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Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com. Miriam Ellis Local SEO Subject Matter Expert, Moz Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com . Articles & Resources 16 Jun 2025 Your About page: Why it isn’t converting customers & how to fix it 13 Feb 2025 Your local SEO career kit: How to develop expertise, decide where to work, and develop your professional profile 5 Dec 2024 Passive vs. Active search marketing: Embrace Google’s modern SERP with old-school strategies 30 Nov 2023 Local SEO for COVID-consciousness 14 Sept 2023 Multi-location local SEO: A framework for organizational success 18 Apr 2023 How local businesses can use low-code solutions for SEO success Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Rejoice has worked in SEO as a content specialist and account manager. Her passion for diversity in the workplace inspired her to co-found the B-DigitalUK network for Black marketers. As an award-winning diversity and inclusion advocate, she is a frequent speaker about all things D&I, as well as SEO content. Rejoice Ojiaku Co-founder at B-DigitalUK Rejoice has worked in SEO as a content specialist and account manager. Her passion for diversity in the workplace inspired her to co-found the B-DigitalUK network for Black marketers . As an award-winning diversity and inclusion advocate, she is a frequent speaker about all things D&I, as well as SEO content. Articles & Resources 25 Jul 2023 Website accessibility and SEO: How they’re related and why it matters Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back Your resource is ready Use this SEO cheat sheet for web designers for a smoother SEO process. We’ve emailed you a link so it’s easy to access. Download Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back SEO blog writing Google Doc template Craft blog articles that give search engines and users what they’re looking for with this SEO template. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this collaborative Google Doc to: Format blog articles that contain on-page SEO elements like meta data, URLs and headings Understand how to create a targeted brief for content writers See how to apply keyword research to blog content Learn how to summarize instructions about brand tone of voice, audience specifics and messaging Condense and apply research to a specific blog article Adriana Stein CEO & Founder, AS Marketing LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and Founder of the marketing agency AS Marketing. She leads a team of multi-language SEO experts who develop holistic international marketing strategies in 30+ languages for global companies. More about this topic Watch this webinar on outranking the biggest brands with blogging , and read this article on using a blog template to streamline your content creation process for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back GA4 event cheat sheet Use this cheat sheet to gain a full understanding of GA4’s automatically collected and recommended events, helping you navigate event tracking and improve report accuracy in GA4. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this resource to: Understand GA4’s event tracking model Improve report accuracy by identifying shared parameters across events Maximize GA4’s reporting capabilities efficiently Jill Quick Analytics Consultant and Trainer, The Coloring In Department LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram As an analytics consultant and trainer at the Coloring in Department , Jill Quick specializes in measurement, GA4, analytics, data visualization, and BigQuery. Renowned for her expertise, Jill regularly speaks at international conferences, establishing herself as a thought leader in the analytics field. More about this topic Read this post on how to get started with Google Analytics 4 from the Wix SEO Hub blog for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Lily is a content marketing consultant for brands like Zapier and HubSpot. For seven years, she has built and managed content sites (including three of her own) that rely on SEO as the main distribution channel. In her spare time, she writes the marketing newsletter Marketing Cyborg. Lily Ugbaja Fractional Content & Growth Manager Lily is a content marketing consultant for brands like Zapier and HubSpot. For seven years, she has built and managed content sites (including three of her own) that rely on SEO as the main distribution channel. In her spare time, she writes the marketing newsletter Marketing Cyborg . Articles & Resources 27 Jul 2023 How to find SEO keywords to rank a new domain quickly 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

Feel like your SEO strategy is swerving all over the digital highway? Buckle up, as Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter explore the art of staying in your SEO lane, or not. Tales of daring digital detours help us explore how big names like Rolling Stones have taken the road less traveled - and hit a few bumps along the way. The team discusses the balance between branching out for those quick wins versus traveling the straight and narrow of true brand alignment. Laval Chissester offers expert advice on owning your niche and knowing when to switch it up. Join us for a ride as we navigate the chaotic freeway of SEO strategies on this episode of the SERP’s Up podcast. Back Site focus? Should SEOs stay in their lane? Feel like your SEO strategy is swerving all over the digital highway? Buckle up, as Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter explore the art of staying in your SEO lane, or not. Tales of daring digital detours help us explore how big names like Rolling Stones have taken the road less traveled - and hit a few bumps along the way. The team discusses the balance between branching out for those quick wins versus traveling the straight and narrow of true brand alignment. Laval Chissester offers expert advice on owning your niche and knowing when to switch it up. Join us for a ride as we navigate the chaotic freeway of SEO strategies on this episode of the SERP’s Up podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 120 | February 5, 2025 | 24 MIN 00:00 / 24:05 This week’s guests Lavall Chichester Lavall Chichester is the founder and CEO of Growth Skills, Flavor Fix and non-profit SpreadLove.org. He is an AdAge 40 under 40 award winner for advertising & marketing innovation. Mr.Chichester is a Growth Marketing expert and has led SEO & Content Marketing strategies for brands like Apple, Seamless AI, MoneyLion, Western Union and others. He has deep experience in tech, finance, cannabis, CBD, spirits, gaming (casinos/sports betting) and other highly regulated industries. Mr.Chichester has written for Forbes, AdWeek, TheNextWeb, eMarketer, and others. In 2022, Mr.Chichester won Best SEO Campaign from Search Engine Land’s Landy Awards and Most Innovative SEO Campaign from the U.S Search Awards. He is a second-degree black belt, a bare-knuckle Karate champion, and a proud father. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast to bring you some groovy insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm your host, Mordy Oberstein. I am joined by she who always drives very carefully, never swerves out of her lane, and if she does, puts on that signal, checks her mirrors, carefully moves over, and then carefully moves back when passing that slow person in front of her, headmaster of communications here at Wix Studio, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. I hope all the listeners today are keeping their hands at 10 and 2 and are making sure that they are paying attention to what they're doing while they are listening to this podcast transmission. If you're listening in your vehicle, then I hope you are minding the rules of the road and staying in that lane. Mordy Oberstein: You know what the worst is? When you have a merge and the merge just suddenly happen, they don't put the actual lines there. Because by the way, I'm from America originally and they're pretty good about doing that. That's not true in all countries. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It makes me angry. Why can't you just put a merge, slowly merge? Crystal Carter: I don't like when the merge is too short when you're getting on the motorway or on the freeway or whatever and it's too short and you're like, "Okay, I'm just going to pray for the best here." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You're just like, "All right, here we go." Crystal Carter: Right. Then sometimes people don't let you on. It's like, "Let me on the freeway. You don't own the freeway. Let me on, man. Get over or something. Let me on the freeway." Freeway, freeway. Come on. Mordy Oberstein: Of the freeway. Crystal Carter: Freeway. Mordy Oberstein: Free to go my way. Crystal Carter: Honestly, I mean you knew. Did you drive when you were in New York? Mordy Oberstein: I used to love driving in New York. Yes. Crystal Carter: Because you have to drive, if you're in a city, the driving is very different. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Once you accept that, I found driving in traffic in New York, because I used to drive all over New York City as part of my job, so relaxing. Crystal Carter: I think it's because you just take your opportunity. You're just like, "I'm going now. Just do it." Mordy Oberstein: I go. If there's traffic people, I'm like stuck in traffic. I'm not going to freak out. I'm just not going to try to get around the guy. I'm just going to go. Crystal Carter: Just going to go. Mordy Oberstein: Going 10 miles an hour, fine. I got a sports podcast to listen to. We're good. Crystal Carter: Driving in LA is mad because the streets in LA are the sizes of freeways in other places. If you're going down Sepulveda or something like that, it's like five lanes going north and there's five lanes going south. If you're all the way on the one side and you need to make a left-hand turn and you have to, my aunt does this, the light would turn green, she'd floor it and then swerve over five lanes and then get over a bit. Sometimes it's what you got to do, I don't know. On the freeway, you have to wait. You're like, "Okay, go, go, go swoop" to get into the next lane. Mordy Oberstein: You can't see what Crystal did. Like moving your hand, swoop. That's great. Crystal Carter: Right. It's like double dutch. Mordy Oberstein: Double dutch. Crystal Carter: You got to time it and then get in there. Mordy Oberstein: God, I never do double dutch. Crystal Carter: I'm okay. Adult. It's been a long time. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like now we're going to go down a whole jump roping Wormhole. The SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: Have we strayed? Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you Wix Studio, where you can use our SEO assistant to make sure your opinions are optimized and focus on the one true path for ranking success. As today we're talking about staying in your lane and path for SEO success. How far is too far? How far is not far enough, and what are the parameters for staying or not staying in your lane? Lavall Chichester chimes in on how to pivot that content strategy of yours, and of course we have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Pardon me as I go full New York on you. What the (beep) are you doing? You can't see there's (beep) laying there. You (beep) moron. Go back to Jersey with that stupid (beep) jug handle (beep). (Beep) lanes are painted right there and this (beep) can't stay in his lane, on episode 120 of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: That was a fantastic introduction. However, it did contradict your previous statement of feeling relaxed whilst in traffic. Just saying. Mordy Oberstein: I'm from New York. You still scream at people when they do something stupid. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's just, it's very cathartic. It's all part of the process. Mordy Oberstein: It is what you do. Crystal Carter: It's what you do. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not angry. It's just what you do. I don't know. When someone steps on your foot, you say, "Ouch." Crystal Carter: That's true. This is true. Do you know what? I had to curb the road rage. I used to be a little shouty a little bit. I stopped being shouty because I became a cyclist at one point and I was cycling and was also being shouty as if I was in my own little container that's a car. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. You're very vulnerable on the bike. Crystal Carter: You're very vulnerable. I was on my bicycle complaining that somebody had cut me up, and to be fair, they had. They were bad. I was like, "I can't believe you did that!" And I was like, "Oh, is that Jeff? Oh, hey. Oh, hey Jeff. Hi. Hey, my bad." That sort of thing. You got to be careful. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. You don't want Tony who's driving that Ryder truck that's probably filled with things that are not legal to actually hear you say what you just said about the way he's driving. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Because Tony has no neck and he looks very scary. Crystal Carter: This brings us to my point about staying in your lane. We have strayed very far from the lane of this podcast Mordy Oberstein: We have done the complete opposite. Okay. Been on a soapbox about this all the way back at SMX in like 2019. Actually, ironically, George Winnar, a writer of the SEO Hub, actually wrote an article about this talk that I did. Crystal Carter: Wow. Mordy Oberstein: Way back when. Yeah. That's when the first time George had to edit me. Crystal Carter: Memories. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Anyway, I was talking about if you sell Derek Jeter jerseys, Derek Jeter's a baseball player, I always talk about baseball and I use examples, you can also sell baseballs. That makes sense. Signed Derek Jeter baseballs, fine. You can't sell garden furniture. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Google's going to figure that out at some point. You got to stay in your lane. Back at the time we were talking about Google just being able to start to do this algorithmically, now fast-forward to now in 2024, we're seeing manual actions against sites like big websites who are getting hit on those sections of the sites that are talking about garden furniture when all they do is sell Derek Jeter jerseys. Google's saying, "Stay in your lane. We do have algorithms that kind of see where you're supposed to be. I'm not saying you can't expand and branch out, but you need to stay in that lane." Here we are now in 2024. Five. We're in 2025, sorry. Crystal Carter: I think that this whole thing has been such an interesting journey, particularly over the last year. Essentially, if people haven't been keeping up with it, there's been this whole discussion around Parasite SEO, around big websites using their domain authority to set up shops and set up content that's not really relevant. I think probably one of the best examples was Rolling Stone selling microwaves and doing big things. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's my favorite example. Crystal Carter: Right. I think that it comes down to when you're thinking about whether you stay in your lane or whether you don't stay in your lane, if I can take the, for devil's advocate, just keep it spicy, keep it interesting, if I can take the side of straying out of your lane. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, so you're okay. No signal. Go ahead. No problem. Crystal Carter: If I can take that side, to my mind, there's a certain element of don't hate the player, hate the game. Where if it works for a little while, and if you're not expecting it to be your be all, end all, your core thing for forever, and if you are getting that traffic. Before the algorithm or whatever catches up with you, there's an argument that you can make that money while you can. Get those clicks while you can and then just slash and burn it, which is what we've actually seen from a lot of these websites. Some of these websites who were using this as a tactic basically just like de-indexed, deleted, took that content off. They still keep their domain authority, they're still authoritative sites and they made money at the time, but they just nixed that for the minute. There is an argument that if it's getting clicks, then why would you look a gift horse in the mouth? Mordy Oberstein: I understand what you're saying and I hear what you're saying and I validate all the things that you are saying. Your voice is important to me. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: But if I could be Jiminy Cricket for one minute and be your conscience. Also, if you ever swerve out of your lane like that again, I will give you the business like there's nothing else. Double fingers everywhere. Crystal Carter: That is a risk. That's a potential risk. That's true. Mordy Oberstein: That actually, all jokes aside, that's kind of the risk. That's where I'm saying be cautious. Because yes, from a performance side, that is totally true. What you're saying is absolutely true, but there's a few things on the more marketing strategy side that would say maybe don't do that. One of them is eventually the bill's going to come due and how do you deal with that and do you want to deal with that? Leaving that aside, I have one of these sites in mind. I'm not going to say the F word on the podcast, but that's the site that I'm talking about. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: People have been, what's the word I'm looking for? Defecating on that website for years. Yes, they did get clicks and they did get that, but they lost a lot of brand efficacy and brand sentiment and brand power from that point of view, and they'll never be able to get that back. Now that they've lost their performance, they're really left with nothing to assert anything, because they lost that brand, at least in this space that we're talking about. The other issue is, and I think this is a bigger issue, is that when you do things like that and you get out of your lane, it's a slippery slope. Because if you have established core identity, we have a certain mission, certain values, this is what we're doing and we are about this, then that should be your guide. If it's out of your lane, you don't do it. Now you could stretch that definition a little bit and you can play around. Fine, I get that. I'm not saying you can't expand the lane, repaint the lines, make a one-lane road, now it's a two-lane road. Fine. I don't know if that analogy actually works, then you would have to transfer the lane. Whatever, you know what I'm saying. You made the lanes wider. Yeah. I'm not saying you can't do that, but when you don't make that core mission identity the guiding light, it's easy to start chasing all sorts of things. Some of those things may end up performing well for you and some of them may not. By the way, I'll give you an example of what I mean. You see brands doing this with AI all the time. Oh, AI, let's chase that AI thing and that AI thing and that AI thing and that AI thing. They don't know yet if they actually are going to be fruitful or not. Maybe some of these companies are just chasing the latest, greatest AI thing and they'll make a lot of money with them, but a lot of companies may not. If they had that aura of, "I know who I am, I know what I'm doing, I know what my mission is, I'm not going to steer away from this" they wouldn't have chased that latest, greatest AI thing, spent all that time, all of that money doing it, ended up with nothing. That's the counter argument. Crystal Carter: I mean, I see what you're saying there, but I also see that there doesn't necessarily have to be, even if you take that short-term gains for a potential risk. Basically with any business decision, you have a risk versus reward. When you're thinking about whether or not to stray out of your lane, you have to think about those risks and rewards. If you take it from a full on, let's just stack that paper perspective, you can weigh up the potential risk versus potential reward for that short-term gain. I think there's also, even when you stray out of your lane, there's also potential for low risk and not necessarily unethical sort elements. Ahrefs has an example. They've got a blog on Parasite SEO and they talk about how it's not always bad. They use an example of Moz doing something that they call gray hat or whatever, and Moz doing something where they're talking about a blog on SEO services for instance, and that's essentially talking about something that kind of works and they're using their brand authority to leverage things. Lots of people do lots of those sorts of things. You see people, we talked about microwaves, you have, I don't know, Panasonic or whatever has a best microwaves thing. They're using their brand authority to boost their brand and they're of course going to put themselves as number one on that. Now when you think about straying out of your lane in a low risk kind of way, sometimes you can mitigate those risks in a couple of different ways. For instance, you can put it on a subdomain. If for instance, it's like you said, you're selling Derek Jeter t-shirts or whatever, maybe there are Derek Jeter... What was it? Mordy Oberstein: Jerseys. Crystal Carter: Jersey. Okay, Derek Jeter jerseys, which are completely different from t-shirts, obviously. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: You're selling Derek Jeter jerseys. Let's say it's game day, and let's say you are a physical shop. On game day, let's say you sell water bottles, because you're located near the stadium. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's fine. Crystal Carter: That's not your core business, but that is relevant to your audience. Mordy Oberstein: Correct. Yes. Crystal Carter: Even though it's not your core business, even though it's not what you normally do, it's still relevant to your audience and your audience will immediately connect with why you're telling them about that thing right there. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Totally agree with you on that. My only thing though with that though, is if you do that too often. I'll call that a neutral moment. I am selling water. It's a great example because water is neutral. It's a neutral form. Crystal Carter: It's not an acid, it's not a base, it's neutral. Mordy Oberstein: Right. It's neutral. Crystal Carter: Science. We're getting scientific people. Mordy Oberstein: Neutral moments are fine, but too many neutral moments is actually a negative. If you have too many of them in aggregate, when they compound on themselves, you lose that like, "Oh, I forgot, are they the water bottle place or are they the jersey place? I can't remember what they do." That's my only concern sometimes. Crystal Carter: Yeah. No, I think that that can be the case. I think that sometimes I think that at that point, in terms of straying out of your lane, you need to decide whether or not you need to make a new lane. We see this with businesses all the time where they'll start in one space and then they'll go, "Oh, actually we should actually define this as a separate entity for its own thing." For instance, I don't know if you think about Nike, Nike also has Air Jordans and Air Jordan is its own space within. It has its own space, it's still part of Nike, but it's its own space. Sometimes, again, risk and reward. You have to look at whether or not this warrants, whether your water bottle sales warrants you putting that effort into that. In those cases, I do think it's worth because that can help your business grow. Sometimes straying out of your lane can be like your litmus test, if we want to keep going scientific on you guys because that's how we are. If you can take that as a litmus test as to whether or not you can expand your business into a new area. Sometimes your audience will go, "What is that?" Let's say instead of selling water bottles on game day, you're selling, I don't know, tiramisu or something. That's not a- Mordy Oberstein: If you're going, "Oh, more science" there needs to be an element in the compound. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You're going to that shop on game day to get the jersey that you can wear and go, "Oh, I showed up to the game. I didn't get a jersey, I looked like a fool. I'm going to get a jersey." That's the same intent. That could be the same intent as the water bottle leaving. I'm readying myself to watch the game. Just making that up. There's the old thing you're doing and the new thing you're doing, there's an element that string... It's string theory. Yeah, going full-on quantum here. It strings it together. If there's no string, you end up like Jaguar, which is like, "What the hell are you even doing?" There has to be a string that connects what you were doing to what you are doing now so the audience is not like, "What in the world just happened?" Crystal Carter: This is the reason why the microwaves on Rolling Stone doesn't make sense, because it's not an instrument. I don't know if Beyonce has a new line of microwaves. I don't know what's going on with those things, but that's why it doesn't make sense. Rolling Stone isn't going to open up a microwave business anytime. They're not selling home appliances. That's not what they do, so that thread doesn't work. However, if they were reviewing musical instruments, that would make sense. Mordy Oberstein: That would totally make sense. Absolutely. Crystal Carter: If they were reviewing stereo equipment, that would kind of make sense. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's a good natural evolution of the brand. Crystal Carter: You have people that like music, you can be like, "Hey, you like music? You might like a thing to play your music on." That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: That's next step. That's not bonkers. "What are you doing? Yeah, you don't sell microwaves, dude." Crystal Carter: I think that when you're thinking about your lane, I don't think it comes down to don't stay in your lane, don't go out of your lane. So many things with online marketing come down to is this relevant to your audience? Can you justify that this is relevant to your audience? As Google likes to say, "Is it genuinely helpful?" On game day, the person who come in to buy the jersey, it is helpful to give them a water bottle if they are thirsty. It is a person and they're going to be at a baseball game all day, it's going to be hot, it is helpful to give them a water bottle. It's not helpful to give them a tiramisu that they have to eat with a fork because you're walking when you don't have time. You're moving. It's not a knife and fork situation. Mordy Oberstein: You should have a core, don't stray away from that core. It should naturally move, naturally evolve, and that core can move along with you. There's a core there. If you start telling microwaves when your core is music, that makes no sense. Do you know who can help you pivot? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking to pivot to your content strategy, Fractional CMO, Lavall Chichester. Here's Lavall Chichester on how to pivot your content strategy. Lavall Chichester: When it comes to targeting topics for your website or web page, how far should you go out of your lane? I think my advice straight off the bat is that you have to really own a niche and then branch out from there. When you look at what Forbes and Rolling Stone and even The Wall Street Journal are able to do, the reason they're able to rank for all sorts of terms like CBD oil or anything like that, credit cards, is because first they started with news. When you're covering news and those types of things, even lifestyle topics and entertainment topics, you're covering a broad range of topics. Something new with CBD, something new with this, something new with that. From the beginning of when these sites were created, they were able to cast a broader net because news is just broad lifestyle things, is broad. Then what they did was they were able to expand with experts. Forbes and Rolling Stone rolled out their councils, and if you look at their councils, they contact experts to actually write articles and create content for their sites. Then they also find expert writers, and they've built armies of writers who are experts within CBD or auto and those types of verticals, and they have very detailed author pages. They're tapping into EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. They're tapping into EEAT because on especially Forbes, you'll see their articles, so you see the expert who actually wrote the topic and their credentials, and then you'll see that it was also reviewed by another person. This sends the signals to Google that two people have actually reviewed this type of content and that's why Google allows it to rank. What's interesting to me is Google came after About.com, which used to rank for everything years ago and hit them pretty hard. About.com actually, I talked to one of their lead SEOs. They had to change into a subdomain strategy to actually protect their sites from getting hit. This was years ago, but now you see Forbes and other sites really leaning into this and being able to tap into this. Then again, Wall Street Journal, the way they did it is they launched a brand within a brand, so they launched Buy Side. Buy Side is their sort of product recommendation email type of thing. It's an affiliate play where people, when you go to that site, you know that they're going to recommend products and a bunch of lists. That's headphones and gadgets and all that kind of stuff. That's a different way, but again, focus on owning a niche. If you are a FinTech company, you shouldn't be writing about hot dogs. Own your niche and then go and branch out from there. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks so much Lavall. Really appreciate your insights. Make sure you give Lavall a big old follow on LinkedIn and wherever else he is present across social media. Link in the show notes. Speaking of great people to follow. Crystal Carter: Yes? Mordy Oberstein: Look at that pivot. Our follow of the week is none only than Preeti Gupta who is sharing stuff all over the place. She's on Bluesky, she's on LinkedIn. She's sharing news articles that you should check out on Aleyda Solis' SEOFOMO news website, which we can link to in the show notes if you want to check that out. She's one of the people always sharing news there. Preeti's a great follow too. I just saw it pop up literally on my Chrome extension. She just shared Google on losing a link fast, submitted by Preeti Gupta. Crystal Carter: She's really active and in the Women of Tech SEO community as well. She's a really active and interested and engaged SEO, and it's somebody who very much stays in the lane of SEO and makes sure that she's keeping up with what's going on. Yeah, she's a great person to follow. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well that's it. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. I know you're going to miss us. Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into are marketers flying Blind with their GA4 data? Look for it wherever you can consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Look into more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us 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 Lavall Chichester Preeti Gupta Resources: Topical Authority Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Lavall Chichester Preeti Gupta Resources: Topical Authority Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast to bring you some groovy insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm your host, Mordy Oberstein. I am joined by she who always drives very carefully, never swerves out of her lane, and if she does, puts on that signal, checks her mirrors, carefully moves over, and then carefully moves back when passing that slow person in front of her, headmaster of communications here at Wix Studio, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. I hope all the listeners today are keeping their hands at 10 and 2 and are making sure that they are paying attention to what they're doing while they are listening to this podcast transmission. If you're listening in your vehicle, then I hope you are minding the rules of the road and staying in that lane. Mordy Oberstein: You know what the worst is? When you have a merge and the merge just suddenly happen, they don't put the actual lines there. Because by the way, I'm from America originally and they're pretty good about doing that. That's not true in all countries. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It makes me angry. Why can't you just put a merge, slowly merge? Crystal Carter: I don't like when the merge is too short when you're getting on the motorway or on the freeway or whatever and it's too short and you're like, "Okay, I'm just going to pray for the best here." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You're just like, "All right, here we go." Crystal Carter: Right. Then sometimes people don't let you on. It's like, "Let me on the freeway. You don't own the freeway. Let me on, man. Get over or something. Let me on the freeway." Freeway, freeway. Come on. Mordy Oberstein: Of the freeway. Crystal Carter: Freeway. Mordy Oberstein: Free to go my way. Crystal Carter: Honestly, I mean you knew. Did you drive when you were in New York? Mordy Oberstein: I used to love driving in New York. Yes. Crystal Carter: Because you have to drive, if you're in a city, the driving is very different. