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

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Back Looker Studio SEO report template Communicate SEO results and get stakeholder buy-in for future strategies with this customizable report. 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: Customize your performance easily Integrate with leading reporting tools Format your data clearly Sophie Brannon Director of SEO, RushOrderTees LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Sophie Brannon is the Director of SEO at RushOrderTees . With agency, in-house, and freelance experience, she has led strategy, implementation, and communication for everything from local campaigns to multi-language international campaigns in the UK, US, and Australia. She’s an industry speaker and author, award-winner, and led the Web Almanac 2022 SEO chapter. More about this topic Read this post on how to create effective SEO reports 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

Crystal Ortiz is an SEO consultant with experience across fashion, health, travel, automotive, and fitness. She teaches digital marketing classes at various universities across the US. Crystal lives in Indiana with her husband, son, and dog. Crystal Ortiz SEO Consultant Crystal Ortiz is an SEO consultant with experience across fashion, health, travel, automotive, and fitness. She teaches digital marketing classes at various universities across the US. Crystal lives in Indiana with her husband, son, and dog. Articles & Resources 15 Nov 2022 What is search volume? Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

How do you get and keep your SEO team up to speed? Where do you even start when training an SEO team? What tactics should you follow when building a strong SEO training program? Take your team to the next level as Sterling Sky’s Colan Nielsen joins Wix’s Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein to share proven strategies for training SEO teams. Formalize your training programs as Wix’s own Henry Collie joins us to discuss his expertise in implementing successful courses to further strengthen your SEO team and beyond. “Go team!”, as this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast helps you take your SEO team to new heights Back How to train your SEO team How do you get and keep your SEO team up to speed? Where do you even start when training an SEO team? What tactics should you follow when building a strong SEO training program? Take your team to the next level as Sterling Sky’s Colan Nielsen joins Wix’s Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein to share proven strategies for training SEO teams. Formalize your training programs as Wix’s own Henry Collie joins us to discuss his expertise in implementing successful courses to further strengthen your SEO team and beyond. “Go team!”, as this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast helps you take your SEO team to new heights Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 59 | October 25, 2023 | 49 MIN 00:00 / 49:23 This week’s guests Colan Nielsen Colan began his career in the local SEO world back in 2010. He became a Google Product Expert at the Google My Business forum in 2014. This allowed him the opportunity to help 1000s of business owners navigate the often confusing world of Google My Business. In 2017 he joined the Sterling Sky team as VP of Local Search, and has served as a faculty member at LocalU and an administrator at the Local Search Forum, both affiliate organizations of Sterling Sky, since coming on board. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We've put out some groovy new insights around what's happening, SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the spectacular, the magnificent, the marvelous head of communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic introduction, Mordy. That was magnificent, and marvelous and... Mordy Oberstein: Not as easy as it sounds, is it? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's hard. You make it look really easy. But, I mean, you are a wordsmith. Are you not, Mr. Oberstein? Mordy Oberstein: I pretend to be one on TV. On the internet, I pretend to be one. Crystal Carter: My favorite thing is Mordy's pretty cas most of the time, but Mordy's got some $5 words in the bank there. I'm just saying. And every now and then, we'll be in a meeting, and he's just like, "Don't forget. Don't forget. I'm educated over here." And I don’t mean. I don’t mean. I hope that you can… Mordy Oberstein: But what you can't see on my other screen is the digital thesaurus. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Okay. I see. I see. Back in the day I thought a thesaurus was a type of dinosaur. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. Crystal Carter: I was like, oh, yeah, there's the Brontosaurus, the Ichthyosaurus, the thesaurus, obviously. Mordy Oberstein: Obviously. Crystal Carter: I was like, why- Mordy Oberstein: It's the thesaurus. It's the biggest one of all, the thesaurus. Crystal Carter: I was like, why they got this book about dinosaurs next to the dictionaries? They keep putting them in the wrong place. What was that about? And so, anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Remind me later. I have a great story about something similar to my brother, but it's not for this podcast. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Right. Got it. Crystal Carter: That's SERP's Up plus plus. Mordy Oberstein: That's plus plus, right. That's the after hours SERP's Plus Up, whatever. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, searchlight over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, which you can get it delivered each and every month into your inbox, which is also part of our wider SEO learning hub, which is a great place to stay up to date on SEO, maybe join a webinar, maybe even access a resource to help, I don't know, train your SEO team. Who knows? The possibilities are endless over at wix.com/seo/learn, as today we're talking about training your SEO team. Get it? That's why I did that plug. Crystal Carter: I see. I see. That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Pat on the back for the pivot. We're talking how you train your SEO team. That's right. Today, whether you're an agency or an in-house team, or just want some tips for yourself, or maybe if you want to see perhaps how your boss is looking at things, we're here to help your team. Where to start when training an SEO team? How much is on you to train your team and how much is on them to train themselves? How do you train different types of people doing different types of SEO all with different levels of experience and then actually get your own work done? To help us bring our SEO pedagogy up to standard, Sterling Sky's VP of Search and Local University faculty member, Professor Colan Nielsen will be joining us in just a few minutes. Plus, we sit down with the true educator, Henry Collie, Wix's own curriculum developer, to talk about what goes into creating a strong learning program. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So open up your lesson planners and put on your spectacles with a little rope thingies attached to them as episode number 59 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you find your teacher's voice. I want the audience to know that Crystal has those spectacles with the stringy thing. Crystal Carter: I do. Mordy Oberstein: And every time she wears her hair up. I'm like, "Oh, my God, you're giving me teacher vibes and I'm having a lot of anxiety." Crystal Carter: This makes you wonder, were you called into the office a lot back in the day? Like, oh, Mordy won't confirm nor deny. Mordy Oberstein: Who knows? Crystal Carter: I think your silence speaks so loud. Mordy Oberstein: I was difficult in high school, for the time I spent in high school. It's a totally different story for a totally different time. Crystal Carter: For SERP's Up plus plus. Mordy Oberstein: Plus plus. Right, the after hours podcast over away. I think just to give a quick, quick, quick background on this before we bring Colan in. You have an SEO team. Let's say, you're at an agency, you have all types of SEO folks. You have seniors and juniors and all types of different people, and whether they are SEO experts or they're new to the SEO game, there's always some kind of training that has to go on. Whether it be SEO training or even beyond SEO training. How do we speak nicely to our clients so they don't leave and they keep paying us every month? You might be a great SEO, but you might not be great with clients. There's a lot of education that continuously has to happen no matter where you are in any profession, but I think particularly when working inside of an SEO team, whether in-house, at an agency, which is why we have, as I mentioned right here, live with us, the VP of Search over at Sterling Sky. Welcome to the SERP's Up podcast, Colan. How are you? Colan Nielsen: Wow, Mordy. Thank you very much. That was a wonderful intro and a tough act to follow. Crystal's right, you are indeed a wordsmith. So I'm going to do my best to follow that incredible intro. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: It's our honor and esteemed pleasure. Okay, quick plug. Sterling Sky, Local U, what do we got? Colan Nielsen: Blue Mountains, Ontario, which is this beautiful city just north of Toronto. It's October 13th, which means we're into that time of year where trees are changing. It's beautiful, and this is probably one of the best places in all of Ontario to be at that time of year if you like the changing of the seasons and seeing these beautiful trees change color. So we're right nestled in this mountainous valley. This is our first Canadian Local University events, I believe, in the history of Local U, so it's very special to us. A lot of our team members, including Joy, the founder of the company, is from Canada. I'm from Canada. We're bringing all of our US team to Canada to be here with us for it as well. So we're super excited. Amazing speakers, amazing location. I can't say enough about how excited I am. Crystal Carter: It looks amazing. I'm looking at it and again, idyllic is the setting I would give. Just absolutely idyllic. Just frolicking in the beautiful leaves and- Mordy Oberstein: You're dropping the words now, by the way. Crystal Carter: But also, the lineup you have here. You're by himself. Darren Shaw, amazing. Claire Carlisle, absolute legend. We've got Matthew Hunt. I don't know him just at the moment, but I will find out and I'm sure he's fantastic. Jan Tomaso, also amazing. Darren, again. Joy, who is such a fountain of knowledge, and Marie Haynes also repping for... Mordy Oberstein: Also. Crystal Carter: ... Canada there. So yeah, what a lineup. What a great day. Colan Nielsen: Yeah, we're excited. And what's really cool about Local U night before networking events, that's, in my opinion, is almost at the same level in terms of the value you're going to get out as the day itself, where you're listening to speakers and presentations. That night before you get to interact, talk business, make connections. So it's all worth it. Crystal Carter: I think that's a great pivot into our topic because I think that sometimes folks think, oh, I'm not sure if we have money to send the junior team members or learning team members to something like Local U or another marketing conference, for instance. But being in the presence of people who are top of their game, who are really passionate about their topic, who are exploring new and interesting ideas can be really, really inspiring and can be really good and to help sort of kickstart someone's learning journey. And I don't know if that's part of your training sort of thing when you guys are getting new folks through the team, but I'd love to hear more about it. Colan Nielsen: It absolutely is. We do our best to try and ensure that certainly as many people from our team can attend these events as possible. Certainly, newer people to the team. We'll get to this in a little bit, but there's certainly an approach we have with hiring people is typically around hiring people that come with experience and knowledge baked in. But we also hire people that are newer to SEO that this is perfect for. Another thing you made me think of there that was really cool, if we're thinking about these different avenues for new people that are new to SEO, getting into training and where do I go? So there's events like Local University, but then something that's kind of connected to Local University is the Local Search Forum. The reason I bring that up is, well, A, it's a totally free resource. Anybody can go sign up. You can ask client questions. You can ask general SEO questions or hiring questions, training questions. And I've been finding for the last couple of Local U events, there are members of the Local Search Forum that are now attending the Local University events to sort of just level things up and then you get to meet those people in person. So it's like this really nice circle that gets completed between the forum and the events. So definitely check out the forum as well. It's a wonderful training resource for sure. Crystal Carter: Yeah, forums are particularly good for helping training. I think also because... And maybe we'll get to this, but sometimes in a team... And I think that that's the important operative word there. A team, is that sometimes in a team you need someone to do something. Maybe it's not the first thing that they want to do necessarily, but you're like, we have this new project that we're doing and we need you to learn how to prompt the AI efficiently or how to use this new tool or how to train everyone on this thing, or whatever it may be. And sometimes you might be the only person in the team that knows that skill or knows that tool, or something like that. And sometimes the forum folks will be the folks that you know that you can talk to about it. There's like the Google Business Profile forums and things like that. How much do you find that as a team, do you need to point people to resources like that forum? Colan Nielsen: So we actually have... Let's say we allocate budgets each month, time, resources, whatever you want to think about it to people on our team to make sure that on any given month they have time to go to the Local Search Forum to either participate, to create threads, or simply just to go through and answer threads that other people are asking. I think that's one of the best things you can do, especially as a beginning SEO. But even as time goes on is go to forums, find problems that people have and just volunteer your time and troubleshoot them and answer them. And it's really just sharpening that knife. It's a free, wonderful way to sharpen your knife. And then there's all those other benefits like the networking and meeting new people and all that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to piggyback on that just a little bit because about time and make sure everybody is able to do all these things, but you as someone who is training other SEOs, it could be a lot. You have your full-time job, and then you have all the training that you need to do. How do you sort of balance both? And I'll sort of piggyback another question on top of that. And you kind of mentioned at the beginning. How much is it on you to teach and how much is it on them to go figure it out and learn? Colan Nielsen: Yeah, it's a great question. So we definitely take a lot of time, care, efforts as an agency to ensure that we're continually training, and as time goes by, this becomes even more time. When we started in 2016, there was about three people on the Sterling Sky team. There was a part-time team member, Joy, and myself. I think we had one other person at the time. We're now approaching 40 full-time team members. So training is something we've really, really integrated. And so just to give you some examples. We kind of break things up in a given month. We'll have general training meetings and we'll break these into some very strategic categories. So for instance, every month, we have a strategy team meeting, and the people that are going to join that meeting are people that are responsible for client strategy. So that meeting is really about performance at the end of the day. It's about training on how to get better results for our clients as far as whatever performance metrics. But then we also have account manager training meetings, which are equally important, but instead of those being focused around client performance, they're around client relationship. Making sure we're doing the things that we say we're going to do, that we're communicating effectively, efficiently, all that kind of stuff. We then also have specific, let's call them, team meetings. So we have link building specific training meetings, which just the link builders are going to be a part of that. The other meeting that I would say for us being a Local Search agency, that's a really, really important meeting to have is we actually have a very specific set Google Business Profile strategy meeting. And the people on our team that join this meeting are, well, anybody that's doing Google Business Profile strategy, which I would say is a little bit higher level than somebody who's just say, optimizing a profile. This is like a level up from there where you're now building strategies, you know how to fix duplicate listing issues, stuff like that. We have a specific strategy meeting for that, where we'll discuss new issues that have come up with Google. You may have saw recently, Ben Fisher tweeted there's this big change coming to the... Mordy Oberstein: I saw that. Colan Nielsen: ... reinstatement process, which is huge. So we'll talk about stuff like that. The other thing that's interesting, and I think this is really important I would say for any agency or anybody learning is if you are an account manager working in Local Search, you also should be striving towards being a Google Business Profile strategist or experts, because that is the one thing that we've found that if you're on a call with a client that is paying you to do Local Search and you're not able to answer some of those important questions they have, where it's more like, let me get back to you about that and check with the team. If you can avoid those and build that knowledge of the account manager up, especially on the GVP stuff, that seems to go a long way as far as training goes. Crystal Carter: I think it's really interesting the way that you're breaking it down into so many different layers of learning. And I think that that will also really appeal to the different ways that people learn. So the different learning styles and qualitative, quantitative, that sort of stuff. Mordy has a degree in education, so he can probably break them down into more of them than me, but there's lots of different learning styles there, which I think is really interesting. I think the other thing that I find fascinating about this approach to team learning is that it helps to reduce skills gaps and it also helps to improve the dissemination of information with regards to a particular topic. So for instance, like Google Business Profile, there's lots of different changes. There's lots of different iterations that you'll see if you're working in a restaurant space, you'll see one type of Google Business Profile. If it's a hotel, it's another one. If it's a shop, it's another one, and things like that. I don't know how you organize your clients', but it might be that you have your clients organized by everybody who's in a restaurant is with one person and everybody who's in a hotel is with another person. Or it might just be that whoever's free, whoever has the time gets the next client. Different agencies work different ways. So if you have a meeting where you're discussing the broad trends that you're seeing across a particular platform or a particular approach, then that helps to reduce some of the gaps so that even if your account manager hasn't necessarily dealt with that particular issue personally, if they heard about it in the meeting, then they can say, oh, well our team has seen this or that, oh, I can get you the report that we saw from, we did that with this other client, that sort of thing. And I think that that also helped reduce some of the tacit knowledge that you sometimes lose in agencies when it's in everyone's head. Can you talk to us about how you disseminate the information that you get from some of those team collaborative training spaces? Colan Nielsen: Yeah. Well, typically if it's something that's, say, mission-critical, like this suspension change, where the reinstatement process changed or Google's making some other crazy change, which they constantly do as we all know. Those types of things will certainly filter themselves up to our monthly team meeting. So today is actually, in about four from now we have our monthly team meeting and this is our all hands on deck meeting. So all 40 people will be attending this, and we break that team meeting up into a similar style as to how I just mentioned we kind of break up those individual training sessions. But anything that comes out of those meetings that is important for everybody to know then makes its way into that monthly team meeting and we discuss it. Some of the other things that seem to be helping with that over time. And then also touch on something you mentioned, Crystal, about just meeting people's styles of how they would like to train. It's an evolving process, and something we've started to do a lot more recently is incorporate more shadowing, for instance. Because I think at the end of the day, if you're training an account manager or a sales role, let's say, there's only so much you can do by standing there and telling somebody, these are our golden rules, these are the things that you have to follow and you got to follow up within two hours and this, that and the other thing. Right, that's fine. People need to know that and they need to be listed somewhere so you can reference them and know rules. But I think what's more important and what we're experimenting with a lot more lately is getting into other styles like shadowing. So for instance, we've just started on the sales side of things. We actually don't have a sales team at Sterling Sky. I talk to clients. I don't have a sales background, but people on the team who love SEO and love talking to people are really good at selling. So that's kind of how we do it. And now we're having more people shadow. So I'll jump on a call with a prospect, I'll have somebody else from my team join, they'll take notes, they'll ask me questions. Maybe next month I'll have them join a sales call, I'll join with them, take notes, give them feedback. And that seems to be a really effective way to do training as well. Mordy Oberstein: So it's really because one of the way it sounds like, through a certain extent, is that you're doing a lot of the training as part of the actual workflow. Something new came up in the SEO industry, you got to know about this, let's have a meeting about discuss, now you're educated. But it also seems like you're trying to address gaps with the shadow. There's always two parts of the educational process. Okay, I'm going to teach you A, B, C, and D, and I when I was a teacher back in the teaching fourth graders, just like teaching SEOs, you have, I'm going to teach you X, Y, and Z today, but when I'm done teaching you or even while I'm teaching you, I also have to address the fact that you might have gaps at the same time. So it sounds like, on the one hand you are driving the conversation forward, we're updating a SEO knowledge on a constant basis and we're also trying to address the sort of gaps by having a shadow work with you so that you can ask your specific questions and get what your actual educational needs are satisfied. Colan Nielsen: 100%. It's amazing what types of things gets, let's say, revealed, for lack of a better word, during a shadowing process. Often things will come up that you didn't even think about. Or maybe the trainee, the person who's receiving the training, they didn't even think to ask or think that it was maybe a gap. Then you do the shadowing, hey, here's this little thing here. I think we have an opportunity to take this to a level 10. Maybe we're at a level six or something right now. And then where that leads to sometimes, another thing that we're, I'd say, relatively new starting to do is we will then have people on our team who are now wanting to do training of things that they've learned new training, which I think is probably the ultimate form of learning something, is taking something that you've recently learned and then teaching other people on the team that thing. I don't think it gets better than that. And for instance, my teammates, Becky on her team here is doing some training this month. It's very specific, but really cool training about something she's become really good at and it's about featured snippets. So she's become this pro in our team of, I refer to it as seizing, featured snippets. And she's gotten so good at, that she's now training the rest of the team on best practices for capturing featured snippets for our clients. Mordy Oberstein: That's awesome. Crystal Carter: That's fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Let me ask you sort of a different kind of question I've been wanting to ask, because I do a lot of training not in SEO. It was totally different industry, and one of the debates we used to always have is, which is better? To hire somebody who knows nothing about whatever it's that we're doing, it's actually property management, whatever, or you can train them the way you want them to be trained? They know nothing about the industry, they're getting all the information from you. They're going to see just by default a lot of the things that they're going to be dealing with the way that you want them to be seeing it. Or do you want to bring in somebody who already has a lot of experience, more experience, who you don't have to train as much, but they may not see things the way that you see things as it pertains to, in this case, SEO? Colan Nielsen: Yeah, that's a great question. So I'd say, for us 90% of the time, certainly over the last six years or so, we are hiring experienced, really smart people that come with presets SEO knowledge. It's pre-programmed into them. They've been doing the SEO for, anywhere from five to 10 plus years. And I don't think that's necessarily the best way to do things, but I think what it really comes down to is what type of SEO service is it that you are providing? What is the perceived value of your service that you want to kind of implant into your potential customer's mind? So when I think of value, there's different things that are drivers of value. One of those is perceived likelihood of outcome, those types of things. And I think if you're building a team of say, all stars or a green team or whatever it may be and can deliver a much higher quality of SEO, it just means that you are able to charge more for your SEO because you're delivering better value at the end of the day. Now, that's not to say there's anything wrong with building a team of people who are less experienced them up. There's a place for that. I just think it might be working towards serving a slightly different product, let's say, or service for that client. So 90% of people who hire definitely come with experience and knowledge. And then what we do here is that for those people that we hire, a lot of the training will then be on Sterling Sky specific SEO tactics that we test, that we have then turned into our processes and tactics. So they've got the base SEO knowledge. That's all taken care of. Now it's like, welcome to Sterling Sky, here's some other really cool things that we have figured out over the years that we now do for our clients, and then we're training them on those specific things. Mordy Oberstein: So you have the dream team over Sterling Sky. I just want to know which one of y'all is Charles Barkley? Colan Nielsen: You know what, Dave could be Charles. It's a- Crystal Carter: I thought it was Noah. Yeah. Colan Nielsen: Could be. Dave's a big basketball fan. I actually have a big poster on my office wall here that Dave sent me, and it's all the caricatures of the big players from the '90s. So he's a big basketball fan. Crystal Carter: Sorry, to go back to what you're saying, I thought it really interesting about all of the different iterations of just being very bespoke with your training and being very attuned to the person that you're with. I think that's really important. So tuning it to somebody who's maybe into basketball. Certainly in my time, whether I'm training clients, because that's often very, very much the case, where you're training clients as well on maybe something that you're handing over to them or something, or juniors, where you sort of try to talk to them a little bit so you can figure out which kind of metaphors you can use with them to try to help make sure that it fit. But I think also how do you identify when somebody needs to do some more and are you able to identify sometimes before they do? Does that ever happen? Colan Nielsen: Yeah, definitely. And I would say that is extremely important to be able to do is figure out, to see that metaphorical train heading for the crash long before it happens. So this, again, is an evolving process, but we're continually trying to introduce new checks and balances along the way all while trying to balance that with not being too overbearing or micromanaging or whatever it may be. So we have started to do things like pre-mortems, regular meetings. So, say, as part of our that monthly strategy meeting that we have, we've recently started talking about very specific clients and then that gives opportunities for people to bring up issues that they're having, which could be a training issue, could be performance, could be progress related to that client. That would be one thing. For account managers, for example, they're more focused on client trust and happiness. So we have triggers in place where every single month we're doing a qualitative feedback to answer the question: Is the client happy and do they trust us? And depending on those answers, we track that over time. If we start to see something going down or dipping or whatever the problem is, it will trigger process here that we refer to as a red flag process, which then goes into a system of if it's a performance issue, okay, it's a strategy red flag. If it's a relationship issue or an account manager issue, it goes into more of a progress red flag. The other way we start to figure out these problems before they become real problems is through assessing via these shadowing type calls that we do and just giving that feedback as quickly as possible, and doing it regularly. And so far that seems to be working well, but it's definitely something that it's almost weekly is evolving. There's a new step, there's a new iteration of it. Mordy Oberstein: So if folks are having their own issues and looking for their own iteration of SEO education, they want to contact you, how can they find you, Professor? Colan Nielsen: My email's open. So colan@sterlingsky.ca , and for those who don't know, my first name's got a bit of a weird spelling. It's Colan, still pronounced like the traditional Colan. Long story there. But I think my parents had SEO in mind when they named me. Because it is wonderful for the old name search on Google. I think I covered the first two pages, so thanks mom and dad. That's good. So colan@sterlingsky.ca . I'm not very active on Twitter, that's probably where I share most things. You can find me at the Local Search Forum where I'm an administrator, very active there. If you come to the Local Search Forum and ask about specific problem with your client or whatever it may be, you very likely will see myself or certainly, one of the other Local U faculty members or one of our amazing guests. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome, and we'll make sure to link to all that in the show notes and definitely check out Local U. There's amazing knowledge from all sorts of amazing SEOs. It's at localu.org. All right, Colan, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you out there in the SEO ether. Colan Nielsen: Thank you so much. This was really fun. We'll talk to you soon. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. So you may not know this, but we at Wix have a slew of courses and tutorials to help you do anything from master the Wix and Wix studio platform to learning how to use Meta to grow your brand and know how to create a site aligned to accessibility standards. And one of the great folks who does help design these curriculums and courses is the one, the only Henry Collie. And he's someone who Crystal and I have worked with directly. Spoiler alert, we're in the earliest stages of our SEO certification course that we're working with Henry on. So we thought it would make sense to talk about training teams that we should talk to Henry. So let's go across the Wix first and welcome Henry. Automated voice: 3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: Hey Henry, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Henry Collie: Hey, Mordy. How's it going? Mordy Oberstein: We're good. So first off all, what's it like to work with Crystal and I on courses? Must be wonderful for you. Henry Collie: It's dreadful. It's awful. Yeah, a trial by fire. No, actually it's been really great. I mean, you and I've worked together now on and off for about a year, I think. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And a few courses, but this will be the first one that actually comes into fruition. Henry Collie: Yeah, the first one that actually gets over the finish line. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Henry Collie: I think that's the thing that people forget when they go into curriculum is that most of the stuff you make probably won't make it to the end for various reasons. It could be to do with production reasons or differences of opinion. Crystal Carter: And you've worked in curriculum for lots of spaces. I think what I find really interesting is that as the idea of education, of creating courses, of creating curriculums has really expanded. I think that maybe 10, 15 years ago it was mostly schools that were doing courses and things. And now, really if you've got a brand, if you've got a complex product, you probably need an education arm. And there's people who are really good at hula-hooping who are putting together courses and things like that. How have you seen that change and grow? Henry Collie: Yeah, so first of all, when I started, I actually started off as a copywriter. So I was simultaneously acting and copywriting, but I was mainly copywriting for educational materials. So one of my first jobs was with Freeformers, making a product for Facebook to teach soft skills. And then I kind of fell into it that way with a mentor. And I think there's a danger to what is happening right now with education online and in the tech space. It's amazing the opportunities are there, and there's a huge marketing value to having educational content. But what often happens and what's happening more and more is we're getting this superficial education like thing because we must have education, so we must make an education thing that looks like education, but we never... Well, I do, to my detriment. But it's really important to make sure that it's actually providing the outcomes that people are expecting. And often it doesn't, because we're making these pieces of education for an agenda that doesn't align with education. So it's really important to keep that in mind, I think. Mordy Oberstein: I find that these kind of courses, ya know, people think it's like writing. They go - I speak English. I write English. I can write. I can write whatever, just because you know how to write doesn't mean you can professionally write. Just because you want to have an educational course and you are going to do this and you feel you need to do this doesn't mean that you actually know how to do this. Because teaching, as someone who has a master's degree in education, is its own art form and it's its own thing and there's own consider... And there's things that you just don't think about when you are naturally speaking or naturally transmitting information that you do think about when you're more formally transmitting information. Henry Collie: Yeah, absolutely. Crystal Carter: And I think it's something that's interesting because a lot of people, there's a thing that people say, which is if you can't do teach. And people say that as an insult or something, which it is not, because I think the thing is that if you are somebody who's like, I don't know, David Beckham or something, and you rolled out of bed and you were like, I know how to do football off the top of your head, you never had to learn football. If you're somebody who you were like, I really love football, but I can't quite get that thing to do the thing that I want it to, then you learn how to learn that and therefore you can convey that. If it's just instinctual, you don't even know how to articulate it because it just came naturally to you. But if it's something that you have to learn how to do, then that's something that works really, really well. Henry Collie: Well, right. And there's also a very well-documented expert bias and experience bias where even if you have had to learn it and you have had to go through that process of learning, you are so far into your journey that you've forgotten what those particular things where that you learn from. And even if you have remembered all of those, let's say you took a log of every single educational step that you've passed through every single point of understanding, that log is special and specific to you. It's not necessarily something that's broadly applicable. So you can't simply just be an expert and then go teach. And what you often get when you have an expert who's way up here. I'm making gesticulations. Crystal Carter: Hand gestures. Henry Collie: Just so you know what can't see. Mordy Oberstein: His hand is way up high right now. Henry Collie: So just so everybody knows, my left hand is currently up around my eye level and my right hand is down around my neck. So if you're up here, then you can't see what those people down there need to understand. And you often fall into that trap of trying to tell everybody everything that you know is important. But sometimes you also need to leave things out. You need to lie to people a little bit so that later on you can reestablish the truth, because otherwise they have no framework of understanding to build on. Crystal Carter: It's like with kids, you tell them C is for cat, and the C word, that C makes a cah sound. T is for tall and it makes a tah sound, except for when it's in notion, then it makes a shah sound, except for when it's in that and it makes the th sound, and there's all these sorts of things. But you just need to get them to understand that the letters work in the first place and to get them forward before you tell them all of the I before Es, which I can never remember. Mordy Oberstein: You see that all the time. In sports, you have professional athletes who now go into broadcasting and they're terrible, because they know all about the game, they don't know how to talk or they don't know how to transmit the information into a way that I can understand it, because not a professional athlete. But if we can zoom out to a different question. So great, we're going to do this course and now we need to figure out how to do it. But what makes you decide legitimately whether or not you should or shouldn't be doing when to begin with? Henry Collie: Right. So it's a really important question. It depends on the situation and it depends on who you're dealing with. But the first step is to understand what value you're going to add. And I think that's, again, going back to the superficial superficiality of a lot of edutainment... Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Henry Collie: Ooh. Mordy Oberstein: That's a shot. Shots fired. Henry Collie: Is that, we ask what are we going to cover? Will people watch it? Will people engage with it? Which really aren't the most important metrics. The most important metrics is... The most important metrics are, rather, will they gain value from this? What value will they gain from it? And then if you can actually measure what that value will be. And there's ways of doing that. For example, with SEO, we're creating this SEO course at the moment. We know that our partners, our freelancers, our agencies will gain measurable value from being able to offer these services and to be able to offer them to a high level. Now of course, that value is completely stripped if we make an edutainment course with a funny little badge that they can put on their LinkedIn that nobody caress about, so it actually has to deliver those educational outcomes or it's completely pointless and it's just wasting their time. So first of all, that's how you figure out whether it's worth doing. You have to measure what that value will be. And then secondly, you need to break down what those services, what outcomes are into their smallest constituent parts and then see where those people are right now and get them to where they need to be to either emulate or even surpass people who are currently operating in that way. I think that's probably the long and short of it. Crystal Carter: And how dynamic would you say that process is? I certainly know that when I've done an article or done a video or something, or even when we do our webinars even, people are like, yeah, but what about this? What about that? How dynamic is that process? How often do we need to revise, do we need to amend, do we need to adjust a course? Henry Collie: Constantly. There is no point at which it's completed. There is no point where like, oh, now we're making curriculum and it's now finished and it's done. You constantly have to reevaluate. And actually that's something I harp on about this all the time, so stop me if it's rambling, but I actually hate the word educate and education. The reason being I think it's an aggressive act, is to educate and it also focuses on the teacher and what the teacher is imparting and what the teacher is enforcing into a student. Whereas, learning I much prefer rather than educator is to focus on learning, because that focuses more on what the learner is getting out of the process. And in order to do that, now you are enforced, just by that linguistic change and that reframing, you now have to not evaluate the student necessarily, which you do, but you actually have to evaluate how well your work is reaching your promises. Because you are promising somebody something. Education is a product. It's not just random thing where we cover topics, and to kind of circle back to what my main point is, is you can cover things and say, that's all covered. We have talked about this. We have talked about that. We have covered this. Why don't you understand you silly student? Well, because you didn't... Actually, you covered it and you checked off the box, but you didn't audit whether what you covered imparted any value to me as a learner. Oh, sorry. I feel myself getting angry. Crystal Carter: No, it's true. I've definitely had a situation where I've done a certification, I won't name which one it is, but I can think of exactly which one it is in my mind. And I've done a certification and you go through all the things and you tick the boxes, because they've told you that you have to do the certification again. And so I would call that, I guess, education, because I studied the things or whatever. But I didn't actually learn it necessarily. You don't really learn it. Mordy Oberstein: You do become part of your scheme, how you think and how you operate as part of your outlook and part of your knowledge base, just because something I like it's somewhere in my brain, but I have to recall it, I guess. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think to learn something, you kind of have to do it. And I think you mentioned mentorship and mentorship is really, really important as part of that, and learning as you go, which I think is one of the reasons why we add that into the product. Henry Collie: We also need to define what learning actually means, because I think we often say learning education, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not one thing. Learning involves loads of cognitive steps, loads of cognitive processes. It's a constant pathway. We constantly have to evaluate to see where we are in that process. And there are innumerable learning theories, instructional design methodologies, but when you break it all down, they're essentially all saying the same thing and providing various ways of achieving the same objective, which is you the learner in one state, and at the end of this process you should be in or at least, close to another state of being. And it's not just about rote learning or saying, I've covered this or I've talked about this and now you can tell me what the capital of X country is. You can learn what the capital of X country is, but do you know why it's the capital? Do you know how it became the capital? Do you understand the social aspects of that country that created that situation in the first place? Now you don't just know that it's the capital. You now understand that it's the capital. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's so Piaget dude. Henry Collie: When I was young. Mordy Oberstein: So as time ebbs away from us, where can people learn about you? Henry Collie: Ooh, I'm pretty quiet, to be honest. I don't really do social media. Mordy Oberstein: Oh. Henry Collie: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's odd for us, personally. Crystal Carter: You run an educational course though, yeah? Henry Collie: Yes. Crystal Carter: Where is the course? Henry Collie: Oh, you mean separately from Wix? No, I don't. Crystal Carter: No. On Wix. Mordy Oberstein: On Wix. Henry Collie: Oh, on Wix. Oh. Mordy Oberstein: Because they can learn by osmosis. They can see the course, take the course in... Henry Collie: Right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: ... and then learn who you are. Almost like reading a poem and understanding the poet. Henry Collie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Right. Well, if they want to find anything that I've done, they can check out Wix Learn, which they can find the e-commerce course on there. Also, the accessibility 101 course, which I highly recommend. It's extremely important. It's extremely important for design, not just for accessibility and for- Crystal Carter: Also important for SEO. Henry Collie: And extremely important for SEO. And then by probably the end of this year, we will have the new SEO course out where they won't directly see me as a human, but they will see- Mordy Oberstein: They will feel you at every step of the way. I guarantee it. Henry Collie: They'll feel my presence. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Henry Collie: My ominous presence. Mordy Oberstein: Your aura. Hum. You should leave like a Easter egg in there somewhere. Henry Collie: Oh, should we? Should we just put in little like my favorite books? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Or like the screenshot should be like... We're talking about the SERP, it could have a screenshot of like who is Henry? Henry Collie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: Just be a photo of you in the background in a frame or something. Mordy Oberstein: Right, look for Easter egg. Henry Collie: Do you know, I think there was a time... I think it's gone now, but I Googled my name and I had a little knowledge profile and a little buttons. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, oh, I don't have social. You have a knowledge graph. Look at you. A knowledge panel. Henry Collie: I think they've clocked it though and gotten rid of it. Mordy Oberstein: I got Google that. Crystal Carter: That's cool. Mordy Oberstein: There was a movie called Henrique . Someone does movies that's also named Henry Collie. But your picture shows up right there when you… Henry Collie: Oh yeah, no, that's me. I used to be an actor. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, so there you are. Okay, so where can they find you? They can find you in movies. Crystal Carter: IMDB. That's funny. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well, look for Henry in our SEO certification course that's coming up or in the movies. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us today. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks Henry. Henry Collie: Cheers guys. Automated voice: 3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So thank you so much again, Henry, it was fascinating to talk to you and looking forward to keep working with you on our SEO course. Spoiler. Spoiler. Spoiler. Now since we are talking about learning, you know what we can do to help you learn more? Crystal Carter: What can we do, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: We can quote Barry Schwartz a bunch of times as we get into this snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Three articles, two updates for you, or two articles about two updates for you. First one from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google completes rollout of October 2023 spam update, which means you can now resume spamming. I'm just kidding, you should not resume spamming. You should never be spamming to begin with. So if you're utilizing, you have been utilizing spammy practices across the webs, you may have seen a significant loss of rankings. If you have not been engaged in spammy practices, and 99.9% of the listeners of this podcast have not been, this update should not have really impacted you. What might have impacted you is the October 2023 core update. And one day before Google announced the completion of the spam update, Google said, per Barry Schwartz, over at SEL, Search Engine Land, Google October 23 core update rollout, now complete. They're both complete. This one may have impacted you. This impacts sites across the web. Have a look at your rankings, see what happened. The update is now finished. There will be data on this, meaning as the recording of this podcast, of the news section, we have not seen the data come out from the tool providers. I know because I do send Russia's data. So have a look by the time this episode does come out over at Search Engine Land, look for Barry's article, Collecting Data from Across the Tool Providers to see the nature of this update and how, perhaps, how impactful it is sort of, kind of, maybe, that's a different story for a different time. But you'll get some data that points to some things about the core update. Lastly, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. Got to make sure Barry gets all the links to all of the different blogs and websites that he has. This one's over at Search Engine Roundtable. Barry writes, Google search generative experience may link to paywalled content, but here's how to block SGE. So if you have content behind a paywall, say you have to sign, enter your name and email address to access the content, Google said they can link to that content in their Search Generative Experience, the SGE, as I like to refer the AI box, where Google, you enter a query, Google spits out a whole AI answer with a couple of links. Google also said, and they updated their robots meta tech documentation to show or to say that they will respect robots meta tag directives with the SGE. Meaning, if you say, "Hey Google, I'm going to implement a no snippet robots meta tag. I don't want you to quote me. I don't want you to show a snippet of my content on this webpage on your SERP. That includes all of the SERP, which also includes the SGE Box. Also, similarly, if say, for example, you say, "Google, you know what? You can show a snippet of my content from this page, on your webpage, on the SERP, rather, but I don't want you to show a ton." So here's the number of characters you're allowed to show is called a max snippet robots meta tag. You can also implement that and Google will respect that in the SGE for Wix users. It's very easy to implement any of these robot meta tags. Simply go to the SEO panel on any particular page and you will see a checkbox where you can tick off, which robots meta tags you want in the advanced SEO section of the SEO panel. And with that, Barry now has all the links, and that's our version of this week's snappy SEO news. Thanks to the learning Barry. Each and every week Barry brings us the SEO learning. Each and every day, in my opinion. I check it out all the time, every day. Crystal Carter: It's true. It's true. I contemplated sending him something today that I saw, but I'm sure that somebody else has seen it already. But you got to roll the dice. If you don't get involved, you can't win. Mordy Oberstein: The best thing to do, as I told you, Crystal, is let the article go live with somebody else, and then as soon as it goes live, say, Barry, is this new, and find your own example and then he will include you in it. Crystal Carter: Right. Oh, of course. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's my hack. I've never done that, but I should. Crystal Carter: I don't know anyone who would do that. Mordy Oberstein: No. Everyone has different standards for how they go about their lives. We're not here to judge anybody. Crystal Carter: Some people are doing their best, and we're just doing our best. Mordy Oberstein: And that's not new. That's just how life goes. Crystal Carter: It's something you got to learn. Mordy Oberstein: So many little SEO jokes in there. You know what's no joke? Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Following the right people on social media so that you get the right SEO learning. So this week's follow of the week is a family favorite, as in the Wix family favorite. Mark Preston, who you can follow over at Mark Preston, 1969. That's at Mark Preston 1969 over on Twitter, formerly known as X, scratch reverse. I'm still confused, but follow Mark. Mark does tons of training, tons of advising, and he's our follow of the week for training people. Crystal Carter: And he's so committed to helping people learn more, particularly about Wix, but also generally about marketing, about personal branding, and is somebody who is very approachable in that regard. He shares a lot of information directly on Twitter. People ask him questions, and he's so generous with his time, and a super nice guy as well. Like Barry, but really lovely when you meet him. So I highly recommend following Mark and checking out his podcast and all the other cool stuff that he does. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. So definitely give Mark a follow. Definitely, definitely give Mark a follow over on Twitter, X, whatever. You got it. We'll link to his profile in the show notes and hope you learned a lot this week. And then you can go out there and train your SEO team. Crystal Carter: Choo, choo. Mordy Oberstein: I choo, choo, choose you Crystal Carter: It was a train because training because choo, choo. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, now I get it. Wow, that went right over my head. Crystal Carter: Well, I hope the train didn't go over your head. That would be very uncomfortable. Mordy Oberstein: Unless it was a toy train, in which case it would just bounce off my head. Crystal Carter: That reminds me of a friend who had a kid and then the other kid was like throwing their Thomas the tank engine at the baby, and it's like, no, don't, don't do that, don't do that. They had to take it away. Mordy Oberstein: I remember throwing my Star Trek Enterprise toy at my little baby brother, but it was a metal and getting in trouble for that. Crystal Carter: Were you shouting engage? Mordy Oberstein: Make it so. Crystal Carter: No, no, don't, don't. Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Well, thank you for joining us on this SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss... Not to worry. We're back next week in the new episode as we dive into how to work well with non-SEO teams. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and newsletter on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Colan Nielsen Henry Collie Mark Preston Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Searchlight SEO Newsletter Sterling Sky SEO Agency LocalU News: Google Completes Rollout of October 2023 Spam Update Google October 2023 Core Update rollout is now complete Google: Search Generative Experience May Link To Paywalled Content But Here Is How To Block SGE Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Colan Nielsen Henry Collie Mark Preston Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Searchlight SEO Newsletter Sterling Sky SEO Agency LocalU News: Google Completes Rollout of October 2023 Spam Update Google October 2023 Core Update rollout is now complete Google: Search Generative Experience May Link To Paywalled Content But Here Is How To Block SGE Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We've put out some groovy new insights around what's happening, SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the spectacular, the magnificent, the marvelous head of communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic introduction, Mordy. That was magnificent, and marvelous and... Mordy Oberstein: Not as easy as it sounds, is it? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's hard. You make it look really easy. But, I mean, you are a wordsmith. Are you not, Mr. Oberstein? Mordy Oberstein: I pretend to be one on TV. On the internet, I pretend to be one. Crystal Carter: My favorite thing is Mordy's pretty cas most of the time, but Mordy's got some $5 words in the bank there. I'm just saying. And every now and then, we'll be in a meeting, and he's just like, "Don't forget. Don't forget. I'm educated over here." And I don’t mean. I don’t mean. I hope that you can… Mordy Oberstein: But what you can't see on my other screen is the digital thesaurus. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Okay. I see. I see. Back in the day I thought a thesaurus was a type of dinosaur. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. Crystal Carter: I was like, oh, yeah, there's the Brontosaurus, the Ichthyosaurus, the thesaurus, obviously. Mordy Oberstein: Obviously. Crystal Carter: I was like, why- Mordy Oberstein: It's the thesaurus. It's the biggest one of all, the thesaurus. Crystal Carter: I was like, why they got this book about dinosaurs next to the dictionaries? They keep putting them in the wrong place. What was that about? And so, anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Remind me later. I have a great story about something similar to my brother, but it's not for this podcast. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Right. Got it. Crystal Carter: That's SERP's Up plus plus. Mordy Oberstein: That's plus plus, right. That's the after hours SERP's Plus Up, whatever. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, searchlight over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, which you can get it delivered each and every month into your inbox, which is also part of our wider SEO learning hub, which is a great place to stay up to date on SEO, maybe join a webinar, maybe even access a resource to help, I don't know, train your SEO team. Who knows? The possibilities are endless over at wix.com/seo/learn, as today we're talking about training your SEO team. Get it? That's why I did that plug. Crystal Carter: I see. I see. That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Pat on the back for the pivot. We're talking how you train your SEO team. That's right. Today, whether you're an agency or an in-house team, or just want some tips for yourself, or maybe if you want to see perhaps how your boss is looking at things, we're here to help your team. Where to start when training an SEO team? How much is on you to train your team and how much is on them to train themselves? How do you train different types of people doing different types of SEO all with different levels of experience and then actually get your own work done? To help us bring our SEO pedagogy up to standard, Sterling Sky's VP of Search and Local University faculty member, Professor Colan Nielsen will be joining us in just a few minutes. Plus, we sit down with the true educator, Henry Collie, Wix's own curriculum developer, to talk about what goes into creating a strong learning program. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So open up your lesson planners and put on your spectacles with a little rope thingies attached to them as episode number 59 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you find your teacher's voice. I want the audience to know that Crystal has those spectacles with the stringy thing. Crystal Carter: I do. Mordy Oberstein: And every time she wears her hair up. I'm like, "Oh, my God, you're giving me teacher vibes and I'm having a lot of anxiety." Crystal Carter: This makes you wonder, were you called into the office a lot back in the day? Like, oh, Mordy won't confirm nor deny. Mordy Oberstein: Who knows? Crystal Carter: I think your silence speaks so loud. Mordy Oberstein: I was difficult in high school, for the time I spent in high school. It's a totally different story for a totally different time. Crystal Carter: For SERP's Up plus plus. Mordy Oberstein: Plus plus. Right, the after hours podcast over away. I think just to give a quick, quick, quick background on this before we bring Colan in. You have an SEO team. Let's say, you're at an agency, you have all types of SEO folks. You have seniors and juniors and all types of different people, and whether they are SEO experts or they're new to the SEO game, there's always some kind of training that has to go on. Whether it be SEO training or even beyond SEO training. How do we speak nicely to our clients so they don't leave and they keep paying us every month? You might be a great SEO, but you might not be great with clients. There's a lot of education that continuously has to happen no matter where you are in any profession, but I think particularly when working inside of an SEO team, whether in-house, at an agency, which is why we have, as I mentioned right here, live with us, the VP of Search over at Sterling Sky. Welcome to the SERP's Up podcast, Colan. How are you? Colan Nielsen: Wow, Mordy. Thank you very much. That was a wonderful intro and a tough act to follow. Crystal's right, you are indeed a wordsmith. So I'm going to do my best to follow that incredible intro. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: It's our honor and esteemed pleasure. Okay, quick plug. Sterling Sky, Local U, what do we got? Colan Nielsen: Blue Mountains, Ontario, which is this beautiful city just north of Toronto. It's October 13th, which means we're into that time of year where trees are changing. It's beautiful, and this is probably one of the best places in all of Ontario to be at that time of year if you like the changing of the seasons and seeing these beautiful trees change color. So we're right nestled in this mountainous valley. This is our first Canadian Local University events, I believe, in the history of Local U, so it's very special to us. A lot of our team members, including Joy, the founder of the company, is from Canada. I'm from Canada. We're bringing all of our US team to Canada to be here with us for it as well. So we're super excited. Amazing speakers, amazing location. I can't say enough about how excited I am. Crystal Carter: It looks amazing. I'm looking at it and again, idyllic is the setting I would give. Just absolutely idyllic. Just frolicking in the beautiful leaves and- Mordy Oberstein: You're dropping the words now, by the way. Crystal Carter: But also, the lineup you have here. You're by himself. Darren Shaw, amazing. Claire Carlisle, absolute legend. We've got Matthew Hunt. I don't know him just at the moment, but I will find out and I'm sure he's fantastic. Jan Tomaso, also amazing. Darren, again. Joy, who is such a fountain of knowledge, and Marie Haynes also repping for... Mordy Oberstein: Also. Crystal Carter: ... Canada there. So yeah, what a lineup. What a great day. Colan Nielsen: Yeah, we're excited. And what's really cool about Local U night before networking events, that's, in my opinion, is almost at the same level in terms of the value you're going to get out as the day itself, where you're listening to speakers and presentations. That night before you get to interact, talk business, make connections. So it's all worth it. Crystal Carter: I think that's a great pivot into our topic because I think that sometimes folks think, oh, I'm not sure if we have money to send the junior team members or learning team members to something like Local U or another marketing conference, for instance. But being in the presence of people who are top of their game, who are really passionate about their topic, who are exploring new and interesting ideas can be really, really inspiring and can be really good and to help sort of kickstart someone's learning journey. And I don't know if that's part of your training sort of thing when you guys are getting new folks through the team, but I'd love to hear more about it. Colan Nielsen: It absolutely is. We do our best to try and ensure that certainly as many people from our team can attend these events as possible. Certainly, newer people to the team. We'll get to this in a little bit, but there's certainly an approach we have with hiring people is typically around hiring people that come with experience and knowledge baked in. But we also hire people that are newer to SEO that this is perfect for. Another thing you made me think of there that was really cool, if we're thinking about these different avenues for new people that are new to SEO, getting into training and where do I go? So there's events like Local University, but then something that's kind of connected to Local University is the Local Search Forum. The reason I bring that up is, well, A, it's a totally free resource. Anybody can go sign up. You can ask client questions. You can ask general SEO questions or hiring questions, training questions. And I've been finding for the last couple of Local U events, there are members of the Local Search Forum that are now attending the Local University events to sort of just level things up and then you get to meet those people in person. So it's like this really nice circle that gets completed between the forum and the events. So definitely check out the forum as well. It's a wonderful training resource for sure. Crystal Carter: Yeah, forums are particularly good for helping training. I think also because... And maybe we'll get to this, but sometimes in a team... And I think that that's the important operative word there. A team, is that sometimes in a team you need someone to do something. Maybe it's not the first thing that they want to do necessarily, but you're like, we have this new project that we're doing and we need you to learn how to prompt the AI efficiently or how to use this new tool or how to train everyone on this thing, or whatever it may be. And sometimes you might be the only person in the team that knows that skill or knows that tool, or something like that. And sometimes the forum folks will be the folks that you know that you can talk to about it. There's like the Google Business Profile forums and things like that. How much do you find that as a team, do you need to point people to resources like that forum? Colan Nielsen: So we actually have... Let's say we allocate budgets each month, time, resources, whatever you want to think about it to people on our team to make sure that on any given month they have time to go to the Local Search Forum to either participate, to create threads, or simply just to go through and answer threads that other people are asking. I think that's one of the best things you can do, especially as a beginning SEO. But even as time goes on is go to forums, find problems that people have and just volunteer your time and troubleshoot them and answer them. And it's really just sharpening that knife. It's a free, wonderful way to sharpen your knife. And then there's all those other benefits like the networking and meeting new people and all that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: So I want to piggyback on that just a little bit because about time and make sure everybody is able to do all these things, but you as someone who is training other SEOs, it could be a lot. You have your full-time job, and then you have all the training that you need to do. How do you sort of balance both? And I'll sort of piggyback another question on top of that. And you kind of mentioned at the beginning. How much is it on you to teach and how much is it on them to go figure it out and learn? Colan Nielsen: Yeah, it's a great question. So we definitely take a lot of time, care, efforts as an agency to ensure that we're continually training, and as time goes by, this becomes even more time. When we started in 2016, there was about three people on the Sterling Sky team. There was a part-time team member, Joy, and myself. I think we had one other person at the time. We're now approaching 40 full-time team members. So training is something we've really, really integrated. And so just to give you some examples. We kind of break things up in a given month. We'll have general training meetings and we'll break these into some very strategic categories. So for instance, every month, we have a strategy team meeting, and the people that are going to join that meeting are people that are responsible for client strategy. So that meeting is really about performance at the end of the day. It's about training on how to get better results for our clients as far as whatever performance metrics. But then we also have account manager training meetings, which are equally important, but instead of those being focused around client performance, they're around client relationship. Making sure we're doing the things that we say we're going to do, that we're communicating effectively, efficiently, all that kind of stuff. We then also have specific, let's call them, team meetings. So we have link building specific training meetings, which just the link builders are going to be a part of that. The other meeting that I would say for us being a Local Search agency, that's a really, really important meeting to have is we actually have a very specific set Google Business Profile strategy meeting. And the people on our team that join this meeting are, well, anybody that's doing Google Business Profile strategy, which I would say is a little bit higher level than somebody who's just say, optimizing a profile. This is like a level up from there where you're now building strategies, you know how to fix duplicate listing issues, stuff like that. We have a specific strategy meeting for that, where we'll discuss new issues that have come up with Google. You may have saw recently, Ben Fisher tweeted there's this big change coming to the... Mordy Oberstein: I saw that. Colan Nielsen: ... reinstatement process, which is huge. So we'll talk about stuff like that. The other thing that's interesting, and I think this is really important I would say for any agency or anybody learning is if you are an account manager working in Local Search, you also should be striving towards being a Google Business Profile strategist or experts, because that is the one thing that we've found that if you're on a call with a client that is paying you to do Local Search and you're not able to answer some of those important questions they have, where it's more like, let me get back to you about that and check with the team. If you can avoid those and build that knowledge of the account manager up, especially on the GVP stuff, that seems to go a long way as far as training goes. Crystal Carter: I think it's really interesting the way that you're breaking it down into so many different layers of learning. And I think that that will also really appeal to the different ways that people learn. So the different learning styles and qualitative, quantitative, that sort of stuff. Mordy has a degree in education, so he can probably break them down into more of them than me, but there's lots of different learning styles there, which I think is really interesting. I think the other thing that I find fascinating about this approach to team learning is that it helps to reduce skills gaps and it also helps to improve the dissemination of information with regards to a particular topic. So for instance, like Google Business Profile, there's lots of different changes. There's lots of different iterations that you'll see if you're working in a restaurant space, you'll see one type of Google Business Profile. If it's a hotel, it's another one. If it's a shop, it's another one, and things like that. I don't know how you organize your clients', but it might be that you have your clients organized by everybody who's in a restaurant is with one person and everybody who's in a hotel is with another person. Or it might just be that whoever's free, whoever has the time gets the next client. Different agencies work different ways. So if you have a meeting where you're discussing the broad trends that you're seeing across a particular platform or a particular approach, then that helps to reduce some of the gaps so that even if your account manager hasn't necessarily dealt with that particular issue personally, if they heard about it in the meeting, then they can say, oh, well our team has seen this or that, oh, I can get you the report that we saw from, we did that with this other client, that sort of thing. And I think that that also helped reduce some of the tacit knowledge that you sometimes lose in agencies when it's in everyone's head. Can you talk to us about how you disseminate the information that you get from some of those team collaborative training spaces? Colan Nielsen: Yeah. Well, typically if it's something that's, say, mission-critical, like this suspension change, where the reinstatement process changed or Google's making some other crazy change, which they constantly do as we all know. Those types of things will certainly filter themselves up to our monthly team meeting. So today is actually, in about four from now we have our monthly team meeting and this is our all hands on deck meeting. So all 40 people will be attending this, and we break that team meeting up into a similar style as to how I just mentioned we kind of break up those individual training sessions. But anything that comes out of those meetings that is important for everybody to know then makes its way into that monthly team meeting and we discuss it. Some of the other things that seem to be helping with that over time. And then also touch on something you mentioned, Crystal, about just meeting people's styles of how they would like to train. It's an evolving process, and something we've started to do a lot more recently is incorporate more shadowing, for instance. Because I think at the end of the day, if you're training an account manager or a sales role, let's say, there's only so much you can do by standing there and telling somebody, these are our golden rules, these are the things that you have to follow and you got to follow up within two hours and this, that and the other thing. Right, that's fine. People need to know that and they need to be listed somewhere so you can reference them and know rules. But I think what's more important and what we're experimenting with a lot more lately is getting into other styles like shadowing. So for instance, we've just started on the sales side of things. We actually don't have a sales team at Sterling Sky. I talk to clients. I don't have a sales background, but people on the team who love SEO and love talking to people are really good at selling. So that's kind of how we do it. And now we're having more people shadow. So I'll jump on a call with a prospect, I'll have somebody else from my team join, they'll take notes, they'll ask me questions. Maybe next month I'll have them join a sales call, I'll join with them, take notes, give them feedback. And that seems to be a really effective way to do training as well. Mordy Oberstein: So it's really because one of the way it sounds like, through a certain extent, is that you're doing a lot of the training as part of the actual workflow. Something new came up in the SEO industry, you got to know about this, let's have a meeting about discuss, now you're educated. But it also seems like you're trying to address gaps with the shadow. There's always two parts of the educational process. Okay, I'm going to teach you A, B, C, and D, and I when I was a teacher back in the teaching fourth graders, just like teaching SEOs, you have, I'm going to teach you X, Y, and Z today, but when I'm done teaching you or even while I'm teaching you, I also have to address the fact that you might have gaps at the same time. So it sounds like, on the one hand you are driving the conversation forward, we're updating a SEO knowledge on a constant basis and we're also trying to address the sort of gaps by having a shadow work with you so that you can ask your specific questions and get what your actual educational needs are satisfied. Colan Nielsen: 100%. It's amazing what types of things gets, let's say, revealed, for lack of a better word, during a shadowing process. Often things will come up that you didn't even think about. Or maybe the trainee, the person who's receiving the training, they didn't even think to ask or think that it was maybe a gap. Then you do the shadowing, hey, here's this little thing here. I think we have an opportunity to take this to a level 10. Maybe we're at a level six or something right now. And then where that leads to sometimes, another thing that we're, I'd say, relatively new starting to do is we will then have people on our team who are now wanting to do training of things that they've learned new training, which I think is probably the ultimate form of learning something, is taking something that you've recently learned and then teaching other people on the team that thing. I don't think it gets better than that. And for instance, my teammates, Becky on her team here is doing some training this month. It's very specific, but really cool training about something she's become really good at and it's about featured snippets. So she's become this pro in our team of, I refer to it as seizing, featured snippets. And she's gotten so good at, that she's now training the rest of the team on best practices for capturing featured snippets for our clients. Mordy Oberstein: That's awesome. Crystal Carter: That's fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Let me ask you sort of a different kind of question I've been wanting to ask, because I do a lot of training not in SEO. It was totally different industry, and one of the debates we used to always have is, which is better? To hire somebody who knows nothing about whatever it's that we're doing, it's actually property management, whatever, or you can train them the way you want them to be trained? They know nothing about the industry, they're getting all the information from you. They're going to see just by default a lot of the things that they're going to be dealing with the way that you want them to be seeing it. Or do you want to bring in somebody who already has a lot of experience, more experience, who you don't have to train as much, but they may not see things the way that you see things as it pertains to, in this case, SEO? Colan Nielsen: Yeah, that's a great question. So I'd say, for us 90% of the time, certainly over the last six years or so, we are hiring experienced, really smart people that come with presets SEO knowledge. It's pre-programmed into them. They've been doing the SEO for, anywhere from five to 10 plus years. And I don't think that's necessarily the best way to do things, but I think what it really comes down to is what type of SEO service is it that you are providing? What is the perceived value of your service that you want to kind of implant into your potential customer's mind? So when I think of value, there's different things that are drivers of value. One of those is perceived likelihood of outcome, those types of things. And I think if you're building a team of say, all stars or a green team or whatever it may be and can deliver a much higher quality of SEO, it just means that you are able to charge more for your SEO because you're delivering better value at the end of the day. Now, that's not to say there's anything wrong with building a team of people who are less experienced them up. There's a place for that. I just think it might be working towards serving a slightly different product, let's say, or service for that client. So 90% of people who hire definitely come with experience and knowledge. And then what we do here is that for those people that we hire, a lot of the training will then be on Sterling Sky specific SEO tactics that we test, that we have then turned into our processes and tactics. So they've got the base SEO knowledge. That's all taken care of. Now it's like, welcome to Sterling Sky, here's some other really cool things that we have figured out over the years that we now do for our clients, and then we're training them on those specific things. Mordy Oberstein: So you have the dream team over Sterling Sky. I just want to know which one of y'all is Charles Barkley? Colan Nielsen: You know what, Dave could be Charles. It's a- Crystal Carter: I thought it was Noah. Yeah. Colan Nielsen: Could be. Dave's a big basketball fan. I actually have a big poster on my office wall here that Dave sent me, and it's all the caricatures of the big players from the '90s. So he's a big basketball fan. Crystal Carter: Sorry, to go back to what you're saying, I thought it really interesting about all of the different iterations of just being very bespoke with your training and being very attuned to the person that you're with. I think that's really important. So tuning it to somebody who's maybe into basketball. Certainly in my time, whether I'm training clients, because that's often very, very much the case, where you're training clients as well on maybe something that you're handing over to them or something, or juniors, where you sort of try to talk to them a little bit so you can figure out which kind of metaphors you can use with them to try to help make sure that it fit. But I think also how do you identify when somebody needs to do some more and are you able to identify sometimes before they do? Does that ever happen? Colan Nielsen: Yeah, definitely. And I would say that is extremely important to be able to do is figure out, to see that metaphorical train heading for the crash long before it happens. So this, again, is an evolving process, but we're continually trying to introduce new checks and balances along the way all while trying to balance that with not being too overbearing or micromanaging or whatever it may be. So we have started to do things like pre-mortems, regular meetings. So, say, as part of our that monthly strategy meeting that we have, we've recently started talking about very specific clients and then that gives opportunities for people to bring up issues that they're having, which could be a training issue, could be performance, could be progress related to that client. That would be one thing. For account managers, for example, they're more focused on client trust and happiness. So we have triggers in place where every single month we're doing a qualitative feedback to answer the question: Is the client happy and do they trust us? And depending on those answers, we track that over time. If we start to see something going down or dipping or whatever the problem is, it will trigger process here that we refer to as a red flag process, which then goes into a system of if it's a performance issue, okay, it's a strategy red flag. If it's a relationship issue or an account manager issue, it goes into more of a progress red flag. The other way we start to figure out these problems before they become real problems is through assessing via these shadowing type calls that we do and just giving that feedback as quickly as possible, and doing it regularly. And so far that seems to be working well, but it's definitely something that it's almost weekly is evolving. There's a new step, there's a new iteration of it. Mordy Oberstein: So if folks are having their own issues and looking for their own iteration of SEO education, they want to contact you, how can they find you, Professor? Colan Nielsen: My email's open. So colan@sterlingsky.ca , and for those who don't know, my first name's got a bit of a weird spelling. It's Colan, still pronounced like the traditional Colan. Long story there. But I think my parents had SEO in mind when they named me. Because it is wonderful for the old name search on Google. I think I covered the first two pages, so thanks mom and dad. That's good. So colan@sterlingsky.ca . I'm not very active on Twitter, that's probably where I share most things. You can find me at the Local Search Forum where I'm an administrator, very active there. If you come to the Local Search Forum and ask about specific problem with your client or whatever it may be, you very likely will see myself or certainly, one of the other Local U faculty members or one of our amazing guests. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome, and we'll make sure to link to all that in the show notes and definitely check out Local U. There's amazing knowledge from all sorts of amazing SEOs. It's at localu.org. All right, Colan, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you out there in the SEO ether. Colan Nielsen: Thank you so much. This was really fun. We'll talk to you soon. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. So you may not know this, but we at Wix have a slew of courses and tutorials to help you do anything from master the Wix and Wix studio platform to learning how to use Meta to grow your brand and know how to create a site aligned to accessibility standards. And one of the great folks who does help design these curriculums and courses is the one, the only Henry Collie. And he's someone who Crystal and I have worked with directly. Spoiler alert, we're in the earliest stages of our SEO certification course that we're working with Henry on. So we thought it would make sense to talk about training teams that we should talk to Henry. So let's go across the Wix first and welcome Henry. Automated voice: 3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: Hey Henry, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Henry Collie: Hey, Mordy. How's it going? Mordy Oberstein: We're good. So first off all, what's it like to work with Crystal and I on courses? Must be wonderful for you. Henry Collie: It's dreadful. It's awful. Yeah, a trial by fire. No, actually it's been really great. I mean, you and I've worked together now on and off for about a year, I think. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And a few courses, but this will be the first one that actually comes into fruition. Henry Collie: Yeah, the first one that actually gets over the finish line. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Henry Collie: I think that's the thing that people forget when they go into curriculum is that most of the stuff you make probably won't make it to the end for various reasons. It could be to do with production reasons or differences of opinion. Crystal Carter: And you've worked in curriculum for lots of spaces. I think what I find really interesting is that as the idea of education, of creating courses, of creating curriculums has really expanded. I think that maybe 10, 15 years ago it was mostly schools that were doing courses and things. And now, really if you've got a brand, if you've got a complex product, you probably need an education arm. And there's people who are really good at hula-hooping who are putting together courses and things like that. How have you seen that change and grow? Henry Collie: Yeah, so first of all, when I started, I actually started off as a copywriter. So I was simultaneously acting and copywriting, but I was mainly copywriting for educational materials. So one of my first jobs was with Freeformers, making a product for Facebook to teach soft skills. And then I kind of fell into it that way with a mentor. And I think there's a danger to what is happening right now with education online and in the tech space. It's amazing the opportunities are there, and there's a huge marketing value to having educational content. But what often happens and what's happening more and more is we're getting this superficial education like thing because we must have education, so we must make an education thing that looks like education, but we never... Well, I do, to my detriment. But it's really important to make sure that it's actually providing the outcomes that people are expecting. And often it doesn't, because we're making these pieces of education for an agenda that doesn't align with education. So it's really important to keep that in mind, I think. Mordy Oberstein: I find that these kind of courses, ya know, people think it's like writing. They go - I speak English. I write English. I can write. I can write whatever, just because you know how to write doesn't mean you can professionally write. Just because you want to have an educational course and you are going to do this and you feel you need to do this doesn't mean that you actually know how to do this. Because teaching, as someone who has a master's degree in education, is its own art form and it's its own thing and there's own consider... And there's things that you just don't think about when you are naturally speaking or naturally transmitting information that you do think about when you're more formally transmitting information. Henry Collie: Yeah, absolutely. Crystal Carter: And I think it's something that's interesting because a lot of people, there's a thing that people say, which is if you can't do teach. And people say that as an insult or something, which it is not, because I think the thing is that if you are somebody who's like, I don't know, David Beckham or something, and you rolled out of bed and you were like, I know how to do football off the top of your head, you never had to learn football. If you're somebody who you were like, I really love football, but I can't quite get that thing to do the thing that I want it to, then you learn how to learn that and therefore you can convey that. If it's just instinctual, you don't even know how to articulate it because it just came naturally to you. But if it's something that you have to learn how to do, then that's something that works really, really well. Henry Collie: Well, right. And there's also a very well-documented expert bias and experience bias where even if you have had to learn it and you have had to go through that process of learning, you are so far into your journey that you've forgotten what those particular things where that you learn from. And even if you have remembered all of those, let's say you took a log of every single educational step that you've passed through every single point of understanding, that log is special and specific to you. It's not necessarily something that's broadly applicable. So you can't simply just be an expert and then go teach. And what you often get when you have an expert who's way up here. I'm making gesticulations. Crystal Carter: Hand gestures. Henry Collie: Just so you know what can't see. Mordy Oberstein: His hand is way up high right now. Henry Collie: So just so everybody knows, my left hand is currently up around my eye level and my right hand is down around my neck. So if you're up here, then you can't see what those people down there need to understand. And you often fall into that trap of trying to tell everybody everything that you know is important. But sometimes you also need to leave things out. You need to lie to people a little bit so that later on you can reestablish the truth, because otherwise they have no framework of understanding to build on. Crystal Carter: It's like with kids, you tell them C is for cat, and the C word, that C makes a cah sound. T is for tall and it makes a tah sound, except for when it's in notion, then it makes a shah sound, except for when it's in that and it makes the th sound, and there's all these sorts of things. But you just need to get them to understand that the letters work in the first place and to get them forward before you tell them all of the I before Es, which I can never remember. Mordy Oberstein: You see that all the time. In sports, you have professional athletes who now go into broadcasting and they're terrible, because they know all about the game, they don't know how to talk or they don't know how to transmit the information into a way that I can understand it, because not a professional athlete. But if we can zoom out to a different question. So great, we're going to do this course and now we need to figure out how to do it. But what makes you decide legitimately whether or not you should or shouldn't be doing when to begin with? Henry Collie: Right. So it's a really important question. It depends on the situation and it depends on who you're dealing with. But the first step is to understand what value you're going to add. And I think that's, again, going back to the superficial superficiality of a lot of edutainment... Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Henry Collie: Ooh. Mordy Oberstein: That's a shot. Shots fired. Henry Collie: Is that, we ask what are we going to cover? Will people watch it? Will people engage with it? Which really aren't the most important metrics. The most important metrics is... The most important metrics are, rather, will they gain value from this? What value will they gain from it? And then if you can actually measure what that value will be. And there's ways of doing that. For example, with SEO, we're creating this SEO course at the moment. We know that our partners, our freelancers, our agencies will gain measurable value from being able to offer these services and to be able to offer them to a high level. Now of course, that value is completely stripped if we make an edutainment course with a funny little badge that they can put on their LinkedIn that nobody caress about, so it actually has to deliver those educational outcomes or it's completely pointless and it's just wasting their time. So first of all, that's how you figure out whether it's worth doing. You have to measure what that value will be. And then secondly, you need to break down what those services, what outcomes are into their smallest constituent parts and then see where those people are right now and get them to where they need to be to either emulate or even surpass people who are currently operating in that way. I think that's probably the long and short of it. Crystal Carter: And how dynamic would you say that process is? I certainly know that when I've done an article or done a video or something, or even when we do our webinars even, people are like, yeah, but what about this? What about that? How dynamic is that process? How often do we need to revise, do we need to amend, do we need to adjust a course? Henry Collie: Constantly. There is no point at which it's completed. There is no point where like, oh, now we're making curriculum and it's now finished and it's done. You constantly have to reevaluate. And actually that's something I harp on about this all the time, so stop me if it's rambling, but I actually hate the word educate and education. The reason being I think it's an aggressive act, is to educate and it also focuses on the teacher and what the teacher is imparting and what the teacher is enforcing into a student. Whereas, learning I much prefer rather than educator is to focus on learning, because that focuses more on what the learner is getting out of the process. And in order to do that, now you are enforced, just by that linguistic change and that reframing, you now have to not evaluate the student necessarily, which you do, but you actually have to evaluate how well your work is reaching your promises. Because you are promising somebody something. Education is a product. It's not just random thing where we cover topics, and to kind of circle back to what my main point is, is you can cover things and say, that's all covered. We have talked about this. We have talked about that. We have covered this. Why don't you understand you silly student? Well, because you didn't... Actually, you covered it and you checked off the box, but you didn't audit whether what you covered imparted any value to me as a learner. Oh, sorry. I feel myself getting angry. Crystal Carter: No, it's true. I've definitely had a situation where I've done a certification, I won't name which one it is, but I can think of exactly which one it is in my mind. And I've done a certification and you go through all the things and you tick the boxes, because they've told you that you have to do the certification again. And so I would call that, I guess, education, because I studied the things or whatever. But I didn't actually learn it necessarily. You don't really learn it. Mordy Oberstein: You do become part of your scheme, how you think and how you operate as part of your outlook and part of your knowledge base, just because something I like it's somewhere in my brain, but I have to recall it, I guess. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think to learn something, you kind of have to do it. And I think you mentioned mentorship and mentorship is really, really important as part of that, and learning as you go, which I think is one of the reasons why we add that into the product. Henry Collie: We also need to define what learning actually means, because I think we often say learning education, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not one thing. Learning involves loads of cognitive steps, loads of cognitive processes. It's a constant pathway. We constantly have to evaluate to see where we are in that process. And there are innumerable learning theories, instructional design methodologies, but when you break it all down, they're essentially all saying the same thing and providing various ways of achieving the same objective, which is you the learner in one state, and at the end of this process you should be in or at least, close to another state of being. And it's not just about rote learning or saying, I've covered this or I've talked about this and now you can tell me what the capital of X country is. You can learn what the capital of X country is, but do you know why it's the capital? Do you know how it became the capital? Do you understand the social aspects of that country that created that situation in the first place? Now you don't just know that it's the capital. You now understand that it's the capital. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's so Piaget dude. Henry Collie: When I was young. Mordy Oberstein: So as time ebbs away from us, where can people learn about you? Henry Collie: Ooh, I'm pretty quiet, to be honest. I don't really do social media. Mordy Oberstein: Oh. Henry Collie: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's odd for us, personally. Crystal Carter: You run an educational course though, yeah? Henry Collie: Yes. Crystal Carter: Where is the course? Henry Collie: Oh, you mean separately from Wix? No, I don't. Crystal Carter: No. On Wix. Mordy Oberstein: On Wix. Henry Collie: Oh, on Wix. Oh. Mordy Oberstein: Because they can learn by osmosis. They can see the course, take the course in... Henry Collie: Right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: ... and then learn who you are. Almost like reading a poem and understanding the poet. Henry Collie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Right. Well, if they want to find anything that I've done, they can check out Wix Learn, which they can find the e-commerce course on there. Also, the accessibility 101 course, which I highly recommend. It's extremely important. It's extremely important for design, not just for accessibility and for- Crystal Carter: Also important for SEO. Henry Collie: And extremely important for SEO. And then by probably the end of this year, we will have the new SEO course out where they won't directly see me as a human, but they will see- Mordy Oberstein: They will feel you at every step of the way. I guarantee it. Henry Collie: They'll feel my presence. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Henry Collie: My ominous presence. Mordy Oberstein: Your aura. Hum. You should leave like a Easter egg in there somewhere. Henry Collie: Oh, should we? Should we just put in little like my favorite books? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Or like the screenshot should be like... We're talking about the SERP, it could have a screenshot of like who is Henry? Henry Collie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: Just be a photo of you in the background in a frame or something. Mordy Oberstein: Right, look for Easter egg. Henry Collie: Do you know, I think there was a time... I think it's gone now, but I Googled my name and I had a little knowledge profile and a little buttons. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, oh, I don't have social. You have a knowledge graph. Look at you. A knowledge panel. Henry Collie: I think they've clocked it though and gotten rid of it. Mordy Oberstein: I got Google that. Crystal Carter: That's cool. Mordy Oberstein: There was a movie called Henrique . Someone does movies that's also named Henry Collie. But your picture shows up right there when you… Henry Collie: Oh yeah, no, that's me. I used to be an actor. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, so there you are. Okay, so where can they find you? They can find you in movies. Crystal Carter: IMDB. That's funny. Mordy Oberstein: All right, well, look for Henry in our SEO certification course that's coming up or in the movies. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us today. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks Henry. Henry Collie: Cheers guys. Automated voice: 3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So thank you so much again, Henry, it was fascinating to talk to you and looking forward to keep working with you on our SEO course. Spoiler. Spoiler. Spoiler. Now since we are talking about learning, you know what we can do to help you learn more? Crystal Carter: What can we do, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: We can quote Barry Schwartz a bunch of times as we get into this snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Three articles, two updates for you, or two articles about two updates for you. First one from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google completes rollout of October 2023 spam update, which means you can now resume spamming. I'm just kidding, you should not resume spamming. You should never be spamming to begin with. So if you're utilizing, you have been utilizing spammy practices across the webs, you may have seen a significant loss of rankings. If you have not been engaged in spammy practices, and 99.9% of the listeners of this podcast have not been, this update should not have really impacted you. What might have impacted you is the October 2023 core update. And one day before Google announced the completion of the spam update, Google said, per Barry Schwartz, over at SEL, Search Engine Land, Google October 23 core update rollout, now complete. They're both complete. This one may have impacted you. This impacts sites across the web. Have a look at your rankings, see what happened. The update is now finished. There will be data on this, meaning as the recording of this podcast, of the news section, we have not seen the data come out from the tool providers. I know because I do send Russia's data. So have a look by the time this episode does come out over at Search Engine Land, look for Barry's article, Collecting Data from Across the Tool Providers to see the nature of this update and how, perhaps, how impactful it is sort of, kind of, maybe, that's a different story for a different time. But you'll get some data that points to some things about the core update. Lastly, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. Got to make sure Barry gets all the links to all of the different blogs and websites that he has. This one's over at Search Engine Roundtable. Barry writes, Google search generative experience may link to paywalled content, but here's how to block SGE. So if you have content behind a paywall, say you have to sign, enter your name and email address to access the content, Google said they can link to that content in their Search Generative Experience, the SGE, as I like to refer the AI box, where Google, you enter a query, Google spits out a whole AI answer with a couple of links. Google also said, and they updated their robots meta tech documentation to show or to say that they will respect robots meta tag directives with the SGE. Meaning, if you say, "Hey Google, I'm going to implement a no snippet robots meta tag. I don't want you to quote me. I don't want you to show a snippet of my content on this webpage on your SERP. That includes all of the SERP, which also includes the SGE Box. Also, similarly, if say, for example, you say, "Google, you know what? You can show a snippet of my content from this page, on your webpage, on the SERP, rather, but I don't want you to show a ton." So here's the number of characters you're allowed to show is called a max snippet robots meta tag. You can also implement that and Google will respect that in the SGE for Wix users. It's very easy to implement any of these robot meta tags. Simply go to the SEO panel on any particular page and you will see a checkbox where you can tick off, which robots meta tags you want in the advanced SEO section of the SEO panel. And with that, Barry now has all the links, and that's our version of this week's snappy SEO news. Thanks to the learning Barry. Each and every week Barry brings us the SEO learning. Each and every day, in my opinion. I check it out all the time, every day. Crystal Carter: It's true. It's true. I contemplated sending him something today that I saw, but I'm sure that somebody else has seen it already. But you got to roll the dice. If you don't get involved, you can't win. Mordy Oberstein: The best thing to do, as I told you, Crystal, is let the article go live with somebody else, and then as soon as it goes live, say, Barry, is this new, and find your own example and then he will include you in it. Crystal Carter: Right. Oh, of course. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's my hack. I've never done that, but I should. Crystal Carter: I don't know anyone who would do that. Mordy Oberstein: No. Everyone has different standards for how they go about their lives. We're not here to judge anybody. Crystal Carter: Some people are doing their best, and we're just doing our best. Mordy Oberstein: And that's not new. That's just how life goes. Crystal Carter: It's something you got to learn. Mordy Oberstein: So many little SEO jokes in there. You know what's no joke? Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Following the right people on social media so that you get the right SEO learning. So this week's follow of the week is a family favorite, as in the Wix family favorite. Mark Preston, who you can follow over at Mark Preston, 1969. That's at Mark Preston 1969 over on Twitter, formerly known as X, scratch reverse. I'm still confused, but follow Mark. Mark does tons of training, tons of advising, and he's our follow of the week for training people. Crystal Carter: And he's so committed to helping people learn more, particularly about Wix, but also generally about marketing, about personal branding, and is somebody who is very approachable in that regard. He shares a lot of information directly on Twitter. People ask him questions, and he's so generous with his time, and a super nice guy as well. Like Barry, but really lovely when you meet him. So I highly recommend following Mark and checking out his podcast and all the other cool stuff that he does. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. So definitely give Mark a follow. Definitely, definitely give Mark a follow over on Twitter, X, whatever. You got it. We'll link to his profile in the show notes and hope you learned a lot this week. And then you can go out there and train your SEO team. Crystal Carter: Choo, choo. Mordy Oberstein: I choo, choo, choose you Crystal Carter: It was a train because training because choo, choo. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, now I get it. Wow, that went right over my head. Crystal Carter: Well, I hope the train didn't go over your head. That would be very uncomfortable. Mordy Oberstein: Unless it was a toy train, in which case it would just bounce off my head. Crystal Carter: That reminds me of a friend who had a kid and then the other kid was like throwing their Thomas the tank engine at the baby, and it's like, no, don't, don't do that, don't do that. They had to take it away. Mordy Oberstein: I remember throwing my Star Trek Enterprise toy at my little baby brother, but it was a metal and getting in trouble for that. Crystal Carter: Were you shouting engage? Mordy Oberstein: Make it so. Crystal Carter: No, no, don't, don't. Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Well, thank you for joining us on this SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss... Not to worry. We're back next week in the new episode as we dive into how to work well with non-SEO teams. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and newsletter on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

How do you build an SEO strategy from scratch? How should SEO differ for specific business models? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by SEO growth specialist Gaetano DiNardi to teach you how to build an SEO strategy from the ground up… using an actual case as a reference. Get hands-on as we explore how Gaetano built his client an SEO strategy from scratch. Also stopping by is messaging strategist Diane Wiredu to discuss ways to articulate brand messaging that actually resonates with your audience effectively. Gather your finest ingredients, as this week we’re giving you the recipe to make SEO from scratch right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back The ins & outs of starting SEO from scratch How do you build an SEO strategy from scratch? How should SEO differ for specific business models? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by SEO growth specialist Gaetano DiNardi to teach you how to build an SEO strategy from the ground up… using an actual case as a reference. Get hands-on as we explore how Gaetano built his client an SEO strategy from scratch. Also stopping by is messaging strategist Diane Wiredu to discuss ways to articulate brand messaging that actually resonates with your audience effectively. Gather your finest ingredients, as this week we’re giving you the recipe to make SEO from scratch right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 77 | March 6, 2024 | 53 MIN 00:00 / 52:57 This week’s guests Diane Wiredu Diane Wiredu is a messaging expert and the founder of Lion Words. She helps scaling SaaS and B2B companies achieve message-market fit. So they can stand out from the crowd, market more effectively, and sell more. Simply put: she helps make the value of your products easier to understand. Gaetano DiNardi Gaetano DiNardi is a music producer and songwriter turned growth marketer. Over the past 10 years, Gaetano has become one of the most prominent voices in B2B marketing. Currently, he's advising companies like Gong, Kustomer, Cognism, Workvivo, DataGrail, Aura and more on SEO, PPC, content strategy, website optimization, and copywriting. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha! Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. I'm brewing new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who cooks up a storm from the scratch. She has the flour, she has the water, she mixes it in, adds the sugar, puts in the oven, out comes great SEO pie, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Okay. I do not make cakes from scratch. Let's just make that clear. I use the box. The box is the best way. Mordy Oberstein: That counts, by the way. That's scratch. Crystal Carter: I use the box. I always use the box. The boxes are good. Highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: If you didn't buy it and you put it into the oven and you had to mix something, that's from scratch in my book. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. I do make cornbread from scratch because I moved to England from America, and in America they have Jiffy Cornbread, comes in a box, get it from the box. Perfect. Gets every single time, right? Every time. In England, Jiffy doesn't exist. So I had to learn how to make it from scratch so that I do make from scratch. But cakes, generally speaking, Betty Crocker, she does a great job. So let's just give Betty her flowers and everybody can have a nice birthday. Throw some sprinkles on it. Let's go. Mordy Oberstein: I make toast from scratch. Crystal Carter: Are you out there? Are you like the little red hen? Did you grow the wheat and- Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I just put it into the thing and out comes toast. Crystal Carter: Ta-daa. Mordy Oberstein: Ta-daa. I did it myself. Crystal Carter: Right. You tell your children, you're like, "You're welcome." Mordy Oberstein: My kids are actually way better cooks than I am. It's a whole- Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they're good. They're good. Crystal Carter: All right. This is good. Mordy Oberstein: That's so great on the cleanup, but on the cooking part. Crystal Carter: You win some, you lose some. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, this SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by a Wix. You can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search over Wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. Got little slashes, but where you can also get started with your SEO by using the Wix SEO setup checklist, where you can connect to Google Search Console to single click with the add a bonus of having your homepage indexed by Google instantly. And who knows what else they'll find when they do. As this week we're talking about starting SEO from scratch, which now you know why there was a scratch joke about cooking in the beginning. It all makes sense, how your product and services and business models factor into SEO. How to craft a strategy and SEO plan from scratch. How to get your SEO to gain some momentum when you are starting from scratch. And to help us stir the pot and add in some spice, musician songwriter and SEO extraordinary Gaetano DiNardi will join us just a few minutes. Or before you could say, "It's shake a bake and I helped." Plus, we'll explore what it means to cook up some brand messaging from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu. And of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news for you this weekend. Who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So add three cups of flour, one cup of water, a teaspoon of yeast, let it sit, and then add 10 sticks of butter, some large, as much as you want, Crisco the entire can, teaspoon of olive oil and a pinch of kosher salt. And you mix it all up till your arms fall off. As episode number 77 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you start baking some SEO goodness from scratch. You smell that? Smells like SEO. Crystal Carter: I don't know what this recipe was for, but it was very greasy. Its like- Mordy Oberstein: Well, some say that SEO is snake oil. It's not really snake oil, it's just Crisco. Crystal Carter: It's Crisco. Crisco is magical. Shout out to Crisco my- Mordy Oberstein: My grandma used scoop Crisco. It was a disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was just nasty. Crystal Carter: No. You want to make cookies? Crisco. Mordy Oberstein: Crisco. Crystal Carter: Those are the best cookies, honestly, dry never. Forever moisturized. Mordy Oberstein: It looks disgusting. I feel like it's the... It's like you eat it and it immediately clogs your entire body. Crystal Carter: I don't care. The cookies are off the chain. The cookies are delicious. Mordy Oberstein: But it's delicious. Probably worth it. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: SEO from scratch. Starting from nothing is never easy. A lot of times when you come into SEO, it's in the middle of the process, but sometimes it's not in the middle of the process. Sometimes you're actually starting from literally nothing. And those are probably great moments because you're actually starting from when the business is getting going. You're there from day one. So that is very opportunistic for you as an SEO. But it's also hard, which gives me the pleasure of introducing today's guest. He's here in the flesh or the digital flesh, Gaetano DiNardi, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Gaetano DiNardi: Guys, thank you so much for having me. What an introduction. And I got to say, I love the banter. I love the chemistry, I love the back and forth. This is the way. It almost feels like a talk radio show here. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. This is what I'm going for. I said this before, if I had to do my life over and I couldn't be what I am now, I had to do something different, I would like to be a talk radio show talking about sports in New York. That would be my dream. Gaetano DiNardi: That's what this feels like. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Thank you. It's the greatest comment anyone has ever given me. Gaetano DiNardi: It's so good, man. I love it. I love it. Being from... Well, I'll tell you, when I was growing up, I couldn't really sleep well as a kid. And I used to put on the AM New York Sports Talk radio it's all right through the night. Mordy Oberstein: I did the same thing. I would put the thing on sleep for 90 minutes. And you have... Steve was choosing from the fan talking about the rangers. Gaetano DiNardi: Exactly. How boring can that be. There's nothing better to put you to sleep. Mordy Oberstein: Right to sleep, right to sleep. Oh wait, who's that on line one? Is it Sal from Staten Island? I'm sorry. Gaetano DiNardi: Sal from Staten Island. Dude, it was some funny stuff though. I used to listen to Joe Benigno. Mordy Oberstein: Joe Benigno. You know he's still around? Gaetano DiNardi: He's still around. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: He's still around. Gaetano DiNardi: He's still around. Yeah. Joe Benigno at like 2:00 AM, Mordy Oberstein: Right. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. Yeah. Frank coming out as … Mordy Oberstein: Crazier than ever- Gaetano DiNardi: ...because he's pissed. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: I feel like though, y'all could do an app for that. There's people who are using... I don't know. There's different apps for meditation. You could just have a like, "Hey, do you need to go to sleep? Here's some vintage." Mordy Oberstein: Vintage 1990s New York Sports Radio. Crystal Carter: Right. You could just pick one and choose yours today. You want Staten Island? You want Long Island? What do you want? Mordy Oberstein: Oh man. I'll give you some good old Mike Francesa. I'll be out in three seconds. Gaetano DiNardi: Oh man, that guy. Mordy Oberstein: That guy is so boring. Gaetano DiNardi: That guy's so... Oh man. Mordy Oberstein: Well, he's also... Look at these guys are all still around with the geezers. Anyway. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Let's talk SEO from scratch. Since we're starting from scratch. Where do you want to start? Gaetano DiNardi: All right, well look, since we're starting from scratch, I'll tell you guys why this topic is being talked about. Now, I had a very tough assignment three years ago. I went into a company as a full-time head of marketing. And the primary way we're going to grow this business was through search. And so the SEO assignment was, well, there's nothing. There's zero. And the primary category was identity theft. The company saw is identity theft protection. Side note, my identity got stolen. It's a horrible situation. And so I was motivated to really thrive and crush this role because I know the kinds of people out there who do that, they are scum. So we need to fight back against this horrible thing that is plaguing so many people. And it's not just affecting young people, people who are digitally savvy. It's mostly hitting people who have no idea. And it's mostly hitting people who are in not great financial situations. So when it cracks them, it cracks hard because they're stuck with bills that they didn't accumulate, that they got to now pay for. Credit card accounts open in your name, the use of your social security number to steal your tax returns, all sorts of wacky stuff. So anyway, the company has a lot of products and they had a huge investment. So the one caveat to this is there was a lot of dough and I could spend. In fact, they kept saying to me, "Why don't you spend more? Can't you spend more? How much more can you spend?" Mordy Oberstein: That's a good problem to have. Gaetano DiNardi: Good problem to have. And of course, all my agency and consultants and link building friends are like, "He has a lot of resources, so let's get in there." So yeah, I did recruit in a lot of players to help me scale this, but this was the ultimate setup that we landed on. Me driving everything. Two content marketers with very strong SEO backgrounds and great editorial chops. 