated: December 6, 2022 With the right internal linking strategies, you can get as much as five times more traffic per page. In this webinar, SEO consultant Cyrus Shepard delves into insights like this one from his case study on 23 million internal links and discusses effective strategies and best practices so you can improve crawlability and increase traffic to your pages. Table of contents Internal links: What and why What are internal links? Why internal links are so important Prioritize diverse anchor text over internal link quantity More internal links don’t necessarily mean more clicks Why more internal links isn’t always better 5 tactical tips to improve your internal linking Webinar transcript Meet the webinar hosts Download the webinar deck Internal links: What and why Creating a robust network of internal links can take time and discipline. To help you decide whether it’s a worthwhile tactic (and it almost always is), you must first understand what internal links are, how they’re different from external links, and why they’re important for both SEO and user experience. What are internal links? An internal link is a link from a page on your site to another page on your site. Shepard mentioned three elements of an internal link: 01. Href element , which identifies the link for browsers. 02. URL , which tells the browser where you’re linking to. 03. Anchor text , or the clickable part of the link. Internal links are different from external links in that they point to another page on the same domain (as where external links point to a different domain). While this may be obvious to some, this distinction is important when discussing links for SEO. Images can also be used to add links (internal or external). While images don’t provide you with the opportunity to add anchor text, the alt text (which is first and foremost used for accessibility reasons), can be used to describe the image so that search engines can get an idea of what the image depicts. Why are internal links so important? Links are an official Google ranking factor and one of the most important parts of the search engine’s algorithm (or any search engine’s algorithm, for that matter). As a ranking factor, internal links can influence rankings in Google search results. However, remember that there are potentially hundreds of ranking factors, and a fixation on any single factor is unlikely to significantly improve your rankings. Internal links also pass PageRank throughout your site. In a nutshell, Google uses PageRank to understand the importance of a page by measuring the number of links (external and internal) pointing to it. When Page A has a link to Page B, some of Page A’s importance gets transferred to Page B. In addition, the anchor text applied to a link gives users an idea of where the link will take them and signals relevance for search engines. Another important benefit is that internal links can help Google (and other search engines) crawl your website. If you create links to your important pages, Google can use that link to discover the page, which can help get it into search results more quickly. Internal links also signal to Google which pages on your site are the most important. Beyond the search-related benefits, internal links also give visitors a path to follow to browse more of your content, products, etc. This helps keep visitors on your site, giving you more opportunities to familiarize them with your brand or market. Prioritize diverse anchor text over internal link quantity Implementing an internal link is easy compared to earning backlinks from external sites . Even so, there are considerations to keep in mind, including anchor text and frequency. More internal links don’t necessarily mean more clicks from search “As you added internal links to a page . . . . traffic tended to rise, but only up until a certain point,” Shepard said, referring to the results of a study conducted by his company Zyppy . “After about 40 or 45 internal links to those pages, traffic actually started to decline after that.” “Then we looked at the anchor text,” he said. Zyppy’s study found that as the anchor text variety increased, the traffic also increased. “This seemed to be the driving factor with traffic,” he said. "And if there’s one key I want you to walk away with from this webinar, it’s that we should be increasing not necessarily the number of internal links, but increasing our anchor text variations." —Cyrus Shepard Based on this observed correlation, site owners and SEOs should prioritize anchor text variations instead of simply ensuring that the links are on the page. Anchor text variations for a recipe blog. Why aren’t more internal links always better? “We found when you have anything more than 40-50 internal links, those tended to be sitewide navigation links,” Shepard explained. “Because it’s in your navigation, everybody can see it. But, how many anchor text variations do you have? Well, you have one, because every page has the same link [and anchor text].” —Cyrus Shepard For larger, established sites, this may be less of an issue because they may have a robust external backlink profile for search engines to factor in. Small- to medium-sized businesses that haven’t established authority in their niches “tended to do better if they didn't link their important pages in their navigation and linked throughout the text [instead],” Shepard said. “My best advice is do what's best for the user and use navigation links for navigation when you want people to find your page. But, don't do it for SEO reasons because the data isn't so clear that those navigation links are going to help your SEO—but, if they help the user, go ahead,” he clarified. 5 tactical tips to improve your internal linking In addition to the guidance above, Cyrus also shared the following tactics to help you get more value from the internal links you’re adding anyway. 01. Audit your anchor text Use a variety of anchor text for your internal links, as pages with more variations tend to rank better and drive more traffic, according to Shepard’s findings. Look for a tool that allows you to export your anchor text (such as Screaming Frog) for easier analysis and organization. “Make sure you know, for every page of your site that’s important, your internal anchor text variations going to that page,” Shepard recommended. 02. Remember your alt text “People forget to fill in their alt text on the image link, but you have to because that counts as the anchor text when you use that image to link,” Shepard said. Alt text also serves as crucial information for screen readers, enabling you to optimize for both search and visually impaired audiences. 03. Use Internal links to help both pages rank better Internal links can help increase traffic for both the page being linked to and the one being linked from, according to a study by SearchPilot. Related content sections offer one way to easily add internal links, Shepard highlighted. Since this does not affect the main content of the page, this tactic may be particularly useful if you’re just looking to add links (and not update the entire page while you’re at it). 04. Link high and tight “If you’re giving people something to click on and you’re telling them something important, put it front and center so that they know where to click,” Shepard said. To that end, add your most important links higher up on the page and avoid burying them in your footer. After all, there’s no guarantee that a user will make it to the bottom of the page before they leave your site. 05. Leverage automation Automation (Shepard recommends tools like inLinks, Twylu, or SiteSeer) can help you find relevant pages to link from at scale, which may be tough to do using manual methods. Automation can be a real timesaver in this regard because it can help you identify internal linking opportunities on older content, which (if not updated) won’t have links to anything that was published after it. Transcript: Internal linking strategies for SEO success Speakers: Cyrus Shepard, Co-Founder, Zyppy Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix George Nguyen, Director of SEO Editorial, Wix 00:00 Mordy: Okay, hello everybody! Welcome. My name is Mordy Oberstein, I'm Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and we have an amazing guest for you today, an amazing webinar about internal linking and the success around internal linking for your SEO success and your strategy. Before we get started, let me just say we are recording the session, so please, if you missed something or if you feel you want to go back and listen to something again–you will get a recording via email in the coming days after the webinar, it is being recorded. With that we have an absolute legend with us today, he's an OG from the SEO community. I'm a little disappointed he's not wearing a fedora hat today, but that's okay... he's Cyrus Shepard! Hey, Cyrus! How are you? 0:42 Cyrus: Good morning or good afternoon, wherever you are in the world! Happy to be here. 0:49 Mordy: And joining us, with Cyrus, is our own Head of SEO Editorial, George Nguyen. Hey George, thanks for joining us. 0:55 George: Hey everyone! This is my webinar debut, right? 1:00 Mordy: It is your Wix webinar debut, but it's certainly not your webinar [debut] 1:02 George: Oh, that's true, that's true. It's just an honor to be here with, uh, hundreds of attendees, first and foremost. And of course with Cyrus, I'm really looking forward to learning all I can about internal linking, especially because we have our own publication all about SEO. I want to take all your wisdom and apply it as soon as possible. 1:13 Mordy: George, we're going to quiz you afterwards to make sure that all the practices that Cyrus laid out in the webinar that we're following on the hub 1:19 George: Make it public! Let's make this humiliation, you know, so there's no screenshots, let's just get it out of the way now. 1:25 Mordy: Sounds great, okay, so before we jump into all the internal linking goodness and data and strategy that Cyrus is going to share, let me just quickly explain the format. So as mentioned, Cyrus Shepard the founder of Zippy SEO and absolute SEO legend is going to share some insights, some data, some strategy around internal linking. Which is really one of, I consider, the low-hanging fruits of SEO. It's really a very easy thing you can do in order to give Google some greater understanding about your web pages, about your website, and to boost your rankings. 2:00 Mordy: After Cyrus is done sharing his insights and his data, we'll have a little bit of a discussion between the panel, after which we will have a Q&A session so if you have questions about SEO and internal linking, please feel free to share it. Not in the chat feature but in the Q&A feature inside of the zoom platform. So again, please there will be a Q&A session after the presentation, after a short panel discussion, please feel free to share, we encourage you to share and ask questions. There also will be moderators who may be answering your questions along the way so that we can answer as many questions as possible. Cyrus with that, I'm ready if you're ready. I'm definitely ready. I think we're all ready to learn more about internal linking. 2:42 Cyrus: Alright, thanks Mordy. While I figure out how to share my screen over here, let me just say I'm already a little intimidated. I do a lot of webinars and the Wix team, you and everybody else, has been one of the most professional organizations I've ever worked with–so this should hopefully be pretty good. 3:02 Cyrus: Alright, alright, did that work? Everybody see everything? 3:07 George: Oh, we look good. 3:09 Cyrus: Alright, alright. So today we are talking about internal linking superpowers and this isn't just any presentation on internal linking. This is the internal linking Top Gun Maverick special edition. Now, why did I include Tom Cruise and Top Gun Maverick? Am I just trying to take advantage of one of the top movies of the summer that was reasonably entertaining, but you know not very realistic and kind of cheesy? No, that's not why this is the Top Gun Maverick special edition–it's because of this guy, Joseph Kaczynski, the director, he's like six foot eight, he towers over Tom Cruise. Joseph is actually from my hometown, that is Marshalltown, Iowa. There's not a lot to do in Marshalltown, Iowa. There's a Maid-Rite, a pizza joint, I live on the west coast of the United States, Astoria, Oregon, uh, it's about 1800 miles from Astoria to Marshalltown. That's two hours if you fly an F-18 Tomcat like they did in the movie. So this really has nothing to do with internal links, but if i want to if I want you to walk away with a couple of things from today's presentation, it's that, uh, cool things from Marshalltown, you know eventually, uh, come out of, come out of, that city and also internal links are incredibly important to your internal linking strategy so with that awkward introduction, uh, let's dive in to internal links. Let's go get those internal links. So there are some things in this presentation that are slightly technical, uh, if you have a lot of experience with SEO you're going to be very comfortable, for those that don't do a lot of SEO or aren't very technical, some things may feel a little intimidating, but we're going to try to go slow and we're going to start try to start on the same page and hopefully, uh, you can ask some questions if you're confused afterwards but hopefully you'll come away with some insights. So you probably have heard of internal links, you've probably heard that they move the needle if you do a Google search of internal links SEO or case studies, you see, you see all these screenshots of people showing their SEO success. Charts that go up and to the right, uh, we hear this over and over and over again. We know, as we know, internal links work for helping you improve your traffic and we're going to dive into a little bit why. So what are we talking about, I want to make sure everybody's on the same page. What are we talking about when we talk about the internal link? Uh, an internal link is a link from your site to your site. It links your pages together as opposed to lurking to an external site, somebody else's site or an external site linking to you. There's three elements to an internal link, uh, and this gets this is a little bit technical but we have an a href element this this tells, uh, this tells browsers that this is a link, uh, it has a link to your website, not somebody else's website, and it has anchor text the third element. The anchor text, uh, is the clickable part of the link–the part of the link that you see that you click on, and this is very important for Google, for reasons that we'll get to in just a few moments. So we also have internal image links if you link an image to another page on your website that also counts as an internal link and here we have, you know, a couple of important distinctions. We have the source of the image but also the alt text. The alt text is, uh, put in for accessibility reasons. It describes the image, in case of the image link you don't have the text that you can click on, but the alt text counts, uh, for search engines in a way that again we'll talk about a little further on in the presentation. But just remember that the alt text is important for the internal image link. So why are internal links so important? Well first of all we know that links are an official Google ranking factor. It's rare that Google talks about what their ranking factors actually are. They like to hide them from us, so we have, so SEOs don't manipulate them, so they have some integrity. But links are included in the original Google PageRank patent. Google has been talking about them, uh, since you know, the early 2000s. Uh, it's one of the most important parts of Google's algorithm. So we know that the links are important from a Google point of view. Uh now, Google uses links in two different ways and this sort of, this sort of, gets into the weeds a little bit but there is popularity and relevance when Google sees a lot of links coming to your website or a particular page on your website that indicates a signal of popularity. Google says, "oh, there's a lot of links coming in. This must be a popular page. It's probably trusted. It's probably an authoritative source. We're going to rank that page." That's known as page rank. Uh, the other signal that Google looks at with internal links is relevance. And that's where the anchor text comes in. The clickable part of the link, Google will look at those words and see what the link is about and that's the hint as to what your page is about. So if you run a page about Goose from Top Gun and people are linking to you with the words "goose", that's the anchor text signal. And Google might say, "oh, this is relevant to this particular topic. So those are the two signals that we want to focus on; popularity, page rank, and relevance anchor text. So internal links aren't just about popularity and relevance. They also help Google crawl your website when you have a bunch of links on your homepage oftentimes the first links that Google are going to crawl are the pages that you link to from your site. So if you provide Google with pages throughout your website linking to other important pages on your site that help Google find, crawl, and discover your pages, it also tells Google what pages on your site are most important. So that's another important way that, that's why we want to pay attention to internal links for any other reason.It also