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Petra is an SEO consultant with a background of working in-house for B2C & B2B brands, TUI, Jack Wills, as well as enterprise software brands, Yext, and Botify. She is also an international conference speaker. Petra Kis-Herczegh SEO Consultant Petra is an SEO consultant with a background of working in-house for B2C & B2B brands, TUI, Jack Wills, as well as enterprise software brands, Yext, and Botify. She is also an international conference speaker. Articles & Resources 15 Aug 2024 SEO career development: How to prioritize your growth when skills change every year 16 May 2023 Beyond the basics: Conversations for developing customized SEO strategies Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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

Einat Hoobian-Seybold is the Head of Product SEO and Accessibility at Wix. She began her career in SEO, developing organic growth strategies for leading global brands, before discovering her passion for product development. Einat Hoobian-Seybold Head of Product SEO & Accessibility at Wix Einat Hoobian-Seybold is the Head of Product SEO and Accessibility at Wix. She began her career in SEO, developing organic growth strategies for leading global brands, before discovering her passion for product development. Today, Einat leads Wix’s SEO and accessibility product vision, creating impactful tools that make SEO and accessibility approachable and effective for more than 200 million users worldwide. Articles & Resources 26 Jan 2026 How to connect your Wix & Wix Studio websites to Bing 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

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

Back SEO keyword performance tracker Google Sheet Drill down into keyword tracking & positions, branded & non-branded traffic and CTRs with this SEO worksheet. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this Google Sheet to: Spot user queries that you could answer with new content Track queries about your brand See how your keywords are doing in specific positions Quantify the rate of branded vs. non-branded traffic to your site Assess your click-through rates (CTR) Olga Zarr SEO Consultant and CEO, SEOSLY LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Olga Zarr is the founder and CEO of SEOSLY, where she shares her knowledge in the form of in-depth articles, tutorials, and videos. As an SEO consultant with 10+ years of experience working at agencies and in-house, she specializes in technical SEO and in-depth SEO audits. More about this topic Once you’ve carried out your keyword research you can use these topics in your SEO content strategy to refresh your content or to update your on-site SEO . 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

Can you have too much of a good thing? SEOs and marketers often rely on data - but is it too much sometimes? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter tackle the paradox of data overload with Katy Powell, PR Director & Co-founder of Bottled Imagination. They explore why a high search volume for a keyword like “buy shoes” doesn’t necessarily mean more traffic and conversions, and how Google’s search query filtering is reshaping SEO strategies. Qualifying the data is the most important factor as we swim in the SEO seas. Plus, we dive into LLM training and the cycle of updates to the datasets of all of the most popular Large Language Model tools. Join us as we unravel the art of data-driven creativity on episode 116 of SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Can you have TOO much SEO data? Can you have too much of a good thing? SEOs and marketers often rely on data - but is it too much sometimes? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter tackle the paradox of data overload with Katy Powell, PR Director & Co-founder of Bottled Imagination. They explore why a high search volume for a keyword like “buy shoes” doesn’t necessarily mean more traffic and conversions, and how Google’s search query filtering is reshaping SEO strategies. Qualifying the data is the most important factor as we swim in the SEO seas. Plus, we dive into LLM training and the cycle of updates to the datasets of all of the most popular Large Language Model tools. Join us as we unravel the art of data-driven creativity on episode 116 of SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 116 | January 8, 2025 | 36 MIN 00:00 / 36:44 This week’s guests Katy Powell Paul Andre de Vera is a 15+ year B2B digital marketer who creates engaging, educational, and entertaining video content that ranks. His innovative approach has made "Dre" a sought-after speaker, online educator, and organic growth strategist for B2B companies like SAP and Workday. He's a diehard Raiders fan who lives with his two Yorkies, Buddha and Santo. You'll find "Dre" hosting the livestream SEO Video Show during Friday lunch, which has accumulated over 75k watch hours. He always looks for the next great place to devour a delicious rib-eye steak and occasionally sip a glass of whiskey. Today, you'll find him providing SEO consultation to hyper-growth startups Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who loves all things data, SEO data, LLM data, AI data, analytics data, GSC data, third party tool data, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello people of the internet. I hope you are well. Mordy Oberstein: They can't answer. How do we ever know if they're well or not? Tell us. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Do you think that we are going to be able to hear from them? They should tell us. They should tag us. Mordy Oberstein: Oh no, no. That opens up Pandora's box for all the hypochondriacs of the world to be like, "Oh, I'll tell you why I'm not doing well." Crystal Carter: "Hey, my sciatica's playing up, the weather's gone and I'm really struggling." Mordy Oberstein: Like, "Hey, how are you doing?" passing by in the grocery store, like somebody you don't really know so well, I don't know, a neighbor down the block kind of thing you never talk to and they're like, "Oh well, you know..." No, no, no. Didn't really mean it. Crystal Carter: Fine. Fine is the answer. Fine. Mordy Oberstein: Fine. Or, "Yeah, I've been better, but things will get better." That's fine too. Tolerable. Fine. As long as a conversation results in three seconds and me going to get a jar of pickles and you going to get whatever you're buying. Crystal Carter: Exactly, exactly. I think sometimes you just got to keep it moving. Mordy Oberstein: Just keep it moving. Too spicy early on the podcast? Crystal Carter: I don't know, I don't know. It's like maybe they'll just start sharing stats. Maybe they'll pull out their health monitor thing and start telling me about their BMI and stuff. Just like too much data. Maybe that's what they'll give you. Mordy Oberstein: You know what my blood sugar is right now? Nope. This Service Hub podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can subscribe to our SEO newsletter. Search for it over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter and take our SEO course. But it's also where you can get keyword data right inside the platform with our native integrations with Semrush, SE Ranking, Wincher, as this week we ask, can you ever have too much data? Let's explore the side that says you can never have too much of a good thing, as well as a side that says too much data might be a distraction, but also how is SEO data used today and how does it differ from yesteryear? Bottled imaginations, PR director and co-founder Katy Powell chimes in on using data for creative campaigns that get links, high DA ones too, plus we'll chat about the different data LLM based search engines may use. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So throw on another scoop onto that cone and order an extra slice, because like carbs, you can never have too much of a good thing, which is SEO data on this, the 106th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Wow, that really tied into the blood sugar thing. Blood sugar now, extra slices and scoops. I didn't plan that. Crystal Carter: What? You've lost me, but I hope everything is well with you. Mordy Oberstein: I'm fine. Crystal Carter: Okay, good. I am fine, I'm fine. Yeah, there was a lot of data for my little brain to handle. So on this topic, this is something that's been rattling around in my head for a little while. We are inundated with data. And speaking of those health tracker things, I saw somebody who was like, "I don't need to know all of this stuff about myself. It's too much information." I've got one of those apps and it tells you all of this stuff, your oxygen... I don't even know. I don't know what it means. And I think that this is something that happens a lot of time in marketing. Marketing is full of charts and stats and graphs and everything. And it's really, really good to have great information about what's going on on your website. We, in our Wix studio tools, we've got Google Search Console data, we have Wix Analytics data, we have stuff that will tell you about people who have come in and what pages they've clicked on and where they've gone to and which channels people are coming to your website. Lots of that sort of stuff. And these things are fantastic, but sometimes if you have too much data, for clients, it can be a little bit overwhelming, for instance. So if you're talking to clients, and I've had this before, where I had a client who was new to us as an agency, when I was working in agency side, and they said, "We get these reports," from their current or previous agency. They said, "We get these reports, but we have no idea what they mean." And there were so many charts on that, and they had so much information, but the client didn't understand them. And I think that from a reporting side, there can definitely be data overload. We have a fantastic article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, and in fact we also have a fantastic course from Judith Lewis, and she talks about these in both of these. When you're talking to stakeholders, the executive summary is your friend. So have the data. If you're the person who's managing the data, who's looking at all of the information, the executive summary is your friend. Give me the TLDR of why I should care about this stack of stats and bubble charts and pie graphs and bar charts and all of that sort of stuff. Sum it up with some key indicators. And Judith Lewis, in her article about talking to multi-stakeholder reporting, talks about all of this. And in her course in the Wix Studio Academy, she gets into all of these details as well. And it's absolutely super, super valuable and will absolutely upgrade how you relate to clients. Because you need to make sure that they only have the data that they need, otherwise their eyes will glaze over and they will get bored. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry, you lost me. I got glazed over and talking about numbers. I blacked out there for a minute. Crystal Carter: Right? And I think it's important to remember that, that there's some people who, if you give them too many numbers and too many digits and too many charts, they will just tune out. I've been in meetings before where I've been pitching to clients, where I've been presenting my data, and I'm like, "Yeah, look at this and look at that," and it's too granular. They need to know sales went up, conversions went up, traffic went up. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Also, even when they do, let's say they are a numbers person, and you're going into this little minutia of this and this. We fixed this for having broken links. And they're not an SEO person, you're talking about number of broken links, like yes, they might understand, they might even be a former SEO person. It's a distraction and it can show, by the way, that you're distracted, that you're not focused on the right thing. And maybe you are, by the way, maybe you are distracted. Because sometimes data is distracting. So much data that you look here, you look there. And I'll say data, I know in certain things or for certain types of things, data is really linear, it's very direct and it's very logical. The number of broken links was 100, now it's 50. Or maybe it's five now, you did a better job. When you're starting to look at things that are a little more complex than the number of broken links, so then you start to look at activities. What was the user activity? They went to this page. But it doesn't explain the behavior. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: They're two different things. Crystal Carter: So here's another thing. So for instance, I've got an article on bounce rate. For GA4 they updated what bounce rate means. And bounce rate for GA4, before it was like people went to the site, they didn't click anything and they left. And now on GA4, essentially bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. So if they engaged by 10%, then the bounce rate was 90%. And that's the inverse of it. And it has to do with clicks and things like that. Now, one of the things that I was looking at is people are very, in terms of data, this is something that people get really hung up on, as bounce rate, is certainly clients, also because it's kind of got a good name. But one of the things that's tricky is if you just look at bounce rate as a data point, it doesn't tell the full story. Whereas if you use something like Microsoft Clarity, and I'm shouting out loads of articles, we've got a great article on Microsoft Clarity by Celeste Gonzalez. Mordy Oberstein: And integration with Microsoft Clarity. Crystal Carter: Right? Where you can check it out on your Wix studio website. And one of the things that they point out is that for that tool, not only can you see how far people scroll, but you can also see rage clicks, where people are like, "Why can't I click this? Why isn't this working?" And they've clicked it seven times, expecting for the word that's bold to be a link and it's not a link, and they clicked it a bunch of times. And that tells you a different story. So I think the other thing about data is making sure that you have the right tool to measure what you're seeing. So it might be that maybe you see the bounce rate thing and maybe that goes, okay, that's a clue. That bit of data is a clue, but that's a clue that you might need another tool to help you get into that information. And I think that's really, really important. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it gets especially more complicated when you're looking at things. Okay, it's not like a UI or UX interface issue. You're trying to explain why did the user take this action? Why didn't they take it? Why did they share this post? Everyone went online, they read this article, they all shared it, why? What happened? So the data will tell you that everyone shared it, where they shared it to, who shared it, when they shared it, but it can't exactly explain why they shared it and what was different. And that's something where you have to actually create a narrative. Data should help you create narratives. And that's where you can put together, if you look at the other articles that people shared, when they shared them, and now you're looking at this article, you can find, hey, there's a common theme between the articles that people tend to share, now I can create a narrative. Because I know SEOs balk at this, sometimes correlation does equal causation. Well, it doesn't actually equal causation, but sometimes causation is good enough, and sometimes causation is accurate, and sometimes causation, it's life is the best that you have. And if you have very strong correlation, you can create a narrative. And you can use data to create a narrative, but don't get lost in, I don't know, it's not one-to-one. Crystal Carter: Right. And so I think this brings us on to what you should use data for. So sometimes you get loads of data, like SEO tools will spit out lots of data points. They'll say, "Oh, this has low HTML on this page." And you're like, that may or may not be an issue, because maybe it's just a thank you page and maybe that's fine. And so there's lots of data points that you get. But how can you use the data? Once you have good data, how can you use it? One of the ways, you use this really, really regularly, Mordy, and I'm a big fan of how you do this really, really well, is data studies. So data studies, where you're able to concentrate on a particular data point and look at how that plays out in different scenarios and things like that, that can be incredibly valuable for progressing an idea in your industry. But it can also be incredibly valuable for bringing together lots of information from a research point of view. And I think that that is something that can be super, super useful. But when you're doing that, you need to be really targeted with the kinds of data that you're looking at. And you need to, again, I think we have another podcast on this, so do check that out, about data studies and how you can make sure that you're looking at the right points. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I mean, by the way, one of the advantages of using a data study is you get the insight yourself out of it. Crystal Carter: And telling that story, as you were saying. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but also, so with the data it's realizing what are the boundaries of that story? What does it say? What doesn't it say? And yes, I can draw a conclusion, but how far can I go with a conclusion, or how strong is a conclusion? And sometimes it's fine to say, you know what, I conclude X, but I'm not 100% sure. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Also helpful. Also helpful. Crystal Carter: Definitely helpful. Definitely helpful. And I think that that's really important. So I think also it's important to sometimes, particularly if you're thinking about getting into thought leadership, sometimes if you're in a thought leadership space, you might be the first person talking about this topic. And so it might be that there's not a lot of data out there. So you can go like, this is what I can see, or this is what I've concluded from the data that I have. And people will take you at your word and they'll say, "Okay, well I will investigate this further," and they will add to that conversation. And so that's really, really useful as well. And this is a thought leadership tactic that is useful in any industry. So if you are somebody who's advising somebody or some of your clients to do some thought leadership, it's also okay for them to take a little bit of a risk and say, "I know this is a new idea, but I think this." And what I see very often is people who do that, people who are confident enough to set out their stall and take the information they have and to run with it, they get a lot of engagement, they get a lot of people interested in what they're saying, because that is an evolving conversation. If conversations that are already where we've got already got all of the information already sent out, that's ground that's already been covered. But if you've got something that's new, even if you don't have every single data point, that doesn't mean that the conversation isn't worth having, as long as you caveat with the fact that you're coming at it from your perspective and using the tools that you've got. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's like the abundance of SEO data. I don't know, keyword difficulty, keyword score this, that metric, search volume, there's a plethora of these metrics. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: They're all good. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: They're all great. By the way, Semrush has a cool new plugin its like a personalized keyword difficulty based on the assessment of your own site, how difficult is it for you. Which makes so much more sense, because I don't know if you want to rank for buy shoes, it's not difficult for Nike, they're ranking number two or number one. But here, we're super difficult. Anyway, but all of that, that's actually a good point. You have all this data, there's a ton of it out there, and I think if you're looking at doing SEO today, it needs to be qualified way more than it was ever. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely. If somebody says, oh, you just need to... People would look at a keyword like buy shoes. And Nike, as you said, they say, "Oh, there's tons of keyword search volume for that." And the other thing about it, is that just because a big search volume, that data point, just because there's big search volume doesn't mean you're going to get all of that. Mordy Oberstein: Doesn't mean it's for you anyway. Crystal Carter: It doesn't mean it's for you anyway. And it doesn't mean that the people that go to that keyword, that Google is sending them to a website. We have another podcast on this with people talking about this as well, but for those head terms, Google's very often like, "That's not enough information, hun, can we filter you? What kind of shoes do you want? You want sandals, you want sneakers, you want high tops? What do you need, hun?" They're going to filter those people. So that's a starter query, and they will filter those people. And also, just because there's such high search volume doesn't mean there's high search intent, or doesn't mean there's high click intent at all. So it might just be that they're searching for how far is it from the moon to the sun? There might be an instant answer there. Nobody's necessarily expecting to click on anything. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Crystal Carter: So those data points, they're a clue, but you have to look into it as well. You can't just take those points at face value. Mordy Oberstein: Somebody asked me for my SEO predictions like 2025 kind of thing and I wrote, it's going to be less about overall visibility, and being at the right place at the right time, with the right tone, with the right message, at the exact right time, and resonance. Because just the way the internet is structured with AI ends, AI overviews and direct answers, and then consumers looking for being more specific and knowing what they want a little bit more, being more informed, not wanting to be nudged the same way, all those kind of things coming together. So you being able to use that data, not just to find the keyword, but using the data to find the right keyword or the right kind of keyword or the right kind of keywords or phrases or topics for the right audience, that you could be there at the right time, is how you should be using this data now versus how you should have been using this data 10 years ago maybe. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think the audience point is so key, because the audiences are so clutch right now. The way that people are doing spray and pray SEO of just going after big keywords and doing skyscraper posts and things like that, cool, you'll still get some traffic from that, but the data that you have on your audiences will give you a lot more information on what will actually resonate and what will actually cut through when we are in the sea of content that we find ourselves in with the proliferation of AI tools and AI capability for creating content. So if everybody has the ability to write pretty good content, then you need to have content, like you said, that's the right place, for the right audience, at the right time that they need to hear, and they go, "Oh yes, thank you Mordy, thank you Crystal." This is exactly what they needed. And that's genuinely helpful and I think that that's really important. Speaking of AI models, if you're building your AI models, data is super, super useful for this. It can help you to make sure that your models are doing the right things. AI models are also incredibly helpful for tidying up data. So if you get a massive data set for someone, one of my favorite uses for AI is to pull out the data points to sort of clean it up, so that you can use it for creating articles, so you can use it for telling that data story, so that you can use it for sharing online and things like that. So if you're not using AI for helping you to shape your data, then I highly recommend it. We have a great webinar with Ross Hudgens where he talks about that, and the team at Siege Media do this really, really well. So highly recommend that too. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking to use data to shape not just your AI models, but your creative campaigns in a way that gets links, well, here's the PR director and co-founder of Bottled Imagination, Katy Powell, on how to do just that. Katy Powell: We use data at all parts of the ideation process really when it comes to our creative campaigns. So first of all, researching into the topic area, we use content analysis tools which allow us to see really how many articles are written about a certain topic in our client's field at a certain time to validate whether that's a topic that the audience actually cares about. If we're going to do a big creative campaign, we still back this by insight. I think this really helps to answer that, "So what? Who cares?" point. Also, it really helps to remove the subjectivity of this campaign when we pitch it to the client. If we're able to say, there's been this many thousand articles written about this topic in this last year, so we really feel like it's something that A, your audience really reads about, and also cares about too. Then once we've got the topics, we can kind of start to delve into the types of stories that are being talked about around this. So something we see works quite well is if we see a topic's being talked about a lot within the client's field, but it's all opinion led, is there a way we can find some data and turn this into facts? So rather than just an opinion piece, we actually bring the facts and bring the data and create something kind of ownable to our client that acts as the sort of true resource for this information. For example, we've got a B2B Tech client. They want to land their marketing press. We saw that rebranding's talked about a lot within this kind of press. So we created a rebranding kind of hub of information of stats, which is now ranking, and it's also picking up links organically without us outreaching, because it's a true, strong resource of information for rebranding. That was also coupled with a really nice creative. I think we find if we've got some really solid data that's ownable to the client, plus a lovely creative, a beautiful piece of imagery or a video or whatever it is, and whatever the format is, that can be kind outreach gold. And then the kind of data that we would use within these campaigns could be anything really from search data. So Google search data. We use Glimpse quite a lot. Big online databases, social media stats, government reports. I love YouGov. I think YouGov is brilliant for even just getting your brain going in that field. I think unfortunately there's not really a quick fix for the data part. I think it is getting your hands dirty and research. We would usually say let's try and find a free resource before we go to something like a survey, unless it's a client that is in a field where we really do need to do a survey, and then we will do that. I do think though, it's always good just to kind of get stuck into research and try and find some free databases before you pay for something, because it can be quite expensive. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks so much, Katy. Make sure to give Katy Powell a big follow on social media. Links to our social media profiles in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, their team are fantastic. Katy and everyone over at Bottled Imagination are doing some fantastic work. When we were thinking about this, they were the first folks that I thought of because they are amazing at, like she said, their owned data. So some of the clients owned data to shape a newsworthy story. A prime example of this is they were working with someone with Dap Gamble and they were looking at NFTs, and they ended up getting tons and tons of media, 1500 pieces of coverage around the world, because they figured out from the data that they had that most NFTs are worth nothing. So they found out that when they looked at this, that most NFTs were dead NFTs, and they were able to pull something over. So they examined an entire asset class of 73,000 collection NFTs, and they found that most of them are worth nothing. And it went everywhere. It went absolutely everywhere. They have another campaign where they were looking at studies that said that public restrooms were likely to be removed, and so they had the toilets are endangered species or something was a thing. And they're really, really great at pulling together noteworthy information from data and driving a story. Mordy Oberstein: Finding gems. Crystal Carter: Yeah, finding gems. And I think that we think about this in our day-to-day. If you find one of those articles that has all of the data points for the thing that you're interested in, then you go back to that page loads. You'll go back to that page because it'll have lots of information. If you're interested in, I don't know, sheds or something, I recently bought a shed, and you wanted, what different types of wood, what different types of roofs, what different types of this? How long does a shed last? What's the average size of a shed? All of those different data points. If you've got people who are pulling together all of those data points from lots of different sources, then you're saving them time by creating something that's one big data set. And if you have that data set as part of your own information, then all the better. So that means that, for instance, with the case of the NFTs, there was only one place that had that much data. So if anybody wanted to talk about this topic, they have to come back to that piece of content. And this is the thing that Bottled Imagination are really great at, and this is something that I think that people talk about, how do we build links? It's like, do something link worthy. And they're really good at this, and data's a great way to do that. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of data and having lots of it, LLM search engines are looking at a wide variety of big data sources, which means it's time for us to run the little segment we call so many search engines. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like all we do is talk about LLM search engines now, by the way. That's the thing. I wake up in the morning, I'm like, "Yeah, I'm really bothered by LLM search engines. I really need to ponder them this morning for an hour over a cup of coffee." Crystal Carter: Dude, I've been doing a deck on this. Mordy Oberstein: This thing has gone viral. Your deck has gone viral. Queen of the LLM search engines. Crystal Carter: Do you know what it was? The reason why, it comes back to it, it's basically like people ask me, and then I ask myself. So people are like, "How do I show up in ChatGPT? How do I show up in Claude or Gemini?" and that sort of thing. And so then you start thinking. And I find that I end up writing things, and I think this is a data thing as well, and you do this with your studies, I know this, where you're like, what is this? You'll have a thing that sticks in your brain, and you're like, I really want to know if this equals this. And you can't get it out of your brain. If you can't get it out of your brain, you have to write it down. So that's the thing. Mordy Oberstein: So LLM search engines, they're obviously looking at lots of different data sources like, I don't know, the web, Wikipedia, all these mentions of you across the web, articles about you, kind of everything. They're kind of looking at everything. I wonder about social. How much you're looking at social. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Probably not. Reddit maybe. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So here's the thing. So a lot of these tools have content partnerships with various different folks. So Reddit has content partnerships. Mordy Oberstein: Right. And so maybe switch that. I don't think X does, but Reddit does. Crystal Carter: Reddit has content partnerships with OpenAI, and they have content partnerships with Google. Mordy Oberstein: The Goog. Crystal Carter: The Goog. So they've got partnerships with that. In terms of Wikipedia, all of the LLMs are trained on Wikipedia. Mordy Oberstein: LLM has been training in all your stuff for years, you haven't even noticed. Crystal Carter: Right. So they've all been trained on Wikipedia. There's 66 million pages on Wikipedia, plus all of the Wiki data stuff that comes with it. And it's all comments. It's all copyright free. So of course, if I was building an LLM, I would absolutely train it on Wikipedia. But the thing that people forget is that if it's trained on Wikipedia, it's essentially trained on entities. So all of the data that's backed up, that's on your entity, all of the information that's on your entity is attached to that as part of that. So I think that that's really important to think about. But in terms of other data, some of the content partnerships, OpenAI is out here like Thanos, collecting big publishers. So there's that post from Detailed that talks about 16 companies dominating Google search results. I'm sure we've all seen that diagram, which I find fascinating. And OpenAI already has content partnerships with three out of 16 of those publishers. Mordy Oberstein: So that's the whole thing, they have partnership with these publishers. Crystal Carter: Right. And that means that basically they have access to their whole archive of stuff. So that includes Hearst, Fox Media and Conde Nast, just from those top 16 publishers. But if you look at the web wider, another big one is News Corp. News Corp has tons and tons of properties. They also have a partnership with OpenAI, and it also includes, they also cover Prisa, Le Monde, Time, GDI, The Atlantic. So these are all things that are publisher collapse. I talk about this in my article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub or Wix Studio Learning Hub, which talks about SEO for brand visibility and LLMs, I talk about it there. So there's a list of these as well, but Perplexity also has content partnerships. So with Time, Entrepreneur, Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, Der Spiegel. Just saying... Crystal Carter: To be honest, from a little sidebar, it's a little bit of a random collection of publications there. But do you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Der Spiegel. Crystal Carter: So I think that it's important when you're looking at, if you're thinking about LLMs, the training data forms the basis for their knowledge. So with these LLMs, they will have a training data. They'll have a knowledge cutoff date that their training data goes up to, and it will vary by LLM. So for instance, and it will also vary within the LLM. So if you're using the free version of ChatGPT, for instance, if they don't have you on a test or something, which they sometimes do for mine, if you're using the free version of ChatGPT, the knowledge cutoff date for you is probably going to be around like September, 2021. But if you're using the premium version of ChatGPT, it could be as up to date as December, 2023. Claude- Mordy Oberstein: It's super up to date. Crystal Carter: Well, Claude is pulling in data from April, 2024 for their premium version. And Gemini won't say, they'll guarantee you to 2023, but I've also seen them update. They update on top of that as well. Mordy Oberstein: They'll be on the fly. They're kind of like Bing, because they're pulling in from... They have the whole search index. I don't feel it's as big of a problem for them. They have the connection, they have it all right there. They just have this sort of like left hand needs talk to the right hand. Crystal Carter: Right. And they're still testing everything and all of that sort of stuff. And then Copilot has an app, and their data goes up to October, 2023. And those are for the ones that are the, I call them sort of static pre-trained data sets. So those are the ones that aren't necessarily jacked into the web. The ones that are search augmented, like perplexity, like ChatGPT Premium, which has the search one, and also Copilot on 365, those ones will have the legacy information from their static pre-trained dataset, but the ones that are search augmented will also have search data. So I tested this on Copilot for instance, and I tested it, it was a while back, but I tested this on Copilot and I said, what did Zendaya wear to the Oscars last week? And it was in a year when Zendaya didn't actually go to the Oscars. But online there were people sharing AI images of Zendaya in an outfit, and people were like, "Oh my God, slay queen." And she wasn't there. She wasn't there. And so I asked Copilot, I said, what did she wear? And Copilot said, "She did not go to the Oscars. She was spending time with her boyfriend Tom Holland," and that was that. And I was like, okay, Copilot, well done. Good job. Yeah, it's good. So they will update. But I think that when you're thinking about the difference between a search augmented one like Perplexity, like Copilot on 365, like ChatGPT with search, versus a more static one like Claude, like ChatGPT basic I guess you would say, and Copilot the app, the data, understanding when the data cut off happens is really important, especially if your client or another stakeholder comes to you and says, why aren't we ranking in ChatGPT for this thing that we just launched a month ago? And you're like, because their knowledge cut off data hasn't updated. It's a little bit like thinking about an encyclopedia. So the encyclopedia or the phone book would come out every year. If you launched your business in January and the phone book came out in the December before, then you're going to have to wait until the next time the phone book comes out or the next time the encyclopedia comes out before you're in it. And they will update their data training sets periodically. And if you're really interested in where you're in ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, you're going to need to keep up to date with how often they're updating their data sets and which new data sets they're adding to it. Mordy Oberstein: You who's constantly updating and constantly adding to his data set? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Who could it be? Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry. Mordy Oberstein: Damn right. Crystal Carter: Just talking about Schwartz. Who is the man who writes for a search engine land? Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: Damn right. That's this time. It's this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. It's going to be really snappy because we're covering basically what happened right around the new year, which was not a whole lot because everybody was on vacation. Anywho, Google wasn't on vacation, and neither was Barry Schwartz. He doesn't take vacations, he doesn't rest. He'll sleep when he dies. Google December 2024 spam update done rolling out. By the way, that's what Barry actually told me when I say, "It's three o'clock in the morning your time, why are you answering me?" Anywho, the spam update took seven days to roll out, and Barry thinks that it was really big. Sites are hit really hard. He actually did a whole YouTube video about it. You should check out Barry. Barry, by the way, since you've been gone, which I'm dying to break out into song, Barry has become a YouTube sensation. An actual YouTuber. So check out Barry's YouTube channel and see all of that for all of its, I'll call it glory. Barry does seem to think that this was a bigger spam update than usual. Lots of chatter, lots of ins and outs, a lot of what have yous, a lot of different people involved. Next up from Roger Monte over at Search Engine Journal. Google Speculates if SEO is on a dying path. This comes from Google's latest Search Off the Record podcast episode where they talk about search is dying and blah, blah, blah. There was an interesting part of the conversation where I think it was John Mueller were talking about how a lot of the things that SEOs currently do in terms of retrieval, data retrieval, kind of falls into what will happen with getting registered with AI platforms, AI search engines. So John says specifically, and when you talk about kind of the retrieval augmented part, that's basically what SEOs work on, making content that's crawlable, indexable for search, and that kind of flows into all of these AI overviews, basically saying a lot of the things that SEOs are already doing kind of speaks to what will happen as the AI era continues to emerge. My take is we keep having these conversations in very fragmented ways. That part is true on the data retrieval side, crawling and indexing. Then there's all these sorts of SEO conversations about how to get into these AI systems so that you register, I don't want to use the word rank again, but you register with them, and conversations around marketing and other channels and brand marketing and what you should be doing and thinking holistically. We keep having these different parts of the conversation, but we've yet to come sit down as an industry and talk about the entire conversation from one part of the spectrum to the complete opposite side of the SEO spectrum. That would be a great conference, by the way. I don't know who out there is listening to this who creates SEO conferences. Calvin, are you out there? That would be a great SEO conference. Like it just goes through every single part of the entire conversation of the implications of AI and SEO from start to finish. Because I keep feeling like we keep having these fragmented conversations. Maybe it's something Barry can do that on his YouTube channel. Because he creates a lot of really great YouTube content now, if I haven't said that already. Check out, by the way, it's new, our daily SEO new series with Barry, which are not nearly as good as just Barry on his actual YouTube extravaganza that he's on right now. And with that, that's this week's snappy news. We should buy Barry like a long leather jacket. Crystal Carter: Right? And a turtle-neck and a chain. Mordy Oberstein: Oh. So good. Crystal Carter: Barry. Mordy Oberstein: I'll pay you. Whatever it costs. It's worth it. Crystal Carter: Totally worth it. Mordy Oberstein: Totally worth it. Or Barry in an Elvis costume I think would be interesting too. Crystal Carter: I feel like he could pull that off. Because we have that... I got a picture of him with the arm up. And the cutout we have was him with an arm up. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Interesting. Crystal Carter: That could work. I don't know, does he like peanut butter sandwiches? Mordy Oberstein: No. Only butter sandwiches and ripped bread. Crystal Carter: This is correct. Mordy Oberstein: As this show goes off the rails, we want to make sure that you follow Debbie Chu online. Debbie Chu, part of our Wix Studio SEO course, did the link building offline SEO section of that course, is our follow of the week. Crystal Carter: Yes, and she is fantastic at this, and this is something that she's been working on for a while. She's got a great article about how to do link building and how to get links the right way. And she's a big, big fan of using data studies to do this, and she outlines some great tips on how to do that in her article. And she outlines some great tips on how to do that in the course, which is absolutely free, and I highly recommend. In fact, Eli Schwartz just recommended this course just a few weeks ago as well. So do tune in for the quality education. Mordy Oberstein: Check that out. And check out Debbie's social link in the show notes so you can follow her on social media. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Hope that's enough data and information for you about following Debbie. Too much data? Crystal Carter: No, I don't think that we have enough Debbie data. Mordy Oberstein: Not enough Debbie data. Crystal Carter: More data on Debbie. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting. Debbie, share more data. Crystal Carter: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: There could never be enough data about Debbie. We can just call it Debbie data. It really flows. It's like alliteration. Crystal Carter: I'm enjoying saying it, but knowing Debbie, I don't think she'd be over the moon about us saying it a million times. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so we'll stop here. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, watch out bosses of the world, here's how you can negotiate your SEO salary. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content webinars and courses on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Katy Powell Debbie Chew Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course It's New - Daily SEO News SEO for brand visibility in LLMs Bottled Imagination News: Google Speculates If SEO ‘Is On A Dying Path Google December 2024 spam update done rolling out Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Katy Powell Debbie Chew Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course It's New - Daily SEO News SEO for brand visibility in LLMs Bottled Imagination News: Google Speculates If SEO ‘Is On A Dying Path Google December 2024 spam update done rolling out Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who loves all things data, SEO data, LLM data, AI data, analytics data, GSC data, third party tool data, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello people of the internet. I hope you are well. Mordy Oberstein: They can't answer. How do we ever know if they're well or not? Tell us. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Do you think that we are going to be able to hear from them? They should tell us. They should tag us. Mordy Oberstein: Oh no, no. That opens up Pandora's box for all the hypochondriacs of the world to be like, "Oh, I'll tell you why I'm not doing well." Crystal Carter: "Hey, my sciatica's playing up, the weather's gone and I'm really struggling." Mordy Oberstein: Like, "Hey, how are you doing?" passing by in the grocery store, like somebody you don't really know so well, I don't know, a neighbor down the block kind of thing you never talk to and they're like, "Oh well, you know..." No, no, no. Didn't really mean it. Crystal Carter: Fine. Fine is the answer. Fine. Mordy Oberstein: Fine. Or, "Yeah, I've been better, but things will get better." That's fine too. Tolerable. Fine. As long as a conversation results in three seconds and me going to get a jar of pickles and you going to get whatever you're buying. Crystal Carter: Exactly, exactly. I think sometimes you just got to keep it moving. Mordy Oberstein: Just keep it moving. Too spicy early on the podcast? Crystal Carter: I don't know, I don't know. It's like maybe they'll just start sharing stats. Maybe they'll pull out their health monitor thing and start telling me about their BMI and stuff. Just like too much data. Maybe that's what they'll give you. Mordy Oberstein: You know what my blood sugar is right now? Nope. This Service Hub podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can subscribe to our SEO newsletter. Search for it over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter and take our SEO course. But it's also where you can get keyword data right inside the platform with our native integrations with Semrush, SE Ranking, Wincher, as this week we ask, can you ever have too much data? Let's explore the side that says you can never have too much of a good thing, as well as a side that says too much data might be a distraction, but also how is SEO data used today and how does it differ from yesteryear? Bottled imaginations, PR director and co-founder Katy Powell chimes in on using data for creative campaigns that get links, high DA ones too, plus we'll chat about the different data LLM based search engines may use. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So throw on another scoop onto that cone and order an extra slice, because like carbs, you can never have too much of a good thing, which is SEO data on this, the 106th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Wow, that really tied into the blood sugar thing. Blood sugar now, extra slices and scoops. I didn't plan that. Crystal Carter: What? You've lost me, but I hope everything is well with you. Mordy Oberstein: I'm fine. Crystal Carter: Okay, good. I am fine, I'm fine. Yeah, there was a lot of data for my little brain to handle. So on this topic, this is something that's been rattling around in my head for a little while. We are inundated with data. And speaking of those health tracker things, I saw somebody who was like, "I don't need to know all of this stuff about myself. It's too much information." I've got one of those apps and it tells you all of this stuff, your oxygen... I don't even know. I don't know what it means. And I think that this is something that happens a lot of time in marketing. Marketing is full of charts and stats and graphs and everything. And it's really, really good to have great information about what's going on on your website. We, in our Wix studio tools, we've got Google Search Console data, we have Wix Analytics data, we have stuff that will tell you about people who have come in and what pages they've clicked on and where they've gone to and which channels people are coming to your website. Lots of that sort of stuff. And these things are fantastic, but sometimes if you have too much data, for clients, it can be a little bit overwhelming, for instance. So if you're talking to clients, and I've had this before, where I had a client who was new to us as an agency, when I was working in agency side, and they said, "We get these reports," from their current or previous agency. They said, "We get these reports, but we have no idea what they mean." And there were so many charts on that, and they had so much information, but the client didn't understand them. And I think that from a reporting side, there can definitely be data overload. We have a fantastic article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, and in fact we also have a fantastic course from Judith Lewis, and she talks about these in both of these. When you're talking to stakeholders, the executive summary is your friend. So have the data. If you're the person who's managing the data, who's looking at all of the information, the executive summary is your friend. Give me the TLDR of why I should care about this stack of stats and bubble charts and pie graphs and bar charts and all of that sort of stuff. Sum it up with some key indicators. And Judith Lewis, in her article about talking to multi-stakeholder reporting, talks about all of this. And in her course in the Wix Studio Academy, she gets into all of these details as well. And it's absolutely super, super valuable and will absolutely upgrade how you relate to clients. Because you need to make sure that they only have the data that they need, otherwise their eyes will glaze over and they will get bored. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry, you lost me. I got glazed over and talking about numbers. I blacked out there for a minute. Crystal Carter: Right? And I think it's important to remember that, that there's some people who, if you give them too many numbers and too many digits and too many charts, they will just tune out. I've been in meetings before where I've been pitching to clients, where I've been presenting my data, and I'm like, "Yeah, look at this and look at that," and it's too granular. They need to know sales went up, conversions went up, traffic went up. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Also, even when they do, let's say they are a numbers person, and you're going into this little minutia of this and this. We fixed this for having broken links. And they're not an SEO person, you're talking about number of broken links, like yes, they might understand, they might even be a former SEO person. It's a distraction and it can show, by the way, that you're distracted, that you're not focused on the right thing. And maybe you are, by the way, maybe you are distracted. Because sometimes data is distracting. So much data that you look here, you look there. And I'll say data, I know in certain things or for certain types of things, data is really linear, it's very direct and it's very logical. The number of broken links was 100, now it's 50. Or maybe it's five now, you did a better job. When you're starting to look at things that are a little more complex than the number of broken links, so then you start to look at activities. What was the user activity? They went to this page. But it doesn't explain the behavior. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: They're two different things. Crystal Carter: So here's another thing. So for instance, I've got an article on bounce rate. For GA4 they updated what bounce rate means. And bounce rate for GA4, before it was like people went to the site, they didn't click anything and they left. And now on GA4, essentially bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. So if they engaged by 10%, then the bounce rate was 90%. And that's the inverse of it. And it has to do with clicks and things like that. Now, one of the things that I was looking at is people are very, in terms of data, this is something that people get really hung up on, as bounce rate, is certainly clients, also because it's kind of got a good name. But one of the things that's tricky is if you just look at bounce rate as a data point, it doesn't tell the full story. Whereas if you use something like Microsoft Clarity, and I'm shouting out loads of articles, we've got a great article on Microsoft Clarity by Celeste Gonzalez. Mordy Oberstein: And integration with Microsoft Clarity. Crystal Carter: Right? Where you can check it out on your Wix studio website. And one of the things that they point out is that for that tool, not only can you see how far people scroll, but you can also see rage clicks, where people are like, "Why can't I click this? Why isn't this working?" And they've clicked it seven times, expecting for the word that's bold to be a link and it's not a link, and they clicked it a bunch of times. And that tells you a different story. So I think the other thing about data is making sure that you have the right tool to measure what you're seeing. So it might be that maybe you see the bounce rate thing and maybe that goes, okay, that's a clue. That bit of data is a clue, but that's a clue that you might need another tool to help you get into that information. And I think that's really, really important. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it gets especially more complicated when you're looking at things. Okay, it's not like a UI or UX interface issue. You're trying to explain why did the user take this action? Why didn't they take it? Why did they share this post? Everyone went online, they read this article, they all shared it, why? What happened? So the data will tell you that everyone shared it, where they shared it to, who shared it, when they shared it, but it can't exactly explain why they shared it and what was different. And that's something where you have to actually create a narrative. Data should help you create narratives. And that's where you can put together, if you look at the other articles that people shared, when they shared them, and now you're looking at this article, you can find, hey, there's a common theme between the articles that people tend to share, now I can create a narrative. Because I know SEOs balk at this, sometimes correlation does equal causation. Well, it doesn't actually equal causation, but sometimes causation is good enough, and sometimes causation is accurate, and sometimes causation, it's life is the best that you have. And if you have very strong correlation, you can create a narrative. And you can use data to create a narrative, but don't get lost in, I don't know, it's not one-to-one. Crystal Carter: Right. And so I think this brings us on to what you should use data for. So sometimes you get loads of data, like SEO tools will spit out lots of data points. They'll say, "Oh, this has low HTML on this page." And you're like, that may or may not be an issue, because maybe it's just a thank you page and maybe that's fine. And so there's lots of data points that you get. But how can you use the data? Once you have good data, how can you use it? One of the ways, you use this really, really regularly, Mordy, and I'm a big fan of how you do this really, really well, is data studies. So data studies, where you're able to concentrate on a particular data point and look at how that plays out in different scenarios and things like that, that can be incredibly valuable for progressing an idea in your industry. But it can also be incredibly valuable for bringing together lots of information from a research point of view. And I think that that is something that can be super, super useful. But when you're doing that, you need to be really targeted with the kinds of data that you're looking at. And you need to, again, I think we have another podcast on this, so do check that out, about data studies and how you can make sure that you're looking at the right points. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I mean, by the way, one of the advantages of using a data study is you get the insight yourself out of it. Crystal Carter: And telling that story, as you were saying. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but also, so with the data it's realizing what are the boundaries of that story? What does it say? What doesn't it say? And yes, I can draw a conclusion, but how far can I go with a conclusion, or how strong is a conclusion? And sometimes it's fine to say, you know what, I conclude X, but I'm not 100% sure. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Also helpful. Also helpful. Crystal Carter: Definitely helpful. Definitely helpful. And I think that that's really important. So I think also it's important to sometimes, particularly if you're thinking about getting into thought leadership, sometimes if you're in a thought leadership space, you might be the first person talking about this topic. And so it might be that there's not a lot of data out there. So you can go like, this is what I can see, or this is what I've concluded from the data that I have. And people will take you at your word and they'll say, "Okay, well I will investigate this further," and they will add to that conversation. And so that's really, really useful as well. And this is a thought leadership tactic that is useful in any industry. So if you are somebody who's advising somebody or some of your clients to do some thought leadership, it's also okay for them to take a little bit of a risk and say, "I know this is a new idea, but I think this." And what I see very often is people who do that, people who are confident enough to set out their stall and take the information they have and to run with it, they get a lot of engagement, they get a lot of people interested in what they're saying, because that is an evolving conversation. If conversations that are already where we've got already got all of the information already sent out, that's ground that's already been covered. But if you've got something that's new, even if you don't have every single data point, that doesn't mean that the conversation isn't worth having, as long as you caveat with the fact that you're coming at it from your perspective and using the tools that you've got. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's like the abundance of SEO data. I don't know, keyword difficulty, keyword score this, that metric, search volume, there's a plethora of these metrics. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: They're all good. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: They're all great. By the way, Semrush has a cool new plugin its like a personalized keyword difficulty based on the assessment of your own site, how difficult is it for you. Which makes so much more sense, because I don't know if you want to rank for buy shoes, it's not difficult for Nike, they're ranking number two or number one. But here, we're super difficult. Anyway, but all of that, that's actually a good point. You have all this data, there's a ton of it out there, and I think if you're looking at doing SEO today, it needs to be qualified way more than it was ever. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely. If somebody says, oh, you just need to... People would look at a keyword like buy shoes. And Nike, as you said, they say, "Oh, there's tons of keyword search volume for that." And the other thing about it, is that just because a big search volume, that data point, just because there's big search volume doesn't mean you're going to get all of that. Mordy Oberstein: Doesn't mean it's for you anyway. Crystal Carter: It doesn't mean it's for you anyway. And it doesn't mean that the people that go to that keyword, that Google is sending them to a website. We have another podcast on this with people talking about this as well, but for those head terms, Google's very often like, "That's not enough information, hun, can we filter you? What kind of shoes do you want? You want sandals, you want sneakers, you want high tops? What do you need, hun?" They're going to filter those people. So that's a starter query, and they will filter those people. And also, just because there's such high search volume doesn't mean there's high search intent, or doesn't mean there's high click intent at all. So it might just be that they're searching for how far is it from the moon to the sun? There might be an instant answer there. Nobody's necessarily expecting to click on anything. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Crystal Carter: So those data points, they're a clue, but you have to look into it as well. You can't just take those points at face value. Mordy Oberstein: Somebody asked me for my SEO predictions like 2025 kind of thing and I wrote, it's going to be less about overall visibility, and being at the right place at the right time, with the right tone, with the right message, at the exact right time, and resonance. Because just the way the internet is structured with AI ends, AI overviews and direct answers, and then consumers looking for being more specific and knowing what they want a little bit more, being more informed, not wanting to be nudged the same way, all those kind of things coming together. So you being able to use that data, not just to find the keyword, but using the data to find the right keyword or the right kind of keyword or the right kind of keywords or phrases or topics for the right audience, that you could be there at the right time, is how you should be using this data now versus how you should have been using this data 10 years ago maybe. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think the audience point is so key, because the audiences are so clutch right now. The way that people are doing spray and pray SEO of just going after big keywords and doing skyscraper posts and things like that, cool, you'll still get some traffic from that, but the data that you have on your audiences will give you a lot more information on what will actually resonate and what will actually cut through when we are in the sea of content that we find ourselves in with the proliferation of AI tools and AI capability for creating content. So if everybody has the ability to write pretty good content, then you need to have content, like you said, that's the right place, for the right audience, at the right time that they need to hear, and they go, "Oh yes, thank you Mordy, thank you Crystal." This is exactly what they needed. And that's genuinely helpful and I think that that's really important. Speaking of AI models, if you're building your AI models, data is super, super useful for this. It can help you to make sure that your models are doing the right things. AI models are also incredibly helpful for tidying up data. So if you get a massive data set for someone, one of my favorite uses for AI is to pull out the data points to sort of clean it up, so that you can use it for creating articles, so you can use it for telling that data story, so that you can use it for sharing online and things like that. So if you're not using AI for helping you to shape your data, then I highly recommend it. We have a great webinar with Ross Hudgens where he talks about that, and the team at Siege Media do this really, really well. So highly recommend that too. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking to use data to shape not just your AI models, but your creative campaigns in a way that gets links, well, here's the PR director and co-founder of Bottled Imagination, Katy Powell, on how to do just that. Katy Powell: We use data at all parts of the ideation process really when it comes to our creative campaigns. So first of all, researching into the topic area, we use content analysis tools which allow us to see really how many articles are written about a certain topic in our client's field at a certain time to validate whether that's a topic that the audience actually cares about. If we're going to do a big creative campaign, we still back this by insight. I think this really helps to answer that, "So what? Who cares?" point. Also, it really helps to remove the subjectivity of this campaign when we pitch it to the client. If we're able to say, there's been this many thousand articles written about this topic in this last year, so we really feel like it's something that A, your audience really reads about, and also cares about too. Then once we've got the topics, we can kind of start to delve into the types of stories that are being talked about around this. So something we see works quite well is if we see a topic's being talked about a lot within the client's field, but it's all opinion led, is there a way we can find some data and turn this into facts? So rather than just an opinion piece, we actually bring the facts and bring the data and create something kind of ownable to our client that acts as the sort of true resource for this information. For example, we've got a B2B Tech client. They want to land their marketing press. We saw that rebranding's talked about a lot within this kind of press. So we created a rebranding kind of hub of information of stats, which is now ranking, and it's also picking up links organically without us outreaching, because it's a true, strong resource of information for rebranding. That was also coupled with a really nice creative. I think we find if we've got some really solid data that's ownable to the client, plus a lovely creative, a beautiful piece of imagery or a video or whatever it is, and whatever the format is, that can be kind outreach gold. And then the kind of data that we would use within these campaigns could be anything really from search data. So Google search data. We use Glimpse quite a lot. Big online databases, social media stats, government reports. I love YouGov. I think YouGov is brilliant for even just getting your brain going in that field. I think unfortunately there's not really a quick fix for the data part. I think it is getting your hands dirty and research. We would usually say let's try and find a free resource before we go to something like a survey, unless it's a client that is in a field where we really do need to do a survey, and then we will do that. I do think though, it's always good just to kind of get stuck into research and try and find some free databases before you pay for something, because it can be quite expensive. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks so much, Katy. Make sure to give Katy Powell a big follow on social media. Links to our social media profiles in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, their team are fantastic. Katy and everyone over at Bottled Imagination are doing some fantastic work. When we were thinking about this, they were the first folks that I thought of because they are amazing at, like she said, their owned data. So some of the clients owned data to shape a newsworthy story. A prime example of this is they were working with someone with Dap Gamble and they were looking at NFTs, and they ended up getting tons and tons of media, 1500 pieces of coverage around the world, because they figured out from the data that they had that most NFTs are worth nothing. So they found out that when they looked at this, that most NFTs were dead NFTs, and they were able to pull something over. So they examined an entire asset class of 73,000 collection NFTs, and they found that most of them are worth nothing. And it went everywhere. It went absolutely everywhere. They have another campaign where they were looking at studies that said that public restrooms were likely to be removed, and so they had the toilets are endangered species or something was a thing. And they're really, really great at pulling together noteworthy information from data and driving a story. Mordy Oberstein: Finding gems. Crystal Carter: Yeah, finding gems. And I think that we think about this in our day-to-day. If you find one of those articles that has all of the data points for the thing that you're interested in, then you go back to that page loads. You'll go back to that page because it'll have lots of information. If you're interested in, I don't know, sheds or something, I recently bought a shed, and you wanted, what different types of wood, what different types of roofs, what different types of this? How long does a shed last? What's the average size of a shed? All of those different data points. If you've got people who are pulling together all of those data points from lots of different sources, then you're saving them time by creating something that's one big data set. And if you have that data set as part of your own information, then all the better. So that means that, for instance, with the case of the NFTs, there was only one place that had that much data. So if anybody wanted to talk about this topic, they have to come back to that piece of content. And this is the thing that Bottled Imagination are really great at, and this is something that I think that people talk about, how do we build links? It's like, do something link worthy. And they're really good at this, and data's a great way to do that. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of data and having lots of it, LLM search engines are looking at a wide variety of big data sources, which means it's time for us to run the little segment we call so many search engines. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like all we do is talk about LLM search engines now, by the way. That's the thing. I wake up in the morning, I'm like, "Yeah, I'm really bothered by LLM search engines. I really need to ponder them this morning for an hour over a cup of coffee." Crystal Carter: Dude, I've been doing a deck on this. Mordy Oberstein: This thing has gone viral. Your deck has gone viral. Queen of the LLM search engines. Crystal Carter: Do you know what it was? The reason why, it comes back to it, it's basically like people ask me, and then I ask myself. So people are like, "How do I show up in ChatGPT? How do I show up in Claude or Gemini?" and that sort of thing. And so then you start thinking. And I find that I end up writing things, and I think this is a data thing as well, and you do this with your studies, I know this, where you're like, what is this? You'll have a thing that sticks in your brain, and you're like, I really want to know if this equals this. And you can't get it out of your brain. If you can't get it out of your brain, you have to write it down. So that's the thing. Mordy Oberstein: So LLM search engines, they're obviously looking at lots of different data sources like, I don't know, the web, Wikipedia, all these mentions of you across the web, articles about you, kind of everything. They're kind of looking at everything. I wonder about social. How much you're looking at social. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Probably not. Reddit maybe. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So here's the thing. So a lot of these tools have content partnerships with various different folks. So Reddit has content partnerships. Mordy Oberstein: Right. And so maybe switch that. I don't think X does, but Reddit does. Crystal Carter: Reddit has content partnerships with OpenAI, and they have content partnerships with Google. Mordy Oberstein: The Goog. Crystal Carter: The Goog. So they've got partnerships with that. In terms of Wikipedia, all of the LLMs are trained on Wikipedia. Mordy Oberstein: LLM has been training in all your stuff for years, you haven't even noticed. Crystal Carter: Right. So they've all been trained on Wikipedia. There's 66 million pages on Wikipedia, plus all of the Wiki data stuff that comes with it. And it's all comments. It's all copyright free. So of course, if I was building an LLM, I would absolutely train it on Wikipedia. But the thing that people forget is that if it's trained on Wikipedia, it's essentially trained on entities. So all of the data that's backed up, that's on your entity, all of the information that's on your entity is attached to that as part of that. So I think that that's really important to think about. But in terms of other data, some of the content partnerships, OpenAI is out here like Thanos, collecting big publishers. So there's that post from Detailed that talks about 16 companies dominating Google search results. I'm sure we've all seen that diagram, which I find fascinating. And OpenAI already has content partnerships with three out of 16 of those publishers. Mordy Oberstein: So that's the whole thing, they have partnership with these publishers. Crystal Carter: Right. And that means that basically they have access to their whole archive of stuff. So that includes Hearst, Fox Media and Conde Nast, just from those top 16 publishers. But if you look at the web wider, another big one is News Corp. News Corp has tons and tons of properties. They also have a partnership with OpenAI, and it also includes, they also cover Prisa, Le Monde, Time, GDI, The Atlantic. So these are all things that are publisher collapse. I talk about this in my article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub or Wix Studio Learning Hub, which talks about SEO for brand visibility and LLMs, I talk about it there. So there's a list of these as well, but Perplexity also has content partnerships. So with Time, Entrepreneur, Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, Der Spiegel. Just saying... Crystal Carter: To be honest, from a little sidebar, it's a little bit of a random collection of publications there. But do you. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Der Spiegel. Crystal Carter: So I think that it's important when you're looking at, if you're thinking about LLMs, the training data forms the basis for their knowledge. So with these LLMs, they will have a training data. They'll have a knowledge cutoff date that their training data goes up to, and it will vary by LLM. So for instance, and it will also vary within the LLM. So if you're using the free version of ChatGPT, for instance, if they don't have you on a test or something, which they sometimes do for mine, if you're using the free version of ChatGPT, the knowledge cutoff date for you is probably going to be around like September, 2021. But if you're using the premium version of ChatGPT, it could be as up to date as December, 2023. Claude- Mordy Oberstein: It's super up to date. Crystal Carter: Well, Claude is pulling in data from April, 2024 for their premium version. And Gemini won't say, they'll guarantee you to 2023, but I've also seen them update. They update on top of that as well. Mordy Oberstein: They'll be on the fly. They're kind of like Bing, because they're pulling in from... They have the whole search index. I don't feel it's as big of a problem for them. They have the connection, they have it all right there. They just have this sort of like left hand needs talk to the right hand. Crystal Carter: Right. And they're still testing everything and all of that sort of stuff. And then Copilot has an app, and their data goes up to October, 2023. And those are for the ones that are the, I call them sort of static pre-trained data sets. So those are the ones that aren't necessarily jacked into the web. The ones that are search augmented, like perplexity, like ChatGPT Premium, which has the search one, and also Copilot on 365, those ones will have the legacy information from their static pre-trained dataset, but the ones that are search augmented will also have search data. So I tested this on Copilot for instance, and I tested it, it was a while back, but I tested this on Copilot and I said, what did Zendaya wear to the Oscars last week? And it was in a year when Zendaya didn't actually go to the Oscars. But online there were people sharing AI images of Zendaya in an outfit, and people were like, "Oh my God, slay queen." And she wasn't there. She wasn't there. And so I asked Copilot, I said, what did she wear? And Copilot said, "She did not go to the Oscars. She was spending time with her boyfriend Tom Holland," and that was that. And I was like, okay, Copilot, well done. Good job. Yeah, it's good. So they will update. But I think that when you're thinking about the difference between a search augmented one like Perplexity, like Copilot on 365, like ChatGPT with search, versus a more static one like Claude, like ChatGPT basic I guess you would say, and Copilot the app, the data, understanding when the data cut off happens is really important, especially if your client or another stakeholder comes to you and says, why aren't we ranking in ChatGPT for this thing that we just launched a month ago? And you're like, because their knowledge cut off data hasn't updated. It's a little bit like thinking about an encyclopedia. So the encyclopedia or the phone book would come out every year. If you launched your business in January and the phone book came out in the December before, then you're going to have to wait until the next time the phone book comes out or the next time the encyclopedia comes out before you're in it. And they will update their data training sets periodically. And if you're really interested in where you're in ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, you're going to need to keep up to date with how often they're updating their data sets and which new data sets they're adding to it. Mordy Oberstein: You who's constantly updating and constantly adding to his data set? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Who could it be? Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry. Mordy Oberstein: Damn right. Crystal Carter: Just talking about Schwartz. Who is the man who writes for a search engine land? Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: Damn right. That's this time. It's this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. It's going to be really snappy because we're covering basically what happened right around the new year, which was not a whole lot because everybody was on vacation. Anywho, Google wasn't on vacation, and neither was Barry Schwartz. He doesn't take vacations, he doesn't rest. He'll sleep when he dies. Google December 2024 spam update done rolling out. By the way, that's what Barry actually told me when I say, "It's three o'clock in the morning your time, why are you answering me?" Anywho, the spam update took seven days to roll out, and Barry thinks that it was really big. Sites are hit really hard. He actually did a whole YouTube video about it. You should check out Barry. Barry, by the way, since you've been gone, which I'm dying to break out into song, Barry has become a YouTube sensation. An actual YouTuber. So check out Barry's YouTube channel and see all of that for all of its, I'll call it glory. Barry does seem to think that this was a bigger spam update than usual. Lots of chatter, lots of ins and outs, a lot of what have yous, a lot of different people involved. Next up from Roger Monte over at Search Engine Journal. Google Speculates if SEO is on a dying path. This comes from Google's latest Search Off the Record podcast episode where they talk about search is dying and blah, blah, blah. There was an interesting part of the conversation where I think it was John Mueller were talking about how a lot of the things that SEOs currently do in terms of retrieval, data retrieval, kind of falls into what will happen with getting registered with AI platforms, AI search engines. So John says specifically, and when you talk about kind of the retrieval augmented part, that's basically what SEOs work on, making content that's crawlable, indexable for search, and that kind of flows into all of these AI overviews, basically saying a lot of the things that SEOs are already doing kind of speaks to what will happen as the AI era continues to emerge. My take is we keep having these conversations in very fragmented ways. That part is true on the data retrieval side, crawling and indexing. Then there's all these sorts of SEO conversations about how to get into these AI systems so that you register, I don't want to use the word rank again, but you register with them, and conversations around marketing and other channels and brand marketing and what you should be doing and thinking holistically. We keep having these different parts of the conversation, but we've yet to come sit down as an industry and talk about the entire conversation from one part of the spectrum to the complete opposite side of the SEO spectrum. That would be a great conference, by the way. I don't know who out there is listening to this who creates SEO conferences. Calvin, are you out there? That would be a great SEO conference. Like it just goes through every single part of the entire conversation of the implications of AI and SEO from start to finish. Because I keep feeling like we keep having these fragmented conversations. Maybe it's something Barry can do that on his YouTube channel. Because he creates a lot of really great YouTube content now, if I haven't said that already. Check out, by the way, it's new, our daily SEO new series with Barry, which are not nearly as good as just Barry on his actual YouTube extravaganza that he's on right now. And with that, that's this week's snappy news. We should buy Barry like a long leather jacket. Crystal Carter: Right? And a turtle-neck and a chain. Mordy Oberstein: Oh. So good. Crystal Carter: Barry. Mordy Oberstein: I'll pay you. Whatever it costs. It's worth it. Crystal Carter: Totally worth it. Mordy Oberstein: Totally worth it. Or Barry in an Elvis costume I think would be interesting too. Crystal Carter: I feel like he could pull that off. Because we have that... I got a picture of him with the arm up. And the cutout we have was him with an arm up. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Interesting. Crystal Carter: That could work. I don't know, does he like peanut butter sandwiches? Mordy Oberstein: No. Only butter sandwiches and ripped bread. Crystal Carter: This is correct. Mordy Oberstein: As this show goes off the rails, we want to make sure that you follow Debbie Chu online. Debbie Chu, part of our Wix Studio SEO course, did the link building offline SEO section of that course, is our follow of the week. Crystal Carter: Yes, and she is fantastic at this, and this is something that she's been working on for a while. She's got a great article about how to do link building and how to get links the right way. And she's a big, big fan of using data studies to do this, and she outlines some great tips on how to do that in her article. And she outlines some great tips on how to do that in the course, which is absolutely free, and I highly recommend. In fact, Eli Schwartz just recommended this course just a few weeks ago as well. So do tune in for the quality education. Mordy Oberstein: Check that out. And check out Debbie's social link in the show notes so you can follow her on social media. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Hope that's enough data and information for you about following Debbie. Too much data? Crystal Carter: No, I don't think that we have enough Debbie data. Mordy Oberstein: Not enough Debbie data. Crystal Carter: More data on Debbie. Mordy Oberstein: Interesting. Debbie, share more data. Crystal Carter: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: There could never be enough data about Debbie. We can just call it Debbie data. It really flows. It's like alliteration. Crystal Carter: I'm enjoying saying it, but knowing Debbie, I don't think she'd be over the moon about us saying it a million times. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so we'll stop here. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, watch out bosses of the world, here's how you can negotiate your SEO salary. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content webinars and courses on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us your 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

