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Bengü is the SEO team lead at Popupsmart, where she consistently seeks innovative strategies to enhance website performance, increase organic rankings, and maximize conversion rates. She also enjoys staying up-to-date on the latest developments in the SEO world. Bengü Sarıca Dinçer SEO Team Lead at Popupsmart Bengü is the SEO team lead at Popupsmart, where she consistently seeks innovative strategies to enhance website performance, increase organic rankings, and maximize conversion rates. She also enjoys staying up-to-date on the latest developments in the SEO world. Articles & Resources 22 Nov 2023 Automate backlink monitoring for free with Google Sheets and GA4 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

Dr. Marie Haynes has been helping businesses perform well in Google's ever changing algorithms since 2008. A recognized leader in the SEO industry, digital marketers around the world use her book and checklist to evaluate website quality like a Google quality rater. Marie Haynes Owner, Marie Haynes Consulting Inc. Dr. Marie Haynes has been helping businesses perform well in Google's ever changing algorithms since 2008. A recognized leader in the SEO industry, digital marketers around the world use her book and checklist to evaluate website quality like a Google quality rater. Articles & Resources 11 Oct 2022 According to Google: How to recover from a core update 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

Ross Simmonds is the founder of Foundation Marketing, a B2B SaaS Marketing agency that works with some of the worlds most successful brands. He's also the author of Create Once. Distribute Forever: How Great Creators Spread Their Ideas and How You Can Too. Ross Simmonds CEO of Foundation Marketing Ross Simmonds is the founder of Foundation Marketing, a B2B SaaS Marketing agency that works with some of the worlds most successful brands. He's also the author of Create Once. Distribute Forever: How Great Creators Spread Their Ideas and How You Can Too . Articles & Resources 16 Jan 2025 How to use AI to win at social media marketing in 2025 9 Apr 2024 Content distribution 101: What it is and how to use it 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

Lidia Infante has been working in SEO for almost a decade, helping businesses in SaaS, media and eCommerce grow online. She has a BSC in Psychology and a Master in Digital Business, and is a regular speaker at international SEO events such as MozCon, BrightonSEO, and WTSFest. Lidia Infante SEO Consultant Lidia Infante has been working in SEO for almost a decade, helping businesses in SaaS, media and eCommerce grow online. She has a BSC in Psychology and a Master in Digital Business, and is a regular speaker at international SEO events such as MozCon, BrightonSEO, and WTSFest. Articles & Resources 31 Aug 2023 SEO gap analysis: Outrank your competitors with data 2 Mar 2023 How to find your real SEO competitors 1 Dec 2022 International SEO: The essential guide to global success Resources Lidia Infante SEO competitor audit Google Sheet Analyze the SERP competition by conducting a data-driven audit with this SEO worksheet. 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

Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 55+ countries globally. He works with brands including LARQ, Birdies, Pela Case, FTD, and Tiger Companies. Him and his team, at Take Some Risk, help eCommerce brands grow through strategy, PPC marketing, and data. Duane Brown Founder & Head of Strategy at Take Some Risk Inc. Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 55+ countries globally. He works with brands including LARQ, Birdies, Pela Case, FTD, and Tiger Companies. Him and his team, at Take Some Risk, help eCommerce brands grow through strategy, PPC marketing, and data. Articles & Resources 27 Feb 2024 Automate and share customer data with Google Ads for better PPC campaigns 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

Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO since 2012. He’s currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, the #1 job site in the world. Every day, he writes tickets for small and large initiatives and works in a cross-functional team with writers, UX, engineers, and product managers. Gus Pelogia SEO Product Manager Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO since 2012. He’s currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, the #1 job site in the world. Every day, he writes tickets for small and large initiatives and works in a cross-functional team with writers, UX, engineers, and product managers. Articles & Resources 27 Jun 2025 6 SEO tools you can build with ChatGPT & Colab 9 Sept 2024 SERP analysis 101: How can I rank for this keyword? 14 Mar 2024 Create SEO proposals that get approved: Pitching big initiatives to clients and stakeholders 12 Dec 2023 Google knowledge panel: How to earn one for your name or brand 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

What’s true and what’s not about content duplication and SEO? Mordy and Crystal discuss duplicate content truths, legends, and falsehoods on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast. Unbeknownst to many, there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Google is more likely to just not index duplicate content rather than punish an entire website. It’s pretty common for large websites to have duplicate or near duplicate content. In addition, many websites, especially news websites, syndicate their content to other domains. With proper attribution, Google can recognize the syndication and potentially serve up both without relying on a no-index. Listen in as the duo dispel these content duplication myths and more! Barry Adams of Polemic Digital stops by to share when to worry and when not to worry about duplicate content from an SEO point of view. Plus, Wix’s own Rebecca Tomasis shares how she approaches dealing with duplicate content on the Wix Blog! Can you hear that echo, echo, echo on the SERPs Up SEO Podcast? Let’s explore duplicate content and SEO together! Back How big of an SEO problem is duplicate content? What’s true and what’s not about content duplication and SEO? Mordy and Crystal discuss duplicate content truths, legends, and falsehoods on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast. Unbeknownst to many, there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Google is more likely to just not index duplicate content rather than punish an entire website. It’s pretty common for large websites to have duplicate or near duplicate content. In addition, many websites, especially news websites, syndicate their content to other domains. With proper attribution, Google can recognize the syndication and potentially serve up both without relying on a no-index. Listen in as the duo dispel these content duplication myths and more! Barry Adams of Polemic Digital stops by to share when to worry and when not to worry about duplicate content from an SEO point of view. Plus, Wix’s own Rebecca Tomasis shares how she approaches dealing with duplicate content on the Wix Blog! Can you hear that echo, echo, echo on the SERPs Up SEO Podcast? Let’s explore duplicate content and SEO together! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 17 | December 14, 2022 | 37 MIN 00:00 / 36:50 This week’s guests Barry Adams Barry Adams has been building and ranking websites since 1998. Through his Polemic Digital consultancy business, he focuses on technical SEO and specialised services for news publishers. Barry counts some of the world’s biggest media brands among his clients including News UK, The Guardian, FOX, Future Publishing, Euronews, and Hearst. He is a regular speaker at conferences and events around the world, delivers annual guest lectures for local universities, and writes an irregular newsletter on SEOforGoogleNews.com. Rebecca Tomasis Rebecca is an SEO expert, specializing in blogs. Currently she works on the Wix Main Blog. Rebecca's specific focus is the planning and optimization of blog content to generate organic growth, at scale. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Serps Up! Aloha! Mahalo for joining us on the Serps 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 we're joined by the wonderful, the fantastic, the phenomenal head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello internet people. It's fantastic to see you. Well, not see you because this is a podcast, but it's great to be here and I'm very pleased. Hi, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I feel bad for you. Crystal Carter: Why? Mordy Oberstein: Because you have to hold your mic up. Your stand thing is not working. Crystal Carter: Why are you bothering on that? This is radio! People can't see that! Mordy Oberstein: I know. But now, they get a visual of you having to sit there holding the mic the whole time while we're recording. Crystal Carter: Well, I'm trying to give people the optimal audio experience for this podcast. I could do some ASMR. I could do some crinkling things. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh! I like that. You ever see those videos where they show you the behind the scenes of how they get sound effects in movies? Crystal Carter: Oh, yes! I can't remember what they're called. Mordy Oberstein: That was great. Crystal Carter: It was a special name for it, and it's a really fun name. But yeah, I followed somebody on TikTok, actually, who does that for Shameless, that TV show. Basically, she said, "Oh, a shammy is great." There's the ones they use for cars. They apparently slosh them around all over the place and they're fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing what they do. The sounds that you're actually hearing, what's actually happening behind the mic, two very different things. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the Serps Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where all of your pages are self-canonicalized. Why is that important? You'll find out! It's part of our show today. Kind of totally aligns. Crystal Carter: Totally, completely aligns. Yeah, I think canonicalization is good. I think canonicalization is good. I think canonicalization is good. Mordy Oberstein: I have this same joke planned out for later and I'm still going to do it because now it's even better, because it'll be the same. It'll be a duplicate joke. Get it? Crystal Carter: We're just going to do the same three lines over and over and over again. This show's never going to go anywhere. It's just an entire podcast of deja vu. Just internet deja vu. Mordy Oberstein: To quote Yogi Vera is deja vu all over again. Love that. Great show for you today as we dive into one of the most myth-filled areas of SEO. No, not LSI keywords, but close: duplicate content. That's right. We're diving into the real deal with duplicate content. What is duplicate content really? How does Google's diversity algorithm factor duplicate content in or out? When it makes sense to have duplicate content for user value and, of course, sub-domains, canonical tags and all that good stuff. Plus, Barry Adams stops by to share when you do, and especially don't, need to worry about duplicate content. We'll also talk to Wix's own Rebecca Tomasis as we chat about how Wix handles duplicate content at the enterprise level. And of course, we are the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Welcome to episode 17 of the Serps Up podcast. Welcome to episode 17 of the Serps Up podcast. Crystal Carter: So let's talk about duplicate content. The thing about duplicate content is it comes up a lot in SEO conversations. John Mueller's asked regularly about this and for some reason, it's been something that Google's tried to clarify on a number of occasions, but there's still a lot of mystery around it. So in most cases, when Google's talking about duplicate content, they're literally talking about scraping or copying and pasting content from another website and publishing it on your own. This can happen on a big scale. So a whole website will scrape an entire website and then put it on another website under a different domain with different URLs, but it's essentially the exact same content. This happens with Wikipedia a lot, so a lot of people will scrape Wikipedia and then put it in a different collection on a new domain. But Google's own webmaster guidelines discourage this kind of scraping. They say, "Don't create multiple pages sub-domains with substantially duplicate content. Avoid cookie cutter approaches, such as affiliate programs with little or no content." They also say, "If you are participating in an affiliate program, make sure that your site actually is adding value to what you're doing affiliate content for. Don't just scrape everything from the feed and post it on your site." Now, this is something that can be a bit confusing because people think that, "Oh, well what if I have content that's naturally kind of repetitive?" Like if you have job listings or real estate listings, or even event listings or product collections or things like that, where multiple pages will be really similar. But that's not the kind of thing that Google's actually talking about. And some people think that they're going to get a penalty, but that's not true. There's no duplicate content penalty. They said it in 2008. They said in their article, Demystifying Duplicate Content Penalty, "Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks. There's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Period." Mordy Oberstein: No one listens. No one listens. Google talks, no one listens. Crystal Carter: They keep asking. And they've asked John Mueller and he's like, "There's no duplicate content penalty." What there is, though, is basically Google is super busy. If you're publishing content that's essentially the same on your website, and you're publishing multiple pages on your website, they're essentially the same. Google might not index all of them because they don't need to, because they're essentially the same. So in the same way that I was like, "Oh, I got to a joke first," if you've published a collection of red shoes already and then you publish another one a week later, they're probably going to publish the first one, or they're probably going to index the first one if they index it at all. But they're probably going to index the first one rather than indexing every single one after it. If you think about the Spice Girls, you don't need two Sporty Spices. You've got one Sporty spice, you don't need two, right? Mordy Oberstein: I don't need one to begin with. That's a different story. Crystal Carter: I love Sporty Spice! Anyways, basically Google needs signals to understand that the content is different, right? So if you think about your meta descriptions, your page titles, your headers, your image attributes, that sort of thing ... If most of those things are the same on one page, then they will think that that's the same page. So what people think of as a duplicate content penalty is actually Google making a quality choice for the sake of the users. Because the users don't want three Sporty Spices, they want one Sporty Spice. So they're making a quality decision, and they have billions of webpages to index. They've got hundreds of thousands of websites being spun up every single day. They have a lot of content to get through. Google has said 25% to 30% of the web's content is duplicate content, and some of that is for a reason. You have things on your main job's thing. You've got it on different jobs board. You've got it on another jobs board. And then if I'm signed up for Ticketmaster and I want to know what's going on with the Taylor Swift concert, then I want that content from the Ticketmaster website. There's also going to be other people who have tickets and they'll have the same content on that website. That's okay. But Google tries to manage that in different ways. There's lots of ways that you can manage that. A schema is actually one way that they manage that. So if you think about jobs, for instance, they'll have a job and they'll say, "It's on this site, this site, and this site," and then you can pick the one that's most suitable for you. There's also canonicalization, which we'll talk about there as well. But just so we're very, very clear, there's no penalty for duplicate content. You just need to make sure that you're sending Google clear signals that your content is valuable and good signals that your content is unique. And you should also, where possible, make the most unique content most of the time. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and there's so many myths around this. For example, if I had the same product description or a very similar product description. Or let's say, for example, you're syndicating a product, like you mentioned with Taylor Swift tickets, or whatever it is. You're just taking the same description that someone else wrote on their website because that's what the manufacturer listed as a description. John Mueller's gone on, right? That's not a problem. That's not duplicate content. And this feeds right into the whole myth around keyword cannibalization and that whole thing. So keyword cannibalization is this theory ... Well, there is a real keyword cannibalization, but the predominant discussion around this, at least in the past, has been, "Oh. If I have two, very near, duplicate kind of pages, and they're both going to rank on the same serp ... Let's say one is at a number seven and one's at number 10 ... they kill each other's rankings. Google won't rank one page higher or rank both of them lower because it's duplicate content," which is what? That's not true at all. That has nothing to do with that. Google's not saying, "Oh, well you have one page and two page and it's very similar. So instead of ranking that first page number one, we're going to rank it number seven now. A-ha! We got you!" That's not true at all. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: What duplicate content and keyword cannibalization does come into play is ... The classic case I always think to make it really clear for you is let's say you have a page that talks about X and it's a blog post, and you also have a page that talks about X and it's a product page. Google ranks the blog post really high and your product page much lower. But the intent of the keyword is commercial or transactional. You want people to buy. So you don't want the blog post ranking really high where they're not going to buy anything. You'd rather have the page where you're actually selling the thing to rank really high. That's cannibalization. There you're killing yourself off and you're ruining your revenue, so to speak. That's a real case. Crystal Carter: That can definitely happen. But I think, also, it is a question of Google trying to understand the value that it has to the user. One of the things I think about is have you ever been to a supermarket or something and they're playing music? Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I've been to a supermarket. And I've been there when they're playing music. Crystal Carter: Thank you. They're playing music and it's essentially ... This is a Taylor Swift episode. Let's say they're playing a Taylor Swift song. Let's say they're playing, I don't know, Shake It Off or whatever, and you're like, "Oh, that's Taylor Swift!" And then you listen a little bit carefully and you're like, "That's not actually Taylor Swift." That's one of those things where they got somebody to do a cover so that they don't have to pay so much for the recording, right? Mordy Oberstein: That's so true. Crystal Carter: You know. You've heard those songs, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah! All the time, totally. A supermarket, great place for it. Crystal Carter: Right. They add no value, right? Those songs add no value at all. None. Now, if you think about other songs that you've heard, where somebody's actually interpreted the song ... Like if you think about All Along the Watch Tower, right? Written by Bob Dylan, and then Jimi Hendrix covered it and it's a totally different song. Mordy Oberstein: Bob Dylan said he wrote it for Jimi Hendrix to play. Crystal Carter: Right, but there's tons of those things. If you think of Walk On By, Dionne Warwick, it's a very Burt Bacharach kind of song. Then you think of Walk On By by Isaac Hayes and it's a completely different song. It's the same source material, but they're actually adding some actual value to the new content. So yeah, you could say, "Oh, yeah. That's the same song. Same notes, same lyrics, same things or whatever." But if you're actually adding different value, then it's worth having them both. I don't need to have the like-for-like Taylor Swift song and the actual Taylor Swift song. I'll just have the Taylor Swift song. Thanks, actually. So I think it's a way of thinking about those things as well. So if Google knows that that's what people value and that people value an actual, substantive bit of content, then that's what they'll give them. And if they notice that you're not adding any value, either to the intent or to the source material, then they'll handle it in a different way. And that might be not ranking your page or it might be aggregating it on ... For instance, Google for Jobs will say, "It's on this site, this site, and this site," and so they'll aggregate them. They'll say, "If you want to buy from Ticketmaster, you can buy it here. If you want to buy from See Tickets or something, you can buy it there," all of that sort of stuff. So they'll aggregate them in some ways and they'll treat the content differently. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and I think people confuse similar content with duplicate content. Similar content could be great. It's very similar, but it meets different users or meets different needs or different intents. And Google does a pretty good job of this. Now, they have indented results. So you search for something and maybe they'll show you a blog post. And then underneath it, indented, is a landing page, and underneath that indented is a knowledge-based page trying to grab all those user intents. So Google does a good job trying to handle similar content. And yes, there is a diversity algorithm where they won't try to rank more than two pages from the same website on one serp. But again, that's not a hard and fast rule anyway. They say it in the documentation. It's not a hard and fast rule. And again, the indented results kind of show you that it's not a hard and fast rule. Crystal Carter: Right. And sometimes, they don't indent everything. And also, there's going to be lots of different things. I think, also, in their recent documentation, they published some confusing information about subdomains as well. I know that a lot people- Mordy Oberstein: I love bringing that up. We're going to bring it up here because that's just different wormholes, a different landmine. Crystal Carter: That's another podcast episode. Mordy Oberstein: We should do one on that, actually. Crystal Carter: But I think a lot of people have help documentation on subdomains, for instance. And your help documentation ... Google can understand that your documentation, your help pages, those have a different intent from, say, your blog. Those have a different intent, say, from your product listings, so that sort of information. They will indent them or they'll list them differently because they understand that the users might want that in a different way. Canonical tags are incredibly helpful for helping Google understand what is the primary content. We have a great article on canonization on the Wix SEO Hub, written by James Clark, that talks about this. But this is a great way to tell Google that maybe this is the collection of, I don't know, plus size t-shirts or something, but it's part of the main collection of t-shirts, so this is a filtered version of this main thing. And you can say the canonical is here, but this is a filtered version, which is useful to users but maybe doesn't necessarily need to be on the index. But if they want to index it, they will. Mordy Oberstein: And if you don't understand canonicalization, it's basically a tag that you can add to a page that tells Google, "This page? It's really this page." They're so similar or perhaps even exact in the case of adding filters and parameters to a URL that, "Google, ignore this page for ranking. This is the one that you want." Crystal Carter: Right. And that's how you can add value to your users so that they can get to the pages that they want and filter all the things, but you're not necessarily diluting what Google's crawling when they're crawling your site. And you're not making it complicated for them to understand which pages are which. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, there's a lot of things you can do. For example, internal linking and to help Google understand ... Two very similar pages and you keep linking across your website to one page over the other page, that's a strong signal to Google that this is the one that we should really be indexing and showing the users. And the one that you're not internal linking to is probably not the one, even though they're quite similar or duplicate. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. And I think, sometimes, there's a few tools that will tell you you have duplicate content. For instance, if you have the same meta description or the same page title, or some of the other attributes ... metatech sort of things ... They'll tell you you've got duplicate content. And I think that that's not red flag duplicate content, but what you are doing there ... You might be sending confusing signals to Google about which page is which. If you've got the same URLs, loads of times you might be sending confusing signals to Google, so just make sure that they're distinct. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. So basically, make sure you're sending the right signals to Google in terms of crawling and indexing. And also, don't be afraid of writing content that's similar if it meets a different user need. Don't not write good content that your users need because you're worried about duplicate content and the duplicate content penalty. Now, when it comes to when should you and when you shouldn't worry about duplicate content, we've got a treat for you. We have a lot of SEO legends on this show. Barry Adams is a legit SEO legend. He's done a ton of work with news websites, and they often have a lot of duplicate content issues. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: So here's Barry Adams on when you do and when you don't need to worry about duplicate content. Barry Adams: When do I and don't I worry about duplicate content? I think I have maybe slightly different opinions on duplicate content than many other people in the SEO industry. But generally, I only worry about duplicate content if it's happening on one website. If you have multiple pages on your website that have identical or near identical content and, thus, are targeting the same keywords, the same topics, the same space in Google search results for the same types of queries. When that happens, you may need to find ways to disambiguate your pages a bit to make them a bit more distinct, to make them more unique, to give them specific, topical focus on one area versus another area so that they don't compete with each other. Because if you have pages on your own website that are competing with each other for the same search results, for the same rankings in Google, you are basically making life a lot more difficult for yourself because you are also, of course, competing with all the other websites out there. So try not to compete with yourself in the process. Another instance where duplicate content is often a worry for a lot of people: if you have your own content distributed on multiple different websites. An example would be a news publisher that syndicates their content to other news websites, and the worry is always there that those other websites are going to outrank the original publisher for keywords and searches related to that article content. That is sort of a valid concern. But it's not a major concern for me because I feel you can use that as a comparative advantage to a certain extent. Duplicate content ... Google does the best to filter it out in search results to a certain extent, but you very often see republished content taken from another publisher ranking quite well in Google search results. Especially in the new search results, but also in regular blue links search results, and I think that is by designed to a certain extent. It is quite difficult for Google to filter out duplicate content in their search results, and I think they deliberately tried to err on the side of coursing and just let content that they feel might be duplicate still show up in search results, and then not filter it out too aggressively. I think as a publisher, you can use syndicated content to your advantage by making sure it is properly attributed. So if you give your content to other websites to publish, make sure there's an attribution link back to your own website. Any internal links in that article you'd ideally point back to your own website, to your own tag pages, your own category pages, and your own related articles. And of course, if you can, put a canonical tag in there. Ask the republishers to canonicalize it back to your original version, which is also part of Google's recommendations when it comes to syndicated content. And beyond that, there's a lot of things, a lot of fear, I think, about duplicate content that isn't entirely warranted. There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, so just make sure all the pages on your own website are unique, are properly structured, well-targeted for specific topics and specific rankings. And don't worry too much about what other websites are doing with taking your content or scraping your content. Just focus on making sure your website is as good as it can be, and that you have all the tools at your disposal to make sure your own content ranks in performance in Google search results to its maximum potential. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Barry. Don't forget you can check out Barry at @badams on Twitter or at polemicdigital.com. I don't think we could have said that better ourselves. By the way, content syndication ... If you're a news publisher, I do not work on news websites. I do not want to work on news websites because that is such a hard decision to make, because it's a business decision. What do you want to do? What do you do now? Because often, you don't rank. Crystal Carter: Well, I think that a lot of times it has to do with building authority for your site as any publisher would. But maybe we should talk about content syndication on another podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Make it it's own thing. I remember talking to Alli Berry over at The Motley Fool ... and now I think she's at Sports Illustrated now ... about what they would do, and it's complicated. But as Barry mentioned, again, let's reiterate, there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: If there's anything you take away from this show, it's that there's no duplicate content penalty. Crystal Carter: And I think that him talking about canonical tags and about link attributes, this is certainly something ... If you're working with digital PR, this is something that you will see a lot. For instance, if you get coverage in a major news publisher, you'll often get published in lots of their syndicated publications as well. People are like, "Oh, those are all individual links." Kind of. They don't count as much as if they were individual articles, but they're still useful. But a lot of the major publishers will use that canonicalization and will use a lot of the tactics that Barry has recommended, because Barry is the dude for that kind of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: He really is, which is why you could find him again on Twitter at @badams, or polemicdigital.com. Now, if you think duplicate content is a problem for your average website to handle ... which it can be ... it is a nightmare, or can be a nightmare, for enterprise sites with thousands upon thousands and thousands of pages, like Wix. If you are working on a large site, we figured you want to get some insight as to have a better handle on duplicate content on such a large site. Which is why we asked our own Rebecca Tomasis over at Wix what we do on literally our thousands upon thousands of pages of overlapping content, from the blog to the knowledge base and niche hubs like the Wix SEO Learning Hub. So let's travel across the Wixverse as we dive into duplicate content and SEO at the enterprise level. Speaker 4: Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So for your listening pleasure today, we have one of the, I would call, biggest SEO experts at Wix because she's part of the blog team, which handles so much of our organic growth and drives so much organic growth. It's such a big focus for us. She's Rebecca Tomasis. She's an organic growth expert on the blog side of Wix, and one of her biggest problems is duplicate content. So that's what we're talking about today, duplicate content with Rebecca. How are you, Rebecca? Rebecca Tomasis: I'm good, thank you. Thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Sure! Crystal Carter: It's so nice to have you. You're brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: You are amazing, by the way. Rebecca Tomasis: [inaudible 00:21:51] Too many kind things at once, but it's very nice of you. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. Just behind the scenes of all these teams, there's always these people that you don't know who they are. Everyone knows Kyle. Kyle … Siegel, right? All the people talk, talk, talk. I'm just kidding. But the people who are the quieter people, who are actually pushing the thing forward ... I'm just kidding. Everybody's pushing it forward. But there are people who are silently doing it and who are really doing an amazing job with it. You are one of those people. Rebecca Tomasis: Well, thank you very much. That means a lot. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just going to go right to it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: What do you do with duplicate content, because it's such a problem for us. We have so many different verticals. We have blog. We have knowledge base. We have the, "Oh, no. The SEO Hub coming in with our own content." You're treading foot on your content. Now, it's a turf war. It's the Jets versus the other people on the West Side Story. Rebecca Tomasis: The sharks? Mordy Oberstein: Sharks, yeah! There we go. Rebecca Tomasis: Yeah, we're an enterprise site, right? It's a headache. And I think in an ideal world, we'd love to avoid it. I know there are a million fixes that we can do and there are all sorts of things that we can do. But I think that on a site level, when we talk about the verticals and we talk about this, I think there needs to be a lot better kind of communication and management of content between us. We all have the same end goal, but we all have very different goals and we're all tracing different intents and different audiences. It shouldn't be so hard for us to have those kind of communications and that sharing of schedules and content ideas and what we're targeting and to be able to make a decision on. I think it's something that the blog and the SEO help now do very, very well, where it's almost like, "This is your content and this is your sphere of expertise. This is what you write about and this is what we write about." Almost to the extent where we avoid it, right? Then there's not even an issue or duplicate content, and I think that's something that definitely comes back to communication and sharing, and it's something that we can all get better with. But I will tell you, honestly, we are a huge blog. We are a legacy blog. The blog is almost 10 years old. Crystal Carter: Wow. Rebecca Tomasis: The number of times that we've duplicated ourselves, and then only realized because we'd run another site audit. It was like, "Where did this URL come from? This wasn't in Screaming Frog last time. Where have you come from?" Seriously. Every time, these URLs keep popping up and we're like, "Oh my goodness," so I think that's also part of it. Running those site audits, a lot of auditing content, checking, checking, checking, checking. We have a very strict redirect budget. We're an enterprise site, right? I think, often, a redirect is thrown around as an easy solution. And yet, technically, and how Google sees it, it is an easy solution. But then, we run into a lot of issues. We run into a lot of issues with crawl budget, with redirect chains. We are potentially preparing for a huge migration. It's just not necessarily always the fix that it is. And a much better fix for us, for example, to de-optimize something or even change the content. Give it to another writer and ask them to turn it into something different. Turn it into something that targets something else. Yeah, that's something that I think we are trialing more and more is how can we be more creative with this content and change it into something that targets a different intent or targets a different audience, or maybe even we'll have a different distribution channel. And actually ... Am I allowed to say it? We won't let it appear somewhere in the search. Everything that we do on the blog because everything we want to be out there. But sometimes, it's on a level of content that we thought was great. We have great pieces of content that were written at a time when the intent was super separate and they were not really duplicate at all, and they really stood their own. And now we find, almost, the more successful we've become with the pieces of content that we really want to be successful ... with our pillar pages and everything ... It seems unavoidable, the duplication, and we really have to ... I don't know, I'm always telling writers, "It's just a piece of content. Stop being so excited about it. I'm de-optimizing it. Live with it." No, I'm joking. Crystal Carter: What I'm getting from this conversation is that when we think about duplicate content, I think a lot of SEOs think about it from the post publish perspective. So, "Oh, there's this duplicate content. Oh, we need to go back and we need to change this around." But it sounds like you're saying that it should start when you're thinking about whether or not content might be duplicate. You should be thinking about it in the planning stages, so when you're planning your content. Rebecca Tomasis: I'm a firm believer in planning content. And I know that we can't plan a year's content in advance, right, but we can plan a content strategy. I mean, we work with a clustering model. Yeah, a very specific, intense change. An intense, specific queries change. But at an entity level, on a topic level, the history of something, or things that are important to designing a logo, these things don't change. Sure, there are trends and different types of font and different types of colors and shapes. But the essence of what's important to, say, designing a logo, this doesn't change. So when we plan a cluster around how to design a logo, we can pull out all of these pieces of content and really plan it better. We used to really try to narrow down with our content like, "This content targets a keyword." And I think this creates a lot of problem with duplicate content, of course, like cannibalization. And now, we're actually at a place where this is a pillar page. This pillar page is going to fall for 100 keywords, 400 keywords, 700 keywords. And then, it also becomes less of an issue there, I think. Look, this is all me speaking. It sounds so easy in theory. Sometimes, I wish I could take our legacy content and just ... I don't know. There's just no way to get rid of it. But it's difficult because we're also a team of different people and different priorities, and somebody wants this and somebody wants that and it's not always so easy to plan. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And I've seen this in work firsthand, where I've done work with you and the blog and I've done work with the SEO Hub. That pre-planning of knowing that certain types of content, even though it might be very similar or not the same topics, but a different kind of intent or for a different kind of audience on one forum versus another kind of intent for another forum. Knowing that in advance, just as a writer, has helped me understand, "Okay, if I'm going to write this, I'm going to go to you for the blog. If I'm going to go for this, I'm going to write this for the Hub." And that clear line of demarcation around intent has been so helpful to me in understanding what goes what and where. It's sort of helped, as you mentioned in advance, prevent duplicate content from showing up. Rebecca Tomasis: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And I think, also, the other thing that I've seen the team do ... And Mordy, I know you've been a part of this process ... is refreshing content, certainly. And that's one way I think, as well, from a planning point of view, that you can reduce the kind of duplicate content that you're creating, instead of spinning up tons of the same ... Trends for Logos, or whatever, 2023, and then another blog, Trends for Logos 2024, and then another blog, Trends for Logos. Whereas, I know that the blog team spends a lot of time refreshing content so that we've got one URL that holds equity around keywords, around intent, around information. And it means that you're giving users the best information possible, but you're not duplicating yourself necessarily. Rebecca Tomasis: And I think within that, so many best practices, right? Even down to the URL we choose and how we optimize. These things are super, super important because these things are things that cannot be fixed, right? Yeah, I think it's a lot of moving parts and a lot of things to think about. Mordy Oberstein: To quote my favorite movie, "A lot of ins and outs, a lot of what-have-yous, a lot of different people involved," to quote The Big Lebowski. Rebecca Tomasis: Right. Mordy Oberstein: It literally sums it up perfectly. Speaker 4: And I think, to quote The Big Lebowski again ... I mean, you talked about pillar pages a lot and they really hold the room together. Mordy Oberstein: We've got a full Big Lebowski in this segment. Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us. Where can people find you? Rebecca Tomasis: Actually, that's a very good question. I'm not on Twitter, which probably everybody's going to be like, "Oh!" Mordy Oberstein: Are you on TikTok? Rebecca Tomasis: I am not. Are you crazy? I was born in the 80s. I have teenagers. Crystal Carter: They can find you on the blog! You wrote on the blog! They can find you. Mordy Oberstein: You're on the blog! Find me on the blog. Rebecca Tomasis: You can find me on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: Okay! Rebecca, thank you so much for coming in and see you soon! Speaker 4: Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: Always love talking to Rebecca. Literally, whenever I go into the Wix office, which is every once in a while. Love it when people always search out and find to have a little chat with because she's so knowledgeable. Crystal Carter: She's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. She really is. She's a huge driving force behind the Wix blog, and it's amazing when you think about these things. There are all these driving forces. You never see them or meet them if you're on the outside, external world. But they're there, and she's a force to be reckoned with. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's absolutely amazing and she's so committed to making the blog better all the time, which I think is awesome. And I think that in marketing and SEO, what you need is somebody who just keeps going, and Rebecca's absolutely that person. Mordy Oberstein: And the proof is in the pudding because their rankings have gone up. Anyway! Leaving that aside for a minute, what would an episode be if we didn't get into what's happening in the wide world of SEO? So, here is this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. This week, got three little nuggets for you. One from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. He says, "Google's desktop search results are now continuously scrollable." So this has been the case for a while on mobile. No more pagination. You just continuously scroll down for a while. It's not infinite scroll. It does stop at a certain point. Now, this is on desktop. The upshot here is that it may mean the users scroll a little further down the results page, making URLs that ranked towards what was the bottom of page one, a bit more visible. Item number two: Google tests topic search bar refinement on desktop after launching on mobile. This one from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. So here we're seeing, again, something that was very recently launched on mobile now appearing on desktop. So let's say, for example, you're looking for a recipe around ... I don't know, some kind of food. You'll now see filters on mobile being tested on desktop. That might mean you refine it by healthy recipes. And then under "healthy," you can refine even more with high protein recipes with lots of vegetables, whatever it is. All sorts of refinements along the way, which is basically the lesson that I think that you should take away from the results page in general, which is Google's offering users way more opportunities to refine the queries. Because Google knows that users, when they might search for a broad term like meatloaf recipe, they really do want something a little bit more specific, like a healthy meatloaf recipe with lots of protein. Which I don't know how you would do without a lot of protein, but different story, different time. I'm not a meatloaf expert. Item number three. And this one, again, comes from Barry Schwartz, but this time, from Search Engine Land. Barry is everywhere. He says, "Google helpful content system update rolling out now. December 2022 update." This is V2 of Google's helpful content update. If you're looking at the tools that track the algorithm's fluctuations, they'll tend to show not a lot of big movement towards almost no movement. I don't think this is that kind of update. There are reports coming in from particular SEOs, such as Glenn Gabe, of showing sites that are being impacted by the helpful content update. I don't think it's a sort of widespread thing that we're used to seeing with, let's say, the way a core algorithm update may roll out. I think this builds over time. I think the patterns around the rollout will be a little bit different from what we normally see, which is kind of what's happening out there, from what I see with the SEO "weather tools." And that is it for this week's snappiest of Snappy News. And we're back from the Snappy News! Always so newsy, isn't it? Crystal Carter: So newsy. Mordy Oberstein: So newsy. Crystal Carter: So newsy. It's so full of news. Mordy Oberstein: So snappy. Well, since we're talking about duplicate content this week, we figured that there are many, many people across the SEO space who talk about this topic and talk about it well, but we're going to focus on one person this week. That's right. It's time for this week's Follow of the Week, which brings us to one of the nicest people you'll meet in the SEO world. He's really, as my grandmother would say, he's a boogie. His name is Patrick Stox. He's from Ahrefs, and you can find him on Twitter @patrickstox. That's P-A-T-R-I-C-K-S-T-O-X. So Stox is S-T-O-X. Patrick Stox. Crystal Carter: He's such a good guy and he's so clever. I think I met him this year at brightonSEO, and he was just super kind and super just jazzed about SEO, which I think is great. Again, you need people that really want to do stuff and really want to move things forward, and he's that kind of guy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he writes a lot for the Ahrefs blog about topics around, let's say, duplicate content or how to use SEO data the right way, and search console and data stuff. So follow Patrick, take a look at what he's writing. I know when he writes something, it's always well-detailed, always well-thought-out, and always substantial, which is rare. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. He takes a lot of care about the work that he's doing. And Ahrefs is also a great place for some information about content syndication. They've got some great articles there, so check it out! Mordy Oberstein: Definitely check it out, and follow Patrick on Twitter. We'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes as well. Anyway, that's going to do it for us this week. Anyway, that's going to do it for us this week. I will make the same joke over and over again. I will make the same joke over and over again. Crystal Carter: Is there an echo in here? Mordy Oberstein: My life is an echo. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds really poetic. Crystal Carter: It sounds so poetic. It sounds like- Mordy Oberstein: It sounds so poetic. Crystal Carter: The kind of thing ... Mordy Oberstein: We can't stop. We're going to end this now before we go down this wormhole way too far. Thank you for joining us on the Serps Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry! We'll be back next week with a new episode as we dive into e-commerce SEO. Is it really a thing? Look for wherever you consume your 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 webinar resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Barry Adams Alli Berry Rebecca Tomasis Patrick Stox Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty Polemic Digital SEO for Google News Canonicalization and why it matters Wix Blog News: Google’s Desktop Search Results Are Now Continuously Scrollable Google Launches +Topic Search Bar Refinements After Several Months Of Testing Google helpful content system update rolling out now (December 2022 update) Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Barry Adams Alli Berry Rebecca Tomasis Patrick Stox Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty Polemic Digital SEO for Google News Canonicalization and why it matters Wix Blog News: Google’s Desktop Search Results Are Now Continuously Scrollable Google Launches +Topic Search Bar Refinements After Several Months Of Testing Google helpful content system update rolling out now (December 2022 update) Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Serps Up! Aloha! Mahalo for joining us on the Serps 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 we're joined by the wonderful, the fantastic, the phenomenal head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello internet people. It's fantastic to see you. Well, not see you because this is a podcast, but it's great to be here and I'm very pleased. Hi, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I feel bad for you. Crystal Carter: Why? Mordy Oberstein: Because you have to hold your mic up. Your stand thing is not working. Crystal Carter: Why are you bothering on that? This is radio! People can't see that! Mordy Oberstein: I know. But now, they get a visual of you having to sit there holding the mic the whole time while we're recording. Crystal Carter: Well, I'm trying to give people the optimal audio experience for this podcast. I could do some ASMR. I could do some crinkling things. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh! I like that. You ever see those videos where they show you the behind the scenes of how they get sound effects in movies? Crystal Carter: Oh, yes! I can't remember what they're called. Mordy Oberstein: That was great. Crystal Carter: It was a special name for it, and it's a really fun name. But yeah, I followed somebody on TikTok, actually, who does that for Shameless, that TV show. Basically, she said, "Oh, a shammy is great." There's the ones they use for cars. They apparently slosh them around all over the place and they're fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: It's amazing what they do. The sounds that you're actually hearing, what's actually happening behind the mic, two very different things. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the Serps Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where all of your pages are self-canonicalized. Why is that important? You'll find out! It's part of our show today. Kind of totally aligns. Crystal Carter: Totally, completely aligns. Yeah, I think canonicalization is good. I think canonicalization is good. I think canonicalization is good. Mordy Oberstein: I have this same joke planned out for later and I'm still going to do it because now it's even better, because it'll be the same. It'll be a duplicate joke. Get it? Crystal Carter: We're just going to do the same three lines over and over and over again. This show's never going to go anywhere. It's just an entire podcast of deja vu. Just internet deja vu. Mordy Oberstein: To quote Yogi Vera is deja vu all over again. Love that. Great show for you today as we dive into one of the most myth-filled areas of SEO. No, not LSI keywords, but close: duplicate content. That's right. We're diving into the real deal with duplicate content. What is duplicate content really? How does Google's diversity algorithm factor duplicate content in or out? When it makes sense to have duplicate content for user value and, of course, sub-domains, canonical tags and all that good stuff. Plus, Barry Adams stops by to share when you do, and especially don't, need to worry about duplicate content. We'll also talk to Wix's own Rebecca Tomasis as we chat about how Wix handles duplicate content at the enterprise level. And of course, we are the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Welcome to episode 17 of the Serps Up podcast. Welcome to episode 17 of the Serps Up podcast. Crystal Carter: So let's talk about duplicate content. The thing about duplicate content is it comes up a lot in SEO conversations. John Mueller's asked regularly about this and for some reason, it's been something that Google's tried to clarify on a number of occasions, but there's still a lot of mystery around it. So in most cases, when Google's talking about duplicate content, they're literally talking about scraping or copying and pasting content from another website and publishing it on your own. This can happen on a big scale. So a whole website will scrape an entire website and then put it on another website under a different domain with different URLs, but it's essentially the exact same content. This happens with Wikipedia a lot, so a lot of people will scrape Wikipedia and then put it in a different collection on a new domain. But Google's own webmaster guidelines discourage this kind of scraping. They say, "Don't create multiple pages sub-domains with substantially duplicate content. Avoid cookie cutter approaches, such as affiliate programs with little or no content." They also say, "If you are participating in an affiliate program, make sure that your site actually is adding value to what you're doing affiliate content for. Don't just scrape everything from the feed and post it on your site." Now, this is something that can be a bit confusing because people think that, "Oh, well what if I have content that's naturally kind of repetitive?" Like if you have job listings or real estate listings, or even event listings or product collections or things like that, where multiple pages will be really similar. But that's not the kind of thing that Google's actually talking about. And some people think that they're going to get a penalty, but that's not true. There's no duplicate content penalty. They said it in 2008. They said in their article, Demystifying Duplicate Content Penalty, "Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks. There's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Period." Mordy Oberstein: No one listens. No one listens. Google talks, no one listens. Crystal Carter: They keep asking. And they've asked John Mueller and he's like, "There's no duplicate content penalty." What there is, though, is basically Google is super busy. If you're publishing content that's essentially the same on your website, and you're publishing multiple pages on your website, they're essentially the same. Google might not index all of them because they don't need to, because they're essentially the same. So in the same way that I was like, "Oh, I got to a joke first," if you've published a collection of red shoes already and then you publish another one a week later, they're probably going to publish the first one, or they're probably going to index the first one if they index it at all. But they're probably going to index the first one rather than indexing every single one after it. If you think about the Spice Girls, you don't need two Sporty Spices. You've got one Sporty spice, you don't need two, right? Mordy Oberstein: I don't need one to begin with. That's a different story. Crystal Carter: I love Sporty Spice! Anyways, basically Google needs signals to understand that the content is different, right? So if you think about your meta descriptions, your page titles, your headers, your image attributes, that sort of thing ... If most of those things are the same on one page, then they will think that that's the same page. So what people think of as a duplicate content penalty is actually Google making a quality choice for the sake of the users. Because the users don't want three Sporty Spices, they want one Sporty Spice. So they're making a quality decision, and they have billions of webpages to index. They've got hundreds of thousands of websites being spun up every single day. They have a lot of content to get through. Google has said 25% to 30% of the web's content is duplicate content, and some of that is for a reason. You have things on your main job's thing. You've got it on different jobs board. You've got it on another jobs board. And then if I'm signed up for Ticketmaster and I want to know what's going on with the Taylor Swift concert, then I want that content from the Ticketmaster website. There's also going to be other people who have tickets and they'll have the same content on that website. That's okay. But Google tries to manage that in different ways. There's lots of ways that you can manage that. A schema is actually one way that they manage that. So if you think about jobs, for instance, they'll have a job and they'll say, "It's on this site, this site, and this site," and then you can pick the one that's most suitable for you. There's also canonicalization, which we'll talk about there as well. But just so we're very, very clear, there's no penalty for duplicate content. You just need to make sure that you're sending Google clear signals that your content is valuable and good signals that your content is unique. And you should also, where possible, make the most unique content most of the time. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and there's so many myths around this. For example, if I had the same product description or a very similar product description. Or let's say, for example, you're syndicating a product, like you mentioned with Taylor Swift tickets, or whatever it is. You're just taking the same description that someone else wrote on their website because that's what the manufacturer listed as a description. John Mueller's gone on, right? That's not a problem. That's not duplicate content. And this feeds right into the whole myth around keyword cannibalization and that whole thing. So keyword cannibalization is this theory ... Well, there is a real keyword cannibalization, but the predominant discussion around this, at least in the past, has been, "Oh. If I have two, very near, duplicate kind of pages, and they're both going to rank on the same serp ... Let's say one is at a number seven and one's at number 10 ... they kill each other's rankings. Google won't rank one page higher or rank both of them lower because it's duplicate content," which is what? That's not true at all. That has nothing to do with that. Google's not saying, "Oh, well you have one page and two page and it's very similar. So instead of ranking that first page number one, we're going to rank it number seven now. A-ha! We got you!" That's not true at all. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: What duplicate content and keyword cannibalization does come into play is ... The classic case I always think to make it really clear for you is let's say you have a page that talks about X and it's a blog post, and you also have a page that talks about X and it's a product page. Google ranks the blog post really high and your product page much lower. But the intent of the keyword is commercial or transactional. You want people to buy. So you don't want the blog post ranking really high where they're not going to buy anything. You'd rather have the page where you're actually selling the thing to rank really high. That's cannibalization. There you're killing yourself off and you're ruining your revenue, so to speak. That's a real case. Crystal Carter: That can definitely happen. But I think, also, it is a question of Google trying to understand the value that it has to the user. One of the things I think about is have you ever been to a supermarket or something and they're playing music? Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I've been to a supermarket. And I've been there when they're playing music. Crystal Carter: Thank you. They're playing music and it's essentially ... This is a Taylor Swift episode. Let's say they're playing a Taylor Swift song. Let's say they're playing, I don't know, Shake It Off or whatever, and you're like, "Oh, that's Taylor Swift!" And then you listen a little bit carefully and you're like, "That's not actually Taylor Swift." That's one of those things where they got somebody to do a cover so that they don't have to pay so much for the recording, right? Mordy Oberstein: That's so true. Crystal Carter: You know. You've heard those songs, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah! All the time, totally. A supermarket, great place for it. Crystal Carter: Right. They add no value, right? Those songs add no value at all. None. Now, if you think about other songs that you've heard, where somebody's actually interpreted the song ... Like if you think about All Along the Watch Tower, right? Written by Bob Dylan, and then Jimi Hendrix covered it and it's a totally different song. Mordy Oberstein: Bob Dylan said he wrote it for Jimi Hendrix to play. Crystal Carter: Right, but there's tons of those things. If you think of Walk On By, Dionne Warwick, it's a very Burt Bacharach kind of song. Then you think of Walk On By by Isaac Hayes and it's a completely different song. It's the same source material, but they're actually adding some actual value to the new content. So yeah, you could say, "Oh, yeah. That's the same song. Same notes, same lyrics, same things or whatever." But if you're actually adding different value, then it's worth having them both. I don't need to have the like-for-like Taylor Swift song and the actual Taylor Swift song. I'll just have the Taylor Swift song. Thanks, actually. So I think it's a way of thinking about those things as well. So if Google knows that that's what people value and that people value an actual, substantive bit of content, then that's what they'll give them. And if they notice that you're not adding any value, either to the intent or to the source material, then they'll handle it in a different way. And that might be not ranking your page or it might be aggregating it on ... For instance, Google for Jobs will say, "It's on this site, this site, and this site," and so they'll aggregate them. They'll say, "If you want to buy from Ticketmaster, you can buy it here. If you want to buy from See Tickets or something, you can buy it there," all of that sort of stuff. So they'll aggregate them in some ways and they'll treat the content differently. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and I think people confuse similar content with duplicate content. Similar content could be great. It's very similar, but it meets different users or meets different needs or different intents. And Google does a pretty good job of this. Now, they have indented results. So you search for something and maybe they'll show you a blog post. And then underneath it, indented, is a landing page, and underneath that indented is a knowledge-based page trying to grab all those user intents. So Google does a good job trying to handle similar content. And yes, there is a diversity algorithm where they won't try to rank more than two pages from the same website on one serp. But again, that's not a hard and fast rule anyway. They say it in the documentation. It's not a hard and fast rule. And again, the indented results kind of show you that it's not a hard and fast rule. Crystal Carter: Right. And sometimes, they don't indent everything. And also, there's going to be lots of different things. I think, also, in their recent documentation, they published some confusing information about subdomains as well. I know that a lot people- Mordy Oberstein: I love bringing that up. We're going to bring it up here because that's just different wormholes, a different landmine. Crystal Carter: That's another podcast episode. Mordy Oberstein: We should do one on that, actually. Crystal Carter: But I think a lot of people have help documentation on subdomains, for instance. And your help documentation ... Google can understand that your documentation, your help pages, those have a different intent from, say, your blog. Those have a different intent, say, from your product listings, so that sort of information. They will indent them or they'll list them differently because they understand that the users might want that in a different way. Canonical tags are incredibly helpful for helping Google understand what is the primary content. We have a great article on canonization on the Wix SEO Hub, written by James Clark, that talks about this. But this is a great way to tell Google that maybe this is the collection of, I don't know, plus size t-shirts or something, but it's part of the main collection of t-shirts, so this is a filtered version of this main thing. And you can say the canonical is here, but this is a filtered version, which is useful to users but maybe doesn't necessarily need to be on the index. But if they want to index it, they will. Mordy Oberstein: And if you don't understand canonicalization, it's basically a tag that you can add to a page that tells Google, "This page? It's really this page." They're so similar or perhaps even exact in the case of adding filters and parameters to a URL that, "Google, ignore this page for ranking. This is the one that you want." Crystal Carter: Right. And that's how you can add value to your users so that they can get to the pages that they want and filter all the things, but you're not necessarily diluting what Google's crawling when they're crawling your site. And you're not making it complicated for them to understand which pages are which. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, there's a lot of things you can do. For example, internal linking and to help Google understand ... Two very similar pages and you keep linking across your website to one page over the other page, that's a strong signal to Google that this is the one that we should really be indexing and showing the users. And the one that you're not internal linking to is probably not the one, even though they're quite similar or duplicate. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. And I think, sometimes, there's a few tools that will tell you you have duplicate content. For instance, if you have the same meta description or the same page title, or some of the other attributes ... metatech sort of things ... They'll tell you you've got duplicate content. And I think that that's not red flag duplicate content, but what you are doing there ... You might be sending confusing signals to Google about which page is which. If you've got the same URLs, loads of times you might be sending confusing signals to Google, so just make sure that they're distinct. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. So basically, make sure you're sending the right signals to Google in terms of crawling and indexing. And also, don't be afraid of writing content that's similar if it meets a different user need. Don't not write good content that your users need because you're worried about duplicate content and the duplicate content penalty. Now, when it comes to when should you and when you shouldn't worry about duplicate content, we've got a treat for you. We have a lot of SEO legends on this show. Barry Adams is a legit SEO legend. He's done a ton of work with news websites, and they often have a lot of duplicate content issues. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: So here's Barry Adams on when you do and when you don't need to worry about duplicate content. Barry Adams: When do I and don't I worry about duplicate content? I think I have maybe slightly different opinions on duplicate content than many other people in the SEO industry. But generally, I only worry about duplicate content if it's happening on one website. If you have multiple pages on your website that have identical or near identical content and, thus, are targeting the same keywords, the same topics, the same space in Google search results for the same types of queries. When that happens, you may need to find ways to disambiguate your pages a bit to make them a bit more distinct, to make them more unique, to give them specific, topical focus on one area versus another area so that they don't compete with each other. Because if you have pages on your own website that are competing with each other for the same search results, for the same rankings in Google, you are basically making life a lot more difficult for yourself because you are also, of course, competing with all the other websites out there. So try not to compete with yourself in the process. Another instance where duplicate content is often a worry for a lot of people: if you have your own content distributed on multiple different websites. An example would be a news publisher that syndicates their content to other news websites, and the worry is always there that those other websites are going to outrank the original publisher for keywords and searches related to that article content. That is sort of a valid concern. But it's not a major concern for me because I feel you can use that as a comparative advantage to a certain extent. Duplicate content ... Google does the best to filter it out in search results to a certain extent, but you very often see republished content taken from another publisher ranking quite well in Google search results. Especially in the new search results, but also in regular blue links search results, and I think that is by designed to a certain extent. It is quite difficult for Google to filter out duplicate content in their search results, and I think they deliberately tried to err on the side of coursing and just let content that they feel might be duplicate still show up in search results, and then not filter it out too aggressively. I think as a publisher, you can use syndicated content to your advantage by making sure it is properly attributed. So if you give your content to other websites to publish, make sure there's an attribution link back to your own website. Any internal links in that article you'd ideally point back to your own website, to your own tag pages, your own category pages, and your own related articles. And of course, if you can, put a canonical tag in there. Ask the republishers to canonicalize it back to your original version, which is also part of Google's recommendations when it comes to syndicated content. And beyond that, there's a lot of things, a lot of fear, I think, about duplicate content that isn't entirely warranted. There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, so just make sure all the pages on your own website are unique, are properly structured, well-targeted for specific topics and specific rankings. And don't worry too much about what other websites are doing with taking your content or scraping your content. Just focus on making sure your website is as good as it can be, and that you have all the tools at your disposal to make sure your own content ranks in performance in Google search results to its maximum potential. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Barry. Don't forget you can check out Barry at @badams on Twitter or at polemicdigital.com. I don't think we could have said that better ourselves. By the way, content syndication ... If you're a news publisher, I do not work on news websites. I do not want to work on news websites because that is such a hard decision to make, because it's a business decision. What do you want to do? What do you do now? Because often, you don't rank. Crystal Carter: Well, I think that a lot of times it has to do with building authority for your site as any publisher would. But maybe we should talk about content syndication on another podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Make it it's own thing. I remember talking to Alli Berry over at The Motley Fool ... and now I think she's at Sports Illustrated now ... about what they would do, and it's complicated. But as Barry mentioned, again, let's reiterate, there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: If there's anything you take away from this show, it's that there's no duplicate content penalty. Crystal Carter: And I think that him talking about canonical tags and about link attributes, this is certainly something ... If you're working with digital PR, this is something that you will see a lot. For instance, if you get coverage in a major news publisher, you'll often get published in lots of their syndicated publications as well. People are like, "Oh, those are all individual links." Kind of. They don't count as much as if they were individual articles, but they're still useful. But a lot of the major publishers will use that canonicalization and will use a lot of the tactics that Barry has recommended, because Barry is the dude for that kind of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: He really is, which is why you could find him again on Twitter at @badams, or polemicdigital.com. Now, if you think duplicate content is a problem for your average website to handle ... which it can be ... it is a nightmare, or can be a nightmare, for enterprise sites with thousands upon thousands and thousands of pages, like Wix. If you are working on a large site, we figured you want to get some insight as to have a better handle on duplicate content on such a large site. Which is why we asked our own Rebecca Tomasis over at Wix what we do on literally our thousands upon thousands of pages of overlapping content, from the blog to the knowledge base and niche hubs like the Wix SEO Learning Hub. So let's travel across the Wixverse as we dive into duplicate content and SEO at the enterprise level. Speaker 4: Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So for your listening pleasure today, we have one of the, I would call, biggest SEO experts at Wix because she's part of the blog team, which handles so much of our organic growth and drives so much organic growth. It's such a big focus for us. She's Rebecca Tomasis. She's an organic growth expert on the blog side of Wix, and one of her biggest problems is duplicate content. So that's what we're talking about today, duplicate content with Rebecca. How are you, Rebecca? Rebecca Tomasis: I'm good, thank you. Thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Sure! Crystal Carter: It's so nice to have you. You're brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: You are amazing, by the way. Rebecca Tomasis: [inaudible 00:21:51] Too many kind things at once, but it's very nice of you. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. Just behind the scenes of all these teams, there's always these people that you don't know who they are. Everyone knows Kyle. Kyle … Siegel, right? All the people talk, talk, talk. I'm just kidding. But the people who are the quieter people, who are actually pushing the thing forward ... I'm just kidding. Everybody's pushing it forward. But there are people who are silently doing it and who are really doing an amazing job with it. You are one of those people. Rebecca Tomasis: Well, thank you very much. That means a lot. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just going to go right to it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: What do you do with duplicate content, because it's such a problem for us. We have so many different verticals. We have blog. We have knowledge base. We have the, "Oh, no. The SEO Hub coming in with our own content." You're treading foot on your content. Now, it's a turf war. It's the Jets versus the other people on the West Side Story. Rebecca Tomasis: The sharks? Mordy Oberstein: Sharks, yeah! There we go. Rebecca Tomasis: Yeah, we're an enterprise site, right? It's a headache. And I think in an ideal world, we'd love to avoid it. I know there are a million fixes that we can do and there are all sorts of things that we can do. But I think that on a site level, when we talk about the verticals and we talk about this, I think there needs to be a lot better kind of communication and management of content between us. We all have the same end goal, but we all have very different goals and we're all tracing different intents and different audiences. It shouldn't be so hard for us to have those kind of communications and that sharing of schedules and content ideas and what we're targeting and to be able to make a decision on. I think it's something that the blog and the SEO help now do very, very well, where it's almost like, "This is your content and this is your sphere of expertise. This is what you write about and this is what we write about." Almost to the extent where we avoid it, right? Then there's not even an issue or duplicate content, and I think that's something that definitely comes back to communication and sharing, and it's something that we can all get better with. But I will tell you, honestly, we are a huge blog. We are a legacy blog. The blog is almost 10 years old. Crystal Carter: Wow. Rebecca Tomasis: The number of times that we've duplicated ourselves, and then only realized because we'd run another site audit. It was like, "Where did this URL come from? This wasn't in Screaming Frog last time. Where have you come from?" Seriously. Every time, these URLs keep popping up and we're like, "Oh my goodness," so I think that's also part of it. Running those site audits, a lot of auditing content, checking, checking, checking, checking. We have a very strict redirect budget. We're an enterprise site, right? I think, often, a redirect is thrown around as an easy solution. And yet, technically, and how Google sees it, it is an easy solution. But then, we run into a lot of issues. We run into a lot of issues with crawl budget, with redirect chains. We are potentially preparing for a huge migration. It's just not necessarily always the fix that it is. And a much better fix for us, for example, to de-optimize something or even change the content. Give it to another writer and ask them to turn it into something different. Turn it into something that targets something else. Yeah, that's something that I think we are trialing more and more is how can we be more creative with this content and change it into something that targets a different intent or targets a different audience, or maybe even we'll have a different distribution channel. And actually ... Am I allowed to say it? We won't let it appear somewhere in the search. Everything that we do on the blog because everything we want to be out there. But sometimes, it's on a level of content that we thought was great. We have great pieces of content that were written at a time when the intent was super separate and they were not really duplicate at all, and they really stood their own. And now we find, almost, the more successful we've become with the pieces of content that we really want to be successful ... with our pillar pages and everything ... It seems unavoidable, the duplication, and we really have to ... I don't know, I'm always telling writers, "It's just a piece of content. Stop being so excited about it. I'm de-optimizing it. Live with it." No, I'm joking. Crystal Carter: What I'm getting from this conversation is that when we think about duplicate content, I think a lot of SEOs think about it from the post publish perspective. So, "Oh, there's this duplicate content. Oh, we need to go back and we need to change this around." But it sounds like you're saying that it should start when you're thinking about whether or not content might be duplicate. You should be thinking about it in the planning stages, so when you're planning your content. Rebecca Tomasis: I'm a firm believer in planning content. And I know that we can't plan a year's content in advance, right, but we can plan a content strategy. I mean, we work with a clustering model. Yeah, a very specific, intense change. An intense, specific queries change. But at an entity level, on a topic level, the history of something, or things that are important to designing a logo, these things don't change. Sure, there are trends and different types of font and different types of colors and shapes. But the essence of what's important to, say, designing a logo, this doesn't change. So when we plan a cluster around how to design a logo, we can pull out all of these pieces of content and really plan it better. We used to really try to narrow down with our content like, "This content targets a keyword." And I think this creates a lot of problem with duplicate content, of course, like cannibalization. And now, we're actually at a place where this is a pillar page. This pillar page is going to fall for 100 keywords, 400 keywords, 700 keywords. And then, it also becomes less of an issue there, I think. Look, this is all me speaking. It sounds so easy in theory. Sometimes, I wish I could take our legacy content and just ... I don't know. There's just no way to get rid of it. But it's difficult because we're also a team of different people and different priorities, and somebody wants this and somebody wants that and it's not always so easy to plan. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And I've seen this in work firsthand, where I've done work with you and the blog and I've done work with the SEO Hub. That pre-planning of knowing that certain types of content, even though it might be very similar or not the same topics, but a different kind of intent or for a different kind of audience on one forum versus another kind of intent for another forum. Knowing that in advance, just as a writer, has helped me understand, "Okay, if I'm going to write this, I'm going to go to you for the blog. If I'm going to go for this, I'm going to write this for the Hub." And that clear line of demarcation around intent has been so helpful to me in understanding what goes what and where. It's sort of helped, as you mentioned in advance, prevent duplicate content from showing up. Rebecca Tomasis: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And I think, also, the other thing that I've seen the team do ... And Mordy, I know you've been a part of this process ... is refreshing content, certainly. And that's one way I think, as well, from a planning point of view, that you can reduce the kind of duplicate content that you're creating, instead of spinning up tons of the same ... Trends for Logos, or whatever, 2023, and then another blog, Trends for Logos 2024, and then another blog, Trends for Logos. Whereas, I know that the blog team spends a lot of time refreshing content so that we've got one URL that holds equity around keywords, around intent, around information. And it means that you're giving users the best information possible, but you're not duplicating yourself necessarily. Rebecca Tomasis: And I think within that, so many best practices, right? Even down to the URL we choose and how we optimize. These things are super, super important because these things are things that cannot be fixed, right? Yeah, I think it's a lot of moving parts and a lot of things to think about. Mordy Oberstein: To quote my favorite movie, "A lot of ins and outs, a lot of what-have-yous, a lot of different people involved," to quote The Big Lebowski. Rebecca Tomasis: Right. Mordy Oberstein: It literally sums it up perfectly. Speaker 4: And I think, to quote The Big Lebowski again ... I mean, you talked about pillar pages a lot and they really hold the room together. Mordy Oberstein: We've got a full Big Lebowski in this segment. Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us. Where can people find you? Rebecca Tomasis: Actually, that's a very good question. I'm not on Twitter, which probably everybody's going to be like, "Oh!" Mordy Oberstein: Are you on TikTok? Rebecca Tomasis: I am not. Are you crazy? I was born in the 80s. I have teenagers. Crystal Carter: They can find you on the blog! You wrote on the blog! They can find you. Mordy Oberstein: You're on the blog! Find me on the blog. Rebecca Tomasis: You can find me on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: Okay! Rebecca, thank you so much for coming in and see you soon! Speaker 4: Three, two, one. Ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: Always love talking to Rebecca. Literally, whenever I go into the Wix office, which is every once in a while. Love it when people always search out and find to have a little chat with because she's so knowledgeable. Crystal Carter: She's amazing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. She really is. She's a huge driving force behind the Wix blog, and it's amazing when you think about these things. There are all these driving forces. You never see them or meet them if you're on the outside, external world. But they're there, and she's a force to be reckoned with. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's absolutely amazing and she's so committed to making the blog better all the time, which I think is awesome. And I think that in marketing and SEO, what you need is somebody who just keeps going, and Rebecca's absolutely that person. Mordy Oberstein: And the proof is in the pudding because their rankings have gone up. Anyway! Leaving that aside for a minute, what would an episode be if we didn't get into what's happening in the wide world of SEO? So, here is this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. This week, got three little nuggets for you. One from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. He says, "Google's desktop search results are now continuously scrollable." So this has been the case for a while on mobile. No more pagination. You just continuously scroll down for a while. It's not infinite scroll. It does stop at a certain point. Now, this is on desktop. The upshot here is that it may mean the users scroll a little further down the results page, making URLs that ranked towards what was the bottom of page one, a bit more visible. Item number two: Google tests topic search bar refinement on desktop after launching on mobile. This one from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. So here we're seeing, again, something that was very recently launched on mobile now appearing on desktop. So let's say, for example, you're looking for a recipe around ... I don't know, some kind of food. You'll now see filters on mobile being tested on desktop. That might mean you refine it by healthy recipes. And then under "healthy," you can refine even more with high protein recipes with lots of vegetables, whatever it is. All sorts of refinements along the way, which is basically the lesson that I think that you should take away from the results page in general, which is Google's offering users way more opportunities to refine the queries. Because Google knows that users, when they might search for a broad term like meatloaf recipe, they really do want something a little bit more specific, like a healthy meatloaf recipe with lots of protein. Which I don't know how you would do without a lot of protein, but different story, different time. I'm not a meatloaf expert. Item number three. And this one, again, comes from Barry Schwartz, but this time, from Search Engine Land. Barry is everywhere. He says, "Google helpful content system update rolling out now. December 2022 update." This is V2 of Google's helpful content update. If you're looking at the tools that track the algorithm's fluctuations, they'll tend to show not a lot of big movement towards almost no movement. I don't think this is that kind of update. There are reports coming in from particular SEOs, such as Glenn Gabe, of showing sites that are being impacted by the helpful content update. I don't think it's a sort of widespread thing that we're used to seeing with, let's say, the way a core algorithm update may roll out. I think this builds over time. I think the patterns around the rollout will be a little bit different from what we normally see, which is kind of what's happening out there, from what I see with the SEO "weather tools." And that is it for this week's snappiest of Snappy News. And we're back from the Snappy News! Always so newsy, isn't it? Crystal Carter: So newsy. Mordy Oberstein: So newsy. Crystal Carter: So newsy. It's so full of news. Mordy Oberstein: So snappy. Well, since we're talking about duplicate content this week, we figured that there are many, many people across the SEO space who talk about this topic and talk about it well, but we're going to focus on one person this week. That's right. It's time for this week's Follow of the Week, which brings us to one of the nicest people you'll meet in the SEO world. He's really, as my grandmother would say, he's a boogie. His name is Patrick Stox. He's from Ahrefs, and you can find him on Twitter @patrickstox. That's P-A-T-R-I-C-K-S-T-O-X. So Stox is S-T-O-X. Patrick Stox. Crystal Carter: He's such a good guy and he's so clever. I think I met him this year at brightonSEO, and he was just super kind and super just jazzed about SEO, which I think is great. Again, you need people that really want to do stuff and really want to move things forward, and he's that kind of guy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he writes a lot for the Ahrefs blog about topics around, let's say, duplicate content or how to use SEO data the right way, and search console and data stuff. So follow Patrick, take a look at what he's writing. I know when he writes something, it's always well-detailed, always well-thought-out, and always substantial, which is rare. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. He takes a lot of care about the work that he's doing. And Ahrefs is also a great place for some information about content syndication. They've got some great articles there, so check it out! Mordy Oberstein: Definitely check it out, and follow Patrick on Twitter. We'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes as well. Anyway, that's going to do it for us this week. Anyway, that's going to do it for us this week. I will make the same joke over and over again. I will make the same joke over and over again. Crystal Carter: Is there an echo in here? Mordy Oberstein: My life is an echo. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds really poetic. Crystal Carter: It sounds so poetic. It sounds like- Mordy Oberstein: It sounds so poetic. Crystal Carter: The kind of thing ... Mordy Oberstein: We can't stop. We're going to end this now before we go down this wormhole way too far. Thank you for joining us on the Serps Up podcast. Already going to miss us? Not to worry! We'll be back next week with a new episode as we dive into e-commerce SEO. Is it really a thing? Look for wherever you consume your 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 webinar resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Kyle Place "E-E-A-Ts," sleeps, and breathes SEO. As an in-house SEO at Wix.com he creates organic growth strategies that satisfy the users (and search engines). Kyle also worked in an agency, helping both local businesses and SaaS companies to expand their online presence. Kyle Place SEO Specialist, Wix.com Kyle Place "E-E-A-Ts," sleeps, and breathes SEO. As an in-house SEO at Wix.com he creates organic growth strategies that satisfy the users (and search engines). Kyle also worked in an agency, helping both local businesses and SaaS companies to expand their online presence. Articles & Resources 1 Jun 2023 8 signs that you need to invest in SEO Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

This week’s SERP’s Up episode is brought to you by the letter ‘L’ for Learning! Mordy and Crystal help guide you during the most critical first steps in your SEO learning journey. Listen as they discuss the SEO learning process from how to get that hands-on experience you’ll need to having the right mindset to really absorb SEO. From the sources, you’ll need to deal with gaps in your SEO knowledge. This episode is all about how to learn SEO! But what does it really mean to learn SEO? Share a ‘Deep Thoughts’ moment with Mordy and Crystal about what it fundamentally means to learn SEO! Back Learning how to learn SEO This week’s SERP’s Up episode is brought to you by the letter ‘L’ for Learning! Mordy and Crystal help guide you during the most critical first steps in your SEO learning journey. Listen as they discuss the SEO learning process from how to get that hands-on experience you’ll need to having the right mindset to really absorb SEO. From the sources, you’ll need to deal with gaps in your SEO knowledge. This episode is all about how to learn SEO! But what does it really mean to learn SEO? Share a ‘Deep Thoughts’ moment with Mordy and Crystal about what it fundamentally means to learn SEO! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 06 | September 28, 2022 | 32 MIN 00:00 / 31:58 This week’s guests Luke Davis Luke Davis is a technical SEO, music producer, and content creator based in the UK. He has been messing around on the Web since 2000 and, after entering digital marketing in 2019, started specialising in technical SEO soon after. He enjoys blogging, making music, coding in Python, playing Pokémon and finding a Simpsons meme for every occasion. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERPs Up podcast. We're pushing out groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our Illustrious head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, all you fantastic SEO people. Mordy Oberstein: You're back. Crystal Carter: I'm back. I was in California. I went to my homeland. Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? How was Mars? Just kidding. Crystal Carter: Women are from Venus, Mordy, don't you remember? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, sorry. I didn't read that. Crystal Carter: No. Yeah. I was in California, and I did some surfing while I was there, actually, which was quite exciting. Mordy Oberstein: So now I'm the odd person out. Crystal Carter: We got to get you on a board, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Do I still fit in this podcast that now I have no surfing experience? Crystal Carter: You surfed the wild waves of the interwebs. Mordy Oberstein: Of the web. I can still be here? Crystal Carter: Sure. Of course. All are welcome. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome. Well, pleasure to have you back. Crystal Carter: Thank you. It's nice to be back. I really, really did enjoy it. It's good to be back doing the things that we do. Mordy Oberstein: Sweet. Well, the things that we do are SERPs Up podcast, which is brought to you by Wix, where you have the log. Server log reports, right in your own backyard, without you having to do anything to access them. Check out our bot log reports in the Wix analytics with full on prebuilt graphs and charts. Crystal Carter: Log, log, log. Mordy Oberstein: And log a logs. Crystal Carter: Do you remember that from Ren and Stimpy? Mordy Oberstein: I love Ren and... Right. The log song. Crystal Carter: Log rolls downstairs, rolls over your chairs, rolls over your neighbor's dog. It's good for your back and fits on a cat. I don't know what it says anyway. That's what I think of when I think- Mordy Oberstein: Such a lost relic of our past. [00:01:58] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? Today's show is sponsored, not just by Wix, but by the letter L, as in learn, because we're learning how to learn about SEO today. We're going to get into what you should be doing to learn the ways of the SEO from mindset to matter. We'll help you create your SEO curriculum with a little help of our friends, cue Joe Cocker from 1969's Woodstock. Anyway, Luke Davis shares his approach for scaling up the SEO ladder. Plus we'll get meta by analyzing what does it even mean to know SEO? What does it mean? Crystal Carter: What does it mean? What does it mean? Mordy Oberstein: No one knows. Crystal Carter: Let's really get into it. Who am I? What are we even doing? Mordy Oberstein: What are we doing here? Crystal Carter: Who, where, what? Mordy Oberstein: The letter L. Crystal Carter: The letter L. Mordy Oberstein: And of course we have some snappy news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. It's rocking and rolling on this episode of the SERPs Up podcast. I'm saying rocket and rolling by the way, I'm not just being cliche. I just watched the Elvis movie. It was amazing. Crystal Carter: Oh, was it? Mordy Oberstein: I finally watched it, it was so good. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: So definitely check out Elvis, but we should definitely check out, by the way, if you're listening now, but didn't listen last week is last week's episode. Cause if you were with us last week, George Nguyen and I took up how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice. Well, now that we've helped you weed out the charlatans and all the snake oil out there in SEO, how should you actually approach SEO learning? What mindset should you have? What actions should you take? What should your SEO curriculum look like? Because SEO's kind of a bit unique, especially when it comes to learning the craft that is SEO. [00:03:38] Focus Topic of the Week: Learning to Learn About SEO So today we are learning to learn. Well, we're learning to learn how to learn about SEO. Crystal Carter: Brought to you by the letter L. Mordy Oberstein: Brought to you by the letter L. By the letter L for all you Sesame Street folks. So Crystal, where do we start with this? Because SEO learning is really unique and it is really different than anything I ever learned before. Crystal Carter: The thing that I always think about when I'm thinking about learning how to learn is learning how you learn. And it's very important to think about your own personal process. It does not have to be the same as anyone else's. It does not have to be what someone recommended to you on a podcast or wherever. It needs to be something that's very unique to you. So my personal general rule of thumb, I tend to fall down rabbit holes and then scrape my way back out of them having made a lot more sense of it. And I normally do this where sort of I'll jump straight into something until I get stuck. And then I'll figure out why I got stuck and figure out how to get back out. I tend to use a lot of YouTube and I tend to spend a lot of time in the technical documentation for whatever I'm doing because I spend a lot of time wrangling tech SEO, and wrangling website configurations and things like that. So that generally speaking is the way that I go. And when I say YouTube, I don't mean two minute videos. I mean find two hour tutorial that walks you through all of this something. Find a two hour conversation from a symposium somewhere or from a conference that talks you through all of those different things. And that's my personal methodology. The second thing I would say, for anybody who particularly is interested in learning technical SEO is to learn your CMS. Whatever your CMS of choice is, learn your CMS. There are so many different tools and the people who make the CMS taking Wix as an example, will provide you with lots of different tools to help you to learn that CMS. And it's a bit like if you were trying to learn an instrument, you wouldn't just try to learn all the instruments. You would learn how to play the bassoon, or you would learn how to play the cello, or you would learn how to play the didgeridoo or whatever it is. You wouldn't seek to learn all of the different instruments at once, but in the process of learning the didgeridoo or the harmonica or whatever it is, you would learn how to learn an instrument and you would learn skills that are applicable to other instruments later on. Mordy Oberstein: I'm so tempted to make the didgeridoo sound. I don't know how to do that, but I really want to make one. Crystal Carter: Something like that. But yeah, it's really important to think about that. So taking Wix as an example, we've got Facebook groups that can help you learn about the CMS. We've got documentation, there're forums, we've got our learning hub, for instance, where you can go and learn about that CMS. And another reason why this is really useful is because you need to be strategic about which things you're learning. So if you are working with clients who are all using the same CMS, it makes sense to learn that in CMS. If you're working with clients who are using lots of different CMSs, because you might be like, I work at an agency, I don't get to pick the CFS for my clients. They just show up and I just get whatever I'm given. Well actually that's not entirely true. I've done this, working agency side I've said to my agency, "There's too many, I've got too many. I would like to specialize on all of the eCommerce clients. Or I would like to specialize on all of the ones that are using this particular CMS, or I would like to... Just give me everybody who's using that." And the reason why is because it allows you to refine your methodology. So if you learned how to optimize for one particular SEO tactic on a given CMS, then you can roll that out across everybody who's using that CMS. And every time you roll it out, you can refine it and refine it and refine it and refine it further. So it allows you to grow, but it allows you to grow exponentially and to learn that much more. So let's say by the time you get down to the fifth one, you go, oh actually I should have done that better on the first one. So you can go back and do it again. And you can see the impact and see all of the efforts and to that point I would say, learn by doing, get involved, get your hands dirty. That's my advice for learning how to learn. Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, that could be very complicated. Could be very simple. You can just spin up a website and start playing around with it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's usually my first advice to people is take a website, get a free... You don't have to pay for the full subscription. If you don't want to do that yet, just spin up a free website and start building. Crystal Carter: And there's lots of things that you can do. Basically your goal with SEO is to try to bend the internet to your will. That is what you want to do. You want- Mordy Oberstein: That's not sensible at all. Crystal Carter: No, but basically you want to be able to say, it's like calling a shot if you're playing pool or something. You're like, I'm going to put it right there. And people are like, no, you aren't. And you're like, yes, I am. Watch me work. And that's essentially what you want to do. So whatever goal you have. So let's say you want to get a bunch of people to come and look at your blog. See if you can do that, set a goal and see if you can do that. See if you want to get a bunch of people to come to your, I don't know, say you're having a clam bake or something and you're advertising it on Facebook or various other things. See if you can get a bunch of people to come and sign up and see how that works. Get involved. Do some. Mordy Oberstein: And don't be scared. Lean in. This is my advice to you. If you're trying to learn SEO, if you have a point or a topic or whatever it is that you're not exactly confident in lean into that. Don't run away from it. That's the thing you should be researching. I feel like everyone has gaps. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And if you're learning SEO, whatever stage in the SEO world you're in, everyone has gaps. It's about being able to recognize, okay, right now this is a gap I don't fully understand. I need to now go research this. If you're creating a curriculum for yourself, I'm saying this as a former teacher, the biggest skill you can have is being self-aware of knowing when you don't know something and then having the proactive stance of going out there and being I am going to find the answer. It's frustrating because when you start out doing that, you might find the answer and understand 70% of it. And as you go along the next time, you'll understand another 10% more of that then another 10% more. So don't think you have to acquire all of that knowledge, what you don't have, in one sitting or one shot. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Look for the answer, get the information, whatever you get out of it, great. Move on. Come back to it again another time it'll inevitably swing back around another time. You'll get it a little bit more refined the next time around. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I saw a talk on greatness and they were talking about figure skaters, people who went on to be Olympian figure skaters and people who were very, very good figure skaters, but maybe didn't make it to Olympic gold medalist status or whatever. And they said the difference was the people who made it to be Olympic rockstar, Brian Boitano, shout out to Kristi Yamaguchi, my childhood hero. Mordy Oberstein: Scott Hamilton. Crystal Carter: So those folks, they practice the jumps they can't do. So they look at their self and they say, I can't do the triple lutz. I can't do the quadruple axle or whatever, I'm not even sure if that's a move. But they look at that and they say, I can't do that. And they practice that until they can. And then they move onto the next thing that they can't do. And they practice that until they can. And they fall over lots in between, but they keep practicing until they can do it. Mordy Oberstein: That's why mindset matters so much. And particularly in SEO learning, I'll quote field of dreams, "Go the distance." Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's the mindset of going the distance, of taking it on on yourself, because what's weird about SEO is, and I know that there our courses out there, even if you're part of a college course, a digital marketing, they'll probably cover SEO to some degree. There are some not so great SEO courses out there, and we talked about this last week and there's some good SEO courses, but it doesn't matter whether it's a course or a podcast or a webinar or a blog or an SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. You're not going to get everything you need to get out of it. That's not possible. It's not how SEO was built. It's not the kind of thing where you take a course. I'm certified. I got it. We're good to go. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's the kind of thing you have to take ownership of and put the extra effort. Nick Leroy, who was on our SEO advisory board one time said the difference between a good SEO and a great SEO is the great SEO will take the extra time to learn more on their own. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah. And as I said, falling down rabbit holes and going, what? You find something, someone asks you a question and you're like, I don't know. How come I don't know that. And you just keep picking at it until you know how to do it or something, or there's a new update or something and the client you have doesn't have that update or you get a new client in a new vertical that maybe you don't know about. We were just talking with a very prominent SEO just recently and I mentioned some company and he knew it right off the bat. I was like, I've never heard of this company and he knew all about it. I was like, you've worked in that vertical before. Mordy Oberstein: The only reason the other company you mentioned, I actually knew them, because I used to use them for my natural gas stove in New York. That was it. Crystal Carter: Ok. But yeah, these are the things. And then you end up learning lots of random things and suddenly you get really into forklifts. You didn't know that you were really into forklifts, but it turns out that you have this client that's into forklifts and you get really into learning forklifts because not only is it a question of learning about the actual tools and the techniques and the methodology that you need, you also need to learn, particularly with clients, you need to learn how to learn that vertical, very quickly. Mordy Oberstein: You have to learn their niche. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. And how to recognize what's good and what will be of value to customers. And there are things that are transferable about that. But I sometimes think about in the matrix where he says, "Oh, I need to find a helicopter." And the guy goes, "Can you find a helicopter? Yes. Now I can." And it's sort of like that. Yeah, I know kung fu. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to make one last point for listening to this a great way to keep up with learning and learn about the ecosystem overall is follow the news religiously in SEO. One, it'll help you realize, Hey, I didn't know that. And helps you kickstart your own investigations. Oh, Barry Schwartz wrote an SEO round table that Google now said this, I don't even know what this is. Let me now go research this. And it helps you get a feel for what's happening in SEO. So even though there are small little stories, it kind of builds up through a kind of osmosis kind of process about learning SEO. So definitely do that. Now, if you're looking to understand, SEO is constantly changing as I just mentioned, it's why you should follow the news, then [00:13:16] Focus Topic Guest: Luke Davis check out Luke Davis technical SEO consultant, extraordinaire out of the UK, as he's going to help you understand that SEO is constantly changing. How do you up skill when you need to learn something new for a client or goal? Here's Luke. Luke Davis: So I start with a Google search of the topic and basically fall down a rabbit hole of articles, videos, and documentation. I tend to focus on reliable sources as they're often backed up by other articles as well. Being able to immerse myself in the subject and kind of get to know every detail has been crucial in my understanding of many things related to SEO. If it's technical, I also like to test my skills on a demo site to see how things work, how things look, follow tutorials online, or any courses that might be available. I did that recently when learning how to use a web framework called Astro. And that pushed me to pick up bits of JavaScript, which has always been my Achilles heel. It also involves breaking stuff and spending hours troubleshooting. That kind of helps me learn what to do and what not to do. And I like to think I'm much better for it. One of the biggest things I've upskilled over the last few years has to be Python. I saw a lot of other colleagues in the industry making these amazing things at the time. And FOMO really hit me hard so I decided to start learning October 2019 and then documented my journey in a Twitter thread. Since then, I've written countless scripts for work and leisure and improved my understanding of things such as automation and LP, machine learning, and then talked about in various podcasts and webinars. And people have even said that they've enjoyed the thread and inspired them to learn too. I'd recommend learning out loud if that's comfortable for you. I know it's not for everyone. I mean, I only started doing it to keep myself accountable, but eventually kind of became something like a mini beacon of learning for other people and realizing that it showed them that it doesn't have to be scary to learn after all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Luke. Very much appreciative of that. Really cool insights. Crystal Carter: I'm so glad to hear from Luke because he has such an enthusiasm for learning. He is somebody who, if you go to his Twitter account, which is @LukeDavisSEO, you'll see that he has a pinned tweet that says, "Right, I'm going to learn Python next week. I'm going to do it. Yes I am." And then that pinned tweet is a thread that he's been updating for two or three years. And it shows his entire journey of going from complete Python newb to being a Pythonista all the way through and that mindset that you were talking about that, that determination to learn the thing and get to grips with it is something that he absolutely has. So it's great to hear from Luke about his approach and how he moves forward with learning. Mordy Oberstein: That is really cool. I didn't even know he had that thread. I got to check that out. Crystal Carter: It's really awesome. It's a beauty to behold. I walked through dust. So I was like, this is amazing. And he has times where he's like, oh, I didn't do it last week. Okay. I'm back on it now, that sort of thing. Or, oh, I just got this new- Mordy Oberstein: It's cool that he's recording that because you will fall and have to get back up. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: I find, maybe this is odd. And maybe we should have done this in reverse order, but this is not how this podcast works. Understanding how to learn about SEO, you kind of need to understand what does it mean to know SEO, which is a whole debate among SEOs, which we'll probably get to in a few seconds, but we're going to have to go deep on this one. We're going meta on this. We're going conceptual on this one. [00:16:32] Deep Thoughts with Mordy and Crystal This is a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. What does it mean to know SEO? Which sounds so weird. I know SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Because SEO's one of those weird things where there's not some sort of official course and there's an actual checklist and now I know it. I'm an astrophysicist, I know all the astrophysics. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: What does it actually mean to know SEO? Crystal Carter: I mean, well, does anyone know SEO? Mordy Oberstein: Well, if you go on Twitter, you're probably going to find people like I know SEO and you don't, which is why we're trying to dispel that myth right here right now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things is SEO is super vast. The reason why I love SEO is it's incredibly vast and there are nooks and crannies and things. I mean, one of my favorite Twitter threads recently was from somebody who was talking about doing SEO for Amish folks who don't use the internet Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I saw that. Brandon Schmidt. Crystal Carter: What? He set up a podcast that people call into. His clients fax him information. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they fax in their SEO needs. Crystal Carter: That is absolutely incredible. I had no idea. And I thought I knew SEO and I had no idea that that was even a thing. As SEOs it's constantly shifting and it's constantly changing. We're essentially working on shifting sand. You can be going about minding your fantastic SEO business and Google will change something completely different. And they'll be like, oh, we're not accepting that schema anymore. We're accepting this schema now. And the schema you had before, wasn't invalid. They just decided they wanted to change it from one thing to another. And so now you have to go back and do the thing. And so if you just left the SEO and thought that you knew the SEO, then you would not be as optimized as you would be if you were keeping up with it all the time. Mordy Oberstein: Like GA4. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Now, no one knows SEO. No one ever will ever again. Crystal Carter: It changes a lot. And also I think Google has so many different... People say, oh, it's a ranking factor. Oh, the Google algorithm. There are many, many, many, many algorithms working in tangent all the time... Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes cohesively, sometimes not cohesively together. Crystal Carter: Right, in lots of different ways. So the feature snippets are running on one thing, the plain blue links are running on another thing, shopping is running one thing. Yeah, exactly. So there's all different stuff. And Google doesn't even know all the time, which algorithm is doing what. So the idea that you could know SEO, that you could know, all of it... Mordy Oberstein: It's kind of silly. For lack of a better word. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I think it's the kind of thing that... I don't know. Erykah Badu once said "The man who knows something knows that he knows nothing at all." And I think that it's very important to think about that. It's okay to say that you don't know it's okay to say- Mordy Oberstein: I once said that in a webinar, they didn't like that. It was the truth. I didn't know the answer. Crystal Carter: I think it's better to say, I'm not sure. I don't know. You can say in my experience, that is a useful one, because you can say- Mordy Oberstein: In my experience, I don't know. Crystal Carter: But some of my favorite SEOs will say, that's not my area of expertise. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's not. Crystal Carter: Speak to this person. Mordy Oberstein: And those are the good SEOs, that they're honest. I feel like if you want to say, what does it mean to no SEO? I feel like it means that you have your little corner of the SEO universe and you own that. That's your thing. That's your jam. You've created identity around that. You deep dive into that. That area really speaks to you. You've done your research, you've done your own investigation. And not only that, you've conceptually thought about. And I feel like perhaps you don't talk enough about this, but there is a conceptual underpinning to SEO. And thinking about SEO at the conceptual level helps you to create new ideas, create new approaches, create new segues into doing SEO. And therefore it helps you kind of own that little corner of the SEO world. So having innovation of your own about how you think about SEO and being into one little specific corner of the SEO world. Not saying you shouldn't have broader knowledge, but having some really souped up awesome uber knowledge about one particular, two particular kinds of verticals in SEO or SERP features or the algorithm or indexing, whatever your jam is. Being able to own that and being like, yes, this is me and I really have an expertise over this. That's what I feel like it means to know SEO. Because you're right, you're never going to know all of it. There is no knowing all of SEO, but there is having identity around, I really like this, I'm really exploring this and I have a really profound, and multi-layered understanding of this particular aspect of SEO. Crystal Carter: Hmm. And I think it makes you more efficient because it means that you can build on that. So you can build on the information you know and build on it more and build on it more. So if you've been following algorithms for years, so you have the context of what the algorithm was before and before that and before that, and this allows you to build on that knowledge. So you're not starting from fresh every single time you're writing an article or you're making a deck or you're doing whatever it allows you to build on that and to refine your knowledge and to get better with that. And it's not to say that you can't use some of those skills for some other projects. And it's not to say that it might not evolve at some point, but yeah, as you say, being able to hone in on something that is your particular perspective is absolutely valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. It totally will evolve. But once you build on one thing, you're like, oh, okay, now I really want to explore the next logical thing. And it kind of takes you in this weird little journey. Going back to what you said before and just going back to our point about how to learn about SEO or learning how to learn about SEO. The history point is a really good point that I think that you should definitely check out what's happened in the past. If you're new to the industry, go look at the past updates like Panda and Penguin and Caffeine and the Google dance and all that kind of stuff, because it helps you contextualize what's happening now. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Seeing what Google used to do, how they moved away from that helps you understand where they're trying to go now, which I guess, I'll say part of knowing SEO is understanding the ecosystem. Google is a living, breathing ecosystem and understanding that ecosystem is part of knowing SEO. Crystal Carter: And I think also something that people forget, we often have conversations about how you also want to know SEO, you need to use the internet. And consciously. If you follow people, some of the best SEOs online, they're constantly sharing screenshots from stuff that they were just doing. They were just looking at a website and they're like, oh, look at this faceted navigation or, oh, they're looking at this website and they're like, oh, your search function is awful or whatever. They're searching for this and they go, oh, look at this. I found this thing on the SERP. Be conscious, keep your eyes open all the time. I look at websites all the time. And I remember looking at a gym website and I was like, wow, your copy's amazing. And I was just looking for a gym. But understand the craft and think about how you find stuff online. Think about the things that you value from the sites that you really appreciate. Think about how you experience things. Think about how your mom finds information online. I recently was talking to an older aunt and she doesn't even have Chrome on her phone. She just has the Google discover the Google app. She doesn't have Chrome. And I was like, how do you even find websites like this? But it's what came with the phone. The phone comes default. Mordy Oberstein: Google gives me the websites. They said, do this. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So that's a completely different search experience from the search experience that I have. And these are very interesting things to think about. So to also think consciously about how SEO impacts- Mordy Oberstein: Your own experience. Crystal Carter: Your own experience, the experience of your friends, Mordy Oberstein: What's happening as you're surfing the web. Totally. You go to Google, I'm like, wow, that's new. Where did that come from? Right. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's a wholly new feature Google threw on the SERP. And I found it by researching the Pittsburgh Steelers, because I wanted to research the Pittsburgh Steelers. Crystal Carter: Right. I recently did a talk on visual search and people were like, oh, that's really interesting. I've been using this for years because I have a kid who's really into wildlife stuff. And he's like, what's that caterpillar? And I'm like, I don't know. So I use Google lens. And so I started learning more about Google lens and how all those things work and using the knowledge that I have about other parts of the SEO to help me shape that as a concept. And that's something that you can do. So think about how you use search and think about how that can be applied to different scenarios and how that fits in with your current skill set. And yeah, it's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: We're going full circle. [00:25:07] Snappy News We've gone from learning about learning about SEO to what does it mean to know SEO back to learning about learning about SEO. If you're not confused already by that, now we're going to help you learn how to learn more about SEO by modeling the learning that we talked about by covering the news. And so here is the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a lot of Google update news for you. Let's kick it off with Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google September, 2022 product review algorithm update rolling out now. If you remember when Google launched the helpful content update, they said they'll be offering a product review update soon after. What they didn't say, by the way, was that there would be a core update in between, but there was. We'll get to that shortly. Product review updates, target pages, reviewing products that may not really have the best info that are helpful to users. So if you have such a page, you want to make sure that you have actual firsthand experience with the products you are reviewing and can in detail discuss what sets each product apart from each other from the user's point of view and explain things like how different models of the product have evolved over time. Google has some great guidelines, read them. We will link to them in the show notes and the product review update generally takes a few weeks to roll out. So keep an eye on your ranking. Now speaking of the aforementioned core update, the product review update rolling out, Google then said that the September 22 core update is coming to a close. I actually dove into the data from Semrush on this update and it was actually pretty interesting. So obviously specific sites and particular pages did get hit hard by this September 2022 core update, most definitely the case Glenn gave us some great examples on Twitter you can check out. But on average, the September, 2022 core update was about 50% less powerful than previous core updates. What exactly does that mean? Well, have a look at Search Engine Land's, article by Barry Schwartz, Google's September, 2022 core update hit fast, but was less significant than previous updates. Because Barry dives into the data that he analyzed in greater detail, along with other data from other data providers. If you want to get an understanding of how impactful the September 2022 core update was overall, have a look at Barry's article over on Search Engine Land. And with that, that is the snappy news. Now, since we're going full meta on you about learning about learning SEO and how to learn about learning about SEO and what does it mean to know SEO. What it means to learn about SEO when no SEO is to follow the people who can help you learn about SEO so that you know the SEO. Crystal Carter: Did you follow that? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Oh, pun intended? Pun intended? Crystal Carter: Pun intended. Mordy Oberstein: Because it is, our follow or the week. Crystal Carter: Woohoo. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of SEO learning, this person has her own SEO mentorship, which is so appropriate for this episode. Who would've thunk. Crystal Carter: I mean, we put a lot of thought into this, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: We do, literally. Crystal Carter: It's how it all goes down. Mordy Oberstein: Meetings upon meetings about every episode. Crystal Carter: I always enjoy our meetings. Mordy Oberstein: I know, they're good. I'm saying it in a good way. So the follow of the week is Chima Mmeje. Who is Chima? I mean, I know Chima is, but Crystal who's Chima? Crystal Carter: Chima is a fantastic freelancer. She's got a course, she's got a few other things, but she also runs the freelance coalition for developing countries, which is an organization which provides learning resources and mentorship for black indigenous people of color freelancers who a need upscaling and learning. And one of the things that's great about her program is it's very holistic. So the people that become part of the freelance coalition will get direct mentorship. They also take courses. They also have access to talks where people will come and discuss their journey. So their tech SEO journey. So John Miller's gone on it. Alada was one of the mentors and they will also get certifications from things like Semrush. So Semrush will ask people to do that. We also for Wix gave people free access to websites so that they could build so that they could see- Mordy Oberstein: That's what learning about SEO means. Crystal Carter: So they can learn hands on. So it's very hands on, mentors, training, lots of different elements. And they're talking about lots of different parts of the freelance journey and it's just a great organization and she's doing some really interesting things. So do follow Chima to find out more about that and to find out more about her work. She's also a fantastic freelance or just generally. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And she does a lot around content marketing. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: From the SEO point of view. So if you're looking to learn about content from an SEO point of view, she has a lot of threads she'll put out there. So definitely follow Chima. It's at C-H-I-M-A M-M-E-J-E. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. But again, great follow. Especially if you're looking to follow some information about content and SEO and well beyond. That's our follow of the week, which means that's our show. Crystal Carter: That's it? Mordy Oberstein: That's it. Crystal Carter: Do you feel like you learned something? Mordy Oberstein: I do. I do. Every time I talk to you, I feel like I learned something. Crystal Carter: I feel like I've learned how to learn something about learning something. Mordy Oberstein: I know what learning is now. Crystal Carter: I'm helping. Mordy Oberstein: I'm helping. Crystal Carter: Was it, wait. Mordy, Mordy. Helpful? Mordy Oberstein: Helpful. Crystal Carter: Great. Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Helpful. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: I do get a helpful stamp for that. And that's a little inside joke. Crystal Carter: We can get you a stamp. We absolutely need to get you a stamp. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: It was just now there is no helpful content update it seems based on the last statement that Google made. So... Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: Someones got to do it now. Anyway, that's a whole other wormhole. Thanks for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry we're back next week with a new episode, as we dive into managing multiple intents with your content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts 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 and so forth we have on the Wix SEO learning hub at you guest it wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. So thank you for listening and until next time, peace, love and SEO. Crystal Carter: SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Luke Davis Chima Mmege Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub How to Know Good SEO Advice from Bad? Write high quality product reviews Luke Davis SEO Consultancy Nick LeRoy Search Engine Roundtable News: Google September 2022 Product Review Algorithm Update Rolling Out Now Google releases September 2022 product reviews update Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Luke Davis Chima Mmege Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub How to Know Good SEO Advice from Bad? Write high quality product reviews Luke Davis SEO Consultancy Nick LeRoy Search Engine Roundtable News: Google September 2022 Product Review Algorithm Update Rolling Out Now Google releases September 2022 product reviews update Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERPs Up podcast. We're pushing out groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our Illustrious head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, all you fantastic SEO people. Mordy Oberstein: You're back. Crystal Carter: I'm back. I was in California. I went to my homeland. Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? How was Mars? Just kidding. Crystal Carter: Women are from Venus, Mordy, don't you remember? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, sorry. I didn't read that. Crystal Carter: No. Yeah. I was in California, and I did some surfing while I was there, actually, which was quite exciting. Mordy Oberstein: So now I'm the odd person out. Crystal Carter: We got to get you on a board, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Do I still fit in this podcast that now I have no surfing experience? Crystal Carter: You surfed the wild waves of the interwebs. Mordy Oberstein: Of the web. I can still be here? Crystal Carter: Sure. Of course. All are welcome. Mordy Oberstein: Awesome. Well, pleasure to have you back. Crystal Carter: Thank you. It's nice to be back. I really, really did enjoy it. It's good to be back doing the things that we do. Mordy Oberstein: Sweet. Well, the things that we do are SERPs Up podcast, which is brought to you by Wix, where you have the log. Server log reports, right in your own backyard, without you having to do anything to access them. Check out our bot log reports in the Wix analytics with full on prebuilt graphs and charts. Crystal Carter: Log, log, log. Mordy Oberstein: And log a logs. Crystal Carter: Do you remember that from Ren and Stimpy? Mordy Oberstein: I love Ren and... Right. The log song. Crystal Carter: Log rolls downstairs, rolls over your chairs, rolls over your neighbor's dog. It's good for your back and fits on a cat. I don't know what it says anyway. That's what I think of when I think- Mordy Oberstein: Such a lost relic of our past. [00:01:58] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? Today's show is sponsored, not just by Wix, but by the letter L, as in learn, because we're learning how to learn about SEO today. We're going to get into what you should be doing to learn the ways of the SEO from mindset to matter. We'll help you create your SEO curriculum with a little help of our friends, cue Joe Cocker from 1969's Woodstock. Anyway, Luke Davis shares his approach for scaling up the SEO ladder. Plus we'll get meta by analyzing what does it even mean to know SEO? What does it mean? Crystal Carter: What does it mean? What does it mean? Mordy Oberstein: No one knows. Crystal Carter: Let's really get into it. Who am I? What are we even doing? Mordy Oberstein: What are we doing here? Crystal Carter: Who, where, what? Mordy Oberstein: The letter L. Crystal Carter: The letter L. Mordy Oberstein: And of course we have some snappy news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. It's rocking and rolling on this episode of the SERPs Up podcast. I'm saying rocket and rolling by the way, I'm not just being cliche. I just watched the Elvis movie. It was amazing. Crystal Carter: Oh, was it? Mordy Oberstein: I finally watched it, it was so good. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: So definitely check out Elvis, but we should definitely check out, by the way, if you're listening now, but didn't listen last week is last week's episode. Cause if you were with us last week, George Nguyen and I took up how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice. Well, now that we've helped you weed out the charlatans and all the snake oil out there in SEO, how should you actually approach SEO learning? What mindset should you have? What actions should you take? What should your SEO curriculum look like? Because SEO's kind of a bit unique, especially when it comes to learning the craft that is SEO. [00:03:38] Focus Topic of the Week: Learning to Learn About SEO So today we are learning to learn. Well, we're learning to learn how to learn about SEO. Crystal Carter: Brought to you by the letter L. Mordy Oberstein: Brought to you by the letter L. By the letter L for all you Sesame Street folks. So Crystal, where do we start with this? Because SEO learning is really unique and it is really different than anything I ever learned before. Crystal Carter: The thing that I always think about when I'm thinking about learning how to learn is learning how you learn. And it's very important to think about your own personal process. It does not have to be the same as anyone else's. It does not have to be what someone recommended to you on a podcast or wherever. It needs to be something that's very unique to you. So my personal general rule of thumb, I tend to fall down rabbit holes and then scrape my way back out of them having made a lot more sense of it. And I normally do this where sort of I'll jump straight into something until I get stuck. And then I'll figure out why I got stuck and figure out how to get back out. I tend to use a lot of YouTube and I tend to spend a lot of time in the technical documentation for whatever I'm doing because I spend a lot of time wrangling tech SEO, and wrangling website configurations and things like that. So that generally speaking is the way that I go. And when I say YouTube, I don't mean two minute videos. I mean find two hour tutorial that walks you through all of this something. Find a two hour conversation from a symposium somewhere or from a conference that talks you through all of those different things. And that's my personal methodology. The second thing I would say, for anybody who particularly is interested in learning technical SEO is to learn your CMS. Whatever your CMS of choice is, learn your CMS. There are so many different tools and the people who make the CMS taking Wix as an example, will provide you with lots of different tools to help you to learn that CMS. And it's a bit like if you were trying to learn an instrument, you wouldn't just try to learn all the instruments. You would learn how to play the bassoon, or you would learn how to play the cello, or you would learn how to play the didgeridoo or whatever it is. You wouldn't seek to learn all of the different instruments at once, but in the process of learning the didgeridoo or the harmonica or whatever it is, you would learn how to learn an instrument and you would learn skills that are applicable to other instruments later on. Mordy Oberstein: I'm so tempted to make the didgeridoo sound. I don't know how to do that, but I really want to make one. Crystal Carter: Something like that. But yeah, it's really important to think about that. So taking Wix as an example, we've got Facebook groups that can help you learn about the CMS. We've got documentation, there're forums, we've got our learning hub, for instance, where you can go and learn about that CMS. And another reason why this is really useful is because you need to be strategic about which things you're learning. So if you are working with clients who are all using the same CMS, it makes sense to learn that in CMS. If you're working with clients who are using lots of different CMSs, because you might be like, I work at an agency, I don't get to pick the CFS for my clients. They just show up and I just get whatever I'm given. Well actually that's not entirely true. I've done this, working agency side I've said to my agency, "There's too many, I've got too many. I would like to specialize on all of the eCommerce clients. Or I would like to specialize on all of the ones that are using this particular CMS, or I would like to... Just give me everybody who's using that." And the reason why is because it allows you to refine your methodology. So if you learned how to optimize for one particular SEO tactic on a given CMS, then you can roll that out across everybody who's using that CMS. And every time you roll it out, you can refine it and refine it and refine it and refine it further. So it allows you to grow, but it allows you to grow exponentially and to learn that much more. So let's say by the time you get down to the fifth one, you go, oh actually I should have done that better on the first one. So you can go back and do it again. And you can see the impact and see all of the efforts and to that point I would say, learn by doing, get involved, get your hands dirty. That's my advice for learning how to learn. Mordy Oberstein: And by the way, that could be very complicated. Could be very simple. You can just spin up a website and start playing around with it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's usually my first advice to people is take a website, get a free... You don't have to pay for the full subscription. If you don't want to do that yet, just spin up a free website and start building. Crystal Carter: And there's lots of things that you can do. Basically your goal with SEO is to try to bend the internet to your will. That is what you want to do. You want- Mordy Oberstein: That's not sensible at all. Crystal Carter: No, but basically you want to be able to say, it's like calling a shot if you're playing pool or something. You're like, I'm going to put it right there. And people are like, no, you aren't. And you're like, yes, I am. Watch me work. And that's essentially what you want to do. So whatever goal you have. So let's say you want to get a bunch of people to come and look at your blog. See if you can do that, set a goal and see if you can do that. See if you want to get a bunch of people to come to your, I don't know, say you're having a clam bake or something and you're advertising it on Facebook or various other things. See if you can get a bunch of people to come and sign up and see how that works. Get involved. Do some. Mordy Oberstein: And don't be scared. Lean in. This is my advice to you. If you're trying to learn SEO, if you have a point or a topic or whatever it is that you're not exactly confident in lean into that. Don't run away from it. That's the thing you should be researching. I feel like everyone has gaps. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And if you're learning SEO, whatever stage in the SEO world you're in, everyone has gaps. It's about being able to recognize, okay, right now this is a gap I don't fully understand. I need to now go research this. If you're creating a curriculum for yourself, I'm saying this as a former teacher, the biggest skill you can have is being self-aware of knowing when you don't know something and then having the proactive stance of going out there and being I am going to find the answer. It's frustrating because when you start out doing that, you might find the answer and understand 70% of it. And as you go along the next time, you'll understand another 10% more of that then another 10% more. So don't think you have to acquire all of that knowledge, what you don't have, in one sitting or one shot. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Look for the answer, get the information, whatever you get out of it, great. Move on. Come back to it again another time it'll inevitably swing back around another time. You'll get it a little bit more refined the next time around. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I saw a talk on greatness and they were talking about figure skaters, people who went on to be Olympian figure skaters and people who were very, very good figure skaters, but maybe didn't make it to Olympic gold medalist status or whatever. And they said the difference was the people who made it to be Olympic rockstar, Brian Boitano, shout out to Kristi Yamaguchi, my childhood hero. Mordy Oberstein: Scott Hamilton. Crystal Carter: So those folks, they practice the jumps they can't do. So they look at their self and they say, I can't do the triple lutz. I can't do the quadruple axle or whatever, I'm not even sure if that's a move. But they look at that and they say, I can't do that. And they practice that until they can. And then they move onto the next thing that they can't do. And they practice that until they can. And they fall over lots in between, but they keep practicing until they can do it. Mordy Oberstein: That's why mindset matters so much. And particularly in SEO learning, I'll quote field of dreams, "Go the distance." Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's the mindset of going the distance, of taking it on on yourself, because what's weird about SEO is, and I know that there our courses out there, even if you're part of a college course, a digital marketing, they'll probably cover SEO to some degree. There are some not so great SEO courses out there, and we talked about this last week and there's some good SEO courses, but it doesn't matter whether it's a course or a podcast or a webinar or a blog or an SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. You're not going to get everything you need to get out of it. That's not possible. It's not how SEO was built. It's not the kind of thing where you take a course. I'm certified. I got it. We're good to go. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's the kind of thing you have to take ownership of and put the extra effort. Nick Leroy, who was on our SEO advisory board one time said the difference between a good SEO and a great SEO is the great SEO will take the extra time to learn more on their own. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah. And as I said, falling down rabbit holes and going, what? You find something, someone asks you a question and you're like, I don't know. How come I don't know that. And you just keep picking at it until you know how to do it or something, or there's a new update or something and the client you have doesn't have that update or you get a new client in a new vertical that maybe you don't know about. We were just talking with a very prominent SEO just recently and I mentioned some company and he knew it right off the bat. I was like, I've never heard of this company and he knew all about it. I was like, you've worked in that vertical before. Mordy Oberstein: The only reason the other company you mentioned, I actually knew them, because I used to use them for my natural gas stove in New York. That was it. Crystal Carter: Ok. But yeah, these are the things. And then you end up learning lots of random things and suddenly you get really into forklifts. You didn't know that you were really into forklifts, but it turns out that you have this client that's into forklifts and you get really into learning forklifts because not only is it a question of learning about the actual tools and the techniques and the methodology that you need, you also need to learn, particularly with clients, you need to learn how to learn that vertical, very quickly. Mordy Oberstein: You have to learn their niche. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. And how to recognize what's good and what will be of value to customers. And there are things that are transferable about that. But I sometimes think about in the matrix where he says, "Oh, I need to find a helicopter." And the guy goes, "Can you find a helicopter? Yes. Now I can." And it's sort of like that. Yeah, I know kung fu. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to make one last point for listening to this a great way to keep up with learning and learn about the ecosystem overall is follow the news religiously in SEO. One, it'll help you realize, Hey, I didn't know that. And helps you kickstart your own investigations. Oh, Barry Schwartz wrote an SEO round table that Google now said this, I don't even know what this is. Let me now go research this. And it helps you get a feel for what's happening in SEO. So even though there are small little stories, it kind of builds up through a kind of osmosis kind of process about learning SEO. So definitely do that. Now, if you're looking to understand, SEO is constantly changing as I just mentioned, it's why you should follow the news, then [00:13:16] Focus Topic Guest: Luke Davis check out Luke Davis technical SEO consultant, extraordinaire out of the UK, as he's going to help you understand that SEO is constantly changing. How do you up skill when you need to learn something new for a client or goal? Here's Luke. Luke Davis: So I start with a Google search of the topic and basically fall down a rabbit hole of articles, videos, and documentation. I tend to focus on reliable sources as they're often backed up by other articles as well. Being able to immerse myself in the subject and kind of get to know every detail has been crucial in my understanding of many things related to SEO. If it's technical, I also like to test my skills on a demo site to see how things work, how things look, follow tutorials online, or any courses that might be available. I did that recently when learning how to use a web framework called Astro. And that pushed me to pick up bits of JavaScript, which has always been my Achilles heel. It also involves breaking stuff and spending hours troubleshooting. That kind of helps me learn what to do and what not to do. And I like to think I'm much better for it. One of the biggest things I've upskilled over the last few years has to be Python. I saw a lot of other colleagues in the industry making these amazing things at the time. And FOMO really hit me hard so I decided to start learning October 2019 and then documented my journey in a Twitter thread. Since then, I've written countless scripts for work and leisure and improved my understanding of things such as automation and LP, machine learning, and then talked about in various podcasts and webinars. And people have even said that they've enjoyed the thread and inspired them to learn too. I'd recommend learning out loud if that's comfortable for you. I know it's not for everyone. I mean, I only started doing it to keep myself accountable, but eventually kind of became something like a mini beacon of learning for other people and realizing that it showed them that it doesn't have to be scary to learn after all. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Luke. Very much appreciative of that. Really cool insights. Crystal Carter: I'm so glad to hear from Luke because he has such an enthusiasm for learning. He is somebody who, if you go to his Twitter account, which is @LukeDavisSEO, you'll see that he has a pinned tweet that says, "Right, I'm going to learn Python next week. I'm going to do it. Yes I am." And then that pinned tweet is a thread that he's been updating for two or three years. And it shows his entire journey of going from complete Python newb to being a Pythonista all the way through and that mindset that you were talking about that, that determination to learn the thing and get to grips with it is something that he absolutely has. So it's great to hear from Luke about his approach and how he moves forward with learning. Mordy Oberstein: That is really cool. I didn't even know he had that thread. I got to check that out. Crystal Carter: It's really awesome. It's a beauty to behold. I walked through dust. So I was like, this is amazing. And he has times where he's like, oh, I didn't do it last week. Okay. I'm back on it now, that sort of thing. Or, oh, I just got this new- Mordy Oberstein: It's cool that he's recording that because you will fall and have to get back up. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: I find, maybe this is odd. And maybe we should have done this in reverse order, but this is not how this podcast works. Understanding how to learn about SEO, you kind of need to understand what does it mean to know SEO, which is a whole debate among SEOs, which we'll probably get to in a few seconds, but we're going to have to go deep on this one. We're going meta on this. We're going conceptual on this one. [00:16:32] Deep Thoughts with Mordy and Crystal This is a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. What does it mean to know SEO? Which sounds so weird. I know SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Because SEO's one of those weird things where there's not some sort of official course and there's an actual checklist and now I know it. I'm an astrophysicist, I know all the astrophysics. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: What does it actually mean to know SEO? Crystal Carter: I mean, well, does anyone know SEO? Mordy Oberstein: Well, if you go on Twitter, you're probably going to find people like I know SEO and you don't, which is why we're trying to dispel that myth right here right now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things is SEO is super vast. The reason why I love SEO is it's incredibly vast and there are nooks and crannies and things. I mean, one of my favorite Twitter threads recently was from somebody who was talking about doing SEO for Amish folks who don't use the internet Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I saw that. Brandon Schmidt. Crystal Carter: What? He set up a podcast that people call into. His clients fax him information. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they fax in their SEO needs. Crystal Carter: That is absolutely incredible. I had no idea. And I thought I knew SEO and I had no idea that that was even a thing. As SEOs it's constantly shifting and it's constantly changing. We're essentially working on shifting sand. You can be going about minding your fantastic SEO business and Google will change something completely different. And they'll be like, oh, we're not accepting that schema anymore. We're accepting this schema now. And the schema you had before, wasn't invalid. They just decided they wanted to change it from one thing to another. And so now you have to go back and do the thing. And so if you just left the SEO and thought that you knew the SEO, then you would not be as optimized as you would be if you were keeping up with it all the time. Mordy Oberstein: Like GA4. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Now, no one knows SEO. No one ever will ever again. Crystal Carter: It changes a lot. And also I think Google has so many different... People say, oh, it's a ranking factor. Oh, the Google algorithm. There are many, many, many, many algorithms working in tangent all the time... Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes cohesively, sometimes not cohesively together. Crystal Carter: Right, in lots of different ways. So the feature snippets are running on one thing, the plain blue links are running on another thing, shopping is running one thing. Yeah, exactly. So there's all different stuff. And Google doesn't even know all the time, which algorithm is doing what. So the idea that you could know SEO, that you could know, all of it... Mordy Oberstein: It's kind of silly. For lack of a better word. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I think it's the kind of thing that... I don't know. Erykah Badu once said "The man who knows something knows that he knows nothing at all." And I think that it's very important to think about that. It's okay to say that you don't know it's okay to say- Mordy Oberstein: I once said that in a webinar, they didn't like that. It was the truth. I didn't know the answer. Crystal Carter: I think it's better to say, I'm not sure. I don't know. You can say in my experience, that is a useful one, because you can say- Mordy Oberstein: In my experience, I don't know. Crystal Carter: But some of my favorite SEOs will say, that's not my area of expertise. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's not. Crystal Carter: Speak to this person. Mordy Oberstein: And those are the good SEOs, that they're honest. I feel like if you want to say, what does it mean to no SEO? I feel like it means that you have your little corner of the SEO universe and you own that. That's your thing. That's your jam. You've created identity around that. You deep dive into that. That area really speaks to you. You've done your research, you've done your own investigation. And not only that, you've conceptually thought about. And I feel like perhaps you don't talk enough about this, but there is a conceptual underpinning to SEO. And thinking about SEO at the conceptual level helps you to create new ideas, create new approaches, create new segues into doing SEO. And therefore it helps you kind of own that little corner of the SEO world. So having innovation of your own about how you think about SEO and being into one little specific corner of the SEO world. Not saying you shouldn't have broader knowledge, but having some really souped up awesome uber knowledge about one particular, two particular kinds of verticals in SEO or SERP features or the algorithm or indexing, whatever your jam is. Being able to own that and being like, yes, this is me and I really have an expertise over this. That's what I feel like it means to know SEO. Because you're right, you're never going to know all of it. There is no knowing all of SEO, but there is having identity around, I really like this, I'm really exploring this and I have a really profound, and multi-layered understanding of this particular aspect of SEO. Crystal Carter: Hmm. And I think it makes you more efficient because it means that you can build on that. So you can build on the information you know and build on it more and build on it more. So if you've been following algorithms for years, so you have the context of what the algorithm was before and before that and before that, and this allows you to build on that knowledge. So you're not starting from fresh every single time you're writing an article or you're making a deck or you're doing whatever it allows you to build on that and to refine your knowledge and to get better with that. And it's not to say that you can't use some of those skills for some other projects. And it's not to say that it might not evolve at some point, but yeah, as you say, being able to hone in on something that is your particular perspective is absolutely valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. It totally will evolve. But once you build on one thing, you're like, oh, okay, now I really want to explore the next logical thing. And it kind of takes you in this weird little journey. Going back to what you said before and just going back to our point about how to learn about SEO or learning how to learn about SEO. The history point is a really good point that I think that you should definitely check out what's happened in the past. If you're new to the industry, go look at the past updates like Panda and Penguin and Caffeine and the Google dance and all that kind of stuff, because it helps you contextualize what's happening now. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Seeing what Google used to do, how they moved away from that helps you understand where they're trying to go now, which I guess, I'll say part of knowing SEO is understanding the ecosystem. Google is a living, breathing ecosystem and understanding that ecosystem is part of knowing SEO. Crystal Carter: And I think also something that people forget, we often have conversations about how you also want to know SEO, you need to use the internet. And consciously. If you follow people, some of the best SEOs online, they're constantly sharing screenshots from stuff that they were just doing. They were just looking at a website and they're like, oh, look at this faceted navigation or, oh, they're looking at this website and they're like, oh, your search function is awful or whatever. They're searching for this and they go, oh, look at this. I found this thing on the SERP. Be conscious, keep your eyes open all the time. I look at websites all the time. And I remember looking at a gym website and I was like, wow, your copy's amazing. And I was just looking for a gym. But understand the craft and think about how you find stuff online. Think about the things that you value from the sites that you really appreciate. Think about how you experience things. Think about how your mom finds information online. I recently was talking to an older aunt and she doesn't even have Chrome on her phone. She just has the Google discover the Google app. She doesn't have Chrome. And I was like, how do you even find websites like this? But it's what came with the phone. The phone comes default. Mordy Oberstein: Google gives me the websites. They said, do this. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So that's a completely different search experience from the search experience that I have. And these are very interesting things to think about. So to also think consciously about how SEO impacts- Mordy Oberstein: Your own experience. Crystal Carter: Your own experience, the experience of your friends, Mordy Oberstein: What's happening as you're surfing the web. Totally. You go to Google, I'm like, wow, that's new. Where did that come from? Right. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's a wholly new feature Google threw on the SERP. And I found it by researching the Pittsburgh Steelers, because I wanted to research the Pittsburgh Steelers. Crystal Carter: Right. I recently did a talk on visual search and people were like, oh, that's really interesting. I've been using this for years because I have a kid who's really into wildlife stuff. And he's like, what's that caterpillar? And I'm like, I don't know. So I use Google lens. And so I started learning more about Google lens and how all those things work and using the knowledge that I have about other parts of the SEO to help me shape that as a concept. And that's something that you can do. So think about how you use search and think about how that can be applied to different scenarios and how that fits in with your current skill set. And yeah, it's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: We're going full circle. [00:25:07] Snappy News We've gone from learning about learning about SEO to what does it mean to know SEO back to learning about learning about SEO. If you're not confused already by that, now we're going to help you learn how to learn more about SEO by modeling the learning that we talked about by covering the news. And so here is the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a lot of Google update news for you. Let's kick it off with Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google September, 2022 product review algorithm update rolling out now. If you remember when Google launched the helpful content update, they said they'll be offering a product review update soon after. What they didn't say, by the way, was that there would be a core update in between, but there was. We'll get to that shortly. Product review updates, target pages, reviewing products that may not really have the best info that are helpful to users. So if you have such a page, you want to make sure that you have actual firsthand experience with the products you are reviewing and can in detail discuss what sets each product apart from each other from the user's point of view and explain things like how different models of the product have evolved over time. Google has some great guidelines, read them. We will link to them in the show notes and the product review update generally takes a few weeks to roll out. So keep an eye on your ranking. Now speaking of the aforementioned core update, the product review update rolling out, Google then said that the September 22 core update is coming to a close. I actually dove into the data from Semrush on this update and it was actually pretty interesting. So obviously specific sites and particular pages did get hit hard by this September 2022 core update, most definitely the case Glenn gave us some great examples on Twitter you can check out. But on average, the September, 2022 core update was about 50% less powerful than previous core updates. What exactly does that mean? Well, have a look at Search Engine Land's, article by Barry Schwartz, Google's September, 2022 core update hit fast, but was less significant than previous updates. Because Barry dives into the data that he analyzed in greater detail, along with other data from other data providers. If you want to get an understanding of how impactful the September 2022 core update was overall, have a look at Barry's article over on Search Engine Land. And with that, that is the snappy news. Now, since we're going full meta on you about learning about learning SEO and how to learn about learning about SEO and what does it mean to know SEO. What it means to learn about SEO when no SEO is to follow the people who can help you learn about SEO so that you know the SEO. Crystal Carter: Did you follow that? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Oh, pun intended? Pun intended? Crystal Carter: Pun intended. Mordy Oberstein: Because it is, our follow or the week. Crystal Carter: Woohoo. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of SEO learning, this person has her own SEO mentorship, which is so appropriate for this episode. Who would've thunk. Crystal Carter: I mean, we put a lot of thought into this, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: We do, literally. Crystal Carter: It's how it all goes down. Mordy Oberstein: Meetings upon meetings about every episode. Crystal Carter: I always enjoy our meetings. Mordy Oberstein: I know, they're good. I'm saying it in a good way. So the follow of the week is Chima Mmeje. Who is Chima? I mean, I know Chima is, but Crystal who's Chima? Crystal Carter: Chima is a fantastic freelancer. She's got a course, she's got a few other things, but she also runs the freelance coalition for developing countries, which is an organization which provides learning resources and mentorship for black indigenous people of color freelancers who a need upscaling and learning. And one of the things that's great about her program is it's very holistic. So the people that become part of the freelance coalition will get direct mentorship. They also take courses. They also have access to talks where people will come and discuss their journey. So their tech SEO journey. So John Miller's gone on it. Alada was one of the mentors and they will also get certifications from things like Semrush. So Semrush will ask people to do that. We also for Wix gave people free access to websites so that they could build so that they could see- Mordy Oberstein: That's what learning about SEO means. Crystal Carter: So they can learn hands on. So it's very hands on, mentors, training, lots of different elements. And they're talking about lots of different parts of the freelance journey and it's just a great organization and she's doing some really interesting things. So do follow Chima to find out more about that and to find out more about her work. She's also a fantastic freelance or just generally. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And she does a lot around content marketing. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: From the SEO point of view. So if you're looking to learn about content from an SEO point of view, she has a lot of threads she'll put out there. So definitely follow Chima. It's at C-H-I-M-A M-M-E-J-E. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. But again, great follow. Especially if you're looking to follow some information about content and SEO and well beyond. That's our follow of the week, which means that's our show. Crystal Carter: That's it? Mordy Oberstein: That's it. Crystal Carter: Do you feel like you learned something? Mordy Oberstein: I do. I do. Every time I talk to you, I feel like I learned something. Crystal Carter: I feel like I've learned how to learn something about learning something. Mordy Oberstein: I know what learning is now. Crystal Carter: I'm helping. Mordy Oberstein: I'm helping. Crystal Carter: Was it, wait. Mordy, Mordy. Helpful? Mordy Oberstein: Helpful. Crystal Carter: Great. Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Helpful. Crystal Carter: Cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: I do get a helpful stamp for that. And that's a little inside joke. Crystal Carter: We can get you a stamp. We absolutely need to get you a stamp. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: It was just now there is no helpful content update it seems based on the last statement that Google made. So... Crystal Carter: Oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: Someones got to do it now. Anyway, that's a whole other wormhole. Thanks for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry we're back next week with a new episode, as we dive into managing multiple intents with your content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts 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 and so forth we have on the Wix SEO learning hub at you guest it wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. So thank you for listening and until next time, peace, love and SEO. Crystal Carter: SEO. 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What operational processes should you follow as a marketing agency? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter discuss how processes are the backbone of a good digital marketing agency. Hosts of The Long Game Podcast and owners of Omniscient Digital, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett join the show to share their own operation tactics. Perfecting an operational structure is one of the biggest challenges for any digital marketing agency. Tune in as we share the fundamental processes needed to help you and your clients thrive. Step-by-step, day-by-day, get the operations know-how your agency needs on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Building the processes for marketing agency efficiency What operational processes should you follow as a marketing agency? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter discuss how processes are the backbone of a good digital marketing agency. Hosts of The Long Game Podcast and owners of Omniscient Digital, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett join the show to share their own operation tactics. Perfecting an operational structure is one of the biggest challenges for any digital marketing agency. Tune in as we share the fundamental processes needed to help you and your clients thrive. Step-by-step, day-by-day, get the operations know-how your agency needs on this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 81 | April 3, 2024 | 53 MIN 00:00 / 53:22 This week’s guests Alex Birkett Alex Birkett is a co-founder at Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that helps ambitious B2B brands drive attributable organic outcomes. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his dog Biscuit and enjoys scuba diving, skiing, and jiu jitsu. Allie Decker Allie Decker is a co-founder at Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that helps marketing leaders at B2B software companies turn SEO and content into growth channels. She previously scaled content programs at HubSpot and Shopify and currently lives in Chicago. David Khim David Ly Khim is a co-founder at Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that helps ambitious B2B software companies drive organic growth. He previously led growth initiatives as a Product Manager at HubSpot and Head of Growth at People.ai and lives in Boston, MA. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: Its 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 overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is a smooth operator, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. I am not sure if I could possibly claim that title, because I never figured out how to do that thing from that music video with the leaning, where they lean all the way over. But apparently after spending much of my childhood trying desperately to do that and falling on my face, I realized that actually what they had was nails in their shoes. There was nail on the floor. Mordy Oberstein: Really, that's how they do that? Crystal Carter: Yeah, there was a nail on the floor, and he had a thing in the shoe and basically they latched into it and then they did the lean and that's how they didn't fall. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like I've been lied to my entire life. Crystal Carter: Basically. Basically. Mordy Oberstein: It's like when they pull the cheese on a pizza in the commercials and it's glue. Crystal Carter: No, no, no. They're not allowed to use glue. They basically, they use some special kind of cheese. Well, at least in the UK at least. Mordy Oberstein: Whatever, it's not real. I've eaten plenty of pizzas, has your pizza ever done that? No. Ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Never done that. Mordy Oberstein: We fall for it though, because you watch the TV, you're like, "Oh, that pizza looks so good." And you know when you go there, it's not going to be anything like that whatsoever, but we do it anyway. Crystal Carter: No, no. Mordy Oberstein: That's how marketing works. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. And that's the world we're living in. Mordy Oberstein: Lies. You know what's not a lie? The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/newsletter. Got all those slashes, but where you can also collaborate on websites uniquely with Wix Studio, make your agency's processes more efficient with collaboration freedom that Wix Studio offers you. Check it out wix.com/studio. Because today we're talking about building the operations for content and SEO to increase team effectiveness. That's right. At the backbone of any good SEO and content game is a set of mundane operations that pushes your boat to shore. And to help us, we will be welcoming the entire crew of The Long Game podcast over at Omniscient Digital. Plus, we'll get a thorough and explore what fundamentally makes for good operations. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So jump in your shell, place your oars into your oar locks and get ready to roam perfect harmony as the Wix and Long Game crew help your crew power through to an efficient SEO and operations game in one seamless glide of grace on episode 81 of the SERP's podcast. In case you can't tell, I just watched that movie with the people on the boats, the crew movie with the boats. Crystal Carter: Oh, there's lots of movies like that. Mordy Oberstein: It's a new one in the Olympics. Crystal Carter: Oh, an actual crew? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, an actual crew. Crystal Carter: Not the crew, actual people doing crew? Mordy Oberstein: No crew, the boat, you're rowing the boat with all the people. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I'm aware of crew. I have never done that. I don't have the core strength for that. Mordy Oberstein: I like rowing boats, but I can never do that. Crystal Carter: Can you do it in the round? You start rowing and then I'll row row the boat. No? Mordy Oberstein: I want to be the guy who just screams at people while the people row. Crystal Carter: The drums, the drums are good as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That guy's gotten the best job, to be honest with you. Row faster. Anyway, so fun fact, about three or four years, I'm going to mention this later again in the podcast, I was a COO of a mid-sized property management company in New York City, which people don't know. And it's a weird Mordy, fun fact. So when I say operations are nitty-gritty and boring and mundane processes, I speak from experience and that's what they are. But they're also the core of everything you do when you're working as part of a huge team and a huge content team and a huge SEO team, it all in my mind comes down to operations. So it's not a little bit weird that we're talking about SEO and content and operations because fundamentally, if you're working on a team, it is the backbone of everything you do. Everything needs to work methodically towards one goal. And that's all based on good-strong operations, which is why I am so very happy to introduce the crew of the Long Game podcasts. Welcome to SERP's Up, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett. Welcome. Alex Birkett: Thank you. Thank you. Allie Decker: Thanks, Mordy. David Khim: Hello. Hello. Alex Birkett: Good to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So first things first, markers going to market. Plug away. What do you got? Alex Birkett: Well, we have a podcast too called The Long Game that you mentioned, and we run an SEO and content marketing agency called, Omniscient Digital. It's beomniscient.com. I think that's all we've got, right? Are we selling anything else? David Khim: So we work primarily with B2B SaaS companies. We've worked with companies like SAP, Adobe, Loom, Jasper, Vendor, Order, I can keep going, but I think that gives an idea of the type of companies. They're typically quite ambitious, growing quickly or want to grow faster. And we typically are the team that they go to either build their content SEO engine from zero to one, or in some cases even scale it from one to 10 or even a hundred and just work with us instead of hiring an in-house team. Alex Birkett: Well, and that's an interesting angle too, because we've seen the backsides of both sides of the spectrum in terms of precedes startups all the way up through the biggest companies in the world and everybody struggles with operations. It's just in different ways. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think people forget how much it can, particularly when you're thinking about SEO projects and stuff. How much you can have the best campaign in the world, but if somebody hasn't remembered to have somebody answer the phone or have somebody pick up all those leads or have enough capacity or make sure that the servers can take all of the traffic. Maybe we need to upgrade our site at the back end so that it can take all the traffic, those kinds of things can make your best campaign fall completely flat. David Khim: What I've found is I think of operations very simply. It's what needs to be done, who's going to do it, when is it going to be done and how is it going to be done? And typically when we meet with prospects or start work with clients, one or more of those things are not defined. A lot of the case, what needs to be done is never defined. Sometimes we'll even ask, well, who do we talk to if we have any questions? That's also not defined, which we in some cases don't realize until down the line that we've been talking to the wrong person. And we also help them define, here's how things are going to happen. Here's when we'll do it by, here's what we can do, here's what we need from you and so on. And once those things are defined, things start rolling and things are smooth like butter. And we find that a lot of clients, because those things aren't defined internally, a lot of times they know what to do, but they're like, "We don't know how to actually get this done," because they bought our likes internally or we don't have resources and things like that. Crystal Carter: And I think it can happen a lot in large organizations and I think that one of the things that's tricky, it's like when someone says in first aid they tell you if somebody is bleeding, if there's an emergency, you don't say someone call an ambulance. You say, "You call an ambulance and then that one person will call the ambulance," because otherwise everyone will assume that somebody else did it. I mean, do you find that a lot of the times somebody assumes that someone else has done or handled whatever it is that needs to be handled? Allie Decker: Yeah, absolutely. It's even more prevalent in a fully distributed team like ours, because not together day to day. Even more so, because our clients are all over the world. So having set responsibilities and ownership designated out the gate really helps the projects once the emergencies arise as they always do. There's a lot of our work that is unpredictable or things change in the middle of the projects and having the infrastructure set up, the operational infrastructure helps, whatever happens, it continues smoothly. Alex Birkett: I would say that's a bigger problem in larger enterprises too, especially with multiple business units. As you sort of absolve responsibility or certain steps in the process to, say, getting a piece of content published. If you can describe how does a piece of content get published, you realize there's so many different stakeholders at each step and sometimes it's unclear who's responsible for each phase in that process and what their incentives are. So in the early stages it's you have one person or maybe one person in a freelancer or an agency. Things are simpler at that stage. As you scale operations, it becomes much less clear who's doing what, when and why, what their incentive structure is. Mordy Oberstein: And I find that either means in best case scenario, a bottleneck until you figure it out or absolute total communication breakdown, which is your probably worst case scenario. David Khim: You touched on an important thing there that I kind of jokingly say to a lot of people that it's communication. As a personal belief, I think if we all as individuals and humans worked on our communication skills, the world would be a better. And if we just zoom in on the workplace, there would probably be less headbutting and more collaboration going on in workspace. But even being able to define a communication cadence of we're going to check in on this once a week, or let's aim to have these things done by a certain deadline and check in at these checkpoints. Having that laid out explicitly is also very helpful, because then you have regular checkpoints to make sure that things don't fall through the cracks. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've been on the other side where I've hired agencies and that hasn't been in place, and what inevitably happens is the whole thing kind of falls apart and you as the consumer feel like, "What is going on here? Why are they not doing this? I'm paying all this money and nothing's happening." Whereas you've built in that operations, those processes from the outset and the expectations are there. And there's checks and balances to the system to make sure that if something falls through the cracks, it'll eventually get picked up again or there's opportunity for it to come up in discussion again. Then that solves a lot of the problems that you really as an agency, I feel like if you don't have that in place, you're basically just setting yourself up to have a lot of angry, resentful customers. Alex Birkett: I think a nightmare scenario for us, one that we actively try to avoid and are constantly iterating on is having a whole list of actions and having it just sit in draft mode or feedback mode or a backlog. Whether that's, we produce content for clients and that's probably the most palpable example. Where it's like you could produce 50 pieces of content and they just sit there in draft mode without being published. Our best case scenario, outcome wise is a great case study for a client, a great outcome for a client. That's a flywheel. That's how we build a reputation and it's not possible unless things get done. Same is true in technical SEO, if you've got a bunch of issues. My background is in experimentation, you could have all the ideas in the world, but if there's no throughput, nothing happens on the outcome side. So that's something we actively try to avoid. Crystal Carter: And I think also with that, you can't grow unless you, you talked about experimentation, you have to publish otherwise, you can't see what the market thinks of what you've done. You can't get customer feedback, user feedback off... David, David's nodding. And those bottlenecks aren't just bottlenecks for you getting your case study, they're bottlenecks for us doing better the next time, because there is no next time if there isn't a first time. I don't know if you have any top tips for being able to push through those bottlenecks that are so frustrating, because I've definitely been in the place where we've had a stack of content. We were commissioned for content, we got all the content through to the client, and then it sat there until it was no longer relevant and then you're going to have to start again. Allie Decker: Yeah, oftentimes I've learned setting those operational expectations of the client. We're a partnership, we're working on this together, really having them understand what their responsibilities would be, which we would do our best to ease those responsibilities. But if we don't have CMS access or if there is a certain point where we need them to review content for accuracy or their brand perspective or point of view, they're going to be inherently involved. So setting the expectation out the gate, even as early as the sales process, was like, "This is what we would need from you. How does this sound? Is this a commitment you can make? Who would be the main point of contact for this?" I think it helps then when it does become an active action for them to own, they know it's coming. They've set this time aside and it's our job to hold them accountable, so it doesn't come as a surprise. We found that that really helps starting the conversation early. Alex Birkett: With any sort of behavioral change. I always go back to this model, I think it's called B=MAP, it's BJ Fogg's behavior model. And it's, you have two axes, one is motivation, so how excited somebody is to do something. And then you have ease or effort and it's like how hard it is to do that thing. So if somebody needs a new driver's license, their motivation is extremely high, so they'll put up with all the BS at the DMV, whatever to get that done. And there's varying levels of motivation in terms of clients, but we try to pick the ones like David said earlier, who are ambitious and have high motivation levels to get content out there to do SEO. So then our job is to make it as easy as possible for those things to go through, and we learn different ways to do that. If we're doing high velocity, sometimes that involves bashing content feedback cycles. So instead of giving somebody 200 things to review and saying, "Get after it." We'll do 10, 20, 30 at a time and be very specific about what we need. Do we need legal approval? Do we need actual structural subject matter expert feedback? We'll be very specific about those things. So it's not this overwhelming cognitive burden that it just sits there on somebody's desk, because it's, "Where do I even start?" Mordy Oberstein: That sounds really interesting, because it sounds almost like you're very agile in how you're approaching the client and the scenario and the ask. How do you set yourselves up your own processes to be set up where it's not overly rigid so that when you have a client, when you have a situation, when you have an ask or a need or a scenario, that you're able to set up the processes that align to that particular given scenario? And not, "Hey, this is how we do things, here's our process." And just blinders on, "Here's how we usually go with it. So that's what we're going to do," and not be agile enough to adapt to the current situation? Allie Decker: Yeah, we're really lucky to have a brilliant editorial team. Our managing editor is Lean Six Sigma certified, so he's brought a lot of those inputs into how he structured the team and our editorial process. A lot of our editorial process is 'rigid'. We have a default set up and we'll iterate on that if necessary. But for the most part, again, it's all about setting expectations right out the gate. We communicate this as early as the first or second sales calls, "Here's what our editorial process looks like," so we can leave a lot of wiggle room for input. SME interviews, SME editors coming in and contributing to really technical pieces. I think ultimately having the tooling in place is really helpful. So we use tools like Airtable. We have a multi-step editorial process. We have a lot of shared communication. So plus one to what David said about just staying as in touch as possible. So we share a Slack channel with our clients and we have really repeatable communication connections, so bi-weekly calls. All of this infrastructure, which is rigid per se, allows for the time in between those calls, the time in between those assignments and the content creation process to take shape as it might. And a lot of what we do is equal parts arts and science, so some of it needs that artistic space to come together. Other times it's a little bit more scientific, so a little bit more repeatable, collecting the data, iterating on the data, using it to inform our next strategy. But I think actually having some of the infrastructure remain rigid, setting the expectation out the gate. And then if push comes to shove and something happens with the client or after a couple times we're like, "Actually, this isn't the best fit for this specific project," then we're able to tweak. So I'd actually argue that maybe having a repeatable process to begin is the best, and then picking and choosing those puzzle pieces as you get to know the project. Crystal Carter: I think there's definitely a case of managing yourself. If your team, the client or the project, folks that you're working with are the variable, you want to control as much on your side as you possibly can. Allie Decker: Yeah. I think one good thing we did last year was build a lot of our process, build a really strong foundation. And as every agency does, we have projects that don't go according to plan. And we were able to, because our process was so clear, we were able to clearly see where the problem was, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But having a really clear foundation infrastructure, I'll just use that word again, allowed us to within days pinpoint what was breaking. And that was why it was so valuable to have that rigid, repeatable process to begin with. And we were able to have a postmortem of sorts and iterate as we needed on specific projects. David Khim: I'd love to get a little bit more into weeds too, just like tactily, what that means, not just for us, but even for folks in-house. Because whether it's Sam or managing editor's Lean Six Sigma certified. I come from a growth background. Alex comes from experimentation. We have a mix of what some people have called, this is the mathy side of things, and then there's also the creative and that form of thinking. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to say you read my mind, because I was going to talk about our in-house and how we do that.So you go ahead, take it. David Khim: Yeah. But one of the things that the team did really well was build out a mirror board of every single step of our workflows, from the first sales call with a prospect all the way down to delivery. And we did that for our hiring process too, and then that allowed us to be able to say, "Hey, this client engagement broke down. Where in this workflow did it break down? Okay, we identified it. Now let's figure out how to actually... What do we need to do to adapt?" Without that, we wouldn't be able to do that sort of diagnostic and actually adapt. And then I think part of it's the culture of, hey, we use a lot of automations, we use ClickUp and a lot of checklists, even if it's a silly thing like, "Send a follow-up to the client after the meeting." Those things help me, because sometimes I forget, I'm like, "Oh, wait, I forgot to do this." So we're just very regimented in how we approach a lot of our work, and that lets us think about more of the strategic and creative things and not have to worry about the more administrative, straightforward things like that. Mordy Oberstein: We literally have that on our SEO Hub. I mean, we have a great head of SEO editorial, George Winn, he has some really strong processes in place. He's very methodical about it. He's very regimented about it. And I find personally, I don't want to speak for Crystal, but I find that because of those processes, I know that when we want to get a little bit creative with it. I know that sometimes I worry about, if we get a little bit too creative, will the quality still be there, will the targeting still be there? But because we have the processes in place, I know that no matter how wild and crazy I get with it, it'll all come back to a place where there's a check and control of how well-targeted and how well-produced the content actually is. I don't need to worry. Hey, I'm being a little bit maybe too off the deep end here, and the quality of the content and the targeting of the content won't come out the way I want it to, but because I know I'm going to be checked in place by the processes our editorial has put in place, I'm good to go. I can do what I want. Crystal Carter: I think that those processes are so important. I think one of the other thing I wanted to pick up on, because I think David and Allie, you both mentioned this was as part of your sales process. Certainly in my experience of speaking with clients, one of the first things I ask, particularly if I'm giving an SEO audit or something is, and I think Alex, I think you also mentioned the who in the team as well. If you're working with someone and you're trying to figure out your process with someone, the first thing I'm doing is, who's on your team? What resources do you have? So that if I give you 45 articles, if there's one person there, then I can expect that that's going to take this long. Or they might say, "I want 400 articles," but they have one person reviewing and you're just like, "No, that's too many. That's too many for you." How does vetting clients and matching clients to your process, how do you match clients to your process and how do you identify whether or not they're going to work well in your framework that you've got? Alex Birkett: I think what you said there around having a DRI basically is the main issue. It's not always that simple. Earlier stage companies may have one person, typically if it's a founder, that's a little tough because they're going to have so many other competing priorities that it's hard to get their time. But as you scale, one thing that I've realized working with much larger clients is that you'll have a DRI, but then there'll be other stakeholders. And finding how to partition those different roles for the different parts of the feedback cycles is important. So one client that I'm thinking about that I talked to earlier today, they've got a strategic editorial person thinking about things from the content side. But then there's legal too, they're decently regulated and there's a heavy legal presence. And then there's product marketing, and that's how they're speaking about the products in the content that we're producing. So how we delineate those stages of feedback instead of just giving it all at once, giving it to our single point of contact and saying, "Do all of this." We can go in phases with each of these, and it is just, I think, important to me to identify and to find who each person is and which part of the process they're taking. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that's a really important part. Mordy Oberstein: David, I wanted to get back to, you weren't about to ask a question? I don't want to gloss over it. David Khim: Okay. I'm very curious. I can share the context on our end, but I'm very curious how you all think about it. Not even just with the pod, but maybe your editorial team too. But one of the things around process and breaking bottlenecks is, I found that we run into bottlenecks when someone doesn't know what they're supposed to do, they don't have the bandwidth, or I'll bucket the rest in fear, uncertainty, doubt. And in that bucket, it's, what if it doesn't work? What if it's not the right content? Or I think the one that is my favorite is, I'm worried about the quality. And quality tends to be a big thing that comes up, and there can be a discussion of, "Hey, maybe we'll get to 90% of what you're expecting, but we need to get it published to get data and iterate." But then I know, and I think this comes a lot from Alex and Allie mainly, but the idea that quality can be made objective, and a lot of folks kind of say it's subjective and move on. But that doesn't enable things to move forward sometimes, because if you can't agree on what quality is. So I'll let Allie and Alex add anything to that, but I'm curious how you all handle that at Wix. Crystal Carter: I think that certainly within our teams, we have various different objectives for different audiences. So at the SEO Hub, we have different objectives for what we want to do with our content and how we want educational value and brand value and things like that. There are other parts of the team that have other parts of, it's a very big company, working in 17 different languages and globally, et cetera. So there's different parts of the company that have different objectives. And I think that we, as a company overall, I think we try to make sure that it's very clear what the objectives are for each piece of content that somebody or each channel that someone's engaging with, for instance. So if they're on, we have our Wix Studio blog, for instance, which has one type of focus, and we have our Wix SEO blog, which has a different focus, for instance, I think there's things like that. And I think that when people think about working with a big company like Adobe or Wix or something like that, I think what people forget is that very often you're working on a project within that. There'll be a project within that specific thing, and that project will be dedicated to a certain thing. If you were think about, if you, "Oh, you work at McDonald's." Well, there's going to be a team that's dedicated just to Happy Meals, just to Happy Meals, and even within that team there'll be somebody who's just dedicated to the toys that go in the Happy Meals, for instance. They're going to be in subsections as well. So I think that we try to focus on the audiences that it's going for and the intent of the audience. Mordy Oberstein: For your quality point, I think what inevitably happens is that, first of all, I personally think there is an objective ideal of quality, and I think it's on a spectrum, but there is an ideal, there's an objective ideal of something that is or is not quality. Either something is or is not soda. There's a definition of what it is, and if there's no definition of what it is and it's completely arbitrary, we might as well not talk about it. But I think though that quality is contextualized. For example, the Wix Studio blog is very much geared towards trends, thought leadership and what quality means in that context is different than let's say our SEO Hub, which is more we want to just educate you about how to do SEO and how to do marketing kind of thing. So it's much more straightforward, informational, and less on the thought leadership side sometimes, or sometimes it is very thought leadershippy. But the quality is in context of what is the nature of the content, because what's quality for a straight-up informational piece and what's quality for an acquisition piece or what's quality for a thought leadership piece are just very, very different things. Alex Birkett: Yeah, I look at it as this bi-directional thing. The word quality is so nebulous that if you get bogged down on definitions, I think it just, to your point, it is a little bit of a waste of time. But there's a quality in the reader of the content, and you can't ever truly control that. I post on LinkedIn quite a bit and things that I think are the best posts in the world get crickets, and then some pithy little fortune cookie thing goes viral, and I'm like, "I guess I can't predict quality." But that doesn't mean, I think conflating that outcome quality with the input quality is where people get bogged down with the definitions. So in pursuit of the goal, like you had mentioned Crystal, it's like you want to define that to the best of your ability, objectively speaking. It's more specs, it's more thinking, does this hit specs, giving the outcome that we want? And then after you see the outcome, you get more data and you can iterate. That can inform those specs too. So to me, it's very bi-directional and both inform the other, but I don't want to confuse the two. I think they're two different things. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think David also touched on people getting bogged down with quality this or quality that and not publishing because of that, and what did they say is done is better than perfect. Sometimes the- Mordy Oberstein: The enemy of good is great, something like that, Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. That sort of thing. And I think that sometimes they say delivering customer value. So something that is good is something that is valuable to the customer and if that's valuable to the customer, there's lots of things that people find valuable. And I think that I was interested in the idea of making it objective, making quality objective. You'll have a baseline of this must do this. A table must have legs and it must be level and it must not be sharp. There's a baseline of what a table must do, and you have to absolutely hit all of those things. And once you can absolutely hit all of those things, if you can't make your table level, then we're not doing anything for instance. Whereas after that you can go, "Oh, we're going to make this heirloom this, we're going to make it hand, et cetera, et cetera. You can get all of the extra lovely stuff on top of that, but you need to be able to do the very, very baseline thing in the first place, whatever it is that is. And I think that part of operations is making things that are very qualitative, very subjective more regimented and more quantitative I guess you would say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I think what the issue though is, so with something like a table, it's very easy to define what is a table. It's a flat service that has... But when you deal with quality, it's very thorough. You're starting to deal with very, I'm going to get philosophical, existential concepts. What is valid? What does it mean for a thing to exist in a certain context? And it's, define value and importance. I can define words somewhere really easily. When you try to define other concepts, it gets very lofty very quickly. And quality, for something we talk about all the time happens to be one of those very thorough kind concepts. So I think there's a danger in trying to define it, and I would go on a limb and say, you know it, when you see it, you can try to describe it and describe certain attributes of it. But you can never really define it per se. So I think it's all of it equals a very layered and complex equation of what is quality, how do you produce quality content? And we're not going to answer in this podcast, unfortunately. David Khim: But we can do it. Alex Birkett: Something I've been thinking about is that maybe quality, we want to make it as objective as possible in terms of our processes and inputs, but there's no universal quality. So you mentioned McDonald's before. Something I think about a lot is McDonald's quality versus say Michelin Star chefs. Both of those actually hit quality specs with what they're aiming to do. And people will smack talk McDonald's and be like, "You don't want to be the McDonald's of this." But I'm reading that book that, 'Grinded out' by Ray Kroc, and the amount of attention to detail that he put into the potatoes, that oil, every piece of it is remarkable. It's like this guy really had an eye for quality, it's just a different shape. It's not the same universal definition that your Michelin Star restaurant in New York City has. Mordy Oberstein: It's a different purpose. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's what I mean by customer value. So a Michelin Star restaurant, what somebody values about that is part of the whole experience, the whole sensory thing, the quality of all the ingredients, all of the other things. What someone values at a McDonald's is that they can get food within five minutes and they can have a certain number of calories and they can have all of it. They can feed their whole family very, very, very quickly and at a reasonable affordable price. That is something that sometimes that is high value, sometimes in some cases that is extremely high value. And sometimes the Michelin Star thing is a high value in different contexts, they will be more or less important. But in both of those cases, what the person ultimately wants to do is to eat edible food. So if that is the baseline. Mordy Oberstein: So abstract question for the crowd. Abstract question for the crowd and we can end on this point. Is usefulness part of quality or is it a layer that quality has to depend on? In other words, something could be quality. I have a Michelin Star burger, it's a hundred dollars for the burger, it's definitely quality. If I have $5, I'm in a huge rush, it's not useful. So is usefulness a separate concept than quality, or is it really part of the same thing? We just went way too deep. Every time we do a conversation, this happens. We always go into the abstract, philosophical. Crystal Carter: It always does. Allie Decker: I don't think usefulness applies to food Mordy, but I would say for content it does. So I would definitely have it as a quality input for the specific work that we do. Alex Birkett: But utility does factor into food too. If everything in the world was a Michelin Star expensive meal, I mean that wouldn't be a great world. Crystal Carter: Equally, I love cotton candy, but I couldn't eat cotton candy every day all the time. I would enjoy it, but it's not useful to my health. If I just ate cotton candy. Allie Decker: I think there's probably someone out there, Crystal, that would disagree with you. Mordy Oberstein: I can eat a Michelin Star hamburger every meal, every day. I'd be fine. I mean, I'd probably die relatively soon, but I'd be fine. Allie Decker: Yeah. Skewed utility, tastes very bad for you. Mordy Oberstein: Who defines what's actually utility? Alex Birkett: It's us, we're doomed. Allie Decker: Doomed. Mordy Oberstein: Doomed. You know what's not doomed? You are not doomed if you follow these great people out there on the ether that is social media. Where can we find all of you? Allie Decker: Mordy, you're so smooth. We're all on LinkedIn, as Alex and David mentioned. We have a lot of fun on there. And check us out on beomniscient.com. You can find all of our work, all of our team. We have some great podcast episodes of our own, blog post resources on there. Yeah, The Long Game. Mordy Oberstein: We'll put links in the show notes, but you can just Google The Long Game podcast and you'll find it. Thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun. Allie Decker: Thank you. Alex Birkett: Thank you. David Khim: Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, well, since we're talking about operations, not the game, not the game operation, which confounded me as a child, I do not have surgeon's hands. I killed that poor fellow many a times. Crystal Carter: I think he was smiling the whole time, the poor guy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I just jabbed you in the ribs, he's still smiling. Crystal Carter: Just trying to put your spleen in your elbow, "Sir, I don't think this is going to work out for you." Mordy Oberstein: We might be dating ourselves. I don't know if that game still exists, so just for- Crystal Carter: It does. I saw one for Grogu from the Mandalorian, actually. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, okay, fine. So in that case, you understand what the game operation is, and we're not dating ourselves. I'm dating myself by not being sure if I'm dating myself or not. Got it. Okay, since we're talking about operations. I have a ton to say about operations, mainly because no one talks to me, no one asks about operations because no one thinks I have any experience around operations. But I actually used to be a COO of a company with 300 people for four years. Little fun fact about Mordy, a long time ago. And again, dating myself that I could say that and it being a long time ago. By the way, I'm channeling my inner saltiness with that. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I would like to, so salty, like Dead Sea salty. I would like to talk about operations in a deeper way, because I have al to say about operations. So Crystal and I are going to take a very deep thought into what makes a good operator with a deep thought from Crystal and a Mordy. So I think there's a universal concept around being good at operations that exist across the board, that sometimes when we get stuck in the marketing or SEO conversation, operations in that context we don't talk about, because we're talking about operations from an SEO team point of view or operations from a digital marketing team point of view. But let's perhaps zoom out and talk about just what does it mean to be good at operations. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I think that this is something, particularly within an SEO team, within an SEO agency, it's hard. It's hard. Mordy Oberstein: Operations is the hardest thing in my opinion. Crystal Carter: It's really difficult. It's really hard. And I know folks who said, I was in a conversation and someone was saying, "I admire this agency owner, because it's really hard running an agency." It's really hard. You've got to think about making sure you can keep the lights on. You have to make sure that everybody's learning stuff. You have to make sure that you're keeping your clients happy. You have to think about all of those sorts of things. And essentially with an agency, what you have is a knowledge-based business. You have something where the knowledge that you have as a team is your bread and butter, that is what people are paying for is what you know. And so you have to make sure that you're keeping those folks happy and that you're keeping everybody clever and all of that sort of stuff, and that they have all the tools that they need and all of that. And so you spend a lot of time deciding, do we need this tool? Is this training module that we're investing in really useful? Is this particular operational tool going to help us make the difference? Because for instance, when people get those team management tools, there's a learning curve. You have to invest months in training your entire team to learn this new operational tool like a Monday or that sort of thing or Asana or whatever. So you have to spend all the time investing and you're like, "Is this going to be worth it, going to be worth it down the line? Are we going to be able to make the money back on this?" All of those sorts of things. Mordy Oberstein: I think you can even zoom out from there, because there's a part of operations where you're trying to make it all go and make it all work. And then I think there's a part of operations where you're basically a gatekeeper. And I think this is the part of operations that no one likes to talk about because it's not very fun. It's super complicated and it has less to do with the sexy part of growth, and more to do with the things that are really super annoying. Which is, so you have a new tool, let's say. You're going to use a new tool. So one part of the operator is like, "Okay, do they have the new tool? Do they have the onboarding to understand the new tool? Are they able to succeed?" And that's the part of operating where you feel good about yourself, I'm helping people succeed. Then this is the part of operating where you feel bad about yourself, and that's the part of making sure they're actually doing the things that you ask them to do. Or making sure that the vendor did all the things that you ask them to do. And making sure that the vendor and the people who are on your team are both doing the things together that you ask them to do. And that part's not as fun. And that part is just, it's just following. It's an insane level of detail. I'll tell you. So when I used to do operations, it was for a property manager company. They had like 3000 apartment units in New York City, and they had all sorts of legal cases going on. Which is, well, the worst part of my job actually. And I, every month would audit out of hundreds of legal cases every month to make sure that the attorneys were doing what they were supposed to do. And it was super tedious and super annoying, and it wasn't the kind of thing you would expect a COO to do. That doesn't seem important. Because all the things that you don't see a COO do are the things that are super minute, super detailed that they have to do that they don't really want to talk about, and that are not really fun to talk about. There's an insane level of detail, and I'll tell you that being a mild control freak helps. And that's the hard part, because you have to be a control freak, but you can't let that freakiness show at all. Because then your team's going to be really annoyed that you're being a control freak or you're micromanaging them. So you need to report back to either the board or the CEO or whoever it is that's running the company and know all of the answers. Which means following up on all of the insane level of detail without making your team feel like you're micromanaging them. And that's the hard part of operations, is being a good operator means balancing every stupid little thing, knowing every stupid little thing. But not passing on that level of micromanagement to the people who are working under you. You have to keep that to yourself. Crystal Carter: And I think that that team cohesion point is super important. So I've been, it's award season. I've been judging a lot of SEO awards and including like SEO agency over the year kind of things. And one of the things people always put in the criteria, or one of the things that comes in as a criteria is, what about your team? How are you managing your team? And if you're a good operations manager, then you're doing all that nuts and bolts stuff. You're doing all of the things that keep everything ticking over, even if it's boring, even if it's not glamorous. You're doing all of those things to keep everyone ticking over and you're making sure that your team are in a good state of mind to be able to do good work. And that is something that is, that's gold dust. That's gold dust. I've worked with good operations managers who were able to do that and seen incredible results, because when people feel good job satisfaction and they feel they're in a safe and stable place. Mordy Oberstein: And that's the hard balance, is that you have to be able to do that while also being all up in their business at the same time and knowing everything that's going on. It's super hard. I think one thing that you can try, it just really is having good relationships. It's knowing how to ask for things. It's knowing how to follow up for things. It's knowing when to follow up with things and letting things go. The person, for whatever reason, the company structure where I used to work, this is almost 20 years ago, 15 years ago. Wow, I'm old. The CFO worked under the COO, which is a weird way of running it, but that's for whatever reason, CEO, a lot of Cs going on. That's how they wanted to do it. Which I always felt was awkward, because normally the CFO would not be under the COO, it would kind of be a co-relationship, at the same level. How the heck do I navigate this? And my last day there, the CFO came in and said, "Whoever you bring in, you need to make sure that they know they're not my boss, because Mordy wasn't my boss. Mordy and I just worked together." And she walked out of the room and she was like, "How the hell did you pull that off? She didn't think you were her boss this whole time, it's four years? I'm like, "No, I just made it seem like everything we're doing is part of our cooperation together. I knew when to push, when not to push, when to follow up, when not to follow up and when to let things that were going wrong, just let them go for the sake of the team environment kind of thing." Crystal Carter: And I think that that's super important. I think nowadays there's a lot of tools that allow you to do that with fewer touch points. So particularly there's a lot of agency management tools like we talked about, I mentioned Monday, other ones I've used their Teamwork. I've also seen, there's Asana, there's a few other things like that, some people use, what's the one with the cards? It's got all those cards all the way along. There's one that has, it's really big - Mordy Oberstein: I only know Monday and Asana. Crystal Carter: So there's a few different ones. There's all these different flavors of all of these different things. And also even in Wix, with Wix Studio we have some great tools that allow you to do this, for instance, that allow you to set tasks and set workflows and things like that. And those are really great for real time reporting so that the COO who needs to have a bird's eye view of what everybody's doing can go and check those things without going, "Hey, what you doing? Hey, what you doing? Hey, what's this?" That sort of thing. So using tools like that can help you to get the information you need and also help you to not drive everyone crazy. The other thing that's great about tools like this is they can also give you information on stuff that can help you help clients, help you help your team as well. So some of these tools will give you information on how much time you've been spending on a client. And sometimes clients will be like, "Oh, I want this and this and this and this." And because they ask a lot of questions, they get a lot of time, but they might not necessarily be paying for all of that time. And that's something that people have to be very mindful of, particularly when you're billing on a monthly, daily, hourly basis. That's something that a COO really has to keep track of for the whole team, and that's something that can make a really big difference. Mordy Oberstein: I'll give you a tip on this, I putting myself back in those shoes, what I would do in that situation. Let's say I notice there's way too much time being spent on clients that I can tell this is not billed time. So instead of going in and saying, "Hey you, we can't be doing this," make it great sympathy. If you're an operator or your operations, you go to the person and you say, "Hey, look, I get what you're doing. We should be doing this. I have a problem though because the CEO is down my back saying, "Hey, why is so much time being spent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And ask them, "What can we do here?" And get their solutions on it. But don't make it about they're messing up. Sometimes the way you want to leverage it is that you have a problem that you have to figure out because your neck is on the line. And it's not like I'm coming after you, I don't care that you do this. From my point of view, go ahead, keep talking to the client all day long. But I'm going to get nailed on it and I'm going to get asked about it, so what could we do to figure this out together? So you give an understanding of the fact that, "Hey, I understand where you're coming from and I personally don't care, and also help me out because I'm going to get nailed if we don't figure this out. Because at the end of the day, it's on me to make sure we're not doing this." Crystal Carter: I think that the good operations managers will definitely foster that kind of team mentality, that we're a team and we all need to move this needle. We all need to make sure that this makes sense for everyone so that we can all get some good results. And I think that that's really core to the operations aspect of SEO management. Mordy Oberstein: You know who's great at managing their news output and getting operating all of the news content for the entire industry on a daily basis? He might be a one-man show, but he sure knows how to operate. It's Barry Schwartz, which brings us to the SEO News. So here's this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. The last week's episode was all about AI and ranking, but this week's news is all about AI and maybe ranking, I don't know. First up, from Barry Schwartz and search engine land, Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE. Some have speculated that Google's going to announce the launch of SGE at Google's IO event on May 14th. Google has said to Barry, "We have not confirmed that. We have not said anything like that. There is no date set yet." Many speculate that not going to do anything until they figure out how to deal with the ad revenue and whatnot. Anyway, so I guess it's a public service announcement more than anything. The SGE has no official date to go live yet. Onwards from Barry Schwartz, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable, new Google Shopping and Maps search features. So a lot of these, okay, backtrack. Google announced a whole heap of features related to Maps and AI, and shopping and AI, and stuff and AI, and a lot of it, to quote Barry, is old, not new. And if you follow Barry on seroundtable.com, which you should check out each and every day for the SEO News. Barry's covered a bunch of these announcements already. This is why it's fun to track what Barry tracks, because you can see when people say, "Hey, Barry is this new?" And Barry's like, "Oh yeah, that's new." And it's a test and it finally rolls out. Barry's already covered it. So officially though, Google's announced some of these features that Barry has caught over the past couple of months, such as, for example, you can now have, well, you've had it for a while I guess. But in the U.S., you could swipe left, swipe right to get style recommendations. Google has its feature for movie recommendations, so you can kind of refine what Google shows you. So it'll show you get style recommendations and you can, it shows you a picture of a polo shirt and with stripes on it, you give it a thumbs up and you swipe to the next one. It's a polo shirt with polka dots. You're like, "No, that's ugly. Thumbs down." And this way you can get more catered or more tasteful to your liking, at least shopping recommendations on the Google SERP, right from Google. Another shopping thing that, again, Barry covered this, I think back in February, was that you can ask AI on Google to generate an image of an article of clothing. So you say, I don't know, "Pants with stripes and purple polka dots," which I think only clowns would wear. But anyway, that's your thing, or if you're a clown. You can now have the AI generate it and then say, "Great. Now show me similar looking products," and you can find the product that you want that way. So that's also rolled out. I don't know if that's, I think it's only... Yeah, that one's only in the U.S. And then there's some interesting things around local. So for example, Google, you can click on an image in a Google business profile. So you go to your favorite pizza place in New York, Joe's Pizza, which is actually a real place. I'm not making that up. And you see the image of, I don't know, a Sicilian pizza, and you click on it. You'll now be able to see reviews related to that particular item of food and a whole bunch of other review summaries and that sort of thing in the Google Business profile. So that's interesting. Another one just run through, there's a whole heap of these, I'll link to the articles so you can see all of them. But just another one that stuck out to me was, Google is using SGE to give you a trip itinerary. So you search for something like, "Create a three-Day trip itinerary for me that shows the history of Philadelphia," and it'll create a whole three-day itinerary of what you should do on day one, day two and day three. I think that's a little interesting, little Mordy commentary for you here. Some of these are great. I guess the shopping styles thing, I guess that's really helpful, you shop a lot online or whatever. The reviews for the particular item on the menu and then the Google business profile, that seems helpful. Three-day itinerary where you're just like, "Yeah, show me an itinerary. I am not going to explore anymore. I'll just do what you say, Google." That doesn't really seem to be a good use of AI in my opinion. This is just my take. This is pure Mordy take. It just feels like, this is really fun, but it's not really helpful. And I wonder if sometimes the big tech brands, Google and Bing swing and miss on this kind of stuff with the approach of like, "Yeah, people don't want to actually explore anything. We'll just give you the answer and you'll just take what we give you." I don't think that's how it works. I think human beings are always going to want to explore. If I'm taking a week off of work, I'm taking my family to Philadelphia, I'm going to explore the city. I'm not going to say, "Hey, Google, just create an itinerary for me. I'm going to invest in that. I'm going to look at each option. I'm going to say, "You know what? That doesn't look so much fun. That does look fun. My kids are going to freak out if I go to this one. That one looks way better or more interactive."" I'm going to put the effort in to explore and research for myself what I think is best for me and my family when we go on vacation to spend all that money. Maybe if I'm like, I'm blowing a day in Philadelphia, "Google, give me five things to do in Philadelphia today." All right, maybe I would do that. So in some of these instances where I think the Google and the Bings of the world are basically saying, "We'll give you the information and you'll just take it I think that works with smaller things perhaps, but I think you're never going to get past the need for the human being to want to explore and see things for themselves and make their own decisions. So I think when they take these things like an itinerary for a vacation, they're like, "Yeah, take this. Use it. Go for it. SGE output, AI output." I'm not sure that works and I think the Googles and the Bings of the world, again, I think they're still trying to figure that out. But again, I think they'll see, my prediction at least, they'll see for those kinds of things. People, maybe they'll create the itinerary, but you'll see the next thing they do is start researching each one of those things and creating their own itinerary. That's just my take, and that's this week's snappy news. It really must be an operation to produced so much news content on a day-by-day basis. Crystal Carter: I thought he went into real surgical detail with it. That's what I thought. Mordy Oberstein: See what you did there. He's a smooth operator, that Barry. Speaking of smooth operators, you know who operates an SEO agency with a ton of SEOs? It's Blake Denman over to RicketyRoo, which means that our follower of the week this week is Blake Denman from RicketyRoo. Spoiler alert from here. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, Blake is a great follower. He's got a fantastic, fantastic cohort of some wonderful, wonderful SEOs on his team, Amanda Jordan, Celeste Gonzalez, Melissa Popp, some amazing, amazing, incredible people. Mordy Oberstein: And they have a great vibe. Crystal Carter: A great vibe. Mordy Oberstein: And they get stuff done. Crystal Carter: Great team, and I think that, again, you're as good as your team, particularly from an SEO point of view, and when you've got a great team, then you're able to do incredible things. I also forgot to shout out VP of operations at RicketyRoo, Tess, who's fantastic. Tess, Voecks, who's amazing as well. Mordy Oberstein: The problem with RicketyRoo is that we're going to be here all day naming them. Crystal Carter: All day saying how great they are, because we love, shout out to the full Roo crew. Mordy Oberstein: I like that, the Roo crew. But if you have questions around, "Hey, how do I manage and operate an SEO team?" I think Blake would be a great person for you to talk to because he's clearly doing a great job with it. Crystal Carter: Right. Because he's got so many great folks on his team, so he must be doing a great job. Mordy Oberstein: He must be, and you can follow Blake over on X @blakedenman. That's B-L-A-K-E D-E-N-M-A-N on X, formerly known as Twitter, currently known as Twitter in my mind. We have to do an outro now. I need to say something charismatic. Crystal Carter: Thank you all for joining us today on this great episode of SERP's Up. Mordy Oberstein: I was thinking of, hey, let's cut that out and retry that, but now we're not doing that. Now we're going to go with it. We're doing it live. Crystal Carter: I don't know, whatever. It's fine. We're a team. We're a team. That's something we do, we support each other. Mordy Oberstein: That's how we operate. Crystal Carter: Exactly. We just bring it back in and deal the deal, get the job done. Mordy Oberstein: I freely admit, I had an absolute brain fart there, I'm like, "Wait, what comes next? Oh, yeah. We need to end the show now." Crystal Carter: It's fine, we can end it. I think we've done a great job and we hit all our KPIs and our targets and our goals and our aims and objectives, and well done everyone. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You'd think after 81 episodes, I'd know how to operate this thing, but clearly not. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Don't worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the maturation process of SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, or on our SEO Learning Hub over 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 over at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter David Khim Allie Decker Alex Birkett Blake Denman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Be Omniscient Digital The Long Game Podcast News: Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE New Google Shopping & Maps Search Features Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter David Khim Allie Decker Alex Birkett Blake Denman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Be Omniscient Digital The Long Game Podcast News: Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE New Google Shopping & Maps Search Features Transcript Mordy Oberstein: Its 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 overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is a smooth operator, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. I am not sure if I could possibly claim that title, because I never figured out how to do that thing from that music video with the leaning, where they lean all the way over. But apparently after spending much of my childhood trying desperately to do that and falling on my face, I realized that actually what they had was nails in their shoes. There was nail on the floor. Mordy Oberstein: Really, that's how they do that? Crystal Carter: Yeah, there was a nail on the floor, and he had a thing in the shoe and basically they latched into it and then they did the lean and that's how they didn't fall. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like I've been lied to my entire life. Crystal Carter: Basically. Basically. Mordy Oberstein: It's like when they pull the cheese on a pizza in the commercials and it's glue. Crystal Carter: No, no, no. They're not allowed to use glue. They basically, they use some special kind of cheese. Well, at least in the UK at least. Mordy Oberstein: Whatever, it's not real. I've eaten plenty of pizzas, has your pizza ever done that? No. Ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Never done that. Mordy Oberstein: We fall for it though, because you watch the TV, you're like, "Oh, that pizza looks so good." And you know when you go there, it's not going to be anything like that whatsoever, but we do it anyway. Crystal Carter: No, no. Mordy Oberstein: That's how marketing works. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. And that's the world we're living in. Mordy Oberstein: Lies. You know what's not a lie? The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/newsletter. Got all those slashes, but where you can also collaborate on websites uniquely with Wix Studio, make your agency's processes more efficient with collaboration freedom that Wix Studio offers you. Check it out wix.com/studio. Because today we're talking about building the operations for content and SEO to increase team effectiveness. That's right. At the backbone of any good SEO and content game is a set of mundane operations that pushes your boat to shore. And to help us, we will be welcoming the entire crew of The Long Game podcast over at Omniscient Digital. Plus, we'll get a thorough and explore what fundamentally makes for good operations. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So jump in your shell, place your oars into your oar locks and get ready to roam perfect harmony as the Wix and Long Game crew help your crew power through to an efficient SEO and operations game in one seamless glide of grace on episode 81 of the SERP's podcast. In case you can't tell, I just watched that movie with the people on the boats, the crew movie with the boats. Crystal Carter: Oh, there's lots of movies like that. Mordy Oberstein: It's a new one in the Olympics. Crystal Carter: Oh, an actual crew? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, an actual crew. Crystal Carter: Not the crew, actual people doing crew? Mordy Oberstein: No crew, the boat, you're rowing the boat with all the people. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. I'm aware of crew. I have never done that. I don't have the core strength for that. Mordy Oberstein: I like rowing boats, but I can never do that. Crystal Carter: Can you do it in the round? You start rowing and then I'll row row the boat. No? Mordy Oberstein: I want to be the guy who just screams at people while the people row. Crystal Carter: The drums, the drums are good as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That guy's gotten the best job, to be honest with you. Row faster. Anyway, so fun fact, about three or four years, I'm going to mention this later again in the podcast, I was a COO of a mid-sized property management company in New York City, which people don't know. And it's a weird Mordy, fun fact. So when I say operations are nitty-gritty and boring and mundane processes, I speak from experience and that's what they are. But they're also the core of everything you do when you're working as part of a huge team and a huge content team and a huge SEO team, it all in my mind comes down to operations. So it's not a little bit weird that we're talking about SEO and content and operations because fundamentally, if you're working on a team, it is the backbone of everything you do. Everything needs to work methodically towards one goal. And that's all based on good-strong operations, which is why I am so very happy to introduce the crew of the Long Game podcasts. Welcome to SERP's Up, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett. Welcome. Alex Birkett: Thank you. Thank you. Allie Decker: Thanks, Mordy. David Khim: Hello. Hello. Alex Birkett: Good to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So first things first, markers going to market. Plug away. What do you got? Alex Birkett: Well, we have a podcast too called The Long Game that you mentioned, and we run an SEO and content marketing agency called, Omniscient Digital. It's beomniscient.com. I think that's all we've got, right? Are we selling anything else? David Khim: So we work primarily with B2B SaaS companies. We've worked with companies like SAP, Adobe, Loom, Jasper, Vendor, Order, I can keep going, but I think that gives an idea of the type of companies. They're typically quite ambitious, growing quickly or want to grow faster. And we typically are the team that they go to either build their content SEO engine from zero to one, or in some cases even scale it from one to 10 or even a hundred and just work with us instead of hiring an in-house team. Alex Birkett: Well, and that's an interesting angle too, because we've seen the backsides of both sides of the spectrum in terms of precedes startups all the way up through the biggest companies in the world and everybody struggles with operations. It's just in different ways. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think people forget how much it can, particularly when you're thinking about SEO projects and stuff. How much you can have the best campaign in the world, but if somebody hasn't remembered to have somebody answer the phone or have somebody pick up all those leads or have enough capacity or make sure that the servers can take all of the traffic. Maybe we need to upgrade our site at the back end so that it can take all the traffic, those kinds of things can make your best campaign fall completely flat. David Khim: What I've found is I think of operations very simply. It's what needs to be done, who's going to do it, when is it going to be done and how is it going to be done? And typically when we meet with prospects or start work with clients, one or more of those things are not defined. A lot of the case, what needs to be done is never defined. Sometimes we'll even ask, well, who do we talk to if we have any questions? That's also not defined, which we in some cases don't realize until down the line that we've been talking to the wrong person. And we also help them define, here's how things are going to happen. Here's when we'll do it by, here's what we can do, here's what we need from you and so on. And once those things are defined, things start rolling and things are smooth like butter. And we find that a lot of clients, because those things aren't defined internally, a lot of times they know what to do, but they're like, "We don't know how to actually get this done," because they bought our likes internally or we don't have resources and things like that. Crystal Carter: And I think it can happen a lot in large organizations and I think that one of the things that's tricky, it's like when someone says in first aid they tell you if somebody is bleeding, if there's an emergency, you don't say someone call an ambulance. You say, "You call an ambulance and then that one person will call the ambulance," because otherwise everyone will assume that somebody else did it. I mean, do you find that a lot of the times somebody assumes that someone else has done or handled whatever it is that needs to be handled? Allie Decker: Yeah, absolutely. It's even more prevalent in a fully distributed team like ours, because not together day to day. Even more so, because our clients are all over the world. So having set responsibilities and ownership designated out the gate really helps the projects once the emergencies arise as they always do. There's a lot of our work that is unpredictable or things change in the middle of the projects and having the infrastructure set up, the operational infrastructure helps, whatever happens, it continues smoothly. Alex Birkett: I would say that's a bigger problem in larger enterprises too, especially with multiple business units. As you sort of absolve responsibility or certain steps in the process to, say, getting a piece of content published. If you can describe how does a piece of content get published, you realize there's so many different stakeholders at each step and sometimes it's unclear who's responsible for each phase in that process and what their incentives are. So in the early stages it's you have one person or maybe one person in a freelancer or an agency. Things are simpler at that stage. As you scale operations, it becomes much less clear who's doing what, when and why, what their incentive structure is. Mordy Oberstein: And I find that either means in best case scenario, a bottleneck until you figure it out or absolute total communication breakdown, which is your probably worst case scenario. David Khim: You touched on an important thing there that I kind of jokingly say to a lot of people that it's communication. As a personal belief, I think if we all as individuals and humans worked on our communication skills, the world would be a better. And if we just zoom in on the workplace, there would probably be less headbutting and more collaboration going on in workspace. But even being able to define a communication cadence of we're going to check in on this once a week, or let's aim to have these things done by a certain deadline and check in at these checkpoints. Having that laid out explicitly is also very helpful, because then you have regular checkpoints to make sure that things don't fall through the cracks. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've been on the other side where I've hired agencies and that hasn't been in place, and what inevitably happens is the whole thing kind of falls apart and you as the consumer feel like, "What is going on here? Why are they not doing this? I'm paying all this money and nothing's happening." Whereas you've built in that operations, those processes from the outset and the expectations are there. And there's checks and balances to the system to make sure that if something falls through the cracks, it'll eventually get picked up again or there's opportunity for it to come up in discussion again. Then that solves a lot of the problems that you really as an agency, I feel like if you don't have that in place, you're basically just setting yourself up to have a lot of angry, resentful customers. Alex Birkett: I think a nightmare scenario for us, one that we actively try to avoid and are constantly iterating on is having a whole list of actions and having it just sit in draft mode or feedback mode or a backlog. Whether that's, we produce content for clients and that's probably the most palpable example. Where it's like you could produce 50 pieces of content and they just sit there in draft mode without being published. Our best case scenario, outcome wise is a great case study for a client, a great outcome for a client. That's a flywheel. That's how we build a reputation and it's not possible unless things get done. Same is true in technical SEO, if you've got a bunch of issues. My background is in experimentation, you could have all the ideas in the world, but if there's no throughput, nothing happens on the outcome side. So that's something we actively try to avoid. Crystal Carter: And I think also with that, you can't grow unless you, you talked about experimentation, you have to publish otherwise, you can't see what the market thinks of what you've done. You can't get customer feedback, user feedback off... David, David's nodding. And those bottlenecks aren't just bottlenecks for you getting your case study, they're bottlenecks for us doing better the next time, because there is no next time if there isn't a first time. I don't know if you have any top tips for being able to push through those bottlenecks that are so frustrating, because I've definitely been in the place where we've had a stack of content. We were commissioned for content, we got all the content through to the client, and then it sat there until it was no longer relevant and then you're going to have to start again. Allie Decker: Yeah, oftentimes I've learned setting those operational expectations of the client. We're a partnership, we're working on this together, really having them understand what their responsibilities would be, which we would do our best to ease those responsibilities. But if we don't have CMS access or if there is a certain point where we need them to review content for accuracy or their brand perspective or point of view, they're going to be inherently involved. So setting the expectation out the gate, even as early as the sales process, was like, "This is what we would need from you. How does this sound? Is this a commitment you can make? Who would be the main point of contact for this?" I think it helps then when it does become an active action for them to own, they know it's coming. They've set this time aside and it's our job to hold them accountable, so it doesn't come as a surprise. We found that that really helps starting the conversation early. Alex Birkett: With any sort of behavioral change. I always go back to this model, I think it's called B=MAP, it's BJ Fogg's behavior model. And it's, you have two axes, one is motivation, so how excited somebody is to do something. And then you have ease or effort and it's like how hard it is to do that thing. So if somebody needs a new driver's license, their motivation is extremely high, so they'll put up with all the BS at the DMV, whatever to get that done. And there's varying levels of motivation in terms of clients, but we try to pick the ones like David said earlier, who are ambitious and have high motivation levels to get content out there to do SEO. So then our job is to make it as easy as possible for those things to go through, and we learn different ways to do that. If we're doing high velocity, sometimes that involves bashing content feedback cycles. So instead of giving somebody 200 things to review and saying, "Get after it." We'll do 10, 20, 30 at a time and be very specific about what we need. Do we need legal approval? Do we need actual structural subject matter expert feedback? We'll be very specific about those things. So it's not this overwhelming cognitive burden that it just sits there on somebody's desk, because it's, "Where do I even start?" Mordy Oberstein: That sounds really interesting, because it sounds almost like you're very agile in how you're approaching the client and the scenario and the ask. How do you set yourselves up your own processes to be set up where it's not overly rigid so that when you have a client, when you have a situation, when you have an ask or a need or a scenario, that you're able to set up the processes that align to that particular given scenario? And not, "Hey, this is how we do things, here's our process." And just blinders on, "Here's how we usually go with it. So that's what we're going to do," and not be agile enough to adapt to the current situation? Allie Decker: Yeah, we're really lucky to have a brilliant editorial team. Our managing editor is Lean Six Sigma certified, so he's brought a lot of those inputs into how he structured the team and our editorial process. A lot of our editorial process is 'rigid'. We have a default set up and we'll iterate on that if necessary. But for the most part, again, it's all about setting expectations right out the gate. We communicate this as early as the first or second sales calls, "Here's what our editorial process looks like," so we can leave a lot of wiggle room for input. SME interviews, SME editors coming in and contributing to really technical pieces. I think ultimately having the tooling in place is really helpful. So we use tools like Airtable. We have a multi-step editorial process. We have a lot of shared communication. So plus one to what David said about just staying as in touch as possible. So we share a Slack channel with our clients and we have really repeatable communication connections, so bi-weekly calls. All of this infrastructure, which is rigid per se, allows for the time in between those calls, the time in between those assignments and the content creation process to take shape as it might. And a lot of what we do is equal parts arts and science, so some of it needs that artistic space to come together. Other times it's a little bit more scientific, so a little bit more repeatable, collecting the data, iterating on the data, using it to inform our next strategy. But I think actually having some of the infrastructure remain rigid, setting the expectation out the gate. And then if push comes to shove and something happens with the client or after a couple times we're like, "Actually, this isn't the best fit for this specific project," then we're able to tweak. So I'd actually argue that maybe having a repeatable process to begin is the best, and then picking and choosing those puzzle pieces as you get to know the project. Crystal Carter: I think there's definitely a case of managing yourself. If your team, the client or the project, folks that you're working with are the variable, you want to control as much on your side as you possibly can. Allie Decker: Yeah. I think one good thing we did last year was build a lot of our process, build a really strong foundation. And as every agency does, we have projects that don't go according to plan. And we were able to, because our process was so clear, we were able to clearly see where the problem was, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But having a really clear foundation infrastructure, I'll just use that word again, allowed us to within days pinpoint what was breaking. And that was why it was so valuable to have that rigid, repeatable process to begin with. And we were able to have a postmortem of sorts and iterate as we needed on specific projects. David Khim: I'd love to get a little bit more into weeds too, just like tactily, what that means, not just for us, but even for folks in-house. Because whether it's Sam or managing editor's Lean Six Sigma certified. I come from a growth background. Alex comes from experimentation. We have a mix of what some people have called, this is the mathy side of things, and then there's also the creative and that form of thinking. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to say you read my mind, because I was going to talk about our in-house and how we do that.So you go ahead, take it. David Khim: Yeah. But one of the things that the team did really well was build out a mirror board of every single step of our workflows, from the first sales call with a prospect all the way down to delivery. And we did that for our hiring process too, and then that allowed us to be able to say, "Hey, this client engagement broke down. Where in this workflow did it break down? Okay, we identified it. Now let's figure out how to actually... What do we need to do to adapt?" Without that, we wouldn't be able to do that sort of diagnostic and actually adapt. And then I think part of it's the culture of, hey, we use a lot of automations, we use ClickUp and a lot of checklists, even if it's a silly thing like, "Send a follow-up to the client after the meeting." Those things help me, because sometimes I forget, I'm like, "Oh, wait, I forgot to do this." So we're just very regimented in how we approach a lot of our work, and that lets us think about more of the strategic and creative things and not have to worry about the more administrative, straightforward things like that. Mordy Oberstein: We literally have that on our SEO Hub. I mean, we have a great head of SEO editorial, George Winn, he has some really strong processes in place. He's very methodical about it. He's very regimented about it. And I find personally, I don't want to speak for Crystal, but I find that because of those processes, I know that when we want to get a little bit creative with it. I know that sometimes I worry about, if we get a little bit too creative, will the quality still be there, will the targeting still be there? But because we have the processes in place, I know that no matter how wild and crazy I get with it, it'll all come back to a place where there's a check and control of how well-targeted and how well-produced the content actually is. I don't need to worry. Hey, I'm being a little bit maybe too off the deep end here, and the quality of the content and the targeting of the content won't come out the way I want it to, but because I know I'm going to be checked in place by the processes our editorial has put in place, I'm good to go. I can do what I want. Crystal Carter: I think that those processes are so important. I think one of the other thing I wanted to pick up on, because I think David and Allie, you both mentioned this was as part of your sales process. Certainly in my experience of speaking with clients, one of the first things I ask, particularly if I'm giving an SEO audit or something is, and I think Alex, I think you also mentioned the who in the team as well. If you're working with someone and you're trying to figure out your process with someone, the first thing I'm doing is, who's on your team? What resources do you have? So that if I give you 45 articles, if there's one person there, then I can expect that that's going to take this long. Or they might say, "I want 400 articles," but they have one person reviewing and you're just like, "No, that's too many. That's too many for you." How does vetting clients and matching clients to your process, how do you match clients to your process and how do you identify whether or not they're going to work well in your framework that you've got? Alex Birkett: I think what you said there around having a DRI basically is the main issue. It's not always that simple. Earlier stage companies may have one person, typically if it's a founder, that's a little tough because they're going to have so many other competing priorities that it's hard to get their time. But as you scale, one thing that I've realized working with much larger clients is that you'll have a DRI, but then there'll be other stakeholders. And finding how to partition those different roles for the different parts of the feedback cycles is important. So one client that I'm thinking about that I talked to earlier today, they've got a strategic editorial person thinking about things from the content side. But then there's legal too, they're decently regulated and there's a heavy legal presence. And then there's product marketing, and that's how they're speaking about the products in the content that we're producing. So how we delineate those stages of feedback instead of just giving it all at once, giving it to our single point of contact and saying, "Do all of this." We can go in phases with each of these, and it is just, I think, important to me to identify and to find who each person is and which part of the process they're taking. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that's a really important part. Mordy Oberstein: David, I wanted to get back to, you weren't about to ask a question? I don't want to gloss over it. David Khim: Okay. I'm very curious. I can share the context on our end, but I'm very curious how you all think about it. Not even just with the pod, but maybe your editorial team too. But one of the things around process and breaking bottlenecks is, I found that we run into bottlenecks when someone doesn't know what they're supposed to do, they don't have the bandwidth, or I'll bucket the rest in fear, uncertainty, doubt. And in that bucket, it's, what if it doesn't work? What if it's not the right content? Or I think the one that is my favorite is, I'm worried about the quality. And quality tends to be a big thing that comes up, and there can be a discussion of, "Hey, maybe we'll get to 90% of what you're expecting, but we need to get it published to get data and iterate." But then I know, and I think this comes a lot from Alex and Allie mainly, but the idea that quality can be made objective, and a lot of folks kind of say it's subjective and move on. But that doesn't enable things to move forward sometimes, because if you can't agree on what quality is. So I'll let Allie and Alex add anything to that, but I'm curious how you all handle that at Wix. Crystal Carter: I think that certainly within our teams, we have various different objectives for different audiences. So at the SEO Hub, we have different objectives for what we want to do with our content and how we want educational value and brand value and things like that. There are other parts of the team that have other parts of, it's a very big company, working in 17 different languages and globally, et cetera. So there's different parts of the company that have different objectives. And I think that we, as a company overall, I think we try to make sure that it's very clear what the objectives are for each piece of content that somebody or each channel that someone's engaging with, for instance. So if they're on, we have our Wix Studio blog, for instance, which has one type of focus, and we have our Wix SEO blog, which has a different focus, for instance, I think there's things like that. And I think that when people think about working with a big company like Adobe or Wix or something like that, I think what people forget is that very often you're working on a project within that. There'll be a project within that specific thing, and that project will be dedicated to a certain thing. If you were think about, if you, "Oh, you work at McDonald's." Well, there's going to be a team that's dedicated just to Happy Meals, just to Happy Meals, and even within that team there'll be somebody who's just dedicated to the toys that go in the Happy Meals, for instance. They're going to be in subsections as well. So I think that we try to focus on the audiences that it's going for and the intent of the audience. Mordy Oberstein: For your quality point, I think what inevitably happens is that, first of all, I personally think there is an objective ideal of quality, and I think it's on a spectrum, but there is an ideal, there's an objective ideal of something that is or is not quality. Either something is or is not soda. There's a definition of what it is, and if there's no definition of what it is and it's completely arbitrary, we might as well not talk about it. But I think though that quality is contextualized. For example, the Wix Studio blog is very much geared towards trends, thought leadership and what quality means in that context is different than let's say our SEO Hub, which is more we want to just educate you about how to do SEO and how to do marketing kind of thing. So it's much more straightforward, informational, and less on the thought leadership side sometimes, or sometimes it is very thought leadershippy. But the quality is in context of what is the nature of the content, because what's quality for a straight-up informational piece and what's quality for an acquisition piece or what's quality for a thought leadership piece are just very, very different things. Alex Birkett: Yeah, I look at it as this bi-directional thing. The word quality is so nebulous that if you get bogged down on definitions, I think it just, to your point, it is a little bit of a waste of time. But there's a quality in the reader of the content, and you can't ever truly control that. I post on LinkedIn quite a bit and things that I think are the best posts in the world get crickets, and then some pithy little fortune cookie thing goes viral, and I'm like, "I guess I can't predict quality." But that doesn't mean, I think conflating that outcome quality with the input quality is where people get bogged down with the definitions. So in pursuit of the goal, like you had mentioned Crystal, it's like you want to define that to the best of your ability, objectively speaking. It's more specs, it's more thinking, does this hit specs, giving the outcome that we want? And then after you see the outcome, you get more data and you can iterate. That can inform those specs too. So to me, it's very bi-directional and both inform the other, but I don't want to confuse the two. I think they're two different things. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think David also touched on people getting bogged down with quality this or quality that and not publishing because of that, and what did they say is done is better than perfect. Sometimes the- Mordy Oberstein: The enemy of good is great, something like that, Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. That sort of thing. And I think that sometimes they say delivering customer value. So something that is good is something that is valuable to the customer and if that's valuable to the customer, there's lots of things that people find valuable. And I think that I was interested in the idea of making it objective, making quality objective. You'll have a baseline of this must do this. A table must have legs and it must be level and it must not be sharp. There's a baseline of what a table must do, and you have to absolutely hit all of those things. And once you can absolutely hit all of those things, if you can't make your table level, then we're not doing anything for instance. Whereas after that you can go, "Oh, we're going to make this heirloom this, we're going to make it hand, et cetera, et cetera. You can get all of the extra lovely stuff on top of that, but you need to be able to do the very, very baseline thing in the first place, whatever it is that is. And I think that part of operations is making things that are very qualitative, very subjective more regimented and more quantitative I guess you would say. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I think what the issue though is, so with something like a table, it's very easy to define what is a table. It's a flat service that has... But when you deal with quality, it's very thorough. You're starting to deal with very, I'm going to get philosophical, existential concepts. What is valid? What does it mean for a thing to exist in a certain context? And it's, define value and importance. I can define words somewhere really easily. When you try to define other concepts, it gets very lofty very quickly. And quality, for something we talk about all the time happens to be one of those very thorough kind concepts. So I think there's a danger in trying to define it, and I would go on a limb and say, you know it, when you see it, you can try to describe it and describe certain attributes of it. But you can never really define it per se. So I think it's all of it equals a very layered and complex equation of what is quality, how do you produce quality content? And we're not going to answer in this podcast, unfortunately. David Khim: But we can do it. Alex Birkett: Something I've been thinking about is that maybe quality, we want to make it as objective as possible in terms of our processes and inputs, but there's no universal quality. So you mentioned McDonald's before. Something I think about a lot is McDonald's quality versus say Michelin Star chefs. Both of those actually hit quality specs with what they're aiming to do. And people will smack talk McDonald's and be like, "You don't want to be the McDonald's of this." But I'm reading that book that, 'Grinded out' by Ray Kroc, and the amount of attention to detail that he put into the potatoes, that oil, every piece of it is remarkable. It's like this guy really had an eye for quality, it's just a different shape. It's not the same universal definition that your Michelin Star restaurant in New York City has. Mordy Oberstein: It's a different purpose. Crystal Carter: And I think that that's what I mean by customer value. So a Michelin Star restaurant, what somebody values about that is part of the whole experience, the whole sensory thing, the quality of all the ingredients, all of the other things. What someone values at a McDonald's is that they can get food within five minutes and they can have a certain number of calories and they can have all of it. They can feed their whole family very, very, very quickly and at a reasonable affordable price. That is something that sometimes that is high value, sometimes in some cases that is extremely high value. And sometimes the Michelin Star thing is a high value in different contexts, they will be more or less important. But in both of those cases, what the person ultimately wants to do is to eat edible food. So if that is the baseline. Mordy Oberstein: So abstract question for the crowd. Abstract question for the crowd and we can end on this point. Is usefulness part of quality or is it a layer that quality has to depend on? In other words, something could be quality. I have a Michelin Star burger, it's a hundred dollars for the burger, it's definitely quality. If I have $5, I'm in a huge rush, it's not useful. So is usefulness a separate concept than quality, or is it really part of the same thing? We just went way too deep. Every time we do a conversation, this happens. We always go into the abstract, philosophical. Crystal Carter: It always does. Allie Decker: I don't think usefulness applies to food Mordy, but I would say for content it does. So I would definitely have it as a quality input for the specific work that we do. Alex Birkett: But utility does factor into food too. If everything in the world was a Michelin Star expensive meal, I mean that wouldn't be a great world. Crystal Carter: Equally, I love cotton candy, but I couldn't eat cotton candy every day all the time. I would enjoy it, but it's not useful to my health. If I just ate cotton candy. Allie Decker: I think there's probably someone out there, Crystal, that would disagree with you. Mordy Oberstein: I can eat a Michelin Star hamburger every meal, every day. I'd be fine. I mean, I'd probably die relatively soon, but I'd be fine. Allie Decker: Yeah. Skewed utility, tastes very bad for you. Mordy Oberstein: Who defines what's actually utility? Alex Birkett: It's us, we're doomed. Allie Decker: Doomed. Mordy Oberstein: Doomed. You know what's not doomed? You are not doomed if you follow these great people out there on the ether that is social media. Where can we find all of you? Allie Decker: Mordy, you're so smooth. We're all on LinkedIn, as Alex and David mentioned. We have a lot of fun on there. And check us out on beomniscient.com. You can find all of our work, all of our team. We have some great podcast episodes of our own, blog post resources on there. Yeah, The Long Game. Mordy Oberstein: We'll put links in the show notes, but you can just Google The Long Game podcast and you'll find it. Thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun. Allie Decker: Thank you. Alex Birkett: Thank you. David Khim: Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, well, since we're talking about operations, not the game, not the game operation, which confounded me as a child, I do not have surgeon's hands. I killed that poor fellow many a times. Crystal Carter: I think he was smiling the whole time, the poor guy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I just jabbed you in the ribs, he's still smiling. Crystal Carter: Just trying to put your spleen in your elbow, "Sir, I don't think this is going to work out for you." Mordy Oberstein: We might be dating ourselves. I don't know if that game still exists, so just for- Crystal Carter: It does. I saw one for Grogu from the Mandalorian, actually. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, okay, fine. So in that case, you understand what the game operation is, and we're not dating ourselves. I'm dating myself by not being sure if I'm dating myself or not. Got it. Okay, since we're talking about operations. I have a ton to say about operations, mainly because no one talks to me, no one asks about operations because no one thinks I have any experience around operations. But I actually used to be a COO of a company with 300 people for four years. Little fun fact about Mordy, a long time ago. And again, dating myself that I could say that and it being a long time ago. By the way, I'm channeling my inner saltiness with that. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I would like to, so salty, like Dead Sea salty. I would like to talk about operations in a deeper way, because I have al to say about operations. So Crystal and I are going to take a very deep thought into what makes a good operator with a deep thought from Crystal and a Mordy. So I think there's a universal concept around being good at operations that exist across the board, that sometimes when we get stuck in the marketing or SEO conversation, operations in that context we don't talk about, because we're talking about operations from an SEO team point of view or operations from a digital marketing team point of view. But let's perhaps zoom out and talk about just what does it mean to be good at operations. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. I think that this is something, particularly within an SEO team, within an SEO agency, it's hard. It's hard. Mordy Oberstein: Operations is the hardest thing in my opinion. Crystal Carter: It's really difficult. It's really hard. And I know folks who said, I was in a conversation and someone was saying, "I admire this agency owner, because it's really hard running an agency." It's really hard. You've got to think about making sure you can keep the lights on. You have to make sure that everybody's learning stuff. You have to make sure that you're keeping your clients happy. You have to think about all of those sorts of things. And essentially with an agency, what you have is a knowledge-based business. You have something where the knowledge that you have as a team is your bread and butter, that is what people are paying for is what you know. And so you have to make sure that you're keeping those folks happy and that you're keeping everybody clever and all of that sort of stuff, and that they have all the tools that they need and all of that. And so you spend a lot of time deciding, do we need this tool? Is this training module that we're investing in really useful? Is this particular operational tool going to help us make the difference? Because for instance, when people get those team management tools, there's a learning curve. You have to invest months in training your entire team to learn this new operational tool like a Monday or that sort of thing or Asana or whatever. So you have to spend all the time investing and you're like, "Is this going to be worth it, going to be worth it down the line? Are we going to be able to make the money back on this?" All of those sorts of things. Mordy Oberstein: I think you can even zoom out from there, because there's a part of operations where you're trying to make it all go and make it all work. And then I think there's a part of operations where you're basically a gatekeeper. And I think this is the part of operations that no one likes to talk about because it's not very fun. It's super complicated and it has less to do with the sexy part of growth, and more to do with the things that are really super annoying. Which is, so you have a new tool, let's say. You're going to use a new tool. So one part of the operator is like, "Okay, do they have the new tool? Do they have the onboarding to understand the new tool? Are they able to succeed?" And that's the part of operating where you feel good about yourself, I'm helping people succeed. Then this is the part of operating where you feel bad about yourself, and that's the part of making sure they're actually doing the things that you ask them to do. Or making sure that the vendor did all the things that you ask them to do. And making sure that the vendor and the people who are on your team are both doing the things together that you ask them to do. And that part's not as fun. And that part is just, it's just following. It's an insane level of detail. I'll tell you. So when I used to do operations, it was for a property manager company. They had like 3000 apartment units in New York City, and they had all sorts of legal cases going on. Which is, well, the worst part of my job actually. And I, every month would audit out of hundreds of legal cases every month to make sure that the attorneys were doing what they were supposed to do. And it was super tedious and super annoying, and it wasn't the kind of thing you would expect a COO to do. That doesn't seem important. Because all the things that you don't see a COO do are the things that are super minute, super detailed that they have to do that they don't really want to talk about, and that are not really fun to talk about. There's an insane level of detail, and I'll tell you that being a mild control freak helps. And that's the hard part, because you have to be a control freak, but you can't let that freakiness show at all. Because then your team's going to be really annoyed that you're being a control freak or you're micromanaging them. So you need to report back to either the board or the CEO or whoever it is that's running the company and know all of the answers. Which means following up on all of the insane level of detail without making your team feel like you're micromanaging them. And that's the hard part of operations, is being a good operator means balancing every stupid little thing, knowing every stupid little thing. But not passing on that level of micromanagement to the people who are working under you. You have to keep that to yourself. Crystal Carter: And I think that that team cohesion point is super important. So I've been, it's award season. I've been judging a lot of SEO awards and including like SEO agency over the year kind of things. And one of the things people always put in the criteria, or one of the things that comes in as a criteria is, what about your team? How are you managing your team? And if you're a good operations manager, then you're doing all that nuts and bolts stuff. You're doing all of the things that keep everything ticking over, even if it's boring, even if it's not glamorous. You're doing all of those things to keep everyone ticking over and you're making sure that your team are in a good state of mind to be able to do good work. And that is something that is, that's gold dust. That's gold dust. I've worked with good operations managers who were able to do that and seen incredible results, because when people feel good job satisfaction and they feel they're in a safe and stable place. Mordy Oberstein: And that's the hard balance, is that you have to be able to do that while also being all up in their business at the same time and knowing everything that's going on. It's super hard. I think one thing that you can try, it just really is having good relationships. It's knowing how to ask for things. It's knowing how to follow up for things. It's knowing when to follow up with things and letting things go. The person, for whatever reason, the company structure where I used to work, this is almost 20 years ago, 15 years ago. Wow, I'm old. The CFO worked under the COO, which is a weird way of running it, but that's for whatever reason, CEO, a lot of Cs going on. That's how they wanted to do it. Which I always felt was awkward, because normally the CFO would not be under the COO, it would kind of be a co-relationship, at the same level. How the heck do I navigate this? And my last day there, the CFO came in and said, "Whoever you bring in, you need to make sure that they know they're not my boss, because Mordy wasn't my boss. Mordy and I just worked together." And she walked out of the room and she was like, "How the hell did you pull that off? She didn't think you were her boss this whole time, it's four years? I'm like, "No, I just made it seem like everything we're doing is part of our cooperation together. I knew when to push, when not to push, when to follow up, when not to follow up and when to let things that were going wrong, just let them go for the sake of the team environment kind of thing." Crystal Carter: And I think that that's super important. I think nowadays there's a lot of tools that allow you to do that with fewer touch points. So particularly there's a lot of agency management tools like we talked about, I mentioned Monday, other ones I've used their Teamwork. I've also seen, there's Asana, there's a few other things like that, some people use, what's the one with the cards? It's got all those cards all the way along. There's one that has, it's really big - Mordy Oberstein: I only know Monday and Asana. Crystal Carter: So there's a few different ones. There's all these different flavors of all of these different things. And also even in Wix, with Wix Studio we have some great tools that allow you to do this, for instance, that allow you to set tasks and set workflows and things like that. And those are really great for real time reporting so that the COO who needs to have a bird's eye view of what everybody's doing can go and check those things without going, "Hey, what you doing? Hey, what you doing? Hey, what's this?" That sort of thing. So using tools like that can help you to get the information you need and also help you to not drive everyone crazy. The other thing that's great about tools like this is they can also give you information on stuff that can help you help clients, help you help your team as well. So some of these tools will give you information on how much time you've been spending on a client. And sometimes clients will be like, "Oh, I want this and this and this and this." And because they ask a lot of questions, they get a lot of time, but they might not necessarily be paying for all of that time. And that's something that people have to be very mindful of, particularly when you're billing on a monthly, daily, hourly basis. That's something that a COO really has to keep track of for the whole team, and that's something that can make a really big difference. Mordy Oberstein: I'll give you a tip on this, I putting myself back in those shoes, what I would do in that situation. Let's say I notice there's way too much time being spent on clients that I can tell this is not billed time. So instead of going in and saying, "Hey you, we can't be doing this," make it great sympathy. If you're an operator or your operations, you go to the person and you say, "Hey, look, I get what you're doing. We should be doing this. I have a problem though because the CEO is down my back saying, "Hey, why is so much time being spent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And ask them, "What can we do here?" And get their solutions on it. But don't make it about they're messing up. Sometimes the way you want to leverage it is that you have a problem that you have to figure out because your neck is on the line. And it's not like I'm coming after you, I don't care that you do this. From my point of view, go ahead, keep talking to the client all day long. But I'm going to get nailed on it and I'm going to get asked about it, so what could we do to figure this out together? So you give an understanding of the fact that, "Hey, I understand where you're coming from and I personally don't care, and also help me out because I'm going to get nailed if we don't figure this out. Because at the end of the day, it's on me to make sure we're not doing this." Crystal Carter: I think that the good operations managers will definitely foster that kind of team mentality, that we're a team and we all need to move this needle. We all need to make sure that this makes sense for everyone so that we can all get some good results. And I think that that's really core to the operations aspect of SEO management. Mordy Oberstein: You know who's great at managing their news output and getting operating all of the news content for the entire industry on a daily basis? He might be a one-man show, but he sure knows how to operate. It's Barry Schwartz, which brings us to the SEO News. So here's this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. The last week's episode was all about AI and ranking, but this week's news is all about AI and maybe ranking, I don't know. First up, from Barry Schwartz and search engine land, Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE. Some have speculated that Google's going to announce the launch of SGE at Google's IO event on May 14th. Google has said to Barry, "We have not confirmed that. We have not said anything like that. There is no date set yet." Many speculate that not going to do anything until they figure out how to deal with the ad revenue and whatnot. Anyway, so I guess it's a public service announcement more than anything. The SGE has no official date to go live yet. Onwards from Barry Schwartz, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable, new Google Shopping and Maps search features. So a lot of these, okay, backtrack. Google announced a whole heap of features related to Maps and AI, and shopping and AI, and stuff and AI, and a lot of it, to quote Barry, is old, not new. And if you follow Barry on seroundtable.com, which you should check out each and every day for the SEO News. Barry's covered a bunch of these announcements already. This is why it's fun to track what Barry tracks, because you can see when people say, "Hey, Barry is this new?" And Barry's like, "Oh yeah, that's new." And it's a test and it finally rolls out. Barry's already covered it. So officially though, Google's announced some of these features that Barry has caught over the past couple of months, such as, for example, you can now have, well, you've had it for a while I guess. But in the U.S., you could swipe left, swipe right to get style recommendations. Google has its feature for movie recommendations, so you can kind of refine what Google shows you. So it'll show you get style recommendations and you can, it shows you a picture of a polo shirt and with stripes on it, you give it a thumbs up and you swipe to the next one. It's a polo shirt with polka dots. You're like, "No, that's ugly. Thumbs down." And this way you can get more catered or more tasteful to your liking, at least shopping recommendations on the Google SERP, right from Google. Another shopping thing that, again, Barry covered this, I think back in February, was that you can ask AI on Google to generate an image of an article of clothing. So you say, I don't know, "Pants with stripes and purple polka dots," which I think only clowns would wear. But anyway, that's your thing, or if you're a clown. You can now have the AI generate it and then say, "Great. Now show me similar looking products," and you can find the product that you want that way. So that's also rolled out. I don't know if that's, I think it's only... Yeah, that one's only in the U.S. And then there's some interesting things around local. So for example, Google, you can click on an image in a Google business profile. So you go to your favorite pizza place in New York, Joe's Pizza, which is actually a real place. I'm not making that up. And you see the image of, I don't know, a Sicilian pizza, and you click on it. You'll now be able to see reviews related to that particular item of food and a whole bunch of other review summaries and that sort of thing in the Google Business profile. So that's interesting. Another one just run through, there's a whole heap of these, I'll link to the articles so you can see all of them. But just another one that stuck out to me was, Google is using SGE to give you a trip itinerary. So you search for something like, "Create a three-Day trip itinerary for me that shows the history of Philadelphia," and it'll create a whole three-day itinerary of what you should do on day one, day two and day three. I think that's a little interesting, little Mordy commentary for you here. Some of these are great. I guess the shopping styles thing, I guess that's really helpful, you shop a lot online or whatever. The reviews for the particular item on the menu and then the Google business profile, that seems helpful. Three-day itinerary where you're just like, "Yeah, show me an itinerary. I am not going to explore anymore. I'll just do what you say, Google." That doesn't really seem to be a good use of AI in my opinion. This is just my take. This is pure Mordy take. It just feels like, this is really fun, but it's not really helpful. And I wonder if sometimes the big tech brands, Google and Bing swing and miss on this kind of stuff with the approach of like, "Yeah, people don't want to actually explore anything. We'll just give you the answer and you'll just take what we give you." I don't think that's how it works. I think human beings are always going to want to explore. If I'm taking a week off of work, I'm taking my family to Philadelphia, I'm going to explore the city. I'm not going to say, "Hey, Google, just create an itinerary for me. I'm going to invest in that. I'm going to look at each option. I'm going to say, "You know what? That doesn't look so much fun. That does look fun. My kids are going to freak out if I go to this one. That one looks way better or more interactive."" I'm going to put the effort in to explore and research for myself what I think is best for me and my family when we go on vacation to spend all that money. Maybe if I'm like, I'm blowing a day in Philadelphia, "Google, give me five things to do in Philadelphia today." All right, maybe I would do that. So in some of these instances where I think the Google and the Bings of the world are basically saying, "We'll give you the information and you'll just take it I think that works with smaller things perhaps, but I think you're never going to get past the need for the human being to want to explore and see things for themselves and make their own decisions. So I think when they take these things like an itinerary for a vacation, they're like, "Yeah, take this. Use it. Go for it. SGE output, AI output." I'm not sure that works and I think the Googles and the Bings of the world, again, I think they're still trying to figure that out. But again, I think they'll see, my prediction at least, they'll see for those kinds of things. People, maybe they'll create the itinerary, but you'll see the next thing they do is start researching each one of those things and creating their own itinerary. That's just my take, and that's this week's snappy news. It really must be an operation to produced so much news content on a day-by-day basis. Crystal Carter: I thought he went into real surgical detail with it. That's what I thought. Mordy Oberstein: See what you did there. He's a smooth operator, that Barry. Speaking of smooth operators, you know who operates an SEO agency with a ton of SEOs? It's Blake Denman over to RicketyRoo, which means that our follower of the week this week is Blake Denman from RicketyRoo. Spoiler alert from here. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, Blake is a great follower. He's got a fantastic, fantastic cohort of some wonderful, wonderful SEOs on his team, Amanda Jordan, Celeste Gonzalez, Melissa Popp, some amazing, amazing, incredible people. Mordy Oberstein: And they have a great vibe. Crystal Carter: A great vibe. Mordy Oberstein: And they get stuff done. Crystal Carter: Great team, and I think that, again, you're as good as your team, particularly from an SEO point of view, and when you've got a great team, then you're able to do incredible things. I also forgot to shout out VP of operations at RicketyRoo, Tess, who's fantastic. Tess, Voecks, who's amazing as well. Mordy Oberstein: The problem with RicketyRoo is that we're going to be here all day naming them. Crystal Carter: All day saying how great they are, because we love, shout out to the full Roo crew. Mordy Oberstein: I like that, the Roo crew. But if you have questions around, "Hey, how do I manage and operate an SEO team?" I think Blake would be a great person for you to talk to because he's clearly doing a great job with it. Crystal Carter: Right. Because he's got so many great folks on his team, so he must be doing a great job. Mordy Oberstein: He must be, and you can follow Blake over on X @blakedenman. That's B-L-A-K-E D-E-N-M-A-N on X, formerly known as Twitter, currently known as Twitter in my mind. We have to do an outro now. I need to say something charismatic. Crystal Carter: Thank you all for joining us today on this great episode of SERP's Up. Mordy Oberstein: I was thinking of, hey, let's cut that out and retry that, but now we're not doing that. Now we're going to go with it. We're doing it live. Crystal Carter: I don't know, whatever. It's fine. We're a team. We're a team. That's something we do, we support each other. Mordy Oberstein: That's how we operate. Crystal Carter: Exactly. We just bring it back in and deal the deal, get the job done. Mordy Oberstein: I freely admit, I had an absolute brain fart there, I'm like, "Wait, what comes next? Oh, yeah. We need to end the show now." Crystal Carter: It's fine, we can end it. I think we've done a great job and we hit all our KPIs and our targets and our goals and our aims and objectives, and well done everyone. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You'd think after 81 episodes, I'd know how to operate this thing, but clearly not. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Don't worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the maturation process of SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, or on our SEO Learning Hub over 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 over at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. 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How should you price your SEO work? What factors might cause a fluctuation in what you charge? On what basis should you be charging your clients: by project, …month, …hour, …word? This week, Wix’s very own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstien are joined by StudioHawk’s Itamar Blauer to evaluate how much you should be charging/paying for SEO services. Itamar goes on to evaluate which pricing model you should incorporate based on the dynamic of your SEO freelance work. Later, industry favorite Jamar Ramos joins to guide you in determining when it is and isn’t appropriate to call upon an SEO agency, and how you go about selecting which agency to work with. You can take this one to the bank, as this week we set SEO service pricing straight and cash in! Right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back How much should SEO cost How should you price your SEO work? What factors might cause a fluctuation in what you charge? On what basis should you be charging your clients: by project, …month, …hour, …word? This week, Wix’s very own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstien are joined by StudioHawk’s Itamar Blauer to evaluate how much you should be charging/paying for SEO services. Itamar goes on to evaluate which pricing model you should incorporate based on the dynamic of your SEO freelance work. Later, industry favorite Jamar Ramos joins to guide you in determining when it is and isn’t appropriate to call upon an SEO agency, and how you go about selecting which agency to work with. You can take this one to the bank, as this week we set SEO service pricing straight and cash in! Right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 61 | November 8, 2023 | 54 MIN 00:00 / 54:05 This week’s guests Jamar Ramos Jamar Ramos is a 10-year digital marketing veteran with SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing experience. He enjoys writing, playing volleyball, and fighting back against anyone who claims that Shakespeare isn't the greatest writer to ever put pen to paper. Itamar Blauer Itamar is the senior SEO director at StudioHawk, a specialist SEO agency. He is an SEO trainer, speaker, author, and host of the "SEO Unplugged" podcast, sharing tips and case studies across various SEO topics. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Maholo Hall joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights into what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the ever thrifty, the ever efficient, the ever, hey, I know how to shop for SEO, the one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hello, hello, hello. It is true, I do like a bargain. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone likes a good bargain. Crystal Carter: I love a bargain. I do a lot of secondhand shopping, personally, particularly for clothes. Mordy Oberstein: I love secondhand shopping, too. Crystal Carter: My best find is I have this little leather jacket, like a biker jacket, that I got for five bucks. Mordy Oberstein: Can I tell you, I once bought on eBay, this beautiful, light brown leather jacket, vintage 1960s. I bought it for 20 bucks, and I left it on a bus one time. Crystal Carter: Oh, mate. Mordy Oberstein: The worse. Crystal Carter: You build it up, and then you break it down. I was like, "Yeah, Mordy, scoring the eBay wins," and then- Mordy Oberstein: It comes crashing down on me. Crystal Carter: That's a hard one. Mordy Oberstein: Terrible. It hurts. It was years ago, and it still hurts. Two, three years ago, I lost that jacket, and it still hurts. Crystal Carter: I recently lost a jacket somewhere, and I'm a little bit upset about it. Mordy Oberstein: I'll never let it go. Crystal Carter: You do have those things. When did you lose this jacket? When was that? Mordy Oberstein: Two, three years ago. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Unlucky, mate. I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: It still stinks. This SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only complain about losing jackets, but no, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which comes out each month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get the most for your money as you can create reviews and share sites, their whole sections, custom templates, reusable widgets across all of your projects with Wix Studio. Look for it at wix.com/studio. You know what you can do with all that saved money, Crystal? Crystal Carter: What can you do? Mordy Oberstein: You can buy more SEO. But wait, Crystal, How much should SEO cost? Crystal Carter: I don't know. How much should it cost, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: It's a great question, and that is today's topic, as we dive into how much should SEO cost like Scrooge McDuck dives into money bins. We're pulling back the curtain on one of the most sensitive topics in SEO, money. That's right. We're looking at the factors that go into the cost of SEO from project complexity to consultation versus implementation to location. If you're wondering if you're paying too much for SEO or if you're wondering if you're not charging enough for your SEO services, this episode is for you. Hey, SEOs, how should you price your SEO work? Great question. We ask StudioHawk's own Itamar Blauer, as he'll chime in with a money answer. Plus, we talk to industry favorite, Jamar Ramos, about when you shouldn't and when you should or should or shouldn't hire an SEO agency. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social. Tighten your belts and watch your wallets as episode number 61 of the SERP's Up Podcast goes after where it hurts, your bank account. I just wanted to say this is one of the most sensitive topics out there, and to prove that it's one of the most sensitive topics out there, it was hard to get a guest who was willing to talk about this very candidly. Crystal Carter: This is true. Jamar's a great guest because Jamar speaks candidly whenever he speaks, so he's a great person to talk about these things, but it is something that can be tricky. People keep their cards very close to their chest. You've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, all of that sort of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Are we breaking into song? Crystal Carter: I don't know. That might remind me of when to run. We'll see about that. It's a really interesting topic, because SEO is built in lots of different ways and people pay for SEO in lots of different ways. I looked at a few pieces of research around this, and probably the best way that people generally figure out, whether this is, because a lot of people, again, are a little bit cagey about what they charge and how much they charge, et cetera, so surveys, basically, is the way that we have that information. Ahrefs has done a survey of 350 SEOs. Backlinko did a survey of 1,200 business owners and how they are doing their SEO. There was also another report from WebFX who also did a survey of 500 US-based marketing professionals, and that's essentially where we get our best information for this. I mean, anecdotally, in a lot of SEO forums, you hear people saying, "Hey, I'm new to SEO, how should I charge, by the hour, by the word, for content writers? Should I charge by the project? What should I do?" Et cetera. It's interesting. The general consensus from all of these, though, is that people generally charge, and the main ways that people charge, particularly for general SEO tasks, is either monthly, hourly, or project-based. Personally, I have never, ever billed someone hourly for SEO. I don't know anyone who does that routinely, billing hourly. I know devs who bill hourly, but I've never done hourly. It's just something to- Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'll charge hourly for a small project, like if someone comes to me on the side and they say, "Hey, I have this website and I want to do X, Y, and Z with it, what would it cost?" I'm like, this is not going to take me a lot of time, whatever it is, and I'll say, I don't know. I'll tell you what I will charge. If it's someone that I know and it's someone that I feel like let me help them kind of thing, I'll charge around $250 an hour. That's my rate. If it's a little bit more complex and a little bit of a larger project, I'll charge 350 an hour. That's me doing that very infrequently and on the side. If I do a couple of those, like maybe five or six a year, that's enough for me. But the problem with those, by the way, and I'll tell you from experience, is that you have to figure out how... They're going to say, "How many hours?" That's where I don't like the hourly, because inevitably, it is going to be more hours than I think it is. I am always not good. I'm like, "Nah," I'll be acting like it'll be fine, I'm like then it's not right. Crystal Carter: Right. I think again, anecdotally speaking, I find that project-based is generally the best way to do it, because then if it takes much longer, then you learn something out of it and you figure out how you want to pace that. If it takes less time, because you have better systems or you have better frameworks or it happened to work out well, then maybe you can add more value in other ways, or you can go, "Great, I'm really good at this and I'm providing this amount of value to this project and it's worth that time," and that's all good. Mordy Oberstein: I think, by the way, on both sides, if you're a client or if you're an SEO, to really make sure that you're both on the same page of how many hours are going to go into this, even if it's project-based, particularly if it's project-based, and to understand the full scope of what's offered, and to be very explicit, if you're on the SEO side, saying, "Here's what I'm going to offer," and if you're on the client side, to understand that's what you're getting, and if you want more, it's going to cost more and it's going to be different. I do want to say, I wanted to say at the beginning, and I'm going to put a caveat on this, one of the issues that I think makes this whole thing sensitive, particularly if you're an SEO listening to this, is that you'll have people go on Twitter, or whatever it is called now, whatever, X, and share, "Oh, I made a million dollars last year. Look at all the money I made." First off, I don't believe you, and number two, that's nice, but that's not realistic. That's like saying, "You know what? I just ran four triathlons in three days. Look at me. I am so..." Most people are just like, even if you work out, you're just not running three triathlons in three days. That's insane. Crystal Carter: I think also, I think that sometimes when people, and it's not to say that you can't make a good living out of SEO, there's a reason why we work in SEO or whatever and it's not to say that you can't make a good living out of SEO, and you can. One of the things that, certainly as a freelancer, is your overheads are fairly low in terms of the service business, so as a career path, I highly recommend SEO. I think it's a great career path and you can definitely make a good living out of it, and it's a pretty flexible career path, as well. I think that it's good to tell people that this is a career path that has some good legs on it. The thing that I find tricky when people are like, "I've made all the money in the world," is that I feel like it puts pressure on people who maybe aren't making that much money at the moment, and I feel like it makes people feel bad that maybe they're not hitting their things, because it might all be bluster, and you have no idea. You have no access to these people. Mordy Oberstein: You have no idea. You have no clue. It probably is, to be honest with you. They're probably doing, in a lot of those cases, I don't want to say anything bad about anybody in particular, but sometimes I get the sense that their business model is providing not the best quality services, so be cautious sometimes like who's saying what? I'll say, the best tweet I ever saw about this was from Brodie Clark. I don't remember when it was, a while ago, and he said that I like to store up, like when I charge, I always build in mind, I'm paraphrasing here, the downturns and the slow times, so I'm not taking all of that money and spending all the money. When I'm charging, I'm also thinking about this has got to cover me when things are a little bit slower. That, to me, and that's a top notch SEO consultant right there saying that, just shows you the reality. It ebbs and flows. Like any business, you're going to have highs, you're going to have lows. You're going to have a lot of clients and all of a sudden, you might have a drought. That's what this really, I think, really is. Crystal Carter: I think also, the other thing that affects the cost of SEO is the impact, because, particularly if you are, and I've had it before, where I've looked at clients and they've got a massive website and I can see the revenue that they're getting every day from an e-commerce site, for instance, and I can see a technical fix that would give them a massive uplift, for instance, and so sometimes people bill according to, PPC folks do this as well, where they're like, "If your spend is this much, then we will charge you that much. If your spend is less, then we'll charge you less," because the percentage of revenue that you'll get out of it is in proportion to that. I think that that can be a factor, as well, and I think that that's something that changes. It's not worth charging someone who's making, I don't know, two grand off of their website a year, for instance, all of the money in the world. That doesn't make sense. It's not sustainable. It's not- Mordy Oberstein: No, you'll never get that bid accepted. You have to charge based upon... You have to find a balance between what they're earning, what they're bringing in, what they need, and find a balance between that. If you have a really complicated content strategy plan, that might be great, but that's not going to work with their budget, so why? Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. It has to be relative to the value that you'll actually bring to the business. This is something that Nick LeRoy has talked about, where sometimes he's looked at clients and he said, "Actually, you don't need SEO. I'm not going to be able to provide enough value for what I'm charging you from this situation." We have a great article from Jeremy Rivera that talks about SEO, ROI, and gets into a little bit of those details about that. Mordy Oberstein: On Nick, by the way, before I forget, and I'm saying this now to remind myself for the show notes, Nick did a great presentation with Wix Partners about how to charge clients and how he goes about it, so we'll link to that in the show note. It's a great webinar, and I highly recommend you watch it. Crystal Carter: To get into some of these stats, because I found stats for you. Let's talk about some stats. Mordy Oberstein: Go ahead. Crystal Carter: We talked about the different types of pricing models, so hourly, monthly, project-based. According to WebFX, they generally recommend hourly for ongoing SEO mid-size/large companies, I would agree with that, these tend to be in retainers, hourly for smaller projects, smaller companies, like you said, Mordy, for instance, if somebody's like, "I just need you to fix my site map," and you're like, "This is going to take me two hours and you're my aunt, so I'm going to help you with your bake sale website," or whatever it is, and then project-based, so one-time SEO projects, small, mid-size, and large companies. Now, when I've worked on projects like this, it works really well for technical SEO things, because sometimes with technical SEOs, they just need to fix that one thing or you need to provide them with a set of code or set of instructions or whatever, or it's something that... For instance, I've had things where we were working on site map, like updating their site map. They had a really old Ajax sort of site map thing. You need one month to do the recon, you need one month to get all the dev stuff implemented, you need another month to make sure that you didn't break anything and all of that sort of stuff, and then you're in, you're out, bada bing, bada boom, et cetera. You can bill on that way, and I think that for technical SEOs, I think that's something that works really well. WebFX also found that in percentage, 41% of people are getting SEO monthly, 30% of folks are getting SEO hourly, and 28% are being billed from a project-based perspective, which I'd say that that probably works out well in terms of, and is probably fairly accurate from what I've seen in agency scenarios and client scenarios, because I think that's the other thing that people forget, is that even if you have a client who's on retainer, there's going to be situations where sometimes they just need an additional project. Maybe the project is to do 50 blogs. They just need you to write these 50 blogs, and then they'll schedule them in, they'll roll them out over the course of the year or whatever it may be, and so that's the project. They'll have ongoing stuff, that's other things that you're just managing as you go, but maybe there's one project in there that's like, hey, I need you to help me with this, I don't know, setting up a web chat or setting up something or other. The relationship that you have will ebb and flow, and you tend to get more value out of some of those projects and some of the hourly stuff if you're topping up with a few things here and there. In terms of money, scrillas, dolla dolla bills, what we also found was very interesting was that I talked about client retention and client satisfaction. According to Backlinko, the average cost of SEO per month is $497. That's the average that most people are paying for SEO per month. That seems kind of, particularly if you're thinking about a wide spectrum of businesses- Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah, it's an average, so it's going to include lots of small projects and then big projects. These are good indicators, but also not great indicators for actually making a decision. Crystal Carter: They found that most people are getting services for $497 a month. Ahrefs also did a survey and they found that they also saw people around in that area, but the biggest percentage, it was over 20% of people were getting SEO for between 500 and 1,000 a month. That's enough to do a day of light just touching up with different elements and keeping up with things like meta tags and stuff like that, and making sure that nobody's broken anything or added the wrong links or all of that sort of stuff. I think for most small businesses, that's probably enough to get good reporting, good value, out of your SEO per month. Mordy Oberstein: That's a good point. If you're a small business or someone listening to this podcast and you're thinking, how much am I going to end up spending a month? The 500 number is a good, it's going to give or take, depending on what exactly you want to do, it all depends, but that's a solid number to work based off of. Crystal Carter: I think if you are, and again, another great article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub from Jamar Ramos, which was one of the reasons why we invited him onto this podcast, but he talks about how you hire a digital marketing and SEO agency. When you're talking to them, if you have a particular budget in mind that is the budget that you have, talk to them straight away. Before they start pitching and doing all of this stuff, say, "I have this much per month that I can spend on SEO, what can you do for that, or can you do anything for that, or can you recommend somebody who could do something for that?" Mordy Oberstein: That's the point I feel like I have to say. If you're a client or if you're not an SEO and you're looking to buy SEO, if you're an SEO offering SEO, you need to understand specifically what you want. I will tell you flat out, if I speak to somebody and they want SEO, and they're a little bit all over the place with what their business goals are in specific, I am charging more, because I know it's going be more work. If you're specific with me, this is what we want, this is where we're going, this is what we're trying to do, we want these kind of people doing these kind of things and this kind of traffic, I'm with you, and I charge less, because I know the chances of me going down a wormhole are far less. If you're an SEO, try to get as much information from the client as possible. If you are a client, I beg you, if you're looking to buy SEO services, be as specific as possible, and before you even go to the SEO, know exactly what you want in terms of your business goals, have those in mind and have those ready for the SEO, and you'll end up saving money. Crystal Carter: Yes. I also think it's important to manage your expectations, because I think the thing is that with SEO, the more that you put in, the more you get back. If you are optimizing lots and lots of content regularly, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. If you're creating more content more regularly, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. If you're creating more web features, if you're enhancing your website, if you're making sure that everything is working really well, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. You're going to see more impact in terms of rankings and traffic. If you're engaging with somebody to help you to do that, that all takes time, and time is money, so that's what all of this is, essentially. If you are spending less, then you should expect your growth chart to go up a little bit smaller. It might be that you've got time for that. It might be that you're like, "Hey, we don't have a lot of money to spend on this, but we know that this is something we want to invest in, and we want to see if we can see some green shoots," so that's the thing. It might be if you have a small spend, you want to have a thing, and you want to share some of that sort of stuff. The other thing I found was really interesting from Backlinko was the satisfaction ratings. Backlinko was saying that the higher SEO spending is actually correlated with higher client satisfaction. Clients who were spending under $500 a month were about 15% extremely satisfied with their SEO services. However, clients who were spending more than $500 a month were over 20% as satisfied with their SEO. This can be a correlation-causation thing, because it could be that people who are charging more are better quality. It could be that current people who are charging more have the ability to offer more services. It could also be that clients who are only able to afford less than that are some of the clients that need a bit more support. Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot there. That's a lot to- Crystal Carter: There's a lot. Mordy Oberstein: It could also be like, look, I think there's two types of SEO, in my opinion. There's an SEO like this is your channel, this is where you're driving business, this is where your focus is, where you're earning money from. And then it was like I need to do SEO because I have a website. I could get traffic from here. This is not your bread and butter. I don't know, you're a mom-and-pop candy store. People are coming because you're the main candy store on Main Street. Yes, you might get some traffic from SEO and you're going to do some SEO, but it may not be the thing that is driving your business, and therefore your level of investment into it is not going to be the same. You're thinking, you know what? I'm going to do this SEO, I'm going to get so much out of it, but you're just not, and you shouldn't and that's fine, but I think there's a lot of that in that satisfaction score, also, in my opinion. Crystal Carter: There's a lot there. It's very interesting to see. I certainly know that anecdotally, people say people who are spending more attention to, you just send them the reports, they're like, "Great, that's wonderful," and people who are spending less tend to be like, "Well, why didn't you do this, and how come we didn't do that?" I think that sometimes it's a question that business owners have a harder time, or business owners maybe... If you're spending less, you might be closer to the bone in terms of your marketing spend, so you might need to get more out of each particular interaction. I think if that's the case, then you need to make sure that that's known upfront with the SEO team that you're working with. And then, let's see, then we think about projects. Now, projects are interesting. The rate of projects, according to WebFX, they are saying that projects can range from between 1,000 and 5,000. Backlinko are saying that they can get even higher than that, around 25,000, and I've definitely seen that be the case. Projects are interesting because they are very much the it depends of SEO pricing, because a project can be literally anything. I think one of the reasons why they can sometimes be tricky, particularly with pricing, is because sometimes you're in completely new territory, so you're trying to optimize for a completely new SERP feature or you're trying to optimize for a completely new technology. For instance, we have a lot of AI-generated content coming out right now, and that's new. Mordy Oberstein: Is it new? Crystal Carter: Yeah, exactly. That's new, so I think that that's something that people have to do additional research, people have to get additional resources, people have to trial things, have to test things, and so that can drive up the price tag for things like that. But there's some great research around pricing, around SEO pricing models. We'll share all of the links in there, and I hope it's useful for people billing, and also booking, SEO. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's one question we haven't actually dealt with straight on? Crystal Carter: What's up? Mordy Oberstein: How do you find my leather jacket on the bus? No. How do you price out SEO work? If you're an SEO, how do you price it out? If you're not an SEO and you are looking to hire an SEO, here's how it works behind the scenes. Take it away, Itamar Blauer from StudioHawk. Itamar Blauer: When it comes to SEO pricing, there's lots of different things that you need to consider. The first one is what kind of pricing model you want to use, whether that's hourly, whether that's project-based, or value-based. Also, it depends on who you actually are, like are you a freelancer, are you a consultant, are you working agency side? Because all of these are going to depend on what exactly you want to charge and how you want to price what it is that you're doing. I'll give you an example. As a freelancer, what I've done when I was consulting is charging hourly. For me, that was great because it's just me working on the project, so the client is able to pay for my time, and that's only my time. That's where I feel like hourly works fine. Obviously, you might get people who reach out to you asking for a specific thing, so then it could be a project-based work, as well, but obviously, you have to sort of factor in what that would look like if you, say, to charge hourly and how long that project might take. Which is another thing why hourly works well, is because if you charge on a project and that project has a bunch of roadblocks in it, which you typically find with SEO campaigns, then obviously, charging for the project means that you've already set the fixed cost there. There's no variability in that. There's not going to be any changes in that, which is why hourly is generally better, I would say, for that if you're a freelancer. But obviously, there are other types of pricing models, like value-based, which doesn't really work. I think it's quite unethical because you can't guarantee results in SEO, so generally, it's something I would stay away from. But obviously, with hours there can be downsides because it depends also on how quick you work. Obviously, if you can do a lot in an hour, whereas somebody might take a few hours, then obviously, you might want to say, "Actually, I'll charge project basis for that, because if it's hourly, I'll be able to get so much done that I won't be able to get as much money out of the client." But let's switch this over to agency side. With agency, it's quite interesting, because internally, you can look at things based on hours and how long you spend on things, but if it's client-facing, I would usually tend to shift this towards resources that you'll need to provide for the campaign. For example, you are going to probably have multiple people on the campaign, so you may need more or less resources for research, on-page, work analysis, outreach, et cetera. It becomes more about resources within a monthly retainer, let's say, as opposed to just saying, "We're going to do X amount of hours." You may get some project-based tasks, for example, if it's a migration, then you might want to charge just based on that project, but also you need to do your due diligence and understand the scope of work before it comes to pricing up something on a project basis. But overall, it really depends on your clients, and also both hours and deliverables can be scrutinized. It's not to say that one's necessarily better than the other, but for example, with hours, people can just maybe assume that you're taking too long on things, and you're just trying to get the client to spend more for more of your time. But also with deliverables, you can get caught up because there might be things out of your control, for instance. Well, I've said that I was going to deliver some outreach, but I can't do that because the wireframe that I made for the page that I was going to do the outreach for to build links for it hasn't been done yet. That's an example of where setting deliverables for the client might come back to bite you if you can't actually get those done. But it really depends on your use case, but there's plenty of ways that you can price SEO in a way to essentially save your skin, but also make it easy to understand for the client, in terms of them understanding exactly what they're getting. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Itamar. Make sure you check out Itamar over on LinkedIn and over on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. We'll link to his profile in the show notes, but it's @ItamarBlauer, B-L-A-U-E-R, over on X. He's right, there's many ways to skin this cat. I hate using that phrase, but there's a lot of ways to go about this. What you really basically need to do is assess the situation and what makes the most sense for this particular client and for this particular website at this particular moment. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. I think that Itamar's very measured about this. Itamar works for a fantastic agency right now. Shout-out to team StudioHawk. Love those guys. He's also worked as a freelancer, so I think he's seen many angles of this, and understands that it can be very, very nuanced, but yeah, totally. They say it depends, but it kind of does. Mordy Oberstein: I saw a great video, by the way, recently. I think it was Greg Finn, from Marketing O'Clock and the Cypress North that shared this, where they were going through hiring an agency and talking about all that. They said, "If the agent doesn't tell you, 'It depends and we need to look at your situation,' run," which is a great pivot to our next segment. Money aside, how do you even know when to get work done? Specifically, how do you know it's time you went all-in and hired an SEO agency to run your SEO program for you? It is a tough decision. I just mentioned, sometimes you need to run. It's why we have a very special version of our segment. Decisions, Decisions, Decisions, as someone who knows quite a lot about agencies, Jamar Ramos, joins us. Here's a look at hiring an SEO agency with Decisions, Decisions, Decisions. Hey, Jamar, welcome to the show. Jamar Ramos: Hello, everyone. How are you? I love how we're doing our radio voice. Mordy Oberstein: Groovy today. Jamar Ramos: We've all got our radio voices on. I love it. Mordy Oberstein: I want you to know that as I was saying it, I'm like, "Wow, I sound way too happy, radioish right now." Jamar Ramos: Hi, this is Mordy talking to you on five after the hour. Mordy Oberstein: Weather on the five, sports on the 20s. Crystal Carter: The 505 is really backed up right now. We're going to the chopper report and we can see that there's a bad... No, I don't know. I ran out. I ran out. Mordy Oberstein: Jamar, plug away. What should we know about you? What should folks be looking at? Time for plugging before we get started. Jamar Ramos: Oh, know about me? I love long walks on the beach. Crystal Carter: Oh, me too. Jamar Ramos: I love strenuous games of pickleball. Mordy Oberstein: Me too. Jamar Ramos: I love good food, good alcohol, good friends. Mordy Oberstein: Me too. Jamar Ramos: Oh my God, Mordy, marry me. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Jamar Ramos: Swipe left on each other, or swipe right or whatever it is on the apps. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know what it is. Jamar Ramos: Me, I'm digital marketer multichannel for 11 years now. Wow, over a decade. Love it. Find me on Twitter @JamRam33, where I talk about some digital marketing, but mostly misogyny, anti-racist, anti-stupidity. If you're into all three of those things and fighting against them, come holler at your boy. Mordy Oberstein: Check, check, check. Rolling to your, what do you call it, Twitter now, X, Twitter X? Twitter X profile. Jamar Ramos: It's mama named it Twitter, I'm going to call it Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: I like that. I'm going to use that. I'm going to steal that line. We're talking about how to know when you should hire an SEO agency. Maybe we should start with how do you know when you should not be using an SEO agency? Jamar Ramos: When you don't have the budget for it, and when you don't have the time to find someone or an agency that you trust. People will know that they need SEO, but they don't understand that you can't pay bargain basement prices. Yes, there's different levels and there's different places you can go and they will charge you different amounts, but every time you find something where you're saving money, look at what you're saving on, because you're probably saving on the expertise, you're probably saving on the platforms that they have, you're probably saving on the time they're going to spend with you. Yes, you can get it for $99 a month, but they're going to give you $99 of time, and you're going to come to find out 3, 6, 9 months down the line, you needed a little bit more. Crystal Carter: I think that's a really interesting place to start. Sometimes people say, "Oh," like you said, "Do you have the money?" I think one of the things that I've seen clients sometimes misunderstand is how they know whether or not they can actually afford it, not just in the neat terms, but in whether or not they will get the ROI that will be worth the investment. Do you find that people struggle with understanding that part of the sort of getting involved with an agency? Jamar Ramos: It is, because just like if you're in SEO, it's not a science, it's an art. The same way when you're hiring an SEO agency, it's not a science, it's an art. You've got to find someone who not only can you afford, but people whom you can talk to, where you can go back and forth with them. In my mind, I'm going to say, I don't want to paint with broad strokes, but in my mind, the biggest thing that an SEO agency should be able to do for you is educate you as a client. If they're going to do something, I as your client need to understand it. You need to tell me, "We're going to do X for Y reasons, and we think that it could potentially get you Z outcome." That's how you need to talk to people, because you can't assume that everyone knows what you're talking about. I think one of the benefits of graduating with a degree in English, this is all I had to do. Every time I wrote an essay, I had to tell you what I was about to tell you, I had to then tell it to you, then I had to go back and tell you what I've just done told you. That's how we need to do it when we're talking to our clients, "Hey, client, we're going to make sure that all your local listings are done. The reason we're doing that is because all the searches are going to take in this information, they're going to see who you are, what you sell, where your brick-and-mortar locations are, and the more information they have from that, the more they're going to say, 'Oh, this business, we understand it. We're going to rank it higher than other places that don't have this stuff.'" It's a low-hanging fruit, but because I've explained it to you in a way that you understand what we're doing, why we're doing it, what you're going to get out of it, the buy-in is so much easier. Plus, you as the client, you now feel, oh my God, this person cares enough about me to educate me, so going forward, when we talk about local SEO, I am now on a higher level than I was and we're now having conversations, rather than this expert is talking down to me or has to consistently explain. I'm going to give you all the tools in my toolbox. The difference is you're not me, so maybe you can't do it like me, but I'm going to make sure you understand it, so when I'm talking, we don't have to sit at that jargon level. We can sit at a conversational friendship level, and you're going to get more buy-in from your clients when you do that. Mordy Oberstein: It's a warning sign if your agency is not educating you and they're not trying to uplift you as a client. We say this all the time when we talk about the SEO Learning Hub, we say, "Who's our target audience? Who are we writing content for?" Chris and I always say, "Hey, it's complicated," because what is a site audit may not seem like it's an SEO really needs to really know, like you don't know what a site audit is or how to run a site audit, but agencies will, and they tell us, they share our content with their clients, and that's what agencies should be doing. They should be telling you exactly why this works, why this is happening, why you have to do it, and if they don't, that's a warning sign. Jamar Ramos: Yep, it's a red flag. It's why are you hiding? Transparency, but also, I'm sharing the information with you that you need to in order to make an informed decision. There can be too much transparency when I'm telling you all this stuff and I'm getting in the weeds and I'm getting super granular. At a certain point, everyone glosses over. Tell them what they need to know in order to make an intelligent, informed decision, and also, to trust you more. SEO is so difficult to do, especially on the agency side, because so many times I heard clients on sales calls say, "Well, we had an SEO agency or we had an SEO," and this right here always got me, "But they burned us, but they bleeped us, but they took our money, but we couldn't trust them." It all boils down to the same thing. Those people were just putting on ski masks to rob those clients of money. They didn't care about actually doing right by the client. I'd rather do right by the client. There's been people who wanted to work with me who I've told, "Yes, I would be happy to take this monthly pay, but here's why I'm saying no to you. You're already at the best spot you need to be. Here's what you actually need to do." I'm being helpful. Yes, I am screwing myself over by not taking that client on, but I'm not screwing that client over. We need to have dangerous levels of transparency, dangerous levels of honesty, and not dangerous for the client, dangerous for us, because we as an industry need to be trusted more, and that trust needs to be built on a foundation of honesty and truth, and I don't see that enough. Crystal Carter: I think this is interesting, because I heard Nick LeRoy say something similar about qualifying clients, and how people have come to him for a discovery call, he's had a look at their site, had a look at their situation, and been like, "Y'all don't need SEO right now," and they've been like, "Oh, oh, but we want to..." Because sometimes people hear about it and they're like, "Wow, I'm really excited," and they get really bought-in at first. They're like, "Yeah, let's do SEO." And then sometimes, it's true, you look at their spec, you run the stats, and you look at their operation and how their business works, and sometimes SEO isn't the answer just then. Nick LeRoy said this, and I've seen this in my personal experiences, as well, working with clients, is that sometimes SEO ain't the thing right then, but when SEO is the thing, you'll be the top of their list for the person that they need to speak to about that. They may come to you for something else. Maybe they don't need you to do SEO for them just then, but maybe they do need you for an educational thing, like can you help this exec to understand this thing so that they can implement something or whatever? Maybe they don't need an agency to do a long-term thing. Maybe they need a short-term project or something to that effect. Jamar Ramos: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really important point, because first off, they might come back to you down the line and say, "Hey, now I do need some SEO work and it does make sense," but let's go back to the first point. I have the money. Money is not the problem. What should I do? How do I decide whether or not I should go and start hiring an SEO agency for work? Jamar Ramos: This is going to sound like I'm telling a joke, but I'm not. Clear out two weeks, go to as many agencies as you can and sign up for a discovery meeting. Talk to as many as you can, hear as many stories, hear as many experiences, have as many pitch calls as you can. Collect as many in-depth decks as you can from these agencies, and start to look at which ones are saying some of the same things? Which ones did I trust? Which ones did I have a great conversation with? Which ones asked more questions about our particular pain points, about our current client base, about our future potential client base? Who is more about our goals versus their goals? Because you're going to find that a lot of agencies, they're offering some of the same thing. It boils down to how much you can trust what they're saying, because in the end, that's what you need to do. Just like if you're hiring someone, you always want to have three to six months of their pay put aside, we have this ramp-up time to say, "Hey, the first two to three months is going to be onboarding, you're learning about us, everything. Those next three months is you showing improvement." When you hire an agency, that's also what you should do. If you're hiring them for SEO, make sure you have three to six months of paying for that agency put away, because then you know we are invested in this, and they have the time to be invested in making sure our SEO is cleaned up, good foundationally, and they can start building on that time and investment. If you're looking for instant gratification, instant wins, talk to a PPC agency. They're the ones who are going to get you that instant stuff. SEO, there's going to be low-hanging fruit that's going to get you some quick wins, but it's going to start taking some time to build up. I have a client right now, their keyword profile, it's all pointing to their homepage. I'm talking to them, "Hey, we've got to clean this up. We need to make sure these pages are helpful to start getting some of these ranking keywords away from your homepage to these other pages that people are looking for. Not only to get those pages ranking, but we want to make sure get that page ranking, your homepage ranking, your GMB up there, get you in that local Map Pack, so not only are you outranking your competitors in one way, you are basically in the face of your current and potential customers as many times as you can, because that's going to show them not only do customers believe in them, search engines believe in them, and they're right there in front of my face. This is all the stuff clients should be looking for when they talk to their SEO agencies, but a lot of them have trained themselves, and been trained to just look at, let's go to that last slide, what's your price? You're within our pricing structure. Let's go. That's not it. Sometimes you have to pay a little bit more than you expected, but you're going to get a lot more when it comes to experience and work and care from that agency if choose the right one and take your time. Crystal Carter: Results. That's the other thing, is the results, and also business opportunities. A really good agency will be able to identify opportunities you'd never even thought were capable. One of the good things about working with an agency is that they will tend to have lots of different experts within their team, so you'll have somebody who works on SEO. It's very rare to find an SEO agency that doesn't have someone doing PPC somewhere in the team, for instance. There might be somebody who's good at links. There might also be somebody who's able to help you with CRO, other things like that, and somebody who could do the strategy and help you sort of scale things out. I think one of the things I did want to touch on, though, is the mindset of somebody who's ready to hire an SEO agency. You were talking about decisions, and this is Decisions, Decisions. I think one of the decisions you have to think about is how much time do you have towards the agency thing? I think a lot of people think like, oh, I got an agency. I just hired someone, like you hired somebody to wash your car. Oh, they'll do it now. I don't have to do it now. They'll do it now. Generally speaking, it's not like that. Generally speaking, it's more of a partnership. How do you decide that you have the internal capacity to get the most out of your agency relationship? Jamar Ramos: You have to be able to, if you're hiring this agency, put someone on as their point of contact, and that person should be able to, at the very least, and I'll speak from my agency, running links. Every client that we had would get at least two monthly meetings we'd have at the start of the month, where it would be both a look back and a look forward. Hey, this is what we did last month. These the goals we set up, this was how we got towards those goals. These are some things that were headwinds for us, and these are the solutions for those. These are some things we didn't anticipate, but here's some ideas for how we can move forward with that, and a look forward, hey, this is what we're going to be doing over this next month, or if it's at the end of a quarter, this is what our next quarter looks like. And then at the end of the month it's, hey, this is what we're doing. Here's what we're getting ready for. Of course, someone who's going to be able to ask questions, send emails. There has to be an investment on both sides. It can't be a set it and forget, and I know a lot of SEOs talk about, "Oh, SEO is set and forget." No, no, no. Some things, yes, are set it and forget it. It's that 80% of stuff where it's like it's not going to get a whole lot of lift, but we just need to keep monitoring, looking at the keywords, making sure we're not dropping, how are featured snippets going and everything? But your SEO agency should always be bringing new stuff, and it should not always be SEO, because sometimes, especially for small companies, SEO is going to look the same month-to-month. This is something where I'm afraid of what agencies are doing to digital marketers, where it's like they want you to be 1,000 miles deep and not wide at all. If you're a technical SEO, you need to know how to code, you need to know how to do this, and you just sit right here. For me, SEO is not a channel. SEO is organic marketing, so your organic marketers should know local SEO, should know content marketing, should know a little bit about social media. Maybe they don't run that for you, but they're able to discover things like, hey, I know we were looking at your keyword profile and I noticed that you have a blog, but you don't do a lot of content marketing. We think that in order to get some of these content-based, long tail keywords up, we've got to get you social media channels. We've got to start putting your content out there. You're running paid advertising, but you're not digging up your blogs. We think that putting together some of your blogs, putting a couple of dollars out there, just getting them out there, because people want six to eight different touchpoints before they'll interact with the company, even when they've shopped with you before. The shirt I have on right now, you can't really see it, guys who are listening to this, but I buy from this company called Reason Clothing. I've bought from them for two years, but they still have to reach out to me through social, through email. I have to go to their website a couple of times before I, a shopper who is committed to them, will buy. Think about that. You need to have all those touchpoints for people. If all you're doing is SEO, you have one touchpoint, one time to get them. If your competitors are doing SEO, local SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, they're touching them multiple times. You're going to lose that client no matter how long they've been with you or if they're new. Get someone who is wide enough to help you with good planning, but can help you with that SEO channel, as well. Mordy Oberstein: With that, don't forget to reach out to Jamar across all of his channels, as time has ebbed away from us. Jamar Ramos: I'm sorry, I just talk so much. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. It was a good time. I had a good pivot, so it was a good time to end the interview. That's how I decide to end an interview or not. Oh, good time, good pivot. That's how podcast is- Crystal Carter: Speaking of pivoting... No, I'm kidding. Jamar Ramos: Check me out on Twitter at @JamRam33. That's @J-A-M-R-A-M, the numbers 3-3. You can find me on LinkedIn at Jamar Ramos. Hit my DMs up. I'm happy to always answer questions, talk shop, or just if you have a bad day and you need someone to rant that, go ahead and hop my DMs, rant, end rant, we're good. Crystal Carter: I should also say that Jamar is also the author of a fantastic article called How to Hire an SEO Agency on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, so do check him out there, as well. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Thanks, Jamar. Jamar Ramos: Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks again, Jamar. Big shout-out to Jamar. Make sure you give Jamar a big follow over on LinkedIn and X, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it, I still don't know what the hell to call it, @JamRam33. J-A-M-R-A-M-3-3. Make sure you give him a follow, please. One of the great ways you as a client can make sure that your SEO agency is doing right by you is to keep up on the latest SEO news, so you can make sure they're following the best practices. Keep an eye on your SEO agency, eh? The way to do that is by catching up on the news. Here's our version of the news, our Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Holy cow, there's so much going on this week. Let's start it off with Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, who says, "Google rolls out November 2023 core update. This comes, by the way, after the October 2023 core update, just basically finished rolling out, which comes after the October 2023 link spam update finished rolling out, which comes after the September 2023 help of content update, and which comes after the August 2023 core update." It's madness. There is speculation, of course, oh, this will be a reversal of either the August 2023 core update or the October 2023 core update. I don't think this is what that's about at all. Looking on the data from the October update relative to the August update, I don't think October was a reversal of August. Of course, there are reversals in there, that's not what I'm saying, but fundamentally, I don't think that's what this is all about. I think this is about a heck of a lot of changes in the entire ecosystem. Too much to get into right now about that, but I don't think it's about reversing previous updates. That's my SEO intuition. Now, on top of that, Google also said that there is a review update coming after that. This from Barry Schwartz, over at SEORoundtable.com, "New Google reviews update coming next week. It will be the last confirmed reviews update." Basically, Google's saying, "After the core update, we're going to have a reviews update," and this targets review content, like content around, I don't know, what's the best microwave? You have a whole post about five different microwaves and which one is the best, so that kind of review content. It doesn't have to be just products, it could be services, as well, all sorts of review content. Google says that's coming, as well, so not only goes to the August update, the September helpful content update, the October link update, and the October core update and the November core update, and now, there's going to be a November reviews update. But what Google also said is fascinating, is that this is the last one. This is the last review update they're going to announce. They wrote, I'll read to you from their blog posts, "We expect an update to review system to start rolling out next week. This will also mark a point what we're no longer be giving periodic notification of improvements to our review system, because they will be happening at a regular and ongoing pace." In other words, it's like a real-time algorithm. I couldn't have said it better myself than I actually said it on Twitter, or X, whatever you want to call it, I wrote, "Regular and constant updates for the review update. This is extremely significant. It means Google feels very confident in its machine learning in this space. I think it also means that Google realizes in this current environment, it needs realtime updates to keep up." I wrote about this a year ago, if you want to go deeper into the weeds, I actually wrote about this for Search Engine Watch in November 2022. I'll link to the article where I go through why I think we're headed to a real-time algorithm update system, whatever you want call it, but meaning that Google's not releasing these big, official updates, but they're constantly updating rankings in real time. I'll link to that. It's definitely worth the read, I'm biased, obviously, but I think this is where we're heading with the algorithm, and I think it's entirely significant and fascinating. The last one I want to briefly mention, this comes from Search Engine Land from Danny Goodwin, seven must-see Google search ranking documents in antitrust trial exhibits. Google has this whole antitrust trial that it's going through and documents are being released, and Danny goes through some seven must-see documents related to Google Search. I don't want to get into it all here. It's a lot. I will link to it. Read through it, but the overall takeaway that I took away is that Google is looking at wider user behavior to try to understand what people want, and trying to adjust the algorithm to it. This is a point I think SEOs don't think enough about. We think in the confinements of the algorithm, what the algorithm wants, but what the algorithm wants is really what people want, so we should be looking at content trends and what people are consuming, what people are not consuming and how that's changing, where they're consuming and how it's changing. All of the trends around content creation and consumption, I think we should be looking at that far more than we already are. I think we have a little bit of resistance around that. We're going to do an upcoming podcast episode about that topic. Because Google is looking at that, if you really want to stay ahead of the curve, you should be looking at where content as a whole across the web is going, because that's where Google will have inevitably follow. With that, that was a mouthful of news. I think it was pretty snappy, so I'm going to say that was this week's Snappy News. Crystal Carter: So snappy. Mordy Oberstein: So snappy. Now you know if your SEO agency is keeping up on the latest trends from Barry. Crystal Carter: Dear listeners, you have no idea how pleased Mordy was with that segue. Mordy Oberstein: So good. So good. I was doing virtual conference recording for SMX and I had a great pivot at the end to the thank you slide, and I almost stopped and said, "Wow, that's a great pivot," but I didn't. I didn't. I didn't do the podcast thing where we congratulate ourselves on the pivot. Crystal Carter: It's fine. You can just pat yourself on the back. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: I did. Mentally, I was like, that was so good. Nailed it. Nailed the last pivot. Because it's always awkward at the end, like all right, now they go like, "We're done, goodbye," but I nailed it. Crystal Carter: My best one was I did a presentation on E-E-A-T, and I was talking about Dolly Parton as an example of somebody who has a lot of authority and expertise and is very trustworthy and et cetera. We love Dolly Parton. At the end of it, I was like, "If you need help with this, call us, because our office is open from 9:00 to 5:00." Big picture of Dolly, end scene, drop mic. Let's go. Best ever. Mordy Oberstein: So good. Anyway, what you should be doing next is following people on social media so you can learn more about SEO and pricing SEO and learning about SEO. This week's follow is someone we had on our webinar a little while ago, Ross Hudgens over at Siege Media. Give him a follow on Twitter, X, whatever, @Ross, R-O-S-S, Hudgens, H-U-D-G-E-N-S. RossHudgens. Follow link in the show notes. Please follow Ross. Crystal Carter: Ross is brilliant. He's brilliant, so smart, and also really straightforward. He's super smart, but doesn't talk to you like either he's trying to impress you with how smart he is or like he thinks that you're dumb. He just explains it in normal, plain English. He's a great follow, he shares some great resources from his team. Shout-out to Ross. Mordy Oberstein: Big shout-out to Ross. Make sure to give him a follow. I'll say, Ross is one of the more, I'll say, transparent people out there in the SEO and content marketing world. You get real takes on real things, which ties into what we're talking about today, getting a real take on SEO pricing. Follow Ross, that's what we're trying to say. Anyway, I think we're done. Crystal Carter: I think that's it. I'll send you my invoice. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to make a money joke, and you beat me to it. Nuts. The bill has come due, you must depart. Well, our retainer is complete. I'm all out of hours. Crystal Carter: I'll put the checks in the mail. Mordy Oberstein: I don't take checks. Crystal Carter: Does anyone? Nobody does. Mordy Oberstein: It's like in The Big Lebowski when he writes a check for 79 cents for the milk at the grocery store. Crystal Carter: Honestly. Mordy Oberstein: I've been wanting to do that just as like a thing. Crystal Carter: I want to make this check out for 13 cents. Mordy Oberstein: Stop & Shop, $1.13 cents. Crystal Carter: I can't even remember the last time I saw a checkbook. Mordy Oberstein: Someone asked me, I had do a check for something, I'm like, "I don't even know if I have checks. I don't have a checkbook. I have no clue." Crystal Carter: Can I Venmo? Zelle? Send you some Bitcoin? Mordy Oberstein: Do you want me to put it in the mail when I'm done writing this check? Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the wide world of E-E-A-T. Look for it wherever you can consume your podcasts, or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content of webinars we have over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seohub/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Itamar Blauer Jamar Ramos Brodie Clark Nick LeRory Ross Hudgens Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Searchlight SEO Newsletter StudioHawk ESO Agency SEO ROI How to Pitch SEO Clients Is Google headed towards a continuous “real-time” algorithm? News: Google Rolls Out November 2023 Core Update New Google Reviews Update Coming Next Week; It Will Be The Last Confirmed Reviews Update 7 must-see Google Search ranking documents in antitrust trial exhibits Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Itamar Blauer Jamar Ramos Brodie Clark Nick LeRory Ross Hudgens Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Searchlight SEO Newsletter StudioHawk ESO Agency SEO ROI How to Pitch SEO Clients Is Google headed towards a continuous “real-time” algorithm? News: Google Rolls Out November 2023 Core Update New Google Reviews Update Coming Next Week; It Will Be The Last Confirmed Reviews Update 7 must-see Google Search ranking documents in antitrust trial exhibits Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Maholo Hall joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights into what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the ever thrifty, the ever efficient, the ever, hey, I know how to shop for SEO, the one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hello, hello, hello. It is true, I do like a bargain. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone likes a good bargain. Crystal Carter: I love a bargain. I do a lot of secondhand shopping, personally, particularly for clothes. Mordy Oberstein: I love secondhand shopping, too. Crystal Carter: My best find is I have this little leather jacket, like a biker jacket, that I got for five bucks. Mordy Oberstein: Can I tell you, I once bought on eBay, this beautiful, light brown leather jacket, vintage 1960s. I bought it for 20 bucks, and I left it on a bus one time. Crystal Carter: Oh, mate. Mordy Oberstein: The worse. Crystal Carter: You build it up, and then you break it down. I was like, "Yeah, Mordy, scoring the eBay wins," and then- Mordy Oberstein: It comes crashing down on me. Crystal Carter: That's a hard one. Mordy Oberstein: Terrible. It hurts. It was years ago, and it still hurts. Two, three years ago, I lost that jacket, and it still hurts. Crystal Carter: I recently lost a jacket somewhere, and I'm a little bit upset about it. Mordy Oberstein: I'll never let it go. Crystal Carter: You do have those things. When did you lose this jacket? When was that? Mordy Oberstein: Two, three years ago. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Unlucky, mate. I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: It still stinks. This SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only complain about losing jackets, but no, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which comes out each month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get the most for your money as you can create reviews and share sites, their whole sections, custom templates, reusable widgets across all of your projects with Wix Studio. Look for it at wix.com/studio. You know what you can do with all that saved money, Crystal? Crystal Carter: What can you do? Mordy Oberstein: You can buy more SEO. But wait, Crystal, How much should SEO cost? Crystal Carter: I don't know. How much should it cost, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: It's a great question, and that is today's topic, as we dive into how much should SEO cost like Scrooge McDuck dives into money bins. We're pulling back the curtain on one of the most sensitive topics in SEO, money. That's right. We're looking at the factors that go into the cost of SEO from project complexity to consultation versus implementation to location. If you're wondering if you're paying too much for SEO or if you're wondering if you're not charging enough for your SEO services, this episode is for you. Hey, SEOs, how should you price your SEO work? Great question. We ask StudioHawk's own Itamar Blauer, as he'll chime in with a money answer. Plus, we talk to industry favorite, Jamar Ramos, about when you shouldn't and when you should or should or shouldn't hire an SEO agency. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social. Tighten your belts and watch your wallets as episode number 61 of the SERP's Up Podcast goes after where it hurts, your bank account. I just wanted to say this is one of the most sensitive topics out there, and to prove that it's one of the most sensitive topics out there, it was hard to get a guest who was willing to talk about this very candidly. Crystal Carter: This is true. Jamar's a great guest because Jamar speaks candidly whenever he speaks, so he's a great person to talk about these things, but it is something that can be tricky. People keep their cards very close to their chest. You've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, all of that sort of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Are we breaking into song? Crystal Carter: I don't know. That might remind me of when to run. We'll see about that. It's a really interesting topic, because SEO is built in lots of different ways and people pay for SEO in lots of different ways. I looked at a few pieces of research around this, and probably the best way that people generally figure out, whether this is, because a lot of people, again, are a little bit cagey about what they charge and how much they charge, et cetera, so surveys, basically, is the way that we have that information. Ahrefs has done a survey of 350 SEOs. Backlinko did a survey of 1,200 business owners and how they are doing their SEO. There was also another report from WebFX who also did a survey of 500 US-based marketing professionals, and that's essentially where we get our best information for this. I mean, anecdotally, in a lot of SEO forums, you hear people saying, "Hey, I'm new to SEO, how should I charge, by the hour, by the word, for content writers? Should I charge by the project? What should I do?" Et cetera. It's interesting. The general consensus from all of these, though, is that people generally charge, and the main ways that people charge, particularly for general SEO tasks, is either monthly, hourly, or project-based. Personally, I have never, ever billed someone hourly for SEO. I don't know anyone who does that routinely, billing hourly. I know devs who bill hourly, but I've never done hourly. It's just something to- Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'll charge hourly for a small project, like if someone comes to me on the side and they say, "Hey, I have this website and I want to do X, Y, and Z with it, what would it cost?" I'm like, this is not going to take me a lot of time, whatever it is, and I'll say, I don't know. I'll tell you what I will charge. If it's someone that I know and it's someone that I feel like let me help them kind of thing, I'll charge around $250 an hour. That's my rate. If it's a little bit more complex and a little bit of a larger project, I'll charge 350 an hour. That's me doing that very infrequently and on the side. If I do a couple of those, like maybe five or six a year, that's enough for me. But the problem with those, by the way, and I'll tell you from experience, is that you have to figure out how... They're going to say, "How many hours?" That's where I don't like the hourly, because inevitably, it is going to be more hours than I think it is. I am always not good. I'm like, "Nah," I'll be acting like it'll be fine, I'm like then it's not right. Crystal Carter: Right. I think again, anecdotally speaking, I find that project-based is generally the best way to do it, because then if it takes much longer, then you learn something out of it and you figure out how you want to pace that. If it takes less time, because you have better systems or you have better frameworks or it happened to work out well, then maybe you can add more value in other ways, or you can go, "Great, I'm really good at this and I'm providing this amount of value to this project and it's worth that time," and that's all good. Mordy Oberstein: I think, by the way, on both sides, if you're a client or if you're an SEO, to really make sure that you're both on the same page of how many hours are going to go into this, even if it's project-based, particularly if it's project-based, and to understand the full scope of what's offered, and to be very explicit, if you're on the SEO side, saying, "Here's what I'm going to offer," and if you're on the client side, to understand that's what you're getting, and if you want more, it's going to cost more and it's going to be different. I do want to say, I wanted to say at the beginning, and I'm going to put a caveat on this, one of the issues that I think makes this whole thing sensitive, particularly if you're an SEO listening to this, is that you'll have people go on Twitter, or whatever it is called now, whatever, X, and share, "Oh, I made a million dollars last year. Look at all the money I made." First off, I don't believe you, and number two, that's nice, but that's not realistic. That's like saying, "You know what? I just ran four triathlons in three days. Look at me. I am so..." Most people are just like, even if you work out, you're just not running three triathlons in three days. That's insane. Crystal Carter: I think also, I think that sometimes when people, and it's not to say that you can't make a good living out of SEO, there's a reason why we work in SEO or whatever and it's not to say that you can't make a good living out of SEO, and you can. One of the things that, certainly as a freelancer, is your overheads are fairly low in terms of the service business, so as a career path, I highly recommend SEO. I think it's a great career path and you can definitely make a good living out of it, and it's a pretty flexible career path, as well. I think that it's good to tell people that this is a career path that has some good legs on it. The thing that I find tricky when people are like, "I've made all the money in the world," is that I feel like it puts pressure on people who maybe aren't making that much money at the moment, and I feel like it makes people feel bad that maybe they're not hitting their things, because it might all be bluster, and you have no idea. You have no access to these people. Mordy Oberstein: You have no idea. You have no clue. It probably is, to be honest with you. They're probably doing, in a lot of those cases, I don't want to say anything bad about anybody in particular, but sometimes I get the sense that their business model is providing not the best quality services, so be cautious sometimes like who's saying what? I'll say, the best tweet I ever saw about this was from Brodie Clark. I don't remember when it was, a while ago, and he said that I like to store up, like when I charge, I always build in mind, I'm paraphrasing here, the downturns and the slow times, so I'm not taking all of that money and spending all the money. When I'm charging, I'm also thinking about this has got to cover me when things are a little bit slower. That, to me, and that's a top notch SEO consultant right there saying that, just shows you the reality. It ebbs and flows. Like any business, you're going to have highs, you're going to have lows. You're going to have a lot of clients and all of a sudden, you might have a drought. That's what this really, I think, really is. Crystal Carter: I think also, the other thing that affects the cost of SEO is the impact, because, particularly if you are, and I've had it before, where I've looked at clients and they've got a massive website and I can see the revenue that they're getting every day from an e-commerce site, for instance, and I can see a technical fix that would give them a massive uplift, for instance, and so sometimes people bill according to, PPC folks do this as well, where they're like, "If your spend is this much, then we will charge you that much. If your spend is less, then we'll charge you less," because the percentage of revenue that you'll get out of it is in proportion to that. I think that that can be a factor, as well, and I think that that's something that changes. It's not worth charging someone who's making, I don't know, two grand off of their website a year, for instance, all of the money in the world. That doesn't make sense. It's not sustainable. It's not- Mordy Oberstein: No, you'll never get that bid accepted. You have to charge based upon... You have to find a balance between what they're earning, what they're bringing in, what they need, and find a balance between that. If you have a really complicated content strategy plan, that might be great, but that's not going to work with their budget, so why? Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. It has to be relative to the value that you'll actually bring to the business. This is something that Nick LeRoy has talked about, where sometimes he's looked at clients and he said, "Actually, you don't need SEO. I'm not going to be able to provide enough value for what I'm charging you from this situation." We have a great article from Jeremy Rivera that talks about SEO, ROI, and gets into a little bit of those details about that. Mordy Oberstein: On Nick, by the way, before I forget, and I'm saying this now to remind myself for the show notes, Nick did a great presentation with Wix Partners about how to charge clients and how he goes about it, so we'll link to that in the show note. It's a great webinar, and I highly recommend you watch it. Crystal Carter: To get into some of these stats, because I found stats for you. Let's talk about some stats. Mordy Oberstein: Go ahead. Crystal Carter: We talked about the different types of pricing models, so hourly, monthly, project-based. According to WebFX, they generally recommend hourly for ongoing SEO mid-size/large companies, I would agree with that, these tend to be in retainers, hourly for smaller projects, smaller companies, like you said, Mordy, for instance, if somebody's like, "I just need you to fix my site map," and you're like, "This is going to take me two hours and you're my aunt, so I'm going to help you with your bake sale website," or whatever it is, and then project-based, so one-time SEO projects, small, mid-size, and large companies. Now, when I've worked on projects like this, it works really well for technical SEO things, because sometimes with technical SEOs, they just need to fix that one thing or you need to provide them with a set of code or set of instructions or whatever, or it's something that... For instance, I've had things where we were working on site map, like updating their site map. They had a really old Ajax sort of site map thing. You need one month to do the recon, you need one month to get all the dev stuff implemented, you need another month to make sure that you didn't break anything and all of that sort of stuff, and then you're in, you're out, bada bing, bada boom, et cetera. You can bill on that way, and I think that for technical SEOs, I think that's something that works really well. WebFX also found that in percentage, 41% of people are getting SEO monthly, 30% of folks are getting SEO hourly, and 28% are being billed from a project-based perspective, which I'd say that that probably works out well in terms of, and is probably fairly accurate from what I've seen in agency scenarios and client scenarios, because I think that's the other thing that people forget, is that even if you have a client who's on retainer, there's going to be situations where sometimes they just need an additional project. Maybe the project is to do 50 blogs. They just need you to write these 50 blogs, and then they'll schedule them in, they'll roll them out over the course of the year or whatever it may be, and so that's the project. They'll have ongoing stuff, that's other things that you're just managing as you go, but maybe there's one project in there that's like, hey, I need you to help me with this, I don't know, setting up a web chat or setting up something or other. The relationship that you have will ebb and flow, and you tend to get more value out of some of those projects and some of the hourly stuff if you're topping up with a few things here and there. In terms of money, scrillas, dolla dolla bills, what we also found was very interesting was that I talked about client retention and client satisfaction. According to Backlinko, the average cost of SEO per month is $497. That's the average that most people are paying for SEO per month. That seems kind of, particularly if you're thinking about a wide spectrum of businesses- Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah, it's an average, so it's going to include lots of small projects and then big projects. These are good indicators, but also not great indicators for actually making a decision. Crystal Carter: They found that most people are getting services for $497 a month. Ahrefs also did a survey and they found that they also saw people around in that area, but the biggest percentage, it was over 20% of people were getting SEO for between 500 and 1,000 a month. That's enough to do a day of light just touching up with different elements and keeping up with things like meta tags and stuff like that, and making sure that nobody's broken anything or added the wrong links or all of that sort of stuff. I think for most small businesses, that's probably enough to get good reporting, good value, out of your SEO per month. Mordy Oberstein: That's a good point. If you're a small business or someone listening to this podcast and you're thinking, how much am I going to end up spending a month? The 500 number is a good, it's going to give or take, depending on what exactly you want to do, it all depends, but that's a solid number to work based off of. Crystal Carter: I think if you are, and again, another great article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub from Jamar Ramos, which was one of the reasons why we invited him onto this podcast, but he talks about how you hire a digital marketing and SEO agency. When you're talking to them, if you have a particular budget in mind that is the budget that you have, talk to them straight away. Before they start pitching and doing all of this stuff, say, "I have this much per month that I can spend on SEO, what can you do for that, or can you do anything for that, or can you recommend somebody who could do something for that?" Mordy Oberstein: That's the point I feel like I have to say. If you're a client or if you're not an SEO and you're looking to buy SEO, if you're an SEO offering SEO, you need to understand specifically what you want. I will tell you flat out, if I speak to somebody and they want SEO, and they're a little bit all over the place with what their business goals are in specific, I am charging more, because I know it's going be more work. If you're specific with me, this is what we want, this is where we're going, this is what we're trying to do, we want these kind of people doing these kind of things and this kind of traffic, I'm with you, and I charge less, because I know the chances of me going down a wormhole are far less. If you're an SEO, try to get as much information from the client as possible. If you are a client, I beg you, if you're looking to buy SEO services, be as specific as possible, and before you even go to the SEO, know exactly what you want in terms of your business goals, have those in mind and have those ready for the SEO, and you'll end up saving money. Crystal Carter: Yes. I also think it's important to manage your expectations, because I think the thing is that with SEO, the more that you put in, the more you get back. If you are optimizing lots and lots of content regularly, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. If you're creating more content more regularly, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. If you're creating more web features, if you're enhancing your website, if you're making sure that everything is working really well, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. You're going to see more impact in terms of rankings and traffic. If you're engaging with somebody to help you to do that, that all takes time, and time is money, so that's what all of this is, essentially. If you are spending less, then you should expect your growth chart to go up a little bit smaller. It might be that you've got time for that. It might be that you're like, "Hey, we don't have a lot of money to spend on this, but we know that this is something we want to invest in, and we want to see if we can see some green shoots," so that's the thing. It might be if you have a small spend, you want to have a thing, and you want to share some of that sort of stuff. The other thing I found was really interesting from Backlinko was the satisfaction ratings. Backlinko was saying that the higher SEO spending is actually correlated with higher client satisfaction. Clients who were spending under $500 a month were about 15% extremely satisfied with their SEO services. However, clients who were spending more than $500 a month were over 20% as satisfied with their SEO. This can be a correlation-causation thing, because it could be that people who are charging more are better quality. It could be that current people who are charging more have the ability to offer more services. It could also be that clients who are only able to afford less than that are some of the clients that need a bit more support. Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot there. That's a lot to- Crystal Carter: There's a lot. Mordy Oberstein: It could also be like, look, I think there's two types of SEO, in my opinion. There's an SEO like this is your channel, this is where you're driving business, this is where your focus is, where you're earning money from. And then it was like I need to do SEO because I have a website. I could get traffic from here. This is not your bread and butter. I don't know, you're a mom-and-pop candy store. People are coming because you're the main candy store on Main Street. Yes, you might get some traffic from SEO and you're going to do some SEO, but it may not be the thing that is driving your business, and therefore your level of investment into it is not going to be the same. You're thinking, you know what? I'm going to do this SEO, I'm going to get so much out of it, but you're just not, and you shouldn't and that's fine, but I think there's a lot of that in that satisfaction score, also, in my opinion. Crystal Carter: There's a lot there. It's very interesting to see. I certainly know that anecdotally, people say people who are spending more attention to, you just send them the reports, they're like, "Great, that's wonderful," and people who are spending less tend to be like, "Well, why didn't you do this, and how come we didn't do that?" I think that sometimes it's a question that business owners have a harder time, or business owners maybe... If you're spending less, you might be closer to the bone in terms of your marketing spend, so you might need to get more out of each particular interaction. I think if that's the case, then you need to make sure that that's known upfront with the SEO team that you're working with. And then, let's see, then we think about projects. Now, projects are interesting. The rate of projects, according to WebFX, they are saying that projects can range from between 1,000 and 5,000. Backlinko are saying that they can get even higher than that, around 25,000, and I've definitely seen that be the case. Projects are interesting because they are very much the it depends of SEO pricing, because a project can be literally anything. I think one of the reasons why they can sometimes be tricky, particularly with pricing, is because sometimes you're in completely new territory, so you're trying to optimize for a completely new SERP feature or you're trying to optimize for a completely new technology. For instance, we have a lot of AI-generated content coming out right now, and that's new. Mordy Oberstein: Is it new? Crystal Carter: Yeah, exactly. That's new, so I think that that's something that people have to do additional research, people have to get additional resources, people have to trial things, have to test things, and so that can drive up the price tag for things like that. But there's some great research around pricing, around SEO pricing models. We'll share all of the links in there, and I hope it's useful for people billing, and also booking, SEO. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's one question we haven't actually dealt with straight on? Crystal Carter: What's up? Mordy Oberstein: How do you find my leather jacket on the bus? No. How do you price out SEO work? If you're an SEO, how do you price it out? If you're not an SEO and you are looking to hire an SEO, here's how it works behind the scenes. Take it away, Itamar Blauer from StudioHawk. Itamar Blauer: When it comes to SEO pricing, there's lots of different things that you need to consider. The first one is what kind of pricing model you want to use, whether that's hourly, whether that's project-based, or value-based. Also, it depends on who you actually are, like are you a freelancer, are you a consultant, are you working agency side? Because all of these are going to depend on what exactly you want to charge and how you want to price what it is that you're doing. I'll give you an example. As a freelancer, what I've done when I was consulting is charging hourly. For me, that was great because it's just me working on the project, so the client is able to pay for my time, and that's only my time. That's where I feel like hourly works fine. Obviously, you might get people who reach out to you asking for a specific thing, so then it could be a project-based work, as well, but obviously, you have to sort of factor in what that would look like if you, say, to charge hourly and how long that project might take. Which is another thing why hourly works well, is because if you charge on a project and that project has a bunch of roadblocks in it, which you typically find with SEO campaigns, then obviously, charging for the project means that you've already set the fixed cost there. There's no variability in that. There's not going to be any changes in that, which is why hourly is generally better, I would say, for that if you're a freelancer. But obviously, there are other types of pricing models, like value-based, which doesn't really work. I think it's quite unethical because you can't guarantee results in SEO, so generally, it's something I would stay away from. But obviously, with hours there can be downsides because it depends also on how quick you work. Obviously, if you can do a lot in an hour, whereas somebody might take a few hours, then obviously, you might want to say, "Actually, I'll charge project basis for that, because if it's hourly, I'll be able to get so much done that I won't be able to get as much money out of the client." But let's switch this over to agency side. With agency, it's quite interesting, because internally, you can look at things based on hours and how long you spend on things, but if it's client-facing, I would usually tend to shift this towards resources that you'll need to provide for the campaign. For example, you are going to probably have multiple people on the campaign, so you may need more or less resources for research, on-page, work analysis, outreach, et cetera. It becomes more about resources within a monthly retainer, let's say, as opposed to just saying, "We're going to do X amount of hours." You may get some project-based tasks, for example, if it's a migration, then you might want to charge just based on that project, but also you need to do your due diligence and understand the scope of work before it comes to pricing up something on a project basis. But overall, it really depends on your clients, and also both hours and deliverables can be scrutinized. It's not to say that one's necessarily better than the other, but for example, with hours, people can just maybe assume that you're taking too long on things, and you're just trying to get the client to spend more for more of your time. But also with deliverables, you can get caught up because there might be things out of your control, for instance. Well, I've said that I was going to deliver some outreach, but I can't do that because the wireframe that I made for the page that I was going to do the outreach for to build links for it hasn't been done yet. That's an example of where setting deliverables for the client might come back to bite you if you can't actually get those done. But it really depends on your use case, but there's plenty of ways that you can price SEO in a way to essentially save your skin, but also make it easy to understand for the client, in terms of them understanding exactly what they're getting. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Itamar. Make sure you check out Itamar over on LinkedIn and over on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. We'll link to his profile in the show notes, but it's @ItamarBlauer, B-L-A-U-E-R, over on X. He's right, there's many ways to skin this cat. I hate using that phrase, but there's a lot of ways to go about this. What you really basically need to do is assess the situation and what makes the most sense for this particular client and for this particular website at this particular moment. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. I think that Itamar's very measured about this. Itamar works for a fantastic agency right now. Shout-out to team StudioHawk. Love those guys. He's also worked as a freelancer, so I think he's seen many angles of this, and understands that it can be very, very nuanced, but yeah, totally. They say it depends, but it kind of does. Mordy Oberstein: I saw a great video, by the way, recently. I think it was Greg Finn, from Marketing O'Clock and the Cypress North that shared this, where they were going through hiring an agency and talking about all that. They said, "If the agent doesn't tell you, 'It depends and we need to look at your situation,' run," which is a great pivot to our next segment. Money aside, how do you even know when to get work done? Specifically, how do you know it's time you went all-in and hired an SEO agency to run your SEO program for you? It is a tough decision. I just mentioned, sometimes you need to run. It's why we have a very special version of our segment. Decisions, Decisions, Decisions, as someone who knows quite a lot about agencies, Jamar Ramos, joins us. Here's a look at hiring an SEO agency with Decisions, Decisions, Decisions. Hey, Jamar, welcome to the show. Jamar Ramos: Hello, everyone. How are you? I love how we're doing our radio voice. Mordy Oberstein: Groovy today. Jamar Ramos: We've all got our radio voices on. I love it. Mordy Oberstein: I want you to know that as I was saying it, I'm like, "Wow, I sound way too happy, radioish right now." Jamar Ramos: Hi, this is Mordy talking to you on five after the hour. Mordy Oberstein: Weather on the five, sports on the 20s. Crystal Carter: The 505 is really backed up right now. We're going to the chopper report and we can see that there's a bad... No, I don't know. I ran out. I ran out. Mordy Oberstein: Jamar, plug away. What should we know about you? What should folks be looking at? Time for plugging before we get started. Jamar Ramos: Oh, know about me? I love long walks on the beach. Crystal Carter: Oh, me too. Jamar Ramos: I love strenuous games of pickleball. Mordy Oberstein: Me too. Jamar Ramos: I love good food, good alcohol, good friends. Mordy Oberstein: Me too. Jamar Ramos: Oh my God, Mordy, marry me. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Jamar Ramos: Swipe left on each other, or swipe right or whatever it is on the apps. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know what it is. Jamar Ramos: Me, I'm digital marketer multichannel for 11 years now. Wow, over a decade. Love it. Find me on Twitter @JamRam33, where I talk about some digital marketing, but mostly misogyny, anti-racist, anti-stupidity. If you're into all three of those things and fighting against them, come holler at your boy. Mordy Oberstein: Check, check, check. Rolling to your, what do you call it, Twitter now, X, Twitter X? Twitter X profile. Jamar Ramos: It's mama named it Twitter, I'm going to call it Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: I like that. I'm going to use that. I'm going to steal that line. We're talking about how to know when you should hire an SEO agency. Maybe we should start with how do you know when you should not be using an SEO agency? Jamar Ramos: When you don't have the budget for it, and when you don't have the time to find someone or an agency that you trust. People will know that they need SEO, but they don't understand that you can't pay bargain basement prices. Yes, there's different levels and there's different places you can go and they will charge you different amounts, but every time you find something where you're saving money, look at what you're saving on, because you're probably saving on the expertise, you're probably saving on the platforms that they have, you're probably saving on the time they're going to spend with you. Yes, you can get it for $99 a month, but they're going to give you $99 of time, and you're going to come to find out 3, 6, 9 months down the line, you needed a little bit more. Crystal Carter: I think that's a really interesting place to start. Sometimes people say, "Oh," like you said, "Do you have the money?" I think one of the things that I've seen clients sometimes misunderstand is how they know whether or not they can actually afford it, not just in the neat terms, but in whether or not they will get the ROI that will be worth the investment. Do you find that people struggle with understanding that part of the sort of getting involved with an agency? Jamar Ramos: It is, because just like if you're in SEO, it's not a science, it's an art. The same way when you're hiring an SEO agency, it's not a science, it's an art. You've got to find someone who not only can you afford, but people whom you can talk to, where you can go back and forth with them. In my mind, I'm going to say, I don't want to paint with broad strokes, but in my mind, the biggest thing that an SEO agency should be able to do for you is educate you as a client. If they're going to do something, I as your client need to understand it. You need to tell me, "We're going to do X for Y reasons, and we think that it could potentially get you Z outcome." That's how you need to talk to people, because you can't assume that everyone knows what you're talking about. I think one of the benefits of graduating with a degree in English, this is all I had to do. Every time I wrote an essay, I had to tell you what I was about to tell you, I had to then tell it to you, then I had to go back and tell you what I've just done told you. That's how we need to do it when we're talking to our clients, "Hey, client, we're going to make sure that all your local listings are done. The reason we're doing that is because all the searches are going to take in this information, they're going to see who you are, what you sell, where your brick-and-mortar locations are, and the more information they have from that, the more they're going to say, 'Oh, this business, we understand it. We're going to rank it higher than other places that don't have this stuff.'" It's a low-hanging fruit, but because I've explained it to you in a way that you understand what we're doing, why we're doing it, what you're going to get out of it, the buy-in is so much easier. Plus, you as the client, you now feel, oh my God, this person cares enough about me to educate me, so going forward, when we talk about local SEO, I am now on a higher level than I was and we're now having conversations, rather than this expert is talking down to me or has to consistently explain. I'm going to give you all the tools in my toolbox. The difference is you're not me, so maybe you can't do it like me, but I'm going to make sure you understand it, so when I'm talking, we don't have to sit at that jargon level. We can sit at a conversational friendship level, and you're going to get more buy-in from your clients when you do that. Mordy Oberstein: It's a warning sign if your agency is not educating you and they're not trying to uplift you as a client. We say this all the time when we talk about the SEO Learning Hub, we say, "Who's our target audience? Who are we writing content for?" Chris and I always say, "Hey, it's complicated," because what is a site audit may not seem like it's an SEO really needs to really know, like you don't know what a site audit is or how to run a site audit, but agencies will, and they tell us, they share our content with their clients, and that's what agencies should be doing. They should be telling you exactly why this works, why this is happening, why you have to do it, and if they don't, that's a warning sign. Jamar Ramos: Yep, it's a red flag. It's why are you hiding? Transparency, but also, I'm sharing the information with you that you need to in order to make an informed decision. There can be too much transparency when I'm telling you all this stuff and I'm getting in the weeds and I'm getting super granular. At a certain point, everyone glosses over. Tell them what they need to know in order to make an intelligent, informed decision, and also, to trust you more. SEO is so difficult to do, especially on the agency side, because so many times I heard clients on sales calls say, "Well, we had an SEO agency or we had an SEO," and this right here always got me, "But they burned us, but they bleeped us, but they took our money, but we couldn't trust them." It all boils down to the same thing. Those people were just putting on ski masks to rob those clients of money. They didn't care about actually doing right by the client. I'd rather do right by the client. There's been people who wanted to work with me who I've told, "Yes, I would be happy to take this monthly pay, but here's why I'm saying no to you. You're already at the best spot you need to be. Here's what you actually need to do." I'm being helpful. Yes, I am screwing myself over by not taking that client on, but I'm not screwing that client over. We need to have dangerous levels of transparency, dangerous levels of honesty, and not dangerous for the client, dangerous for us, because we as an industry need to be trusted more, and that trust needs to be built on a foundation of honesty and truth, and I don't see that enough. Crystal Carter: I think this is interesting, because I heard Nick LeRoy say something similar about qualifying clients, and how people have come to him for a discovery call, he's had a look at their site, had a look at their situation, and been like, "Y'all don't need SEO right now," and they've been like, "Oh, oh, but we want to..." Because sometimes people hear about it and they're like, "Wow, I'm really excited," and they get really bought-in at first. They're like, "Yeah, let's do SEO." And then sometimes, it's true, you look at their spec, you run the stats, and you look at their operation and how their business works, and sometimes SEO isn't the answer just then. Nick LeRoy said this, and I've seen this in my personal experiences, as well, working with clients, is that sometimes SEO ain't the thing right then, but when SEO is the thing, you'll be the top of their list for the person that they need to speak to about that. They may come to you for something else. Maybe they don't need you to do SEO for them just then, but maybe they do need you for an educational thing, like can you help this exec to understand this thing so that they can implement something or whatever? Maybe they don't need an agency to do a long-term thing. Maybe they need a short-term project or something to that effect. Jamar Ramos: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: That's a really important point, because first off, they might come back to you down the line and say, "Hey, now I do need some SEO work and it does make sense," but let's go back to the first point. I have the money. Money is not the problem. What should I do? How do I decide whether or not I should go and start hiring an SEO agency for work? Jamar Ramos: This is going to sound like I'm telling a joke, but I'm not. Clear out two weeks, go to as many agencies as you can and sign up for a discovery meeting. Talk to as many as you can, hear as many stories, hear as many experiences, have as many pitch calls as you can. Collect as many in-depth decks as you can from these agencies, and start to look at which ones are saying some of the same things? Which ones did I trust? Which ones did I have a great conversation with? Which ones asked more questions about our particular pain points, about our current client base, about our future potential client base? Who is more about our goals versus their goals? Because you're going to find that a lot of agencies, they're offering some of the same thing. It boils down to how much you can trust what they're saying, because in the end, that's what you need to do. Just like if you're hiring someone, you always want to have three to six months of their pay put aside, we have this ramp-up time to say, "Hey, the first two to three months is going to be onboarding, you're learning about us, everything. Those next three months is you showing improvement." When you hire an agency, that's also what you should do. If you're hiring them for SEO, make sure you have three to six months of paying for that agency put away, because then you know we are invested in this, and they have the time to be invested in making sure our SEO is cleaned up, good foundationally, and they can start building on that time and investment. If you're looking for instant gratification, instant wins, talk to a PPC agency. They're the ones who are going to get you that instant stuff. SEO, there's going to be low-hanging fruit that's going to get you some quick wins, but it's going to start taking some time to build up. I have a client right now, their keyword profile, it's all pointing to their homepage. I'm talking to them, "Hey, we've got to clean this up. We need to make sure these pages are helpful to start getting some of these ranking keywords away from your homepage to these other pages that people are looking for. Not only to get those pages ranking, but we want to make sure get that page ranking, your homepage ranking, your GMB up there, get you in that local Map Pack, so not only are you outranking your competitors in one way, you are basically in the face of your current and potential customers as many times as you can, because that's going to show them not only do customers believe in them, search engines believe in them, and they're right there in front of my face. This is all the stuff clients should be looking for when they talk to their SEO agencies, but a lot of them have trained themselves, and been trained to just look at, let's go to that last slide, what's your price? You're within our pricing structure. Let's go. That's not it. Sometimes you have to pay a little bit more than you expected, but you're going to get a lot more when it comes to experience and work and care from that agency if choose the right one and take your time. Crystal Carter: Results. That's the other thing, is the results, and also business opportunities. A really good agency will be able to identify opportunities you'd never even thought were capable. One of the good things about working with an agency is that they will tend to have lots of different experts within their team, so you'll have somebody who works on SEO. It's very rare to find an SEO agency that doesn't have someone doing PPC somewhere in the team, for instance. There might be somebody who's good at links. There might also be somebody who's able to help you with CRO, other things like that, and somebody who could do the strategy and help you sort of scale things out. I think one of the things I did want to touch on, though, is the mindset of somebody who's ready to hire an SEO agency. You were talking about decisions, and this is Decisions, Decisions. I think one of the decisions you have to think about is how much time do you have towards the agency thing? I think a lot of people think like, oh, I got an agency. I just hired someone, like you hired somebody to wash your car. Oh, they'll do it now. I don't have to do it now. They'll do it now. Generally speaking, it's not like that. Generally speaking, it's more of a partnership. How do you decide that you have the internal capacity to get the most out of your agency relationship? Jamar Ramos: You have to be able to, if you're hiring this agency, put someone on as their point of contact, and that person should be able to, at the very least, and I'll speak from my agency, running links. Every client that we had would get at least two monthly meetings we'd have at the start of the month, where it would be both a look back and a look forward. Hey, this is what we did last month. These the goals we set up, this was how we got towards those goals. These are some things that were headwinds for us, and these are the solutions for those. These are some things we didn't anticipate, but here's some ideas for how we can move forward with that, and a look forward, hey, this is what we're going to be doing over this next month, or if it's at the end of a quarter, this is what our next quarter looks like. And then at the end of the month it's, hey, this is what we're doing. Here's what we're getting ready for. Of course, someone who's going to be able to ask questions, send emails. There has to be an investment on both sides. It can't be a set it and forget, and I know a lot of SEOs talk about, "Oh, SEO is set and forget." No, no, no. Some things, yes, are set it and forget it. It's that 80% of stuff where it's like it's not going to get a whole lot of lift, but we just need to keep monitoring, looking at the keywords, making sure we're not dropping, how are featured snippets going and everything? But your SEO agency should always be bringing new stuff, and it should not always be SEO, because sometimes, especially for small companies, SEO is going to look the same month-to-month. This is something where I'm afraid of what agencies are doing to digital marketers, where it's like they want you to be 1,000 miles deep and not wide at all. If you're a technical SEO, you need to know how to code, you need to know how to do this, and you just sit right here. For me, SEO is not a channel. SEO is organic marketing, so your organic marketers should know local SEO, should know content marketing, should know a little bit about social media. Maybe they don't run that for you, but they're able to discover things like, hey, I know we were looking at your keyword profile and I noticed that you have a blog, but you don't do a lot of content marketing. We think that in order to get some of these content-based, long tail keywords up, we've got to get you social media channels. We've got to start putting your content out there. You're running paid advertising, but you're not digging up your blogs. We think that putting together some of your blogs, putting a couple of dollars out there, just getting them out there, because people want six to eight different touchpoints before they'll interact with the company, even when they've shopped with you before. The shirt I have on right now, you can't really see it, guys who are listening to this, but I buy from this company called Reason Clothing. I've bought from them for two years, but they still have to reach out to me through social, through email. I have to go to their website a couple of times before I, a shopper who is committed to them, will buy. Think about that. You need to have all those touchpoints for people. If all you're doing is SEO, you have one touchpoint, one time to get them. If your competitors are doing SEO, local SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, they're touching them multiple times. You're going to lose that client no matter how long they've been with you or if they're new. Get someone who is wide enough to help you with good planning, but can help you with that SEO channel, as well. Mordy Oberstein: With that, don't forget to reach out to Jamar across all of his channels, as time has ebbed away from us. Jamar Ramos: I'm sorry, I just talk so much. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. It was a good time. I had a good pivot, so it was a good time to end the interview. That's how I decide to end an interview or not. Oh, good time, good pivot. That's how podcast is- Crystal Carter: Speaking of pivoting... No, I'm kidding. Jamar Ramos: Check me out on Twitter at @JamRam33. That's @J-A-M-R-A-M, the numbers 3-3. You can find me on LinkedIn at Jamar Ramos. Hit my DMs up. I'm happy to always answer questions, talk shop, or just if you have a bad day and you need someone to rant that, go ahead and hop my DMs, rant, end rant, we're good. Crystal Carter: I should also say that Jamar is also the author of a fantastic article called How to Hire an SEO Agency on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, so do check him out there, as well. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Thanks, Jamar. Jamar Ramos: Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks again, Jamar. Big shout-out to Jamar. Make sure you give Jamar a big follow over on LinkedIn and X, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it, I still don't know what the hell to call it, @JamRam33. J-A-M-R-A-M-3-3. Make sure you give him a follow, please. One of the great ways you as a client can make sure that your SEO agency is doing right by you is to keep up on the latest SEO news, so you can make sure they're following the best practices. Keep an eye on your SEO agency, eh? The way to do that is by catching up on the news. Here's our version of the news, our Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Holy cow, there's so much going on this week. Let's start it off with Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, who says, "Google rolls out November 2023 core update. This comes, by the way, after the October 2023 core update, just basically finished rolling out, which comes after the October 2023 link spam update finished rolling out, which comes after the September 2023 help of content update, and which comes after the August 2023 core update." It's madness. There is speculation, of course, oh, this will be a reversal of either the August 2023 core update or the October 2023 core update. I don't think this is what that's about at all. Looking on the data from the October update relative to the August update, I don't think October was a reversal of August. Of course, there are reversals in there, that's not what I'm saying, but fundamentally, I don't think that's what this is all about. I think this is about a heck of a lot of changes in the entire ecosystem. Too much to get into right now about that, but I don't think it's about reversing previous updates. That's my SEO intuition. Now, on top of that, Google also said that there is a review update coming after that. This from Barry Schwartz, over at SEORoundtable.com, "New Google reviews update coming next week. It will be the last confirmed reviews update." Basically, Google's saying, "After the core update, we're going to have a reviews update," and this targets review content, like content around, I don't know, what's the best microwave? You have a whole post about five different microwaves and which one is the best, so that kind of review content. It doesn't have to be just products, it could be services, as well, all sorts of review content. Google says that's coming, as well, so not only goes to the August update, the September helpful content update, the October link update, and the October core update and the November core update, and now, there's going to be a November reviews update. But what Google also said is fascinating, is that this is the last one. This is the last review update they're going to announce. They wrote, I'll read to you from their blog posts, "We expect an update to review system to start rolling out next week. This will also mark a point what we're no longer be giving periodic notification of improvements to our review system, because they will be happening at a regular and ongoing pace." In other words, it's like a real-time algorithm. I couldn't have said it better myself than I actually said it on Twitter, or X, whatever you want to call it, I wrote, "Regular and constant updates for the review update. This is extremely significant. It means Google feels very confident in its machine learning in this space. I think it also means that Google realizes in this current environment, it needs realtime updates to keep up." I wrote about this a year ago, if you want to go deeper into the weeds, I actually wrote about this for Search Engine Watch in November 2022. I'll link to the article where I go through why I think we're headed to a real-time algorithm update system, whatever you want call it, but meaning that Google's not releasing these big, official updates, but they're constantly updating rankings in real time. I'll link to that. It's definitely worth the read, I'm biased, obviously, but I think this is where we're heading with the algorithm, and I think it's entirely significant and fascinating. The last one I want to briefly mention, this comes from Search Engine Land from Danny Goodwin, seven must-see Google search ranking documents in antitrust trial exhibits. Google has this whole antitrust trial that it's going through and documents are being released, and Danny goes through some seven must-see documents related to Google Search. I don't want to get into it all here. It's a lot. I will link to it. Read through it, but the overall takeaway that I took away is that Google is looking at wider user behavior to try to understand what people want, and trying to adjust the algorithm to it. This is a point I think SEOs don't think enough about. We think in the confinements of the algorithm, what the algorithm wants, but what the algorithm wants is really what people want, so we should be looking at content trends and what people are consuming, what people are not consuming and how that's changing, where they're consuming and how it's changing. All of the trends around content creation and consumption, I think we should be looking at that far more than we already are. I think we have a little bit of resistance around that. We're going to do an upcoming podcast episode about that topic. Because Google is looking at that, if you really want to stay ahead of the curve, you should be looking at where content as a whole across the web is going, because that's where Google will have inevitably follow. With that, that was a mouthful of news. I think it was pretty snappy, so I'm going to say that was this week's Snappy News. Crystal Carter: So snappy. Mordy Oberstein: So snappy. Now you know if your SEO agency is keeping up on the latest trends from Barry. Crystal Carter: Dear listeners, you have no idea how pleased Mordy was with that segue. Mordy Oberstein: So good. So good. I was doing virtual conference recording for SMX and I had a great pivot at the end to the thank you slide, and I almost stopped and said, "Wow, that's a great pivot," but I didn't. I didn't. I didn't do the podcast thing where we congratulate ourselves on the pivot. Crystal Carter: It's fine. You can just pat yourself on the back. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: I did. Mentally, I was like, that was so good. Nailed it. Nailed the last pivot. Because it's always awkward at the end, like all right, now they go like, "We're done, goodbye," but I nailed it. Crystal Carter: My best one was I did a presentation on E-E-A-T, and I was talking about Dolly Parton as an example of somebody who has a lot of authority and expertise and is very trustworthy and et cetera. We love Dolly Parton. At the end of it, I was like, "If you need help with this, call us, because our office is open from 9:00 to 5:00." Big picture of Dolly, end scene, drop mic. Let's go. Best ever. Mordy Oberstein: So good. Anyway, what you should be doing next is following people on social media so you can learn more about SEO and pricing SEO and learning about SEO. This week's follow is someone we had on our webinar a little while ago, Ross Hudgens over at Siege Media. Give him a follow on Twitter, X, whatever, @Ross, R-O-S-S, Hudgens, H-U-D-G-E-N-S. RossHudgens. Follow link in the show notes. Please follow Ross. Crystal Carter: Ross is brilliant. He's brilliant, so smart, and also really straightforward. He's super smart, but doesn't talk to you like either he's trying to impress you with how smart he is or like he thinks that you're dumb. He just explains it in normal, plain English. He's a great follow, he shares some great resources from his team. Shout-out to Ross. Mordy Oberstein: Big shout-out to Ross. Make sure to give him a follow. I'll say, Ross is one of the more, I'll say, transparent people out there in the SEO and content marketing world. You get real takes on real things, which ties into what we're talking about today, getting a real take on SEO pricing. Follow Ross, that's what we're trying to say. Anyway, I think we're done. Crystal Carter: I think that's it. I'll send you my invoice. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to make a money joke, and you beat me to it. Nuts. The bill has come due, you must depart. Well, our retainer is complete. I'm all out of hours. Crystal Carter: I'll put the checks in the mail. Mordy Oberstein: I don't take checks. Crystal Carter: Does anyone? Nobody does. Mordy Oberstein: It's like in The Big Lebowski when he writes a check for 79 cents for the milk at the grocery store. Crystal Carter: Honestly. Mordy Oberstein: I've been wanting to do that just as like a thing. Crystal Carter: I want to make this check out for 13 cents. Mordy Oberstein: Stop & Shop, $1.13 cents. Crystal Carter: I can't even remember the last time I saw a checkbook. Mordy Oberstein: Someone asked me, I had do a check for something, I'm like, "I don't even know if I have checks. I don't have a checkbook. I have no clue." Crystal Carter: Can I Venmo? Zelle? Send you some Bitcoin? Mordy Oberstein: Do you want me to put it in the mail when I'm done writing this check? Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the wide world of E-E-A-T. Look for it wherever you can consume your podcasts, or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content of webinars we have over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seohub/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