improves engagement signals. Now, I can do an entire webinar on Google engagement signals. But consider this, consider this piece of text here, with no links on it, and your user finds this link. What are they going to do when they land on this page, they see this page. Well, they're not going to do anything they might read it, hopefully, they read it. But there's nothing to click on. There's nothing for the user to engage with on this page–to click on other pages of your website, consider another page. And these are, these are, from my own website where I have a bunch of links; internal links, external links. What's a user going to do when they land on this page? Well, hopefully, they'll read it again, but now we've given them an option to click on other pages, explore pages on our website, and engage further. What's this going to do, this is going to increase the amount of time that users spend on my site, it's going to increase the number of pages that they visit on my site, it's going to lower my bounce rate–not a Google ranking signal, but an important signal nonetheless. And the more users engage with my site, you'll, we'll see over time, and we've done studies on this, it's usually correlated with higher Google rankings and more traffic so even if it isn't, you're still giving your users more satisfaction because they're viewing more pages, they're reading your top content, and you're giving, you're giving them things to do and engage on. People love clicking on links but you have to give them to them in order to make that happen. First, here's my favorite thing about links. Now, I work in the SEO world and it's often our job to build links because it's an official Google ranking signal. But building links is one of the hardest jobs in SEO and I've sent out emails. I'm sure you've gotten emails, "hey you, want to look at my content"–it's a, it's a terrible, hard, agonizing approach to building links. Uh, and when you ask for links from another website you usually get a terrible response rate. "Will you link to me?" No, we've all had that experience. So why, why is nobody linking to my content? Now, internal links probably don't carry the same weight as external links but the cool thing is you get a hundred percent of the links that you ask for. Yes, when Tom Cruise asks Tom Cruise for a link he gets that link and so do you. You have the same internal link building powers as Tom Cruise because you get 100 percent of the links that you ask for. They're easy, they're sitting there, waiting in the basket just for you to pick up and grab and take and most, most webmasters aren't taking advantage of those internal links that they can give to themselves. So that's why internal links are important. So I know what you're saying, at this point you've done SEO, you're a marketer, you're saying, "Cyrus, my links are optimized. Whenever I write new content, I make sure to link from four or five pages on my site. Uh, we have a process for our writers to do this, I do it myself". I'm here to tell you no, your internal links are not optimized. I know because we've looked at the data and we have the receipts. So, here's a uh, here's a study done by in-links. It's a great uh, internal linking optimization tool that I've used in the past. They did their own study using their own methodology and what they did was they looked for uh, related pages on individual websites. Now if pages are related they should be linking to each other, uh, to help you know, those contextual, relevant signals that we're talking about with anchor text. And in their own methodology, they found that people were missing 82 percent of the important link opportunities. Now, that's a lot. That means four out of five links are internal links are being missed. Now you could argue with their methodology uh, and, and some is perfectly valid. So we ran our own study uh, at my company, Zippy, we looked at 1800 websites and 23 million internal links. Now a caveat, 23 million links sounds like a lot uh, but in the scope of the internet with billions and trillions of links, it's just a tiny bit. But this gave us some clues as to how people were actually internally linking and this, these, this was a cross section of sites across the globe. uh, we looked at everything, and we wanted to find out how often people were linking to their own content internally. And what we found was shocking, depressing, but not too surprising. Most pages had one internal link on the far, far left side of the column and this does not even include pages that were orphaned pages that had zero internal links. Uh, in fact 53 of all the pages we looked at only had three or fewer internal links. Uh, and that's not very many. Three or fewer, that might help your crawling but we're going to get into the number that you should have. In just a minute, uh, in fact only 24 had more than 10 internal links so this verifies that In-link study that we looked at that 82 percent of internal link opportunities were probably being missed even among people who think they're doing a good job of internal linking. So if you're smart, or maybe not so smart like me, you might be asking, "well, l how many internal links do I need, Cyrus? If three isn't enough, uh, what's a good number? Are you saying 10? Are you saying seven? How many internal links should I have?". There's no one definitive answer to that. But we do have some clues. So that study I just told you about was kind of neat because not only did we look at 1800 websites, 20 some odd million links, we were also able to look at the traffic for each of those pages. and to my knowledge this was the first study of its kind where we could actually correlate actual Google traffic to internal link signals. Uh, most studies, you know, use third party data whatever–we actually had first party Google search console data so we could look at the actual traffic and try to dissect some signals, and this is what we found. We pulled everything together uh, now the bottom, the bottom number is the number of internal links to the url, uh, we went up to 100 for this chart, and the left is Google search clicks, uh, 0 to 10. Those don't sound like very high numbers but just keep in mind that most pages on the internet get very little traffic so these are averages. Uh, some pages get hundreds of thousands of clicks so what we found was this interesting trend that actually the more clicks, the more links that you had, actually kind of trended down. But- but- the chart was kind of weird, uh, as you added internal links to a page, you know, "click here, click here, click here", and you're adding links–traffic tended to rise, but only up into a certain point after about 40 or 45 links. Internal links to those pages' traffic actually started to decline after that and that was kind of weird. Why did, why does traffic start to increase but then we see that, dramatically in fact, but then we see traffic start to decrease. So this was a mystery, this was a mystery to us. What- what's happening here? Why do, why does adding more internal links seem to work to a point, but then the effect kind of wears off after that? Then we looked at the anchor text because remember there are two signals with a link that are two big signals. There's popularity, the number of links, uh, you could think of it, but there's also relevance which is the anchor text. And so we looked at the number of different types of anchor text to each link because links can have different anchor text, you can link using different anchor text each time or you can use the same anchor text. So what we did, I'm getting in the weeds a little bit, but we looked at the number of different anchor texts going to URLs. Holy cow. And this is what we found as the anchor text variety increased, the traffic increased dramatically. And we ran this data three different times. We cleaned it, we threw out outliers, no matter what we did, there was a dramatic increase in traffic with anchor text variations–not just the number of links. But the number of different anchor texts, the number of different phrases, and the way you said things, this seemed to be the driving factor with traffic and, sorry, got ahead of myself there. As we get in, as we get increased, uh, the traffic kept going up is a little bit less reliable data. So this is what we want to focus on. And if there's one key I want you to walk away from in this webinar, it's that we should be increasing, not necessarily, the number of internal links, but increasing our anchor text variations. And we're going to go into a few techniques on how to do that. How do I increase my anchor text variety? We want to pass this test. So what are we talking about when we talk about anchor text variety? We're talking about all those different words that we can link to this page. So let's say this is our, this is our page, uh, on recipes–Pinch of Yum, pretty cool little recipe website and we want to link to our recipe page. Well, there are different ways that we could do that. We could, we could simply say, "recipes", every time we write a link to this page. Or we can mix it up a little bit on this page. We say recipes from, from another page, we link to it saying, "tasty dishes, top rated recipes, click here", not very helpful but certainly that's an option. We might use the URL, this is called a naked URL, "pinchofyum.com.recipes", where we don't actually use any words i.e. "our favorite is", etc...etc...etc. So what I'm suggesting is mixing it up like this is a much better tactic than simply linking to it the same way every single time. In fact, we've sort of always known this in SEO but our data shows that the effect is dramatic. That you really want to mix it up every time, and that the number of these variations is what you really want to be looking at instead of the raw number of links, which is the traditional SEO way to do it. So one way to think about this is think about your links in your navigation, uh, and how that impacts anchor text variety. So, traditionally you put, you have an important page–you put it in your navigation, but think about how that works when you put a link in your navigation. You have lots of links throughout your site. Every page on your site links to the same page. Because it's in your navigation, everybody can see it. But how many anchor text variations do you have? Then, well, you have one–because every page has the same link. In this example, it's "How it Works". Every page links to the "How it Works" page with one anchor text. So you have lots of links, lots of popularity, but not, not a lot of relevant signals, not a lot of variation. Now, let's contrast this with a link we put in the body, the body of the text in cold outreach strategy. This is in the blog post, this is a link that Amanda, our friend Amanda Sparturo put in cold outreach strategy. Fewer links you have to manually place them, put them in your blog, but you have an infinite anchor text variety because every page can link differently. You can increase your anchor text variation that way, but this is a complex strategy. Should you link in the navigation? Should you link in the body? What we found in the data, uh, going back to the study. Remember when the chart went down? Uh, with more internal links, we found when you have anything more than 40-50 internal links those tended to be site-wide navigation links. And they didn't perform as well as when the links were in the body. Getting lots of text navigation, uh, lots of anchor text variation so these, these URLs at the top of chart that we saw less traffic, these tended to be pages that were linked to in the top navigation. And there are certainly, there are certainly variations, uh, the data had spikes in it for popular sites and what we tend to see uh, was sites that had lots of authority like Home Depot, lots of popularity. They could get away with big navigation, uh, because lots of other sites are linking to them from all over the internet–for, and so it varies. So you're asking yourself, "should I put a link in the navigation or a link in my body?". If you're a big site like Home Depot, our data suggested–go ahead and put it in. Go ahead and put it in your navigation because it doesn't really matter because they have so much authority but smaller sites in our data so, uh, smaller businesses, mom and pops, medium-sized businesses that aren't Home Depot, they tended to do better if they didn't link their important pages in their navigation and linked throughout, throughout the text. Our friend Backlinko, popular SEO, Brian Dean, um, hugely successful site. This was his, this is his navigation, uh. There's just four links in the whole thing, uh, as a user I sometimes found it frustrating to navigate Backlinko's site because I could never find anything in the navigation. But as SEO was extremely well by limiting his navigation in the top. Uh, he was able to do infinite anchor text variations in the body adding those links himself and there may have been other reasons that he did this but this is something to consider when you're formulating your internal linking strategy. Navigation links or in body links? My best advice is do what's best for the user and use navigation links for navigation when you want people to find your page. But don't do it for SEO reasons because the data isn't so clear that those navigation links are going to help you SEO, but if they help the user go ahead. So here's a question for you, and this kind of gets into some SEO geekery. Excuse me, what happens when you link twice on the same page to, to one of your pages. For example you have a link in your navigation that goes somewhere but you also link to it down in your body. Here's an example, uh, from one of the posts I wrote for Moz back when I used to work for them. We have this popular page, Free SEO Tools. Well I wanted to write a post on Free SEO Tools so I linked to it in the body of the post. Here's a question that SEOs have been asking themselves for 20 years, "which link does Google use? Do they use both links equally? The link in the navigation and the link in the body?" Well traditionally, uh, early in the days of SEO we had this thing called first link priority–that means that Google is going to treat those links differently. The and, here's how, here's how first link priority works with Google. Google will count the first link more than the second link. Specifically, the first link, they'll get both signals page rank and anchor text, popularity and relevance. But if they find a second link to the same page, on the page they don't count the anchor text, they only count the page rank, the popularity. So I'm going fast here, but let's keep this in mind, what we care about is the anchor text and what we're saying with first link priority is, traditionally, Google only counts the anchor text for the first link on the page. So this was 15 years ago, we want to find out with this new data, is this still true in 2022. Is Google only counting those first links for anchor text–which is what we care about? So I ran an experiment, I ran an experiment updated for 2022 where I added a bunch of different links all going to the same page from different pages. And then, I wanted to see how Google measures those links. Uh, set up. The setup was kind of complicated. But the important thing to know is, uh, a bunch of different links were all on the same page going to the same page. I want to see the anchor text that Google counted because anchor text and those variations are what we care about. And I was able to do this, using Google Search Console. Uh, if you don't use Google Search Console–it's a wonderful tool with lots of data and it's free. They have a report in there called links and you can see your top linking text. I was able to set up a sample site so I could isolate the data. For, for the most part, Google Search Console isn't very good for the link report. But in this case, it did help me. Uh, we'll go over some tools here in just a bit. So a page looked like this. It was just an example page and I did various scenarios. So here's the first test. Here's the first test. I have a page and I have an image link linking to a page. And below it, I have a text link linking to the same page. Remember, an image link–we're going to use the alt text for the anchor text. And the second link, it's the clickable part. So, I ran the test. I waited a few weeks and then I saw which anchor text Google recorded. Uh, what do you guess happened when we ran this test? Which links do you think Google counted? Both of them. Both of them. So, this is good to know. This matches with traditional signals. Uh, if, if you have an image link and a text link, Google seems to count both the anchor texts. Okay, good. This is great for when you, when you're selling products and you, have an image of the product and a text link below it that you can vary up your anchor text. This gives you a chance–instead of using the same anchor text both times, you can use different anchor text. Alright, so that was that test. Next test is a little more complicated. I have a text link going to the page. I have a second text link with different anchor text going to the page. And I have a third image link with different alt text going to the page. What do you think happened in this instance? Oh! Google didn't index the second anchor text. This also goes with what, uh, the traditional signals, but very surprising, Google did pick up the image. So it seems if you have at least one image, uh, Google will generally pick that up no matter where