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Once you accept that, I found driving in traffic in New York, because I used to drive all over New York City as part of my job, so relaxing. Crystal Carter: I think it's because you just take your opportunity. You're just like, "I'm going now. Just do it." Mordy Oberstein: I go. If there's traffic people, I'm like stuck in traffic. I'm not going to freak out. I'm just not going to try to get around the guy. I'm just going to go. Crystal Carter: Just going to go. Mordy Oberstein: Going 10 miles an hour, fine. I got a sports podcast to listen to. We're good. Crystal Carter: Driving in LA is mad because the streets in LA are the sizes of freeways in other places. If you're going down Sepulveda or something like that, it's like five lanes going north and there's five lanes going south. If you're all the way on the one side and you need to make a left-hand turn and you have to, my aunt does this, the light would turn green, she'd floor it and then swerve over five lanes and then get over a bit. Sometimes it's what you got to do, I don't know. On the freeway, you have to wait. You're like, "Okay, go, go, go swoop" to get into the next lane. Mordy Oberstein: You can't see what Crystal did. Like moving your hand, swoop. That's great. Crystal Carter: Right. It's like double dutch. Mordy Oberstein: Double dutch. Crystal Carter: You got to time it and then get in there. Mordy Oberstein: God, I never do double dutch. Crystal Carter: I'm okay. Adult. It's been a long time. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like now we're going to go down a whole jump roping Wormhole. The SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: Have we strayed? Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you Wix Studio, where you can use our SEO assistant to make sure your opinions are optimized and focus on the one true path for ranking success. As today we're talking about staying in your lane and path for SEO success. How far is too far? How far is not far enough, and what are the parameters for staying or not staying in your lane? Lavall Chichester chimes in on how to pivot that content strategy of yours, and of course we have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Pardon me as I go full New York on you. What the (beep) are you doing? You can't see there's (beep) laying there. You (beep) moron. Go back to Jersey with that stupid (beep) jug handle (beep). (Beep) lanes are painted right there and this (beep) can't stay in his lane, on episode 120 of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: That was a fantastic introduction. However, it did contradict your previous statement of feeling relaxed whilst in traffic. Just saying. Mordy Oberstein: I'm from New York. You still scream at people when they do something stupid. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's just, it's very cathartic. It's all part of the process. Mordy Oberstein: It is what you do. Crystal Carter: It's what you do. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not angry. It's just what you do. I don't know. When someone steps on your foot, you say, "Ouch." Crystal Carter: That's true. This is true. Do you know what? I had to curb the road rage. I used to be a little shouty a little bit. I stopped being shouty because I became a cyclist at one point and I was cycling and was also being shouty as if I was in my own little container that's a car. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. You're very vulnerable on the bike. Crystal Carter: You're very vulnerable. I was on my bicycle complaining that somebody had cut me up, and to be fair, they had. They were bad. I was like, "I can't believe you did that!" And I was like, "Oh, is that Jeff? Oh, hey. Oh, hey Jeff. Hi. Hey, my bad." That sort of thing. You got to be careful. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. You don't want Tony who's driving that Ryder truck that's probably filled with things that are not legal to actually hear you say what you just said about the way he's driving. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Because Tony has no neck and he looks very scary. Crystal Carter: This brings us to my point about staying in your lane. We have strayed very far from the lane of this podcast Mordy Oberstein: We have done the complete opposite. Okay. Been on a soapbox about this all the way back at SMX in like 2019. Actually, ironically, George Winnar, a writer of the SEO Hub, actually wrote an article about this talk that I did. Crystal Carter: Wow. Mordy Oberstein: Way back when. Yeah. That's when the first time George had to edit me. Crystal Carter: Memories. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Anyway, I was talking about if you sell Derek Jeter jerseys, Derek Jeter's a baseball player, I always talk about baseball and I use examples, you can also sell baseballs. That makes sense. Signed Derek Jeter baseballs, fine. You can't sell garden furniture. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Google's going to figure that out at some point. You got to stay in your lane. Back at the time we were talking about Google just being able to start to do this algorithmically, now fast-forward to now in 2024, we're seeing manual actions against sites like big websites who are getting hit on those sections of the sites that are talking about garden furniture when all they do is sell Derek Jeter jerseys. Google's saying, "Stay in your lane. We do have algorithms that kind of see where you're supposed to be. I'm not saying you can't expand and branch out, but you need to stay in that lane." Here we are now in 2024. Five. We're in 2025, sorry. Crystal Carter: I think that this whole thing has been such an interesting journey, particularly over the last year. Essentially, if people haven't been keeping up with it, there's been this whole discussion around Parasite SEO, around big websites using their domain authority to set up shops and set up content that's not really relevant. I think probably one of the best examples was Rolling Stone selling microwaves and doing big things. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's my favorite example. Crystal Carter: Right. I think that it comes down to when you're thinking about whether you stay in your lane or whether you don't stay in your lane, if I can take the, for devil's advocate, just keep it spicy, keep it interesting, if I can take the side of straying out of your lane. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, so you're okay. No signal. Go ahead. No problem. Crystal Carter: If I can take that side, to my mind, there's a certain element of don't hate the player, hate the game. Where if it works for a little while, and if you're not expecting it to be your be all, end all, your core thing for forever, and if you are getting that traffic. Before the algorithm or whatever catches up with you, there's an argument that you can make that money while you can. Get those clicks while you can and then just slash and burn it, which is what we've actually seen from a lot of these websites. Some of these websites who were using this as a tactic basically just like de-indexed, deleted, took that content off. They still keep their domain authority, they're still authoritative sites and they made money at the time, but they just nixed that for the minute. There is an argument that if it's getting clicks, then why would you look a gift horse in the mouth? Mordy Oberstein: I understand what you're saying and I hear what you're saying and I validate all the things that you are saying. Your voice is important to me. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: But if I could be Jiminy Cricket for one minute and be your conscience. Also, if you ever swerve out of your lane like that again, I will give you the business like there's nothing else. Double fingers everywhere. Crystal Carter: That is a risk. That's a potential risk. That's true. Mordy Oberstein: That actually, all jokes aside, that's kind of the risk. That's where I'm saying be cautious. Because yes, from a performance side, that is totally true. What you're saying is absolutely true, but there's a few things on the more marketing strategy side that would say maybe don't do that. One of them is eventually the bill's going to come due and how do you deal with that and do you want to deal with that? Leaving that aside, I have one of these sites in mind. I'm not going to say the F word on the podcast, but that's the site that I'm talking about. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: People have been, what's the word I'm looking for? Defecating on that website for years. Yes, they did get clicks and they did get that, but they lost a lot of brand efficacy and brand sentiment and brand power from that point of view, and they'll never be able to get that back. Now that they've lost their performance, they're really left with nothing to assert anything, because they lost that brand, at least in this space that we're talking about. The other issue is, and I think this is a bigger issue, is that when you do things like that and you get out of your lane, it's a slippery slope. Because if you have established core identity, we have a certain mission, certain values, this is what we're doing and we are about this, then that should be your guide. If it's out of your lane, you don't do it. Now you could stretch that definition a little bit and you can play around. Fine, I get that. I'm not saying you can't expand the lane, repaint the lines, make a one-lane road, now it's a two-lane road. Fine. I don't know if that analogy actually works, then you would have to transfer the lane. Whatever, you know what I'm saying. You made the lanes wider. Yeah. I'm not saying you can't do that, but when you don't make that core mission identity the guiding light, it's easy to start chasing all sorts of things. Some of those things may end up performing well for you and some of them may not. By the way, I'll give you an example of what I mean. You see brands doing this with AI all the time. Oh, AI, let's chase that AI thing and that AI thing and that AI thing and that AI thing. They don't know yet if they actually are going to be fruitful or not. Maybe some of these companies are just chasing the latest, greatest AI thing and they'll make a lot of money with them, but a lot of companies may not. If they had that aura of, "I know who I am, I know what I'm doing, I know what my mission is, I'm not going to steer away from this" they wouldn't have chased that latest, greatest AI thing, spent all that time, all of that money doing it, ended up with nothing. That's the counter argument. Crystal Carter: I mean, I see what you're saying there, but I also see that there doesn't necessarily have to be, even if you take that short-term gains for a potential risk. Basically with any business decision, you have a risk versus reward. When you're thinking about whether or not to stray out of your lane, you have to think about those risks and rewards. If you take it from a full on, let's just stack that paper perspective, you can weigh up the potential risk versus potential reward for that short-term gain. I think there's also, even when you stray out of your lane, there's also potential for low risk and not necessarily unethical sort elements. Ahrefs has an example. They've got a blog on Parasite SEO and they talk about how it's not always bad. They use an example of Moz doing something that they call gray hat or whatever, and Moz doing something where they're talking about a blog on SEO services for instance, and that's essentially talking about something that kind of works and they're using their brand authority to leverage things. Lots of people do lots of those sorts of things. You see people, we talked about microwaves, you have, I don't know, Panasonic or whatever has a best microwaves thing. They're using their brand authority to boost their brand and they're of course going to put themselves as number one on that. Now when you think about straying out of your lane in a low risk kind of way, sometimes you can mitigate those risks in a couple of different ways. For instance, you can put it on a subdomain. If for instance, it's like you said, you're selling Derek Jeter t-shirts or whatever, maybe there are Derek Jeter... What was it? Mordy Oberstein: Jerseys. Crystal Carter: Jersey. Okay, Derek Jeter jerseys, which are completely different from t-shirts, obviously. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: You're selling Derek Jeter jerseys. Let's say it's game day, and let's say you are a physical shop. On game day, let's say you sell water bottles, because you're located near the stadium. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's fine. Crystal Carter: That's not your core business, but that is relevant to your audience. Mordy Oberstein: Correct. Yes. Crystal Carter: Even though it's not your core business, even though it's not what you normally do, it's still relevant to your audience and your audience will immediately connect with why you're telling them about that thing right there. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Totally agree with you on that. My only thing though with that though, is if you do that too often. I'll call that a neutral moment. I am selling water. It's a great example because water is neutral. It's a neutral form. Crystal Carter: It's not an acid, it's not a base, it's neutral. Mordy Oberstein: Right. It's neutral. Crystal Carter: Science. We're getting scientific people. Mordy Oberstein: Neutral moments are fine, but too many neutral moments is actually a negative. If you have too many of them in aggregate, when they compound on themselves, you lose that like, "Oh, I forgot, are they the water bottle place or are they the jersey place? I can't remember what they do." That's my only concern sometimes. Crystal Carter: Yeah. No, I think that that can be the case. I think that sometimes I think that at that point, in terms of straying out of your lane, you need to decide whether or not you need to make a new lane. We see this with businesses all the time where they'll start in one space and then they'll go, "Oh, actually we should actually define this as a separate entity for its own thing." For instance, I don't know if you think about Nike, Nike also has Air Jordans and Air Jordan is its own space within. It has its own space, it's still part of Nike, but it's its own space. Sometimes, again, risk and reward. You have to look at whether or not this warrants, whether your water bottle sales warrants you putting that effort into that. In those cases, I do think it's worth because that can help your business grow. Sometimes straying out of your lane can be like your litmus test, if we want to keep going scientific on you guys because that's how we are. If you can take that as a litmus test as to whether or not you can expand your business into a new area. Sometimes your audience will go, "What is that?" Let's say instead of selling water bottles on game day, you're selling, I don't know, tiramisu or something. That's not a- Mordy Oberstein: If you're going, "Oh, more science" there needs to be an element in the compound. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You're going to that shop on game day to get the jersey that you can wear and go, "Oh, I showed up to the game. I didn't get a jersey, I looked like a fool. I'm going to get a jersey." That's the same intent. That could be the same intent as the water bottle leaving. I'm readying myself to watch the game. Just making that up. There's the old thing you're doing and the new thing you're doing, there's an element that string... It's string theory. Yeah, going full-on quantum here. It strings it together. If there's no string, you end up like Jaguar, which is like, "What the hell are you even doing?" There has to be a string that connects what you were doing to what you are doing now so the audience is not like, "What in the world just happened?" Crystal Carter: This is the reason why the microwaves on Rolling Stone doesn't make sense, because it's not an instrument. I don't know if Beyonce has a new line of microwaves. I don't know what's going on with those things, but that's why it doesn't make sense. Rolling Stone isn't going to open up a microwave business anytime. They're not selling home appliances. That's not what they do, so that thread doesn't work. However, if they were reviewing musical instruments, that would make sense. Mordy Oberstein: That would totally make sense. Absolutely. Crystal Carter: If they were reviewing stereo equipment, that would kind of make sense. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's a good natural evolution of the brand. Crystal Carter: You have people that like music, you can be like, "Hey, you like music? You might like a thing to play your music on." That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: That's next step. That's not bonkers. "What are you doing? Yeah, you don't sell microwaves, dude." Crystal Carter: I think that when you're thinking about your lane, I don't think it comes down to don't stay in your lane, don't go out of your lane. So many things with online marketing come down to is this relevant to your audience? Can you justify that this is relevant to your audience? As Google likes to say, "Is it genuinely helpful?" On game day, the person who come in to buy the jersey, it is helpful to give them a water bottle if they are thirsty. It is a person and they're going to be at a baseball game all day, it's going to be hot, it is helpful to give them a water bottle. It's not helpful to give them a tiramisu that they have to eat with a fork because you're walking when you don't have time. You're moving. It's not a knife and fork situation. Mordy Oberstein: You should have a core, don't stray away from that core. It should naturally move, naturally evolve, and that core can move along with you. There's a core there. If you start telling microwaves when your core is music, that makes no sense. Do you know who can help you pivot? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking to pivot to your content strategy, Fractional CMO, Lavall Chichester. Here's Lavall Chichester on how to pivot your content strategy. Lavall Chichester: When it comes to targeting topics for your website or web page, how far should you go out of your lane? I think my advice straight off the bat is that you have to really own a niche and then branch out from there. When you look at what Forbes and Rolling Stone and even The Wall Street Journal are able to do, the reason they're able to rank for all sorts of terms like CBD oil or anything like that, credit cards, is because first they started with news. When you're covering news and those types of things, even lifestyle topics and entertainment topics, you're covering a broad range of topics. Something new with CBD, something new with this, something new with that. From the beginning of when these sites were created, they were able to cast a broader net because news is just broad lifestyle things, is broad. Then what they did was they were able to expand with experts. Forbes and Rolling Stone rolled out their councils, and if you look at their councils, they contact experts to actually write articles and create content for their sites. Then they also find expert writers, and they've built armies of writers who are experts within CBD or auto and those types of verticals, and they have very detailed author pages. They're tapping into EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. They're tapping into EEAT because on especially Forbes, you'll see their articles, so you see the expert who actually wrote the topic and their credentials, and then you'll see that it was also reviewed by another person. This sends the signals to Google that two people have actually reviewed this type of content and that's why Google allows it to rank. What's interesting to me is Google came after About.com, which used to rank for everything years ago and hit them pretty hard. About.com actually, I talked to one of their lead SEOs. They had to change into a subdomain strategy to actually protect their sites from getting hit. This was years ago, but now you see Forbes and other sites really leaning into this and being able to tap into this. Then again, Wall Street Journal, the way they did it is they launched a brand within a brand, so they launched Buy Side. Buy Side is their sort of product recommendation email type of thing. It's an affiliate play where people, when you go to that site, you know that they're going to recommend products and a bunch of lists. That's headphones and gadgets and all that kind of stuff. That's a different way, but again, focus on owning a niche. If you are a FinTech company, you shouldn't be writing about hot dogs. Own your niche and then go and branch out from there. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks so much Lavall. Really appreciate your insights. Make sure you give Lavall a big old follow on LinkedIn and wherever else he is present across social media. Link in the show notes. Speaking of great people to follow. Crystal Carter: Yes? Mordy Oberstein: Look at that pivot. Our follow of the week is none only than Preeti Gupta who is sharing stuff all over the place. She's on Bluesky, she's on LinkedIn. She's sharing news articles that you should check out on Aleyda Solis' SEOFOMO news website, which we can link to in the show notes if you want to check that out. She's one of the people always sharing news there. Preeti's a great follow too. I just saw it pop up literally on my Chrome extension. She just shared Google on losing a link fast, submitted by Preeti Gupta. Crystal Carter: She's really active and in the Women of Tech SEO community as well. She's a really active and interested and engaged SEO, and it's somebody who very much stays in the lane of SEO and makes sure that she's keeping up with what's going on. Yeah, she's a great person to follow. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well that's it. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. I know you're going to miss us. Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into are marketers flying Blind with their GA4 data? Look for it wherever you can consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Look into more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Are search engines as relevant today as they once were? People’s expectations around search engines are changing. With a shift of focus on social search, is the way Google and other search engines go about serving results due for an upgrade? Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein dive into how search needs have evolved and how traditional search engines may need to adapt in order to stay relevant. Janet Machuka takes our guest slot to talk about how social media and search engines can work hand-in-hand for organic success. It’s episode 23 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast all about the relevancy of search engines in a social media centered world. Back Do search engines matter as much as they used to? Are search engines as relevant today as they once were? People’s expectations around search engines are changing. With a shift of focus on social search, is the way Google and other search engines go about serving results due for an upgrade? Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein dive into how search needs have evolved and how traditional search engines may need to adapt in order to stay relevant. Janet Machuka takes our guest slot to talk about how social media and search engines can work hand-in-hand for organic success. It’s episode 23 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast all about the relevancy of search engines in a social media centered world. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 23 | February 1, 2023 | 35 MIN 00:00 / 35:19 This week’s guests Janet Machuka Janet Machuka is a leading authority on helping businesses through their digital transformation of sales and marketing through consulting, training, and helping enterprises large and small develop and execute on various digital marketing platforms. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Cerps Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the Cerps Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm a very congested, head of SEO branding here at Wicks. My name is Mordy Oberstein and I'm joined by the very not congested, very awesome, very stupendous, very amazing head of SEO communications here at Wicks, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everybody. Hello all internet people. I'm in a good mood. I'm not congested, that's right, because I've been listening to my classic RnB all morning. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, is that what I should be doing for my cold? I didn't just listen to... Forget the medicine. Crystal Carter: Get yourself some nice like Toni Braxton or some nice Anita Baker and a cup of tea and just chill out. Honestly, it's vibes. How can you feel upset when- Mordy Oberstein: I feel my sinuses already clearing up. Crystal Carter: Just let it flow. Mordy Oberstein: I recovered listening to Bob Dylan because I feel like Bob Dylan. I feel amazely. Crystal Carter: How many tissues does a man need to use? I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: A lot. I'm not going there. A lot. The Cerps Up podcast is brought to you by Wicks, where you can instantly connect your site to Google Cert Console and automatically have your site map submitted automatically, and your homepage index instantly by the great Google in the sky. Why am I telling you this? One, because it's awesome, but also because this is talking about you submitting your site to search engines, and today we're talking about search engines. Huh? And if they still matter or not. Do they still matter? Will they continue to matter? Pum, pum, pum, pum. Crystal Carter: Is SEO dead? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, but search engines might be. Crystal Carter: What? Are search engine dead? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. We're going to find out, because on this episode we're talking about the potential evolution of search engines. Are we on the precipice? Will social come to replace search? Is Chat GPT a search engine killer. 10 blue links a thing of the past? Lion, tigers and bears, and bing. Oh my. Get it? I said bing. Not Bing. Lions, tigers and bing. Oh my. Plus Janet Machuka stops by to share how social can impact search, even if social doesn't end up replacing search. And we'll dive into all of the different search engines and how they handle queries in different ways. And as always, we have the Snappy News and who you should be following on social. Ready, set search, episode 23 of the Cerps Up podcast is here. So search engines. Crystal Carter: Search engines. Mordy Oberstein: For years you've been using them, you've been relying on them to access information. They're old, not new. We all get that. I feel in every episode we have to have a Barry Schwartz Easter egg. Crystal Carter: And I'm going to put on my Barry Schwartz merch slippers as well. Mordy Oberstein: Oh shoot, forgot my Barry Schwartz slippers. So search engines are old but not new, we all understand this. We all understand search engines have changed over times while the ones that have survived, RIP Alta Vista, Google isn't using just 10 blue links anymore. There's not the 10 old, plain old organic results. There's all sorts of, I'm officially calling them do hickeys. We spoke about search features, boxes that give you answers without URLs, boxes that gives you answers with URLs. Video results, images, filters. Search engines have obviously evolved. But have we evolved past search engines? Yes, with questions like that, I do wear jackets with leather patches because I'm all philosophical. I do. By the way, I have a jacket with leather patches. When I became a teacher, that's the first thing I did. I bought a jacket, leather patches. Crystal Carter: Did you stand on the desk and say, oh captain, my captain? Mordy Oberstein: No, I did stand on a desk one time, but I was yelling other things. We as an internet, have we gotten to the point where the traditional search engine doesn't meet or satisfy our needs anymore? Do we not want a list of results? Do we not even want answers from search engines anymore? Perhaps we want, I don't know, to move to social for our answers. It's not crazy, by the way, the young kids, they all like going to social. My kids, they go to the YouTube for answers and YouTubers for answers. They don't go to Google. Check that out. I am disappointed in them, by the way. Mr. Beast is not a replacement for Google, but I'm a curmudgeon, I get this. In other words, do we not want to a list of results? Do we instead want the ability to dive deeper into things or take up multiple aspects of a topic? Not only that, does emerging tech like Chat GPT mean that we want a more interactive and dynamic environment that search engines don't provide? Whether it's user expectations or emerging tech, there's a lot to say whether we're at a crossroads what it comes to search engines, and that perhaps the practical definition of a search engine is about to change. Crystal, what are your thoughts? Crystal Carter: I think that part of the reason why search engines have changed is because the way we search has changed and the kind of information that is useful to us has changed. Also, the kind of information that people can provide to us has changed. So the search features try to keep up with them. Sometimes when I'm searching for information, sometimes I find that I need multiple inputs, but maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not normal. But sometimes if if I want to know if the pumpkin patch is open and if they still have pumpkins around Halloween or something like that, I could Google it, but that may or may not be accurate. I could go to their Facebook page or something and they'll say whatever they said about the thing. But do you know what I tend to do for that sort of query? If I want to know if something is going on, if something's happening, if I want to know what realtime activity's happening? I'll tend to go to Instagram. I'll go to Instagram and I'll type in that pumpkin patch, where it is. I've literally done this. Then I'll see their most recent posts. And nobody's telling me the information, nobody's written down that they still have pumpkins. But I'll scan through the pictures and I'll go, "There's still a lot of pumpkins, those people look happy, and they just took that picture a half an hour ago. I bet if I go there they'll still have pumpkins." But Google also gives you real time stuff. If I want to know if I'm going to have to have a really long line when I go to the sandwich place, then I can see this place is busy on Google, and that's information that's useful. But I think that if Jeeves, Ask Jeeves back in the day, does anybody remember Jeeves? Good old Jeeves? Mordy Oberstein: I do. Crystal Carter: That was a popular search engine that people used, and now we're asking Chat GPT. I wonder if they'll bring back Jeeves. That would be amazing to bring back Jeeves with AI. If anybody does that, please give me a shout out when you make your millions. But I think that the way that it's changed is because there's so much information now and there's so many people putting information online now, and it needs to be organized in lots of different ways. So some tools will lean into some parts. So for instance, again, Instagram has a now, but their search feature is terrible. But they do have location and they have time. So if that's what you need to know, that's really useful. And I think Google for instance, has lots of information on what things people have published and that sort of thing. Chat GPT is fantastic, but they don't cite their sources in their content. And I never actually asked for the sources and which I might do the next time I try it, but it doesn't cite it's sources. So if you need to dig deeper, you just have to take their word for it, which as somebody who's studied academically, I don't call myself a professor, I don't have leather patches on my jacket. Mordy Oberstein: You don't have leather patches? I'll get you a jacket next time. I already won. Crystal Carter: But with academic rigor, if you've ever studied anything academically, they're like, "Who did you get this information from? Where is this from? Where is the bibliography? What is that from?" So I think that there's lots of different things depending on what you need you might need to get from different search engines, but there'll probably be some point where they converge. Mordy Oberstein: And I think with Chat GPT or GPT3 or AI writers in general, I think what we've done is basically said, you know what? That's going to come in and that's going to kill Google. And I just don't see that. I do think we're going to... I'll get to it. I do think that Google's going to have to change. What Google is now is not what people really want. But I don't think that a AI writer coming in... I think the interactivity is cool. I fully expect there to be some kind of interactivity, if they can move faster, it's still a little bit too slow. But I saw an article about how they're trying to fix that problem in general. They'll figure it out. You definitely do want to have that interactivity as a cool dynamic. I don't think it replaces search. I don't think it can ever replace search. For instance the point that you mentioned, even if it gave me the answer, I want to be able to explore, I want to be able to dive deeper, I want to be able to see multiple vantage points on this topic. And one true answer is not the answer. Crystal Carter: And I think that can be dangerous sometimes depending on what the question is. Either it says there isn't something. And so if you think that this is the definitive source, if you think one search engine is a definitive source, indeed I mean dangerous with a lower case D. But if you think that one search engine is a definitive source, then if it says that, oh no, there isn't an answer for that, then people might stop looking. If it tells you the answer and you go, oh yes, that is absolutely the answer, never in the history of information has that ever been useful. People need multiple perspectives. It's always important. Mordy Oberstein: That's why they're sourcing. It's an academic thing. It's a necessary thing for the nature of information. There has to be sourcing, which is why that's a thing. I think that people, your point about going to multiple sources, is why social is becoming more relevant. And I would say that if a search engine wants to adopt something, it should put access points to more social perspectives on the results page itself. Well you see Google doing that with a Twitter carousel, for example. And it is doing that with TikTok. The more, the better at this point. For certain types of queries, I don’t mean as a universal, because I do want to get information in real time for multiple people and see what's happening out there. I'll give you an example. Recently a