Are you an SEO with clients? Want to reduce churn and improve retention? On this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share how you can do both successfully. Join them and their guests as they talk about building trust through communication, the importance of listening, having patience, using candor, and being open and honest with clients. Guest Lucy Dodds, a Senior SEO Strategist at Evolved, discusses how to leverage a content hub on your website to improve client and pre-client communication. Now let’s jump into how to retain your SEO clients on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast. Back How to keep your SEO clients Are you an SEO with clients? Want to reduce churn and improve retention? On this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share how you can do both successfully. Join them and their guests as they talk about building trust through communication, the importance of listening, having patience, using candor, and being open and honest with clients. Guest Lucy Dodds, a Senior SEO Strategist at Evolved, discusses how to leverage a content hub on your website to improve client and pre-client communication. Now let’s jump into how to retain your SEO clients on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 28 | March 8, 2023 | 40 MIN 00:00 / 40:02 This week’s guests Lucy Dodds Lucy Dodds is a Senior SEO Strategist at Evolved, where she creates meaningful goals for clients and ensures all SEO efforts are aligned to meet business objectives. Lucy’s a big fan of building E-E-A-T and learning how to better communicate with users. Clay Kemp Spending a good chunk of my SEO career in the eCommerce space doing in house SEO for various brands, I was lucky to get some great industry exposure early on in my career. I've also had the pleasure of working in a small agency, doing agency contract work, and now I get the pleasure to work with agencies right here at Wix! In the few years I've spent at Wix it has been a thrill to see the company's growth on the SEO front, and I'm beyond excited to see where we're headed. Sean Del Galdo I have spent the last 6+ years working in SEO across many different positions. Starting out as a content writer, I worked my way up to becoming a Digital Marketing Manager where I helped my team develop and implement SEO strategies for clients. Now, as an SEO Product Advisor at Wix, I get to use my knowledge and experience to educate and help Partners understand what Wix SEO has to offer. Getting the chance to work closely with Wix users and show them all of the incredible SEO tools Wix provides has been a real treat, and I am looking forward to the bright future Wix has ahead. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPS Up. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO over here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fantastically fabulous, the ever so awesome head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Hey, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Hi, Mordy. That's a very nice intro, as usual. Thank you very much. And hello to all the internet friends out there. Hi. Mordy Oberstein: Hi. Well, it's what they pay me to say. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is true. It reminds me of a little bit of the "Let's get Ready to Rumble" thing. That guy is a legend. Mordy Oberstein: What ever happened to that guy? Does he still do that? Crystal Carter: I don't know. I think he just walks around in a tuxedo looking for things that might rumble. Maybe he goes to building sites and just before they stir the cement he goes, "Let's get ready to rumble." Mordy Oberstein: That's a dude who made a whole living doing just one thing. Crystal Carter: One thing. One thing. To be fair... Mordy Oberstein: Maybe he does more, I don't know. Crystal Carter: Possibly, but I mean, who cares? It's the rumble that everybody's there for. Mordy Oberstein: Who cares. "I do so many things." Who cares. Crystal Carter: Who cares? Just Rumble. Mordy Oberstein: Just rumble Crystal Carter: Do the Rumble. But I think there's also the Rock. The Rock. There's a clip of him on a UK late night show explaining the whole thing of the, "Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?" And he breaks it down entirely. He's like, "Can you smell?" Mordy Oberstein: I remember watching it, not as a teenager guess. My brother at the time was really into wrestling, and I would watch it with him. That was very entertaining, even though I didn't like wrestling at the time, but it was entertaining. Crystal Carter: He was very good at it. Yeah, he's pivoted amazingly. Mordy Oberstein: He's really good. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And shout to all the wrestling SERPS Up fans. I know there are a few. Shout out to Jack Shaffer's Ward and all of them folks. So there's a lot of Wix wrestling. Mordy Oberstein: All Elite Wrestling. All Elite Wrestling. Crystal Carter: All Elite Wrestling. Mordy Oberstein: Is a Wix website. Crystal Carter: Is a Wix website. And they crush it every week. Mordy Oberstein: They do. I don't watch it. I don't even know so much about what it is. I know that it's wrestling and that it's on Wix. Crystal Carter: And they put the smack down on SEO. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's the wrong league. Is that a league? Crystal Carter: Is that the wrong one? Mordy Oberstein: I think so. Again, the SERPS Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can schedule analytics reports to show up in whoever's inbox you want. It's right there with Wix Analytics. Send Rick your client, if that's what you want, and do it automatically so that you can retain those clients really easily. Since today we're talking about how do I retain clients in 10 days. By the way, is a reference to... what is it? How to Lose a Guy in 10 days? That's where they got that from. It's a movie. Crystal Carter: Oh, I see. I see. That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I never even saw the movie though. I don't why. Crystal Carter: I'm not sure I've seen the movie either, but if you want to talk about romcoms, Dr. Pete is the romcom dude. Mordy Oberstein: Is he really? Crystal Carter: Yeah. He's been spending a lot of time writing AI romcom plot lines and it's incredibly amusing. So check out Dr. Pete's thread on that. Mordy Oberstein: I'm using Chat PT to write prompts using the Twilight Zone intro. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Write a essay about astrophysics in the tone of a Twilight Zone intro. Crystal Carter: Nice. Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's great. Anyway, today we're talking about how to ensure you keep your clients. We do have some simple steps for you, though often disregarded steps, that'll help you keep your SEO clients happy. Things like why the first 90 days are so important, the absolute importance of good SEO communications, and client churn prevention, what to do and what to learn from it. Plus, Lucy Dodds will stop buying and share her tips on building trust with SEO clients. We'll also travel across the Wixverse to talk to two client management aficionados, Wix's own Clay Kemp and Sean Delgado. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO News with you and who usually be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Don't lose us, as episode 28 of the SURPS Up podcast is on a retainer for the next 30 plus minutes. Crystal Carter: I like that. We love a retainer. A retainer is exactly what we need. Mordy Oberstein: It's a holy grail of SEO agencies, the retainer. Crystal Carter: yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that it's really important. The retainers are good for two reasons, they're good for the clients and they're good for the SEOs. Having worked agency side, I can tell you that when you have a good retainer client it really gives you the scope to plan and grow. I think people talk about quick wins and low-hanging fruit and all of that sort of stuff, but that stuff gets done very quickly, hopefully within the sort of first 10 days, first 90 days. But then what do you do after that? The retainer allows you to plan for your SEO growth and allows the agency to plan for that and to plan effectively. So it's really, really useful for people to be able to service their clients really well and to build in the scope to do some of the really fancy, really high value SEO deliverables. So yeah, retainer is great because it gets you great results as a client and it also is great for the agency cause it allows you to plan. Thinking about the first few days of an SEO client though and how you get to maintaining those lovely retainers. Having worked agency side, I can tell you that those first few days are really crucial and it's really important for people to understand how they relate to the agency and how the agency relates to the client and to sort of make sure that you've got good relationships there. The relationships are really, really important. Sometimes what I find with relationship building, there's a lot of some of the soft skills of finding out the kinds of things that they like, finding out the kinds of references that are very relatable. For me, I talk in metaphors all the time and... Mordy Oberstein: I love your metaphors. They're so good sometimes. Crystal Carter: My favorite is my nacho cheese internal linking metaphor. That's my favorite one. But anyway, I talk in metaphors all the time, but the reason why I do that is for relatability and depending on who you're talking to. A sports metaphor will work well for somebody who's really into sports, but something else like a film metaphor or sewing even or something might work better for a different audience. So it's really important to think about that and to make sure that you've got good foundations for your relationship going forward because what's really important in the first few days as demonstrators is being able to convey trust. That comes with being honest with your clients about your capabilities and about the things that you can do for them, and also being honest with them about what you can expect from them and what they can expect from their team. So for instance, if you're working with, let's say an owner operator and maybe a marketing manager, let's say it's a small business. The amount of SEO stuff they're going to be able to achieve is going to be smaller than if it was a massive team with developers, and a graphic design department, and a film team, and all that sort of stuff. It's going to be different, so they need to set some real expectations for what they can achieve and what you can achieve with what you're doing there. So that's really, really important. I think also making sure that they've got clear understanding of your reporting, so reporting is also really important for that. Also being able to get some of those quick wins. Quick wins can be part of making sure that you've got some client trust there, because what will then tend to happen before a client comes on is there'll be some kind of audit. It might be a really deep dive audit that goes into every single element, or it might be just a quick audit just to sort of say whether or not there's some possibilities, what kind of growth we might expect. Generally speaking, from that audit there'll be a couple of things where it's like, "Oh, you don't have this tag. You haven't enabled this. You haven't set up your Google business profile." For instance. And if you're able to deliver some of those and get things moving in the first few days and actually get some things that will show some good results, then that will help you to retain your client, to build trust with your client to get some momentum, and to get the kind of enthusiasm that helps SEO projects stay at the forefront of the marketing mix, which is what you want as a client manager, as a project manager, and to make sure that you've got all of the things that you want set up for the months, weeks ahead. Mordy Oberstein: So I think a lot of what we're going to be discussing today is not, "Wow, that's brilliant." There are things you didn't know. I think in when you learn something, there are things like this, there are topics like this where it's not that I didn't know that, but you need to bring it out to the conscious level and bringing that out to the conscious level really helps you solidify it and then be able to act on it. I think that's a lot of what we're going to be doing today, what you just did there. One of those things is, yeah, a great communication I'll get to in a second, but it's not a brilliant idea where you know that when you have a new client and any new relationship, it's one of those periods where there's a lot of uncertainty and skepticism around the relationship. I don't think we're saying anything earth sharing or brilliant in that, but bringing that out to the conscious forefront when you're thinking about it in the context of SEO clients is really important because if you're not consciously aware, then you won't consciously act on it. A great strategy, I was talking to Jacob Clark from Nerd Wilder about this recently, not on the keeping client context, but getting buy-in from clients, so a very similar kind of context. Where a quick win gets them to trust you, see that what you're doing, see that this process is going to work, see this is worth investing, everything you just said, and it doesn't have to be super complicated. It's not manipulative, you are just laying the foundation with that client, with that person so that you can move ahead forward because they might be very skeptical of you for nothing to do with you. SEO, sometimes, has a bad repetition as being snake oil or being about tricks. Crystal Carter: Consultants. Some people really are hesitant about getting consultancy, and certainly sometimes with consultants people will tell you something you already know and they'll spend lots of money telling you something you already know and maybe won't give you actionables or something from that, for instance. I think that can make people skeptical. We've spoken recently about how to speak to the C-suite, and I think this is something that overlaps with that. Again, this is why I use metaphors. If you're speaking in jargon all the time, if you're speaking in words that are difficult for a normal person to understand, then that can breed distrust. So quick wins are something that people can see, but also it allows people to have more conversations with you about getting involved with the process because you'll say, "Okay, we did this quick win. Are you seeing results?" And they can say, "Yes, we did." Or "No, we didn't." I think also the checking in about the process as you go along is really important. I remember when I first started working with clients, we get them on a retainer and I would say, "Hi, this month we're going to do this and this and this." I do my deliverables for six months, and then the beginning of the month would come, then I would say, "Okay, we did this to this blog and we did this to this, and we did that to that." And then I wouldn't talk to them for another month until we did the report. People of the internet, that was a terrible thing. That was terrible. That was terrible and that was awful. Don't do that. Don't do that. If you have clients or if you're working on a project in-house, for instance, if you're working on something talk to them as you go. Talk to them, as you go talk to them as you're working through the project. Don't leave it a month between speaking to people. That was terrible. As soon as I started speaking more regularly with clients, I started seeing the retention grow and the trust grow. Also, when that happens, then people will come to you with more projects, right? Because they know that you're somebody that they can have a regular conversation with. They know that you're somebody who they can speak to consciously and solve problems and things like that. So I'd have people come to say, "Oh, well what about this? Do you know about that?" And I'd say, "Well, I know something about that, but I could recommend somebody else who knows more about that." For instance. That works really, really well. So I think having the ongoing conversation. Sometimes it's a question of, let's say, you've got something really technical that's going through, try to find ways to get them involved, even if it's on a lower level. Sort of like, "Hey, we're doing this. Would you like it to be like this? Or would you like it to be like that?" Mordy Oberstein: It all goes back to the foundation which is the outright start of really crisp, clear communication and expectations. Which is the foundation for all of it. This is where I see a lot of people get messed up, because you are anxious and don't want to undersell. You want to show, "I'm going to get you so much. You're going to get so much." I don't think that that's the right way to go about that, because inevitably you're going to hit roadblocks, you're going to hit complications. For lack of a better way of putting it, it's going to hit the fan at some point and the growth that you anticipate is not going to be as quick and easy as you perhaps anticipated for this website. Even though it looks on paper, there's no way. There's no way it's not going to work. Then you've created a situation where the expectations are not aligned to reality. That's just a recipe for disaster because again, underlying all of this, I think it's true for most business relationships, is a degree of skepticism. You're just letting that come out to the forefront, it's there already for multiple reasons, more so I think in SEO than even in other places. And because you're not setting up the expectations to be fully transparent you're breeding a situation that's going to end up biting you in the rear end later on. There's nothing wrong in setting realistic expectations, telling the client that this is going to be hard, it's not going to be easy. I think most people, that will probably add a degree of credibility to what you're selling, versus "It's going to be so easy. Everyone's going to see this. Everyone's going to love this. You're going to get it done so quickly." Crystal Carter: Exactly. If you're like, "Oh yeah. Soon as we do this, we're going to be this, this, and this." Now sometimes, sometimes you can have a look at it and you can go, "I mean, this is a slam dunk." Sometimes you can do that, but you should do that cautiously. Sometimes hold those cards closer to your chest, because you can give them realistic expectations of what you're absolutely sure that you can do. For instance, you can say, "We can do this implementation, which will make you more eligible for rich results." And that you can guarantee, right? Certain implementation will make you more eligible for rich results. You can't guarantee how many rich results they will get. You can't guarantee what they will rank for. You can't guarantee necessarily the traffic because there are many, many variables outside of that. But you can say, "We will get you this, which will increase your visibility and rich results." You can say that. So say that. That's fine. But caveat what you're saying and things. I used to do forecast for PPC stuff, and we would hedge them. We would hedge. We'd be like, "Look, if we can bring the cost per acquisition down to five pounds, then if we spend this much we should expect to see this much. But if the cost per acquisition is 10 pounds and if we spend this much, we should expect to see this much." So you can hedge, and having the sort of understanding of what the best case scenario is, what the worst case scenario is, what your potential plan B might be, is also really important. It's not a negative to be aware of the negatives. So if you're telling the client that there's a potential that this might go wrong, that's useful, and that shows that you've thought it all the way through. Mordy Oberstein: And that's also a great point, because if it does go wrong you've already laid down the foundation of good communication. I'll tell you from an interesting point of view, because a lot of my work with the agency has come in where someone comes to me and said, "Hey, I'm working with an agency and this doesn't look right to me. Have a look at this." So I've multiple times have. "Okay, we're going to fact check or check up on." And clients will do this. They'll hire a consultant to check on what an agency's doing."Does this sound right to you?" And it's inevitably when they hit a problem. One case I had was someone came to me and said, "Hey, a bunch of my local listings got suspended from Google Business Profile, and the agency is telling me X." I'm like, "That makes absolutely no sense. This is absolutely their fault. They should have known that." When you don't have those lines of communication set up at the outset, it's really easy to get into big problems once things go a little bit sou. A point to that is, when they go sour, be upfront. Things happen, people generally understand. Nothing is ever a hundred percent simple. Nothing ever goes a hundred percent the way you think it's going to. You're going to have problems, and it's all about communication and communicating about those problems and being upfront, because the thing you don't want is for the trust to erode. Problems are fine. Trust eroding is not fine. If you can keep a level of trust up while dealing with the problem, then you should be fine assuming you know how to handle that problem. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think, again, this is one of the reasons why it's worth spending some time getting to know your clients generally as well as getting to know your clients professionally. You don't have to be hanging out with them every weekend or whatever, but it's sometimes useful to be able to speak to them in a sort of casual way because in those moments where you're talking about what happened at the football game over the weekend, or what your kids did at the thing or whatever, in those moments you understand the nuances and the ways that they talk about maybe sensitive topics, which can help you to talk about sensitive topics in other spaces. I think that, yeah, it can be tricky, but it's really, really worth it. It's really, really worth it. I've had conversations where clients have come to me and they maybe weren't happy about something, that can happen happens. It happens. Sometimes a client can come to you and they say, "Well, I'm not happy about this. I don't like this." And I remember having one conversation and I was like, "Thank you for your candor." And they were like, "What?" I was like, "Thank you for your candor, thank you for telling." I think that in those moments, if you have clients who are unhappy or something, be grateful that they're telling you because, like you were saying how somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, this agency told me this. Or this consultant told me that." And they're asking you to double check them. Be grateful that they're talking to you about whatever the issue is, because it takes a lot for someone to come and say, "Hey. Actually, I'm not happy about this." So listen to them. Mordy Oberstein: Being respectful and normal about it. Which by the way, if they're not, and this is okay also, you are allowed to drop clients. Crystal Carter: I think this is important. I think that when you're thinking about clients, when you're onboarding clients, for instance, and your onboarding process should be paying attention to this as well, but when you're onboarding clients, make sure that you're onboarding them for a good fit. Somebody might be a good fit for somebody and might not be such a good fit for another person, but pay attention to how they operate, how you operate. For instance, if they're the kind of person who expects you to reply back to an email in the next hour or something and maybe you don't have the capacity for that, then maybe they're not the best client for you, or maybe that particular way of working isn't the best for you. Maybe they might not be a good fit for a retainer client, but maybe they might be a good fit for a project client, for instance. If you have other things, then that's something. I can see that you wanted to come in there, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, I wanted to say what you could do there, by the way, is if you have a friend who owns another agency or somebody you know owns another agency that does that kind of whatever work that you don't want to do, and you do the work that they don't want to do, you can refer your clients back and forth to each other. You don't have to feel like you're losing out. This could just be part of a relationship where that makes you win, just later on. Crystal Carter: Right. And again, that's something that doesn't make you look less valuable to the client. That still keeps you as the person who is able to solve their problems, because at the end of the day, that's what the client wants you to do. They want you to help them solve the problem. They want to find business solutions. So if you're able to facilitate that with either a tool, or a contact, or a whatever, then that's something that's really, really valuable for them. I think that there's lots of nuances to it, but there's a really good piece of content on the Wix Partners blog called The No Surprises Doctrine of Building Trust Through Better Communication, which talks about a lot of this and it's really well written. I would also recommend, with regards to additional reading, on the Wix SEO hub, we have something from Sophie Brannan talking about SEO reporting. She talks about how to report to clients, and I think that that's a really important part of building trust and making sure that they understand. When I work with clients, I build their reports bespoke. So we talk to them about what things they want to see, what things are most valuable to them, will work with them. Before I've had clients who maybe the project ended it, they wanted me to make them a new report separately even though I wasn't working on the project anymore because it's really important. Mordy Oberstein: With that, we have Lucy Dodds, who's a Senior SEO Strategist over at Evolved Search to share with us her top tips for building trust, cause that's what we're talking about. This whole episode basically is building trust. Keeping your clients, if you want to boil it down to it, it's building trust with your SEO clients. So here's Lucy Dodds and her top tips to build trust with SEO clients. Lucy Dodds: For me, the best way to build trust is through a content hub. These hubs give you a great opportunity to become a trusted resource for your users. In fact, the only resource they'll ever need to use when they're researching your products or services. Your content hub is there to satisfy your audiences every need of the marketing funnel, including pre and post purchase stages. So you can embed yourselves in their sales journey. The best content hubs put the brand at the forefront of their customer's minds by building that trust, which in the long-term results in sales and repeat business. And although we call it a content hub, it actually encompasses all parts of SEO, which means your technical on-site content and digital PR records are all aligned working together towards that one goal. But let's break that down. So the technical SEOs will start out and build the foundations for your content hub. They ensure that all the content is housed in the correct sub folders coming from your commercial page, and not just left in a blog forgotten about. This helps to ensure any value from traffic or link building is only funneled into that one commercial pitch, which they'll also be managing through some very controlled internal linking. Then we have the onsite content itself. We're going to be answering long-tail queries about the products or services that this business offers with more unique and informative content. We're integrating product experience, we're using internal statistics, we're creating genuine video reviews. Building trust by using authentic contact that's much better than any AI can scrape from another source. Users can find the content through search when looking up the long-tail query, and it's your job to ensure they leave your site feeling like you are the best and most trustworthy resource, so when the time comes to buy they remember you. And finally, the digital PRs are going to make this content, and therefore your brand, more visible. Of course, there's always room for big creative link building campaigns, but actually you can get a lot of value from outreaching this informational helpful content. With the rising cost of living, pandemic, and other global worries, many journalists are looking for ways to support their readership with helpful content. So say we have a piece of informational guide content on cleaning a mattress. The digital PR can still make some headlines from that, like "How to Cheaply Clean your Mattress", or how to do it naturally with household goods. Probably not an award-winning campaign sure, but does it genuinely help users? Absolutely. Reactive commentary works in the same way. When your sites in-house expert offers insight into an event that's happening in the world, that allows the digital PR to get your brand out there while helping users and forming trust with them at the same time. So, we have the best informational content which strengthens our sites authority on the products or services we offer, and also means we don't look overly salesy. We have our brand building efforts through digital PR to pose in-house experts as the most knowledgeable people on a topic. And then we have the optimal technical setup to ensure all value from backlinks and organic traffic is being passed to our key commercial page, so we'll rank better too. And that's what a content hub is a great way to build trust because it gives you the opportunity to bring your SEO efforts together to become the greatest resource for your audience. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Lucy. That was really interesting and quite insightful for our audience. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's starting from a really good place. Lucy comes from an agency which is renowned for SEO. Evolve Search is an award-winning agency, and so she knows exactly how to work with clients and how to keep clients happy. Wise words from Lucy, she's a great follower as well, so follow her @lucyalicedodds on Twitter. She's got some great information about client management, about SEO, and she's worth checking out. Mordy Oberstein: So with that client management, as you just mentioned, one, is obviously not easy, but two, it's obviously not unique to SEO. A lot of the principle, like client management, have nothing to do with SEO, just being good at managing clients. So with that, we're privileged to know some really amazing folks here at Wix, and in this particular case, these folks, we have to meet with them quite often so I know firsthand that they're awesome. They do also have an amazing SEO background, so we thought, wouldn't it be cool to learn more about client management, and client success, and driving client success, and having clients feel valued and taken care of, and how to do all of that from people who also know the SEO world all at the same time. It's all coming together. One magnificent storm of perfect awesomeness. So let's explore our client success with an all product advisement team as we go across the Wixverse with our own Clay Kemp and Sean Delgado. Speaker 6: 3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: Hey Clay. Hey Sean. Thanks for coming on to the podcast, guys. Clay Kemp: How's it going, Mordy? Sean Delgado: How's it going? Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: So you both work to help our clients feel, I'll call it valued and taken care of. What goes into what y'all do and how do you approach it? Clay Kemp: Yeah. So on the product advisor team, we actually have a bunch of our top partners, top users, some of our best users on the Wix platform. We really jump into help our team Account Managers when certain users on Wix need to learn more about SEO, or even have some troubleshooting issues. So if they need help doing some redirects, they're doing a site migration, or if we're just getting them up to speed on all the new changes that are constantly rolling out with the Wix platform, like the new SEO home dashboard or whatever it might be. We kind of have those two arms to our team. So whether it's making them successful through product and education, or that troubleshooting side that's kind of where we step in. Mordy Oberstein: So the troubleshooting side is interesting to me, because I feel at that point the client's on the fence. It can go either really, really well or any second it can break out into all sorts of frustration and chaos. Clay Kemp: Indeed. Sean Delgado: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: I think Sean was like, "Yes." And it's understandable, because it's something that's complicated, it's something that's frustrating that you're trying to get your business going, your site going. So what's important to keep in mind in those moments, Sean, when you are dealing with something that it's really complicated, it's really frustrating, and you just want to make sure that the person understands that you have them, you have their back, and no matter how complicated it's going to get, you're going to be there for them. How do you walk that line? Sean Delgado: Yeah. It's a tough line to walk, but I think patience comes into play and also just being open and honest comes into play. I think it's important to really get as much information from the user as you can, just having a good backstory and a good background from where the problem started, what issues they're facing, what these issues are causing for them, the troubles that they're causing, whether it's just on the website or their business itself. I think understanding that is really, really important, but then taking the time to go through everything that they brought up and everything that might be the issue. Doing really good audits on the website and audits on troubleshooting things on your own time, just making copies of websites, going through things, making sure that things are working properly. I think it's really important to make sure that you listen to them, talk it through, show them what you're doing. If in that session we don't get a full answer, reassuring them that, "Listen, we will do our work on our end. Make sure that you know are heard, you are understood, and you're not going to be forgotten just because that our session is up. It's a continuous thing and we're going to keep working to make sure that that issue is solved." Crystal Carter: Certainly with some of the discussions with partners I know that you have some bespoke communication tools that you use, I know you've got a few dashboards and things that you help to keep people aware of what's going on and how things are progressing. Can you talk a little bit more about communication methods? Certainly I know from my client side working, making bespoke things for communication requirements can be useful. Can you and expand on that or share any stories around that? Clay Kemp: Yeah, so I think keeping clients engaged is really a holistic process, at least where we sit. We sit in a unique spot between, I guess you could say product and then the actual clients themselves, so we come in as the subject matter experts. There's a lot of different channels of communication between. We sometimes help with webinars, we have a lot of different email campaigns that could be highly automated sometimes based on their behavior, even, just to empower them based on what they're doing within the platform. Then also very tailored approaches. It could be something slightly exclusive at times, like if they want to join this specific small group training, that's something that we will do from time to time. If there's a small cohort of partners, for example, like you're talking about Crystal, that I think have a stronger need to get up to speed on this tool to empower their business. I think the most impactful thing, and I don't want to get ahead of myself, but within all this communication is really just continuing to ask those questions when we're in our one-on-one consultations themselves, which is what Sean was referencing, is just doing the discovery. I think the number one way that we make clients successful is just by continuously asking those questions, because everyone's goal is going to be a little different. We can't come in with a totally templated approach or too much automation or anything, but really just asking them, "What are you doing with your agency right now, and what are your goals from let's say 2023? Or what are your goals for the next few months?" And really digging into those on a client by client basis. Mordy Oberstein: Hearing that, and especially in working with both of you, the term that comes to mind is you both seem like advocates of the client. I'll have cases, for example, where Sean will come to me and say, "Hey, what's going on with this on the SEO side? What's happening with that?" And it really feels that you are an advocate for the client. It goes back to what you were talking about before, and we actually talked about this earlier in the show, it's not about avoiding problems. There's going to be problems, but it's a matter of when you're trying to retain clients, about showing the client that even though there is a problem, you're there for them and you're an advocate for them to get the problem solved. I feel both of you do that. Particularly, Sean, we work closely on stuff together where it does legitimately feel like you're an advocate for the client. Sean Delgado: Right. A hundred percent. I think any client feels that, and if it's an actual genuine want to help someone, I think they feel that and understand that. So whether it is something that you're solving in that moment or later on, like you said, me and you work together, I'll reach out to members of different teams if it involves something differently. We go that extra mile because we want to make sure that that client is happy in the end. We want to make sure that they feel heard, feel wanted, and feel needed in everything that they're asking and everything that they want. So, I think it is important to remember that we're here to help, we're not just here to go through our days just to go through them. We're here to help and actually give people the answers and tools that they need to succeed in their business and in their life. Crystal Carter: I think nobody likes feeling like they've asked for help and somebody's ticking a box. "Check, check. Yes" And you're like, "Oh my God." And they're like, "Press number three." And you're like, "I'd like to talk to a human being, please." Clay Kemp: Exactly. We're here to take those in. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. I think that it is something that builds a lot of trust. I think Clay, you also talked about nurturing people and in a sort of education space, training people up on things that they need training on. I think particularly when you're working in a digital space, whether you're working in a B2B space like you are, or working client side, or even if you're working with customers even, where they're trying to learn how to use your product or a complimentary tool, for instance, one of the things you find is that in digital marketing, very often they're working with something completely new. So there's a brand new tool or brand new feature that exists and there isn't training for it so you have to be that trainer, and in order to help make sure that the client is successful with this new tool that you've either advised them to have or that you are giving them you, that should be part of your mix and part of an expected process for your agency or for your client management thing. I don't know, did you ever consider or did you ever expect that you'd end up being a trainer in your job? Clay Kemp: Yeah. Actually, that's one of the things that I love the most about this role, because I've sat at the enterprise in-house side doing the analyst day to day. While I actually really did love it, I kind of realized that I wanted to teach people, cause part of what I was actually doing at the time was doing a lot of cross-departmental trainings or, let's say, more of our content strategy or our copywriter team. I would sit in on blog meetings and then I would give them some those targets for that quarter or that month. Then also just some 100 level and 200 level training, so that SEO became more of a mindset across the company and not just in our little small department over in the corner. I think that's when I realized that I just love teaching people and empowering them to use product, and especially SEO, because I think with SEO there's a lot of at times gray areas, I will say that, and I think debunking some of those and just clearing some of that up is just a really fulfilling thing. It's great to see that among Wix users, and partners, and clients over here as well. Mordy Oberstein: What better way than to end here. That was perfect. Guys, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and keep it up. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Clay. It's great to be able to bring their expertise to the podcast, cause I learn so much from them every time we actually meet. Looking forward to seeing them over at Brighton. So we're going to be at Brighton, by the way, BrightonSEO in April. Clay and Sean just let me know. Crystal is surprised. Yeah, they're coming. Crystal Carter: I'm very surprised. Yay. Mordy Oberstein: Yay, right? Crystal Carter: They're both great folks. Mordy Oberstein: They're awesome. Crystal Carter: Absolutely fantastic and so, so enthusiastic about making sure that Wix partners do amazing things and that clients of Wix do amazing things. It's a very Wix. Mordy Oberstein: So if you'll be there, say hi to Clay, and say hi to Sean. Nice. You know what else is news, is Crystal coughing. Crystal Carter: Sorry. Mordy Oberstein: You know what else might be news for you, Crystal. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: The Snappy News. Crystal Carter: The Snappy N`ews. Mordy Oberstein: Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Here's what's happened in the world of SEO outside of AI writers. Just kidding, this is all about AI writers, because Bing made a few interesting announcements over at Pubcon, the SEO conference, about its AI chat experience. First off, they said SEO is not dead. So thank God, I was worried for a second. They also said impressions, clicks, and so forth that come to your site from their AI chat experience you'll be able to see them inside of Bing's webmaster tools at some point. Meaning you'll have real data about if or if not AI chat is hurting or helping your site from organic traffic point of view. Very cool and very transparent of Bing. Not to worry though, Google's Gary Ilia said, also at Pubcon... Wow, so many things going on at Pubcon about AI chat... That Google's Bard will also have its own unique way of sending traffic to sites, as there were initial concerns about Google's Bard when Google announced Google's Bard as there were no citations to other websites. So have no fear. Less fear? Let's go with no fear. We're going to go with no fear. Have no fear. This comes, by the way, on the heels of Bing saying that they have finished an update to their AI chat systems to make them more likely that the chat will return an answer and reduce what Bing is calling "hallucination answers", which sounds fun, but I'm glad they're gone, I guess. Coming on the heels of this, geez, everyone is stepping on everyone's heels these days. Anyway, on the heels of this Brave announce its own AI powered chat experience is live on its own search engine. AI is everywhere and not a drop of accuracy to spare. I jest, but there are some accuracy issues that I have seen. So please be careful when using the AI chat experiences on the various search engines to make sure that the information they're showing you is up-to-date and as accurate as possible. With that, that is this week's Snappy News. Now, wasn't that jus the snappiest of news for you? Crystal Carter: It was so snappy. The snappiest Snappy News. Mordy Oberstein: Snap. It was news. Crystal Carter: Oh, Snap! Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us to the last little part of our humble little episode, which is who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness, which brings us to a very, very special person who knows a lot about managing clients because he is the founder of the UK's largest specialist SEO agency, also known as Blue Array. He is Simon Schnieders. Crystal Carter: Simon is fantastic. I spoke at the London SEO Meetup XL last year and met Simon, spent a good amount of time with Simon, and he's just fantastic. Blue Array is a great agency who has a free SEO course available to anyone who would like to check that out. They're a great agency, and Simon at the helm does some amazing things. I think that managing clients, looking after clients, is absolutely crucial to making sure that agencies perform well and grow. I think retaining your clients, whether you're a freelancer or an agency, is absolutely critical. Absolutely crucial. I hope that this episode has been useful to people who are looking to do that, and follow Simon for more. Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Simon's on LinkedIn predominantly. He also has a newsletter he puts out with Blue Array, so we'll link to that in the show notes, and is a great follow on LinkedIn. Do you follow on LinkedIn? How does that work? Yeah, you do follow people on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: You can follow. You can follow, you can also connect. Mordy Oberstein: Follow and then connect, yes. I know. I do LinkedIn, but I just repurpose all my Twitter stuff for LinkedIn. Simon does put out a lot of thought-provoking posts on LinkedIn, so he is a wonderful follow on LinkedIn for you. Of course, we'll link to his profile and the newsletter that you have over at Blue Array in the show notes, which means that hopefully we've retained you to this point. Crystal Carter: We have. We have. Mordy Oberstein: We go all the way back around. We've clearly communicated with you so that you feel that we have embedded trust in our listener-host relationship. Crystal Carter: Exactly. And we set expectations that the podcast would end, and now it will. Mordy Oberstein: And now it will. 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 the new episode and a special guest as we dive into how will chat GPT change search and the web forever. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on the SEO learning over on wix.com/seo/learn. Looking for a little more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning 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, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Lucy Dodds Clay Kemp Sean Del Galdo Simon Schnieders Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub SEO Reporting for SMBs Evolved Search Blue Array Pubcon News: Bing Webmaster Tools to gain Bing Chat and index coverage reporting Microsoft Bing Chat launches quality improvements Google Has Its Own Way To Send Traffic To Publishers Through Bard/Chat Brave Search launches an AI-powered summarization feature Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Lucy Dodds Clay Kemp Sean Del Galdo Simon Schnieders Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub SEO Reporting for SMBs Evolved Search Blue Array Pubcon News: Bing Webmaster Tools to gain Bing Chat and index coverage reporting Microsoft Bing Chat launches quality improvements Google Has Its Own Way To Send Traffic To Publishers Through Bard/Chat Brave Search launches an AI-powered summarization feature Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPS Up. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO over here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fantastically fabulous, the ever so awesome head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Hey, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Hi, Mordy. That's a very nice intro, as usual. Thank you very much. And hello to all the internet friends out there. Hi. Mordy Oberstein: Hi. Well, it's what they pay me to say. Crystal Carter: This is true. This is true. It reminds me of a little bit of the "Let's get Ready to Rumble" thing. That guy is a legend. Mordy Oberstein: What ever happened to that guy? Does he still do that? Crystal Carter: I don't know. I think he just walks around in a tuxedo looking for things that might rumble. Maybe he goes to building sites and just before they stir the cement he goes, "Let's get ready to rumble." Mordy Oberstein: That's a dude who made a whole living doing just one thing. Crystal Carter: One thing. One thing. To be fair... Mordy Oberstein: Maybe he does more, I don't know. Crystal Carter: Possibly, but I mean, who cares? It's the rumble that everybody's there for. Mordy Oberstein: Who cares. "I do so many things." Who cares. Crystal Carter: Who cares? Just Rumble. Mordy Oberstein: Just rumble Crystal Carter: Do the Rumble. But I think there's also the Rock. The Rock. There's a clip of him on a UK late night show explaining the whole thing of the, "Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?" And he breaks it down entirely. He's like, "Can you smell?" Mordy Oberstein: I remember watching it, not as a teenager guess. My brother at the time was really into wrestling, and I would watch it with him. That was very entertaining, even though I didn't like wrestling at the time, but it was entertaining. Crystal Carter: He was very good at it. Yeah, he's pivoted amazingly. Mordy Oberstein: He's really good. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And shout to all the wrestling SERPS Up fans. I know there are a few. Shout out to Jack Shaffer's Ward and all of them folks. So there's a lot of Wix wrestling. Mordy Oberstein: All Elite Wrestling. All Elite Wrestling. Crystal Carter: All Elite Wrestling. Mordy Oberstein: Is a Wix website. Crystal Carter: Is a Wix website. And they crush it every week. Mordy Oberstein: They do. I don't watch it. I don't even know so much about what it is. I know that it's wrestling and that it's on Wix. Crystal Carter: And they put the smack down on SEO. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's the wrong league. Is that a league? Crystal Carter: Is that the wrong one? Mordy Oberstein: I think so. Again, the SERPS Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can schedule analytics reports to show up in whoever's inbox you want. It's right there with Wix Analytics. Send Rick your client, if that's what you want, and do it automatically so that you can retain those clients really easily. Since today we're talking about how do I retain clients in 10 days. By the way, is a reference to... what is it? How to Lose a Guy in 10 days? That's where they got that from. It's a movie. Crystal Carter: Oh, I see. I see. That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I never even saw the movie though. I don't why. Crystal Carter: I'm not sure I've seen the movie either, but if you want to talk about romcoms, Dr. Pete is the romcom dude. Mordy Oberstein: Is he really? Crystal Carter: Yeah. He's been spending a lot of time writing AI romcom plot lines and it's incredibly amusing. So check out Dr. Pete's thread on that. Mordy Oberstein: I'm using Chat PT to write prompts using the Twilight Zone intro. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Write a essay about astrophysics in the tone of a Twilight Zone intro. Crystal Carter: Nice. Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's great. Anyway, today we're talking about how to ensure you keep your clients. We do have some simple steps for you, though often disregarded steps, that'll help you keep your SEO clients happy. Things like why the first 90 days are so important, the absolute importance of good SEO communications, and client churn prevention, what to do and what to learn from it. Plus, Lucy Dodds will stop buying and share her tips on building trust with SEO clients. We'll also travel across the Wixverse to talk to two client management aficionados, Wix's own Clay Kemp and Sean Delgado. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO News with you and who usually be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Don't lose us, as episode 28 of the SURPS Up podcast is on a retainer for the next 30 plus minutes. Crystal Carter: I like that. We love a retainer. A retainer is exactly what we need. Mordy Oberstein: It's a holy grail of SEO agencies, the retainer. Crystal Carter: yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that it's really important. The retainers are good for two reasons, they're good for the clients and they're good for the SEOs. Having worked agency side, I can tell you that when you have a good retainer client it really gives you the scope to plan and grow. I think people talk about quick wins and low-hanging fruit and all of that sort of stuff, but that stuff gets done very quickly, hopefully within the sort of first 10 days, first 90 days. But then what do you do after that? The retainer allows you to plan for your SEO growth and allows the agency to plan for that and to plan effectively. So it's really, really useful for people to be able to service their clients really well and to build in the scope to do some of the really fancy, really high value SEO deliverables. So yeah, retainer is great because it gets you great results as a client and it also is great for the agency cause it allows you to plan. Thinking about the first few days of an SEO client though and how you get to maintaining those lovely retainers. Having worked agency side, I can tell you that those first few days are really crucial and it's really important for people to understand how they relate to the agency and how the agency relates to the client and to sort of make sure that you've got good relationships there. The relationships are really, really important. Sometimes what I find with relationship building, there's a lot of some of the soft skills of finding out the kinds of things that they like, finding out the kinds of references that are very relatable. For me, I talk in metaphors all the time and... Mordy Oberstein: I love your metaphors. They're so good sometimes. Crystal Carter: My favorite is my nacho cheese internal linking metaphor. That's my favorite one. But anyway, I talk in metaphors all the time, but the reason why I do that is for relatability and depending on who you're talking to. A sports metaphor will work well for somebody who's really into sports, but something else like a film metaphor or sewing even or something might work better for a different audience. So it's really important to think about that and to make sure that you've got good foundations for your relationship going forward because what's really important in the first few days as demonstrators is being able to convey trust. That comes with being honest with your clients about your capabilities and about the things that you can do for them, and also being honest with them about what you can expect from them and what they can expect from their team. So for instance, if you're working with, let's say an owner operator and maybe a marketing manager, let's say it's a small business. The amount of SEO stuff they're going to be able to achieve is going to be smaller than if it was a massive team with developers, and a graphic design department, and a film team, and all that sort of stuff. It's going to be different, so they need to set some real expectations for what they can achieve and what you can achieve with what you're doing there. So that's really, really important. I think also making sure that they've got clear understanding of your reporting, so reporting is also really important for that. Also being able to get some of those quick wins. Quick wins can be part of making sure that you've got some client trust there, because what will then tend to happen before a client comes on is there'll be some kind of audit. It might be a really deep dive audit that goes into every single element, or it might be just a quick audit just to sort of say whether or not there's some possibilities, what kind of growth we might expect. Generally speaking, from that audit there'll be a couple of things where it's like, "Oh, you don't have this tag. You haven't enabled this. You haven't set up your Google business profile." For instance. And if you're able to deliver some of those and get things moving in the first few days and actually get some things that will show some good results, then that will help you to retain your client, to build trust with your client to get some momentum, and to get the kind of enthusiasm that helps SEO projects stay at the forefront of the marketing mix, which is what you want as a client manager, as a project manager, and to make sure that you've got all of the things that you want set up for the months, weeks ahead. Mordy Oberstein: So I think a lot of what we're going to be discussing today is not, "Wow, that's brilliant." There are things you didn't know. I think in when you learn something, there are things like this, there are topics like this where it's not that I didn't know that, but you need to bring it out to the conscious level and bringing that out to the conscious level really helps you solidify it and then be able to act on it. I think that's a lot of what we're going to be doing today, what you just did there. One of those things is, yeah, a great communication I'll get to in a second, but it's not a brilliant idea where you know that when you have a new client and any new relationship, it's one of those periods where there's a lot of uncertainty and skepticism around the relationship. I don't think we're saying anything earth sharing or brilliant in that, but bringing that out to the conscious forefront when you're thinking about it in the context of SEO clients is really important because if you're not consciously aware, then you won't consciously act on it. A great strategy, I was talking to Jacob Clark from Nerd Wilder about this recently, not on the keeping client context, but getting buy-in from clients, so a very similar kind of context. Where a quick win gets them to trust you, see that what you're doing, see that this process is going to work, see this is worth investing, everything you just said, and it doesn't have to be super complicated. It's not manipulative, you are just laying the foundation with that client, with that person so that you can move ahead forward because they might be very skeptical of you for nothing to do with you. SEO, sometimes, has a bad repetition as being snake oil or being about tricks. Crystal Carter: Consultants. Some people really are hesitant about getting consultancy, and certainly sometimes with consultants people will tell you something you already know and they'll spend lots of money telling you something you already know and maybe won't give you actionables or something from that, for instance. I think that can make people skeptical. We've spoken recently about how to speak to the C-suite, and I think this is something that overlaps with that. Again, this is why I use metaphors. If you're speaking in jargon all the time, if you're speaking in words that are difficult for a normal person to understand, then that can breed distrust. So quick wins are something that people can see, but also it allows people to have more conversations with you about getting involved with the process because you'll say, "Okay, we did this quick win. Are you seeing results?" And they can say, "Yes, we did." Or "No, we didn't." I think also the checking in about the process as you go along is really important. I remember when I first started working with clients, we get them on a retainer and I would say, "Hi, this month we're going to do this and this and this." I do my deliverables for six months, and then the beginning of the month would come, then I would say, "Okay, we did this to this blog and we did this to this, and we did that to that." And then I wouldn't talk to them for another month until we did the report. People of the internet, that was a terrible thing. That was terrible. That was terrible and that was awful. Don't do that. Don't do that. If you have clients or if you're working on a project in-house, for instance, if you're working on something talk to them as you go. Talk to them, as you go talk to them as you're working through the project. Don't leave it a month between speaking to people. That was terrible. As soon as I started speaking more regularly with clients, I started seeing the retention grow and the trust grow. Also, when that happens, then people will come to you with more projects, right? Because they know that you're somebody that they can have a regular conversation with. They know that you're somebody who they can speak to consciously and solve problems and things like that. So I'd have people come to say, "Oh, well what about this? Do you know about that?" And I'd say, "Well, I know something about that, but I could recommend somebody else who knows more about that." For instance. That works really, really well. So I think having the ongoing conversation. Sometimes it's a question of, let's say, you've got something really technical that's going through, try to find ways to get them involved, even if it's on a lower level. Sort of like, "Hey, we're doing this. Would you like it to be like this? Or would you like it to be like that?" Mordy Oberstein: It all goes back to the foundation which is the outright start of really crisp, clear communication and expectations. Which is the foundation for all of it. This is where I see a lot of people get messed up, because you are anxious and don't want to undersell. You want to show, "I'm going to get you so much. You're going to get so much." I don't think that that's the right way to go about that, because inevitably you're going to hit roadblocks, you're going to hit complications. For lack of a better way of putting it, it's going to hit the fan at some point and the growth that you anticipate is not going to be as quick and easy as you perhaps anticipated for this website. Even though it looks on paper, there's no way. There's no way it's not going to work. Then you've created a situation where the expectations are not aligned to reality. That's just a recipe for disaster because again, underlying all of this, I think it's true for most business relationships, is a degree of skepticism. You're just letting that come out to the forefront, it's there already for multiple reasons, more so I think in SEO than even in other places. And because you're not setting up the expectations to be fully transparent you're breeding a situation that's going to end up biting you in the rear end later on. There's nothing wrong in setting realistic expectations, telling the client that this is going to be hard, it's not going to be easy. I think most people, that will probably add a degree of credibility to what you're selling, versus "It's going to be so easy. Everyone's going to see this. Everyone's going to love this. You're going to get it done so quickly." Crystal Carter: Exactly. If you're like, "Oh yeah. Soon as we do this, we're going to be this, this, and this." Now sometimes, sometimes you can have a look at it and you can go, "I mean, this is a slam dunk." Sometimes you can do that, but you should do that cautiously. Sometimes hold those cards closer to your chest, because you can give them realistic expectations of what you're absolutely sure that you can do. For instance, you can say, "We can do this implementation, which will make you more eligible for rich results." And that you can guarantee, right? Certain implementation will make you more eligible for rich results. You can't guarantee how many rich results they will get. You can't guarantee what they will rank for. You can't guarantee necessarily the traffic because there are many, many variables outside of that. But you can say, "We will get you this, which will increase your visibility and rich results." You can say that. So say that. That's fine. But caveat what you're saying and things. I used to do forecast for PPC stuff, and we would hedge them. We would hedge. We'd be like, "Look, if we can bring the cost per acquisition down to five pounds, then if we spend this much we should expect to see this much. But if the cost per acquisition is 10 pounds and if we spend this much, we should expect to see this much." So you can hedge, and having the sort of understanding of what the best case scenario is, what the worst case scenario is, what your potential plan B might be, is also really important. It's not a negative to be aware of the negatives. So if you're telling the client that there's a potential that this might go wrong, that's useful, and that shows that you've thought it all the way through. Mordy Oberstein: And that's also a great point, because if it does go wrong you've already laid down the foundation of good communication. I'll tell you from an interesting point of view, because a lot of my work with the agency has come in where someone comes to me and said, "Hey, I'm working with an agency and this doesn't look right to me. Have a look at this." So I've multiple times have. "Okay, we're going to fact check or check up on." And clients will do this. They'll hire a consultant to check on what an agency's doing."Does this sound right to you?" And it's inevitably when they hit a problem. One case I had was someone came to me and said, "Hey, a bunch of my local listings got suspended from Google Business Profile, and the agency is telling me X." I'm like, "That makes absolutely no sense. This is absolutely their fault. They should have known that." When you don't have those lines of communication set up at the outset, it's really easy to get into big problems once things go a little bit sou. A point to that is, when they go sour, be upfront. Things happen, people generally understand. Nothing is ever a hundred percent simple. Nothing ever goes a hundred percent the way you think it's going to. You're going to have problems, and it's all about communication and communicating about those problems and being upfront, because the thing you don't want is for the trust to erode. Problems are fine. Trust eroding is not fine. If you can keep a level of trust up while dealing with the problem, then you should be fine assuming you know how to handle that problem. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think, again, this is one of the reasons why it's worth spending some time getting to know your clients generally as well as getting to know your clients professionally. You don't have to be hanging out with them every weekend or whatever, but it's sometimes useful to be able to speak to them in a sort of casual way because in those moments where you're talking about what happened at the football game over the weekend, or what your kids did at the thing or whatever, in those moments you understand the nuances and the ways that they talk about maybe sensitive topics, which can help you to talk about sensitive topics in other spaces. I think that, yeah, it can be tricky, but it's really, really worth it. It's really, really worth it. I've had conversations where clients have come to me and they maybe weren't happy about something, that can happen happens. It happens. Sometimes a client can come to you and they say, "Well, I'm not happy about this. I don't like this." And I remember having one conversation and I was like, "Thank you for your candor." And they were like, "What?" I was like, "Thank you for your candor, thank you for telling." I think that in those moments, if you have clients who are unhappy or something, be grateful that they're telling you because, like you were saying how somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, this agency told me this. Or this consultant told me that." And they're asking you to double check them. Be grateful that they're talking to you about whatever the issue is, because it takes a lot for someone to come and say, "Hey. Actually, I'm not happy about this." So listen to them. Mordy Oberstein: Being respectful and normal about it. Which by the way, if they're not, and this is okay also, you are allowed to drop clients. Crystal Carter: I think this is important. I think that when you're thinking about clients, when you're onboarding clients, for instance, and your onboarding process should be paying attention to this as well, but when you're onboarding clients, make sure that you're onboarding them for a good fit. Somebody might be a good fit for somebody and might not be such a good fit for another person, but pay attention to how they operate, how you operate. For instance, if they're the kind of person who expects you to reply back to an email in the next hour or something and maybe you don't have the capacity for that, then maybe they're not the best client for you, or maybe that particular way of working isn't the best for you. Maybe they might not be a good fit for a retainer client, but maybe they might be a good fit for a project client, for instance. If you have other things, then that's something. I can see that you wanted to come in there, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, I wanted to say what you could do there, by the way, is if you have a friend who owns another agency or somebody you know owns another agency that does that kind of whatever work that you don't want to do, and you do the work that they don't want to do, you can refer your clients back and forth to each other. You don't have to feel like you're losing out. This could just be part of a relationship where that makes you win, just later on. Crystal Carter: Right. And again, that's something that doesn't make you look less valuable to the client. That still keeps you as the person who is able to solve their problems, because at the end of the day, that's what the client wants you to do. They want you to help them solve the problem. They want to find business solutions. So if you're able to facilitate that with either a tool, or a contact, or a whatever, then that's something that's really, really valuable for them. I think that there's lots of nuances to it, but there's a really good piece of content on the Wix Partners blog called The No Surprises Doctrine of Building Trust Through Better Communication, which talks about a lot of this and it's really well written. I would also recommend, with regards to additional reading, on the Wix SEO hub, we have something from Sophie Brannan talking about SEO reporting. She talks about how to report to clients, and I think that that's a really important part of building trust and making sure that they understand. When I work with clients, I build their reports bespoke. So we talk to them about what things they want to see, what things are most valuable to them, will work with them. Before I've had clients who maybe the project ended it, they wanted me to make them a new report separately even though I wasn't working on the project anymore because it's really important. Mordy Oberstein: With that, we have Lucy Dodds, who's a Senior SEO Strategist over at Evolved Search to share with us her top tips for building trust, cause that's what we're talking about. This whole episode basically is building trust. Keeping your clients, if you want to boil it down to it, it's building trust with your SEO clients. So here's Lucy Dodds and her top tips to build trust with SEO clients. Lucy Dodds: For me, the best way to build trust is through a content hub. These hubs give you a great opportunity to become a trusted resource for your users. In fact, the only resource they'll ever need to use when they're researching your products or services. Your content hub is there to satisfy your audiences every need of the marketing funnel, including pre and post purchase stages. So you can embed yourselves in their sales journey. The best content hubs put the brand at the forefront of their customer's minds by building that trust, which in the long-term results in sales and repeat business. And although we call it a content hub, it actually encompasses all parts of SEO, which means your technical on-site content and digital PR records are all aligned working together towards that one goal. But let's break that down. So the technical SEOs will start out and build the foundations for your content hub. They ensure that all the content is housed in the correct sub folders coming from your commercial page, and not just left in a blog forgotten about. This helps to ensure any value from traffic or link building is only funneled into that one commercial pitch, which they'll also be managing through some very controlled internal linking. Then we have the onsite content itself. We're going to be answering long-tail queries about the products or services that this business offers with more unique and informative content. We're integrating product experience, we're using internal statistics, we're creating genuine video reviews. Building trust by using authentic contact that's much better than any AI can scrape from another source. Users can find the content through search when looking up the long-tail query, and it's your job to ensure they leave your site feeling like you are the best and most trustworthy resource, so when the time comes to buy they remember you. And finally, the digital PRs are going to make this content, and therefore your brand, more visible. Of course, there's always room for big creative link building campaigns, but actually you can get a lot of value from outreaching this informational helpful content. With the rising cost of living, pandemic, and other global worries, many journalists are looking for ways to support their readership with helpful content. So say we have a piece of informational guide content on cleaning a mattress. The digital PR can still make some headlines from that, like "How to Cheaply Clean your Mattress", or how to do it naturally with household goods. Probably not an award-winning campaign sure, but does it genuinely help users? Absolutely. Reactive commentary works in the same way. When your sites in-house expert offers insight into an event that's happening in the world, that allows the digital PR to get your brand out there while helping users and forming trust with them at the same time. So, we have the best informational content which strengthens our sites authority on the products or services we offer, and also means we don't look overly salesy. We have our brand building efforts through digital PR to pose in-house experts as the most knowledgeable people on a topic. And then we have the optimal technical setup to ensure all value from backlinks and organic traffic is being passed to our key commercial page, so we'll rank better too. And that's what a content hub is a great way to build trust because it gives you the opportunity to bring your SEO efforts together to become the greatest resource for your audience. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Lucy. That was really interesting and quite insightful for our audience. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's starting from a really good place. Lucy comes from an agency which is renowned for SEO. Evolve Search is an award-winning agency, and so she knows exactly how to work with clients and how to keep clients happy. Wise words from Lucy, she's a great follower as well, so follow her @lucyalicedodds on Twitter. She's got some great information about client management, about SEO, and she's worth checking out. Mordy Oberstein: So with that client management, as you just mentioned, one, is obviously not easy, but two, it's obviously not unique to SEO. A lot of the principle, like client management, have nothing to do with SEO, just being good at managing clients. So with that, we're privileged to know some really amazing folks here at Wix, and in this particular case, these folks, we have to meet with them quite often so I know firsthand that they're awesome. They do also have an amazing SEO background, so we thought, wouldn't it be cool to learn more about client management, and client success, and driving client success, and having clients feel valued and taken care of, and how to do all of that from people who also know the SEO world all at the same time. It's all coming together. One magnificent storm of perfect awesomeness. So let's explore our client success with an all product advisement team as we go across the Wixverse with our own Clay Kemp and Sean Delgado. Speaker 6: 3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: Hey Clay. Hey Sean. Thanks for coming on to the podcast, guys. Clay Kemp: How's it going, Mordy? Sean Delgado: How's it going? Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: So you both work to help our clients feel, I'll call it valued and taken care of. What goes into what y'all do and how do you approach it? Clay Kemp: Yeah. So on the product advisor team, we actually have a bunch of our top partners, top users, some of our best users on the Wix platform. We really jump into help our team Account Managers when certain users on Wix need to learn more about SEO, or even have some troubleshooting issues. So if they need help doing some redirects, they're doing a site migration, or if we're just getting them up to speed on all the new changes that are constantly rolling out with the Wix platform, like the new SEO home dashboard or whatever it might be. We kind of have those two arms to our team. So whether it's making them successful through product and education, or that troubleshooting side that's kind of where we step in. Mordy Oberstein: So the troubleshooting side is interesting to me, because I feel at that point the client's on the fence. It can go either really, really well or any second it can break out into all sorts of frustration and chaos. Clay Kemp: Indeed. Sean Delgado: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: I think Sean was like, "Yes." And it's understandable, because it's something that's complicated, it's something that's frustrating that you're trying to get your business going, your site going. So what's important to keep in mind in those moments, Sean, when you are dealing with something that it's really complicated, it's really frustrating, and you just want to make sure that the person understands that you have them, you have their back, and no matter how complicated it's going to get, you're going to be there for them. How do you walk that line? Sean Delgado: Yeah. It's a tough line to walk, but I think patience comes into play and also just being open and honest comes into play. I think it's important to really get as much information from the user as you can, just having a good backstory and a good background from where the problem started, what issues they're facing, what these issues are causing for them, the troubles that they're causing, whether it's just on the website or their business itself. I think understanding that is really, really important, but then taking the time to go through everything that they brought up and everything that might be the issue. Doing really good audits on the website and audits on troubleshooting things on your own time, just making copies of websites, going through things, making sure that things are working properly. I think it's really important to make sure that you listen to them, talk it through, show them what you're doing. If in that session we don't get a full answer, reassuring them that, "Listen, we will do our work on our end. Make sure that you know are heard, you are understood, and you're not going to be forgotten just because that our session is up. It's a continuous thing and we're going to keep working to make sure that that issue is solved." Crystal Carter: Certainly with some of the discussions with partners I know that you have some bespoke communication tools that you use, I know you've got a few dashboards and things that you help to keep people aware of what's going on and how things are progressing. Can you talk a little bit more about communication methods? Certainly I know from my client side working, making bespoke things for communication requirements can be useful. Can you and expand on that or share any stories around that? Clay Kemp: Yeah, so I think keeping clients engaged is really a holistic process, at least where we sit. We sit in a unique spot between, I guess you could say product and then the actual clients themselves, so we come in as the subject matter experts. There's a lot of different channels of communication between. We sometimes help with webinars, we have a lot of different email campaigns that could be highly automated sometimes based on their behavior, even, just to empower them based on what they're doing within the platform. Then also very tailored approaches. It could be something slightly exclusive at times, like if they want to join this specific small group training, that's something that we will do from time to time. If there's a small cohort of partners, for example, like you're talking about Crystal, that I think have a stronger need to get up to speed on this tool to empower their business. I think the most impactful thing, and I don't want to get ahead of myself, but within all this communication is really just continuing to ask those questions when we're in our one-on-one consultations themselves, which is what Sean was referencing, is just doing the discovery. I think the number one way that we make clients successful is just by continuously asking those questions, because everyone's goal is going to be a little different. We can't come in with a totally templated approach or too much automation or anything, but really just asking them, "What are you doing with your agency right now, and what are your goals from let's say 2023? Or what are your goals for the next few months?" And really digging into those on a client by client basis. Mordy Oberstein: Hearing that, and especially in working with both of you, the term that comes to mind is you both seem like advocates of the client. I'll have cases, for example, where Sean will come to me and say, "Hey, what's going on with this on the SEO side? What's happening with that?" And it really feels that you are an advocate for the client. It goes back to what you were talking about before, and we actually talked about this earlier in the show, it's not about avoiding problems. There's going to be problems, but it's a matter of when you're trying to retain clients, about showing the client that even though there is a problem, you're there for them and you're an advocate for them to get the problem solved. I feel both of you do that. Particularly, Sean, we work closely on stuff together where it does legitimately feel like you're an advocate for the client. Sean Delgado: Right. A hundred percent. I think any client feels that, and if it's an actual genuine want to help someone, I think they feel that and understand that. So whether it is something that you're solving in that moment or later on, like you said, me and you work together, I'll reach out to members of different teams if it involves something differently. We go that extra mile because we want to make sure that that client is happy in the end. We want to make sure that they feel heard, feel wanted, and feel needed in everything that they're asking and everything that they want. So, I think it is important to remember that we're here to help, we're not just here to go through our days just to go through them. We're here to help and actually give people the answers and tools that they need to succeed in their business and in their life. Crystal Carter: I think nobody likes feeling like they've asked for help and somebody's ticking a box. "Check, check. Yes" And you're like, "Oh my God." And they're like, "Press number three." And you're like, "I'd like to talk to a human being, please." Clay Kemp: Exactly. We're here to take those in. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. I think that it is something that builds a lot of trust. I think Clay, you also talked about nurturing people and in a sort of education space, training people up on things that they need training on. I think particularly when you're working in a digital space, whether you're working in a B2B space like you are, or working client side, or even if you're working with customers even, where they're trying to learn how to use your product or a complimentary tool, for instance, one of the things you find is that in digital marketing, very often they're working with something completely new. So there's a brand new tool or brand new feature that exists and there isn't training for it so you have to be that trainer, and in order to help make sure that the client is successful with this new tool that you've either advised them to have or that you are giving them you, that should be part of your mix and part of an expected process for your agency or for your client management thing. I don't know, did you ever consider or did you ever expect that you'd end up being a trainer in your job? Clay Kemp: Yeah. Actually, that's one of the things that I love the most about this role, because I've sat at the enterprise in-house side doing the analyst day to day. While I actually really did love it, I kind of realized that I wanted to teach people, cause part of what I was actually doing at the time was doing a lot of cross-departmental trainings or, let's say, more of our content strategy or our copywriter team. I would sit in on blog meetings and then I would give them some those targets for that quarter or that month. Then also just some 100 level and 200 level training, so that SEO became more of a mindset across the company and not just in our little small department over in the corner. I think that's when I realized that I just love teaching people and empowering them to use product, and especially SEO, because I think with SEO there's a lot of at times gray areas, I will say that, and I think debunking some of those and just clearing some of that up is just a really fulfilling thing. It's great to see that among Wix users, and partners, and clients over here as well. Mordy Oberstein: What better way than to end here. That was perfect. Guys, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and keep it up. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Clay. It's great to be able to bring their expertise to the podcast, cause I learn so much from them every time we actually meet. Looking forward to seeing them over at Brighton. So we're going to be at Brighton, by the way, BrightonSEO in April. Clay and Sean just let me know. Crystal is surprised. Yeah, they're coming. Crystal Carter: I'm very surprised. Yay. Mordy Oberstein: Yay, right? Crystal Carter: They're both great folks. Mordy Oberstein: They're awesome. Crystal Carter: Absolutely fantastic and so, so enthusiastic about making sure that Wix partners do amazing things and that clients of Wix do amazing things. It's a very Wix. Mordy Oberstein: So if you'll be there, say hi to Clay, and say hi to Sean. Nice. You know what else is news, is Crystal coughing. Crystal Carter: Sorry. Mordy Oberstein: You know what else might be news for you, Crystal. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: The Snappy News. Crystal Carter: The Snappy N`ews. Mordy Oberstein: Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Here's what's happened in the world of SEO outside of AI writers. Just kidding, this is all about AI writers, because Bing made a few interesting announcements over at Pubcon, the SEO conference, about its AI chat experience. First off, they said SEO is not dead. So thank God, I was worried for a second. They also said impressions, clicks, and so forth that come to your site from their AI chat experience you'll be able to see them inside of Bing's webmaster tools at some point. Meaning you'll have real data about if or if not AI chat is hurting or helping your site from organic traffic point of view. Very cool and very transparent of Bing. Not to worry though, Google's Gary Ilia said, also at Pubcon... Wow, so many things going on at Pubcon about AI chat... That Google's Bard will also have its own unique way of sending traffic to sites, as there were initial concerns about Google's Bard when Google announced Google's Bard as there were no citations to other websites. So have no fear. Less fear? Let's go with no fear. We're going to go with no fear. Have no fear. This comes, by the way, on the heels of Bing saying that they have finished an update to their AI chat systems to make them more likely that the chat will return an answer and reduce what Bing is calling "hallucination answers", which sounds fun, but I'm glad they're gone, I guess. Coming on the heels of this, geez, everyone is stepping on everyone's heels these days. Anyway, on the heels of this Brave announce its own AI powered chat experience is live on its own search engine. AI is everywhere and not a drop of accuracy to spare. I jest, but there are some accuracy issues that I have seen. So please be careful when using the AI chat experiences on the various search engines to make sure that the information they're showing you is up-to-date and as accurate as possible. With that, that is this week's Snappy News. Now, wasn't that jus the snappiest of news for you? Crystal Carter: It was so snappy. The snappiest Snappy News. Mordy Oberstein: Snap. It was news. Crystal Carter: Oh, Snap! Mordy Oberstein: Which brings us to the last little part of our humble little episode, which is who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness, which brings us to a very, very special person who knows a lot about managing clients because he is the founder of the UK's largest specialist SEO agency, also known as Blue Array. He is Simon Schnieders. Crystal Carter: Simon is fantastic. I spoke at the London SEO Meetup XL last year and met Simon, spent a good amount of time with Simon, and he's just fantastic. Blue Array is a great agency who has a free SEO course available to anyone who would like to check that out. They're a great agency, and Simon at the helm does some amazing things. I think that managing clients, looking after clients, is absolutely crucial to making sure that agencies perform well and grow. I think retaining your clients, whether you're a freelancer or an agency, is absolutely critical. Absolutely crucial. I hope that this episode has been useful to people who are looking to do that, and follow Simon for more. Thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Simon's on LinkedIn predominantly. He also has a newsletter he puts out with Blue Array, so we'll link to that in the show notes, and is a great follow on LinkedIn. Do you follow on LinkedIn? How does that work? Yeah, you do follow people on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: You can follow. You can follow, you can also connect. Mordy Oberstein: Follow and then connect, yes. I know. I do LinkedIn, but I just repurpose all my Twitter stuff for LinkedIn. Simon does put out a lot of thought-provoking posts on LinkedIn, so he is a wonderful follow on LinkedIn for you. Of course, we'll link to his profile and the newsletter that you have over at Blue Array in the show notes, which means that hopefully we've retained you to this point. Crystal Carter: We have. We have. Mordy Oberstein: We go all the way back around. We've clearly communicated with you so that you feel that we have embedded trust in our listener-host relationship. Crystal Carter: Exactly. And we set expectations that the podcast would end, and now it will. Mordy Oberstein: And now it will. 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 the new episode and a special guest as we dive into how will chat GPT change search and the web forever. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on the SEO learning over on wix.com/seo/learn. Looking for a little more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning 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, love, and SEO. 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Back Looker Studio SEO report template Communicate SEO results and get stakeholder buy-in for future strategies with this customizable report. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this resource to: Customize your performance easily Integrate with leading reporting tools Format your data clearly Sophie Brannon Director of SEO, RushOrderTees LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Sophie Brannon is the Director of SEO at RushOrderTees . With agency, in-house, and freelance experience, she has led strategy, implementation, and communication for everything from local campaigns to multi-language international campaigns in the UK, US, and Australia. She’s an industry speaker and author, award-winner, and led the Web Almanac 2022 SEO chapter. More about this topic Read this post on how to create effective SEO reports on the Wix SEO Hub blog for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Does needing a refresher make you a bad SEO? No! Every SEO needs to revisit and familiarize themselves with certain aspects of SEO. Renew and refresh yourself this week as Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are your guides toward refreshing your SEO knowledge. Explore how remastering past skills can enhance your professional journey. Seer Interactive founder and CEO, Wil Reynolds, chimes in to share why you should be proactive about refreshing and refining your professional expertise. When was the last time you considered refreshing and revamping your brand? Mordy and Crystal share a deep thought into diagnosing the problems within your own brand identity. Whether it’s design language, logo, or the brand as a whole, it may be time to consider a refresher. Grab your backpacks as we’re going back to school to learn the importance of refreshing your SEO skills this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Even SEO pros need a refresher Does needing a refresher make you a bad SEO? No! Every SEO needs to revisit and familiarize themselves with certain aspects of SEO. Renew and refresh yourself this week as Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are your guides toward refreshing your SEO knowledge. Explore how remastering past skills can enhance your professional journey. Seer Interactive founder and CEO, Wil Reynolds, chimes in to share why you should be proactive about refreshing and refining your professional expertise. When was the last time you considered refreshing and revamping your brand? Mordy and Crystal share a deep thought into diagnosing the problems within your own brand identity. Whether it’s design language, logo, or the brand as a whole, it may be time to consider a refresher. Grab your backpacks as we’re going back to school to learn the importance of refreshing your SEO skills this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 57 | September 27, 2023 | 40 MIN 00:00 / 40:19 This week’s guests Wil Reynolds Wil Reynolds is the Founder and CEO at Seer Interactive, one of the most highly regarded digital marketing agencies in the U.S. A former teacher with a knack for advising, Wil is passionate about helping people and businesses grow. He's been helping Fortune 500 companies develop SEO and digital marketing strategies since 1999. Wil started Seer Interactive in 2002 after his boss wouldn’t let him volunteer on his lunch break. A philanthropist at heart, he had the first few Seer team members sign contracts committing to giving back to the community. In 2022, that throughline comes in a recommitment by providing $15MM in community impact over the next 10 years. 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. You're going to got 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 she who is all knowledgeable all the time, never needs a refresh about anything ever, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, Mordy Oberstein. How are you today? I am appreciating your introduction as ever, very kind view. Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's refreshing, isn't it? Crystal Carter: I feel refreshed. I feel like I'm seeing things in a new light. I feel like maybe things are becoming more clear and that after approaching it from a different direction, I can see it afresh. Mordy Oberstein: I'm like your Sprite, I'm refreshing. Crystal Carter: I was really big into Sprite in the nineties because they were really big into basketball. They were just like, "Yeah, Sprite has to do with basketball." And I was like, "Yeah, I love basketball." It was like peak Michael Jordan and Space Jam and Dream Team. Mordy Oberstein: Obey your thirst. Image is nothing, something something is everything, obey your thirst. Crystal Carter: They had a bottle cap contest that was huge. Mordy Oberstein: That's right, the yellow bottle caps. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that was a big campaign. Also a big marketing campaign was the McDonald's Monopoly thing. Do you remember that? Mordy Oberstein: I do remember that. Do you remember the McDonald's Off the Hoop though? Crystal Carter: No, I don't remember that one. Mordy Oberstein: Or am I confusing Sprite and McDonald's? Larry Bird and Michael Jordan shooting these crazy shots. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I do remember that campaign, that was a good campaign. Mordy Oberstein: So much good, the nineties is the best decade other than the eighties, I kind of lean a little bit more eighties, nineties campaigns. Regardless, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight, which goes out each month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can get automatic alerts about significant traffic changes to your site right inside of Wix. Why? Because we all forget stuff. My kids forget things all the time. They forget to put the milk away, dirty clothes away, anything away really. Regardless of my kids, we could all use a refresher every once in a while about SEO, which is why today we're talking about why everyone from an SEO pro to someone new to SEO sometimes needs to refresh their SEO knowledge. We're talking why SEO lends itself to needing refreshers, how to know if you need an SEO refresher, how to re-familiarize yourself with an SEO topic once you know you need a little refresher because you're a little bit rusty with it. Also, Seer Interactive's CEO Wil Reynolds stops by to share how relearning things has helped him advance in his professional life. Plus, we'll go deep into how to refresh your brand and how SEO can help. And of course we have the snappiest of SEO news of who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So like Coke's slogan of 1924, I should gone called Sprite looking back at it now, whatever like Coke slogan of 1924, refresh yourself as episode number 57 of the SERP's Up podcast, like Coke's 1904 slogan, is going to both be delicious and refreshing so that by the time we're done with you, like Coke's 1959 slogan, it'll be really refreshed. I come up with my own slogan, but as you can tell, you can't beat the real thing. So catch the wave and more Coke slogans, I could go on forever. First off, the fact that they have so many slogans that deal with being refreshed is amazing. Go look at their history because they have endless amount of slogans. It's amazing. Crystal Carter: Another similar one is the Google logo. The Google logo, it's changed, but it really hasn't changed the entire time. It's always been sort of those colors and they've just very finely refined the font as they've gone along until we got to the sort of more, I guess, Helvetica kind of style of font from something before that was very Timesy, et cetera. So just ever so finely done it, and in fact, Wix just refreshed their logo as well. Mordy Oberstein: Everybody's refreshed now. Crystal Carter: Oh, everybody's feeling refresh. Mordy Oberstein: I forgot we refreshed our logo. That's right, we got rid of the dot in the I, now it's just one stick. Crystal Carter: Exactly, exactly. And also I think they slimmed down a little bit in parts of it as well. So yeah, normally I think it's a sign that something's changed a little bit and maybe you want to sort of take a new approach, but at the same time you want to stay true to who you are. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, we'll talk about that actually in a little bit because we're talking about brands and how to know when to refresh and how to go about diagnosing the refresh. So we'll get to all of this. But first, SEO is a lot. So we're talking about refreshing your SEO knowledge, every once in a while you need a refresher, and there's a lot of reasons why that is. First of, like I just mentioned, SEO is a lot. There's a lot of topics from local SEO to technical SEO to content to links. There's a wide gamut of knowledge that you need to have at least some level of familiarity depending upon what area of SEO you touch on, if not all of them. And SEO is constantly changing whether it be AI or Google updates or new guidelines or updates to previous guidelines or new systems that Google has or new ways of utilizing those systems that Google has gone about, there's a constant stream of changes that come along with SEO. On top of all of that, there are small little details that sometimes really, really matter and sometimes you forget those small details because literally buried deep, deep, deep within the recesses of Google's guidance and Google's guidelines and their documentation. On top of all of that, SEO is siloed. So you might spend most of your time doing local SEO or you might spend very little of your time doing local SEO, and one day having a local SEO situation, you're like, "Whoa, wait a second, I don't remember because I don't really do a lot of local SEO until today, until right now," so you'll need a refresh. Then on top of all of that, we're all just human, so we all kind of forget things every once in a while, literally happens to me all the time. And I'm not unusual, well, I am unusual, but I'm not unusual in this regard. I cannot tell you by the way to that, there's so many times where if I've asked Barry Schwartz, "Is this new?" The SERP itself changes. How Google constructs the results page, the features they show, they might add a new feature, take away a feature which has been done many times before, or they might reformat a feature or redesign the SERP or change an ad label or change this or change that and people will go on Twitter and ask Barry Schwarz, who we feature every week on the SEO news, "Hey Barry, is this new?" And literally there have been times I'll be, "Hey, Barry is this new?" And he goes, "No, and you are the one who found that it wasn't new three years ago," and I had totally forgotten. So my point is, yeah, it's a little embarrassing when that happens to me, there are a lot of reasons why everyone from the most knowledgeable SEO to someone new to SEO is going to need to refresh their SEO knowledge. There's really no way around it. But yeah, that's embarrassing, that's happened multiple times with Barry. Crystal Carter: To be fair, you ask Barry if things are new a lot so the chances that you've asked it before are fairly high in that regard. Sometimes you can schedule to check that something needs a refresh, like maybe a skillset set or maybe sometimes it's set for a schedule. So for instance, Google Ads, if you've got Google Ad Certified, or at least back in the day when you got Google Ad Certified, there would be a time limit on your certification and they'd be like, "Hey, well in two years you're going to have to retake this test." Driver's licenses can be that way as well and they'll say, "You got to retake this test." Why? Because things will change. Performance Max, for instance, is very different from the sort of original Google Ads set up. If you have a Google Analytics Certification from two years ago, it's not going to be worth anything in the days of GA4, for instance. So sometimes there's going to be certifications and they will have a time limit. Similarly, people who are managing content, I know that the blog team here, for instance, has a date that they schedule to go back and refresh that content, to have a look at that content and make sure that it still makes sense, that it's still accurate and things like that. Because as you said, it's constantly changing. There'll be new competitors, there'll be new SERP features, there'll be new capabilities on your platform or within your team. For instance, it may be a year ago you didn't have somebody that was able to speak technically about certain things, maybe now you do have somebody who can speak technically about things. Maybe a year ago you didn't have somebody who was doing a lot of video, but now you do have somebody who's able to do a lot of video. So that can be something as well. Externally, there can be new regulations that come up or new requirements. So something like GDPR was a prime example. In the EU everybody had to sort of go like, "Okay, well we need to rethink how we approach this whole situation." And then in the US there's some websites who were just like, "Actually, we're just going to not let people from the EU come to our webpage." So that's a way to think about it as well. So I think that it's worth remembering don't take anything for granted in terms of what you know. I had a conversation with someone recently and they had some very firm opinions about core web vital stuff, and I was like, "Google changed it. They changed their opinion on core web vitals and it's not as cut and dry as it was before." It's A TLDR, complicated is what I'm saying. Mordy Oberstein: We actually covered that on the podcast a couple episodes ago with Brittany Muller. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So sometimes you need to just go back over and see what's changed because external things are happening. And I think that when I know that it's time for that, it's essentially when you hear that there's a change that you're unfamiliar with or when you're starting to see that maybe people who are taking a different approach are getting different or better results than you. So if you look up and you're seeing that lots of people who are eligible for a certain type of rich result are showing at the top of the SERP, then maybe you should refresh that content that shows on there. Or for instance, Google will sometimes update their seat staying in the rich results area, Google will sometimes update their requirements for rich results ever so slightly So that- Mordy Oberstein: Right, but that small thing can have big implications. Crystal Carter: Right, precisely. So that means that you've got to go back through and you've got to see how big of a deal is this? Is it a big deal? Is it not a big deal? Is this something that needs to be done absolutely right now or is this something that we can sort of put on the back burner for a little bit while we get the resources for it? I think that that's really useful to think about it. And in terms of prioritizing, again, it has to do with resources. If I think about like redecorating my house, for instance, I'll be honest, the wallpaper in my living room could definitely do with a refresh, but I literally cannot be assed. I don't want to have to go and look at swatches of wallpaper. Mordy Oberstein: And then pulling it off, ugh. Crystal Carter: I just don't want to. And so yeah, it could do with the refresh, absolutely, but I don't want to so I'm not going to. But my windows in my house, for instance, they did need some updating because yeah, it was cold. And so I was like, "Okay, well, we need to fix these," because the necessity. Mordy Oberstein: You have to do that. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And there's been cases, like I'm trying to think, updates to structured data markup, right? So what makes you eligible to appear as a rich result. And for example, I'm going to say two years ago, Google made a change to what is required to show up as a rich result for events. And if you have no events on your website, you'd be like, "Ah, I'll get to that later." But if you are a heavy event website, then you need to get on that. By the way, for the record, the Wix sites already had that taken care of for them. We already built it in, it was part of our best practices. We had a do nothing, and if it was, then we would've added it and you would've had the do nothing plug. It's our podcast, we can plug Wix. But it kind of highlights the point to me of why you need to read the SEO news because first off, social media is a little bit less reliable relative to the past for these kind of things. It used to be you would go on Twitter, the SEO community was very active, three seconds flat, you'd realize something's up. It's not the same anymore. It is to a certain extent if it's a Google update, but the smaller things I think slip through the cracks more often than they used to so I wouldn't rely on social for this anymore, but I would go to say seproundtable.com, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, especially seoroundtable.com, where Barry covers all of the small things, whereas Search Engine Land will cover a lot of the big stories, or SEJ will cover the big stories, Barry covers every little thing that changes on seoroundtable.com, and it's super important. Crystal Carter: I was just going to shout out to Barry because whenever, and we've definitely had a "Nuh-uh, yuh-uh, nuh-uh, yuh-uh," about Google, about like, "Oh, Google said this," "No, they said that," "Well, no, they said this, or this changed or that changed." And honestly, the service that Barry does with documenting the little changes and the evolution of different changes, for instance, so it's an incredible resource that he provides there. So for instance, if you want to know the evolution of featured snippets, for instance, you can go on SEO Roundtable and you can see how featured snippets have evolved since 2016, since they were starting testing them, since they were moving things through this, since they were doing that sort of thing. And you can go, "Are featured snippets machine learning powered?" And then you'll say, "Yeah, from 2014," they'll say, "Back in the day they said yes, they are powered by machine learning," et cetera, et cetera, and it's an incredible resource. So yeah, I cannot recommend enough because the other thing is that Google, for instance, they don't always store their pages. So if they change the page, you could go and look in a way back machine, for instance, but you can't necessarily see the change on the page. So for instance, the ranking systems page recently changed to remove core web vitals as a ranking system, but they added it as a ranking signal on the helpful content thing. But if you go to the ranking systems page, there's no mention of it, there's no mention of the change, you can't see the record of it. However, if you go on Search Engine Roundtable, then you can see the whole conversation and the whole evolution of all of that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he reports everything. And featured snippets is a great example because some of the changes that Google just makes to the format of them can have big implications. For example, Google, I don't have a timeline, say the last six, seven months has started showing more multiple URLs within feature snippets. So not just you ask a question, "How much does a cow weigh?" I don't know. And you get an answer back in a feature snippet. Now you can have multiple URLs, multiple snippets, kind of like what Bing does, but you wouldn't know that unless you either see it out in there in the wild or you're keeping up with what Barry's writing or you're going back and looking, "Okay, I need to refresh about feature snippets because I'm really focused on them right now. Let me see what Barry's covered in the last few months." That is a great way to refresh. And I just want to pivot a little bit and point out, there's no stigma about needing a refresh. And anyone who says, "Oh, you needed a refresh on that? Whoa, what kind of SEO are you?" Is, A, not a nice person, and B, completely wrong because it happens to everyone. Crystal Carter: Everyone, everyone. People talk about SEO experts and SEO beginners and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Everyone's a beginner at something, everyone's a beginner at something. And definitely a lot of people in SEO are specialists, and that's totally great, that's totally fine. And you mentioned this before, that it can be siloed where you work a lot in local SEO for instance, or you work a lot in enterprise maybe, or you work a lot in technical SEO sort of stuff. So maybe you work a lot in technical SEO and maybe content stuff ain't your thing particularly so you might need to start from the beginning of sort of understanding the elements that you need to do in order to get some results in terms of content or in terms of whatever it is that you have a skill gap. And I think that that's fine. And I think also, even if you aren't necessarily running the project directly, so let's say you were somebody who has a technical SEO specialism and you're leading a project because you're adept at leading projects, but the project involves a lot of content staff, for instance. You need to, as a project leader, understand what's going on in that space. You maybe don't need to know every single detail of it, you maybe have somebody in your team who's working on it, but you need to be sort of up to date on what is useful. I think one of the other things that's really great is to check out conferences and podcasts like this and webinars and things for getting an idea of what the state-of-the art is. If you go to a conference and you see a talk about a topic that you've never heard of, check it out, check it out. It literally costs... I wouldn't say it costs you nothing because conferences do cost you something generally speaking, but you can sit there and if you're like, "Ah, this isn't for me," that's fine. If it is for you, then you go, "Oh, actually there's some things that you mentioned there that I hadn't considered, and maybe I can go back and I can fill in those gaps and get myself up to speed." And it's quite a good way to get a good overview before you do a sort of specific upskill. And that's my general approach is that I'll find some two-hour lecture from Cindy Krum and then figure out how to get myself to make sense of the different things that she's discussing there because she's super. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's exactly how I approach it. Sometimes there's a very specific thing that pops up, and this happens all the time, whether there's a particular SEO question or scenario that arises and you just, "I don't remember the answer to that, that was so specific, I did that five years ago." And you go and you research it and you find it. And then there's some cases where it's more of topical like, "I haven't dived into GVP in a long time, let me..." And for that, you want to find trusted sources. We spoke about this way early on in the podcast, but how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice. But I'll just harp on what we spoke about there for a second. Look for people that you trust, whether it's outlets like the Wix SEO Hub, or it's people like Cindy Krum. You want to make sure that the information that you're getting is, A, current, because there's a lot of people who are talking who are not current, and it is a little bit of a problem. So look for recommendations. If you don't know where to go, then find somebody you know on social, be like, "Hey, I'm looking for more about local SEO, could you send me a few resources?" Literally you can ask us on social media, we'd be happy to direct you. But people will generally answer you and it'd be helpful, just make sure you're looking at the right resources and trusted resources when you're trying to refresh on a topic. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think in terms of resources and tools and things, don't expect that a tool that you used like six months ago or a year ago is exactly the same. There are going to be constant iterations and updates for different SaaS tools all the time. So Facebook Ads in particular is a prime example. Literally if you leave Facebook Ads for two weeks, then you might have to come back and relearn the situation. So it's really important to keep on top of your tools that you're using. And yeah, let's say you weren't doing local SEO, and then you're back in local SEO, you're going to have to do a refresh on Google Business Profile. And I think it's really useful to find people who are product experts for some of those things. And I think there's a lot of people who stay on top of those... Probably the best resource that I would find, particularly for tactical and tools things is Aleyda. Aleyda is really, really, really adept at scanning what's going on in the industry and also resharing other folks' stuff. So somebody builds something cool, Aleyda will share it from her platform, she'll share links to it, she shares it in her SEO FOMO newsletter. I would highly recommend it, particularly for tools things, that she's a good one to follow and to sort of signpost you to other people who are good to follow. Mordy Oberstein: Now because we wanted to show you that everyone needs a refresh every once in a while, we went out and we found one of the biggest SEO OGs of all time to talk about how going back and relearning and getting refresh has helped him as a professional. Here is Seer's founder and CEO, the one, the only Wil Reynolds on how going back and relearning something helped him as a professional. Wil Reynolds: So how has going back and relearning something helped me as a professional? I once decided to spend a year not reading any new books and only rereading old books. And the way that that helped me is a lot of the books that I read that I really loved 10, 15 years ago, my career and the business was in one place then. So I actually took a lot of different things out of the book or the set of books because now the business and my career are in a different place. So what I kind of learned from that, and I strongly recommend to a lot of people, is consider taking a book that you enjoyed reading, but it's been five or 10 years ago, and the way the world comes at us, probably five is fine, and then re-listen to it again and see if you get very different things out of it based on the place that you're in at the current moment. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Wil. Make sure you give Wil a follow over on Twitter at W-I-L R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S, Wil Reynolds, we'll lead to his profile in the show notes. First off, forget as an SEO, as a marketing professional, just as a person, that is a great point. But going back to the SEO marketing side of things, it is a really true point that why you shouldn't just wait for the refresh but actively look to refresh, actively let's say go through Google's documentation again, have another look at it because what you take away from it now, five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years into being an SEO, into being a digital marketer is going to be different than what you took away from it that first time you read it when you were first on your SEO journey, that kind of thing. So it's a great point to as to why you should be proactive about refreshing your SEO knowledge. Really cool. Crystal Carter: I couldn't agree more. And I think that he was talking about place in your business, in your career, but I think also in your skillset, you are constantly building your skillset as a digital marketer. So it might be that six months ago when you read it, you were reading it from a content point of view, and maybe now you've got a real good handle on like page SEO or something like that and so you go back to a really good piece of text and you're like, "Ah, actually I can see this, this, and this." The Quality Rater Guidelines is a really, really good example of that. So the quality rater guidelines are available from Google and they're extensive and they change every year. If you troll around, you can find older copies of it. But what's interesting is going through and looking at the different things that they're asking for and looking at the different things that they're looking at. And when you have one set of skills, you'll say, "Okay, well we could do this, we could do that, we could do that," and then if you go forward, you can add more things to it. And this is similar I think with clients. So when working with clients, we would always set a time for R&D so we'd maybe set out six months of planned activity and then at the end of that six months, we re-audit, right? We refresh our perspective on where we are with the client, with the website, with the web project, whatever it may be. And based on that, we would take a new position, a new approach, or refine our approach because again, we have new skills, we have new things. So yeah, absolutely. And revisiting things that you loved is great. I always really enjoy listening to jazz, for instance. And if you listen to a jazz quartet, maybe one time you listen to the saxophonist and then maybe the next time you listen to the drummer and the next time you listen to the person playing the piano or something, and you will find different things in different parts of it. It's a great way to approach content that you love. And yeah, I think Wil's got some great points there. Mordy Oberstein: It's why I watched The Big Lebowski over and over and over again, different jokes every single time. Again, thank you so much, Wil. Make sure to give Wil a follow. Again, we'll link to his profile in the show notes. So speaking about refreshing and refamiliarizing yourself with whatever SEO topic we're talking about, one thing that very often comes up, we actually hit on it way early in the episode here, is refreshing your brand. And whether that be a visual update or an entire new brand identity or creating brand identity from the start even... Well, that's not refreshing, but you kind of know what I mean. Anyway, I thought it'd be cool to talk about how we can go through and refresh your brand as we get into a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. So I have a lot of thoughts about this. I feel like when you try to refresh your brand, let's say, let's make it an easy case, you have a problem, you have a branding problem. You're whatever company and you made a mistake, and I don't know, you positioned yourself in a way that it didn't really resonate with your audience. In fact, it backfired. Let's just go with that for a second. And I think we focus or we overfocus or overemphasize the fix, but I think the biggest problem is the diagnosis. I'll explain what I mean. So when you're trying to refresh your brand, I think the first thing you need to do is figure out, "Okay, do I need a refresh?" And as Crystal mentioned before, Wix, when we refreshed our logo, we sat down and someone at some point said, "You know what? Has design language shifted? It seems that design language has shifted and perhaps we're a little bit out of date, we should refresh our design language." And I'm assuming, I don't know firsthand, that's how the logo refresh for the Wix logo came about. And it really speaks to putting your finger on the pulse. You have to have your finger on the pulse when it comes to your brand. And that could be anything like I just mentioned, the design language or that could be just chatter about your brand and general sentiment around your brand. And there are tools out there that you can use that sort of monitor these things. But there really is no way around, in my personal humble opinion, having your finger on the pulse and really being in there, looking at what people are saying and really understanding what the environment is about for your brand. And then comes the most important thing which is diagnosis. Okay, let's go with the example you have a sentiment problem. Okay, great, where's the problem? What's the root of the problem? Is it how you relate to your audience? Is it perhaps there's a lack of cohesion with your own brand identity and people are confused and when people are confused, they end up being frustrated? Is it simply a lack of an evolution of your product? Forget the brand, the product hasn't evolved, right? And now you need to figure out how to deal with the branding because the product is the one that caused a problem to begin with. Whatever it is, the diagnosis is the most important part of the problem. Why is it happening? Why is there a problem with the brand? Or why do we need the refresh? What is exactly is the issue that we're trying to resolve and what caused it? Because you can't really diagnose the issue until you figure out what caused it and what's the root cause. And then the fix, and the fix to me is easy. Once you have the diagnosis, the fix should be obvious, "Oh, design language has shifted, our logo is now slightly out of date. Let us refresh the logo." Crystal Carter: It can be very tricky. I think also it's important to understand that the core of what you were saying was the finger on the pulse sort of element, and I think that that is something that's really, really important. I remember reading something, and I was unable to find it, but somebody was talking about, I think it was a post about how brands die. And it was talking essentially about how you can have brands where they're not paying attention to customer service stuff or they're not paying attention to customer sentiment, and by the time they do pay attention to customer sentiment, it's already gone past the point of fixing it. So you have to pay attention to the customer service, and you have to be actionable with those things. And I think it can be tricky sometimes diagnosing it. So for instance, sometimes you have a situation where people are like, "Oh, people don't like this, or people don't say good things." And sometimes the things that people are saying are not even accurate, sometimes the things people are saying aren't even accurate. So then when you're trying to diagnose it, why is it the case that people are able to say stuff that's inaccurate about your brand? Why is that the case? So when you think about the diagnosis, the issue isn't even necessarily what people are saying, it's a question of relationship. Mordy Oberstein: 1000%. Take Google, Google is a great example. People are saying, let's say Google and SEO, wrong things about what worked for SEO, what doesn't work for SEO for years, right? Going back to Matt Cutts who used to work at Google, I don't know, like 10 years ago at this point and people still kind of propagate these falsehoods we covered in another episode, Debunking SEO Myths, around what Google does and doesn't tend to prefer. And you could look okay what they're saying, and that's one thing, "Oh, LSI keywords are really important," which they're not, that's not true, it's a myth, but why are people saying that is the root cause. And that to me has to do with the fact that Google's algorithm is not 100% transparent because it can't be, A, it's impossible for it to be. And two, it wouldn't be a good idea for them to do because people will try to game the system. So now you have a situation where people are trying to feel a sense of control over things with a certain aura of mystery and clarity, that's not a real word, about what's actually happening here. And that lends itself to people looking for security in all of these things that they think work. And because Google is not being transparent because they can't be, it's not possible, it's a machine learning system, you don't know the algorithm, that breeds a certain mistrust. "Oh, Google, you're not telling me 100% what's in the algorithm because, oh, you're trying to lie to me," which they're not, it is they literally can't tell you what's in the algorithm. So there's this sort of weird mistrust which sort of propagates these myths and falsehoods that comes out why? Because of the way the algorithm is constructed, that's not possible to give over and Google shouldn't give it over because people will misuse that information. And that relationship now between some people out there in the SEO world and Google is one of mistrust, and that's the core symptom. Crystal Carter: And I think to counter that, Google since the days of Matt Cutts has done things like they've had the search liaison so you have Danny who's joined the team, you have John Mueller who's joined the team and would do Webmaster hangouts and stuff and chat to people about different things. And they've done a lot of stuff in their documentation to try to be fairly transparent about a lot of their stuff. But I think there was a realization that they needed to have an education piece and that they needed to have a direct relationship with the search community in order to make sure that people are getting good information and that know where to go when things are happening. So I think that that's a prime example of figuring out what the diagnosis is in order to make sure that you've got good channels to manage the brand well. And I think that the other thing that's interesting is that particularly with the search liaison thing, taking Google as an example, they have that conversation from their Google search central channels, they don't have those conversations from their Google channels on social media for instance. They have how search works, they have search on, they have Google I/O, they have various different events and activities and stuff, but they have specific channels that are dedicated to having conversations about their brand. And I think it is important to remember that when you're thinking about your brand and you're thinking about your brand refresh, sometimes it should also be a question of adding on to your brand. Maybe what you need is you have Batman, so if you think about Batman, you have Batman and there's like, "I'm Batman," Batman, right? Then you have Batman and Robin, right? And Batman and Robin is a different ballgame. Batman and Robin has a slightly different vibe than just Batman on his own. So sometimes it might be that you need a new strand, you needed a new angle to add to your brand so that people understand what's going on there, and so that you can dedicate information or dedicate time and resources in a focused way towards something that you care about. Just like in the same way that a normal person might be like, "Hey, yeah, on the weekends I do rock climbing." And you're like, "Oh, I didn't know that. I thought you were, I don't know, an accountant or something." It's like, "No, actually I'm also an amazing rock climber." And you have your rock climbing friends and they know that you do the rock climbing thing and that's a slightly different thing from what you do. So I think it is also a question of remembering that refreshing your brand can sometimes be adding onto your brand so that people can see the main parts of your brand in a new light as well. Mordy Oberstein: Great point. And it's kind of exactly what Google did. And if you see, Google really a diagnosed a problem, and they did a great job using John Mueller and Danny Sullivan and John in particular, really trying to combat that, "Hey, there's a certain level of mistrust for a variety of reasons that brewed, now we have to handle that." And the fix then becomes about, A, execution, which is not always easy, but it's really, "Okay, what we need to do next, we need to build trust." The next move should be easy after diagnosis, like, where do we go? Obvious where we go, the diagnosis naturally leads to it. And Google did a brilliant job with this. But it's really the point, I think when we think about brand marketing, we think, "Oh, creative idea around this, creative idea around that," that's true but that only comes after, in my opinion, the real branding work, which is diagnosis. And then you can get to all those crazy ideas and all those fun ideas and all that great stuff about how to implement the fix. Crystal Carter: And it can be hard, diagnosis can be hard, and- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's the hardest part. Crystal Carter: I don't mean just hard from a sort of like, "Oh, it's hard to find out," I mean also it can be painful. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. And by the way, no matter what, take Google for example, does everybody believe them now? No, you're not going to convince everybody. You need to have realistic expectations. There's always going to be people saying, "LSI keywords are a real thing, Google's lying." That's going to happen. Crystal Carter: But I think also sometimes you have to have some home truths. One of the things that John Mueller very often says is like sometimes SEO ain't the only answer, sometimes the issue is actually something to do with product or whatever it may be. Do you know what I mean? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. Crystal Carter: So sometimes you have to have some home truths. Like I broke my arm when I was 16, I ran into a parked car on my roller plates. Anyway, I broke my arm and I went to the emergency room, the ER, and they're like, "Oh, can you put your arm like this on the X-ray machine?" And I was like, "No, I cannot, I cannot." They were doing this so they could diagnose the problem, but it was painful for me because if I could do that, I wouldn't be in the emergency room in the first place. So anyway, but what I'm saying is it can be painful to have to look at yourself and go, "Why is this happening?" And maybe the issue is something to do with something that's going on with your brand in that maybe you actually need to do some fundamental changes to that. Mordy Oberstein: Well, no matter what changes your brand is going through, there's always something that's changed in the wider world of SEO so here's this week's Snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. First up, and mainly because it fell through the cracks of when I record these news segments, I try to balance out observing the Jewish holidays and recording these segments, the many articles from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable say there is a new helpful content update. It rolled out on September 15th, Barry covered it on Search Engine Roundtable. There was also a downtrend in some of the volatility on the 21st, which Barry also covered over at Search Engine Roundtable. It's hard to pinpoint what that volatility downgrade means as the whole volatility landscape over the last two months is out of whack. I have some wild conspiracy theories about that, but I try to only wear my tinfoil hat on Twitter so we're going to forego that for now. By the time you hear this, the update may already be over, making this old not new. So keep tabs by heading over to seoroundtable.com, as you always should for the latest and greatest on all the idiosyncrasies of the SEO world. Okay, article number two from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google confirms quality is foremost factor in search indexing. So Google has their podcast, Search off the Record, and they said quality, content quality, website quality is the most important thing. So it's official. We said it was meta descriptions, but clearly I was wrong. Joking, I never thought that, nor should anybody have ever thought that. Quality is obviously the most important thing for all things. Anyway, lastly, Barry did it again, the last time he complained, Bard didn't have any updates. Google released an update to Bard. Well, he did it again, he went on Twitter, started complaining, "Hey, there's never been an update in 465 days," I'm making that number up, and then Google updated Bard, which just shows you who's pulling the strings over at Google. Anyway, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google Search can now check Bard's answers. There's a whole slew of changes and updates that Google has made to Bard. These updates include Google telling you if the content in search results is similar to what Bard conjured up. That is very cool and interesting. They also expanded Bard into 40 new languages. There's a connection to Google Flights, hotels, et cetera, to help you get real time info. I tried the flight things, it gave me relevant information that was up-to-date. I just don't see how that's better than going to Google Flights where the experience is far more holistic and visual. But it's cool. And you can also see a connection or make a connection to your Google account so that you can pull in information from there into Bard. Google said they won't add the information that you connect to the wider Bard database. So that's good to know. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. Always so snappy, always so newsy, always so many changes every week, and it's part of, like we said, refreshing about your SEO knowledge, the SEO news, why we cover it. Crystal Carter: So newsy and so fresh, like a Mountain Dew, like a mountain breeze. Mordy Oberstein: Mountain Dew? Ugh, gross. Crystal Carter: No, I mean like dew on a mountain. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, like real Mountain Dew. Got it, got it. Not that disgusting stuff. No offense if you like Mountain Dew, but I clearly don't. But you know what I do like? I like Travis Tallent. Travis Tallent is our follow of the week, and you can follow him over on Twitter, or X now, I'm just going to keep calling it Twitter @TallentSpeaks. That's @T-A-L-L-E-N-T S-P-E-A-K-S over on Twitter, TallentSpeaks. He's a VP of SEO and Global Agency over at Brainlabs. He does a lot about branding and SEO, which is why he's our follow of the week because we're talking a lot about branding just now and SEO. So perfect follow for this week, Travis Tallent, check him out over on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, Travis is great. He's got some fantastic insights, and he's always just full of tons of energy about what's going on in search. So yeah, absolutely follow him. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. Well, that's it. We've reached the mountain of refreshment. Crystal Carter: Are we going to go to the fountain of knowledge? Mordy Oberstein: Every week. Crystal Carter: Every week? Mordy Oberstein: Every week on this podcast, it's the fountain. I'm just looking for the fountain of youth, the fountain of Knowledge, not my problem, it's the youth, that's what I'm in need of. Also the fountain of babysitters for my children for the summer vacation while we're recording this and oh boy. Well, on that happy note, 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 as we take up the future of SEO in 2024 in a very very special episode format. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Wil Reynolds Travis Tallent Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Seer Interactive SEO Fomo Newsletter Google's Quality Raters Guidelines News: Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update Current Impact & Volatility Google Confirms: Quality Is Foremost Factor In Search Indexing Google Search Can Now Check Bard's Answers Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Wil Reynolds Travis Tallent Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Seer Interactive SEO Fomo Newsletter Google's Quality Raters Guidelines News: Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update Current Impact & Volatility Google Confirms: Quality Is Foremost Factor In Search Indexing Google Search Can Now Check Bard's Answers 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. You're going to got 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 she who is all knowledgeable all the time, never needs a refresh about anything ever, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, Mordy Oberstein. How are you today? I am appreciating your introduction as ever, very kind view. Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's refreshing, isn't it? Crystal Carter: I feel refreshed. I feel like I'm seeing things in a new light. I feel like maybe things are becoming more clear and that after approaching it from a different direction, I can see it afresh. Mordy Oberstein: I'm like your Sprite, I'm refreshing. Crystal Carter: I was really big into Sprite in the nineties because they were really big into basketball. They were just like, "Yeah, Sprite has to do with basketball." And I was like, "Yeah, I love basketball." It was like peak Michael Jordan and Space Jam and Dream Team. Mordy Oberstein: Obey your thirst. Image is nothing, something something is everything, obey your thirst. Crystal Carter: They had a bottle cap contest that was huge. Mordy Oberstein: That's right, the yellow bottle caps. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that was a big campaign. Also a big marketing campaign was the McDonald's Monopoly thing. Do you remember that? Mordy Oberstein: I do remember that. Do you remember the McDonald's Off the Hoop though? Crystal Carter: No, I don't remember that one. Mordy Oberstein: Or am I confusing Sprite and McDonald's? Larry Bird and Michael Jordan shooting these crazy shots. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I do remember that campaign, that was a good campaign. Mordy Oberstein: So much good, the nineties is the best decade other than the eighties, I kind of lean a little bit more eighties, nineties campaigns. Regardless, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight, which goes out each month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can get automatic alerts about significant traffic changes to your site right inside of Wix. Why? Because we all forget stuff. My kids forget things all the time. They forget to put the milk away, dirty clothes away, anything away really. Regardless of my kids, we could all use a refresher every once in a while about SEO, which is why today we're talking about why everyone from an SEO pro to someone new to SEO sometimes needs to refresh their SEO knowledge. We're talking why SEO lends itself to needing refreshers, how to know if you need an SEO refresher, how to re-familiarize yourself with an SEO topic once you know you need a little refresher because you're a little bit rusty with it. Also, Seer Interactive's CEO Wil Reynolds stops by to share how relearning things has helped him advance in his professional life. Plus, we'll go deep into how to refresh your brand and how SEO can help. And of course we have the snappiest of SEO news of who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So like Coke's slogan of 1924, I should gone called Sprite looking back at it now, whatever like Coke slogan of 1924, refresh yourself as episode number 57 of the SERP's Up podcast, like Coke's 1904 slogan, is going to both be delicious and refreshing so that by the time we're done with you, like Coke's 1959 slogan, it'll be really refreshed. I come up with my own slogan, but as you can tell, you can't beat the real thing. So catch the wave and more Coke slogans, I could go on forever. First off, the fact that they have so many slogans that deal with being refreshed is amazing. Go look at their history because they have endless amount of slogans. It's amazing. Crystal Carter: Another similar one is the Google logo. The Google logo, it's changed, but it really hasn't changed the entire time. It's always been sort of those colors and they've just very finely refined the font as they've gone along until we got to the sort of more, I guess, Helvetica kind of style of font from something before that was very Timesy, et cetera. So just ever so finely done it, and in fact, Wix just refreshed their logo as well. Mordy Oberstein: Everybody's refreshed now. Crystal Carter: Oh, everybody's feeling refresh. Mordy Oberstein: I forgot we refreshed our logo. That's right, we got rid of the dot in the I, now it's just one stick. Crystal Carter: Exactly, exactly. And also I think they slimmed down a little bit in parts of it as well. So yeah, normally I think it's a sign that something's changed a little bit and maybe you want to sort of take a new approach, but at the same time you want to stay true to who you are. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, we'll talk about that actually in a little bit because we're talking about brands and how to know when to refresh and how to go about diagnosing the refresh. So we'll get to all of this. But first, SEO is a lot. So we're talking about refreshing your SEO knowledge, every once in a while you need a refresher, and there's a lot of reasons why that is. First of, like I just mentioned, SEO is a lot. There's a lot of topics from local SEO to technical SEO to content to links. There's a wide gamut of knowledge that you need to have at least some level of familiarity depending upon what area of SEO you touch on, if not all of them. And SEO is constantly changing whether it be AI or Google updates or new guidelines or updates to previous guidelines or new systems that Google has or new ways of utilizing those systems that Google has gone about, there's a constant stream of changes that come along with SEO. On top of all of that, there are small little details that sometimes really, really matter and sometimes you forget those small details because literally buried deep, deep, deep within the recesses of Google's guidance and Google's guidelines and their documentation. On top of all of that, SEO is siloed. So you might spend most of your time doing local SEO or you might spend very little of your time doing local SEO, and one day having a local SEO situation, you're like, "Whoa, wait a second, I don't remember because I don't really do a lot of local SEO until today, until right now," so you'll need a refresh. Then on top of all of that, we're all just human, so we all kind of forget things every once in a while, literally happens to me all the time. And I'm not unusual, well, I am unusual, but I'm not unusual in this regard. I cannot tell you by the way to that, there's so many times where if I've asked Barry Schwartz, "Is this new?" The SERP itself changes. How Google constructs the results page, the features they show, they might add a new feature, take away a feature which has been done many times before, or they might reformat a feature or redesign the SERP or change an ad label or change this or change that and people will go on Twitter and ask Barry Schwarz, who we feature every week on the SEO news, "Hey Barry, is this new?" And literally there have been times I'll be, "Hey, Barry is this new?" And he goes, "No, and you are the one who found that it wasn't new three years ago," and I had totally forgotten. So my point is, yeah, it's a little embarrassing when that happens to me, there are a lot of reasons why everyone from the most knowledgeable SEO to someone new to SEO is going to need to refresh their SEO knowledge. There's really no way around it. But yeah, that's embarrassing, that's happened multiple times with Barry. Crystal Carter: To be fair, you ask Barry if things are new a lot so the chances that you've asked it before are fairly high in that regard. Sometimes you can schedule to check that something needs a refresh, like maybe a skillset set or maybe sometimes it's set for a schedule. So for instance, Google Ads, if you've got Google Ad Certified, or at least back in the day when you got Google Ad Certified, there would be a time limit on your certification and they'd be like, "Hey, well in two years you're going to have to retake this test." Driver's licenses can be that way as well and they'll say, "You got to retake this test." Why? Because things will change. Performance Max, for instance, is very different from the sort of original Google Ads set up. If you have a Google Analytics Certification from two years ago, it's not going to be worth anything in the days of GA4, for instance. So sometimes there's going to be certifications and they will have a time limit. Similarly, people who are managing content, I know that the blog team here, for instance, has a date that they schedule to go back and refresh that content, to have a look at that content and make sure that it still makes sense, that it's still accurate and things like that. Because as you said, it's constantly changing. There'll be new competitors, there'll be new SERP features, there'll be new capabilities on your platform or within your team. For instance, it may be a year ago you didn't have somebody that was able to speak technically about certain things, maybe now you do have somebody who can speak technically about things. Maybe a year ago you didn't have somebody who was doing a lot of video, but now you do have somebody who's able to do a lot of video. So that can be something as well. Externally, there can be new regulations that come up or new requirements. So something like GDPR was a prime example. In the EU everybody had to sort of go like, "Okay, well we need to rethink how we approach this whole situation." And then in the US there's some websites who were just like, "Actually, we're just going to not let people from the EU come to our webpage." So that's a way to think about it as well. So I think that it's worth remembering don't take anything for granted in terms of what you know. I had a conversation with someone recently and they had some very firm opinions about core web vital stuff, and I was like, "Google changed it. They changed their opinion on core web vitals and it's not as cut and dry as it was before." It's A TLDR, complicated is what I'm saying. Mordy Oberstein: We actually covered that on the podcast a couple episodes ago with Brittany Muller. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So sometimes you need to just go back over and see what's changed because external things are happening. And I think that when I know that it's time for that, it's essentially when you hear that there's a change that you're unfamiliar with or when you're starting to see that maybe people who are taking a different approach are getting different or better results than you. So if you look up and you're seeing that lots of people who are eligible for a certain type of rich result are showing at the top of the SERP, then maybe you should refresh that content that shows on there. Or for instance, Google will sometimes update their seat staying in the rich results area, Google will sometimes update their requirements for rich results ever so slightly So that- Mordy Oberstein: Right, but that small thing can have big implications. Crystal Carter: Right, precisely. So that means that you've got to go back through and you've got to see how big of a deal is this? Is it a big deal? Is it not a big deal? Is this something that needs to be done absolutely right now or is this something that we can sort of put on the back burner for a little bit while we get the resources for it? I think that that's really useful to think about it. And in terms of prioritizing, again, it has to do with resources. If I think about like redecorating my house, for instance, I'll be honest, the wallpaper in my living room could definitely do with a refresh, but I literally cannot be assed. I don't want to have to go and look at swatches of wallpaper. Mordy Oberstein: And then pulling it off, ugh. Crystal Carter: I just don't want to. And so yeah, it could do with the refresh, absolutely, but I don't want to so I'm not going to. But my windows in my house, for instance, they did need some updating because yeah, it was cold. And so I was like, "Okay, well, we need to fix these," because the necessity. Mordy Oberstein: You have to do that. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And there's been cases, like I'm trying to think, updates to structured data markup, right? So what makes you eligible to appear as a rich result. And for example, I'm going to say two years ago, Google made a change to what is required to show up as a rich result for events. And if you have no events on your website, you'd be like, "Ah, I'll get to that later." But if you are a heavy event website, then you need to get on that. By the way, for the record, the Wix sites already had that taken care of for them. We already built it in, it was part of our best practices. We had a do nothing, and if it was, then we would've added it and you would've had the do nothing plug. It's our podcast, we can plug Wix. But it kind of highlights the point to me of why you need to read the SEO news because first off, social media is a little bit less reliable relative to the past for these kind of things. It used to be you would go on Twitter, the SEO community was very active, three seconds flat, you'd realize something's up. It's not the same anymore. It is to a certain extent if it's a Google update, but the smaller things I think slip through the cracks more often than they used to so I wouldn't rely on social for this anymore, but I would go to say seproundtable.com, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, especially seoroundtable.com, where Barry covers all of the small things, whereas Search Engine Land will cover a lot of the big stories, or SEJ will cover the big stories, Barry covers every little thing that changes on seoroundtable.com, and it's super important. Crystal Carter: I was just going to shout out to Barry because whenever, and we've definitely had a "Nuh-uh, yuh-uh, nuh-uh, yuh-uh," about Google, about like, "Oh, Google said this," "No, they said that," "Well, no, they said this, or this changed or that changed." And honestly, the service that Barry does with documenting the little changes and the evolution of different changes, for instance, so it's an incredible resource that he provides there. So for instance, if you want to know the evolution of featured snippets, for instance, you can go on SEO Roundtable and you can see how featured snippets have evolved since 2016, since they were starting testing them, since they were moving things through this, since they were doing that sort of thing. And you can go, "Are featured snippets machine learning powered?" And then you'll say, "Yeah, from 2014," they'll say, "Back in the day they said yes, they are powered by machine learning," et cetera, et cetera, and it's an incredible resource. So yeah, I cannot recommend enough because the other thing is that Google, for instance, they don't always store their pages. So if they change the page, you could go and look in a way back machine, for instance, but you can't necessarily see the change on the page. So for instance, the ranking systems page recently changed to remove core web vitals as a ranking system, but they added it as a ranking signal on the helpful content thing. But if you go to the ranking systems page, there's no mention of it, there's no mention of the change, you can't see the record of it. However, if you go on Search Engine Roundtable, then you can see the whole conversation and the whole evolution of all of that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he reports everything. And featured snippets is a great example because some of the changes that Google just makes to the format of them can have big implications. For example, Google, I don't have a timeline, say the last six, seven months has started showing more multiple URLs within feature snippets. So not just you ask a question, "How much does a cow weigh?" I don't know. And you get an answer back in a feature snippet. Now you can have multiple URLs, multiple snippets, kind of like what Bing does, but you wouldn't know that unless you either see it out in there in the wild or you're keeping up with what Barry's writing or you're going back and looking, "Okay, I need to refresh about feature snippets because I'm really focused on them right now. Let me see what Barry's covered in the last few months." That is a great way to refresh. And I just want to pivot a little bit and point out, there's no stigma about needing a refresh. And anyone who says, "Oh, you needed a refresh on that? Whoa, what kind of SEO are you?" Is, A, not a nice person, and B, completely wrong because it happens to everyone. Crystal Carter: Everyone, everyone. People talk about SEO experts and SEO beginners and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Everyone's a beginner at something, everyone's a beginner at something. And definitely a lot of people in SEO are specialists, and that's totally great, that's totally fine. And you mentioned this before, that it can be siloed where you work a lot in local SEO for instance, or you work a lot in enterprise maybe, or you work a lot in technical SEO sort of stuff. So maybe you work a lot in technical SEO and maybe content stuff ain't your thing particularly so you might need to start from the beginning of sort of understanding the elements that you need to do in order to get some results in terms of content or in terms of whatever it is that you have a skill gap. And I think that that's fine. And I think also, even if you aren't necessarily running the project directly, so let's say you were somebody who has a technical SEO specialism and you're leading a project because you're adept at leading projects, but the project involves a lot of content staff, for instance. You need to, as a project leader, understand what's going on in that space. You maybe don't need to know every single detail of it, you maybe have somebody in your team who's working on it, but you need to be sort of up to date on what is useful. I think one of the other things that's really great is to check out conferences and podcasts like this and webinars and things for getting an idea of what the state-of-the art is. If you go to a conference and you see a talk about a topic that you've never heard of, check it out, check it out. It literally costs... I wouldn't say it costs you nothing because conferences do cost you something generally speaking, but you can sit there and if you're like, "Ah, this isn't for me," that's fine. If it is for you, then you go, "Oh, actually there's some things that you mentioned there that I hadn't considered, and maybe I can go back and I can fill in those gaps and get myself up to speed." And it's quite a good way to get a good overview before you do a sort of specific upskill. And that's my general approach is that I'll find some two-hour lecture from Cindy Krum and then figure out how to get myself to make sense of the different things that she's discussing there because she's super. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's exactly how I approach it. Sometimes there's a very specific thing that pops up, and this happens all the time, whether there's a particular SEO question or scenario that arises and you just, "I don't remember the answer to that, that was so specific, I did that five years ago." And you go and you research it and you find it. And then there's some cases where it's more of topical like, "I haven't dived into GVP in a long time, let me..." And for that, you want to find trusted sources. We spoke about this way early on in the podcast, but how to know good SEO advice from bad SEO advice. But I'll just harp on what we spoke about there for a second. Look for people that you trust, whether it's outlets like the Wix SEO Hub, or it's people like Cindy Krum. You want to make sure that the information that you're getting is, A, current, because there's a lot of people who are talking who are not current, and it is a little bit of a problem. So look for recommendations. If you don't know where to go, then find somebody you know on social, be like, "Hey, I'm looking for more about local SEO, could you send me a few resources?" Literally you can ask us on social media, we'd be happy to direct you. But people will generally answer you and it'd be helpful, just make sure you're looking at the right resources and trusted resources when you're trying to refresh on a topic. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think in terms of resources and tools and things, don't expect that a tool that you used like six months ago or a year ago is exactly the same. There are going to be constant iterations and updates for different SaaS tools all the time. So Facebook Ads in particular is a prime example. Literally if you leave Facebook Ads for two weeks, then you might have to come back and relearn the situation. So it's really important to keep on top of your tools that you're using. And yeah, let's say you weren't doing local SEO, and then you're back in local SEO, you're going to have to do a refresh on Google Business Profile. And I think it's really useful to find people who are product experts for some of those things. And I think there's a lot of people who stay on top of those... Probably the best resource that I would find, particularly for tactical and tools things is Aleyda. Aleyda is really, really, really adept at scanning what's going on in the industry and also resharing other folks' stuff. So somebody builds something cool, Aleyda will share it from her platform, she'll share links to it, she shares it in her SEO FOMO newsletter. I would highly recommend it, particularly for tools things, that she's a good one to follow and to sort of signpost you to other people who are good to follow. Mordy Oberstein: Now because we wanted to show you that everyone needs a refresh every once in a while, we went out and we found one of the biggest SEO OGs of all time to talk about how going back and relearning and getting refresh has helped him as a professional. Here is Seer's founder and CEO, the one, the only Wil Reynolds on how going back and relearning something helped him as a professional. Wil Reynolds: So how has going back and relearning something helped me as a professional? I once decided to spend a year not reading any new books and only rereading old books. And the way that that helped me is a lot of the books that I read that I really loved 10, 15 years ago, my career and the business was in one place then. So I actually took a lot of different things out of the book or the set of books because now the business and my career are in a different place. So what I kind of learned from that, and I strongly recommend to a lot of people, is consider taking a book that you enjoyed reading, but it's been five or 10 years ago, and the way the world comes at us, probably five is fine, and then re-listen to it again and see if you get very different things out of it based on the place that you're in at the current moment. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Wil. Make sure you give Wil a follow over on Twitter at W-I-L R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S, Wil Reynolds, we'll lead to his profile in the show notes. First off, forget as an SEO, as a marketing professional, just as a person, that is a great point. But going back to the SEO marketing side of things, it is a really true point that why you shouldn't just wait for the refresh but actively look to refresh, actively let's say go through Google's documentation again, have another look at it because what you take away from it now, five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years into being an SEO, into being a digital marketer is going to be different than what you took away from it that first time you read it when you were first on your SEO journey, that kind of thing. So it's a great point to as to why you should be proactive about refreshing your SEO knowledge. Really cool. Crystal Carter: I couldn't agree more. And I think that he was talking about place in your business, in your career, but I think also in your skillset, you are constantly building your skillset as a digital marketer. So it might be that six months ago when you read it, you were reading it from a content point of view, and maybe now you've got a real good handle on like page SEO or something like that and so you go back to a really good piece of text and you're like, "Ah, actually I can see this, this, and this." The Quality Rater Guidelines is a really, really good example of that. So the quality rater guidelines are available from Google and they're extensive and they change every year. If you troll around, you can find older copies of it. But what's interesting is going through and looking at the different things that they're asking for and looking at the different things that they're looking at. And when you have one set of skills, you'll say, "Okay, well we could do this, we could do that, we could do that," and then if you go forward, you can add more things to it. And this is similar I think with clients. So when working with clients, we would always set a time for R&D so we'd maybe set out six months of planned activity and then at the end of that six months, we re-audit, right? We refresh our perspective on where we are with the client, with the website, with the web project, whatever it may be. And based on that, we would take a new position, a new approach, or refine our approach because again, we have new skills, we have new things. So yeah, absolutely. And revisiting things that you loved is great. I always really enjoy listening to jazz, for instance. And if you listen to a jazz quartet, maybe one time you listen to the saxophonist and then maybe the next time you listen to the drummer and the next time you listen to the person playing the piano or something, and you will find different things in different parts of it. It's a great way to approach content that you love. And yeah, I think Wil's got some great points there. Mordy Oberstein: It's why I watched The Big Lebowski over and over and over again, different jokes every single time. Again, thank you so much, Wil. Make sure to give Wil a follow. Again, we'll link to his profile in the show notes. So speaking about refreshing and refamiliarizing yourself with whatever SEO topic we're talking about, one thing that very often comes up, we actually hit on it way early in the episode here, is refreshing your brand. And whether that be a visual update or an entire new brand identity or creating brand identity from the start even... Well, that's not refreshing, but you kind of know what I mean. Anyway, I thought it'd be cool to talk about how we can go through and refresh your brand as we get into a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. So I have a lot of thoughts about this. I feel like when you try to refresh your brand, let's say, let's make it an easy case, you have a problem, you have a branding problem. You're whatever company and you made a mistake, and I don't know, you positioned yourself in a way that it didn't really resonate with your audience. In fact, it backfired. Let's just go with that for a second. And I think we focus or we overfocus or overemphasize the fix, but I think the biggest problem is the diagnosis. I'll explain what I mean. So when you're trying to refresh your brand, I think the first thing you need to do is figure out, "Okay, do I need a refresh?" And as Crystal mentioned before, Wix, when we refreshed our logo, we sat down and someone at some point said, "You know what? Has design language shifted? It seems that design language has shifted and perhaps we're a little bit out of date, we should refresh our design language." And I'm assuming, I don't know firsthand, that's how the logo refresh for the Wix logo came about. And it really speaks to putting your finger on the pulse. You have to have your finger on the pulse when it comes to your brand. And that could be anything like I just mentioned, the design language or that could be just chatter about your brand and general sentiment around your brand. And there are tools out there that you can use that sort of monitor these things. But there really is no way around, in my personal humble opinion, having your finger on the pulse and really being in there, looking at what people are saying and really understanding what the environment is about for your brand. And then comes the most important thing which is diagnosis. Okay, let's go with the example you have a sentiment problem. Okay, great, where's the problem? What's the root of the problem? Is it how you relate to your audience? Is it perhaps there's a lack of cohesion with your own brand identity and people are confused and when people are confused, they end up being frustrated? Is it simply a lack of an evolution of your product? Forget the brand, the product hasn't evolved, right? And now you need to figure out how to deal with the branding because the product is the one that caused a problem to begin with. Whatever it is, the diagnosis is the most important part of the problem. Why is it happening? Why is there a problem with the brand? Or why do we need the refresh? What is exactly is the issue that we're trying to resolve and what caused it? Because you can't really diagnose the issue until you figure out what caused it and what's the root cause. And then the fix, and the fix to me is easy. Once you have the diagnosis, the fix should be obvious, "Oh, design language has shifted, our logo is now slightly out of date. Let us refresh the logo." Crystal Carter: It can be very tricky. I think also it's important to understand that the core of what you were saying was the finger on the pulse sort of element, and I think that that is something that's really, really important. I remember reading something, and I was unable to find it, but somebody was talking about, I think it was a post about how brands die. And it was talking essentially about how you can have brands where they're not paying attention to customer service stuff or they're not paying attention to customer sentiment, and by the time they do pay attention to customer sentiment, it's already gone past the point of fixing it. So you have to pay attention to the customer service, and you have to be actionable with those things. And I think it can be tricky sometimes diagnosing it. So for instance, sometimes you have a situation where people are like, "Oh, people don't like this, or people don't say good things." And sometimes the things that people are saying are not even accurate, sometimes the things people are saying aren't even accurate. So then when you're trying to diagnose it, why is it the case that people are able to say stuff that's inaccurate about your brand? Why is that the case? So when you think about the diagnosis, the issue isn't even necessarily what people are saying, it's a question of relationship. Mordy Oberstein: 1000%. Take Google, Google is a great example. People are saying, let's say Google and SEO, wrong things about what worked for SEO, what doesn't work for SEO for years, right? Going back to Matt Cutts who used to work at Google, I don't know, like 10 years ago at this point and people still kind of propagate these falsehoods we covered in another episode, Debunking SEO Myths, around what Google does and doesn't tend to prefer. And you could look okay what they're saying, and that's one thing, "Oh, LSI keywords are really important," which they're not, that's not true, it's a myth, but why are people saying that is the root cause. And that to me has to do with the fact that Google's algorithm is not 100% transparent because it can't be, A, it's impossible for it to be. And two, it wouldn't be a good idea for them to do because people will try to game the system. So now you have a situation where people are trying to feel a sense of control over things with a certain aura of mystery and clarity, that's not a real word, about what's actually happening here. And that lends itself to people looking for security in all of these things that they think work. And because Google is not being transparent because they can't be, it's not possible, it's a machine learning system, you don't know the algorithm, that breeds a certain mistrust. "Oh, Google, you're not telling me 100% what's in the algorithm because, oh, you're trying to lie to me," which they're not, it is they literally can't tell you what's in the algorithm. So there's this sort of weird mistrust which sort of propagates these myths and falsehoods that comes out why? Because of the way the algorithm is constructed, that's not possible to give over and Google shouldn't give it over because people will misuse that information. And that relationship now between some people out there in the SEO world and Google is one of mistrust, and that's the core symptom. Crystal Carter: And I think to counter that, Google since the days of Matt Cutts has done things like they've had the search liaison so you have Danny who's joined the team, you have John Mueller who's joined the team and would do Webmaster hangouts and stuff and chat to people about different things. And they've done a lot of stuff in their documentation to try to be fairly transparent about a lot of their stuff. But I think there was a realization that they needed to have an education piece and that they needed to have a direct relationship with the search community in order to make sure that people are getting good information and that know where to go when things are happening. So I think that that's a prime example of figuring out what the diagnosis is in order to make sure that you've got good channels to manage the brand well. And I think that the other thing that's interesting is that particularly with the search liaison thing, taking Google as an example, they have that conversation from their Google search central channels, they don't have those conversations from their Google channels on social media for instance. They have how search works, they have search on, they have Google I/O, they have various different events and activities and stuff, but they have specific channels that are dedicated to having conversations about their brand. And I think it is important to remember that when you're thinking about your brand and you're thinking about your brand refresh, sometimes it should also be a question of adding on to your brand. Maybe what you need is you have Batman, so if you think about Batman, you have Batman and there's like, "I'm Batman," Batman, right? Then you have Batman and Robin, right? And Batman and Robin is a different ballgame. Batman and Robin has a slightly different vibe than just Batman on his own. So sometimes it might be that you need a new strand, you needed a new angle to add to your brand so that people understand what's going on there, and so that you can dedicate information or dedicate time and resources in a focused way towards something that you care about. Just like in the same way that a normal person might be like, "Hey, yeah, on the weekends I do rock climbing." And you're like, "Oh, I didn't know that. I thought you were, I don't know, an accountant or something." It's like, "No, actually I'm also an amazing rock climber." And you have your rock climbing friends and they know that you do the rock climbing thing and that's a slightly different thing from what you do. So I think it is also a question of remembering that refreshing your brand can sometimes be adding onto your brand so that people can see the main parts of your brand in a new light as well. Mordy Oberstein: Great point. And it's kind of exactly what Google did. And if you see, Google really a diagnosed a problem, and they did a great job using John Mueller and Danny Sullivan and John in particular, really trying to combat that, "Hey, there's a certain level of mistrust for a variety of reasons that brewed, now we have to handle that." And the fix then becomes about, A, execution, which is not always easy, but it's really, "Okay, what we need to do next, we need to build trust." The next move should be easy after diagnosis, like, where do we go? Obvious where we go, the diagnosis naturally leads to it. And Google did a brilliant job with this. But it's really the point, I think when we think about brand marketing, we think, "Oh, creative idea around this, creative idea around that," that's true but that only comes after, in my opinion, the real branding work, which is diagnosis. And then you can get to all those crazy ideas and all those fun ideas and all that great stuff about how to implement the fix. Crystal Carter: And it can be hard, diagnosis can be hard, and- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's the hardest part. Crystal Carter: I don't mean just hard from a sort of like, "Oh, it's hard to find out," I mean also it can be painful. Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. And by the way, no matter what, take Google for example, does everybody believe them now? No, you're not going to convince everybody. You need to have realistic expectations. There's always going to be people saying, "LSI keywords are a real thing, Google's lying." That's going to happen. Crystal Carter: But I think also sometimes you have to have some home truths. One of the things that John Mueller very often says is like sometimes SEO ain't the only answer, sometimes the issue is actually something to do with product or whatever it may be. Do you know what I mean? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. Crystal Carter: So sometimes you have to have some home truths. Like I broke my arm when I was 16, I ran into a parked car on my roller plates. Anyway, I broke my arm and I went to the emergency room, the ER, and they're like, "Oh, can you put your arm like this on the X-ray machine?" And I was like, "No, I cannot, I cannot." They were doing this so they could diagnose the problem, but it was painful for me because if I could do that, I wouldn't be in the emergency room in the first place. So anyway, but what I'm saying is it can be painful to have to look at yourself and go, "Why is this happening?" And maybe the issue is something to do with something that's going on with your brand in that maybe you actually need to do some fundamental changes to that. Mordy Oberstein: Well, no matter what changes your brand is going through, there's always something that's changed in the wider world of SEO so here's this week's Snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. First up, and mainly because it fell through the cracks of when I record these news segments, I try to balance out observing the Jewish holidays and recording these segments, the many articles from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable say there is a new helpful content update. It rolled out on September 15th, Barry covered it on Search Engine Roundtable. There was also a downtrend in some of the volatility on the 21st, which Barry also covered over at Search Engine Roundtable. It's hard to pinpoint what that volatility downgrade means as the whole volatility landscape over the last two months is out of whack. I have some wild conspiracy theories about that, but I try to only wear my tinfoil hat on Twitter so we're going to forego that for now. By the time you hear this, the update may already be over, making this old not new. So keep tabs by heading over to seoroundtable.com, as you always should for the latest and greatest on all the idiosyncrasies of the SEO world. Okay, article number two from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google confirms quality is foremost factor in search indexing. So Google has their podcast, Search off the Record, and they said quality, content quality, website quality is the most important thing. So it's official. We said it was meta descriptions, but clearly I was wrong. Joking, I never thought that, nor should anybody have ever thought that. Quality is obviously the most important thing for all things. Anyway, lastly, Barry did it again, the last time he complained, Bard didn't have any updates. Google released an update to Bard. Well, he did it again, he went on Twitter, started complaining, "Hey, there's never been an update in 465 days," I'm making that number up, and then Google updated Bard, which just shows you who's pulling the strings over at Google. Anyway, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google Search can now check Bard's answers. There's a whole slew of changes and updates that Google has made to Bard. These updates include Google telling you if the content in search results is similar to what Bard conjured up. That is very cool and interesting. They also expanded Bard into 40 new languages. There's a connection to Google Flights, hotels, et cetera, to help you get real time info. I tried the flight things, it gave me relevant information that was up-to-date. I just don't see how that's better than going to Google Flights where the experience is far more holistic and visual. But it's cool. And you can also see a connection or make a connection to your Google account so that you can pull in information from there into Bard. Google said they won't add the information that you connect to the wider Bard database. So that's good to know. And with that, that is this week's snappy news. Always so snappy, always so newsy, always so many changes every week, and it's part of, like we said, refreshing about your SEO knowledge, the SEO news, why we cover it. Crystal Carter: So newsy and so fresh, like a Mountain Dew, like a mountain breeze. Mordy Oberstein: Mountain Dew? Ugh, gross. Crystal Carter: No, I mean like dew on a mountain. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, like real Mountain Dew. Got it, got it. Not that disgusting stuff. No offense if you like Mountain Dew, but I clearly don't. But you know what I do like? I like Travis Tallent. Travis Tallent is our follow of the week, and you can follow him over on Twitter, or X now, I'm just going to keep calling it Twitter @TallentSpeaks. That's @T-A-L-L-E-N-T S-P-E-A-K-S over on Twitter, TallentSpeaks. He's a VP of SEO and Global Agency over at Brainlabs. He does a lot about branding and SEO, which is why he's our follow of the week because we're talking a lot about branding just now and SEO. So perfect follow for this week, Travis Tallent, check him out over on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, Travis is great. He's got some fantastic insights, and he's always just full of tons of energy about what's going on in search. So yeah, absolutely follow him. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. Well, that's it. We've reached the mountain of refreshment. Crystal Carter: Are we going to go to the fountain of knowledge? Mordy Oberstein: Every week. Crystal Carter: Every week? Mordy Oberstein: Every week on this podcast, it's the fountain. I'm just looking for the fountain of youth, the fountain of Knowledge, not my problem, it's the youth, that's what I'm in need of. Also the fountain of babysitters for my children for the summer vacation while we're recording this and oh boy. Well, on that happy note, 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 as we take up the future of SEO in 2024 in a very very special episode format. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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How do you balance multiple sub-brands while ensuring your parent brand stays at the top of the SEO leaderboard? When do you actually create a sub-brand? Hint—it comes from the people, not the C-level! You have to be thoughtful when deciding whether to create a sub-brand and when to extend the parent brand. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by Claudio Cabrera from The Athletic to dissect the art of managing SEO for sub-brands. Plus, brand experts Matt Davies and Steven Picanza join the conversation to explore the nitty-gritty of balancing a sub-brand, bringing their unique perspectives to the forefront! Join us for this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast as we “sub”merge ourselves into the art of managing sub-brands and all the SEO implications it brings. Back How to do SEO & marketing for sub-brands How do you balance multiple sub-brands while ensuring your parent brand stays at the top of the SEO leaderboard? When do you actually create a sub-brand? Hint—it comes from the people, not the C-level! You have to be thoughtful when deciding whether to create a sub-brand and when to extend the parent brand. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by Claudio Cabrera from The Athletic to dissect the art of managing SEO for sub-brands. Plus, brand experts Matt Davies and Steven Picanza join the conversation to explore the nitty-gritty of balancing a sub-brand, bringing their unique perspectives to the forefront! Join us for this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast as we “sub”merge ourselves into the art of managing sub-brands and all the SEO implications it brings. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 110 | November 13, 2024 | 1 HR 00:00 / 1:01:07 This week’s guests Steven Picanza As a brand strategist and fractional CMO, Steven has spent more than a decade helping brands and executives identify and bring their purpose to life through evocative ideas, award-winning campaigns, and compelling consumer experiences. While he specializes in building, repositioning, and marketing brands, his background is diverse (by design!) with roles in creative brand strategy, brand planning, and experience design. This range has enabled him to bring thoughtful, comprehensive strategic plans to his clients and be an empathetic thought leader. Steven has helped brands realize their potential and resonate across categories that include: financial, cpg, hospitality, retail, health and wellness, food and beverage, travel and tourism, and non-profit/education. Steven is also the Branders Magazine 'Talking w/ Branders' Podcast host, co-founder of NJ Content Studio, and an Adjunct Professor of Branding at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Notable clients include: Dude Wipes, Holland America Line, WaFd Bank, Dr Teal's, IDG Media, Pieology Pizza, MGM International, Academy Sports and Outdoors, and many more. Matt Davies Matt Davies is an executive strategy consultant. He helps business leaders all over the world develop and align around powerful ideas which build brands and inspire more meaningful customer and employee experiences. As well as being an entrepreneur himself, he has over twenty years experience working with businesses of all shapes and sizes from start-ups through to household names like Microsoft, Nestlé, Capital One, Boots, Experian, Nikon and Specsavers. Matt was recently listed as a ‘Top 50 UK Advisor’ by Enterprize Nation. He is a certified Level-C Brand Architect. He runs the award winning Podcast “Just Branding” which has had over half a million downloads. Matt is an author, a frequent public speaker, writer and thought-leader in areas on leadership, branding, creativity, design thinking, innovation, storytelling and marketing. Claudio Cabrera Claudio E. Cabrera is an award-winning journalist and audience development expert, speciailizing in SEO. Cabrera began his journalism career in 2004 while in his second year at Brooklyn College. He landed an internship at the historic black newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News. At the Amsterdam News, he covered the 2005 mayoral campaign between Michael Bloomberg and Fernando Ferrer and the likes of former President Barack Obama, Rev. Al Sharpton and Shaquille O'Neal to name a few. In 2016, he joined the New York Times as a Senior Digital Strategist and is now their Deputy Off-Platform Director of News SEO. In his 4 years at the Times, he's been able to grow the company's traffic by over 100% and lead them to record years on search and in total audience. Since, he’s joined The Athletic where he leads a team of over 30 globally on audience and has led the brand to record growth on audience. " Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is a fanatic of all things SEO, because fan is really short for fanatic, the head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Let's go team. Mordy Oberstein: No. Team? Crystal Carter: Give me a D. Give me an A. Give me a link. Can I get a link? Is that possible? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, no problem. How much are you willing to pay for them? I have many high DA. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Lots, I guess. Mordy Oberstein: I would sell you Forbes, but they kind of got hit. So there goes that. I'm being that spicy that early on the show. Crystal Carter: Is that too soon? Too soon? Mordy Oberstein: No, by the time... We're recording weeks in advance. Crystal Carter: Got to keep it above the belt, Mordy. That's also a sports thing. There you go. Mordy Oberstein: That is, yeah. But look, the real winners bite other people's ears off, in sports. Crystal Carter: I remember watching that live and I was like, "What is that? Did he ju... Oh my God." Mordy Oberstein: You want to hit a home run, you take steroids. That's my idea of sports. Cork the bat, deflate the ball. There's so much, I can endlessly go on about cheating in sports. Crystal Carter: No, we don't have to. We will triumph. We will win. If you build it, they will come. Mordy Oberstein: Ease my pain. When we talk sports on the podcast, usually it's me just going off on a tangent. This week, it actually makes sense. But we'll get to that in a minute. As the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter. But where you can also take our SEO course, and where you can also set up and monitor sub users, so that you can collaborate in real time with advanced sub user permissions, all on Wix Studio. As this week, we explore the Cs that are SEO for sub brands, the unique characteristics of SEO for a sub brand, how to prevent overlap when doing SEO for a sub brand, what universal truths you could take away when doing, you guessed it, SEO for a sub brand. Full steam ahead is SEO sub brand supreme, Claudio Cabrera of The Athletic, now the sports thing makes sense, will join us in just a few minutes to chat about his experiences. Plus, we'll get into the thick of it, as Matt Davies and Steven Picanza chat how to best market a sub brand, as things get a little bit complicated pretty quickly. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO News, who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So it's one ping only, as we batten up the hatches and down periscope, and dive, dive, dive into SEO for sub brands, on this the 110th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. If you can tell me where the one ping only is from, I'll give you, I don't know, a chocolate bar. Crystal Carter: Hunt For Red October. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I owe you a chocolate bar. Crystal Carter: And he's like, he's drinking his tea and Sean Connery is just cool as a cucumber, and the missile's coming right at him and he's like, "I need to finish this Earl Gray." I can't remember what tea it was- Mordy Oberstein: One ping only. But the best part, he's playing a Russian commander and he doesn't bother to change his accent. "One ping only." Crystal Carter: Sean Connery plays Sean Connery, whatever he's doing, and nobody's mad at it. I mean lots of people do that. Like Jason Statham, he's Jason Statham wherever he goes. But it's fine. It's fine. That's what he does. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: I got to find a way to use that line on my wife, like, "One ping only." Crystal Carter: You can play ping pong, I guess. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, one of my kids plays ping pong. There we go. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: So before we blink Claudio on, let me just explain really quick, enterprise level SEO is complicated. And one of the areas that complicates it the most, maybe not the most, but one of the ways that it gets complicated a lot is because there's often brands within brands, and it gets really complicated when trying to do SEO. And the problem only compounds itself a gazillion percent over, if there's overlap between what the sub brand is doing and the actual brand is doing, and then becomes a giant mess. So with that, we have a well-smart person who knows how to handle all of us. He's a Lions fan and a Padres fan, and he's from New York. Make sense of that. Welcome to the show, Claudio Cabrera. Claudio Cabrera: Hey, Mordy. Hey, Crystal. Thanks so much for having me. I'm super, super happy to be here. Super happy that my Padres are in the playoffs, the Lions are doing well, and my Spurs are coming to play in the NBA season soon. Mordy Oberstein: It's Wembee time. Claudio Cabrera: Crystal, you're just going to hear a bunch of sports references throughout this whole part. Crystal Carter: It's fine. I went to high school in San Diego, in the days of Tony Gwynn, so I'm very familiar with the Padres when they were at Qualcomm Stadium. Now they've moved on. So I know some sports. I know. I'm familiar. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on. If we're going to do sport, there has to be... I know people with sportsmanship and whatever. But hey, Claudio, how do you feel about 1998? Claudio Cabrera: Oh, that was a bad year. It was a good year, but a bad maybe week and a half within that year, when the Yankees beat the Padres- Mordy Oberstein: How do you like Scott Brochus? No name, third baseman. Claudio Cabrera: Look what I have right next to me. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice, nice. Mike came for my birthday one year, drew me like a Yogi Berra card. Claudio Cabrera: That's super cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, super cool. Sports is fun. I enjoy all of it. But you know what's better than sports? SEO for some brands. Claudio Cabrera: I know a little bit about that. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Where did we get started? Because we had this problem, like break the fourth wall, pull the curtain back. We had this problem also, because there's the Wix blog, then there's a Wix SEO hub and then there's Wix Studio, it's all these other entities. There's a lot of overlap. You're at The Athletic. Does that mean the New York Times doesn't cover sports anymore? Claudio Cabrera: Yes. So essentially when The Times bought The Athletic, they bought them in 2022. The thought there was that, number one, I guess the alignment between the two brands is that The Athletic does a lot of original journalism across local markets in the US. And some local markets that The Times may not necessarily have deep penetration into right. The Times has huge audiences on the coast, but also in the middle of the country, but not everywhere. Whereas The Athletic has fans pretty much in every single market. Additionally, the main thing that I would say is that they were really, really focused on the original journalism aspect. There's not a lot of brands in the sports space now that are still creating original journalism at scale. So it seemed like a really, really natural fit. Right? Now, when the brand was acquired in 2022, there was obviously still The New York Times sports page, and it was still operating and it's obviously a very historic sports page that's been around for... I don't even know, 150, 200 years at this point. And I think the overall goal was really to, throughout those first few years, really acclimate The Athletic to The New York Times audience. As you can see us now, we're like the sub folder, we have a presence on the page, we have a module, so many different things. And last year at some point, The New York Times sports page pretty much closed down, which was a big deal, just because of the historic nature of it. And now how we kind of view each other is, The Athletic is the home of that real time, day-to-day coverage for sports. But if you look at the Olympics, if you look at the World Cup in the last few years, when both brands were covering it, The Athletic was the real time. The Times kind of leaned into the cultural aspect of these events. Like, what was the scene in Paris? What was the scene in Qatar when the World Cup was there? So many different things. So it feels like we continue balancing ourselves out. But what you see continuously is The Athletic just increasing their presence on The Times platform, and familiarity with their audiences overall. Crystal Carter: I think you brought up some great points there. First of all, I'm not sure if we cleared up, and I think you kind of did in your description anyway, but in any case, if anyone isn't entirely sure, when we mean sub brand, we don't mean... It's not a question of hierarchy in terms of quality or anything like that. It tends to be like you have a parent brand, say The New York Times, and then within that parent brand, they'll have a brand like The Athletic that we're describing now. And what you're talking about, that process, acquisition is very often a way that sub brands emerge, like you're talking about with The Athletic. Or sometimes it's a case that a team might think, "We need to have a dedicated entity for this particular topic or whichever." And a couple of things that stood out in the way you described The Athletic and how you've been negotiating developing that identity within The New York Times family, as it were, is the USP. You were very clear on the USP of The Athletic and what The Athletic brings to the table, that's unique to the core offering of the brand. Are you able to share how you articulate that or how you make that more clear to your users? Claudio Cabrera: Yeah. I mean, I think overall, when you look at The Times, they have, I don't know, I think four or five sub brands at this point. They have cooking, they have wire cutter, they have sports and they have games, Wordle and those other games that we have. I think in terms of articulation, I'm sure The Times has done a ton of work when it comes to really communicating to the audiences what The Athletic is. But what I would say overall that's been really clear, and the synergy between both brands is that, The Athletic is... When you look at a brand like ESPN, there are ties to the networks. I mean there are ties to the leagues. So there is this belief that organizations like those may not necessarily be able to really report out everything they want to. Right? Now, The Athletic, similar to The Times, is independent of any entities in that sense. So what we really try to communicate to the audiences when we introduce them to The Athletic is really that this is a brand that's independent of any sports leagues. Therefore, we can report anything and everything. So we can hold the brands to account, we can hold TV networks to account, pretty much anything associated with sports. So that allows us to gain the trust of the audience overall, versus there being this feeling like, whether it's ESPN, NBC or any of these other networks that have lead ties, a viewer kind of saying like, "Oh, are they not criticizing them because of this reason or that reason?" And we try to really just keep that independence, in the same way that The Times does, if that makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to point out by how unique and how important that is in particular in the sports world. Let's say for example, I watch Rich Eisen. Rich Eisen is an old, ESPN Sports Center, newscaster, whatever you want to call him. He also works for the NFL network. So when he is on his own show, you can almost see he's got to be a little bit careful of what he says about the NFL, because he actually works for the NFL. Or Mike Floria who covers NFL and NBC, will literally say, "I don't know if my boss is going to like this or not." Or you see what ESPN did, they brought Pat... I'm really going down the sports wormhole now. They brought Pat McAfee on to make it look like, "Oh, we're offering honest takes. Pat's going to say whatever he wants to say." As if Pat's not playing the game. But it's also nonsense. So The Athletic coming in and offering that USP like, "We're the honest broker," is huge, to me at least, in the sports world. Claudio Cabrera: And what I would also say to that, Mordy and Crystal, one of the things that's happened a lot in sports journalism overall, is newspapers locally downsizing, obviously downsizing in different areas and in different sports. I think the NFL and the NBA seem to be those sports that they don't necessarily downsize in, just because of the popularity of them both. But when you look at baseball, when you look at NHL specifically, there's been a lot of downsizing from a local market perspective. So the thought is, all right, at the same time, we have either the first or the second or the third ranked beat reporter in each specific market. So you have someone that you've developed a relationship with throughout time, and someone that's trustworthy at the same juncture. So it's really multiple value adds. The independence, but also, hey, you could come to The New York Times, but you can also go to The Athletic, if, let's say you don't have the breadth and the depth of sports coverage for your local team in Minnesota, Phoenix, wherever it may be, and kind of follow your team in that way as well. So it's really centered around the fan. Everything about the product is really centered around the fan, and just making sure that the fan feels like we're speaking to them in a way that feels original and doesn't feel like we're just producing content for audience scale. Crystal Carter: And I think that's really interesting, the way that you described. Because most website folks, most people who are producing content, et cetera, would say, "Oh, the users. The users." And you're like, "The fans, the fans that come to our website, because they're fans and we are providing a service for the fans." And I think that perspective is really valuable and it clearly, clearly resonates with your fans, and with the fans of sports who come through. And also, I think that from a sub-brand, parent-brand sort of relationship, it helps bring new audiences to both the parent brand and the sub-brand. And I think also, you were talking about filling gaps, essentially what you're talking about is a content gap. Your team noticed a content gap on the sort of local level of say local NHL teams. The only one I know is the Kings, the Oilers. Those are teams, right? Claudio Cabrera: Yes. Yeah, those are teams. Crystal Carter: Danly Cup. Go Mighty Ducks. Just naming sports things. Anyway, but you notice a gap, and then your team is able to fill that gap. And therefore, both support the fans, but also build your audience. I think, as somebody who works in, like we were saying, a similar brand, we are part of the Wix SEO team, we are part of the Wix SEO hub, one of the things that's great is that you have some of the resources that the parent brand has, in order to fill some of those gaps. How do you manage your resources? How do you get resources for some of the content projects? Let's say you're like, "Hey, there was some..." Mordy, you'll pick me up. Is it like banana ball or something? Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. Claudio Cabrera: Pickle ball? Crystal Carter: No, it's like a banana- Mordy Oberstein: No, it's the banana baseball league. Where they- Claudio Cabrera: Oh yeah, yeah. The Savannah something. I don't know what they're called. Mordy Oberstein: Savannah Bananas. Crystal Carter: Right. So let's say your team finds the Savannah Bananas and you're like, "We want to make a whole section about this completely new league." Or something. How do you negotiate getting resources for that, so that you can build something that works for those fans, and helps to support both your brand and the parent brand? Claudio Cabrera: That's a great question. I mean, I think when it comes to sports that aren't necessarily top of mind but are sort of gaining interest, I think a lot of times, in newsrooms, which most newsrooms are pretty strapped when it comes to resources overall, it really comes down to, is there someone from an advertising perspective that's so interested in this particular product or the particular league, that's willing to really say, "Hey, we would love to buy advertising space on your website for F1 or for, let's say Savannah Bananas." Now at that point, you can either do one of two things. You can say, "All right, we're going to have this huge advertising buy from this company and maybe we can build out a vertical for this." Or you can actually say, which we do a lot of, is we say, "Well, we don't necessarily have enough research at this point to say whether pickle ball or that league that you mentioned, or let's say even F1, at the interest level that we need to really dedicate a full team of resourcing to it." So maybe we take one writer and really test out content consistently, to see, one, really less so from... I think from an external perspective, you're obviously able to see day-to-day, like, "Oh, wow. We're getting a lot of audience interest on F1." But I think because we're one of the few only subscription products in the sports space specifically, it allows us to understand, all right, the people that are on our website, do they actually like F1? Right? So we have the EPO in the UK, which is a huge market for us. And in the UK, F1 is more popular than it is in the US. So we started really kind of connecting the dots there and saying, "All right, is F1 something that even our EPO subscribers are really interested in?" We started seeing that interest, and we said, "All right, let's launch F1 vertical." Much smaller than EPL and NFL and all those others, but sort of building it out. So I think multiple things occur, right? I think there has to be interest from an external level on that specific sport. And then I think internally, you just have to do a ton of research, like user segmentation, and so many different things, to really understand, all right, internally, the people that we have as subscribers, do they like this? But also externally, do we have enough that we can provide from an editorial level, to really reach a large scale audience? Crystal Carter: I was just going to say that testing point, the proof of concept thing, and testing and monitoring, is super important. People should definitely pay attention to that as a tactic. Mordy Oberstein: As you're doing the whole F1 thing, in your opinion, how concerned should you be... And abstract because I don't know if you can get into the details of what you do on The Athletic side. I don't want to put you in an uncomfortable position. But as a concept, how closely do you feel the sub-brand should be working with the main brand? Or how concerned should the sub-brand be about keyword targeting, considering what the main brand or the other sub-brands are also doing? Or should it be as independent thing, like do what it does and that's it? Should there be connection? How strong should that connection be? Claudio Cabrera: Yeah, it'll be fully transparent. I think what's been really good about the relationship with The Athletic and The Times, is that it's been pretty independent, for the most part. So there hasn't been like, "You need to do this or you need to do that." We are like two separate newsrooms, one is remote, one is in-person remote. When it comes to keyword targeting, those types of things too, there hasn't been any clashes or anything of the sorts. I think the main thing that we've been really collaborative on is the understanding that our audience is much smaller than theirs. And what The Times is trying to do is really make sure that they get as much visibility to The Athletic as possible. And that takes a lot of things. That takes homepage visibility with a module, that takes email targeting, that takes push notifications. So on their part, it's been, how do we present The Athletic on a day-to-day level when it's just a regular sports cycle? And how do we present The Athletic when it's the Olympics, a World Cup, the NFL trade bill and the NFL draft, and more? So overall, what I would say is that I think there needs to be a relationship, unless the brands are so alike, then I think you're going to run into those issues around keywords and topic pages, and tagging and so many different things. But because we're so different, I think the parent brand, in a lot of respects, unless it's totally disassociated from what the other brand is, probably has the opportunity to really just build up the profile of that specific brand over time, if that makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Makes a ton of sense. And I love the fact that you guys are taking it from an audience-first point of view. It's so refreshing to hear. Claudio Cabrera: Yeah. And I think one of the things that was really great about... And we obviously migrated, so we did a migration. But even before that migration, we were just getting all this link equity, right? Because we were getting links from The Times every single day. And The Athletic was already kind of growing its authority over the six years since it launched. But just kind of having that presence overall is really important. And what you find is this. Right? I came from The Times, I was leading SEO there for about six or seven years, and I never really looked at The Times audience as this sports audience. I looked at them as more of a casual sports audience that's not into the day-to-day, but is more into the moments. And what ended up happening when The Athletic was acquired, is that we had that module, and we would find sports like baseball, Mordy and Crystal, were the sports that were most popular. And it was like, "Wait, MLB is more popular with this audience than NFL or NBA." And then you would see it kind of fluctuate by season. But it really kind of gave us an idea of what types of stories Times users like, how we program for that specific homepage. So how our homepage looks is very different from how we program for them. Because our audience is very intense. Their audience is more like, "Give me the really, really cool story around sports. Or the things I need to talk about near the water cooler with my coworkers." I think- Crystal Carter: Was that break dancing or not? Claudio Cabrera: Exactly. Exactly. So it's two different audiences. And what I would say is that, we don't tailor our content for The Times audience, but we have the ability to frame headlines for The Times audience. So I'll give you a great example. Wembanyama last year, when he entered the league, we could easily say, "Victor Wembanyama is taking over the league." Right? We could say that on The Athletic, but no one at The Times knew who he was. So we said, "The 7'7" unicorn that's taking over the NBA." Right? So the framing is different, but it connects with that audience as well. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's awesome. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that's so important. And I think that it's a question of warm leads or general leads. So you have the resources of the NYT audience, but it's going to be so many people coming through there. And like you said, you're competing with all of the other headlines of everything else that's going on there. So yeah, I think it's absolutely important to filter your content for the main part of the brand's audience, as opposed to your core audience. But the differentiation I think is key there. I think it's great that you're focusing on differentiation for your core audience and the mainstream audience. I think that's a great tactic. They're highly effective. Mordy Oberstein: And yeah, it is highly effective, because as someone who consumes way too much sports media, you'll always hear, whether it's a New York radio talk show or the national guys, "So-and-so reported on The Athletic more than any other source." So kudos. Crystal Carter: I was literally going to say, and then there's some of us who just... I only know the Super Bowl by who did the halftime show. Mordy Oberstein: You're The New York Times audience. Crystal Carter: That me. I'm like, "Is it the Rihanna Super Bowl or the Shakira Super Bowl?" I'm not sure. I don't know- Claudio Cabrera: The Rihanna Super Bowl was huge. It was like biggest audience. It was huge. Crystal Carter: Massive. Mordy Oberstein: As we ebb away here, first off, this was an amazingly enlightening conversation. It really resonated with me, just want to say on a personal level. But I have two questions for you. One is, do you know Ken Rosenthal? Claudio Cabrera: I met Ken Rosenthal, yeah. I met Ken Rosenthal. Loved the bow tie. Fantastic. Really, really good guy. Really warm, really collaborative. I think the interesting part about... And there's a misconception about star reporters. Some star reporters can be a little tricky, but Ken is the guy that, with every MLB reporter and editor literally at The Athletic, if the beat reporter for the Padres is like, "Hey, I don't really know this, but Ken, can I give you a call to see if you have any more information on this?" Happy to collaborate. So Ken is a baseball legend, as you know, and a reporting legend, and really, really warm and nice guy. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm mad jealous. That was a follow-up to that. And the second question is, who do you have winning the Super Bowl? No, no, not just winning. Who's in it? And who wins it? Claudio Cabrera: I think it's going to be the Lions and the Chiefs. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Lions win? Claudio Cabrera: Yeah, I'm a Lions fan, Crystal. So yeah, the Lions are going to win. I think the Lions will make it happen. But I mean if I remove myself from everything and all my biases in the situation, I would say probably the Chiefs. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. But the Lions still in it? Claudio Cabrera: The Lions still in it. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Even with the bias. Okay, I'm with you on this, by the way. I can't stand the Chiefs. I can't deal with another dynasty in the AFC. I had enough. Claudio Cabrera: Oh yeah, I had enough of it. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm going Texans-Lions, knowing full well the Chiefs are going to be there, but I will not verbalize it. And I have Lions either way. Crystal Carter: I'm looking forward to Kendrick Lamar. Claudio Cabrera: Kendrick Lamar is this year. That's right, it is Kendrick. Mordy Oberstein: My kids always ask, it's like, "Who's playing the Super Bowl halftime show?" I'm like, "I don't know. I don't care." Claudio Cabrera: It's like the highest rated 20 minutes of the year for... I don't know. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I don't care about the halftime show. I want to see some- Crystal Carter: That's the sub brand of the Super Bowl. The halftime show is the sub brand of the Super Bowl. It's its own thing. And sometimes it eclipses it. Claudio Cabrera: It's so interesting that you say that because it's spot on. We've gotten to a point even here, where most sports brands at this point, do a separate live blog for the halftime show. Crystal Carter: Oh wow, okay. Claudio Cabrera: Yeah. So you have your Super Bowl live blog, which is full of all the stuff. Right? Some people have a commercial live blog, which is with an expert on just commercial. Crystal Carter: Oh, right. That's also another sub brand. Claudio Cabrera: And then you have the halftime live blog, which is like Rihanna, Usher, et cetera. And I think the interesting part about it is that, before it was like, "Oh, we could get millions of views for this. Let's just put whoever on it." And now you actually have people who are experts about specific artists and things, handling that live blog. Which is pretty cool. Mordy Oberstein: You have experts about people who know about Doritos handling the commercial. Crystal Carter: Also people who've been reporting on it for years. So people who will be comparing it to all of the other Super Bowl shows, or comparing it to all of the other things. Claudio Cabrera: Yes, ranking them and, how good was this one versus the other? All that stuff. Yep. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, fine. So now I have a question for Crystal. Favorite halftime show? Crystal Carter: Favorite halftime show, it's got to be Beyonce. I'm just going to say that, just because I'm biased. Katy Perry, you cannot knock Katy Perry for effort. She did everything. She did all of the things. You can't knock Katy Perry for effort. And I liked Rihanna, but I liked the lady who was doing the sign language better, in terms of dance moves. So there we go. But Usher was fantastic. Usher was brilliant. It was brilliant to see all of that. And I really enjoyed the roller skating. Claudio Cabrera: Oh yeah, the roller skating was pretty cool too. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to go old school, I'm into the Chili Peppers, but my favorite one was when it had Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent and, was it Dr. Dre also? Crystal Carter: That was very good. Mordy Oberstein: That was really good. I really enjoyed that- Crystal Carter: I don’t know why 50 Cent was upside down. Claudio Cabrera: That one made me feel so old. Mordy Oberstein: Everybody felt like, "Oh my God." Claudio Cabrera: Yeah, I was like, "Oh, man, I'm old." Mordy Oberstein: We are old. On that note, Claudio, where can people find your old self? Claudio Cabrera: Where can people find my old... In terms of socials? Mordy Oberstein: Well, I wanted to hand out your address on the podcast, just giving some advice. Claudio Cabrera: I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. I'm always kind of lurking on Twitter, and hanging out there and reading stuff. I'm actually mostly on LinkedIn, but not from a posting perspective, but just talking to people in messages and things like that. That's mainly where I kind of hang out. And my email is always like... I always tell people I'm always open and willing to answer any questions if they have any. So I'm pretty open on that front. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much for being open and sharing all of your insights today. Claudio Cabrera: Of course. Thank you for having me. This was great. And I'm glad we finally made it happen. Mordy Oberstein: So glad. It was really, really great. Look for Claudio on social media. We'll put the links in the show notes, or just read The Athletic. Support Claudio, subscribe to The Athletic. Claudio Cabrera: Please. Mordy Oberstein: Check out Ken Rosenthal. All right. Thanks, Claudio. Claudio Cabrera: Thank you guys. Mordy Oberstein: So as I mentioned before, sub-brands are hard because you have multiple brands to work with, consider, dance around and whatnot. How to deal with a sub-brand is really one of my favorite topics, because literally what I spend almost my entire day doing, managing a sub-brand. Like the Wix Studio, Wix SEO, sub-brandish thing, that's what we do. That's our jam. So we're stoked to have two great brand marketers join us in just a second, Matt Davies of the Just Branding podcast, and Steven Picanza of Branders Magazine, are going to join us as we go into a deep thought. Welcome to the show, Steven and Matt. How are you? Steven Picanza: All right. Mordy, good to see you. Matt Davies: Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Super stoked. The pre-Paul part of this recording was epic. We should have recorded and that should have been the whole thing. Matt Davies: It was wild. Steven Picanza: Well, Matt and I have a history, so I think, get us in a room together... Matt Davies: It's going to be a problem. Steven Picanza: Yeah, there's a lot of magical problems. Mordy Oberstein: I love magical problems. Like my finances, magical problems. Steven Picanza: Right. Beautiful chaos, whatever. Dynamic tension, you keep going with these. Mordy Oberstein: So before we get dragged down this whole wormhole, pitch away and plug away whatever you got. Marketers are going to market, that's what we do on our show. Steven Picanza: Well, Steven Picanza. I am the host of the Talking With Branders podcast, which is part of Branders Magazine. I also am a consultant, brand consultant for startups and a lot of nonprofits recently, a lot of associations. And I also run a content studio here in New Jersey, where as I was telling the gang, we're going to have five sets open right outside Philadelphia. We are changing the game on how small businesses can create and scale content, because it should not be a Herculean task. Also, just go to my website, Stevenpicanza.com. I got a cool newsletter, I do content, and I just want to be the voice of the Branders community. There are a lot of smart MFers out there, like Mr. Matt Davies, that actually know what they're doing. I'm just a mouthpiece and a talking head, and I just want to bring people together. Mordy Oberstein: What do you say to that, Matt? Matt Davies: I mean, wow, how do you follow that? I shouldn't have let him go first, should I? Mordy Oberstein: No, that was your first mistake, for sure. Matt Davies: I'm Matt Davis. As Mordy has kindly said, I am the co-host of the Just Branding podcast with Jacob Cass. But more than that, I also am a consultant, and I tend to work with leadership teams all over the world, who basically need to align around their strategy for the future, and to position their brands powerfully in their marketplaces. So I won't bore you with all of that. I guess a couple of accolades. I've written a book called Storyategy, and I also sit on the editorial team at Branders Magazine, alongside Steven. So that's probably enough for now. Bore you with more stuff another time. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm just going to double down on that and say that, your website and the Branders Magazine website are on Wix. Which is not why you're here, it just happened to be a nice little find. Matt Davies: I like that you've done your homework Mordy. I'm a huge fan of Wix. No one is paying me to say that, by the way, folks, but I am. I find it super easy. I'll tell you a very quick, little story. I used to run an agency about... Well, many moons ago, maybe 20 years ago or something. And we used to do a lot of hand coded websites. As time went on, I could see that the potential of high-end CMSs was coming in. And I've actually pivoted completely, over many, many years now, completely away from execution because I just think technology is catching us up. And Wix is a great example of that. And I use it all the time, and I find it fantastic for my project. So thank you. Steven Picanza: I'm all for Clint after that. Crystal Carter: Great. Thank you for coming on our podcast. It was great talking to you. Bye. Steven Picanza: Matt, you definitely got a nice paycheck coming in the mail now. Mordy Oberstein: One giant IOU coming your way. Steven Picanza: You just can't cash it for 180 days plus. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So branding for a sub brand, marketing for a sub brand. We talked about the SEO side with Claudio Cabrera from The Athletic. Let's get into the actual marketing side. At what point does one say, "You know what? We can really go, and should go, with a sub brand here"? Matt Davies: Can I take that one? I would just pause for one second and just take a quick step back. I just think it's super helpful. Then I'll dive in and attack your question, but I always like to kind of get definitions out of the way. Because when we are talking about brands, sometimes there's huge confusion. Because the average person, when you talk about a brand, they think of a logo, a name, some fonts, maybe some colors or whatever. And that might be part of it, but I don't think that's the best definition. So my definition of a brand is the meaning that people attach to you and your audience. And the game that Steven and I are in, and those brand marketeers out there, we are in the game of managing that meaning. So it's not about us, it should be about them. It should be about, how do people perceive us? How do people understand us? And our strategy should be all about doing that in a way that gives the best impact, gives them the best choice, makes sure that they make the right decisions. And hopefully, the right people choose our product, service offering, or wherever it might be. So that's kind of a bit of a segue to then attack what you've just asked, which is, okay, when do you actually create a sub-brand? So my answer to that is, well, we create a sub-brand when it's necessary for the meaning we want people to attach to us, to ensure that it's easily understood and digestible by them. They can understand this is maybe a new offering or a sub-offering, from a main category offering. And so we offer something like a sub-brand when we're targeting perhaps a new audience. So we've got a new offer that might relate to our overarching offer, but needs definition. It needs distinction, it needs signposting in a way that is relevant and meaningful for the people we're trying to speak to. So that's when you decide to maybe branch out of an overarching portfolio and dive into a sub-brand kind of offering. Steven Picanza: Matt, brilliantly said. And you set the pace, you paved that road with that definition. So definitely appreciate that. To Matt's point, I think as we drill down more specifically, when your product or service diversifies, and the parent brand can't stretch without dilution, that's when you need to look at a sub-brand. Perfect example, you got Coca-Cola, but then maybe you have more health conscious people and they wanted Diet Coke. And so, it was a perfect opportunity to create these sub-brands. And I think we see a lot of this within food and beverage, as people's tastes get more narrow, as people's dietary restrictions get more narrow, it gives the opportunity to create these sub-brands. But some caution, there's got to be the opportunity there, and the opportunity has to come from the people, as Matt was saying. It can't just be a bunch of board directors and CEOs saying, "We should branch out and do extensions, because I like this idea and I think it'll work." That'll never work. Matt Davies: Yeah, that's the number one mistake I see, is people making decisions like this because it makes sense from the business's perspective, but it doesn't make sense from the customer's perspective. And- Steven Picanza: Perfect case. No, sorry, Matt. No, perfect point. I did a lot of work with Dude Wipes on launching their latest campaign. And Dude Wipes Shark Tank brand, they do male, flushable wipes. Well six years ago, more or less, they decided to come out to try to attack Dr. Sasquatch or Dr. Swatch, or whatever they're called, and some of these other male care brands. So they introduced a deodorant, they introduced a bath bomb, they introduced all these other male care products. It wasn't until Cuban called up the founders and said, "Stay in your lane, own your category. You do not need to be branching out now because you're going to lose focus." And thankfully they did, because when COVID hit and the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 happened in America, Dude Wipes cleaned up literally and figuratively, and they saw sales skyrocket because of that laser focus. So you have to be really careful on when to branch, and create extensions or sub brands, and when to kind of hold yourself back. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I mean that's something that actually we deal with all the time, because how we sort of evolve into being... I want to call us a sub brand, but we're like almost a sub brand. We function like a sub brand. Within Wix is, there was a reputation issue around SEO for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. And then once that issue started to get dealt with in an active way, it's a whole different story for a whole different time. And SEO started to come around like, "Wait a second, Wix is actually great for SEO." There started to become an audience interest and an audience shift, and a particular focus on that vertical, different, let's say like Wix and social media, or Wix and analytics, or Wix or whatever it is, around SEO. And the audience determined, "Wait a second, there should be a unique focus for this segment, almost that it operates like that sub brand." And then audience need comes in and says to you, "You need something a little bit more focused and a little bit more defined around that topic or around that category, around whatever that is," that's exactly when you should come in and start doing a sub brand. My go-to category with this when I go to product rather with this, is Blue Moon, which is really Coors. When Coors saw, and all the big companies saw that, wait a second, people are stopping to drink crap beer, and craft beer becoming a thing, they dealt with it two ways. One is, they dealt with it by trying to control the distribution. And when that didn't work the way that it was supposed to work, some of the smarter brands, like Coors, said, "You know what? Let's just create our own craft beer." And distanced itself from the actual... No one's going to know that it's really Coors unless you're reading the very, very, very back of the label that says, "Coors." But it's Blue Moon and it's craft, and you love craft beer. And it tastes different, I think, than actual Coors. I haven't drunk actual Coors in forever, so I wouldn't know. Matt Davies: So it's interesting, because when you start diving into this rabbit hole, there's various strategies brands can take. So let's just imagine we've got a brand and we decide, there's an offering here that feels like it needs its own sub brand. You've kind of got two choices in the management of the meaning. And there's the two main kind of structures, are what we call branded house and house of brands. So let me just briefly, if I may, just quickly reiterate what those are. The branded house is like you are going into a house, and it's all the same house. You feel like you're in the front room, you're in the lounge, you're in the kitchen, you feel like you're in the same house, the same branded house. So for example, if I was in Virgin, I'll be in Virgin Media, I'll be in Virgin Atlantic, I'll be in whatever, all the Virgins. Virgin Galactica, whatever the things are. So it feels very Virgin. There's the core mother brand essence that runs through everything. The customer understands the connection between everything like that. So that's one. The other one is the house of brands, which is a very different approach, which I think you were talking about there, Mordy, with Coors. which is where basically, you're in the house. So let's say we're in Unilever. But I'm in all the different rooms and I don't really know that they connect to each other, or even to Unilever. So I might be in the Dove room, which is all about the Dove products, but that might be very different to some of the other products that they're offering. So you might ask, "Well, why would I choose one over the other? What's the difference?" And again, this comes down to the management of meaning, and you have to be quite strategic in how you think about this. Because if you go down the branded house model, there are some pros and cons. The pros are that, if I have a great experience in one room, in one brand, it might encourage me as a customer to move to also experience another brand. So this works really well for example, for Virgin, because I might be buying my broadband from Virgin. And I have a great experience and I think, "Do you know what? That was really fun. I'll go on holiday with Virgin as well." And so there's a plus. The negative is the same, right? Because if I've had terrible experience with my broadband, it'll put me off completely going on holiday with Virgin. So you've got to think about that. But in the house of brands model, that's very segmented. So you can kind of distance yourself, almost like zone off all your brands, positively or negatively, so that customers don't really know that they're buying from the same company. Again, that can have pros. For example, if your model, your business model is to sell bits off, then it doesn't really matter if you sell off Dove or another brand that you've got, because it doesn't impact the rest of your business. So these are kind of big strategic questions, and there isn't a wrong or a right I would suggest. It just depends on really your end game and what you are really trying to do. But my number one bit of advice is, think of the poor customer. If you're trying to segment it too much, and connect it and not connect, it's just confusing. Steven Picanza: Think of the customer. Indeed. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that that definitely comes into it, and I think that that will really be the deciding factor between whether or not you want to go with the house of brands model or the branded house sort of element. If you think about Ben and Jerry's for instance, Ben and Jerry's was a very beloved brand for a very long time, with a very distinct audience and very distinct USPs, and things like that. When they became part of Unilever, I think people in the industry knew what was going on, but they don't shout about it. It's not shouted about. The branding still is very, very similar, even though it's Unilever. However, because it's part of the Unilever family, there are certain benefits to it. There's scalability, there's distribution. There's also the fact that, because they're part of Unilever, they get a lot of the tooling that you get from Swedish Glass, which is a vegan ice cream thing. Which means that Ben and Jerry's is able to do vegan ice cream really, really quickly and really, really easily. So there's a lot of backend elements for that. And a website, this is also similar, we were talking to Claudio from The Athletic. They are able to benefit from a lot of the legacy content, a lot of the infrastructure, a lot of the links from the parent brand of The New York Times. But they're also able to maintain their identity. So there can be benefits to that. In terms of Virgin, their airlines are fantastic, their broadband I was not impressed with overall, if I'm completely honest. Matt Davies: Crystal, you make a really great point about infrastructure, connections, all of that side of things. I also think there's another area that's probably worthy of note, and that is culture. So I've got a client at the moment, they're in the B2B space. They are a massive brand in the energy sector, and they're going through a lot of M&As at the moment. So they're buying up smaller competitors. And that causes tension with culture. But what I'm doing with their leadership team is we're saying, "This is actually a really amazing thing. Because now, you might've been in a team of 40 to 100 people, now you've got access to a much bigger company, with more support, with more rigorous training, with more opportunity." So it can be great internally as well, depending on how you handle the messaging and how you build that culture. But that all connects in my view, to the brand and the sub-brand strategy that you employ. Crystal Carter: Going back to the people thing, you have to communicate that really, really well between your people. And if you're talking about from an internal point of view, that communication piece is really key. If you're talking about that from a customer point of view, that's also really key. So recently, Brighton SEO, which is a big conference in the SEO industry, they recently merged with PPC... What is it? Matt Davies: Hero Con. Crystal Carter: Hero Con. And they bought that. And when they joined, they were like, "Hi, everyone who loves Hero Con. We now own Hero Con. We're Brighton SEO. If you don't know us, this is who we are. Hi. Hello. If you'd like to leave our mailing list, then good luck to you. But hi, hello." And they had to go through that process. And that's really, really important, both from a client retention, user retention sort of element. And also as you're thinking about other web assets and things like that. Mordy Oberstein: That internal thing is super huge. I want to ask Steve a question also, but the internal thing is huge. I don't know if you're Blue Moon or if you're Hero Con, or if you're Wix, whatever it is, if you don't give that team the autonomy to do their thing as a sub-brand, the way they're meant to do their thing, it does not work. Because by the way, I think it doesn't work so well with Blue Moon sometimes. But for example, with Hero Con, PPC is different than SEO. Right? Or with us, we're talking to SEOs and marketers, as SEOs and marketers. We do not tie our hands together and say, "Well, we have to only talk about it this way because we're Wix and because we're Wix Studio." We have full range. Because the internal teams understand, if you're going to target this audience and act almost like a sub brand, in our case, you have to have full range to speak about SEO and speak about marketing, the way that SEOs and marketers speak about marketing. If you're going after the craft brew audience, you need to speak about craft brewery, brewing, drinking craft beer, the way that someone who drinks craft beer would normally go about. If you tie their hands together, and try to put a square peg into a round hole a little bit, this is not going to work. Steven Picanza: I'm shaking my head in agreement with everything, you've all said it so brilliantly. It is such an opportunity, as Matt was saying, and Crystal, you too, use it as an opportunity to be proactive with your messaging. I think too many brands oftentimes are reactive because they don't think about it, or they don't think the implications, or they don't think strongly enough about how to communicate this merge or this acquisition, or how it's going to impact culture, how it's going to impact your livelihood. Are you out of a job? Is it fear mongering in a way? Which, in this job market, everyone's eyes just popped up. It's fucking tough out there. Excuse me for dropping an F bomb. But use it as an opportunity. Because if you nurture your employees, you nurture your staff, you nurture your customers, and you listen to them and you give them the tools to succeed, they will reward you with their patronage, with their longevity. They'll just reward you by staying with part of your tribe. Mordy Oberstein: Pivot. I want to ask you about the tools to do that, because you mentioned tools, so now we're going to talk about tools. Look at that pivot. Okay. What are some tools that you can use in order to either distance or marry the sub-brand together? I'll give you an example, like a podcast. I think a podcast is a great tool because you can decide, I want to keep the podcast super away from the main brand, or I want to tie it super closely. It's the whatever podcast. Where's the branding from the parent? It's not there. Or it could be the whatever podcast, by parent brand. So that's something that you can either decide to pull in really close or something you can decide to keep really far away. And you can move that along as you decide to. Just an example of a tool. What are some of the tools, or things that you can do or use, to either disconnect the sub-brand from the main brand, if that's what you're trying to do, or to marry them together? Matt Davies: I mean the basic... Oh, sorry. You go, Steven. We're just super excited. We just can't help it. Steven Picanza: Biting and we're chopping at- Matt Davies: You go, I'll give way to you, sir, again. Just putting it out there, that's two now. Steven Picanza: I think that, and going back to what Matt was saying, it depends on what your strategy is. Are your branded house or house of brands? The nomenclature, which is so subjective on your business and your business strategy and your brand strategy, is going to dictate if you say, "From Unilever. A Unilever brand, et cetera, et cetera. Powered by whatever." But I think a tool that should be used is, how do you incorporate those stories together? As Matt was saying, how do you create meaning with these two organizations together? There is a shared story. Whether or not it's a shared legacy, but it's a shared future. So how do we make sure that we're storytelling before that shared future, always with, not the stakeholders or the shareholders thought in mind, but with the audience in mind? So I think that that is such an under leveraged tool that can be used to marry or to tie these brands together. Now of course you can go down the road and you can say, "Oh. Well, visual identity is an easy one." Look at FedEx and all the different FedEx properties, and they all share the same look and feel. But I think when you start to think about brands that want to operate with autonomy, and brands that want to operate as their own but are part of a parent company, it's about those shared values, that shared story and that shared meaning, to go back to what Matt was saying. Matt Davies: So I've got a few ideas on tools. I predominantly work in strategy, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask about tools in the sense of execution. But in terms of strategy, what I would do as a strategist is, first of all, set about trying to understand what the value of this new entity is to customers. So I love surveys. There's tons of survey tools out there. I would actually ask my clients to give me access to say their top 10, top 20 customers, if that's possible. I would literally speak to them. That sounds ridiculously simple, but do you know how many people do not actually speak to their top customers? It's bananas to me. Particularly leadership teams. Speak to them, or get someone like me or Steven to go and speak to them. Because you get an insight then, that's not based on your hunch or your personal view. It's based on something that you've been told by your audience. And if the brand is the meaning that they attach to you, that's got to be the primary source of your thinking. So go speak to people, get surveys, get interviews with them. You can do obviously hardcore market research if you like, and there's lots of tools out there that would enable you to do that as well. And then I think the other thing is really, I'm a massive fan of workshops. I just love a good workshop. So armed with good insight from customers, from how the competitors are positioning themselves, from the category itself, armed with that in mind, get the right decision makers in a room and say, "Okay, look. We need to craft this. We need to align around a strategy for this new entity, this new sub brand. We need to understand..." I mean, I've got four big brand questions I like to ask of any brand, and that is, why do we exist beyond making money? Who do we exist to serve? How should we show up for them? And perhaps the most important, what is the unique value that we're offering? In other words, what is it that people can get from us, that they cannot get from anywhere else? Do we know the answer to that? And if you can answer those four questions, you're on your way to crafting then a focus for the internal teams, which is super powerful. Because they get to focus on the important things, the value that we're offering to the market, in a way that we can communicate it that people would really love. If you don't answer those, then you've got 50 people working on the project, absolute chaos. Because everybody can have their own view of what might be going on here or not, and you end up splintering your brand very swiftly. Crystal Carter: To follow that up, my question is, are your brand guidelines a tool? Matt Davies: Yes, they should be. They should be. And to my mind, there's the visual guidelines, but that is not what I'm talking about. That is important. There's the strategic guidelines, the narrative, the high level stuff, the answer of those four questions. And both of those relate obviously, but start- Steven Picanza: And they live together. Matt Davies: For sure. Steven Picanza: I might even go as far to say that the day of guidelines is almost passing us, and we need to start living in this idea of an operating system. It needs to live and breathe with us. And those four questions that Matt... And Matt and I come from the same school, mentored by Marty Neumeyer and the level C, and that way of brand thinking. But the greater the foundation that we can build on the brand, I always like to say, theoretically, the less money we're going to waste on marketing at the end. Right? Because we're focused. We know who the hell we're talking to. We know what message to say. We have all the answers. And just to Matt's point about talking to your customers, I tell brands this all the time. There was a famous philosopher 2000 years ago, Zeno of Centium. He said, "We all have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Act accordingly." Right? Listen more than you talk. Well, if we put that in the lens of brands, today, brands have two ears and one mouth for a reason, and we should listen to our customers more. They're going to tell us things that we would never have seen. And they're going to tell an outside consultant, like Matt or myself, something perhaps vastly different than the CEO or the CFO, who they have perhaps an intimate relationship with, or there's a monetary relationship there. So there's so much that we could pull out, whether it's data, insight or just insider trading knowledge, to get to where we need to go. Matt Davies: One really big tip that I just want to share is the concept, if you've not come across it yet, of social listening, and having a look... On the most basic level, you can just see how many times your brand is mentioned in a month, for example, versus your competitor set. So that gives you a bit of a sense of share, in terms of how much voice or how much people are talking about you. But if you want to go a little bit more nuanced, you then need to dive into that. Okay, what are they saying about us? Are they complaining? And if they're complaining, what are they complaining about? And if they're loving- Steven Picanza: Is it a positive or negative sentiment? Matt Davies: For sure. So you can go really deep into that, and I always recommend that to any marketing team. Because it's not expensive to start. Obviously if you want to get really in-depth and you've got a lot of data to get through, you might need to pay a bit more to start. Steven Picanza: And a tool that I've used in the past for social listening, that's a great point, Matt, is NetBase. NetBase is a brilliant tool, and it gives you the opportunity to start to attach positive, negative emotions to what's being said, mentioned. We did that a lot for Dude Wipes, and we came up with a crazy insight, and this is a tip for brands. Dude Wipes, oftentimes their comments would have a more positive sentiment than the actual comment that they were responding to. So for example, Chipotle might say, "Free Burrito today." And Dude Wipes would come out and say, "You're going to need us tomorrow." And oftentimes we would see the insight of, "Holy shit, that comment got more engagement than the actual post." And that was their trick. It's incredible. Mordy Oberstein: It's not the amount of engagement, it's the type of engagement. On that happy note, speaking of sharing and listening, could you share where people can find you, so they can listen to you more? Matt Davies: Okay, I'll go first on this one. So you can check out my website, mrmattdavies.me. Spelled M-R-M-A-T-T-D-A-V-I-E-S.M-E. And that's a Wix website. If somebody hasn't mentioned that already, just popping that in there. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. Say it again. It's fine. Matt Davies: Side point. But also, perhaps more importantly, I love LinkedIn. I'm a massive LinkedIn dweller, so please connect with me if you're interested in anything I have to say. I'm often posting content on all this stuff and more. So see you there. Love to connect. Steven Picanza: For me, go to Stevenpicanza.com. I unfortunately am on one of your competitor websites. Mordy Oberstein: Squarespace, I saw. I know. You'll get there. Steven Picanza: But I'm open. Free Agency's coming up. I'm on a month-to-month plan, just saying. So Stevenpicanza.com. You can check me out there. And then like Matt, I am a LinkedIn dweller, if you type in Steven Picanza. But I think more importantly, just look for the peace sign and the pizza slice. We all want a piece of pizza, don't we? Always. Just saying, right? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, truer words were never spoken, unless you're talking about what you just said before about branding. And with that, thanks guys for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate it very much. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Matt Davies: Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: So again, thank you Matt and Steven for joining us. Make sure you give them a follow on LinkedIn. Links again, in the show. You know who's a sub-brand? Barry's a sub-brand. No, he is. Because he's got Search Engine Land and then he's got Search Engine Round Table. It's a brand within a brand of SEO news coverage. Crystal Carter: It's because he's part-time Barry, part-time Rusty Brick. Mordy Oberstein: That should be his tagline, part-time Barry, full-time Rusty Brick. Or full-time Barry. Crystal Carter: I feel like it's his superhero persona. I feel like he needs an action hero outfit that's- Mordy Oberstein: Full on cape, underwear on the outside. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And then when he sees the bad guys who are causing volatility in the algorithm or something- Mordy Oberstein: Like Danny Sullivan? Crystal Carter: No, no. Danny's not a bad guy. He throws bricks at them. That's his thing. So Spider-Man has webs, Batman has batarangs, Barry throws internet bricks at them. You see? Mordy Oberstein: It's like the mafia, like throwing bricks through your window. Crystal Carter: No, those are just ex-girlfriends. That is a tried and tested ex-girlfriend move. Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're throwing the news through a window now, as we pivot into the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, 2:40 from Barry Shortz. And both from Suroundtable.com. First up, report, 22% of sites hit by Google's helpful content update are up 20% plus. This was from originally Glenn Gabe. Glenn Gabe is, call it an index of 400 sites that he's tracking around these official updates. And he said that 88 out of these 400, or 22% of them, saw a 20% increase, at least 20% increase, since the August 2024 core update. Barry says that some had full recoveries, but most did not. And most saw no lifts at all. It's 22%, right? It's just an interesting, I call it a status check on where we are with these updates. Rather these sites getting recoveries from some of these updates. Really interesting to see a link to them within the show notes. You can check out all the great charts that Barry has from Glenn there. Also, from Barry again, Google AI overview displayed within People Also Ask. So there was a test where you opened up the People Also Ask expandable cards. And normally what you see is a featured snippet sort of thing, where you get a little summary answering the question that reflects the card, and then a URL to the website. Again, feature snippet basically. But in this instance, there was a test where when you opened up the expandable card, you were getting the AI overview instead. Same kind of format as you would normally see with the AI overview in general, with just more cards at the bottom it looks like. Anyway, I'll link to the article in the show and you can take a look at what it looks like there. But it is interesting to take note of just Google really doubling down and trying to expand out the AI overview. I don't know, I don't think it'll stick here necessarily. But just again, keeping tabs on where Google is not shying away from pushing AI overviews out there to other places on the SERP, so it clearly seems. And that is this week's Snappy News. Crash. That's the sound of this pivot. Crystal Carter: Bang. Boom. Kapow. Mordy Oberstein: Coming back. Crystal Carter: Is Robin a sub-brand of Batman? Mordy Oberstein: Coming out of the news, is Robin a sub-brand of... Does Robin exist outside of Batman? Crystal Carter: Okay, okay, better. Better. The villains, right? You have Joker, right? Joker is definitely- Mordy Oberstein: Well, they made that into its own brand, until they killed it with the second movie I heard. I didn't even watch it. And I won't watch it now that I heard it's terrible. Crystal Carter: Then there's also Catwoman. Catwoman had a movie, which also didn't... That was kind of okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah. All right. I don't know. Kind of. Mordy Oberstein: Great. Yeah. Perfect. Which brings us to our follow of the week, which is Sarah Press over at Dragon Metrics, and she does a great job marketing her brand, Dragon Metrics. Why we thought she'd be a great follow of the week. She speaks at Brighton SEO. So I met her at Brighton SEO, a few years back. That's how I got introduced to her. So follow her on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's super great. We saw the Dragon Metrics team again at Brighton SEO this year, and they're super lovely. And they've got some great tools, and a great way to track your brand, your sub brand, everything you need. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. So big old follow to Sarah, and shout out the Dragon Metrics. And link in the show notes where you can follow her. I don't know. Sub me out. Done with the episode. Trying to put the subs in. Crystal Carter: Right. I could go for a Subway sandwich. Mordy Oberstein: Subs, not scrubs. Crystal Carter: We don't want no scrubs. Mordy Oberstein: Scrub is a... Not going to even go there. 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, is it time to stop relying on algorithms? Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix Studio SEO learning over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content on webinars on the Wix Studio Learning hub, 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 Claudio Cabrera Steven Picanza Matt Davies Sarah Presch Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center The Athletic Just Branding Podcast Talking with Branders Branding Magazine Matt Davies Brand and Culture Strategy Consultancy Steven Picanza Creative Brand Stragist News: Report: 22% Of Sites Hit By Google's Helpful Content Update Are Up 20%+ Google AI Overview Displayed Within People Also Ask Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Claudio Cabrera Steven Picanza Matt Davies Sarah Presch Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center The Athletic Just Branding Podcast Talking with Branders Branding Magazine Matt Davies Brand and Culture Strategy Consultancy Steven Picanza Creative Brand Stragist News: Report: 22% Of Sites Hit By Google's Helpful Content Update Are Up 20%+ Google AI Overview Displayed Within People Also Ask Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is a fanatic of all things SEO, because fan is really short for fanatic, the head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Let's go team. Mordy Oberstein: No. Team? Crystal Carter: Give me a D. Give me an A. Give me a link. Can I get a link? Is that possible? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, no problem. How much are you willing to pay for them? I have many high DA. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Lots, I guess. Mordy Oberstein: I would sell you Forbes, but they kind of got hit. So there goes that. I'm being that spicy that early on the show. Crystal Carter: Is that too soon? Too soon? Mordy Oberstein: No, by the time... We're recording weeks in advance. Crystal Carter: Got to keep it above the belt, Mordy. That's also a sports thing. There you go. Mordy Oberstein: That is, yeah. But look, the real winners bite other people's ears off, in sports. Crystal Carter: I remember watching that live and I was like, "What is that? Did he ju... Oh my God." Mordy Oberstein: You want to hit a home run, you take steroids. That's my idea of sports. Cork the bat, deflate the ball. There's so much, I can endlessly go on about cheating in sports. Crystal Carter: No, we don't have to. We will triumph. We will win. If you build it, they will come. Mordy Oberstein: Ease my pain. When we talk sports on the podcast, usually it's me just going off on a tangent. This week, it actually makes sense. But we'll get to that in a minute. As the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter. But where you can also take our SEO course, and where you can also set up and monitor sub users, so that you can collaborate in real time with advanced sub user permissions, all on Wix Studio. As this week, we explore the Cs that are SEO for sub brands, the unique characteristics of SEO for a sub brand, how to prevent overlap when doing SEO for a sub brand, what universal truths you could take away when doing, you guessed it, SEO for a sub brand. Full steam ahead is SEO sub brand supreme, Claudio Cabrera of The Athletic, now the sports thing makes sense, will join us in just a few minutes to chat about his experiences. Plus, we'll get into the thick of it, as Matt Davies and Steven Picanza chat how to best market a sub brand, as things get a little bit complicated pretty quickly. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO News, who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So it's one ping only, as we batten up the hatches and down periscope, and dive, dive, dive into SEO for sub brands, on this the 110th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. If you can tell me where the one ping only is from, I'll give you, I don't know, a chocolate bar. Crystal Carter: Hunt For Red October. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. I owe you a chocolate bar. Crystal Carter: And he's like, he's drinking his tea and Sean Connery is just cool as a cucumber, and the missile's coming right at him and he's like, "I need to finish this Earl Gray." I can't remember what tea it was- Mordy Oberstein: One ping only. But the best part, he's playing a Russian commander and he doesn't bother to change his accent. "One ping only." Crystal Carter: Sean Connery plays Sean Connery, whatever he's doing, and nobody's mad at it. I mean lots of people do that. Like Jason Statham, he's Jason Statham wherever he goes. But it's fine. It's fine. That's what he does. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: I got to find a way to use that line on my wife, like, "One ping only." Crystal Carter: You can play ping pong, I guess. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, one of my kids plays ping pong. There we go. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: So before we blink Claudio on, let me just explain really quick, enterprise level SEO is complicated. And one of the areas that complicates it the most, maybe not the most, but one of the ways that it gets complicated a lot is because there's often brands within brands, and it gets really complicated when trying to do SEO. And the problem only compounds itself a gazillion percent over, if there's overlap between what the sub brand is doing and the actual brand is doing, and then becomes a giant mess. So with that, we have a well-smart person who knows how to handle all of us. He's a Lions fan and a Padres fan, and he's from New York. Make sense of that. Welcome to the show, Claudio Cabrera. Claudio Cabrera: Hey, Mordy. Hey, Crystal. Thanks so much for having me. I'm super, super happy to be here. Super happy that my Padres are in the playoffs, the Lions are doing well, and my Spurs are coming to play in the NBA season soon. Mordy Oberstein: It's Wembee time. Claudio Cabrera: Crystal, you're just going to hear a bunch of sports references throughout this whole part. Crystal Carter: It's fine. I went to high school in San Diego, in the days of Tony Gwynn, so I'm very familiar with the Padres when they were at Qualcomm Stadium. Now they've moved on. So I know some sports. I know. I'm familiar. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on. If we're going to do sport, there has to be... I know people with sportsmanship and whatever. But hey, Claudio, how do you feel about 1998? Claudio Cabrera: Oh, that was a bad year. It was a good year, but a bad maybe week and a half within that year, when the Yankees beat the Padres- Mordy Oberstein: How do you like Scott Brochus? No name, third baseman. Claudio Cabrera: Look what I have right next to me. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, nice, nice. Mike came for my birthday one year, drew me like a Yogi Berra card. Claudio Cabrera: That's super cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, super cool. Sports is fun. I enjoy all of it. But you know what's better than sports? SEO for some brands. Claudio Cabrera: I know a little bit about that. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Where did we get started? Because we had this problem, like break the fourth wall, pull the curtain back. We had this problem also, because there's the Wix blog, then there's a Wix SEO hub and then there's Wix Studio, it's all these other entities. There's a lot of overlap. You're at The Athletic. Does that mean the New York Times doesn't cover sports anymore? Claudio Cabrera: Yes. So essentially when The Times bought The Athletic, they bought them in 2022. The thought there was that, number one, I guess the alignment between the two brands is that The Athletic does a lot of original journalism across local markets in the US. And some local markets that The Times may not necessarily have deep penetration into right. The Times has huge audiences on the coast, but also in the middle of the country, but not everywhere. Whereas The Athletic has fans pretty much in every single market. Additionally, the main thing that I would say is that they were really, really focused on the original journalism aspect. There's not a lot of brands in the sports space now that are still creating original journalism at scale. So it seemed like a really, really natural fit. Right? Now, when the brand was acquired in 2022, there was obviously still The New York Times sports page, and it was still operating and it's obviously a very historic sports page that's been around for... I don't even know, 150, 200 years at this point. And I think the overall goal was really to, throughout those first few years, really acclimate The Athletic to The New York Times audience. As you can see us now, we're like the sub folder, we have a presence on the page, we have a module, so many different things. And last year at some point, The New York Times sports page pretty much closed down, which was a big deal, just because of the historic nature of it. And now how we kind of view each other is, The Athletic is the home of that real time, day-to-day coverage for sports. But if you look at the Olympics, if you look at the World Cup in the last few years, when both brands were covering it, The Athletic was the real time. The Times kind of leaned into the cultural aspect of these events. Like, what was the scene in Paris? What was the scene in Qatar when the World Cup was there? So many different things. So it feels like we continue balancing ourselves out. But what you see continuously is The Athletic just increasing their presence on The Times platform, and familiarity with their audiences overall. Crystal Carter: I think you brought up some great points there. First of all, I'm not sure if we cleared up, and I think you kind of did in your description anyway, but in any case, if anyone isn't entirely sure, when we mean sub brand, we don't mean... It's not a question of hierarchy in terms of quality or anything like that. It tends to be like you have a parent brand, say The New York Times, and then within that parent brand, they'll have a brand like The Athletic that we're describing now. And what you're talking about, that process, acquisition is very often a way that sub brands emerge, like you're talking about with The Athletic. Or sometimes it's a case that a team might think, "We need to have a dedicated entity for this particular topic or whichever." And a couple of things that stood out in the way you described The Athletic and how you've been negotiating developing that identity within The New York Times family, as it were, is the USP. You were very clear on the USP of The Athletic and what The Athletic brings to the table, that's unique to the core offering of the brand. Are you able to share how you articulate that or how you make that more clear to your users? Claudio Cabrera: Yeah. I mean, I think overall, when you look at The Times, they have, I don't know, I think four or five sub brands at this point. They have cooking, they have wire cutter, they have sports and they have games, Wordle and those other games that we have. I think in terms of articulation, I'm sure The Times has done a ton of work when it comes to really communicating to the audiences what The Athletic is. But what I would say overall that's been really clear, and the synergy between both brands is that, The Athletic is... When you look at a brand like ESPN, there are ties to the networks. I mean there are ties to the leagues. So there is this belief that organizations like those may not necessarily be able to really report out everything they want to. Right? Now, The Athletic, similar to The Times, is independent of any entities in that sense. So what we really try to communicate to the audiences when we introduce them to The Athletic is really that this is a brand that's independent of any sports leagues. Therefore, we can report anything and everything. So we can hold the brands to account, we can hold TV networks to account, pretty much anything associated with sports. So that allows us to gain the trust of the audience overall, versus there being this feeling like, whether it's ESPN, NBC or any of these other networks that have lead ties, a viewer kind of saying like, "Oh, are they not criticizing them because of this reason or that reason?" And we try to really just keep that independence, in the same way that The Times does, if that makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: I just want to point out by how unique and how important that is in particular in the sports world. Let's say for example, I watch Rich Eisen. Rich Eisen is an old, ESPN Sports Center, newscaster, whatever you want to call him. He also works for the NFL network. So when he is on his own show, you can almost see he's got to be a little bit careful of what he says about the NFL, because he actually works for the NFL. Or Mike Floria who covers NFL and NBC, will literally say, "I don't know if my boss is going to like this or not." Or you see what ESPN did, they brought Pat... I'm really going down the sports wormhole now. They brought Pat McAfee on to make it look like, "Oh, we're offering honest takes. Pat's going to say whatever he wants to say." As if Pat's not playing the game. But it's also nonsense. So The Athletic coming in and offering that USP like, "We're the honest broker," is huge, to me at least, in the sports world. Claudio Cabrera: And what I would also say to that, Mordy and Crystal, one of the things that's happened a lot in sports journalism overall, is newspapers locally downsizing, obviously downsizing in different areas and in different sports. I think the NFL and the NBA seem to be those sports that they don't necessarily downsize in, just because of the popularity of them both. But when you look at baseball, when you look at NHL specifically, there's been a lot of downsizing from a local market perspective. So the thought is, all right, at the same time, we have either the first or the second or the third ranked beat reporter in each specific market. So you have someone that you've developed a relationship with throughout time, and someone that's trustworthy at the same juncture. So it's really multiple value adds. The independence, but also, hey, you could come to The New York Times, but you can also go to The Athletic, if, let's say you don't have the breadth and the depth of sports coverage for your local team in Minnesota, Phoenix, wherever it may be, and kind of follow your team in that way as well. So it's really centered around the fan. Everything about the product is really centered around the fan, and just making sure that the fan feels like we're speaking to them in a way that feels original and doesn't feel like we're just producing content for audience scale. Crystal Carter: And I think that's really interesting, the way that you described. Because most website folks, most people who are producing content, et cetera, would say, "Oh, the users. The users." And you're like, "The fans, the fans that come to our website, because they're fans and we are providing a service for the fans." And I think that perspective is really valuable and it clearly, clearly resonates with your fans, and with the fans of sports who come through. And also, I think that from a sub-brand, parent-brand sort of relationship, it helps bring new audiences to both the parent brand and the sub-brand. And I think also, you were talking about filling gaps, essentially what you're talking about is a content gap. Your team noticed a content gap on the sort of local level of say local NHL teams. The only one I know is the Kings, the Oilers. Those are teams, right? Claudio Cabrera: Yes. Yeah, those are teams. Crystal Carter: Danly Cup. Go Mighty Ducks. Just naming sports things. Anyway, but you notice a gap, and then your team is able to fill that gap. And therefore, both support the fans, but also build your audience. I think, as somebody who works in, like we were saying, a similar brand, we are part of the Wix SEO team, we are part of the Wix SEO hub, one of the things that's great is that you have some of the resources that the parent brand has, in order to fill some of those gaps. How do you manage your resources? How do you get resources for some of the content projects? Let's say you're like, "Hey, there was some..." Mordy, you'll pick me up. Is it like banana ball or something? Mordy Oberstein: Oh yeah. Claudio Cabrera: Pickle ball? Crystal Carter: No, it's like a banana- Mordy Oberstein: No, it's the banana baseball league. Where they- Claudio Cabrera: Oh yeah, yeah. The Savannah something. I don't know what they're called. Mordy Oberstein: Savannah Bananas. Crystal Carter: Right. So let's say your team finds the Savannah Bananas and you're like, "We want to make a whole section about this completely new league." Or something. How do you negotiate getting resources for that, so that you can build something that works for those fans, and helps to support both your brand and the parent brand? Claudio Cabrera: That's a great question. I mean, I think when it comes to sports that aren't necessarily top of mind but are sort of gaining interest, I think a lot of times, in newsrooms, which most newsrooms are pretty strapped when it comes to resources overall, it really comes down to, is there someone from an advertising perspective that's so interested in this particular product or the particular league, that's willing to really say, "Hey, we would love to buy advertising space on your website for F1 or for, let's say Savannah Bananas." Now at that point, you can either do one of two things. You can say, "All right, we're going to have this huge advertising buy from this company and maybe we can build out a vertical for this." Or you can actually say, which we do a lot of, is we say, "Well, we don't necessarily have enough research at this point to say whether pickle ball or that league that you mentioned, or let's say even F1, at the interest level that we need to really dedicate a full team of resourcing to it." So maybe we take one writer and really test out content consistently, to see, one, really less so from... I think from an external perspective, you're obviously able to see day-to-day, like, "Oh, wow. We're getting a lot of audience interest on F1." But I think because we're one of the few only subscription products in the sports space specifically, it allows us to understand, all right, the people that are on our website, do they actually like F1? Right? So we have the EPO in the UK, which is a huge market for us. And in the UK, F1 is more popular than it is in the US. So we started really kind of connecting the dots there and saying, "All right, is F1 something that even our EPO subscribers are really interested in?" We started seeing that interest, and we said, "All right, let's launch F1 vertical." Much smaller than EPL and NFL and all those others, but sort of building it out. So I think multiple things occur, right? I think there has to be interest from an external level on that specific sport. And then I think internally, you just have to do a ton of research, like user segmentation, and so many different things, to really understand, all right, internally, the people that we have as subscribers, do they like this? But also externally, do we have enough that we can provide from an editorial level, to really reach a large scale audience? Crystal Carter: I was just going to say that testing point, the proof of concept thing, and testing and monitoring, is super important. People should definitely pay attention to that as a tactic. Mordy Oberstein: As you're doing the whole F1 thing, in your opinion, how concerned should you be... And abstract because I don't know if you can get into the details of what you do on The Athletic side. I don't want to put you in an uncomfortable position. But as a concept, how closely do you feel the sub-brand should be working with the main brand? Or how concerned should the sub-brand be about keyword targeting, considering what the main brand or the other sub-brands are also doing? Or should it be as independent thing, like do what it does and that's it? Should there be connection? How strong should that connection be? Claudio Cabrera: Yeah, it'll be fully transparent. I think what's been really good about the relationship with The Athletic and The Times, is that it's been pretty independent, for the most part. So there hasn't been like, "You need to do this or you need to do that." We are like two separate newsrooms, one is remote, one is in-person remote. When it comes to keyword targeting, those types of things too, there hasn't been any clashes or anything of the sorts. I think the main thing that we've been really collaborative on is the understanding that our audience is much smaller than theirs. And what The Times is trying to do is really make sure that they get as much visibility to The Athletic as possible. And that takes a lot of things. That takes homepage visibility with a module, that takes email targeting, that takes push notifications. So on their part, it's been, how do we present The Athletic on a day-to-day level when it's just a regular sports cycle? And how do we present The Athletic when it's the Olympics, a World Cup, the NFL trade bill and the NFL draft, and more? So overall, what I would say is that I think there needs to be a relationship, unless the brands are so alike, then I think you're going to run into those issues around keywords and topic pages, and tagging and so many different things. But because we're so different, I think the parent brand, in a lot of respects, unless it's totally disassociated from what the other brand is, probably has the opportunity to really just build up the profile of that specific brand over time, if that makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Makes a ton of sense. And I love the fact that you guys are taking it from an audience-first point of view. It's so refreshing to hear. Claudio Cabrera: Yeah. And I think one of the things that was really great about... And we obviously migrated, so we did a migration. But even before that migration, we were just getting all this link equity, right? Because we were getting links from The Times every single day. And The Athletic was already kind of growing its authority over the six years since it launched. But just kind of having that presence overall is really important. And what you find is this. Right? I came from The Times, I was leading SEO there for about six or seven years, and I never really looked at The Times audience as this sports audience. I looked at them as more of a casual sports audience that's not into the day-to-day, but is more into the moments. And what ended up happening when The Athletic was acquired, is that we had that module, and we would find sports like baseball, Mordy and Crystal, were the sports that were most popular. And it was like, "Wait, MLB is more popular with this audience than NFL or NBA." And then you would see it kind of fluctuate by season. But it really kind of gave us an idea of what types of stories Times users like, how we program for that specific homepage. So how our homepage looks is very different from how we program for them. Because our audience is very intense. Their audience is more like, "Give me the really, really cool story around sports. Or the things I need to talk about near the water cooler with my coworkers." I think- Crystal Carter: Was that break dancing or not? Claudio Cabrera: Exactly. Exactly. So it's two different audiences. And what I would say is that, we don't tailor our content for The Times audience, but we have the ability to frame headlines for The Times audience. So I'll give you a great example. Wembanyama last year, when he entered the league, we could easily say, "Victor Wembanyama is taking over the league." Right? We could say that on The Athletic, but no one at The Times knew who he was. So we said, "The 7'7" unicorn that's taking over the NBA." Right? So the framing is different, but it connects with that audience as well. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's awesome. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that's so important. And I think that it's a question of warm leads or general leads. So you have the resources of the NYT audience, but it's going to be so many people coming through there. And like you said, you're competing with all of the other headlines of everything else that's going on there. So yeah, I think it's absolutely important to filter your content for the main part of the brand's audience, as opposed to your core audience. But the differentiation I think is key there. I think it's great that you're focusing on differentiation for your core audience and the mainstream audience. I think that's a great tactic. They're highly effective. Mordy Oberstein: And yeah, it is highly effective, because as someone who consumes way too much sports media, you'll always hear, whether it's a New York radio talk show or the national guys, "So-and-so reported on The Athletic more than any other source." So kudos. Crystal Carter: I was literally going to say, and then there's some of us who just... I only know the Super Bowl by who did the halftime show. Mordy Oberstein: You're The New York Times audience. Crystal Carter: That me. I'm like, "Is it the Rihanna Super Bowl or the Shakira Super Bowl?" I'm not sure. I don't know- Claudio Cabrera: The Rihanna Super Bowl was huge. It was like biggest audience. It was huge. Crystal Carter: Massive. Mordy Oberstein: As we ebb away here, first off, this was an amazingly enlightening conversation. It really resonated with me, just want to say on a personal level. But I have two questions for you. One is, do you know Ken Rosenthal? Claudio Cabrera: I met Ken Rosenthal, yeah. I met Ken Rosenthal. Loved the bow tie. Fantastic. Really, really good guy. Really warm, really collaborative. I think the interesting part about... And there's a misconception about star reporters. Some star reporters can be a little tricky, but Ken is the guy that, with every MLB reporter and editor literally at The Athletic, if the beat reporter for the Padres is like, "Hey, I don't really know this, but Ken, can I give you a call to see if you have any more information on this?" Happy to collaborate. So Ken is a baseball legend, as you know, and a reporting legend, and really, really warm and nice guy. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm mad jealous. That was a follow-up to that. And the second question is, who do you have winning the Super Bowl? No, no, not just winning. Who's in it? And who wins it? Claudio Cabrera: I think it's going to be the Lions and the Chiefs. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Lions win? Claudio Cabrera: Yeah, I'm a Lions fan, Crystal. So yeah, the Lions are going to win. I think the Lions will make it happen. But I mean if I remove myself from everything and all my biases in the situation, I would say probably the Chiefs. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. But the Lions still in it? Claudio Cabrera: The Lions still in it. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Even with the bias. Okay, I'm with you on this, by the way. I can't stand the Chiefs. I can't deal with another dynasty in the AFC. I had enough. Claudio Cabrera: Oh yeah, I had enough of it. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm going Texans-Lions, knowing full well the Chiefs are going to be there, but I will not verbalize it. And I have Lions either way. Crystal Carter: I'm looking forward to Kendrick Lamar. Claudio Cabrera: Kendrick Lamar is this year. That's right, it is Kendrick. Mordy Oberstein: My kids always ask, it's like, "Who's playing the Super Bowl halftime show?" I'm like, "I don't know. I don't care." Claudio Cabrera: It's like the highest rated 20 minutes of the year for... I don't know. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I don't care about the halftime show. I want to see some- Crystal Carter: That's the sub brand of the Super Bowl. The halftime show is the sub brand of the Super Bowl. It's its own thing. And sometimes it eclipses it. Claudio Cabrera: It's so interesting that you say that because it's spot on. We've gotten to a point even here, where most sports brands at this point, do a separate live blog for the halftime show. Crystal Carter: Oh wow, okay. Claudio Cabrera: Yeah. So you have your Super Bowl live blog, which is full of all the stuff. Right? Some people have a commercial live blog, which is with an expert on just commercial. Crystal Carter: Oh, right. That's also another sub brand. Claudio Cabrera: And then you have the halftime live blog, which is like Rihanna, Usher, et cetera. And I think the interesting part about it is that, before it was like, "Oh, we could get millions of views for this. Let's just put whoever on it." And now you actually have people who are experts about specific artists and things, handling that live blog. Which is pretty cool. Mordy Oberstein: You have experts about people who know about Doritos handling the commercial. Crystal Carter: Also people who've been reporting on it for years. So people who will be comparing it to all of the other Super Bowl shows, or comparing it to all of the other things. Claudio Cabrera: Yes, ranking them and, how good was this one versus the other? All that stuff. Yep. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, fine. So now I have a question for Crystal. Favorite halftime show? Crystal Carter: Favorite halftime show, it's got to be Beyonce. I'm just going to say that, just because I'm biased. Katy Perry, you cannot knock Katy Perry for effort. She did everything. She did all of the things. You can't knock Katy Perry for effort. And I liked Rihanna, but I liked the lady who was doing the sign language better, in terms of dance moves. So there we go. But Usher was fantastic. Usher was brilliant. It was brilliant to see all of that. And I really enjoyed the roller skating. Claudio Cabrera: Oh yeah, the roller skating was pretty cool too. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to go old school, I'm into the Chili Peppers, but my favorite one was when it had Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent and, was it Dr. Dre also? Crystal Carter: That was very good. Mordy Oberstein: That was really good. I really enjoyed that- Crystal Carter: I don’t know why 50 Cent was upside down. Claudio Cabrera: That one made me feel so old. Mordy Oberstein: Everybody felt like, "Oh my God." Claudio Cabrera: Yeah, I was like, "Oh, man, I'm old." Mordy Oberstein: We are old. On that note, Claudio, where can people find your old self? Claudio Cabrera: Where can people find my old... In terms of socials? Mordy Oberstein: Well, I wanted to hand out your address on the podcast, just giving some advice. Claudio Cabrera: I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. I'm always kind of lurking on Twitter, and hanging out there and reading stuff. I'm actually mostly on LinkedIn, but not from a posting perspective, but just talking to people in messages and things like that. That's mainly where I kind of hang out. And my email is always like... I always tell people I'm always open and willing to answer any questions if they have any. So I'm pretty open on that front. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much for being open and sharing all of your insights today. Claudio Cabrera: Of course. Thank you for having me. This was great. And I'm glad we finally made it happen. Mordy Oberstein: So glad. It was really, really great. Look for Claudio on social media. We'll put the links in the show notes, or just read The Athletic. Support Claudio, subscribe to The Athletic. Claudio Cabrera: Please. Mordy Oberstein: Check out Ken Rosenthal. All right. Thanks, Claudio. Claudio Cabrera: Thank you guys. Mordy Oberstein: So as I mentioned before, sub-brands are hard because you have multiple brands to work with, consider, dance around and whatnot. How to deal with a sub-brand is really one of my favorite topics, because literally what I spend almost my entire day doing, managing a sub-brand. Like the Wix Studio, Wix SEO, sub-brandish thing, that's what we do. That's our jam. So we're stoked to have two great brand marketers join us in just a second, Matt Davies of the Just Branding podcast, and Steven Picanza of Branders Magazine, are going to join us as we go into a deep thought. Welcome to the show, Steven and Matt. How are you? Steven Picanza: All right. Mordy, good to see you. Matt Davies: Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: Super stoked. The pre-Paul part of this recording was epic. We should have recorded and that should have been the whole thing. Matt Davies: It was wild. Steven Picanza: Well, Matt and I have a history, so I think, get us in a room together... Matt Davies: It's going to be a problem. Steven Picanza: Yeah, there's a lot of magical problems. Mordy Oberstein: I love magical problems. Like my finances, magical problems. Steven Picanza: Right. Beautiful chaos, whatever. Dynamic tension, you keep going with these. Mordy Oberstein: So before we get dragged down this whole wormhole, pitch away and plug away whatever you got. Marketers are going to market, that's what we do on our show. Steven Picanza: Well, Steven Picanza. I am the host of the Talking With Branders podcast, which is part of Branders Magazine. I also am a consultant, brand consultant for startups and a lot of nonprofits recently, a lot of associations. And I also run a content studio here in New Jersey, where as I was telling the gang, we're going to have five sets open right outside Philadelphia. We are changing the game on how small businesses can create and scale content, because it should not be a Herculean task. Also, just go to my website, Stevenpicanza.com. I got a cool newsletter, I do content, and I just want to be the voice of the Branders community. There are a lot of smart MFers out there, like Mr. Matt Davies, that actually know what they're doing. I'm just a mouthpiece and a talking head, and I just want to bring people together. Mordy Oberstein: What do you say to that, Matt? Matt Davies: I mean, wow, how do you follow that? I shouldn't have let him go first, should I? Mordy Oberstein: No, that was your first mistake, for sure. Matt Davies: I'm Matt Davis. As Mordy has kindly said, I am the co-host of the Just Branding podcast with Jacob Cass. But more than that, I also am a consultant, and I tend to work with leadership teams all over the world, who basically need to align around their strategy for the future, and to position their brands powerfully in their marketplaces. So I won't bore you with all of that. I guess a couple of accolades. I've written a book called Storyategy, and I also sit on the editorial team at Branders Magazine, alongside Steven. So that's probably enough for now. Bore you with more stuff another time. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I'm just going to double down on that and say that, your website and the Branders Magazine website are on Wix. Which is not why you're here, it just happened to be a nice little find. Matt Davies: I like that you've done your homework Mordy. I'm a huge fan of Wix. No one is paying me to say that, by the way, folks, but I am. I find it super easy. I'll tell you a very quick, little story. I used to run an agency about... Well, many moons ago, maybe 20 years ago or something. And we used to do a lot of hand coded websites. As time went on, I could see that the potential of high-end CMSs was coming in. And I've actually pivoted completely, over many, many years now, completely away from execution because I just think technology is catching us up. And Wix is a great example of that. And I use it all the time, and I find it fantastic for my project. So thank you. Steven Picanza: I'm all for Clint after that. Crystal Carter: Great. Thank you for coming on our podcast. It was great talking to you. Bye. Steven Picanza: Matt, you definitely got a nice paycheck coming in the mail now. Mordy Oberstein: One giant IOU coming your way. Steven Picanza: You just can't cash it for 180 days plus. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So branding for a sub brand, marketing for a sub brand. We talked about the SEO side with Claudio Cabrera from The Athletic. Let's get into the actual marketing side. At what point does one say, "You know what? We can really go, and should go, with a sub brand here"? Matt Davies: Can I take that one? I would just pause for one second and just take a quick step back. I just think it's super helpful. Then I'll dive in and attack your question, but I always like to kind of get definitions out of the way. Because when we are talking about brands, sometimes there's huge confusion. Because the average person, when you talk about a brand, they think of a logo, a name, some fonts, maybe some colors or whatever. And that might be part of it, but I don't think that's the best definition. So my definition of a brand is the meaning that people attach to you and your audience. And the game that Steven and I are in, and those brand marketeers out there, we are in the game of managing that meaning. So it's not about us, it should be about them. It should be about, how do people perceive us? How do people understand us? And our strategy should be all about doing that in a way that gives the best impact, gives them the best choice, makes sure that they make the right decisions. And hopefully, the right people choose our product, service offering, or wherever it might be. So that's kind of a bit of a segue to then attack what you've just asked, which is, okay, when do you actually create a sub-brand? So my answer to that is, well, we create a sub-brand when it's necessary for the meaning we want people to attach to us, to ensure that it's easily understood and digestible by them. They can understand this is maybe a new offering or a sub-offering, from a main category offering. And so we offer something like a sub-brand when we're targeting perhaps a new audience. So we've got a new offer that might relate to our overarching offer, but needs definition. It needs distinction, it needs signposting in a way that is relevant and meaningful for the people we're trying to speak to. So that's when you decide to maybe branch out of an overarching portfolio and dive into a sub-brand kind of offering. Steven Picanza: Matt, brilliantly said. And you set the pace, you paved that road with that definition. So definitely appreciate that. To Matt's point, I think as we drill down more specifically, when your product or service diversifies, and the parent brand can't stretch without dilution, that's when you need to look at a sub-brand. Perfect example, you got Coca-Cola, but then maybe you have more health conscious people and they wanted Diet Coke. And so, it was a perfect opportunity to create these sub-brands. And I think we see a lot of this within food and beverage, as people's tastes get more narrow, as people's dietary restrictions get more narrow, it gives the opportunity to create these sub-brands. But some caution, there's got to be the opportunity there, and the opportunity has to come from the people, as Matt was saying. It can't just be a bunch of board directors and CEOs saying, "We should branch out and do extensions, because I like this idea and I think it'll work." That'll never work. Matt Davies: Yeah, that's the number one mistake I see, is people making decisions like this because it makes sense from the business's perspective, but it doesn't make sense from the customer's perspective. And- Steven Picanza: Perfect case. No, sorry, Matt. No, perfect point. I did a lot of work with Dude Wipes on launching their latest campaign. And Dude Wipes Shark Tank brand, they do male, flushable wipes. Well six years ago, more or less, they decided to come out to try to attack Dr. Sasquatch or Dr. Swatch, or whatever they're called, and some of these other male care brands. So they introduced a deodorant, they introduced a bath bomb, they introduced all these other male care products. It wasn't until Cuban called up the founders and said, "Stay in your lane, own your category. You do not need to be branching out now because you're going to lose focus." And thankfully they did, because when COVID hit and the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 happened in America, Dude Wipes cleaned up literally and figuratively, and they saw sales skyrocket because of that laser focus. So you have to be really careful on when to branch, and create extensions or sub brands, and when to kind of hold yourself back. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I mean that's something that actually we deal with all the time, because how we sort of evolve into being... I want to call us a sub brand, but we're like almost a sub brand. We function like a sub brand. Within Wix is, there was a reputation issue around SEO for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. And then once that issue started to get dealt with in an active way, it's a whole different story for a whole different time. And SEO started to come around like, "Wait a second, Wix is actually great for SEO." There started to become an audience interest and an audience shift, and a particular focus on that vertical, different, let's say like Wix and social media, or Wix and analytics, or Wix or whatever it is, around SEO. And the audience determined, "Wait a second, there should be a unique focus for this segment, almost that it operates like that sub brand." And then audience need comes in and says to you, "You need something a little bit more focused and a little bit more defined around that topic or around that category, around whatever that is," that's exactly when you should come in and start doing a sub brand. My go-to category with this when I go to product rather with this, is Blue Moon, which is really Coors. When Coors saw, and all the big companies saw that, wait a second, people are stopping to drink crap beer, and craft beer becoming a thing, they dealt with it two ways. One is, they dealt with it by trying to control the distribution. And when that didn't work the way that it was supposed to work, some of the smarter brands, like Coors, said, "You know what? Let's just create our own craft beer." And distanced itself from the actual... No one's going to know that it's really Coors unless you're reading the very, very, very back of the label that says, "Coors." But it's Blue Moon and it's craft, and you love craft beer. And it tastes different, I think, than actual Coors. I haven't drunk actual Coors in forever, so I wouldn't know. Matt Davies: So it's interesting, because when you start diving into this rabbit hole, there's various strategies brands can take. So let's just imagine we've got a brand and we decide, there's an offering here that feels like it needs its own sub brand. You've kind of got two choices in the management of the meaning. And there's the two main kind of structures, are what we call branded house and house of brands. So let me just briefly, if I may, just quickly reiterate what those are. The branded house is like you are going into a house, and it's all the same house. You feel like you're in the front room, you're in the lounge, you're in the kitchen, you feel like you're in the same house, the same branded house. So for example, if I was in Virgin, I'll be in Virgin Media, I'll be in Virgin Atlantic, I'll be in whatever, all the Virgins. Virgin Galactica, whatever the things are. So it feels very Virgin. There's the core mother brand essence that runs through everything. The customer understands the connection between everything like that. So that's one. The other one is the house of brands, which is a very different approach, which I think you were talking about there, Mordy, with Coors. which is where basically, you're in the house. So let's say we're in Unilever. But I'm in all the different rooms and I don't really know that they connect to each other, or even to Unilever. So I might be in the Dove room, which is all about the Dove products, but that might be very different to some of the other products that they're offering. So you might ask, "Well, why would I choose one over the other? What's the difference?" And again, this comes down to the management of meaning, and you have to be quite strategic in how you think about this. Because if you go down the branded house model, there are some pros and cons. The pros are that, if I have a great experience in one room, in one brand, it might encourage me as a customer to move to also experience another brand. So this works really well for example, for Virgin, because I might be buying my broadband from Virgin. And I have a great experience and I think, "Do you know what? That was really fun. I'll go on holiday with Virgin as well." And so there's a plus. The negative is the same, right? Because if I've had terrible experience with my broadband, it'll put me off completely going on holiday with Virgin. So you've got to think about that. But in the house of brands model, that's very segmented. So you can kind of distance yourself, almost like zone off all your brands, positively or negatively, so that customers don't really know that they're buying from the same company. Again, that can have pros. For example, if your model, your business model is to sell bits off, then it doesn't really matter if you sell off Dove or another brand that you've got, because it doesn't impact the rest of your business. So these are kind of big strategic questions, and there isn't a wrong or a right I would suggest. It just depends on really your end game and what you are really trying to do. But my number one bit of advice is, think of the poor customer. If you're trying to segment it too much, and connect it and not connect, it's just confusing. Steven Picanza: Think of the customer. Indeed. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that that definitely comes into it, and I think that that will really be the deciding factor between whether or not you want to go with the house of brands model or the branded house sort of element. If you think about Ben and Jerry's for instance, Ben and Jerry's was a very beloved brand for a very long time, with a very distinct audience and very distinct USPs, and things like that. When they became part of Unilever, I think people in the industry knew what was going on, but they don't shout about it. It's not shouted about. The branding still is very, very similar, even though it's Unilever. However, because it's part of the Unilever family, there are certain benefits to it. There's scalability, there's distribution. There's also the fact that, because they're part of Unilever, they get a lot of the tooling that you get from Swedish Glass, which is a vegan ice cream thing. Which means that Ben and Jerry's is able to do vegan ice cream really, really quickly and really, really easily. So there's a lot of backend elements for that. And a website, this is also similar, we were talking to Claudio from The Athletic. They are able to benefit from a lot of the legacy content, a lot of the infrastructure, a lot of the links from the parent brand of The New York Times. But they're also able to maintain their identity. So there can be benefits to that. In terms of Virgin, their airlines are fantastic, their broadband I was not impressed with overall, if I'm completely honest. Matt Davies: Crystal, you make a really great point about infrastructure, connections, all of that side of things. I also think there's another area that's probably worthy of note, and that is culture. So I've got a client at the moment, they're in the B2B space. They are a massive brand in the energy sector, and they're going through a lot of M&As at the moment. So they're buying up smaller competitors. And that causes tension with culture. But what I'm doing with their leadership team is we're saying, "This is actually a really amazing thing. Because now, you might've been in a team of 40 to 100 people, now you've got access to a much bigger company, with more support, with more rigorous training, with more opportunity." So it can be great internally as well, depending on how you handle the messaging and how you build that culture. But that all connects in my view, to the brand and the sub-brand strategy that you employ. Crystal Carter: Going back to the people thing, you have to communicate that really, really well between your people. And if you're talking about from an internal point of view, that communication piece is really key. If you're talking about that from a customer point of view, that's also really key. So recently, Brighton SEO, which is a big conference in the SEO industry, they recently merged with PPC... What is it? Matt Davies: Hero Con. Crystal Carter: Hero Con. And they bought that. And when they joined, they were like, "Hi, everyone who loves Hero Con. We now own Hero Con. We're Brighton SEO. If you don't know us, this is who we are. Hi. Hello. If you'd like to leave our mailing list, then good luck to you. But hi, hello." And they had to go through that process. And that's really, really important, both from a client retention, user retention sort of element. And also as you're thinking about other web assets and things like that. Mordy Oberstein: That internal thing is super huge. I want to ask Steve a question also, but the internal thing is huge. I don't know if you're Blue Moon or if you're Hero Con, or if you're Wix, whatever it is, if you don't give that team the autonomy to do their thing as a sub-brand, the way they're meant to do their thing, it does not work. Because by the way, I think it doesn't work so well with Blue Moon sometimes. But for example, with Hero Con, PPC is different than SEO. Right? Or with us, we're talking to SEOs and marketers, as SEOs and marketers. We do not tie our hands together and say, "Well, we have to only talk about it this way because we're Wix and because we're Wix Studio." We have full range. Because the internal teams understand, if you're going to target this audience and act almost like a sub brand, in our case, you have to have full range to speak about SEO and speak about marketing, the way that SEOs and marketers speak about marketing. If you're going after the craft brew audience, you need to speak about craft brewery, brewing, drinking craft beer, the way that someone who drinks craft beer would normally go about. If you tie their hands together, and try to put a square peg into a round hole a little bit, this is not going to work. Steven Picanza: I'm shaking my head in agreement with everything, you've all said it so brilliantly. It is such an opportunity, as Matt was saying, and Crystal, you too, use it as an opportunity to be proactive with your messaging. I think too many brands oftentimes are reactive because they don't think about it, or they don't think the implications, or they don't think strongly enough about how to communicate this merge or this acquisition, or how it's going to impact culture, how it's going to impact your livelihood. Are you out of a job? Is it fear mongering in a way? Which, in this job market, everyone's eyes just popped up. It's fucking tough out there. Excuse me for dropping an F bomb. But use it as an opportunity. Because if you nurture your employees, you nurture your staff, you nurture your customers, and you listen to them and you give them the tools to succeed, they will reward you with their patronage, with their longevity. They'll just reward you by staying with part of your tribe. Mordy Oberstein: Pivot. I want to ask you about the tools to do that, because you mentioned tools, so now we're going to talk about tools. Look at that pivot. Okay. What are some tools that you can use in order to either distance or marry the sub-brand together? I'll give you an example, like a podcast. I think a podcast is a great tool because you can decide, I want to keep the podcast super away from the main brand, or I want to tie it super closely. It's the whatever podcast. Where's the branding from the parent? It's not there. Or it could be the whatever podcast, by parent brand. So that's something that you can either decide to pull in really close or something you can decide to keep really far away. And you can move that along as you decide to. Just an example of a tool. What are some of the tools, or things that you can do or use, to either disconnect the sub-brand from the main brand, if that's what you're trying to do, or to marry them together? Matt Davies: I mean the basic... Oh, sorry. You go, Steven. We're just super excited. We just can't help it. Steven Picanza: Biting and we're chopping at- Matt Davies: You go, I'll give way to you, sir, again. Just putting it out there, that's two now. Steven Picanza: I think that, and going back to what Matt was saying, it depends on what your strategy is. Are your branded house or house of brands? The nomenclature, which is so subjective on your business and your business strategy and your brand strategy, is going to dictate if you say, "From Unilever. A Unilever brand, et cetera, et cetera. Powered by whatever." But I think a tool that should be used is, how do you incorporate those stories together? As Matt was saying, how do you create meaning with these two organizations together? There is a shared story. Whether or not it's a shared legacy, but it's a shared future. So how do we make sure that we're storytelling before that shared future, always with, not the stakeholders or the shareholders thought in mind, but with the audience in mind? So I think that that is such an under leveraged tool that can be used to marry or to tie these brands together. Now of course you can go down the road and you can say, "Oh. Well, visual identity is an easy one." Look at FedEx and all the different FedEx properties, and they all share the same look and feel. But I think when you start to think about brands that want to operate with autonomy, and brands that want to operate as their own but are part of a parent company, it's about those shared values, that shared story and that shared meaning, to go back to what Matt was saying. Matt Davies: So I've got a few ideas on tools. I predominantly work in strategy, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask about tools in the sense of execution. But in terms of strategy, what I would do as a strategist is, first of all, set about trying to understand what the value of this new entity is to customers. So I love surveys. There's tons of survey tools out there. I would actually ask my clients to give me access to say their top 10, top 20 customers, if that's possible. I would literally speak to them. That sounds ridiculously simple, but do you know how many people do not actually speak to their top customers? It's bananas to me. Particularly leadership teams. Speak to them, or get someone like me or Steven to go and speak to them. Because you get an insight then, that's not based on your hunch or your personal view. It's based on something that you've been told by your audience. And if the brand is the meaning that they attach to you, that's got to be the primary source of your thinking. So go speak to people, get surveys, get interviews with them. You can do obviously hardcore market research if you like, and there's lots of tools out there that would enable you to do that as well. And then I think the other thing is really, I'm a massive fan of workshops. I just love a good workshop. So armed with good insight from customers, from how the competitors are positioning themselves, from the category itself, armed with that in mind, get the right decision makers in a room and say, "Okay, look. We need to craft this. We need to align around a strategy for this new entity, this new sub brand. We need to understand..." I mean, I've got four big brand questions I like to ask of any brand, and that is, why do we exist beyond making money? Who do we exist to serve? How should we show up for them? And perhaps the most important, what is the unique value that we're offering? In other words, what is it that people can get from us, that they cannot get from anywhere else? Do we know the answer to that? And if you can answer those four questions, you're on your way to crafting then a focus for the internal teams, which is super powerful. Because they get to focus on the important things, the value that we're offering to the market, in a way that we can communicate it that people would really love. If you don't answer those, then you've got 50 people working on the project, absolute chaos. Because everybody can have their own view of what might be going on here or not, and you end up splintering your brand very swiftly. Crystal Carter: To follow that up, my question is, are your brand guidelines a tool? Matt Davies: Yes, they should be. They should be. And to my mind, there's the visual guidelines, but that is not what I'm talking about. That is important. There's the strategic guidelines, the narrative, the high level stuff, the answer of those four questions. And both of those relate obviously, but start- Steven Picanza: And they live together. Matt Davies: For sure. Steven Picanza: I might even go as far to say that the day of guidelines is almost passing us, and we need to start living in this idea of an operating system. It needs to live and breathe with us. And those four questions that Matt... And Matt and I come from the same school, mentored by Marty Neumeyer and the level C, and that way of brand thinking. But the greater the foundation that we can build on the brand, I always like to say, theoretically, the less money we're going to waste on marketing at the end. Right? Because we're focused. We know who the hell we're talking to. We know what message to say. We have all the answers. And just to Matt's point about talking to your customers, I tell brands this all the time. There was a famous philosopher 2000 years ago, Zeno of Centium. He said, "We all have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Act accordingly." Right? Listen more than you talk. Well, if we put that in the lens of brands, today, brands have two ears and one mouth for a reason, and we should listen to our customers more. They're going to tell us things that we would never have seen. And they're going to tell an outside consultant, like Matt or myself, something perhaps vastly different than the CEO or the CFO, who they have perhaps an intimate relationship with, or there's a monetary relationship there. So there's so much that we could pull out, whether it's data, insight or just insider trading knowledge, to get to where we need to go. Matt Davies: One really big tip that I just want to share is the concept, if you've not come across it yet, of social listening, and having a look... On the most basic level, you can just see how many times your brand is mentioned in a month, for example, versus your competitor set. So that gives you a bit of a sense of share, in terms of how much voice or how much people are talking about you. But if you want to go a little bit more nuanced, you then need to dive into that. Okay, what are they saying about us? Are they complaining? And if they're complaining, what are they complaining about? And if they're loving- Steven Picanza: Is it a positive or negative sentiment? Matt Davies: For sure. So you can go really deep into that, and I always recommend that to any marketing team. Because it's not expensive to start. Obviously if you want to get really in-depth and you've got a lot of data to get through, you might need to pay a bit more to start. Steven Picanza: And a tool that I've used in the past for social listening, that's a great point, Matt, is NetBase. NetBase is a brilliant tool, and it gives you the opportunity to start to attach positive, negative emotions to what's being said, mentioned. We did that a lot for Dude Wipes, and we came up with a crazy insight, and this is a tip for brands. Dude Wipes, oftentimes their comments would have a more positive sentiment than the actual comment that they were responding to. So for example, Chipotle might say, "Free Burrito today." And Dude Wipes would come out and say, "You're going to need us tomorrow." And oftentimes we would see the insight of, "Holy shit, that comment got more engagement than the actual post." And that was their trick. It's incredible. Mordy Oberstein: It's not the amount of engagement, it's the type of engagement. On that happy note, speaking of sharing and listening, could you share where people can find you, so they can listen to you more? Matt Davies: Okay, I'll go first on this one. So you can check out my website, mrmattdavies.me. Spelled M-R-M-A-T-T-D-A-V-I-E-S.M-E. And that's a Wix website. If somebody hasn't mentioned that already, just popping that in there. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. Say it again. It's fine. Matt Davies: Side point. But also, perhaps more importantly, I love LinkedIn. I'm a massive LinkedIn dweller, so please connect with me if you're interested in anything I have to say. I'm often posting content on all this stuff and more. So see you there. Love to connect. Steven Picanza: For me, go to Stevenpicanza.com. I unfortunately am on one of your competitor websites. Mordy Oberstein: Squarespace, I saw. I know. You'll get there. Steven Picanza: But I'm open. Free Agency's coming up. I'm on a month-to-month plan, just saying. So Stevenpicanza.com. You can check me out there. And then like Matt, I am a LinkedIn dweller, if you type in Steven Picanza. But I think more importantly, just look for the peace sign and the pizza slice. We all want a piece of pizza, don't we? Always. Just saying, right? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, truer words were never spoken, unless you're talking about what you just said before about branding. And with that, thanks guys for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate it very much. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Matt Davies: Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein: So again, thank you Matt and Steven for joining us. Make sure you give them a follow on LinkedIn. Links again, in the show. You know who's a sub-brand? Barry's a sub-brand. No, he is. Because he's got Search Engine Land and then he's got Search Engine Round Table. It's a brand within a brand of SEO news coverage. Crystal Carter: It's because he's part-time Barry, part-time Rusty Brick. Mordy Oberstein: That should be his tagline, part-time Barry, full-time Rusty Brick. Or full-time Barry. Crystal Carter: I feel like it's his superhero persona. I feel like he needs an action hero outfit that's- Mordy Oberstein: Full on cape, underwear on the outside. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And then when he sees the bad guys who are causing volatility in the algorithm or something- Mordy Oberstein: Like Danny Sullivan? Crystal Carter: No, no. Danny's not a bad guy. He throws bricks at them. That's his thing. So Spider-Man has webs, Batman has batarangs, Barry throws internet bricks at them. You see? Mordy Oberstein: It's like the mafia, like throwing bricks through your window. Crystal Carter: No, those are just ex-girlfriends. That is a tried and tested ex-girlfriend move. Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're throwing the news through a window now, as we pivot into the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, 2:40 from Barry Shortz. And both from Suroundtable.com. First up, report, 22% of sites hit by Google's helpful content update are up 20% plus. This was from originally Glenn Gabe. Glenn Gabe is, call it an index of 400 sites that he's tracking around these official updates. And he said that 88 out of these 400, or 22% of them, saw a 20% increase, at least 20% increase, since the August 2024 core update. Barry says that some had full recoveries, but most did not. And most saw no lifts at all. It's 22%, right? It's just an interesting, I call it a status check on where we are with these updates. Rather these sites getting recoveries from some of these updates. Really interesting to see a link to them within the show notes. You can check out all the great charts that Barry has from Glenn there. Also, from Barry again, Google AI overview displayed within People Also Ask. So there was a test where you opened up the People Also Ask expandable cards. And normally what you see is a featured snippet sort of thing, where you get a little summary answering the question that reflects the card, and then a URL to the website. Again, feature snippet basically. But in this instance, there was a test where when you opened up the expandable card, you were getting the AI overview instead. Same kind of format as you would normally see with the AI overview in general, with just more cards at the bottom it looks like. Anyway, I'll link to the article in the show and you can take a look at what it looks like there. But it is interesting to take note of just Google really doubling down and trying to expand out the AI overview. I don't know, I don't think it'll stick here necessarily. But just again, keeping tabs on where Google is not shying away from pushing AI overviews out there to other places on the SERP, so it clearly seems. And that is this week's Snappy News. Crash. That's the sound of this pivot. Crystal Carter: Bang. Boom. Kapow. Mordy Oberstein: Coming back. Crystal Carter: Is Robin a sub-brand of Batman? Mordy Oberstein: Coming out of the news, is Robin a sub-brand of... Does Robin exist outside of Batman? Crystal Carter: Okay, okay, better. Better. The villains, right? You have Joker, right? Joker is definitely- Mordy Oberstein: Well, they made that into its own brand, until they killed it with the second movie I heard. I didn't even watch it. And I won't watch it now that I heard it's terrible. Crystal Carter: Then there's also Catwoman. Catwoman had a movie, which also didn't... That was kind of okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah. All right. I don't know. Kind of. Mordy Oberstein: Great. Yeah. Perfect. Which brings us to our follow of the week, which is Sarah Press over at Dragon Metrics, and she does a great job marketing her brand, Dragon Metrics. Why we thought she'd be a great follow of the week. She speaks at Brighton SEO. So I met her at Brighton SEO, a few years back. That's how I got introduced to her. So follow her on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: Yeah, she's super great. We saw the Dragon Metrics team again at Brighton SEO this year, and they're super lovely. And they've got some great tools, and a great way to track your brand, your sub brand, everything you need. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. So big old follow to Sarah, and shout out the Dragon Metrics. And link in the show notes where you can follow her. I don't know. Sub me out. Done with the episode. Trying to put the subs in. Crystal Carter: Right. I could go for a Subway sandwich. Mordy Oberstein: Subs, not scrubs. Crystal Carter: We don't want no scrubs. Mordy Oberstein: Scrub is a... Not going to even go there. 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, is it time to stop relying on algorithms? Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix Studio SEO learning over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content on webinars on the Wix Studio Learning hub, 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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Solomon Thimothy is a digital marketing expert with 17+ years of experience helping businesses scale through SEO and growth strategies. As the founder of Clickx, he’s worked with companies to drive organic traffic and dominate search results. Solomon Thimothy Co-founder at Clickx Solomon Thimothy is a digital marketing expert with 17+ years of experience helping businesses scale through SEO and growth strategies. As the founder of Clickx, he’s worked with companies to drive organic traffic and dominate search results. Learn more at Clickx.io . Articles & Resources 3 Dec 2024 Automation for digital marketing agencies: How to drive growth, efficiency, and profits 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

Alla is product manager at Wix. Best known for leading Wix’s integration with Google AdSense, she is dedicated to helping users maximize their business and online presence. Alla also collaborates with various teams and contributes to the development of multiple products and features. Alla Avgustinov Product Manager, Wix Alla is product manager at Wix. Best known for leading Wix’s integration with Google AdSense, she is dedicated to helping users maximize their business and online presence. Alla also collaborates with various teams and contributes to the development of multiple products and features. Articles & Resources 24 Sept 2024 Generate additional revenue streams with Wix & Google AdSense Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Is AI writing for long-form web content the right way to go? We don’t think so. Actually, if you’re not careful, it may illicit action from Google. Mordy and Crystal address the growing use of artificial intelligence in content writing for the web in light of the most recent Google algorithm changes regarding helpful content. Is AI written content really good content? It certainly isn’t differentiated and doesn’t have critical thought. Even if the AI content ranks well, what are you delivering to your audience? You don’t often hear the cheers for generic, mediocre content. Let alone the one thought: Whose content is it, really? Who’s the author? Danny Richman, the founder of Richman SEO Training, clarifies where AI writers can be a legitimate help: classification, transformation, and translation. A key use for GPT3 is for keyword classification, done in seconds! Remember: AI-written content for rank manipulation is against Google's guidelines. To quote Mordy, “with the Helpful Content Update, which, to me, is Google saying, We know AI written content is coming, It's already here. We need to develop an algorithm that's able to find it and weed it out“. Back Is the SEO world ready for AI content writers? Is AI writing for long-form web content the right way to go? We don’t think so. Actually, if you’re not careful, it may illicit action from Google. Mordy and Crystal address the growing use of artificial intelligence in content writing for the web in light of the most recent Google algorithm changes regarding helpful content. Is AI written content really good content? It certainly isn’t differentiated and doesn’t have critical thought. Even if the AI content ranks well, what are you delivering to your audience? You don’t often hear the cheers for generic, mediocre content. Let alone the one thought: Whose content is it, really? Who’s the author? Danny Richman, the founder of Richman SEO Training, clarifies where AI writers can be a legitimate help: classification, transformation, and translation. A key use for GPT3 is for keyword classification, done in seconds! Remember: AI-written content for rank manipulation is against Google's guidelines. To quote Mordy, “with the Helpful Content Update, which, to me, is Google saying, We know AI written content is coming, It's already here. We need to develop an algorithm that's able to find it and weed it out“. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 09 | October 19, 2022 | 32 MIN 00:00 / 32:04 This week’s guests Danny Richman Danny Richman is the founder of Richman SEO Training. He has over 20 years’ experience in search marketing and a regular speaker at many industry events. Danny has been helping businesses and organisations grow their online traffic since the birth of the internet. His clients include the BBC, Bank of England and the John Lewis Partnership. Danny also works as a volunteer mentor to the Prince’s Trust supporting disadvantaged young people to start their own business. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy, new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix and I'm joined by our own head of SEO communications, the one, the only, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, there internet people. I'm always pleased to be here with you on this lovely, fantastic day for podcasting. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, do you think they are internet people like an Oompa-Loompa who lives on the internet? Crystal Carter: Am I not an internet person? Are you not an internet person? Mordy Oberstein: Well, I always thought I lived in real life also. Crystal Carter: I live here. This is where I live. Mordy Oberstein: You're in the internet. Crystal Carter: I'm in the computer. Mordy Oberstein: You're in the computer. Wait, when you order-? Crystal Carter: Delete. Mordy Oberstein: When you order something online and they say address, "In the computer." Crystal Carter: In the computer. I'm already here. We're already there. Mordy Oberstein: You're basically AI, which is kind of what we're going to get at today. Crystal Carter: That is what we will talk about. Mordy Oberstein: Before we do that, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where if you want to add product structured data markups so that you could be eligible for Google shopping results, since now product markup makes you eligible, you have to do nothing. Crystal Carter: Nothing. Mordy Oberstein: Nothing. You have to literally do nothing. Crystal Carter: I love it. Mordy Oberstein: If you want, you can totally rely on the automated structure data markup Wix creates for you on your product pages out of the box. Crystal Carter: This is one of those times where it's just stay ready so you don't have to get ready. I love when these updates happen and they're like, "Oh, what do we...? Oh, nothing. We already did it. We already did it." It's like finding money in your pocket. I just love it. Mordy Oberstein: But good money, not like a penny. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: 20 bucks. Crystal Carter: You got like 20 bucks, 20 bucks to your pocket, you're like, "I'm going to give myself a latte. This is nice." Mordy Oberstein: "Should I tell my spouse I'm just going to get another...? No, they're just-" Crystal Carter: No. Buy myself a latte. I'm going to get whipped cream. I'm going to get a pastry or something. It's going to be pumpkin spiced. Lovely. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's going to be lovely? Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: This show. This show is going to be lovely. Crystal Carter: Oh, you segue's galore. Mordy Oberstein: Oh good. Because the AI writers are coming, or conversely, guess who's coming to dinner? AI writers. Crystal Carter: They only have the megabytes. Mordy Oberstein: They only care about dinner. They're not coming for lunch, just for dinner. But should you let them into the henhouse, where I guess you would eat dinner... I don't know why you- Crystal Carter: These have so many metaphors. I don't even know where you're going with this. Mordy Oberstein: We're talking about the value of content created by AI writers and if the content they create is good or bad for your SEO. And to that, Danny Richman stops by to give his take on where AI writers can actually be truly helpful for SEO and the answer may surprise you. Plus a new form of image preview on the SERP. But is it really new? And why does it matter, even if it's not? And of course, some snappy SEO news on who you should be following on social for some SEO awesomeness. It's episode number nine of the SERP's Up podcast. So creating content is really hard. Crystal Carter: It takes a lot of time, especially if you want to do good content. Mordy Oberstein: So that's sort of the problem. So while content is the commodity of your website, it's really an area where many websites struggle by forgetting knowing which piece of content to write or what topics to write or well, who to target and how to optimize it. Who's going to write all this content? Crystal Carter: Yeah, who's going to write it? Who's going to make it? Who's going to make sure that it actually makes sense as well? There's a lot of stuff to think about. Mordy Oberstein: So much. And the worst thing is there's so many things to think about and there's so many options, but none of them are good. Either you can farm the content creation out and some churn and burn content agency or write something really quick, which would be probably really thin. Or you could spend the time, a lot of time, and a lot of money creating a really strong piece of well-crafted content. But who's got time and/or money to do that on a regular basis? So what do you do? Well, then one day along came the AI writer who promised the world with the cheap option to create content in bulk really quickly, that's of good quality. But there's the rub. Is it really good? Is AI written content really good for users? Because in most cases, spoiler, probably isn't. And while it might be tempting to go with an AI writer to write your content, you might as a rule with certain exceptions, want to stay away from it. So let's dive into AI writers' content and Google. What a world we live in! We have AI writers writing content for us. I don't how to start with this. Crystal Carter: Honestly, there's so much to think about here. So I think with AI writers, we are engaging with AI writers regularly in lots of different ways, but in sort of smaller ways and we have been for smaller ways. So your phone has predictive text and that's going to be using the patterns of things that you say. If you say lol a lot, it's going to show up in your phone a lot. They've added it into Gmail, they've added it into the other email platforms. It's also in Google Docs. There's sometimes you can get search predictive texts, for instance. I use Grammarly a lot. We will help you with your grammar. We'll also say maybe you should mix up some of your words here. So I think that lots of people are using a little bit of AI as a sort of assist, kind of an e-bike. Maybe you don't want to do the whole hill, maybe you just want to put the e-bike on. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. This is exactly what it is. Crystal Carter: So you can get up the hill but without sweating. So I think that's fine and I think that that's something that's useful, but it's very, very tricky. There are options. There are options where you can just let the e-bike do the whole thing, where you can let the machine do the whole thing. And I think a lot of people are thinking, "Oh, that looks good. That sounds great. That does the job." Mordy Oberstein: Does sound great. It sounds like the panacea. This is great. It's a solution that solves all the problems. But like most panaceas, they solve nothing. And I think you're right on spot. There are cases like oh, every time you run an email, you write something and Google's like, "No, no, here's the suggested text and it has the comma in the right place." By the way, it's how if someone's using the AI in Gmail because they have all the commas in the right place. Crystal Carter: Honestly, that Oxford comma gets me every time. Mordy Oberstein: Every time. Crystal Carter: Every single time. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. That is legitimately great. But then when it comes to okay, now we're going to write entire blog post written by AI writers, and I think that is an absolute mistake. I know there are people out there listening to this who think, "No, no, no. You can absolutely do that." And I'm sure you can use an AI writer with a little bit of editing and get a readable blog post. There's not a lot of mistakes. It's a usable piece of content. But is it really good? Is it differentiated in any way? Does it have actual critical thought put into it? Because as great as AI writers are, and I say this as a matter of philosophy, you can disagree with me, you cannot replicate human thought. We don't even understand human thought. So how are we going to create an AI writer that replicates human thought? It makes no sense to me. Crystal Carter: Also, I think sometimes it is the idiosyncrasies about a writer that makes them fantastic. So I' mean, the person that I think of is Tony Morrison. I remember reading a book of Tony Morrison's, and the whole page was one sentence. An AI writer would never do that. Grammarly would tell you that's a terrible, awful idea. But I definitely read that and thought, "This is beautiful. It's pretty much a poem." And it was one sentence and sometimes I go, "And this, and that, and that," in my sentences, and I do that for effect. I don't do that for grammar, I do that for effect. And sometimes you repeat. I repeat words in my writing and I do that, again, for effect. You want rhythm, you want different things when you're doing your writing. And AI will do something different there. So I think that the uniqueness that comes with some of human idiosyncrasies not only provides some of the flavor, some of the things that make something pleasurable to read, but can also be a USP. So if lots of people are using AI writers and if you are able to do something that is unique with your actual personal tone of voice, I remember this, a play about Sondheim, Sunday in The Park With George, and I remember watching that and they said, "Oh, everything's already been painted before." And somebody's like, "But painted by you George, has it been painted by you?" Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: So it's important to think about how you would phrase something, how you would think about your content. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, leave the SEO aside for one quick second. We'll get back to it. Just from a branding point of view, imagine this, imagine any serious writer. I'll say, I think I'm a serious writer for the most part. I have been offered by people, "Hey, well, we'll ghostwrite this blog post for you. We'll just put your name on there." Absolutely not. First off, I have a unique writing style. I have a unique way of phrasing things. I think there's a level of nuance and detail and substance that I offer on the topics I know about that other people just don't have that same perspective as I do. I wouldn't entrust my name with another human being. And then you want to entrust it, as a writer, to a bot? That makes no sense. And by the way, that brings up a real SEO question of who's the author of the content? Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Is the content owned by the AI tool and could they just farm it out to someone else? I mean it's a potential risk. What does it say? A million monkeys writing on a typewriter will suddenly make Shakespeare. I think there's a potential risk. This is me spitballing, but there's a potential risk that your content could end up being very, very similar to somebody else- Mordy Oberstein: Oh sure. Crystal Carter: Who's using the same prompt from the same tool. For instance, let's say you're looking at a tool and tool says that you should ask, "What different the earrings should I wear with a ball gown or something?" And that's the prompt that it tells you. And then the same person puts in the same prompt and gets the same response out of that. Mordy Oberstein: Even if it's not exactly the same, there's not going to be any differentiation or any significant differentiation. And that's kind of the point. When you think what the algorithms are trying to do, they're trying to find unique, really helpful content, you're not going to be differentiated. And that goes into things like, I don't know, the helpful content update, which to me by the way, is Google basically saying, "We know AI content is coming, it's already here. We need to develop an algorithm that's able to find it and weed it out." Crystal Carter: Yeah. And in their Google Search Central, there are SEO guidelines, they have a section under Quality Guidelines called Automatically Generated Content. And they state their automatically generated content, which is AI content, essentially, it's content that's been generated programmatically and cases where it's intended to manipulate search rankings and not users, Google may take action against such content. And this is something that they expanded upon when they were talking about the helpful content update. So it's something that you've got to be very, very careful with if it is something that you're thinking about. And it'll be interesting to see how that plays out as the update rolls out and becomes more entrenched. Mordy Oberstein: And long and short, it's a really good point because it's important to remember, AI written content is against Google's guidelines. So whether or not you think it's a good solution, not a good solution, it's against their guidelines. So I don't recommend ever going against Google's own guidelines with this. And I do think, by the way, as time goes on, I think John Mueller's talked about this, John Mueller from Google, that in the future yeah, you can have an AI writer maybe write a headline for you or a title tag. Those sort of things I think are going to be legitimately fine going forward. At some point, Google's going to have to adjust it's guideline and say, "Yeah, you can have a header written by an AI. That's fine." I think having an AI writer write a line or take your line that you wrote and rewrite it in different ways to give you some ideas. I know so much has it in their SEO writing assistant, they're connected to GPT-3. You can feed a very small snippet of content in and it will reword it for you in two or three different ways. Meaning if you're stuck on something, "I don't like the way this sounds. I have writer's block, can I get a different version of it to stimulate me? Or maybe I'll just kind of tweak this one a little bit," that's fine. I think AI writing makes sense for that. But for writing an actual thing of substance, I don't ever see that being okay in my opinion. Crystal Carter: And I think that if you're writing for people, then yeah, there should be people involved. If you've ever had those chat bots, those AI chat bots and you try to talk to them, they will eventually end up in nonsense. Mordy Oberstein: That's a joke. Crystal Carter: And sometimes they work for very simple questions like, "What time do you open?" They can be like, "Three o'clock, we open at three o'clock." And you're like, "Thank you AI bot thing that I didn't really need." Mordy Oberstein: That's not a content strategy. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Running that kind of content... If you are writing content, then AI can actually really legitimately answer those questions, well, that's not a content strategy. Hot take right there. Crystal Carter: You could be right. You could be right. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so let me ask you then, what do you do? Because again, we mentioned before, none of the options are great. Crystal Carter: Right. Here's the thing that's tricky. On the one hand, you don't want to use AI content. You want to do unique content, you want to do interesting content. On the other hand, everybody's time poor, everybody's time stretched. So what do you do? I think that we mentioned Ross Simmons, who talks a lot about content distribution. And I think that that approach is a really good way to think about it. So there are loads of people that do this, Disney does it all the time where they will have the Little Mermaid, for instance, and they will do it as the animated one, they'll do it as the live action one. They'll do it on DVD, they'll do it on VHS, they'll do it on- Mordy Oberstein: Ice. They'll do it on ice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, on ice. Frozen, little mermaid. Poor, frozen mermaid. Mordy Oberstein: Salmon, frozen up on those- Crystal Carter: That's so grim. So they'll repackage it in lots of different ways. So basically what I think you should do is to sort of focus on making one piece of very good content at a time and then roll it out, repackage it, make it more accessible to lots of different audiences, but use that as a sort of linchpin. Another good example of this is Beyonce. I talk about a lot about Beyonce, but for instance, Beyonce was in the Lion King reboot as an actress. She also did the soundtrack. Then later on, a year later she did another movie called Black is King, which is essentially the story of the Lion King where she wrote it, direct it, and starred in it. And it was the album that she'd done for the movie before as a visual thing. And so she's just reusing the same content over and over again. So essentially you can change around the same piece of good content. So it means that you're not spreading yourself super thin and doing lots and lots of things poorly or lots and lots of things halfheartedly. You can do one thing really well and then just add value to it in lots of different ways. Mordy Oberstein: I couldn't agree more. First off, leave SEO aside. Okay, let's say it works. Okay, Yeah, you rank. You use the AI and it ranks and whatever. You fooled Google, you did it. Then a user clicks on the page, they show up and they read it. You're not fooling anybody. They aren't going to be like, "Oh, I really like this brand. This seems like very generic content. I love generic content. Let me give you all my money." Crystal Carter: Right. What are you going to do? Mordy Oberstein: I know we don't think of the second step. We rank, we got it, we're done. Crystal Carter: Right, job done. Yeah, absolutely, you should think about it holistically. And I think that when people make content that actually connects with people, that's something that lasts a long time. So if you are making content that people ask you for, you're making content that is responding to a need, then that's something that will last and will help build your brand much further after the content is or isn't ranking many years down the line. Mordy Oberstein: Truth in that. Let's turn it over to someone who's done a lot with AI writers, some of the really fun things that GPT-3 created John Mueller bot, if you don't know what that is, Google it, find it. Basically you asked the question to this bot and it gave you a John Mueller like response back and it was amazing and hilarious and it's great. One of the funniest things I've ever seen in the SEO space. He's the founder of Richman SEO training, and again, he's done a ton with AI writers and he's here to answer what are ways AI writing technology is actually applicable to a website now that we've totally trashed them. So here's Danny. Danny Richman: So what is the most surprising thing you've seen an AI writer be able to do? Well, first of all, I'm assuming when you say AI writer, what you really mean is a machine learning language model such as GPT-3. And I think one of the most common misconceptions with that technology is that it was never really designed for writing long form content and that isn't what it's best at doing. The areas where I found it most useful and surprising was kind of three different categories. One is around classification, then transformation, and then in translation. So for example, let's imagine you're doing some keyword research for a criminal law firm and you are looking at all keywords that are searched for on Google that include the word conspiracy because you're interested in creating some content around the offense of conspiracy to murder or conspiracy to defraud, those kind of offenses. Now, if you go and put a term like that into a keyword research tool, you're going to get a whole load of keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the area of criminal law. You're going to get UFO conspiracies, Princess Diana conspiracies. So one of the things you often have to do when you're doing keyword research is to filter out all the noise and just find the keywords that are relevant and applicable to the website you are working with. And that's one of the areas where a tool like GPT-3 really excels because you can very easily upload a whole load of keyword research data into a Google sheet and then using a very simple script, you can then get GPT-3 to classify all those keywords in a matter of seconds according to whether they are in the context of a criminal law firm. So that's something that would've taken just hours or days of work for somebody to have to do. And then you can use the same process if you've got a bunch of keywords and you want to categorize them according to how likely they are to result in a conversion for your client's website. Again, that's a really good way of doing that. And I'm not just talking about keyword intent, there are tools already out there that will do that, this can intelligently look at the keywords with an understanding of the business that you are working with and then classify those keywords according to how likely it is to lead to somebody making an inquiry or buying a product that that particular business offers. One final example would be if you have access to a tool like SparkToro where you can put in something that's going to help you identify your audience. So say for example, a social media account that they follow or a website they visit. That will then show you a list of all the hashtags that your target audience use most frequently whenever they're posting things online. And so using GPT-3, what you can do is then upload that list of most frequently used hashtags and get the machine learning model to generate content topics and article titles that you know are going to appeal to that audience because it's what they're talking about most when they're posting on social media. So those are just kind of a few of the areas where I found these tools to be really surprising and exceptionally useful. Mordy Oberstein: That is actually a really good point. I think there's tremendous value in AI writers and AI backed technology helping you to refine things, as tools to better understand opportunities, to help you filter things out, to help you understand where you could focus your content, all those sort of things. I would definitely keep an eye on the AI tool space when it comes to content generation, those sort of things. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. There's a tool that I've seen that allows you to sort of enter content that you have and sort of see which entities and things it's understanding, which can help you to refine what you're doing there. I think that AI used as a tool and AI used as something that helps you to understand what you're doing is absolutely valuable because I think one of the reasons why people are interested in AI is because it's time saving and the research process of putting together content, research, and filling through keywords and understanding the topics and understanding what people are interested in with regards to the content can take time. And so if you're able to use AI to help you to find the content that you need to make your content better, then that's super valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. So I want to tell you a story, dear audience, and you, Crystal, obviously. Crystal Carter: I don't know where this is going so audience here, it's important. Mordy Oberstein: Only good places. Only good places. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: So the other day I saw that you Crystal were asking the godfather of SEO, Barry Schwartz, if something was new, which I knew it wasn't by the way. And like a good AI writer, I immediately plugged in my site isthisnew.com in a snarky tweet reply because this is what I do on Twitter, but many folks don't realize that Google made this change and I think maybe it could be significant. So today we're looking at the image preview overlay on the results page to see is this new? Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: So we already said it's kind of not new, but it's not old either. But what changed basically... I know, spoiler, I ruined it. I completely ruined it. Crystal Carter: I didn't know. Mordy Oberstein: No. But we're still asking if it's new, but we're going to show why it's significant, which is way more important, is this new, which is why the whole segment's kind of sarcastic. Anyway- Crystal Carter: Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: You know when you search for something, you get a box at the top of the results page with the whole group of images, an image pack or an image box depending on your vernacular. So clicking them used to take you from the main results page to the special image result page, all full of images, but not so anymore or not as often anymore. Now often enough, a panel appears to the right of the organic results on the main SERP itself. So no more going to the image search results per se. And I think it's actually significant, especially if you rely on image traffic. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that I think that Google's starting to try to move away from having images, videos, and other media content on the SERP as standalone elements. So for instance, they recently introduced something within Google Search Console where you have information about your video content and it will tell you how your video page is performing. And within the report it gives you the information about the page itself and also the video that's listed on the page. And also very often when you go to the images tab on Google SERP, they will show both the website that it's embedded on and also the YouTube link. So they'll show them at the same time. So this I think is another evolution of that sort of concept of making sure that the images aren't sort of seen as standalone, but rather as part of the website. Because when you click on it, so on the sort of image carousel sort of area, I'm not sure if you call it a carousel, but on the image sort of area, you click on it and then it shows you a preview of the page and the sort of summary around it, a little bit, as well as more similar images. So it's something that I think will allow people to see a bit more about the website before they go to it, and also to sort keep them on the main page of the SERP so that they can see more information about the query as well as the image. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I think from a directional point of view, this is Google... I always kind of say Google's trying to go more portal, trying to show you multiple types of information all in one spot, so a little more immersive than, "Here's a bunch of results, and then here's another bunch of images on a separate SERP." And like you're saying, or a bunch of videos on another SERP. It's all kind of one holistic content experience. And I think there's going to be a lot of that coming down the pipe, and this is just one small peak into that future. But also just simply now, when you're looking at an image, first off, there's not as many images. When you see the related images show under the panel on the main results page, you don't have 50 million images like you have on image SERP results. So those image impressions you might have been getting before just don't happen anymore, and you're still competing intent-wise with the actual other results on the page. You might say, "Yeah, I see all these images here," but you know what? It's an organic result with an image thumbnail and I like that one better. I'm just going to click on that page. So it's a totally different construct. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think that this makes the SERP a bit richer with regards to images. I talked a lot about images and media and things, and the reason why I think it's because they say a picture's worth a thousand words, and you can get a lot of information off of a single image, you can get a brand sentiment from it. You can describe something very quickly in the amount of space that a thumbnail takes up. You can add more description about a product or about a concept, or whatever it may be than if you had the same number of texts. I think we looked up purple carrots, for instance. In some of the images you see a crosscut where it's white inside and some of them you see an orange inside. And I can just see that from the picture and I can understand that from the picture, whereas I'd have to explain all of that in words and it would take up a lot more space than that single picture, which is something that's really, really valuable for Google. Mordy Oberstein: And if you want just a little plug with Crystal, if you want to check out more images, Crystal has a ton of SEO content all around images and image search and reverse image search or- Crystal Carter: Visual search, Mordy Oberstein: Visual search. I was looking to find it. I knew I got it right. So we'll link to all of those in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Lovely. I also just want to shout out like Bing, because we say this isn't new. This is really not new for Bing. Mordy Oberstein: True. Crystal Carter: Bing has these overlays all over their SERP. Mordy Oberstein: It's very immersive. Crystal Carter: It's extremely immersive. I think looking at things six months ago, I was like, "Ah, this is busy." There's a lot of stuff going on there, but Google is looking more and more like what Bing looked like six months ago. And this is another prime example. On Bing, if you look up a query like purple carrots or whatever, for every SERP result, they have a little light bulb. You click on the little light bulb and then they give you an overlay that gives you lots of information about that search result, will give you more images, will give you more links, will give you a Wikipedia thing. Lots of stuff like that. So it's interesting, and I think we talk a lot about MUM and I think again, the stuff around images and media is partly Google trying to get to grips with MUM and their multimodal search. And I think that Bing is also doing that, and they very much lay their cards on the table with regards to how they manage multi-modal search, and it's definitely worth looking at. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and by the way, Google has been taking things from the Bing SERP for a long time. If you look at what's going on now where there's Google's testing out multiple URLs and featured snippets, Bing has been doing that for a long time. We actually just covered that on the news the other week, which by the way, speaking of news, so nailed that pivot. That's two. I get a gold star. Here's the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, some changes to the results page for you this week. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, "Google rolling out site names and updated favicon logos in search results." Oh, my. Oh, the "Oh, my," wasn't a quote, that was me saying, "Oh, my." But in a nutshell, what it means is above the URL in mobile will be the name of the site on the Google Results page. So if you Google best website builder and you see the result for Wix, it will now say Wix above the URL to wix.com, more prominently displayed than it was before, more individually displayed than it was before. To me, where this matters is where you have some brand awareness tied to a website. Why? Well, because with the change, this site name is more prominent. So if the site slash brand name has some recognition, to me, it means you might actually get some additional clicks, even if you rank a position or two below a website result, without that kind of recognition, which just goes to show you that all aspects of digital strategy do converge at some point. In this case, brand marketing and SEO intersect. You have to think about the full picture and user experience on the SERP. Of course, much of this was tested at various points in the recent past. So who says paying attention to all sorts of changes to the SERP doesn't pay off? Is this new? No, it's the news, the snappy news, and now it's over. That's all I have to... Oh wait, the ad label. You know where it says ad on the Google results page next to ads on the SERP? Now it's going to say sponsored. And that's the snappy news. All right, news is done. Wonderful. But before we go, we have one more thing we have to do. Crystal Carter: What is that? Mordy Oberstein: What might that be, y'all? This is episode number nine so if you've been listening to the other eight episodes, you already know, but if you don't know, we like to give shout-outs to people from our own community so that you could have more people to follow across social for more awesome SEO insights, because there's nothing like getting SEO insights from other SEOs. So here is our follow of the week, which is drum roll please, Ann Smarty. Crystal Carter: Ann Smarty. Ann Smarty is an amazing SEO to follow. She is such a phenomenon with regards to content. She writes content on lots of different elements of SEO. Mordy Oberstein: She does not use an AI writer. Crystal Carter: She does not use an AI writer, but she's incredibly prolific. She's written lots of different content and she's also runs something called- Mordy Oberstein: VC Buzz, Viral Content Buzz. Crystal Carter: Which is a great resource for anyone who's looking to learn more about content and how to manage it and SEO stuff. So if you see anything written by Ann Smarty across the web, doing SEO things, you should absolutely read it and you'll very, very likely see many things written by Ann Smarty because she's written on lots of great topics. I come across her work a lot. Mordy Oberstein: Everywhere. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And it's always really, really valuable. So I would absolutely recommend following her and reading lots of her content. Mordy Oberstein: Truly one of the SEO veterans, SEO OGs of the industry. You could find her on Twitter at @seosmarty, S-E-O-S-M-A-R-T-Y or just look at the show notes and find her Twitter link there. And that's it. We did it. Crystal Carter: That's it? Mordy Oberstein: That's it. It's in the bag. We got it. Crystal Carter: Number nine. Mordy Oberstein: And we use no artificial content written by some bot either. Crystal Carter: That's what you think. Mordy Oberstein: This whole time, you've been a cyborg. You've shattered my world, Crystal. Crystal Carter: I am a cyborg. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, are you a friendly cyborg or a world destroying cyborg? Crystal Carter: I haven't decided yet. Mordy Oberstein: It's be nice to Crystal day. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We'll be back next week with an all new episode as we dive into are links everything SEOs make them out to be. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content all written by human beings and our webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub at, you guested it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. But until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Danny Richman Ann Smarty Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Richman SEO Training Viral Content Bee News: Google rolling out site names and updated favicon logos in search results Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Danny Richman Ann Smarty Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Richman SEO Training Viral Content Bee News: Google rolling out site names and updated favicon logos in search results Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy, new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix and I'm joined by our own head of SEO communications, the one, the only, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, there internet people. I'm always pleased to be here with you on this lovely, fantastic day for podcasting. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, do you think they are internet people like an Oompa-Loompa who lives on the internet? Crystal Carter: Am I not an internet person? Are you not an internet person? Mordy Oberstein: Well, I always thought I lived in real life also. Crystal Carter: I live here. This is where I live. Mordy Oberstein: You're in the internet. Crystal Carter: I'm in the computer. Mordy Oberstein: You're in the computer. Wait, when you order-? Crystal Carter: Delete. Mordy Oberstein: When you order something online and they say address, "In the computer." Crystal Carter: In the computer. I'm already here. We're already there. Mordy Oberstein: You're basically AI, which is kind of what we're going to get at today. Crystal Carter: That is what we will talk about. Mordy Oberstein: Before we do that, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where if you want to add product structured data markups so that you could be eligible for Google shopping results, since now product markup makes you eligible, you have to do nothing. Crystal Carter: Nothing. Mordy Oberstein: Nothing. You have to literally do nothing. Crystal Carter: I love it. Mordy Oberstein: If you want, you can totally rely on the automated structure data markup Wix creates for you on your product pages out of the box. Crystal Carter: This is one of those times where it's just stay ready so you don't have to get ready. I love when these updates happen and they're like, "Oh, what do we...? Oh, nothing. We already did it. We already did it." It's like finding money in your pocket. I just love it. Mordy Oberstein: But good money, not like a penny. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: 20 bucks. Crystal Carter: You got like 20 bucks, 20 bucks to your pocket, you're like, "I'm going to give myself a latte. This is nice." Mordy Oberstein: "Should I tell my spouse I'm just going to get another...? No, they're just-" Crystal Carter: No. Buy myself a latte. I'm going to get whipped cream. I'm going to get a pastry or something. It's going to be pumpkin spiced. Lovely. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's going to be lovely? Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: This show. This show is going to be lovely. Crystal Carter: Oh, you segue's galore. Mordy Oberstein: Oh good. Because the AI writers are coming, or conversely, guess who's coming to dinner? AI writers. Crystal Carter: They only have the megabytes. Mordy Oberstein: They only care about dinner. They're not coming for lunch, just for dinner. But should you let them into the henhouse, where I guess you would eat dinner... I don't know why you- Crystal Carter: These have so many metaphors. I don't even know where you're going with this. Mordy Oberstein: We're talking about the value of content created by AI writers and if the content they create is good or bad for your SEO. And to that, Danny Richman stops by to give his take on where AI writers can actually be truly helpful for SEO and the answer may surprise you. Plus a new form of image preview on the SERP. But is it really new? And why does it matter, even if it's not? And of course, some snappy SEO news on who you should be following on social for some SEO awesomeness. It's episode number nine of the SERP's Up podcast. So creating content is really hard. Crystal Carter: It takes a lot of time, especially if you want to do good content. Mordy Oberstein: So that's sort of the problem. So while content is the commodity of your website, it's really an area where many websites struggle by forgetting knowing which piece of content to write or what topics to write or well, who to target and how to optimize it. Who's going to write all this content? Crystal Carter: Yeah, who's going to write it? Who's going to make it? Who's going to make sure that it actually makes sense as well? There's a lot of stuff to think about. Mordy Oberstein: So much. And the worst thing is there's so many things to think about and there's so many options, but none of them are good. Either you can farm the content creation out and some churn and burn content agency or write something really quick, which would be probably really thin. Or you could spend the time, a lot of time, and a lot of money creating a really strong piece of well-crafted content. But who's got time and/or money to do that on a regular basis? So what do you do? Well, then one day along came the AI writer who promised the world with the cheap option to create content in bulk really quickly, that's of good quality. But there's the rub. Is it really good? Is AI written content really good for users? Because in most cases, spoiler, probably isn't. And while it might be tempting to go with an AI writer to write your content, you might as a rule with certain exceptions, want to stay away from it. So let's dive into AI writers' content and Google. What a world we live in! We have AI writers writing content for us. I don't how to start with this. Crystal Carter: Honestly, there's so much to think about here. So I think with AI writers, we are engaging with AI writers regularly in lots of different ways, but in sort of smaller ways and we have been for smaller ways. So your phone has predictive text and that's going to be using the patterns of things that you say. If you say lol a lot, it's going to show up in your phone a lot. They've added it into Gmail, they've added it into the other email platforms. It's also in Google Docs. There's sometimes you can get search predictive texts, for instance. I use Grammarly a lot. We will help you with your grammar. We'll also say maybe you should mix up some of your words here. So I think that lots of people are using a little bit of AI as a sort of assist, kind of an e-bike. Maybe you don't want to do the whole hill, maybe you just want to put the e-bike on. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. This is exactly what it is. Crystal Carter: So you can get up the hill but without sweating. So I think that's fine and I think that that's something that's useful, but it's very, very tricky. There are options. There are options where you can just let the e-bike do the whole thing, where you can let the machine do the whole thing. And I think a lot of people are thinking, "Oh, that looks good. That sounds great. That does the job." Mordy Oberstein: Does sound great. It sounds like the panacea. This is great. It's a solution that solves all the problems. But like most panaceas, they solve nothing. And I think you're right on spot. There are cases like oh, every time you run an email, you write something and Google's like, "No, no, here's the suggested text and it has the comma in the right place." By the way, it's how if someone's using the AI in Gmail because they have all the commas in the right place. Crystal Carter: Honestly, that Oxford comma gets me every time. Mordy Oberstein: Every time. Crystal Carter: Every single time. Mordy Oberstein: That's great. That is legitimately great. But then when it comes to okay, now we're going to write entire blog post written by AI writers, and I think that is an absolute mistake. I know there are people out there listening to this who think, "No, no, no. You can absolutely do that." And I'm sure you can use an AI writer with a little bit of editing and get a readable blog post. There's not a lot of mistakes. It's a usable piece of content. But is it really good? Is it differentiated in any way? Does it have actual critical thought put into it? Because as great as AI writers are, and I say this as a matter of philosophy, you can disagree with me, you cannot replicate human thought. We don't even understand human thought. So how are we going to create an AI writer that replicates human thought? It makes no sense to me. Crystal Carter: Also, I think sometimes it is the idiosyncrasies about a writer that makes them fantastic. So I' mean, the person that I think of is Tony Morrison. I remember reading a book of Tony Morrison's, and the whole page was one sentence. An AI writer would never do that. Grammarly would tell you that's a terrible, awful idea. But I definitely read that and thought, "This is beautiful. It's pretty much a poem." And it was one sentence and sometimes I go, "And this, and that, and that," in my sentences, and I do that for effect. I don't do that for grammar, I do that for effect. And sometimes you repeat. I repeat words in my writing and I do that, again, for effect. You want rhythm, you want different things when you're doing your writing. And AI will do something different there. So I think that the uniqueness that comes with some of human idiosyncrasies not only provides some of the flavor, some of the things that make something pleasurable to read, but can also be a USP. So if lots of people are using AI writers and if you are able to do something that is unique with your actual personal tone of voice, I remember this, a play about Sondheim, Sunday in The Park With George, and I remember watching that and they said, "Oh, everything's already been painted before." And somebody's like, "But painted by you George, has it been painted by you?" Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: So it's important to think about how you would phrase something, how you would think about your content. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, leave the SEO aside for one quick second. We'll get back to it. Just from a branding point of view, imagine this, imagine any serious writer. I'll say, I think I'm a serious writer for the most part. I have been offered by people, "Hey, well, we'll ghostwrite this blog post for you. We'll just put your name on there." Absolutely not. First off, I have a unique writing style. I have a unique way of phrasing things. I think there's a level of nuance and detail and substance that I offer on the topics I know about that other people just don't have that same perspective as I do. I wouldn't entrust my name with another human being. And then you want to entrust it, as a writer, to a bot? That makes no sense. And by the way, that brings up a real SEO question of who's the author of the content? Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Is the content owned by the AI tool and could they just farm it out to someone else? I mean it's a potential risk. What does it say? A million monkeys writing on a typewriter will suddenly make Shakespeare. I think there's a potential risk. This is me spitballing, but there's a potential risk that your content could end up being very, very similar to somebody else- Mordy Oberstein: Oh sure. Crystal Carter: Who's using the same prompt from the same tool. For instance, let's say you're looking at a tool and tool says that you should ask, "What different the earrings should I wear with a ball gown or something?" And that's the prompt that it tells you. And then the same person puts in the same prompt and gets the same response out of that. Mordy Oberstein: Even if it's not exactly the same, there's not going to be any differentiation or any significant differentiation. And that's kind of the point. When you think what the algorithms are trying to do, they're trying to find unique, really helpful content, you're not going to be differentiated. And that goes into things like, I don't know, the helpful content update, which to me by the way, is Google basically saying, "We know AI content is coming, it's already here. We need to develop an algorithm that's able to find it and weed it out." Crystal Carter: Yeah. And in their Google Search Central, there are SEO guidelines, they have a section under Quality Guidelines called Automatically Generated Content. And they state their automatically generated content, which is AI content, essentially, it's content that's been generated programmatically and cases where it's intended to manipulate search rankings and not users, Google may take action against such content. And this is something that they expanded upon when they were talking about the helpful content update. So it's something that you've got to be very, very careful with if it is something that you're thinking about. And it'll be interesting to see how that plays out as the update rolls out and becomes more entrenched. Mordy Oberstein: And long and short, it's a really good point because it's important to remember, AI written content is against Google's guidelines. So whether or not you think it's a good solution, not a good solution, it's against their guidelines. So I don't recommend ever going against Google's own guidelines with this. And I do think, by the way, as time goes on, I think John Mueller's talked about this, John Mueller from Google, that in the future yeah, you can have an AI writer maybe write a headline for you or a title tag. Those sort of things I think are going to be legitimately fine going forward. At some point, Google's going to have to adjust it's guideline and say, "Yeah, you can have a header written by an AI. That's fine." I think having an AI writer write a line or take your line that you wrote and rewrite it in different ways to give you some ideas. I know so much has it in their SEO writing assistant, they're connected to GPT-3. You can feed a very small snippet of content in and it will reword it for you in two or three different ways. Meaning if you're stuck on something, "I don't like the way this sounds. I have writer's block, can I get a different version of it to stimulate me? Or maybe I'll just kind of tweak this one a little bit," that's fine. I think AI writing makes sense for that. But for writing an actual thing of substance, I don't ever see that being okay in my opinion. Crystal Carter: And I think that if you're writing for people, then yeah, there should be people involved. If you've ever had those chat bots, those AI chat bots and you try to talk to them, they will eventually end up in nonsense. Mordy Oberstein: That's a joke. Crystal Carter: And sometimes they work for very simple questions like, "What time do you open?" They can be like, "Three o'clock, we open at three o'clock." And you're like, "Thank you AI bot thing that I didn't really need." Mordy Oberstein: That's not a content strategy. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Running that kind of content... If you are writing content, then AI can actually really legitimately answer those questions, well, that's not a content strategy. Hot take right there. Crystal Carter: You could be right. You could be right. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so let me ask you then, what do you do? Because again, we mentioned before, none of the options are great. Crystal Carter: Right. Here's the thing that's tricky. On the one hand, you don't want to use AI content. You want to do unique content, you want to do interesting content. On the other hand, everybody's time poor, everybody's time stretched. So what do you do? I think that we mentioned Ross Simmons, who talks a lot about content distribution. And I think that that approach is a really good way to think about it. So there are loads of people that do this, Disney does it all the time where they will have the Little Mermaid, for instance, and they will do it as the animated one, they'll do it as the live action one. They'll do it on DVD, they'll do it on VHS, they'll do it on- Mordy Oberstein: Ice. They'll do it on ice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, on ice. Frozen, little mermaid. Poor, frozen mermaid. Mordy Oberstein: Salmon, frozen up on those- Crystal Carter: That's so grim. So they'll repackage it in lots of different ways. So basically what I think you should do is to sort of focus on making one piece of very good content at a time and then roll it out, repackage it, make it more accessible to lots of different audiences, but use that as a sort of linchpin. Another good example of this is Beyonce. I talk about a lot about Beyonce, but for instance, Beyonce was in the Lion King reboot as an actress. She also did the soundtrack. Then later on, a year later she did another movie called Black is King, which is essentially the story of the Lion King where she wrote it, direct it, and starred in it. And it was the album that she'd done for the movie before as a visual thing. And so she's just reusing the same content over and over again. So essentially you can change around the same piece of good content. So it means that you're not spreading yourself super thin and doing lots and lots of things poorly or lots and lots of things halfheartedly. You can do one thing really well and then just add value to it in lots of different ways. Mordy Oberstein: I couldn't agree more. First off, leave SEO aside. Okay, let's say it works. Okay, Yeah, you rank. You use the AI and it ranks and whatever. You fooled Google, you did it. Then a user clicks on the page, they show up and they read it. You're not fooling anybody. They aren't going to be like, "Oh, I really like this brand. This seems like very generic content. I love generic content. Let me give you all my money." Crystal Carter: Right. What are you going to do? Mordy Oberstein: I know we don't think of the second step. We rank, we got it, we're done. Crystal Carter: Right, job done. Yeah, absolutely, you should think about it holistically. And I think that when people make content that actually connects with people, that's something that lasts a long time. So if you are making content that people ask you for, you're making content that is responding to a need, then that's something that will last and will help build your brand much further after the content is or isn't ranking many years down the line. Mordy Oberstein: Truth in that. Let's turn it over to someone who's done a lot with AI writers, some of the really fun things that GPT-3 created John Mueller bot, if you don't know what that is, Google it, find it. Basically you asked the question to this bot and it gave you a John Mueller like response back and it was amazing and hilarious and it's great. One of the funniest things I've ever seen in the SEO space. He's the founder of Richman SEO training, and again, he's done a ton with AI writers and he's here to answer what are ways AI writing technology is actually applicable to a website now that we've totally trashed them. So here's Danny. Danny Richman: So what is the most surprising thing you've seen an AI writer be able to do? Well, first of all, I'm assuming when you say AI writer, what you really mean is a machine learning language model such as GPT-3. And I think one of the most common misconceptions with that technology is that it was never really designed for writing long form content and that isn't what it's best at doing. The areas where I found it most useful and surprising was kind of three different categories. One is around classification, then transformation, and then in translation. So for example, let's imagine you're doing some keyword research for a criminal law firm and you are looking at all keywords that are searched for on Google that include the word conspiracy because you're interested in creating some content around the offense of conspiracy to murder or conspiracy to defraud, those kind of offenses. Now, if you go and put a term like that into a keyword research tool, you're going to get a whole load of keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the area of criminal law. You're going to get UFO conspiracies, Princess Diana conspiracies. So one of the things you often have to do when you're doing keyword research is to filter out all the noise and just find the keywords that are relevant and applicable to the website you are working with. And that's one of the areas where a tool like GPT-3 really excels because you can very easily upload a whole load of keyword research data into a Google sheet and then using a very simple script, you can then get GPT-3 to classify all those keywords in a matter of seconds according to whether they are in the context of a criminal law firm. So that's something that would've taken just hours or days of work for somebody to have to do. And then you can use the same process if you've got a bunch of keywords and you want to categorize them according to how likely they are to result in a conversion for your client's website. Again, that's a really good way of doing that. And I'm not just talking about keyword intent, there are tools already out there that will do that, this can intelligently look at the keywords with an understanding of the business that you are working with and then classify those keywords according to how likely it is to lead to somebody making an inquiry or buying a product that that particular business offers. One final example would be if you have access to a tool like SparkToro where you can put in something that's going to help you identify your audience. So say for example, a social media account that they follow or a website they visit. That will then show you a list of all the hashtags that your target audience use most frequently whenever they're posting things online. And so using GPT-3, what you can do is then upload that list of most frequently used hashtags and get the machine learning model to generate content topics and article titles that you know are going to appeal to that audience because it's what they're talking about most when they're posting on social media. So those are just kind of a few of the areas where I found these tools to be really surprising and exceptionally useful. Mordy Oberstein: That is actually a really good point. I think there's tremendous value in AI writers and AI backed technology helping you to refine things, as tools to better understand opportunities, to help you filter things out, to help you understand where you could focus your content, all those sort of things. I would definitely keep an eye on the AI tool space when it comes to content generation, those sort of things. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. There's a tool that I've seen that allows you to sort of enter content that you have and sort of see which entities and things it's understanding, which can help you to refine what you're doing there. I think that AI used as a tool and AI used as something that helps you to understand what you're doing is absolutely valuable because I think one of the reasons why people are interested in AI is because it's time saving and the research process of putting together content, research, and filling through keywords and understanding the topics and understanding what people are interested in with regards to the content can take time. And so if you're able to use AI to help you to find the content that you need to make your content better, then that's super valuable. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. So I want to tell you a story, dear audience, and you, Crystal, obviously. Crystal Carter: I don't know where this is going so audience here, it's important. Mordy Oberstein: Only good places. Only good places. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: So the other day I saw that you Crystal were asking the godfather of SEO, Barry Schwartz, if something was new, which I knew it wasn't by the way. And like a good AI writer, I immediately plugged in my site isthisnew.com in a snarky tweet reply because this is what I do on Twitter, but many folks don't realize that Google made this change and I think maybe it could be significant. So today we're looking at the image preview overlay on the results page to see is this new? Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Mordy Oberstein: So we already said it's kind of not new, but it's not old either. But what changed basically... I know, spoiler, I ruined it. I completely ruined it. Crystal Carter: I didn't know. Mordy Oberstein: No. But we're still asking if it's new, but we're going to show why it's significant, which is way more important, is this new, which is why the whole segment's kind of sarcastic. Anyway- Crystal Carter: Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: You know when you search for something, you get a box at the top of the results page with the whole group of images, an image pack or an image box depending on your vernacular. So clicking them used to take you from the main results page to the special image result page, all full of images, but not so anymore or not as often anymore. Now often enough, a panel appears to the right of the organic results on the main SERP itself. So no more going to the image search results per se. And I think it's actually significant, especially if you rely on image traffic. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that I think that Google's starting to try to move away from having images, videos, and other media content on the SERP as standalone elements. So for instance, they recently introduced something within Google Search Console where you have information about your video content and it will tell you how your video page is performing. And within the report it gives you the information about the page itself and also the video that's listed on the page. And also very often when you go to the images tab on Google SERP, they will show both the website that it's embedded on and also the YouTube link. So they'll show them at the same time. So this I think is another evolution of that sort of concept of making sure that the images aren't sort of seen as standalone, but rather as part of the website. Because when you click on it, so on the sort of image carousel sort of area, I'm not sure if you call it a carousel, but on the image sort of area, you click on it and then it shows you a preview of the page and the sort of summary around it, a little bit, as well as more similar images. So it's something that I think will allow people to see a bit more about the website before they go to it, and also to sort keep them on the main page of the SERP so that they can see more information about the query as well as the image. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I think from a directional point of view, this is Google... I always kind of say Google's trying to go more portal, trying to show you multiple types of information all in one spot, so a little more immersive than, "Here's a bunch of results, and then here's another bunch of images on a separate SERP." And like you're saying, or a bunch of videos on another SERP. It's all kind of one holistic content experience. And I think there's going to be a lot of that coming down the pipe, and this is just one small peak into that future. But also just simply now, when you're looking at an image, first off, there's not as many images. When you see the related images show under the panel on the main results page, you don't have 50 million images like you have on image SERP results. So those image impressions you might have been getting before just don't happen anymore, and you're still competing intent-wise with the actual other results on the page. You might say, "Yeah, I see all these images here," but you know what? It's an organic result with an image thumbnail and I like that one better. I'm just going to click on that page. So it's a totally different construct. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think that this makes the SERP a bit richer with regards to images. I talked a lot about images and media and things, and the reason why I think it's because they say a picture's worth a thousand words, and you can get a lot of information off of a single image, you can get a brand sentiment from it. You can describe something very quickly in the amount of space that a thumbnail takes up. You can add more description about a product or about a concept, or whatever it may be than if you had the same number of texts. I think we looked up purple carrots, for instance. In some of the images you see a crosscut where it's white inside and some of them you see an orange inside. And I can just see that from the picture and I can understand that from the picture, whereas I'd have to explain all of that in words and it would take up a lot more space than that single picture, which is something that's really, really valuable for Google. Mordy Oberstein: And if you want just a little plug with Crystal, if you want to check out more images, Crystal has a ton of SEO content all around images and image search and reverse image search or- Crystal Carter: Visual search, Mordy Oberstein: Visual search. I was looking to find it. I knew I got it right. So we'll link to all of those in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Lovely. I also just want to shout out like Bing, because we say this isn't new. This is really not new for Bing. Mordy Oberstein: True. Crystal Carter: Bing has these overlays all over their SERP. Mordy Oberstein: It's very immersive. Crystal Carter: It's extremely immersive. I think looking at things six months ago, I was like, "Ah, this is busy." There's a lot of stuff going on there, but Google is looking more and more like what Bing looked like six months ago. And this is another prime example. On Bing, if you look up a query like purple carrots or whatever, for every SERP result, they have a little light bulb. You click on the little light bulb and then they give you an overlay that gives you lots of information about that search result, will give you more images, will give you more links, will give you a Wikipedia thing. Lots of stuff like that. So it's interesting, and I think we talk a lot about MUM and I think again, the stuff around images and media is partly Google trying to get to grips with MUM and their multimodal search. And I think that Bing is also doing that, and they very much lay their cards on the table with regards to how they manage multi-modal search, and it's definitely worth looking at. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and by the way, Google has been taking things from the Bing SERP for a long time. If you look at what's going on now where there's Google's testing out multiple URLs and featured snippets, Bing has been doing that for a long time. We actually just covered that on the news the other week, which by the way, speaking of news, so nailed that pivot. That's two. I get a gold star. Here's the snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, some changes to the results page for you this week. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, "Google rolling out site names and updated favicon logos in search results." Oh, my. Oh, the "Oh, my," wasn't a quote, that was me saying, "Oh, my." But in a nutshell, what it means is above the URL in mobile will be the name of the site on the Google Results page. So if you Google best website builder and you see the result for Wix, it will now say Wix above the URL to wix.com, more prominently displayed than it was before, more individually displayed than it was before. To me, where this matters is where you have some brand awareness tied to a website. Why? Well, because with the change, this site name is more prominent. So if the site slash brand name has some recognition, to me, it means you might actually get some additional clicks, even if you rank a position or two below a website result, without that kind of recognition, which just goes to show you that all aspects of digital strategy do converge at some point. In this case, brand marketing and SEO intersect. You have to think about the full picture and user experience on the SERP. Of course, much of this was tested at various points in the recent past. So who says paying attention to all sorts of changes to the SERP doesn't pay off? Is this new? No, it's the news, the snappy news, and now it's over. That's all I have to... Oh wait, the ad label. You know where it says ad on the Google results page next to ads on the SERP? Now it's going to say sponsored. And that's the snappy news. All right, news is done. Wonderful. But before we go, we have one more thing we have to do. Crystal Carter: What is that? Mordy Oberstein: What might that be, y'all? This is episode number nine so if you've been listening to the other eight episodes, you already know, but if you don't know, we like to give shout-outs to people from our own community so that you could have more people to follow across social for more awesome SEO insights, because there's nothing like getting SEO insights from other SEOs. So here is our follow of the week, which is drum roll please, Ann Smarty. Crystal Carter: Ann Smarty. Ann Smarty is an amazing SEO to follow. She is such a phenomenon with regards to content. She writes content on lots of different elements of SEO. Mordy Oberstein: She does not use an AI writer. Crystal Carter: She does not use an AI writer, but she's incredibly prolific. She's written lots of different content and she's also runs something called- Mordy Oberstein: VC Buzz, Viral Content Buzz. Crystal Carter: Which is a great resource for anyone who's looking to learn more about content and how to manage it and SEO stuff. So if you see anything written by Ann Smarty across the web, doing SEO things, you should absolutely read it and you'll very, very likely see many things written by Ann Smarty because she's written on lots of great topics. I come across her work a lot. Mordy Oberstein: Everywhere. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And it's always really, really valuable. So I would absolutely recommend following her and reading lots of her content. Mordy Oberstein: Truly one of the SEO veterans, SEO OGs of the industry. You could find her on Twitter at @seosmarty, S-E-O-S-M-A-R-T-Y or just look at the show notes and find her Twitter link there. And that's it. We did it. Crystal Carter: That's it? Mordy Oberstein: That's it. It's in the bag. We got it. Crystal Carter: Number nine. Mordy Oberstein: And we use no artificial content written by some bot either. Crystal Carter: That's what you think. Mordy Oberstein: This whole time, you've been a cyborg. You've shattered my world, Crystal. Crystal Carter: I am a cyborg. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, are you a friendly cyborg or a world destroying cyborg? Crystal Carter: I haven't decided yet. Mordy Oberstein: It's be nice to Crystal day. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We'll be back next week with an all new episode as we dive into are links everything SEOs make them out to be. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content all written by human beings and our webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub at, you guested it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. But 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 . 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Naomi is an SEO expert with over 5 years of experience working with eCommerce brands. Her passion comes from a holistic approach to digital marketing that encourages growth through the collective use of content, PR, social media, and SEO. Naomi Francis-Parker SEO Manager Naomi is an SEO expert with over 5 years of experience working with eCommerce brands. Her passion comes from a holistic approach to digital marketing that encourages growth through the collective use of content, PR, social media, and SEO. Articles & Resources 7 Nov 2024 Customer-first product categorization: Leverage internal data, emerging trends and long-tail keywords 3 Apr 2024 eCommerce content marketing: How to move customers down your sales funnel Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back SEO client retention checklist A roadmap for developing long-lasting partnerships with your SEO clients. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this SEO checklist to: Create an effective onboarding process that sets out mutually agreed KPIs Understand how to outline a communication flow that works for you and your client Ensure you compile meaningful reports for your client Help craft a narrative around metrics that align with your client’s goals Nick LeRoy Freelance SEO Consultant, Nick LeRoy Consulting LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Nick LeRoy is a freelance SEO consultant, podcaster and newsletter author based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in SEO strategy, technical SEO, editorial strategy, and website migrations. Nick is the author of the SEOForLunch newsletter and owner of SEOjobs.com . More about this topic Listen to this episode of the SERPs Up podcast for a deeper dive into SEO client retention. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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