it is on the page. But, they'll still only pick up the first text anchor text. Um, and suppo-, and presumably, if we had another image link, they would only take the first one. So we're only getting two anchor text varieties on this page even though we have three anchor texts going to the same page. So let's make the test more complicated: text link, text link, image link, text link. So four potential anchor text on this page, all linking to the same page. What's Google going to index? Well, here's what we would predict. Here's what we would predict, uh, based on our previous test we would predict that Google counts the first anchor text, ignores the second, counts the third because it's an image link and ignores the fourth because it's a text link. This is what we predict. Now, I am withholding some information from you which may influence how you would predict this. I cheated. I cheated on this test because I wanted to see if I could get around Google's, uh, restrictions because anchor text is what we're going for and Google isn't counting some of those anchor text variations. And here's how I cheated. Instead of linking to the page, I use what's called a hash link. Where I just, example.com, I use the same URL. I just added a hash to the end of the link and it could be anything. Any random word. Anything. These are sometimes known as "anchor links". If there's an anchor on the page but you don't need it, you can just add a hash link. Because, I heard a rumor that you know 10-15 years ago, Google was counting these anchor texts if you use a hash link because they see it somewhat as a different page but they consolidate the anchor text signals. So I did this to every link on the page. That's how I cheated, because I want more anchor text. Because that's important for ranking and this is the result. By cheating, by using those hash links, I was able to get Google to index every anchor text on that page, and this is important, if you have a lot of things in your navigation that you're linking to but you want to increase your anchor text variety, beneath it you can simply use a hash link to get Google to count more of those links. So that got a little technical, a little in the weeds. Thank you for keeping up with me on that and I can answer some questions on that if you want, but the SEO geek in me was really excited by this. Alright, so you listen to me get into the geekery. I want to give you six quick tactical tips to improve your internal linking. Uh, make this a little bit more actionable. And please don't share these tips outside this webinar except with your team or your clients. Alright, first of all, you want to audit your anchor text. There's a lot of, there's a lot of tools out there that let you audit your links, but what you really want to be doing is auditing your anchor text because every anchor text counts as a link. That's what you use. There's a lot of good tools out there, but whatever, I'm not going to recommend a very specific tool just be sure that whatever tool you're using lets you look at your anchor text. Uh, I use Screaming Frog in this example because it's a popular SEO, uh, software that a lot of people use. It's free for the first 500 URLs of your site so if you have a smaller site, uh, it's, it's a pretty good solution. They have an- a, you just run a report they have an anchor text export that's very useful. You can turn it into pivot tables–things like that. But make sure you know for every page of your site that it's important your internal anchor text variations going to that page. Keep in mind that even unoptimized anchor text can help, uh, Google. We talked about those naked URls, URLs that when you, when you link to something and it doesn't have any keywords it just says, "Hey, click here at example.com". Google says don't use anchor text like that, but in our data, we found that pages that use those naked URLs actually ranked a little bit better than pages that didn't. And the reason is they generally had more anchor text variations they had more different types of anchor text. Uh, so even unoptimized anchor text can help but keywords in your anchor text help a lot more. Uh, in another part of our data we looked at pages. When you- pages who linked to another page using the exact keywords you were trying to rank for. Those pages had five times more traffic than pages that didn't have optimized anchor text. Again, you don't want to overdo it. You don't want to make every link to internal have exact match anchor text because you want the variety. Uh, but including those keywords, those exact keyword phrases you're trying to rank for–that's a pretty good strategy. Okay, second actual tip: don't miss your alt text anchors. You have images, you have to include those alt text when you're linking internally. Uh, in our data set, five percent of our links had no anchor text at all and the vast majority of those were image links. People forget to fill in their alt text on the image link but you have to because that counts as the anchor text when you're- when you use that image to link. Don't sleep. It's an easy, no-brainer, low hanging fruit thing that everybody can do. Alright, so we often think when we link to a page, that helps that page rank. That the source page you're linking to a target page. But weirdly, and a lot of SEO studies have validated this, the internal link can help both pages to rank. And we have a few examples of this and you'll understand a little bit better as I talk about it. So here's a study that SearchPilot did, uh, great SEO split testing platform. They added a bunch of internal links, uh, on their category pages; this- the left side is the before, the right side is the after–where they added popular categories. The theory was that these popular categories, that they're linking to, would rise in traffic and the result was a 20 percent increase in traffic. Okay, that's great. That's wonderful. They increased traffic 20 percent by adding these internal links but here is the surprising part: it wasn't just the category pages that rose in traffic. The pages being linked from also rose in traffic. Uh, both pages rose in traffic by adding the internal links and in my career this is something we've seen over, and over, and over again... it's just not the page you're linking to, it's the page you're linking from that is rising in, in traffic. Overall, doesn't happen every time. Uh, and we see- and I think the reason for this is those engagement signals that we talked about and the relevant signals. Uh, so this is a this is- this is a post, uh, October 27, 2010, on canonical tags written by our friend Lindsay Wassell, this was a post on Moz that was pretty old but relevant, but we saw its engagement metrics were really in the toilet. Possibly because it's so old–people saw the- the date. All we did to this page was add links in the top of the page; internal links to other sections that give people something to click on. You often see related links at the bottom of the page, we put the related links at the top of the page and what we saw was this increase engagement; people were clicking on the links, we had a better time on site. And so not only did those pages do well but this page, 12 years old, also improved in ranking simply by adding those internal links and this was a strategy we used over and over again, uh, to help this page and the page we're linking to. So that brings me to my fourth point. When you're adding internal links, you'll want to link high and tight. You don't want to bury those links in your footer at the bottom of the page. You want to make them prominent. If you're giving people something to click and you're telling them important–put it front and center so that they know where to click. We- we always did this on the, on the Mo- Moz posts, your most important internal links should go at the top of your post because you're looking for, you want people to click them, you want Google to see that these are important links and you want to increase your engagement. So this is a typical Moz post; we put our most important links at the top, we're an SEO company, our, our important links to Moz. At the bottom we'll link to our competitors Ahrefs, Semrush and neilpatel, if necessary. That's kind of an inside SEO joke, uh, but that's okay. Alright, five tip, number, tip number five. Avoid the first link priority. Uh, this is what we talked about with our experiments. If you have links in your navigation and your body, uh, you might wanna, and you wanna get both anchor texts to count from Google–you might want to use, uh, hash links, index. I wrote this entire post just for this link at the top of the post but I wanted it to count so I used the hash link and if you go, you can inspect it. Uh, is it is indeed a hash link. Does it work? That's when I wrote the blog post and this is the page I linked to. The target page I- I can't say there's a definite correlation between adding that link, and this traffic, uh, to our free SEO tools page. But I think maybe there was. I think maybe there was, and I wrote that entire post for that one internal link. I spent two weeks for one internal link. Uh, but this was the result. I like to think, I like to think that was a million dollar post but that's the power of internal links, um, when- when- when done effectively. Uh, sixth tip in SEO. I like to think that most things can be done by a human. Most things can be done with spreadsheets and free simple tools. Internal linking is one of those rare things where I actually do encourage automation because automation can help you find relevant pages to link from at scale that are really hard to find using traditional methods. Uh, three of my favorite tools are in-Links uh, twylu, I don't actually know how to pronounce it, I've used them several times, I need to reach out. And siteseer, which is my formal- former company, used to be Zippy. Uh, all have great automated internal link uh, recommendations. Some of these have free tiers that you can use. Crawl your sites and they look for topically relevant pages that you can add internal links from, not just the number of links, which a lot of tools do. But they're looking at your anchor text, your topicality, all that good stuff. Um, alright, so to summarize. Maverick six rules of internal linking, Maverick is so good at everything he can fly F-18 Tomcats. He is also a master of internal linking because of course, Tom Cruise, audit your anchor text. Keep in mind your anchor text variations are your number one things that you're going for when internal linking. Don't sleep on your image alts. Uh, make sure all your image alts are tucked away; tight link for both pages, the source page. If you want to improve the ranking on this page add internal links from that page to other relevant pages because it might improve your engagement. You might see your- your- your Google traffic go up. Link high and tight. Keep those important links high on your page. Avoid link first priority if you're linking from your navigation and your body, and leverage automation. Alright, some helpful resources, this will be available in the deck afterwards and hey, thank you for internal linking. I hope you enjoyed this webinar. We're, uh, we're going to take some questions now. Whoo!" 36:55 George: What a ride, Cyrus. Thank you. 37:00 Cyrus: Thank you. 37:01 George: Mordy you're on mute, buddy. 37:03 Mordy: I'm on mute. I was gonna say–thank you, Cyrus. You have that smooth radio voice. I don't have any voice so my mic was off! Um, one of the things, you know, I'm glad, George, you're here as well. Cyrus dribbling on the SEO side, George the content editorial side, one of the things that strikes me is how do you balance that, you know, your- your internal linking there's definitely the SEO benefit to it how- how hard do you push the issue?" 37:26 Cyrus: I push it pretty hard. Uh, one thing I don't like, I think people push it hard in the wrong direction. Uh, they use internal linking solutions, uh, that go through and they just find- you're reading a blog- maybe Forbes is a good example. I don't want to pick on Forbes, and they just overlink everywhere with exact match anchor text for things that aren't quite relevant. Uh, the thing you want to do is when you're adding an internal link make sure the user knows why it's important. Why this is related to the topic of the page. This is a learn more about this. Don't just link to your tire page because you use the word tire on this page that's not very helpful. But, uh, so I think, I think people should be pushing it a lot harder but also with more care and a little, a little less automatic exact match anchor text. But think, keep the user in mind and add those links. Because people are, this is like Google's related questions. When- when somebody searches something they don't have one question they have six questions and if you're not giving them all those other resources on your website, you're doing a disservice to your reader. So add those internal links. Find those, don't make them do a Google search for it. Give them to them up in front. 38:44 George: I can just hop in here. Internal linking is something like there's- there's so many approaches here and one of the approaches that has been presented to me is the exact match method–that I'm sure you're familiar with. I know right, um? 38:56 Cyrus: [Wretches] This is why it's bad. There's so many, I read so many blog posts that do exact match and it's great once. It's the other five, the other 10 links you want variation. And that's why I don't think it's a very good solution. The data doesn't support it. 39:08 George: Yeah like, contextually I've always challenged the um, the efficacy of that because like, yeah, you're sending those signals and it's good for SEO but the user has to, like, it has to make sense for the user. And so, I've not implemented any of those recommendations and my- my approach to this is just kind of been, well, contextually what is most relevant? If I'm talking about a GDP part article, we're talking local SEO here. Do I really need to link to something about redirects here just because it's an exact match? I don't find, like, you have to really contextualize that for your user. I think, I mean this is early days for the Wix SEO learning hub. We're only about four months into publishing, so we'll see how it goes. But everything's promising so far and I think, like, really going with a user first approach will help simplify things uh, in addition to a lot of the, uh, the little things. There was one thing, Mordy, before we move on here, there's a question about the, um, hashtag URLs–you're referring to jump links, right?" 40:06 Cyrus: Right. They can be jump links if you have the a-anchors on the page. If you don't have the a-anchors on the page, they just go to your top level page and the user doesn't notice any difference. Uh, but if you, you can use them as jump links to jump to very specific parts on the page and you, you see that with a table of content links and things like that. My- my own testing so far is that, uh, Google doesn't do a great job of indexing table of content links. Um although they may still be important, we haven't really tested that, but yeah, they- so they long complicated answer to a simple question: they can be jump links but you don't need to use them that way. 40:49 George: Yeah, so in the chat for those of you who sort of had a reaction there, you don't really know how to get those jump links on Wix. Um, just add a link like you normally would and in the interface you can instead of, instead of going to a different site outside you click to link to a section and then you'll get a link to a section as I put in the, um, the chat for you to see. And then you can reverse engineer what that URL is and put it into your internal links. 41:06 Cyrus: Great. Great tip. Great technical tip. 41:15 Mordy: Nice, George. Thank you so much. Okay, so one last thing I wanted to bring up and I was kind of curious how you would approach this. So you- you have the link of the navigation. So again, if you're not familiar, the term that you have the menu of your site, the top menu, that's the navigation of your website and there are links to other pages. And for mentioning from an internal linking perspective, we're going to have the same link in the navigation and the same link in the actual body of the page, go with the body of the page. And again from a user point of view, you mentioned that, yeah, you know, you need to be careful with that–because you do need the user to be able to navigate the website. From an SEO point of view then, you know, the internal linking is more beneficial in the actual body itself. Yeah, I'm just kind of curious what your method is like, when do you know, like, when do you go too far with, I've gone too far by stripping the navigation down. When have I not? 42:03 So I- I shared the, I shared the uh, Home Depot example. A site that I think everybody can learn from that does a great job with this and thank you for that question, Mordy, is Ikea. Go to Ikea. They do not have a monster navigation, they have five or six links in their navigation and it simplifies the user choices. The studies have shown that humans can only handle about seven choices on a page, uh, so you- when you look- when you're doing linking and your navigation, you provide users with 100 links–they're not going to read all those. They're looking for one of seven things. Seven. So, go to Ikea. They hop- they'll have very few, uh, navigation links. Then you click on that page and then you have seven more choices, then you have seven more choices, and they lead you into the funnel until you can finally find that bedroom dresser that you're looking for. So that's a great example don't overwhelm the user. Uh, limit your, I suggest limiting your navigation links to your most important and then expand on the, on the next page and bring them into the funnel. And it's good for the user. It's good for search engines–works really well. 43:03 Mordy: Makes a lot of sense. Again, if you're thinking about, like, "How do I do that?" You think, your- most importantly your- yeah, it's an ecommerce site. You sell, I don't know, clothes. Your most important election pages, you know, those might be something you have the navigation. Particular product pages, you really don't need to have them in there, the user will find them. Okay, I'll go through the boys collection or the adult collection and I'll- I'll go through there and find you know shirts or pants or whatever. It doesn't need to have that in the actual navigation itself. So... okay! Okay, you have a lot of questions. I'm not sure where to start. There's been a bunch of questions around buttons. Do buttons count as internal links?" 