10 freelance writers, one in-house link building manager, plus like two, three external link builders. The result of that is approximately 20 articles a month and approximately a hundred links per month. And that was the pace we ran at from when I started building that program, which really kicked off in late 2021. The first article was published in November 2021. I personally wrote it actually. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Gaetano DiNardi: It was how to check if your identity has been stolen. It's still a top killer. It's still ranks- Mordy Oberstein: EEAT. E For experience. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. E for experience, baby. Yeah. I wrote it personally, built links to it personally through my own network. And it ranked pretty fast actually for a site with nothing. And so I guess I'll pause there before I keep ranting and riffing, but that's the initial setup. I know it's a lot to take in because most people do an SEO, it's way smaller scale than that. Nobody's doing 20 articles a month. Nobody's treating a SaaS SEO as a publisher almost would. And so anyway, I guess I'll pause there so we can just get your reactions. But that's how we launched it and that's the setup. Crystal Carter: I think one of the first things that stood out for me from that conversation, and you brought it back at the end, was when you were talking about the building it from scratch, you'd had the customer base in mind and you actually discussed that throughout your description of what you were going to do. You were saying, "I had my identity stolen. This is the experience that people were having. And I wrote the first article myself." And Mordy mentioned the experience in the EEAT. And I think that when people are thinking about getting going with SEO, having the customer experience and the customer focus, and like, "I get you, I get this, I get why this is an issue for you, and that's at the core of what we're doing." I feel like that is always a good recipe for success. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's exactly what stood out to me initially also is that when you're first starting out, you're really trying to think, "Okay, who is the audience? What are the needs? How do I align the needs? And how do I align SEO with what the business itself is actually trying to do?" So it's completely harmonious from the start. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. So here's the next thing I realized. The company has a lot of products and services. Like identity theft protection is the flagship product, but it's sold as a bundle with a lot of other stuff. So there's financial fraud protection, there's password manager, there's VPN, there's antivirus and there's family safety, parental controls and stuff like that. Have you guys ever looked at how difficult VPN the category is? Have you ever seen how insane- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, actually. Gaetano DiNardi: ...antiviruses? You know the kind of brands and players that are in those categories. It's pretty wild. So you can get overwhelmed really fast as an SEO with the company saying, "Hey, we got to get more subscribers into this. We got to grow our presence for that. We got to do this and that and this and that." And so you got to actually deflect a lot of that noise and say, "All right, the reality is we have no topical focus and no strength and no brand association with anything right now." So we've got to hammer one thing and go all in and say, "All right, that other stuff is going to have to come later." And so I made the decision to say, "All right, we're just going to build our identity theft and own that to start because we need to get something going somehow, somewhere." Crystal Carter: And I think that that's a real strength because I think that a lot of people think that when my brand, I have to get my logo out there and this and that. And it's like when you're very much starting from a completely new business or a completely new website or a completely new product, for instance, the solution is the lead there. So when you're saying identity theft first, that's how people are going to find you. And I think that building that out and building the depth of information there is going to help you build trust with people so that when you introduce them to a new product, they're more likely to actually get involved with you because they trust you on that one thing that you show yourself to be very good at. Mordy Oberstein: I want to read you an email that I sent to somebody who was asking about an SEO product that I'm working on with them. And I'm not going to go into the whole details around the whole thing, but I wrote, I generally recommend in these cases, putting your full energy behind one thing, seeing how it goes- Gaetano DiNardi: Thank You. Mordy Oberstein: ...and then taking it from there. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you. Crystal Carter: Right. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Because it's so easy to get overwhelmed and all over the place. And what I feel like when you're starting from scratch, what you're trying to do is really getting... We spoke about this on the podcast, is getting momentum. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And that's both momentum internally in terms of your own process, getting things going, getting things moving. And also externally, getting some momentum in terms of creating a digital presence for yourself, building up those associations and getting Google to really see your light in that dark sky so that it's gravitated to it, like a moth kind of thing. And you can't do that if you're all over the place. You have to just pick one thing and just go all in. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you so much for saying that. You just made me so happy because this is what I say too, the momentum piece in SEO is huge. It's such an underrated factor. But when you have momentum, think about it. You're publishing 10, 15, 20 articles a month, a hundred plus links a month. Now, I'll tell you guys how we sprinkled some more sauce on top of that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it is like a deep dish pizza, you're putting the sauce on top. Gaetano DiNardi: Oh, this is crazy. So now when the company you're driving results for is backed by the former chairman of Walt Disney Corporation, you know there's some heavy hitters behind this project. So they went and sponsored the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA basketball team. So then the next part of this was, all right, this can't just be SEO, it's got to be fully surround sound. Let's hit all the review sites as hard as we can. So we started doing surround sound search, hitting up every big site that reviews identity theft products and getting them to review us. We started getting included on all those X best top software lists for identity theft protection, working out affiliate deals with every single affiliate player out there. We started working with YouTube creators and influencers to mention our product in their scam stories. We did YouTube SEO, we mirrored our editorial strategy with a YouTube SEO playbook. It was literally just a dude who's well-spoken and credible, like a Mordy, I got to say. He's like your son. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. I don't have a credible part, but well-spoken I'll take. Gaetano DiNardi: To deliver on camera, very confident with good, clear delivery of speech and stuff. We basically took all the content briefs for our SEO pages and transformed them into scripts, and we started embedding all the YouTube videos into our SEO pages. But I guess where I was going with all this was it helped a lot to start seeing in branded search aura plus identity protection, aura identity theft. Now we're getting somewhere. Now it's like okay, we're getting a lot of links with those anchor texts. We're starting to rank for some really competitive terms, and we're branding ourselves real hard against LifeLock. So that was pick out the big nasty enemy in the room and just go attack. So ranking for stuff like that was key. Crystal Carter: And I think something that's interesting with that playbook that you just laid out, there is a lot of people... Some people will be listening to this and they'll go, "I'm a small business, how could I possibly do this?" But like, "Yo, you could sponsor the local 5K. You could sponsor your local little league team. You could sponsor the local football team at your high school, the high school near you. You can do that sort of thing. And then you can build on that. You can get links in local publications. You can talk to local influencers. You can literally talk to them because they're probably in your town. You can invite them to your restaurant. You could give them a free consultation at your law firm, whatever it may be." So there are definitely plays that you can make. And YouTube videos, you could make a YouTube video. We have the tools, we have the technology. It doesn't have to cost you a million dollars. And certainly when you're getting started, it doesn't have to be a massive production in order to get going. So I think that there's lots of things that you can take from that, even if you have a small budget. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, nothing's actually different. Just the scale of it is different. What you actually want to do is the same thing. It's actually probably easier at a smaller scale than doing it at a massive scale. I am thinking of two particular projects in my mind. One was a very big massive project with a big massive budget, and one is not. And the strategy I did for... They're pretty much the same. Just the scale is different. So in one of them, they have a hundred thousand dollars budget for SEO. I'm like, okay, 20 grand for the first three months should be on social media, getting influencers to share your content, put it out there, get your brand known, get your content known, get people to link to it, put money there. On the smaller scale product, it was the same thing, but it wasn't $20,000, it was $200. Crystal Carter: And you could figure that out. You can beg, borrow, et cetera, for instance- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's much easier. If you're a smaller grassroots, then you could beg, borrow and steal people. I do you a favor, you do me a favor. You work at a big product and no one doing any favors. Crystal Carter: No. But if you have people that you know that you're like, "Hey." These people, you can get involved with them. And I think you mentioned, you said, "Oh, this person's related to Disney," et cetera, et cetera. That's a sign. Be aware of your networks, that's the other thing. Use your networks to grow as well. I think that's really important. Mordy Oberstein: Think like a marketer. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. So to the point of not needing a huge budget, I'll tell you, most of our ads were shot with iPhones. Most of our videos that we used for ads were shorts. We just got customers to put your iPhone in front of your face and just talk. And we would clip that up, shape that up. We would even take little clips of the news saying, "Austin, tonight, 10:00 PM news, this crazy identity theft story is out of control." And then we would have somebody talking about that same topic. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Gaetano DiNardi: And we would collage stuff together. So we got creative and nifty with some of our advertising as well. And then remember what we said at the beginning, how I actually wrote the first post, and like it's really about understanding that customer deeply. I forgot to mention one of the most important things I did in this whole process, and it was just listening to calls, listening to sales calls. That's all I did for the first week actually. As I was doing keyword research, I was listening to calls. We used a call transcription software, and I would type in things like dark web and I would see that 35% of our calls mentioned dark web or I would type in little focus terms like that just to see what pops up. And I would look at the surrounding texts near it and I would see, oh, dark web monitoring, dark web alerts. And I would form content strategy based on that. And then I would actually use mostly autosuggest to be honest with you, to find the super long tail stuff. Because what I realized was there's two things in somebody's mind who's worried about identity theft. It definitely has happened. I got hacked, I got scammed. Somebody took advantage of me somehow, some way, and I'm freaking out versus I think something weird is happening. Am I in that danger zone? I'm still very, very concerned, but I don't know if I should be out in full out panic mode yet. What should I do? And then there's actually another category of people that are just like, "Whatever, I don't care. I know that I use the same passwords across 80 different online accounts and I don't care. I'll be fine. This is all just marketing hype to try and get me to buy stuff." And we countered a lot of those thoughts and feelings with our content. We actually realized that is X worth it? Should I get X is a great topic for this category. Is identity theft insurance worth it? Is identity theft protection worth it? And we took the narrative of we're going to be the only company out there that says something different than everyone else. If you go look at Norton, LifeLock and all those big brands, they all say, "Yes, you need it, you need it, you need it, you need it. If you don't, you're screwed." We were the only ones that said, "You actually don't really need this if you're comfortable with doing all this manual work." And the reality is, no one's comfortable doing all this manual work. Who do you know that goes to the credit score website and checks all their credit reports and credit scores manually? Who goes through the three- Crystal Carter: I do all the time. No, I'm kidding. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Who do you know that... I mean, I do this because I'm a freak, but who logs in to all their credit card accounts and checks all the charges all the time, the debit card? Who's on top of that stuff like 24/7? You know what I mean? It's tough. So anyway, that's just some thoughts around the content strategy and how I came up with ideas and stuff. Crystal Carter: I think though, there's so many points to take from that. Again, this is something you do not need a gigantic budget for. You can look at your customer service information. You can see the reviews on your product. You can see the reviews on your business. You can talk to the people who are your customer service team. You can look in your Slack channels for the questions that are coming from that. I have an article that talks about user first content information. That is gold dust. That is gold dust. Going through those user calls is super, super useful. Does not cost the earth and like you said, gives you some keywords that you would not find in other places. The trending topics thing is really important, I think is particularly when you're working in SaaS or something that's where the technology is evolving and stuff because auto suggest updates quicker than you're going to see in historic keyword search volumes. So that's super useful. And also differentiation, like you said, we don't want to sound like everybody else. That's huge as well. With all the AI stuff, for instance, a lot of people are going to be making a lot of content that sounds very similar to a lot of content that's also being published at the same time. And that's been the case for a while. But if you can cut through that noise, that is absolutely crucial. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: So I feel like we've got a really good solid foundation about how to get started, how to think strategically, how to think about... How to get going from the very beginning, how to structure, know what you're going to need long term. We going to make a point that maybe we can consciousize a little bit, that's not a real word. Make conscious a little bit, you need to think about what the plan is not now, but also long-term, the resource that you're going to need and build yourself up in order to handle that. But if there's one last thing you wanted to focus on before time quickly runs out on us, what would it be? Gaetano DiNardi: I think I would in terms of just how to decide topics, because there's so many different kinds of topics you could create content about. It's like an endless sea of ideas. I mean, I'm sure you guys are familiar with this framework. I'll just show it to you. It's this framework that prioritizes the business potential of a topic based on how commercially relevant it is. So there's a lot of rabbit holes with content. A lot of times even somebody at your company will bring up a really wacky idea like, "Hey, PPP loan fraud is exploding right now. Let's go cover this topic." That could potentially work. But the problem is there's very, very little connection with that trending topic to your solution. The other problem with it is that it's not really going to be much of an SEO play because think about who's covering the topic PPP loan fraud. Every big news site out there is already covering it. So it doesn't really make sense for you as a smaller brand to try and out-cover what these big publishers are already going nuts over. So I like to go as close to the product as possible, and it doesn't have to be the classic X best software list. There's other ways to find that pain point. So for example, how to protect your child from identity theft. That would be the highest possible business potential because you pretty much need a solution to do that. There are other things you can do manually, but a solution is going to do that really, really well. The next level down is if your product is helpful, but it's not absolutely essential to solving the problem. So something like I got scammed on Facebook marketplace. That was a very, very common thing that we would see. The solution can help you solve parts of that problem, but it can't guarantee 100% scam prevention. And we would say that pretty openly in all of our marketing material. Because a lot of people would get the impression that if you are a customer and you do get scammed on Facebook, we'll be able to help you recover a hundred percent of your lost assets or things like that. It's not always the case. The next level down is if the product can be mentioned sparingly or as part of the recovery process in the event of fraud or some kind of identity theft. So an example is like how do scammers steal credit card numbers? This is a very popular long-tail search, and we felt that explaining all the ways that scammers can steal your credit card number and then how to prevent that from happening is a great way to get in front of the audiences that matter. The audiences who are thinking about this, they may be worried that their credit card number already has been stolen, but this may be what they're searching. So that's the framework for thinking about how close is this topic to how our product can solve that potential problem. And if too many ideas are coming to the table that are far away from the product, we probably need to reevaluate what we're doing because the reality is we're not getting judged based on how much traffic we generate to the site. We're getting judged on SERPs. And so the traffic is nice, it's a leading indicator. We can show that to leadership and say, "Hey, we have this much organic visibility," and they're going to be like, "That's great. That's a great positive sign." But if none of that traffic is really doing anything in terms of business results, they're going to start questioning the program. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. And we spoke about this on a recent podcast about emerging content versus evergreen content and bailing those two things out and going after, even for emerging content, if the big players are there, maybe not the best place for you to go. Being really strategic, especially at the very beginning about what topics you go after will be the difference maker between burning through resources that you don't really have or being effective with the limited resource that you have and making sure that you're actually building that momentum we spoke about before. With that, where can people find you? Gaetano DiNardi: You just go to my website, officialgaetano.com. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Social? Gaetano DiNardi: Social. Yeah, I'm all over that stuff. If you guys go to LinkedIn, that's where you'll primarily find me. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, Cool. Okay. So not TikTok. Gaetano DiNardi: You just search Gaetano DiNardi. I'm not a tiktoker man. It's just not- Mordy Oberstein: It's not our thing. Again, I've never said, "Yeah, SEO marketing. But yeah, TikTok is my thing." And then we talk about TikTok, it's marketing TikTok, of course, but then actually on TikTok. Gaetano DiNardi: I know. The thing is I'm a good writer and it's easier for me to just rant on X or put together a nice little LinkedIn post or something. It takes too much work to get on camera and start talking and doing video content. I don't know. I got to be in the mood for it. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm with you. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you very much for being in the mood for this today. We really appreciate all your insights and it's very clear that you've got very clear focus of where you want to take something from zero to hero, and that's amazing. So thank you very much for sharing today. Gaetano DiNardi: Guys. Thank you so much. I don't know what to say. I feel pretty blessed and humbled to be a part of the Wix podcast. This is going to be a stamp on the- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. Gaetano DiNardi: Stamp on the old resume here. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Gaetano DiNardi: Checkbox, accomplishment done. Mordy Oberstein: We're happy we can make this happen for you. Thanks so much for coming by. Gaetano DiNardi: All right, sounds good. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. So building SEO from scratch is one thing, but to build brand messaging from scratch is a totally different thing, but not really because it overlap in a lot of ways. But let's pretend that they don't. Okay, let's not pretend that they don't, they do. What I'm saying is let's just focus on the brand messaging part and move beyond SEO, just so we bit as we get into brand messaging and building it from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu in a little segment we call The Great Beyond. So I, in case you don't know, I love brand building, I love brand messaging, I love brand positioning, I love brand marketing. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Let's bring a little bit of that into this. As we look at building messaging from scratch, which is really, really, really hard to do. Building brand from scratch, I take building a brand from scratch is harder than building SEO from scratch. And building SEO from scratch is incredibly difficult,. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And I think sometimes you have to decide which things to lean on. So I've seen people... I saw somebody on Dragon Stand, which is something like Shark Tank in America. It's like that sort of thing where you're presenting a business and they had this matcha tea brand and the guy asked him, "Why don't you have the name of your brand bigger on the can of tea?" It was like an iced tea kind of thing. And he was like, "Because matcha as a concept is bigger at the moment than our brand name. So if somebody is looking for this particular product, they will recognize the word matcha sooner than they will recognize our brand name." And sometimes you have to think about that. Sometimes you have to think about that and that balance of which thing is actually going to lead the conversation and which thing is going to be more recognizable. And sometimes that's a little bit of a tough pill to swallow because people are like, "But I want to have this thing." It's like, but people don't know you yet. Mordy Oberstein: That's always a tough pill to swallow in my opinion. And brand messaging is swallowing that pill. People don't care about the product the way that you think that they actually do, the way that you do, and just swallowing that pill. Crystal Carter: Right. And you have to recognize where the value is and people will come with you because let's say on this matcha tea thing, I love matcha tea, by the way, but if I were to try- Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if you've had a bit before. Crystal Carter: It's fantastic. I drink matcha tea, I switched from coffee to matcha tea. I highly recommend it to anyone. Anyway- Mordy Oberstein: Don't do that. No, no, no. Slow down. Do not get off coffee people. Crystal Carter: Do it. Do it. It's the best thing that ever happened to you. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to have a sip of coffee. Crystal Carter: And I think that the thing that you can do with that is that it allows you to... Let's say if I'm the matcha tea person, I'm in this audience and I go, "Oh, matcha tea." Then I can experience the brand and I can go, "Oh, I like this. I want to find out more about this." And then I will check out the brand and if I've had a good brand experience, and then I'll say, "Hey, have you heard about that?" I'll tell other people about it. I'll let people know, say, "Hey, I found this great thing. It's really, really great." I'll be out and about. And I'll say, "Oh, I'll see that. That's what I want." And I think that sometimes you can lead with that, lead with the product and the actual USP of the product, the solution that you have until you get that brand equity as you're building from scratch. Mordy Oberstein: It's a slow burn. I have so much to say about this, but let's actually get to what Diane Wiredu from Lion's Words, the founder of Lion Words has to say about building brand messaging from scratch. Here's Diane. Diane Wiredu: So the question is, how do you create brand messaging from scratch? Well, usually you're not really starting from scratch. You've probably been explaining what you do successfully somehow or somewhere to get your business to the state that it's at right now. So whether that's on your current website, on sales calls, chats, or prospect conversations, it could be in decks or proposals or even just on social media. So I'll start by saying that you've probably got a foundation. What you need to do is figure out if what you're saying about your product or service actually resonates with your market and buyers and how to better articulate the value that you deliver in a really clear, relevant and differentiated way. So for that, there are a few crucial steps. Step one is to document and evaluate your existing messaging. So I always do this with my clients. I take a look at their current messaging and bring it into one place. So what's working, what's not? Where are the gaps or inconsistencies in the story that you're telling? You want to identify some points of friction, but also opportunities. What do you want to be saying? So starting with this step, this gives you a really good point of reference and a benchmark to evaluate against. Then step two, we want to find out what your customers are saying. So go out and perform voice of customer research to discover how your customers speak about your product or service and their experience with it. So I love to set up customer interviews where I can ask open-ended questions around the before, during, and after stage. So I'll ask questions that dig into customer struggles, the decision and buying process, what their needs and jobs to be done were, and of course the results and outcomes afterwards. Step three is to go out and look at what competitors are saying. So our messaging doesn't exist in a vacuum. And aside from being clear, we also want to avoid drowning in the sea of sameness. So look at competitive alternatives and evaluate what they are and aren't saying as well. And then lastly, step four, you want to filter those findings and really narrow your messaging focus. So I like to create a messaging map, which is essentially a prioritized list of key themes, words, messages that came up in the research, and then map this against your initial evaluation and start drafting new messaging that better reflects your value as well as the customer's needs and point of view. A really important little copywriting tip is to really bring in and use those customer words as well. So this step is a bit tricky, but it's all about simplifying. Remember that you can't be known for a hundred things as a company, so find your north star and really narrow down your focus. And lastly, I guess a bonus step, step five is to test because creating messaging might be done by you and/or your team, but it's really your prospects and customers who will tell you if it works and resonates or not. So validate your messaging through message testing or user testing and then iterate on it and optimize so that you can get the biggest ROI from it. So hopefully that will help you get started with your messaging. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Diane. Make sure you follow Diane on LinkedIn. We'll link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Just look for Diane Wiredu on LinkedIn, give Lion's Word a look, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. She's also an event and host organizer for the Marketing Meetup. So shout out to the Marketing Meetup. We love them. A lot of shout-outs. There's a lot of points to get to in this, and I'll say first off, one of the points people don't realize about messaging and something that she hit on is that I find that good messaging is the vertex of what your users need and who you are. And it's a convergence of those two things together. And I think what brands often don't get right is often they lean too into who they are or too far into who their audience is and what their audience needs, but don't connect that to who they are either. And that's finding that sweet spot is what you really ultimately want because what you're trying to do when you're building a brand is really trying to create a connection. So it has to be part of you and part of your audience together in that, in order for there to be a conversation or there be a connection, it can just be one or the other one. And the last thing I wanted to say, or one of the last things, I have a million things to say, but the last thing I want to say before I hand it over to Crystal is messaging frameworks when you're getting started are great. And to what she's talking about there about refining that and doing focus groups and really understanding what people want and who you are. All that stuff is great. I do find though, as you start getting things rolling, and as your brand starts evolving, as you mature, as you get past the starting up phase from scratch, messaging framework can also become a crutch and it's something to watch out for. Messaging frameworks are great for working at scale, especially in larger companies because you cannot talk to everybody all the time and all the different people all the time about what the USPS are, how you want to... You need to have some framework. What nearly happens though is as you use those frameworks to scale things, you lose touch with the actual user, the actual needs and the actual pain points and things can become a little bit templatized. So you need to find a good balance between scaling and actually being in tune and having your finger on the pulse, which you can't scale. There's no way to scale that in my personal opinion. So yes, frameworks are great, but as things start to evolve, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself with the frameworks and relying on them as a crutch. Crystal Carter: She talked about refining testing and things, and I think that really ties in with what you're saying as well. These shouldn't be static. They should evolve with your brand because your brand will evolve. Your brand is a living, breathing thing and will evolve. And certainly with digital marketing, with SEO, you will be able to get actual feedback on that in real time, essentially. So if a new story breaks and people want to talk about your brand in a different way, then your brand positioning will evolve. So for instance, I mean with Wix, we had this last year, people started talking about AI and Wix was like, "No, actually we are big in the game on AI, and we have been for a long time and started putting that information more to the fore. Another prime example is there's a drink called Lucozade, which exists in England, and it's a little bit like Gatorade. And back in the day it was marketed as the brand was medicinal. So it came in glass bottles and it had very medicinal packaging and stuff because it had electrolytes, it was the kind of thing that you would have after you'd been- Mordy Oberstein: Like coke, literally like Coke. Both the drink and the drug were medicinal. Crystal Carter: So yeah, so people thought of it as a medicinal thing. And then later on people started realizing that athletes were having it because it replaced electrolytes, and so they started marketing it as a sports drink, and that is people listening to how the audience is responding to their brand. And as she said, this is something you should see how users are responding to it, how your audience is responding to your brand. I also liked what she was saying about you're not really starting from scratch. You have input. You have data on how people respond to your brand from sales calls and from going to conferences and talking to people at expos and from talking about your brand, explaining what you do to your mom. Does your mom actually understand what you do? Can you summarize the brand of your company in a couple of words? That's something that you refine and that's something that's really, really important. If you're able to do that really, really quickly, then that means you've really nailed the essence of your brand. And I think also what you were talking about, about the relationship between what can you do for me? That sort of thing. What can you do for me? Who are you? Do you understand who you are? And do I understand who you are and do you understand who I am? I think sometimes there's a thing, it's like it's not necessarily that I don't have confidence in you but sometimes it's like... Not you personally Mordy, but- Mordy Oberstein: You're completely right. Crystal Carter: ...I do. But I think sometimes you have a situation, like I mentioned Dragons Den earlier, but something that happens on that show is they'll say, "Oh, I'm investing in you as a person," or whatever. And I think it's hard to understand what that means, but sometimes with the brand, it's a question of demonstrating that you have confidence in yourself, and if you don't have confidence in yourself, how can you expect somebody else to also have confidence in you? So it might be that you think this brand is great, but it doesn't seem like they think they're great, which makes you worry what they know that you don't know. So I think it's really important that you're confident, but maybe not necessarily overly so, but just confident in your capabilities and aware of your competitors and things like that. And I think that that's something that's really, really useful. Dan had some great points. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. One thing I'll say real quick before we have to move on, and never really when you're going to start thinking about messaging, you're going to bring up tone like what's our tone in our messaging going to be? I will say that the biggest mistake I see people make is the tone is simply a list of adjectives when really tone is actually a way of communicating with your audience in nonverbal ways or less like subtle, more sublime verbal ways. It's basically asking in what way and more importantly, on what emotional level do we want to communicate with our audience? And once you understand that's what tone actually is, you'll immediately realize that it's more than a few adjectives. Anyway, you know who's got a great tone? I always find this tone very fun, really fun, uplifting and exciting. Crystal Carter: I do too. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's Barry, Barry Schwartz, it's Barry Schwarz time on the SERP's Up podcast. When we get into the SEO news, I'm going to say, "Take it away, Barry," at this point. Crystal Carter: All right, go RustyBrick, go. Mordy Oberstein: Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, three articles for you this week. Two from Search Engine Roundtable. One from Search Engine Land. All three from Barry Schwartz, who clearly has a monopoly on the SEO news. First up from SEO Roundtable, Google Popular Opinion search carousel. What about the Google Popular Opinions search carousel? Let me help you, Barry. Google tests popular Opinion search carousel. As spotted by Brodie Clark was a great follow, follow him over an X. Brodie was searching for Sony XM4, which is a pair of headphones and underneath an Amazon listing, got a carousel that was called Popular Opinions, which presented a series of cards that were review articles of the headphones. Barry pointed out that he saw a similar test a year ago with a section on the cervical perspectives and opinions. What's interesting though is that back then the results Barry got back were from CNET and Gadget, CNN, big, big name sites. In Brodie's case, the results seem a little bit more niche, which I think is interesting. What I think is happening here is Google looking for a way to put results up on the top of the SERP from more specifically topically specific websites that are not just the usual big names. There's been a lot of controversy around Google just defaulting to the big name websites and is that really healthy and are those results really good, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? I don't want to get into the controversy here right now, but what I do see is with a popular opinion is if the results are more niche and more topically specific than they used to be with the tests a year ago, that to me seems like Google is trying to find a way to implement a scenario where there are more topically focused websites that offer perhaps better content up at the top of the SERP. So I like that one. Okay. Also from seoroundtable.com and also from Barry Schwartz because who else would it be? Well, I guess technically Glenn Gabe does write once in a while for SEO Roundtable. By the way, Barry, more Glenn on SEO Roundtable. I like that little diversity of authors there. Anyway, Barry writes Early Signs, Google search ranking update on February 28th and 29th. There's been a... Well, it looks like almost like massive increase in ring fluctuations, not just on the 20th and 29th, but a few days before that. Also, it looks to be like 25th. So a series of ring volatility. Glenn Gabe who will try to link to the show notes on this as well, walk through some cases you've seen of massive reversals and so forth. Sometimes these kind of things could be a precursor to an official algorithm update. So who knows? As of the recording of this new section, it looks like things have calmed down a little bit. By the time when we release this episode, things could be spiking again. Who knows? It's a game of roulette. Onto searchengineland.com. But again, sticking with Barry Schwartz, new Google structured data carousels beta. What about them, Barry? Google announces new structured data carousels beta. Well, they didn't announce it, they added documentation. I digress. Google add in new documentation for a new beta carousel that basically looks when you have, let's say events or products or whatever it might be, but you have multiple iterations of them. So imagine a collection page or an event page with multiple events. If you want to show those multiple items, there's a new carousel that Google might implement, and you can use structurally in a markup to be eligible to appear in this little carousel that is attached to your result. It's not a separate independent cert feature carousel, but imagine you see this often with, let's say, news aggregators where if you search for something related to, say, sports news, ESPN might have a carousel, like multiple stories there. It's like that. Where in your organic result, you'll have multiple swipeable carousel cards. Basically this item list structured data needs to be attached or combined with something that supports the items. So you need to have product markup on there if you have a series of multiple products, right? If you are a local business and your page has multiple, I don't know, vacation rentals listed on the page, so you have to have local business markup or a subtype for a vacation rental listed on there. So it's not like it's independent thing, it's a markup to show the items or the items of what. So there's going to be multiple markups on the page. And with that, I'm done. That is your Snappy news for this week. Thank you, Barry, for your contributions and for your great headlines. Well, that was always fun. Thank you, Barry and the other contributors to the SEO News world out there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, thank you very much for keeping us up to date with everything that's going on. It's like, it's wild though here. There's a lot of SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Lot of ins and outs, sort of what have yous. Different people involved. Speaking of people, speaking of people, that brings us to our follow of the week this week, which is the one, the only Lily Ugbaja who's over at Lily U-G-B-A-J-A over on X slash Twitter, whatever you want to call it. She's up first off contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. Crystal Carter: Contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. She's fantastic. She also has a great TED Talk online as well. One of the things she talks about on the Wix SEO Hub is how she built up our website from scratch and built up all the traffic from scratch and built that up from zero. That's one of the reasons why she's the follow of the week, and she talks about a lot of different tactics there and competitors and pulling things through. And I think she talks about being a little bit scrappy in the marketing, and I think that that's something that's really important when you're trying to get a brand going. I think Glenn Gabe has said, when trying to recover from an algorithm update, throw the kitchen sink at it, do all of the things- Mordy Oberstein: This is welcome wisdom by the way. Just want to shout out to Glen. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so Glen, Lily, everybody, Lily Ugbaja. And I think that it's important to, when you're thinking about your brand, get in there, get stuck in and move things forward until you get to the place where you want to be. And Lily definitely takes that approach. So yeah, she's a great follow. Do that. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. And she takes a content first approach. I think people realize your content is your brand. That's you talking. Some random blog post about whatever, that's actually you communicating with your audience and they're looking how you're doing that. So watch your tone. As we said before, I don't like your tone young man. Listen to my children, never. Crystal Carter: I found a great blog. I don't know if we have time for another tangent. Mordy Oberstein: Always. Crystal Carter: Okay, so I was looking at sheds and I found this great blog. Mordy Oberstein: Like wood sheds, like the store tool? Crystal Carter: Like a shed in your garden. I found this great blog, and my question was, should I build a shed by a wall? And the article that I found was the general thing you would find on a blog, like a marketing blog, but it was so well written, me and my kids, I read it aloud to my family because it was so- Mordy Oberstein: Like a bedtime story? Crystal Carter: It was just so well written. I was like, "Should I build a shed by a wall?" And it was like, "Do you want to build a shed by a wall? That's a bad idea. You shouldn't do that." But then the heading, so they gave all the reasons, and then the last heading was like, "But I still want to build my shed by a wall." And it was so well written. And after that thinking, speaking of tone from that, I get that these people are knowledgeable. They know what they're talking about because there was definitely knowledge in this blog, but they also have a sense of humor. And they also saw me coming. They know. Mordy Oberstein: They know. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: 99.9% of all communication is nonverbal. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that there's definitely something in there, your tone of voice and what you're saying about your brand being... Your blog being your brand, your content being your brand. It's absolutely true. Mordy Oberstein: I only have one question for you. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: You know what's coming, right? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: Did you build a shed by the wall? Yeah. Crystal Carter: So I had a shed that was by a wall, and it's causing me problems, and I was trying to figure out a way to get around it, but apparently you can't. So basically note to anybody who's listening, if you have a shed, do not build it by a wall because it will cause damp and the shed will fall down. So don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Next question. Are you rebuilding the shed yourself? Crystal Carter: I do not have the skills. I have- Mordy Oberstein: I would like to see this. Crystal Carter: I do not have the skills. I mean, it would be like the House of Jack- Mordy Oberstein: Please. No, please do it and like live, like video blogging. Crystal Carter: No, no, I'm not doing that. But I have a professional person who is assisting me with this. He's a very nice man named James. Thanks, James. Mordy Oberstein: Is he your husband? Crystal Carter: No. We are artsy. We don't build things with tools. We don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: We build knowledge. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we read books and stuff, but not about sheds. Mordy Oberstein: Well, apparently you do read books about... Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: All right. Well, I guess you got to do for us. 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 what you never knew about Local pacs. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/seo/learn. Looking into more about SEO, check it all the great content, webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guest, at Wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, piece of love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gaetano DiNardi Diane Wiredu Lily Ugbaja Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Lion Words News: Google Structured Data Carousels Beta Documentation Added Early Signs: Google Search Ranking Update On February 28 & 29th Glenn Gabe showing rank volatility examples New Google structured data carousels (beta) Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gaetano DiNardi Diane Wiredu Lily Ugbaja Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Lion Words News: Google Structured Data Carousels Beta Documentation Added Early Signs: Google Search Ranking Update On February 28 & 29th Glenn Gabe showing rank volatility examples New Google structured data carousels (beta) Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha! Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. I'm brewing new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who cooks up a storm from the scratch. She has the flour, she has the water, she mixes it in, adds the sugar, puts in the oven, out comes great SEO pie, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Okay. I do not make cakes from scratch. Let's just make that clear. I use the box. The box is the best way. Mordy Oberstein: That counts, by the way. That's scratch. Crystal Carter: I use the box. I always use the box. The boxes are good. Highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: If you didn't buy it and you put it into the oven and you had to mix something, that's from scratch in my book. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. I do make cornbread from scratch because I moved to England from America, and in America they have Jiffy Cornbread, comes in a box, get it from the box. Perfect. Gets every single time, right? Every time. In England, Jiffy doesn't exist. So I had to learn how to make it from scratch so that I do make from scratch. But cakes, generally speaking, Betty Crocker, she does a great job. So let's just give Betty her flowers and everybody can have a nice birthday. Throw some sprinkles on it. Let's go. Mordy Oberstein: I make toast from scratch. Crystal Carter: Are you out there? Are you like the little red hen? Did you grow the wheat and- Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I just put it into the thing and out comes toast. Crystal Carter: Ta-daa. Mordy Oberstein: Ta-daa. I did it myself. Crystal Carter: Right. You tell your children, you're like, "You're welcome." Mordy Oberstein: My kids are actually way better cooks than I am. It's a whole- Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they're good. They're good. Crystal Carter: All right. This is good. Mordy Oberstein: That's so great on the cleanup, but on the cooking part. Crystal Carter: You win some, you lose some. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, this SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by a Wix. You can always subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search over Wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. Got little slashes, but where you can also get started with your SEO by using the Wix SEO setup checklist, where you can connect to Google Search Console to single click with the add a bonus of having your homepage indexed by Google instantly. And who knows what else they'll find when they do. As this week we're talking about starting SEO from scratch, which now you know why there was a scratch joke about cooking in the beginning. It all makes sense, how your product and services and business models factor into SEO. How to craft a strategy and SEO plan from scratch. How to get your SEO to gain some momentum when you are starting from scratch. And to help us stir the pot and add in some spice, musician songwriter and SEO extraordinary Gaetano DiNardi will join us just a few minutes. Or before you could say, "It's shake a bake and I helped." Plus, we'll explore what it means to cook up some brand messaging from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu. And of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news for you this weekend. Who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So add three cups of flour, one cup of water, a teaspoon of yeast, let it sit, and then add 10 sticks of butter, some large, as much as you want, Crisco the entire can, teaspoon of olive oil and a pinch of kosher salt. And you mix it all up till your arms fall off. As episode number 77 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you start baking some SEO goodness from scratch. You smell that? Smells like SEO. Crystal Carter: I don't know what this recipe was for, but it was very greasy. Its like- Mordy Oberstein: Well, some say that SEO is snake oil. It's not really snake oil, it's just Crisco. Crystal Carter: It's Crisco. Crisco is magical. Shout out to Crisco my- Mordy Oberstein: My grandma used scoop Crisco. It was a disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was just nasty. Crystal Carter: No. You want to make cookies? Crisco. Mordy Oberstein: Crisco. Crystal Carter: Those are the best cookies, honestly, dry never. Forever moisturized. Mordy Oberstein: It looks disgusting. I feel like it's the... It's like you eat it and it immediately clogs your entire body. Crystal Carter: I don't care. The cookies are off the chain. The cookies are delicious. Mordy Oberstein: But it's delicious. Probably worth it. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: SEO from scratch. Starting from nothing is never easy. A lot of times when you come into SEO, it's in the middle of the process, but sometimes it's not in the middle of the process. Sometimes you're actually starting from literally nothing. And those are probably great moments because you're actually starting from when the business is getting going. You're there from day one. So that is very opportunistic for you as an SEO. But it's also hard, which gives me the pleasure of introducing today's guest. He's here in the flesh or the digital flesh, Gaetano DiNardi, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast. Gaetano DiNardi: Guys, thank you so much for having me. What an introduction. And I got to say, I love the banter. I love the chemistry, I love the back and forth. This is the way. It almost feels like a talk radio show here. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. This is what I'm going for. I said this before, if I had to do my life over and I couldn't be what I am now, I had to do something different, I would like to be a talk radio show talking about sports in New York. That would be my dream. Gaetano DiNardi: That's what this feels like. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Thank you. It's the greatest comment anyone has ever given me. Gaetano DiNardi: It's so good, man. I love it. I love it. Being from... Well, I'll tell you, when I was growing up, I couldn't really sleep well as a kid. And I used to put on the AM New York Sports Talk radio it's all right through the night. Mordy Oberstein: I did the same thing. I would put the thing on sleep for 90 minutes. And you have... Steve was choosing from the fan talking about the rangers. Gaetano DiNardi: Exactly. How boring can that be. There's nothing better to put you to sleep. Mordy Oberstein: Right to sleep, right to sleep. Oh wait, who's that on line one? Is it Sal from Staten Island? I'm sorry. Gaetano DiNardi: Sal from Staten Island. Dude, it was some funny stuff though. I used to listen to Joe Benigno. Mordy Oberstein: Joe Benigno. You know he's still around? Gaetano DiNardi: He's still around. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: He's still around. Gaetano DiNardi: He's still around. Yeah. Joe Benigno at like 2:00 AM, Mordy Oberstein: Right. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. Yeah. Frank coming out as … Mordy Oberstein: Crazier than ever- Gaetano DiNardi: ...because he's pissed. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Crystal Carter: I feel like though, y'all could do an app for that. There's people who are using... I don't know. There's different apps for meditation. You could just have a like, "Hey, do you need to go to sleep? Here's some vintage." Mordy Oberstein: Vintage 1990s New York Sports Radio. Crystal Carter: Right. You could just pick one and choose yours today. You want Staten Island? You want Long Island? What do you want? Mordy Oberstein: Oh man. I'll give you some good old Mike Francesa. I'll be out in three seconds. Gaetano DiNardi: Oh man, that guy. Mordy Oberstein: That guy is so boring. Gaetano DiNardi: That guy's so... Oh man. Mordy Oberstein: Well, he's also... Look at these guys are all still around with the geezers. Anyway. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Let's talk SEO from scratch. Since we're starting from scratch. Where do you want to start? Gaetano DiNardi: All right, well look, since we're starting from scratch, I'll tell you guys why this topic is being talked about. Now, I had a very tough assignment three years ago. I went into a company as a full-time head of marketing. And the primary way we're going to grow this business was through search. And so the SEO assignment was, well, there's nothing. There's zero. And the primary category was identity theft. The company saw is identity theft protection. Side note, my identity got stolen. It's a horrible situation. And so I was motivated to really thrive and crush this role because I know the kinds of people out there who do that, they are scum. So we need to fight back against this horrible thing that is plaguing so many people. And it's not just affecting young people, people who are digitally savvy. It's mostly hitting people who have no idea. And it's mostly hitting people who are in not great financial situations. So when it cracks them, it cracks hard because they're stuck with bills that they didn't accumulate, that they got to now pay for. Credit card accounts open in your name, the use of your social security number to steal your tax returns, all sorts of wacky stuff. So anyway, the company has a lot of products and they had a huge investment. So the one caveat to this is there was a lot of dough and I could spend. In fact, they kept saying to me, "Why don't you spend more? Can't you spend more? How much more can you spend?" Mordy Oberstein: That's a good problem to have. Gaetano DiNardi: Good problem to have. And of course, all my agency and consultants and link building friends are like, "He has a lot of resources, so let's get in there." So yeah, I did recruit in a lot of players to help me scale this, but this was the ultimate setup that we landed on. Me driving everything. Two content marketers with very strong SEO backgrounds and great editorial chops. 10 freelance writers, one in-house link building manager, plus like two, three external link builders. The result of that is approximately 20 articles a month and approximately a hundred links per month. And that was the pace we ran at from when I started building that program, which really kicked off in late 2021. The first article was published in November 2021. I personally wrote it actually. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Gaetano DiNardi: It was how to check if your identity has been stolen. It's still a top killer. It's still ranks- Mordy Oberstein: EEAT. E For experience. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah. E for experience, baby. Yeah. I wrote it personally, built links to it personally through my own network. And it ranked pretty fast actually for a site with nothing. And so I guess I'll pause there before I keep ranting and riffing, but that's the initial setup. I know it's a lot to take in because most people do an SEO, it's way smaller scale than that. Nobody's doing 20 articles a month. Nobody's treating a SaaS SEO as a publisher almost would. And so anyway, I guess I'll pause there so we can just get your reactions. But that's how we launched it and that's the setup. Crystal Carter: I think one of the first things that stood out for me from that conversation, and you brought it back at the end, was when you were talking about the building it from scratch, you'd had the customer base in mind and you actually discussed that throughout your description of what you were going to do. You were saying, "I had my identity stolen. This is the experience that people were having. And I wrote the first article myself." And Mordy mentioned the experience in the EEAT. And I think that when people are thinking about getting going with SEO, having the customer experience and the customer focus, and like, "I get you, I get this, I get why this is an issue for you, and that's at the core of what we're doing." I feel like that is always a good recipe for success. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's exactly what stood out to me initially also is that when you're first starting out, you're really trying to think, "Okay, who is the audience? What are the needs? How do I align the needs? And how do I align SEO with what the business itself is actually trying to do?" So it's completely harmonious from the start. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. So here's the next thing I realized. The company has a lot of products and services. Like identity theft protection is the flagship product, but it's sold as a bundle with a lot of other stuff. So there's financial fraud protection, there's password manager, there's VPN, there's antivirus and there's family safety, parental controls and stuff like that. Have you guys ever looked at how difficult VPN the category is? Have you ever seen how insane- Mordy Oberstein: Yes, actually. Gaetano DiNardi: ...antiviruses? You know the kind of brands and players that are in those categories. It's pretty wild. So you can get overwhelmed really fast as an SEO with the company saying, "Hey, we got to get more subscribers into this. We got to grow our presence for that. We got to do this and that and this and that." And so you got to actually deflect a lot of that noise and say, "All right, the reality is we have no topical focus and no strength and no brand association with anything right now." So we've got to hammer one thing and go all in and say, "All right, that other stuff is going to have to come later." And so I made the decision to say, "All right, we're just going to build our identity theft and own that to start because we need to get something going somehow, somewhere." Crystal Carter: And I think that that's a real strength because I think that a lot of people think that when my brand, I have to get my logo out there and this and that. And it's like when you're very much starting from a completely new business or a completely new website or a completely new product, for instance, the solution is the lead there. So when you're saying identity theft first, that's how people are going to find you. And I think that building that out and building the depth of information there is going to help you build trust with people so that when you introduce them to a new product, they're more likely to actually get involved with you because they trust you on that one thing that you show yourself to be very good at. Mordy Oberstein: I want to read you an email that I sent to somebody who was asking about an SEO product that I'm working on with them. And I'm not going to go into the whole details around the whole thing, but I wrote, I generally recommend in these cases, putting your full energy behind one thing, seeing how it goes- Gaetano DiNardi: Thank You. Mordy Oberstein: ...and then taking it from there. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you. Crystal Carter: Right. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Because it's so easy to get overwhelmed and all over the place. And what I feel like when you're starting from scratch, what you're trying to do is really getting... We spoke about this on the podcast, is getting momentum. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And that's both momentum internally in terms of your own process, getting things going, getting things moving. And also externally, getting some momentum in terms of creating a digital presence for yourself, building up those associations and getting Google to really see your light in that dark sky so that it's gravitated to it, like a moth kind of thing. And you can't do that if you're all over the place. You have to just pick one thing and just go all in. Gaetano DiNardi: Thank you so much for saying that. You just made me so happy because this is what I say too, the momentum piece in SEO is huge. It's such an underrated factor. But when you have momentum, think about it. You're publishing 10, 15, 20 articles a month, a hundred plus links a month. Now, I'll tell you guys how we sprinkled some more sauce on top of that. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it is like a deep dish pizza, you're putting the sauce on top. Gaetano DiNardi: Oh, this is crazy. So now when the company you're driving results for is backed by the former chairman of Walt Disney Corporation, you know there's some heavy hitters behind this project. So they went and sponsored the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA basketball team. So then the next part of this was, all right, this can't just be SEO, it's got to be fully surround sound. Let's hit all the review sites as hard as we can. So we started doing surround sound search, hitting up every big site that reviews identity theft products and getting them to review us. We started getting included on all those X best top software lists for identity theft protection, working out affiliate deals with every single affiliate player out there. We started working with YouTube creators and influencers to mention our product in their scam stories. We did YouTube SEO, we mirrored our editorial strategy with a YouTube SEO playbook. It was literally just a dude who's well-spoken and credible, like a Mordy, I got to say. He's like your son. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. I don't have a credible part, but well-spoken I'll take. Gaetano DiNardi: To deliver on camera, very confident with good, clear delivery of speech and stuff. We basically took all the content briefs for our SEO pages and transformed them into scripts, and we started embedding all the YouTube videos into our SEO pages. But I guess where I was going with all this was it helped a lot to start seeing in branded search aura plus identity protection, aura identity theft. Now we're getting somewhere. Now it's like okay, we're getting a lot of links with those anchor texts. We're starting to rank for some really competitive terms, and we're branding ourselves real hard against LifeLock. So that was pick out the big nasty enemy in the room and just go attack. So ranking for stuff like that was key. Crystal Carter: And I think something that's interesting with that playbook that you just laid out, there is a lot of people... Some people will be listening to this and they'll go, "I'm a small business, how could I possibly do this?" But like, "Yo, you could sponsor the local 5K. You could sponsor your local little league team. You could sponsor the local football team at your high school, the high school near you. You can do that sort of thing. And then you can build on that. You can get links in local publications. You can talk to local influencers. You can literally talk to them because they're probably in your town. You can invite them to your restaurant. You could give them a free consultation at your law firm, whatever it may be." So there are definitely plays that you can make. And YouTube videos, you could make a YouTube video. We have the tools, we have the technology. It doesn't have to cost you a million dollars. And certainly when you're getting started, it doesn't have to be a massive production in order to get going. So I think that there's lots of things that you can take from that, even if you have a small budget. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, nothing's actually different. Just the scale of it is different. What you actually want to do is the same thing. It's actually probably easier at a smaller scale than doing it at a massive scale. I am thinking of two particular projects in my mind. One was a very big massive project with a big massive budget, and one is not. And the strategy I did for... They're pretty much the same. Just the scale is different. So in one of them, they have a hundred thousand dollars budget for SEO. I'm like, okay, 20 grand for the first three months should be on social media, getting influencers to share your content, put it out there, get your brand known, get your content known, get people to link to it, put money there. On the smaller scale product, it was the same thing, but it wasn't $20,000, it was $200. Crystal Carter: And you could figure that out. You can beg, borrow, et cetera, for instance- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's much easier. If you're a smaller grassroots, then you could beg, borrow and steal people. I do you a favor, you do me a favor. You work at a big product and no one doing any favors. Crystal Carter: No. But if you have people that you know that you're like, "Hey." These people, you can get involved with them. And I think you mentioned, you said, "Oh, this person's related to Disney," et cetera, et cetera. That's a sign. Be aware of your networks, that's the other thing. Use your networks to grow as well. I think that's really important. Mordy Oberstein: Think like a marketer. Gaetano DiNardi: Absolutely. So to the point of not needing a huge budget, I'll tell you, most of our ads were shot with iPhones. Most of our videos that we used for ads were shorts. We just got customers to put your iPhone in front of your face and just talk. And we would clip that up, shape that up. We would even take little clips of the news saying, "Austin, tonight, 10:00 PM news, this crazy identity theft story is out of control." And then we would have somebody talking about that same topic. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Gaetano DiNardi: And we would collage stuff together. So we got creative and nifty with some of our advertising as well. And then remember what we said at the beginning, how I actually wrote the first post, and like it's really about understanding that customer deeply. I forgot to mention one of the most important things I did in this whole process, and it was just listening to calls, listening to sales calls. That's all I did for the first week actually. As I was doing keyword research, I was listening to calls. We used a call transcription software, and I would type in things like dark web and I would see that 35% of our calls mentioned dark web or I would type in little focus terms like that just to see what pops up. And I would look at the surrounding texts near it and I would see, oh, dark web monitoring, dark web alerts. And I would form content strategy based on that. And then I would actually use mostly autosuggest to be honest with you, to find the super long tail stuff. Because what I realized was there's two things in somebody's mind who's worried about identity theft. It definitely has happened. I got hacked, I got scammed. Somebody took advantage of me somehow, some way, and I'm freaking out versus I think something weird is happening. Am I in that danger zone? I'm still very, very concerned, but I don't know if I should be out in full out panic mode yet. What should I do? And then there's actually another category of people that are just like, "Whatever, I don't care. I know that I use the same passwords across 80 different online accounts and I don't care. I'll be fine. This is all just marketing hype to try and get me to buy stuff." And we countered a lot of those thoughts and feelings with our content. We actually realized that is X worth it? Should I get X is a great topic for this category. Is identity theft insurance worth it? Is identity theft protection worth it? And we took the narrative of we're going to be the only company out there that says something different than everyone else. If you go look at Norton, LifeLock and all those big brands, they all say, "Yes, you need it, you need it, you need it, you need it. If you don't, you're screwed." We were the only ones that said, "You actually don't really need this if you're comfortable with doing all this manual work." And the reality is, no one's comfortable doing all this manual work. Who do you know that goes to the credit score website and checks all their credit reports and credit scores manually? Who goes through the three- Crystal Carter: I do all the time. No, I'm kidding. Gaetano DiNardi: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Who do you know that... I mean, I do this because I'm a freak, but who logs in to all their credit card accounts and checks all the charges all the time, the debit card? Who's on top of that stuff like 24/7? You know what I mean? It's tough. So anyway, that's just some thoughts around the content strategy and how I came up with ideas and stuff. Crystal Carter: I think though, there's so many points to take from that. Again, this is something you do not need a gigantic budget for. You can look at your customer service information. You can see the reviews on your product. You can see the reviews on your business. You can talk to the people who are your customer service team. You can look in your Slack channels for the questions that are coming from that. I have an article that talks about user first content information. That is gold dust. That is gold dust. Going through those user calls is super, super useful. Does not cost the earth and like you said, gives you some keywords that you would not find in other places. The trending topics thing is really important, I think is particularly when you're working in SaaS or something that's where the technology is evolving and stuff because auto suggest updates quicker than you're going to see in historic keyword search volumes. So that's super useful. And also differentiation, like you said, we don't want to sound like everybody else. That's huge as well. With all the AI stuff, for instance, a lot of people are going to be making a lot of content that sounds very similar to a lot of content that's also being published at the same time. And that's been the case for a while. But if you can cut through that noise, that is absolutely crucial. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: So I feel like we've got a really good solid foundation about how to get started, how to think strategically, how to think about... How to get going from the very beginning, how to structure, know what you're going to need long term. We going to make a point that maybe we can consciousize a little bit, that's not a real word. Make conscious a little bit, you need to think about what the plan is not now, but also long-term, the resource that you're going to need and build yourself up in order to handle that. But if there's one last thing you wanted to focus on before time quickly runs out on us, what would it be? Gaetano DiNardi: I think I would in terms of just how to decide topics, because there's so many different kinds of topics you could create content about. It's like an endless sea of ideas. I mean, I'm sure you guys are familiar with this framework. I'll just show it to you. It's this framework that prioritizes the business potential of a topic based on how commercially relevant it is. So there's a lot of rabbit holes with content. A lot of times even somebody at your company will bring up a really wacky idea like, "Hey, PPP loan fraud is exploding right now. Let's go cover this topic." That could potentially work. But the problem is there's very, very little connection with that trending topic to your solution. The other problem with it is that it's not really going to be much of an SEO play because think about who's covering the topic PPP loan fraud. Every big news site out there is already covering it. So it doesn't really make sense for you as a smaller brand to try and out-cover what these big publishers are already going nuts over. So I like to go as close to the product as possible, and it doesn't have to be the classic X best software list. There's other ways to find that pain point. So for example, how to protect your child from identity theft. That would be the highest possible business potential because you pretty much need a solution to do that. There are other things you can do manually, but a solution is going to do that really, really well. The next level down is if your product is helpful, but it's not absolutely essential to solving the problem. So something like I got scammed on Facebook marketplace. That was a very, very common thing that we would see. The solution can help you solve parts of that problem, but it can't guarantee 100% scam prevention. And we would say that pretty openly in all of our marketing material. Because a lot of people would get the impression that if you are a customer and you do get scammed on Facebook, we'll be able to help you recover a hundred percent of your lost assets or things like that. It's not always the case. The next level down is if the product can be mentioned sparingly or as part of the recovery process in the event of fraud or some kind of identity theft. So an example is like how do scammers steal credit card numbers? This is a very popular long-tail search, and we felt that explaining all the ways that scammers can steal your credit card number and then how to prevent that from happening is a great way to get in front of the audiences that matter. The audiences who are thinking about this, they may be worried that their credit card number already has been stolen, but this may be what they're searching. So that's the framework for thinking about how close is this topic to how our product can solve that potential problem. And if too many ideas are coming to the table that are far away from the product, we probably need to reevaluate what we're doing because the reality is we're not getting judged based on how much traffic we generate to the site. We're getting judged on SERPs. And so the traffic is nice, it's a leading indicator. We can show that to leadership and say, "Hey, we have this much organic visibility," and they're going to be like, "That's great. That's a great positive sign." But if none of that traffic is really doing anything in terms of business results, they're going to start questioning the program. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. And we spoke about this on a recent podcast about emerging content versus evergreen content and bailing those two things out and going after, even for emerging content, if the big players are there, maybe not the best place for you to go. Being really strategic, especially at the very beginning about what topics you go after will be the difference maker between burning through resources that you don't really have or being effective with the limited resource that you have and making sure that you're actually building that momentum we spoke about before. With that, where can people find you? Gaetano DiNardi: You just go to my website, officialgaetano.com. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice. Social? Gaetano DiNardi: Social. Yeah, I'm all over that stuff. If you guys go to LinkedIn, that's where you'll primarily find me. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, Cool. Okay. So not TikTok. Gaetano DiNardi: You just search Gaetano DiNardi. I'm not a tiktoker man. It's just not- Mordy Oberstein: It's not our thing. Again, I've never said, "Yeah, SEO marketing. But yeah, TikTok is my thing." And then we talk about TikTok, it's marketing TikTok, of course, but then actually on TikTok. Gaetano DiNardi: I know. The thing is I'm a good writer and it's easier for me to just rant on X or put together a nice little LinkedIn post or something. It takes too much work to get on camera and start talking and doing video content. I don't know. I got to be in the mood for it. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm with you. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you very much for being in the mood for this today. We really appreciate all your insights and it's very clear that you've got very clear focus of where you want to take something from zero to hero, and that's amazing. So thank you very much for sharing today. Gaetano DiNardi: Guys. Thank you so much. I don't know what to say. I feel pretty blessed and humbled to be a part of the Wix podcast. This is going to be a stamp on the- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. Gaetano DiNardi: Stamp on the old resume here. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Gaetano DiNardi: Checkbox, accomplishment done. Mordy Oberstein: We're happy we can make this happen for you. Thanks so much for coming by. Gaetano DiNardi: All right, sounds good. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. So building SEO from scratch is one thing, but to build brand messaging from scratch is a totally different thing, but not really because it overlap in a lot of ways. But let's pretend that they don't. Okay, let's not pretend that they don't, they do. What I'm saying is let's just focus on the brand messaging part and move beyond SEO, just so we bit as we get into brand messaging and building it from scratch with the help of the great Diane Wiredu in a little segment we call The Great Beyond. So I, in case you don't know, I love brand building, I love brand messaging, I love brand positioning, I love brand marketing. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Let's bring a little bit of that into this. As we look at building messaging from scratch, which is really, really, really hard to do. Building brand from scratch, I take building a brand from scratch is harder than building SEO from scratch. And building SEO from scratch is incredibly difficult,. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And I think sometimes you have to decide which things to lean on. So I've seen people... I saw somebody on Dragon Stand, which is something like Shark Tank in America. It's like that sort of thing where you're presenting a business and they had this matcha tea brand and the guy asked him, "Why don't you have the name of your brand bigger on the can of tea?" It was like an iced tea kind of thing. And he was like, "Because matcha as a concept is bigger at the moment than our brand name. So if somebody is looking for this particular product, they will recognize the word matcha sooner than they will recognize our brand name." And sometimes you have to think about that. Sometimes you have to think about that and that balance of which thing is actually going to lead the conversation and which thing is going to be more recognizable. And sometimes that's a little bit of a tough pill to swallow because people are like, "But I want to have this thing." It's like, but people don't know you yet. Mordy Oberstein: That's always a tough pill to swallow in my opinion. And brand messaging is swallowing that pill. People don't care about the product the way that you think that they actually do, the way that you do, and just swallowing that pill. Crystal Carter: Right. And you have to recognize where the value is and people will come with you because let's say on this matcha tea thing, I love matcha tea, by the way, but if I were to try- Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if you've had a bit before. Crystal Carter: It's fantastic. I drink matcha tea, I switched from coffee to matcha tea. I highly recommend it to anyone. Anyway- Mordy Oberstein: Don't do that. No, no, no. Slow down. Do not get off coffee people. Crystal Carter: Do it. Do it. It's the best thing that ever happened to you. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to have a sip of coffee. Crystal Carter: And I think that the thing that you can do with that is that it allows you to... Let's say if I'm the matcha tea person, I'm in this audience and I go, "Oh, matcha tea." Then I can experience the brand and I can go, "Oh, I like this. I want to find out more about this." And then I will check out the brand and if I've had a good brand experience, and then I'll say, "Hey, have you heard about that?" I'll tell other people about it. I'll let people know, say, "Hey, I found this great thing. It's really, really great." I'll be out and about. And I'll say, "Oh, I'll see that. That's what I want." And I think that sometimes you can lead with that, lead with the product and the actual USP of the product, the solution that you have until you get that brand equity as you're building from scratch. Mordy Oberstein: It's a slow burn. I have so much to say about this, but let's actually get to what Diane Wiredu from Lion's Words, the founder of Lion Words has to say about building brand messaging from scratch. Here's Diane. Diane Wiredu: So the question is, how do you create brand messaging from scratch? Well, usually you're not really starting from scratch. You've probably been explaining what you do successfully somehow or somewhere to get your business to the state that it's at right now. So whether that's on your current website, on sales calls, chats, or prospect conversations, it could be in decks or proposals or even just on social media. So I'll start by saying that you've probably got a foundation. What you need to do is figure out if what you're saying about your product or service actually resonates with your market and buyers and how to better articulate the value that you deliver in a really clear, relevant and differentiated way. So for that, there are a few crucial steps. Step one is to document and evaluate your existing messaging. So I always do this with my clients. I take a look at their current messaging and bring it into one place. So what's working, what's not? Where are the gaps or inconsistencies in the story that you're telling? You want to identify some points of friction, but also opportunities. What do you want to be saying? So starting with this step, this gives you a really good point of reference and a benchmark to evaluate against. Then step two, we want to find out what your customers are saying. So go out and perform voice of customer research to discover how your customers speak about your product or service and their experience with it. So I love to set up customer interviews where I can ask open-ended questions around the before, during, and after stage. So I'll ask questions that dig into customer struggles, the decision and buying process, what their needs and jobs to be done were, and of course the results and outcomes afterwards. Step three is to go out and look at what competitors are saying. So our messaging doesn't exist in a vacuum. And aside from being clear, we also want to avoid drowning in the sea of sameness. So look at competitive alternatives and evaluate what they are and aren't saying as well. And then lastly, step four, you want to filter those findings and really narrow your messaging focus. So I like to create a messaging map, which is essentially a prioritized list of key themes, words, messages that came up in the research, and then map this against your initial evaluation and start drafting new messaging that better reflects your value as well as the customer's needs and point of view. A really important little copywriting tip is to really bring in and use those customer words as well. So this step is a bit tricky, but it's all about simplifying. Remember that you can't be known for a hundred things as a company, so find your north star and really narrow down your focus. And lastly, I guess a bonus step, step five is to test because creating messaging might be done by you and/or your team, but it's really your prospects and customers who will tell you if it works and resonates or not. So validate your messaging through message testing or user testing and then iterate on it and optimize so that you can get the biggest ROI from it. So hopefully that will help you get started with your messaging. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Diane. Make sure you follow Diane on LinkedIn. We'll link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Just look for Diane Wiredu on LinkedIn, give Lion's Word a look, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. She's also an event and host organizer for the Marketing Meetup. So shout out to the Marketing Meetup. We love them. A lot of shout-outs. There's a lot of points to get to in this, and I'll say first off, one of the points people don't realize about messaging and something that she hit on is that I find that good messaging is the vertex of what your users need and who you are. And it's a convergence of those two things together. And I think what brands often don't get right is often they lean too into who they are or too far into who their audience is and what their audience needs, but don't connect that to who they are either. And that's finding that sweet spot is what you really ultimately want because what you're trying to do when you're building a brand is really trying to create a connection. So it has to be part of you and part of your audience together in that, in order for there to be a conversation or there be a connection, it can just be one or the other one. And the last thing I wanted to say, or one of the last things, I have a million things to say, but the last thing I want to say before I hand it over to Crystal is messaging frameworks when you're getting started are great. And to what she's talking about there about refining that and doing focus groups and really understanding what people want and who you are. All that stuff is great. I do find though, as you start getting things rolling, and as your brand starts evolving, as you mature, as you get past the starting up phase from scratch, messaging framework can also become a crutch and it's something to watch out for. Messaging frameworks are great for working at scale, especially in larger companies because you cannot talk to everybody all the time and all the different people all the time about what the USPS are, how you want to... You need to have some framework. What nearly happens though is as you use those frameworks to scale things, you lose touch with the actual user, the actual needs and the actual pain points and things can become a little bit templatized. So you need to find a good balance between scaling and actually being in tune and having your finger on the pulse, which you can't scale. There's no way to scale that in my personal opinion. So yes, frameworks are great, but as things start to evolve, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself with the frameworks and relying on them as a crutch. Crystal Carter: She talked about refining testing and things, and I think that really ties in with what you're saying as well. These shouldn't be static. They should evolve with your brand because your brand will evolve. Your brand is a living, breathing thing and will evolve. And certainly with digital marketing, with SEO, you will be able to get actual feedback on that in real time, essentially. So if a new story breaks and people want to talk about your brand in a different way, then your brand positioning will evolve. So for instance, I mean with Wix, we had this last year, people started talking about AI and Wix was like, "No, actually we are big in the game on AI, and we have been for a long time and started putting that information more to the fore. Another prime example is there's a drink called Lucozade, which exists in England, and it's a little bit like Gatorade. And back in the day it was marketed as the brand was medicinal. So it came in glass bottles and it had very medicinal packaging and stuff because it had electrolytes, it was the kind of thing that you would have after you'd been- Mordy Oberstein: Like coke, literally like Coke. Both the drink and the drug were medicinal. Crystal Carter: So yeah, so people thought of it as a medicinal thing. And then later on people started realizing that athletes were having it because it replaced electrolytes, and so they started marketing it as a sports drink, and that is people listening to how the audience is responding to their brand. And as she said, this is something you should see how users are responding to it, how your audience is responding to your brand. I also liked what she was saying about you're not really starting from scratch. You have input. You have data on how people respond to your brand from sales calls and from going to conferences and talking to people at expos and from talking about your brand, explaining what you do to your mom. Does your mom actually understand what you do? Can you summarize the brand of your company in a couple of words? That's something that you refine and that's something that's really, really important. If you're able to do that really, really quickly, then that means you've really nailed the essence of your brand. And I think also what you were talking about, about the relationship between what can you do for me? That sort of thing. What can you do for me? Who are you? Do you understand who you are? And do I understand who you are and do you understand who I am? I think sometimes there's a thing, it's like it's not necessarily that I don't have confidence in you but sometimes it's like... Not you personally Mordy, but- Mordy Oberstein: You're completely right. Crystal Carter: ...I do. But I think sometimes you have a situation, like I mentioned Dragons Den earlier, but something that happens on that show is they'll say, "Oh, I'm investing in you as a person," or whatever. And I think it's hard to understand what that means, but sometimes with the brand, it's a question of demonstrating that you have confidence in yourself, and if you don't have confidence in yourself, how can you expect somebody else to also have confidence in you? So it might be that you think this brand is great, but it doesn't seem like they think they're great, which makes you worry what they know that you don't know. So I think it's really important that you're confident, but maybe not necessarily overly so, but just confident in your capabilities and aware of your competitors and things like that. And I think that that's something that's really, really useful. Dan had some great points. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. One thing I'll say real quick before we have to move on, and never really when you're going to start thinking about messaging, you're going to bring up tone like what's our tone in our messaging going to be? I will say that the biggest mistake I see people make is the tone is simply a list of adjectives when really tone is actually a way of communicating with your audience in nonverbal ways or less like subtle, more sublime verbal ways. It's basically asking in what way and more importantly, on what emotional level do we want to communicate with our audience? And once you understand that's what tone actually is, you'll immediately realize that it's more than a few adjectives. Anyway, you know who's got a great tone? I always find this tone very fun, really fun, uplifting and exciting. Crystal Carter: I do too. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's Barry, Barry Schwartz, it's Barry Schwarz time on the SERP's Up podcast. When we get into the SEO news, I'm going to say, "Take it away, Barry," at this point. Crystal Carter: All right, go RustyBrick, go. Mordy Oberstein: Snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, three articles for you this week. Two from Search Engine Roundtable. One from Search Engine Land. All three from Barry Schwartz, who clearly has a monopoly on the SEO news. First up from SEO Roundtable, Google Popular Opinion search carousel. What about the Google Popular Opinions search carousel? Let me help you, Barry. Google tests popular Opinion search carousel. As spotted by Brodie Clark was a great follow, follow him over an X. Brodie was searching for Sony XM4, which is a pair of headphones and underneath an Amazon listing, got a carousel that was called Popular Opinions, which presented a series of cards that were review articles of the headphones. Barry pointed out that he saw a similar test a year ago with a section on the cervical perspectives and opinions. What's interesting though is that back then the results Barry got back were from CNET and Gadget, CNN, big, big name sites. In Brodie's case, the results seem a little bit more niche, which I think is interesting. What I think is happening here is Google looking for a way to put results up on the top of the SERP from more specifically topically specific websites that are not just the usual big names. There's been a lot of controversy around Google just defaulting to the big name websites and is that really healthy and are those results really good, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? I don't want to get into the controversy here right now, but what I do see is with a popular opinion is if the results are more niche and more topically specific than they used to be with the tests a year ago, that to me seems like Google is trying to find a way to implement a scenario where there are more topically focused websites that offer perhaps better content up at the top of the SERP. So I like that one. Okay. Also from seoroundtable.com and also from Barry Schwartz because who else would it be? Well, I guess technically Glenn Gabe does write once in a while for SEO Roundtable. By the way, Barry, more Glenn on SEO Roundtable. I like that little diversity of authors there. Anyway, Barry writes Early Signs, Google search ranking update on February 28th and 29th. There's been a... Well, it looks like almost like massive increase in ring fluctuations, not just on the 20th and 29th, but a few days before that. Also, it looks to be like 25th. So a series of ring volatility. Glenn Gabe who will try to link to the show notes on this as well, walk through some cases you've seen of massive reversals and so forth. Sometimes these kind of things could be a precursor to an official algorithm update. So who knows? As of the recording of this new section, it looks like things have calmed down a little bit. By the time when we release this episode, things could be spiking again. Who knows? It's a game of roulette. Onto searchengineland.com. But again, sticking with Barry Schwartz, new Google structured data carousels beta. What about them, Barry? Google announces new structured data carousels beta. Well, they didn't announce it, they added documentation. I digress. Google add in new documentation for a new beta carousel that basically looks when you have, let's say events or products or whatever it might be, but you have multiple iterations of them. So imagine a collection page or an event page with multiple events. If you want to show those multiple items, there's a new carousel that Google might implement, and you can use structurally in a markup to be eligible to appear in this little carousel that is attached to your result. It's not a separate independent cert feature carousel, but imagine you see this often with, let's say, news aggregators where if you search for something related to, say, sports news, ESPN might have a carousel, like multiple stories there. It's like that. Where in your organic result, you'll have multiple swipeable carousel cards. Basically this item list structured data needs to be attached or combined with something that supports the items. So you need to have product markup on there if you have a series of multiple products, right? If you are a local business and your page has multiple, I don't know, vacation rentals listed on the page, so you have to have local business markup or a subtype for a vacation rental listed on there. So it's not like it's independent thing, it's a markup to show the items or the items of what. So there's going to be multiple markups on the page. And with that, I'm done. That is your Snappy news for this week. Thank you, Barry, for your contributions and for your great headlines. Well, that was always fun. Thank you, Barry and the other contributors to the SEO News world out there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, thank you very much for keeping us up to date with everything that's going on. It's like, it's wild though here. There's a lot of SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Lot of ins and outs, sort of what have yous. Different people involved. Speaking of people, speaking of people, that brings us to our follow of the week this week, which is the one, the only Lily Ugbaja who's over at Lily U-G-B-A-J-A over on X slash Twitter, whatever you want to call it. She's up first off contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. Crystal Carter: Contributor to the Wix SEO Hub. She's fantastic. She also has a great TED Talk online as well. One of the things she talks about on the Wix SEO Hub is how she built up our website from scratch and built up all the traffic from scratch and built that up from zero. That's one of the reasons why she's the follow of the week, and she talks about a lot of different tactics there and competitors and pulling things through. And I think she talks about being a little bit scrappy in the marketing, and I think that that's something that's really important when you're trying to get a brand going. I think Glenn Gabe has said, when trying to recover from an algorithm update, throw the kitchen sink at it, do all of the things- Mordy Oberstein: This is welcome wisdom by the way. Just want to shout out to Glen. Crystal Carter: Yeah, so Glen, Lily, everybody, Lily Ugbaja. And I think that it's important to, when you're thinking about your brand, get in there, get stuck in and move things forward until you get to the place where you want to be. And Lily definitely takes that approach. So yeah, she's a great follow. Do that. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. And she takes a content first approach. I think people realize your content is your brand. That's you talking. Some random blog post about whatever, that's actually you communicating with your audience and they're looking how you're doing that. So watch your tone. As we said before, I don't like your tone young man. Listen to my children, never. Crystal Carter: I found a great blog. I don't know if we have time for another tangent. Mordy Oberstein: Always. Crystal Carter: Okay, so I was looking at sheds and I found this great blog. Mordy Oberstein: Like wood sheds, like the store tool? Crystal Carter: Like a shed in your garden. I found this great blog, and my question was, should I build a shed by a wall? And the article that I found was the general thing you would find on a blog, like a marketing blog, but it was so well written, me and my kids, I read it aloud to my family because it was so- Mordy Oberstein: Like a bedtime story? Crystal Carter: It was just so well written. I was like, "Should I build a shed by a wall?" And it was like, "Do you want to build a shed by a wall? That's a bad idea. You shouldn't do that." But then the heading, so they gave all the reasons, and then the last heading was like, "But I still want to build my shed by a wall." And it was so well written. And after that thinking, speaking of tone from that, I get that these people are knowledgeable. They know what they're talking about because there was definitely knowledge in this blog, but they also have a sense of humor. And they also saw me coming. They know. Mordy Oberstein: They know. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: 99.9% of all communication is nonverbal. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that there's definitely something in there, your tone of voice and what you're saying about your brand being... Your blog being your brand, your content being your brand. It's absolutely true. Mordy Oberstein: I only have one question for you. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: You know what's coming, right? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: Did you build a shed by the wall? Yeah. Crystal Carter: So I had a shed that was by a wall, and it's causing me problems, and I was trying to figure out a way to get around it, but apparently you can't. So basically note to anybody who's listening, if you have a shed, do not build it by a wall because it will cause damp and the shed will fall down. So don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Next question. Are you rebuilding the shed yourself? Crystal Carter: I do not have the skills. I have- Mordy Oberstein: I would like to see this. Crystal Carter: I do not have the skills. I mean, it would be like the House of Jack- Mordy Oberstein: Please. No, please do it and like live, like video blogging. Crystal Carter: No, no, I'm not doing that. But I have a professional person who is assisting me with this. He's a very nice man named James. Thanks, James. Mordy Oberstein: Is he your husband? Crystal Carter: No. We are artsy. We don't build things with tools. We don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: We build knowledge. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we read books and stuff, but not about sheds. Mordy Oberstein: Well, apparently you do read books about... Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: All right. Well, I guess you got to do for us. 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 what you never knew about Local pacs. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/seo/learn. Looking into more about SEO, check it all the great content, webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guest, at Wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, piece of 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

Can a content marketer’s mindset help you with creating highly successful SEO content? Did you know that the gap between content marketing and SEO has significantly narrowed in recent years? Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter welcome guest Sarah McDowell, SEO Manager at Captivate, where they discuss the nuances and crossroads between SEO and content marketing on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEOPodcast. Back Should SEOs adopt a content mindset? Can a content marketer’s mindset help you with creating highly successful SEO content? Did you know that the gap between content marketing and SEO has significantly narrowed in recent years? Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter welcome guest Sarah McDowell, SEO Manager at Captivate, where they discuss the nuances and crossroads between SEO and content marketing on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEOPodcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 35 | April 26, 2023 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 42:58 This week’s guests Sarah McDowell Sarah McDowell is a digital marketer, specialising in SEO. She currently works for the podcast hosting company Captivate, as the SEO Manager. She is also an international speaker, podcaster, kickboxer (early days) and at the end of 2022, became a book co-author including SEOin2023 by Majestic and In House SEO Success by Blue Array. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha and mahalo for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein the head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, fantastic, a completely awesome, spectacular, fabulous, amazing, redundant again, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Thank you. I'm, I'm not redundant, but I like- Mordy Oberstein: No, my intro is redundant. I said the same thing twice. You are not redundant. Sorry. Crystal Carter: To be fair though, I made the same Star Trek joke in the last episode at least three times, so that's fine. We've got a lot of content to cover. Mordy Oberstein: Star Trek joke can never be redundant. My kid's like, "Hey, what movie should we watch next?" I'm like, "Oh, should watch Star Trek." And I'm thinking about it and I was like, they're going to hate it. I'm like, why am I even going to bother showing them Star Trek? Crystal Carter: Do you know what? Don't do that. Don't apologize for that. Your job as a parent to isn't to indoctrinate your children with things that you're into. My dad was a seventies child and basically he had a cassette tape set called The History of Funk Volumes one through Five, and we listened to every single volume Bayside B side for hours every time we got into the car. It was just some version of the history of funk all the time. And like, yes, I do know my Parliament from my Funkadelic as a result, and I had no choice. I had no choice whatsoever. So yeah, go for it. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Fine. I will do that to their detriment. If they say, "Why did you show us this slow old movie?" I'll be like, "Crystal told me to." Crystal Carter: Because you want them to live long and prosper. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, I do. More Star Trek jokes here on the SERPs Up podcast each and every week. The SERPs Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we automatically add article markup to your blog post, which you can customize that markup and where you can manage your structure to markup as well as your title tag, meta descriptions, OG tags, and more for all of your blog posts in one shot at the folder level. Because Wix, it's where SEO meets content strategy because today's episode is where SEO meets content strategy. Crystal Carter: Seamless, seamless. Mordy Oberstein: Seamless so well. That's right today we're diving into the overlap between content marketing and SEO. And should you as an SEO be thinking more like a content creator? Why both content marketing and SEO requires staunch topical focus. The role of media diversification in SEO and content marketing. And why a long tail approach is good for both SEO and for content marketing. With that Captivate's, Sarah McDowell stops by to share how to market your media assets and how that might be different across different types of media assets. And on top of all of that, Crystal and I are going to explore a possible shake up to both the content marketing and SEO worlds when we dive into whether or not featured snippets... You heard that right, featured snippets, are about to become obsolete, maybe, maybe not. We'll see. And of course, we have the Snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Mind the gap as episode 35 of the SERPs Up podcast bridges the schisms between content marketing and SEO. Crystal Carter: Oh, schism. I always like that word. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great word, isn't it? Crystal Carter: Prism. Prism, schism. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's just one of those words. It's like you use the word schism, you sound smart. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, yes, schisms, of course. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah, schism and juxtaposition. Mordy Oberstein: How many schisms? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy, it's very important. Mordy Oberstein: So there's a reason why content has come into the focus of the SEO world very, very strongly, way stronger than before since 2018 for sure, since the advent of the new era of the core algorithm updates. And it's why you have all the talk around EAT or rather EEAT, that is never going to sound right. It's like from GMB to GBP does sound wrong. Crystal Carter: Or Looker Studio. Mordy Oberstein: Look. Yeah, all these things. I guess the new kids like it. Anyway, it has to do with what we spoke about during the episode. We took a look at Google's ranking factors, and there we mentioned things like links are not a direct signal. Links are a secondary signal. Having good back links doesn't actually tell you if the content on the page is any good. It doesn't. It perhaps alludes to the fact that it might be good. And what Google's been doing in Google's goal has been to get better at actually understanding content, not just finding ways to get around understanding content so we can ring sites. It means to actually understand content as spoken about few times on this podcast, Google using machine learning to do things like better contextualize content making meaning of understanding the words and the phrases by using the context around those words and phrases by profiling language structure in all different ways. Google's getting way, way, way, way better at actually understanding the content. The net result of all of that... We're not getting into all of that again. The net result of all of that is that Google's better able to focus on the actual content of the site. And the net result of all of that is that you should be focusing more on the content on your site. And I don't know, less on dare I say, links, SEO police come knocking on my door right now, which means the gap between SEOs and content creators has significantly narrowed. In fact, to a larger or lesser extent to be a good SEO, to me... SEOs will fight about this on Twitter... But to me personally qualifying this, not saying universally means to be good at content creation, means I don't think you need to necessarily be a good writer, but you need to know what good content looks like and sounds like and what makes good content. Which means that that gap between content creators and SEOs has significantly shrunken to the point where it's almost nonexistent. Crystal Carter: Right? The idea of what good content is includes technical things as well. So good content does not have broken pictures in the middle of it. Good content does not have 404s. Good content does not have problems when you're on mobile. Good content doesn't take a long time load. Good content should also be fit for purpose and should be rendered and served and constructed from a technical point of view in a good way, in a way that adds value to the users. So I think that certainly good SEOs will be working hand in glove with a good technical SEO, with their developers, with their designers, with all of that sort of stuff. It is something that needs to work well and needs to work in a synergy- Mordy Oberstein: There it is. Can use that word synergy. And I feel like that's a great place where SEOs bring value to the content marketing table. But I also think at the same time, in reverse to the things that we're talking about now in SEO and content, I feel like marketers or good marketers have been talking about forever. Oh, targeting the audience, multi-layered content experiences, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: For us, wow, this is novel. This is so new. EEAT expertise? Wow. And good content means I need to have actual interesting, I like how you're thinking there. Content marketers or marketers in general, they're like, "Oh, we've been thinking like that for years." Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that this also goes back to some of the... I was reading something, someone who was talking about, oh, Google trends and how to find trending topics and things and like, oh, you need to look at political and in considerations and social things that are happening and maybe technology trends. And I'm like, that's a PESTLE analysis. That's a classic marketing PEST analysis. And there's also SWAT analysis and a lot of that stuff that's from classic marketing training. A lot of that stuff still applies. I think that that's something that you're absolutely right about that content marketers tend to come from more of a marketing background and the tech comes second. Whereas I think a lot of SEOs will often come from a sort of tech first and connecting with the audience via the tech first and then getting into some of the marketing things. And if you're able to bridge the gap across the two, you'll do really well. And I think that some of the marketing techniques might seem a little old school, but a lot of marketing techniques are 100% transferrable to an SEO space and will do well for you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I think that the devil there is in the details. First off, plus one for diversity of thought in the SEO world, but it's all sorts of SEOs adding to the great SEO conversation in the sky, and it all comes together to be one set of awesomeness. But yeah, I think when you talk about your audience targeting, very basic. Content marketers have been thinking about targeting their audiences forever. Recently, I say recently, in the last couple of years in the SEO role, that's come into way more of a focus because there's less opportunity to rank for short-tail keywords. You need to diversify into long-tail keywords. Now you are thinking about how you're targeting your audiences. I think the uniqueness or the abstractness of that comes into the details. What does it mean to target an audience? How do you target an audience? What does it mean in this space versus that space finding opportunity on the SERP to target the audience, which is where I think an SEO has a tremendous amount of value for content marketers all comes into play. So yeah, when you say targeting an audience, long-tail focused, yeah, that sounds obvious, but when you start getting into the particulars in a particular scenario, then it becomes, wow, there's some real ingenuity there. I was going to say... I know you have something to say hold on one... If you're ever submitting to an SEO award category and you say, "Yeah, we need target audiences, not novel," but if you show the unique ways in which you've targeted that audience, that's where the novelty is, and that's what'll make you win the award. Crystal Carter: The thing that I love about SEO and the thing that I find challenging with sometimes with traditional marketing and traditional marketing, not necessarily metrics but maybe KPIs or whatever. And one of the things that I love about SEO is that if you want to say we're targeting audiences, and of course you can do that from a general marketing point of view, one of the things I love about SEO is that you can get some tangibles for that. You can say, okay, this audience is looking for bird feed for robins, or something like that. And so you can look at the search volume for that term for information around that content. You can look at the search volume for pages that are ranking for those terms. And you can see with tangibles, how many people are actually, how big is this market? Well, actually there's only 1000 people looking for this particular thing for instance, in UK, then you can set your expectations for your marketing based on that. So I think that the research tools that SEOs have available to them work so well to help marketing teams to refine and to focus on certain things. And again, if you're working in tangent, if you're working together, where you have, we have this marketing idea? Well, I have this marketing data. Well we have this marketing data. And you can bring it together with the SEO and the marketing side, then I think that's when you're really flying and that's when it's working really well. Mordy Oberstein: And to that point, that's why you see companies like Semrush, where they, you see their advertising, they're going after the wider marketing world with their ads because they realize that the keyword research is just as relevant to an SEO as it is to a content marketer. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And These tools have a certain universality, that's not a real word, to it. At the same time, I'll say that if SEOs adopt... At times if you look out to the content marketing world and you could adopt some of their mindsets, that can very much help you refine your SEO strategy. For the one I always use, and it's because I love brand marketing is a brand marketing mindset because with SEOs, we talk about topical focus, topical nuance, creating authority around a particular topic and all that kind of stuff. Brand marketers are experts at that. That's literally what they're trying to do. They're trying to position their company as being authoritative, as being reputable, as being whatever, whatever, around a particular set of topics. If you take a brand marketing mindset to your SEO, to your topical focus from an SEO point of view, you'll naturally limit yourself to the topics you should be focusing on as opposed to trying to cast a wide net and catching all sorts of keywords for vanity search volume or vanity traffic metrics. Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. So I guess when you're thinking about that, Mordy, what questions would you ask yourself to make sure that the topic that you're using or the topic that you're pursuing is in keeping with your brand? Mordy Oberstein: So it's not even that. That I think is very, again, that's like that's very top level and very easy to do. And I think where it gets more tricky is when you start asking more questions once you've chosen that topic. So obviously as a brand, let's take Wix. Now for us to talk about NASCAR, how to build a race car makes no sense whatsoever. We might get a lot of traffic on that theoretically if we were to write about it. Well, probably not, but let's say we were. That traffic is meaningless and as a brand it dilutes your brand value. Who are you? What are you talking about? What are you doing? I think once you've picked those topics, and again, it can get very nuanced. For example, on the Wix SEO hub, do we cover this or does blog cover this? And where's a topical focus for us as an asset within a wider brand? It gets very, very nuanced. But then you have the question of how do... Okay, I figured out the topic, how do I handle the topic? What tone do I take? Once you answer those kinds of questions, you'll usually end up creating content that comes off as in a professional authoritative manner that has nuance to it, which is exactly what you want to be doing from an SEO point of view at the same time. So I think I call that brand sniff test. Does it sound right, look right, formatted right, I'm speaking in the right way to the right people? If it passes that brand test, it'll usually pass the EEAT test from the SEO point of view. Crystal Carter: Right. And do you think it's important that people identify what their expertise, what their authority is if they were ever to- Mordy Oberstein: I would say yes. If you want to create actual a authoritative content, you need to know, not an expert on this, needs somebody else. Crystal Carter: Right? Okay. So like- Mordy Oberstein: Doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means you need somebody else to do it. Crystal Carter: Right? So I'm not an expert on NASCAR, for instance. So like- Mordy Oberstein: Neither am I. Crystal Carter: ... no, that's not it. That's not a thing. Even if I did all the keyboard research in the world, I am not a NASCAR- Mordy Oberstein: And that shines through. Crystal Carter: I thought I fooled you, I thought I fooled you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the only people you're fooling are people who are not going to buy your product anyway. Crystal Carter: Right, or people who don't really know. And just because you watched Talladega Nights does not make you a NASCAR expert. Mordy Oberstein: Didn't finish watching that. So I would've even know that much. That's how little I know about NASCAR. Crystal Carter: Shake and bake. Mordy Oberstein: But that's really the point is that you can't fudge that expertise. I taking a look at the product review update, the February 2023 product review update recently, and a lot of the top ranking pages, and I'm not getting into why they're ranking, why they're not ranking. But some of the things that they're doing just from a pure content point of view, if you want to compete with them at a content level, they're bringing in expertise, be it the Wirecutter, those kind of websites, are bringing in a level of expertise that you can't fake. And one of the pros and cons I saw around what was animal carriers? The sites that weren't ranking well, were putting things like, oh, it's too small or too big, or whatever it is. I don't know. Very generic things. And the sites that are ranking well and forget the ranking for a second, just from a pure content point of view, were things like, it smells weird when you unbox it. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: You could not like... There's the only way that is, you either completely made that up or you actually took it out of the box. Crystal Carter: Right. But I think also that's the kind of thing that people will be searching for. But that's also the kind of thing that you like this, I think people have talked a lot about how TikTok is affecting Google and Google search, but I think that actually one of the things that's most prescient about TikTok's emergence is that TikTok is very real. There's a lot of people who are sharing very personal, very unfiltered, very deep things about themselves, about topics, et cetera. There's very few boundaries on TikTok. And so there's people... And in fact, if you're too polished on TikTok, people are like, "Ugh, you're too polished. I don't believe you." Similarly, this piece of content that you've seen that was like, "Oh, this smells funny." I recently saw a piece of content that was talking about steam rollers or some hair rollers or ceramic rollers or something like that. And they were like, "We tested all these rollers." And they posted the ugliest picture I've ever seen of all of the different rollers that they had, and they had six different sets and it was on a desk and it was an ugly photo, but I believe that they actually took that photo, that that's an actual photo that somebody actually took when they actually reviewed whatever it is they were reviewing. That realness is also something that can help differentiate you from AI generated content, which is something that you need to think about. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So again, take that point, take the AI point. It's a great point by the way, and don't feel weird about taking a picture of whatever it is on a desk, because if you look at the big brands and what they're doing the same thing, they're going the travel carrier for animals, they had actual pictures at the airport of the dog and the carrier on the conveyor belt, whatever it was, at the airport. It wasn't a very pretty picture, but it was real. And again, going back to say a brand marketing or content marketing mindset, if you're trying to distinguish yourself, forget ranking, but you're just trying to distinguish yourself in front of users that your content is real content written by real people as opposed to AI, you're going to approach the content and the way of writing the content differently. Now, think that Google's able to detect AI content and let's say for just argument's sake, it says if it's AI content and it's a really Y in, Y out kind of query, we're not going to rank it. I know they're not going to say... That they're not, but just argument's sake, hypothetically they are. The content that you just wrote from a brand and a content point of view now automatically completely aligns the search. Crystal Carter: Right. So Joe Hall, who we've had on the podcast previously and who's a fantastic SEO was talking about, he recently put out a prompt generator tool, which I tried out and was interesting. And the other thing that he had on his site was how to write content that's better than ChatGPT. And one of the things that he said, and I thought this was really interesting, and one of the things he said was, have an opinion. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Have an opinion. If you ask one of these chatbots, what's your opinion? It's like, "I am a robot. I do not have an opinion. I cannot give you an opinion because I'm a robot." That's what it'll tell you. So have an opinion, actually have an opinion, and that actual opinion of, "Oh, it smells funny." That's like, a robot can't tell whether or not it smells funny, it can't smell. Mordy Oberstein: SEOs have been making this mistake for a long time. Forget the AI side, which we'll get more into later. I know we disagree about listicles and I will fully admit there are value to listicles. However, many times SEOs write these sort of listicle kind of content because they wanted to rank and it has no opinion, it has no unique value, it has no targeting, it has none of the good stuff that a content marketer, if you were thinking like a content marketer would've put in there. Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Interesting. I think that the tricky thing with it, and we're going to talk about featured snippets coming up and the featured snippets love and a listicle, which is one of the reasons why content marketers love a listicle. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not against a listicle. Crystal Carter: But I think one of the things that's tricky about it, and I was thinking about this too the other day, so again, I said, I used Joe Hall's Prompt Generator and I plugged it in and it pulled out an article, and the article that it wrote was perfectly solid. It was solid it and stuff. And so those sorts of listicle kinds of things like that are thin, that don't have an opinion, that don't have additional value. Somebody can get that from one of these AI tools and pretty solidly, pretty solidly like enough to get going to maybe do a deeper search or whatever. So it is the deeper, more brand aware, more high value content. And also I think people need to think about the kinds of content you have on your site, once they're on your site, that adds value to your site and making sure that your content aligns with your brand is going to be absolutely crucial in this new space. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of value and insights, Sarah McDowell is going to join us as we ask her, how does marketing media assets like a podcast change based on medium and media? Here's Captivate's Sarah McDowell. Sarah McDowell: There are some similarities and differences when marketing a podcast or video, compared to say something like a blog post or written content. Similar to an article or written content, the title needs to be engaging. You need to give people reason to check your content out. We can't be boring folks. You also have to think about keywords, the queries people are searching in places like Google where you should be coming up. For example, with a podcast, you need to think about keywords for your main show title and show description, but you also need to think about keywords for your episode titles. Long-tail keywords work great here. Use something like the tool AlsoAsked which generates data from people also ask on Google. We also need to think about repurposing. So when you repurpose blog content, let's say into social media posts, et cetera, you should be doing the same for your podcast and videos. Something that I have tried for my podcast is Twitter threads. So taking the key takeaways from a podcast episode and creating a Twitter thread with the last tweet in the thread, asking people to check out your podcast episode. Now this is great because people are going to engage and we share different parts of the Twitter threads and you're providing value there and then, so you're giving people more reason to check the thing out at the end. I also share video clips of the podcast. When I record, I also record a video, which I then clip into a short two-minute video to share over social media. Obviously, links are also important. Your in external back links, links pointing to you and internal links. There's some examples of how it's the same. Differences then. First up, it can be tricky with discoverability. There's a debate whether search engines like Google are automatically transcribing audio or not. If they are, it's not going to be perfect. Sorry, John Mueller, search engines are great when it comes to webpages and textbook. Other assets can be tricky, like we know that they can't read texts on an image. You need to think about how people come across your podcast and videos. Sure, they may go to YouTube or they may go to a podcast app, but people will be searching for you in other places. So for example, according to Semrush, there's over 32,000 searches globally for keywords that include best podcast and over 18,000 for keywords that include best video. I reckon that number is even higher. More people are searching. Google shows video in the search, so you must have seen it when you are searching for different things and you get a YouTube carousel or a YouTube video. But podcasts are a different ballgame. They used to show a podcast episode carousel when you were on a mobile, but they took this away in February this year. I know, boo/ we need to help Google surface our podcasts and episodes. This is why a website is important here, ways like I've mentioned before, but also transcripts okay? Taking the time to use it all, I use Poddin. My mate Danny is Scottish and he says he finds Poddin the most accurate. But you need to use a tool to transcribe, but you also need to tidy up the text. There's always mistakes and you need to remove the filler words. Make it easy for Google. If you have this transcript visible on your podcast episode page, this is going to help as much relevant information as you can to help Google search engines understand your content and what it is about. There's my thoughts, or my two pence, I think that's the right saying, on the matter. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Sarah for that. Don't forget to check out Sarah has a wonderful SEO podcast called the SEO Mindset podcast. We'll link to that in the show notes. Yeah, so a lot of what you're saying goes into what we're talking about before about repurposing, but to target your audience the right way and I love repurposing content. Especially like let's say around a podcast, you throw out an audiogram, you're targeting what the user wants on social, which is interaction. So an interactive asset like an audiogram, and you have the add a bonus of repurposing content at the same time. So two birds with one stone. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think that making sure that you are tapping into where your audience is across the web is really, really important. So the repurposing task does that. So you might have people that are on your podcast that are there. You might have people who might be interested in your podcast on Twitter, then you might have people who are interested in your podcast who are on LinkedIn, and making sure that you're available and visible on those spaces is really, really, really important and should absolutely part of your content marketing journey. I think we had Ross Simmons, who is the king of content distro on a webinar talking about this as well, and there's some great tactics that you can implement to make sure that you're making your content get the best opportunity to be seen. Mordy Oberstein: So because we're talking about SEO from the content mindset, one of the things that generally greatly impacts SEOs and content marketers alike because they just drive so much traffic in theory and can serve as part of your branded efforts also are featured snippets. But is there very existence in jeopardy? Join us now as we explore whether or not AI chat experiences on search engines are going to make featured snippets obsolete as we explore the new trends on the SERP with the little segment we call going, going, Google. Speaker 4: And it's going, going, google! It's out of here! Mordy Oberstein: So there's Bard, which is Google's AI chat experience, you.com, the chat experience bing in the chat experience, and- Crystal Carter: Neeva. Mordy Oberstein: Neeva, I apologize to all the other search engines who have... Brave... Have a chat experience and I didn't mention them. Apologies. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry. One of the interesting outcomes of that, let's just stick with Google for a minute. They're going, if not by the time this episode airs, release Bard into the wild. What does that mean for feature snippets? Meaning if I'm searching for "How do I change a tire? What are the five steps of changing a tire?" And you currently get either a video or a list or a paragraph of how to change a tire. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But now I just go to the chat and it basically gives me the exact same information that a featured snippet... So what does that mean for featured snippets? You see the problem? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I do. I do. So they're constantly tinkering with featured snippets. Google is constantly tinkering with featured snippets. Mordy Oberstein: Forever. Crystal Carter: I've done a few presentations on featured snippets, and it's always exhausting because they're constantly changing what what's going on with them. So you have to update every single time and they'll change it the week before you have to present and the whole thing. Anyway, enough about me. The thing that people forget about featured snippets is that they are also powered by AI. Everybody's like, "Oh, AI and search!" Y'all. AI has been all over search for years. And Google had that presentation that they did and they talked about, "Oh, we're doing AI with our visual search, and we're using AI for this, and we're using AI for that." And it's true, they've been using AI for featured tidbits for years. They go into your content, they pull it out and they re-structure it on the SERP. Sometimes they'll put bullets in where there aren't, sometimes they'll put numbers in where there aren't. Sometimes they'll add in pictures from other places. So this tooling is already there. What is likely to happen is that some of the things that they've been toying with, with featured snippets are probably going to come to the fore. So with featured snippets, one of the things they were talking about for a while was adding in multiple links to the featured snippets, so you wouldn't have an exclusive featured snippet for each query- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they've played with that a few times. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they've played with that a few times, but I mean that's fair game now. Although at the moment they're now talking about not having any links in their chat, which I think is a real challenge. Mordy Oberstein: That's a different... like that's a whole different- Crystal Carter: That's another real challenge. Mordy Oberstein: ... let's just say for a minute there are links in the chat, in a perfect where I don't want to- Crystal Carter: Things are happening. Mordy Oberstein: ... That's a Pandora's box. I'm not opening on this podcast. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of things changing at the moment. So who knows where we'll be by the time this airs. But I think Bing have certainly done this, and I think Google have done this sometimes, but they'll sometimes have two featured snippets. So if it's a controversial issue then they'll have Mordy Oberstein: Bing, or Google has a multifaceted featured snippet. Crystal Carter: So they'll have multiple things there. And to be honest, most of the time for most quick queries, the featured snippet is useful. Is useful, is enough, is pretty much the same as what you would get from a quick answer from one of the generator search things. So yeah, I think it will absolutely change, and I think that we might see more people using, you can opt out a featured snippets, we might see more people doing that and depending on how the search results are shown. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's complicated. What do you think? Mordy Oberstein: So I'm with you and your point about the featured snippets have changed so much over time is really, I think, on point. First off, I did a study a long time ago. Just cause you're in a featured snippet doesn't mean that you show there consistently over a 30-day period. I don't remember the numbers, but it's not the case. You can go... I'll link to it in the show notes, it's from years ago though. So it's a little out of date, but you don't get that... If you're Wikipedia, maybe you get the 100% of coverage in the featured snippet for 30 days. Other than that, it usually, there's a dominant URL and a secondary URL that Google usually inter-disperses throughout the month. Obviously Google's not thinking about it on a monthly basis, but as a study, I needed a timeframe. Anyway with that so featured snippets has evolved and I think that one of our issues as SEOs is we look at what's on the SERP now and we think that's how it should be forever. If you've been in SEO long enough, you'd remember there were no feature snippets ever. Crystal Carter: 2017, 2016? Mordy Oberstein: Probably 2014 I think was the, I'm terrible with time but I think it was 2014 was when featured snippets came into the play. I could be confusing with direct answers. Anyway, there's a different problem. All part of the same problem sort of, kind of, maybe not, but it doesn't matter. Well, it does matter. One of the things that I think is really important for us to realize though, is that these things are constantly changing. So I actually did a whole blog post about this on the Wix SEO about why Google is switching to a content diversity focus as opposed to a one true answer authority focus. So back in the day, Google loved being the one true authority. You put in a search query, gave you back a featured snippet, the one URL. And as you mentioned, Bing has been not doing that for a very long time, showing you multiple URLs for featured snippets, or a carousel of featured snippets. Over the last, let's say six months to a year, Google's been testing all sorts of formats where they're throwing in multiple URLs throughout the featured snippet or they're having one under the other, under the other, under the other, a multiple things that we mentioned, like- Crystal Carter: Like an accordion type thing. Mordy Oberstein: All sorts of variations around that because I think Google realized what we mentioned earlier, that content consumption trends have changed, and just like people want more personal content, they also want a more diverse set of content. And there's a recent change to the top stories carousel, Google's showing multiple perspectives now. This is a change for Google overall, where it's going away from the one true answer, "We know everything. We are Google." to multiple perspectives, multiple URLs, a diverse set of URLs and perspectives, and I think it's important to take the question of AI replacing featured snippets from that point of view. In which case the format of you put in how to change a tire, you get back a AI generated snippet with multiple citations. Let's take the Bing version of it for the moment. That is the future of featured snippets anyway. So yes, it might replace it, but that already is the future of featured snippets Crystal Carter: Right and also they replace featured snippets all the time. They've also replaced featured snippets with some of these from sources around the web dropdowns, which are essentially AI generated. That is AI curated content, and then they put it in. So if you type in "seven wonders of the world," or "50 books to read before you die," or something like that, then you may get one of these dropdown things and it'll say, so let's say 50 books to read before you die. And one of them is let's say 1984, and then they'll list these 50 books and then there'll be a dropdown and then there's a bunch of featured snippet type content underneath those things. But that list is very similar to the AI generated chat because they don't have a source for who came up with the list. They just put the list on there. I've always found that a bit challenging because some of those lists, if I wrote a list for instance, then somebody could say, "Well, you might be biased because you are Western or because of whatever, and so your list will be based on your biases, which I can see from who you are or whatever." Whereas if Google puts that on, then that's a different sort of, "This is the answer" sort of perspective. So I think those lists, those dropdown lists are very similar to that space. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Totally. Exactly. Crystal Carter: I think that the featured snippet has always been a challenging beast to wrangle because they show up, they go away, they show up, they go away. Mordy Oberstein: Listen, I don't think they're going to die. I think they might be secondary. You might have the chat experience first and then you might have a feature snippet afterwards is what Bing does now currently. So yeah, they'll still be there. Are they still as relevant? Probably not because they're probably not getting the same kind of traffic because Google or in this case, if we're talking about Bing, is showing the chat experience above it. But that is where featured snippets were headed already. Crystal Carter: I think also it's important to remember that they're part of an ecosystem. So they're also, and the people also ask, they're also in the voice search, the voice search return, which that may very well change with AI as well. They're also part of the visual search might turn them up. That there's lots of different parts of things that it will show up in and a knowledge panels that'll be like a dropdown on a knowledge panel as well. So I think that, and that goes to more- Mordy Oberstein: More panels. Crystal Carter: More panels. So I think that goes to the idea of making sure that you've got content that is able to touch on all of those parts of the SERP`. I think that the featured snippet is less of a destination and more part of the journey. Mordy Oberstein: So perhaps something has changed with featured snippets that we should cover in the news. Who knows? Perhaps not, probably not the case because this is not what's been in focus, whatever, but it's possible. You'll have to wait and find out. Crystal Carter: I'm going to guess it's going to be something about AI. That's my guess. Mordy Oberstein: There was one episode, okay, couple of weeks ago, or I don't know if you caught the line where I said, "Okay, there was other news in SEO this week, but it wasn't about AI, so who cares?" Crystal Carter: Just AI, Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, AI, AI, AI, AIO. Mordy Oberstein: AIO. As we AAAIO ourselves over to the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Geez Louise, what is going on? A lot, and it all has to do with the page experience, update, ranking system or lack thereof. I'll explain. First off, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable Google Search Console to drop page experience report, mobile usability report and mobile friendly tests. Yes, you heard that, right, but it's all a little bit confusing. So one, the page experience report Google added in 2021 is going away. Then in December of 2023, Google will also drop the mobile usability report from Google Search Console along with the mobile friendly test API and tool. Barry speculates this is related to the recent layoffs at Google and resource issues they are subsequently having. Who am I to argue with Barry? On top of all of that, you know the relatively new page where Google talks about their different rankings, algorithms, and different ranking systems? Well, they just removed the page experience update/ranking system from the page. It's gone completely. Barry speculates that the algorithm was pretty much a nothing burger, putting words in Barry's mouth there, which Google basically used to try to convince us that making these changes to our pages was really important. Wow Barry, diving into the whole conspiracy world now, aren't we? This time I see things slightly ever so different from Barry. Forgive me, Barry, Google here said quote, "It was not," meaning the page experience ranking system, "... was not a separate ranking system and it did not combine all these signals into one single page experience signal." So I guess they removed it, but I think what's going on here is that Google might now have a different way of defining page experience more broadly. Hear me out. Okay. While all this was happening and as also reported by none other than the King of SERPs, Barry Schwartz, Google added page experience guidance around the helpful content update saying "Provide a great page experience. Google's core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience. Site owners seeking to be successful with our systems should not focus on only one or two aspects of page experience. Instead, check if you're providing an overall great page experience across many aspects. For more advice see our page." That updated page that Google said see our page has some really interesting things on it, such as questions to self success page experience. These include obviously things around Core Web Vitals as you would expect, but also questions like how easily can visitors navigate to or locate the main content of your pages? Or is the page designed so visitors can easily distinguish the main content from other content on your page? See, what I think is happening here is Google might be redefining page experience as basically usability, and I wonder if they will assess this by proxy, meaning using various aspects of the algorithm to simulate how a human would best assess good page experience or good page usability. Meaning that the page experience is far more abstract, far more subtle, and is not unified in any way, shape, or form within the algorithm. Hence, they removed it, meaning the page experience ranking system, from their ranking system page. Why? Again, because it might include or it might be headed towards including way more subtle, way more abstract, and way more broadly defined aspects of experience or usability. What do you think, Barry? Do you agree? Parenthetically Google also added a section about EEAT to the helpful content guidance page saying quote, "While EEAT itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good EEAT is useful." This all feels like an SEO, soap opera. And with that, that is this week's snappiest of news. I hope you weren't disappointed with that snappy news. If you were expecting major news around either AI or feature snippets that wasn't covered. Crystal Carter: I found it to be incredibly newsworthy. Mordy Oberstein: That's why we covered it really. Crystal Carter: Right? Because it was the news. Mordy Oberstein: It was new news for everybody. Crystal Carter: Just kidding. Mordy Oberstein: You know what may be new news to you if you're in the SEO world, although probably not, let's be honest here. Is our follow of the week, who is coming from the content marketing world? Does that make sense? Right? We're covering the overlapping content marketing and SEO, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So here's a content marketing person for you. Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Ann Handley. Crystal Carter: And Handley. Mordy Oberstein: A legend, an absolute legend in the content marketing space. She's done an absolute ton for the content marketing space. Of course, I think if I look through my Twitter feed, like my Twitter follow list, whatever, one of the first people I think I've ever followed ever on Twitter. Crystal Carter: She's incredibly well respected and with great reason. She's very strategic and has a lot of resources available for people to get sucked into and has a reputation that absolutely precedes her. Mordy Oberstein: And you could check out what she's doing over at MarketingProfs. It's a great website to learn more about writing and content and content marketing, content writing. There are events that she has. There's a lot there. So check out marketingprofs.com and definitely check out Ann Handley, whose handle is at @marketingprofs. So it's at the word marketing and P-R-O-F-S, profs, we'll include it in the show notes because who's listening and spelling at the same time right now? I don't know why I do that, but I feel like I have to do that. I have to spell it out in case maybe you won't go to the show notes. Crystal Carter: Some people are auditory learners. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I don't know who those people are. Those people are like that's not- Crystal Carter: There are people, they listen to podcasts. Mordy Oberstein: There probably are, there are, there are, but even spelling of names. I'm isolating our audio learners right now. I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: Have you ever had called someone and they just had said their number? Like you called someone and they're like 555-555, and you're like, what? Mordy Oberstein: I have no idea what you just... Yeah, every time I have no- Crystal Carter: Sometimes like when people answer the phone, some people tell me, instead of saying hello, they just tell you their phone number. Mordy Oberstein: When I ask like, "Okay, what's your number?" I have to ask for three times. Crystal Carter: I also don't like it when people, so I say my phone number, my mobile phone number in a certain way, and if somebody says it back to me in a different way, I'm like, I don't even know whose number that is. I don't understand. Mordy Oberstein: Is that your number? Yes. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Yes it is. Yes it is. Crystal Carter: Probably. Mordy Oberstein: And then you're like worried like, oh man, I really hope they... they need to call me back. I didn't give them the wrong number. Crystal Carter: These are the things we think about. Mordy Oberstein: You know what you can't go wrong with is tuning into next week's episode. Thank you for joining us on the SERPs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to shape an SEO campaign. Use cookie cutters and you shape it with those cookie cutter out. That's how you shape an SEO campaign. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great webinars and content we have over 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 or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Sarah McDowell Joe Hall Ann Handley Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Capitvate The SEO Mindset Podcast Do Ranking Factors Matter for SEO Featured Snippet Market Share Study Featured Snippet Content Diversity The Searchlight Newsletter News: Google Search Console To Drop Page Experience Report, Mobile Usability Report & Mobile-Friendly Tests Google Drops Mobile-Friendly, Page Speed, Secure Sites & Page Experience As Retired Ranking Systems Understanding page experience in Google Search results Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Sarah McDowell Joe Hall Ann Handley Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Capitvate The SEO Mindset Podcast Do Ranking Factors Matter for SEO Featured Snippet Market Share Study Featured Snippet Content Diversity The Searchlight Newsletter News: Google Search Console To Drop Page Experience Report, Mobile Usability Report & Mobile-Friendly Tests Google Drops Mobile-Friendly, Page Speed, Secure Sites & Page Experience As Retired Ranking Systems Understanding page experience in Google Search results Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha and mahalo for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein the head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, fantastic, a completely awesome, spectacular, fabulous, amazing, redundant again, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Thank you. I'm, I'm not redundant, but I like- Mordy Oberstein: No, my intro is redundant. I said the same thing twice. You are not redundant. Sorry. Crystal Carter: To be fair though, I made the same Star Trek joke in the last episode at least three times, so that's fine. We've got a lot of content to cover. Mordy Oberstein: Star Trek joke can never be redundant. My kid's like, "Hey, what movie should we watch next?" I'm like, "Oh, should watch Star Trek." And I'm thinking about it and I was like, they're going to hate it. I'm like, why am I even going to bother showing them Star Trek? Crystal Carter: Do you know what? Don't do that. Don't apologize for that. Your job as a parent to isn't to indoctrinate your children with things that you're into. My dad was a seventies child and basically he had a cassette tape set called The History of Funk Volumes one through Five, and we listened to every single volume Bayside B side for hours every time we got into the car. It was just some version of the history of funk all the time. And like, yes, I do know my Parliament from my Funkadelic as a result, and I had no choice. I had no choice whatsoever. So yeah, go for it. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Fine. I will do that to their detriment. If they say, "Why did you show us this slow old movie?" I'll be like, "Crystal told me to." Crystal Carter: Because you want them to live long and prosper. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, I do. More Star Trek jokes here on the SERPs Up podcast each and every week. The SERPs Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we automatically add article markup to your blog post, which you can customize that markup and where you can manage your structure to markup as well as your title tag, meta descriptions, OG tags, and more for all of your blog posts in one shot at the folder level. Because Wix, it's where SEO meets content strategy because today's episode is where SEO meets content strategy. Crystal Carter: Seamless, seamless. Mordy Oberstein: Seamless so well. That's right today we're diving into the overlap between content marketing and SEO. And should you as an SEO be thinking more like a content creator? Why both content marketing and SEO requires staunch topical focus. The role of media diversification in SEO and content marketing. And why a long tail approach is good for both SEO and for content marketing. With that Captivate's, Sarah McDowell stops by to share how to market your media assets and how that might be different across different types of media assets. And on top of all of that, Crystal and I are going to explore a possible shake up to both the content marketing and SEO worlds when we dive into whether or not featured snippets... You heard that right, featured snippets, are about to become obsolete, maybe, maybe not. We'll see. And of course, we have the Snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Mind the gap as episode 35 of the SERPs Up podcast bridges the schisms between content marketing and SEO. Crystal Carter: Oh, schism. I always like that word. Mordy Oberstein: It's a great word, isn't it? Crystal Carter: Prism. Prism, schism. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's just one of those words. It's like you use the word schism, you sound smart. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, yes, schisms, of course. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah, schism and juxtaposition. Mordy Oberstein: How many schisms? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy, it's very important. Mordy Oberstein: So there's a reason why content has come into the focus of the SEO world very, very strongly, way stronger than before since 2018 for sure, since the advent of the new era of the core algorithm updates. And it's why you have all the talk around EAT or rather EEAT, that is never going to sound right. It's like from GMB to GBP does sound wrong. Crystal Carter: Or Looker Studio. Mordy Oberstein: Look. Yeah, all these things. I guess the new kids like it. Anyway, it has to do with what we spoke about during the episode. We took a look at Google's ranking factors, and there we mentioned things like links are not a direct signal. Links are a secondary signal. Having good back links doesn't actually tell you if the content on the page is any good. It doesn't. It perhaps alludes to the fact that it might be good. And what Google's been doing in Google's goal has been to get better at actually understanding content, not just finding ways to get around understanding content so we can ring sites. It means to actually understand content as spoken about few times on this podcast, Google using machine learning to do things like better contextualize content making meaning of understanding the words and the phrases by using the context around those words and phrases by profiling language structure in all different ways. Google's getting way, way, way, way better at actually understanding the content. The net result of all of that... We're not getting into all of that again. The net result of all of that is that Google's better able to focus on the actual content of the site. And the net result of all of that is that you should be focusing more on the content on your site. And I don't know, less on dare I say, links, SEO police come knocking on my door right now, which means the gap between SEOs and content creators has significantly narrowed. In fact, to a larger or lesser extent to be a good SEO, to me... SEOs will fight about this on Twitter... But to me personally qualifying this, not saying universally means to be good at content creation, means I don't think you need to necessarily be a good writer, but you need to know what good content looks like and sounds like and what makes good content. Which means that that gap between content creators and SEOs has significantly shrunken to the point where it's almost nonexistent. Crystal Carter: Right? The idea of what good content is includes technical things as well. So good content does not have broken pictures in the middle of it. Good content does not have 404s. Good content does not have problems when you're on mobile. Good content doesn't take a long time load. Good content should also be fit for purpose and should be rendered and served and constructed from a technical point of view in a good way, in a way that adds value to the users. So I think that certainly good SEOs will be working hand in glove with a good technical SEO, with their developers, with their designers, with all of that sort of stuff. It is something that needs to work well and needs to work in a synergy- Mordy Oberstein: There it is. Can use that word synergy. And I feel like that's a great place where SEOs bring value to the content marketing table. But I also think at the same time, in reverse to the things that we're talking about now in SEO and content, I feel like marketers or good marketers have been talking about forever. Oh, targeting the audience, multi-layered content experiences, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: For us, wow, this is novel. This is so new. EEAT expertise? Wow. And good content means I need to have actual interesting, I like how you're thinking there. Content marketers or marketers in general, they're like, "Oh, we've been thinking like that for years." Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that this also goes back to some of the... I was reading something, someone who was talking about, oh, Google trends and how to find trending topics and things and like, oh, you need to look at political and in considerations and social things that are happening and maybe technology trends. And I'm like, that's a PESTLE analysis. That's a classic marketing PEST analysis. And there's also SWAT analysis and a lot of that stuff that's from classic marketing training. A lot of that stuff still applies. I think that that's something that you're absolutely right about that content marketers tend to come from more of a marketing background and the tech comes second. Whereas I think a lot of SEOs will often come from a sort of tech first and connecting with the audience via the tech first and then getting into some of the marketing things. And if you're able to bridge the gap across the two, you'll do really well. And I think that some of the marketing techniques might seem a little old school, but a lot of marketing techniques are 100% transferrable to an SEO space and will do well for you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I think that the devil there is in the details. First off, plus one for diversity of thought in the SEO world, but it's all sorts of SEOs adding to the great SEO conversation in the sky, and it all comes together to be one set of awesomeness. But yeah, I think when you talk about your audience targeting, very basic. Content marketers have been thinking about targeting their audiences forever. Recently, I say recently, in the last couple of years in the SEO role, that's come into way more of a focus because there's less opportunity to rank for short-tail keywords. You need to diversify into long-tail keywords. Now you are thinking about how you're targeting your audiences. I think the uniqueness or the abstractness of that comes into the details. What does it mean to target an audience? How do you target an audience? What does it mean in this space versus that space finding opportunity on the SERP to target the audience, which is where I think an SEO has a tremendous amount of value for content marketers all comes into play. So yeah, when you say targeting an audience, long-tail focused, yeah, that sounds obvious, but when you start getting into the particulars in a particular scenario, then it becomes, wow, there's some real ingenuity there. I was going to say... I know you have something to say hold on one... If you're ever submitting to an SEO award category and you say, "Yeah, we need target audiences, not novel," but if you show the unique ways in which you've targeted that audience, that's where the novelty is, and that's what'll make you win the award. Crystal Carter: The thing that I love about SEO and the thing that I find challenging with sometimes with traditional marketing and traditional marketing, not necessarily metrics but maybe KPIs or whatever. And one of the things that I love about SEO is that if you want to say we're targeting audiences, and of course you can do that from a general marketing point of view, one of the things I love about SEO is that you can get some tangibles for that. You can say, okay, this audience is looking for bird feed for robins, or something like that. And so you can look at the search volume for that term for information around that content. You can look at the search volume for pages that are ranking for those terms. And you can see with tangibles, how many people are actually, how big is this market? Well, actually there's only 1000 people looking for this particular thing for instance, in UK, then you can set your expectations for your marketing based on that. So I think that the research tools that SEOs have available to them work so well to help marketing teams to refine and to focus on certain things. And again, if you're working in tangent, if you're working together, where you have, we have this marketing idea? Well, I have this marketing data. Well we have this marketing data. And you can bring it together with the SEO and the marketing side, then I think that's when you're really flying and that's when it's working really well. Mordy Oberstein: And to that point, that's why you see companies like Semrush, where they, you see their advertising, they're going after the wider marketing world with their ads because they realize that the keyword research is just as relevant to an SEO as it is to a content marketer. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: And These tools have a certain universality, that's not a real word, to it. At the same time, I'll say that if SEOs adopt... At times if you look out to the content marketing world and you could adopt some of their mindsets, that can very much help you refine your SEO strategy. For the one I always use, and it's because I love brand marketing is a brand marketing mindset because with SEOs, we talk about topical focus, topical nuance, creating authority around a particular topic and all that kind of stuff. Brand marketers are experts at that. That's literally what they're trying to do. They're trying to position their company as being authoritative, as being reputable, as being whatever, whatever, around a particular set of topics. If you take a brand marketing mindset to your SEO, to your topical focus from an SEO point of view, you'll naturally limit yourself to the topics you should be focusing on as opposed to trying to cast a wide net and catching all sorts of keywords for vanity search volume or vanity traffic metrics. Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. So I guess when you're thinking about that, Mordy, what questions would you ask yourself to make sure that the topic that you're using or the topic that you're pursuing is in keeping with your brand? Mordy Oberstein: So it's not even that. That I think is very, again, that's like that's very top level and very easy to do. And I think where it gets more tricky is when you start asking more questions once you've chosen that topic. So obviously as a brand, let's take Wix. Now for us to talk about NASCAR, how to build a race car makes no sense whatsoever. We might get a lot of traffic on that theoretically if we were to write about it. Well, probably not, but let's say we were. That traffic is meaningless and as a brand it dilutes your brand value. Who are you? What are you talking about? What are you doing? I think once you've picked those topics, and again, it can get very nuanced. For example, on the Wix SEO hub, do we cover this or does blog cover this? And where's a topical focus for us as an asset within a wider brand? It gets very, very nuanced. But then you have the question of how do... Okay, I figured out the topic, how do I handle the topic? What tone do I take? Once you answer those kinds of questions, you'll usually end up creating content that comes off as in a professional authoritative manner that has nuance to it, which is exactly what you want to be doing from an SEO point of view at the same time. So I think I call that brand sniff test. Does it sound right, look right, formatted right, I'm speaking in the right way to the right people? If it passes that brand test, it'll usually pass the EEAT test from the SEO point of view. Crystal Carter: Right. And do you think it's important that people identify what their expertise, what their authority is if they were ever to- Mordy Oberstein: I would say yes. If you want to create actual a authoritative content, you need to know, not an expert on this, needs somebody else. Crystal Carter: Right? Okay. So like- Mordy Oberstein: Doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means you need somebody else to do it. Crystal Carter: Right? So I'm not an expert on NASCAR, for instance. So like- Mordy Oberstein: Neither am I. Crystal Carter: ... no, that's not it. That's not a thing. Even if I did all the keyboard research in the world, I am not a NASCAR- Mordy Oberstein: And that shines through. Crystal Carter: I thought I fooled you, I thought I fooled you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the only people you're fooling are people who are not going to buy your product anyway. Crystal Carter: Right, or people who don't really know. And just because you watched Talladega Nights does not make you a NASCAR expert. Mordy Oberstein: Didn't finish watching that. So I would've even know that much. That's how little I know about NASCAR. Crystal Carter: Shake and bake. Mordy Oberstein: But that's really the point is that you can't fudge that expertise. I taking a look at the product review update, the February 2023 product review update recently, and a lot of the top ranking pages, and I'm not getting into why they're ranking, why they're not ranking. But some of the things that they're doing just from a pure content point of view, if you want to compete with them at a content level, they're bringing in expertise, be it the Wirecutter, those kind of websites, are bringing in a level of expertise that you can't fake. And one of the pros and cons I saw around what was animal carriers? The sites that weren't ranking well, were putting things like, oh, it's too small or too big, or whatever it is. I don't know. Very generic things. And the sites that are ranking well and forget the ranking for a second, just from a pure content point of view, were things like, it smells weird when you unbox it. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: You could not like... There's the only way that is, you either completely made that up or you actually took it out of the box. Crystal Carter: Right. But I think also that's the kind of thing that people will be searching for. But that's also the kind of thing that you like this, I think people have talked a lot about how TikTok is affecting Google and Google search, but I think that actually one of the things that's most prescient about TikTok's emergence is that TikTok is very real. There's a lot of people who are sharing very personal, very unfiltered, very deep things about themselves, about topics, et cetera. There's very few boundaries on TikTok. And so there's people... And in fact, if you're too polished on TikTok, people are like, "Ugh, you're too polished. I don't believe you." Similarly, this piece of content that you've seen that was like, "Oh, this smells funny." I recently saw a piece of content that was talking about steam rollers or some hair rollers or ceramic rollers or something like that. And they were like, "We tested all these rollers." And they posted the ugliest picture I've ever seen of all of the different rollers that they had, and they had six different sets and it was on a desk and it was an ugly photo, but I believe that they actually took that photo, that that's an actual photo that somebody actually took when they actually reviewed whatever it is they were reviewing. That realness is also something that can help differentiate you from AI generated content, which is something that you need to think about. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So again, take that point, take the AI point. It's a great point by the way, and don't feel weird about taking a picture of whatever it is on a desk, because if you look at the big brands and what they're doing the same thing, they're going the travel carrier for animals, they had actual pictures at the airport of the dog and the carrier on the conveyor belt, whatever it was, at the airport. It wasn't a very pretty picture, but it was real. And again, going back to say a brand marketing or content marketing mindset, if you're trying to distinguish yourself, forget ranking, but you're just trying to distinguish yourself in front of users that your content is real content written by real people as opposed to AI, you're going to approach the content and the way of writing the content differently. Now, think that Google's able to detect AI content and let's say for just argument's sake, it says if it's AI content and it's a really Y in, Y out kind of query, we're not going to rank it. I know they're not going to say... That they're not, but just argument's sake, hypothetically they are. The content that you just wrote from a brand and a content point of view now automatically completely aligns the search. Crystal Carter: Right. So Joe Hall, who we've had on the podcast previously and who's a fantastic SEO was talking about, he recently put out a prompt generator tool, which I tried out and was interesting. And the other thing that he had on his site was how to write content that's better than ChatGPT. And one of the things that he said, and I thought this was really interesting, and one of the things he said was, have an opinion. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Have an opinion. If you ask one of these chatbots, what's your opinion? It's like, "I am a robot. I do not have an opinion. I cannot give you an opinion because I'm a robot." That's what it'll tell you. So have an opinion, actually have an opinion, and that actual opinion of, "Oh, it smells funny." That's like, a robot can't tell whether or not it smells funny, it can't smell. Mordy Oberstein: SEOs have been making this mistake for a long time. Forget the AI side, which we'll get more into later. I know we disagree about listicles and I will fully admit there are value to listicles. However, many times SEOs write these sort of listicle kind of content because they wanted to rank and it has no opinion, it has no unique value, it has no targeting, it has none of the good stuff that a content marketer, if you were thinking like a content marketer would've put in there. Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Interesting. I think that the tricky thing with it, and we're going to talk about featured snippets coming up and the featured snippets love and a listicle, which is one of the reasons why content marketers love a listicle. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not against a listicle. Crystal Carter: But I think one of the things that's tricky about it, and I was thinking about this too the other day, so again, I said, I used Joe Hall's Prompt Generator and I plugged it in and it pulled out an article, and the article that it wrote was perfectly solid. It was solid it and stuff. And so those sorts of listicle kinds of things like that are thin, that don't have an opinion, that don't have additional value. Somebody can get that from one of these AI tools and pretty solidly, pretty solidly like enough to get going to maybe do a deeper search or whatever. So it is the deeper, more brand aware, more high value content. And also I think people need to think about the kinds of content you have on your site, once they're on your site, that adds value to your site and making sure that your content aligns with your brand is going to be absolutely crucial in this new space. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of value and insights, Sarah McDowell is going to join us as we ask her, how does marketing media assets like a podcast change based on medium and media? Here's Captivate's Sarah McDowell. Sarah McDowell: There are some similarities and differences when marketing a podcast or video, compared to say something like a blog post or written content. Similar to an article or written content, the title needs to be engaging. You need to give people reason to check your content out. We can't be boring folks. You also have to think about keywords, the queries people are searching in places like Google where you should be coming up. For example, with a podcast, you need to think about keywords for your main show title and show description, but you also need to think about keywords for your episode titles. Long-tail keywords work great here. Use something like the tool AlsoAsked which generates data from people also ask on Google. We also need to think about repurposing. So when you repurpose blog content, let's say into social media posts, et cetera, you should be doing the same for your podcast and videos. Something that I have tried for my podcast is Twitter threads. So taking the key takeaways from a podcast episode and creating a Twitter thread with the last tweet in the thread, asking people to check out your podcast episode. Now this is great because people are going to engage and we share different parts of the Twitter threads and you're providing value there and then, so you're giving people more reason to check the thing out at the end. I also share video clips of the podcast. When I record, I also record a video, which I then clip into a short two-minute video to share over social media. Obviously, links are also important. Your in external back links, links pointing to you and internal links. There's some examples of how it's the same. Differences then. First up, it can be tricky with discoverability. There's a debate whether search engines like Google are automatically transcribing audio or not. If they are, it's not going to be perfect. Sorry, John Mueller, search engines are great when it comes to webpages and textbook. Other assets can be tricky, like we know that they can't read texts on an image. You need to think about how people come across your podcast and videos. Sure, they may go to YouTube or they may go to a podcast app, but people will be searching for you in other places. So for example, according to Semrush, there's over 32,000 searches globally for keywords that include best podcast and over 18,000 for keywords that include best video. I reckon that number is even higher. More people are searching. Google shows video in the search, so you must have seen it when you are searching for different things and you get a YouTube carousel or a YouTube video. But podcasts are a different ballgame. They used to show a podcast episode carousel when you were on a mobile, but they took this away in February this year. I know, boo/ we need to help Google surface our podcasts and episodes. This is why a website is important here, ways like I've mentioned before, but also transcripts okay? Taking the time to use it all, I use Poddin. My mate Danny is Scottish and he says he finds Poddin the most accurate. But you need to use a tool to transcribe, but you also need to tidy up the text. There's always mistakes and you need to remove the filler words. Make it easy for Google. If you have this transcript visible on your podcast episode page, this is going to help as much relevant information as you can to help Google search engines understand your content and what it is about. There's my thoughts, or my two pence, I think that's the right saying, on the matter. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Sarah for that. Don't forget to check out Sarah has a wonderful SEO podcast called the SEO Mindset podcast. We'll link to that in the show notes. Yeah, so a lot of what you're saying goes into what we're talking about before about repurposing, but to target your audience the right way and I love repurposing content. Especially like let's say around a podcast, you throw out an audiogram, you're targeting what the user wants on social, which is interaction. So an interactive asset like an audiogram, and you have the add a bonus of repurposing content at the same time. So two birds with one stone. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think that making sure that you are tapping into where your audience is across the web is really, really important. So the repurposing task does that. So you might have people that are on your podcast that are there. You might have people who might be interested in your podcast on Twitter, then you might have people who are interested in your podcast who are on LinkedIn, and making sure that you're available and visible on those spaces is really, really, really important and should absolutely part of your content marketing journey. I think we had Ross Simmons, who is the king of content distro on a webinar talking about this as well, and there's some great tactics that you can implement to make sure that you're making your content get the best opportunity to be seen. Mordy Oberstein: So because we're talking about SEO from the content mindset, one of the things that generally greatly impacts SEOs and content marketers alike because they just drive so much traffic in theory and can serve as part of your branded efforts also are featured snippets. But is there very existence in jeopardy? Join us now as we explore whether or not AI chat experiences on search engines are going to make featured snippets obsolete as we explore the new trends on the SERP with the little segment we call going, going, Google. Speaker 4: And it's going, going, google! It's out of here! Mordy Oberstein: So there's Bard, which is Google's AI chat experience, you.com, the chat experience bing in the chat experience, and- Crystal Carter: Neeva. Mordy Oberstein: Neeva, I apologize to all the other search engines who have... Brave... Have a chat experience and I didn't mention them. Apologies. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry. One of the interesting outcomes of that, let's just stick with Google for a minute. They're going, if not by the time this episode airs, release Bard into the wild. What does that mean for feature snippets? Meaning if I'm searching for "How do I change a tire? What are the five steps of changing a tire?" And you currently get either a video or a list or a paragraph of how to change a tire. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But now I just go to the chat and it basically gives me the exact same information that a featured snippet... So what does that mean for featured snippets? You see the problem? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I do. I do. So they're constantly tinkering with featured snippets. Google is constantly tinkering with featured snippets. Mordy Oberstein: Forever. Crystal Carter: I've done a few presentations on featured snippets, and it's always exhausting because they're constantly changing what what's going on with them. So you have to update every single time and they'll change it the week before you have to present and the whole thing. Anyway, enough about me. The thing that people forget about featured snippets is that they are also powered by AI. Everybody's like, "Oh, AI and search!" Y'all. AI has been all over search for years. And Google had that presentation that they did and they talked about, "Oh, we're doing AI with our visual search, and we're using AI for this, and we're using AI for that." And it's true, they've been using AI for featured tidbits for years. They go into your content, they pull it out and they re-structure it on the SERP. Sometimes they'll put bullets in where there aren't, sometimes they'll put numbers in where there aren't. Sometimes they'll add in pictures from other places. So this tooling is already there. What is likely to happen is that some of the things that they've been toying with, with featured snippets are probably going to come to the fore. So with featured snippets, one of the things they were talking about for a while was adding in multiple links to the featured snippets, so you wouldn't have an exclusive featured snippet for each query- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they've played with that a few times. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they've played with that a few times, but I mean that's fair game now. Although at the moment they're now talking about not having any links in their chat, which I think is a real challenge. Mordy Oberstein: That's a different... like that's a whole different- Crystal Carter: That's another real challenge. Mordy Oberstein: ... let's just say for a minute there are links in the chat, in a perfect where I don't want to- Crystal Carter: Things are happening. Mordy Oberstein: ... That's a Pandora's box. I'm not opening on this podcast. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of things changing at the moment. So who knows where we'll be by the time this airs. But I think Bing have certainly done this, and I think Google have done this sometimes, but they'll sometimes have two featured snippets. So if it's a controversial issue then they'll have Mordy Oberstein: Bing, or Google has a multifaceted featured snippet. Crystal Carter: So they'll have multiple things there. And to be honest, most of the time for most quick queries, the featured snippet is useful. Is useful, is enough, is pretty much the same as what you would get from a quick answer from one of the generator search things. So yeah, I think it will absolutely change, and I think that we might see more people using, you can opt out a featured snippets, we might see more people doing that and depending on how the search results are shown. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's complicated. What do you think? Mordy Oberstein: So I'm with you and your point about the featured snippets have changed so much over time is really, I think, on point. First off, I did a study a long time ago. Just cause you're in a featured snippet doesn't mean that you show there consistently over a 30-day period. I don't remember the numbers, but it's not the case. You can go... I'll link to it in the show notes, it's from years ago though. So it's a little out of date, but you don't get that... If you're Wikipedia, maybe you get the 100% of coverage in the featured snippet for 30 days. Other than that, it usually, there's a dominant URL and a secondary URL that Google usually inter-disperses throughout the month. Obviously Google's not thinking about it on a monthly basis, but as a study, I needed a timeframe. Anyway with that so featured snippets has evolved and I think that one of our issues as SEOs is we look at what's on the SERP now and we think that's how it should be forever. If you've been in SEO long enough, you'd remember there were no feature snippets ever. Crystal Carter: 2017, 2016? Mordy Oberstein: Probably 2014 I think was the, I'm terrible with time but I think it was 2014 was when featured snippets came into the play. I could be confusing with direct answers. Anyway, there's a different problem. All part of the same problem sort of, kind of, maybe not, but it doesn't matter. Well, it does matter. One of the things that I think is really important for us to realize though, is that these things are constantly changing. So I actually did a whole blog post about this on the Wix SEO about why Google is switching to a content diversity focus as opposed to a one true answer authority focus. So back in the day, Google loved being the one true authority. You put in a search query, gave you back a featured snippet, the one URL. And as you mentioned, Bing has been not doing that for a very long time, showing you multiple URLs for featured snippets, or a carousel of featured snippets. Over the last, let's say six months to a year, Google's been testing all sorts of formats where they're throwing in multiple URLs throughout the featured snippet or they're having one under the other, under the other, under the other, a multiple things that we mentioned, like- Crystal Carter: Like an accordion type thing. Mordy Oberstein: All sorts of variations around that because I think Google realized what we mentioned earlier, that content consumption trends have changed, and just like people want more personal content, they also want a more diverse set of content. And there's a recent change to the top stories carousel, Google's showing multiple perspectives now. This is a change for Google overall, where it's going away from the one true answer, "We know everything. We are Google." to multiple perspectives, multiple URLs, a diverse set of URLs and perspectives, and I think it's important to take the question of AI replacing featured snippets from that point of view. In which case the format of you put in how to change a tire, you get back a AI generated snippet with multiple citations. Let's take the Bing version of it for the moment. That is the future of featured snippets anyway. So yes, it might replace it, but that already is the future of featured snippets Crystal Carter: Right and also they replace featured snippets all the time. They've also replaced featured snippets with some of these from sources around the web dropdowns, which are essentially AI generated. That is AI curated content, and then they put it in. So if you type in "seven wonders of the world," or "50 books to read before you die," or something like that, then you may get one of these dropdown things and it'll say, so let's say 50 books to read before you die. And one of them is let's say 1984, and then they'll list these 50 books and then there'll be a dropdown and then there's a bunch of featured snippet type content underneath those things. But that list is very similar to the AI generated chat because they don't have a source for who came up with the list. They just put the list on there. I've always found that a bit challenging because some of those lists, if I wrote a list for instance, then somebody could say, "Well, you might be biased because you are Western or because of whatever, and so your list will be based on your biases, which I can see from who you are or whatever." Whereas if Google puts that on, then that's a different sort of, "This is the answer" sort of perspective. So I think those lists, those dropdown lists are very similar to that space. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Totally. Exactly. Crystal Carter: I think that the featured snippet has always been a challenging beast to wrangle because they show up, they go away, they show up, they go away. Mordy Oberstein: Listen, I don't think they're going to die. I think they might be secondary. You might have the chat experience first and then you might have a feature snippet afterwards is what Bing does now currently. So yeah, they'll still be there. Are they still as relevant? Probably not because they're probably not getting the same kind of traffic because Google or in this case, if we're talking about Bing, is showing the chat experience above it. But that is where featured snippets were headed already. Crystal Carter: I think also it's important to remember that they're part of an ecosystem. So they're also, and the people also ask, they're also in the voice search, the voice search return, which that may very well change with AI as well. They're also part of the visual search might turn them up. That there's lots of different parts of things that it will show up in and a knowledge panels that'll be like a dropdown on a knowledge panel as well. So I think that, and that goes to more- Mordy Oberstein: More panels. Crystal Carter: More panels. So I think that goes to the idea of making sure that you've got content that is able to touch on all of those parts of the SERP`. I think that the featured snippet is less of a destination and more part of the journey. Mordy Oberstein: So perhaps something has changed with featured snippets that we should cover in the news. Who knows? Perhaps not, probably not the case because this is not what's been in focus, whatever, but it's possible. You'll have to wait and find out. Crystal Carter: I'm going to guess it's going to be something about AI. That's my guess. Mordy Oberstein: There was one episode, okay, couple of weeks ago, or I don't know if you caught the line where I said, "Okay, there was other news in SEO this week, but it wasn't about AI, so who cares?" Crystal Carter: Just AI, Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, AI, AI, AI, AIO. Mordy Oberstein: AIO. As we AAAIO ourselves over to the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Geez Louise, what is going on? A lot, and it all has to do with the page experience, update, ranking system or lack thereof. I'll explain. First off, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable Google Search Console to drop page experience report, mobile usability report and mobile friendly tests. Yes, you heard that, right, but it's all a little bit confusing. So one, the page experience report Google added in 2021 is going away. Then in December of 2023, Google will also drop the mobile usability report from Google Search Console along with the mobile friendly test API and tool. Barry speculates this is related to the recent layoffs at Google and resource issues they are subsequently having. Who am I to argue with Barry? On top of all of that, you know the relatively new page where Google talks about their different rankings, algorithms, and different ranking systems? Well, they just removed the page experience update/ranking system from the page. It's gone completely. Barry speculates that the algorithm was pretty much a nothing burger, putting words in Barry's mouth there, which Google basically used to try to convince us that making these changes to our pages was really important. Wow Barry, diving into the whole conspiracy world now, aren't we? This time I see things slightly ever so different from Barry. Forgive me, Barry, Google here said quote, "It was not," meaning the page experience ranking system, "... was not a separate ranking system and it did not combine all these signals into one single page experience signal." So I guess they removed it, but I think what's going on here is that Google might now have a different way of defining page experience more broadly. Hear me out. Okay. While all this was happening and as also reported by none other than the King of SERPs, Barry Schwartz, Google added page experience guidance around the helpful content update saying "Provide a great page experience. Google's core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience. Site owners seeking to be successful with our systems should not focus on only one or two aspects of page experience. Instead, check if you're providing an overall great page experience across many aspects. For more advice see our page." That updated page that Google said see our page has some really interesting things on it, such as questions to self success page experience. These include obviously things around Core Web Vitals as you would expect, but also questions like how easily can visitors navigate to or locate the main content of your pages? Or is the page designed so visitors can easily distinguish the main content from other content on your page? See, what I think is happening here is Google might be redefining page experience as basically usability, and I wonder if they will assess this by proxy, meaning using various aspects of the algorithm to simulate how a human would best assess good page experience or good page usability. Meaning that the page experience is far more abstract, far more subtle, and is not unified in any way, shape, or form within the algorithm. Hence, they removed it, meaning the page experience ranking system, from their ranking system page. Why? Again, because it might include or it might be headed towards including way more subtle, way more abstract, and way more broadly defined aspects of experience or usability. What do you think, Barry? Do you agree? Parenthetically Google also added a section about EEAT to the helpful content guidance page saying quote, "While EEAT itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good EEAT is useful." This all feels like an SEO, soap opera. And with that, that is this week's snappiest of news. I hope you weren't disappointed with that snappy news. If you were expecting major news around either AI or feature snippets that wasn't covered. Crystal Carter: I found it to be incredibly newsworthy. Mordy Oberstein: That's why we covered it really. Crystal Carter: Right? Because it was the news. Mordy Oberstein: It was new news for everybody. Crystal Carter: Just kidding. Mordy Oberstein: You know what may be new news to you if you're in the SEO world, although probably not, let's be honest here. Is our follow of the week, who is coming from the content marketing world? Does that make sense? Right? We're covering the overlapping content marketing and SEO, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So here's a content marketing person for you. Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Ann Handley. Crystal Carter: And Handley. Mordy Oberstein: A legend, an absolute legend in the content marketing space. She's done an absolute ton for the content marketing space. Of course, I think if I look through my Twitter feed, like my Twitter follow list, whatever, one of the first people I think I've ever followed ever on Twitter. Crystal Carter: She's incredibly well respected and with great reason. She's very strategic and has a lot of resources available for people to get sucked into and has a reputation that absolutely precedes her. Mordy Oberstein: And you could check out what she's doing over at MarketingProfs. It's a great website to learn more about writing and content and content marketing, content writing. There are events that she has. There's a lot there. So check out marketingprofs.com and definitely check out Ann Handley, whose handle is at @marketingprofs. So it's at the word marketing and P-R-O-F-S, profs, we'll include it in the show notes because who's listening and spelling at the same time right now? I don't know why I do that, but I feel like I have to do that. I have to spell it out in case maybe you won't go to the show notes. Crystal Carter: Some people are auditory learners. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I don't know who those people are. Those people are like that's not- Crystal Carter: There are people, they listen to podcasts. Mordy Oberstein: There probably are, there are, there are, but even spelling of names. I'm isolating our audio learners right now. I'm sorry. Crystal Carter: Have you ever had called someone and they just had said their number? Like you called someone and they're like 555-555, and you're like, what? Mordy Oberstein: I have no idea what you just... Yeah, every time I have no- Crystal Carter: Sometimes like when people answer the phone, some people tell me, instead of saying hello, they just tell you their phone number. Mordy Oberstein: When I ask like, "Okay, what's your number?" I have to ask for three times. Crystal Carter: I also don't like it when people, so I say my phone number, my mobile phone number in a certain way, and if somebody says it back to me in a different way, I'm like, I don't even know whose number that is. I don't understand. Mordy Oberstein: Is that your number? Yes. Crystal Carter: Right? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Yes it is. Yes it is. Crystal Carter: Probably. Mordy Oberstein: And then you're like worried like, oh man, I really hope they... they need to call me back. I didn't give them the wrong number. Crystal Carter: These are the things we think about. Mordy Oberstein: You know what you can't go wrong with is tuning into next week's episode. Thank you for joining us on the SERPs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to shape an SEO campaign. Use cookie cutters and you shape it with those cookie cutter out. That's how you shape an SEO campaign. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great webinars and content we have over 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 or both. 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

Constance Chen is the Director of Search Marketing at Moving Traffic Media in New York. She specializes in marketing strategy, building Gen AI-driven marketing systems, technical SEO, and content strategy. She studies and explores AI developments and machine learning, writing about industry advancements and providing insights on emerging innovations. Constance Chen Director of Search Marketing at Moving Traffic Media Constance Chen is the Director of Search Marketing at Moving Traffic Media in New York. She specializes in marketing strategy, building Gen AI-driven marketing systems, technical SEO, and content strategy. She studies and explores AI developments and machine learning, writing about industry advancements and providing insights on emerging innovations. Articles & Resources 18 Aug 2025 10 ways Gemini Live can supercharge your SEO tasks 20 Jun 2025 9 ways to use MCP and agentic AI in your marketing stack 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