new chain opened up here and I wanted to see what exactly are they selling, what kind of products are they selling, and all of the results that Google gave me were for press releases about the new store or articles from news outlets about the store. It didn't give me the information that I want. And where I got the information from? I went to the Google business profile, I took a look at the image that people posted there and looked in the background, what's on the shelves. I'm like, "Oh, they have that. Interesting. I want to go there now." Crystal Carter: Exactly. It's because a picture says a thousand words. Our picture's worth a thousand words. And sometimes these different bits of information can tell you a lot. Mordy Oberstein: People want to see what other people are doing and what's happening, how they're relating to whatever it is and the other thing. Crystal Carter: And TripAdvisor is a great search engine for things. So for instance, on TripAdvisor, if you want to know if a hotel is good, you can go and you can look at the pictures that the hotel puts up, you can also look at the pictures that regular folks have put up with their terrible camera phones and compare that to the reviews and compare that to the information. So you're getting lots of different points of information to make a decision. Mordy Oberstein: Isn't it interesting though, we're talking about, on the one hand, Chat GPT coming into search engine isn't replacing a search engine, which is a very cold... Replacing one cold machine with another cold machine. And on the other hand we're saying that people want to see what other people are saying more. You can't say both of those in the same breath. You can't say, people want the machine giving the answer and people also want to dive in more into social. My kids want to hear information from a person, so that's why they go to YouTube to get information. I think the era of the cold machine is dying. And that's not to say you can't integrate something like Chat GPT into the search engine. But I think a much more... Look, 10 blue links, the idea, and by the way, in my opinion, all results pages are still predicated, they're still fundamentally about 10 blue links, 10 organic results. They're not 10 anymore, whatever, eight or nine or seven, whatever the number is. That is the backbone of the results page. But that's not what I want. I want to see multiple media formats, I want to see multiple layers of information. If I search for this store that opened up, I do want to see the press release, I do want to see what the media outlets are reporting. I also want to see what people are reporting at the same time, I want to see the images at the same time. I want to get all of that all at once, dive into one, come back and go down the next rabbit hole. To me it's all about rabbit holes. I want to be able to go down as many rabbit holes as I possibly can, and the search engine that does that first is where I'm going to go. 10 blue links are dead. Crystal Carter: I think you're absolutely right and I think that we're able to process information a lot more quickly than when that was the day of that, and we were able to filter more quickly. And again, depending on what your search need is, if I want to find reviews, Amazon is absolutely part of my search engine process. Absolutely. Even if I'm not buying from Amazon, I'm checking the reviews on Amazon because they almost always have some. That's always part of it if I'm looking for reviews. If I want to do a deep dive review, if I'm spending out a lot of money on something... Let's say I win the lottery and I decide to buy myself a boat. I know nothing about boats, but I want to be like, "I'm on a boat." So before I'm on my boat, I'm going to go on YouTube. Mordy Oberstein: A rowboat. Crystal Carter: No, I'm not getting a rowboat. When I win the lottery, I'm not getting a rowboat, I'm getting a- Mordy Oberstein: If I win the lottery, I don't want oars. Crystal Carter: No man, I'm not rowing that boat. When I win the lottery, I'm getting a boat with rims. No, I'm kidding. You can't put rims on a boat. I'm going to get a big boat. My boat's going to be amazing. But I know nothing about boats so I'm going to have to watch a lot of YouTube videos about people on boats and in yachts, and looking amazing in Miami or whatever. And so I'm going to have to do all that research. And so for reviews, YouTube is absolutely going to be part of that. That's going to be a big part of that. Maybe TikTok a little bit or something, but probably YouTube because I want to get right into it. And also Google because they're doing well at reviews. So there's going to be certain parts of search where there's going to be certain ways of searching that are going to be better than others. If I was looking for book reviews for instance, I'm probably going to be checking out Good Reads a lot, actually. If I'm looking at film reviews, there's going to be stuff on Google, there's going to be stuff on IMDB, there's going to be stuff on Rotten Tomatoes. You know which ones are the places that you chat, and so they fall into categories when you're thinking about that stuff. But when I've done research on Chat GPT, I always end up going on search engines anyway. It's a good place to start. I think it might replace Wikipedia because I think much of it is summarizing what you get from Wikipedia Mordy Oberstein: Very much so. Crystal Carter: And sometimes in a tidier way. But to be fair, Wikipedia's got a very good search, it's very good on search as well. Mordy Oberstein: But that's what I mean. We're asking, is the age of the search engine dead? I would say, I'm going to qualify it as yes. The search engine as it is, I think people are feeling like, "It's not giving me exactly what I want." Does that mean that search engines as a concept are dead? No. And this is why I think, when the next new thing comes up, "Oh, that's going to replace the search engine." And then something new comes up, "That's going to replace the search engine." Because I think there's a general sense of not feeling satisfied, of wanting something different. And then when that next new thing, that different thing comes along, be like, "Oh, that's it." What I think it is is all of it. It's all of it. It's not, oh, this thing, it's social that's going to replace the search engine. No. Chat GPT it's going to replace a search engine. All of it is going to evolve in a new version of what a search engine is and what it should be. Crystal Carter: And I think it's if an Uber comes along, we're like, "Oh, taxis are over." No, I still get taxis. There's still a place for a taxi or whatever. If you go to a train station, there's always a taxi there, that's really easy, blah, blah, blah. but it explodes, so it's like a decentralization of the concept. So Apple's adding more search around maps and around other things as well. People are creating their own search engines in lots of different ways. So it's more of a diversification of those things. So for instance, when they say taxis aren't over, but there's also Uber, there's also Lyft, there's also Gett, there's also those little scooters that people take. It's become more complex because our needs have become more complex. And people say, "Well, I don't want that one, but I do want this one." And so people have more options for getting more information. And I think what other people forget is that a lot of these search engines will index each other. So Google will pull in search results from Pinterest, will pull in search results from Twitter, they will pull in results from various different things. Thing will pull in some results from certain things. Like Duck Duck Go is powered by Bing, in some countries Bing and Google overlap as well. So sometimes it'll say that it's from one company, but the search engine is actually powered by a different one. So there's a lot of different ways that search engines make sure that they're able to help people find information. Because then we go back to the taxi example, the point is that people want to get from A to B. And that's the same with information. People want to find information, and at the end of the day, people aren't particularly fussed about how they get from A to B, whether it's in a taxi or a bus or a train or whatever. And some people will have different preferences or whatever, but they want the best way. Mordy Oberstein: And if you want to take a lesson out of this, if you're thinking about, "Oh well surgeons are going to die, they're not going to die." The lesson is that what people expect out of content and out of information is rapidly shifting and it's becoming way more diverse and decentralized and offering as much option as possible and as much autonomy to the user as possible. People want autonomy. The way that knowledge has come across on the web has been very direct and very dictatored. That's not a real word. It's been a dictatorship. You go to the search engine, it gives you and it gives you this. But people want autonomy in their knowledge experience. And as a marketer, as a content creator, whatever it is that you're doing on the web, that sense of autonomy you can give over in the knowledge acquisition experience is going to go a long way with your audience. Now speaking about search engines and social media and whatnot, social media activity can actually impact your SEO. How does that work? Well, here's Janet Machuka on how does social media activity impact your SEO? Janet Machuka: My name is Janet Machuka and I will want to talk a little bit about SEO and social media. SEO basically is the optimization of content through search engines. And I like the fact that social media is a great search engine. Search engines will love you if people love you first. And we have seen it happen a lot of the times with even our content through social media, the way we write it. If the search engine on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook loves us, our content will actually be seen by so many people. And looking at it from the point of consistency, it means you need to create content that is consistent, content that is going to make people know that you exist. And you actually need to be active. Either be it on your Twitter, on your Instagram, on your Facebook. So what am I saying at the end of the day? Do content that will keep you be seen by the people who are searching you. And something else is social media actually benefits those people who are consistent from this point of view. If I search you on Google, for example, maybe I'm searching something about Twitter and you're creating amazing threads on Twitter, and I come across your content, it can actually lead me to your profile. So the consistency use of social media can lead to your profile on social media being seen on the search engines. Actually, it's not just about the Google alone. As I said earlier, social media alone is a search engine. And when people see the kind of information they search out of the keywords they are looking for, it helps you increase the visibility of your content and also the interactions of your content. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Janet for that. That was really interesting. Crystal Carter: It's really useful. And she talked about a few things there. She talked about being consistent on social media and about your profile and stuff, and I've spoken about this as well. I think that it's an absolutely underrated, super valuable thing. Because for instance, we talked about Twitter showing up in search results. That only happens when you are posting regularly on Twitter. But it's really valuable for a few reasons. One is because it's a good way to get your links actually onto the Cerp because if you share links there, then they show as live links on the Cerp. It's also really good, particularly if you're talking about branding or if you're talking about what they refer to as Cerp dominance because it takes up a lot of space on the Twitter account. And she also talked about being consistent with your brand, having your profile there. Optimizing your profile. If you do nothing else with your social media, optimizing your profile can add significant benefit for your SEO because you can link it to your schema markup which helps Google to understand your entity better, which helps everything you do online to work in conjunction and to benefit you overall. So there's a lot of good things there. And with regards to the consistency point, again, if you are using those profiles more like regularly and being consistent, then again, they will show up. So when people search for your name, they'll see your name, your Instagram, your Twitter, your TikTok, your YouTube, whatever it may be. Mordy Oberstein: If you have a result that's on the precipice and it's a negative result about your brand, I've definitely used the Twitter box as a way to push that down off of page one because again, the Twitter box can be really, really big sometimes. Also, and just what she was talking about, the content focus is a great... If you are thinking about, "How am I going to share this piece on social media with my audience?" It helps keep you topically focused and topically relevant. And that's also really good for your SEO. Crystal Carter: It also can help you build some momentum. If Google can see that there's a surge of interest on a particular topic, then it can help you to get indexed more quickly, because you're sending them lots of signals that lots of people want to see this content. And it can also help to see more keywords happen. It can also help you to get some more feedback on your content straight away, because if people are coming to the content and they're like, "What does that actually mean?" You're like, oh okay, maybe I'll write you another one. Maybe they'll write you a follow up piece. Mordy Oberstein: There's so much you can do there with that, there's so much value in this. Since, however, we're talking about search engines today, Crystal has an amazing idea. She's like, "Hey, let's do a new segment and let's call it, So Many Search Engines." Because there's not just one search engine, there's Bing, there's Duck Duck Go, there's Neighbor, there's View, there's all these search engines, and they don't always show the same exact thing or take the same exact approach with very straightforward keywords. So because we're talking about search engines and where they're heading on this episode, we thought today would be the day to introduce Crystal's brilliant new segment, So Many Search Engines. Speaker 4: Google's latest update, popular search engine Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, Jeeves. Crystal Carter: They're everywhere. Mordy Oberstein: They're so many. Crystal Carter: They're so many, oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: They're coming at me, there's so many of them. Crystal Carter: But no more Jeeves. No, I think Jeeves has gone. Am I misquoting that? Mordy Oberstein: Oh well, till there, I don't even know. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Poor Jeeves. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe it's gone. Maybe they shut that down Crystal Carter: Nobody's asking Clippy either. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, we thought with the inaugural version of So Many Search Engines, that we would start asking all of the different search engines, what is the best search engine? Crystal Carter: So Meta. That's so Meta. Mordy Oberstein: We just broke the fourth wall. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: It's like when they're watching TV while you're watching TV, on TV. Crystal Carter: I know somebody who gets a really big kick out of taking pictures of people taking pictures. Mordy Oberstein: I like this. So I've logged in, what is the best search engine into Google, and guess what? I got a bunch of ads. I did, I got three ads. One of them was from a Semrush and SEO ability. SEOs, there we go. And then I got a feature snippet listing the top 10 search engines and it gave me a list of eight. The best search engine in the world, Google. Search engine number two, Bing, then Baidu, then Yahoo, then Yandex and Ask, then Duck Duck Go, then Neighbor. And then it says more items so we have to click through to see the rest of the list. That's what I got on Google. Crystal Carter: All right. On my one I was checking out Neva, which is an interesting search engine which was recently has been shared by a few people. So Glenn Gabe's been talking about it, been talking about it, because they've got a search engine that allows you to tailor your search, but they also have a new feature where they're incorporating AI. So remember I was talking about how some of this AI generators, so if you're asking Chat GBT for things, they don't always give you sources. Neva has a feature where it does give you a source, which is very interesting. But I asked Neva, what is the best search engine? And it just gave you links, very similar to the plain blue links. It says 12 best search engines in the world and it's from inspire.scott, which is interesting. And then reliablesoft.net, 10 search engines. And then rapidapi.com, and then search enginejournal.com, which is very interesting because I've never heard of three of those websites. I've obviously heard of Search Engine Journal. Mordy Oberstein: That's very similar to what I got by the way, on Duck duck Go. So I got nothing rich in any way, shape or form, it's just your typical organic results. The first one from Life Wire, the best search engine of 2022, and then it has site links, like sublisting of some of the headers on the page. And then I just have another list of organic results. Some of them similar to Google, some of them not. Bing however, was completely different. And this is what we're talking about. Different search engines have very, very different approaches, so you need to be aware because you can get a lot of track from other search engines other than Google. Bing went full knowledge graph on me. First it gave me one organic result at the top from grape.com, which is a browser, which is very different in terms of organic results than anything else any other search you gave me. It says Brave, best search browser. So it gave me a browser and not a search engine. So that's a little weird Bing. But at the same time, it gave an answer of Google according to two sources, and then it gave me those two sources and a snippet from those two sources. So it was very clear and definitive Google is the best search engine, Bing being honest there, and giving sources. At the same time, it gave me a knowledge panel of search engine, like what is a search engine? Crystal Carter: And it's got multiple links in there. So Bing does this a lot with their knowledge panels where they can be very illustrative. So for some things, if you look up a lion on Bing, it gives you a picture of Africa and a beautiful photo of a lion, and all these different links to it. For the search engine one, it's got links to different parts of it. It's got links across Wikipedia and various different things. They're also citing. Even though their knowledge panel is pulling together content, presumably using AI to generate that content, they are citing their sources underneath the knowledge panel, which I think is really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: And just going to show you that being very much in general likes to take a very knowledge graph based approach even more than Google does. And I think it's because Microsoft has really vested heavily, heavily heavily in AI and they like to showcase it and they actually like to use it on the Cerp a little bit more than Google. I actually did the same thing, by the way, on TikTok. What is the best search engine? And I got a bunch of videos about private search engines.Private search engine. I was like, "I don't even know what this is talking about." Or I have a video about website the government should tell you about, a lot of privacy government stuff showing up, which I thought was- Crystal Carter: Very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: ... very interesting. Social was totally different than the traditional search engine here. Crystal Carter: YouTube, they're starting with similar sort of things, so 20 search engines that are better than Google. And then Duck Duck Go versus Google, which in Duck Duck Go is a more private search engine. And then the next one is, protect your privacy. And I think that something you get when you look at that is that people who are searching in places like YouTube, and YouTube is also a search engine obviously, and so people are searching on YouTube or searching on TikTok for search engines, might be searching for stuff that's maybe a little bit less mainstream. Because Google, for instance, has a lot of restricted searches, for instance. So people who work in the cannabis field, with CPD and things like that, they restrict a lot of the search results for that. And I've known SEOs who've worked in that space and they have to be very creative about how they optimize for search because it's very sensitive, it's a sensitive topic. So I think that in places like TikTok and places like YouTube, people can have those conversations a bit more easily, maybe, and so you might see more of that stuff coming to the fore in those search engines. Mordy Oberstein: Which just goes to show you, if you're researching a topic, don't just go to a queue to research tool that's focused on Google, go and look what's happening in other platforms because it could be a very diverse way of looking at what a topic is. So a little tip for you. And if that's news to you, guess what's also going to be news to you? Crystal Carter: What's news to me? Mordy Oberstein: The Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Oh boy. Perfect timing with the release of last week's episode of the service op podcast, all about ranking factors, because now you'll know how to handle the news that Yandex's 1,922 ranking factors have been leaked in a hack, per Danny Goodwin over at search engine land Yandex, leak reveals 1,922 search ranking factors. So what do you get as part of this leak? A lot of cool stuff, and what some calling the biggest SEO event in years as Yandex is similar to Google in a lot of ways, but also different in a lot of ways. So we know now that Yandex looks at things like is a page orphaned, meaning are there no internal links from the website pointing to a particular page. Looks at dwell time. How long are people spending on the page? How many queries the site or the page ranks for, the average ranking. Is a page being bookmarked by people, is actually a ranking factor with Yandex. Also keywords in the URL, also a ranking factor on Yandex, which Google has also said is a ranking factor, but super, super small. But we don't know what it is on Yandex, is the point. We have this whole list, but we don't know how they're weighted and how they're considered, which is what we spoke about on last week's episode, all about ranking factors. Alex Burkas has a great Twitter thread or two on this. I'll link to it in the show notes. And while it is all very, very interesting, really my question is now, now what? Let's assume Google uses the same 1,922 ranking factors, the exact same ones. Let's just pretend that they do. They don't, but let's pretend that they do. Now I need to create, according to these 1,922 ranking factors, if you go through all of them, which I have not gone through all of them, I've gone through a lot of them. But basically now I need to create well optimized content that I need to push out there to get some momentum around, maybe through social, get some folks to visit the content, maybe link to the content, which of course means I need to create really, really good content that helps my target audience. And now my life is different because... So now that I know all these ranking factors, my life is different because... And that's the Snappy News. See, I told you it was going to be news to you because it wasn't new. See, I didn't lie. Crystal Carter: That was new. That was some new news. Mordy Oberstein: It was new. Crystal Carter: It was new. It was not old, it was new. Mordy Oberstein: It was not old. I just saw a tweet recently. Bowery wants to now charge people to be asked, is this new? I'm going to go bankrupt. If it is new, he'll pay you $10. Crystal Carter: Oh, that's interesting. I could get that boat. Mordy Oberstein: I like this. Which that brings us to who you should be following on social media, and you're expecting it to be Barry Schwartz, but we actually recommended you follow Barry, I think like three or four times already. So follow Barry. Also, because we're talking about search engines, keeping with our theme here, someone who's been very focused on TikTok SEO and TikTok as a search engine has been the one, the only, Lidia Infante, who's @LidiaInfanteM on Twitter, that's L-I-D-I-A I-N-F-A-N-T-E M on Twitter. Crystal Carter: The M is very important. When she got married, I was like, "Happy wedding, Lidia Infante without the M, and it's a completely different person. So I'm sure that the other Lidia Infante's fantastic, but the Lidia Infante that we're talking about is a great SEO who's spoken at lots of events and has written extensively on various topics. She's particularly good on keyword research as well and keyword research gaps. Also, she's contributed to the Wix SEO hub, talking about international SEO, and her work on TikTok is really great. And so check it out. She's a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: Couple of pieces, I think Moz had a piece about TikTok SEO, so we'll link to them in the show notes. I'll find them. I'll use a search engine. I'll find the article she wrote. Which search engine? I don't know. Maybe I'll go to TikTok or Instagram alone. Crystal Carter: Who knows? Mordy Oberstein: Who knows? No one knows. I know. I'm not telling you yet. It's secret. You want me to tell you? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to use Google. Crystal Carter: Plot twist people. That was- Mordy Oberstein: I am so boring. Crystal Carter: I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't entirely expecting that. Mordy Oberstein: What flavor is Mordy? Vanilla. Crystal Carter: I remember having a conversation with you once and I was like, "Ah, vanilla." You're like, "Why is everybody always- Mordy Oberstein: Why is everybody... Vanilla's a great flavor. Especially with the little specks. Crystal Carter: The best flavor is mint chocolate chip. Mordy Oberstein: Mint chocolate chip. Absolutely. Hands down. Crystal Carter: It's the best one. Mordy Oberstein: We're not even going to argue that. Crystal Carter: We're not going to argue because it's got chocolate, which is great, and it's got mint and the mint is cold. You feel refreshed and nice. Mordy Oberstein: End of conversation, we'll stop here. Thank you for joining us on the Cerps Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we are back next week with an all new episode as we dive into how to pick an SEO tool. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn, looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and the webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Janet Machucuke Lidia Infante Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Understanding Google SERP Features News: Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors Alex Buraks Twitter Thread on Yandex Ranking Factors Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Janet Machucuke Lidia Infante Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Understanding Google SERP Features News: Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors Alex Buraks Twitter Thread on Yandex Ranking Factors Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Cerps Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the Cerps Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm a very congested, head of SEO branding here at Wicks. My name is Mordy Oberstein and I'm joined by the very not congested, very awesome, very stupendous, very amazing head of SEO communications here at Wicks, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everybody. Hello all internet people. I'm in a good mood. I'm not congested, that's right, because I've been listening to my classic RnB all morning. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, is that what I should be doing for my cold? I didn't just listen to... Forget the medicine. Crystal Carter: Get yourself some nice like Toni Braxton or some nice Anita Baker and a cup of tea and just chill out. Honestly, it's vibes. How can you feel upset when- Mordy Oberstein: I feel my sinuses already clearing up. Crystal Carter: Just let it flow. Mordy Oberstein: I recovered listening to Bob Dylan because I feel like Bob Dylan. I feel amazely. Crystal Carter: How many tissues does a man need to use? I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: A lot. I'm not going there. A lot. The Cerps Up podcast is brought to you by Wicks, where you can instantly connect your site to Google Cert Console and automatically have your site map submitted automatically, and your homepage index instantly by the great Google in the sky. Why am I telling you this? One, because it's awesome, but also because this is talking about you submitting your site to search engines, and today we're talking about search engines. Huh? And if they still matter or not. Do they still matter? Will they continue to matter? Pum, pum, pum, pum. Crystal Carter: Is SEO dead? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, but search engines might be. Crystal Carter: What? Are search engine dead? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. We're going to find out, because on this episode we're talking about the potential evolution of search engines. Are we on the precipice? Will social come to replace search? Is Chat GPT a search engine killer. 10 blue links a thing of the past? Lion, tigers and bears, and bing. Oh my. Get it? I said bing. Not Bing. Lions, tigers and bing. Oh my. Plus Janet Machuka stops by to share how social can impact search, even if social doesn't end up replacing search. And we'll dive into all of the different search engines and how they handle queries in different ways. And as always, we have the Snappy News and who you should be following on social. Ready, set search, episode 23 of the Cerps Up podcast is here. So search engines. Crystal Carter: Search engines. Mordy Oberstein: For years you've been using them, you've been relying on them to access information. They're old, not new. We all get that. I feel in every episode we have to have a Barry Schwartz Easter egg. Crystal Carter: And I'm going to put on my Barry Schwartz merch slippers as well. Mordy Oberstein: Oh shoot, forgot my Barry Schwartz slippers. So search engines are old but not new, we all understand this. We all understand search engines have changed over times while the ones that have survived, RIP Alta Vista, Google isn't using just 10 blue links anymore. There's not the 10 old, plain old organic results. There's all sorts of, I'm officially calling them do hickeys. We spoke about search features, boxes that give you answers without URLs, boxes that gives you answers with URLs. Video results, images, filters. Search engines have obviously evolved. But have we evolved past search engines? Yes, with questions like that, I do wear jackets with leather patches because I'm all philosophical. I do. By the way, I have a jacket with leather patches. When I became a teacher, that's the first thing I did. I bought a jacket, leather patches. Crystal Carter: Did you stand on the desk and say, oh captain, my captain? Mordy Oberstein: No, I did stand on a desk one time, but I was yelling other things. We as an internet, have we gotten to the point where the traditional search engine doesn't meet or satisfy our needs anymore? Do we not want a list of results? Do we not even want answers from search engines anymore? Perhaps we want, I don't know, to move to social for our answers. It's not crazy, by the way, the young kids, they all like going to social. My kids, they go to the YouTube for answers and YouTubers for answers. They don't go to Google. Check that out. I am disappointed in them, by the way. Mr. Beast is not a replacement for Google, but I'm a curmudgeon, I get this. In other words, do we not want to a list of results? Do we instead want the ability to dive deeper into things or take up multiple aspects of a topic? Not only that, does emerging tech like Chat GPT mean that we want a more interactive and dynamic environment that search engines don't provide? Whether it's user expectations or emerging tech, there's a lot to say whether we're at a crossroads what it comes to search engines, and that perhaps the practical definition of a search engine is about to change. Crystal, what are your thoughts? Crystal Carter: I think that part of the reason why search engines have changed is because the way we search has changed and the kind of information that is useful to us has changed. Also, the kind of information that people can provide to us has changed. So the search features try to keep up with them. Sometimes when I'm searching for information, sometimes I find that I need multiple inputs, but maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not normal. But sometimes if if I want to know if the pumpkin patch is open and if they still have pumpkins around Halloween or something like that, I could Google it, but that may or may not be accurate. I could go to their Facebook page or something and they'll say whatever they said about the thing. But do you know what I tend to do for that sort of query? If I want to know if something is going on, if something's happening, if I want to know what realtime activity's happening? I'll tend to go to Instagram. I'll go to Instagram and I'll type in that pumpkin patch, where it is. I've literally done this. Then I'll see their most recent posts. And nobody's telling me the information, nobody's written down that they still have pumpkins. But I'll scan through the pictures and I'll go, "There's still a lot of pumpkins, those people look happy, and they just took that picture a half an hour ago. I bet if I go there they'll still have pumpkins." But Google also gives you real time stuff. If I want to know if I'm going to have to have a really long line when I go to the sandwich