43:32 Cyrus: Yes, they do! And uh, a couple things you want to be careful. I- I'm not that familiar with how Wix works with buttons and what the options are but generally, the text of the button, uh, not is- is, counts as the anchor text if it's, if it's actual live text. If you're using an image for a button, you have to make sure there's some text behind it in the html or otherwise. But yeah, the text of the button counts as a link and if you're using "click here", "buy now"–not the best anchor text. Uh, so you might want to be more- more descriptive. But yes, buttons count as links. 44:15 Mordy: That's exactly how it works inside of Wix. Um, to that why- there have been questions around context and anchor text. Why don't things like a naked link or you know a "click here" / "buy now", why are those not as good as a more contextual anchor text. 44:28 Cyrus: Yeah, so I want to be- I want to be clear, they're not bad per se and in fact our data, as I alluded to, shows that even bad anchor text helps. Uh, such as the naked URLs and the "click here". But you're missing, you're missing keyword opportunities with "click here". Uh, again those relevant signals. Your page isn't, you're not trying to rank for the words "click here" or "buy now". Yet, that's never going to happen. You want, what are you- you're trying to rank for a certain brand of men's t-shirts or a particular type of art. Uh, Google actually has a patent, uh, one of their original PageRank patents that if they find a generic anchor text; like "click here", or you know, "buy now", that they might just ignore the- they might ignore the link or they might assign it a lower weight. Uh, there's not a lot of evidence that they do that but they're probably not going to count those links as much as if you use something descriptive and exciting and entices people to click–that describes where they're going to go. Great question." 45:30 George: I wonder if contextually there's a case here in terms of accessibility. Sometimes, I mean every site, every button, all your links are going to be different but you also have to factor in your user experience. And I just want to say that if you're using nebulous terminology, like "click here" "buy now", for people who rely on screen readers–is that meaning coming across? Or are you missing that conversion potentially because of your ambiguous anchor text. So think about that as well. 45:54 Cyrus: Interesting, yeah. 45:59 Mordy: You're just, you wanna- you're the entire, well not the entire. About one of the points of internal linking–so you're giving Google context like, you know, if you write about a topic over and over again, you're an authority on this topic. You're showing Google that connection that, yeah, you know, whatever topic I speak about–I am an authority on that topic. And by having the anchor text being descriptive you're giving them a stronger signal of the contextual content they're going to find there–it's, you're creating a stronger cluster of content around that particular topic. Thereby increasing your relevancy and authority around that topic so give them that signal, why not." 46:28 Cyrus: Yep. The relevance and popularity. Yep. 46:34 Mordy: Um... second. How far down the page does Google read? Will they see the internal links they have all the way at the bottom of the page? 46:40 Cyrus: Yeah, they will. This is kind of this, again, gets into the technical, uh, weeds. Google will index very large pages and all the links on the page. But uh, there's- there's so many different consi- a very large page maybe slow. It may be, Google may not be able to render the whole thing. Uh, there's also the original Google patent called something- called Reasonable Surfer. Google assigns value to links based on how likely people are to click them and with Chrome–used by, you know, a billion people in the world, they actually know what links people are clicking. So links that are higher up on the page generally get more clicks. And there, I heard Matt Cutts say, Matt Cutts was an old Google representative. Not old–he was a Google representative of years gone by. Uh, he no longer directly works with the algorithm or the company, great guy. But years ago, I heard him say, "pay attention to that first link on the page. Pay very close attention to that first link on the page". Uh, and so yeah, the Google will index links further down on the page but just keep in mind they will have less weight than links higher up 47:56 Mordy: Which behaves almost like content. Like the content that's higher up on the page is usually more relevant more contextual to what the page is about and that, you know, the very last paragraph you're running in your blog post is generally not the most contextual, most important part of the page. Just the way the reader would, it's kind of what Google's doing in a way. 48:08 Cyrus: Yeah, and I'm not opposed to putting, I'm not opposed to putting links at the bottom of the page especially to cover your bases. Like, hey, we- these are the important things up here, but, hey, just for the few people who have made it all the way to the bottom–here are some additional resources for you to read. And that- that covers your bases too because at least you got the link on the page. 48:30 Mordy: Yeah, and I've definitely seen a case where that footer link–it definitely helps Google somewhat and I'll say definitely, but it can help Google crawl your site more efficiently because that link is still there even though for the reader. But for Google they see the link at the further page okay next page, we understand the link structure here, it's good to have. Um, okay on this how do you know the links that Google has indexed? 48:49 Cyrus: That is, that's a really good question. I was able to set that, set it up on that test using a very controlled environment. Um, it's to be honest when you're looking at internal links it's really hard because Google's reporting on this is not very good. Um, generally yeah, there's no, the- the short answer is there's for most websites, there's no good way to know which links and anchor text Google have has indexed because their anchor text reporting is honestly not that robust. You can tell the pages that Google indexed, uh, and there are various ways of doing this. You know, Google Search Console or just Google the page, you can Google an article on how to do it, but short answer is there's no good way to know what anchor text and links Google has indexed." 49:41 Mordy: Yep, I like this question. Um, can you link internally to a page too often? 49:47 Cyrus: So there is this idea of over optimization. Uh, that is somewhat controversial in the SEO world. Can you uh, but I believe it's true. We've seen lots of evidence of it. I don't think you can link to an internal page too often at all. I think it's fine to have a gazillion links to the same page and you can't overdo it. What you can overdo is anchor text and that's using your exact match keyword. You have a page on men's jeans and then you just say, "men's jeans", "men's jeans", "men's jeans" over and over again. Google's gonna think well, this guy's trying to manipulate the algorithm he doesn't–maybe the site doesn't have a lot of authority. Uh, we're not going to let it rank for men's jeans. Instead larger sites can get away with it because they have all this authority. They have all this variety. So, I think you want to be careful about varying your anchor text a lot and if you're doing a–if you're linking over and over and over again, don't be scared of naked URLs. Don't be scared of the generic ones that we said. Don't- don't worry about because they increase your variety and they make you less likely to get hit by an over optimization filter." 50:58 George: I'm gonna- I'm gonna hop in on this here and, uh, just bring this to something pretty topical. Uh, for those of you who are really into SEO. The helpful content update is rolling out–some any minute now, right? I think that's any minute now, right? 51:11 Cyrus: Everybody who's not on this webinar is paying attention to the helpful content update. 51:16 George: Right, and part of that is making sure that your content isn't spun up using automated tools and things like that. And you have to think about what Google has said in terms of using automated tools and automatically generated content, GPT 3 type stuff. If you're approaching it with, um, an exact match mindset–in which you're just programming what to replace with what for internal linking. That's kind of a shortcut and it sort of goes against the editorial recommendations that everything has to be reviewed by a human. Now, I'm not saying that this is how Google approaches it at all, but these lines of thinking align. If you're using your brain to just keep going and- and link for the user, add value, your anchor text is going to have permutations. It's going to look different, right, but if you're doing it just with excel and replacing that kind of might be a little bit more sketchy. Something for you to think about, for you to decide on your own. 52:08 Cyrus: Great points, yeah. 52:14 Mordy: Okay, George, I'm going to ask you this one. I never know when adding a link to have the link open in a new window or not. As someone who adds many links to many pages, George, what's your general practice? 52:27 George: Okay, so in terms of how we have things set up on the Wix SEO learning hub for internal things, um, and this is not like- my understanding here is not a hundred percent. But I have links that open internally, for all my internal links, I have them just set to open in the same window. That's my rule of thumb and that's how I've worked at it in a lot of publications. And perhaps, Cyrus, you can shed a little bit more context here on why we do this. But for external links they always open in a different window and that, for me, has to do with the metrics that we're recording. Um, what about you, Cyrus? 52:57 Cyrus: Yeah, so this is- I'm always a little conflicted. I've read a lot of accessibility studies that say you shouldn't open links in a new window and I don't recall all the reasons why. But for people using screen readers and such, apparently it's not as great an experience. But yeah, I generally, I used to religiously open everything in a new window. Uh, but for internal links, especially, I do open them in the same window. Uh, it- i don't think there's one right answer to that. Uh, I think whatever you choose is going to be fine. Um, yeah. 53:34 George: Best practice has not been- there's no consensus on best practice here. 53:40 Cyrus: Yeah, that's an excellent way to put it. No consensus. 53:45 Mordy: You know, just keep in mind, if it is an external link–you are taking the user to a different website. Are they going to come back to your site? To the page? Your web page? I generally find if your content is compelling they will come back. But again, this is something to keep- keep that in mind. Speaking of external links, I know we're talking about internal links, but is there a benefit to linking out externally on your page?" 54:10 Yes! Yes, there is. Uh, this is something we covered extensively, uh, during my years at Moz. That every study we looked at, we talked about internal links today, but every study we looked at where you add external links to relevant pages it seems to help your own SEO. And again, this could be because of engagement signals or relevance, uh, signals that we don't quite understand what Google is doing here. But it seems to work really well. And think of it this way, if someone's going to- if you can't provide the answer, you don't want people going back to Google to do a search because Google's- Google's looking at your website and how users are interacting with it. You would rather have someone land on your site and visit an external page than have to go back to Google the thing. You don't want to do in SEO is have people hit the back button. You want your site to be the place for resources–even if it includes external links, because Google can learn, "hey, people are going to this site and they're not leaving. This is a good site". Even if you're sending people away to external sites, The New York Times, uh, Marshall Simmons uh, who led the SEO there, did- was one of the first to experiment this, where they started linking- followed links to other sites and they saw their pages rise in New York Times. This was years ago and nothing has changed. Don't be scared to link to other sites. Keep in mind you might want to link to yourself first if you have that resource. 55:30 George: And another thing here, very easy to understand–reason to link. Cite your sources. That makes you more authoritative. Like just bottom line, if I, and for everybody, all 669 of you here. Google says that engagement like bounce rate and stuff; those back- those aren't search ranking factors. Google has said that a lot of people write that in their content but they don't substantiate it. A lot of people will say that and then they'll say, "but Google has said otherwise", and then they'll put the citation there. Cite your sources it automatically makes you more authoritative which is always good for visibility. 56:02 Cyrus: Yes, yeah. If you want to practice you can cite zippy.com, uh, just an example site I'm throwing out there. But for your first blog post. 56:11 George: You had to go for it. 56:17 Cyrus: But if I made it funny I thought I could get away with it. 56:20 Mordy: No, that's good. Make sure it's a no follow everybody! 56:24 Cyrus: Oh, no no no no no. 56:30 Mordy: I'll tell you later! As an old teacher, the way I think about linking is almost like, as a way of supporting your content. It's a way of building up or scaffolding understanding. If i don't have that resource internally on my own site, if i want to make sure the user understands exactly the point I'm trying to make, then I'll link to an external resource to make sure that that knowledge is built in a scaffolded way that makes a, a lot of sense for the user. So again, think of it as almost like pedagogically when you link out. Okay, I think we have time for one last question–it involves naked URLs. You're not using any anchor text whatsoever, does it ever make sense to do that." 56:58 Cyrus: Yeah, it- it does uh, uh, it does. But I can't think of any great use cases. I, what I'm saying is, uh, you can use them especially if you're looking. If you just need more anchor text variety they're not the most helpful in the world. Uh, but sometimes you know, I- I've received, I've received emails and sometimes people just need to copy and paste a link. There are rare situations where the naked URL is important. Uh, like an activation link for cable or something like that, you know. I need to type in this URL. I need to share this URL. Things like that, so it does make sense in some instances. I- I wouldn't be scared of naked URLs. I would use something better, but the data says–if you got to use them don't be scared of them. 57:45 Mordy: I gotta go in, okay fine. If you put like- if you want to show the difference between the http and https and the URL that you have a whole- whole post about the difference in the URL structure. Like the difference, the added "s", right, so you want to show the URL structure. You're going to show the naked link there. I found a case! 58:05 Cyrus: Yeah, I- I wouldn't go seeking them out. But don't be scared. I think that's it. 58:12 Mordy: Cyrus, thank you so much! Yeah, thank you, that was amazing and wonderful. And we're honored to have you here and we appreciate the knowledge that you shared. 58:17 Cyrus: Hey, thanks to the Wix team! This has been a great webinar and I've enjoyed working with you. Props to Wix. 58:26 Mordy: Awesome. Um, don't forget. This has been recorded and you will receive the recording. You can find more SEO resources and expand your SEO learning on Wix dot com slash SEO slash learn. That's for SEO learning. We're back next month with a fantastic webinar; myself, Crystal Carter, SEO legends Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe will be here as we talk about what it means to write good content for Google. Thank you so much everybody, of course thank you, George, as well for joining. Bye bye! Meet your webinar hosts Cyrus Shepard, Co-Founder, Zyppy Cyrus’ SEO research and insights have made him one of the most trusted voices in search today. Having started in SEO in 2009, he formerly led SEO and Audience Development at Moz and currently serves as Co-Founder of the US-based SEO consultancy Zyppy. Twitter | Linkedin Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | Linkedin George Nguyen, Director of SEO Editorial, Wix As Director of SEO Editorial at Wix, George creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. Formerly a search news journalist, he has spoken at industry events and endeavors to improve the general public’s knowledge of search engines. Twitter | Linkedin