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

Greg is one of the founders of Cypress North and its head of performance and innovation. He co-manages the digital marketing department and works to ensure clients achieve the best results. He also co-hosts the Marketing O'Clock podcast, providing updates, insights, and hot takes on the latest SEO, PPC, and social media marketing news. Greg Finn Partner at Cypress North Greg is one of the founders of Cypress North and its head of performance and innovation. He co-manages the digital marketing department and works to ensure clients achieve the best results. He also co-hosts the Marketing O'Clock podcast , providing updates, insights, and hot takes on the latest SEO, PPC, and social media marketing news. Articles & Resources 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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SEO Ranking Factors. Do they matter? Should you focus on them? And if not, what should you be focused on? Do some ranking factors matter more than others? How do you know if a tactic has directly influenced your ranking? On this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast we’re diving into the narrative around “ranking factors”! Marcus Tober, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions for Semrush, joins the podcast to further discuss ranking factors and SEO. Tune in as Mordy and Crystal take on the importance, or lack thereof, of ranking factors. Back Do ranking factors matter for SEO? SEO Ranking Factors. Do they matter? Should you focus on them? And if not, what should you be focused on? Do some ranking factors matter more than others? How do you know if a tactic has directly influenced your ranking? On this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast we’re diving into the narrative around “ranking factors”! Marcus Tober, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions for Semrush, joins the podcast to further discuss ranking factors and SEO. Tune in as Mordy and Crystal take on the importance, or lack thereof, of ranking factors. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 22 | January 25, 2023 | 37 MIN 00:00 / 36:59 This week’s guests Marcus Tober Marcus Tober is a leading global SEO specialist and speaker, named a top-8 Online Influencer in Digital Marketing and EU Search Personality of the Year 2016. He previously founded and led Searchmetrics, a global search experience platform, and joined Semrush as Head of Enterprise in 2022. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're approaching our groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO Branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazing and fabulously incredible, the greatest of all, Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for that fantastic introduction, Mordy Oberstein. One of these days I'm going to listen back to the podcast and see if they're all different, or if you- Mordy Oberstein: No, there are slight variations. I don't script it out. I get stuck. I guess like, "Wait. What do I say next? That doesn't rhyme. I don't know. Okay, stop here and just say her name." Crystal Carter: The breath control is very impressive. I must say. Mordy Oberstein: I'm having a hard time because I have a cold. Crystal Carter: Awe. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone take pity on me. Pity me. Pity, pity, pity please. Crystal Carter: Put the tiny violins on the audio track, please. Right there. For Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I will take it. Don't forget, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where every Wix site is HTTPS. Wix offers enterprise level security, keeping your site safe and your users happy. After all, HTTPS is a ranking factor. Interesting. Why would I mention that random fact? I don't know. By the way, it's a very small ranking factor. Don't get hung up over it. But I'm saying that because today's topic is ranking factors. Do they matter? Should you focus on them? And if not, what should you be focused on? Again, spoiler alert, HTTPS is a very, very small ranking factor. Be that as it may, we'll dive into, do some ranking factors matter more than others? How do you know if a tactic has directly influenced your ranking? Why a focus on intent has perhaps replaced a focus on ranking factors? And why ranking factors matter less in a world that's all about interpreting meaning. That sounds abstract. Plus, we'll dive into a whole lot on Google's machine learning and its impact on the ranking wormhole. And of course, we have your snappiest of snappiest news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Get ready, get set, get ranking factors, or not. Episode number 23 of the SERP's Up podcast is flying. I don't know what we're flying to yet. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: If it’s a nonstop flight or not, because I have a cold and might need to pause for a few minutes here and there. Crystal Carter: We're a top-ranked podcast. We are. I lied. There's- Mordy Oberstein: I know all the factors too. Crystal Carter: All of the factors. Mordy Oberstein: All of the factors. All 200 of the factors. We'll get to all of this. Let's take a step back. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: When someone's searching for something, the question is, how does Google know what results to show? It's a simple foundational question, but we don't really have a lot of information, when you think about it, about that process. As much as we do know, it's what we don't know. It's the tip of the iceberg kind of thing. We have, I'll call it breadcrumbs. We know certain things that Google officially looks at. For example, we know that back links are something that Google has looked at in order to determine whether or not a page should rank or not. When I say back links, by the way, we also know ... well, we know that Google is considering it less important over time, officially, but we don't know how big of a factor it is. So we know that certain things are factors like back links, but how big of a factor are they? Again, in fact, Google has downplayed links recently. We know that, for example, your site being secure is a factor, but how big of a factor is it? Or we know, for example, that your location is a factor when you're searching for things like, "Pizza near me." So you can get some pizza near you, and put that pizza near you inside of you. That location is a factor. How close the businesses are to you when you're searching are a factor. So you would think ranking on Google would kind of be easy. We have a list of all these factors. Oh, factors here, factors there. Just check them off, no problem. And supposedly there are 200 plus of these different factors. Whether or not that's actually true or not, I don't know. But that's what the general consensus has said, there's 200 of these factors. I don't know. First off, when it comes to factors, all sorts of misinformation, things like LSI keywords being a factor, false. No such thing. They don't exist. LSI factors, not a thing. Or Google looking how old your domain is. False. No. Not true. False. Heck, there was one time where Google ... or someone misunderstood what a Googler said about RankBrain, which we'll get into later, I'm sure, and said that it's a top three ranking factor. RankBrain's not even a ranking factor. It's got nothing to do with being a factor. It impacts. It impacts what might be a factor, but it itself is not a ranking factor. It's a machine learning property. We're going to talk more about that later. Then on top of all of that, the ranking factors that we do know that actually exist, we don't always know the role that they play, and when they play and how big of a role. For example, Google has said that they assess the quality of a website at the domain level. They look at quality across the entire site, not page by page. But what exactly does quality even mean? What exactly are they looking at? You can quickly get the picture that focusing on ranking factors may not be the best thing to do if you're trying to thrive on the old Googs. Crystal Carter: I think that's absolutely true in an almost evangelical delivery. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on, that's the sound of me getting off my soapbox. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Just so you know. I think that it's absolutely true, because basically, it's a question of, if you're focusing on ranking factors, you're essentially simplifying ... you're really, really oversimplifying some extremely complex systems. Google today calls them ranking systems. They've got a really good piece of documentation that talks about their ranking systems. Talks about how those systems overlap, intersect, and how there are various different machine learning properties and various different machine learning models that help Google to understand what's going on with search results. We've got deduplication systems. There's the local news systems. There's MUM. There's BERT. There's neural matching. There's various different things that are going on at once. So yeah, a correlation doesn't always equal causation. Sometimes with a website there's lots of different factors happening at once. So it's sometimes difficult to understand which variable was the decision maker on that. But it's very complex. It's a very complex system, or very complex set of systems that overlap and intersect and are engaging with a very dynamic web that's more and more dynamic every day. So if you're just focusing on so-called factors, you're going to be missing a lot of important elements. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's one of the things that frustrates me the most about the ranking factor conversation is not just, "Okay, is it a factor? Is it not a factor? How big of a factor?" But it's really the mindset that it produces. Whereas you are so focused on, "Oh, the title tag, Google looks at that for ranking. It is a factor. I must make sure my keyword is in the title tag in order to be factored in for the factor of the factoring, of the factoring of the ranking." You're missing out on the whole mindset of, "Let me make sure that I create really good content on a page that's technically healthy, so Google can crawl, index it, and then serve this really great piece of content to users." You're missing all of that when you focus on the 200 plus ranking factors. Crystal Carter: Right. For instance, it's like the equivalent of if you were trying to get fit or if you were trying to get more physically fit, then you might say, "Oh, I need to eat this many calories." What if all those calories are junk calories? What if all those calories are from Skittles or something? And then you're going to be missing a lot of nutrition if you're just focusing on that. Or if you say, "Oh, I need to exercise for two hours." Let's say you do those two hours and then you go and eat 17 cheeseburgers. Paying attention to the holistic situation is really important and understanding that there's lots of very complex systems that are interacting at once. If we think about the fitness thing, what you eat, how you sleep, when you eat, all of those different things will come into play in order to make sure that you're happy and healthy. This is the same with your website. When Google sees that your website is happy and healthy and full of good quality content and full of good quality information, and functions well using lots of different criteria, then they'll be able to serve it to users because they know the users will get a good experience. Mordy Oberstein: That, to me, from an actual technical SEO point of view kind of thing is the point. There's things that happen beyond the ... let's call them the factors or the signals, that impacts how Google ranks something, that we don't appreciate and talk enough about. Let's say, for example, like user intent. This is something that has been more and more of an issue in the last, let's say, five, six years, where the particular factors that are applicable all depend on the various intents. So you don't even know what the factor is here because you don't really understand how Google's understanding it. For example, I'll give you a concrete example of this. Back in the day, not all recipe pages had images on them. Today, any ranking page, any ranking recipe page has an image on it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And very likely, a video. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Because machine learning, Google, RankBrain in particular, figured out that when users go to a webpage for a recipe, they want an image. An image became a ranking factor. You might say, "Okay, great, I'm not talking about a recipe, I'm a health website. I'm cooking something." Let's say meatloaf for people with diabetes. Making that up. Yeah. You might be a health website or you might be a medical website, but you're talking about a recipe. So now a recipe ranking factor steps into your health website, which you never would've thought of, because, "I'm a health website. I don't have to worry about the ranking factors for a recipe website." You don't even know what works anywhere at any point at this point. Part of the reason is because of machine learning, which we're going to talk about later on, but part of that is also, in a world where Google's trying to focus on ... Listen, take a step back. What's Google trying to do is trying to offer relevant results to people. A lot of what goes into what it shows or doesn't show is how well it understands the query and how well it understands the content. So things like MUM or BERT ... MUM, not so much yet, but Bert, all these kind of machine learning things that help Google actually understand the content itself, those are not ranking factors. Those impact what might be a ranking factor ultimately, but those things just help Google understand stuff. So while you are focusing on ranking factors, Google's focusing on understanding stuff. What can actually impact the ranking has nothing to do with the factors per se, but what happens beyond the factors or what's a meta factor. What plays into Google and how they understand the content itself versus the factors per se. Crystal Carter: Right. What helps Google to read it with their machines and what helps users to be able to understand and appreciate the content, and to convey the information appropriately. One of the things you mentioned was, "What is Google doing?" If you go to how search works, if you ask Google, "What do they want to do?" They say they want to organize the world's information. They don't talk about websites. They say they want to organize the world's information. And they want to do that in a way that is high quality. That's their business. Their business is to be able to provide high quality information to people. So whatever enables you to do that in the best possible way is what will help you to rank better, if that's your objective. Sometimes that might mean making sure that you're actually using words in your content that are relevant to the query. So when they're talking about their favorite pastries, they're talking about Ding Dongs instead of Ring Dings, then you should probably include Ding Dongs. Mordy Oberstein: Ring Dings all the way. Crystal Carter: Then you should probably include something about Ring Dings. But if you wanted to do something more niche, that only Mordy Oberstein likes, then you can maybe write some content about Ring Dings. Mordy Oberstein: Harry Schwartz also likes Ring Dings. Crystal Carter: That might include their content. It might include the way that your content is formatted. It might include things like site speed, mobile performance. That sort of thing. Make sure that you're doing whatever will help your content perform best. Again, one of the things that people sometimes get overwhelmed with, particularly when you're talking about ranking factors and ranking, da, da, da, da, da, you can accumulate ranking. Your ranking, it's dynamic. It will change. It goes up and down with regards to algorithm updates and stuff like that and different cert features. So if you start with one thing, you can go back and you can optimize. You can go back and you can optimize again. There are pages that rank for years because they're regularly updating those. Certainly something we talked about on the podcast previously with Rebecca from the Wix blog, they regularly update their content to make sure that it's relevant, it's accurate, and it's meeting user's expectations with regards to format, content, et cetera. Mordy Oberstein: On the relevant point, relevancy is a ranking factor, but if you focus on it like that, "Oh, I need to make sure my content is relevant because it's a ranking factor," that's not the way I would approach it. I'll just put it that way. One is because you don't really know anything. Doesn't tell you anything. What you should be thinking about is your user. But let's say you're thinking about Google. Let's just say you are thinking about Google that way. I would think about it as, "Okay, how is Google determining relevancy? How does machine learning properties understand content in order to say, 'This is or this isn't relevant'?" In that case, what I'm trying to say before is that you're not focused on the ranking factor when you're doing that, you're focused on the ecosystem. You're focusing on what's happening before Google ever gets to the point of saying, "Okay, how do we weigh this page for this query? How do we weigh the different ranking factors?" You're looking at, okay, relevancy, great, whatever, that's a ranking factor, who cares? I'm more concerned with, what happens underneath the surface that Google ... to determine rate relevancy? What does relevancy mean to Google? Crystal Carter: Right. If you think about just that one thing, they've got a couple of different things. They have a freshness systems. It says, "We have various Query Deserves Freshness systems designed to show fresher content for queries where it would be expected." That's something that they think about, for instance. They have local news systems, if it's something that's about local news, which might make it more relevant in certain places. For instance, if I Google hurricane, or something, and I'm in a place where there isn't a hurricane happening, then I don't need to know the local news about the hurricane. If I'm in a place where it's hurricane season and I Google hurricane, they know that I want to know what is coming. Like, "Do I need to batten down the hatches?" That's something that we need to think about. They also have systems that are around reliable information, which helps them to make sure that they're surfacing high quality content and elevating quality journalism and various different things. Their ranking systems guide is a really good outline of some of the things that they think about when they're considering that. I should also of course give a shout out to Lily Ray and her tireless commitment to encouraging people to read Google's Quality Reader Guidelines, which also talks about how they understand quality and all of the different nuances that are included, including E-E-A-T, which Lily talks a lot about, but lots of other, not factors, but considerations as well. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That's a good thing, I think, because again, you're not focusing on, "Is this a factor? Check." You're trying to get into a mindset and an approach and an understanding of content relative to users, and what Google may or may not be doing in the algorithm. That's what you should be focused on, not ranking factors. That's not to say, however, that thinking about ranking factors is inherently bad. It's like anything, it's how you use it, how you approach it. Let's bring in someone who I remember way, way, way back when, when ranking factor studies were the big thing in SEO, who is moving the industry along from general ranking factor studies to niche ranking factor studies, who's really been a part of the ranking factor conversation since it started. Senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions over at Semrush, Marcus Tober, is going to share his thoughts about, is thinking about ranking factors harmful to SEO? Marcus Tober: I believe thinking about ranking factors is helpful to SEO, as it helps to reflect and create context between your own pages and to competition. It also helps to create aspirational goals and is actually really motivating. But generally, just checking boxes, meaning chasing irrelevant or broad ranking factors is not SEO. This is how SEO used to be 15 years ago, but it's not really SEO anymore. But there are general ranking factors and this is something people should keep in mind all the time. Like, the page of your website and the context of your competition, and not just purely following Google's recommendations. Or looking at user engagement metrics and having a good CTR to know that, "Okay, I'm actually relevant. People click my results." Or generally, basic SEO, which I believe many people are not getting right, like having a good page structure, relevant title text, clean code, crawlable content, or generally, a crawlable website, avoiding load and duplicate content. Then I would also put into the bucket of ranking factors is having a good internal linking structure. Generally, relevant content. A good usage of structured data. And of course, as we all know, you need to be appealing to others, so that you track back links. Because Google is still machine, Google need these back links to discover your content and understand if you're important or not. But if you then think about ranking factors, Google really wants to deliver the most relevant result for this particular query the user has. Generally, basically, there are ranking factors on a keyword level. That's why before you start optimizing your website, you should really think about why you should rank, why you might be or will be the best and most important source, and if you cannot believe even yourself that you should be the one ranking first, then you should do something else before you apply SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much to Marcus for that. If you were looking to find Marcus on the internet, you can take a look for Marcus over on Twitter. That's @MarcusTober, at M-A-R-C-U-S-T-O-B-E-R. He's absolutely right. I think my contention with ranking factors has to do with the fact that that's not the approach that we should be constantly thinking about. That's not to say that ... Hey, look, HTTPS is a ranking factor. All things being equal, if I could just quickly make my site HTTPS, leaving aside all the reasons why you would want to do that anyway, well, why not? Why not try to get any competitive edge I can over another website, from a ranking factor point of view? Crystal Carter: I think the fitness analogy is another one as well. For instance, exercise is a factor for being more fit. Doing some exercise, if you're doing none is going to be better than ... doing some exercise is going to be better than doing none. It might not make you look like an Adonis or whatever, but it'll make you look ... it'll be better than not doing anything. Absolutely. With regards to the HTTPS thing, you said that it's not as important. They've included that as part of their page experience network of systems. One of the reasons why it's less important is because most people have it now. So if most people have HTTPS now, then it's not going to give you a particularly competitive edge. However, if you do not have HTTPS on your website, then yeah, if you add, it'll improve your website because people- Mordy Oberstein: In so many ways. In so many ways. Also, at a minimum, you have an extra S. Everyone loves the letter S. Crystal Carter: Everybody loves the letter S. It's very useful in Wordle. I'm not going to lie. I- Mordy Oberstein: It's done me wrong in Wordle. So we'll talk about the S later. Crystal Carter: My starter word has an S in it. It's super easy. Mordy Oberstein: I tried it. It doesn't always work for me. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. What's your starter word? Mordy Oberstein: It depends on my kid, but I always try to ... We do it together. I try to put an S in it. "No, do this one, it has an S in it." Or an R. I like Rs. Right? Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: But it doesn't always work. I would need, I would like, a machine learning algorithm to help me get my Wordle right. Which brings us to our conversation that I think we need to have. It behooves us to have. We wouldn't be doing our job as podcast host, an SEO podcast host, if we were not talking about machine learning relative to ranking factors, and how the whole machine learning thing has changed the dynamic around ranking factors, because it has changed. Back in the day, all anyone talked about was ranking factor, ranking factor, ranking factor. That conversation has sort of died off in a lot of ways because of what's happened with machine learning. So, let's take a little bit of a deep thought into machine learning and ranking and the role it plays. Ranking factors mean algorithms. Algorithms mean technical advancements. In Google land, that means machine learning. That's what fuels the advancements in the algorithm. Ranking factors play a more immediate role. I'll put it like this, ranking factors play a more immediate role, whereas machine learning plays a meta role. I'll give you a good example of what I mean. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: You can hit all the ... you've checked all ... Let's assume we know all the ranking factors. All of them. And you've checked all of the boxes. You've checked them twice. You have all the ranking factors. You get a metal. You have a ranking factor, and you get a ranking factor, and you get a ranking factor, to quote my inner Oprah. Crystal Carter: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: The problem is, is that machine learning dictates the SERP itself. What do I mean? Let's say you type in, "Buy car insurance," and you have a page that sells car insurance. Again, you have all the ranking factors checked off, you've done them all. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But machine learning is telling Google that the intent here is not just to buy car insurance, it's also to learn about buying car insurance. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Google will say, and they literally do this, "We will have six slots for pages that sell car insurance and four slots among the top 10 results that offer places to learn more about car insurance." So even though you've checked off all the boxes, if your page sells car insurance, you are limited to six out of 10 slots, let's say, on the first page. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: So ranking factors are one thing. Great, you've checked off the ranking factors. But unless you're understanding the Google ecosystem from machine learning point of view, which in this case means that there's multiple intents and Google's going to divide the SERP into multiple intents, and you should have content that hits both of those intents, you will be limiting yourself to just 60% of the SERP, assuming you can rank for all six slots. Crystal Carter: This is why Mordy and I both very regularly tell people to look at the SERP, and also, to experience the SERP. For instance, for that "Buy car insurance" thing or car insurance query, sometimes machine learning starts before the person even gets to the SERP. They'll start typing in, "Car insurance," or, "Buy car insurance," and they'll get some results, some preview results, and those are machine learning generated. Google learns that lots of people, when they start typing in car will type in insurance, or something. I've gone off on and fallen into an internet wormhole based on some of those things, where I started typing in something and it then started giving me ... I was like, "What is that? I've never even heard of that." Mordy Oberstein: The autocomplete is very helpful sometimes. If you're thinking about ranking factors, you're not thinking about access points or entry points to your content from the SERP, and you're not even creating any of that content. Crystal Carter: Users are very aware of this as well. Users are very aware that Google will give them an autocomplete. They're also aware that Google will filter them. I was having a conversation with somebody who was talking about, "How do I compete with a brand that has the same name as a city?" For instance. I was like, "Think about your entity." The way that Google understands entities and the knowledge graph is also another thing to consider with regards to quote, unquote ranking, because those knowledge panels show up with high priority, either on mobile or on the sidebar of the desktop search. How Google understands those entities will affect whether or not they rank certain bits of content. That's really important to think about as well. For instance, I looked up the band Texas during this conversation. Or no, I looked up the word Texas. Texas is a band in the UK. And obviously, it's Texas. Don't mess with Texas. Mordy Oberstein: What's that? I heard about the band, what's the other thing? Crystal Carter: Exactly. Because I'm in the UK where that band is famous, I got a disambiguation box that was like, "Do you mean Texas the band or do you mean Texas the state?" It popped up. That is machine learning. Google knows that people in the UK are regularly looking for Texas the band, and then sometimes, Texas the state. Then I also did the same query for Chicago. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, a working band. Crystal Carter: The first time I did- Mordy Oberstein: Terrible city. I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: Shout out to all my Chicago fans. The Bulls. Mordy Oberstein: Hi, Dr. Pete. Hi, Kevin. Crystal Carter: I also looked up Chicago. The first time I looked up Chicago, I didn't get a disambiguation thing for Chicago, the band. But then I kept looking around and I didn't click on the thing that it was talking about, Chicago, the city, and then Google gave me the disambiguation for the band. Because they were like, "You're clearly not finding what you want." So it's very important to remember that Google is doing this ... it's machine learning. It's happening in real time. They have lots of things that are happening in real time that are very complex. Mordy Oberstein: It's not even conjecture. I'm going to read something from Google to you. This is Google telling you that the way they appropriate ranking factors is based on machine learning. This is in reference to RankBrain, which is the first machine learning property Google introduced. I'm going to say 2015, could be 2014. Not 2016, but I think it's either 2014 or '15. I'm terrible with years, but it's one of those two. RankBrain helped Google understand not only queries that it never saw before, but also helped Google understand intent and what users want out of the pages that they're seeing. Or potentially be seeing. I'm quoting you from Google here. You ready? "Beyond looking at keywords, our systems also analyze if content is relevant to a query in other ways. We also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries. We transform that data into signals that help our machine learned systems better estimate relevance. Just think, when you search for dogs, you likely want a page with the word dogs on it hundreds of times. With that in mind, algorithm's assessment page contains other relevant content beyond the keyword dogs, such as pictures of dogs, videos, or even lists of breeds." It's what I said to you before about recipes. Google saw, hey, users, when they went to a recipe page that had no picture, bounced, and when it had a picture, they stayed. So, pictures are a ranking factor for recipes. Crystal Carter: Everyone's really going mad for machine learning. Everyone's going really mad for ChatGPT right now. They're saying, "Oh, Google's really lagging behind." I'm like, "Google's been doing generative search results for years." With featured snippets, they're able to extract different content, they're able to manipulate it. For instance, sometimes you go to a webpage and they've got numbers, they've got a list in numbers, and then sometimes on the SERP it shows it in bullets. They know what they're doing. They change around the ... They change around ... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they'll take the H2 and H3s and turn that into a numbered list. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. They're able to do that. In the featured snippets, what you get is Google understands the intent. For instance, the word for ladybug in America is called a ladybird in the UK. If I look up, "Why are ladybugs different colors?" I'll tell you why. One of them. Because the orange ones in Ohio bite you. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Crystal Carter: Yeah. They're awful. They're vicious. They come out in the … Mordy Oberstein: You know why, because Ohio's near Chicago. Crystal Carter: Whoops. We love the Midwest. We love the Midwest. And all of the pop that happens in the Midwest. Mordy Oberstein: I love pop. Crystal Carter: I love pop. It's my favorite. Shout out to Kenyon College. Hey. Shout out to my alma mater, Kenyon College in Ohio. Anyway. Yeah, if you look up, "Why are ladybugs different colors in the UK?" Or, "Why are ladybirds different colors in the UK?" They will give you information about ladybugs because they understand that that's not the literal word, that is the fly. They understand that there's different words for those things. And they do that in real time. As things change and as language evolves, which it does really regularly, they understand this. And yeah, it's something that they actively work with, and machine learning is absolutely crucial to that. Mordy Oberstein: I think the point we're trying to drive home is that things that are not ranking factors per se, impact rank more so than your specific ranking factors. Crystal Carter: I think that there's a difference between SEO best practice and ranking factors. There's SEO best practice, like your headings and your meta descriptions, and your this and that and the other. All of those things are great best practice, and they contribute to how Google understands your content so that they can rank it. Mordy Oberstein: So the next time you see a, "This is a list of the top ranking factors." Have a look. Sure, whatever. But focus more on what's happening in the ecosystem. How is Google going about actually understanding content and trying to align with that? Because if you align with how Google's trying to understand content, Google will see you as relevant. And then when they weigh the ranking factor of relevancy at 90% for this query, you will rank. Crystal Carter: There you go. There we have it. Mordy Oberstein: And you'll have done it without ever worrying about a ranking factor. You know what you should be worried about though? Crystal Carter: What? What? Mordy Oberstein: The news, and what's happening in the news. Maybe something's- Crystal Carter: What is happening? Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're about to find out, because here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy news. Some people will lie, "I hate to say, I told you so," but I revel in it. I told you so. Just one week after I reported to you about bank rate using AI to write content. I said, "Be careful." CNET stepped in it like you would not believe. Allegedly, they have been spitting up AI content and having it reviewed by people. But it turns out it's been a hot mess of inaccuracy from Mia Sato and James Vincent over at The Verge, inside CNET's AI powered SEO money machine. I am not going to get into the whole thing here. I will link to the story in the show notes. Most definitely read it. Fascinating. I feel like we've gone backwards in time in SEO world. Not happy about it, but read the article. But the article said it goes through CNET's alleged content farm or content building of over 70 articles built by AI writers, saying, quote, "The business model is straightforward and explicit. It publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for high intense queries, and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links." Meaning exactly what Google says you are not allowed to do in their guidelines. For the record, by the way, according to Mashable, CNET has ceased with the creation of AI powered content. The moral of the story is this is an emerging technology that needs to be used the right way. Please, please, please don't just jump into these tools carte blanche. Let the dust settle. Be mature with them. Figure it out. In other news, Google will be adding an AI powered chatbot in 2023. How's that for contrast? Per Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land. Report, "Google Search will debut chatbot features this year." It's been speculated that Google went bonkers when the popularity of ChatGPT came about, trying to determine how it might impact their business model. So it makes sense that Google's anxiously letting you know, "Hey, hey, we're going to do this. We're not behind the times here. We have this. We've got you covered. We're going to have the chatbot. We're going to have the chatbot." At least according to a report from the New York Times. I think this will be an interactive chat experience, where instead of getting a simple question answered with a simple result, which Google already does, it'll be something like, "Hey, where can I get pizza near me?" The chatbot replies back with a bunch of listings. And then you say, "Hey, chatbot, which one of these listings has gluten free pizza?" In other words, it'll be a way of interactively refining or exploring topics and queries. Expanding on that and refining in on that ... on all new and interactive ways. With that, this is this week's Snappy News. You no longer have to worry because now you know the news. Crystal Carter: I'm even more worried now. No, I'm not. I'm not. That was great news. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks. I was worried that you weren't going to like it. Crystal Carter: No, I love good news. It's always good to get good news. It's great. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. All news is good news. Is that a thing? No, that can't be a thing. That shouldn't be a thing. Crystal Carter: Well ... Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: You know what might be news to you, then? Crystal Carter: What's news to me? Mordy Oberstein: Who you should be following this week from our social awesomeness around SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Social media is a great way to hear about SEO. That's where I get a lot of my SEO news. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking to get a more holistic understanding of how you should be going about content and SEO, and not worrying so much about, "Is this a ranking factor?" You know who you should be following, is Dr. Marie Haynes. Crystal Carter: Dr. Marie Haynes, she's an absolute gem. Mordy Oberstein: She's a treasure. Crystal Carter: She has such a healthy, incredible curiosity for SEO. She asks questions about things that she's considering. And she thinks deeply about the questions and the answers and what it might mean. I saw her having a really interesting discussion about, again, mentioning ChatGPT, about what that means for search. I know a lot of people are asking those questions, but I'm really interested to see what she thinks about that. Speaking of which, she wrote a fantastic article about Google and their algorithm updates. Which has to do with ranking, particularly from a domain point of view, for the Wix SEO Hub, which is an absolute must-read. Please check that out. But yeah, she's a fantastic, incredible thought follow, and is amazing. All of the platitudes, all of the compliments for Marie. Mordy Oberstein: Great conversation on Twitter. Does great assets for the community. Search news you can use. So check that out. If you're looking to understand the algorithm better, the quality reader guidelines better, she's someone you definitely want to keep an eye on and follow. Over on Twitter, @MarieHaynes. That's at M-A-R-I-E underscore H-A-Y-N-E-S. On Twitter, @Marie_Haynes. We'll lead to it in the show notes. Definitely give her a follow because she's our follow of the week. Which means we have reached the end. Crystal Carter: We have? Mordy Oberstein: I hope I have factored in an ending. Crystal Carter: What did we learn today about machines? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, we learned there are a lot of factors, and worry about the machines more than the factors. Crystal Carter: Factors to consider about machines. Mordy Oberstein: I'm factoring in the point you've been making about machines, about the factors, and factoring in your point about the machines, my factoring of the factors is less. Does that make sense? Crystal Carter: How should we rank that assessment? Mordy Oberstein: It's very secure. Has an S. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: 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, ooh, this is a hot topic, do traditional search engines matter as much as they used to? We're probably going to Chat GPT-3 with that one. Look for us wherever you consume your podcast, or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wick SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wick.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 Marcus Tober Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Semrush The power of keyword intent for organic success News: Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine CNET pauses its controversial AI-generated stories 'for now' Report: Google search will debut chatbot features this year Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Marcus Tober Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Semrush The power of keyword intent for organic success News: Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine CNET pauses its controversial AI-generated stories 'for now' Report: Google search will debut chatbot features this year Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're approaching our groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO Branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazing and fabulously incredible, the greatest of all, Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for that fantastic introduction, Mordy Oberstein. One of these days I'm going to listen back to the podcast and see if they're all different, or if you- Mordy Oberstein: No, there are slight variations. I don't script it out. I get stuck. I guess like, "Wait. What do I say next? That doesn't rhyme. I don't know. Okay, stop here and just say her name." Crystal Carter: The breath control is very impressive. I must say. Mordy Oberstein: I'm having a hard time because I have a cold. Crystal Carter: Awe. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone take pity on me. Pity me. Pity, pity, pity please. Crystal Carter: Put the tiny violins on the audio track, please. Right there. For Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I will take it. Don't forget, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where every Wix site is HTTPS. Wix offers enterprise level security, keeping your site safe and your users happy. After all, HTTPS is a ranking factor. Interesting. Why would I mention that random fact? I don't know. By the way, it's a very small ranking factor. Don't get hung up over it. But I'm saying that because today's topic is ranking factors. Do they matter? Should you focus on them? And if not, what should you be focused on? Again, spoiler alert, HTTPS is a very, very small ranking factor. Be that as it may, we'll dive into, do some ranking factors matter more than others? How do you know if a tactic has directly influenced your ranking? Why a focus on intent has perhaps replaced a focus on ranking factors? And why ranking factors matter less in a world that's all about interpreting meaning. That sounds abstract. Plus, we'll dive into a whole lot on Google's machine learning and its impact on the ranking wormhole. And of course, we have your snappiest of snappiest news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Get ready, get set, get ranking factors, or not. Episode number 23 of the SERP's Up podcast is flying. I don't know what we're flying to yet. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: If it’s a nonstop flight or not, because I have a cold and might need to pause for a few minutes here and there. Crystal Carter: We're a top-ranked podcast. We are. I lied. There's- Mordy Oberstein: I know all the factors too. Crystal Carter: All of the factors. Mordy Oberstein: All of the factors. All 200 of the factors. We'll get to all of this. Let's take a step back. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: When someone's searching for something, the question is, how does Google know what results to show? It's a simple foundational question, but we don't really have a lot of information, when you think about it, about that process. As much as we do know, it's what we don't know. It's the tip of the iceberg kind of thing. We have, I'll call it breadcrumbs. We know certain things that Google officially looks at. For example, we know that back links are something that Google has looked at in order to determine whether or not a page should rank or not. When I say back links, by the way, we also know ... well, we know that Google is considering it less important over time, officially, but we don't know how big of a factor it is. So we know that certain things are factors like back links, but how big of a factor are they? Again, in fact, Google has downplayed links recently. We know that, for example, your site being secure is a factor, but how big of a factor is it? Or we know, for example, that your location is a factor when you're searching for things like, "Pizza near me." So you can get some pizza near you, and put that pizza near you inside of you. That location is a factor. How close the businesses are to you when you're searching are a factor. So you would think ranking on Google would kind of be easy. We have a list of all these factors. Oh, factors here, factors there. Just check them off, no problem. And supposedly there are 200 plus of these different factors. Whether or not that's actually true or not, I don't know. But that's what the general consensus has said, there's 200 of these factors. I don't know. First off, when it comes to factors, all sorts of misinformation, things like LSI keywords being a factor, false. No such thing. They don't exist. LSI factors, not a thing. Or Google looking how old your domain is. False. No. Not true. False. Heck, there was one time where Google ... or someone misunderstood what a Googler said about RankBrain, which we'll get into later, I'm sure, and said that it's a top three ranking factor. RankBrain's not even a ranking factor. It's got nothing to do with being a factor. It impacts. It impacts what might be a factor, but it itself is not a ranking factor. It's a machine learning property. We're going to talk more about that later. Then on top of all of that, the ranking factors that we do know that actually exist, we don't always know the role that they play, and when they play and how big of a role. For example, Google has said that they assess the quality of a website at the domain level. They look at quality across the entire site, not page by page. But what exactly does quality even mean? What exactly are they looking at? You can quickly get the picture that focusing on ranking factors may not be the best thing to do if you're trying to thrive on the old Googs. Crystal Carter: I think that's absolutely true in an almost evangelical delivery. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on, that's the sound of me getting off my soapbox. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Just so you know. I think that it's absolutely true, because basically, it's a question of, if you're focusing on ranking factors, you're essentially simplifying ... you're really, really oversimplifying some extremely complex systems. Google today calls them ranking systems. They've got a really good piece of documentation that talks about their ranking systems. Talks about how those systems overlap, intersect, and how there are various different machine learning properties and various different machine learning models that help Google to understand what's going on with search results. We've got deduplication systems. There's the local news systems. There's MUM. There's BERT. There's neural matching. There's various different things that are going on at once. So yeah, a correlation doesn't always equal causation. Sometimes with a website there's lots of different factors happening at once. So it's sometimes difficult to understand which variable was the decision maker on that. But it's very complex. It's a very complex system, or very complex set of systems that overlap and intersect and are engaging with a very dynamic web that's more and more dynamic every day. So if you're just focusing on so-called factors, you're going to be missing a lot of important elements. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's one of the things that frustrates me the most about the ranking factor conversation is not just, "Okay, is it a factor? Is it not a factor? How big of a factor?" But it's really the mindset that it produces. Whereas you are so focused on, "Oh, the title tag, Google looks at that for ranking. It is a factor. I must make sure my keyword is in the title tag in order to be factored in for the factor of the factoring, of the factoring of the ranking." You're missing out on the whole mindset of, "Let me make sure that I create really good content on a page that's technically healthy, so Google can crawl, index it, and then serve this really great piece of content to users." You're missing all of that when you focus on the 200 plus ranking factors. Crystal Carter: Right. For instance, it's like the equivalent of if you were trying to get fit or if you were trying to get more physically fit, then you might say, "Oh, I need to eat this many calories." What if all those calories are junk calories? What if all those calories are from Skittles or something? And then you're going to be missing a lot of nutrition if you're just focusing on that. Or if you say, "Oh, I need to exercise for two hours." Let's say you do those two hours and then you go and eat 17 cheeseburgers. Paying attention to the holistic situation is really important and understanding that there's lots of very complex systems that are interacting at once. If we think about the fitness thing, what you eat, how you sleep, when you eat, all of those different things will come into play in order to make sure that you're happy and healthy. This is the same with your website. When Google sees that your website is happy and healthy and full of good quality content and full of good quality information, and functions well using lots of different criteria, then they'll be able to serve it to users because they know the users will get a good experience. Mordy Oberstein: That, to me, from an actual technical SEO point of view kind of thing is the point. There's things that happen beyond the ... let's call them the factors or the signals, that impacts how Google ranks something, that we don't appreciate and talk enough about. Let's say, for example, like user intent. This is something that has been more and more of an issue in the last, let's say, five, six years, where the particular factors that are applicable all depend on the various intents. So you don't even know what the factor is here because you don't really understand how Google's understanding it. For example, I'll give you a concrete example of this. Back in the day, not all recipe pages had images on them. Today, any ranking page, any ranking recipe page has an image on it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And very likely, a video. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Because machine learning, Google, RankBrain in particular, figured out that when users go to a webpage for a recipe, they want an image. An image became a ranking factor. You might say, "Okay, great, I'm not talking about a recipe, I'm a health website. I'm cooking something." Let's say meatloaf for people with diabetes. Making that up. Yeah. You might be a health website or you might be a medical website, but you're talking about a recipe. So now a recipe ranking factor steps into your health website, which you never would've thought of, because, "I'm a health website. I don't have to worry about the ranking factors for a recipe website." You don't even know what works anywhere at any point at this point. Part of the reason is because of machine learning, which we're going to talk about later on, but part of that is also, in a world where Google's trying to focus on ... Listen, take a step back. What's Google trying to do is trying to offer relevant results to people. A lot of what goes into what it shows or doesn't show is how well it understands the query and how well it understands the content. So things like MUM or BERT ... MUM, not so much yet, but Bert, all these kind of machine learning things that help Google actually understand the content itself, those are not ranking factors. Those impact what might be a ranking factor ultimately, but those things just help Google understand stuff. So while you are focusing on ranking factors, Google's focusing on understanding stuff. What can actually impact the ranking has nothing to do with the factors per se, but what happens beyond the factors or what's a meta factor. What plays into Google and how they understand the content itself versus the factors per se. Crystal Carter: Right. What helps Google to read it with their machines and what helps users to be able to understand and appreciate the content, and to convey the information appropriately. One of the things you mentioned was, "What is Google doing?" If you go to how search works, if you ask Google, "What do they want to do?" They say they want to organize the world's information. They don't talk about websites. They say they want to organize the world's information. And they want to do that in a way that is high quality. That's their business. Their business is to be able to provide high quality information to people. So whatever enables you to do that in the best possible way is what will help you to rank better, if that's your objective. Sometimes that might mean making sure that you're actually using words in your content that are relevant to the query. So when they're talking about their favorite pastries, they're talking about Ding Dongs instead of Ring Dings, then you should probably include Ding Dongs. Mordy Oberstein: Ring Dings all the way. Crystal Carter: Then you should probably include something about Ring Dings. But if you wanted to do something more niche, that only Mordy Oberstein likes, then you can maybe write some content about Ring Dings. Mordy Oberstein: Harry Schwartz also likes Ring Dings. Crystal Carter: That might include their content. It might include the way that your content is formatted. It might include things like site speed, mobile performance. That sort of thing. Make sure that you're doing whatever will help your content perform best. Again, one of the things that people sometimes get overwhelmed with, particularly when you're talking about ranking factors and ranking, da, da, da, da, da, you can accumulate ranking. Your ranking, it's dynamic. It will change. It goes up and down with regards to algorithm updates and stuff like that and different cert features. So if you start with one thing, you can go back and you can optimize. You can go back and you can optimize again. There are pages that rank for years because they're regularly updating those. Certainly something we talked about on the podcast previously with Rebecca from the Wix blog, they regularly update their content to make sure that it's relevant, it's accurate, and it's meeting user's expectations with regards to format, content, et cetera. Mordy Oberstein: On the relevant point, relevancy is a ranking factor, but if you focus on it like that, "Oh, I need to make sure my content is relevant because it's a ranking factor," that's not the way I would approach it. I'll just put it that way. One is because you don't really know anything. Doesn't tell you anything. What you should be thinking about is your user. But let's say you're thinking about Google. Let's just say you are thinking about Google that way. I would think about it as, "Okay, how is Google determining relevancy? How does machine learning properties understand content in order to say, 'This is or this isn't relevant'?" In that case, what I'm trying to say before is that you're not focused on the ranking factor when you're doing that, you're focused on the ecosystem. You're focusing on what's happening before Google ever gets to the point of saying, "Okay, how do we weigh this page for this query? How do we weigh the different ranking factors?" You're looking at, okay, relevancy, great, whatever, that's a ranking factor, who cares? I'm more concerned with, what happens underneath the surface that Google ... to determine rate relevancy? What does relevancy mean to Google? Crystal Carter: Right. If you think about just that one thing, they've got a couple of different things. They have a freshness systems. It says, "We have various Query Deserves Freshness systems designed to show fresher content for queries where it would be expected." That's something that they think about, for instance. They have local news systems, if it's something that's about local news, which might make it more relevant in certain places. For instance, if I Google hurricane, or something, and I'm in a place where there isn't a hurricane happening, then I don't need to know the local news about the hurricane. If I'm in a place where it's hurricane season and I Google hurricane, they know that I want to know what is coming. Like, "Do I need to batten down the hatches?" That's something that we need to think about. They also have systems that are around reliable information, which helps them to make sure that they're surfacing high quality content and elevating quality journalism and various different things. Their ranking systems guide is a really good outline of some of the things that they think about when they're considering that. I should also of course give a shout out to Lily Ray and her tireless commitment to encouraging people to read Google's Quality Reader Guidelines, which also talks about how they understand quality and all of the different nuances that are included, including E-E-A-T, which Lily talks a lot about, but lots of other, not factors, but considerations as well. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That's a good thing, I think, because again, you're not focusing on, "Is this a factor? Check." You're trying to get into a mindset and an approach and an understanding of content relative to users, and what Google may or may not be doing in the algorithm. That's what you should be focused on, not ranking factors. That's not to say, however, that thinking about ranking factors is inherently bad. It's like anything, it's how you use it, how you approach it. Let's bring in someone who I remember way, way, way back when, when ranking factor studies were the big thing in SEO, who is moving the industry along from general ranking factor studies to niche ranking factor studies, who's really been a part of the ranking factor conversation since it started. Senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions over at Semrush, Marcus Tober, is going to share his thoughts about, is thinking about ranking factors harmful to SEO? Marcus Tober: I believe thinking about ranking factors is helpful to SEO, as it helps to reflect and create context between your own pages and to competition. It also helps to create aspirational goals and is actually really motivating. But generally, just checking boxes, meaning chasing irrelevant or broad ranking factors is not SEO. This is how SEO used to be 15 years ago, but it's not really SEO anymore. But there are general ranking factors and this is something people should keep in mind all the time. Like, the page of your website and the context of your competition, and not just purely following Google's recommendations. Or looking at user engagement metrics and having a good CTR to know that, "Okay, I'm actually relevant. People click my results." Or generally, basic SEO, which I believe many people are not getting right, like having a good page structure, relevant title text, clean code, crawlable content, or generally, a crawlable website, avoiding load and duplicate content. Then I would also put into the bucket of ranking factors is having a good internal linking structure. Generally, relevant content. A good usage of structured data. And of course, as we all know, you need to be appealing to others, so that you track back links. Because Google is still machine, Google need these back links to discover your content and understand if you're important or not. But if you then think about ranking factors, Google really wants to deliver the most relevant result for this particular query the user has. Generally, basically, there are ranking factors on a keyword level. That's why before you start optimizing your website, you should really think about why you should rank, why you might be or will be the best and most important source, and if you cannot believe even yourself that you should be the one ranking first, then you should do something else before you apply SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much to Marcus for that. If you were looking to find Marcus on the internet, you can take a look for Marcus over on Twitter. That's @MarcusTober, at M-A-R-C-U-S-T-O-B-E-R. He's absolutely right. I think my contention with ranking factors has to do with the fact that that's not the approach that we should be constantly thinking about. That's not to say that ... Hey, look, HTTPS is a ranking factor. All things being equal, if I could just quickly make my site HTTPS, leaving aside all the reasons why you would want to do that anyway, well, why not? Why not try to get any competitive edge I can over another website, from a ranking factor point of view? Crystal Carter: I think the fitness analogy is another one as well. For instance, exercise is a factor for being more fit. Doing some exercise, if you're doing none is going to be better than ... doing some exercise is going to be better than doing none. It might not make you look like an Adonis or whatever, but it'll make you look ... it'll be better than not doing anything. Absolutely. With regards to the HTTPS thing, you said that it's not as important. They've included that as part of their page experience network of systems. One of the reasons why it's less important is because most people have it now. So if most people have HTTPS now, then it's not going to give you a particularly competitive edge. However, if you do not have HTTPS on your website, then yeah, if you add, it'll improve your website because people- Mordy Oberstein: In so many ways. In so many ways. Also, at a minimum, you have an extra S. Everyone loves the letter S. Crystal Carter: Everybody loves the letter S. It's very useful in Wordle. I'm not going to lie. I- Mordy Oberstein: It's done me wrong in Wordle. So we'll talk about the S later. Crystal Carter: My starter word has an S in it. It's super easy. Mordy Oberstein: I tried it. It doesn't always work for me. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. What's your starter word? Mordy Oberstein: It depends on my kid, but I always try to ... We do it together. I try to put an S in it. "No, do this one, it has an S in it." Or an R. I like Rs. Right? Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: But it doesn't always work. I would need, I would like, a machine learning algorithm to help me get my Wordle right. Which brings us to our conversation that I think we need to have. It behooves us to have. We wouldn't be doing our job as podcast host, an SEO podcast host, if we were not talking about machine learning relative to ranking factors, and how the whole machine learning thing has changed the dynamic around ranking factors, because it has changed. Back in the day, all anyone talked about was ranking factor, ranking factor, ranking factor. That conversation has sort of died off in a lot of ways because of what's happened with machine learning. So, let's take a little bit of a deep thought into machine learning and ranking and the role it plays. Ranking factors mean algorithms. Algorithms mean technical advancements. In Google land, that means machine learning. That's what fuels the advancements in the algorithm. Ranking factors play a more immediate role. I'll put it like this, ranking factors play a more immediate role, whereas machine learning plays a meta role. I'll give you a good example of what I mean. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: You can hit all the ... you've checked all ... Let's assume we know all the ranking factors. All of them. And you've checked all of the boxes. You've checked them twice. You have all the ranking factors. You get a metal. You have a ranking factor, and you get a ranking factor, and you get a ranking factor, to quote my inner Oprah. Crystal Carter: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: The problem is, is that machine learning dictates the SERP itself. What do I mean? Let's say you type in, "Buy car insurance," and you have a page that sells car insurance. Again, you have all the ranking factors checked off, you've done them all. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But machine learning is telling Google that the intent here is not just to buy car insurance, it's also to learn about buying car insurance. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Google will say, and they literally do this, "We will have six slots for pages that sell car insurance and four slots among the top 10 results that offer places to learn more about car insurance." So even though you've checked off all the boxes, if your page sells car insurance, you are limited to six out of 10 slots, let's say, on the first page. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: So ranking factors are one thing. Great, you've checked off the ranking factors. But unless you're understanding the Google ecosystem from machine learning point of view, which in this case means that there's multiple intents and Google's going to divide the SERP into multiple intents, and you should have content that hits both of those intents, you will be limiting yourself to just 60% of the SERP, assuming you can rank for all six slots. Crystal Carter: This is why Mordy and I both very regularly tell people to look at the SERP, and also, to experience the SERP. For instance, for that "Buy car insurance" thing or car insurance query, sometimes machine learning starts before the person even gets to the SERP. They'll start typing in, "Car insurance," or, "Buy car insurance," and they'll get some results, some preview results, and those are machine learning generated. Google learns that lots of people, when they start typing in car will type in insurance, or something. I've gone off on and fallen into an internet wormhole based on some of those things, where I started typing in something and it then started giving me ... I was like, "What is that? I've never even heard of that." Mordy Oberstein: The autocomplete is very helpful sometimes. If you're thinking about ranking factors, you're not thinking about access points or entry points to your content from the SERP, and you're not even creating any of that content. Crystal Carter: Users are very aware of this as well. Users are very aware that Google will give them an autocomplete. They're also aware that Google will filter them. I was having a conversation with somebody who was talking about, "How do I compete with a brand that has the same name as a city?" For instance. I was like, "Think about your entity." The way that Google understands entities and the knowledge graph is also another thing to consider with regards to quote, unquote ranking, because those knowledge panels show up with high priority, either on mobile or on the sidebar of the desktop search. How Google understands those entities will affect whether or not they rank certain bits of content. That's really important to think about as well. For instance, I looked up the band Texas during this conversation. Or no, I looked up the word Texas. Texas is a band in the UK. And obviously, it's Texas. Don't mess with Texas. Mordy Oberstein: What's that? I heard about the band, what's the other thing? Crystal Carter: Exactly. Because I'm in the UK where that band is famous, I got a disambiguation box that was like, "Do you mean Texas the band or do you mean Texas the state?" It popped up. That is machine learning. Google knows that people in the UK are regularly looking for Texas the band, and then sometimes, Texas the state. Then I also did the same query for Chicago. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, a working band. Crystal Carter: The first time I did- Mordy Oberstein: Terrible city. I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: Shout out to all my Chicago fans. The Bulls. Mordy Oberstein: Hi, Dr. Pete. Hi, Kevin. Crystal Carter: I also looked up Chicago. The first time I looked up Chicago, I didn't get a disambiguation thing for Chicago, the band. But then I kept looking around and I didn't click on the thing that it was talking about, Chicago, the city, and then Google gave me the disambiguation for the band. Because they were like, "You're clearly not finding what you want." So it's very important to remember that Google is doing this ... it's machine learning. It's happening in real time. They have lots of things that are happening in real time that are very complex. Mordy Oberstein: It's not even conjecture. I'm going to read something from Google to you. This is Google telling you that the way they appropriate ranking factors is based on machine learning. This is in reference to RankBrain, which is the first machine learning property Google introduced. I'm going to say 2015, could be 2014. Not 2016, but I think it's either 2014 or '15. I'm terrible with years, but it's one of those two. RankBrain helped Google understand not only queries that it never saw before, but also helped Google understand intent and what users want out of the pages that they're seeing. Or potentially be seeing. I'm quoting you from Google here. You ready? "Beyond looking at keywords, our systems also analyze if content is relevant to a query in other ways. We also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries. We transform that data into signals that help our machine learned systems better estimate relevance. Just think, when you search for dogs, you likely want a page with the word dogs on it hundreds of times. With that in mind, algorithm's assessment page contains other relevant content beyond the keyword dogs, such as pictures of dogs, videos, or even lists of breeds." It's what I said to you before about recipes. Google saw, hey, users, when they went to a recipe page that had no picture, bounced, and when it had a picture, they stayed. So, pictures are a ranking factor for recipes. Crystal Carter: Everyone's really going mad for machine learning. Everyone's going really mad for ChatGPT right now. They're saying, "Oh, Google's really lagging behind." I'm like, "Google's been doing generative search results for years." With featured snippets, they're able to extract different content, they're able to manipulate it. For instance, sometimes you go to a webpage and they've got numbers, they've got a list in numbers, and then sometimes on the SERP it shows it in bullets. They know what they're doing. They change around the ... They change around ... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they'll take the H2 and H3s and turn that into a numbered list. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. They're able to do that. In the featured snippets, what you get is Google understands the intent. For instance, the word for ladybug in America is called a ladybird in the UK. If I look up, "Why are ladybugs different colors?" I'll tell you why. One of them. Because the orange ones in Ohio bite you. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Crystal Carter: Yeah. They're awful. They're vicious. They come out in the … Mordy Oberstein: You know why, because Ohio's near Chicago. Crystal Carter: Whoops. We love the Midwest. We love the Midwest. And all of the pop that happens in the Midwest. Mordy Oberstein: I love pop. Crystal Carter: I love pop. It's my favorite. Shout out to Kenyon College. Hey. Shout out to my alma mater, Kenyon College in Ohio. Anyway. Yeah, if you look up, "Why are ladybugs different colors in the UK?" Or, "Why are ladybirds different colors in the UK?" They will give you information about ladybugs because they understand that that's not the literal word, that is the fly. They understand that there's different words for those things. And they do that in real time. As things change and as language evolves, which it does really regularly, they understand this. And yeah, it's something that they actively work with, and machine learning is absolutely crucial to that. Mordy Oberstein: I think the point we're trying to drive home is that things that are not ranking factors per se, impact rank more so than your specific ranking factors. Crystal Carter: I think that there's a difference between SEO best practice and ranking factors. There's SEO best practice, like your headings and your meta descriptions, and your this and that and the other. All of those things are great best practice, and they contribute to how Google understands your content so that they can rank it. Mordy Oberstein: So the next time you see a, "This is a list of the top ranking factors." Have a look. Sure, whatever. But focus more on what's happening in the ecosystem. How is Google going about actually understanding content and trying to align with that? Because if you align with how Google's trying to understand content, Google will see you as relevant. And then when they weigh the ranking factor of relevancy at 90% for this query, you will rank. Crystal Carter: There you go. There we have it. Mordy Oberstein: And you'll have done it without ever worrying about a ranking factor. You know what you should be worried about though? Crystal Carter: What? What? Mordy Oberstein: The news, and what's happening in the news. Maybe something's- Crystal Carter: What is happening? Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're about to find out, because here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy news. Some people will lie, "I hate to say, I told you so," but I revel in it. I told you so. Just one week after I reported to you about bank rate using AI to write content. I said, "Be careful." CNET stepped in it like you would not believe. Allegedly, they have been spitting up AI content and having it reviewed by people. But it turns out it's been a hot mess of inaccuracy from Mia Sato and James Vincent over at The Verge, inside CNET's AI powered SEO money machine. I am not going to get into the whole thing here. I will link to the story in the show notes. Most definitely read it. Fascinating. I feel like we've gone backwards in time in SEO world. Not happy about it, but read the article. But the article said it goes through CNET's alleged content farm or content building of over 70 articles built by AI writers, saying, quote, "The business model is straightforward and explicit. It publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for high intense queries, and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links." Meaning exactly what Google says you are not allowed to do in their guidelines. For the record, by the way, according to Mashable, CNET has ceased with the creation of AI powered content. The moral of the story is this is an emerging technology that needs to be used the right way. Please, please, please don't just jump into these tools carte blanche. Let the dust settle. Be mature with them. Figure it out. In other news, Google will be adding an AI powered chatbot in 2023. How's that for contrast? Per Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land. Report, "Google Search will debut chatbot features this year." It's been speculated that Google went bonkers when the popularity of ChatGPT came about, trying to determine how it might impact their business model. So it makes sense that Google's anxiously letting you know, "Hey, hey, we're going to do this. We're not behind the times here. We have this. We've got you covered. We're going to have the chatbot. We're going to have the chatbot." At least according to a report from the New York Times. I think this will be an interactive chat experience, where instead of getting a simple question answered with a simple result, which Google already does, it'll be something like, "Hey, where can I get pizza near me?" The chatbot replies back with a bunch of listings. And then you say, "Hey, chatbot, which one of these listings has gluten free pizza?" In other words, it'll be a way of interactively refining or exploring topics and queries. Expanding on that and refining in on that ... on all new and interactive ways. With that, this is this week's Snappy News. You no longer have to worry because now you know the news. Crystal Carter: I'm even more worried now. No, I'm not. I'm not. That was great news. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks. I was worried that you weren't going to like it. Crystal Carter: No, I love good news. It's always good to get good news. It's great. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. All news is good news. Is that a thing? No, that can't be a thing. That shouldn't be a thing. Crystal Carter: Well ... Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: You know what might be news to you, then? Crystal Carter: What's news to me? Mordy Oberstein: Who you should be following this week from our social awesomeness around SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Social media is a great way to hear about SEO. That's where I get a lot of my SEO news. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking to get a more holistic understanding of how you should be going about content and SEO, and not worrying so much about, "Is this a ranking factor?" You know who you should be following, is Dr. Marie Haynes. Crystal Carter: Dr. Marie Haynes, she's an absolute gem. Mordy Oberstein: She's a treasure. Crystal Carter: She has such a healthy, incredible curiosity for SEO. She asks questions about things that she's considering. And she thinks deeply about the questions and the answers and what it might mean. I saw her having a really interesting discussion about, again, mentioning ChatGPT, about what that means for search. I know a lot of people are asking those questions, but I'm really interested to see what she thinks about that. Speaking of which, she wrote a fantastic article about Google and their algorithm updates. Which has to do with ranking, particularly from a domain point of view, for the Wix SEO Hub, which is an absolute must-read. Please check that out. But yeah, she's a fantastic, incredible thought follow, and is amazing. All of the platitudes, all of the compliments for Marie. Mordy Oberstein: Great conversation on Twitter. Does great assets for the community. Search news you can use. So check that out. If you're looking to understand the algorithm better, the quality reader guidelines better, she's someone you definitely want to keep an eye on and follow. Over on Twitter, @MarieHaynes. That's at M-A-R-I-E underscore H-A-Y-N-E-S. On Twitter, @Marie_Haynes. We'll lead to it in the show notes. Definitely give her a follow because she's our follow of the week. Which means we have reached the end. Crystal Carter: We have? Mordy Oberstein: I hope I have factored in an ending. Crystal Carter: What did we learn today about machines? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, we learned there are a lot of factors, and worry about the machines more than the factors. Crystal Carter: Factors to consider about machines. Mordy Oberstein: I'm factoring in the point you've been making about machines, about the factors, and factoring in your point about the machines, my factoring of the factors is less. Does that make sense? Crystal Carter: How should we rank that assessment? Mordy Oberstein: It's very secure. Has an S. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: 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, ooh, this is a hot topic, do traditional search engines matter as much as they used to? We're probably going to Chat GPT-3 with that one. Look for us wherever you consume your podcast, or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wick SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wick.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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Adel Raslan is a product marketing manager responsible for publisher acquisition at Google AdSense. Google AdSense makes it easy to earn money from your content, whether you're an independent creator or a larger company. Adel Raslan Product Marketing Manager at Google Adel Raslan is a product marketing manager responsible for publisher acquisition at Google AdSense. Google AdSense makes it easy to earn money from your content, whether you're an independent creator or a larger company. Articles & Resources 24 Nov 2025 Optimize your website ads for the holidays with Google AdSense 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