place, then I can see this place is busy on Google, and that's information that's useful. But I think that if Jeeves, Ask Jeeves back in the day, does anybody remember Jeeves? Good old Jeeves? Mordy Oberstein: I do. Crystal Carter: That was a popular search engine that people used, and now we're asking Chat GPT. I wonder if they'll bring back Jeeves. That would be amazing to bring back Jeeves with AI. If anybody does that, please give me a shout out when you make your millions. But I think that the way that it's changed is because there's so much information now and there's so many people putting information online now, and it needs to be organized in lots of different ways. So some tools will lean into some parts. So for instance, again, Instagram has a now, but their search feature is terrible. But they do have location and they have time. So if that's what you need to know, that's really useful. And I think Google for instance, has lots of information on what things people have published and that sort of thing. Chat GPT is fantastic, but they don't cite their sources in their content. And I never actually asked for the sources and which I might do the next time I try it, but it doesn't cite it's sources. So if you need to dig deeper, you just have to take their word for it, which as somebody who's studied academically, I don't call myself a professor, I don't have leather patches on my jacket. Mordy Oberstein: You don't have leather patches? I'll get you a jacket next time. I already won. Crystal Carter: But with academic rigor, if you've ever studied anything academically, they're like, "Who did you get this information from? Where is this from? Where is the bibliography? What is that from?" So I think that there's lots of different things depending on what you need you might need to get from different search engines, but there'll probably be some point where they converge. Mordy Oberstein: And I think with Chat GPT or GPT3 or AI writers in general, I think what we've done is basically said, you know what? That's going to come in and that's going to kill Google. And I just don't see that. I do think we're going to... I'll get to it. I do think that Google's going to have to change. What Google is now is not what people really want. But I don't think that a AI writer coming in... I think the interactivity is cool. I fully expect there to be some kind of interactivity, if they can move faster, it's still a little bit too slow. But I saw an article about how they're trying to fix that problem in general. They'll figure it out. You definitely do want to have that interactivity as a cool dynamic. I don't think it replaces search. I don't think it can ever replace search. For instance the point that you mentioned, even if it gave me the answer, I want to be able to explore, I want to be able to dive deeper, I want to be able to see multiple vantage points on this topic. And one true answer is not the answer. Crystal Carter: And I think that can be dangerous sometimes depending on what the question is. Either it says there isn't something. And so if you think that this is the definitive source, if you think one search engine is a definitive source, indeed I mean dangerous with a lower case D. But if you think that one search engine is a definitive source, then if it says that, oh no, there isn't an answer for that, then people might stop looking. If it tells you the answer and you go, oh yes, that is absolutely the answer, never in the history of information has that ever been useful. People need multiple perspectives. It's always important. Mordy Oberstein: That's why they're sourcing. It's an academic thing. It's a necessary thing for the nature of information. There has to be sourcing, which is why that's a thing. I think that people, your point about going to multiple sources, is why social is becoming more relevant. And I would say that if a search engine wants to adopt something, it should put access points to more social perspectives on the results page itself. Well you see Google doing that with a Twitter carousel, for example. And it is doing that with TikTok. The more, the better at this point. For certain types of queries, I don’t mean as a universal, because I do want to get information in real time for multiple people and see what's happening out there. I'll give you an example. Recently a new chain opened up here and I wanted to see what exactly are they selling, what kind of products are they selling, and all of the results that Google gave me were for press releases about the new store or articles from news outlets about the store. It didn't give me the information that I want. And where I got the information from? I went to the Google business profile, I took a look at the image that people posted there and looked in the background, what's on the shelves. I'm like, "Oh, they have that. Interesting. I want to go there now." Crystal Carter: Exactly. It's because a picture says a thousand words. Our picture's worth a thousand words. And sometimes these different bits of information can tell you a lot. Mordy Oberstein: People want to see what other people are doing and what's happening, how they're relating to whatever it is and the other thing. Crystal Carter: And TripAdvisor is a great search engine for things. So for instance, on TripAdvisor, if you want to know if a hotel is good, you can go and you can look at the pictures that the hotel puts up, you can also look at the pictures that regular folks have put up with their terrible camera phones and compare that to the reviews and compare that to the information. So you're getting lots of different points of information to make a decision. Mordy Oberstein: Isn't it interesting though, we're talking about, on the one hand, Chat GPT coming into search engine isn't replacing a search engine, which is a very cold... Replacing one cold machine with another cold machine. And on the other hand we're saying that people want to see what other people are saying more. You can't say both of those in the same breath. You can't say, people want the machine giving the answer and people also want to dive in more into social. My kids want to hear information from a person, so that's why they go to YouTube to get information. I think the era of the cold machine is dying. And that's not to say you can't integrate something like Chat GPT into the search engine. But I think a much more... Look, 10 blue links, the idea, and by the way, in my opinion, all results pages are still predicated, they're still fundamentally about 10 blue links, 10 organic results. They're not 10 anymore, whatever, eight or nine or seven, whatever the number is. That is the backbone of the results page. But that's not what I want. I want to see multiple media formats, I want to see multiple layers of information. If I search for this store that opened up, I do want to see the press release, I do want to see what the media outlets are reporting. I also want to see what people are reporting at the same time, I want to see the images at the same time. I want to get all of that all at once, dive into one, come back and go down the next rabbit hole. To me it's all about rabbit holes. I want to be able to go down as many rabbit holes as I possibly can, and the search engine that does that first is where I'm going to go. 10 blue links are dead. Crystal Carter: I think you're absolutely right and I think that we're able to process information a lot more quickly than when that was the day of that, and we were able to filter more quickly. And again, depending on what your search need is, if I want to find reviews, Amazon is absolutely part of my search engine process. Absolutely. Even if I'm not buying from Amazon, I'm checking the reviews on Amazon because they almost always have some. That's always part of it if I'm looking for reviews. If I want to do a deep dive review, if I'm spending out a lot of money on something... Let's say I win the lottery and I decide to buy myself a boat. I know nothing about boats, but I want to be like, "I'm on a boat." So before I'm on my boat, I'm going to go on YouTube. Mordy Oberstein: A rowboat. Crystal Carter: No, I'm not getting a rowboat. When I win the lottery, I'm not getting a rowboat, I'm getting a- Mordy Oberstein: If I win the lottery, I don't want oars. Crystal Carter: No man, I'm not rowing that boat. When I win the lottery, I'm getting a boat with rims. No, I'm kidding. You can't put rims on a boat. I'm going to get a big boat. My boat's going to be amazing. But I know nothing about boats so I'm going to have to watch a lot of YouTube videos about people on boats and in yachts, and looking amazing in Miami or whatever. And so I'm going to have to do all that research. And so for reviews, YouTube is absolutely going to be part of that. That's going to be a big part of that. Maybe TikTok a little bit or something, but probably YouTube because I want to get right into it. And also Google because they're doing well at reviews. So there's going to be certain parts of search where there's going to be certain ways of searching that are going to be better than others. If I was looking for book reviews for instance, I'm probably going to be checking out Good Reads a lot, actually. If I'm looking at film reviews, there's going to be stuff on Google, there's going to be stuff on IMDB, there's going to be stuff on Rotten Tomatoes. You know which ones are the places that you chat, and so they fall into categories when you're thinking about that stuff. But when I've done research on Chat GPT, I always end up going on search engines anyway. It's a good place to start. I think it might replace Wikipedia because I think much of it is summarizing what you get from Wikipedia Mordy Oberstein: Very much so. Crystal Carter: And sometimes in a tidier way. But to be fair, Wikipedia's got a very good search, it's very good on search as well. Mordy Oberstein: But that's what I mean. We're asking, is the age of the search engine dead? I would say, I'm going to qualify it as yes. The search engine as it is, I think people are feeling like, "It's not giving me exactly what I want." Does that mean that search engines as a concept are dead? No. And this is why I think, when the next new thing comes up, "Oh, that's going to replace the search engine." And then something new comes up, "That's going to replace the search engine." Because I think there's a general sense of not feeling satisfied, of wanting something different. And then when that next new thing, that different thing comes along, be like, "Oh, that's it." What I think it is is all of it. It's all of it. It's not, oh, this thing, it's social that's going to replace the search engine. No. Chat GPT it's going to replace a search engine. All of it is going to evolve in a new version of what a search engine is and what it should be. Crystal Carter: And I think it's if an Uber comes along, we're like, "Oh, taxis are over." No, I still get taxis. There's still a place for a taxi or whatever. If you go to a train station, there's always a taxi there, that's really easy, blah, blah, blah. but it explodes, so it's like a decentralization of the concept. So Apple's adding more search around maps and around other things as well. People are creating their own search engines in lots of different ways. So it's more of a diversification of those things. So for instance, when they say taxis aren't over, but there's also Uber, there's also Lyft, there's also Gett, there's also those little scooters that people take. It's become more complex because our needs have become more complex. And people say, "Well, I don't want that one, but I do want this one." And so people have more options for getting more information. And I think what other people forget is that a lot of these search engines will index each other. So Google will pull in search results from Pinterest, will pull in search results from Twitter, they will pull in results from various different things. Thing will pull in some results from certain things. Like Duck Duck Go is powered by Bing, in some countries Bing and Google overlap as well. So sometimes it'll say that it's from one company, but the search engine is actually powered by a different one. So there's a lot of different ways that search engines make sure that they're able to help people find information. Because then we go back to the taxi example, the point is that people want to get from A to B. And that's the same with information. People want to find information, and at the end of the day, people aren't particularly fussed about how they get from A to B, whether it's in a taxi or a bus or a train or whatever. And some people will have different preferences or whatever, but they want the best way. Mordy Oberstein: And if you want to take a lesson out of this, if you're thinking about, "Oh well surgeons are going to die, they're not going to die." The lesson is that what people expect out of content and out of information is rapidly shifting and it's becoming way more diverse and decentralized and offering as much option as possible and as much autonomy to the user as possible. People want autonomy. The way that knowledge has come across on the web has been very direct and very dictatored. That's not a real word. It's been a dictatorship. You go to the search engine, it gives you and it gives you this. But people want autonomy in their knowledge experience. And as a marketer, as a content creator, whatever it is that you're doing on the web, that sense of autonomy you can give over in the knowledge acquisition experience is going to go a long way with your audience. Now speaking about search engines and social media and whatnot, social media activity can actually impact your SEO. How does that work? Well, here's Janet Machuka on how does social media activity impact your SEO? Janet Machuka: My name is Janet Machuka and I will want to talk a little bit about SEO and social media. SEO basically is the optimization of content through search engines. And I like the fact that social media is a great search engine. Search engines will love you if people love you first. And we have seen it happen a lot of the times with even our content through social media, the way we write it. If the search engine on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook loves us, our content will actually be seen by so many people. And looking at it from the point of consistency, it means you need to create content that is consistent, content that is going to make people know that you exist. And you actually need to be active. Either be it on your Twitter, on your Instagram, on your Facebook. So what am I saying at the end of the day? Do content that will keep you be seen by the people who are searching you. And something else is social media actually benefits those people who are consistent from this point of view. If I search you on Google, for example, maybe I'm searching something about Twitter and you're creating amazing threads on Twitter, and I come across your content, it can actually lead me to your profile. So the consistency use of social media can lead to your profile on social media being seen on the search engines. Actually, it's not just about the Google alone. As I said earlier, social media alone is a search engine. And when people see the kind of information they search out of the keywords they are looking for, it helps you increase the visibility of your content and also the interactions of your content. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Janet for that. That was really interesting. Crystal Carter: It's really useful. And she talked about a few things there. She talked about being consistent on social media and about your profile and stuff, and I've spoken about this as well. I think that it's an absolutely underrated, super valuable thing. Because for instance, we talked about Twitter showing up in search results. That only happens when you are posting regularly on Twitter. But it's really valuable for a few reasons. One is because it's a good way to get your links actually onto the Cerp because if you share links there, then they show as live links on the Cerp. It's also really good, particularly if you're talking about branding or if you're talking about what they refer to as Cerp dominance because it takes up a lot of space on the Twitter account. And she also talked about being consistent with your brand, having your profile there. Optimizing your profile. If you do nothing else with your social media, optimizing your profile can add significant benefit for your SEO because you can link it to your schema markup which helps Google to understand your entity better, which helps everything you do online to work in conjunction and to benefit you overall. So there's a lot of good things there. And with regards to the consistency point, again, if you are using those profiles more like regularly and being consistent, then again, they will show up. So when people search for your name, they'll see your name, your Instagram, your Twitter, your TikTok, your YouTube, whatever it may be. Mordy Oberstein: If you have a result that's on the precipice and it's a negative result about your brand, I've definitely used the Twitter box as a way to push that down off of page one because again, the Twitter box can be really, really big sometimes. Also, and just what she was talking about, the content focus is a great... If you are thinking about, "How am I going to share this piece on social media with my audience?" It helps keep you topically focused and topically relevant. And that's also really good for your SEO. Crystal Carter: It also can help you build some momentum. If Google can see that there's a surge of interest on a particular topic, then it can help you to get indexed more quickly, because you're sending them lots of signals that lots of people want to see this content. And it can also help to see more keywords happen. It can also help you to get some more feedback on your content straight away, because if people are coming to the content and they're like, "What does that actually mean?" You're like, oh okay, maybe I'll write you another one. Maybe they'll write you a follow up piece. Mordy Oberstein: There's so much you can do there with that, there's so much value in this. Since, however, we're talking about search engines today, Crystal has an amazing idea. She's like, "Hey, let's do a new segment and let's call it, So Many Search Engines." Because there's not just one search engine, there's Bing, there's Duck Duck Go, there's Neighbor, there's View, there's all these search engines, and they don't always show the same exact thing or take the same exact approach with very straightforward keywords. So because we're talking about search engines and where they're heading on this episode, we thought today would be the day to introduce Crystal's brilliant new segment, So Many Search Engines. Speaker 4: Google's latest update, popular search engine Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, Jeeves. Crystal Carter: They're everywhere. Mordy Oberstein: They're so many. Crystal Carter: They're so many, oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: They're coming at me, there's so many of them. Crystal Carter: But no more Jeeves. No, I think Jeeves has gone. Am I misquoting that? Mordy Oberstein: Oh well, till there, I don't even know. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Poor Jeeves. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe it's gone. Maybe they shut that down Crystal Carter: Nobody's asking Clippy either. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, we thought with the inaugural version of So Many Search Engines, that we would start asking all of the different search engines, what is the best search engine? Crystal Carter: So Meta. That's so Meta. Mordy Oberstein: We just broke the fourth wall. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: It's like when they're watching TV while you're watching TV, on TV. Crystal Carter: I know somebody who gets a really big kick out of taking pictures of people taking pictures. Mordy Oberstein: I like this. So I've logged in, what is the best search engine into Google, and guess what? I got a bunch of ads. I did, I got three ads. One of them was from a Semrush and SEO ability. SEOs, there we go. And then I got a feature snippet listing the top 10 search engines and it gave me a list of eight. The best search engine in the world, Google. Search engine number two, Bing, then Baidu, then Yahoo, then Yandex and Ask, then Duck Duck Go, then Neighbor. And then it says more items so we have to click through to see the rest of the list. That's what I got on Google. Crystal Carter: All right. On my one I was checking out Neva, which is an interesting search engine which was recently has been shared by a few people. So Glenn Gabe's been talking about it, been talking about it, because they've got a search engine that allows you to tailor your search, but they also have a new feature where they're incorporating AI. So remember I was talking about how some of this AI generators, so if you're asking Chat GBT for things, they don't always give you sources. Neva has a feature where it does give you a source, which is very interesting. But I asked Neva, what is the best search engine? And it just gave you links, very similar to the plain blue links. It says 12 best search engines in the world and it's from inspire.scott, which is interesting. And then reliablesoft.net, 10 search engines. And then rapidapi.com, and then search enginejournal.com, which is very interesting because I've never heard of three of those websites. I've obviously heard of Search Engine Journal. Mordy Oberstein: That's very similar to what I got by the way, on Duck duck Go. So I got nothing rich in any way, shape or form, it's just your typical organic results. The first one from Life Wire, the best search engine of 2022, and then it has site links, like sublisting of some of the headers on the page. And then I just have another list of organic results. Some of them similar to Google, some of them not. Bing however, was completely different. And this is what we're talking about. Different search engines have very, very different approaches, so you need to be aware because you can get a lot of track from other search engines other than Google. Bing went full knowledge graph on me. First it gave me one organic result at the top from grape.com, which is a browser, which is very different in terms of organic results than anything else any other search you gave me. It says Brave, best search browser. So it gave me a browser and not a search engine. So that's a little weird Bing. But at the same time, it gave an answer of Google according to two sources, and then it gave me those two sources and a snippet from those two sources. So it was very clear and definitive Google is the best search engine, Bing being honest there, and giving sources. At the same time, it gave me a knowledge panel of search engine, like what is a search engine? Crystal Carter: And it's got multiple links in there. So Bing does this a lot with their knowledge panels where they can be very illustrative. So for some things, if you look up a lion on Bing, it gives you a picture of Africa and a beautiful photo of a lion, and all these different links to it. For the search engine one, it's got links to different parts of it. It's got links across Wikipedia and various different things. They're also citing. Even though their knowledge panel is pulling together content, presumably using AI to generate that content, they are citing their sources underneath the knowledge panel, which I think is really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: And just going to show you that being very much in general likes to take a very knowledge graph based approach even more than Google does. And I think it's because Microsoft has really vested heavily, heavily heavily in AI and they like to showcase it and they actually like to use it on the Cerp a little bit more than Google. I actually did the same thing, by the way, on TikTok. What is the best search engine? And I got a bunch of videos about private search engines.Private search engine. I was like, "I don't even know what this is talking about." Or I have a video about website the government should tell you about, a lot of privacy government stuff showing up, which I thought was- Crystal Carter: Very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: ... very interesting. Social was totally different than the traditional search engine here. Crystal Carter: YouTube, they're starting with similar sort of things, so 20 search engines that are better than Google. And then Duck Duck Go versus Google, which in Duck Duck Go is a more private search engine. And then the next one is, protect your privacy. And I think that something you get when you look at that is that people who are searching in places like YouTube, and YouTube is also a search engine obviously, and so people are searching on YouTube or searching on TikTok for search engines, might be searching for stuff that's maybe a little bit less mainstream. Because Google, for instance, has a lot of restricted searches, for instance. So people who work in the cannabis field, with CPD and things like that, they restrict a lot of the search results for that. And I've known SEOs who've worked in that space and they have to be very creative about how they optimize for search because it's very sensitive, it's a sensitive topic. So I think that in places like TikTok and places like YouTube, people can have those conversations a bit more easily, maybe, and so you might see more of that stuff coming to the fore in those search engines. Mordy Oberstein: Which just goes to show you, if you're researching a topic, don't just go to a queue to research tool that's focused on Google, go and look what's happening in other platforms because it could be a very diverse way of looking at what a topic is. So a little tip for you. And if that's news to you, guess what's also going to be news to you? Crystal Carter: What's news to me? Mordy Oberstein: The Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Oh boy. Perfect timing with the release of last week's episode of the service op podcast, all about ranking factors, because now you'll know how to handle the news that Yandex's 1,922 ranking factors have been leaked in a hack, per Danny Goodwin over at search engine land Yandex, leak reveals 1,922 search ranking factors. So what do you get as part of this leak? A lot of cool stuff, and what some calling the biggest SEO event in years as Yandex is similar to Google in a lot of ways, but also different in a lot of ways. So we know now that Yandex looks at things like is a page orphaned, meaning are there no internal links from the website pointing to a particular page. Looks at dwell time. How long are people spending on the page? How many queries the site or the page ranks for, the average ranking. Is a page being bookmarked by people, is actually a ranking factor with Yandex. Also keywords in the URL, also a ranking factor on Yandex, which Google has also said is a ranking factor, but super, super small. But we don't know what it is on Yandex, is the point. We have this whole list, but we don't know how they're weighted and how they're considered, which is what we spoke about on last week's episode, all about ranking factors. Alex Burkas has a great Twitter thread or two on this. I'll link to it in the show notes. And while it is all very, very interesting, really my question is now, now what? Let's assume Google uses the same 1,922 ranking factors, the exact same ones. Let's just pretend that they do. They don't, but let's pretend that they do. Now I need to create, according to these 1,922 ranking factors, if you go through all of them, which I have not gone through all of them, I've gone through a lot of them. But basically now I need to create well optimized content that I need to push out there to get some momentum around, maybe through social, get some folks to visit the content, maybe link to the content, which of course means I need to create really, really good content that helps my target audience. And now my life is different because... So now that I know all these ranking factors, my life is different because... And that's the Snappy News. See, I told you it was going to be news to you because it wasn't new. See, I didn't lie. Crystal Carter: That was new. That was some new news. Mordy Oberstein: It was new. Crystal Carter: It was new. It was not old, it was new. Mordy Oberstein: It was not old. I just saw a tweet recently. Bowery wants to now charge people to be asked, is this new? I'm going to go bankrupt. If it is new, he'll pay you $10. Crystal Carter: Oh, that's interesting. I could get that boat. Mordy Oberstein: I like this. Which that brings us to who you should be following on social media, and you're expecting it to be Barry Schwartz, but we actually recommended you follow Barry, I think like three or four times already. So follow Barry. Also, because we're talking about search engines, keeping with our theme here, someone who's been very focused on TikTok SEO and TikTok as a search engine has been the one, the only, Lidia Infante, who's @LidiaInfanteM on Twitter, that's L-I-D-I-A I-N-F-A-N-T-E M on Twitter. Crystal Carter: The M is very important. When she got married, I was like, "Happy wedding, Lidia Infante without the M, and it's a completely different person. So I'm sure that the other Lidia Infante's fantastic, but the Lidia Infante that we're talking about is a great SEO who's spoken at lots of events and has written extensively on various topics. She's particularly good on keyword research as well and keyword research gaps. Also, she's contributed to the Wix SEO hub, talking about international SEO, and her work on TikTok is really great. And so check it out. She's a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: Couple of pieces, I think Moz had a piece about TikTok SEO, so we'll link to them in the show notes. I'll find them. I'll use a search engine. I'll find the article she wrote. Which search engine? I don't know. Maybe I'll go to TikTok or Instagram alone. Crystal Carter: Who knows? Mordy Oberstein: Who knows? No one knows. I know. I'm not telling you yet. It's secret. You want me to tell you? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to use Google. Crystal Carter: Plot twist people. That was- Mordy Oberstein: I am so boring. Crystal Carter: I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't entirely expecting that. Mordy Oberstein: What flavor is Mordy? Vanilla. Crystal Carter: I remember having a conversation with you once and I was like, "Ah, vanilla." You're like, "Why is everybody always- Mordy Oberstein: Why is everybody... Vanilla's a great flavor. Especially with the little specks. Crystal Carter: The best flavor is mint chocolate chip. Mordy Oberstein: Mint chocolate chip. Absolutely. Hands down. Crystal Carter: It's the best one. Mordy Oberstein: We're not even going to argue that. Crystal Carter: We're not going to argue because it's got chocolate, which is great, and it's got mint and the mint is cold. You feel refreshed and nice. Mordy Oberstein: End of conversation, we'll stop here. Thank you for joining us on the Cerps Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we are back next week with an all new episode as we dive into how to pick an SEO tool. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn, looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and the webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back User-first keyword ideation Google Sheet Uncover razor sharp insights by collating search data from existing user touchpoints with this SEO worksheet. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this SEO worksheet to: Identify unique long-tail keywords that engage high-intent users Use language in your content that resonates with users to build stronger relationships with them Assess the value of content ideas before hitting the creation stage Collate data from internal sources like customer care, sales and team training sessions Collect commentary from Google Business Profile, Amazon and more Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Crystal Carter is an SEO & digital marketing professional whose previous clients include Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. She hosts SEO webinars and podcasts and her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush, and more. More about this topic This resource can help you to identify content gaps too. Read this post about user first topic and keyword research on the Wix SEO Hub blog for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Vinnie is a content expert with over 5 years of SEO and content marketing experience. He's worked with Ahrefs, Empire Flippers, and is committed to crafting exceptional content and educating others on the symbiotic relationship between content creation and effective link building. Vinnie Wong Founder and Chief Strategist, Content Cartography Vinnie is a content expert with over 5 years of SEO and content marketing experience. He's worked with Ahrefs, Empire Flippers, and is committed to crafting exceptional content and educating others on the symbiotic relationship between content creation and effective link building. Articles & Resources 8 Aug 2024 The noindex tag: What it is, why you need it, and when to use it for better SEO 21 Feb 2024 Thin content: What it is and how to do better for your users and your website 4 May 2023 Why rank tracking is important for SEO 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

Judith is a renowned international speaker and digital media consultant, specializing in digital technologies to help businesses innovate and optimize. With over 25 years of experience, she runs her own consultancy delivering actionable business insight for M2B, B2B, and B2C companies. Judith Lewis Founder CEO at Decabbit Consultancy Judith is a renowned international speaker and digital media consultant, specializing in digital technologies to help businesses innovate and optimize. With over 25 years of experience, she runs her own consultancy delivering actionable business insight for M2B, B2B, and B2C companies. Articles & Resources 2 Jul 2024 Tactics for multi-stakeholder reporting Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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