September 13, 2022 Keeping up with Google’s algorithm updates doesn’t have to be a source of anxiety once you’re able to recognize quality indicators for content creation. Join industry experts, Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe, along with our hosts, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, as we dissect real examples of impacted sites and dive into the data about Google updates. Check out the webinar's decks: Check out Glenn's webinar deck Check out Lily's webinar deck Check out Mordy's webinar deck Read the Transcript In this webinar we'll cover: What good content looks like to Google How to strategically approach content Recognize the right content for your business vertical Meet your hosts: Lily Ray , Sr. Director of SEO & Head of Organic Research, Amsive Digital Lily has been making waves in the SEO industry since 2010. Shifting from start-up to agency–she has helped develop and establish an award-winning SEO department at Amsive Digital, delivering high impact work for a long-list of notable clients, including several Fortune 500 companies. Twitter | Linkedin Glenn Gabe , SEO Consultant, G-Squared Interactive Glenn Gabe is a digital marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience. As an SEO writer, frequent conference speaker, and a go-to resource for SEO consulting–Glenn has made an impact in a wide range of industries, ranging from e-comm, military, all the way to finance and education. Twitter | Linkedin Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | Linkedin Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush and more. Twitter | Linkedin Transcript: What Google wants from your content Speakers: Lily Ray, Sr. Director of SEO & Head of Organic Research, Amsive Digital Glenn Gabe, SEO Consultant, G-Squared Interactive Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix 00:00 Crystal Carter: I'm joined here today by Glenn Gabe, who is joining us from the East Coast of the United States and he is from G-Squared Interactive. He is an absolute legend, absolute phenom in the SEO space and we're very pleased to have him here. And he's got 25 years experience as an SEO writer, SEO analyst, SEO Sensei, as it were. And we're very pleased to have him here. Thanks for joining us today, Gabe. 00:30 Glenn Gabe: Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here. I'm really excited especially given the timing that we had the broad core update rolling out and we just had the Helpful Content Update and probably a Product Reviews Update– so this is very fitting. 00:44 Crystal Carter: It's super exciting. And we're joined by another absolute SEO hero, Lily Ray, who is the Senior Director of SEO and the head of organic research over at Amsive Digital. She is going to talk to us about some of her research she's done across SEO algorithms and also about E-A-T, I’m sure. And about all the ways that you can bring quality to your content on a sort of holistic scale. She's also an amazing DJ, and is dialing in to us from Berlin this week. So thank you so much for joining us, Lily. 01:21 Lily Ray: Of course. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here with you guys. 01:25 Crystal Carter: Absolutely fantastic. And finally, last but not least, we are also joined by our own Wix’s own algorithm smith who loves to do deep dives on algorithms and how they all work and he's worked with SEMrush he's worked with other tools. He is here at Wix and helps drive so much of our SEO innovation. It's Mordy Oberstein. 01:47 Mordy Oberstein: Hello! 01:53 Crystal Carter: So I'm super, super excited to have everyone here. We've got two Yankees fans. Lily I'm not sure which team you support. 02:02 Lily Ray: Yankees, I guess. Sorry, sorry! 02:05 Glenn Gabe: You are from Queens though so it might be the Mets. 02:08 Lily Ray: Right, yeah. 02:10 Crystal Carter: Yeah. Okay. So we're gonna hope to hit ourselves an algorithmic homerun today with some of this content. So I'm just gonna let Glenn Gabe get set up so that he can share some of his insights. We have almost 1000 people joining us already, which is brilliant to see. I love how punctual everyone is. I had a look at this deck earlier. It's fantastic. So you're in for a real treat. I'm going to mute myself and let Glenn take it away. 02:39 Glenn Gabe: All right, excellent. So again, it's great to be here. We have major updates rolling out. The September broad core update is actually rolling out, it started yesterday. So within the next few days, I'm sure we're going to see a lot of movement. And obviously your content is super important from that standpoint. So let's hop in. So first, a few key concepts, right. First, machine learning and major algorithm updates. This is extremely important to understand. First, let's talk about Google's Alan Kent, who's been kind of leading the effort a little bit from a product review standpoint. He confirmed that machine learning–a machine learning system is being used for Product Reviews Update. That is not shocking. You can see that tweet on the right side there– here he kind of alluded to that. He also explained a lot more about machine learning in general and how it can be used on a recent podcast with Marie Haynes. So I definitely recommend checking that out and we truly believe broad core updates are using machine learning as well or multiple machine learning systems. And this is where Google could be sending many signals to a machine learning system, which determines weighting of factors and ultimately rankings. So as Bing put it, Fabrice Canel, an engineer can't really go in and understand, you know, the weighting of certain factors and machine learning systems figuring it out. So the idea that you can tweak a handful of things and surge back is not what this is about. You should think holistically about your content, address Google's best practices, and don't just match the competition but try and 10X their content. And you know, it's great that Bing is very open about their use of machine learning and Google little by little explaining more about it. For example, the Helpful Content Updates uses a machine learning system as well. Okay, another important concept, site level quality algorithms. Yes, site level. Not everything is at the URL level, which unfortunately has kind of spread throughout the industry a little bit over the past few years. So Google has site level quality algorithms that can have a very big impact. During major algorithm updates, especially like broad core updates. Google hass explained its evaluating sites overall and over an extended period of time via machine learning system, right? And now the Helpful Content Update’s doing that as well, as well as the Product Reviews Update. So don't miss the forest through the trees, focus on quality overall, don't just look at a specific URL rankings. Across the site could be impacted by site level quality algorithms. So, definitely important to understand that. Another important concept is quality indexing, which I've been writing about for years, probably dating back to medieval Panda days. So for those people that think quality is just about the content. It's not. And anyone that's really focused on broad core updates has seen this, right. You have a terrible user experience, heavy ads, deceptive ads, all sorts of stuff going on on the page. confusing for users, sites like that could be impacted by broad core updates as well. So, Google's John Mueller has explained that in search central hangout quality is not just about the text on the page, it's about the site overall, the UX, the layout, how things are presented, ads and more. So, definitely important to look beyond the content. You may have great content but what if the user experience is absolutely terrible, you’ve better watch out. And this I find myself saying to clients all the time, especially newer clients, the SEO mantra, meet or exceed user expectations based on quarter, right. So it's really, really important. This is what Google wants to do, right? They don't want to dish out rankings for sites that don't meet or exceed user expectations. It can happen, everybody sees it. Sometimes, you know, a site squeaks through and its ranking but over the long term, it probably will not. So it's important to objectively review your content through the lens of user expectations. Then boost content that doesn't pass, right. Or even nuke it if needed. I help usually larger scale sites. It's not uncommon during an audit over a number of months for a site to nuke 10, 20, 30 thousand URLs. Right if they're just cruft, old crop, lower quality content, etc. And also user studies come in very handy for evaluating content and I'm going to cover more about that soon. And yes, short content could still meet or exceed user expectations. Google just covered this on a help hangout that they uploaded to YouTube, I believe it was last week. And they've been explaining this for the long term. If a query yields shorter content and it can meet or exceed user expectations, it's totally fine. Don't just see something with one paragraph and think that it should be nuked. Another important concept. Staying in your lane. I have a case study where I talk heavily about this coming up. So focus on your core competency, show Google what you should rank for, earn links and mentions from other sites based on those pieces of content. All of this can really help especially from an E-A-T standpoint, which I'm sure Lily will cover. It's okay to veer out of your lane occasionally. So some sites are like, could we write about this or that, even though it's not a core competency?” Sure if it's every now and then, totally fine. But in my opinion, based on what I've seen, I would maintain a very strong focus on your core competency. If you veer heavily out of your lane and heavily is a little different than what I explained before. You can pay a heavy price. So what's wrong with my content? So I kind of overloaded this next slide. It's usually three slides. I just wanted to quickly explain the difference between relevancy adjustments, intent shifts and overall site quality problems. Because any site impacted by a broad core update or major update is going to run into this situation. Okay. Again, a lot of information on the slide. Sorry, relevancy adjustments might be totally correct. That's where your content might not be as relevant anymore for the query. A great example of that is when I help entertainment sites, news publishers that maybe have a three year old post that was ranking on page one for a celebrity or politician. Now it's not as relevant anymore. It's still good. It's not low quality. It's just not as relevant anymore. So if that's happening, that's not something where it's overall site quality it’s a relevancy adjustment. Intent shifts are where Google decides to show a completely different type of site for the query. We've seen this and I know Willie has brought this up too, with the Product Reviews Update where an ecommerce retailer might start ranking for reviews or vice versa, and that intent shift can switch as well. So there's not a lot you can do. You can't just suddenly become an ecommerce retailer, if you’re a review site and vice versa. Now, if it's not one of those, it could be overall site quality problems. If it is the good news is you can address those over time and usually recover eventually. But it takes significant work over the long term. It can take six months or longer or even a year or more to see recovery. I've written a lot of case studies about recoveries from broad core updates. Some took a year, year and a half to actually recover if the situation is bad enough. So if quality is a problem, then what is there a way to understand how users actually perceive your site? Yes, there is. And I mentioned this to almost every client and I will tell you a small percentage actually executed for whatever reason. It's super, super powerful to go through that. So anyway, the power of running user studies. You run them through the lens of broad core updates to Helpful Content Update, Product Reviews Update, or whatever you're actually looking at, right? For a lot of clients I’m helping it's usually one of those two; usually Product Reviews Update or broad core update. So Google literally gave you the questions right. There's tons of questions now from the Panda questions from medieval Panda, to broad core updates, to product reviews update, and now Helpful Content Update. Lots of questions, craft scenarios for objective users, not your spouse, not your kids, not your clients, not your co-workers, really from a panel of people that are objective, and have them go through watch videos, listen to them, ask specific questions, have them trying to traverse the site and accomplish something. I'm telling you it's super powerful to see this and hear it. Clients that I've helped go through this it's usually a lightbulb moment. So what can you test? You can test everything from expertise, content quality, deception, ad aggressiveness, barriers, triggers for people which can happen. You may not even know that what you're producing on your site is a trigger for some people. I've seen that happen. Credibility and trust and user experience and from a content standpoint, obviously, focus on content, quality, expertise, credibility, trust and user experience, right. So these are things where you can test like how do real people feel about the content? This isn't just looking at bounce rate or adjusted bounce rate or anything like that. It's literally hearing from objective people. So it's a really good way to go. Okay, let's hop into some case studies. I’ve provided three. First, was a news publisher in a very tough niche, very strong E-A-T but some glaring issues, right. So they tanked during two consecutive core updates, right, as you can see on the right hand side there. So they basically got hammered between the two of them. Contacted mem and what was crazy is, I've been on the site, all the time. So I love the site. I was really eager to help them. So overall, the content, the articles were great, right, outstanding. But there were some really interesting, glaring issues. For example, users could end up in an endless loop trying to find answers they could never find on the site. I found myself doing this based on checking the site via a query, and then I checked the behavior flow report. And I wrote a case study about this, by the way, too. So there’s a blog post backing this, but they also I'll get to that in a second. So the user can end up in an endless loop. There was also a lot of cruft from over the years, they've been around forever. So that was also an issue. So let's talk about behavior flow. So I started from organic search at a certain landing page and watched people go downstream. And watched people go back upstream. And watched people go back downstream. And this was going on over and over. It was unbelievable. So I know a lot of people hammer this report in the old Google Analytics, but boy, it was so easy to explain to the client what was going on, they got it immediately and took action. So what they do is significantly improve the site quality site overall, including nuking or improving pockets of content that were ranking but couldn't meet or exceed user expectations. That's exactly what I was just talking about. They nuked cruft that had built up over the years. They also improved the user experience, technical SEO issues causing quality problems and more. Did a lot of work over several months, and they surged back with the December 2020 broad core update. By the way, they were never in Google News based on their niche and they jumped into Google News. They also jumped back into discover, and this is what it looked like. I mean, you want to talk about spike. I mean, look at that top graph. That's web search. And again, they were really never a Google News for the most part, and they popped in right after the update. So we're down the line. So it was really cool to see that. So what's great about their content? Tons of expertise in the niche, tons. They stay in their lane, you never go on their site, and suddenly, you know, they're writing about entertainment or something, you know, like they're focused on a very specific niche. They provide supporting links and content, which is really important. I can't explain what they cover but it's really important for them to do this. They have visuals, charts and graphs to support the content. And also the story yields shorter content. That's totally fine. I explained this to them. They're totally cool with that. And sometimes it is shorter. It might only be four or five paragraphs. And it still ranks really well because it meets or exceeds user expectations. And they are trusted and well known. Okay, again, I knew them when they contacted me. Okay case study two. Veering way out of its lane. So this was a reference site. Keep that in mind, reference site. Long