What is structured data markup? What should and shouldn’t you do when adding schema markup to your site? Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they are joined by the co-founder of Schema App Martha Van Berkel to learn the dos and don'ts about implementing structured data markup and how it might impact your site’s performance. Plus, take a look into Crystal’s Ball to see the future of rich results! This week we’re teaching you how to translate your content to a search engine for optimized organic performance here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Structured data dos and don'ts What is structured data markup? What should and shouldn’t you do when adding schema markup to your site? Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they are joined by the co-founder of Schema App Martha Van Berkel to learn the dos and don'ts about implementing structured data markup and how it might impact your site’s performance. Plus, take a look into Crystal’s Ball to see the future of rich results! This week we’re teaching you how to translate your content to a search engine for optimized organic performance here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 72 | January 31, 2024 | 49 MIN 00:00 / 48:42 This week’s guests Martha Van Berkel Martha van Berkel is the CEO and co-founder of Schema App, an end-to-end Schema Markup solution provider. She focuses on helping SEO teams globally understand the value of Schema Markup and how they can leverage semantic Schema Markup to develop their knowledge graph and drive search performance. Prior to Schema App, Martha was a Senior Manager at Cisco Systems for 14 years, responsible for the global online support strategy. She has a degree in Applied Mathematics and Engineering, attended MIT for Innovation and Strategy, is a Mom of two, and is an avid rower. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: SERPS Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining this SERP podcast. We're pushing some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. I'm joined by the very structured, organized, well-put-together, easy-to-read, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I do my best. I'm not sure if I would say I was ever organized or think like that. Mordy Oberstein: Or easy to read. I'll be honest with you. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I've got a lot of things, a lot of what have yous, things that I like to categorize. I like to compartmentalize. That's something. I will say that I like to compartmentalize. I'm doing this over here, I'm doing that over there. I'm fine. I also am somebody who likes, when you put the food in a tray, if the food comes in a tray, I eat things out of each tray. I don't blend them together. I don't like that. I like that structure. Mordy Oberstein: I eat one thing, then I move to the next thing, and then move to the next thing. When I was dating my wife, she made this dish, whatever it was, and she's like, "Why aren't you eating it? Do you not like it?" I'm like, "No, I liked it the most. I'm saving it for last." I eat the one thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing. Crystal Carter: You don't move them together. People are like, "Oh, yeah." I'm like, no, no, no. I don't like that. Mordy Oberstein: No, that makes no sense. Why would you do that? Crystal Carter: No, no. You want your food to be structured. Mordy Oberstein: The SERPS Up podcast is brought to you by Ziploc. No, the SERPS Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get downloadable resources, one pager checklist templates that can do things like help you audit your website on our new resource section of the SEO hub. Which by the way includes structured data markup materials, as this week, we're talking about Ziploc bags. No, structured data markup, which is the Ziploc bag of SEO. Yep, we're talking about what to do and what not to do for the markup you add to your websites. What do you need to know and what do you need to do or don't do with your structured data markup? From structured data markup best practices to the mistakes that can cost you, we're looking at structured data markup like we've never done before because we've never done it on this particular podcast. I'm not saying as a marketing. We've literally never done it. Anyway, back to the intro. If structured data markup is an elusive topic for you or a non-existent topic for you, then listen up as Schema App founder Martha Van Burkel herself will be joining us in just a jiffy to get into the nitty-gritty of structured data markup and SEO. Plus, we'll peek into Crystal's crystal ball as we see what the future holds for structured data markup. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. Join us as we cook up a good scheme to help you understand where structured data markup fits into the grand scheme of things, as episode 72 of the SERPS Up podcast is here to help you with your schema markup as often the best-laid schemes go astray. Hi, Martha. Welcome to our show. Martha Van Burkel: How's it going? Oh my goodness, I am just loving all the scheming going on as we intro schema markup. Rocking and rolling. By the way, I do eat things just all together. I'm not like that. Crystal Carter: Are you an all-together person? Martha Van Burkel: I'm an all-together person. No order, no structure, Crystal Carter: It's all going in the same place. That's what my dad says. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I think also it's a good way to think about structured data. People always say what is structured data? When SEO, we think about it as one thing, but anytime you order a range data, you're structuring your data and stuff. If you arrange all your Lego into colors, then that's structuring your data for instance, if you're thinking about Lego as data and things. You must get this question a lot, Martha. We haven't given Martha the intro that she deserves, but Martha is- Mordy Oberstein: No, not at all. We were too busy talking about schemes. Crystal Carter: Schemes. But Martha is a schema champion, a schema hero if you will, and has been flying the flag to get more people to use a structured data markup for years now. I'm so glad that people are paying a lot more attention to it given that there's been so much encouragement from Google and so many things from Google. We're absolutely so pleased to have Martha in our podcast right now. Thank you so much for joining us. Martha Van Burkel: Oh, it's exciting. Well, we started on this journey in 2013, so we were just too early. I think what was so fun is times back then when I was like, semantic search marketing is a thing and it helps you be understood by all machines. I was pitching that, and people were looking at me like I had eight heads. Now that's the cool thing, right? Everything has its time. Around the definition of structured data, I love that clarity. Schema markup and structured data is about disambiguating or bringing clarity. And so that's actually why at Schema App we call it schema markup and we don't call it structured data. Because it seems really funny that we would use a term that's not clear for something that's supposed to bring clarity, right? It doesn't make much sense. Crystal Carter: Right. Because I think people forget your headers on your website when you write the H ones and H twos, that's structuring your data. A numbered list is structured data technically. Martha Van Burkel: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: But that's different from schema markup, and it's really important for us to think about. I wanted to give glue in our podcast listeners to why we started having this conversation. I met Martha finally at brightonSEO in San Diego after basically contacting her down, flagging her down, Martha, and fully fangirling at her. We got into a little discussion about a few things, and we started thinking about schema and don'ts and thinking about bugbears as it were. Here's the first one. What's your opinion on a website webpage schema? Some people think that it should be on every page, and some people think that maybe that's not the case. Do you think that is a schema do or a schema don't? Martha Van Burkel: It's a don't. But I like to explain why, and especially for those that are new to schema markup. When you're using schema markup, you're basically translating your web content to be understood by the search engines, right? That's how I explain what I do to my mom, right? I'm like, I'm a translator, right? This is machine language. If you're thinking about then, so you're talking about your homepage and you're like, "I need to translate what my homepage is, what the content on my homepage is," is it a webpage? No, of course it's a webpage, right? On one hand we're talking about large language models and AI and the inferencing that's being done by search engines, and so we're choosing to explain that it's a webpage. Of course it's a webpage. It's on the web. Now, I do see sometimes where webpage, I was just looking at someone schema markup this morning, and they've nested breadcrumb and organization under it. I do think that nesting is good. I just don't think it's necessary to have a webpage. I think you can say this is an organization, and then breadcrumbs are a separate thing, right? Breadcrumbs are a separate thing on that page. I am of the mindset of, no, I don't think you need to do webpage. I think you can be more specific about what the page is actually about. That's when we think about if you're new to this or you're thinking about your schema markup strategy, that should be the first question. It's the philosophical question of what is this page about and how are you making sure that that's being really clear. And so we always want to be as specific as possible with that. Crystal Carter: I think that for people who are getting into schema markup and the idea of schema markup, essentially one of my favorite places on the web, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time here too, Martha, is schema.org. That's the literal webpage. There, they have all of the different schema there. I check it fairly regularly. Currently, they say they have 803 types of information that include 1,466 properties across 14 different databases and a bunch of other things like that. Basically, all of these are different ways for you to categorize and to itemize the different parts of your webpage. Martha mentioned organization for instance. You can specify what kind of organization you are, and it even drills down to that. You can specify whether you're a restaurant or a theme park or a corporation or an NGO or a library or all of these different things. I think it's important that people that when we talk about being specific, it's literally finding something that's the most specific thing to what you're looking at. I think that when people are trying to do that, in terms of schema do's and don'ts, what if you find something that's fuzzy? Sometimes not every single thing is covered. How do people decide which one is the closest one? Do you think that catchalls work best for that, or do you think that there's other things that people should try to specify within that? Mordy Oberstein: I'll add onto that because I've seen this question a bunch of times. People are like, "Okay, I have services. Can I add product markup to my services?" Martha Van Burkel: All right, that's a separate question, Mordy, let's address the first one first. But no, it's a good one. It's one of my favorites, especially for organizations that do services markup. I think there's not something that's really specific, and local business is a great example, right? There's a ton of local businesses. You're better to go up one level to the more generic one. There's a home and construction business, I think one, or organization is very generic. And then you can use properties to be more specific about it. We were actually having a chuckle because in my local business schema markup best practices document, we've talked about additional type as a really cool way to add specificity. It showed up in the documentation for the first time from Google. It's like, oh, welcome. 10 years later adopting our best practice. This is great. I think you should just pick whatever is best. Again, it is fuzzy. Sometimes it is confusing what you should use, but just go up. What's cool around if you're new to schema.org, it's like the dictionary of schema markup. At the top there's almost like breadcrumbs that help you understand how to get more specific. Thing is the most generic. I don't recommend using that, right? There's probably something more specific. And then actually if you get to organization or local business, if you scroll to the very bottom of the schema.org definition page, it actually gives you more specific types. And so often people don't go to the bottom, but that's where you can see of the listing of the more specific types. It's also where they hide a bunch of examples. think if you're learning, spend some time on schema.org. The other thing I've been really encouraging people, especially if you're in content and you're like, "Oh, well I don't need to know schema.org or schema markup. I'm in content, not in technical SEO," it's actually really important for you to understand. Because this is the dictionary that Google and Microsoft, Bing, wrote in 2011 saying, "This is what we want to know about these different topics." Don't take it as a challenge to fill out every property, but use it to inspire the type of content that you might want to talk about about those different types of things. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that is such a sage piece of advice. For instance, if you go to the local business property on schema.org for instance, it will say that things that we wanted to see: opening hours. Yeah, everybody wants to see that. You can use it like a checklist, really. If you haven't put that on your page, then you can go, "We should have that on their page." If it says things like whether you've had an award, what brand you are, what departments you have, what your email address is obviously, your founding date, your founder, things like that. And so you might go through that and you go, "Oh, okay, actually we can add that information in. Actually, people should know that about who we are. Maybe we should put that on the webpage." It could give you a guide even from a content point of view. I think that's absolutely sage advice, and I think it can also help you to create which properties or which elements should be maybe static. For instance, I've seen people do this for local business in particular on lots of location pages. They'll make sure that their template has this built into it, and it can make it a lot easier for bots and for people to understand. Martha Van Burkel: Oh my goodness, so you hit on something that I really think is so important is enterprise. People think about data architecture. That's a thing. But everyone should be thinking of data architecture in the sense of how am I structuring all these pages? If I can do it in a logical way, just like Crystal said, it allows you to more easily understand things, right? If you're reading even pages that have a table on it, maybe you're looking at comparing shoes or something, when it's structured in the same way, it's easier to make that comparison and make that decision. Machines are the same by the way. Think about that template. Think about building in those elements. And then also what needs to be actually separate versus nested in the long paragraph. I think that's another piece that comes into the structured data and in schema markup is really these are unique pieces of content that need to be understood so you can structure them in their own field is what I'm talking about versus in a long paragraph. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think that we try to build that into some of our frameworks in Wix. For instance, we have certain things like where your product name, your product prices, whether it's for a gender or whether it's this, that, and the other. We build that into the back end so that we can output that on the front end. Martha Van Burkel: Way to go, Wix. Mordy Oberstein: Side note, if you're listening to this and let's say you are a local business, if your address is added to your homepage, we'll automatically add a local business market to your page. If you're listening and you're nerding out right now, like, "Why do I do all of this," if you're using Wix, a lot of it's done for you. If you want to customize it, you can customize all of it. But check it out before you freak out. Martha Van Burkel: Amazing. Crystal Carter: If you're not sure about which properties you sees, I highly recommend Schema App has a great tool that helps you to understand which properties are dependent upon each other. I don't remember the address off the top of my head, but we can link it in the show notes. Martha Van Burkel: Yeah, it's called Schema Path. Yeah, and it's always in our footer is the easiest place to find it. Yeah, Schema Path. Mordy Oberstein: Just made my life a lot easier. Thank you. Crystal Carter: You found the path to the Schema Path. Martha Van Burkel: Yeah. Mordy, let's go back to your question though because I think it's a really good one, right? Mordy Oberstein: It's my favorite markup question. Martha Van Burkel: All right. Let's go Crystal's do's and don'ts, right? What is the do or don't with regards to services pages with regards to what you should do? I'll say historically there is services schema markup. Services schema markup is awesome because it actually has very specific services, like what the service area is, what the services that you're delivering, who the audience of the service is. However, about a couple years ago, Google updated the documentation for product to include product and services. And so we actually changed our recommendation. Historically we would say absolutely just use services, now we actually say to multi-type. This is a bit advanced. The reason why you want to sometimes use two types is because it can be two things. Let me give you a more easy example other than product and services. A home. A home can be for sale, but it's also a home. We want to be able to articulate that it has a price, but also that the home has this many rooms, this many square footage, et cetera. A services and product is no different, so the services schema markup allows us to articulate specific things relative to a service, such as service area or what you're delivering. But it's also a product. Why you'd want to multi-type it is that you might want to also try to get the rich result for product. And so by multi-typing it, it allows you to articulate and disambiguate and be very clear, which is what we want to do with schema markup. While also setting yourself up to be able to get product, whether that be a price or rating, a review, type of rich result. Crystal Carter: I think that that also brings up another do and don't. Here's one that people have really freaked out about recently. Should you still use FAQ markup even if it doesn't give you a rich result? Mordy Oberstein: First off, to leave aside the premise of that question for a quick second, there's been a lot of chatter about the tools showing the FAQ is back. Who knows? Crystal Carter: Okay, FAQ how to whichever. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, let's go back and pretend it's not back. Sorry. Crystal Carter: Let's broaden it. Let's broaden it. Here's my do and don't. Should you still apply schema markup even if you don't expect a rich result? Mordy Oberstein: That's the question. By the way, for the audience just to explain that term, if you add something like products your data markup to your product pages, it helps you show with additional elements to your organic result. Google, there's all sorts of markups out there. Some of them are supportive for rich results and some of them are not supportive for rich results. When they're not supported, like FAQ used to be but currently isn't but maybe is because the tools are showing that they are, but Google said officially not, should you edit anyway? Even though you don't expect to get a rich result, will there be a ranking boost perhaps? Martha Van Burkel: Oh, ranking FAQs is a fun one. Mordy Oberstein: I know I brought up the R word. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you changed the question. You had the question. You changed it. Mordy Oberstein: I know, I know, I know. Martha Van Burkel: Okay, so let's start at the basics. A rich result is when you see additional data in the search result, I like to describe it to my mother again like with stars, price information, historically FAQs- Crystal Carter: Recipe cards. Martha Van Burkel: Recipe cards, videos, images on a physician, you name it, right? There's lots of them. They change often, so we actually have seen a lot of changes recently. I think this is actually important for us to talk about because it's actually what I would say influences my answer to this do or don't, right? My answer is, yes, you should use schema markup even if you don't get a rich result. Why? Because we're seeing a really big shift from Google. Even Google very specifically articulating that they're not just using structured data to give you that feature, but they're also using structured data for understanding. Mordy. I highly recommend we put a link to John Mueller's October 6th update. It's a search update where he for the first time, so John Mueller is a spokesperson from Google, said, "Schema markup or structured data is data that helps search engine understand your content." He historically has only ever said do it to get a visual change. Only do structured data to get a rich result. This is a pretty big change. He then said, "There's going to be lots coming and lots going," right? FAQ, what we're talking about, is an example of one that went away. We've also seen six new rich results since October 16th. In my time, I've been doing structured data since 2013, I have never seen this many things reviewed or announced. Really, and then the other piece that's a bit more technical is we're seeing the technology driving search engines, so Gemini was one of the most recent ones that was announced, becoming way more technical, right? This goes back to my webpage piece. These are large language models that are really smart, and they're trying to make inferences or trying to make decisions in order to give the best result to the user. Mordy, I'm getting to your ranking question. And so the schema markup makes it easier, right? We're translating it into this language of search engines to make the job easier. Now, I don't know about you, but Bing and Google complain a lot about how much it costs to index our webpages and understand the content. By doing schema markup and being thorough by explaining what the content is about, we're making it easier, therefore cheaper, for them to do it. They're also getting it right more often. Often when we work with a lot of enterprise and I'm like, this is a control point, this is a way that you can actually tell Google and tell binging exactly what you mean by your content. If you're investing all of this time and effort into writing your content, into managing your website, into filling in all the pieces in your Wix to make sure that it's rocking, let's make sure that it's then getting the best return for you. That's what would be my piece. With regards to ranking, I think what's interesting is that we're seeing with this evolution of search engines and with people doing robust schema markup, being very articulate about things, we're seeing higher quality traffic come through, which means actually the metrics are changing. I would say step back. Think of this as metrics are changing macro. Not just with schema market, but people are going to see less clicks and impressions as we see Bard and ChatGPT and other things come through. Why? Because people are going further down the exploratory journey in the chat before they get to the specific content that they want. If you're measuring success just on impressions and clicks and you're either the business owner like me or you're just the SEO trying to explain to the business owner, it's okay. What we're really suggesting people look at is the conversion, right? How is it actually impacting your business? Because we are seeing with structured data, when you do it, you're getting more qualified traffic, so a higher click-through rate on the impressions that you're getting. But the volume might be lower, so I think that's a pretty big change. Mordy Oberstein: I 100% agree with that. I think that's where the web is heading. I think things like SGE, not to go down that rabbit hole but just really quickly, are more about refinement than they are taking away clicks per se. Crystal Carter: I think it's just giving people more intelligent avenues and helping Google to organize the content better based on intent. Because I think that's the other thing that people forget about with schema markup. You were talking about local business. For instance, with the local business, it's got opening hours, so Google wants to know when you're open, right? Mordy Oberstein: 24/7. Crystal Carter: 24/7. Shout out Joy Hawkins. Yeah, I think there are very specific things that are required for certain types of businesses, which Google can serve appropriately. On a recipe for instance, they need to know quantities, they need to know time, they need to know the ingredients. They need to do all of that sort of stuff. Google knows that there's an intention behind when someone's looking for a recipe that requires them to have this particular type of information, which again, as you said, goes to quality and things like that. I think that when I think about whether or not, I mean, I don't know if you scribe to this as well, but with schema thing, I tend to take an approach of stay ready so you don't have to get ready. Like you said, they just announced six different types of schema markup things. If you already had that schema ready and then they added- Martha Van Burkel: You're rocking. That's right. Mordy Oberstein: We've had that before. We've literally had that on the Wix site. I think it was something where they changed something with event market maybe like two years ago. I'm not good with time. Google made the update and we already included it anyway, even though it wasn't part of the requirements for a rich result. We're like, "You're done. You don't anything." Martha Van Burkel: This is why you should keep doing FAQ schema markup because we are seeing it come and go, I'll be honest, across different clients. The other thing I think is if it's on your page, you should structure it, right? And then I would say it's also think of the chat experiences are questions and answers, right? If you have questions and answers on your page, make it clear and make it... Ideally my recommendations with FAQs is not to have a standalone FAQ page, but the questions and answers should be related to something. If it's about your service or about your product and then it's nested under, so it's subject of is often the best connector in order to do that. Crystal Carter: I think that's super interesting. What are your predictions for the next phase in schema markup before we sign off? Martha Van Burkel: All right, predictions. Well, I really think there's going to be broader use of schema markup beyond search. One thing, and I think this is exciting for all types of businesses, is if you think of the advent of all the AI chatbots and things coming up, they all need to be trained on data. They all need to have understanding of content. I really think SEOs are going to be the hero in that all the marketing content, all your website content, is going to be really ready for that. This is all businesses because it's not just homegrown AI. This is going to be lots of business relative people building businesses that are going to use that. I think that's a really cool evolution that we'll see over the next couple of years as to how SEO plays more a bigger role in customer experience versus just search. And then my other thing is I think it's going to keep accelerating. I'm hoping that there's additional measures that Google gives us around how we know how the structured data is being used and them articulating the broader value of it. We're seeing a lot of the structured data stuff coming out actually replacing data feeds that Google previously had, right? Whether that be merchant feed, whether that be car detail pages, whether that be vacation rentals. And so I see that interesting because one is consolidation. Again, if you think of follow the money, Google has to have all these separate teams managing these different data feeds. Well, if it's all structured data, it's coming in one pipeline. I'm interested to see what else that might look like. How that impacts local I think could be really interesting, so we'll see. Mordy Oberstein: That's a good point. Crystal Carter: I think it's also interesting because basically it is Google giving you the recipe. They're like, "You want this? Give us this." It's like quid pro quo, you want the recipe card? Give us the structured data in that format. It just reduces the chaos of the web so that it's not just random information. You know that at least whatever you click through, for instance on the recipes for instance, whatever recipe you click through that has the recipe card will have all of this information, bare minimum. Whatever business that has will have that information through, whatever product page will say this, this, and this. It sets a criteria that is good for the web, and I think that we'll see more of that. I agree that we might see more of that sort of standardization in order to be involved with search and marketing experiences. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it just opens it up like I do with the merger center feed, right? You don't have to have them actually do anything. It just democratizes a web. It lets Google do what they want to do with the volume of websites that they want to do it with. I think for things like in this particular case, it gets them around like, okay, we need to have more products in the feed if you're really going to compete with Amazon in the merchant center. If we're going to compete with Amazon, I don't want to wait for you to do it. We'll do it. We got you. We'll take this. Thank you. Martha Van Burkel: I think the other thing, the last point maybe, is there is a dictionary that tells you what to talk about. In all the things that are very gray with Google and Bing and search, this is something that's very articulate and structured, right? You don't have to scheme in order to figure out what it is. And so I think when searches, it's complicated, right? I love how Wix is uncomplicating it. But here's an area that's not that it is technical, but it is very straightforward. I think that would be my other piece of the things that you can control that is documented that you can't execute on, this is something that's very straightforward, very white hat. Mordy Oberstein: Before I ask where people can find you, I just want to say that if you want to create markup code, you don't necessarily need to know how to code. There are tools that can help you do that. Martha has one of her own, so you can check that out. But if you want free training around how to think about structured data mark, how to implement structure data markup, definitely check out Schema Markup app. I've gone through their content multiple times. I once had a crazy question about local business structure data markup and local service businesses and how to go about doing it, and your article was very, very helpful. It's probably like a year or two ago already, but it was great. So thank you. With that, where can people find you? Martha Van Burkel: Sure, so I'm the founder of Schema Apps, so you can find me at www.schemaapp.com . That's where Schema Paths is. This is going to help you connect things. Under resources, we have a ton of blogs and things that you can read about. The best way to know what's going on in the world of schema markup is to follow Schema App on LinkedIn, so you can follow us there. And then if you want to see me, you can either connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter @marthavanburkel. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to all that in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Yes, and thank you so, so much for joining us today. An absolute pleasure to be speaking with you. I've been following you for years, so thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: I have an admission. We've been doing this podcast for over a year already. It took me more than 365 Earth days, and countless hours of which I do not know because I do not do math, I'm not paid to do math, to realize that we should do a segment about the future of SEO and we should call it Crystal's Ball. I'm ashamed of myself it took me this long. Crystal Carter: I mean these are things that we think of, but we got a lot of things going on a of what have you. It's a lot of ins and outs, all that kind of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: My mind is like a busy street. It grows no grass and grows no hair. But still, the fact that I didn't realize it was an obvious... It was right there the whole time. Crystal Carter: If it helps you feel better, I knew it was coming. There we go. Mordy Oberstein: Yay. That was so good. Anyway, we're going to take a look at the future and SEO by looking at the future of rich results, which are produced by structured data markups, so that totally aligns to our previous segment, in a brand new segment we're calling Crystal's Ball. Crystal Carter: In this section, we're going to talk about looking forward into the future and how things are developing. We wanted to start with structured data because we're talking about structured data and also because I love structured data. I think that we've seen a lot of interesting developments across structured data in the last year, and I think that we will see more coming up in the next little while. One of the things that I think is really fascinating is that Google seems to be parceling more and more sections of the SERP and more and more sections of content into rich results with some of those enhancements. They keep adding more enhancements reports to Google Search Console for instance. We have the video ones, which that's changed around a lot recently, but we also have other ones that have happened as well. We have some new results that are coming through there. I think that this goes to the way that Google thinks about the SERO, and it also goes to the way that we should also be thinking about the SERP. For instance when you try to connect to get your rich results around product snippets, it sends you to Google Merchant Center. It tells you you should go to Google Merchant Center and you should update those things there, for instance. I think that when you have Google for Jobs, that does the same thing. It's worth thinking about how your content can be better organized going forward in order to adjust to these things. For instance with the courses for instance, they've parceled them off into a couple of different types of courses with the rich results. I think that you should also be thinking about your courses, for instance, in that way as well. You're learning videos for instance, they're calling them. And so at Wix for instance, we have a lot of our content parceled into these things. For instance, we can't just pick a blog from any page. We have a blog product, for instance. The blog product is configured with built-in structured data and built-in properties and elements and assets, et cetera, that are specific for the blog. Similarly, we have product pages that are built that way as well. Good websites are built like that. Good websites have a section of the website that is optimized, including the structured data, including all of the assets, including the variables to help Google to crawl it efficiently and also to help Google to render it with structured data on the SERP. I think that that content by type and structured data optimized by type, which it is optimized by type, but the focus and the emphasis on drilling down into that specificity is going to become more and more acute. I think we're going to see more and more dedicated feeds from Google in the next few years, in the next few months, and more dedicated content management from Google in that way. Mordy Oberstein: Something you mentioned a while back that I wanted to, if you could please, look into your crystal ball and enlighten us about audio rich results. You've mentioned it to me a few times. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so I think audio rich results are interesting. I think that we don't exactly see them on the SERP- Mordy Oberstein: Don't see anything audio, it's very surprising. Well, I'll tell you where you see an audio rich result audio functionality, in Google Translate. It'll tell you how to pronounce certain words. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so what you see, well, in Google Search Console, what we see for instance, so we do this podcast, right? We track this podcast in Google Search Console because it's on the Wix SEO hub at wix.com/seo/learn/podcast, and we track that. But what I've seen recently is within Google Search Console, you have your tab which says search appearance. And then when you go into search appearance, there are a few different options. Lots of them are things that I've seen before, like translated results or videos or FAQ rich results for instance. But what I've started seeing recently are media actions that are also showing up into the Google Search Console performance report. All of those they're also associated with podcast pages. I've not looked into exactly why this is triggered or how it's configured. However, this gives me an inkling in terms of my crystal ball that we might start seeing more in terms of audio rich results. There is structured data to give you more information around podcasts. Podcasts for instance are very, very structured in the way that they function. We also have the fact that Google has the ability to add audio onto the SERPS, so for instance, if you go and you say how do I pronounce- Mordy Oberstein: How do I pronounce niche? How do pronounce niche? Is it niche or niche? Niche. Crystal Carter: Niche. Mordy Oberstein: Google will tell you that. Crystal Carter: Niche sounds like something you need a cream for. It sounds like a rash. Say niche, please. Mordy Oberstein: But it's a good point because there's so much content that's out there that is audio content and it's so useful. For years as a serial podcaster, it's been mind-boggling to me why Google hasn't done anything with that audio content on the SERP. especially as things have introduced around multimedia formats on the SERP. A lot around video, a lot around images, but audio never seemed to make its way in. At one point, Google was hinting at the fact that they can take a podcast and transcribe it. They know what's there. It's not like it's unstructured to the point where, yeah, we know you have a podcast. We know this is a podcast page. We know there's an episode and an audio file on here, but we can't do anything. We can't parse it. It seems to me that they very much can. What's the difference between taking the audio and the YouTube video and transcribing that and transcribing the podcast audio? It's the same thing. Crystal Carter: Right, so I think that they understand the text that's in it further. I think we've seen a lot of developments around AI and machine learning for audio for a while. Screen readers for instance will take texts from a page and they will make it audible. I do use this regularly for large articles. I will put the screen reader on and I will have the bot read it to me quite regularly. But we also see that there are lots of things like Medium, for instance, started adding listen to this article. HackerNoon added this recently as well. There are a lot of NPR articles are translated, which use an audio element as well. I've seen other ones in different countries as well. I've spoken on this at a few different conferences in the last little while. Particularly the one from HackerNoon, which they've done for a few years now, that's powered by machine learning. That's machine learning generated, it's AI created, and so it's not impossible for us to see maybe in the future, like an audio SERP. Listen to the SERP, but I don't think that would be impossible. Furthermore, we have all of the Google assistants, they all have an audio element to them. You say, "Hey, Google," and they say, "Yes, how can I help you?" I think that it wouldn't be outside of the realms of expectation to have a more audio experience on the SERP. Not necessarily voice search. I know that- Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no- Crystal Carter: ... the age of voice SERP is coming. Mordy Oberstein: ... two very different things. Crystal Carter: But I think being able to listen to the SERP, being able to listen to answers. Even with a voice assistant, if you ask Google, "Is it tiramisu a cake," for instance, it will read you the featured snippet from an article talking about whether or not tiramisu is a cake, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Is it a cake? Crystal Carter: It's not a cake. It's a dessert. It's not a cake. Mordy Oberstein: Same difference. There's something about it. I don't know what it is. For example, Google Podcasts, they're going to shutter that by the time this episode comes out. Maybe it already is shuttered. It's like they have a weird, there's something about podcasts and audio. It's just not firing on all cylinders. It's funny because if you look at some of the numbers around podcasts, I'm looking at from explodingtopics.com, they have listeners at 275 million of them in 2019. And then in 2021 it comes up to 384 million and 424 million in 2022. There's just a lot of people who are looking for the audio content. You would expect, just like Google went down the video wormhole to provide video on the SERP, it would meet that demand for audio on the SERP. But it hasn't, but who knows. Now, if I'm going to look into my crystal ball and wonder who might we be covering for the SEO news this week? My crystal ball might tell me it's coming through now outlook is murky. Oh. Sorry, Barry. Crystal Carter: That's an eight-ball. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, sorry. I got very confused. Let me look at these cards here and see what they tell me. Some bones. Crystal Carter: I see in the future something from Barry. That's what I see. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah, it said image is emerging. I am seeing a face and it has a goatee on the face. It is Barry. Here is this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news got three for you this week. First up from Search Engine Journal's very own Matt Southern, Google's SEO starter guide set for a major update. It's a Google update, but it's not a Google algorithm update. It's an update to their official SEO starter guide as mentioned on Google's podcast Search Off the Record. They're looking to revamp their starter guide. I think they're actually looking to cut it down to half, basically. What they're looking to do is take out a lot of the jargon around it and modernize it so that the concepts that make sense for people to focus on around SEO are clearly digestible by people who are not SEO experts. A lot of the beginner content out there for SEO really does target beginner SEOs but doesn't speak to the average person, the average business owner. I think it's great that Google's trying to do something like that because I think that most people can actually do some great SEO stuff on their website on their own. Now, obviously there are things that are super complicated or more advanced that the average person who's not an SEO professional will not even know about, won't know how to start with, won't know how to process. However, there's a lot out there that people can do, and I think democratizing SEO is something that's very, very, very important. I'm glad to see that Google's trying to make their beginner's guide a little bit more digestible and translatable to the average person and business owner who can do some great things on their own. Next up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Round Table. This kind of relates to our episode today is about. Barry writes, "Google may penalize recipe collection pages using recipe structured data." You can add a recipe structure in a markup to your pages, but they should be the actual pages where the recipe is found. There is a practice that has gone on out there where people are adding it to their collection pages. SEO goes, "Ah, we'll just add data a markup to all the pages and that will improve our rankings. We'll just do it indiscriminately." Google's like, "No, it should be the markup that actually correlates to the content on the page." Google's basically saying that they're going to look into this. Danny Sullivan who is Google Search Liason wrote: “We're aware some do this, i.e. Referring to adding the markup to the collection page and not to the actual page. Again, we're aware some do this against our guidelines. I wouldn't recommend doing it. It passes on to the team involved before. I'm hoping that will lead to this type of behavior being curbed.” Again, please add the markup. The guidelines says add the recipe structured data for content about preparing a particular dish to that page, meaning it's a dish-level markup. It's not a collection-level markup. If it's a dish-level markup, it should be on the page where you are talking about the recipe for that dish. After, of course, you described that dish with four pages of irrelevant content. I'm just kidding. Don't do that either. Last up from Search Engine Roundtable, which means that, again, coming from Barry Schwartz. Barry is doing some fearmongering with this one poll. 60% of SEOs are worried about the impact of SGE. Okay, Barry's not fearmongering. He's actually reporting on a poll done by the very fabulous Aleyda Solis. Make sure you give her a follow. Aleyda ran a poll on her chat.seofomo.co, which you should also check out. Great forum for interacting with SEOs and getting some SEO knowledge. I'll link to that in the show notes. The poll is basic. Are you worried about Google's SGE? 60% said, "Yes. I'm not worried." I've talked about this before on the podcast and I advocate that you shouldn't be worried. The web is constantly changing. Content is constantly evolving. How people consume content is constantly evolving and constantly changing. If SGE is the next evolution of the SERP, it probably has a lot to do with people's already ingrained content preferences more than Google ticking away traffic, that sort of thing. Also, I very much believe that the SGE you see now a year, two years down the line will not be the SGE of the future. I don't see the novelty in a text-based output. I can get it into featured snippet. I do see the novelty in Google offering unique search experiences that help you explore topics uniquely via the SGE. That's a facilitator versus going to, say, provider of the actual answer itself. This is my personal theory that by the way, as I've talked about before, but I'll say it again because I'm on a soapbox, that will indeed impact traffic. It will make traffic more focused. It will make it harder to cast a wide net with head terms or that sort of thing. But that's where the web has been going over the last couple of years anyway. You see Google doing that with all the filters they've added. You see Google doing that talking about hidden gems. You see Google doing that trying to rank very specific pieces of content for very specific queries. But that's a general trend of content. People don't want to consume some top-level piece that doesn't really relate to their very, very specific need. Google's going to, and it has been doing this, facilitate trying to get the user in front of a very specific piece of content to answer the very specific question. Will that impact traffic? In a sense yes. It'll make traffic much more focused, but that's just the natural evolution of what people want. There's no way around that in my personal opinion. But again, 60% of SEOs are worried. So, hey, what do I know? 60% of SEOs out there disagree with me. I'm worried what you think, Barry, are you worried about SGE? Are you worried about anything? Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. Thank you so much, Barry. Barry's always a good sport, too. We'll probably get a tweet about a little intro there once Barry hears the episode, Barry Schwartz, international treasure to SEOs and digital marketers of all kinds. Crystal Carter: Friend of the SEO. Mordy Oberstein: While we're recording this, let's break the fourth wall. I put out a tweet there. Barry was covering an article about something like chatter in the SEO industry about the quality of Google results and whatnot, whatever it is. I'm like, no one would actually cover this. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, they wouldn't cover it. But Barry's covering what other SEOs are saying in a much more minute way. I'm like, this is the biggest news story of the week. Without Barry, would never have known about it if you weren't on Twitter kind of thing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think it's also really, really interesting because a lot of these things are evolving as they go. I think that the way that Barry covers the news is really conducive to that. The things might change and then it changed back, and then it moved around and then it went like this and that sort of thing. I think if you were to try to be like this is this, and it's a static event that happened, then I think that it would be much more difficult to cover. I think also the fact that he gets so much insights from different people helps us to realize that search is a many dynamic thing. Lots of people in different places will be getting different results, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it's great. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like we need another segment on this podcast called Waxing Poetic about Barry. Speaking of people we're going to wax poetic about, time for our follow of the week. This week's follow of the week is none other than Gray Dot's own Sam Torres, who you can find over on Twitter @samtorresatl. It's like Sam Torres Atlanta. Crystal Carter: Yes. Yes, and she's fantastic. Fantastic SEO who's great at all of the technical stuff and does some amazing stuff with the team at Gray Dot. Yeah, big shout out. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us to our second follow of the week. Oh, I got you. A little curveball there. Tory Gray from Gray Dot. Crystal Carter: Tory Gray from Gray Dot. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so both of them. Tory's at Tory, T-O-R-Y-L-Y-N-N-E, Lynn over on X. Crystal Carter: Yes, they're both fantastic. See them at speaking at different events and around. They've got a great podcast and they do some wonderful stuff. Mordy Oberstein: They put a video series also, so check that out. Gray Dot on their blog, they put out some really, really nice articles. It's not fluffy at all. It's really in depth, really. Well-written. Definitely check out their blog. Crystal Carter: They get really technical, but in a really approachable way. Tory recently published something that was really interesting about the SGE and user-generated content, which I think is really fascinating. Do head over to the blog and check out what they do. Mordy Oberstein: Now, we're done waxing poetic about people. Barry is always our perpetual follow of the week, Sam and Tory. Crystal Carter: There you go. Follow them all and make your world better. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, we try to structure it for you. We put all of the people at the end of the podcast. It's Barry, then the follow of the week, and that's how we organize our content for you. That's very structured that you know to expect, and you're able to consume it far easier than you would've been otherwise. Crystal Carter: You see? You see? It all makes sense, and we put it all into segments and section. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. See, it's all segments. It's all marked up for you. And some other dad jokes about structured data markup. Crystal Carter: Right. Well, I think this might be the type of segue that ends the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, is it time to end the podcast? I didn't have anything clearly delineated in my notes to know this is where we're at now. If only it was more structured. Crystal Carter: Right. We can do closed bracket. We're done. Mordy Oberstein: Closed bracket. Thank you for joining us on the SERPS Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with another new episode as we dive into what clients should you take and which clients shouldn't you take. That sounds juicy. Look wherever you consume your podcast, or on the Wix SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great resources and content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning over at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Martha Van Berkel Sam Torres Tory (Lynne) Gray Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Schema App Schema App Training Schema Paths Tool Gray Dot SEO Blog John Mueller October Update News: Google’s SEO Starter Guide Set For A Major Update Google May Penalize Recipe Collection Pages Using Recipe Structured Data Poll: 60% Of SEOs Are Worried About The Impact Of Google SGE Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Martha Van Berkel Sam Torres Tory (Lynne) Gray Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Schema App Schema App Training Schema Paths Tool Gray Dot SEO Blog John Mueller October Update News: Google’s SEO Starter Guide Set For A Major Update Google May Penalize Recipe Collection Pages Using Recipe Structured Data Poll: 60% Of SEOs Are Worried About The Impact Of Google SGE Transcript Mordy Oberstein: SERPS Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining this SERP podcast. We're pushing some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. I'm joined by the very structured, organized, well-put-together, easy-to-read, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I do my best. I'm not sure if I would say I was ever organized or think like that. Mordy Oberstein: Or easy to read. I'll be honest with you. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I've got a lot of things, a lot of what have yous, things that I like to categorize. I like to compartmentalize. That's something. I will say that I like to compartmentalize. I'm doing this over here, I'm doing that over there. I'm fine. I also am somebody who likes, when you put the food in a tray, if the food comes in a tray, I eat things out of each tray. I don't blend them together. I don't like that. I like that structure. Mordy Oberstein: I eat one thing, then I move to the next thing, and then move to the next thing. When I was dating my wife, she made this dish, whatever it was, and she's like, "Why aren't you eating it? Do you not like it?" I'm like, "No, I liked it the most. I'm saving it for last." I eat the one thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing. Crystal Carter: You don't move them together. People are like, "Oh, yeah." I'm like, no, no, no. I don't like that. Mordy Oberstein: No, that makes no sense. Why would you do that? Crystal Carter: No, no. You want your food to be structured. Mordy Oberstein: The SERPS Up podcast is brought to you by Ziploc. No, the SERPS Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get downloadable resources, one pager checklist templates that can do things like help you audit your website on our new resource section of the SEO hub. Which by the way includes structured data markup materials, as this week, we're talking about Ziploc bags. No, structured data markup, which is the Ziploc bag of SEO. Yep, we're talking about what to do and what not to do for the markup you add to your websites. What do you need to know and what do you need to do or don't do with your structured data markup? From structured data markup best practices to the mistakes that can cost you, we're looking at structured data markup like we've never done before because we've never done it on this particular podcast. I'm not saying as a marketing. We've literally never done it. Anyway, back to the intro. If structured data markup is an elusive topic for you or a non-existent topic for you, then listen up as Schema App founder Martha Van Burkel herself will be joining us in just a jiffy to get into the nitty-gritty of structured data markup and SEO. Plus, we'll peek into Crystal's crystal ball as we see what the future holds for structured data markup. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. Join us as we cook up a good scheme to help you understand where structured data markup fits into the grand scheme of things, as episode 72 of the SERPS Up podcast is here to help you with your schema markup as often the best-laid schemes go astray. Hi, Martha. Welcome to our show. Martha Van Burkel: How's it going? Oh my goodness, I am just loving all the scheming going on as we intro schema markup. Rocking and rolling. By the way, I do eat things just all together. I'm not like that. Crystal Carter: Are you an all-together person? Martha Van Burkel: I'm an all-together person. No order, no structure, Crystal Carter: It's all going in the same place. That's what my dad says. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I think also it's a good way to think about structured data. People always say what is structured data? When SEO, we think about it as one thing, but anytime you order a range data, you're structuring your data and stuff. If you arrange all your Lego into colors, then that's structuring your data for instance, if you're thinking about Lego as data and things. You must get this question a lot, Martha. We haven't given Martha the intro that she deserves, but Martha is- Mordy Oberstein: No, not at all. We were too busy talking about schemes. Crystal Carter: Schemes. But Martha is a schema champion, a schema hero if you will, and has been flying the flag to get more people to use a structured data markup for years now. I'm so glad that people are paying a lot more attention to it given that there's been so much encouragement from Google and so many things from Google. We're absolutely so pleased to have Martha in our podcast right now. Thank you so much for joining us. Martha Van Burkel: Oh, it's exciting. Well, we started on this journey in 2013, so we were just too early. I think what was so fun is times back then when I was like, semantic search marketing is a thing and it helps you be understood by all machines. I was pitching that, and people were looking at me like I had eight heads. Now that's the cool thing, right? Everything has its time. Around the definition of structured data, I love that clarity. Schema markup and structured data is about disambiguating or bringing clarity. And so that's actually why at Schema App we call it schema markup and we don't call it structured data. Because it seems really funny that we would use a term that's not clear for something that's supposed to bring clarity, right? It doesn't make much sense. Crystal Carter: Right. Because I think people forget your headers on your website when you write the H ones and H twos, that's structuring your data. A numbered list is structured data technically. Martha Van Burkel: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: But that's different from schema markup, and it's really important for us to think about. I wanted to give glue in our podcast listeners to why we started having this conversation. I met Martha finally at brightonSEO in San Diego after basically contacting her down, flagging her down, Martha, and fully fangirling at her. We got into a little discussion about a few things, and we started thinking about schema and don'ts and thinking about bugbears as it were. Here's the first one. What's your opinion on a website webpage schema? Some people think that it should be on every page, and some people think that maybe that's not the case. Do you think that is a schema do or a schema don't? Martha Van Burkel: It's a don't. But I like to explain why, and especially for those that are new to schema markup. When you're using schema markup, you're basically translating your web content to be understood by the search engines, right? That's how I explain what I do to my mom, right? I'm like, I'm a translator, right? This is machine language. If you're thinking about then, so you're talking about your homepage and you're like, "I need to translate what my homepage is, what the content on my homepage is," is it a webpage? No, of course it's a webpage, right? On one hand we're talking about large language models and AI and the inferencing that's being done by search engines, and so we're choosing to explain that it's a webpage. Of course it's a webpage. It's on the web. Now, I do see sometimes where webpage, I was just looking at someone schema markup this morning, and they've nested breadcrumb and organization under it. I do think that nesting is good. I just don't think it's necessary to have a webpage. I think you can say this is an organization, and then breadcrumbs are a separate thing, right? Breadcrumbs are a separate thing on that page. I am of the mindset of, no, I don't think you need to do webpage. I think you can be more specific about what the page is actually about. That's when we think about if you're new to this or you're thinking about your schema markup strategy, that should be the first question. It's the philosophical question of what is this page about and how are you making sure that that's being really clear. And so we always want to be as specific as possible with that. Crystal Carter: I think that for people who are getting into schema markup and the idea of schema markup, essentially one of my favorite places on the web, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time here too, Martha, is schema.org. That's the literal webpage. There, they have all of the different schema there. I check it fairly regularly. Currently, they say they have 803 types of information that include 1,466 properties across 14 different databases and a bunch of other things like that. Basically, all of these are different ways for you to categorize and to itemize the different parts of your webpage. Martha mentioned organization for instance. You can specify what kind of organization you are, and it even drills down to that. You can specify whether you're a restaurant or a theme park or a corporation or an NGO or a library or all of these different things. I think it's important that people that when we talk about being specific, it's literally finding something that's the most specific thing to what you're looking at. I think that when people are trying to do that, in terms of schema do's and don'ts, what if you find something that's fuzzy? Sometimes not every single thing is covered. How do people decide which one is the closest one? Do you think that catchalls work best for that, or do you think that there's other things that people should try to specify within that? Mordy Oberstein: I'll add onto that because I've seen this question a bunch of times. People are like, "Okay, I have services. Can I add product markup to my services?" Martha Van Burkel: All right, that's a separate question, Mordy, let's address the first one first. But no, it's a good one. It's one of my favorites, especially for organizations that do services markup. I think there's not something that's really specific, and local business is a great example, right? There's a ton of local businesses. You're better to go up one level to the more generic one. There's a home and construction business, I think one, or organization is very generic. And then you can use properties to be more specific about it. We were actually having a chuckle because in my local business schema markup best practices document, we've talked about additional type as a really cool way to add specificity. It showed up in the documentation for the first time from Google. It's like, oh, welcome. 10 years later adopting our best practice. This is great. I think you should just pick whatever is best. Again, it is fuzzy. Sometimes it is confusing what you should use, but just go up. What's cool around if you're new to schema.org, it's like the dictionary of schema markup. At the top there's almost like breadcrumbs that help you understand how to get more specific. Thing is the most generic. I don't recommend using that, right? There's probably something more specific. And then actually if you get to organization or local business, if you scroll to the very bottom of the schema.org definition page, it actually gives you more specific types. And so often people don't go to the bottom, but that's where you can see of the listing of the more specific types. It's also where they hide a bunch of examples. think if you're learning, spend some time on schema.org. The other thing I've been really encouraging people, especially if you're in content and you're like, "Oh, well I don't need to know schema.org or schema markup. I'm in content, not in technical SEO," it's actually really important for you to understand. Because this is the dictionary that Google and Microsoft, Bing, wrote in 2011 saying, "This is what we want to know about these different topics." Don't take it as a challenge to fill out every property, but use it to inspire the type of content that you might want to talk about about those different types of things. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that is such a sage piece of advice. For instance, if you go to the local business property on schema.org for instance, it will say that things that we wanted to see: opening hours. Yeah, everybody wants to see that. You can use it like a checklist, really. If you haven't put that on your page, then you can go, "We should have that on their page." If it says things like whether you've had an award, what brand you are, what departments you have, what your email address is obviously, your founding date, your founder, things like that. And so you might go through that and you go, "Oh, okay, actually we can add that information in. Actually, people should know that about who we are. Maybe we should put that on the webpage." It could give you a guide even from a content point of view. I think that's absolutely sage advice, and I think it can also help you to create which properties or which elements should be maybe static. For instance, I've seen people do this for local business in particular on lots of location pages. They'll make sure that their template has this built into it, and it can make it a lot easier for bots and for people to understand. Martha Van Burkel: Oh my goodness, so you hit on something that I really think is so important is enterprise. People think about data architecture. That's a thing. But everyone should be thinking of data architecture in the sense of how am I structuring all these pages? If I can do it in a logical way, just like Crystal said, it allows you to more easily understand things, right? If you're reading even pages that have a table on it, maybe you're looking at comparing shoes or something, when it's structured in the same way, it's easier to make that comparison and make that decision. Machines are the same by the way. Think about that template. Think about building in those elements. And then also what needs to be actually separate versus nested in the long paragraph. I think that's another piece that comes into the structured data and in schema markup is really these are unique pieces of content that need to be understood so you can structure them in their own field is what I'm talking about versus in a long paragraph. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think that we try to build that into some of our frameworks in Wix. For instance, we have certain things like where your product name, your product prices, whether it's for a gender or whether it's this, that, and the other. We build that into the back end so that we can output that on the front end. Martha Van Burkel: Way to go, Wix. Mordy Oberstein: Side note, if you're listening to this and let's say you are a local business, if your address is added to your homepage, we'll automatically add a local business market to your page. If you're listening and you're nerding out right now, like, "Why do I do all of this," if you're using Wix, a lot of it's done for you. If you want to customize it, you can customize all of it. But check it out before you freak out. Martha Van Burkel: Amazing. Crystal Carter: If you're not sure about which properties you sees, I highly recommend Schema App has a great tool that helps you to understand which properties are dependent upon each other. I don't remember the address off the top of my head, but we can link it in the show notes. Martha Van Burkel: Yeah, it's called Schema Path. Yeah, and it's always in our footer is the easiest place to find it. Yeah, Schema Path. Mordy Oberstein: Just made my life a lot easier. Thank you. Crystal Carter: You found the path to the Schema Path. Martha Van Burkel: Yeah. Mordy, let's go back to your question though because I think it's a really good one, right? Mordy Oberstein: It's my favorite markup question. Martha Van Burkel: All right. Let's go Crystal's do's and don'ts, right? What is the do or don't with regards to services pages with regards to what you should do? I'll say historically there is services schema markup. Services schema markup is awesome because it actually has very specific services, like what the service area is, what the services that you're delivering, who the audience of the service is. However, about a couple years ago, Google updated the documentation for product to include product and services. And so we actually changed our recommendation. Historically we would say absolutely just use services, now we actually say to multi-type. This is a bit advanced. The reason why you want to sometimes use two types is because it can be two things. Let me give you a more easy example other than product and services. A home. A home can be for sale, but it's also a home. We want to be able to articulate that it has a price, but also that the home has this many rooms, this many square footage, et cetera. A services and product is no different, so the services schema markup allows us to articulate specific things relative to a service, such as service area or what you're delivering. But it's also a product. Why you'd want to multi-type it is that you might want to also try to get the rich result for product. And so by multi-typing it, it allows you to articulate and disambiguate and be very clear, which is what we want to do with schema markup. While also setting yourself up to be able to get product, whether that be a price or rating, a review, type of rich result. Crystal Carter: I think that that also brings up another do and don't. Here's one that people have really freaked out about recently. Should you still use FAQ markup even if it doesn't give you a rich result? Mordy Oberstein: First off, to leave aside the premise of that question for a quick second, there's been a lot of chatter about the tools showing the FAQ is back. Who knows? Crystal Carter: Okay, FAQ how to whichever. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, let's go back and pretend it's not back. Sorry. Crystal Carter: Let's broaden it. Let's broaden it. Here's my do and don't. Should you still apply schema markup even if you don't expect a rich result? Mordy Oberstein: That's the question. By the way, for the audience just to explain that term, if you add something like products your data markup to your product pages, it helps you show with additional elements to your organic result. Google, there's all sorts of markups out there. Some of them are supportive for rich results and some of them are not supportive for rich results. When they're not supported, like FAQ used to be but currently isn't but maybe is because the tools are showing that they are, but Google said officially not, should you edit anyway? Even though you don't expect to get a rich result, will there be a ranking boost perhaps? Martha Van Burkel: Oh, ranking FAQs is a fun one. Mordy Oberstein: I know I brought up the R word. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you changed the question. You had the question. You changed it. Mordy Oberstein: I know, I know, I know. Martha Van Burkel: Okay, so let's start at the basics. A rich result is when you see additional data in the search result, I like to describe it to my mother again like with stars, price information, historically FAQs- Crystal Carter: Recipe cards. Martha Van Burkel: Recipe cards, videos, images on a physician, you name it, right? There's lots of them. They change often, so we actually have seen a lot of changes recently. I think this is actually important for us to talk about because it's actually what I would say influences my answer to this do or don't, right? My answer is, yes, you should use schema markup even if you don't get a rich result. Why? Because we're seeing a really big shift from Google. Even Google very specifically articulating that they're not just using structured data to give you that feature, but they're also using structured data for understanding. Mordy. I highly recommend we put a link to John Mueller's October 6th update. It's a search update where he for the first time, so John Mueller is a spokesperson from Google, said, "Schema markup or structured data is data that helps search engine understand your content." He historically has only ever said do it to get a visual change. Only do structured data to get a rich result. This is a pretty big change. He then said, "There's going to be lots coming and lots going," right? FAQ, what we're talking about, is an example of one that went away. We've also seen six new rich results since October 16th. In my time, I've been doing structured data since 2013, I have never seen this many things reviewed or announced. Really, and then the other piece that's a bit more technical is we're seeing the technology driving search engines, so Gemini was one of the most recent ones that was announced, becoming way more technical, right? This goes back to my webpage piece. These are large language models that are really smart, and they're trying to make inferences or trying to make decisions in order to give the best result to the user. Mordy, I'm getting to your ranking question. And so the schema markup makes it easier, right? We're translating it into this language of search engines to make the job easier. Now, I don't know about you, but Bing and Google complain a lot about how much it costs to index our webpages and understand the content. By doing schema markup and being thorough by explaining what the content is about, we're making it easier, therefore cheaper, for them to do it. They're also getting it right more often. Often when we work with a lot of enterprise and I'm like, this is a control point, this is a way that you can actually tell Google and tell binging exactly what you mean by your content. If you're investing all of this time and effort into writing your content, into managing your website, into filling in all the pieces in your Wix to make sure that it's rocking, let's make sure that it's then getting the best return for you. That's what would be my piece. With regards to ranking, I think what's interesting is that we're seeing with this evolution of search engines and with people doing robust schema markup, being very articulate about things, we're seeing higher quality traffic come through, which means actually the metrics are changing. I would say step back. Think of this as metrics are changing macro. Not just with schema market, but people are going to see less clicks and impressions as we see Bard and ChatGPT and other things come through. Why? Because people are going further down the exploratory journey in the chat before they get to the specific content that they want. If you're measuring success just on impressions and clicks and you're either the business owner like me or you're just the SEO trying to explain to the business owner, it's okay. What we're really suggesting people look at is the conversion, right? How is it actually impacting your business? Because we are seeing with structured data, when you do it, you're getting more qualified traffic, so a higher click-through rate on the impressions that you're getting. But the volume might be lower, so I think that's a pretty big change. Mordy Oberstein: I 100% agree with that. I think that's where the web is heading. I think things like SGE, not to go down that rabbit hole but just really quickly, are more about refinement than they are taking away clicks per se. Crystal Carter: I think it's just giving people more intelligent avenues and helping Google to organize the content better based on intent. Because I think that's the other thing that people forget about with schema markup. You were talking about local business. For instance, with the local business, it's got opening hours, so Google wants to know when you're open, right? Mordy Oberstein: 24/7. Crystal Carter: 24/7. Shout out Joy Hawkins. Yeah, I think there are very specific things that are required for certain types of businesses, which Google can serve appropriately. On a recipe for instance, they need to know quantities, they need to know time, they need to know the ingredients. They need to do all of that sort of stuff. Google knows that there's an intention behind when someone's looking for a recipe that requires them to have this particular type of information, which again, as you said, goes to quality and things like that. I think that when I think about whether or not, I mean, I don't know if you scribe to this as well, but with schema thing, I tend to take an approach of stay ready so you don't have to get ready. Like you said, they just announced six different types of schema markup things. If you already had that schema ready and then they added- Martha Van Burkel: You're rocking. That's right. Mordy Oberstein: We've had that before. We've literally had that on the Wix site. I think it was something where they changed something with event market maybe like two years ago. I'm not good with time. Google made the update and we already included it anyway, even though it wasn't part of the requirements for a rich result. We're like, "You're done. You don't anything." Martha Van Burkel: This is why you should keep doing FAQ schema markup because we are seeing it come and go, I'll be honest, across different clients. The other thing I think is if it's on your page, you should structure it, right? And then I would say it's also think of the chat experiences are questions and answers, right? If you have questions and answers on your page, make it clear and make it... Ideally my recommendations with FAQs is not to have a standalone FAQ page, but the questions and answers should be related to something. If it's about your service or about your product and then it's nested under, so it's subject of is often the best connector in order to do that. Crystal Carter: I think that's super interesting. What are your predictions for the next phase in schema markup before we sign off? Martha Van Burkel: All right, predictions. Well, I really think there's going to be broader use of schema markup beyond search. One thing, and I think this is exciting for all types of businesses, is if you think of the advent of all the AI chatbots and things coming up, they all need to be trained on data. They all need to have understanding of content. I really think SEOs are going to be the hero in that all the marketing content, all your website content, is going to be really ready for that. This is all businesses because it's not just homegrown AI. This is going to be lots of business relative people building businesses that are going to use that. I think that's a really cool evolution that we'll see over the next couple of years as to how SEO plays more a bigger role in customer experience versus just search. And then my other thing is I think it's going to keep accelerating. I'm hoping that there's additional measures that Google gives us around how we know how the structured data is being used and them articulating the broader value of it. We're seeing a lot of the structured data stuff coming out actually replacing data feeds that Google previously had, right? Whether that be merchant feed, whether that be car detail pages, whether that be vacation rentals. And so I see that interesting because one is consolidation. Again, if you think of follow the money, Google has to have all these separate teams managing these different data feeds. Well, if it's all structured data, it's coming in one pipeline. I'm interested to see what else that might look like. How that impacts local I think could be really interesting, so we'll see. Mordy Oberstein: That's a good point. Crystal Carter: I think it's also interesting because basically it is Google giving you the recipe. They're like, "You want this? Give us this." It's like quid pro quo, you want the recipe card? Give us the structured data in that format. It just reduces the chaos of the web so that it's not just random information. You know that at least whatever you click through, for instance on the recipes for instance, whatever recipe you click through that has the recipe card will have all of this information, bare minimum. Whatever business that has will have that information through, whatever product page will say this, this, and this. It sets a criteria that is good for the web, and I think that we'll see more of that. I agree that we might see more of that sort of standardization in order to be involved with search and marketing experiences. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it just opens it up like I do with the merger center feed, right? You don't have to have them actually do anything. It just democratizes a web. It lets Google do what they want to do with the volume of websites that they want to do it with. I think for things like in this particular case, it gets them around like, okay, we need to have more products in the feed if you're really going to compete with Amazon in the merchant center. If we're going to compete with Amazon, I don't want to wait for you to do it. We'll do it. We got you. We'll take this. Thank you. Martha Van Burkel: I think the other thing, the last point maybe, is there is a dictionary that tells you what to talk about. In all the things that are very gray with Google and Bing and search, this is something that's very articulate and structured, right? You don't have to scheme in order to figure out what it is. And so I think when searches, it's complicated, right? I love how Wix is uncomplicating it. But here's an area that's not that it is technical, but it is very straightforward. I think that would be my other piece of the things that you can control that is documented that you can't execute on, this is something that's very straightforward, very white hat. Mordy Oberstein: Before I ask where people can find you, I just want to say that if you want to create markup code, you don't necessarily need to know how to code. There are tools that can help you do that. Martha has one of her own, so you can check that out. But if you want free training around how to think about structured data mark, how to implement structure data markup, definitely check out Schema Markup app. I've gone through their content multiple times. I once had a crazy question about local business structure data markup and local service businesses and how to go about doing it, and your article was very, very helpful. It's probably like a year or two ago already, but it was great. So thank you. With that, where can people find you? Martha Van Burkel: Sure, so I'm the founder of Schema Apps, so you can find me at www.schemaapp.com . That's where Schema Paths is. This is going to help you connect things. Under resources, we have a ton of blogs and things that you can read about. The best way to know what's going on in the world of schema markup is to follow Schema App on LinkedIn, so you can follow us there. And then if you want to see me, you can either connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter @marthavanburkel. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to all that in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Yes, and thank you so, so much for joining us today. An absolute pleasure to be speaking with you. I've been following you for years, so thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: I have an admission. We've been doing this podcast for over a year already. It took me more than 365 Earth days, and countless hours of which I do not know because I do not do math, I'm not paid to do math, to realize that we should do a segment about the future of SEO and we should call it Crystal's Ball. I'm ashamed of myself it took me this long. Crystal Carter: I mean these are things that we think of, but we got a lot of things going on a of what have you. It's a lot of ins and outs, all that kind of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: My mind is like a busy street. It grows no grass and grows no hair. But still, the fact that I didn't realize it was an obvious... It was right there the whole time. Crystal Carter: If it helps you feel better, I knew it was coming. There we go. Mordy Oberstein: Yay. That was so good. Anyway, we're going to take a look at the future and SEO by looking at the future of rich results, which are produced by structured data markups, so that totally aligns to our previous segment, in a brand new segment we're calling Crystal's Ball. Crystal Carter: In this section, we're going to talk about looking forward into the future and how things are developing. We wanted to start with structured data because we're talking about structured data and also because I love structured data. I think that we've seen a lot of interesting developments across structured data in the last year, and I think that we will see more coming up in the next little while. One of the things that I think is really fascinating is that Google seems to be parceling more and more sections of the SERP and more and more sections of content into rich results with some of those enhancements. They keep adding more enhancements reports to Google Search Console for instance. We have the video ones, which that's changed around a lot recently, but we also have other ones that have happened as well. We have some new results that are coming through there. I think that this goes to the way that Google thinks about the SERO, and it also goes to the way that we should also be thinking about the SERP. For instance when you try to connect to get your rich results around product snippets, it sends you to Google Merchant Center. It tells you you should go to Google Merchant Center and you should update those things there, for instance. I think that when you have Google for Jobs, that does the same thing. It's worth thinking about how your content can be better organized going forward in order to adjust to these things. For instance with the courses for instance, they've parceled them off into a couple of different types of courses with the rich results. I think that you should also be thinking about your courses, for instance, in that way as well. You're learning videos for instance, they're calling them. And so at Wix for instance, we have a lot of our content parceled into these things. For instance, we can't just pick a blog from any page. We have a blog product, for instance. The blog product is configured with built-in structured data and built-in properties and elements and assets, et cetera, that are specific for the blog. Similarly, we have product pages that are built that way as well. Good websites are built like that. Good websites have a section of the website that is optimized, including the structured data, including all of the assets, including the variables to help Google to crawl it efficiently and also to help Google to render it with structured data on the SERP. I think that that content by type and structured data optimized by type, which it is optimized by type, but the focus and the emphasis on drilling down into that specificity is going to become more and more acute. I think we're going to see more and more dedicated feeds from Google in the next few years, in the next few months, and more dedicated content management from Google in that way. Mordy Oberstein: Something you mentioned a while back that I wanted to, if you could please, look into your crystal ball and enlighten us about audio rich results. You've mentioned it to me a few times. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so I think audio rich results are interesting. I think that we don't exactly see them on the SERP- Mordy Oberstein: Don't see anything audio, it's very surprising. Well, I'll tell you where you see an audio rich result audio functionality, in Google Translate. It'll tell you how to pronounce certain words. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so what you see, well, in Google Search Console, what we see for instance, so we do this podcast, right? We track this podcast in Google Search Console because it's on the Wix SEO hub at wix.com/seo/learn/podcast, and we track that. But what I've seen recently is within Google Search Console, you have your tab which says search appearance. And then when you go into search appearance, there are a few different options. Lots of them are things that I've seen before, like translated results or videos or FAQ rich results for instance. But what I've started seeing recently are media actions that are also showing up into the Google Search Console performance report. All of those they're also associated with podcast pages. I've not looked into exactly why this is triggered or how it's configured. However, this gives me an inkling in terms of my crystal ball that we might start seeing more in terms of audio rich results. There is structured data to give you more information around podcasts. Podcasts for instance are very, very structured in the way that they function. We also have the fact that Google has the ability to add audio onto the SERPS, so for instance, if you go and you say how do I pronounce- Mordy Oberstein: How do I pronounce niche? How do pronounce niche? Is it niche or niche? Niche. Crystal Carter: Niche. Mordy Oberstein: Google will tell you that. Crystal Carter: Niche sounds like something you need a cream for. It sounds like a rash. Say niche, please. Mordy Oberstein: But it's a good point because there's so much content that's out there that is audio content and it's so useful. For years as a serial podcaster, it's been mind-boggling to me why Google hasn't done anything with that audio content on the SERP. especially as things have introduced around multimedia formats on the SERP. A lot around video, a lot around images, but audio never seemed to make its way in. At one point, Google was hinting at the fact that they can take a podcast and transcribe it. They know what's there. It's not like it's unstructured to the point where, yeah, we know you have a podcast. We know this is a podcast page. We know there's an episode and an audio file on here, but we can't do anything. We can't parse it. It seems to me that they very much can. What's the difference between taking the audio and the YouTube video and transcribing that and transcribing the podcast audio? It's the same thing. Crystal Carter: Right, so I think that they understand the text that's in it further. I think we've seen a lot of developments around AI and machine learning for audio for a while. Screen readers for instance will take texts from a page and they will make it audible. I do use this regularly for large articles. I will put the screen reader on and I will have the bot read it to me quite regularly. But we also see that there are lots of things like Medium, for instance, started adding listen to this article. HackerNoon added this recently as well. There are a lot of NPR articles are translated, which use an audio element as well. I've seen other ones in different countries as well. I've spoken on this at a few different conferences in the last little while. Particularly the one from HackerNoon, which they've done for a few years now, that's powered by machine learning. That's machine learning generated, it's AI created, and so it's not impossible for us to see maybe in the future, like an audio SERP. Listen to the SERP, but I don't think that would be impossible. Furthermore, we have all of the Google assistants, they all have an audio element to them. You say, "Hey, Google," and they say, "Yes, how can I help you?" I think that it wouldn't be outside of the realms of expectation to have a more audio experience on the SERP. Not necessarily voice search. I know that- Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no- Crystal Carter: ... the age of voice SERP is coming. Mordy Oberstein: ... two very different things. Crystal Carter: But I think being able to listen to the SERP, being able to listen to answers. Even with a voice assistant, if you ask Google, "Is it tiramisu a cake," for instance, it will read you the featured snippet from an article talking about whether or not tiramisu is a cake, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Is it a cake? Crystal Carter: It's not a cake. It's a dessert. It's not a cake. Mordy Oberstein: Same difference. There's something about it. I don't know what it is. For example, Google Podcasts, they're going to shutter that by the time this episode comes out. Maybe it already is shuttered. It's like they have a weird, there's something about podcasts and audio. It's just not firing on all cylinders. It's funny because if you look at some of the numbers around podcasts, I'm looking at from explodingtopics.com, they have listeners at 275 million of them in 2019. And then in 2021 it comes up to 384 million and 424 million in 2022. There's just a lot of people who are looking for the audio content. You would expect, just like Google went down the video wormhole to provide video on the SERP, it would meet that demand for audio on the SERP. But it hasn't, but who knows. Now, if I'm going to look into my crystal ball and wonder who might we be covering for the SEO news this week? My crystal ball might tell me it's coming through now outlook is murky. Oh. Sorry, Barry. Crystal Carter: That's an eight-ball. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, sorry. I got very confused. Let me look at these cards here and see what they tell me. Some bones. Crystal Carter: I see in the future something from Barry. That's what I see. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah, it said image is emerging. I am seeing a face and it has a goatee on the face. It is Barry. Here is this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news got three for you this week. First up from Search Engine Journal's very own Matt Southern, Google's SEO starter guide set for a major update. It's a Google update, but it's not a Google algorithm update. It's an update to their official SEO starter guide as mentioned on Google's podcast Search Off the Record. They're looking to revamp their starter guide. I think they're actually looking to cut it down to half, basically. What they're looking to do is take out a lot of the jargon around it and modernize it so that the concepts that make sense for people to focus on around SEO are clearly digestible by people who are not SEO experts. A lot of the beginner content out there for SEO really does target beginner SEOs but doesn't speak to the average person, the average business owner. I think it's great that Google's trying to do something like that because I think that most people can actually do some great SEO stuff on their website on their own. Now, obviously there are things that are super complicated or more advanced that the average person who's not an SEO professional will not even know about, won't know how to start with, won't know how to process. However, there's a lot out there that people can do, and I think democratizing SEO is something that's very, very, very important. I'm glad to see that Google's trying to make their beginner's guide a little bit more digestible and translatable to the average person and business owner who can do some great things on their own. Next up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Round Table. This kind of relates to our episode today is about. Barry writes, "Google may penalize recipe collection pages using recipe structured data." You can add a recipe structure in a markup to your pages, but they should be the actual pages where the recipe is found. There is a practice that has gone on out there where people are adding it to their collection pages. SEO goes, "Ah, we'll just add data a markup to all the pages and that will improve our rankings. We'll just do it indiscriminately." Google's like, "No, it should be the markup that actually correlates to the content on the page." Google's basically saying that they're going to look into this. Danny Sullivan who is Google Search Liason wrote: “We're aware some do this, i.e. Referring to adding the markup to the collection page and not to the actual page. Again, we're aware some do this against our guidelines. I wouldn't recommend doing it. It passes on to the team involved before. I'm hoping that will lead to this type of behavior being curbed.” Again, please add the markup. The guidelines says add the recipe structured data for content about preparing a particular dish to that page, meaning it's a dish-level markup. It's not a collection-level markup. If it's a dish-level markup, it should be on the page where you are talking about the recipe for that dish. After, of course, you described that dish with four pages of irrelevant content. I'm just kidding. Don't do that either. Last up from Search Engine Roundtable, which means that, again, coming from Barry Schwartz. Barry is doing some fearmongering with this one poll. 60% of SEOs are worried about the impact of SGE. Okay, Barry's not fearmongering. He's actually reporting on a poll done by the very fabulous Aleyda Solis. Make sure you give her a follow. Aleyda ran a poll on her chat.seofomo.co, which you should also check out. Great forum for interacting with SEOs and getting some SEO knowledge. I'll link to that in the show notes. The poll is basic. Are you worried about Google's SGE? 60% said, "Yes. I'm not worried." I've talked about this before on the podcast and I advocate that you shouldn't be worried. The web is constantly changing. Content is constantly evolving. How people consume content is constantly evolving and constantly changing. If SGE is the next evolution of the SERP, it probably has a lot to do with people's already ingrained content preferences more than Google ticking away traffic, that sort of thing. Also, I very much believe that the SGE you see now a year, two years down the line will not be the SGE of the future. I don't see the novelty in a text-based output. I can get it into featured snippet. I do see the novelty in Google offering unique search experiences that help you explore topics uniquely via the SGE. That's a facilitator versus going to, say, provider of the actual answer itself. This is my personal theory that by the way, as I've talked about before, but I'll say it again because I'm on a soapbox, that will indeed impact traffic. It will make traffic more focused. It will make it harder to cast a wide net with head terms or that sort of thing. But that's where the web has been going over the last couple of years anyway. You see Google doing that with all the filters they've added. You see Google doing that talking about hidden gems. You see Google doing that trying to rank very specific pieces of content for very specific queries. But that's a general trend of content. People don't want to consume some top-level piece that doesn't really relate to their very, very specific need. Google's going to, and it has been doing this, facilitate trying to get the user in front of a very specific piece of content to answer the very specific question. Will that impact traffic? In a sense yes. It'll make traffic much more focused, but that's just the natural evolution of what people want. There's no way around that in my personal opinion. But again, 60% of SEOs are worried. So, hey, what do I know? 60% of SEOs out there disagree with me. I'm worried what you think, Barry, are you worried about SGE? Are you worried about anything? Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. Thank you so much, Barry. Barry's always a good sport, too. We'll probably get a tweet about a little intro there once Barry hears the episode, Barry Schwartz, international treasure to SEOs and digital marketers of all kinds. Crystal Carter: Friend of the SEO. Mordy Oberstein: While we're recording this, let's break the fourth wall. I put out a tweet there. Barry was covering an article about something like chatter in the SEO industry about the quality of Google results and whatnot, whatever it is. I'm like, no one would actually cover this. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, they wouldn't cover it. But Barry's covering what other SEOs are saying in a much more minute way. I'm like, this is the biggest news story of the week. Without Barry, would never have known about it if you weren't on Twitter kind of thing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think it's also really, really interesting because a lot of these things are evolving as they go. I think that the way that Barry covers the news is really conducive to that. The things might change and then it changed back, and then it moved around and then it went like this and that sort of thing. I think if you were to try to be like this is this, and it's a static event that happened, then I think that it would be much more difficult to cover. I think also the fact that he gets so much insights from different people helps us to realize that search is a many dynamic thing. Lots of people in different places will be getting different results, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it's great. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like we need another segment on this podcast called Waxing Poetic about Barry. Speaking of people we're going to wax poetic about, time for our follow of the week. This week's follow of the week is none other than Gray Dot's own Sam Torres, who you can find over on Twitter @samtorresatl. It's like Sam Torres Atlanta. Crystal Carter: Yes. Yes, and she's fantastic. Fantastic SEO who's great at all of the technical stuff and does some amazing stuff with the team at Gray Dot. Yeah, big shout out. Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us to our second follow of the week. Oh, I got you. A little curveball there. Tory Gray from Gray Dot. Crystal Carter: Tory Gray from Gray Dot. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, so both of them. Tory's at Tory, T-O-R-Y-L-Y-N-N-E, Lynn over on X. Crystal Carter: Yes, they're both fantastic. See them at speaking at different events and around. They've got a great podcast and they do some wonderful stuff. Mordy Oberstein: They put a video series also, so check that out. Gray Dot on their blog, they put out some really, really nice articles. It's not fluffy at all. It's really in depth, really. Well-written. Definitely check out their blog. Crystal Carter: They get really technical, but in a really approachable way. Tory recently published something that was really interesting about the SGE and user-generated content, which I think is really fascinating. Do head over to the blog and check out what they do. Mordy Oberstein: Now, we're done waxing poetic about people. Barry is always our perpetual follow of the week, Sam and Tory. Crystal Carter: There you go. Follow them all and make your world better. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, we try to structure it for you. We put all of the people at the end of the podcast. It's Barry, then the follow of the week, and that's how we organize our content for you. That's very structured that you know to expect, and you're able to consume it far easier than you would've been otherwise. Crystal Carter: You see? You see? It all makes sense, and we put it all into segments and section. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. See, it's all segments. It's all marked up for you. And some other dad jokes about structured data markup. Crystal Carter: Right. Well, I think this might be the type of segue that ends the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, is it time to end the podcast? I didn't have anything clearly delineated in my notes to know this is where we're at now. If only it was more structured. Crystal Carter: Right. We can do closed bracket. We're done. Mordy Oberstein: Closed bracket. Thank you for joining us on the SERPS Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with another new episode as we dive into what clients should you take and which clients shouldn't you take. That sounds juicy. Look wherever you consume your podcast, or on the Wix SEO Learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great resources and content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning over at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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Keywords sure aren’t what they used to be. Google is challenging SEOs to understand the user first. Here’s where to start. Crystal Carter kicks off this episode with an explanation of keywords in search and how Google has evolved its understanding of user intent (as opposed to the literal use of the word). Along with Mordy Oberstein, they break it down like this: Understanding what’s already on the SERP (like, the actual SERP) gives you the full picture of how Google understands user intent. Analyzing the current real estate shows how users are being affected along their search pursuit. SEO legend Cindy Krum of Mobile Moxie, also jumps in and provides a solid overview of how leveraging topic-cluster knowledge guides an understanding of user intent. Entities matter a lot, and they continue to make keywords less relevant. Oh, and one more thing. We need to talk about the WixVerse and Featured Snippets. Mordy and Crystal catch up with Idan Segal, Head of Organic Growth & Brand Development at Wix, as we go Inside the WixVerse. Let’s dive in Back The real deal with keyword research Keywords sure aren’t what they used to be. Google is challenging SEOs to understand the user first. Here’s where to start. Crystal Carter kicks off this episode with an explanation of keywords in search and how Google has evolved its understanding of user intent (as opposed to the literal use of the word). Along with Mordy Oberstein, they break it down like this: Understanding what’s already on the SERP (like, the actual SERP) gives you the full picture of how Google understands user intent. Analyzing the current real estate shows how users are being affected along their search pursuit. SEO legend Cindy Krum of Mobile Moxie, also jumps in and provides a solid overview of how leveraging topic-cluster knowledge guides an understanding of user intent. Entities matter a lot, and they continue to make keywords less relevant. Oh, and one more thing. We need to talk about the WixVerse and Featured Snippets. Mordy and Crystal catch up with Idan Segal, Head of Organic Growth & Brand Development at Wix, as we go Inside the WixVerse. Let’s dive in Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 04 | September 14, 2022 | 48 MIN 00:00 / 47:59 This week’s guests Cindy Krum Cindy Krum is the Founder & CEO of MobileMoxie (previously Rank-Mobile). She has been bringing fresh and creative ideas about SEO & ASO to consulting clients and digital marketing stages around the world since 2005. She regularly speaks at national and international trade events, and launched MobileMoxie in 2008 to address mobile-specific marketing needs within the traditional digital marketing specialty. Cindy’s leadership helped MobileMoxie launch the first mobile-focused SEO toolset, to help SEO's see what actual mobile search results & pages look like from anywhere and to provide insights about the impact of Mobile-First Indexing on search results; Now, free versions of these great tools are also available to all digital marketers as two easy to use Chrome Extensions. Idan Segal Idan Segal is the Head of Organic Growth at Wix.com. Idan leads SEO, Blogs, CRO, international, Social Media & Brand teams in the marketing department. Obsessed with everything related to content marketing and growth hacking Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulous head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, everybody. I hope everybody's feeling gnarly and radical and tubular today. Mordy Oberstein: I'm feeling gnarly, but not radical. Crystal Carter: Not radical, not feeling radical, just feeling normal. Not- Mordy Oberstein: No, but gnarly. Crystal Carter: Gnarly. I don't know. Yeah. I just say- Mordy Oberstein: When I say it I mean nauseous like, oh, that's gnarly. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: How do you mean gnarly? Crystal Carter: I just watched Bill and Ted's and I'm just saying the things that I saw on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so I grew up on that, right? When I said gnarly as an individual, like, awe, that's gnarly. That's messed up. Crystal Carter: Like bad? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, bad. Ah it's gnarly. Ugh. Crystal Carter: Have I used the keyword with the wrong intent there? Did I- Mordy Oberstein: No. No. I think I am. Crystal Carter: ...not do enough keyword research on my term. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Oh, SEO joke. Good SEO joke. You know what's no joke? The fact that this podcast is brought to you by Wix where 301 redirects are automatic for your main pages products and booking pages. Hello. Crystal Carter: Hello, automated automatic automations. That's right. You can also do bulk 301. Redirects take them all in bulk and poof. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I'm dancing as if the people can see me. It's a podcast. Mordy Oberstein: No, we are dancing like robots. Anyway, we're not talking about 301 redirects in this particular podcast in this podcast, [00:01:46] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? we're talking about the real deal with keyword research. That's right. Keywords ain't what they used to be, which means your process for doing keyword research has or should have changed. We'll cover what you should be doing with keyword research, where you should be starting the process. Spoiler alert. It's not where many people say you should start keyword research, which is SEO tools. And we'll talk about where the tools do and don't come in the keyword research process and special tip from the great legend of SEO, Cindy Krum on Google keywords advancements. Also, we're talking with Wix's head of organic growth at Idan Segal, all about how he uses keyword research to capture featured snippets in his net of awesomeness. Crystal Carter: Amazing, amazing. Idan is such a Jedi when it comes to all of this stuff, it's absolutely incredible. I've studied his featured snippets. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why we're going to talk to him later, which is why you said we should invite him about this topic. Also, we're going to get a little bit philosophical here. We're talking entities and SEO, and we're going to be covering the latest and greatest in the SEO news. And of course, as we do each and every week, who you should be following out there in the SEO industry [00:02:57] Focus Topic of the Week: The Real Deal on Keyword Research so you could get some more SEO a wesomeness. But let's kick it off with the real deal on keyword research. Crystal Carter: Cool. I'm just going to do a little explainer real quick just to make sure everybody's on the same page. So when we talk about keywords, we are essentially talking about phrases that people enter into search to find the information that they need. For years Google has understood these terms, the keywords as literal, the literal words that people type in. And so just to be clear, a keyword can be one word or it can be lots of words. So we talk about a keyword as a singular thing, but it's actually the whole phrase that people enter in. It used to be that Google would understand this quite literally. So if you were writing something about coriander and you were writing something else about cilantro, then it used to be that those pages would rank differently and that you would need to spell it out really, really clearly. But a lot of SEO has been built around this sort of literal phrasing of those particular words, but Google's getting much better at understanding that cilantro and coriander are essentially the same plant. When we talk about that, that's where we start to get into the area of entities. And Google's starting to understand that they don't necessarily need to rank one page for cilantro and one page for coriander. They can rank the best content around that plant for users. So that comes into how we think about keyword research that comes into how users are experiencing the web, that comes into thinking about the common names that are seen across lots of different media. And the change from being more literal terms to being more entity-based keywords, will affect how you approach your keyword research as you go forward with your SEO activity. Mordy Oberstein: I never knew that cilantro and coriander were the same thing until right now. Crystal Carter: They're the same entity. So I'm from California and I eat a lot of Mexican food. And basically I had to start making my own when I moved to England and in England, it's called coriander and in California, it's called cilantro. So I learned that very quickly. And similarly, there's a Latin name for that plant as well, which is different again. And I'm sure they call it something else in other places. So Google knows that if I want to make guacamole and I'm in London, they will serve me whatever content is best. Even if I put in coriander for guacamole, they'll give me a good guacamole recipe, which has cilantro in it. Mordy Oberstein: I never liked cilantro until maybe relatively recently, last few years. I always hated it for some reason. It tastes like soap to me, anyway. Crystal Carter: Sir, you're incorrect. Mordy Oberstein: I said I like it now. Crystal Carter: It's good. Mordy Oberstein: I said I like it now. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Sheesh. Tough crowd. Crystal Carter: Don't come at me about guacamole Mordy Mordy Oberstein: I'm not. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I think I'm not. Crystal Carter: I take it very seriously. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry I offended you. Are we still friends? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: That escalated so quickly. So let's start this off with where you should start with keyword research. And I always start, I've said it already on this podcast at this point, I probably said 10 times already, I always start with understanding two people. Me and you. Who am I? What do I do with my website? What's my website all about what am I trying to accomplish with my website? What's my site's identity? What am I all about as a company, a product, as a website, and what are the people who I'm trying to target? What are they all about? What are their pain points? What's their life circumstance. What's their life context? Where are they coming from? I'm trying to empathize with them. So know thyself and then know thy other, which I don't think is a real phrase, but it is now. Know thy other. And that's where I start with keyword research, which is not where many SEOs usually do. Crystal Carter: I absolutely agree that it's important to think like a user. So think about how your users are discovering your service or your products, and think about how users are talking about it. It may very well be the case that you refer to your particular product in one way, but if users are referring it to it in another way, then you need to think about that. And you need to understand that and you need to make sure that you're articulating that clearly. And that you're including those things. There are lots of tools that can help you do this. But I mentioned this before, when you're thinking about keywords, it's also important to actually talk to people who are speaking regularly to users. So if you're talking to your sales team, if you're talking to people who are front of house, if you are reading reviews, then that will give you some information about how people are interacting with your product and the kind of keywords that you should be including in your content and the kind of entities even that you should be including in your content. Mordy Oberstein: And it doesn't tell you just that. It tells you what kind of content they're looking for also. The problem with a keyword research tool, I know we all use them and I know if you're getting into SEO, you've probably heard all about them. And I know when you Google how to do keyword research, you're going to see a whole bunch of stuff about tools, which is why we're literally doing this podcast to be honest with you. Yeah. The keyword research tool can tell you, this is the keyword, but what kind of content do you create around it? Do you create a video around it? Do you create a really long post? Do you create something really salesy? Do you create something informational, but when you think about your audience or when you see what people are saying about what they want, or what they like, what they don't like. It helps you to understand what kind of content they want. Even if it's informational. Obviously you're talking about the best toaster oven. What kind of content do users want around that? Do they want something comparing multiple toaster ovens? They want a blog post just about this one toaster oven. It's all about the intent. Crystal Carter: The intent will change dramatically depending on what the term is. And also depending on what the person's trying to do with it. So I think that if you were thinking about uses for coconut oil, there's a lot of- Mordy Oberstein: Everything. On everything. Crystal Carter: On everything. Mordy Oberstein: To me it's just everything. Crystal Carter: So there's lots of different ways that you can use coconut oil. But if the intent is cooking, then that's one thing. If the intent is, I don't know, skincare, that's another thing. If the intent is wellness or something, that's another thing, but there's lots of different uses. So you can't just go literally coconut oil. Coconut oil is good. You should use coconut oil. You have to think about the intent behind that. And you have to think about how users are using it. And it might be that there's ways that users are using it, that you've never even considered, that you've never even considered. Mordy Oberstein: A hundred percent. Crystal Carter: I think YouTube is a really good example of this. On YouTube I watch a lot of hair tutorials and people are combining different products and people are saying, "Oh, I use this like this, I use that like this." That's great information for keyword research. That is a great place to do keyword research. If there's a really popular YouTube video, that's talking about your product, or talking about product in your wheelhouse, then that's a really good source for that sort of stuff, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: And then to take your coconut oil example, because my wife loves coconut oil. You have to segment those intents out. I always think of it by the way, primarily for skincare, cause my wife really likes it for skincare. And if you want to write a top 10 ways to use coconut oil and you're writing a mix of, use it for your skincare and you use it on your salad, you might be catering to nobody and everybody at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And you might need to write just 10 ways to use coconut oil for skincare. Probably don't do the whole 10 ways thing by the way. Crystal Carter: But that's the thing, I think also it has to do with your website. So if you are a spa or something or you're a dermatologist or you're a skincare professional and you write 10 ways to use coconut oil, then you should keep it to the skincare area, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: If you are a recipe blog and you're saying 10 ways to use coconut oil, then you should keep it to food. Mordy Oberstein: The key [inaudible 00:10:04] are not going to tell you that, that goes back to what we talked about before. Your identity as a site. You have a context of where you're working out of it's not coming out of nowhere. And again, the keyword research tool, you'll come down on them is not the best place for that. You what the great place for that is? The SERP. Crystal Carter: The SERP. The SERP. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Go to the actual SERP. Crystal Carter: And look up your keywords because this comes back to the user journey. You need to think about how users are actually experiencing finding your content. And it's very, very, very vague, very important that you do this on both desktop and mobile. And also particularly if you're an international branch, you have a look at some of the different mobile experiences. So I do not live in the United States, even though I am an American, the SERP in America is very different from the SERP where I live. And so if you have a lot of clients or users who are based there, that it's important to look at what the SERP looks like there and what the competition is there compared to what the conversation is, where you are. And then again, on different devices. So mobile versus desktop will again be very, very different. So if you're not on top of that, then you won't be able to understand the keywords. And Google's recommending keywords as well. So on the coconut oil, they'll say, do you mean coconut oil for skin or they'll suggest coconut oil health. Mordy Oberstein: People also search for coconut oil for your hair. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. People also ask related searches- Mordy Oberstein: Can I use coconut oil on my hair? Does coconut oil help you retain your hair? Does it? I would like to know the answer to that one. But no, the SERP is really, really important for so many different reasons. One is you can reverse engineer it from multiple perspectives. If you see Google's showing videos and images, you can tell... Yes, and again, a keyword research tool might not be able to tell you this. They might be able in some kind of way, but you need to know, yeah, I can create a post about this, but I really need to have some kind of media in there because that's part of the intent package. You see this by the way, with recipes all the time, there's always going to be an image of the food. That's not by accident. Google wants that there. There's also something really important for understanding your keyword research and what you should or shouldn't be targeting. And that's, there are a limited number of slots on page one. And there's a limited number of slots for certain types of content. Take, for example, the go-to example, they always use it buy car insurance. So 10 years ago, every single ranking website was a place where you can buy car insurance. Now it's split up between places I can go, Geico, Allstate State Farm, to buy car insurance and places to learn about buying car insurance. What's the best policy? What kind of policies should I not consider? Where should you go to buy car insurance? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Crystal Carter: The comparison sites where you're comparing lots at once. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, review sites a hundred percent, which will be my next point. But you need to know how many slots are available. If I'm trying to ring for a commercial oriented page, maybe there's only two slots available. Maybe I need to create an informational page. And if I'm creating an informational page, what kind of informational page should I create? Should I create a listicle? Should I create a comparison? Should I create a long form blog post? I need to see what's there. And there might be three slots for a long form blog post, and only one slot for a listicle. And that's all part of the intent package on the SERP. Crystal Carter: And it's also the case that it might be that it doesn't even need to be immediately on your website. Everything should come back to your website. Your website should always be HQ. You should always have anything that you do online should always be able to be traced back to your website and supported by stuff on your website. But for instance, if it's a how to, like how to use coconut oil in your hair, it's probably going to be a video. A video's, probably going to be what people are going to expect. And you should probably put it on YouTube. That's not on your website, but you can obviously tie that back in within the comments and the links and the various different things. And you can support that on your website as well. So make sure that you're understanding where the best venue for the information is for that particular query as well as the query itself. And to be honest, I think that tools sometimes do this well, but they cannot give you the full picture. They cannot give you the full picture that you can get from the SERP. They can give you a sort of bird's eye view of certain things like featured snippets and things like video or things like images and things. They can give you a general bird's eye view, but the SERP can be very dynamic and it can change really, really quickly. Google doesn't have to tell anybody when they want to change what they [inaudible 00:14:15] what the SERP looks like. And there's also certain features that aren't included. So if you look up a lion on Google, you get a 3D AR lion. There's a penguin one, there's a 3D AR thing of the tower of London, for instance. That's not going to show up in a third party keyword research tool, but that is going to affect how people are behaving on the search. So this is something that you have to track. Mordy Oberstein: Before we end this conversation or move on from this conversation around keyword research and whatnot. Tools do play a role. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: We're not advocating you shouldn't use a keyword research tool. I like to use a keyword research tool. Once I've understood myself and my audience. I know what's out there on the SEPR. I know exactly how Google's relating to this keyword, but there's things that I missed, like subtopics that I may have never thought of or questions I may never have thought of or getting some more context about the topic overall by seeing what kind of results the keyword resources are coming back with. I like to sort of refine my process. I don't start my process with the keyword research tool. I know many people do, I don't. But I do refine my process with the keyword research tools. Crystal Carter: I always think that with anything, and particularly in SEO, I always use a couple of tools at once. So I will look at the SERP, I'll get some ideas. I'll go through the keyword research tools and see what they say. Then I'll check the SERP that they say. I'll check that in Google as well. And then you want to back that up with a few different things and experience it as a user on different devices. So there's a couple of different tools, but I don't think you should ever rely on a single source for anything. And also you should also back it up with stuff from Google Search Console. So Google Search Console will give you information on where you're getting impressions for, but maybe not necessarily getting quick clicks for. They also have a breakdown of different parts of the search. So whether it's webpages, whether it's images, whether it's videos, whether it's product pages, that sort of thing. So it's important to just spend the time to see how the keywords are showing on the different parts of the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: And there's just so many tools in there from Search Console, which everybody should be using to Semrush, Ahrefs, they have Mangools, also [inaudible 00:16:11]. There's plenty of tools out there. Have a look at them. A lot of them offer a freemium version. [inaudible 00:16:16]. If I didn't mention your tool, I'm sorry. SEOrank. I could keep going. There's really a ton of them. Crystal Carter: Many tools are available. Mordy Oberstein: Many, many tools. Now we've been mentioning and throwing around entities a little bit and we're going to get into more of that later on in the podcast, but we thought it would make sense to bring it an absolute SEO legend for you, to talk about entities, to talk about keywords, to talk about specifically, how has Google's ability to understand entities made focusing on specific keywords less relevant? [00:16:47] Focus Topic Guest: Cindy Krum Here's the founder of MobileMoxie, the one, the only Cindy Krum. Cindy Krum: So when I think about keyword research for entities, I think about topic clusters. And so your main kind of head keyword, the main concept is in the center. And then we think about ways that that topic breaks down. So if we're thinking about a breed of a dog, let's say a labradoodle. So we have labradoodle and then we have their health, coat, where to adopt a labradoodle, temperament, things like that. And so you would do the research to see what comes up around the head term. And then you would create a cluster for each topic that is a reasonable section of questions about that head term. And you can see when Google's building out entities, they do this and they add sometimes in a mobile search result, they'll add expanders under the knowledge graph where they know, and they say, Hey, here's the main topic. And here are some subtopics. And so subtopics are different from related topics. Subtopics are within the core topic and they're just a division of what you would want to know or what someone might want to know. And I think to rank well in search, in some cases, we may have to go a little bit beyond topics that our website has a financial benefit for. So for instance, let's say that we are a site that allows you to adopt Labradoodles. When we only talk about adopting Labradoodles, Google knows that people who want to adopt a pet have more questions than just where to adopt, usually. And so they are thinking about the next step of someone saying, "Well, I think I want to adopt a labradoodle," because that's how the normal process goes. You don't go, I think I want to adopt, let's do it today. You usually go through a research process. And the more you can answer those questions and help users with their journey on the topic and not just try and sell them things it seems like, the more Google is going to count that as high quality content, the more Google is going to understand the entity. The more Google is going to understand that you understand the entity and you are going to have the requisite keywords clustered somewhat together or in a meaningful way that Google uses to determine if you are authoritative and an expert. And if you're willingly giving people information to help them, or if you're just trying to make a sale. And I think that Google does seem to want the extra steps to prove that you're not an affiliate site for instance, or maybe if you are an affiliate site, that you're a great affiliate site that you're going the extra mile to keep your customers happy. In my mind, I kind of equate it to having a clean brick and mortar store. Yes, you could sell stuff in a brick and mortar store, but just selling it might not be enough. You also have to have nice educated employees. You have to have a clean store. You have to have easy parking, things like this. And since those aren't concerns, when you're shopping on the internet or when you're searching on the internet, they're looking for other things, other symbols that this is going to be a good experience for you. Mordy Oberstein: So that was super, super interesting. And what I think people don't necessarily realize is that concepts, topics are entities. I know Cindy gave the example of a labradoodle, which my in-laws used to have a labradoodle, I really did not like that dog. But anyway, topics are entities. Concepts are entities. And within a certain topic, there are certain things that are subsumed in that topic, or also known as subtopic. So if you're talking about baseball, you're going to have teams and players and rules and playoffs and world series and blah, blah, blah, blah. This goes into how machine learning works. When you talk about a certain topic... Well, let's go back a step. When Google see a certain topic, let's say Labradoodles, or let's say, I don't know, healthcare. It understands that healthcare means X. It means subtopic, A subtopic B subtopic C. And this is connected to that thing. And that things connected to this thing. This is all what constructs the concept of healthcare. And then when you talk about healthcare on your site, if your profile doesn't match that, if, when you talk about healthcare, you're not talking about A, B and C, you're talking about completely different things in the way Google understands the entity that is healthcare, the concept that is healthcare, that's not going to bode well for you. So you can be focusing on all the keywords that you want. It's not going to matter. What you need to focus on is the fact, how does Google understand this entity? And that could be, again, anything from Labradoodles, to healthcare, to bricks, to astrophysics. If you understand and talk about that entity, the same way that Google understands it, which is hopefully how everybody kind of sees it, because let's hope we all understand astrophysics the same way, then that will help you rank as opposed to focusing on the keywords. That's what I took away from that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the difference between keywords and topics or entities is very clear to me because I've seen this in action. So for instance, goggles, if I talk about goggles, there's lots of different types of goggles and the intent will change, depending on what you're talking about. So if I were to write just keyword optimizing for the word goggles, I could say, goggles are great. You can wear goggles on your face, goggles protect your eyes, buy goggles in Brazil. Yeah. I could say that. And that would be optimized for the word goggles because I said it lots of time. Or that's what old school just- Mordy Oberstein: Goggles. Crystal Carter: Goggles, right. Mordy Oberstein: Goggles. Crystal Carter: But what kind of goggles am I actually talking about? When I say that. Beer goggles, ski goggles, safety goggles, swimming goggles. What am I talking about now? Now if I said, when you are skiing, you should wear goggles to protect your eyes from sun and wind. That's giving Google a lot more information about context, topic, and more relationships for the entity of the goggles that I'm talking about. And additionally, if I were to talk about that as a topic, I might also include things like ski gloves or hats or helmets or protective clothing for skiing or maybe even sunscreen. And that helps Google to understand that I'm talking about goggles. I'm also helping the user who's probably going skiing and is probably deciding what they need to wear to be safe. And it's telling them that all of those entities are related and they understand that all of those entities are related and that they're different from if I was talking about goggles and a swimsuit and fins and a snorkel and things like that, they understand that those are different, but you have to put them in a topic together to help them to understand that the entity is the entity that you're actually talking about. Mordy Oberstein: The entity. Speaking of the entity, we've been talking a lot about entities. But the truth is what is an entity? Crystal Carter: Who am I? Mordy Oberstein: [00:24:12] Deep Thoughts, with Crystal and Mordy You are now entering a deep thought by Crystal and Mordy around entities? Mordy Oberstein: What are entities, crystal? Crystal Carter: An entity is like... It's a person, place or thing. It's a noun people. It's a noun... Wait. It's a noun. Mordy Oberstein: Oh that settles it. We have defined [inaudible 00:24:37]. We're done. Crystal Carter: We're done entities. We're done. Done here. But yeah, it's essentially, the way I think about it's very similar to Latin names. So there's a Latin name for an Oak tree, Quercus. Quercus hispanica I think is the Latin name for London plane tree, for instance. And I might call it one thing and somebody else might call it another thing, but there's a Latin name for that tree or Latin name for that animal. Like Roly-Poly bugs we used to call them when I was a kid, but my husband calls them something else. But there's a Latin name for that. And essentially in science, they settled that and they said you might call it a bear. I might call it oso, but is it a bear? And they'll settle that. Google's essentially trying to do that with entities. They're trying to apply that same logic of just understanding the concept to the world. Wider things in the world. And I think that it's- Mordy Oberstein: Which by the way, it saves them so much on resources. Crystal Carter: Saves them so much because I mentioned cilantro and coriander. Mordy Oberstein: Because they understand bear. And bear goes with honey and bear goes with Winnie. It all goes. And then the language doesn't matter. They know this is universal across the board. They don't have to figure out it again in another language by looking at the number of instances that bear went with honey on a webpage. Crystal Carter: So again, there's a Latin name for a brown bear for instance. And it doesn't matter if I call it cafe Oso or if I call it brown bear, Google understands just like scientists understand that it's the same thing. And that means that it's transferable because it's the same thing. And you've essentially distilled it to its essence. And you can see a really good way to see this as well is if you have Google photos, if you go to the Explorer area and type in a word, you can see the way that they understand entities because they classify everything into different sections. So they'll classify things into trees or birds or flowers or cars. Or if you look up goggles, you'll see lots of sunglasses because they just sort of think of it as eyewear for instance. But yeah, there's a lot of different tools around there. And a lot of people who are doing some very clever things around entities and it's very, very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: I think of entities as fundamentally, something that has a unique identity. That's something that's discernible, that's distinct. And that, by the way, identity, we're going to go philosophical here for a sec. Identity can either be independent identity or dependent identity, for example. And this is where you start understanding why entities relate to other entities because they have to. For example, a keyboard. A keyboard's it's own thing, but then a keyboard has keys. So the keys on the keyboard. Is the key it's own thing or is it part of a keyboard? Crystal Carter: It's also which keyboard are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: A keyboard on my computer. Keyboard. Crystal Carter: I thought you were talking about piano keyboard. Mordy Oberstein: Oh we're not going that way with the entities right now. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. Keyboard on my laptop, right? So the keys on my laptop, are the keys independent? Are they it's own thing? Yeah. I can obviously refer to it. That's the A key, that's the W key, but together they can also be a keyboard. So entities relate to one another because no entity is independent of another entity. Right, parent and child. I am me, but I'm also my mother's son. So entities are always going to relate to other things and be spoken about as independent things at the same time. Which is super important to know because now you could understand why Google is going to automatically connect whatever entity that you're talking about with something else. Because that is simply the nature of entity. It's not making this up out of nowhere. That's how entities work. Also important to know, and I'll end on this point is that your website is an entity. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Is your website a distinct discernible thing? I would hope so. Then it too is an entity. Crystal Carter: It too is an entity. Mordy Oberstein: Now what kind of entity is it? Let's say you have a website that talks about bricks. I [inaudible 00:28:17] saying bricks. I'm looking out my window and looking at bricks. What does it mean to be a brick website, a website that talks about bricks? It's very different than a website that talks about physics. Crystal Carter: Also there's relationships between the entities because there's keywords and with keyword research now in this space, we have to think about the modifiers, right? So you say bricks, there's lots of different types of bricks, so different bricks materials. There's also like Lego bricks. So I spend a lot of time playing Lego with my kid. So when you say bricks, I think Lego straightaway. That's what I think. And you're looking out your window and you're thinking another things. So Google says, okay, Cindy talked about the head keyword and it's like, okay, brick. They're like, great. Now if you said rusty brick, that would mean a different thing. Mordy Oberstein: That would mean Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Right, that would be Barry Schwartz. If you said Lego brick, that means a different thing. And that takes you down a different path. So it's very important to understand the modifiers. So not just the keyword, but also the modifiers that are important for those users. Mordy Oberstein: A thousand percent. And it also is really important about what you talk about, what you link out to what's linking to you on your website. Because again, if you are a brick website and you are talking about things like air conditioners, right? Yeah, that might make sense. I could see if you have a brick in your house, how do you connect your air conditioning unit to the bricks? Right? That would make sense if you have... I guess, I think. If you have a brick website that sells bricks to build your house and you're talking about football teams, does that really make sense? And when Google's looking at that, your site is an entity, your site's an entity about bricks. Your entity is a brick website. Does a brick website, talk about football teams? No. So what's going on here? Are you really a brick entity website? Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: And there you have it. Crystal Carter: And there you have it. Mordy Oberstein: From philosophy to action. All on the SERP's Up podcast. Crystal Carter: That's what we're doing here, people. Mordy Oberstein: That's what we do here. All day, every day or at least once a week. But we're not done yet. We are not done yet. You thought we were done. We're not done, because we have a legend for you. [00:24:12] Inside the WixVerse: Idan Segal We have Idan Segal, the head of organic growth here at Wix. As we go across the Wixverse to bring you experts from Wix who talk about all different types of things, in this case about getting keywords for featured snippets. Let's talk with Idan. Mordy Oberstein: So as promised, I just want to preface this. A lot of the time you go out there on Twitter or wherever you consume social media content around SEO. And you see all these people with a lot of big mouths, I'm talking about myself in particular, but you don't see the people working behind the scenes doing some great things who are generally in house, because they don't feel they need to have a social presence in the same way that some other people do. And that's fine. I feel at Wix, we have so many people here that you have no idea who they are, and you might know who Ian is, I'm not talking about Idan that way, but it's so important to bring those voices out in general. So I kind of love this segment. With that, Idan is here. Idan Segal: What's up? It's nice to finally be here. Mordy Oberstein: It is. Idan, I love your eyes. I always say that. Idan Segal: Yeah. You say it a lot, I must say. Mordy Oberstein: I know. Is that weird? Crystal Carter: So much. Idan Segal: No, it's okay. It's okay. I'm already so flattered from what you said before. So what can I say now? Mordy Oberstein: Did I set you up? Idan Segal: Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, you invited me so many times and finally I'm here. I was starting to think that those [inaudible 00:31:48] invitations. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well when you know when you invite somebody your wedding or whatever, but you don't really want them to come. So you invite, "Yeah, it's at one o'clock in the morning, but we'd love to have you there." Crystal Carter: Oh, in England they do it two tier. At England there's the ceremony and that's how you know your real friends. And if they're like meh friends, you only get invited to the dinner after. Mordy Oberstein: What? I would do the opposite. I don't want to be invited to the ceremony. Invite me to the dinner. That's all I care about. Idan Segal: Anyways, for me, it's amazing. What a morning. I repaired my car. I watch the NBA finals and now I'm in a podcast. So it's a work procrastination at its best. Mordy Oberstein: So we've been talking in this episode a lot about keywords and keyword research. And you're a little bit of a legend around here because you and your team and we, all of you, but you're the head of this, so we're going to call it you, rank for a ton of featured snippets. Idan Segal: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Crystal in particular is really impressed. Not that I'm not impressed, but... Idan Segal: So yeah, I'm leading a team of rock stars. They really do the magic, not me, but it's a bunch of SEO teams and blog teams and CRO teams. But the bottom line is really amazing. I think only in the US, we're triggering more than 3,000 feature snippets. I think 54% of them, according to the May report, probably even more now are from the blog. Many of them are from product gates. And that's really cool. I must say that even the last algorithm change worked tremendously well for us. And I think we increased the amount of featured snippet that we have in 20 something percent. So that's just awesome. Mordy Oberstein: Do you get a bonus for that when you- Idan Segal: I'm not answering without my lawyer. Crystal Carter: I'm not surprised because I did an article around featured snippets for Search London recently and they used Wix as a really good case study because the featured snippets, for instance, there was one article that was 120 best blog niche ideas to write about. And if you look up topics for blogs, it shows as the featured snippet for that. If you look up blog topics for beginners, that same article shows as the people also ask. And then if you look up blog topics, it shows in an accordion as a dropdown there as well. You're also covered if you look up blogging, it shows in the knowledge panel as one of the, what is the subtopics of blogging as well. It really is an incredible case study in topic clusters of how you mapped out different topics around blogging. Can you share any insights on how you did that? Idan Segal: First of all, we are big fans of HubSpot and HubSpot Strategy in general here. We think that they're awesome. I think by the way, they are kind of a role model, to some extent. I think they even call the HTML components, some of them, when you go to the HTML, you see they call them featured snippets. Let's say that they're students of the game and they really try to get better every day. And this is my philosophy here as well. I think that here in Wix we are very lucky to have products in many niches so we can get tons of feature snippets. I think it's also a good sign for our product to show that you are capable of getting featured snippets when using the Wix blog. We have 22 different blogs in 16 languages and in most of them or all of them, we are getting featured snippets. And that's really, really cool. I think we are really trying to give the people what they want to bring real value. I don't want to say some fancy words, but we're really trying to bring value and to answer real problems. And by doing that, we also have structure that we're trying to do because we see that it's working. If we are doing a recap in the end so we're also doing a precap in the beginning, an introduction. We are trying to use things that we see that are working like ordered list and unordered list. And we have even showcases, inspirational intent content, we are trying to use scattered age free titles along the text. And you see that it's just working because we write great content and our philosophy that we're always on the hunt for more, but it's not that I detect featured snippets on the SERP and I'm trying to get them. I'm trying to even help Google educate him that it's worth a featured snippets. And I think we have tons of success by creating feature snippets on SERP's that didn't have any, and that's really cool. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really great point, because the way you usually hear this topic being talked about and even the way we introduced it was, yeah, how do you target keywords for featured snippets? Whereas you're just saying, yeah, we just target writing content and then we tell Google, this is a great place for a feature snippet. Idan Segal: Google is kind of good in what they're doing. Usually they figure it out and it's not always violets and roses here. I think in the last algo update, there was a topic that it's not really our niche, but was how to start a YouTube channel. And now of course Google is getting the featured snippet, their support. And I think we crushed. Decreased. I have it here, 67% decrease, but on the same graph we had some content about writing a bio, about blogging, about fonts, I think. And we increased in a second in between 20 to 50% in traffic. And in general featured snippet are more than 10% of our blog traffic. And that's huge. That's really huge for business. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think one of the things that I noticed again, from studying your featured snippets from the outside or whatever is that you spend a lot of time on the long tail, which is really, really core for featured snippets. A lot of the broad terms are going to be covered by things like Wikipedia or even by an instant answer. So the number of blogs you have about blogging is extensive, which means that you're going to be getting into that sort of longer tail. Can you talk to us a little bit about your research process at all? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. How do you break down topics like that? What's your approach? Idan Segal: Again, I think in the Wix blog, we're going after our products and what we're really offering to people and we're trying to go after that. So we have different clusters. One of them is about the website creation and that means that I need to cover everything. Also, things that I can't really cover on my product pages. And if I want to talk about menus and about the importance of navigation and about what is a 404, it's all about semantic depth. And again, I am a very cynical person and I am a capitalistic pig that cares about conversions. But having said that, I do try to do it while I'm trying to imagine that I'm writing to a fancy editor and to really give value because that's the right way to tackle it. So blogging is another big cluster of ours that we're trying to tackle the same way that marketing is and web design is. And we're trying to all the time to beef up and to learn from our competitors about topics that we're not covering. And also for us to lose a featured snippet, it's a wake up call. It means that we need to do something better. We need to try to learn from our competitors how to do things better. And sometimes it's just about Google turning off the feature snippet. And that's also okay. Mordy Oberstein: It's such a good point that, we were talking about this earlier in the podcast, about when you're thinking about keyword research in a nonlinear way, not so focused on the tools, it's really about being able to yourself, and you can use tools to help you do this, being able to parse out what that topic is or what that topic means and creating content around all of that in a really substantial kind of way. Just one more question before we have to let you go. When you see that you lose a feature snippet, you're talking about the YouTube content that came in and took away our feature snippets. Do you try to regain that or do you say, "Okay, look, I realize I should never have really had those to begin with and I'm not going to waste my time." Idan Segal: So, if I think that I didn't deserve it, it will affect my priorities. Having said that the fact that I got it previously means that at least I will give it a try. And I think that part of our work process here, we have tons of emphasis on redos. We want to send Google fresh signals that will keep working on our content. Huge part of our strategy is evergreen content. So for me, when I'm losing it, I'm trying to learn why I lost it. What's the other competitor, the URL that took it. I'm trying to learn from what they did. And I will try to do a redo to prioritize it in many cases the success rate is awesome. And again, all the credits to my team. And also I'm lucky to work in a company that has a great domain authority because Wix has a great product. That enables us to get those featured snippets. Crystal Carter: When I was speaking at Search London about featured snippets, someone said, "Oh, can you go over existing content to make feature snippets?" And I was like, "Yeah, you absolutely 100% can. And it's definitely, as you say, redos, going back over the content and adding bullet points or lists or tables or adding images or videos or whatever can really help. Idan Segal: There was a thread on Twitter from someone that I didn't know. Maybe you'll remember it. And if not, I will share it and you can share it later in a thread or something about someone that explained to details, how he's trying to tackle featured snippets. It was a very insightful one. Most of the things that he's trying to do we are already doing here, but I learned a trick or two. And there is a lot of technicalities when you're doing it, right? So you need to use some techniques, some HTML markup, ordered lists, unordered lists, hierarchy, amount of text, imperative verbs. There's some stuff to do, but eventually create good content and you'll enjoy the fruits. Mordy Oberstein: Idan, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day and joining us. Idan Segal: No problem. Thank you for inviting me. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Again, Idan, before you leave, where can we find you out there in the public? Where can your people find you? Idan Segal: You know, you can find me on Twitter probably. You can share the handle later on. Mordy Oberstein: I'll share the handle. It'll be in the show notes. Look for it in the show notes folks. Idan, thank you so much. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Idan Segal: Amazing. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Bye, bye. Idan Segal: Ciao. Mordy Oberstein: Brilliant fellow, no? Crystal Carter: Idan never ceases to amaze. I think that he just delivers. I think there's such amazing content that comes out of that team and the way that they approach it is incredible. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why we go across the Wixverse. There's so many awesome people here. By the way, there's so many people out there in the SEO world who are not super famous who are doing super amazing things. [00:41:43] Snappy News So just know that. You know what else might be news to you other than the fact that there are SEOs out there who don't have huge profiles? The actual news, the actual news. The actual SEO, snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Let's get right into it because otherwise it wouldn't be snappy. First up for the master of disaster and last week's guest Barry, made the Schwartz be with you. From search engine round table, new Google featured snippet with multiple answers, new design call outs and more. Essentially what we have here is a featured snippet on a gray background with a call out i.e. bolded text that basically gives you the answer to the query and multiple answers from multiple URLs to boot. I'm covering this because this has been the fifth or sixth test where Google's actually using multiple URLs inside of the feature snippet. It's a big shift in how they're thinking about feature snippets and search overall. In my honest opinion, Asher just covered this and why I think Google is doing this on the Wix SEO hub. I'll link to that and I'll link to Barry's article where you can see what this feature snippet looks like. So check out the show notes. Okay. More on the old HCU the Helpful Content Update from SEJ, Search Engine Journals, Matt Southern. Google, helpful content signal, make it stronger with next core update. So the helpful content update might be a strong part of the ranking equation as time goes on. It was not a very potent part of the equation this go around as the update, as Google confirmed, has finished rolling out. This actually kind of makes sense as the HCU as we call it, the Helpful Content Update is based on machine learning properties and the machine needs to learn. And as it learns, it'll be more powerful than anything the SERP has ever known before. Okay. Maybe that's hyperbolic, but it does make sense that as time goes on, as the machine learns more, it will be a greater factor in the ranking equation. So Helpful Content Update, go get some learning done and come back soon, you hear. And with that, that is the snappiest of news. And what a set of news that was, no? Crystal Carter: It as very news news to me. Mordy Oberstein: That was very newsy. It was newsworthy, Newsies, good movie. Classic growing up as a kid, Christian Bale. Crystal Carter: I was just about to say that people don't realize the American Psycho was in Newsies. Mordy Oberstein: He was. Dancing around singing about newspapers. Crystal Carter: Do you want some news? Because he's Batman as well. That was my Batman. Mordy Oberstein: News. Crystal Carter: That's a much better Batman. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. I have specialties in doing Batman voices. Now let's talk about other stuff about SEO. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Again, before we leave you and thank you so much for listening all the way through to this point, we want to make sure that you understand that there is so much great SEO information out there besides just this podcast. And a lot of it comes from the SEO industry itself, which means the people, the people are the industry. [00:46:31] Follow of the Week And today we're going to share who you should be following out there in Twitter. And that person is Crystal. No, it is crystal. Crystal Carter: It's not me. Mordy Oberstein: You are someone we should follow. It's not what I meant. But crystal, who are we following this week? Crystal Carter: Today I would like to discuss, and I would like to put a little shine on Lazarina Stoy. I think she's amazing. She's an SEO, she's like a data phenom. She's really- Mordy Oberstein: Machine learning. Crystal Carter: Right. She's really into machine learning and she's got some great, great resources that she has particularly around keywords. She has a tool called the keyword search intent classifier tool. And it's a Google sheet that you can use to understand your keywords better and to understand the intent behind them. She also has some really good resources around big data sets as well. So she's a great person to follow. She tinkers a lot and makes a lot of really cool resources and shares some really good stuff. And she's just really, really clever. I think that if you're interested in keywords, you're interested in machine learning, you're interested in checking out somebody who's doing really cool stuff follow Lazarina. Mordy Oberstein: She's doing some really cool stuff. And that's @LazarinaStoy on Twitter. L-A-Z-A-R-I-N-A-S-T-O-Y. And of course we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes for this podcast. Folks, that's it. That's that's all we got. I know you wanted more, but that's all we got for you this week. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's UP podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry we're back next week with an all new episode diving into Ooh, ranking factors. Should you care? Crystal Carter: Should you? Mordy Oberstein: We have different point of views on this one I think. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah, we kind of do. Mordy Oberstein: Oh boy. Going to be some drama. Well- Crystal Carter: It's going to get heated. [inaudible 00:46:43] at the guacamole discussions though. Mordy Oberstein: I will draw lines in the sand. You should not cross them. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars we have on the Wix SEO learning hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Until next time everyone peace, love and SEO. See ya. Crystal Carter: Bye. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Cindy Krum Idan Segal Lazarina Stoy Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Mobile Moxie Featured Snippets In 2022 Lazarina Stoy SEO Resources Google’s shifts from authority to content diversity on the SERP News: New Google Featured Snippet With Multiple Answers, New Design, Callouts & More? Google Announces September 2022 Core Algorithm Update Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Cindy Krum Idan Segal Lazarina Stoy Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Mobile Moxie Featured Snippets In 2022 Lazarina Stoy SEO Resources Google’s shifts from authority to content diversity on the SERP News: New Google Featured Snippet With Multiple Answers, New Design, Callouts & More? Google Announces September 2022 Core Algorithm Update Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulous head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, everybody. I hope everybody's feeling gnarly and radical and tubular today. Mordy Oberstein: I'm feeling gnarly, but not radical. Crystal Carter: Not radical, not feeling radical, just feeling normal. Not- Mordy Oberstein: No, but gnarly. Crystal Carter: Gnarly. I don't know. Yeah. I just say- Mordy Oberstein: When I say it I mean nauseous like, oh, that's gnarly. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: How do you mean gnarly? Crystal Carter: I just watched Bill and Ted's and I'm just saying the things that I saw on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so I grew up on that, right? When I said gnarly as an individual, like, awe, that's gnarly. That's messed up. Crystal Carter: Like bad? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, bad. Ah it's gnarly. Ugh. Crystal Carter: Have I used the keyword with the wrong intent there? Did I- Mordy Oberstein: No. No. I think I am. Crystal Carter: ...not do enough keyword research on my term. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Oh, SEO joke. Good SEO joke. You know what's no joke? The fact that this podcast is brought to you by Wix where 301 redirects are automatic for your main pages products and booking pages. Hello. Crystal Carter: Hello, automated automatic automations. That's right. You can also do bulk 301. Redirects take them all in bulk and poof. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I'm dancing as if the people can see me. It's a podcast. Mordy Oberstein: No, we are dancing like robots. Anyway, we're not talking about 301 redirects in this particular podcast in this podcast, [00:01:46] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? we're talking about the real deal with keyword research. That's right. Keywords ain't what they used to be, which means your process for doing keyword research has or should have changed. We'll cover what you should be doing with keyword research, where you should be starting the process. Spoiler alert. It's not where many people say you should start keyword research, which is SEO tools. And we'll talk about where the tools do and don't come in the keyword research process and special tip from the great legend of SEO, Cindy Krum on Google keywords advancements. Also, we're talking with Wix's head of organic growth at Idan Segal, all about how he uses keyword research to capture featured snippets in his net of awesomeness. Crystal Carter: Amazing, amazing. Idan is such a Jedi when it comes to all of this stuff, it's absolutely incredible. I've studied his featured snippets. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why we're going to talk to him later, which is why you said we should invite him about this topic. Also, we're going to get a little bit philosophical here. We're talking entities and SEO, and we're going to be covering the latest and greatest in the SEO news. And of course, as we do each and every week, who you should be following out there in the SEO industry [00:02:57] Focus Topic of the Week: The Real Deal on Keyword Research so you could get some more SEO a wesomeness. But let's kick it off with the real deal on keyword research. Crystal Carter: Cool. I'm just going to do a little explainer real quick just to make sure everybody's on the same page. So when we talk about keywords, we are essentially talking about phrases that people enter into search to find the information that they need. For years Google has understood these terms, the keywords as literal, the literal words that people type in. And so just to be clear, a keyword can be one word or it can be lots of words. So we talk about a keyword as a singular thing, but it's actually the whole phrase that people enter in. It used to be that Google would understand this quite literally. So if you were writing something about coriander and you were writing something else about cilantro, then it used to be that those pages would rank differently and that you would need to spell it out really, really clearly. But a lot of SEO has been built around this sort of literal phrasing of those particular words, but Google's getting much better at understanding that cilantro and coriander are essentially the same plant. When we talk about that, that's where we start to get into the area of entities. And Google's starting to understand that they don't necessarily need to rank one page for cilantro and one page for coriander. They can rank the best content around that plant for users. So that comes into how we think about keyword research that comes into how users are experiencing the web, that comes into thinking about the common names that are seen across lots of different media. And the change from being more literal terms to being more entity-based keywords, will affect how you approach your keyword research as you go forward with your SEO activity. Mordy Oberstein: I never knew that cilantro and coriander were the same thing until right now. Crystal Carter: They're the same entity. So I'm from California and I eat a lot of Mexican food. And basically I had to start making my own when I moved to England and in England, it's called coriander and in California, it's called cilantro. So I learned that very quickly. And similarly, there's a Latin name for that plant as well, which is different again. And I'm sure they call it something else in other places. So Google knows that if I want to make guacamole and I'm in London, they will serve me whatever content is best. Even if I put in coriander for guacamole, they'll give me a good guacamole recipe, which has cilantro in it. Mordy Oberstein: I never liked cilantro until maybe relatively recently, last few years. I always hated it for some reason. It tastes like soap to me, anyway. Crystal Carter: Sir, you're incorrect. Mordy Oberstein: I said I like it now. Crystal Carter: It's good. Mordy Oberstein: I said I like it now. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Sheesh. Tough crowd. Crystal Carter: Don't come at me about guacamole Mordy Mordy Oberstein: I'm not. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I think I'm not. Crystal Carter: I take it very seriously. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry I offended you. Are we still friends? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: That escalated so quickly. So let's start this off with where you should start with keyword research. And I always start, I've said it already on this podcast at this point, I probably said 10 times already, I always start with understanding two people. Me and you. Who am I? What do I do with my website? What's my website all about what am I trying to accomplish with my website? What's my site's identity? What am I all about as a company, a product, as a website, and what are the people who I'm trying to target? What are they all about? What are their pain points? What's their life circumstance. What's their life context? Where are they coming from? I'm trying to empathize with them. So know thyself and then know thy other, which I don't think is a real phrase, but it is now. Know thy other. And that's where I start with keyword research, which is not where many SEOs usually do. Crystal Carter: I absolutely agree that it's important to think like a user. So think about how your users are discovering your service or your products, and think about how users are talking about it. It may very well be the case that you refer to your particular product in one way, but if users are referring it to it in another way, then you need to think about that. And you need to understand that and you need to make sure that you're articulating that clearly. And that you're including those things. There are lots of tools that can help you do this. But I mentioned this before, when you're thinking about keywords, it's also important to actually talk to people who are speaking regularly to users. So if you're talking to your sales team, if you're talking to people who are front of house, if you are reading reviews, then that will give you some information about how people are interacting with your product and the kind of keywords that you should be including in your content and the kind of entities even that you should be including in your content. Mordy Oberstein: And it doesn't tell you just that. It tells you what kind of content they're looking for also. The problem with a keyword research tool, I know we all use them and I know if you're getting into SEO, you've probably heard all about them. And I know when you Google how to do keyword research, you're going to see a whole bunch of stuff about tools, which is why we're literally doing this podcast to be honest with you. Yeah. The keyword research tool can tell you, this is the keyword, but what kind of content do you create around it? Do you create a video around it? Do you create a really long post? Do you create something really salesy? Do you create something informational, but when you think about your audience or when you see what people are saying about what they want, or what they like, what they don't like. It helps you to understand what kind of content they want. Even if it's informational. Obviously you're talking about the best toaster oven. What kind of content do users want around that? Do they want something comparing multiple toaster ovens? They want a blog post just about this one toaster oven. It's all about the intent. Crystal Carter: The intent will change dramatically depending on what the term is. And also depending on what the person's trying to do with it. So I think that if you were thinking about uses for coconut oil, there's a lot of- Mordy Oberstein: Everything. On everything. Crystal Carter: On everything. Mordy Oberstein: To me it's just everything. Crystal Carter: So there's lots of different ways that you can use coconut oil. But if the intent is cooking, then that's one thing. If the intent is, I don't know, skincare, that's another thing. If the intent is wellness or something, that's another thing, but there's lots of different uses. So you can't just go literally coconut oil. Coconut oil is good. You should use coconut oil. You have to think about the intent behind that. And you have to think about how users are using it. And it might be that there's ways that users are using it, that you've never even considered, that you've never even considered. Mordy Oberstein: A hundred percent. Crystal Carter: I think YouTube is a really good example of this. On YouTube I watch a lot of hair tutorials and people are combining different products and people are saying, "Oh, I use this like this, I use that like this." That's great information for keyword research. That is a great place to do keyword research. If there's a really popular YouTube video, that's talking about your product, or talking about product in your wheelhouse, then that's a really good source for that sort of stuff, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: And then to take your coconut oil example, because my wife loves coconut oil. You have to segment those intents out. I always think of it by the way, primarily for skincare, cause my wife really likes it for skincare. And if you want to write a top 10 ways to use coconut oil and you're writing a mix of, use it for your skincare and you use it on your salad, you might be catering to nobody and everybody at the same time. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And you might need to write just 10 ways to use coconut oil for skincare. Probably don't do the whole 10 ways thing by the way. Crystal Carter: But that's the thing, I think also it has to do with your website. So if you are a spa or something or you're a dermatologist or you're a skincare professional and you write 10 ways to use coconut oil, then you should keep it to the skincare area, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: If you are a recipe blog and you're saying 10 ways to use coconut oil, then you should keep it to food. Mordy Oberstein: The key [inaudible 00:10:04] are not going to tell you that, that goes back to what we talked about before. Your identity as a site. You have a context of where you're working out of it's not coming out of nowhere. And again, the keyword research tool, you'll come down on them is not the best place for that. You what the great place for that is? The SERP. Crystal Carter: The SERP. The SERP. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Go to the actual SERP. Crystal Carter: And look up your keywords because this comes back to the user journey. You need to think about how users are actually experiencing finding your content. And it's very, very, very vague, very important that you do this on both desktop and mobile. And also particularly if you're an international branch, you have a look at some of the different mobile experiences. So I do not live in the United States, even though I am an American, the SERP in America is very different from the SERP where I live. And so if you have a lot of clients or users who are based there, that it's important to look at what the SERP looks like there and what the competition is there compared to what the conversation is, where you are. And then again, on different devices. So mobile versus desktop will again be very, very different. So if you're not on top of that, then you won't be able to understand the keywords. And Google's recommending keywords as well. So on the coconut oil, they'll say, do you mean coconut oil for skin or they'll suggest coconut oil health. Mordy Oberstein: People also search for coconut oil for your hair. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. People also ask related searches- Mordy Oberstein: Can I use coconut oil on my hair? Does coconut oil help you retain your hair? Does it? I would like to know the answer to that one. But no, the SERP is really, really important for so many different reasons. One is you can reverse engineer it from multiple perspectives. If you see Google's showing videos and images, you can tell... Yes, and again, a keyword research tool might not be able to tell you this. They might be able in some kind of way, but you need to know, yeah, I can create a post about this, but I really need to have some kind of media in there because that's part of the intent package. You see this by the way, with recipes all the time, there's always going to be an image of the food. That's not by accident. Google wants that there. There's also something really important for understanding your keyword research and what you should or shouldn't be targeting. And that's, there are a limited number of slots on page one. And there's a limited number of slots for certain types of content. Take, for example, the go-to example, they always use it buy car insurance. So 10 years ago, every single ranking website was a place where you can buy car insurance. Now it's split up between places I can go, Geico, Allstate State Farm, to buy car insurance and places to learn about buying car insurance. What's the best policy? What kind of policies should I not consider? Where should you go to buy car insurance? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Crystal Carter: The comparison sites where you're comparing lots at once. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, review sites a hundred percent, which will be my next point. But you need to know how many slots are available. If I'm trying to ring for a commercial oriented page, maybe there's only two slots available. Maybe I need to create an informational page. And if I'm creating an informational page, what kind of informational page should I create? Should I create a listicle? Should I create a comparison? Should I create a long form blog post? I need to see what's there. And there might be three slots for a long form blog post, and only one slot for a listicle. And that's all part of the intent package on the SERP. Crystal Carter: And it's also the case that it might be that it doesn't even need to be immediately on your website. Everything should come back to your website. Your website should always be HQ. You should always have anything that you do online should always be able to be traced back to your website and supported by stuff on your website. But for instance, if it's a how to, like how to use coconut oil in your hair, it's probably going to be a video. A video's, probably going to be what people are going to expect. And you should probably put it on YouTube. That's not on your website, but you can obviously tie that back in within the comments and the links and the various different things. And you can support that on your website as well. So make sure that you're understanding where the best venue for the information is for that particular query as well as the query itself. And to be honest, I think that tools sometimes do this well, but they cannot give you the full picture. They cannot give you the full picture that you can get from the SERP. They can give you a sort of bird's eye view of certain things like featured snippets and things like video or things like images and things. They can give you a general bird's eye view, but the SERP can be very dynamic and it can change really, really quickly. Google doesn't have to tell anybody when they want to change what they [inaudible 00:14:15] what the SERP looks like. And there's also certain features that aren't included. So if you look up a lion on Google, you get a 3D AR lion. There's a penguin one, there's a 3D AR thing of the tower of London, for instance. That's not going to show up in a third party keyword research tool, but that is going to affect how people are behaving on the search. So this is something that you have to track. Mordy Oberstein: Before we end this conversation or move on from this conversation around keyword research and whatnot. Tools do play a role. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: We're not advocating you shouldn't use a keyword research tool. I like to use a keyword research tool. Once I've understood myself and my audience. I know what's out there on the SEPR. I know exactly how Google's relating to this keyword, but there's things that I missed, like subtopics that I may have never thought of or questions I may never have thought of or getting some more context about the topic overall by seeing what kind of results the keyword resources are coming back with. I like to sort of refine my process. I don't start my process with the keyword research tool. I know many people do, I don't. But I do refine my process with the keyword research tools. Crystal Carter: I always think that with anything, and particularly in SEO, I always use a couple of tools at once. So I will look at the SERP, I'll get some ideas. I'll go through the keyword research tools and see what they say. Then I'll check the SERP that they say. I'll check that in Google as well. And then you want to back that up with a few different things and experience it as a user on different devices. So there's a couple of different tools, but I don't think you should ever rely on a single source for anything. And also you should also back it up with stuff from Google Search Console. So Google Search Console will give you information on where you're getting impressions for, but maybe not necessarily getting quick clicks for. They also have a breakdown of different parts of the search. So whether it's webpages, whether it's images, whether it's videos, whether it's product pages, that sort of thing. So it's important to just spend the time to see how the keywords are showing on the different parts of the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: And there's just so many tools in there from Search Console, which everybody should be using to Semrush, Ahrefs, they have Mangools, also [inaudible 00:16:11]. There's plenty of tools out there. Have a look at them. A lot of them offer a freemium version. [inaudible 00:16:16]. If I didn't mention your tool, I'm sorry. SEOrank. I could keep going. There's really a ton of them. Crystal Carter: Many tools are available. Mordy Oberstein: Many, many tools. Now we've been mentioning and throwing around entities a little bit and we're going to get into more of that later on in the podcast, but we thought it would make sense to bring it an absolute SEO legend for you, to talk about entities, to talk about keywords, to talk about specifically, how has Google's ability to understand entities made focusing on specific keywords less relevant? [00:16:47] Focus Topic Guest: Cindy Krum Here's the founder of MobileMoxie, the one, the only Cindy Krum. Cindy Krum: So when I think about keyword research for entities, I think about topic clusters. And so your main kind of head keyword, the main concept is in the center. And then we think about ways that that topic breaks down. So if we're thinking about a breed of a dog, let's say a labradoodle. So we have labradoodle and then we have their health, coat, where to adopt a labradoodle, temperament, things like that. And so you would do the research to see what comes up around the head term. And then you would create a cluster for each topic that is a reasonable section of questions about that head term. And you can see when Google's building out entities, they do this and they add sometimes in a mobile search result, they'll add expanders under the knowledge graph where they know, and they say, Hey, here's the main topic. And here are some subtopics. And so subtopics are different from related topics. Subtopics are within the core topic and they're just a division of what you would want to know or what someone might want to know. And I think to rank well in search, in some cases, we may have to go a little bit beyond topics that our website has a financial benefit for. So for instance, let's say that we are a site that allows you to adopt Labradoodles. When we only talk about adopting Labradoodles, Google knows that people who want to adopt a pet have more questions than just where to adopt, usually. And so they are thinking about the next step of someone saying, "Well, I think I want to adopt a labradoodle," because that's how the normal process goes. You don't go, I think I want to adopt, let's do it today. You usually go through a research process. And the more you can answer those questions and help users with their journey on the topic and not just try and sell them things it seems like, the more Google is going to count that as high quality content, the more Google is going to understand the entity. The more Google is going to understand that you understand the entity and you are going to have the requisite keywords clustered somewhat together or in a meaningful way that Google uses to determine if you are authoritative and an expert. And if you're willingly giving people information to help them, or if you're just trying to make a sale. And I think that Google does seem to want the extra steps to prove that you're not an affiliate site for instance, or maybe if you are an affiliate site, that you're a great affiliate site that you're going the extra mile to keep your customers happy. In my mind, I kind of equate it to having a clean brick and mortar store. Yes, you could sell stuff in a brick and mortar store, but just selling it might not be enough. You also have to have nice educated employees. You have to have a clean store. You have to have easy parking, things like this. And since those aren't concerns, when you're shopping on the internet or when you're searching on the internet, they're looking for other things, other symbols that this is going to be a good experience for you. Mordy Oberstein: So that was super, super interesting. And what I think people don't necessarily realize is that concepts, topics are entities. I know Cindy gave the example of a labradoodle, which my in-laws used to have a labradoodle, I really did not like that dog. But anyway, topics are entities. Concepts are entities. And within a certain topic, there are certain things that are subsumed in that topic, or also known as subtopic. So if you're talking about baseball, you're going to have teams and players and rules and playoffs and world series and blah, blah, blah, blah. This goes into how machine learning works. When you talk about a certain topic... Well, let's go back a step. When Google see a certain topic, let's say Labradoodles, or let's say, I don't know, healthcare. It understands that healthcare means X. It means subtopic, A subtopic B subtopic C. And this is connected to that thing. And that things connected to this thing. This is all what constructs the concept of healthcare. And then when you talk about healthcare on your site, if your profile doesn't match that, if, when you talk about healthcare, you're not talking about A, B and C, you're talking about completely different things in the way Google understands the entity that is healthcare, the concept that is healthcare, that's not going to bode well for you. So you can be focusing on all the keywords that you want. It's not going to matter. What you need to focus on is the fact, how does Google understand this entity? And that could be, again, anything from Labradoodles, to healthcare, to bricks, to astrophysics. If you understand and talk about that entity, the same way that Google understands it, which is hopefully how everybody kind of sees it, because let's hope we all understand astrophysics the same way, then that will help you rank as opposed to focusing on the keywords. That's what I took away from that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the difference between keywords and topics or entities is very clear to me because I've seen this in action. So for instance, goggles, if I talk about goggles, there's lots of different types of goggles and the intent will change, depending on what you're talking about. So if I were to write just keyword optimizing for the word goggles, I could say, goggles are great. You can wear goggles on your face, goggles protect your eyes, buy goggles in Brazil. Yeah. I could say that. And that would be optimized for the word goggles because I said it lots of time. Or that's what old school just- Mordy Oberstein: Goggles. Crystal Carter: Goggles, right. Mordy Oberstein: Goggles. Crystal Carter: But what kind of goggles am I actually talking about? When I say that. Beer goggles, ski goggles, safety goggles, swimming goggles. What am I talking about now? Now if I said, when you are skiing, you should wear goggles to protect your eyes from sun and wind. That's giving Google a lot more information about context, topic, and more relationships for the entity of the goggles that I'm talking about. And additionally, if I were to talk about that as a topic, I might also include things like ski gloves or hats or helmets or protective clothing for skiing or maybe even sunscreen. And that helps Google to understand that I'm talking about goggles. I'm also helping the user who's probably going skiing and is probably deciding what they need to wear to be safe. And it's telling them that all of those entities are related and they understand that all of those entities are related and that they're different from if I was talking about goggles and a swimsuit and fins and a snorkel and things like that, they understand that those are different, but you have to put them in a topic together to help them to understand that the entity is the entity that you're actually talking about. Mordy Oberstein: The entity. Speaking of the entity, we've been talking a lot about entities. But the truth is what is an entity? Crystal Carter: Who am I? Mordy Oberstein: [00:24:12] Deep Thoughts, with Crystal and Mordy You are now entering a deep thought by Crystal and Mordy around entities? Mordy Oberstein: What are entities, crystal? Crystal Carter: An entity is like... It's a person, place or thing. It's a noun people. It's a noun... Wait. It's a noun. Mordy Oberstein: Oh that settles it. We have defined [inaudible 00:24:37]. We're done. Crystal Carter: We're done entities. We're done. Done here. But yeah, it's essentially, the way I think about it's very similar to Latin names. So there's a Latin name for an Oak tree, Quercus. Quercus hispanica I think is the Latin name for London plane tree, for instance. And I might call it one thing and somebody else might call it another thing, but there's a Latin name for that tree or Latin name for that animal. Like Roly-Poly bugs we used to call them when I was a kid, but my husband calls them something else. But there's a Latin name for that. And essentially in science, they settled that and they said you might call it a bear. I might call it oso, but is it a bear? And they'll settle that. Google's essentially trying to do that with entities. They're trying to apply that same logic of just understanding the concept to the world. Wider things in the world. And I think that it's- Mordy Oberstein: Which by the way, it saves them so much on resources. Crystal Carter: Saves them so much because I mentioned cilantro and coriander. Mordy Oberstein: Because they understand bear. And bear goes with honey and bear goes with Winnie. It all goes. And then the language doesn't matter. They know this is universal across the board. They don't have to figure out it again in another language by looking at the number of instances that bear went with honey on a webpage. Crystal Carter: So again, there's a Latin name for a brown bear for instance. And it doesn't matter if I call it cafe Oso or if I call it brown bear, Google understands just like scientists understand that it's the same thing. And that means that it's transferable because it's the same thing. And you've essentially distilled it to its essence. And you can see a really good way to see this as well is if you have Google photos, if you go to the Explorer area and type in a word, you can see the way that they understand entities because they classify everything into different sections. So they'll classify things into trees or birds or flowers or cars. Or if you look up goggles, you'll see lots of sunglasses because they just sort of think of it as eyewear for instance. But yeah, there's a lot of different tools around there. And a lot of people who are doing some very clever things around entities and it's very, very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: I think of entities as fundamentally, something that has a unique identity. That's something that's discernible, that's distinct. And that, by the way, identity, we're going to go philosophical here for a sec. Identity can either be independent identity or dependent identity, for example. And this is where you start understanding why entities relate to other entities because they have to. For example, a keyboard. A keyboard's it's own thing, but then a keyboard has keys. So the keys on the keyboard. Is the key it's own thing or is it part of a keyboard? Crystal Carter: It's also which keyboard are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: A keyboard on my computer. Keyboard. Crystal Carter: I thought you were talking about piano keyboard. Mordy Oberstein: Oh we're not going that way with the entities right now. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay. Keyboard on my laptop, right? So the keys on my laptop, are the keys independent? Are they it's own thing? Yeah. I can obviously refer to it. That's the A key, that's the W key, but together they can also be a keyboard. So entities relate to one another because no entity is independent of another entity. Right, parent and child. I am me, but I'm also my mother's son. So entities are always going to relate to other things and be spoken about as independent things at the same time. Which is super important to know because now you could understand why Google is going to automatically connect whatever entity that you're talking about with something else. Because that is simply the nature of entity. It's not making this up out of nowhere. That's how entities work. Also important to know, and I'll end on this point is that your website is an entity. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Is your website a distinct discernible thing? I would hope so. Then it too is an entity. Crystal Carter: It too is an entity. Mordy Oberstein: Now what kind of entity is it? Let's say you have a website that talks about bricks. I [inaudible 00:28:17] saying bricks. I'm looking out my window and looking at bricks. What does it mean to be a brick website, a website that talks about bricks? It's very different than a website that talks about physics. Crystal Carter: Also there's relationships between the entities because there's keywords and with keyword research now in this space, we have to think about the modifiers, right? So you say bricks, there's lots of different types of bricks, so different bricks materials. There's also like Lego bricks. So I spend a lot of time playing Lego with my kid. So when you say bricks, I think Lego straightaway. That's what I think. And you're looking out your window and you're thinking another things. So Google says, okay, Cindy talked about the head keyword and it's like, okay, brick. They're like, great. Now if you said rusty brick, that would mean a different thing. Mordy Oberstein: That would mean Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Right, that would be Barry Schwartz. If you said Lego brick, that means a different thing. And that takes you down a different path. So it's very important to understand the modifiers. So not just the keyword, but also the modifiers that are important for those users. Mordy Oberstein: A thousand percent. And it also is really important about what you talk about, what you link out to what's linking to you on your website. Because again, if you are a brick website and you are talking about things like air conditioners, right? Yeah, that might make sense. I could see if you have a brick in your house, how do you connect your air conditioning unit to the bricks? Right? That would make sense if you have... I guess, I think. If you have a brick website that sells bricks to build your house and you're talking about football teams, does that really make sense? And when Google's looking at that, your site is an entity, your site's an entity about bricks. Your entity is a brick website. Does a brick website, talk about football teams? No. So what's going on here? Are you really a brick entity website? Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: And there you have it. Crystal Carter: And there you have it. Mordy Oberstein: From philosophy to action. All on the SERP's Up podcast. Crystal Carter: That's what we're doing here, people. Mordy Oberstein: That's what we do here. All day, every day or at least once a week. But we're not done yet. We are not done yet. You thought we were done. We're not done, because we have a legend for you. [00:24:12] Inside the WixVerse: Idan Segal We have Idan Segal, the head of organic growth here at Wix. As we go across the Wixverse to bring you experts from Wix who talk about all different types of things, in this case about getting keywords for featured snippets. Let's talk with Idan. Mordy Oberstein: So as promised, I just want to preface this. A lot of the time you go out there on Twitter or wherever you consume social media content around SEO. And you see all these people with a lot of big mouths, I'm talking about myself in particular, but you don't see the people working behind the scenes doing some great things who are generally in house, because they don't feel they need to have a social presence in the same way that some other people do. And that's fine. I feel at Wix, we have so many people here that you have no idea who they are, and you might know who Ian is, I'm not talking about Idan that way, but it's so important to bring those voices out in general. So I kind of love this segment. With that, Idan is here. Idan Segal: What's up? It's nice to finally be here. Mordy Oberstein: It is. Idan, I love your eyes. I always say that. Idan Segal: Yeah. You say it a lot, I must say. Mordy Oberstein: I know. Is that weird? Crystal Carter: So much. Idan Segal: No, it's okay. It's okay. I'm already so flattered from what you said before. So what can I say now? Mordy Oberstein: Did I set you up? Idan Segal: Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, you invited me so many times and finally I'm here. I was starting to think that those [inaudible 00:31:48] invitations. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well when you know when you invite somebody your wedding or whatever, but you don't really want them to come. So you invite, "Yeah, it's at one o'clock in the morning, but we'd love to have you there." Crystal Carter: Oh, in England they do it two tier. At England there's the ceremony and that's how you know your real friends. And if they're like meh friends, you only get invited to the dinner after. Mordy Oberstein: What? I would do the opposite. I don't want to be invited to the ceremony. Invite me to the dinner. That's all I care about. Idan Segal: Anyways, for me, it's amazing. What a morning. I repaired my car. I watch the NBA finals and now I'm in a podcast. So it's a work procrastination at its best. Mordy Oberstein: So we've been talking in this episode a lot about keywords and keyword research. And you're a little bit of a legend around here because you and your team and we, all of you, but you're the head of this, so we're going to call it you, rank for a ton of featured snippets. Idan Segal: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Crystal in particular is really impressed. Not that I'm not impressed, but... Idan Segal: So yeah, I'm leading a team of rock stars. They really do the magic, not me, but it's a bunch of SEO teams and blog teams and CRO teams. But the bottom line is really amazing. I think only in the US, we're triggering more than 3,000 feature snippets. I think 54% of them, according to the May report, probably even more now are from the blog. Many of them are from product gates. And that's really cool. I must say that even the last algorithm change worked tremendously well for us. And I think we increased the amount of featured snippet that we have in 20 something percent. So that's just awesome. Mordy Oberstein: Do you get a bonus for that when you- Idan Segal: I'm not answering without my lawyer. Crystal Carter: I'm not surprised because I did an article around featured snippets for Search London recently and they used Wix as a really good case study because the featured snippets, for instance, there was one article that was 120 best blog niche ideas to write about. And if you look up topics for blogs, it shows as the featured snippet for that. If you look up blog topics for beginners, that same article shows as the people also ask. And then if you look up blog topics, it shows in an accordion as a dropdown there as well. You're also covered if you look up blogging, it shows in the knowledge panel as one of the, what is the subtopics of blogging as well. It really is an incredible case study in topic clusters of how you mapped out different topics around blogging. Can you share any insights on how you did that? Idan Segal: First of all, we are big fans of HubSpot and HubSpot Strategy in general here. We think that they're awesome. I think by the way, they are kind of a role model, to some extent. I think they even call the HTML components, some of them, when you go to the HTML, you see they call them featured snippets. Let's say that they're students of the game and they really try to get better every day. And this is my philosophy here as well. I think that here in Wix we are very lucky to have products in many niches so we can get tons of feature snippets. I think it's also a good sign for our product to show that you are capable of getting featured snippets when using the Wix blog. We have 22 different blogs in 16 languages and in most of them or all of them, we are getting featured snippets. And that's really, really cool. I think we are really trying to give the people what they want to bring real value. I don't want to say some fancy words, but we're really trying to bring value and to answer real problems. And by doing that, we also have structure that we're trying to do because we see that it's working. If we are doing a recap in the end so we're also doing a precap in the beginning, an introduction. We are trying to use things that we see that are working like ordered list and unordered list. And we have even showcases, inspirational intent content, we are trying to use scattered age free titles along the text. And you see that it's just working because we write great content and our philosophy that we're always on the hunt for more, but it's not that I detect featured snippets on the SERP and I'm trying to get them. I'm trying to even help Google educate him that it's worth a featured snippets. And I think we have tons of success by creating feature snippets on SERP's that didn't have any, and that's really cool. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really great point, because the way you usually hear this topic being talked about and even the way we introduced it was, yeah, how do you target keywords for featured snippets? Whereas you're just saying, yeah, we just target writing content and then we tell Google, this is a great place for a feature snippet. Idan Segal: Google is kind of good in what they're doing. Usually they figure it out and it's not always violets and roses here. I think in the last algo update, there was a topic that it's not really our niche, but was how to start a YouTube channel. And now of course Google is getting the featured snippet, their support. And I think we crushed. Decreased. I have it here, 67% decrease, but on the same graph we had some content about writing a bio, about blogging, about fonts, I think. And we increased in a second in between 20 to 50% in traffic. And in general featured snippet are more than 10% of our blog traffic. And that's huge. That's really huge for business. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think one of the things that I noticed again, from studying your featured snippets from the outside or whatever is that you spend a lot of time on the long tail, which is really, really core for featured snippets. A lot of the broad terms are going to be covered by things like Wikipedia or even by an instant answer. So the number of blogs you have about blogging is extensive, which means that you're going to be getting into that sort of longer tail. Can you talk to us a little bit about your research process at all? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. How do you break down topics like that? What's your approach? Idan Segal: Again, I think in the Wix blog, we're going after our products and what we're really offering to people and we're trying to go after that. So we have different clusters. One of them is about the website creation and that means that I need to cover everything. Also, things that I can't really cover on my product pages. And if I want to talk about menus and about the importance of navigation and about what is a 404, it's all about semantic depth. And again, I am a very cynical person and I am a capitalistic pig that cares about conversions. But having said that, I do try to do it while I'm trying to imagine that I'm writing to a fancy editor and to really give value because that's the right way to tackle it. So blogging is another big cluster of ours that we're trying to tackle the same way that marketing is and web design is. And we're trying to all the time to beef up and to learn from our competitors about topics that we're not covering. And also for us to lose a featured snippet, it's a wake up call. It means that we need to do something better. We need to try to learn from our competitors how to do things better. And sometimes it's just about Google turning off the feature snippet. And that's also okay. Mordy Oberstein: It's such a good point that, we were talking about this earlier in the podcast, about when you're thinking about keyword research in a nonlinear way, not so focused on the tools, it's really about being able to yourself, and you can use tools to help you do this, being able to parse out what that topic is or what that topic means and creating content around all of that in a really substantial kind of way. Just one more question before we have to let you go. When you see that you lose a feature snippet, you're talking about the YouTube content that came in and took away our feature snippets. Do you try to regain that or do you say, "Okay, look, I realize I should never have really had those to begin with and I'm not going to waste my time." Idan Segal: So, if I think that I didn't deserve it, it will affect my priorities. Having said that the fact that I got it previously means that at least I will give it a try. And I think that part of our work process here, we have tons of emphasis on redos. We want to send Google fresh signals that will keep working on our content. Huge part of our strategy is evergreen content. So for me, when I'm losing it, I'm trying to learn why I lost it. What's the other competitor, the URL that took it. I'm trying to learn from what they did. And I will try to do a redo to prioritize it in many cases the success rate is awesome. And again, all the credits to my team. And also I'm lucky to work in a company that has a great domain authority because Wix has a great product. That enables us to get those featured snippets. Crystal Carter: When I was speaking at Search London about featured snippets, someone said, "Oh, can you go over existing content to make feature snippets?" And I was like, "Yeah, you absolutely 100% can. And it's definitely, as you say, redos, going back over the content and adding bullet points or lists or tables or adding images or videos or whatever can really help. Idan Segal: There was a thread on Twitter from someone that I didn't know. Maybe you'll remember it. And if not, I will share it and you can share it later in a thread or something about someone that explained to details, how he's trying to tackle featured snippets. It was a very insightful one. Most of the things that he's trying to do we are already doing here, but I learned a trick or two. And there is a lot of technicalities when you're doing it, right? So you need to use some techniques, some HTML markup, ordered lists, unordered lists, hierarchy, amount of text, imperative verbs. There's some stuff to do, but eventually create good content and you'll enjoy the fruits. Mordy Oberstein: Idan, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day and joining us. Idan Segal: No problem. Thank you for inviting me. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Again, Idan, before you leave, where can we find you out there in the public? Where can your people find you? Idan Segal: You know, you can find me on Twitter probably. You can share the handle later on. Mordy Oberstein: I'll share the handle. It'll be in the show notes. Look for it in the show notes folks. Idan, thank you so much. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Idan Segal: Amazing. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Bye, bye. Idan Segal: Ciao. Mordy Oberstein: Brilliant fellow, no? Crystal Carter: Idan never ceases to amaze. I think that he just delivers. I think there's such amazing content that comes out of that team and the way that they approach it is incredible. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why we go across the Wixverse. There's so many awesome people here. By the way, there's so many people out there in the SEO world who are not super famous who are doing super amazing things. [00:41:43] Snappy News So just know that. You know what else might be news to you other than the fact that there are SEOs out there who don't have huge profiles? The actual news, the actual news. The actual SEO, snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Let's get right into it because otherwise it wouldn't be snappy. First up for the master of disaster and last week's guest Barry, made the Schwartz be with you. From search engine round table, new Google featured snippet with multiple answers, new design call outs and more. Essentially what we have here is a featured snippet on a gray background with a call out i.e. bolded text that basically gives you the answer to the query and multiple answers from multiple URLs to boot. I'm covering this because this has been the fifth or sixth test where Google's actually using multiple URLs inside of the feature snippet. It's a big shift in how they're thinking about feature snippets and search overall. In my honest opinion, Asher just covered this and why I think Google is doing this on the Wix SEO hub. I'll link to that and I'll link to Barry's article where you can see what this feature snippet looks like. So check out the show notes. Okay. More on the old HCU the Helpful Content Update from SEJ, Search Engine Journals, Matt Southern. Google, helpful content signal, make it stronger with next core update. So the helpful content update might be a strong part of the ranking equation as time goes on. It was not a very potent part of the equation this go around as the update, as Google confirmed, has finished rolling out. This actually kind of makes sense as the HCU as we call it, the Helpful Content Update is based on machine learning properties and the machine needs to learn. And as it learns, it'll be more powerful than anything the SERP has ever known before. Okay. Maybe that's hyperbolic, but it does make sense that as time goes on, as the machine learns more, it will be a greater factor in the ranking equation. So Helpful Content Update, go get some learning done and come back soon, you hear. And with that, that is the snappiest of news. And what a set of news that was, no? Crystal Carter: It as very news news to me. Mordy Oberstein: That was very newsy. It was newsworthy, Newsies, good movie. Classic growing up as a kid, Christian Bale. Crystal Carter: I was just about to say that people don't realize the American Psycho was in Newsies. Mordy Oberstein: He was. Dancing around singing about newspapers. Crystal Carter: Do you want some news? Because he's Batman as well. That was my Batman. Mordy Oberstein: News. Crystal Carter: That's a much better Batman. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. I have specialties in doing Batman voices. Now let's talk about other stuff about SEO. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Again, before we leave you and thank you so much for listening all the way through to this point, we want to make sure that you understand that there is so much great SEO information out there besides just this podcast. And a lot of it comes from the SEO industry itself, which means the people, the people are the industry. [00:46:31] Follow of the Week And today we're going to share who you should be following out there in Twitter. And that person is Crystal. No, it is crystal. Crystal Carter: It's not me. Mordy Oberstein: You are someone we should follow. It's not what I meant. But crystal, who are we following this week? Crystal Carter: Today I would like to discuss, and I would like to put a little shine on Lazarina Stoy. I think she's amazing. She's an SEO, she's like a data phenom. She's really- Mordy Oberstein: Machine learning. Crystal Carter: Right. She's really into machine learning and she's got some great, great resources that she has particularly around keywords. She has a tool called the keyword search intent classifier tool. And it's a Google sheet that you can use to understand your keywords better and to understand the intent behind them. She also has some really good resources around big data sets as well. So she's a great person to follow. She tinkers a lot and makes a lot of really cool resources and shares some really good stuff. And she's just really, really clever. I think that if you're interested in keywords, you're interested in machine learning, you're interested in checking out somebody who's doing really cool stuff follow Lazarina. Mordy Oberstein: She's doing some really cool stuff. And that's @LazarinaStoy on Twitter. L-A-Z-A-R-I-N-A-S-T-O-Y. And of course we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes for this podcast. Folks, that's it. That's that's all we got. I know you wanted more, but that's all we got for you this week. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's UP podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry we're back next week with an all new episode diving into Ooh, ranking factors. Should you care? Crystal Carter: Should you? Mordy Oberstein: We have different point of views on this one I think. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah, we kind of do. Mordy Oberstein: Oh boy. Going to be some drama. Well- Crystal Carter: It's going to get heated. [inaudible 00:46:43] at the guacamole discussions though. Mordy Oberstein: I will draw lines in the sand. You should not cross them. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars we have on the Wix SEO learning hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Until next time everyone peace, love and SEO. See ya. Crystal Carter: Bye. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Mark Williams-Cook has over 20 years of SEO experience and is co-owner of search agency Candour, the founder of AlsoAsked, and runs a pet category eCommerce business. Outside of speaking at conferences, Mark has trained over 3,000 SEOs with his Udemy course. Mark Williams-Cook Digital Marketing Director, Candour Mark Williams-Cook has over 20 years of SEO experience and is co-owner of search agency Candour , the founder of AlsoAsked, and runs a pet category eCommerce business. Outside of speaking at conferences, Mark has trained over 3,000 SEOs with his Udemy course. Articles & Resources 19 Sept 2024 Google’s People Also Ask: Understand customers and improve SEO with intent data 13 Dec 2022 Understanding the nofollow link attribute Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Is the world of analytics leaving you feeling a little blind? Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they navigate the murky waters of modern marketing data with analytics maestro, Dana DiTomaso. From missing numbers to the almighty Google, it's all about understanding the true story that your data is trying to tell. Discover the secrets of meaningful metrics and learn to embrace trends over absolutes—because it's time to stop being a ‘data accountant’. Prepare to lift the fog on data uncertainty on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Making marketing metrics meaningful Is the world of analytics leaving you feeling a little blind? Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they navigate the murky waters of modern marketing data with analytics maestro, Dana DiTomaso. From missing numbers to the almighty Google, it's all about understanding the true story that your data is trying to tell. Discover the secrets of meaningful metrics and learn to embrace trends over absolutes—because it's time to stop being a ‘data accountant’. Prepare to lift the fog on data uncertainty on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 121 | February 12, 2025 | 38 MIN 00:00 / 37:51 This week’s guests Dana DiTomaso Founder, KP Playbook President & Partner, Kick Point Dana is founder and lead instructor at KP Playbook, and president and partner at Kick Point. She shows marketers how to set smart goals and track results so that they understand what strategies bring real value. Dana also teaches analytics at the University of Alberta. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm your host, Mordy Oberstein, and I'm joined by she who is not blind. She can see, can see clearly now that the rain has come. She's our own head communications here, Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that lovely introduction. I cannot see as well as I used to be able to see. I have to wear glasses now, but I always forget that I need to wear glasses and then I try to look at things and I can't read them. And why are restaurants so dark? That's my question. Why are they so dark? Mordy Oberstein: They are dark. Crystal Carter: How am I supposed to read the menu? I don't understand. Mordy Oberstein: It's so annoying. I got to say something. Restaurants are annoying place to eat a meal. Okay? There's, one, other people around you which is... Crystal Carter: Boo. Mordy Oberstein: ... not what you want. Yeah. Boo. Then secondly, while you're eating, people come around and ask you questions. Oh. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: No. Okay? Crystal Carter: It's like it's a quiz. Mordy Oberstein: How are things? If I had a problem, you would know. Crystal Carter: What kind of bread would you like? I'm like bread. And then they named 17 bread. They're pumpernickel, rye, sourdough, white bread, brown bread, granary bread, seeded bread, loaf bread. I'm like, I don't know. I didn't know this was a bread... Mordy Oberstein: I want good bread. Crystal Carter: ... bread test. It was a bread test? I didn't know. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. And then there's music. Why do they play music? Now you can't even see the person. Now you can't talk to the person you actually want to talk to because they're playing stupid annoying. It's never good music. It's always annoying. Crystal Carter: I don't like it when you go to a restaurant and there's a million screens. I do not eat my dinner in front of a TV. And then I go to these restaurants and there's 17 TVs playing like 17 different baseball, basketball, football, hockey. Mordy Oberstein: Were you in a sports bar? Crystal Carter: There's loads of places where they're just always on even when you're not in a sports bar. Mordy Oberstein: I was in New York a while ago and went out to eat with my dad and it was on a football Sunday and there was the football game on. It was a regular restaurant. I mean, I was kind of happy to see the football game, but it was weird. Why is that even here? Crystal Carter: It's distracting. It's distracting. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So now that we told you we hate restaurants, SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Peter Lugers. No. It's brought to you by Wix Studio where you can use Wix Studio to get a recording of how users are interacting with your website for free. There is a paid plan as well, and natively is built right in three clicks. It's awesome. I love using it literally. We'll get into more on using data like that later, soon. This as today, are marketers flying blind? What are the metrics that still matter with changes to GA4 and reduced visibility in channels like ChatGPT. Are marketers flying blind? Data throttling in GA4 and GSC? What data matters and what data does it in a sea of analytics to help us sail your ship through the numbers analytics Maven teacher and consultant, Dana DiTomaso sat down with Crystal for a clear conversation about data. And of course we have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So grab your binoculars, telescope, and magnifying glass or just get some LASIK as episode 121 helps you give yourself sight, the gift of sight of data analytics. Crystal Carter: So yeah, I had a fantastic conversation with Dana DiTomaso. I've heard her speak at MozCon and other events on multiple occasions and she's one of my favorite analytics marketers because she is so astute and so clear with she's, you know, how she communicates what she's saying. Mordy Oberstein: And funny. She's funny. Crystal Carter: She's funny. She's super awesome. And the other thing is that one of the things that really stuck with me, I think it was MozCon this year, she was talking about this topic and she'll get into it into the discussion, but she says that we need to stop being so beholden to the actual numbers. We need to be so beholden between whether or not it's 373 clicks or 375 clicks because really those two clicks isn't going to make that much of a difference and she'll get into this, but essentially the trends are... Mordy Oberstein: Trends. Crystal Carter: ... very important. Mordy Oberstein: Trends. So many times said this, by the way, I said this on Traffic Think Tank the other day because of all the rank volatility and Google's going to run out consistent updates all the time now, stop looking at actual numbers and look at like create a range for yourself of where you think this site normally ranges and just look at that. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's the thing. I think that people need to be more intelligent about what actually matters. And I think that people need to be more intelligent about having a good understanding of their data and what normal is and what different is and figuring out what that means for them. Mordy Oberstein: You have me at people should be more intelligent. Crystal Carter: We'll see how it goes. But yeah, we had a super intelligent conversation with Dana and with her doing the heavy lifting on the intelligence there. Mordy Oberstein: So here's two really intelligent people having a really intelligent conversation about data intelligence. Crystal Carter: I am so pleased to be joined here today by analytics maven, Dana DiTomaso, who I've heard speak at MozCon on a couple of occasions about data and analytics and all of those fantastic things. She is the CEO of Kick Point and fount of knowledge of all things analytics. I'm so glad that she's joining us here today. Dana, welcome to the show. Dana DiTomaso: Thank you so much for having me. Crystal Carter: Such an absolute honor. And I think when we were looking at this topic, I said we have to speak to Dana because she knows all about this and basically we're kind of looking at the space that we're in terms of marketers and analytics. I feel like there's a certain amount of uncertainty that we have now. I feel like when I first started my journey as a marketer, even five years ago, I felt very certain about saying we've had this much traffic and we've had this channel brought us in this much value and all of that sort of stuff. Do you feel that certain these days in terms of the information that you're getting from the various tools out there as a marketer? Dana DiTomaso: No. But I also think that it hasn't been certain for longer even than five years. And I think that this is one of the big things that happened when people switched from universal analytics to GA4. A lot of people, if you were transitioning to it early, you had both running at the same time. You had UA and GA4 and you would look at the reports and they'd be different numbers and you would say, well, one of these is wrong. But the thing is they were both right. They were just measuring data in different ways and I think that this is where it sort of pulled back the curtain a little bit and said, hey, actually analytics data is only as good as your analytics measurement system, but there's also a sense of data capture in terms of what you're looking at when you look at analytics. And it doesn't matter if it's GA4 or Matomo or Fathom or any of the other millions of analytics products out there, it is only as good as what the system decides to do with the data. And what you're looking at is never the raw data. So when I first started the field back in the dark ages in 2000, we didn't have Google Analytics. It was called Urchin Analytics and Google bought them in 2004, but I didn't have that. In 2000 we had log file analysis. And I would say that log file analysis is probably the most reliable in terms of what pages are being viewed because it is actually requests from the server. And so we would use products like web trends, if people remember those, and we'd actually look at what things were accessed, but then as soon as other analytics product, and that was when you were looking at the actual raw data. But you're not going to look at the actual raw data and add it up yourself. That's when you use a tool to do it. So you are relying on the tool a little bit to process the data. And then as we move through the analytics landscape, people have ad blockers. People have tabs. People use different devices. You may not be able to tie people across those different devices. Right? And the classic example that I use quite often is, let's say, I am booking a pest control service for my house. I live in an area we have to spray for ants every year, whether you like it or not. And so I found this company that I want to go with, but I sent the link to my wife to do the booking 'cause she was going to be home and I was not. Well, I just texted her the link. That means the attribution path is lost. It's going to show up as direct in their system even though I found them originally from Google business profile. So that is a classic example of attribution that happens every single day. So if you look at your data and you need to point at it and say this is 100% correct, you are wrong. And it doesn't matter how good your analytics is, it doesn't matter if you're using what's called server side tracking, which gets around ad blockers 'cause there's still consent management. If someone says no to being tracked, you can't track them. But then there's also people just using the internet the way the people who use the internet and we really can't control or manage what happens there. So I think that there's a certain amount of uncertainty that we have to get comfortable with in analytics and I think that that's really difficult for analysts because we are used to a lot of certainty. Right? But coming at this from my SEO background, I mean what's the classic SEO response? Right? It depends. And so I think that SEOs are actually a little bit more comfortable with the idea of uncertainty, but because we've always had analytics presented to us as this, this is exact and this is perfect and this is, you know, then I think getting more comfortable with that uncertainty is something that actually, as SEOs, we could bring to analytics a little bit and get them to calm down a little bit on the exact numbers 'cause they're not real. They're never going to be real. They're just pleasant fairy tales sometimes. Crystal Carter: And I think that we all want to be able to get our little gold star, get our dopamine hit. We see that up into the right. And so I can't begrudge people for wanting to believe it's true. I want to believe. Dana DiTomaso: Oh yeah. I totally get that. Like I was working with this one client and we were switching them from UA to GA4 and it turns out that they had their UA code running four times on their blog. So every time someone viewed a page, it would record a four page visits. And then, of course, when we put on GA4, we had the setting turned on that doesn't allow that to happen. And so it was recording one page view and then they're like, oh my god, our traffic has gone down. What happened? Actually your traffic is the same. That's not the issue here. Right? And so this is why I talk about like how can you possibly report on this stuff, if you don't know for sure that's recording properly. Again, you could just have it running multiple times and be like, look, look at these numbers and no one else is going to go in there and double check. So you could be reporting on pleasant fairy tales. You don't know. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. And I think also I think it comes down to are you reporting on stuff that actually matters in the first place? And all the analytics suites, you mentioned a few different ones. Wix Studio has built-in analytics. So there's CMS side analytics. There's going to be your third party analytics. There's going to be other stuff. And they're all measuring, they're all giving you various different metrics and some of them matter and some of them don't. And just because I know they say that if it isn't measured, it doesn't matter, but there's also just because measured doesn't necessarily mean that it matters. I mean classic examples like BMI. Right? My BMI is always off the chart, but I'm just thick. I don't know what to tell you. I did sports in high school and I could drop 10, I just, I couldn't possibly, I haven't been that weight since I was 16 and I would look ridiculous, if I was that weight. Dana DiTomaso: Oh no. I boxed for years. Being heavier is an advantage in boxing 'cause you can punch harder. That's why there's weight classes. Crystal Carter: Right. I know somebody who went to the doctor the other day and he told him his weight and the doctor was like, no way. Nuh-uh. I just saw you. And so he got on the scales like I can't believe you weigh that. It's like because it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous made up measurement. But I think, again, if you think about BMI, which I think most people are familiar with as a general annoyance, it's kind of a guideline. I don't think necessarily that you should be beholden to it, but I guess it's kind of like if you're in the ballpark then that's sort of a guideline generally, but you shouldn't be beholden to it necessarily. You should use your common sense and understand that you did boxing, you did weightlifting, you did whatever. You're a professional athlete who is perfectly fine at this weight. And I think that with the analytics one that people used to go back and forth over was bounce rate all the time back in the day. And sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't. But I think also- Dana DiTomaso: Well, and bounce rate was never measuring what people thought it was too. And this is why I hate bounce rate so much. Anyone's ever seen me present you know that just say bounce rate and I just go on a tangent, but I mean in universal analytics, bounce rate was measuring if you viewed a page and then you didn't have a measurable event on that page, which meant that if you submitted a form and it didn't take you to a second page and you weren't recording that form submit, that person would bounce. And so unless I set up your analytics, I wouldn't trust that your bounce rate was correct. More than once I saw bounce rates close to 0% and it was because somebody decided to fake out bounce rate by having an event be recorded the moment the page was loaded. You know? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: And it's like, yeah, you can totally fake out bounce rate. No problem. And in GA4, I think it is slightly more accurate. You have what's called engagement rate, but I've actually been testing whether or not you can fake that out. And you can. There's an event called user engagement that's recorded when a session becomes engaged and by default a session in GA4 becomes engaged when someone's had your tab as their active tab for at least 10 seconds, viewed a second page, or converted. If you send the user engagement event right away, you could artificially inflate your engagement rates. So it is possible to fake that out as well. But it is actually like you have to actually know what you're doing and try to fake it out. If anyone ever goes on my Kick Point playbook website, looks at the analytics there, you'll see some weird events called pizza, for example. It's just things I'm testing, but I always try to see how you can manipulate the system so I can spot it when I'm working with other people to be like this bounce rate or engagement rate doesn't seem correct. And then in GA4 there is bounce rate, but it's the inverse of engagement rate. So just use engagement rate. Let's all let bounce rate just die out. Thank you. The end. Okay. Crystal Carter: And I think that this comes to, but that's a great point because people, like I said, people are measuring, have been measuring things that don't necessarily matter. And I feel like with the traffic and attribution, I've had it before where I've had clients and I'm trying to piece together their attribution, messy middle because they have like it's an event. Like I had a client and their ticket booking system was a different one from the one that was their website that was different from their things. And then they have microsites and they have KB sites and then they have all of these different stuff and you're trying to piece it all back together. And I think it can be, like you mentioned traffic as a metric, I think that SEOs and speaking about the SEO map thing, traffic is going to become much more complex in the next few years with the advent of AI and an AI search and how people are getting to the content and how people are discovering the brand. So which metrics do you think still matter? Do you think traffic still matters? Do you think other things matter more? Dana DiTomaso: I think traffic is a good temperature check on what's going on. You know? And I think certainly myself and Will Reynolds for example from Seer have spoken about this quite a bit where Will's, I just saw a great presentation by him where he was talking about how he has less traffic on his site, but that traffic is more engaged, is more likely to get in touch with him. And I actually just published a blog post as well. If you do want to see how much AI traffic, AI tool traffic is coming to your website, I have a walkthrough on my website and we can include the link, the show notes of how to set up an AI tools channel in GA4 or really any tool, but it's a piece of what's called RegEx that you can set up and it'll pull out all that. AI tools traffic can put it into own channel for you. And that's really interesting to see as well. But I think it's where, I mean, generally in the industry, I think people have to realize that Google is not necessarily going to be the only player out there for a long time. And if you've been in this for a long time, as I have, Google wasn't always the big player. There's this like cool... Crystal Carter: Netscape. Dana DiTomaso: There's this like AltaVista. Yahoo was a thing. You know? Like it was being actually had a decent market rate for a little while there. So it's not impossible for us to move past Google. And I think search GPT for example, is definitely an existential threat to Google and they're taking it very seriously, as you can see. But I think that there are lots of different ways that people engage with this. If you're aiming for a younger audience, TikTok search, YouTube, by the way, second largest search engine and you report on YouTube search, probably not. Right? So I think that there's lots of opportunities for search that aren't necessarily what people immediately think of when it comes to search. And so when you think about things like traffic, this is where are you bringing together all of your actual traffic sources? And one of the things that I've really been reporting on is what I call efficiency rate. So are part of the effectiveness rate. It used to be called efficiency, I felt effectiveness was a better number. And so effectiveness looks at your impressions across all channels, all of your search console impressions, all of your ads impressions, like social impressions, number of people in your email list, all that stuff, add it all together, divide it by the number of transactions or conversions or whatever your final piece is. And this isn't just recorded in something like GA4, like how many people bought your stuff in store online, just the raw number of transactions. Look at that percentage. Is it going up or down over time? If it's going up, then that means you're more effective with your work, your marketing work that you're doing. If it's going down, then you're less effective. And then that means that maybe you've got some diminishing returns or maybe this big radio campaign you decide to spend some money on wasn't actually that effective or you introduced a bunch of broad match keywords into your Google Ads account you probably shouldn't have or there's lots of different things why but you'll know by looking at those overall trends. And the example that I give is for example, if people live in North America, Old Navy, very big, you know, fast fa, is there Old Navy in the UK? I'm not entirely sure, but. Crystal Carter: They don't have it in the UK. Dana DiTomaso: I think it's just North America. Crystal Carter: They should. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. It's just the idea. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. And they send out approximately 80 million emails a day individually to one person. If you ever get an email list, you're just going to get a thousand emails. Right? No one is going to go into the store and hold up their phone and say, I'm here today 'cause I got an email. Right? But that's probably what encouraged people to come in. And they may not even use the coupons in the email. They might just come in and purchase and, yeah, if they actually enter their email address at the register, which you can see that they're desperately trying to tie everything together, but maybe I bought something and I didn't enter my email at the register, does that mean that that sale should not be attributed to email? No. It should. But if that's your strict rules, then no, it's not going to. And this is where I think something like effectiveness kind of sidesteps that because it's like, hey, we sent out this big email blast and sales in store went up. Great. You know? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: We sent out this other big email blast and stores and sale went down. Oh. I guess that one wasn't as effective. Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: And so it's a way to sort sidestep attribution and really focus on what matters, which is how much are we putting out into the world and then how much are we getting in as a result of that? Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that that is something that's really useful, particularly for teams that are working across multiple channels. If you're sponsoring the local little league team, if you're doing some PR where they've been featured in the newspaper or even featured in different activities, and then you're also doing websites that to support that, not everything's going to be attributed. Every mention that you get for your brand isn't necessarily going to be attributed. Every link might not, you might see every single link necessarily. But yeah, it will add value to your brand and it will be able to … Dana DiTomaso: Especially if you're in a high profile field working with say a criminal defense lawyer, you know, if they had a really high profile case and they got somebody off because of a technicality, for example, people are going to call that lawyer. Are they going to say, hey, I called you because I Googled best criminal defense lawyer in thing? Like no, because of that case. Right? So how do you attribute that? Well, it's still marketing 'cause you were still good at your job. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dana DiTomaso: And so I think that that's where those kinds of things kind of get lost under the radar per se, but it's all attributions, all ways that people have heard about you. So why wouldn't we consider, for example, like the number of views of a news article about your business in addition to everything else that happens? Crystal Carter: Right. So this sounds wonderful. It sounds tricky to set up though, Dana. Dana DiTomaso: It is a little tricky, I have to say. And so there's a really simple, I have again another post on my site where I go through the process. If you just want to start with just the basics, the easiest thing to do is in Looker Studio you can attach Google Search Console, Google Ads, just add those two together, attach GA4 divided by the number of key events that are entered in your GA4. That's a really simple blend to accomplish in Looker Studio. And I go through it in the blog post. And that's a really good way to dip your toe in. But it doesn't have to be fancy. You could just have a spreadsheet with some numbers popped on it that you do some math on. Right? Like this is of true back of the envelope, are things trending in the right direction kind of question. Because one thing I really want to encourage us in the marketing spaces is stop being data accountants. We have sort of taken on this role of trying to be the most precise people in the room when it comes to data, and I don't think that ever should have been put on us. Right? You have accountants in the business. They serve a very useful role. As marketers, we should not be providing that accounting role and really trying to step away from that idea of precision and instead focusing on, say, trends or instead of presenting and say this landing page at 820 visits, say this landing page was 60% of your overall views of landing pages. This landing page, however, only converted people at a 30% rate. Really, if it's 60% of the views, we should see 60% of the conversions. So what can we do with this landing page to improve it or do we just know it's never going to be a great converting tool 'cause it pushes people off somewhere else, for example. You know? And I think that that's where really looking at those percentages instead of absolutes, I think, is really where the future of analysis in marketing and reporting is going. Crystal Carter: And I think also thinking of the percentages in terms of output, you know, like I know great SEOs who sometimes say to people, maybe you don't need SEO right now. Maybe what you actually need is ads for instance right now. Maybe that's what you need or maybe what you need is social right now because that's where your audience is. So I think that- Dana DiTomaso: Or maybe your website does not convert well and you should really work on that before we spend one more dollar getting more people to your website? Crystal Carter: We get them to there and then they just fall off a cliff. Dana DiTomaso: Right. Crystal Carter: That's not good at all. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Crystal Carter: So I think that that's important to know. So in terms of percentage of input compared to percentage of output compared to percentage of growth, I think that the trends are good, and also I think the trends are something that can help you benchmark yourself against almost anyone. So if you are seeing a 10% increase in your business, that's good, whether you're big or small, whatever kind of business you are, and that's useful to think about as well. So if you're seeing that your conversion rate and there are loads of people who have benchmarks for conversion rates across different sectors and stuff, if you're seeing that your conversion rate is on target, then you can plan how you scale what you do and all of that sort of stuff. Dana DiTomaso: I think there's also some value in considering when you're looking at your conversion rate, are you including people who already bought from you and can't buy again? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: You know? Like this is where setting up audiences in whatever, if different analytics tools do help you with this like GA4, for example, set up an audience of people who have not bought from you already, who didn't click the login button on your website. Those people, if they've logged in, they already bought from you. They're not going to buy again. You know? And the example I tell people about is we're working with a convention center, there's two audiences for the convention center. There's people who want to book events and there's people going to events. People going to events want to know how much parking is and the best way to get there and what transit routes go there. Very important information. Are the escalators broken? This was a huge thing at the convention center we were working with the escalators had this whole string of being broken. Right? So the other part of it, you have people who want to book events and when we're talking to the sales team, they do not really care about the people coming to events. That's customer experience. They care about the people who want to book events. So instead of reporting on a site-wide engagement rate, which is driven entirely by whether or not Disney on Ice happens to be there that night because more people are visiting the site, it drives down the conversion rate. Instead, we're only reporting on the people who actually visited a book page and then looking at those conversion rates. And it makes such a difference in the reporting to say, here's my really targeted audience. So again, if there's a way for you to say, these are the people who actually showed intent to go ahead and contact me, then that's what I'm interested in. You know, on Kick Point playbook. For example, we sell courses. If you already bought a course, you're not going to buy it again. Maybe you might buy for more members on your team, but for the most part, you bought the course, you're good. So why would we, in our conversion rates, look at absolutely everybody? Why would we not just look at the people who haven't bought a course yet? You know? And I'm sure that there's lots of ways you can think about how can I exclude people? And if there's nothing on your website that you can use to exclude people already bought from you, think about adding something. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's super, super useful. And I think that we have a whole course, we have the Wix Studio SEO course, and we have a whole section on reporting, because it's super important that you pay attention to the things that matter and segment your audiences. Segmentation is so important. I think that particularly when you're thinking about the messy middle for all of this stuff, because the middle is so much messier I think now in the last little while. I mean I find myself using multiple, multiple tools to find information these days. Some which result in a click. Some which do not result in a click. And so if you're able to segment your audiences so that you're very direct and very bottom up so that they are getting only what they need, then that will make a really, really big difference. I have a question just to get back a little bit in the weeds. What about users? How tricky is it to … these days with users? We talked about trends in terms of traffic and things like that, but I know for a fact I am one of these people that if I go into a store and I want to know what's going on with that product, I will go on their website and look at what they have on their website. I'll look at the reviews on the website. I'll check out other things that they have that I maybe can't find in the shop, but should be on the shelf. Then you also have people who are, like you said, you're sending it to your wife. You're sending it to the person, all these different people. So how tricky is it to keep track of users, especially as people are opting out of things, ad blockers … Dana DiTomaso: Oh. Yeah. I mean consent alone for sure. And this is a concern obviously, I would say. American businesses are starting to pick up on this, for sure, but European businesses are obviously far ahead and I think that European listeners, I would say, yeah, you haven't had analytics for a long time and you're kind looking at North America like what's your problem, man? We haven't been able to track things for years. You know? And I think that the consent management for sure, it's going to remove people. It'll have these conversations and they'll say, well, they said no to being tracked, but we want to track them anyway. You can't. Yes, there is modeling in GA4 where if enough people say no and enough people say yes, it will sort of fill in the blanks on what it thinks maybe happened. But I'm not necessarily a big fan of model data. I'd rather go with what's actually observed. And I think too that there's just accepting that you don't have that certain percentage of your data, and ideally your consent tool should show you how many people have said no. I use Cookiebot quite a lot for consent. I really like their tool. Crystal Carter: That's in Wix Studio. Dana DiTomaso: And they'll show me what percentage of people have said no. Yes. I really like Cookiebot. I think that they have the best set of metrics out there, and I think that they tell you what percentage of people said no, and you can be like, here's our report. 60% of people said no. So this is only 40% of our data, but we're going to make decisions in the 40% we're actually able to measure. Right? That's an important point to make when you're presenting a report to say, senior leadership, 'cause they're not going to know the intricacies of consent management and they don't care and they don't need to care. But then yes, also ad blockers, Chrome is making a change right now that should make ad blockers less effective, but it's an arms race and the ad blockers are going to win. So I think this is just temporary. And then, yeah, there's different devices, and this is the thing with GA4 when it says user, a user is a device, unless you have a log in on your site and you are reporting user IDs from that log in to GA4, and this is true of really any analytic system. Matomo, doesn't matter what you're using, you have to report those user IDs and it has to be something non-identifiable. You can't just say their email address in order for it to understand a user across devices. Otherwise the cookie is set at the device level. And if a cookie set it all, maybe they said no, but that's just how it is and it's how it's been for years. So when you're looking at users, you're really it just say devices, honestly. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. I think that's totally valid. 'Cause I'm absolutely somebody who is on my phone looking at a website on my phone and on my Chrome profile and sometimes on my other Chrome profile as well. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Oh. Marketers are the worst. I have eight different Chrome profiles for all the different accounts I have to log into. Right? I am the problem here. I understand that. Or you're talking about being in a store. More than once, I've been in Home Depot, where do I find this? Load up the website, tells you where to go. Great. Going to aisle nine, bin 18, perfect. You know? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: But I didn't buy online. The Home Depot people are probably like. Why? Well, because standing in your store, I just need to know what it is. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Right. Dana DiTomaso: You know? Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. Dana DiTomaso: So I hope Home Depot marketing people, if you're listening, I hope you have a system to filter that out, but like that's a great example of intent. You know? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: I was never going to buy online. I'm buying in store. How do you deal with that? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Exactly. And I think that maybe we do need to relax, maybe we do need to just chill out a little bit and just. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Well, I don't think it's necessarily, we need to chill out a little bit. I think leadership needs to chill out a little bit. And I think this is where, as marketers, it really comes onto us to do that education piece. And there's always going to be people that you work for who are never going to accept that analytics is fuzzy and blah, blah, blah. They want exact numbers, and you may not be able to change your mind. That's okay. You might want to look for another job, but there are some people who will realize that as you explain to them, this is why things are fuzzy. And so again, but those of my website where I talk about reporting on trends on absolutes. I also talk about how to talk to senior leadership about this. But part of it is really a process. If you've been reporting in exact numbers for years, whether or not those numbers are accurate, that's not where you want to lead with it and say, hey, remember those reports they gave you? They were all lies. Don't start there. It's not a good way to keep your job. Instead, I would say start changing the metrics over slowly. Start removing decimal places. If you're reporting on year over year traffic, does 12.62 versus 12% actually matter? No. Of course not. Crystal Carter: That's a 0.6% increase. Dana... Dana DiTomaso: Oh. Pardon me. It's- Crystal Carter: ... that's a 0.6%. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Which if you round it up is 1%, so hey. Crystal Carter: Basically. Dana DiTomaso: But I mean that is just a rounding error. Right? Just round that number. Instead of 12.62 is 13%. Leave it at that. No one is going to get upset about it. Right? But those are the little changes you can start now. Start including a report that just has, you know, and I have some screenshot examples of this in my website. There's some charts we present that have just bars of percentage amounts of the total as opposed to individual accounts. It's a much easier way to present data or comparing to pie charts. You know, one of my favorite chart types is where I put a pie chart in the middle and then I put a donut around it, and then you compare the composition of the colors and the outer, for example, donut would be sessions by channel. The inner pie would be conversions by channel. Do the slices relatively match up? Yes. No. You know? And there's no numbers on it. We're just looking at whether or not the colors match. And so doing something like that is a really easy way to be able to visually communicate something without making it sound like you're talking over someone's head because nobody likes that. And then also really start to make those slow changes to explain things aren't as accurate as they used to be so this is what we're going to report on instead. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think so. And I think also if we think about conversions as the metric, which it generally ultimately comes down to conversions. Whatever the business is, if it's an attorney, if it's fast fashion, if it's a dog groomer, it will come down eventually to conversions. And I think that where you can say 50% of the conversions came from online, 50% of the conversions came from in-store, or whatever it may be, then I think that that's probably going to be something, a good trend line to follow. Would you agree? Dana DiTomaso: Yep. I would agree for sure. And I think, again, include some caveats with that trend line, but again, also make sure that what you're tracking as a conversion is actually meaningful. You know, for example, if you're using call tracking and you are say a dog groomer to pick on that example, returning phone calls is probably fine 'cause that's going to become a customer as well. If you're a home builder, returning calls, how many times do people order a custom home? You know? Probably not that often. So first time calls may be the way to go. Right? But again, it's not just like you don't want to include telemarketers in that number. You have to actually dial it down and say, here's the number of people who called us who were actually legitimate leads. Right? And so it's where using tools like call tracking, et cetera, are only as good as making sure that the person at the other end, whether it's you working in house and talking to your sales team, or if your agency side and talking to the client, get them to mark off things as good or bad. And I think that's where, you know, yeah, we can see the number of form fills. Were they good form fills? And I think a lot of marketers sort of leave it at the form fill happened and they don't follow through. And what separates an okay marketer from a good marketer is knowing whether or not that follow through happened. Were those leads good? Not just the volume. Crystal Carter: I learned that the hard way. I've told the story a few times. But I remember taking on an account and we got a bunch of signups on the form, more than they'd ever had, and they were like, we didn't notice that. And I was like, what do you mean? And they were like, oh, we didn't notice that. Did you notice that? It's like, oh, I don't know who actually answers those forms. Who actually gets those emails? Dana DiTomaso: Oh. No. Crystal Carter: Like, oh, I think Susan does. Oh. Susan was on vacation and literally my heart sank. Dana DiTomaso: Oh my God. I would, yeah. Crystal Carter: And I learned that the hard way. And this was a few years back. But it was definitely a teachable moment. And then from then on, whenever we started doing anything, I was like, okay, where does this form go? Who's answering that? If the form's not going anywhere, we should take it off. If you don't actually have a newsletter and you have a newsletter sign up, don't put one on there. Dana DiTomaso: That's my favorite is we say to people, hey, how often did you send a newsletter? They're like, oh, we don't. Why do you have this big prominent sign up pop up that comes up on every single page if you're never going to send people a newsletter? Yep. If you somehow convince people to sign up for it, how dare you let them down and then only email you with their Black Friday sale? You know, Black Friday's like the perfect day to find out what email list you've been living on for the past year that you had no idea, for example. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Speaking of newsletters and email lists, good newsletters, where can people find you? I know that you send out lots of fantastic information, actual good information… Where can people find you online to learn more about all of this fantastic stuff? Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. I would say I'm most active on LinkedIn. Although I am on Blue Sky now and using that a bit more, but I would say LinkedIn is still like the place to go. And if you go to KPPlaybook.com/Newsletter, you can sign up for our newsletter, which we send out every other week, and it is, I promise, useful. And if you are listening to this podcast and you would like a discount on any of my courses, use the code WIXSTUDIO to get 20% off any of my courses. Crystal Carter: We love it. Thank you so, so much for joining us, and thank you so, so much for all of that fantastic insight, and we will get all of those links in the show note. So thank you so very much, Dana DiTomaso. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Make sure to follow Dana on all of her social media platforms, and she has a whole course. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Dana has so many courses and so much great content. So she's got great content on LinkedIn. She's got great content on Kick Point Playbook, so do check out all of that. If you're still confused about GA4, she's the person to help you with that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And yeah, stop being a data accountant and get yourself together. Mordy Oberstein: Oh. And to help you get yourself together with even more analytical nerd stuff is our follow of the week, Bri Anderson, self-described analytical nerd. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Bri's great as well, and she's got some fantastic stuff about GA4 and about getting to grips on that. And yeah, there's some great folks doing some great stuff with analytics. So do follow Bri. Do follow Dana. And yeah, get your data together because it's not easy out here, but you got to make it happen. Mordy Oberstein: So you and the captain can make it happen. By the way, that's a great cereal still. Crystal Carter: Cap'n Crunch? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Thank you for getting the reference. Crystal Carter: I'm a Cheerios person myself. Mordy Oberstein: I like Cheerios. I eat Cheerios almost every day 'cause like got enough fiber, not too much fiber. Let's not get into that. But Cap'n Crunch still holds up for me. It's like a sugar cereal. That and Frosted Flakes still hold up for me. Some other sugar cereals don't. Like ew, that's Fruit Loops- Crystal Carter: Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Mordy Oberstein: Cinnamon Toast Crunch still holds up, but as you get older, some of them, the fruity ones don't for me. Like Fruity Pebbles, Fruit Loops, throw them in the trash. Cocoa Pebbles is fine. Crystal Carter: Man, I'm a granola and yogurt kind of person. I make my own granola. It's very good. Mordy Oberstein: You make your own granola? Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: I never, how did I not know that about you? Crystal Carter: You never asked. Mordy Oberstein: Why would you? Can I ask? I'm supposed to ask like, hey, do you make your own granola? Crystal Carter: I do make my own granola. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. You don't, but there's nothing else about you that would indicate that. Crystal Carter: I do. Mordy Oberstein: Like you don't wear like gemstone jewelry. Crystal Carter: Hey, I blended my own tea yesterday with like multiple dried herbs. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I blended like tea before. I take two different tea flavors in the bag and you mix them together… Crystal Carter: No. I took like… I dried the herbs and then I put them in the thing, and I like did the whole- Mordy Oberstein: You also call them herbs? Crystal Carter: I live in England. My accent is confused. Mordy Oberstein: I thought I, I've known you for a long time at this point, and I'm finding out all these things all at once. Crystal Carter: I'm many layers, many layers. You thought you had all the data, but no. Mordy Oberstein: There's no better way to end the podcast than with that. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/SEO/Learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or on Spotify. Peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Dana DiTomaso  Brie Anderson Resources: Topical Authority Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course KickPoint Playbook Marketing Analytics Data is Wrong. Can It Be Fixed?: GA4: One year on Webinar Getting Started with GA4 Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Dana DiTomaso  Brie Anderson Resources: Topical Authority Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course KickPoint Playbook Marketing Analytics Data is Wrong. Can It Be Fixed?: GA4: One year on Webinar Getting Started with GA4 Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm your host, Mordy Oberstein, and I'm joined by she who is not blind. She can see, can see clearly now that the rain has come. She's our own head communications here, Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that lovely introduction. I cannot see as well as I used to be able to see. I have to wear glasses now, but I always forget that I need to wear glasses and then I try to look at things and I can't read them. And why are restaurants so dark? That's my question. Why are they so dark? Mordy Oberstein: They are dark. Crystal Carter: How am I supposed to read the menu? I don't understand. Mordy Oberstein: It's so annoying. I got to say something. Restaurants are annoying place to eat a meal. Okay? There's, one, other people around you which is... Crystal Carter: Boo. Mordy Oberstein: ... not what you want. Yeah. Boo. Then secondly, while you're eating, people come around and ask you questions. Oh. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: No. Okay? Crystal Carter: It's like it's a quiz. Mordy Oberstein: How are things? If I had a problem, you would know. Crystal Carter: What kind of bread would you like? I'm like bread. And then they named 17 bread. They're pumpernickel, rye, sourdough, white bread, brown bread, granary bread, seeded bread, loaf bread. I'm like, I don't know. I didn't know this was a bread... Mordy Oberstein: I want good bread. Crystal Carter: ... bread test. It was a bread test? I didn't know. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. And then there's music. Why do they play music? Now you can't even see the person. Now you can't talk to the person you actually want to talk to because they're playing stupid annoying. It's never good music. It's always annoying. Crystal Carter: I don't like it when you go to a restaurant and there's a million screens. I do not eat my dinner in front of a TV. And then I go to these restaurants and there's 17 TVs playing like 17 different baseball, basketball, football, hockey. Mordy Oberstein: Were you in a sports bar? Crystal Carter: There's loads of places where they're just always on even when you're not in a sports bar. Mordy Oberstein: I was in New York a while ago and went out to eat with my dad and it was on a football Sunday and there was the football game on. It was a regular restaurant. I mean, I was kind of happy to see the football game, but it was weird. Why is that even here? Crystal Carter: It's distracting. It's distracting. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So now that we told you we hate restaurants, SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Peter Lugers. No. It's brought to you by Wix Studio where you can use Wix Studio to get a recording of how users are interacting with your website for free. There is a paid plan as well, and natively is built right in three clicks. It's awesome. I love using it literally. We'll get into more on using data like that later, soon. This as today, are marketers flying blind? What are the metrics that still matter with changes to GA4 and reduced visibility in channels like ChatGPT. Are marketers flying blind? Data throttling in GA4 and GSC? What data matters and what data does it in a sea of analytics to help us sail your ship through the numbers analytics Maven teacher and consultant, Dana DiTomaso sat down with Crystal for a clear conversation about data. And of course we have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So grab your binoculars, telescope, and magnifying glass or just get some LASIK as episode 121 helps you give yourself sight, the gift of sight of data analytics. Crystal Carter: So yeah, I had a fantastic conversation with Dana DiTomaso. I've heard her speak at MozCon and other events on multiple occasions and she's one of my favorite analytics marketers because she is so astute and so clear with she's, you know, how she communicates what she's saying. Mordy Oberstein: And funny. She's funny. Crystal Carter: She's funny. She's super awesome. And the other thing is that one of the things that really stuck with me, I think it was MozCon this year, she was talking about this topic and she'll get into it into the discussion, but she says that we need to stop being so beholden to the actual numbers. We need to be so beholden between whether or not it's 373 clicks or 375 clicks because really those two clicks isn't going to make that much of a difference and she'll get into this, but essentially the trends are... Mordy Oberstein: Trends. Crystal Carter: ... very important. Mordy Oberstein: Trends. So many times said this, by the way, I said this on Traffic Think Tank the other day because of all the rank volatility and Google's going to run out consistent updates all the time now, stop looking at actual numbers and look at like create a range for yourself of where you think this site normally ranges and just look at that. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's the thing. I think that people need to be more intelligent about what actually matters. And I think that people need to be more intelligent about having a good understanding of their data and what normal is and what different is and figuring out what that means for them. Mordy Oberstein: You have me at people should be more intelligent. Crystal Carter: We'll see how it goes. But yeah, we had a super intelligent conversation with Dana and with her doing the heavy lifting on the intelligence there. Mordy Oberstein: So here's two really intelligent people having a really intelligent conversation about data intelligence. Crystal Carter: I am so pleased to be joined here today by analytics maven, Dana DiTomaso, who I've heard speak at MozCon on a couple of occasions about data and analytics and all of those fantastic things. She is the CEO of Kick Point and fount of knowledge of all things analytics. I'm so glad that she's joining us here today. Dana, welcome to the show. Dana DiTomaso: Thank you so much for having me. Crystal Carter: Such an absolute honor. And I think when we were looking at this topic, I said we have to speak to Dana because she knows all about this and basically we're kind of looking at the space that we're in terms of marketers and analytics. I feel like there's a certain amount of uncertainty that we have now. I feel like when I first started my journey as a marketer, even five years ago, I felt very certain about saying we've had this much traffic and we've had this channel brought us in this much value and all of that sort of stuff. Do you feel that certain these days in terms of the information that you're getting from the various tools out there as a marketer? Dana DiTomaso: No. But I also think that it hasn't been certain for longer even than five years. And I think that this is one of the big things that happened when people switched from universal analytics to GA4. A lot of people, if you were transitioning to it early, you had both running at the same time. You had UA and GA4 and you would look at the reports and they'd be different numbers and you would say, well, one of these is wrong. But the thing is they were both right. They were just measuring data in different ways and I think that this is where it sort of pulled back the curtain a little bit and said, hey, actually analytics data is only as good as your analytics measurement system, but there's also a sense of data capture in terms of what you're looking at when you look at analytics. And it doesn't matter if it's GA4 or Matomo or Fathom or any of the other millions of analytics products out there, it is only as good as what the system decides to do with the data. And what you're looking at is never the raw data. So when I first started the field back in the dark ages in 2000, we didn't have Google Analytics. It was called Urchin Analytics and Google bought them in 2004, but I didn't have that. In 2000 we had log file analysis. And I would say that log file analysis is probably the most reliable in terms of what pages are being viewed because it is actually requests from the server. And so we would use products like web trends, if people remember those, and we'd actually look at what things were accessed, but then as soon as other analytics product, and that was when you were looking at the actual raw data. But you're not going to look at the actual raw data and add it up yourself. That's when you use a tool to do it. So you are relying on the tool a little bit to process the data. And then as we move through the analytics landscape, people have ad blockers. People have tabs. People use different devices. You may not be able to tie people across those different devices. Right? And the classic example that I use quite often is, let's say, I am booking a pest control service for my house. I live in an area we have to spray for ants every year, whether you like it or not. And so I found this company that I want to go with, but I sent the link to my wife to do the booking 'cause she was going to be home and I was not. Well, I just texted her the link. That means the attribution path is lost. It's going to show up as direct in their system even though I found them originally from Google business profile. So that is a classic example of attribution that happens every single day. So if you look at your data and you need to point at it and say this is 100% correct, you are wrong. And it doesn't matter how good your analytics is, it doesn't matter if you're using what's called server side tracking, which gets around ad blockers 'cause there's still consent management. If someone says no to being tracked, you can't track them. But then there's also people just using the internet the way the people who use the internet and we really can't control or manage what happens there. So I think that there's a certain amount of uncertainty that we have to get comfortable with in analytics and I think that that's really difficult for analysts because we are used to a lot of certainty. Right? But coming at this from my SEO background, I mean what's the classic SEO response? Right? It depends. And so I think that SEOs are actually a little bit more comfortable with the idea of uncertainty, but because we've always had analytics presented to us as this, this is exact and this is perfect and this is, you know, then I think getting more comfortable with that uncertainty is something that actually, as SEOs, we could bring to analytics a little bit and get them to calm down a little bit on the exact numbers 'cause they're not real. They're never going to be real. They're just pleasant fairy tales sometimes. Crystal Carter: And I think that we all want to be able to get our little gold star, get our dopamine hit. We see that up into the right. And so I can't begrudge people for wanting to believe it's true. I want to believe. Dana DiTomaso: Oh yeah. I totally get that. Like I was working with this one client and we were switching them from UA to GA4 and it turns out that they had their UA code running four times on their blog. So every time someone viewed a page, it would record a four page visits. And then, of course, when we put on GA4, we had the setting turned on that doesn't allow that to happen. And so it was recording one page view and then they're like, oh my god, our traffic has gone down. What happened? Actually your traffic is the same. That's not the issue here. Right? And so this is why I talk about like how can you possibly report on this stuff, if you don't know for sure that's recording properly. Again, you could just have it running multiple times and be like, look, look at these numbers and no one else is going to go in there and double check. So you could be reporting on pleasant fairy tales. You don't know. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. And I think also I think it comes down to are you reporting on stuff that actually matters in the first place? And all the analytics suites, you mentioned a few different ones. Wix Studio has built-in analytics. So there's CMS side analytics. There's going to be your third party analytics. There's going to be other stuff. And they're all measuring, they're all giving you various different metrics and some of them matter and some of them don't. And just because I know they say that if it isn't measured, it doesn't matter, but there's also just because measured doesn't necessarily mean that it matters. I mean classic examples like BMI. Right? My BMI is always off the chart, but I'm just thick. I don't know what to tell you. I did sports in high school and I could drop 10, I just, I couldn't possibly, I haven't been that weight since I was 16 and I would look ridiculous, if I was that weight. Dana DiTomaso: Oh no. I boxed for years. Being heavier is an advantage in boxing 'cause you can punch harder. That's why there's weight classes. Crystal Carter: Right. I know somebody who went to the doctor the other day and he told him his weight and the doctor was like, no way. Nuh-uh. I just saw you. And so he got on the scales like I can't believe you weigh that. It's like because it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous made up measurement. But I think, again, if you think about BMI, which I think most people are familiar with as a general annoyance, it's kind of a guideline. I don't think necessarily that you should be beholden to it, but I guess it's kind of like if you're in the ballpark then that's sort of a guideline generally, but you shouldn't be beholden to it necessarily. You should use your common sense and understand that you did boxing, you did weightlifting, you did whatever. You're a professional athlete who is perfectly fine at this weight. And I think that with the analytics one that people used to go back and forth over was bounce rate all the time back in the day. And sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't. But I think also- Dana DiTomaso: Well, and bounce rate was never measuring what people thought it was too. And this is why I hate bounce rate so much. Anyone's ever seen me present you know that just say bounce rate and I just go on a tangent, but I mean in universal analytics, bounce rate was measuring if you viewed a page and then you didn't have a measurable event on that page, which meant that if you submitted a form and it didn't take you to a second page and you weren't recording that form submit, that person would bounce. And so unless I set up your analytics, I wouldn't trust that your bounce rate was correct. More than once I saw bounce rates close to 0% and it was because somebody decided to fake out bounce rate by having an event be recorded the moment the page was loaded. You know? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: And it's like, yeah, you can totally fake out bounce rate. No problem. And in GA4, I think it is slightly more accurate. You have what's called engagement rate, but I've actually been testing whether or not you can fake that out. And you can. There's an event called user engagement that's recorded when a session becomes engaged and by default a session in GA4 becomes engaged when someone's had your tab as their active tab for at least 10 seconds, viewed a second page, or converted. If you send the user engagement event right away, you could artificially inflate your engagement rates. So it is possible to fake that out as well. But it is actually like you have to actually know what you're doing and try to fake it out. If anyone ever goes on my Kick Point playbook website, looks at the analytics there, you'll see some weird events called pizza, for example. It's just things I'm testing, but I always try to see how you can manipulate the system so I can spot it when I'm working with other people to be like this bounce rate or engagement rate doesn't seem correct. And then in GA4 there is bounce rate, but it's the inverse of engagement rate. So just use engagement rate. Let's all let bounce rate just die out. Thank you. The end. Okay. Crystal Carter: And I think that this comes to, but that's a great point because people, like I said, people are measuring, have been measuring things that don't necessarily matter. And I feel like with the traffic and attribution, I've had it before where I've had clients and I'm trying to piece together their attribution, messy middle because they have like it's an event. Like I had a client and their ticket booking system was a different one from the one that was their website that was different from their things. And then they have microsites and they have KB sites and then they have all of these different stuff and you're trying to piece it all back together. And I think it can be, like you mentioned traffic as a metric, I think that SEOs and speaking about the SEO map thing, traffic is going to become much more complex in the next few years with the advent of AI and an AI search and how people are getting to the content and how people are discovering the brand. So which metrics do you think still matter? Do you think traffic still matters? Do you think other things matter more? Dana DiTomaso: I think traffic is a good temperature check on what's going on. You know? And I think certainly myself and Will Reynolds for example from Seer have spoken about this quite a bit where Will's, I just saw a great presentation by him where he was talking about how he has less traffic on his site, but that traffic is more engaged, is more likely to get in touch with him. And I actually just published a blog post as well. If you do want to see how much AI traffic, AI tool traffic is coming to your website, I have a walkthrough on my website and we can include the link, the show notes of how to set up an AI tools channel in GA4 or really any tool, but it's a piece of what's called RegEx that you can set up and it'll pull out all that. AI tools traffic can put it into own channel for you. And that's really interesting to see as well. But I think it's where, I mean, generally in the industry, I think people have to realize that Google is not necessarily going to be the only player out there for a long time. And if you've been in this for a long time, as I have, Google wasn't always the big player. There's this like cool... Crystal Carter: Netscape. Dana DiTomaso: There's this like AltaVista. Yahoo was a thing. You know? Like it was being actually had a decent market rate for a little while there. So it's not impossible for us to move past Google. And I think search GPT for example, is definitely an existential threat to Google and they're taking it very seriously, as you can see. But I think that there are lots of different ways that people engage with this. If you're aiming for a younger audience, TikTok search, YouTube, by the way, second largest search engine and you report on YouTube search, probably not. Right? So I think that there's lots of opportunities for search that aren't necessarily what people immediately think of when it comes to search. And so when you think about things like traffic, this is where are you bringing together all of your actual traffic sources? And one of the things that I've really been reporting on is what I call efficiency rate. So are part of the effectiveness rate. It used to be called efficiency, I felt effectiveness was a better number. And so effectiveness looks at your impressions across all channels, all of your search console impressions, all of your ads impressions, like social impressions, number of people in your email list, all that stuff, add it all together, divide it by the number of transactions or conversions or whatever your final piece is. And this isn't just recorded in something like GA4, like how many people bought your stuff in store online, just the raw number of transactions. Look at that percentage. Is it going up or down over time? If it's going up, then that means you're more effective with your work, your marketing work that you're doing. If it's going down, then you're less effective. And then that means that maybe you've got some diminishing returns or maybe this big radio campaign you decide to spend some money on wasn't actually that effective or you introduced a bunch of broad match keywords into your Google Ads account you probably shouldn't have or there's lots of different things why but you'll know by looking at those overall trends. And the example that I give is for example, if people live in North America, Old Navy, very big, you know, fast fa, is there Old Navy in the UK? I'm not entirely sure, but. Crystal Carter: They don't have it in the UK. Dana DiTomaso: I think it's just North America. Crystal Carter: They should. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. It's just the idea. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. And they send out approximately 80 million emails a day individually to one person. If you ever get an email list, you're just going to get a thousand emails. Right? No one is going to go into the store and hold up their phone and say, I'm here today 'cause I got an email. Right? But that's probably what encouraged people to come in. And they may not even use the coupons in the email. They might just come in and purchase and, yeah, if they actually enter their email address at the register, which you can see that they're desperately trying to tie everything together, but maybe I bought something and I didn't enter my email at the register, does that mean that that sale should not be attributed to email? No. It should. But if that's your strict rules, then no, it's not going to. And this is where I think something like effectiveness kind of sidesteps that because it's like, hey, we sent out this big email blast and sales in store went up. Great. You know? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: We sent out this other big email blast and stores and sale went down. Oh. I guess that one wasn't as effective. Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: And so it's a way to sort sidestep attribution and really focus on what matters, which is how much are we putting out into the world and then how much are we getting in as a result of that? Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that that is something that's really useful, particularly for teams that are working across multiple channels. If you're sponsoring the local little league team, if you're doing some PR where they've been featured in the newspaper or even featured in different activities, and then you're also doing websites that to support that, not everything's going to be attributed. Every mention that you get for your brand isn't necessarily going to be attributed. Every link might not, you might see every single link necessarily. But yeah, it will add value to your brand and it will be able to … Dana DiTomaso: Especially if you're in a high profile field working with say a criminal defense lawyer, you know, if they had a really high profile case and they got somebody off because of a technicality, for example, people are going to call that lawyer. Are they going to say, hey, I called you because I Googled best criminal defense lawyer in thing? Like no, because of that case. Right? So how do you attribute that? Well, it's still marketing 'cause you were still good at your job. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dana DiTomaso: And so I think that that's where those kinds of things kind of get lost under the radar per se, but it's all attributions, all ways that people have heard about you. So why wouldn't we consider, for example, like the number of views of a news article about your business in addition to everything else that happens? Crystal Carter: Right. So this sounds wonderful. It sounds tricky to set up though, Dana. Dana DiTomaso: It is a little tricky, I have to say. And so there's a really simple, I have again another post on my site where I go through the process. If you just want to start with just the basics, the easiest thing to do is in Looker Studio you can attach Google Search Console, Google Ads, just add those two together, attach GA4 divided by the number of key events that are entered in your GA4. That's a really simple blend to accomplish in Looker Studio. And I go through it in the blog post. And that's a really good way to dip your toe in. But it doesn't have to be fancy. You could just have a spreadsheet with some numbers popped on it that you do some math on. Right? Like this is of true back of the envelope, are things trending in the right direction kind of question. Because one thing I really want to encourage us in the marketing spaces is stop being data accountants. We have sort of taken on this role of trying to be the most precise people in the room when it comes to data, and I don't think that ever should have been put on us. Right? You have accountants in the business. They serve a very useful role. As marketers, we should not be providing that accounting role and really trying to step away from that idea of precision and instead focusing on, say, trends or instead of presenting and say this landing page at 820 visits, say this landing page was 60% of your overall views of landing pages. This landing page, however, only converted people at a 30% rate. Really, if it's 60% of the views, we should see 60% of the conversions. So what can we do with this landing page to improve it or do we just know it's never going to be a great converting tool 'cause it pushes people off somewhere else, for example. You know? And I think that that's where really looking at those percentages instead of absolutes, I think, is really where the future of analysis in marketing and reporting is going. Crystal Carter: And I think also thinking of the percentages in terms of output, you know, like I know great SEOs who sometimes say to people, maybe you don't need SEO right now. Maybe what you actually need is ads for instance right now. Maybe that's what you need or maybe what you need is social right now because that's where your audience is. So I think that- Dana DiTomaso: Or maybe your website does not convert well and you should really work on that before we spend one more dollar getting more people to your website? Crystal Carter: We get them to there and then they just fall off a cliff. Dana DiTomaso: Right. Crystal Carter: That's not good at all. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Crystal Carter: So I think that that's important to know. So in terms of percentage of input compared to percentage of output compared to percentage of growth, I think that the trends are good, and also I think the trends are something that can help you benchmark yourself against almost anyone. So if you are seeing a 10% increase in your business, that's good, whether you're big or small, whatever kind of business you are, and that's useful to think about as well. So if you're seeing that your conversion rate and there are loads of people who have benchmarks for conversion rates across different sectors and stuff, if you're seeing that your conversion rate is on target, then you can plan how you scale what you do and all of that sort of stuff. Dana DiTomaso: I think there's also some value in considering when you're looking at your conversion rate, are you including people who already bought from you and can't buy again? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: You know? Like this is where setting up audiences in whatever, if different analytics tools do help you with this like GA4, for example, set up an audience of people who have not bought from you already, who didn't click the login button on your website. Those people, if they've logged in, they already bought from you. They're not going to buy again. You know? And the example I tell people about is we're working with a convention center, there's two audiences for the convention center. There's people who want to book events and there's people going to events. People going to events want to know how much parking is and the best way to get there and what transit routes go there. Very important information. Are the escalators broken? This was a huge thing at the convention center we were working with the escalators had this whole string of being broken. Right? So the other part of it, you have people who want to book events and when we're talking to the sales team, they do not really care about the people coming to events. That's customer experience. They care about the people who want to book events. So instead of reporting on a site-wide engagement rate, which is driven entirely by whether or not Disney on Ice happens to be there that night because more people are visiting the site, it drives down the conversion rate. Instead, we're only reporting on the people who actually visited a book page and then looking at those conversion rates. And it makes such a difference in the reporting to say, here's my really targeted audience. So again, if there's a way for you to say, these are the people who actually showed intent to go ahead and contact me, then that's what I'm interested in. You know, on Kick Point playbook. For example, we sell courses. If you already bought a course, you're not going to buy it again. Maybe you might buy for more members on your team, but for the most part, you bought the course, you're good. So why would we, in our conversion rates, look at absolutely everybody? Why would we not just look at the people who haven't bought a course yet? You know? And I'm sure that there's lots of ways you can think about how can I exclude people? And if there's nothing on your website that you can use to exclude people already bought from you, think about adding something. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's super, super useful. And I think that we have a whole course, we have the Wix Studio SEO course, and we have a whole section on reporting, because it's super important that you pay attention to the things that matter and segment your audiences. Segmentation is so important. I think that particularly when you're thinking about the messy middle for all of this stuff, because the middle is so much messier I think now in the last little while. I mean I find myself using multiple, multiple tools to find information these days. Some which result in a click. Some which do not result in a click. And so if you're able to segment your audiences so that you're very direct and very bottom up so that they are getting only what they need, then that will make a really, really big difference. I have a question just to get back a little bit in the weeds. What about users? How tricky is it to … these days with users? We talked about trends in terms of traffic and things like that, but I know for a fact I am one of these people that if I go into a store and I want to know what's going on with that product, I will go on their website and look at what they have on their website. I'll look at the reviews on the website. I'll check out other things that they have that I maybe can't find in the shop, but should be on the shelf. Then you also have people who are, like you said, you're sending it to your wife. You're sending it to the person, all these different people. So how tricky is it to keep track of users, especially as people are opting out of things, ad blockers … Dana DiTomaso: Oh. Yeah. I mean consent alone for sure. And this is a concern obviously, I would say. American businesses are starting to pick up on this, for sure, but European businesses are obviously far ahead and I think that European listeners, I would say, yeah, you haven't had analytics for a long time and you're kind looking at North America like what's your problem, man? We haven't been able to track things for years. You know? And I think that the consent management for sure, it's going to remove people. It'll have these conversations and they'll say, well, they said no to being tracked, but we want to track them anyway. You can't. Yes, there is modeling in GA4 where if enough people say no and enough people say yes, it will sort of fill in the blanks on what it thinks maybe happened. But I'm not necessarily a big fan of model data. I'd rather go with what's actually observed. And I think too that there's just accepting that you don't have that certain percentage of your data, and ideally your consent tool should show you how many people have said no. I use Cookiebot quite a lot for consent. I really like their tool. Crystal Carter: That's in Wix Studio. Dana DiTomaso: And they'll show me what percentage of people have said no. Yes. I really like Cookiebot. I think that they have the best set of metrics out there, and I think that they tell you what percentage of people said no, and you can be like, here's our report. 60% of people said no. So this is only 40% of our data, but we're going to make decisions in the 40% we're actually able to measure. Right? That's an important point to make when you're presenting a report to say, senior leadership, 'cause they're not going to know the intricacies of consent management and they don't care and they don't need to care. But then yes, also ad blockers, Chrome is making a change right now that should make ad blockers less effective, but it's an arms race and the ad blockers are going to win. So I think this is just temporary. And then, yeah, there's different devices, and this is the thing with GA4 when it says user, a user is a device, unless you have a log in on your site and you are reporting user IDs from that log in to GA4, and this is true of really any analytic system. Matomo, doesn't matter what you're using, you have to report those user IDs and it has to be something non-identifiable. You can't just say their email address in order for it to understand a user across devices. Otherwise the cookie is set at the device level. And if a cookie set it all, maybe they said no, but that's just how it is and it's how it's been for years. So when you're looking at users, you're really it just say devices, honestly. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. I think that's totally valid. 'Cause I'm absolutely somebody who is on my phone looking at a website on my phone and on my Chrome profile and sometimes on my other Chrome profile as well. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Oh. Marketers are the worst. I have eight different Chrome profiles for all the different accounts I have to log into. Right? I am the problem here. I understand that. Or you're talking about being in a store. More than once, I've been in Home Depot, where do I find this? Load up the website, tells you where to go. Great. Going to aisle nine, bin 18, perfect. You know? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: But I didn't buy online. The Home Depot people are probably like. Why? Well, because standing in your store, I just need to know what it is. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Right. Dana DiTomaso: You know? Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. Dana DiTomaso: So I hope Home Depot marketing people, if you're listening, I hope you have a system to filter that out, but like that's a great example of intent. You know? Crystal Carter: Right. Dana DiTomaso: I was never going to buy online. I'm buying in store. How do you deal with that? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Exactly. And I think that maybe we do need to relax, maybe we do need to just chill out a little bit and just. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Well, I don't think it's necessarily, we need to chill out a little bit. I think leadership needs to chill out a little bit. And I think this is where, as marketers, it really comes onto us to do that education piece. And there's always going to be people that you work for who are never going to accept that analytics is fuzzy and blah, blah, blah. They want exact numbers, and you may not be able to change your mind. That's okay. You might want to look for another job, but there are some people who will realize that as you explain to them, this is why things are fuzzy. And so again, but those of my website where I talk about reporting on trends on absolutes. I also talk about how to talk to senior leadership about this. But part of it is really a process. If you've been reporting in exact numbers for years, whether or not those numbers are accurate, that's not where you want to lead with it and say, hey, remember those reports they gave you? They were all lies. Don't start there. It's not a good way to keep your job. Instead, I would say start changing the metrics over slowly. Start removing decimal places. If you're reporting on year over year traffic, does 12.62 versus 12% actually matter? No. Of course not. Crystal Carter: That's a 0.6% increase. Dana... Dana DiTomaso: Oh. Pardon me. It's- Crystal Carter: ... that's a 0.6%. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Which if you round it up is 1%, so hey. Crystal Carter: Basically. Dana DiTomaso: But I mean that is just a rounding error. Right? Just round that number. Instead of 12.62 is 13%. Leave it at that. No one is going to get upset about it. Right? But those are the little changes you can start now. Start including a report that just has, you know, and I have some screenshot examples of this in my website. There's some charts we present that have just bars of percentage amounts of the total as opposed to individual accounts. It's a much easier way to present data or comparing to pie charts. You know, one of my favorite chart types is where I put a pie chart in the middle and then I put a donut around it, and then you compare the composition of the colors and the outer, for example, donut would be sessions by channel. The inner pie would be conversions by channel. Do the slices relatively match up? Yes. No. You know? And there's no numbers on it. We're just looking at whether or not the colors match. And so doing something like that is a really easy way to be able to visually communicate something without making it sound like you're talking over someone's head because nobody likes that. And then also really start to make those slow changes to explain things aren't as accurate as they used to be so this is what we're going to report on instead. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think so. And I think also if we think about conversions as the metric, which it generally ultimately comes down to conversions. Whatever the business is, if it's an attorney, if it's fast fashion, if it's a dog groomer, it will come down eventually to conversions. And I think that where you can say 50% of the conversions came from online, 50% of the conversions came from in-store, or whatever it may be, then I think that that's probably going to be something, a good trend line to follow. Would you agree? Dana DiTomaso: Yep. I would agree for sure. And I think, again, include some caveats with that trend line, but again, also make sure that what you're tracking as a conversion is actually meaningful. You know, for example, if you're using call tracking and you are say a dog groomer to pick on that example, returning phone calls is probably fine 'cause that's going to become a customer as well. If you're a home builder, returning calls, how many times do people order a custom home? You know? Probably not that often. So first time calls may be the way to go. Right? But again, it's not just like you don't want to include telemarketers in that number. You have to actually dial it down and say, here's the number of people who called us who were actually legitimate leads. Right? And so it's where using tools like call tracking, et cetera, are only as good as making sure that the person at the other end, whether it's you working in house and talking to your sales team, or if your agency side and talking to the client, get them to mark off things as good or bad. And I think that's where, you know, yeah, we can see the number of form fills. Were they good form fills? And I think a lot of marketers sort of leave it at the form fill happened and they don't follow through. And what separates an okay marketer from a good marketer is knowing whether or not that follow through happened. Were those leads good? Not just the volume. Crystal Carter: I learned that the hard way. I've told the story a few times. But I remember taking on an account and we got a bunch of signups on the form, more than they'd ever had, and they were like, we didn't notice that. And I was like, what do you mean? And they were like, oh, we didn't notice that. Did you notice that? It's like, oh, I don't know who actually answers those forms. Who actually gets those emails? Dana DiTomaso: Oh. No. Crystal Carter: Like, oh, I think Susan does. Oh. Susan was on vacation and literally my heart sank. Dana DiTomaso: Oh my God. I would, yeah. Crystal Carter: And I learned that the hard way. And this was a few years back. But it was definitely a teachable moment. And then from then on, whenever we started doing anything, I was like, okay, where does this form go? Who's answering that? If the form's not going anywhere, we should take it off. If you don't actually have a newsletter and you have a newsletter sign up, don't put one on there. Dana DiTomaso: That's my favorite is we say to people, hey, how often did you send a newsletter? They're like, oh, we don't. Why do you have this big prominent sign up pop up that comes up on every single page if you're never going to send people a newsletter? Yep. If you somehow convince people to sign up for it, how dare you let them down and then only email you with their Black Friday sale? You know, Black Friday's like the perfect day to find out what email list you've been living on for the past year that you had no idea, for example. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Speaking of newsletters and email lists, good newsletters, where can people find you? I know that you send out lots of fantastic information, actual good information… Where can people find you online to learn more about all of this fantastic stuff? Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. I would say I'm most active on LinkedIn. Although I am on Blue Sky now and using that a bit more, but I would say LinkedIn is still like the place to go. And if you go to KPPlaybook.com/Newsletter, you can sign up for our newsletter, which we send out every other week, and it is, I promise, useful. And if you are listening to this podcast and you would like a discount on any of my courses, use the code WIXSTUDIO to get 20% off any of my courses. Crystal Carter: We love it. Thank you so, so much for joining us, and thank you so, so much for all of that fantastic insight, and we will get all of those links in the show note. So thank you so very much, Dana DiTomaso. Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Make sure to follow Dana on all of her social media platforms, and she has a whole course. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Dana has so many courses and so much great content. So she's got great content on LinkedIn. She's got great content on Kick Point Playbook, so do check out all of that. If you're still confused about GA4, she's the person to help you with that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And yeah, stop being a data accountant and get yourself together. Mordy Oberstein: Oh. And to help you get yourself together with even more analytical nerd stuff is our follow of the week, Bri Anderson, self-described analytical nerd. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Bri's great as well, and she's got some fantastic stuff about GA4 and about getting to grips on that. And yeah, there's some great folks doing some great stuff with analytics. So do follow Bri. Do follow Dana. And yeah, get your data together because it's not easy out here, but you got to make it happen. Mordy Oberstein: So you and the captain can make it happen. By the way, that's a great cereal still. Crystal Carter: Cap'n Crunch? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Thank you for getting the reference. Crystal Carter: I'm a Cheerios person myself. Mordy Oberstein: I like Cheerios. I eat Cheerios almost every day 'cause like got enough fiber, not too much fiber. Let's not get into that. But Cap'n Crunch still holds up for me. It's like a sugar cereal. That and Frosted Flakes still hold up for me. Some other sugar cereals don't. Like ew, that's Fruit Loops- Crystal Carter: Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Mordy Oberstein: Cinnamon Toast Crunch still holds up, but as you get older, some of them, the fruity ones don't for me. Like Fruity Pebbles, Fruit Loops, throw them in the trash. Cocoa Pebbles is fine. Crystal Carter: Man, I'm a granola and yogurt kind of person. I make my own granola. It's very good. Mordy Oberstein: You make your own granola? Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: I never, how did I not know that about you? Crystal Carter: You never asked. Mordy Oberstein: Why would you? Can I ask? I'm supposed to ask like, hey, do you make your own granola? Crystal Carter: I do make my own granola. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. You don't, but there's nothing else about you that would indicate that. Crystal Carter: I do. Mordy Oberstein: Like you don't wear like gemstone jewelry. Crystal Carter: Hey, I blended my own tea yesterday with like multiple dried herbs. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I blended like tea before. I take two different tea flavors in the bag and you mix them together… Crystal Carter: No. I took like… I dried the herbs and then I put them in the thing, and I like did the whole- Mordy Oberstein: You also call them herbs? Crystal Carter: I live in England. My accent is confused. Mordy Oberstein: I thought I, I've known you for a long time at this point, and I'm finding out all these things all at once. Crystal Carter: I'm many layers, many layers. You thought you had all the data, but no. Mordy Oberstein: There's no better way to end the podcast than with that. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/SEO/Learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or on Spotify. Peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Is Google sweet on your website, or does it have a secret grudge? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter get a little nostalgic as they take a quick detour into ‘90s music, reminiscing about Ace of Base and Hanson—Mmmbop! We learn how to shore up the pages that are on the brink between ranking and not ranking, and figure out if it is a topic or intent misalignment or if it has something to do with your topic depth. Minding the SERP gaps by comparing content with competitors, updating internal links, and supporting content. Andy Crestondina of Orbit Media gives recommendations on what to do once websites are established and already have brand awareness. Suggesting ways to diversify and continue to build momentum beyond the SERP. Don't miss these game-changing SEO insights, topped with a generous side of fun, on this spirited edition of SERP’s Up! Back How to tell if Google loves you Is Google sweet on your website, or does it have a secret grudge? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter get a little nostalgic as they take a quick detour into ‘90s music, reminiscing about Ace of Base and Hanson—Mmmbop! We learn how to shore up the pages that are on the brink between ranking and not ranking, and figure out if it is a topic or intent misalignment or if it has something to do with your topic depth. Minding the SERP gaps by comparing content with competitors, updating internal links, and supporting content. Andy Crestondina of Orbit Media gives recommendations on what to do once websites are established and already have brand awareness. Suggesting ways to diversify and continue to build momentum beyond the SERP. Don't miss these game-changing SEO insights, topped with a generous side of fun, on this spirited edition of SERP’s Up! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 104 | October 2,2024 | 56 MIN 00:00 / 56:37 This week’s guests Despina Gavoyannis Despina is a Senior SEO Consultant with 8+ years of experience growing B2B, e-commerce, SaaS, and national brands. She's an optimist at heart, taking time to enjoy life's silver linings each day. Andy Crestondina Andy is the CMO and Co-Founder at Orbit Media Studios. He has been at the forefront of digital marketing innovation for over two decades. With a deep-seated passion for SEO, analytics, and website optimization, Andy is highly regarded as a leading expert in the marketing field. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahalo. Welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights into what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head SEO of brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by she who is always transparent, clear, and crystal. Our own head of communications, Crystal Carter. There's no doubt when it comes to Crystal. Crystal Carter: I get charged up in a full moon. I find water really easily as well. That's another thing. Mordy Oberstein: You have the two pronged stick that finds water? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I'm very reflective in my general demeanor and I like to think that I bring a nice warm glow. Mordy Oberstein: You always know where you stand with Crystal. Crystal Carter: It's true. It's true. Mordy Oberstein: For better or for worse. I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: Mostly for better, I hope. Mordy Oberstein: Only for better. The SERP'S Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our built-in Google Search Console Insights to see just how much Google does love you. As today we're diving into the gray area of the algorithm, how to know the signs of whether or not Google does or doesn't love you. What are the telltale signs that Google is infatuated with your website? What are some of the signs that they maybe are not infatuated with you, and how do all of those reversals you see in algorithm updates factor into this love triangle? HREF's Despina Gavoyannis will join us to share her tips on how to shore up those pages that might be wavering in the rankings. Plus, Orbit Media co-founder, and all around great digital marketer star, Andy Crestodina stops by to chat about what you can do while you're waiting for Google to fall in love with you. So turn up your Ace of Base because today we're showing you the sign of algorithmic love on this the 104th episode of the SERP'S Up Podcast. Full disclosure, I had a moment in time where I actually liked the Ace of Base for five minutes. Crystal Carter: Dude, I totally had that CD. I mean, that introduction definitely opened up my eyes. I think. Mordy Oberstein: What's the other song they had? They have another one, one other song. Crystal Carter: The, All That She Wants. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, right, that one, right. What the hell were we thinking with that crap. Crystal Carter: Dude. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's terrible. Crystal Carter: They've gone a little bit off the rails in recent times, but in 1998 or whatever- Mordy Oberstein: It made sense in the moment. I remember as a kid being like, "Oh, this is great," and an older friend is like, "No, don't say that. It's not good." Crystal Carter: You had to be there, man. You had to be there. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's kind of like Hanson but worse. Hanson I thought was a good... like, Hanson was good. Crystal Carter: MMMBop is a bop. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good song. Crystal Carter: I'm sorry. MMMBop comes on and I am singing every single word. And the breakdown. Mordy Oberstein: There are only three words in MMMBop. What do you mean all words? Crystal Carter: No, I mean there's lots of parts that aren't words like, du dubi dop, ba du bop. Mordy Oberstein: Di dibby dop dop, the du ap. That's the... Crystal Carter: Then there's all of the verses. It's very- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: Oh, come on. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great song. Crystal Carter: You say you can, but you don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Bob Dylan, it is not. Crystal Carter: No, of course not. It's a bop. It's a bop. Mordy Oberstein: It's like a word. Is it a word? Crystal Carter: It's like, the quintessential bop. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, no, it's great. I'm all for the MMMBop, I'm all for the Hanson. They played their own instruments like, win. Crystal Carter: Hey, I mean, all this nineties nostalgia. It was a beautiful life. Whoa, oh, oh, oh. Mordy Oberstein: How do I pivot this into SEO? I'm just not... just whatever. It's not... Not every day to win is a win, and not every loss is a loss. There's a lot to read into it. And sometimes Google demotes a site's rankings, but you may not know that's going to be a real long-term problem. Maybe these are signs of signals, Google's having a real issue with your website. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's just the ebb and flow of the rankings on the SERP these days, although it's always been volatile, but pretty, especially these days. For example, you can have a prolonged slow ebbing of the rankings over time. That to me is usually a very serious issue. For me, that's usually something where Google has a quality issue with your website and it's slowly eroding away at your rankings over time. I know we're used to looking at a quality issue with your website as, oh, algorithm update, goodbye, but sometimes it's not like that. Sometimes you might see a downtrend with the algorithm update and then it slowly ebbs and erodes from there. At the same time, there are signs that maybe Google does like your content, and those could be really important for you to realize what those are because then you can improve upon them and build upon them. For example, one case that I saw back with the March 2024 core update was it was a certain keyword and the only website that was ranking... all of the websites that were ranking were pages that were specifically built to target that keyword, meaning the only topic that those pages dealt with was the topic represented in that keyword. There was this other page though that showed up around position like three, four or five, forgot exactly, and that was about the topic overall, but it dealt with as a subtopic, that one aspect of the page dealt with the keyword. That to me was a signal looking at that page and then how that page ranked and how the website ranked overall where Google's like, you know what? This website is so strong that we're even going to rank you for instances or keywords where the page isn't specifically targeting just that keyword, and even though the only other pages that are ranking are targeting that keyword, we're going to rank you anyway 'cause the content overall is so great that you now have the power to rank... in this case, this website had the power to rank, even though it wasn't particularly targeting that keyword, but just dealt with the topic tangentially. That might be a sign. In this case, it was a sign that the site was really showing favor and love in the eyes of Google, so it's really important, I think, to know what those signals and signs might be. I don't think it's an exact science because sometimes you just don't know. Having a look and seeing what the signs are that Google really does have an issue with your website or that Google doesn't, and really is loving your website. Knowing those signs and signals or trends can really be important guiding what you do for your SEO strategy. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because I think it determines how much risk you take with different topics and whether or not you, as you said, go into the sort of tangential ones, whether you try something that maybe is very long tail and whether or not you... and whether or not you go for some of those head terms. Because if Google is generally into you, then you'll know because you'll have a couple of big ticket, big search volume pieces of content, and if you're able to give them something that's similar to some of your rock star pieces of content, then they're going to come back for more, and so if you can prove that users appreciate your content and that you have a good experience for users who come to the website, things aren't glitchy, that it all works well, that it's superfast loading, that kind of thing, then yeah, Google's probably going to send you some more traffic because I think what people forget is that Google's into you because users are into you. What's it called? Danny Sullivan was talking about the user signals. We have a podcast on user signals and stuff previously, but he said that people were like, oh, Google uses user signals. He's like, we've always said that. We've always paid attention to that. Not new. Mordy Oberstein: Not new. Old. Crystal Carter: Old, not new. And it's not a question of just doing it for Google, which I think Google has been trying to get into people's brains for the last couple of years. It's not just about doing it for Google, it's also about doing it for users, and then Google will see that works and then they will send their users to you. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you were talking about profiling the types of keywords that you're ranking for. That's a huge thing, by the way, to take a look at because you should really be breaking down, not just, am I ranking? Am I not ranking? That's way too broad. Am I ranking or does Google love me? Is too broad of a question. You should really be looking at where does Google rank you? Where do they not rank you? Meaning where do they love me? Where do they not love me? How do they understand me? Because being understood is really what it means to be loved, but really looking at what folders or what types of keywords or topics am I ranking for, and those sort of things are really important to understand so that either you can double down on that and build on that or say, you know what? Or cut off what's not working. It's like a bad limb on a tree. It's dying. Just cut that off. Just happened to me with a tree. Crystal Carter: Because like any relationship, there's going to be things that are annoying. Mordy, you've been married for a while, I've been married for a while. You're in a long-term relationship, there's things that are annoying about yourself and about your partner and Google will know what things they don't like about your website, but they'll know the things that they do like about your website and just if you're in a relationship and you know that maybe they don't like when you leave your shoes in the doorway or maybe they don't like it when you, I don't know, play your music really loud or something like that. If you're trying to carry favor with someone, you wouldn't do the things that you know irritate them. You would do the things that they like. So if you know that they like it when you make that particular dinner for them, you know that they really love that lasagna that you make, give them more lasagna. That's the thing. So you look at your keywords and you're like, what are the things that they like, give them more of that. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes it's very clear that they don't like that. You just don't rank for that no matter what you do and how many links you've built from high DA sites, you're not ranking for that. But sometimes it's a little bit tricky. For example, sometimes you could see with every algorithm update official and unofficial, you get thrown into the volatility fire. That's probably a sign that you might be okay in the end, you might not be okay in the end, but Google's clearly looking around at other partners. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right, right, right. I had a client and they used to have a lot of competitors, so they'd have loads of competitors for particular keywords, and it was really spicy. Basically for this particular SERP, there was up and down, who was in one, who was in three, and the top five would switch around a lot depending on who had updated what most recently and stuff. In those situations, you really need to give Google your attention in order to make sure that you're able to stay on the side of having that SERP visibility, and that can include, it's sort of a quid pro quo. You want traffic, you have to give them more opportunities to give you traffic. It's one of the reasons why I'm such a big fan of schema markup and structured data because it gives you more opportunities to get on the SERP because you have more opportunities to get more rich features, for instance. And if your competitors are not optimized in that way, then they have fewer opportunities to get on there. It's another reason why I'm a big fan of using multimedia because that also gives you more opportunities to get in there. It also gives Google more opportunity to show you to different folks, and it helps them to understand your content better. So if you want them to help you, you also have to help them, but there's that saying, what is it? "The Lord helps those who help themselves," and you need to help yourself to let them help you. And I'm not saying that Google's Lord or whatever, but I think that it's worth thinking about it in that way anyway. So yeah, multimedia is something that can help you. Structured data is something that can help you. Obviously having relevant, well-written, well-researched and well-known, as in you're distributing it to people who need to know about it. You're getting people enthused about it. The content that's getting people hyped up is really useful as well because Google can take those signals and go, oh, okay, this sample of people liked it. Then we can show it to other samples of people. The other thing about that kind of thing is today, so historically speaking, when we think about content distribution, we think about it from a sort of opportunities for clicks and things like that, but in today's space where Google is not just a publisher, but Google also is a web browser and Google's also a phone manufacturer and Google is also, they have data on my wallet. I use Google Wallet all the time. They've got all of that data. They store my phone, my phone photos and all that sort of stuff. Google also, when you're sending signals out, when you're sending your content out on social, for instance, you're also giving them signals for which users to send your content to. I don't have the exact technical links between all of the content that they store and all of the data that they store, but they're going to be getting signals from, even if it's a small amount. Mordy Oberstein: No, that's the semantic analysis, that's the semantic web. It's like showing how it's all connected and making those links. Crystal Carter: Right. And like the For You feed essentially from Google that comes up... the Discover page, sorry, that shows up. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. For you is Twitter. Crystal Carter: And also on TikTok as well, but it's basically, it's a similar kind of thing. So,- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure. Crystal Carter: ... if I- Mordy Oberstein: They know what I want. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And so- Mordy Oberstein: They know what I want. Yankees and SEO. Crystal Carter: So for instance, if you send content to a few people and then they're like, okay, this kind of person likes this content, that gives more opportunity to filter down those bespoke queries, which are going to get more and more bespoke as we get into a more AI assisted search space. So I think that we need to show them that we care about our content before we expect them to care about our content. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And the last thing I want to say, I agree with that a billion percent. The last thing I want to say before we get into Despina is, I'm not always big on rank tracking. I think sometimes it could be a little bit of a... you run into the problem of being a little bit of vanity or a little bit too micro-analytic. But looking at rank tracking patterns over time is a great way to get an understanding of how much Google is into you and how Google is not into you, where they're into you and where they're not into you. So if you are using a rank tracking tool, I would highly recommend you go back and look at the rank tracking trends over an extended period of time to take a look at volatility within your keywords and break them down into subcategories or tags, as they're traditionally referred to in SEO tools and to really get an understanding of where Google is into you, where they're not into you, and how in into they are. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think you need to think about the variables of content creation and all of that sort of stuff. One of the things that you also want to think about is, let's say you're tracking this stuff and you're seeing the patterns and you're seeing the way that Google's looking at the way your content is created, etc. One of the things you might also want to think about is, is it my domain or is it the content? Right? So sometimes if you serve the content on a different domain or if you serve similar content in a different platform, and let's say it goes off, so let's say you've been writing your blog, writing your blog, and maybe you're not getting that much traffic, but let's say you do a guest post on a different blog and that gets loads of traffic and you've taken the same approach that you always do, that's a really positive signal, that's a really positive signal that if you keep going in the way that you're going, that you'll eventually get the traffic. It doesn't mean that you'll get it right that second, but it means that the content itself is good, and that means that the technical things that you do might need to change, but the content itself is solid. And you see this on social a lot where you'll have some creator will do a video or something and then some bigger platform like Lab Bible or something will share it on there and that will go really big. And if it goes off on there, you're like, okay, the content is good. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That's a great point. It's such a good point. Crystal Carter: Distribution, whichever, might be the technical, it might be whatever that might need to change, but the content itself is good. And so I think it's important to do that not just for link building, but also to understand what it is that you need to tweak in order for Google to- Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Yeah, is it your authority? Is it the content, is it the technical aspect of it? All that diagnosing where the problem is? That's a great point. Speaking of shoring up that content and finding out what you should be doing and how to go about doing it, we spoke to HREF's Despina Gavoyannis about how to shore up a page or pages that seemed to be wavering between ranking and not ranking. Here's what she had to say. Despina Gavoyannis: So like anything with SEO, it depends on your situation, like what you're seeing and what kind of positions your page is wavering between, because I've seen pages, they just don't stick in the SERPs at all like your targeted keyword, but then in the top 100 they'll show up sometimes and then just drop out of the top 100. So if you're seeing that sort of thing, that's a really big kind of flickering. And to me that is a hundred percent about topic alignment and intent alignment. It means you're targeting the right keyword, sure, but you're not really matching your content with what Google and people expect to see. So when you fix that up, the intent misalignment there. Generally what you'll see is that the page will stick in the SERPs. Now if you wanted to rank higher and stick higher, so for example, it'll land somewhere generally in the top 50 results is what I see, maybe even in the top 30. But then you want to get it ranking and if what you are seeing is that it's wavering between say the bottom of page one and page two, so you can't quite crack position 10 and stay there or higher. So in that case, it could be a topic or an intent misalignment. It could also be a topic depth thing. Maybe you don't have as many sections in your content that cover the subtopics that are relevant to the keyword, and your competitors might be doing a better job of that. So looking at their content and any kind of gaps in terms of the content topic depth perspective. Also looking at any gaps in your core fundamentals of SEO, things like, on-page and links. A lot of SEO depends on doing these small things that on their own don't move the needle much or even at all, but in combination can have a big impact. So for example, if your competitors have much more solid on-page optimization than what you do, that's a big gap. So they're doing it and they're doing a lot of little things that can add up and have a big impact in total. Whereas if you are not doing any of it or very little of it, then that creates a huge gap right there and it's a pretty easy gap to fix. So making sure that you've got your keywords in your headings, you've got keywords in your URLs, that you've got image alt texts and things like that, and providing a great user experience with the page itself, make sure that's all sorted. Also with links, don't look at it just from your whole website. Get links to the individual page and close those gaps. This includes internal links. So if you're covering the topic in other articles on your website, make sure you are internally linking to the page you're trying to support. And also I suppose if you can't internally link because you don't have enough content or any kind of mentions about the topic, then in that case you need to create supporting content so that it works as a hub or a bit of a content cluster that can support each other. And that helps in terms of closing topical gaps across your whole website, not just within one article. And finally, if you've tried all these things, and you're still not seeing much movement. Evaluate the recency of your content. Is the advice relevant to people right now? Even if you add new sections and technically the date on your content might be written in this year, the advice you're giving might still be outdated or not providing great user experience or things like that. So look at, is it relevant to people right now? Is it providing the best experience to people right now? Are your competitors potentially doing a better job there? And if you're not sure, if you can't be unbiased about it, you can use a website like user testing and get real people's feedback, get them to compare your competitor's content to yours and to give you their thoughts on which one they think does a better job of answering a particular question or for a specific keyword. It helps you overcome biases in your own thinking of what's working and whether your content is actually good compared to competitors or not. So those are a few of the things that I think can help. In summary: check your intent misalignment, cover any topical gaps, cover any really basic SEO gaps like, on-page and links. Those have been fundamentals for ages for a reason. Make sure that you're doing internal linking and topical gaps are covered across your whole website. And then also check the recency in user experience of the content for people searching today. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Despina. Look for Despina out on social media. Link to her profile is in the show notes. Yeah, it comes back to we're talking diagnosing. Diagnosing what the problem is, what you should be doing, have a methodical approach. Also running through the options like she's talking about. You don't always know exactly what it is. You have to roll through them and throw the kitchen sink at it in a way. So diagnose, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and also I think she was talking about testing as well. So one of the things she mentioned was user testing. So getting people to look at it and why do you think this content is better? Or why do you think this content is good? Why do you think this content is struggling or whatever? And I think she's totally right because you see this a lot. And Glenn Gabe is a big advocate of user testing for websites and particularly for user journeys because sometimes if you are in it all the time, you don't know how difficult it is to find the things that people need to find. Or maybe you do know how difficult it is, but you've gotten so used to having to navigate it in the way that you do that you're not conscious of it. So I think that getting someone with a fresh set of eyes can be really, really useful, even if, I think she mentioned that it can be a bit painful sometimes. You might have to eat a little bit of humble pie, but it is really important to do and really, really valuable both for publishers who are doing it directly and also for agency folks who are managing clients. Mordy Oberstein: And humble pie is fine because pie is pie. Pie is good. Crystal Carter: I love pie. I'm a big fan of like- Mordy Oberstein: Pie is the best- Crystal Carter: I do love Pie. Mordy Oberstein: It's the best dessert. I'm sorry, hands down, it's pie. Crystal Carter: I also like a savory pie, like- Mordy Oberstein: Like shepherd's pie? Crystal Carter: Shepherd's pie, cottage pie, chicken pot pie. Mordy Oberstein: Chicken pot pie is delicious. Oh, love chicken pot pie. Crystal Carter: Right. In England there's a lot of savory pies. It's really common. Also in America, you get chicken pot pie. Chicken pot pie is the classic one. I don't eat meat anymore, but when I did, I was all about the chicken pot pie. Mordy Oberstein: Tofu pot pie. Crystal Carter: Which one? Mordy Oberstein: Tofu pot pie. Crystal Carter: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. There are lots of delicious, lots of delicious veggie pies that I'm a big fan of. So yeah, pies are good. I just generally like things that are pastry with yummy stuff in the middle of it. Mordy Oberstein: It's the best. It's literally the best. I don't have access to a lot of pie where I live, which means we don't live in a perfect world and while we're not living in a perfect world and you're sorting out your love or Google's love for you, to make sure your content is bringing in the traffic and the conversions and yada yada yada that you want, while that's all being worked out, you might want to try other marketing activities to drive that awareness, traffic, leads, and conversions instead. It's a crazy idea. Which is why we're going down a rabbit hole in a little segment we call, from the top of the SERP, as in this case, we're looking at not what gets you to the top of page one, but what other activities can get you traffic while you work your way there. And to help us, we have special guest, the co-founder of Orbit Media, Andy Crestodina. Andy, welcome to the SERPs Up Podcast. Andy Crestondina: I am glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks for sticking with us by the way, because the audience doesn't know this. I've known your name for many, many years, but I couldn't get it out of my mouth the right way. Andy Crestondina: I stumbled on it myself. No trouble at all. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you with us today. Andy Crestondina: Yeah, thanks for having me, Crystal. I'm glad. This will be fun. I've been looking forward to this. I'm psyched. Mordy Oberstein: So I know it's a little bit like heresy to the SEO folk listening to this. If you're not an SEO folk, this makes obvious logical sense. But putting all of your eggs in one algorithmic basket, whether you're still trying to get Google to love you and whatnot, or in general, Google does love you now, they might not love you tomorrow. What do you recommend sites do? Let's say there are an established website, they have traffic, they have some brand awareness. What do you recommend they do to really increase that, diversify their channels and get some momentum beyond the SERP? Andy Crestondina: I love this question. I think that it's important for SEOs to consider this because there is such a thing as topic channel fit, and there are lots of articles and web pages and service we offer different things that have no keyword opportunity. Only about half of the articles that I write are actually relevant for search. And that's fine. I'm not a keyword first marketer. I'm trying to connect a piece of content to a target audience. So my first thought is, I'm making this thing, is there a keyword opportunity here? If no, no problem, I can use other channels. Everything can be promoted in email and social, through influencers, and other ways. So it's really important to keep that in mind. And I sleep well at night knowing that I am not totally beholden to Google for all of my traffic and that I can be kind of a dual threat marketer. There's more to life than search and many things that we all make really are not relevant for that channel whatsoever. Crystal Carter: I think that's a really interesting way to think about it because I've definitely seen people go, oh, well, we shouldn't write this blog because it doesn't have a good search volume. We shouldn't write this piece of content because no one's going to find it on Google or the search volume's low or that sort of thing. And I think it's really interesting that you're like, this is a thing that people need to hear. We can get it to them in a different way. If it's not for search, it can go another way. Is there a way that you sort of figure out which is the best channel for a piece of content that you think people need to hear? Andy Crestondina: For sure. The job of the search marketer is to basically meet expectations. The searcher has an information need and your job is satisfy that information need. The social media marketer, the job is to be a little bit unexpected. See how that's actually the opposite channel? So there are lots of topics where social is the proper channel. Let's say you want to put out a counter-narrative perspective. No one's looking for counter-narratives, they're looking for confirmation or they're looking for an answer. And thought leadership. Another way to say that, op-ed content, anything that is a perspective where you're trying to start a conversation or you're saying something that's maybe contrarian to the conventional wisdom. That stuff crushes social media. It's great in social, it starts big conversations, right? Say something interesting. So search, if your content meets expectations, search. If your content is a bit unexpected, social. And by the way, these channels, understanding the difference between social and search, it's so fascinating. In search there's actually a ceiling to the amount of demand in the market. There's only X number of people searching for a topic each day, but social media, there is no limit. I have seen things... If you've never seen the analytics for a mini viral event, you're missing out. It is breathtaking how many people are on the internet. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, totally true. Andy Crestondina: And if you're exhausted, just long form content, long text pieces, Hey, guess what? The short, punchy, pithy thing, the highly visual thing, the collaboration with an influencer thing, social's perfect. So you don't have enough in your content mix, and Mordy, thanks for saying diversification because that's the perfect perspective. If you are not first thinking of the topic, what does my audience need? What's the most interesting thing I can do today? And then asking what is the proper channel for promoting this thing? The answer is not always search. Mordy Oberstein: So when you're thinking of diversifying those channels, okay, I am not going to write for search. Where do you start? What are you looking at? Is there like, okay, I want to do something on social. Does the channel drive the strategy itself or the type of content drive the strategy, trying to build a brand awareness? What's driving the overall strategy for you? Andy Crestondina: Well, I am a fifteen-year content strategist, and I often think to myself, this is something new, interesting, helpful, valuable to me, working for me, I should share this with the world. Next question. Is this something that could work in content marketing or maybe I'm just make this as a sales enablement piece. By the way, there's bottom of funnel content that you can share with prospects that is 100X the value of that new weird top of funnel, high search volume phrase. Make something for your prospects first. I'd say let's all prioritize the bottom of the funnel. And then whatever that thing is, whatever you're making, does it relate to other pieces of content? Is there already a conversation happening about this? Is this part of a trend? Is this content evergreen? What is the proper format? Should this be a video or long form text or is it an infographic thing here? Give you an example. Two weeks ago, I've always been thinking about this, you know how every chart in marketing is like a log scale curve. There are no straight lines. The top performers are... search especially, top performer gets most of the clicks. Number two gets half as many. Number three gets a third as many. That mathematical distribution is called the Zipfian distribution. Okay, you've never heard of that? No one's heard of that. I get it. But actually it's super interesting that that Zipfian distribution applies across topics and formats and channels. Click-through rate by search position, and a tiny percentage of things go viral, and a tiny percentage of social accounts gets most of the engagement. And a tiny percentage YouTube videos get most of the views. That's a really interesting way to think about marketing and it's valuable because you can focus on trying to make top performers and avoid making the medium quality stuff , but there's a practical takeaway. Okay, you get the idea. I'm making this article, right? I want to do this. I want to show the charts. I want people to see the alignment between this math thing and their marketing, and I want to make strategic recommendations based on that. Focus on the 10X things. No keyword opportunity at all. No one is searching for log scale pattern- Crystal Carter: Zipfian. Andy Crestondina: ... marketing. Yeah, George Zipf. So no problem. I'm making it anyway. I feel strongly about this. I think the world needs the article. It's a failure of the internet that this article doesn't exist. That's how passionate I am about creating it. Who has all the data? Pete Caputa from Databox. Let's talk to Pete. Great, Pete and I have a call. He shares a bunch of data. I overlay my little chart thing on it. He starts a conversation on LinkedIn. I jump in, I write the article, I publish on LinkedIn, he jumps in. It got huge results. Nothing to do with search. What did I do? I found something that was visual. I collaborated with a subject matter expert. I didn't hesitate to write the cool, weird, fun headline with no keywords in it. It's liberating, by the way, to not have to worry about keywords sometimes, right? In search, I'm all in or I'm all out. If that thing's keyword relevant, I'm totally focused on making something that is the best page on the internet for that topic. But if it's just an unusual thing, a weird thing, a visual thing, a surprising thing. It's kind of like working with, if you've ever worked with an innovator or an inventor or someone who makes new things, no one's looking for new things. It doesn't exist yet. Those people should still start those companies. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Andy Crestondina: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I think it's like, if you were cooking for, I don't know, 500 people, if you were cooking for, I don't know, the family reunion or something like that, you're not going to do an artisanal ceviche or something with heirloom tomatoes from here, there and there. You're going to do the macaroni and cheese. You know that the macaroni and cheese is going to get the most people and they're going to enjoy it and they're going to be happy. Whereas, I don't know, if it's some special dinner for your anniversary or whatever, and it's a special person and you know that they'll appreciate that you've spent all of this time, but it's a different audience. You're still cooking, you're still making whatever you're making, but it's a different kind of situation and they'll appreciate it more. And both audiences will appreciate that you've taken the care to give them the right thing, in the right space. Mordy Oberstein: I love that. Crystal Carter: ... really important. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great example. Andy Crestondina: Yep. Mac and cheese, that's the highest search volume key phrase. And my daughter loves it. But the heirloom tomato, like the fancy Caprese salad that people weren't expecting, like, whoa, dude, pine nuts. Wait a minute, that's a different... you get it, right? Crystal Carter: Right. Andy Crestondina: So, it's really kind of a boring content strategy both for your readers to consume and for you to create if you think that everything's got to be a keyword. Come on. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, a thousand percent. Crystal Carter: And I think also, so there's a couple of things that I come for that. So people who have just discovered you on our podcast might not know that you are also speaking from the point of having a massive social media following. So I think that that's something that's worth thinking about as well. If you're not following Andy on LinkedIn, you should do that because it's absolutely worth doing. And all the other channels as well- Andy Crestondina: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Link in the show notes. Crystal Carter: So I think that that's something that's really important to think about as well, is that you have spent time cultivating an audience that you know is interested in the thing that you found really fascinating this week. The thing that you found really fascinating today or whatever it may be. And I think that in order to do some of the things that you're talking about in order to speak to some of that more creative, more out-of-the-box content, do you think that it's worth building that community first before you start doing that? Or do you think the two things go together? Andy Crestondina: I'm not sure if... community building and in some ways search rankings, these are not... they're more like outcomes than they are a strategy in a way. That's what happens if you did everything else well. So what did I do on LinkedIn? I wrote an article every two weeks for 12 years. I never write an article without collaborating with a subject matter expert or influencer. I made sure that my articles were highly visual. I promoted those things in many places as well as on LinkedIn. I used LinkedIn for all kinds of other activities, for research and collaborating and connecting with people. I started a LinkedIn newsletter, which is my number one tip for B2B marketers today, started a LinkedIn newsletter. Crystal Carter: It's fantastic. I was talking to Andy about this at MozCon. It really is a masterclass. It's fantastic. Subscribe to Digital Marketing Tips on LinkedIn. Andy Crestondina: Give it a boring name like Digital Marketing Tips. Actually, this is common across channels. Specificity correlates with engagement, conversion, search rankings. I think that a lot of things, a lot of... one of the common mistakes that marketers make is just writing sort of vague headlines and subheads. So Digital Marketing Tips. I've seen people launch LinkedIn newsletters that's like, What's in Brian's Brain? What would I get if... no, I'm not. You can subscribe to a LinkedIn newsletter with one tap of your finger that explains the growth. But why would someone tap? Who's Brian? I don't get... there's no specificity. Be specific about the benefits, right? It's like a call to action in anything. Tell them what they're going to get if they do it. But yeah, LinkedIn newsletters, you can repurpose old content. It's going to reach a much larger audience. It's a lot of tableau funnel stuff, but it's great for brand. Mordy Oberstein: This is SERP's Up Podcast, we ask the hard questions. I don't think I've ever asked a hard question in this podcast before, but this is the first time. If we're saying, okay, wait a second, be careful with the whole Google thing. You're beholden to the algorithm. Who knows what'll happen? Is it the same thing to play devil's advocate on social media? Like, look what happened with X. Andy Crestondina: Excellent point. No social and search are algorithm marketing. And no one really uses that term, but that's exactly what you're doing if you're marketing in those. And those marketers have a bit of anxiety all the time anyway. Oh, what will I do if I... It's like LinkedIn, I've never done it. But some people on LinkedIn, they make a post promoting an article, then they put the article link in the first comment. Oh, because LinkedIn doesn't like if you have a thing that sends people... Who cares? Mordy Oberstein: I'll tell you on that, someone once said, I'm... because I would play around with doing this thing, what worked, what didn't work? And then someone said, "I hate when people put the link in the comment. You never find the damn thing." I'm like, "You know what? I don't care about the algorithm anymore. People who are reading what I'm writing are annoyed by it, then I'm not going to do that." Andy Crestondina: People first, no matter what channel you're in. But then, yeah, I mean a diversified marketing strategy should have more than search and social because you will be forever beholden to those algorithms and they will change. You don't own your LinkedIn newsletter subscribers or your followers or your search rankings. Email, live events, where Crystal and I first met. Webinars, podcasts, we're doing right now. These are all where word of mouth crushes it. They're relationship based. They cause greater loyalty. There are higher touch formats. But now I have to say that Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube and our listeners know this, but those should be in the mix. I'm just saying those shouldn't be the only things in the mix. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. And I think also platforms come and go. TikTok, there's a lot going on there at the moment, but people remember, gosh, I can't even remember the name of it, the audio one, Clubhouse, everyone was crazy for Clubhouse for about 20 minutes. Mordy Oberstein: Blast from the COVID past. Crystal Carter: Right. And there were people everywhere. I'm doing that Clubhouse, and then it was really blowing up and people were desperate to get invitations and stuff like that. But again, not putting everything in one basket, it's kind of like a ghost town now. Mordy Oberstein: It’s still there. Come on. Andy Crestondina: I remember, I guess I'm old, but Google+. Crystal Carter: Right. Yeah, I was on Google+. Andy Crestondina: There were a lot of people who invested time to build a network, and so yeah, the people who invested in email, they aren't disrupted. You're just prone to disruption. Think of it this way, if you're doing algorithm marketing, big tech sits between you and your audience. Email marketing, webinars, podcasts, live events… Mordy Oberstein: Resources. You have to sign up and download the thing. Submit your email. Andy Crestondina: Yeah. Yeah. Gated content. That's disintermediation. You're taking big tech out from in the middle of between you and your audience. I've always thought of email as just a disintermediation. So as soon as that person who lands from search and loved with the thing and shared their address. You got permission to talk to them directly, that is special. And that means you are not forever beholden to the algorithm. You've diversified your traffic sources. I think also algorithm marketers, they get very focused on top of funnel metrics. It's really hard not to obsess over some of these numbers, even if the number has a very low correlation with real business impact. Crystal Carter: I've had this before, so I've worked with clients before and I've done the SEO, we did the audit, we did the updates, we did the thing, we did the blah, and we looked and they're like, "But our traffic went down." I was like, "Yeah, but you had traffic two pages that were trash. They were trash pages. They meant nothing to what you were doing. So yes, the traffic did go down, but your conversions went up. That means that we're more specific. That means that we're more targeted. That means that we are getting to the right people instead of just some random people." And I've had it where I had ads that we were running, for instance, and we were getting tons of traffic in the middle of the night, but none of the people who were looking at the website between midnight and 3:00 A.M. were buying anything. So I turned off all the ads for the looky-loos, and we concentrated it for all the daytime people, and then suddenly we got more conversions. And it's not just about traffic. It's not just about those top of funnel metrics as you're saying, it's about being smart about what you're doing. Mordy Oberstein: Why I hate rank tracking on the SEO side. Yes, you rank number two, one, whatever. Okay, that's nice. Andy Crestondina: I once did a piece, it had no conversion opportunities or keyword opportunities, but I made the case that there's an inverse relationship between the visibility of a metric and its importance. The most important things in your business: net promoter score, net margins, revenue, these things you need an expert to help you create, even to find the metric. Net promoter score is very hard to measure, it takes a big effort. The most visible things in your marketing: number of followers, your rankings for a keyword, have very low correlation with business outcomes. So all the way from the top to bottom, I had this list of 37 metrics and I purposely ordered them in a way where you could sort of see the more visible the metric, the lower the business impact, the less visible the metric, the higher the business impact. It's strangely true. These platforms want us to obsess over them. Social media has gamified engagement and followings, that's why they made the... it's the availability heuristic. We pay attention to things we can see. Those big numbers, even LinkedIn now, remember they used to be like 500+. They show followings. They've gamified engagement and it helps them a lot, but it gets marketers distracted. Mordy Oberstein: LinkedIn as a side note, it's been interesting when the whole X thing was happening, I feel like they boosted engagement on purpose because they knew, okay, people were flocking over from X, let's get them hooked. Whereas I felt like that's why Threads failed or I don't want to say failed, I don't think that Threads caught on the way that it should have because when people were moving from X to Threads, the engagement was garbage, they'd be like, "Ah, what am I doing here?" Which is funny because I think it's an important point to realize that when you're on these platforms, you're right, they are gaming you and they are playing with you a little bit and it's distracting. Andy Crestondina: It is, and junior marketers and less informed executives alike pay a lot of attention to those things. It's also sort of true in analytics because if you only click on the high level report in analytics, you see top line numbers. To really get any, and I strongly believe this, you are using GA4 wrong if you don't add another dimension or drill down to a certain audience. Oh, my search rankings are down. To which pages? From which phrases? Visitors who have what kind of intent? And Crystal, we've all, anybody who's done this for half an hour will know, sure, there's tons of URLs that will attract a ton of visibility with a 0%. They don't see a single other page, they don't subscribe. They don't engage with the offers. So those are vanity. We've all heard the term, vanity metrics, so that's part of it. Don't put all your eggs in one algorithmic basket, Mordy love how you said that. And then don't put all your focus on a single metric. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. I think it's really important, and I think it's really important to keep track and to understand what actual metrics matter to your business. So I had a client once who was really concerned about brochure downloads, and I was like, why? They were really into these brochure download things. No matter what I did. In the end, we parted ways because no matter what I did, we didn't get the brochure downloads. I was like, nobody's going to download your brochure, which is the same thing that the website says. And they were like, "We needed the brochure." I was like, there are other things we can do. We can do a webinar, we could do something else, and it just wouldn't line up. But I think that it is really important for people to be conscious of those data points and maybe not so distracted by the shiny things, by all of the followers, by the things. There was a company I was talking to, or it was a talk I was at, and he was someone who worked with big influencers, people like Ronaldo, the football player, and various different things like big sports teams and stuff. And Ronaldo literally had a thing where he went viral wearing their product and they got tons of views on this video and they got tons of traffic to the site, but they got hardly any sales. Then, and this goes back to your point of the things that aren't visible or the things that really make the difference. They did a postmortem and they figured out that they needed to sort out their funnel so that when these kinds of viral things happened, they were able to actually monetize the funnel so that they were ready for it. So the next time there was a big sports player who was seen with one of these things, they were able to actually monetize it and it wasn't even as big as the first spike, but they were able to get a lot more revenue out of the instance because they spent the time doing the boring... Mordy Oberstein: That's so funny. I feel like that's one of those things where brand and performance people always silo those things separately, but they're not separate. There's just marketing and there's just awareness and there's just revenue and conversions. It's all one. It's a Neil Young song. They all sound the same because it's all one song. It all has to work together. So yeah, you could have that viral moment, but if they can't get through the funnel to buy the actual thing. They're like, great. Andy Crestondina: Yeah. So if you carry that thinking through and you conclude like, Hey, I need to fix the mousetrap before I make cheese. So here's a way to use the analytics, go look at analytics and figure out which of your landing pages converts visitors into subscribers at the highest rate of all in your content marketing. And that's that same Zipfian thing again, right? I have pages where 3% of visitors who land subscribe. I have pages where 0.003% of visitors who land subscribe. This is zero rounded up to zero in GA4. Now that I know that, I know which articles to optimize better for search, which articles to keep in heavy social media rotation, which articles to put back on my home page or to link to from my email signature or to put back on the top of the blog. Once you know where your best mousetraps are, now go make the cheese. This is the problem with SEOs right, they're all cheese and no mousetrap. You're not going to drive results. Mordy Oberstein: I don't think there's a better phrase to end this interview with than it's all cheese and no mousetraps when it comes to SEO. Andy, where can people find you? Andy Crestondina: Crystal mentioned LinkedIn. I'm of course very active there. Orbitmedia.com is where I write one article every two weeks. That's been my frequency forever. I will never send more than one email every two weeks if you sign up there. I don't know, YouTube. I wrote a book, it's on Amazon. You can find me at conferences, that's where Crystal and I hang out, so I'm easy to reach. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Well, thanks for joining us and I guess we'll see you out there at the next conference. Andy Crestondina: Thanks, Marty. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, make sure you follow Andy on social media. He is absolutely fabulous, almost as fabulous or maybe the opposite way around, maybe this person is almost as fabulous as Andy is Barry Schwartz, which means that it's... is it really fair to compare Andy and Barry. I feel like it's two different things all together. Crystal Carter: Hey, there's plenty of room in the SEO universe for everyone to shine. Mordy Oberstein: Mount Rushmore, only four people. Who do you put on top? Crystal Carter: Oh no, we don't put anything on Mount Rushmore. Leave that mountain alone. Mordy Oberstein: Who's like the Mount Rushmore of Yankees greats? It's always a big argument. Crystal Carter: Honestly, I think leave the mountain alone. My personal opinion is like, let the mountain be a mountain. It doesn't need a face on it. Mordy Oberstein: It doesn't need to be an artwork. You know what's artwork? The way Barry covers the SEO news, which means it's time for this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, two articles for you from Barry Schwartz and from SE Roundtable or from Barry on SE Roundtable. They're not from two different people, Barry is SE Roundtable. First up, this comes from September 27th. Spike in remove Google Reviews on September 17th. A lot of sevens in there, on September 27th Barry was reporting about a review removal spike on the 17th. Lucky number seven, I guess. Anyway, this comes from a little bit of a consensus across the local SEO space. Tim Colling posted this in local search forums. He basically asked like, Hey, seems like there's a spike in the number of legitimate favorable reviews inside of Google business profiles. Then again, Michel van Luijtelaar, saw the same sort of thing. Claudia Tomina jumped in the conversation and saw, yeah, there seems to be a bigger spike in September with more deleted reviews. So if you are in the local space, or if you are yourself a local business and you're seeing, hey, some of those great reviews are gone, you're not alone, doesn't solve the problem, but you're not alone. Also from Barry and also from SE Roundtable, but not from September 27th but from September 26th, Google Search Ranking Movement Heated, Volatility Continues 9/25. There's so many dates, so many dates this week Barry. Okay. Basically in a nutshell, the SEO weather tools are still bonkers, still reporting an incredible amount of rank volatility. I think we're approaching at least on the Semrush Sensor. By the time you listen to this and the rank volatility on the Semrush Sensor is still high or very high, you are looking at the longest period of elevated rank volatility in history, or in the history of tracking these things the way that we do. But it sounds better to say in history. But again, all of the tools are kind of bonkers and off the rails. Some of them have reset a little bit and they're showing less volatility the way these things work, there's no such thing as high or low rank volatility, there's just relative high or relative low volatility. Think of the weather itself. If the normal was a million degrees Fahrenheit like we were living on the sun, if it was a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside, wow, that's a pretty cool day. So it's all relative. It does mean, by the way, you have to be looking at what's happening in your rankings and your traffic and yada yada, yada, go Barry, yada, yada yada. There have been reports from folks like Glenn Gabe, I've seen this myself, where a lot of the rewards in the August 2024 update have been reversed. Maybe there have been reversed back since, who knows by the time you listening to this? Who doesn't love a good reversal? Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. Barry, the Picasso of SEO News. Crystal Carter: What? Are you saying he's all over the place. Is that what you mean? Mordy Oberstein: I didn't call him Jackson Pollock or anything. Can you imagine? You ever seen the movie Pollock where it was Ed Harris plays Jackson Pollock and it goes through the whole thing and like, wow, imagine that's how Barry wrote articles, on the floor smoking cigarettes. Crystal Carter: No, I could not imagine Barry doing that, ever. Just not a thing. Mordy Oberstein: Someone should make a meme of that. Instead of Ed Harris in the movie it's Barry's face. Love that. That's a good idea. Someone should do that. Anyway, you know who else is a master of painting the fine arts of SEO? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Darth Autocrat, Lyndon NA. Darth is a... first of all, he's brilliant, but we also don't know who he really is, so it's an like an air of mystery. Crystal Carter: He's mysterious. Like a man of mystery, and yeah, he's got this fantastic collection of Threads talking about technical SEO and talking about integrating content and talking about the way you should think about content in a really nuanced way. If you follow him, he is got a really, really great perspective on all of this stuff, and it's really, really nuanced, and it doesn't just stick to standard SEO practices, but he doesn't stay just in the SEO lane. He goes into a lane that includes thinking about the business objectives, thinking about what actually moves the needle for actual businesses, and he's somebody who works with clients and who does a lot of research as well. So honestly, a great follow Mordy Oberstein: Super conceptual, really gives you frameworks that you can operate out of. I used have a standing bet with him. I used to do SEO chat. It was like a Twitter chat that I no longer do. If he could answer a question in one tweet, I gave him 20 bucks. Crystal Carter: Everything is a thread, but they're delightful. Mordy Oberstein: But they're really good. It's a fresh take. It's not the same thing regurded a thousand times over, which is why he's the follow of the week, this week. Props to Darth Autocrat, Lyndon NA. The man under the mask. Links to his profiles in the show notes. He's now available on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Oh, I did not realize that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. He's on LinkedIn now. Crystal Carter: There we go. Follow him on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: So I'll try to link to both of those in the show notes and quite a collection of people this week. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I mean, it's been great, but I think as Rihanna said, we want everyone to love us like a hot pie. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's really one of those, it's a stew, but in pie form, the stew- Crystal Carter: Stew pie form. And everyone- Mordy Oberstein: Stew pie. It's stupendous. Crystal Carter: We want Google to appreciate the delicious pie that we've made. Mordy Oberstein: And give us a larger piece of the traffic pie. Crystal Carter: Exactly. And put it on a chart. Mordy Oberstein: With a dollop of whipped cream. Crystal Carter: Right. And the dollop needs to go up into the right. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. Can I get a good dollop, by the way, that's all... You think AI creates fake things, commercials have been creating fake things for a long time. No one can get a dollop that looks like that, okay. It's ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Yo, dude, I used to work in that industry. I used to work in that industry. Do you know anytime you see an apple pie, it's actually a potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: Potato pie? Crystal Carter: It's a mashed potato pie. Because what happens is if you have an actual real apple pie, you cut it and all the apple oozes out. Mordy Oberstein: It oozes out. Yeah. Crystal Carter: So what they do is they bake a mashed potato pie, and then they stick the apples on the side. So when they cut it, the apple stays in, nestled into the mashed potato, and then they just cut the- Mordy Oberstein: You're saying my whole life I've been like, it's been a lie, we're living a lie? Crystal Carter: It's mashed potato pie. I've got other secrets as well. It's like a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Mashed potato pie is also delicious. I'm not upset. Okay. Crystal Carter: I've never had a mashed potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, me neither. But it sounds like it's delicious. It's pie. Crystal Carter: I mean like… Mordy Oberstein: Are potatoes good? Is pie good? Crystal Carter: Best pie. Best pie, Mordy. Best sweet pie? Mordy Oberstein: Cherry pie is the best pie. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Hands down the best pie. Crystal Carter: Sweet potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: And you have cherry pie on top of pudding. Or no, key lime pie is also delicious. I'm sorry. Lemon pie is also good. Pumpkin. I can't decide. Crystal Carter: Sweet potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: That's also delicious. Crystal Carter: Pecan pie. Mordy Oberstein: Pecan pie is also delicious. Pineapple. I like pineapple pie, which is a weird thing, but- Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Tell me one... Marshmallow pie. Good. Skittles and pie, that would probably taste good. Crystal Carter: Marshmallow. You put marshmallows on your sweet potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: Cereal pie. You just put Lucky charms to a pie crust. Crystal Carter: Okay. I think we should end with that. I think that's enough now. Mordy Oberstein: I think it's kind of ridiculous. Crystal Carter: We've reached the conclusion. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks for joining us on the Serp's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with the new episode, as we dive into, bored? Here's how to rejuvenate your SEO career. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio, SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check on all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio, SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO and pie. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Despina Gavoyannis Andy Crestondina Lyndon NA Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series AHREFS Orbit Media A Guide for Content Marketing Metrics: The 37 Most (and Least) Useful Metrics This Math Pattern Explains Your Content Performance (and what to do about it) News: Spike In Removed Google Reviews On September 17th Google Search Ranking Movement Heated, Volatility Continues 9/25 Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Despina Gavoyannis Andy Crestondina Lyndon NA Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series AHREFS Orbit Media A Guide for Content Marketing Metrics: The 37 Most (and Least) Useful Metrics This Math Pattern Explains Your Content Performance (and what to do about it) News: Spike In Removed Google Reviews On September 17th Google Search Ranking Movement Heated, Volatility Continues 9/25 Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahalo. Welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights into what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head SEO of brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by she who is always transparent, clear, and crystal. Our own head of communications, Crystal Carter. There's no doubt when it comes to Crystal. Crystal Carter: I get charged up in a full moon. I find water really easily as well. That's another thing. Mordy Oberstein: You have the two pronged stick that finds water? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I'm very reflective in my general demeanor and I like to think that I bring a nice warm glow. Mordy Oberstein: You always know where you stand with Crystal. Crystal Carter: It's true. It's true. Mordy Oberstein: For better or for worse. I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: Mostly for better, I hope. Mordy Oberstein: Only for better. The SERP'S Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our built-in Google Search Console Insights to see just how much Google does love you. As today we're diving into the gray area of the algorithm, how to know the signs of whether or not Google does or doesn't love you. What are the telltale signs that Google is infatuated with your website? What are some of the signs that they maybe are not infatuated with you, and how do all of those reversals you see in algorithm updates factor into this love triangle? HREF's Despina Gavoyannis will join us to share her tips on how to shore up those pages that might be wavering in the rankings. Plus, Orbit Media co-founder, and all around great digital marketer star, Andy Crestodina stops by to chat about what you can do while you're waiting for Google to fall in love with you. So turn up your Ace of Base because today we're showing you the sign of algorithmic love on this the 104th episode of the SERP'S Up Podcast. Full disclosure, I had a moment in time where I actually liked the Ace of Base for five minutes. Crystal Carter: Dude, I totally had that CD. I mean, that introduction definitely opened up my eyes. I think. Mordy Oberstein: What's the other song they had? They have another one, one other song. Crystal Carter: The, All That She Wants. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, right, that one, right. What the hell were we thinking with that crap. Crystal Carter: Dude. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's terrible. Crystal Carter: They've gone a little bit off the rails in recent times, but in 1998 or whatever- Mordy Oberstein: It made sense in the moment. I remember as a kid being like, "Oh, this is great," and an older friend is like, "No, don't say that. It's not good." Crystal Carter: You had to be there, man. You had to be there. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's kind of like Hanson but worse. Hanson I thought was a good... like, Hanson was good. Crystal Carter: MMMBop is a bop. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good song. Crystal Carter: I'm sorry. MMMBop comes on and I am singing every single word. And the breakdown. Mordy Oberstein: There are only three words in MMMBop. What do you mean all words? Crystal Carter: No, I mean there's lots of parts that aren't words like, du dubi dop, ba du bop. Mordy Oberstein: Di dibby dop dop, the du ap. That's the... Crystal Carter: Then there's all of the verses. It's very- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: Oh, come on. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great song. Crystal Carter: You say you can, but you don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Bob Dylan, it is not. Crystal Carter: No, of course not. It's a bop. It's a bop. Mordy Oberstein: It's like a word. Is it a word? Crystal Carter: It's like, the quintessential bop. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, no, it's great. I'm all for the MMMBop, I'm all for the Hanson. They played their own instruments like, win. Crystal Carter: Hey, I mean, all this nineties nostalgia. It was a beautiful life. Whoa, oh, oh, oh. Mordy Oberstein: How do I pivot this into SEO? I'm just not... just whatever. It's not... Not every day to win is a win, and not every loss is a loss. There's a lot to read into it. And sometimes Google demotes a site's rankings, but you may not know that's going to be a real long-term problem. Maybe these are signs of signals, Google's having a real issue with your website. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's just the ebb and flow of the rankings on the SERP these days, although it's always been volatile, but pretty, especially these days. For example, you can have a prolonged slow ebbing of the rankings over time. That to me is usually a very serious issue. For me, that's usually something where Google has a quality issue with your website and it's slowly eroding away at your rankings over time. I know we're used to looking at a quality issue with your website as, oh, algorithm update, goodbye, but sometimes it's not like that. Sometimes you might see a downtrend with the algorithm update and then it slowly ebbs and erodes from there. At the same time, there are signs that maybe Google does like your content, and those could be really important for you to realize what those are because then you can improve upon them and build upon them. For example, one case that I saw back with the March 2024 core update was it was a certain keyword and the only website that was ranking... all of the websites that were ranking were pages that were specifically built to target that keyword, meaning the only topic that those pages dealt with was the topic represented in that keyword. There was this other page though that showed up around position like three, four or five, forgot exactly, and that was about the topic overall, but it dealt with as a subtopic, that one aspect of the page dealt with the keyword. That to me was a signal looking at that page and then how that page ranked and how the website ranked overall where Google's like, you know what? This website is so strong that we're even going to rank you for instances or keywords where the page isn't specifically targeting just that keyword, and even though the only other pages that are ranking are targeting that keyword, we're going to rank you anyway 'cause the content overall is so great that you now have the power to rank... in this case, this website had the power to rank, even though it wasn't particularly targeting that keyword, but just dealt with the topic tangentially. That might be a sign. In this case, it was a sign that the site was really showing favor and love in the eyes of Google, so it's really important, I think, to know what those signals and signs might be. I don't think it's an exact science because sometimes you just don't know. Having a look and seeing what the signs are that Google really does have an issue with your website or that Google doesn't, and really is loving your website. Knowing those signs and signals or trends can really be important guiding what you do for your SEO strategy. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because I think it determines how much risk you take with different topics and whether or not you, as you said, go into the sort of tangential ones, whether you try something that maybe is very long tail and whether or not you... and whether or not you go for some of those head terms. Because if Google is generally into you, then you'll know because you'll have a couple of big ticket, big search volume pieces of content, and if you're able to give them something that's similar to some of your rock star pieces of content, then they're going to come back for more, and so if you can prove that users appreciate your content and that you have a good experience for users who come to the website, things aren't glitchy, that it all works well, that it's superfast loading, that kind of thing, then yeah, Google's probably going to send you some more traffic because I think what people forget is that Google's into you because users are into you. What's it called? Danny Sullivan was talking about the user signals. We have a podcast on user signals and stuff previously, but he said that people were like, oh, Google uses user signals. He's like, we've always said that. We've always paid attention to that. Not new. Mordy Oberstein: Not new. Old. Crystal Carter: Old, not new. And it's not a question of just doing it for Google, which I think Google has been trying to get into people's brains for the last couple of years. It's not just about doing it for Google, it's also about doing it for users, and then Google will see that works and then they will send their users to you. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you were talking about profiling the types of keywords that you're ranking for. That's a huge thing, by the way, to take a look at because you should really be breaking down, not just, am I ranking? Am I not ranking? That's way too broad. Am I ranking or does Google love me? Is too broad of a question. You should really be looking at where does Google rank you? Where do they not rank you? Meaning where do they love me? Where do they not love me? How do they understand me? Because being understood is really what it means to be loved, but really looking at what folders or what types of keywords or topics am I ranking for, and those sort of things are really important to understand so that either you can double down on that and build on that or say, you know what? Or cut off what's not working. It's like a bad limb on a tree. It's dying. Just cut that off. Just happened to me with a tree. Crystal Carter: Because like any relationship, there's going to be things that are annoying. Mordy, you've been married for a while, I've been married for a while. You're in a long-term relationship, there's things that are annoying about yourself and about your partner and Google will know what things they don't like about your website, but they'll know the things that they do like about your website and just if you're in a relationship and you know that maybe they don't like when you leave your shoes in the doorway or maybe they don't like it when you, I don't know, play your music really loud or something like that. If you're trying to carry favor with someone, you wouldn't do the things that you know irritate them. You would do the things that they like. So if you know that they like it when you make that particular dinner for them, you know that they really love that lasagna that you make, give them more lasagna. That's the thing. So you look at your keywords and you're like, what are the things that they like, give them more of that. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes it's very clear that they don't like that. You just don't rank for that no matter what you do and how many links you've built from high DA sites, you're not ranking for that. But sometimes it's a little bit tricky. For example, sometimes you could see with every algorithm update official and unofficial, you get thrown into the volatility fire. That's probably a sign that you might be okay in the end, you might not be okay in the end, but Google's clearly looking around at other partners. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right, right, right. I had a client and they used to have a lot of competitors, so they'd have loads of competitors for particular keywords, and it was really spicy. Basically for this particular SERP, there was up and down, who was in one, who was in three, and the top five would switch around a lot depending on who had updated what most recently and stuff. In those situations, you really need to give Google your attention in order to make sure that you're able to stay on the side of having that SERP visibility, and that can include, it's sort of a quid pro quo. You want traffic, you have to give them more opportunities to give you traffic. It's one of the reasons why I'm such a big fan of schema markup and structured data because it gives you more opportunities to get on the SERP because you have more opportunities to get more rich features, for instance. And if your competitors are not optimized in that way, then they have fewer opportunities to get on there. It's another reason why I'm a big fan of using multimedia because that also gives you more opportunities to get in there. It also gives Google more opportunity to show you to different folks, and it helps them to understand your content better. So if you want them to help you, you also have to help them, but there's that saying, what is it? "The Lord helps those who help themselves," and you need to help yourself to let them help you. And I'm not saying that Google's Lord or whatever, but I think that it's worth thinking about it in that way anyway. So yeah, multimedia is something that can help you. Structured data is something that can help you. Obviously having relevant, well-written, well-researched and well-known, as in you're distributing it to people who need to know about it. You're getting people enthused about it. The content that's getting people hyped up is really useful as well because Google can take those signals and go, oh, okay, this sample of people liked it. Then we can show it to other samples of people. The other thing about that kind of thing is today, so historically speaking, when we think about content distribution, we think about it from a sort of opportunities for clicks and things like that, but in today's space where Google is not just a publisher, but Google also is a web browser and Google's also a phone manufacturer and Google is also, they have data on my wallet. I use Google Wallet all the time. They've got all of that data. They store my phone, my phone photos and all that sort of stuff. Google also, when you're sending signals out, when you're sending your content out on social, for instance, you're also giving them signals for which users to send your content to. I don't have the exact technical links between all of the content that they store and all of the data that they store, but they're going to be getting signals from, even if it's a small amount. Mordy Oberstein: No, that's the semantic analysis, that's the semantic web. It's like showing how it's all connected and making those links. Crystal Carter: Right. And like the For You feed essentially from Google that comes up... the Discover page, sorry, that shows up. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. For you is Twitter. Crystal Carter: And also on TikTok as well, but it's basically, it's a similar kind of thing. So,- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure. Crystal Carter: ... if I- Mordy Oberstein: They know what I want. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And so- Mordy Oberstein: They know what I want. Yankees and SEO. Crystal Carter: So for instance, if you send content to a few people and then they're like, okay, this kind of person likes this content, that gives more opportunity to filter down those bespoke queries, which are going to get more and more bespoke as we get into a more AI assisted search space. So I think that we need to show them that we care about our content before we expect them to care about our content. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And the last thing I want to say, I agree with that a billion percent. The last thing I want to say before we get into Despina is, I'm not always big on rank tracking. I think sometimes it could be a little bit of a... you run into the problem of being a little bit of vanity or a little bit too micro-analytic. But looking at rank tracking patterns over time is a great way to get an understanding of how much Google is into you and how Google is not into you, where they're into you and where they're not into you. So if you are using a rank tracking tool, I would highly recommend you go back and look at the rank tracking trends over an extended period of time to take a look at volatility within your keywords and break them down into subcategories or tags, as they're traditionally referred to in SEO tools and to really get an understanding of where Google is into you, where they're not into you, and how in into they are. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think you need to think about the variables of content creation and all of that sort of stuff. One of the things that you also want to think about is, let's say you're tracking this stuff and you're seeing the patterns and you're seeing the way that Google's looking at the way your content is created, etc. One of the things you might also want to think about is, is it my domain or is it the content? Right? So sometimes if you serve the content on a different domain or if you serve similar content in a different platform, and let's say it goes off, so let's say you've been writing your blog, writing your blog, and maybe you're not getting that much traffic, but let's say you do a guest post on a different blog and that gets loads of traffic and you've taken the same approach that you always do, that's a really positive signal, that's a really positive signal that if you keep going in the way that you're going, that you'll eventually get the traffic. It doesn't mean that you'll get it right that second, but it means that the content itself is good, and that means that the technical things that you do might need to change, but the content itself is solid. And you see this on social a lot where you'll have some creator will do a video or something and then some bigger platform like Lab Bible or something will share it on there and that will go really big. And if it goes off on there, you're like, okay, the content is good. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That's a great point. It's such a good point. Crystal Carter: Distribution, whichever, might be the technical, it might be whatever that might need to change, but the content itself is good. And so I think it's important to do that not just for link building, but also to understand what it is that you need to tweak in order for Google to- Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Yeah, is it your authority? Is it the content, is it the technical aspect of it? All that diagnosing where the problem is? That's a great point. Speaking of shoring up that content and finding out what you should be doing and how to go about doing it, we spoke to HREF's Despina Gavoyannis about how to shore up a page or pages that seemed to be wavering between ranking and not ranking. Here's what she had to say. Despina Gavoyannis: So like anything with SEO, it depends on your situation, like what you're seeing and what kind of positions your page is wavering between, because I've seen pages, they just don't stick in the SERPs at all like your targeted keyword, but then in the top 100 they'll show up sometimes and then just drop out of the top 100. So if you're seeing that sort of thing, that's a really big kind of flickering. And to me that is a hundred percent about topic alignment and intent alignment. It means you're targeting the right keyword, sure, but you're not really matching your content with what Google and people expect to see. So when you fix that up, the intent misalignment there. Generally what you'll see is that the page will stick in the SERPs. Now if you wanted to rank higher and stick higher, so for example, it'll land somewhere generally in the top 50 results is what I see, maybe even in the top 30. But then you want to get it ranking and if what you are seeing is that it's wavering between say the bottom of page one and page two, so you can't quite crack position 10 and stay there or higher. So in that case, it could be a topic or an intent misalignment. It could also be a topic depth thing. Maybe you don't have as many sections in your content that cover the subtopics that are relevant to the keyword, and your competitors might be doing a better job of that. So looking at their content and any kind of gaps in terms of the content topic depth perspective. Also looking at any gaps in your core fundamentals of SEO, things like, on-page and links. A lot of SEO depends on doing these small things that on their own don't move the needle much or even at all, but in combination can have a big impact. So for example, if your competitors have much more solid on-page optimization than what you do, that's a big gap. So they're doing it and they're doing a lot of little things that can add up and have a big impact in total. Whereas if you are not doing any of it or very little of it, then that creates a huge gap right there and it's a pretty easy gap to fix. So making sure that you've got your keywords in your headings, you've got keywords in your URLs, that you've got image alt texts and things like that, and providing a great user experience with the page itself, make sure that's all sorted. Also with links, don't look at it just from your whole website. Get links to the individual page and close those gaps. This includes internal links. So if you're covering the topic in other articles on your website, make sure you are internally linking to the page you're trying to support. And also I suppose if you can't internally link because you don't have enough content or any kind of mentions about the topic, then in that case you need to create supporting content so that it works as a hub or a bit of a content cluster that can support each other. And that helps in terms of closing topical gaps across your whole website, not just within one article. And finally, if you've tried all these things, and you're still not seeing much movement. Evaluate the recency of your content. Is the advice relevant to people right now? Even if you add new sections and technically the date on your content might be written in this year, the advice you're giving might still be outdated or not providing great user experience or things like that. So look at, is it relevant to people right now? Is it providing the best experience to people right now? Are your competitors potentially doing a better job there? And if you're not sure, if you can't be unbiased about it, you can use a website like user testing and get real people's feedback, get them to compare your competitor's content to yours and to give you their thoughts on which one they think does a better job of answering a particular question or for a specific keyword. It helps you overcome biases in your own thinking of what's working and whether your content is actually good compared to competitors or not. So those are a few of the things that I think can help. In summary: check your intent misalignment, cover any topical gaps, cover any really basic SEO gaps like, on-page and links. Those have been fundamentals for ages for a reason. Make sure that you're doing internal linking and topical gaps are covered across your whole website. And then also check the recency in user experience of the content for people searching today. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Despina. Look for Despina out on social media. Link to her profile is in the show notes. Yeah, it comes back to we're talking diagnosing. Diagnosing what the problem is, what you should be doing, have a methodical approach. Also running through the options like she's talking about. You don't always know exactly what it is. You have to roll through them and throw the kitchen sink at it in a way. So diagnose, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and also I think she was talking about testing as well. So one of the things she mentioned was user testing. So getting people to look at it and why do you think this content is better? Or why do you think this content is good? Why do you think this content is struggling or whatever? And I think she's totally right because you see this a lot. And Glenn Gabe is a big advocate of user testing for websites and particularly for user journeys because sometimes if you are in it all the time, you don't know how difficult it is to find the things that people need to find. Or maybe you do know how difficult it is, but you've gotten so used to having to navigate it in the way that you do that you're not conscious of it. So I think that getting someone with a fresh set of eyes can be really, really useful, even if, I think she mentioned that it can be a bit painful sometimes. You might have to eat a little bit of humble pie, but it is really important to do and really, really valuable both for publishers who are doing it directly and also for agency folks who are managing clients. Mordy Oberstein: And humble pie is fine because pie is pie. Pie is good. Crystal Carter: I love pie. I'm a big fan of like- Mordy Oberstein: Pie is the best- Crystal Carter: I do love Pie. Mordy Oberstein: It's the best dessert. I'm sorry, hands down, it's pie. Crystal Carter: I also like a savory pie, like- Mordy Oberstein: Like shepherd's pie? Crystal Carter: Shepherd's pie, cottage pie, chicken pot pie. Mordy Oberstein: Chicken pot pie is delicious. Oh, love chicken pot pie. Crystal Carter: Right. In England there's a lot of savory pies. It's really common. Also in America, you get chicken pot pie. Chicken pot pie is the classic one. I don't eat meat anymore, but when I did, I was all about the chicken pot pie. Mordy Oberstein: Tofu pot pie. Crystal Carter: Which one? Mordy Oberstein: Tofu pot pie. Crystal Carter: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. There are lots of delicious, lots of delicious veggie pies that I'm a big fan of. So yeah, pies are good. I just generally like things that are pastry with yummy stuff in the middle of it. Mordy Oberstein: It's the best. It's literally the best. I don't have access to a lot of pie where I live, which means we don't live in a perfect world and while we're not living in a perfect world and you're sorting out your love or Google's love for you, to make sure your content is bringing in the traffic and the conversions and yada yada yada that you want, while that's all being worked out, you might want to try other marketing activities to drive that awareness, traffic, leads, and conversions instead. It's a crazy idea. Which is why we're going down a rabbit hole in a little segment we call, from the top of the SERP, as in this case, we're looking at not what gets you to the top of page one, but what other activities can get you traffic while you work your way there. And to help us, we have special guest, the co-founder of Orbit Media, Andy Crestodina. Andy, welcome to the SERPs Up Podcast. Andy Crestondina: I am glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks for sticking with us by the way, because the audience doesn't know this. I've known your name for many, many years, but I couldn't get it out of my mouth the right way. Andy Crestondina: I stumbled on it myself. No trouble at all. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you with us today. Andy Crestondina: Yeah, thanks for having me, Crystal. I'm glad. This will be fun. I've been looking forward to this. I'm psyched. Mordy Oberstein: So I know it's a little bit like heresy to the SEO folk listening to this. If you're not an SEO folk, this makes obvious logical sense. But putting all of your eggs in one algorithmic basket, whether you're still trying to get Google to love you and whatnot, or in general, Google does love you now, they might not love you tomorrow. What do you recommend sites do? Let's say there are an established website, they have traffic, they have some brand awareness. What do you recommend they do to really increase that, diversify their channels and get some momentum beyond the SERP? Andy Crestondina: I love this question. I think that it's important for SEOs to consider this because there is such a thing as topic channel fit, and there are lots of articles and web pages and service we offer different things that have no keyword opportunity. Only about half of the articles that I write are actually relevant for search. And that's fine. I'm not a keyword first marketer. I'm trying to connect a piece of content to a target audience. So my first thought is, I'm making this thing, is there a keyword opportunity here? If no, no problem, I can use other channels. Everything can be promoted in email and social, through influencers, and other ways. So it's really important to keep that in mind. And I sleep well at night knowing that I am not totally beholden to Google for all of my traffic and that I can be kind of a dual threat marketer. There's more to life than search and many things that we all make really are not relevant for that channel whatsoever. Crystal Carter: I think that's a really interesting way to think about it because I've definitely seen people go, oh, well, we shouldn't write this blog because it doesn't have a good search volume. We shouldn't write this piece of content because no one's going to find it on Google or the search volume's low or that sort of thing. And I think it's really interesting that you're like, this is a thing that people need to hear. We can get it to them in a different way. If it's not for search, it can go another way. Is there a way that you sort of figure out which is the best channel for a piece of content that you think people need to hear? Andy Crestondina: For sure. The job of the search marketer is to basically meet expectations. The searcher has an information need and your job is satisfy that information need. The social media marketer, the job is to be a little bit unexpected. See how that's actually the opposite channel? So there are lots of topics where social is the proper channel. Let's say you want to put out a counter-narrative perspective. No one's looking for counter-narratives, they're looking for confirmation or they're looking for an answer. And thought leadership. Another way to say that, op-ed content, anything that is a perspective where you're trying to start a conversation or you're saying something that's maybe contrarian to the conventional wisdom. That stuff crushes social media. It's great in social, it starts big conversations, right? Say something interesting. So search, if your content meets expectations, search. If your content is a bit unexpected, social. And by the way, these channels, understanding the difference between social and search, it's so fascinating. In search there's actually a ceiling to the amount of demand in the market. There's only X number of people searching for a topic each day, but social media, there is no limit. I have seen things... If you've never seen the analytics for a mini viral event, you're missing out. It is breathtaking how many people are on the internet. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, totally true. Andy Crestondina: And if you're exhausted, just long form content, long text pieces, Hey, guess what? The short, punchy, pithy thing, the highly visual thing, the collaboration with an influencer thing, social's perfect. So you don't have enough in your content mix, and Mordy, thanks for saying diversification because that's the perfect perspective. If you are not first thinking of the topic, what does my audience need? What's the most interesting thing I can do today? And then asking what is the proper channel for promoting this thing? The answer is not always search. Mordy Oberstein: So when you're thinking of diversifying those channels, okay, I am not going to write for search. Where do you start? What are you looking at? Is there like, okay, I want to do something on social. Does the channel drive the strategy itself or the type of content drive the strategy, trying to build a brand awareness? What's driving the overall strategy for you? Andy Crestondina: Well, I am a fifteen-year content strategist, and I often think to myself, this is something new, interesting, helpful, valuable to me, working for me, I should share this with the world. Next question. Is this something that could work in content marketing or maybe I'm just make this as a sales enablement piece. By the way, there's bottom of funnel content that you can share with prospects that is 100X the value of that new weird top of funnel, high search volume phrase. Make something for your prospects first. I'd say let's all prioritize the bottom of the funnel. And then whatever that thing is, whatever you're making, does it relate to other pieces of content? Is there already a conversation happening about this? Is this part of a trend? Is this content evergreen? What is the proper format? Should this be a video or long form text or is it an infographic thing here? Give you an example. Two weeks ago, I've always been thinking about this, you know how every chart in marketing is like a log scale curve. There are no straight lines. The top performers are... search especially, top performer gets most of the clicks. Number two gets half as many. Number three gets a third as many. That mathematical distribution is called the Zipfian distribution. Okay, you've never heard of that? No one's heard of that. I get it. But actually it's super interesting that that Zipfian distribution applies across topics and formats and channels. Click-through rate by search position, and a tiny percentage of things go viral, and a tiny percentage of social accounts gets most of the engagement. And a tiny percentage YouTube videos get most of the views. That's a really interesting way to think about marketing and it's valuable because you can focus on trying to make top performers and avoid making the medium quality stuff , but there's a practical takeaway. Okay, you get the idea. I'm making this article, right? I want to do this. I want to show the charts. I want people to see the alignment between this math thing and their marketing, and I want to make strategic recommendations based on that. Focus on the 10X things. No keyword opportunity at all. No one is searching for log scale pattern- Crystal Carter: Zipfian. Andy Crestondina: ... marketing. Yeah, George Zipf. So no problem. I'm making it anyway. I feel strongly about this. I think the world needs the article. It's a failure of the internet that this article doesn't exist. That's how passionate I am about creating it. Who has all the data? Pete Caputa from Databox. Let's talk to Pete. Great, Pete and I have a call. He shares a bunch of data. I overlay my little chart thing on it. He starts a conversation on LinkedIn. I jump in, I write the article, I publish on LinkedIn, he jumps in. It got huge results. Nothing to do with search. What did I do? I found something that was visual. I collaborated with a subject matter expert. I didn't hesitate to write the cool, weird, fun headline with no keywords in it. It's liberating, by the way, to not have to worry about keywords sometimes, right? In search, I'm all in or I'm all out. If that thing's keyword relevant, I'm totally focused on making something that is the best page on the internet for that topic. But if it's just an unusual thing, a weird thing, a visual thing, a surprising thing. It's kind of like working with, if you've ever worked with an innovator or an inventor or someone who makes new things, no one's looking for new things. It doesn't exist yet. Those people should still start those companies. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Andy Crestondina: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I think it's like, if you were cooking for, I don't know, 500 people, if you were cooking for, I don't know, the family reunion or something like that, you're not going to do an artisanal ceviche or something with heirloom tomatoes from here, there and there. You're going to do the macaroni and cheese. You know that the macaroni and cheese is going to get the most people and they're going to enjoy it and they're going to be happy. Whereas, I don't know, if it's some special dinner for your anniversary or whatever, and it's a special person and you know that they'll appreciate that you've spent all of this time, but it's a different audience. You're still cooking, you're still making whatever you're making, but it's a different kind of situation and they'll appreciate it more. And both audiences will appreciate that you've taken the care to give them the right thing, in the right space. Mordy Oberstein: I love that. Crystal Carter: ... really important. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great example. Andy Crestondina: Yep. Mac and cheese, that's the highest search volume key phrase. And my daughter loves it. But the heirloom tomato, like the fancy Caprese salad that people weren't expecting, like, whoa, dude, pine nuts. Wait a minute, that's a different... you get it, right? Crystal Carter: Right. Andy Crestondina: So, it's really kind of a boring content strategy both for your readers to consume and for you to create if you think that everything's got to be a keyword. Come on. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, a thousand percent. Crystal Carter: And I think also, so there's a couple of things that I come for that. So people who have just discovered you on our podcast might not know that you are also speaking from the point of having a massive social media following. So I think that that's something that's worth thinking about as well. If you're not following Andy on LinkedIn, you should do that because it's absolutely worth doing. And all the other channels as well- Andy Crestondina: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Link in the show notes. Crystal Carter: So I think that that's something that's really important to think about as well, is that you have spent time cultivating an audience that you know is interested in the thing that you found really fascinating this week. The thing that you found really fascinating today or whatever it may be. And I think that in order to do some of the things that you're talking about in order to speak to some of that more creative, more out-of-the-box content, do you think that it's worth building that community first before you start doing that? Or do you think the two things go together? Andy Crestondina: I'm not sure if... community building and in some ways search rankings, these are not... they're more like outcomes than they are a strategy in a way. That's what happens if you did everything else well. So what did I do on LinkedIn? I wrote an article every two weeks for 12 years. I never write an article without collaborating with a subject matter expert or influencer. I made sure that my articles were highly visual. I promoted those things in many places as well as on LinkedIn. I used LinkedIn for all kinds of other activities, for research and collaborating and connecting with people. I started a LinkedIn newsletter, which is my number one tip for B2B marketers today, started a LinkedIn newsletter. Crystal Carter: It's fantastic. I was talking to Andy about this at MozCon. It really is a masterclass. It's fantastic. Subscribe to Digital Marketing Tips on LinkedIn. Andy Crestondina: Give it a boring name like Digital Marketing Tips. Actually, this is common across channels. Specificity correlates with engagement, conversion, search rankings. I think that a lot of things, a lot of... one of the common mistakes that marketers make is just writing sort of vague headlines and subheads. So Digital Marketing Tips. I've seen people launch LinkedIn newsletters that's like, What's in Brian's Brain? What would I get if... no, I'm not. You can subscribe to a LinkedIn newsletter with one tap of your finger that explains the growth. But why would someone tap? Who's Brian? I don't get... there's no specificity. Be specific about the benefits, right? It's like a call to action in anything. Tell them what they're going to get if they do it. But yeah, LinkedIn newsletters, you can repurpose old content. It's going to reach a much larger audience. It's a lot of tableau funnel stuff, but it's great for brand. Mordy Oberstein: This is SERP's Up Podcast, we ask the hard questions. I don't think I've ever asked a hard question in this podcast before, but this is the first time. If we're saying, okay, wait a second, be careful with the whole Google thing. You're beholden to the algorithm. Who knows what'll happen? Is it the same thing to play devil's advocate on social media? Like, look what happened with X. Andy Crestondina: Excellent point. No social and search are algorithm marketing. And no one really uses that term, but that's exactly what you're doing if you're marketing in those. And those marketers have a bit of anxiety all the time anyway. Oh, what will I do if I... It's like LinkedIn, I've never done it. But some people on LinkedIn, they make a post promoting an article, then they put the article link in the first comment. Oh, because LinkedIn doesn't like if you have a thing that sends people... Who cares? Mordy Oberstein: I'll tell you on that, someone once said, I'm... because I would play around with doing this thing, what worked, what didn't work? And then someone said, "I hate when people put the link in the comment. You never find the damn thing." I'm like, "You know what? I don't care about the algorithm anymore. People who are reading what I'm writing are annoyed by it, then I'm not going to do that." Andy Crestondina: People first, no matter what channel you're in. But then, yeah, I mean a diversified marketing strategy should have more than search and social because you will be forever beholden to those algorithms and they will change. You don't own your LinkedIn newsletter subscribers or your followers or your search rankings. Email, live events, where Crystal and I first met. Webinars, podcasts, we're doing right now. These are all where word of mouth crushes it. They're relationship based. They cause greater loyalty. There are higher touch formats. But now I have to say that Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube and our listeners know this, but those should be in the mix. I'm just saying those shouldn't be the only things in the mix. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. And I think also platforms come and go. TikTok, there's a lot going on there at the moment, but people remember, gosh, I can't even remember the name of it, the audio one, Clubhouse, everyone was crazy for Clubhouse for about 20 minutes. Mordy Oberstein: Blast from the COVID past. Crystal Carter: Right. And there were people everywhere. I'm doing that Clubhouse, and then it was really blowing up and people were desperate to get invitations and stuff like that. But again, not putting everything in one basket, it's kind of like a ghost town now. Mordy Oberstein: It’s still there. Come on. Andy Crestondina: I remember, I guess I'm old, but Google+. Crystal Carter: Right. Yeah, I was on Google+. Andy Crestondina: There were a lot of people who invested time to build a network, and so yeah, the people who invested in email, they aren't disrupted. You're just prone to disruption. Think of it this way, if you're doing algorithm marketing, big tech sits between you and your audience. Email marketing, webinars, podcasts, live events… Mordy Oberstein: Resources. You have to sign up and download the thing. Submit your email. Andy Crestondina: Yeah. Yeah. Gated content. That's disintermediation. You're taking big tech out from in the middle of between you and your audience. I've always thought of email as just a disintermediation. So as soon as that person who lands from search and loved with the thing and shared their address. You got permission to talk to them directly, that is special. And that means you are not forever beholden to the algorithm. You've diversified your traffic sources. I think also algorithm marketers, they get very focused on top of funnel metrics. It's really hard not to obsess over some of these numbers, even if the number has a very low correlation with real business impact. Crystal Carter: I've had this before, so I've worked with clients before and I've done the SEO, we did the audit, we did the updates, we did the thing, we did the blah, and we looked and they're like, "But our traffic went down." I was like, "Yeah, but you had traffic two pages that were trash. They were trash pages. They meant nothing to what you were doing. So yes, the traffic did go down, but your conversions went up. That means that we're more specific. That means that we're more targeted. That means that we are getting to the right people instead of just some random people." And I've had it where I had ads that we were running, for instance, and we were getting tons of traffic in the middle of the night, but none of the people who were looking at the website between midnight and 3:00 A.M. were buying anything. So I turned off all the ads for the looky-loos, and we concentrated it for all the daytime people, and then suddenly we got more conversions. And it's not just about traffic. It's not just about those top of funnel metrics as you're saying, it's about being smart about what you're doing. Mordy Oberstein: Why I hate rank tracking on the SEO side. Yes, you rank number two, one, whatever. Okay, that's nice. Andy Crestondina: I once did a piece, it had no conversion opportunities or keyword opportunities, but I made the case that there's an inverse relationship between the visibility of a metric and its importance. The most important things in your business: net promoter score, net margins, revenue, these things you need an expert to help you create, even to find the metric. Net promoter score is very hard to measure, it takes a big effort. The most visible things in your marketing: number of followers, your rankings for a keyword, have very low correlation with business outcomes. So all the way from the top to bottom, I had this list of 37 metrics and I purposely ordered them in a way where you could sort of see the more visible the metric, the lower the business impact, the less visible the metric, the higher the business impact. It's strangely true. These platforms want us to obsess over them. Social media has gamified engagement and followings, that's why they made the... it's the availability heuristic. We pay attention to things we can see. Those big numbers, even LinkedIn now, remember they used to be like 500+. They show followings. They've gamified engagement and it helps them a lot, but it gets marketers distracted. Mordy Oberstein: LinkedIn as a side note, it's been interesting when the whole X thing was happening, I feel like they boosted engagement on purpose because they knew, okay, people were flocking over from X, let's get them hooked. Whereas I felt like that's why Threads failed or I don't want to say failed, I don't think that Threads caught on the way that it should have because when people were moving from X to Threads, the engagement was garbage, they'd be like, "Ah, what am I doing here?" Which is funny because I think it's an important point to realize that when you're on these platforms, you're right, they are gaming you and they are playing with you a little bit and it's distracting. Andy Crestondina: It is, and junior marketers and less informed executives alike pay a lot of attention to those things. It's also sort of true in analytics because if you only click on the high level report in analytics, you see top line numbers. To really get any, and I strongly believe this, you are using GA4 wrong if you don't add another dimension or drill down to a certain audience. Oh, my search rankings are down. To which pages? From which phrases? Visitors who have what kind of intent? And Crystal, we've all, anybody who's done this for half an hour will know, sure, there's tons of URLs that will attract a ton of visibility with a 0%. They don't see a single other page, they don't subscribe. They don't engage with the offers. So those are vanity. We've all heard the term, vanity metrics, so that's part of it. Don't put all your eggs in one algorithmic basket, Mordy love how you said that. And then don't put all your focus on a single metric. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. I think it's really important, and I think it's really important to keep track and to understand what actual metrics matter to your business. So I had a client once who was really concerned about brochure downloads, and I was like, why? They were really into these brochure download things. No matter what I did. In the end, we parted ways because no matter what I did, we didn't get the brochure downloads. I was like, nobody's going to download your brochure, which is the same thing that the website says. And they were like, "We needed the brochure." I was like, there are other things we can do. We can do a webinar, we could do something else, and it just wouldn't line up. But I think that it is really important for people to be conscious of those data points and maybe not so distracted by the shiny things, by all of the followers, by the things. There was a company I was talking to, or it was a talk I was at, and he was someone who worked with big influencers, people like Ronaldo, the football player, and various different things like big sports teams and stuff. And Ronaldo literally had a thing where he went viral wearing their product and they got tons of views on this video and they got tons of traffic to the site, but they got hardly any sales. Then, and this goes back to your point of the things that aren't visible or the things that really make the difference. They did a postmortem and they figured out that they needed to sort out their funnel so that when these kinds of viral things happened, they were able to actually monetize the funnel so that they were ready for it. So the next time there was a big sports player who was seen with one of these things, they were able to actually monetize it and it wasn't even as big as the first spike, but they were able to get a lot more revenue out of the instance because they spent the time doing the boring... Mordy Oberstein: That's so funny. I feel like that's one of those things where brand and performance people always silo those things separately, but they're not separate. There's just marketing and there's just awareness and there's just revenue and conversions. It's all one. It's a Neil Young song. They all sound the same because it's all one song. It all has to work together. So yeah, you could have that viral moment, but if they can't get through the funnel to buy the actual thing. They're like, great. Andy Crestondina: Yeah. So if you carry that thinking through and you conclude like, Hey, I need to fix the mousetrap before I make cheese. So here's a way to use the analytics, go look at analytics and figure out which of your landing pages converts visitors into subscribers at the highest rate of all in your content marketing. And that's that same Zipfian thing again, right? I have pages where 3% of visitors who land subscribe. I have pages where 0.003% of visitors who land subscribe. This is zero rounded up to zero in GA4. Now that I know that, I know which articles to optimize better for search, which articles to keep in heavy social media rotation, which articles to put back on my home page or to link to from my email signature or to put back on the top of the blog. Once you know where your best mousetraps are, now go make the cheese. This is the problem with SEOs right, they're all cheese and no mousetrap. You're not going to drive results. Mordy Oberstein: I don't think there's a better phrase to end this interview with than it's all cheese and no mousetraps when it comes to SEO. Andy, where can people find you? Andy Crestondina: Crystal mentioned LinkedIn. I'm of course very active there. Orbitmedia.com is where I write one article every two weeks. That's been my frequency forever. I will never send more than one email every two weeks if you sign up there. I don't know, YouTube. I wrote a book, it's on Amazon. You can find me at conferences, that's where Crystal and I hang out, so I'm easy to reach. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Well, thanks for joining us and I guess we'll see you out there at the next conference. Andy Crestondina: Thanks, Marty. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, make sure you follow Andy on social media. He is absolutely fabulous, almost as fabulous or maybe the opposite way around, maybe this person is almost as fabulous as Andy is Barry Schwartz, which means that it's... is it really fair to compare Andy and Barry. I feel like it's two different things all together. Crystal Carter: Hey, there's plenty of room in the SEO universe for everyone to shine. Mordy Oberstein: Mount Rushmore, only four people. Who do you put on top? Crystal Carter: Oh no, we don't put anything on Mount Rushmore. Leave that mountain alone. Mordy Oberstein: Who's like the Mount Rushmore of Yankees greats? It's always a big argument. Crystal Carter: Honestly, I think leave the mountain alone. My personal opinion is like, let the mountain be a mountain. It doesn't need a face on it. Mordy Oberstein: It doesn't need to be an artwork. You know what's artwork? The way Barry covers the SEO news, which means it's time for this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, two articles for you from Barry Schwartz and from SE Roundtable or from Barry on SE Roundtable. They're not from two different people, Barry is SE Roundtable. First up, this comes from September 27th. Spike in remove Google Reviews on September 17th. A lot of sevens in there, on September 27th Barry was reporting about a review removal spike on the 17th. Lucky number seven, I guess. Anyway, this comes from a little bit of a consensus across the local SEO space. Tim Colling posted this in local search forums. He basically asked like, Hey, seems like there's a spike in the number of legitimate favorable reviews inside of Google business profiles. Then again, Michel van Luijtelaar, saw the same sort of thing. Claudia Tomina jumped in the conversation and saw, yeah, there seems to be a bigger spike in September with more deleted reviews. So if you are in the local space, or if you are yourself a local business and you're seeing, hey, some of those great reviews are gone, you're not alone, doesn't solve the problem, but you're not alone. Also from Barry and also from SE Roundtable, but not from September 27th but from September 26th, Google Search Ranking Movement Heated, Volatility Continues 9/25. There's so many dates, so many dates this week Barry. Okay. Basically in a nutshell, the SEO weather tools are still bonkers, still reporting an incredible amount of rank volatility. I think we're approaching at least on the Semrush Sensor. By the time you listen to this and the rank volatility on the Semrush Sensor is still high or very high, you are looking at the longest period of elevated rank volatility in history, or in the history of tracking these things the way that we do. But it sounds better to say in history. But again, all of the tools are kind of bonkers and off the rails. Some of them have reset a little bit and they're showing less volatility the way these things work, there's no such thing as high or low rank volatility, there's just relative high or relative low volatility. Think of the weather itself. If the normal was a million degrees Fahrenheit like we were living on the sun, if it was a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside, wow, that's a pretty cool day. So it's all relative. It does mean, by the way, you have to be looking at what's happening in your rankings and your traffic and yada yada, yada, go Barry, yada, yada yada. There have been reports from folks like Glenn Gabe, I've seen this myself, where a lot of the rewards in the August 2024 update have been reversed. Maybe there have been reversed back since, who knows by the time you listening to this? Who doesn't love a good reversal? Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. Barry, the Picasso of SEO News. Crystal Carter: What? Are you saying he's all over the place. Is that what you mean? Mordy Oberstein: I didn't call him Jackson Pollock or anything. Can you imagine? You ever seen the movie Pollock where it was Ed Harris plays Jackson Pollock and it goes through the whole thing and like, wow, imagine that's how Barry wrote articles, on the floor smoking cigarettes. Crystal Carter: No, I could not imagine Barry doing that, ever. Just not a thing. Mordy Oberstein: Someone should make a meme of that. Instead of Ed Harris in the movie it's Barry's face. Love that. That's a good idea. Someone should do that. Anyway, you know who else is a master of painting the fine arts of SEO? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Darth Autocrat, Lyndon NA. Darth is a... first of all, he's brilliant, but we also don't know who he really is, so it's an like an air of mystery. Crystal Carter: He's mysterious. Like a man of mystery, and yeah, he's got this fantastic collection of Threads talking about technical SEO and talking about integrating content and talking about the way you should think about content in a really nuanced way. If you follow him, he is got a really, really great perspective on all of this stuff, and it's really, really nuanced, and it doesn't just stick to standard SEO practices, but he doesn't stay just in the SEO lane. He goes into a lane that includes thinking about the business objectives, thinking about what actually moves the needle for actual businesses, and he's somebody who works with clients and who does a lot of research as well. So honestly, a great follow Mordy Oberstein: Super conceptual, really gives you frameworks that you can operate out of. I used have a standing bet with him. I used to do SEO chat. It was like a Twitter chat that I no longer do. If he could answer a question in one tweet, I gave him 20 bucks. Crystal Carter: Everything is a thread, but they're delightful. Mordy Oberstein: But they're really good. It's a fresh take. It's not the same thing regurded a thousand times over, which is why he's the follow of the week, this week. Props to Darth Autocrat, Lyndon NA. The man under the mask. Links to his profiles in the show notes. He's now available on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Oh, I did not realize that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. He's on LinkedIn now. Crystal Carter: There we go. Follow him on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: So I'll try to link to both of those in the show notes and quite a collection of people this week. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I mean, it's been great, but I think as Rihanna said, we want everyone to love us like a hot pie. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's really one of those, it's a stew, but in pie form, the stew- Crystal Carter: Stew pie form. And everyone- Mordy Oberstein: Stew pie. It's stupendous. Crystal Carter: We want Google to appreciate the delicious pie that we've made. Mordy Oberstein: And give us a larger piece of the traffic pie. Crystal Carter: Exactly. And put it on a chart. Mordy Oberstein: With a dollop of whipped cream. Crystal Carter: Right. And the dollop needs to go up into the right. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. Can I get a good dollop, by the way, that's all... You think AI creates fake things, commercials have been creating fake things for a long time. No one can get a dollop that looks like that, okay. It's ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Yo, dude, I used to work in that industry. I used to work in that industry. Do you know anytime you see an apple pie, it's actually a potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: Potato pie? Crystal Carter: It's a mashed potato pie. Because what happens is if you have an actual real apple pie, you cut it and all the apple oozes out. Mordy Oberstein: It oozes out. Yeah. Crystal Carter: So what they do is they bake a mashed potato pie, and then they stick the apples on the side. So when they cut it, the apple stays in, nestled into the mashed potato, and then they just cut the- Mordy Oberstein: You're saying my whole life I've been like, it's been a lie, we're living a lie? Crystal Carter: It's mashed potato pie. I've got other secrets as well. It's like a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Mashed potato pie is also delicious. I'm not upset. Okay. Crystal Carter: I've never had a mashed potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, me neither. But it sounds like it's delicious. It's pie. Crystal Carter: I mean like… Mordy Oberstein: Are potatoes good? Is pie good? Crystal Carter: Best pie. Best pie, Mordy. Best sweet pie? Mordy Oberstein: Cherry pie is the best pie. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Hands down the best pie. Crystal Carter: Sweet potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: And you have cherry pie on top of pudding. Or no, key lime pie is also delicious. I'm sorry. Lemon pie is also good. Pumpkin. I can't decide. Crystal Carter: Sweet potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: That's also delicious. Crystal Carter: Pecan pie. Mordy Oberstein: Pecan pie is also delicious. Pineapple. I like pineapple pie, which is a weird thing, but- Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Tell me one... Marshmallow pie. Good. Skittles and pie, that would probably taste good. Crystal Carter: Marshmallow. You put marshmallows on your sweet potato pie. Mordy Oberstein: Cereal pie. You just put Lucky charms to a pie crust. Crystal Carter: Okay. I think we should end with that. I think that's enough now. Mordy Oberstein: I think it's kind of ridiculous. Crystal Carter: We've reached the conclusion. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks for joining us on the Serp's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with the new episode, as we dive into, bored? Here's how to rejuvenate your SEO career. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio, SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check on all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio, SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO and pie. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Google Gemini is here but what does it mean for SEO? How does Gemini factor into Search and what does it even mean for the evolution of AI in general? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by Search Engine Land’s Editor-in-Chief, Danny Goodwin, to evaluate what Gemini is and might become from an SEO point of view. Plus, The Neuron’s Pete Huang takes a look at what Gemini means for the overall evolution of AI. Look up at the stars, and tune in to episode 74 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast as today we are all Geminis! Back How will Google's most powerful AI, Gemini, impact SEO? Google Gemini is here but what does it mean for SEO? How does Gemini factor into Search and what does it even mean for the evolution of AI in general? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by Search Engine Land’s Editor-in-Chief, Danny Goodwin, to evaluate what Gemini is and might become from an SEO point of view. Plus, The Neuron’s Pete Huang takes a look at what Gemini means for the overall evolution of AI. Look up at the stars, and tune in to episode 74 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast as today we are all Geminis! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 74 | February 14, 2024 | 48 MIN 00:00 / 47:44 This week’s guests Danny Goodwin Danny Goodwin is the Managing Editor of Search Engine Land & SMX (Search Marketing Expo). Goodwin has been editing and writing about the latest search marketing news and updates since 2007. He joined Search Engine Land in 2022, where he manages the Search Engine Land SME (Subject Matter Expert) program and oversees the programming of U.S. SMX events. Pete Huang Pete Huang is an AI futurist and artificial intelligence leader with a global following that relies on his technological expertise to run their businesses. He created The Neuron, a daily newsletter tracking the latest AI trends, products and research making an impact, with over 250,000+ business leaders relying on their coverage to stay informed about AI. Pete has spoken about AI around the world and is regularly tapped as a consultant to enterprises investing in AI. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by She who searches the stars for SEO answers, the one, the only, Head of Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. My name is Crystal Carter. I'm a Pisces and I am a stargazer. I've been enjoying Jupiter being in the Northern Hemisphere for the last few months. It keeps hanging out by the moon. We're going to talk about lots of things like that. So yeah, welcome to our podcast about SEO. Mordy Oberstein: I'm also a Pisces. What does that mean though? Crystal Carter: I know you're a Pisces. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, because of my personality or because you know what my birthday is? Crystal Carter: Actually, a lot of SEOs are Pisces. I think it's because we like to jump around and we like to go with the flow of the algorithm and things. Mordy Oberstein: I always thought it was my traumatic childhood, but now you're telling me it's really... Okay. Got it. Crystal Carter: Definitely your star sign. Mordy Oberstein: That's just- Crystal Carter: I mean, I think I am definitely... I'm a Pisces rising in a Taurus. No, I'm kidding. I don't know how that works. Literally, I'm very top level on my astrology. I'm completely honest. Mordy Oberstein: I know Taurus, I know Pisces, and I know Gemini, and that's all I know. Crystal Carter: Okay, well, we'll leave it at that. Mordy Oberstein: A little foreshadowing there. Now, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter Searchlight over Wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also automate the heck out of your client's site with Wix's revamped integration with Zapier. Connect your client's site and take advantage of thousands of marketing automations. You know what else can automate a heck of a lot of things? Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Google's Gemini. Oh. They're taking a play out of the back pages of a newspaper, as our horoscope says AI technology is on the horizon. We'll get into what is Google Gemini, what has Google said about Gemini in search, and what are some possible ways Gemini may impact SEO in the future. To help us see the future of search, we'll soon chat with the one, the only, editor of Search Engine Land, that's Barry Schwartz's boss. Danny Goodwin will join us in just a few moments. We'll also talk to the co-founder of The Neuron, Peter Huang, about what Gemini means, not just for SEO, but beyond SEO, and of course we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following a social media for more SEO awesomeness. So let's see what's in the stars today and what the horoscope of the SERP is, as episode number 74 of the SERP's Up podcast. It's all playful, perceptive, and intellectually curious as we go all Gemini on you. Crystal Carter: You know, there are a lot of sides to a Gemini. It's like they have twin personality. Mordy Oberstein: I have no idea. I have literally no clue. Crystal Carter: That's what they say about all of that sort of thing, and I mean that kind of tracks with what we've heard about it so far. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Nicely done. I've never actually read a horoscope in my life before. Crystal Carter: Really? Mordy Oberstein: No, I've never really like- Crystal Carter: I love horoscopes. It's like a fortune cookie. That's how I treat it. Mordy Oberstein: I like fortune cookies. They tastes good. Can you eat a horoscope? Crystal Carter: I mean... Mordy Oberstein: I don't care. Okay, so before we bring in Danny, let's talk a little bit what just very, very quickly is catch everybody up. What is Google Gemini? It's a new AI model that allegedly solves very complex tasks. It could understand all sorts of media and mediums, from text, to code, to audio, et cetera. It's extremely powerful and it's meant to compete with Google... With Google's. With OpenAI's GPT-4, and according to certain tests, it seems to outperform GPT-4, which is interesting. So there are all sorts of possible implications about what this means for Google search. Google has kind of talked a little bit about it, which is why we thought we would bring Danny Goodwin on, because Danny wrote a whole article about this. So welcome to SERP's Up, Danny. Danny Goodwin: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Mordy, and Crystal, I guess I should disclose I'm a Scorpio. So- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, right. Scorpio. Right, right, right. Okay. I know that one. Crystal Carter: Right? Okay. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate that. Danny Goodwin: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Danny Goodwin: It depends. Mordy Oberstein: It depends. Crystal Carter: Although Scorpios I know are very, very loyal people. Very loyal- Danny Goodwin: Very true. Crystal Carter: Very, like, ride or die. That's my homie. Danny Goodwin: Very much. Crystal Carter: That's the end of that. Danny Goodwin: That's some people saying and it's some people, not their thing. But yes, that's a very good assessment. Loyal, ambitious, all that stuff. Crystal Carter: Well, welcome to the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: It sounds like competing personality traits, loyal and ambitious. Danny Goodwin: Well, I don't know. I tend to look at as I like to do my absolute best for whatever company I work for. But in doing so, I also grow my own brand, so to speak. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, okay. That works. Danny Goodwin: I think they work together. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's cool. Okay. I get it. Crystal Carter: I think so. Danny Goodwin: It's like... You think back on my earliest days in search was at Search Engine Watch. A lot of the work I did there sort of built my reputation for the rest of my career. Mordy Oberstein: Truth. Danny Goodwin: So I thought... Yeah, I think just generally doing hard work and showcasing your talent is incredibly valuable for advancing your career. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And advancing the company you're with. So I've heard people who are like, "Oh, should I let my team go out and do speaking and stuff? What if they go somewhere else?" I'm like, "Yeah, but they're letting you shine by shining. I shine, you shine, we all shine." It's good for everybody. Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. Crystal Carter: Agree. Danny Goodwin: And we all love shining happy people. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so let's talk Gemini. Danny Goodwin: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: You wrote a whole article about covering... When Google came out with their big Gemini announcement covering what Google has said about it and what it is. So what has Google said about Gemini in search and what is Gemini exactly? Danny Goodwin: The easiest way to think about it is Gemini is basically the equivalent to GPT from OpenAI. It's sort of the backend large language model that is powering a lot of the things that Google wants to do in search in the future. I don't think they have all the capabilities yet. And basically they came out with three flavors, I guess, of Gemini, initially, and this is 1.0. So we're going to see advancements in it. They have Ultra, Pro, and Nano. We're getting a taste of the Pro model now in Bard, and I believe... The rumor is they're going to have a paid version of Bard in the future, and I think that will be powered by the Ultra version. So we'll see how that shakes out. That's just all rumor at this point. But basically, yeah. So right now they're testing Gemini for SGE. They've said that in addition to reducing the time it takes to generate the SGE responses, the AI answers, they claim that it basically has resulted in other search quality improvements. But they didn't really explain what those are. It's in testing now and they said that it is coming to search and ads in the future, in the next few months. So that will be interesting and I don't think they're going to announce it before it comes out. I imagine it'll be sort of RankBrain or some of the other things they've just deployed. It will be there and then at some point later they'll go, "Oh, by the way, we launched this two months ago." So we will see. I could be wrong. And I think this just ultimately gets Google closer to that model it's sort of been at for the... They've had this long-term vision. If you go back to some of the earliest interviews, Marie Haynes uncovered this really great old interview with Larry Page. It's just like, ultimately AI is search. "When someone comes to Google and asks a question, we give them the right answer. That's AI. That's search." It's sort of always been the model. I've been comparing it recently... I'll give credit, too, to Michael King for this one. He had this great video from a few years ago where he compared where Google's going to the movie Her, which I don't know if you guys have seen. It was a 2013 movie, I believe. Scarlett Johansson... Really good cast, actually. Amy Adams and some other good people. But it's basically like Her was an operating system. It's a virtual assistant. It adapts to you. It learns from you. I think that's where Google's going. It's just you talk to Google and it will- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I did see this movie. Okay. I did see this. Danny Goodwin: ... Respond to you. Yeah, it's basically it learns from you and responds to you and anticipates your needs. It's basically your virtual assistant. And I think we're going to start seeing that first when they incorporate Bard into the assistant on Google phones. Mordy Oberstein: So where do you think, based upon what Google has said, what they're trying to do, where do you think they're going, what are they trying to use Gemini for exactly? It's simply to generate answers as better answers, faster answers? Or are they going to expand what AI means? Or do you think... Because we don't really know what they're going to do. But do you think they're going to expand what AI means on the SERP, beyond what we're currently seeing in the form of SGE? Danny Goodwin: I think right now, my guess is a lot of it, because... I'm sure you remember when they first launched SGE, it took a really long time to generate those answers, and I have definitely... We've reported, Michael King did research on it, Authoritas did some research on it, and that time has definitely reduced. So I think that's the biggest area right now. Quality wise, I still don't see perfect answers or they're just very surfacey, generic. I don't know if they're going to make... I'd love to see a bit more depth if they're going to really go all in on this, but they're not there. It's kind of like a fourth grade book report on, "Tell me about this thing." So I don't know if that's going to improve. That'll be interesting to see. But I ultimately think they have so much data that they collected on you, on me... They know the story you clicked on in Google News and what videos you watch on YouTube. I just imagine them connecting all these dots together ultimately, and Gemini is going to be that kind of backend for connecting all these dots and trying to figure out what you want, click on what you want, what content you want to consume, what do you want to read, what videos you want to see, all these things and just be like a real recommendation engine. Best way to compare it to what TikToks doing. Mordy Oberstein: So Google Discover on steroids? Danny Goodwin: Yes. Yes. That's what it feels like. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting. Yeah. Crystal Carter: And do you think that this is a play to put them back ahead of the game? I think that when ChatGPT broke more for the mainstream, and particularly when Bing was like, "We've put this into New Bing," I think Google, it seemed anyway, they were a little bit on the back foot. Not that they haven't been progressing with AI. They've had tons of AI for years. But for a public facing product, they seem to be a little bit trying to pull something together. Do you think that this is a play to move to be the forerunners, and do you think this puts them there? Danny Goodwin: I think it's definitely... There's definitely a PR aspect to a lot of what we're seeing. Going all the way back to SGE, it was kind of like vaporware announcements. It's like, "We have this really awesome thing. You can't see it yet though." And that seems to be how they've been going with us. And it was even the same with Gemini to an extent, because they had that video. Mordy Oberstein: The video was interesting. Danny Goodwin: The video was very interesting and was also very fake, and I called out on it. So it's like they're taking a couple steps forward and back. But it's like when they flubbed their initial introduction of Bard, when they had that wrong answer, and they got called out on it and their stock took a dive. Remember that way back in the day? And all these things have consequences. So from big perspective, Bing is honestly... The game is over for Microsoft. This was, to me, I thought their kind of the last chance because they had all this hype going with GPT, but we've followed the numbers. They've gained no market share since launching this, despite all the hoopla. Despite like, "Oh my God, this is the shiny new thing. ChatGPT is awesome." Hasn't helped them a bit. Mordy Oberstein: Which is interesting because Google went doubled down and said, "Oh, you're going to do that? We'll do that better." But was that really what users really want in the end? And I think... We don't like talking about this on the podcast, but the money aspect is fascinating and the PR aspect is fascinating, because a lot of this does have to do with stock prices. And a lot of it is, "Hey, let's put this out there. Let's show us... Position ourselves at a certain way." But at a certain point, you do have to actually address what users want. Otherwise, your fundamental product will not work and that's also impact the stock price. And I wonder if it goes back to what you were saying before about offering deeper answers because I find it... It's novel, it's interesting. It's really not that helpful. It's a featured snippet with citations. Like, okay, that's interesting. But one of the things that I thought was interesting when Google announced Gemini was they were showing, if you can ask it something like... I think the example they gave had to do was "I want to plan a birthday party for my kid." And it gave you one format of results that kind of aligned to the information. Maybe there's a lot of videos there, maybe there's a lot of lists or whatever. And they formatted the result to meet the need of that query, so that you can better explore what you wanted to learn about whatever is about a birthday party for your kid. Then they asked about a recipe and the format was very different because the type of exploration you're going to do when you're looking for a recipe requires a different visual format to be able to explore those results. I thought that was fascinating, and I wondered if maybe they would bring something like that to SGE. I think where SGE, to me, at least where it's novel is... Not it's pitting out an answer. It's novel in being able to facilitate exploration. "Here's a bunch of little tidbit of information. Here's a bunch of information that I'll give you the TLDR and you can now go explore this." And it'll be really interesting to me if they were able to bring in the custom formatting that they discussed in the Gemini demo, we'll link to that in the show notes, and bring that to SGE because that would really allow you to explore like a mad person. Danny Goodwin: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that Google hasn't figured this thing out. I think they'll dispute it. They'll say they didn't rush this out. I feel like they felt like they had to rush it out. It's an imperfect product. It's an experiment. They keep reiterating, "It's still an experiment." So yeah, I feel like this is just going to be one of those things. They're really all in on this. I know a lot of people are like, "Oh, they think that SGE is not going to end up being launched." It is going to be launched. Mordy Oberstein: No, it's going to be launched. Just what will it be? Danny Goodwin: Right? Yeah. And that's the big question. So yeah, if they can do that and they can really nail that user intent, that is going to be, I think, the major change. We've already talked about there are certain niches that are really going to be hammered hard by SGE. There's been lots of discussion about that. Informational searches. What is this thing? What is that thing? Those are going to be hurt. They're going to lose a lot of traffic. Yes. And I remember Ryan Jones... I don't know if everyone watching knows who Ryan Jones is, but he is in SEO. He's been around for a long time. At Pubcon, he basically said, when I was watching his presentations, "When the web launched, you have to think about... " People were looking for answers, but webpages were the only way at that time you could get an answer. Since that time, 25 years later now, the web has evolved a lot. So there are other ways to get answers now, especially with these deep learning systems that Google's using, passage ranking, all these things, and users really expect more. Even Google has admitted that they're seeing the Gen Z, the younger people, they're going to TikTok, they're going Instagram when they're looking for a restaurant or other things, and that is a threat to them. So it's like they have to adapt, especially... Maybe the three of us have searched a certain way. We've done so for many years, but maybe we're not the core audience anymore. I know I'm probably outside the key demographic for them at this point, but- Mordy Oberstein: Are we old? Danny Goodwin: It could be. I know I am, but I don't know how old you two are, but- Crystal Carter: I do not identify as old. Mordy Oberstein: I do, and I have for a long time, even though I was young. Danny Goodwin: You both look much younger than me. Crystal Carter: Thank you! Danny Goodwin: SEO is aged for me very much. Crystal Carter: Like when you see those presidents at the beginning of their term and then at the end, and they're like, "Wow." Danny Goodwin: Exactly. Crystal Carter: And you see Obama on a jet ski and you're like, "Oh, he looks great now. He suddenly doesn't have the way to the world." But one thing that I think is interesting, with Gemini, for instance. With the release, they also talked about Vertex AI, which is one of their product things. And essentially, they talk about other people being able to build with it and to be able to create with it. How much do you think that's going to affect how this develops and who adopts and what they adopt and how they integrate? Danny Goodwin: That part is very interesting. I've been reading a lot of stuff that's kind of outside of SEO. It almost seems like to me we're heading toward this weird future, too, where Crystal has her own AI persona. Like Mordy has his own AI persona. And your persona exists separate of you on the web, goes out, and does things that Mordy would want or figure out things that you would be interested in and finds it. Mordy Oberstein: I already have this. It's called my Twitter account. Danny Goodwin: Well, yes. But imagine you just took and trained your model on your Twitter account. You went out there. Boom, there you go. Now you don't even have to do it. Mordy Oberstein: Don't let that happen. Crystal Carter: Too late. Danny Goodwin: It's kind of scary. It's like the whole web at some point in the future could just be the AIs talking to other AIs. And that was another part of that movie Her. It's like the main AI in that movie, the Her character is talking to all these other AIs and they're coming up with these solutions to things and doing things all on their own, separate from humans. So it's really interesting to think about. Is the Web even going to be human-centric 10 years from now? I know we're already overrun and we're already overrun by bots. We know that too. Bot traffic too. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Danny Goodwin: So that's only going to get worse. Crystal Carter: I definitely know what you mean though, because I've seen people saying, "Oh yeah, you can have your AI read your emails." And then somebody else being like, "You can have AI write your emails." So who is actually reading the emails? But I also have this sort of thing where I'm regularly thinking, "Oh, that's how we ended... How that movie ended up like that." I feel like we're in a lot of times these days, I just find myself like, "Oh, that's how that movie starts. That's how we ended in that futurescape." Danny Goodwin: Totally. I know. Yeah, just don't let it take over the defense system is all I know. Mordy Oberstein: I know. Someone cue up the Terminator music. Danny Goodwin: Right. That's when all the trouble really starts. Crystal Carter: But I do think it's important to look at the Google Cloud stuff as well, because when I found... Particularly when I was looking at visual search a few years ago. When I was doing the research for it, I was looking at all of the Google Cloud product drops. Basically, that's where they tell you how the AI actually works, is that they're at the Google Cloud product drop things. That's where a lot of the magic happens, and I think that it'll be interesting to see who adopts the APIs for Gemini and how that rolls out to see... Because Google very often gets ideas from users, from large scale users for these kinds of products, for how we might see it applied in search, I think. Danny Goodwin: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that's definitely a To-Be-Determined area. I couldn't claim specialization in that area or expertise, so I won't. But yeah, I definitely agree. Definitely watch whatever Google Cloud is doing. I've seen that many times, especially the stuff around... All the entity SEO stuff. There's so much to learn in that area too, from Google Cloud and all those tools. So yes. Mordy Oberstein: It does, to me, kind of come down to what you were talking about before as to how we consume content and how that changes. To piggyback off of Ryan, I'll oftentimes... I don't live in the US anymore, but I follow NFL football. So most of the games are in the middle of the night for me. So if it's a game that I want to catch up on, I'll watch the highlights in the morning. I'm like, "All right, I'll watch the highlights. I don't want to know the score yet." And before I even go to Google or anything, I turn my phone on and there's a little card that says the score. I'm like, "Damn it." And that's not a feature snippet on the service. Not a direct answer on the service. This is a push notification. And the way we consume content and people talk about, "Oh, it's taking away clicks." But it's not just Google doing it. It's just a whole ecosystem is built and designed... That quick information is not meant for websites anymore. I know it sounds horrible to say, but to a certain extent, it's not. It's meant for a push notification. It's meant for an AI answer. It's meant for whatever. And I feel like however content consumption evolves is how AI is going to evolve to match it and to supplement it and to drive that need or that desire that people have in what they consume and how they consume it. Danny Goodwin: Yeah, I remember there was all kinds of outrage at one point. I don't remember the year. It was probably early 2010s, and everybody got so upset. I think it was a search on Google for the temperature was literally a one answer result. I don't know if you remember this. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I remember this. I remember freaking out about it. Danny Goodwin: Everybody freaked out about it. Mordy Oberstein: Every once in a while still shows up that way. There's nothing else on the SERP, but the direct answer. Danny Goodwin: Exactly. And it's just like, well, yeah, because you can find the temperature on weather channels, on the news, on various... It's just a thing. You shouldn't base your monetary model around getting organic traffic for the current temperature. Mordy Oberstein: Basing your business strategy on something that someone's able to understand by literally sticking their hand out the window- Danny Goodwin: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: ... Is probably not the best thing. Danny Goodwin: Also, yes. But one interesting thing that, just going really quickly back to the sports thing, which I found very interesting. I don't know if this could be rolled out in some way to search, but I just signed up for YouTube TV. They have an option on the TV now where you can hide sports scores before you watch the game, which I had not seen before. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Danny Goodwin: That would be very interesting if they could roll that out into search somehow where it's like a spoiler free version. Mordy Oberstein: That's amazing. That'd be great because it's happened so many times. Okay, I'm looking forward to that. Danny Goodwin: So anyway. I don't know if that, but if YouTube's doing it now on YouTube TV. Who knows? It could come to search someday. We'll see. Crystal Carter: I think that comes back to what you were talking about before. You mentioned that Google has all these different data sets and they have all this different amount of data on us, just as Google users and all of that. And I think it's interesting, because you were saying with Bing while they were trying to push ChatGPT and while they were trying to push New Bing, they were like, "Hey, if you want new Bing, you've got to make Edge your default browser." And I was like, "What?" They were like, "You got to put it on your phone." And I was like, "Huh?" My first response was like, "Why are they doing this?" And then I realized, "Oh, they don't have the same amount of data that Google has on me for being a Chrome user for years and years and years, and that everybody who has a Google Pixel has and everybody who has Gmail and all that sort of stuff. That whole ecosystem." And I think that that's going to be the linchpin for Google being able to drive Gemini forward and more of their other tech is how much data that they're able to collect on a daily basis about search and things like that. And like you said, being able to pull the dots together. Danny Goodwin: I mean, yeah, there are cases where being the first mover matters. I don't think in search it does, because Google can wait. And from the beginning, I was almost like, "Google's going to sit and watch Bing for a little while, see what they screw up, and not do that." That was my thinking from the beginning. I was just like, "Let Bing be the first one through the wall. Let them make all the mistakes. And it's one less thing that they'll have to worry about maybe from a feature antitrust thing, because I can go, oh, well, Microsoft did that first." Mordy Oberstein: Well, that is coming back to bite. There are lawsuits now. Danny Goodwin: Well, this is true, yes. But it's just... Again, goes back to the PR angle, which I know probably isn't most interesting to your listeners. Mordy Oberstein: No, I find that part the most interesting, because it's like the puppet and the string kind of thing. Danny Goodwin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, ultimately... And I said this... I did my keynote at SMX. It's like when you think about these AI companies, behind everything, you always have to remember it's monetary. They're not in this... I mean, yes, they want to give users a good experience, blah, blah, blah, because it makes them money. Like, yes. Okay, you're going to get good results. But ultimately they're making money on these great results and they don't want to upset that model. So that's why I say people who are saying SGE won't launch, just give that up. It's launching. They're going to figure it out and I kind of compared it to a casino. It's like, the House always wins. They just got to figure out where to put the big money slot machines on the right location on the floor, and they're going to stack the deck and they're going to figure it out. And they're probably going to end up, too, with ads. It's going to be less inventory, which means prices are going to go up for PPC advertisers. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: I think the other thing is that they've got a lot of, in terms of the house always wins or whatever, they've got a lot of cards in their hand. Danny Goodwin: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: They call it SGE now. It might be that it feeds into a different part of the SERP. That it might be that it shows up in a different way. It might be that it's just a shopping assistant or something and that sort of stuff. So they have a lot of different levers they can pull in terms of AI integration. So yeah, I think it is absolutely important that people pay attention to what they're doing there and how it all moves around. Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: So if people wanted to connect the dots and find you, Danny, where could they find you? Danny Goodwin: They can find me on Search Engine Land. Probably the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Just search for me. I'm Mr. Danny Goodwin on socials. I am on X, but not as much as I used to be. But yes, mainly, writing daily on Search Engine Land or near daily. And we also have our two big SMX shows twice a year, SMX Advanced and SMX next. And you just spoke Next and Mordy got rave reviews. Everybody should know, because he is awesome as a presenter. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Danny Goodwin: So thank you for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: One good thing I'm good at. Presenting. I'm very presentable. Danny Goodwin: You are. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Danny Goodwin: Yep. Yeah, the people love you in our community. Well, some of them. Mordy Oberstein: No, well. The SMX site are a classic... Some people do. SMX are a classic SEO conference. They moved to digital a couple of years ago. Danny Goodwin: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: And they're free. Are they... Right? I'm correct to say that? Danny Goodwin: They're totally free. Yep. Yeah, we moved online, unfortunately due to covid, but they've actually ended up working out really well. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I spoke at SMX during Covid, and it was lovely. I think I spoke with, I remember chatting to Barry actually during a session. Danny Goodwin: That must have been fun. Crystal Carter: Which was great. Mordy Oberstein: I hope you two had fun. Barry loves fun. Crystal Carter: Oh yes, we did have fun. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. So yeah, definitely please, you're listening to this. Check out the SMX conference series. We'll link to it in the show notes. It's free. Sign up. You can learn an absolute ton. Danny Goodwin: And yeah, read Search Engine Land every day. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Danny Goodwin: All spam. That was my spam plug. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. We're all- Danny Goodwin: Sign up for the newsletter. Follow us on social. Mordy Oberstein: No, we're all for plugging. Crystal Carter: Like and subscribe. Danny Goodwin: Yeah, like and subscribe. Mordy Oberstein: So say thank you to Barry and say hi to Barry, rather. Say hi to Barry for us. Barry looms large over our show. He's a part of our show every week, but he is not actually on it. Crystal Carter: Should we have him on it one day? Mordy Oberstein: We had him once. You forgot? We had Barry. See? We- Crystal Carter: Yes, that's true. That's true. But we didn't have him as an interview. That's why. Mordy Oberstein: For those of you, it's your first time listening to the podcast, we cover the SEO news. Often we'll cover Danny's articles. But we also often inevitably cover at least one of Barry Schwartz's articles. So Barry is a very much part of our podcast each and every week, and he looms over it. Danny Goodwin: Have you had the Standee behind you for an entire podcast? Mordy Oberstein: I need to get that. It's still in England, I think. Danny Goodwin: That was fantastic. So I just remember... I don't... Which conference was it? Was that BrightonSEO, where you went- Mordy Oberstein: It was Brighton, yeah. We had a giant cut out of Barry Schwartz and it was a cornhole game too. Danny Goodwin: That was epic. I remember seeing that and just laughing when I saw that on social. I was like, "That's awesome." I wanted that. Mordy Oberstein: People, we have to get it. It's still somewhere in England. People came up and thought, "Wait, is that actually Barry?" And didn't realize it was a cutout. Crystal Carter: Like a foot taller than him as well. It was a giant Barry. Mordy Oberstein: He was a great sport. He took a picture just for that. I didn't pull that picture offline. He actually took a picture for the thing. He's a great sport, Barry. Danny Goodwin: Yes, yes he is. And he is been doing it 20 years, which is insane. His productivity, I don't know... If you don't mind me plugging one more thing. JR Oakes did this really awesome article on Search Engine Land. I don't know if you saw that one. But yeah, it was just sort of recapping the history through the lens of Barry Schwartz, which was... There was so many amazing insights of how productive Barry is and just all the... So many topics he's covered through 20 years and how his growth of... His writing has gone up into the right curve over the years, which is insane. He just gets more and more productive. So I don't know how he does it. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. JR is also amazing. I will- Crystal Carter: Do you think it's AI? Danny Goodwin: No. Definitely not. Mordy Oberstein: Barry's not a robot. Danny Goodwin: BI? Barry intelligence? Mordy Oberstein: Barry... Danny Goodwin: But we do need to... Yeah, we should download his brain. Mordy Oberstein: We should save it in the ether forever. Danny Goodwin: Yes, absolutely. If for nothing else, just the sarcasm. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: A thousand percent. A thousand percent. Thank you so much, Danny. Really appreciate you coming on, and we'll see you out there. Thanks for all you do for Search Engine Land and the industry. Danny Goodwin: Thank you, Mordy. Thank you, Crystal. It's been great to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So limiting the conversation around AI just to SEO will not be doing Gemini justice. And because it is something of influence in the stars, I want to do Gemini justice, and I don't want to get my horoscope ruined and my life destroyed because I didn't do justice. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: So we're going to take a look at what Gemini means for the evolution of AI with a little help from the co-founder of The Neuron, Pete Huang, as we move out of SEO per se and into a segment we call the Great Beyond. So Pete is a masterful expert around all things AI. Said a lot about the topic. So we asked him, "Hey Pete, why is Chip and I a big deal for the evolution of AI?" And here's what Pete had to say. Pete Huang: Gemini is really a catch-up moment for Google this time. Last year, people had two thoughts when it came to this sector, AI, if you rewind to just two months after ChatGPT got released. The first one is OpenAI might just run away with it and nobody's ever going to catch up. And two, where the heck is Google? I mean, after all, they have everything on their side. Money, computing, resources, talent, and they seem to have no answer to what OpenAI has done. And so every time Google would make an announcement, it would just be one or two steps behind where people thought they needed to be for them to catch up. So Google releases Gemini and makes a very pointed statement that their best model Gemini Ultra beats OpenAI's GPT-4. And if this holds up after people get access to Gemini Ultra, we would now have two models at this level, which is more choice and more capabilities on the market that performs as well as GPT-4 does, which is currently what powers ChatGPT on the backend, especially if you upgrade to ChatGPT Plus. The main way this has shown up so far is in Google Bard, which is like Google's version of ChatGPT. It had always been lagging ChatGPT and was sort of unusable when it first launched. When we first used it, we would ask it for basic integration stuff, which is, "Can you find me three restaurants near this area?" And all the information would be wrong. Since then, they've swapped out the model behind Bard to use Gemini, and it's gotten a whole lot better. It's become good enough to recommend, in fact, especially if you use Google products. So in summary, Gemini is really Google saying, "We're here now and we've taken a year to do this." I mean, Gemini was released in the tail end of 2023. "But we're finally here." And in the grand scheme of these sort of races to build technology one year really isn't all that much. But it does paint a contrast to what was going on earlier in the year in 2023, where it felt like every day, every week, every month, there was something happening. And so therefore, it made Google's relative silence feel like there was nothing real or tangible or productive going on there, or at least that they were very much falling behind in the race. So from my perspective, it is good for developers, good for businesses who want more choice, and certainly good for the consumer who wants to use Google products even more. As for SEO, I think this is the part where the SGE generated results might get a little bit better. The question I think is whether or not SGE is the form factor, is the product that makes users more engaged. That is ultimately the question that decides how far a new feature gets rolled out. So we might see SGE results improve, especially if they share that Gemini is powering those results. But that is all TBD and I think more immediately we're seeing the impact in products that Google Bard for now. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Pete. Make sure you check out Pete's newsletter, The Neuron Daily at TheNeuronDaily.com, and we'll link to Pete's social media profiles in the show notes. So make sure to give them a follow. Really, really interesting. First off, I want to take up the SGE thing really quick. I don't want to get too hung up on the SEO side. We said it's the great beyond. We're beyond SEO for a minute. But if you look at what happened with Bing and their version of SGE, it did nothing for them in terms of market share. And I think we talked about this in the podcast multiple times. The SGE, as you see it now, was part of the great AI race to keep up with Bing. And I don't think it's fundamentally what users actually need or want and that what will move the needle for Google. So I do see, to Pete's point, I do see SGE morphing to something else and not being what it is now. In terms of the overall picture, if I could sum up what I took away from that, there was a lot of daily noise for the last year or so, and then things went quiet. And now we're finally looking at the real developments in AI as opposed to all of the noise around AI, which is so ironic because you see the interest in ChatGPT falling off a little bit over the last few months. So it's sort of ironic as now things actually ramp up and things develop people's interest in it, it's sort of gone down just a bit. We're all past the hype part of it. But ironically now we're getting to the real stuff. Maybe it's now when you should be paying attention. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that that's the case. I think that when a lot of people are like, "Oh, AI is magical." It's not magical. Basically- Mordy Oberstein: No. Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? Crystal Carter: It's not magical. Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was at the end of a rainbow was an pot full of AI? Crystal Carter: No, no. And the other thing is that we've had AI in our lives for ages. What we've have now is the ability to harness it directly ourselves in a way that we were not able to do before. And I agree with Pete when he says that Google was playing catch up and this is now them trying to get into it. Because I think that ChatGPT has made AI more accessible. It's very user-friendly. It's very easily accessible. But to get real good nuanced, sophisticated benefit from these tools, you still have to know stuff. You can't just be like any schmo off the street and just walk in and get something that's particularly amazing because literally everyone has access to it. So the smart people still have access to the same thing as the people who are maybe moving along and making their way. So I think that we are seeing, like you said, the real... More sophisticated, more nuanced, and people who have been working with these tools for years, because they have been available for years, are able to do more than they were able to do before. And I think that, yeah, I agree that Bard is going to... I think at the moment they've got a lot of things running. They've got Bard running, they've got the SGE running, they've got Gemini running, they've got lots of different things running, and I think that we're probably going to see convergence. Mordy Oberstein: Bet their knees hurt from all the running. Crystal Carter: We're probably going to see a convergence of some of these AI tools at the same time, because the other thing that they have running as well is Lens. I've talked about Lens a lot across when I was talking about visual search a lot. And Lens is becoming very, very sophisticated. So you can use it for QR codes. You can use it for it for- Mordy Oberstein: Translation of images. I use it all the time for that. Crystal Carter: Right? It's super useful for that. You just hold it up in the thing and it translates multiple languages at once. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: So if you're looking at ingredients and you're trying to figure out whether or not it has peanuts and it's going to give you an allergic reaction, you can see it in English and French and Spanish, and it can translate all of those different languages at once. And I think that we're probably going to see a convergence of those tools into something that changes search significantly. And Gemini, I think, like Pete is saying, is going to be the backbone of that. Mordy Oberstein: And you see that reflected in the fact that Gemini has multiple pricing models and multiple models are not for the average person. Crystal Carter: Right? And like I said, in our discussion earlier as well, we are going to see more players that are making use of Gemini, the quicker Google's going to be able to learn from that. It's the same reason why they made ChatGPT available to people in the first place for pretty much for free. And then the plus is because they are learning. They're learning from every single interaction that we're having with it, and they're learning what people value from it, what people can do with it, and all of that. So as Gemini is more available to enterprise level clients, they're going to be able to learn what it's able to do and they're going to be able to make more advance, more advancements more quickly. Mordy Oberstein: You know what I would like? I would like to have some sort of chatGPT version of Barry. BarryGPT. It's like you ask Siri. "Hey Siri, what's happening with the NFL today?" And Siri gives you an answer back. "Hey Barry, what's happening in the SEO news today?" And it would be Barry talking and telling you what's happening. BarryGPT. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay, you've put that down. Now that... You now ideate that. Mordy Oberstein: If anyone takes it, I want, some kind of finder's fee for it. Crystal Carter: I'm sure there's a technical term. Technical legal term for it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I don't know what it is, but give me the money. It was my idea first. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: So without further ado, here's Barry and other people talking about the SEO news and possibly about AI. Let's find out. Mordy Oberstein: Now for this week's snappy news. Barry Schwartz reports on SEL that Google has dropped web stories from the image results, Google Discover carousel, and reduced the grid view to carousel view in Google search. Web stories have had a mixed reception amongst search marketers due to their complex implementation, effect on Google Discover traffic, and what Lily Ray referred to as the ability of folks to have used the feature by spamming the hell out of web stories. Glenn Gabe, who shared a great thread on the news, predicts that this change is the start of a full scale deprecation and that web stories could be completely gone in a year or so. Time will tell. Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Goodwin reports that Yandex search engine has been sold in a $5.2 billion deal. The Dutch parent company of what is effectively Russia's version of Google has just agreed on the sale of their search engine to a conglomerate of Russian based companies and business leaders. It is used by more than 60% of people in Russia and could result in some changes to how the search engine performs in the not too distance feature. So keep an eye on this one. In a post from blog.google, Google has announced that they are merging their Google Bard product into Gemini. This signals a move to streamline their AI offering and is illustrated by the fact that they are adding Gemini into the Google Assistant tool. This means that those who opt-in can use Google Gemini on their phone simply by saying, "Hey, Google." This, combined with a subscription-based model, should help them become more direct competitors, which ChatGPT, and might make voice search more of a thing. Maybe this year is the year. This week, there was also some great discussion on core web vitals as Google search liaison, Danny Sullivan, doubled down on a previous statement saying, "We don't confirm any core web vitals as a direct ranking factor." As reported by Barry Schwartz in Search Engine Roundtable, Sullivan shared an article saying, "While not all aspects may be directly used to inform ranking, they do generally align with success in search ranking and are worth attention." And in a lively Twitter discussion, he shared that. It doesn't say it's a ranking factor. SEOs continue to be confused by this, but as Danny explains, "Is there a single page experience signal that Google uses for ranking? There is no single signal. Our core systems look at a variety of signals that align with overall page experience." So in the end, I think if we can all agree that it depends, and that's this week's snappy news. Mordy Oberstein: Do you think now that Barry heard this idea, because Barry does listen to the podcast, if he'll create, if Barry created BarryGPT himself, does he still owe me a finder's fee thing? Crystal Carter: I don't know. You'd have to discuss that with Barry. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. It's all right, Barry, I'll just take a bread and butter sandwich instead as payment. Crystal Carter: Sounds good. I think that's fair. I think that's fair. Mordy Oberstein: For Halloween, I want to dress up as the butter and Barry can be the bread. This is, by the way, an inside joke about Barry's ability to make butter sandwiches, which is not as great as his ability to make news. Crystal Carter: I'm like, "Why didn't you toast it?" And he's like, "No, I just thought I'd mangle the bread." Mordy Oberstein: "There's no time." Just to explain, Barry, a year ago and somehow it resurfaced, posted a picture of his butter sandwich that he made, and it's mutilated. It's like the bread is torn. The butters in chunks. Crystal Carter: It's what happens when you put cold butter on soft bread and just smear it. Mordy Oberstein: Just force it. Crystal Carter: Right? It's not going to work. Mordy Oberstein: Spread, damn it. Spread. It's unbelievable. But he's like, "I didn't have any time to make a sandwich." I'm like, "All right." Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to the tweet in the show notes. That's how... Yeah, this is pathetic, but we'll link to it in the show notes. We've gotten way off the rails. Speaking of other people who are AI tools, or love AI tools rather, our follow of the week this week is a very special person. He happens to be one of the producers of this very podcast. It is the one, the only, host of EDGE of the web radio. Erin Sparks over at E-R-I-N-S-P-A-R-K-S Sparks on X, formerly known as Twitter. Twitter, formerly known as X, in my mind. Erin does a podcast called EDGE of the Web. It's a great podcast. Listen to it after you listen to this one. And he does the SEO news every week, which I co-host with him, which is full of shenanigans. It's not like anything like this podcast at all. Pure shenanigans. Crystal Carter: With the occasional guest star from yours truly as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I do appreciate you, Crystal filling in for me when I can't. Crystal Carter: Mordy's like, "I can't. Can you?" And I'm like, "Sure. Great." Love Erin. Love Jacob. Mordy Oberstein: They're great. Jacob, Jacob Mann. They're fabulous people. And Erin loves his AI tools. And every week on the SEO... On the EDGE of the web news rather, he'll cover his favorite AI tools, which makes me completely check out, by the way. Crystal Carter: Okay. So every time I guest host, and this is the reason why Erin is our follow of the week... If you're not following Erin, do. But every time we go on there, he's always like, "Oh, I found this new thing." I'm like, "But that's so cool." Mordy Oberstein: Some of it is really cool. Okay, I gave him a hard time. But there are some really cool ones in there. Crystal Carter: There's some cool ones. The best one I found, or the one that he showed me last time, was one that was around AI image generators. And I've tried AI generator- Mordy Oberstein: You showed me this hack, by the way. Crystal Carter: ... And my prompts are... It's good, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's very good. Okay, explain, please. Crystal Carter: So my prompts are janky. I've tried and people are like, "Yeah, it's great." And I was like, "What?" And all the images that I get are terrible. My prompts, I do my best. They don't really work. So then he showed me something called freeflow.ai, and basically they have a bank of prompts that did work. And you can go in- Mordy Oberstein: And you just steal them. Crystal Carter: ... And you can copy, you can adapt, you can remix, you can update the prompts for it. I used this to redecorate my office. So I found a design prompt and stuff. But for instance, there's one that's like a selfie one, for instance, and you can see the prompt. And the prompt is selfie shot, iPhone 12 Pro Max of subject taking a selfie, et cetera, et cetera. It's got all these different things that whoever's done these prompts actually understands the way, the syntax that the bots prefer in order to give them the best thing. Anyway, it's really great, and he has tons of these and he shares them a lot. And Erin's also super nice and funny and knowledgeable and does a great podcast. And yeah, follow Erin. Mordy Oberstein: Him, Jacob, the whole EDGE of the web crew, really wonderful people. A lot of SEO knowledge. A lot of AI knowledge. So definitely please give them a follow and tell them we said hi when you follow them. "Crystal and Mordy sent us to follow you." That's... I'm all out of predictions from the stars this week. I have nothing else to add. Crystal Carter: Well, I mean, I think that means Mercury's in retrograde or something. Is that what it means? Mordy Oberstein: Sure. Mercury. It's in tuna fish also. Crystal Carter: I'm done. That ended me. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. Anyway, thank you for joining us on The SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into do you really need experts to write the content for you to actually be expert content by experts? Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on SEO Learning over at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content webinar resources on the Wix SEO Learning at, you guessed it, at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Danny Goodwin Pete Huang Erin Sparks Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Search Engine Land Google Gemini Google Gemini is here – and it’s already being tested in Search The Neuron Barry Schwartz's Famous Butter Sandwich Edge of the Web Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Danny Goodwin Pete Huang Erin Sparks Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Search Engine Land Google Gemini Google Gemini is here – and it’s already being tested in Search The Neuron Barry Schwartz's Famous Butter Sandwich Edge of the Web Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by She who searches the stars for SEO answers, the one, the only, Head of Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. My name is Crystal Carter. I'm a Pisces and I am a stargazer. I've been enjoying Jupiter being in the Northern Hemisphere for the last few months. It keeps hanging out by the moon. We're going to talk about lots of things like that. So yeah, welcome to our podcast about SEO. Mordy Oberstein: I'm also a Pisces. What does that mean though? Crystal Carter: I know you're a Pisces. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, because of my personality or because you know what my birthday is? Crystal Carter: Actually, a lot of SEOs are Pisces. I think it's because we like to jump around and we like to go with the flow of the algorithm and things. Mordy Oberstein: I always thought it was my traumatic childhood, but now you're telling me it's really... Okay. Got it. Crystal Carter: Definitely your star sign. Mordy Oberstein: That's just- Crystal Carter: I mean, I think I am definitely... I'm a Pisces rising in a Taurus. No, I'm kidding. I don't know how that works. Literally, I'm very top level on my astrology. I'm completely honest. Mordy Oberstein: I know Taurus, I know Pisces, and I know Gemini, and that's all I know. Crystal Carter: Okay, well, we'll leave it at that. Mordy Oberstein: A little foreshadowing there. Now, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter Searchlight over Wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also automate the heck out of your client's site with Wix's revamped integration with Zapier. Connect your client's site and take advantage of thousands of marketing automations. You know what else can automate a heck of a lot of things? Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Google's Gemini. Oh. They're taking a play out of the back pages of a newspaper, as our horoscope says AI technology is on the horizon. We'll get into what is Google Gemini, what has Google said about Gemini in search, and what are some possible ways Gemini may impact SEO in the future. To help us see the future of search, we'll soon chat with the one, the only, editor of Search Engine Land, that's Barry Schwartz's boss. Danny Goodwin will join us in just a few moments. We'll also talk to the co-founder of The Neuron, Peter Huang, about what Gemini means, not just for SEO, but beyond SEO, and of course we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following a social media for more SEO awesomeness. So let's see what's in the stars today and what the horoscope of the SERP is, as episode number 74 of the SERP's Up podcast. It's all playful, perceptive, and intellectually curious as we go all Gemini on you. Crystal Carter: You know, there are a lot of sides to a Gemini. It's like they have twin personality. Mordy Oberstein: I have no idea. I have literally no clue. Crystal Carter: That's what they say about all of that sort of thing, and I mean that kind of tracks with what we've heard about it so far. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Nicely done. I've never actually read a horoscope in my life before. Crystal Carter: Really? Mordy Oberstein: No, I've never really like- Crystal Carter: I love horoscopes. It's like a fortune cookie. That's how I treat it. Mordy Oberstein: I like fortune cookies. They tastes good. Can you eat a horoscope? Crystal Carter: I mean... Mordy Oberstein: I don't care. Okay, so before we bring in Danny, let's talk a little bit what just very, very quickly is catch everybody up. What is Google Gemini? It's a new AI model that allegedly solves very complex tasks. It could understand all sorts of media and mediums, from text, to code, to audio, et cetera. It's extremely powerful and it's meant to compete with Google... With Google's. With OpenAI's GPT-4, and according to certain tests, it seems to outperform GPT-4, which is interesting. So there are all sorts of possible implications about what this means for Google search. Google has kind of talked a little bit about it, which is why we thought we would bring Danny Goodwin on, because Danny wrote a whole article about this. So welcome to SERP's Up, Danny. Danny Goodwin: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Mordy, and Crystal, I guess I should disclose I'm a Scorpio. So- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, right. Scorpio. Right, right, right. Okay. I know that one. Crystal Carter: Right? Okay. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate that. Danny Goodwin: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Danny Goodwin: It depends. Mordy Oberstein: It depends. Crystal Carter: Although Scorpios I know are very, very loyal people. Very loyal- Danny Goodwin: Very true. Crystal Carter: Very, like, ride or die. That's my homie. Danny Goodwin: Very much. Crystal Carter: That's the end of that. Danny Goodwin: That's some people saying and it's some people, not their thing. But yes, that's a very good assessment. Loyal, ambitious, all that stuff. Crystal Carter: Well, welcome to the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: It sounds like competing personality traits, loyal and ambitious. Danny Goodwin: Well, I don't know. I tend to look at as I like to do my absolute best for whatever company I work for. But in doing so, I also grow my own brand, so to speak. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, okay. That works. Danny Goodwin: I think they work together. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's cool. Okay. I get it. Crystal Carter: I think so. Danny Goodwin: It's like... You think back on my earliest days in search was at Search Engine Watch. A lot of the work I did there sort of built my reputation for the rest of my career. Mordy Oberstein: Truth. Danny Goodwin: So I thought... Yeah, I think just generally doing hard work and showcasing your talent is incredibly valuable for advancing your career. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And advancing the company you're with. So I've heard people who are like, "Oh, should I let my team go out and do speaking and stuff? What if they go somewhere else?" I'm like, "Yeah, but they're letting you shine by shining. I shine, you shine, we all shine." It's good for everybody. Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. Crystal Carter: Agree. Danny Goodwin: And we all love shining happy people. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so let's talk Gemini. Danny Goodwin: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: You wrote a whole article about covering... When Google came out with their big Gemini announcement covering what Google has said about it and what it is. So what has Google said about Gemini in search and what is Gemini exactly? Danny Goodwin: The easiest way to think about it is Gemini is basically the equivalent to GPT from OpenAI. It's sort of the backend large language model that is powering a lot of the things that Google wants to do in search in the future. I don't think they have all the capabilities yet. And basically they came out with three flavors, I guess, of Gemini, initially, and this is 1.0. So we're going to see advancements in it. They have Ultra, Pro, and Nano. We're getting a taste of the Pro model now in Bard, and I believe... The rumor is they're going to have a paid version of Bard in the future, and I think that will be powered by the Ultra version. So we'll see how that shakes out. That's just all rumor at this point. But basically, yeah. So right now they're testing Gemini for SGE. They've said that in addition to reducing the time it takes to generate the SGE responses, the AI answers, they claim that it basically has resulted in other search quality improvements. But they didn't really explain what those are. It's in testing now and they said that it is coming to search and ads in the future, in the next few months. So that will be interesting and I don't think they're going to announce it before it comes out. I imagine it'll be sort of RankBrain or some of the other things they've just deployed. It will be there and then at some point later they'll go, "Oh, by the way, we launched this two months ago." So we will see. I could be wrong. And I think this just ultimately gets Google closer to that model it's sort of been at for the... They've had this long-term vision. If you go back to some of the earliest interviews, Marie Haynes uncovered this really great old interview with Larry Page. It's just like, ultimately AI is search. "When someone comes to Google and asks a question, we give them the right answer. That's AI. That's search." It's sort of always been the model. I've been comparing it recently... I'll give credit, too, to Michael King for this one. He had this great video from a few years ago where he compared where Google's going to the movie Her, which I don't know if you guys have seen. It was a 2013 movie, I believe. Scarlett Johansson... Really good cast, actually. Amy Adams and some other good people. But it's basically like Her was an operating system. It's a virtual assistant. It adapts to you. It learns from you. I think that's where Google's going. It's just you talk to Google and it will- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I did see this movie. Okay. I did see this. Danny Goodwin: ... Respond to you. Yeah, it's basically it learns from you and responds to you and anticipates your needs. It's basically your virtual assistant. And I think we're going to start seeing that first when they incorporate Bard into the assistant on Google phones. Mordy Oberstein: So where do you think, based upon what Google has said, what they're trying to do, where do you think they're going, what are they trying to use Gemini for exactly? It's simply to generate answers as better answers, faster answers? Or are they going to expand what AI means? Or do you think... Because we don't really know what they're going to do. But do you think they're going to expand what AI means on the SERP, beyond what we're currently seeing in the form of SGE? Danny Goodwin: I think right now, my guess is a lot of it, because... I'm sure you remember when they first launched SGE, it took a really long time to generate those answers, and I have definitely... We've reported, Michael King did research on it, Authoritas did some research on it, and that time has definitely reduced. So I think that's the biggest area right now. Quality wise, I still don't see perfect answers or they're just very surfacey, generic. I don't know if they're going to make... I'd love to see a bit more depth if they're going to really go all in on this, but they're not there. It's kind of like a fourth grade book report on, "Tell me about this thing." So I don't know if that's going to improve. That'll be interesting to see. But I ultimately think they have so much data that they collected on you, on me... They know the story you clicked on in Google News and what videos you watch on YouTube. I just imagine them connecting all these dots together ultimately, and Gemini is going to be that kind of backend for connecting all these dots and trying to figure out what you want, click on what you want, what content you want to consume, what do you want to read, what videos you want to see, all these things and just be like a real recommendation engine. Best way to compare it to what TikToks doing. Mordy Oberstein: So Google Discover on steroids? Danny Goodwin: Yes. Yes. That's what it feels like. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting. Yeah. Crystal Carter: And do you think that this is a play to put them back ahead of the game? I think that when ChatGPT broke more for the mainstream, and particularly when Bing was like, "We've put this into New Bing," I think Google, it seemed anyway, they were a little bit on the back foot. Not that they haven't been progressing with AI. They've had tons of AI for years. But for a public facing product, they seem to be a little bit trying to pull something together. Do you think that this is a play to move to be the forerunners, and do you think this puts them there? Danny Goodwin: I think it's definitely... There's definitely a PR aspect to a lot of what we're seeing. Going all the way back to SGE, it was kind of like vaporware announcements. It's like, "We have this really awesome thing. You can't see it yet though." And that seems to be how they've been going with us. And it was even the same with Gemini to an extent, because they had that video. Mordy Oberstein: The video was interesting. Danny Goodwin: The video was very interesting and was also very fake, and I called out on it. So it's like they're taking a couple steps forward and back. But it's like when they flubbed their initial introduction of Bard, when they had that wrong answer, and they got called out on it and their stock took a dive. Remember that way back in the day? And all these things have consequences. So from big perspective, Bing is honestly... The game is over for Microsoft. This was, to me, I thought their kind of the last chance because they had all this hype going with GPT, but we've followed the numbers. They've gained no market share since launching this, despite all the hoopla. Despite like, "Oh my God, this is the shiny new thing. ChatGPT is awesome." Hasn't helped them a bit. Mordy Oberstein: Which is interesting because Google went doubled down and said, "Oh, you're going to do that? We'll do that better." But was that really what users really want in the end? And I think... We don't like talking about this on the podcast, but the money aspect is fascinating and the PR aspect is fascinating, because a lot of this does have to do with stock prices. And a lot of it is, "Hey, let's put this out there. Let's show us... Position ourselves at a certain way." But at a certain point, you do have to actually address what users want. Otherwise, your fundamental product will not work and that's also impact the stock price. And I wonder if it goes back to what you were saying before about offering deeper answers because I find it... It's novel, it's interesting. It's really not that helpful. It's a featured snippet with citations. Like, okay, that's interesting. But one of the things that I thought was interesting when Google announced Gemini was they were showing, if you can ask it something like... I think the example they gave had to do was "I want to plan a birthday party for my kid." And it gave you one format of results that kind of aligned to the information. Maybe there's a lot of videos there, maybe there's a lot of lists or whatever. And they formatted the result to meet the need of that query, so that you can better explore what you wanted to learn about whatever is about a birthday party for your kid. Then they asked about a recipe and the format was very different because the type of exploration you're going to do when you're looking for a recipe requires a different visual format to be able to explore those results. I thought that was fascinating, and I wondered if maybe they would bring something like that to SGE. I think where SGE, to me, at least where it's novel is... Not it's pitting out an answer. It's novel in being able to facilitate exploration. "Here's a bunch of little tidbit of information. Here's a bunch of information that I'll give you the TLDR and you can now go explore this." And it'll be really interesting to me if they were able to bring in the custom formatting that they discussed in the Gemini demo, we'll link to that in the show notes, and bring that to SGE because that would really allow you to explore like a mad person. Danny Goodwin: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that Google hasn't figured this thing out. I think they'll dispute it. They'll say they didn't rush this out. I feel like they felt like they had to rush it out. It's an imperfect product. It's an experiment. They keep reiterating, "It's still an experiment." So yeah, I feel like this is just going to be one of those things. They're really all in on this. I know a lot of people are like, "Oh, they think that SGE is not going to end up being launched." It is going to be launched. Mordy Oberstein: No, it's going to be launched. Just what will it be? Danny Goodwin: Right? Yeah. And that's the big question. So yeah, if they can do that and they can really nail that user intent, that is going to be, I think, the major change. We've already talked about there are certain niches that are really going to be hammered hard by SGE. There's been lots of discussion about that. Informational searches. What is this thing? What is that thing? Those are going to be hurt. They're going to lose a lot of traffic. Yes. And I remember Ryan Jones... I don't know if everyone watching knows who Ryan Jones is, but he is in SEO. He's been around for a long time. At Pubcon, he basically said, when I was watching his presentations, "When the web launched, you have to think about... " People were looking for answers, but webpages were the only way at that time you could get an answer. Since that time, 25 years later now, the web has evolved a lot. So there are other ways to get answers now, especially with these deep learning systems that Google's using, passage ranking, all these things, and users really expect more. Even Google has admitted that they're seeing the Gen Z, the younger people, they're going to TikTok, they're going Instagram when they're looking for a restaurant or other things, and that is a threat to them. So it's like they have to adapt, especially... Maybe the three of us have searched a certain way. We've done so for many years, but maybe we're not the core audience anymore. I know I'm probably outside the key demographic for them at this point, but- Mordy Oberstein: Are we old? Danny Goodwin: It could be. I know I am, but I don't know how old you two are, but- Crystal Carter: I do not identify as old. Mordy Oberstein: I do, and I have for a long time, even though I was young. Danny Goodwin: You both look much younger than me. Crystal Carter: Thank you! Danny Goodwin: SEO is aged for me very much. Crystal Carter: Like when you see those presidents at the beginning of their term and then at the end, and they're like, "Wow." Danny Goodwin: Exactly. Crystal Carter: And you see Obama on a jet ski and you're like, "Oh, he looks great now. He suddenly doesn't have the way to the world." But one thing that I think is interesting, with Gemini, for instance. With the release, they also talked about Vertex AI, which is one of their product things. And essentially, they talk about other people being able to build with it and to be able to create with it. How much do you think that's going to affect how this develops and who adopts and what they adopt and how they integrate? Danny Goodwin: That part is very interesting. I've been reading a lot of stuff that's kind of outside of SEO. It almost seems like to me we're heading toward this weird future, too, where Crystal has her own AI persona. Like Mordy has his own AI persona. And your persona exists separate of you on the web, goes out, and does things that Mordy would want or figure out things that you would be interested in and finds it. Mordy Oberstein: I already have this. It's called my Twitter account. Danny Goodwin: Well, yes. But imagine you just took and trained your model on your Twitter account. You went out there. Boom, there you go. Now you don't even have to do it. Mordy Oberstein: Don't let that happen. Crystal Carter: Too late. Danny Goodwin: It's kind of scary. It's like the whole web at some point in the future could just be the AIs talking to other AIs. And that was another part of that movie Her. It's like the main AI in that movie, the Her character is talking to all these other AIs and they're coming up with these solutions to things and doing things all on their own, separate from humans. So it's really interesting to think about. Is the Web even going to be human-centric 10 years from now? I know we're already overrun and we're already overrun by bots. We know that too. Bot traffic too. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Danny Goodwin: So that's only going to get worse. Crystal Carter: I definitely know what you mean though, because I've seen people saying, "Oh yeah, you can have your AI read your emails." And then somebody else being like, "You can have AI write your emails." So who is actually reading the emails? But I also have this sort of thing where I'm regularly thinking, "Oh, that's how we ended... How that movie ended up like that." I feel like we're in a lot of times these days, I just find myself like, "Oh, that's how that movie starts. That's how we ended in that futurescape." Danny Goodwin: Totally. I know. Yeah, just don't let it take over the defense system is all I know. Mordy Oberstein: I know. Someone cue up the Terminator music. Danny Goodwin: Right. That's when all the trouble really starts. Crystal Carter: But I do think it's important to look at the Google Cloud stuff as well, because when I found... Particularly when I was looking at visual search a few years ago. When I was doing the research for it, I was looking at all of the Google Cloud product drops. Basically, that's where they tell you how the AI actually works, is that they're at the Google Cloud product drop things. That's where a lot of the magic happens, and I think that it'll be interesting to see who adopts the APIs for Gemini and how that rolls out to see... Because Google very often gets ideas from users, from large scale users for these kinds of products, for how we might see it applied in search, I think. Danny Goodwin: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that's definitely a To-Be-Determined area. I couldn't claim specialization in that area or expertise, so I won't. But yeah, I definitely agree. Definitely watch whatever Google Cloud is doing. I've seen that many times, especially the stuff around... All the entity SEO stuff. There's so much to learn in that area too, from Google Cloud and all those tools. So yes. Mordy Oberstein: It does, to me, kind of come down to what you were talking about before as to how we consume content and how that changes. To piggyback off of Ryan, I'll oftentimes... I don't live in the US anymore, but I follow NFL football. So most of the games are in the middle of the night for me. So if it's a game that I want to catch up on, I'll watch the highlights in the morning. I'm like, "All right, I'll watch the highlights. I don't want to know the score yet." And before I even go to Google or anything, I turn my phone on and there's a little card that says the score. I'm like, "Damn it." And that's not a feature snippet on the service. Not a direct answer on the service. This is a push notification. And the way we consume content and people talk about, "Oh, it's taking away clicks." But it's not just Google doing it. It's just a whole ecosystem is built and designed... That quick information is not meant for websites anymore. I know it sounds horrible to say, but to a certain extent, it's not. It's meant for a push notification. It's meant for an AI answer. It's meant for whatever. And I feel like however content consumption evolves is how AI is going to evolve to match it and to supplement it and to drive that need or that desire that people have in what they consume and how they consume it. Danny Goodwin: Yeah, I remember there was all kinds of outrage at one point. I don't remember the year. It was probably early 2010s, and everybody got so upset. I think it was a search on Google for the temperature was literally a one answer result. I don't know if you remember this. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I remember this. I remember freaking out about it. Danny Goodwin: Everybody freaked out about it. Mordy Oberstein: Every once in a while still shows up that way. There's nothing else on the SERP, but the direct answer. Danny Goodwin: Exactly. And it's just like, well, yeah, because you can find the temperature on weather channels, on the news, on various... It's just a thing. You shouldn't base your monetary model around getting organic traffic for the current temperature. Mordy Oberstein: Basing your business strategy on something that someone's able to understand by literally sticking their hand out the window- Danny Goodwin: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: ... Is probably not the best thing. Danny Goodwin: Also, yes. But one interesting thing that, just going really quickly back to the sports thing, which I found very interesting. I don't know if this could be rolled out in some way to search, but I just signed up for YouTube TV. They have an option on the TV now where you can hide sports scores before you watch the game, which I had not seen before. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Danny Goodwin: That would be very interesting if they could roll that out into search somehow where it's like a spoiler free version. Mordy Oberstein: That's amazing. That'd be great because it's happened so many times. Okay, I'm looking forward to that. Danny Goodwin: So anyway. I don't know if that, but if YouTube's doing it now on YouTube TV. Who knows? It could come to search someday. We'll see. Crystal Carter: I think that comes back to what you were talking about before. You mentioned that Google has all these different data sets and they have all this different amount of data on us, just as Google users and all of that. And I think it's interesting, because you were saying with Bing while they were trying to push ChatGPT and while they were trying to push New Bing, they were like, "Hey, if you want new Bing, you've got to make Edge your default browser." And I was like, "What?" They were like, "You got to put it on your phone." And I was like, "Huh?" My first response was like, "Why are they doing this?" And then I realized, "Oh, they don't have the same amount of data that Google has on me for being a Chrome user for years and years and years, and that everybody who has a Google Pixel has and everybody who has Gmail and all that sort of stuff. That whole ecosystem." And I think that that's going to be the linchpin for Google being able to drive Gemini forward and more of their other tech is how much data that they're able to collect on a daily basis about search and things like that. And like you said, being able to pull the dots together. Danny Goodwin: I mean, yeah, there are cases where being the first mover matters. I don't think in search it does, because Google can wait. And from the beginning, I was almost like, "Google's going to sit and watch Bing for a little while, see what they screw up, and not do that." That was my thinking from the beginning. I was just like, "Let Bing be the first one through the wall. Let them make all the mistakes. And it's one less thing that they'll have to worry about maybe from a feature antitrust thing, because I can go, oh, well, Microsoft did that first." Mordy Oberstein: Well, that is coming back to bite. There are lawsuits now. Danny Goodwin: Well, this is true, yes. But it's just... Again, goes back to the PR angle, which I know probably isn't most interesting to your listeners. Mordy Oberstein: No, I find that part the most interesting, because it's like the puppet and the string kind of thing. Danny Goodwin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, ultimately... And I said this... I did my keynote at SMX. It's like when you think about these AI companies, behind everything, you always have to remember it's monetary. They're not in this... I mean, yes, they want to give users a good experience, blah, blah, blah, because it makes them money. Like, yes. Okay, you're going to get good results. But ultimately they're making money on these great results and they don't want to upset that model. So that's why I say people who are saying SGE won't launch, just give that up. It's launching. They're going to figure it out and I kind of compared it to a casino. It's like, the House always wins. They just got to figure out where to put the big money slot machines on the right location on the floor, and they're going to stack the deck and they're going to figure it out. And they're probably going to end up, too, with ads. It's going to be less inventory, which means prices are going to go up for PPC advertisers. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: I think the other thing is that they've got a lot of, in terms of the house always wins or whatever, they've got a lot of cards in their hand. Danny Goodwin: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: They call it SGE now. It might be that it feeds into a different part of the SERP. That it might be that it shows up in a different way. It might be that it's just a shopping assistant or something and that sort of stuff. So they have a lot of different levers they can pull in terms of AI integration. So yeah, I think it is absolutely important that people pay attention to what they're doing there and how it all moves around. Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: So if people wanted to connect the dots and find you, Danny, where could they find you? Danny Goodwin: They can find me on Search Engine Land. Probably the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Just search for me. I'm Mr. Danny Goodwin on socials. I am on X, but not as much as I used to be. But yes, mainly, writing daily on Search Engine Land or near daily. And we also have our two big SMX shows twice a year, SMX Advanced and SMX next. And you just spoke Next and Mordy got rave reviews. Everybody should know, because he is awesome as a presenter. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Danny Goodwin: So thank you for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: One good thing I'm good at. Presenting. I'm very presentable. Danny Goodwin: You are. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Danny Goodwin: Yep. Yeah, the people love you in our community. Well, some of them. Mordy Oberstein: No, well. The SMX site are a classic... Some people do. SMX are a classic SEO conference. They moved to digital a couple of years ago. Danny Goodwin: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: And they're free. Are they... Right? I'm correct to say that? Danny Goodwin: They're totally free. Yep. Yeah, we moved online, unfortunately due to covid, but they've actually ended up working out really well. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I spoke at SMX during Covid, and it was lovely. I think I spoke with, I remember chatting to Barry actually during a session. Danny Goodwin: That must have been fun. Crystal Carter: Which was great. Mordy Oberstein: I hope you two had fun. Barry loves fun. Crystal Carter: Oh yes, we did have fun. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. So yeah, definitely please, you're listening to this. Check out the SMX conference series. We'll link to it in the show notes. It's free. Sign up. You can learn an absolute ton. Danny Goodwin: And yeah, read Search Engine Land every day. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Danny Goodwin: All spam. That was my spam plug. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. We're all- Danny Goodwin: Sign up for the newsletter. Follow us on social. Mordy Oberstein: No, we're all for plugging. Crystal Carter: Like and subscribe. Danny Goodwin: Yeah, like and subscribe. Mordy Oberstein: So say thank you to Barry and say hi to Barry, rather. Say hi to Barry for us. Barry looms large over our show. He's a part of our show every week, but he is not actually on it. Crystal Carter: Should we have him on it one day? Mordy Oberstein: We had him once. You forgot? We had Barry. See? We- Crystal Carter: Yes, that's true. That's true. But we didn't have him as an interview. That's why. Mordy Oberstein: For those of you, it's your first time listening to the podcast, we cover the SEO news. Often we'll cover Danny's articles. But we also often inevitably cover at least one of Barry Schwartz's articles. So Barry is a very much part of our podcast each and every week, and he looms over it. Danny Goodwin: Have you had the Standee behind you for an entire podcast? Mordy Oberstein: I need to get that. It's still in England, I think. Danny Goodwin: That was fantastic. So I just remember... I don't... Which conference was it? Was that BrightonSEO, where you went- Mordy Oberstein: It was Brighton, yeah. We had a giant cut out of Barry Schwartz and it was a cornhole game too. Danny Goodwin: That was epic. I remember seeing that and just laughing when I saw that on social. I was like, "That's awesome." I wanted that. Mordy Oberstein: People, we have to get it. It's still somewhere in England. People came up and thought, "Wait, is that actually Barry?" And didn't realize it was a cutout. Crystal Carter: Like a foot taller than him as well. It was a giant Barry. Mordy Oberstein: He was a great sport. He took a picture just for that. I didn't pull that picture offline. He actually took a picture for the thing. He's a great sport, Barry. Danny Goodwin: Yes, yes he is. And he is been doing it 20 years, which is insane. His productivity, I don't know... If you don't mind me plugging one more thing. JR Oakes did this really awesome article on Search Engine Land. I don't know if you saw that one. But yeah, it was just sort of recapping the history through the lens of Barry Schwartz, which was... There was so many amazing insights of how productive Barry is and just all the... So many topics he's covered through 20 years and how his growth of... His writing has gone up into the right curve over the years, which is insane. He just gets more and more productive. So I don't know how he does it. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing. JR is also amazing. I will- Crystal Carter: Do you think it's AI? Danny Goodwin: No. Definitely not. Mordy Oberstein: Barry's not a robot. Danny Goodwin: BI? Barry intelligence? Mordy Oberstein: Barry... Danny Goodwin: But we do need to... Yeah, we should download his brain. Mordy Oberstein: We should save it in the ether forever. Danny Goodwin: Yes, absolutely. If for nothing else, just the sarcasm. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: A thousand percent. A thousand percent. Thank you so much, Danny. Really appreciate you coming on, and we'll see you out there. Thanks for all you do for Search Engine Land and the industry. Danny Goodwin: Thank you, Mordy. Thank you, Crystal. It's been great to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So limiting the conversation around AI just to SEO will not be doing Gemini justice. And because it is something of influence in the stars, I want to do Gemini justice, and I don't want to get my horoscope ruined and my life destroyed because I didn't do justice. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: So we're going to take a look at what Gemini means for the evolution of AI with a little help from the co-founder of The Neuron, Pete Huang, as we move out of SEO per se and into a segment we call the Great Beyond. So Pete is a masterful expert around all things AI. Said a lot about the topic. So we asked him, "Hey Pete, why is Chip and I a big deal for the evolution of AI?" And here's what Pete had to say. Pete Huang: Gemini is really a catch-up moment for Google this time. Last year, people had two thoughts when it came to this sector, AI, if you rewind to just two months after ChatGPT got released. The first one is OpenAI might just run away with it and nobody's ever going to catch up. And two, where the heck is Google? I mean, after all, they have everything on their side. Money, computing, resources, talent, and they seem to have no answer to what OpenAI has done. And so every time Google would make an announcement, it would just be one or two steps behind where people thought they needed to be for them to catch up. So Google releases Gemini and makes a very pointed statement that their best model Gemini Ultra beats OpenAI's GPT-4. And if this holds up after people get access to Gemini Ultra, we would now have two models at this level, which is more choice and more capabilities on the market that performs as well as GPT-4 does, which is currently what powers ChatGPT on the backend, especially if you upgrade to ChatGPT Plus. The main way this has shown up so far is in Google Bard, which is like Google's version of ChatGPT. It had always been lagging ChatGPT and was sort of unusable when it first launched. When we first used it, we would ask it for basic integration stuff, which is, "Can you find me three restaurants near this area?" And all the information would be wrong. Since then, they've swapped out the model behind Bard to use Gemini, and it's gotten a whole lot better. It's become good enough to recommend, in fact, especially if you use Google products. So in summary, Gemini is really Google saying, "We're here now and we've taken a year to do this." I mean, Gemini was released in the tail end of 2023. "But we're finally here." And in the grand scheme of these sort of races to build technology one year really isn't all that much. But it does paint a contrast to what was going on earlier in the year in 2023, where it felt like every day, every week, every month, there was something happening. And so therefore, it made Google's relative silence feel like there was nothing real or tangible or productive going on there, or at least that they were very much falling behind in the race. So from my perspective, it is good for developers, good for businesses who want more choice, and certainly good for the consumer who wants to use Google products even more. As for SEO, I think this is the part where the SGE generated results might get a little bit better. The question I think is whether or not SGE is the form factor, is the product that makes users more engaged. That is ultimately the question that decides how far a new feature gets rolled out. So we might see SGE results improve, especially if they share that Gemini is powering those results. But that is all TBD and I think more immediately we're seeing the impact in products that Google Bard for now. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Pete. Make sure you check out Pete's newsletter, The Neuron Daily at TheNeuronDaily.com, and we'll link to Pete's social media profiles in the show notes. So make sure to give them a follow. Really, really interesting. First off, I want to take up the SGE thing really quick. I don't want to get too hung up on the SEO side. We said it's the great beyond. We're beyond SEO for a minute. But if you look at what happened with Bing and their version of SGE, it did nothing for them in terms of market share. And I think we talked about this in the podcast multiple times. The SGE, as you see it now, was part of the great AI race to keep up with Bing. And I don't think it's fundamentally what users actually need or want and that what will move the needle for Google. So I do see, to Pete's point, I do see SGE morphing to something else and not being what it is now. In terms of the overall picture, if I could sum up what I took away from that, there was a lot of daily noise for the last year or so, and then things went quiet. And now we're finally looking at the real developments in AI as opposed to all of the noise around AI, which is so ironic because you see the interest in ChatGPT falling off a little bit over the last few months. So it's sort of ironic as now things actually ramp up and things develop people's interest in it, it's sort of gone down just a bit. We're all past the hype part of it. But ironically now we're getting to the real stuff. Maybe it's now when you should be paying attention. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that that's the case. I think that when a lot of people are like, "Oh, AI is magical." It's not magical. Basically- Mordy Oberstein: No. Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? Crystal Carter: It's not magical. Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was at the end of a rainbow was an pot full of AI? Crystal Carter: No, no. And the other thing is that we've had AI in our lives for ages. What we've have now is the ability to harness it directly ourselves in a way that we were not able to do before. And I agree with Pete when he says that Google was playing catch up and this is now them trying to get into it. Because I think that ChatGPT has made AI more accessible. It's very user-friendly. It's very easily accessible. But to get real good nuanced, sophisticated benefit from these tools, you still have to know stuff. You can't just be like any schmo off the street and just walk in and get something that's particularly amazing because literally everyone has access to it. So the smart people still have access to the same thing as the people who are maybe moving along and making their way. So I think that we are seeing, like you said, the real... More sophisticated, more nuanced, and people who have been working with these tools for years, because they have been available for years, are able to do more than they were able to do before. And I think that, yeah, I agree that Bard is going to... I think at the moment they've got a lot of things running. They've got Bard running, they've got the SGE running, they've got Gemini running, they've got lots of different things running, and I think that we're probably going to see convergence. Mordy Oberstein: Bet their knees hurt from all the running. Crystal Carter: We're probably going to see a convergence of some of these AI tools at the same time, because the other thing that they have running as well is Lens. I've talked about Lens a lot across when I was talking about visual search a lot. And Lens is becoming very, very sophisticated. So you can use it for QR codes. You can use it for it for- Mordy Oberstein: Translation of images. I use it all the time for that. Crystal Carter: Right? It's super useful for that. You just hold it up in the thing and it translates multiple languages at once. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: So if you're looking at ingredients and you're trying to figure out whether or not it has peanuts and it's going to give you an allergic reaction, you can see it in English and French and Spanish, and it can translate all of those different languages at once. And I think that we're probably going to see a convergence of those tools into something that changes search significantly. And Gemini, I think, like Pete is saying, is going to be the backbone of that. Mordy Oberstein: And you see that reflected in the fact that Gemini has multiple pricing models and multiple models are not for the average person. Crystal Carter: Right? And like I said, in our discussion earlier as well, we are going to see more players that are making use of Gemini, the quicker Google's going to be able to learn from that. It's the same reason why they made ChatGPT available to people in the first place for pretty much for free. And then the plus is because they are learning. They're learning from every single interaction that we're having with it, and they're learning what people value from it, what people can do with it, and all of that. So as Gemini is more available to enterprise level clients, they're going to be able to learn what it's able to do and they're going to be able to make more advance, more advancements more quickly. Mordy Oberstein: You know what I would like? I would like to have some sort of chatGPT version of Barry. BarryGPT. It's like you ask Siri. "Hey Siri, what's happening with the NFL today?" And Siri gives you an answer back. "Hey Barry, what's happening in the SEO news today?" And it would be Barry talking and telling you what's happening. BarryGPT. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay, you've put that down. Now that... You now ideate that. Mordy Oberstein: If anyone takes it, I want, some kind of finder's fee for it. Crystal Carter: I'm sure there's a technical term. Technical legal term for it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I don't know what it is, but give me the money. It was my idea first. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: So without further ado, here's Barry and other people talking about the SEO news and possibly about AI. Let's find out. Mordy Oberstein: Now for this week's snappy news. Barry Schwartz reports on SEL that Google has dropped web stories from the image results, Google Discover carousel, and reduced the grid view to carousel view in Google search. Web stories have had a mixed reception amongst search marketers due to their complex implementation, effect on Google Discover traffic, and what Lily Ray referred to as the ability of folks to have used the feature by spamming the hell out of web stories. Glenn Gabe, who shared a great thread on the news, predicts that this change is the start of a full scale deprecation and that web stories could be completely gone in a year or so. Time will tell. Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Goodwin reports that Yandex search engine has been sold in a $5.2 billion deal. The Dutch parent company of what is effectively Russia's version of Google has just agreed on the sale of their search engine to a conglomerate of Russian based companies and business leaders. It is used by more than 60% of people in Russia and could result in some changes to how the search engine performs in the not too distance feature. So keep an eye on this one. In a post from blog.google, Google has announced that they are merging their Google Bard product into Gemini. This signals a move to streamline their AI offering and is illustrated by the fact that they are adding Gemini into the Google Assistant tool. This means that those who opt-in can use Google Gemini on their phone simply by saying, "Hey, Google." This, combined with a subscription-based model, should help them become more direct competitors, which ChatGPT, and might make voice search more of a thing. Maybe this year is the year. This week, there was also some great discussion on core web vitals as Google search liaison, Danny Sullivan, doubled down on a previous statement saying, "We don't confirm any core web vitals as a direct ranking factor." As reported by Barry Schwartz in Search Engine Roundtable, Sullivan shared an article saying, "While not all aspects may be directly used to inform ranking, they do generally align with success in search ranking and are worth attention." And in a lively Twitter discussion, he shared that. It doesn't say it's a ranking factor. SEOs continue to be confused by this, but as Danny explains, "Is there a single page experience signal that Google uses for ranking? There is no single signal. Our core systems look at a variety of signals that align with overall page experience." So in the end, I think if we can all agree that it depends, and that's this week's snappy news. Mordy Oberstein: Do you think now that Barry heard this idea, because Barry does listen to the podcast, if he'll create, if Barry created BarryGPT himself, does he still owe me a finder's fee thing? Crystal Carter: I don't know. You'd have to discuss that with Barry. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. It's all right, Barry, I'll just take a bread and butter sandwich instead as payment. Crystal Carter: Sounds good. I think that's fair. I think that's fair. Mordy Oberstein: For Halloween, I want to dress up as the butter and Barry can be the bread. This is, by the way, an inside joke about Barry's ability to make butter sandwiches, which is not as great as his ability to make news. Crystal Carter: I'm like, "Why didn't you toast it?" And he's like, "No, I just thought I'd mangle the bread." Mordy Oberstein: "There's no time." Just to explain, Barry, a year ago and somehow it resurfaced, posted a picture of his butter sandwich that he made, and it's mutilated. It's like the bread is torn. The butters in chunks. Crystal Carter: It's what happens when you put cold butter on soft bread and just smear it. Mordy Oberstein: Just force it. Crystal Carter: Right? It's not going to work. Mordy Oberstein: Spread, damn it. Spread. It's unbelievable. But he's like, "I didn't have any time to make a sandwich." I'm like, "All right." Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to the tweet in the show notes. That's how... Yeah, this is pathetic, but we'll link to it in the show notes. We've gotten way off the rails. Speaking of other people who are AI tools, or love AI tools rather, our follow of the week this week is a very special person. He happens to be one of the producers of this very podcast. It is the one, the only, host of EDGE of the web radio. Erin Sparks over at E-R-I-N-S-P-A-R-K-S Sparks on X, formerly known as Twitter. Twitter, formerly known as X, in my mind. Erin does a podcast called EDGE of the Web. It's a great podcast. Listen to it after you listen to this one. And he does the SEO news every week, which I co-host with him, which is full of shenanigans. It's not like anything like this podcast at all. Pure shenanigans. Crystal Carter: With the occasional guest star from yours truly as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I do appreciate you, Crystal filling in for me when I can't. Crystal Carter: Mordy's like, "I can't. Can you?" And I'm like, "Sure. Great." Love Erin. Love Jacob. Mordy Oberstein: They're great. Jacob, Jacob Mann. They're fabulous people. And Erin loves his AI tools. And every week on the SEO... On the EDGE of the web news rather, he'll cover his favorite AI tools, which makes me completely check out, by the way. Crystal Carter: Okay. So every time I guest host, and this is the reason why Erin is our follow of the week... If you're not following Erin, do. But every time we go on there, he's always like, "Oh, I found this new thing." I'm like, "But that's so cool." Mordy Oberstein: Some of it is really cool. Okay, I gave him a hard time. But there are some really cool ones in there. Crystal Carter: There's some cool ones. The best one I found, or the one that he showed me last time, was one that was around AI image generators. And I've tried AI generator- Mordy Oberstein: You showed me this hack, by the way. Crystal Carter: ... And my prompts are... It's good, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's very good. Okay, explain, please. Crystal Carter: So my prompts are janky. I've tried and people are like, "Yeah, it's great." And I was like, "What?" And all the images that I get are terrible. My prompts, I do my best. They don't really work. So then he showed me something called freeflow.ai, and basically they have a bank of prompts that did work. And you can go in- Mordy Oberstein: And you just steal them. Crystal Carter: ... And you can copy, you can adapt, you can remix, you can update the prompts for it. I used this to redecorate my office. So I found a design prompt and stuff. But for instance, there's one that's like a selfie one, for instance, and you can see the prompt. And the prompt is selfie shot, iPhone 12 Pro Max of subject taking a selfie, et cetera, et cetera. It's got all these different things that whoever's done these prompts actually understands the way, the syntax that the bots prefer in order to give them the best thing. Anyway, it's really great, and he has tons of these and he shares them a lot. And Erin's also super nice and funny and knowledgeable and does a great podcast. And yeah, follow Erin. Mordy Oberstein: Him, Jacob, the whole EDGE of the web crew, really wonderful people. A lot of SEO knowledge. A lot of AI knowledge. So definitely please give them a follow and tell them we said hi when you follow them. "Crystal and Mordy sent us to follow you." That's... I'm all out of predictions from the stars this week. I have nothing else to add. Crystal Carter: Well, I mean, I think that means Mercury's in retrograde or something. Is that what it means? Mordy Oberstein: Sure. Mercury. It's in tuna fish also. Crystal Carter: I'm done. That ended me. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. Anyway, thank you for joining us on The SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into do you really need experts to write the content for you to actually be expert content by experts? Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on SEO Learning over at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content webinar resources on the Wix SEO Learning at, you guessed it, at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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