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

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

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

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

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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