history, very strong E-A-T, veered way out of its lane at one point. They, unfortunately, there was a content strategy that you know, they figured that they could potentially rank for a lot of stuff outside of their core competency and they did initially and then they got hammered by a broad core update. As you can see in the charts, right. That's Sistrix visibility at the bottom, GSC up top, that's clicks dropping off a cliff. So what do they do? They removed all that fringe content and focused on its core competency. Again, two broad core updates later, they suged back so again. It can take a while, right? Google's algorithms need to evaluate over time and see, “oh wait, there's not health and entertainment and politics and sports. They're focusing on a reference site again.” So it was really cool to see. So these are the surges in visibility. Again, surged back pretty heavily. So what's great about their content, a ton of facts and information about each topic, very strong visuals, which is very important for their site, and in different formats. Which from a user experience–amazing. They have well organized pages with a table of contents and jump links to each section, which is a great way to go if you have a lot of content organized well. They provide links to relevant information across the site. So very strong internal linking, not for the sake of just linking, but really to help users and Google. And it's also a very trusted site. So it was very cool to see that. And the last case, steady as it goes. This site, it's always amazing. Every time a major update rolls through. I go to see what's going on. And they just keep going. It's not like they're surging, they're doing well already. They seem always just, you know, not impacted by these major updates. So it's really fascinating. I've been helping the site by the way since 2014. So they were hit by Panda and Penguin in the past, right? So this was 2012. So they worked hard to improve the site overall and did a lot of stuff over the years. They contain a ton of user generated content in UGC, they moderate now, the UGC heavily and continually review their article content to review or boot the content. Again, extremely steady trending through broad core updates over time, as you can see on the right hand side. So what's great about their content, their articles and blog posts are very strong and based on firsthand expertise, the UGC is provided by real users who have first hand expertise with the programs. Strong moderation, heavily moderated and vetting system in place–so no spam gets on the site, or even really rudimentary comments don't even get up there. They have a voting system to help users understand the most helpful UGC, and they have great visual support in the content. They're a leader in their niche, well known and trusted now by users. And as you can see below, this is over time. Again, they just, I’m sure with this latest update, my guess is they'll probably just keep going. They're doing all the right things. Okay, so let's switch gears a little bit. Let's talk about the Product Reviews Update and content quality. So the wire cutter approach and testing labs. So not surprisingly, through the several Product Reviews Updates for sites that were heavily impacted, they lacked strong content, right? Not shocking. They often had an affiliate focus versus people focus. Very low effort content–trying to monetize, right? so he lacked first hand expertise, experience didn't provide pros and cons, lacked visual supporting review, including photos, videos, and gifs. Don't underestimate gifs, they can be great. They often link to a single seller, mostly Amazon and they just felt like quick and dirty reviews content. I've had so many review sites impacted by these updates reach out to me and when I checked a lot of them, unfortunately, you know, you could check off almost every box here. So it's tough because they have a lot of work to do. So Wirecutter. So in my post about the PRU I often reference the Wirecutter approach to review content, they produce some of the best reviews on the web, super thorough, heavily tested in the lab. Reviews provide everything you need to know for the most part when looking to purchase a product. They've done this for years. They're owned by the New York Times now. But they ranked really well even before that. They have an incredible reputation and it is a trusted site and trust has come up several times in this presentation. So testing labs, there are others doing similar things from a testing situation. Good Housekeeping Institute also has a very, very in depth lab. Right you can check out all this stuff after the presentation. Very well testing lab, same deal. And now other smaller players are creating their own testing labs, which is really interesting, right? For example, a client of mine who surged, let's see, they surged there in the first, dropped there in the second, saw weird movement. Anyway, they basically are like, “okay, we're gonna just really try and figure this stuff out.” So they created their own testing lab. and I'll tell you, those reviews are really, really good. So I expect testing labs to keep growing. Everybody can create one. Is it hard? Yep. Does it take a lot of time? Yep. But if you're focused on review, providing reviews, you should really consider creating your own testing lab. So the anatomy of a strong review, I'll just go down these bullets. So based on Wirecutter, right? Clear affiliate disclosure, make sure people know that you can make money off them clicking your links. A table of contents with jump links, very helpful headings for each section, logically broken down categories, demonstrating firsthand use, techniques and valuable insights, providing pros and cons, very strong visuals, unique visuals as well original photos, videos and gifs, graphs and charts where needed, author details with a link to a bio, references and citations when needed. So, really important when you go down, if you go to Wirecutter, you go down the reviews you’re gonna see a lot of this. So if you're producing product reviews, I would definitely take a look. 20:54 Glenn Gabe: Okay, so now before we move on to Lily, let's cover some key points based on the presentation. So remember that Google is using machine learning for some major algorithm updates. Don't miss the forest for the trees–focus on the site overall. There are site level quality algorithms at play. Again, those site level quality algorithms can have a big impact on broad core updates and other major algorithm updates. Focus on quality indexing, right? So Google's evaluating all content indexed when it's evaluating quality, not just specific URL. Always look to meet or exceed user expectations based on query. Stay in your lane, content wise. If you veer out of your lane heavily you can pay a price. Run user studies–don't think it's great not to do it, just do it. And I'm telling you, you'll have that light bulb moment, probably. Use a Wirecutter approach to building review content, check out their site, you won't be disappointed. Create a testing lab if reviews are important to you. It's very important moving forward to build trust with your users and become a well known source for the topics you cover. So hopefully that was helpful, and I look forward to your questions in the Q&A. 22:00 Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing Glenn. It's always, it's always a pleasure to hear you speak. It's always a pleasure to hear those insights. I've got loads of questions myself. So I'm sure that they'll, we'll have lots from the content as well. Just a quick shout out to the audience. Yes, this is being recorded. Yes, we're going to be sharing resources after the event. And so just in case these are new concepts to you, you can sort of take a deep dive later, later on. But yeah, some fantastic insights. I think the point about user testing is very interesting and I think, not relying on your mom, or your best friend. 22:42 Glenn Gabe: Yeah. That's exactly right. And just one thing on that Google actually provided information in their post about broad core updates about user testing, so they think it's really important too, just keep that in mind. 22:56 Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think there's a few different ways to get to do that. So maybe we can talk about that later in the discussion. And so thank you so much for that and we're gonna move on to Lily's fantastic presentation now. And again, we're going to be sharing the resources from all the speakers after the event. So yes, I'm just going to let Lily get all set up with her beautiful deck. Yeah, yes, Louise Louisa, you'll receive a recording. It'll be on our YouTube channel. It'll also be on the same place where you registered for the event. 23:32 Lily Ray: Awesome. Okay, I finally remembered how to share my slideshow. Okay. Everything looked okay? 23:37 Crystal Carter: Looks beautiful. 23:38 Lily Ray: Awesome. Well, thank you all so much for having me. Thank you, Glenn. That was so much excellent information. And I'm really excited to share some insights as well. I think there’s definitely a lot of overlap between some of the concepts that we're going to be talking about today. So I'm Lily Ray, and I'm going to be talking about how to incorporate real expertise into your SEO strategy. So again, my name is Lily Ray. I'm the Senior Director of SEO and head of organic research at an agency called Amsive Digital. We're based in New York City. and super excited to be here with the Wix crew today. So today, I'll be talking a lot about expertise. I know a few people in the chat asked what E-A-T means. I'll talk about that in a little bit. But it stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust. Expertise is the E in E-A-T. And this is definitely an acronym and a word that we see appearing throughout a lot of different Google documents and Google communications over the past few years. And the way that they're framing it, is honestly one of the most important factors for producing high quality content. And I know that Glenn discusses that in some of his case studies. You know, some of those clients that are doing really well in the SEO space are conveying a lot of expertise throughout their content. So again, for anybody who's unfamiliar with E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. This is an acronym that Google started using in its documentation in about 2014. And it's something that Google uses to train human search quality evaluators who they conduct tests with thousands of times throughout the year all around the world. And Google tells its quality evaluators to think about the E-A-T of the websites, of the people that are producing the content, the brand itself, anybody that's contributing to the website. And so these quality evaluators basically rate how much E-A-T a website or a content contributor might be displaying in the content. And this is something that Google uses to inform future algorithm updates. So it's an important concept to understand for SEO. And beyond that, if you've read a lot of different Google docs, and you know, communications and, you know, product updates and algorithm updates and the language that they're using, you can see that they talk a lot about expertise specifically throughout these documents. So Google actually has this really fantastic guide called the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. It's a really great free resource for SEO. And they specifically say if you want to learn SEO, you should learn how to cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area. They also say that expertise and authoritativeness of a site can increase its quality. This is Danny Sullivan from Google. He does a lot of communications related to what Google is up to. And in an article that he wrote called, what site owners should know about Google's core updates. He asks, “Is this content written by an expert or an enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic very, very well?” So basically, like, is there evidence that the person that's creating this content is a true expert in their field? There's another article that Danny and Google put out about ranking well in Google News and Google Discover, and they explicitly say, “if you want to appear in Google Discover, Google News, you need to make sure that you're producing content that conveys a lot of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.” I know that Glenn mentioned Alan Kent, this is Alan Kent from Google. He's been kind of overseeing the Product Review Updates, which there's been about to be five in the past two years. They keep rolling out new versions of the Product Review Updates. And Alan says that you should always express expert knowledge about the products where appropriate. So we'll talk about that a little bit later as well. And most recently, we have the Helpful Content Update. And this is Danny again, basically saying that with this brand new update that Google launched a couple of weeks ago called the Helpful Content Update. You need to make sure that your content clearly demonstrates first hand expertise and a depth of knowledge, for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service or visiting a place. So we call this this common language that Google's using throughout a lot of these communications. The last thing Danny says about the Helpful Content Update is that you should avoid basically entering some niche topic area without sufficient expertise to be able to write about that content. But basically, if you're putting out a site because you see maybe you bought a domain, you want to pretend like you're an expert in a field you thought you'd get a lot of SEO traffic and potentially, you know, like affiliate revenue or ad revenue, but you don't actually have real expertise to write about that content. That could potentially set you up to be negatively impacted by the Helpful Content Update. So my theory, and I know that like Mordy, we talked about his, Mordy from Wix, we kind of think that there's like this big change that's happening with Google over the past couple of years, where I believe that they're algorithmically being able to differentiate between a real expert and somebody who might be faking expertise or basically just rehashing what a lot of other people have said online. So there's a really interesting Google patent that was analyzed by the late great Bill Slawski a couple of years ago, called contextual estimation of Link Information Gain. This is a Google patent that they filed in 2020. And it has this really important concept called an Information Gain Score. What this means is that Google is capable of understanding when they're looking at two different documents, and let's say the documents have effectively the same information, if something has net new information that they haven't seen before. That's going to increase the information gain score of that content. So basically, that means if this content has a certain expert opinion, or certain pieces of information or fact that Google hasn't seen in other content, that's going to increase the information gained score, and therefore that could potentially increase the rankings because Google is looking to produce or provide more original content in the search results, different perspectives and the search results and as you can see by a lot of these communications, they're really focused on conveying expertise as well. So I wanted to share with you a little SEO storytime because whenever I think about the role of expertise in SEO, I always think back to this one little anecdote that I've experienced in my time doing SEO for clients. So I wanted to show you guys one example of a small tattoo shop website that continues to outrank Cosmopolitan, Byrdie, Good Housekeeping and Men's Health for a variety of different tattoo keywords. What's amazing about this example is this site has been sitting here in the Featured Snippets on and off for six years. And these are really big brands that have a much bigger presence, you know, bigger domain authority and all these other SEO metrics that we think about–this is just a small tattoo shop business from New York. So how does this site continue to rank in the Featured Snippets? And how does it continue to maintain such great page one positions for all these different keywords? So you can see here, there's a variety of different, you know, really relevant keywords that this small website, probably only a 10 or 15 page website, continues to rank on page one and in many cases in the Featured Snippets. Well, what if I also told you that nobody has touched this content since 2016? This website has essentially not changed at all. The content that's ranking in the Featured Snippets has not changed at all. It hasn't even been updated at all. So I worked with this client, and I'll tell you all about our SEO process. It's pretty simple. Obviously, this person is a tattoo artist. He's been tattooing for 20 years, and what I did was, we came up with a couple of different pieces of content that we thought would be really relevant for his customers to know. Such as, “what lotion to use on a healing tattoo?” I asked him some questions. He gave me all the answers based only on his own experience. I transcribed all the content lightly optimized for SEO. So it wasn't that you know, it wasn't like I was giving him a bunch of things that he needed to answer based on my own keyword research. He was giving me a bunch of content based on his own experience, but then we tweaked it for SEO and included relevant headlines, and honestly haven't touched it since. It's been six years. And my theory is that Google is capable of understanding number one, this is an expert in their field. This is a website that's focused on tattooing. This is a person that's an expert in tattooing that we recognize online, that person, and this website has a lot of E-A-T in the tattoo space. But beyond that the content that he's creating demonstrates that he's a true expert in his field. And the content offers that unique expert perspective that we're not just seeing from a bunch of other publisher sites who are honestly probably doing a lot of research from all the same resources. This person didn't look at any of these other resources. He's just providing his true expertise. So I believe that there's a lot of sites that are doing a really great job of this and they're using an expert focused content strategy that's getting them big gains in the SEO space. So these are a variety of different sites that are seeing big increases in SEO this year. So this was calculated using the Sistrix visibility index. That's a tool that basically evaluates how much visibility a given domain has on Google over time. Think of it like the stock market for SEO. And you can see that all these sites have seen pretty substantial increases in Sistrix visibility this year. This was calculated between January and September of this year. Now, I want to be clear, there's obviously many different factors that go into an SEO strategy. There could be all kinds of reasons why they're seeing increases, you know, these sites are doing a lot of things, right? It's not just about the expertise. They have, in many cases, great technical SEO, they have great PR, great backlinks, you know, great brand recognition. All these things are of course contributing. But there's a lot of different ways that you can look through the content of these sites and see how they're leveraging real in house expertise, or in some cases reaching out to experts in their field to inform the content that they're creating. So lifewire is a really interesting one. They have a lot of different product reviews. And what you can see is that they actually have a dedicated page on their site that describes Lifewire’s experts and they specifically say to Glen's point, you know, we were careful to work with real experts in their fields. We take seriously the credentials and the expertise behind the people who write and edit the content that you're reading on this website. So not only does this site focus on expertise they actually have an entire page describing how important expertise is to their business. This is another site that is really interesting to keep an eye on. This is a gentleman named Bob Vila. He does home construction projects and he maintains a lot of position one or page one rankings for a lot of different keywords. And what I love about this is that Bob Vila is, you know, a professional home contractor. But there's so much great content that's either written with Bob, you know, in conjunction with Bob or maybe Bob oversees the content or provides an expert review of the content. And in this example, this is a page that he's ranking position one for the keyword, “basement waterproofing”. And then this article is written by Bob and another writer. There's honest recommendations for how to work with a contractor, there's FAQs and the content. He explains the what, why and how you should, you know, implement basement waterproofing in your home. He isn't necessarily linked to a lot of other sites, because again, he's the one that's providing the expert information. He provides clarity around the expected costs of doing basement waterproofing with real numbers, you know, not just like a vague range but an actual cost of this process. And then again, you know, there's a lot of sites that do use other external writers or maybe they hire writers in house but what I love about this site is that Bob is often involved in that content creation process. And you can see that this article was co-written with an author named Glenda as well as Bob. This is a site called gadget review that ranks number one for best ceiling mounted projector. And this is, you know, Glenn talked about some product review sites. This site actually has in its footer, like the methodology behind why the site exists. They talked about the fact that too many product review sites are just trying to capitalize on affiliate revenue and that's kind of informing the content that they're writing. Whereas with gadget review, they're very focused on real expertise. They're focused on objectivity, and they make sure that they've actually tested the products themselves. So these are some screenshots that convey how users and most likely search engines are able to read this content. And say, “there's a lot of evidence on this page that the author's actually spent time with the products. There's pros and cons. There's examples of why they like it.” And if you're Google, you can tell like, maybe a bunch of other people have written about these ceiling projectors. But Gadget Review has net new information because they're experts and they've tried the products, and Google hasn't found that information on any other page before. This is REI. I'm sure you all are familiar with them. They do a lot of things right from an SEO standpoint. And you know, a lot of the growth that they're seeing is not just because of the content, they obviously have a huge ecommerce business as well. But what I love about REI’s content strategy is that they leverage real employees from REI who have specific expertise in different areas. So in this case, this is the number one ranking page for backpacking for women. And it's written by a woman named Liz who's an REI Outdoor School instructor. So it's like from woman to woman. Here's what you need to know about backpacking for women. And it's written in the first person. It's written based on her own experience. And I believe this is what Google's looking for in terms of providing expert advice. This is another site that I love to look at. It's called Smith's Pest Management and it's an exterminator business that based in California, they ranked number one for all these different “how to get rid of” pest queries, and they're growing a lot over time. You can see the SEO visibility of the site is increasing a lot over the past couple of years. This is a gentleman named Zachary Smith. He runs the business. He is an exterminator. He does pest control. And he's involved in the content creation process. You can see his author bio in the content on every page. He uses firsthand experience. They use actual photos that they've taken on the job. They're very empathetic with the reader. You know, it's basically just real evidence that the company that's doing the work is the same company that's providing expert information. So maybe you don't have experts on staff. That's a really common situation for companies to be in. Redfin and Business News Daily are two sites that do a really good job of saying, you know, we wanted to figure out the answer to this question. So what we did is we reached out to a communication and etiquette expert, or we asked human resource experts and professionals to chime in. So you know, just because you don't have an expert working at your company doesn't mean that you can't do that outreach, reach out to them and ask for an expert contribution. So really quick, I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about Google’s Helpful Content Update because I do believe that this new update by Google is very aligned with, you know, this notion of E-A-T and the focus on expertise. So what Google said about this update is that you're going to see more results with unique, authentic information, and you're more likely to read something that you haven't read before. So what have we seen from this update so far? I think a lot of us read Google's communications and kind of saw this coming as like really a potentially big change to search, right? We expected this really monumental change the same way that we see with a lot of these broad core updates, but what's actually happening in reality is it's been a pretty slow update to begin to roll out. But what I think we're going to see is that there's this new notion of classifier, which I'll talk about in a later slide. But Google's beginning to classify sites that are unhelpful, and it's a machine learning system which Glenn talked about. So over time, the classifier can get smarter and smarter and better and better at identifying unhelpful content. So I think we're seeing just the beginning of this update. And Google started with low hanging fruit. So with this update, we're starting to see some kind of fringy sites that aren't really following SEO best practices and content quality best practices, starting to see negative impacts from these updates. So we have things like lyric sites, some adult sites, sites that offer different grammar, recommendations, mp3 downloads, low quality affiliate sites, product manuals, and sites that have copied code on them. So just some really quick examples. We have some lyric sites, there's a lot of lyric sites on the Internet. Obviously. But Glenn pointed out a really good point that in some cases, lyric sites don't actually have the license to be legally displaying this lyric information online. So it's entirely possible that Google is starting to catch on to some of that and you know, really reward like licensed lyric sites. Whereas other sites that are just replicating what everybody else says, without actually adding real value could potentially be impacted by this update. So this is a screenshot of one of the sites that was affected, and I'm in Germany. So that's why these ads are in German. But you can see the extent to which the ads are overtaking the page content, right. It's very hard to use. So it's possible Google's just saying like this, this lyric site is really not helpful compared to other sites that are offering much better content. There's also some product manual sites that started to get hit. So these are sites that offer actual PDFs of different product documentation, but they don't add a lot of original value or anything that hasn't already been found online before. So these sites are being impacted. Grammar sites, which also you know, there's thousands of these types of sites online. Some of them are seeing declines from this update. It's possible Google's just saying, “you know what, we already have so many different answers to this question. These sites are not doing a great job differentiating their content.” And I'm just a little bit like, well, we'll see what happens with this update. But this makes me a little skeptical. Like, I don't know if this is helpful or not. So apparently, Google has deemed a lot of these sites is not not being unhelpful, but personally, I'm like, I don't know this could be seen as helpful. So it'll be really interesting to see how this Helpful Content Update classifier changes over time. And as I mentioned before, this classifier that Google's using is still learning, it's a machine learning process, it's going to get better and smarter over time. The frustrating part is we don't exactly know the extent to which that classifier is working in the algorithms. It's a little bit of a mystery for us. And really quick, the product review updates. I know Glenn talked about this a lot. But if you read the documentation related to what it takes to write good product reviews, they do talk about showing expert knowledge whenever possible, and also providing evidence of your own experience with the products. So they want you to actually show videos and pictures of yourself using the products whenever possible. These are two sites doing that really well. This is Clever Hiker as well as Switchback Travel, you can see that these are pictures of the actual women that are using the products that they're recommending in the article. So this is a really good example: don't just use stock photography, take actual photos of yourself whenever possible. Product Review Updates have been really, really intense for a lot of different product review sites. This is an example of a product review site that was basically wiped off the map with one of these Product Review Update. There was supposed to be a new one maybe this week or next week, but Google just announced a core update yesterday, so we don't really know when that's going to be rolling out but there is a new one coming. And Glenn talked about this as well. But basically there's like a bad and an okay and then a much better way to convey product reviews. This is bad. When you're just pulling in data from Amazon. You're not providing any unique insights. You're just putting affiliate links on the page. Not great. Google does not like that. What you're saying, you know, we have an algorithm that we're using to take all the different information online and create our own scoring system. That's a little bit better, right? You're doing some work, but you haven't exactly tested the products. Better is to say we've tested the products, you know, we have a product testing lab, like when mentioned. And here's what we've actually found through our own product tests. So do this whenever possible. 43:02 So quick tips for incorporating real expertise into your SEO strategy. Number one, as much as you can incorporate real experts into your content strategy. You should do that. So you can provide questionnaires to experts that help inform your content. You can transcribe expert audio and video interviews that they've already done. Or even just asking experts to review the content and then using their names. Number two–make personal branding for experts part of your SEO strategy. So this is a site that's in Spanish but what I love about this site is that they have an expert that contributes content to the site, that same expert, she's a doctor, she has a profile on the site. And then if you Google her name, you'll see that her profile on that site ranks really well for her name. So this site does this for all the different doctors that it has on the site, their content contributors, their experts, and you can tell them, we get to have a page on the internet that ranks number one or number two for your name, which the experts always love. And you can reach out for experts for content contributions when you don't have any experts at your company. So you know, research credible experts in their field, make sure that they're the best person for the job, offer them maybe a link to their site or other publicity, and it turns out that experts really enjoy sharing their contributions. So I ran a quick Twitter survey this week, asking for anybody that considers themselves an expert in the field. How would you respond if somebody reached out to you and said, Hey, would you mind contributing to my article? Turns out 44% of people would happily contribute with no incentive, 22% would contribute with some type of incentive. So the vast majority of experts, basically 66% of experts, are happy to contribute. So always use that as part of your content strategy. 44:46 Crystal Carter: Great insights, we're getting some great feedback from the audience on this. I think Lily might need to rejoin just quickly. But yeah, we're getting some great insights. A few people asked a couple of questions in the chat. If I may, around some of the Wix things we have built in around this. I can jump into that straightaway. Or we can jump back into your deck, Lily? 45:13 Lily Ray: Ah sorry, my internet went out. Can you repeat the question? 45:14 Crystal Carter: Oh, no, I was just gonna give a shout out to a few Wix things because some things some people were saying like, “what do you do if you have a small budget?” And I think that you know, your example of the tattoo parlor was a really good example because I think one of the great things about E-A-T is that you don't need a massive budget to make some of these changes. And you can do them on Wix or on any platform. 45:14 Lily Ray: Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, in both the example of the tattoo artist, as well as the pest control guy like that doesn't need to have a big budget, you just need some time with the expert. So sit down with them. Think about what are the most important resources to have on your site. It only really needs to be like five, you know, five of the most relevant questions people ask and just work with them to create the content that stands the test of time. 45:59 Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think one of the things that a lot of times if you don't have a big budget what you what you might have is time so if you have the time to to put in then it then it can absolutely make a difference. 46:11 Crystal Carter: Do we have more slides from you there, Lily? Was that your last slide? That was that? Okay, it was beautiful. We had some fantastic feedback on it and Mordy I don't know if you want to jump in. We're running out of time rapidly. 46:22 Mordy Oberstein: Sure, so I'm gonna jump in really quickly. And I know we're sensitive to time so I will do this quickly. Hi, I'm Mordy Oberstein. I'm the head of SEO branding at Wix and do a bunch of other stuff. We're going to skip it but we do actually Crystal and I host a podcast called the SERP's Up podcast you can find it on the Wix SEO Learning Hub and last week we actually talked about Google algorithm updates. So if you're looking to learn more, check out the podcast episode. Okay, I'm done plugging. Let's get learning. I'll cut this a little bit short. But one of the things I want to talk about is, Lily and Glenn talked about is the approach is more important than anything your mindset of how you think about content, and how you're analyzing the content after a core algorithm update is really important. So what I tend to do is look at–hey, you know, this page went up in the rankings or stayed the same and still ranking really well versus pages that lost ranking and automatically analyze what's missing in the content, what these pages could have done better. So really performing a thorough and holistic content analysis. And we can talk about this for a long time but I want to be sensitive to the Q&A. So I want to run through three very quick lessons that I have seen over the years from Google's larger broad core algorithm updates, meaning fundamental changes to the algorithm. Lesson number one is to be exact. Whenever and wherever you can, be exact. So core updates or Google algorithm updates are kind of like playing Operation and I don’t know if you ever played Operation as a kid but one small little touch and you set off the red buzzer. Algorithm updates are kind of like that one small little problem can really set Google off, which is why it's really important to be specific. And I'm gonna give you an example. So the key word here is “mild bipolar disorder”. So a really important, very sensitive keyword. And the top three lines, the green line, the pink line, and the light pink line, I guess. These are all URLs or websites/web pages that stayed the same throughout the algorithm update. The purple line lost ranking and what I want to understand is what happened with that purple line. Meaning what happened with that web page that lost rankings? What was the problem with it? And I want to show you really quickly. So the Cleveland Clinic is one of the websites that stayed ranking among the top three results throughout the algorithm update and when they talk about cyclothymia, and they say cyclothymia is often, keyword often, considered a milder form, a milder and chronic form of bipolar disorder. The Mayo Clinic again, one of the top ranking consistent websites, says that it's a, cyclothymia, there are several types of bipolar and related disorders. WebMD says what causes cyclothymic disorder? Many experts, not all, but many experts say that cyclothymic disorder is a very mild form of bipolar disorder. Here's the page that loss rate cyclothymia, sometimes called cyclothymic disorder is “known”, not “often known”, “can be known”, “many think”, “is known”, is known as a mild form of bipolar disorder and they use it in the subheading of the page. An Overview of cyclothymia, I'll get it right. The condition commonly called bipolar three, that's a really big problem because imagine you're somebody who's looking at this webpage and wondering, well, what should I do next? In terms of mental health, and you're reading this paper saying that if you have the symptoms of cyclothymia, then you have bipolar disorder, when that's not necessarily the case. Being exact and being specific, especially as it applies to people's lives and their financial well being is very, very important. So if you can be as exact as possible in your content, it's a way of creating really good, really quality content and Google's kind of in the know about it. Moving on, watch your tone, which I tell my children all the time. So I'm gonna go back to the September 2019 core update. I'll say very quickly, we're looking at the keyword, “business term loan”. What you're looking at here is a web page that lost ranking because of this update. And it did because, well, they're selling a loan that could really mess up your financial life and they're saying, well, a business term loan never goes out of style. We all love a classic, like he’s trying to sell me a used car. Even talks about using a business term loan to finance my brother in law's wacky startup is not really the content you want when taking up millions of dollars of loans. Going to skip the slide for the sake of time. What happened was they sort of updated the content. They wrote the classic small business loan This is the page as it is now still not the best but they got rid of all the weird content about funding your brother in law's wacky startup and they put really helpful really useful informational content about what a term loan means? Types of term loans, so instead of trying to sell, I'm just gonna skip that, skip that, instead of trying to sell or oversell content or via their content. They were being reasonable. They are being reasonable. Now, Google knows you need to make money. Google is fine with you making money on your website, but you should do that appropriately. And don't over don't try to market a very problematic product. If you don't get it right, such as a term loan. As you're trying to market a used car. Market things appropriately. Be reasonable how you go about your marketing language. Lesson number three, teach, don't preach. And we're going to the product review update that Lily and Glenn spoke about, and we're looking at two different web pages, one web page gained rank, one page lost rank at the hand of the Product Review Update. And the question is why? By the way, this is still a problem for these websites. Well, in the case of the site, that won rankings they're still winning rankings and the site that lost rankings. Guess what? They still are in the gutter. Well, they're on page two, which is the equivalent, I guess. And the page that lost ranking. It's not like it's a bad page. It's got stuff on the page. It has a nice chart that goes through each of the products that we're reviewing, in this case the reviewing camping air mattresses. It tells you the price it tells you the warranty grid information even goes through a nice little write up around each product. They even give you a rubric of what they were looking for when they were evaluating the product, but they don't do this. And I'll explain to you what this is in a second. And this is from the page that one rankings. The page that lost rankings when they went through their rubric of how we were evaluating these products, they wrote things like, “oh yes, we looked at comfort”, but it kind of went on and didn't really define what does comfort mean? And how do I define what is comfort if I'm looking for a mattress myself. The page that gained rankings did that. I'll read it to you. For example, they write for comfort some air mattresses have a soft top surface which eliminates the need for a sheet or a sleeping bag others don't. So you'll need to save some type of installation to stay warm. They're telling you when they looked at comfort, these were the specific things that they were looking for, which is really usable because now if I want to go to Walmart, I don't want to look at any of the products on the actual page anymore. I want to go to the store and buy one of these mattresses. I know what to look for. You actually taught me something that I can take and apply somewhere else. In teacher language by the way, that's me teaching children, which is a scary thought. But in teacher language, we call it scaffolding. In other words, if i’m just telling you that we looked at comfort, you may have a rubric around that you use to understand what comfort means. But you haven't brought me along. There's still gaps. I don't really understand that. But if you tell me yes, we looked at comfort and here's how we define comfort. You're filling in all those gaps by the end of the piece of content. I'm walking away fully understanding something that I can apply somewhere else. So if you're thinking how do I create content that Google is going to like? I always think about it as creating scaffolded content that really walks the user through the concepts that you're trying to teach them without leaving any gaps and I don't want to leave any gap by forgetting about the Q&A. So I'm going to end here. Thank you. 54:03 Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for it. Always, always a pleasure. And yeah, some great, great, great insights about making good content and about comparing the SERP and comparing the different results that you see and comparing content to figure out what to do next. So yes, thank you. Thank you all. We've had lots of questions. The audience has been really, really engaged. So thanks, everyone for sticking around and forever asking some questions. Let's jump right into it. Just a quick question for Gabe. You talked a lot about user studies. Can you give us an example of a way that somebody can get started with user studies if they've never done it before? Or maybe that someone might be able to get started with it if they don't have a big budget or that sort of thing? 54:45 Glenn Gabe: Yeah, absolutely. So I wrote an entire post about this. So if you Google, “Glenn Gabe user studies”. So just go there. It has a whole case study of how I helped a health client through a user study through the lens of broad core updates. I list on there various services you can use and everything like that. So it's probably best just to go through that post because it's pretty in depth. Definitely do it. A lot of people again, look at it and are like, “oh, that sounds cool”, and they never do it. But definitely go through that and then just try it out. 55:17 Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think that's really important because Google is trying to make sure that the content is good for users. So you know, they can see a lot of indicators to show that through all their algorithms. And if you've got real users giving you that insight, it's really valuable. So yeah, cool. And so you mentioned broad core updates, somebody asked what that is, and if I could just summarize quickly. Glenn's like, “that's a big question”. A broad core update is essentially when Google decides to adjust their algorithms across the web, overall. We've mentioned people talking about Product Review Updates, we've talked about other things, and sometimes they'll focus on one particular part of the web and then sometimes they'll focus on the web overall. Those are called broad core updates. Generally speaking, in a very, very top level 56:06 Glenn Gabe: They’re usually three to four times a year. They make the earth shake. It's when Google is basically updating its core ranking algorithm. So it's global across all languages, etc. 56:16 Crystal Carter: Fantastic. And then, we also talked about lots of things for Lily, one of the things that someone was saying was how does Google know whether or not someone was an expert? They were saying, you know, Google's you know, they're just taking these people's word for it. Is that what's going on? Or how do they know that someone is an expert on their website or using external information? 56:41 Lily Ray: So Google doesn't always know, right? Like Google can't possibly know everybody in the world, but they're trying to. They have something called the Knowledge Graph, which is 500 million facts about… 500 billion facts about 5 million entities… or something like that. I should definitely memorize that statistic. But basically, they're trying to understand most of the recognizable people in the world. So when you get to a certain point of credibility, Google actually has an entity for you in the Knowledge Graph. If you Google a person's name, you can see on the right sidebar at the top of the page, they know who that person is, they know that they're an expert in their field and they can make connections between who's writing this content. For example, when Glenn writes content, sometimes they might highlight his name as an author in something like Google discover. So there's a lot of different examples of how Google's using real authorship and trying to get to know who all the real experts are. And I just want to mention something because a lot of people are chatting here, when I mentioned websites that have been dinged because they have copied code, I did not mean CMS platforms like Wix, Wix is fine. I mean, sites that are literally copy pasting code, like Stack Exchange, where they're just like basically plagiarizing other sites–so you're fine if you're using Wix, you're all good. 57:47 Crystal Carter: Okay. And Mordy you talked a lot about different quality of content. Is there sort of a litmus test that you use when you're trying to evaluate whether a piece of content is decent or not? 58:07 Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's very similar to what Glenn and Lily talked about. I call it the brand sniff test. So think like a brand marketer for a second. So if you're a brand marketer, what you tend to do is you'll look at something you'll think of all the latest signals that it's sending. Is it the right tone? Is it sending up the right quality signals, like your brain is basically AI on steroids. So when you look at something you're making a million snap judgments like point three seconds. Kind of think of your content like that. If you're a fresh user coming to the page, what latent signals is the page sending? Does this format look right? Is it structured well? Is the tone right? Is it graphically appeasing? And if you take a look at those latent, more subtle signals, and you walk away saying, “this looks like a great page”, then it is probably going to be a great page for Google as well. Obviously, you need to dive a little bit deeper, but that’s my general litmus test. 58:54 Crystal Carter: I think so. And it's interesting that you bring up some of the visual things because Lily and Glenn both alluded to some of those. So that useful one that you showed that had all of those ads everywhere that you couldn't see anything and Glenn, you mentioned you know that when we talk about quality content, we're also talking about content that's messy. So, yeah. 59:13 Glenn Gabe: Right. Yeah, I was just gonna say I mean, I've written for years about the negative UX experience, aggressive ads, deceptive ads. It's been in the quality rater guidelines. So you Google me and ad aggressiveness and all sorts of stuff like that. You'll find some posts about it, but definitely do not overload the page with ads. 59:34 Crystal Carter: And I don't know if we want to take just a minute saying what we think, maybe, about the Helpful Content Update? Or if we think we just keep that can of worms closed. I don’t know if I'm opening a can of worms. I think, do you think, can we possibly make some predictions, maybe? I think it'd be interesting to see how it all plays out. There's a lot of different tools that Google is using for the Helpful Content Update. So. 1:00:02 Glenn Gabe I mean, the biggest thing and I actually pinged Danny Sullivan on Twitter about this, but since it's continually running, if they juice it up, change it, enhance it, whatever. You'll never know that you're impacted by that. That's a huge problem. So I asked Danny, I said if you do that, can you let us know? And he said, if it's significantly updated, then they'll try and let us know. So if not four months from now, a site could tank, it could be the Helpful Content Update. You would have no idea. We had no idea. So I mean, that's the only thing–I just hope that they actually communicate that. 1:00:37 Mordy Oberstein: That part of what makes it hard. They're running another algorithm update right now right after the Helpful Content Update and implying that it's very possible that the Helpful Content Update is going to boosted by the release of the Core Update. So which is responsible for the ranking shift? 1:00:52 Glenn Gabe: Yeah, actually, Danny replied to my tweet about that. That's actually not the case. Based on his response last week, it sounded like broad core would take that signal and actually use it as another signal for broad core update. That's not the case. They're separate. What he was saying is the combo of the two could impact you and be more extreme. Yeah, I know I was with you. And that's what I thought. But that's not the case. Unfortunately. 1:01:18 Crystal Carter: Well interesting to see how it all plays out. In the end. Yeah. And how it affects sites and how we can make sure that we keep the content, the one that you showed Glenn, where it's just always doing well. I've seen clients like that and it was just interesting that Lily you were saying about experts. It was a lawyer site and they just wrote the content. I never did anything like you know, I did like you were saying light SEO make sure they've got headings, bullets and blah, blah, blah. But I didn't go over it too deeply and they and they just said about the structure. And they always do well, because they always just write the content based on you know, what their clients ask them and, and that's that sort of thing. So it's really interesting to see that. Yeah. Cool. I think I don't know if we should start wrapping up because we're sort of hitting our time. We got loads more questions. 1:02:07 Crystal Carter: So we'd love to have you back another time. Thank you very much to everyone for joining, for joining the session. We will be back next month for another Wix SEO session. And it will be all on local SEO. We'll be joined by Amanda Jordan. So please do join us for that. Thank you so much, Lily. Thank you so much, Glenn. Thank you so much, Mordy, thank you all for joining us. 1:02:33 Lily Ray: Thanks for having us. 1:02:35 Glenn Gabe: Okay, great. Thank you!