What's the SEO verdict: subdomains or subfolders? Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein take up this age-old question as they dive into the SEO nuances between using subdomains versus subfolders. Migrating subdomain content into a subfolder? How can you make the transition smooth as silk? Tech SEO expert Nikki Halliwell joins the conversation to help you make the move as seamless as possible. Plus, a deep look into indented results on the SERP and the surprising clue they leave about subfolders and subdomains for SEO. It’s subdomain versus subfolder and all of the subsequent SEO conversation that follows on this episode of SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Subdomains or subfolders? Which is best for SEO? What's the SEO verdict: subdomains or subfolders? Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein take up this age-old question as they dive into the SEO nuances between using subdomains versus subfolders. Migrating subdomain content into a subfolder? How can you make the transition smooth as silk? Tech SEO expert Nikki Halliwell joins the conversation to help you make the move as seamless as possible. Plus, a deep look into indented results on the SERP and the surprising clue they leave about subfolders and subdomains for SEO. It’s subdomain versus subfolder and all of the subsequent SEO conversation that follows on this episode of SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 43 | June 21, 2023 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 42:42 This week’s guests Nikki Halliwell Based in Manchester, UK, Nikki Halliwell is a freelance Technical SEO Consultant and Technical SEO Specialist for Journey Further. She has worked at several agencies and in-house and has worked across the health, hospitality and fashion industries and more. Nikki enjoys working with eCommerce websites and ensuring that websites are easy to find, load quickly and work efficiently. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast . We're pushing out some groovy insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy O, overseeing the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fabulous, the unequivocable, the always right, there's nothing I could say more about Crystal Carter, our own Head of SEO communications. I haven't done that kind of intro in a while, and it felt it was long overdue. Crystal Carter: I would tell you right now that I am not always right. Mordy Oberstein: Crystals is always right. Crystal Carter: I'm never always right. In fact, I was wrong. My husband got me a Fitbit for Christmas, and at first I was like, "Uh, how could you? What are you trying to say? What do you mean by this?" I was wrong about that. I love my Fitbit thing now. It's good. And I count my little steps and I do my little thing, and it's cool. So, I was wrong about that. And sometimes it's okay to admit when you got things incorrect, that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Those are the small little things. But the big things, Crystal's always right. Crystal Carter: It's fine if you want to go with that, I'll take that to every meeting. So, next time you say it, I say to quote... Mordy Oberstein: Okay, you know what, let's do that. It will make meetings shorter, I think. Crystal Carter: It will. Mordy Oberstein: Which is the goal. This SERPs' Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter , but where you can easily decide whether to structure your site with subfolders or subdomains, including from multilingual sites, as today, the battle wages on, subdomains or subfolders, which is better for SEO. Just ask John Mueller on Twitter, and tell him we sent you. I am just kidding, do not do that. He has literally asked 1,000 times over about this. But yes, today we're stepping on that landmine that is a debate about subdomains versus subfolders . I feel it is the debate that's captured the hearts and souls of a generation of SEOs, which is better? Because just like Highlander, there can be only one. Or can there, I don't know. We're going right after the jugular with this one as we ask, is there really still a debate? When are subfolders or subdomains a good idea, when are they a bad idea? And just what exactly can Google grasp and what can't it grasp when it comes to how you structure your website? Also, joining us, tech SEOs extraordinaire, Nikki Halliwell will join us to discuss the considerations of a migration for subdomain content to a subfolder, plus, we look at a little format on the SERP or a little SERP feature on the SERP, obviously, the SERP feature on the SERP, that's redundant, but anyway, that sheds a bit of light into this whole subdomain versus subfolder discussion, and survey what the feature tends to prefer. And of course, with your snappiest SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So, Up Periscope as episode number 43 of the SERP's UP Podcast submerges you in an SEO question of all SEO questions. It's subdomain versus subfolder, and all of the subsequent conversation that follows on episode 43. Crystal Carter: I'm so glad that we're getting into this subject. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, I didn't even think of that. That's so obvious, and I didn't even think of it. Crystal Carter: Well, I just had to submit that into the conversation. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I was just going to... You beat me. You stole my thought. I was going to submit you were right again. Crystal Carter: All right. So, I'm excited to be talking about this. It comes up every now and then where people say, "What's better for SEO, a subdomain or a subfolder?" Before we get into it, in particular, let's just get everybody up to speed. So, a subdomain is essentially a part of your top-level domain. So, top-level domain might be example.com, for instance. A subdomain might be blog.example.com. It might also be something like de.example.com. For instance, if it was a language one, it might also be support.example.com. These, essentially, are treated as separate entities from each other. So, it's not exactly treated as the same entity as your top-level domain, it's treated as a separate entity. And the way I like to think about the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder, which is when you have, essentially, the folder at the end of it, for instance, in the example.com example, you'd have example.com/blog, or as a subfolder or subdirectory, they are interchangeable terms, if you were going to have it as a subdomain, you would have it as blog.example.com. Now, the difference between the two is, essentially, the same difference between a shed and an extension, because if you have a house and you want more space and you want to create more space for something that you've got going on, then you might think of building an extension onto your house, in which case the extension would be on the same property, but would use the same electricity, the same plumbing, and all of that sort of stuff. However, if you were to build a shed, in this case a subdomain, then, essentially, you would need to run electricity to this different place. It might have a different circuit breaker. If you were going to put plumbing in, you might have to build a whole nother set of plumbing, et cetera, et cetera. It's all still on the same property, so it's all still understood as being part of the same ecosystem, however, they are two different entities. So, that's essentially the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder. Where we get into conversations with SEOs about whether or not subfolders and subdomains are better or worse for an SEO is something that is a bit of a point of debate. Now, I asked the SEO high-of-mind whether or not subdomains or subfolders were better for SEO, and on Twitter I got 439 votes, and 83% of SEOs said that subfolders were better than subdomains. And I got some very interesting replies on that. Now, the thing I find interesting about it was, it depends, really. I definitely think that subdomains have a place. And I think we'll get into a bit of some of the ways that people can use them, but subdomains can often be used for things like helpdesks, job boards, they can also be used for international SEO, they can be used for lots of other things like that. I've seen them used for corporate, like CSR things and things like that. And essentially, to my mind, the time when you would use a subdomain is, essentially, where you have a bulk of content that maybe potentially needs a completely different set of infrastructure from your existing top-level domain and maybe would add better customer value if it was in that particular thing. A lot of times the subdomain things, for instance, Yukto uses a Wix subdomain for their customer support section, and it's got a specially dedicated framework for answering questions and doing customer service and raising tickets and things like that, which is different from their main website. HubSpot, for instance, use their blog on a subdomain, which is very different from their main domain, which is dedicated entirely to their product. And their blog, @blog.hubspot.com, does very well in terms of SEO, but it has a completely different setup from their main domain. So, I definitely think that there is a place. However, lots of SEOs will report to you that they've seen some great results from moving blogs onto the main-level domain. And this is because it's really the top-level domain, and this is because it makes it easier to get more value out of links, it makes it more easy for users to find it. You're also able to benefit from a lot of the search equity and a lot of the keyword understanding that Google has about the main domain in order to get great results on Search. So, I think it depends on what the user needs, but there are some great benefits to both. Mordy Oberstein: So, this whole debate falls under one of these weird SEO conversations because Google, for the longest time, has been like, "Whatever the heck you want." Yes, there are real differences, like setting it up in Search console on a subdomain is far, perhaps, depends, far more annoying because you have to add different properties for each subdomain and then you can't track them, and that's a problem. It might be better for you. It all depends. But it might be a little more annoying. And that's a personal choice, fine. But Google's general thing is, "Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's all good." They do, however, or have, however, said that sometimes Google does really separate the two out, and that's where I think the sweet spot is. I remember doing a webinar one time, it was actually with the SEJ, and someone had made a subfolder. I'm like, "Yeah. Well, Google said you can whatever you want." And they send you the stuff after, I was building the T here a bit, but after some of the webinars, they sent you the comments that people leave. As one commented, "This guy knows nothing about SEO." So, people have really strong opinions about this. Crystal Carter: Really strong opinions. Mordy Oberstein: So, before I say what I'm about to say, I want everyone to take a drink, whether it be an alcoholic drink or just some water, clear your throat, let's relax for a minute. This is my opinion. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: This is not the SEO gospel. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I think Google is not lying. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Crazy, I know. I think it really does all depend. For example, I'll give you, again, a case. It's not an actual case. I'm not sure if they actually do this or not, but just imagine they did. CNN does use subdomains, for example. So, like travel.cnn, or entertainment.cnn, or, I don't know, news.cnn. I don't think that's an actual subdomain, news.cnn. That wouldn't make any sense. I think Google understands that all of that is CNN reporting about different types of news; travel news, entertainment news, news-news in my case, which makes no sense. And I think they understand that should be looked at as one identity, one entity. To quote Eli Schwartz, he one time said in a talk I heard him give, Google has a self-driving car, he used to live in the Bay Area, and the car was able to determine whether or not a squirrel or a human being jumped out in front of it. If they can do that, they can understand that travel.cnn and entertainment.cnn is all reporting about different types of news, as opposed to, and I don't know if they do this, and I should have looked at it beforehand, Honda. Honda has the cars, it has vehicles, all sorts of vehicles, motorcycles. They also have Honda robotics- Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: ... which is totally separate. So, I don't know how they structure it, but imagine they had robots.honda versus cars.honda. I might look at those two things, like, "No, not connected." They're very different. Crystal Carter: So, in the discussion, Joelle Irvine from Moz, she was saying exactly what you're talking about. She says, "I use subdomains when the goals and audience are different. So, that's what you're talking about with your robotics and your cars. If the main goals of the site are brand awareness, engagement conversion for your business, then having jobs on a subdomain makes sense, for instance, and you can track and optimize them separately. If audience and goals are the same, then subfolders are better for SEO, and that makes sense entirely. For instance, another one was Kindr Grindr, Grindr, the dating app, has a whole thing that talks about their CSR and how they do the corporate responsibility. They don't need to have that on their dating app thing that doesn't affect them things. It's useful- Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: ... information for people to have. If somebody wants to see your sustainability report, that's great for your team or whatever, but it can sometimes confuse your overall brand entity in that, if you have it on your main domain, if it's not specifically relevant to the general intent of your general website. So, that's something that's interesting there. Then, I think, also, here's something that was interesting. So, Alex Hartford was saying that, "I generally prefer subdomains only when it's poor content setup." A support product with a bad tech SEO or content-wise, for example, which I think is interesting because I think that's another point. Sometimes, with subdomain content, it's content that's not intended to rank anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Agreed. Crystal Carter: Sometimes it's content that is intended to serve a purpose, to provide value for your customers who know you and who know what you're doing, and things like that, but it's not necessarily intended to rank. So, a lot of people will have a lot of larger businesses. Enterprise businesses might have their corporate information online, they might have all their latest stock prices and things like that, and that's not necessarily going to rank. They don't need it to be competitive, they need it to be visible so that they're transparent and all of that sort of information. They need to have a link to it. It doesn't really matter if it ranks or not. So, it's important to remember that it provides business value. I was actually involved in a project where we had a client who wanted to move a large chunk of their main content onto a subdomain, and I was initially very hesitant. And I followed the SEO gospel, and they said, "No, this is a terrible idea. Do not do it. Oh, no, gosh, no, no, no." And what I found was that the client was like, "This subdomain product, the product that's going to be using the subdomain, has immense business value for us." It was one of those bells and whistles, fully integrated, so the back end was integrated with the front end. And it was a situation where it was providing them a lot of business value, and so they decided that even if there was an SEO risk, they were willing to take it in order to benefit from the overall business value. So, bearing that in mind and trying to keep my clients happy, we tried to mitigate the risk as much as possible. One of the things that was important was making sure that the tech spec between the subdomain and the main domain, or the top-level domain, were as close to each other as possible. So, when we initially got this subdomain product, the security level was much lower, and there was a lot of lag in the speed, and I was like, "This is terrible. If we're linking between the two, this is gonna be a terrible user experience, and it's not going to work." So, I campaigned and literally got the people, who built the product, to upgrade their security across the whole product so that they could fix it. And in the end, because we did the linking correctly and because we did lots of stuff, we actually saw a general benefit- Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: ... for the users, for the business, for everyone. So, I think that there's ways that you can do it. But one of the other things that someone mentioned was, they were having a discussion about subdomains and subfolders, and the client wanted to go forward with it. So, it's Ashley Thornhill . She was saying, "There are things we have to get done first and they want to jump into this new product," because I think that's another thing that people sometimes do with subdomain is they'll use it to patch up so that- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ...everything here. And I think that that brings to mind one of the other issues is that, with a subdomain, you do need to maintain it. It is like the garden shed or your external garage, somebody needs to maintain it. And if somebody comes to you and they say, "We wanna split the site into a top-level domain and a subdomain," well, essentially, from an SEO point of view, that's two websites to manage because they're two different CMSs or two different setups or two different routing situations, all of that sort of stuff. So- Mordy Oberstein: That's a huge consideration, by the way. Just the practical considerations are the fact that you now have two distinct properties to deal with is a major thing to consider, and long-term, how the client is going to evolve as a business, and then what's going to happen in a year from now that you have these two distinct properties that they're going to need to handle and they're really going to want to have to deal with that in a year. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And this comes into international SEO as well. So, Lydia Infante , in her article about international SEO, she talks about that subdomains are sometimes the solution for international SEO. It's quite a common use for subdomains. We do it with Wix.com as well. And one of the things about that is that they have to evolve, be maintained. Each version of the site has to be maintained uniquely to make sure that it's working there as well, so it's something to think about that you've definitely got the chops to support your subdomain situation. Mordy Oberstein: I want to jump back to something you were saying before about links. I think it's a great thing we need to talk about. I've been involved in discussions with whether or not to go with a subfolder or a subdomain. The case was, it was a new product, the product was tangentially related to the core product that this company offered. And the question was, "What do you do with this thing?" Because from a brand point of view, it definitely helps to have it on a subdomain, but the product was going to be kept separate for different audiences, and they weren't going to interlink between the two. So, you run the risk of Google not realizing, because it wasn't like, "Okay, here's our core product, here's like a very, very close variant of the core product subdomain. Okay, Google will be able to get that." Different, but the same. Same, but different. You run the risk of Google not really understanding that the product on the subdomain is actually related to the core product on the main domain, and you're not going to have a lot of linking opportunities between the two because it's for different audiences, so now what? Then, you really run the risk of Google not realizing that this is all one story, because you're not linking. Crystal Carter: Right. The links are incredibly important. The links are incredibly important and should absolutely be factored into any decisions you make about how you're going to proceed with this subdomain or subfolder or whatever. So, when you see it work well, they're linking back and forth to each other and supporting each other where relevant. Mordy Oberstein: That's your power cable. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Precisely, precisely. That's your shed. Mordy Oberstein: That's your power cable. Going back. Crystal Carter: These are the things. So, I think it's really important, and I think that- Mordy Oberstein: Do you use a special outdoor cable or any cable? What happens when it rains? Crystal Carter: Well, exactly. You've got to shore that all up. And these are very- Mordy Oberstein: One of those orange cables. Crystal Carter: Yeah, with the little mat that you can walk over. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. That's how you want to handle your subdomain. Crystal Carter: So, links are really important. And I think, also, indented results... Are we going to- Mordy Oberstein: We're going to get... That's my spoiler. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's my spoiler. Hey SEOs, I have some proof for you that Google does understand the relationship between domain and the various subdomains, because they do it right on the SERP. I'm not revealing that. You have to keep listening. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. I have one more thing that I wanted to share from the discussion we had on Twitter, which was Freddie Chat. And there's lots of people who have great examples of this, who shared that he actually saw a really big bump moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, of an increase of 20% from moving one of his brands into a subfolder, in an international SEO perspective, which I think is interesting. So, this is something that I find interesting considering that Google can sometimes find it a bit of a challenge with regards to international SEO. So, it's interesting to see that they've seen that increase, and that I think if they've done that well, then that's a really good example of somebody who managed that migration well, because essentially, if you're moving from a subfolder to a subdomain or moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, that's essentially a migration, and should be managed well. So, if you are seeing a bump or you're a client who has seen the fruits of some SEO labor, then thank your SEO for helping you with that and making sure that that was managed well. So, yeah, there's some great things there. I will link to the discussion because there was a really great, fantastic thread, which I cannot give into all the details of it, but it's fantastic, from @darth_na as well where he gets into all of the details of the nuances of subfolders, subdomains, et cetera, and particularly, one of the- Mordy Oberstein: I've already tweeted to take him to do it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he loves a thread. One of the ones that was particularly prescient, I thought, was, he mentioned, if you have risky content, including Adal or low value or high similarity or uncertain quality, et cetera, he said these are best for putting them on a subdomain. I think that's really interesting of using it as a risk-management thing, particularly if you have a brand that has a particular unique positioning or has a very curated positioning, for instance. So, you see this a lot with celebrities and things where they'll have their main website that's like, "Oh, yeah, look at me, I'm this person and I'm so great," and it's just lots of beauty shots, et cetera, et cetera, and then they'll have a subdomain that's their shop that's like, "And here's my merch." Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: …all my lifestyle things buy this T-shirt, that sort of thing. So, I think that that's interesting as well. Also, if the merch thing fails or doesn't work, then you can just- Mordy Oberstein: Get rid with it. Crystal Carter: ... stop with the subdomain, and then it doesn't mess up the rest of your website. Mordy Oberstein: JLo, who's on Wix, does that, I believe. Crystal Carter: JLo does do that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, just in case you're looking to get more on international SEO, we did a whole interview with Aleyda Solis about this. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. It's Crystal's thread of all the high-of-mind talking about subdomain and subfolders in the show notes. But now we're going to circle back to what you mentioned before, which is migrating or moving subdomain content over to a subfolder. And we're going to ask Nikki Halliwell what's her top consideration for migrating subdomain content to a subfolder. Take it away, Nikki. Nikki Halliwell: This is an interesting one for me because I've done several pieces of work around migrating from subdomains to subfolders, and also, investigations into the benefits of both of those. And overwhelmingly, in my experience, I definitely do prefer a subfolder. I'm going to start this off and share, first of all, that subdomains definitely do have their place. I'm not saying you should never use them whatsoever, but I do think that you need to have a special case for using them. And that can be things like if there's a completely separate brand from the rest of the site, you're using an entirely different language, and there's not a particular reason why you can use a subfolder for that. I know that some CMSs limit the use of subfolders for international content. Also, if it's a help section, in cases like that, I think it's okay to use a subdomain, but certainly, for anything like a blog or newer areas of the website, in most cases I will always advocate for using a subfolder. And one of the most interesting projects that I worked on around this was for a very large international medical equipment website, and they had done an international migration as part of a redesign of their website, and all of their international sub photos got moved onto subdomains, and there was a tank in performance. And we did lots of investigations into this to see what had happened and everything else. And long story short, we were able to rule out everything else. And the only thing that remained was that the content was now on a subdomain. So, it was as if Google was seeing them as separate sites. Even though Google will tell you that they don't consider them as separate, it does tend to be the case, certainly in my experience. Then, I led the migration to move this content back onto the previous subfolders that it sat on. So, instead of UK.domain, we now had domain/UK, and so on, for all of the different international variations that we had. And the results were instant. They went straight back up to 23,000 impressions, I think, was what we saw at the time, on average each day. And some were patterns with clicks and the average positions as well. In terms of top considerations when you are migrating to a subfolder, do your investigations, make sure that you know that it is the right decision. Other things is just making sure that everyone is aware of what you're doing and why you are doing it. That includes everyone from internal stakeholders as well as the dev teams. Are they still able to sit on the same CMS as well? Sometimes, depending on what platform you have or how the website is built, if it's a custom CMS, they might need a bit more involvement from some of the dev teams. And other things to think about during a migration such as this involves things like just making sure that you are very carefully planning all of your redirects. I'd suggest getting multiple people to check over your final redirects when you've done it just so that there is that extra layer of validation so you can mitigate the risk of any additional drops as much as possible. Think about how you're redirecting. Obviously, you want to implement them in the right place, but also make sure that you're using 301 redirects and that they're all remaining on https. Again, that depends on how they're implemented. Then, one of the final points that I want to say to make sure that you consider when you are migrating from a subdomain to a subfolder is to take the time to update all of the internal links . These are now all going to be incorrect because obviously, before, they were pointing to the subdomain, so you now need to update them to point to the new version. But that also means that you need to update things like your canonicals. You might be able to get a plugin to help you do this, but also things like HREFLANG, those will also need updating across the site as well. And that can be quite a large amount of work, but if you don't do it, you can see yourself falling into a lot of issues, and you might not see the uptick in performance that perhaps you expected if you don't take the time to update your internal links like that. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Nikki. I love the point, by the way, about have to go check the redirects, multiple people check the redirects. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh, yeah. No, it's really important. And updating internal links is also such an important thing to do. I think a lot of people forget that step because it can be very tedious, upload, updating all of your internal links, but it is absolutely crucial, because even if you've got redirects, what happens is that all of the redirects are happening on your server and it's dragging down your server as people are moving between all of those different spaces. So, if you can update your internal links to go to the direct link that they're supposed to be, that's really important. But I think that the general takeaway from Nikki's fantastic advice is that all of these things should be done carefully and with care, and you should be making sure that anything you're implementing is technically sound. When she was talking about moving from the subfolder to the subdomain and seeing that they drop, I think one of the things that's interesting there is that, essentially, because they are treated as unique entities, the subdomain in the top-level domain, is, essentially you're starting from scratch. So, in terms of your back link profile in terms of what Google knows about that entity, if time is of the essence, if you don't have time to build the brand equity for that specific subdomain, then it might be best to keep it in a subfolder set up because it allows you to build on some of the equity of the overall domain if you're on a subfolder, which is, I think, again, one of the reasons why people tend to try to do it if they can. And I think that it's interesting that she was able to discern that that was the best thing to do in that situation because it takes a lot of data points to make that decision. Decisions like that shouldn't be made lightly because they require a lot of time and energy to implement. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of subdomains and subfolders and which one is better, which one is worse and what would you do, and all what we just said and all what Nikki just said, I have the proof- Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: ... sort of, maybe. I want to get into that. Yeah, and I want to get into also just, what this feature, that is my proof, does and shows about things in general. Anyway. This time we're going to take a look at a little SERP feature. I don't know what to call it. A feature, maybe it's a layout, I don't know, a format, I don't know. We'll call it a feature, because in the SEO tools they label it separately. We're taking a look at indented results for a very special Top of the SERP to show you how Google can or can't relate to subdomains and subfolders. So, let's take it away with indented results from the Top of the SERP. So, I think you pointed this out to me. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: You pointed it out to me, but I think I made the connection. I don't know, maybe I'm taking too much credit for myself. You were right, you're right. Indented results Google will show. Let's say you search for the latest news, and you'll have, for example, "The economic times of India." They will show with their domain, and they'll show with maybe their sports news. They're not a sports site, they're an economic site. Their financial news and stock news, market news, and they'll all be different organic results, or they're all from the same site, but to show that they're on their own, that they're connected to the initial site's ranking or organic result, they get indented, like an outlier. They get a bit indented, and they're indented results. Now, guess what? Sometimes there are subfolders that are part of the indented results, and this is what you pointed out, sometimes they're subdomains, which to me says, guess what, Google knows this domain and that and that subdomain and that subfolder and that other subdomain, it's all the same thing, because it shows it as all part of one organic result. Crystal Carter: This is what I've observed on a number of different occasions. This is something that I've experienced as a user. For instance, one of the classic ones is trying to figure out what the luggage allowance is on an airline, or something like that. If you look up "Ryanair suitcase allowance", for instance, then the top result will be from help.ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another result in the terms and conditions from ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another one from helpcenter.ryanair.com, and they're all talking about that baggage allowance. But Google knows that they're all talking about the same thing for the same brand, and they're all serving the same intent. And essentially, one of the things that I think Google likes about a subdomain, particularly like a KB subdomain, is that it is a very clear intent. Mordy Oberstein: Correct. Crystal Carter: So, with the baggage and suitcase allowance query, for instance, they know that if I'm looking at suitcase allowance, I want to know what is the suitcase allowance. I don't want to have a discussion about the value of suitcases and what is a suitcase. No, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Google loves documentation, loves documentation. Crystal Carter: They absolutely do. And what's really important for Abs, and particular for documentation and things like that, is that you're linking back and forth and in between some of the documentation information and also into maybe more conversational, maybe more informational information as well. But Google does this all the time. They are constantly pulling this through. Mordy Oberstein: I want to get into some of the trends around what Google's doing with the indented results. I don't want this to be just like, "I told you. See, Google does understand the connection." But one of the trends that I have seen, and same as you, is that Google loves to do this with knowledge-based content. And oftentimes that knowledge-based content that sits at a subdomain. For example, if you search for a Wix SEO, the first thing you get, the main non-indented result is our SEO gate where we go through all the features that we have for SEO, blah, blah, blah. Then, the first indented result is actually the SEO learning hub. Then, there's a second result on a subdomain... I'm sorry, it's a subfolder rather, I apologize. Then, there's one about an article from the blog about SEO, and that's also an indented result. And the third indented result is support.wix.com subdomain. But it's very often knowledge-based content. Google loves throwing that in the indented results. Crystal Carter: So, to my mind, there's an SEO value for this in that it's taking up a lot of real estate. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah- Crystal Carter: I think that- Mordy Oberstein: ... so big, huge, lot of real estate. Crystal Carter: Huge. I think it might be a bit of an overlooked SEO opportunity that a lot of people will ignore the subdomains. They'll ignore the support documentation, they'll ignore the help center, they'll ignore the jobs board, they'll ignore that sort of thing, for instance. But I'm sorry, if you're showing up for four search results across four domains under your brand- Mordy Oberstein: It's almost the entire above-the-fold. Spoiler alert, I'm spoiling some data that I got from nozzle.io, the average number of organic results that appear above the fold on the SERP is three and a half. And we're talking, there's four right here. Crystal Carter: Right. That's a lot, that's a lot. Also, sometimes you get subdomains that'll have the indented results, and then you'll have your top-level domain underneath that- Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: ... for some of those things. So, I think that if it's managed correctly, you can get a lot of good real estate, you can get a lot of good opportunities from those particular things. And again, it has to do with interlinking between the two, that has to do with having good clear connections between the two. For instance, you can declare, in your schema markup, that support documentation is run by this organization, @organization, et cetera, and you can link back to the main domain, you can have your footer that declares who you are, you can have your subdomains, et cetera, but there's lots of ways that you can do that. And the indented results... Semrush recently added in the feature where you can see what's an indented result and where they're spreading out, and they're updated their tools- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... so that you can see the SERP features reflected more clearly in the SERP write-up at the bottom. And I think it's really interesting because you can see the impact of it, and sometimes, with those indented results, which ones on top can affect what your click-through rate is. But I think that what's really important to think about this is, and you're a big advocate of this, but it's how your subdomains, how your domain domains, how the indented results all reflect your brand. What I see when I see a brand that has a robust knowledge base, has a solid blog, has good product pages, et cetera, et cetera, is I see a brand that has a commitment to delivering good content and is looking to provide good value for their customers, and I think if you can reflect that at all stages, you're onto a winner or whatever you're doing. Mordy Oberstein: One other place I really see that is with news content. If you're in the new space, there's a huge amount of opportunity for indented results. Why I was using the "economic times of India", because that was the result I was literally looking at on the SERP. It shows up all the time from news content. And just to your point about the branding, it shows you that I as a website, as a brand, as a company, handle this topic really well in a really organized way also. For example, one of the cases I was looking at, I think it was Yahoo, I think it was Yahoo. So, it was a query about financial news, and one of the indented results was something like finance.yahoo.com, and another one below it was money.yahoo.com, meaning, they've taken the topic of economics and finances, and they've parsed it out into multiple categories. And if you see that show up, I thought, initially, that's a bit repetitive, but when you dive into the content, it makes sense. It's taking it from a very different angle. They cover it from multiple perspectives for multiple users. And by the way, it does really reflect, in my mind, that you've taken your content, thought about the different intents and the different users and created content in an organized way to deal with both of those audiences or all of those audiences or all of those intents at the same time, which is why it really works well in the news. Just, by the way, back to our subdomain subfolder thing, the SERP for Europe and US News, you get US News and World Report. The first result is a subfolder for Europe news, so usnews.com/topics/locations, whatever it is, and then, one of the other results is travel.usnews.com. So, subdomain, subfolder, all in the same result. But if you're in the news space, and I find there are spaces, so know your space that don't have data, it's very anecdotal, but I find there are spaces that are more predisposed towards intended results than other spaces. So, make sure you know your space. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, it's really important, because I think the other thing is that you get into... Because you also have to think about this in terms of duplicate content. So, you have to think about this in terms of, if you've covered it on your KB, and your knowledge-based articles or your support documentation, or whatever you want to call it, is showing at the top of the indented results pack, for instance, and you're covering it on a blog, then you need to make sure that you're not duplicating that content as well. So, I think you also need to think about, when you're doing your audits to make sure that you're looking at whatever keyword and whatever positioning you're going to be doing when you're creating your content, you also need to think about that content as well so that you're taking into account all of the things that are associated with your brand that are showing on the SERP. So, pay attention to your indented results. If you see the indented results, that's your brand showing with your brand, so you need to just double check that you're showing with the things that are appropriate, and also that what's on those pages that Google is showing in that collection. So, do check those things out. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of checking things out, what you should always make sure to check out is the SEO news each and every week so that you are up-to-date on what's happening in the industry. This is why we cover the SEO news every week so you are up-to-date with what's happening in the industry. So, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First up, I have some perspective for you, Google Perspectives. As announced at Google I/O , the Perspectives filter is here. Well, if you're in the US. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google finally launches the Perspective Search Filter. Well, Barry, clearly impatient, it finally launches. I/O wasn't that long ago. But I'm glad that Barry got his wish, Perspectives is here. The idea of Perspectives is, well, to give you wider perspective on the topic that's reflected in your search query. Currently, there's a lot of social media results in there. I think this is very early on. It's going to evolve. For example, if you search for the Beatles, the band, you get some YouTube videos about different songs and some content around who the lead singer is. It's not very perspectivy yet. In this case, I think you would have things like perspectives if the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were the first real rock band, or which Beatle is the best. Clearly, it's George. But those kinds of things that really give you an extra layer of perspective on the topic. But again, it's very new. Okay. Google held a live search central event in Tokyo, and friend of the show, Kenichi Suzuki was sharing some great tweets from his attendance of the event. For example, Kenichi tweeted that per Google's Gary Ish, Illyes Ish, whatever, "Machine learning-based ranking algorithms and signals are trained on content by humans for humans. They understand and promote natural content better," which, by the way, is an absolutely brilliant point that Gary's pointing out through Kenichi here, that if Google's using machine learning to train itself on what to show via the algorithm, then what is training itself on is going to be a very important part of that. So, if Google's looking at saying, "Hey, great content is X," and in the data dataset it's focusing on content with, say, firsthand experience, then the output of that is going to be rewarding of firsthand experience. Anyway. We'll link to the tweets in the show notes, so check them out for sure. And last, but not least, Glen Gabe shared a fantastic case study showing that a site indeed thrived despite its abandoning of disavowing practices. Google has long said they ignore spammy links that are pointing to your sites, so you don't need to disavow them. Many SEOs have been skeptical about Google's transparency here for some reason that is well beyond me. I take Google out their word about this. It makes absolutely total sense. Anyway. Well, Glenn took a look at a site that was very involved in disavowing links very energetically. They were hit by an update. Glen worked with the site to improve the site, but said, "Hey, you don't need to do that disavowing stuff." And they stopped doing the disavowing stuff because it's not worth anybody's time. And lo and behold, as the case study shows, the site did return towards its former glory all without the disavowing of links. So, a great article. We'll link to it in the show notes, check it out. Glen, I hope us featuring your wonderful article is some consolation for the terrible way the Yankees have been playing. It's been depressing if you're a Yankees fan, like myself and Glen. Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. How does it feel to be updated? It's always a good feeling to be updated. Crystal Carter: I feel refreshed. Mordy Oberstein: I feel updated. Crystal Carter: I feel sublime. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's what the SEO-ners do for you. That's the effect it has. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Barry has an effect on people. Speaking of people, as I just plow through segways like it's butter. Crystal Carter: That was silky smooth. Mordy Oberstein: Silky smooth. I took like a machete to warm butter, that's how smooth it was. Speaking of people, here's this week's follower of the week, and this week's follower of the week is none other than Jess Joyce over on Twitter @JessJoyce . We'll link to her profile in the show notes, but if you want to spell it out, which I will do painfully. It's @J-E-S-S-J-O-Y-C-E, Jess Joyce on Twitter. She's full of knowledge, a little fun, a little snarkiness sometimes I will always appreciate, and that's what makes her an absolutely great follow. Crystal Carter: Jess Joyce, yes, she's fantastically dedicated to technical SEO, and she just loves getting into the details of it. It's fantastic the way- Mordy Oberstein: And jokes. Crystal Carter: ... she unpacks that. Yeah. And she's got a great sense of humor as well. So, she's a fantastic follower, and she shares some really good examples of her work and how she approaches what she does, and it's really incredible. So, yeah, she's a great person to follow, and yeah, cannot recommend enough. Mordy Oberstein: So, follow her. Crystal Carter: Already. Mordy Oberstein: Over on Twitter @JessJoyse, which brings us to the end of the episode. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Oberstein: How about that? Crystal Carter: Have we... Oh, no, don't scratch. Delete. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: I was going to make a sub joke, but I didn't. Mordy Oberstein: Is there a subliminal message in there that you wanted me to take away from that or... Crystal Carter: I think we have reached our conclusion- Mordy Oberstein: We wouldn't want to subjugate you to anymore. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh! Mordy Oberstein: Nailed it, nailed it, nailed it. Crystal Carter: It was superb. No, that's not one. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no, no. Crystal Carter: That's not sub. Mordy Oberstein: That's- Crystal Carter: It certainly wasn't subpar. Mordy Oberstein: It's an upside down B, so I guess it counts. Crystal Carter: A cute B. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Anyway, that's it for us this week's SEO. 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 we dive into, "How to grow from a junior to a senior at an SEO agency." Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning About at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Nikki Halliwell Jess Joyce Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter What Are The Benefits Of Subdirectories vs. Subdomains? Tech SEO Tips Newsletter Journey Further News: Google Finally Launches The Perspectives Search Filter Updates from Search Central Live Tokyo Disavowing The Disavow Tool [Case Study] Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Nikki Halliwell Jess Joyce Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter What Are The Benefits Of Subdirectories vs. Subdomains? Tech SEO Tips Newsletter Journey Further News: Google Finally Launches The Perspectives Search Filter Updates from Search Central Live Tokyo Disavowing The Disavow Tool [Case Study] Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast . We're pushing out some groovy insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy O, overseeing the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fabulous, the unequivocable, the always right, there's nothing I could say more about Crystal Carter, our own Head of SEO communications. I haven't done that kind of intro in a while, and it felt it was long overdue. Crystal Carter: I would tell you right now that I am not always right. Mordy Oberstein: Crystals is always right. Crystal Carter: I'm never always right. In fact, I was wrong. My husband got me a Fitbit for Christmas, and at first I was like, "Uh, how could you? What are you trying to say? What do you mean by this?" I was wrong about that. I love my Fitbit thing now. It's good. And I count my little steps and I do my little thing, and it's cool. So, I was wrong about that. And sometimes it's okay to admit when you got things incorrect, that's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Those are the small little things. But the big things, Crystal's always right. Crystal Carter: It's fine if you want to go with that, I'll take that to every meeting. So, next time you say it, I say to quote... Mordy Oberstein: Okay, you know what, let's do that. It will make meetings shorter, I think. Crystal Carter: It will. Mordy Oberstein: Which is the goal. This SERPs' Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter , but where you can easily decide whether to structure your site with subfolders or subdomains, including from multilingual sites, as today, the battle wages on, subdomains or subfolders, which is better for SEO. Just ask John Mueller on Twitter, and tell him we sent you. I am just kidding, do not do that. He has literally asked 1,000 times over about this. But yes, today we're stepping on that landmine that is a debate about subdomains versus subfolders . I feel it is the debate that's captured the hearts and souls of a generation of SEOs, which is better? Because just like Highlander, there can be only one. Or can there, I don't know. We're going right after the jugular with this one as we ask, is there really still a debate? When are subfolders or subdomains a good idea, when are they a bad idea? And just what exactly can Google grasp and what can't it grasp when it comes to how you structure your website? Also, joining us, tech SEOs extraordinaire, Nikki Halliwell will join us to discuss the considerations of a migration for subdomain content to a subfolder, plus, we look at a little format on the SERP or a little SERP feature on the SERP, obviously, the SERP feature on the SERP, that's redundant, but anyway, that sheds a bit of light into this whole subdomain versus subfolder discussion, and survey what the feature tends to prefer. And of course, with your snappiest SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So, Up Periscope as episode number 43 of the SERP's UP Podcast submerges you in an SEO question of all SEO questions. It's subdomain versus subfolder, and all of the subsequent conversation that follows on episode 43. Crystal Carter: I'm so glad that we're getting into this subject. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, I didn't even think of that. That's so obvious, and I didn't even think of it. Crystal Carter: Well, I just had to submit that into the conversation. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I was just going to... You beat me. You stole my thought. I was going to submit you were right again. Crystal Carter: All right. So, I'm excited to be talking about this. It comes up every now and then where people say, "What's better for SEO, a subdomain or a subfolder?" Before we get into it, in particular, let's just get everybody up to speed. So, a subdomain is essentially a part of your top-level domain. So, top-level domain might be example.com, for instance. A subdomain might be blog.example.com. It might also be something like de.example.com. For instance, if it was a language one, it might also be support.example.com. These, essentially, are treated as separate entities from each other. So, it's not exactly treated as the same entity as your top-level domain, it's treated as a separate entity. And the way I like to think about the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder, which is when you have, essentially, the folder at the end of it, for instance, in the example.com example, you'd have example.com/blog, or as a subfolder or subdirectory, they are interchangeable terms, if you were going to have it as a subdomain, you would have it as blog.example.com. Now, the difference between the two is, essentially, the same difference between a shed and an extension, because if you have a house and you want more space and you want to create more space for something that you've got going on, then you might think of building an extension onto your house, in which case the extension would be on the same property, but would use the same electricity, the same plumbing, and all of that sort of stuff. However, if you were to build a shed, in this case a subdomain, then, essentially, you would need to run electricity to this different place. It might have a different circuit breaker. If you were going to put plumbing in, you might have to build a whole nother set of plumbing, et cetera, et cetera. It's all still on the same property, so it's all still understood as being part of the same ecosystem, however, they are two different entities. So, that's essentially the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder. Where we get into conversations with SEOs about whether or not subfolders and subdomains are better or worse for an SEO is something that is a bit of a point of debate. Now, I asked the SEO high-of-mind whether or not subdomains or subfolders were better for SEO, and on Twitter I got 439 votes, and 83% of SEOs said that subfolders were better than subdomains. And I got some very interesting replies on that. Now, the thing I find interesting about it was, it depends, really. I definitely think that subdomains have a place. And I think we'll get into a bit of some of the ways that people can use them, but subdomains can often be used for things like helpdesks, job boards, they can also be used for international SEO, they can be used for lots of other things like that. I've seen them used for corporate, like CSR things and things like that. And essentially, to my mind, the time when you would use a subdomain is, essentially, where you have a bulk of content that maybe potentially needs a completely different set of infrastructure from your existing top-level domain and maybe would add better customer value if it was in that particular thing. A lot of times the subdomain things, for instance, Yukto uses a Wix subdomain for their customer support section, and it's got a specially dedicated framework for answering questions and doing customer service and raising tickets and things like that, which is different from their main website. HubSpot, for instance, use their blog on a subdomain, which is very different from their main domain, which is dedicated entirely to their product. And their blog, @blog.hubspot.com, does very well in terms of SEO, but it has a completely different setup from their main domain. So, I definitely think that there is a place. However, lots of SEOs will report to you that they've seen some great results from moving blogs onto the main-level domain. And this is because it's really the top-level domain, and this is because it makes it easier to get more value out of links, it makes it more easy for users to find it. You're also able to benefit from a lot of the search equity and a lot of the keyword understanding that Google has about the main domain in order to get great results on Search. So, I think it depends on what the user needs, but there are some great benefits to both. Mordy Oberstein: So, this whole debate falls under one of these weird SEO conversations because Google, for the longest time, has been like, "Whatever the heck you want." Yes, there are real differences, like setting it up in Search console on a subdomain is far, perhaps, depends, far more annoying because you have to add different properties for each subdomain and then you can't track them, and that's a problem. It might be better for you. It all depends. But it might be a little more annoying. And that's a personal choice, fine. But Google's general thing is, "Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's all good." They do, however, or have, however, said that sometimes Google does really separate the two out, and that's where I think the sweet spot is. I remember doing a webinar one time, it was actually with the SEJ, and someone had made a subfolder. I'm like, "Yeah. Well, Google said you can whatever you want." And they send you the stuff after, I was building the T here a bit, but after some of the webinars, they sent you the comments that people leave. As one commented, "This guy knows nothing about SEO." So, people have really strong opinions about this. Crystal Carter: Really strong opinions. Mordy Oberstein: So, before I say what I'm about to say, I want everyone to take a drink, whether it be an alcoholic drink or just some water, clear your throat, let's relax for a minute. This is my opinion. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: This is not the SEO gospel. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: I think Google is not lying. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Crazy, I know. I think it really does all depend. For example, I'll give you, again, a case. It's not an actual case. I'm not sure if they actually do this or not, but just imagine they did. CNN does use subdomains, for example. So, like travel.cnn, or entertainment.cnn, or, I don't know, news.cnn. I don't think that's an actual subdomain, news.cnn. That wouldn't make any sense. I think Google understands that all of that is CNN reporting about different types of news; travel news, entertainment news, news-news in my case, which makes no sense. And I think they understand that should be looked at as one identity, one entity. To quote Eli Schwartz, he one time said in a talk I heard him give, Google has a self-driving car, he used to live in the Bay Area, and the car was able to determine whether or not a squirrel or a human being jumped out in front of it. If they can do that, they can understand that travel.cnn and entertainment.cnn is all reporting about different types of news, as opposed to, and I don't know if they do this, and I should have looked at it beforehand, Honda. Honda has the cars, it has vehicles, all sorts of vehicles, motorcycles. They also have Honda robotics- Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: ... which is totally separate. So, I don't know how they structure it, but imagine they had robots.honda versus cars.honda. I might look at those two things, like, "No, not connected." They're very different. Crystal Carter: So, in the discussion, Joelle Irvine from Moz, she was saying exactly what you're talking about. She says, "I use subdomains when the goals and audience are different. So, that's what you're talking about with your robotics and your cars. If the main goals of the site are brand awareness, engagement conversion for your business, then having jobs on a subdomain makes sense, for instance, and you can track and optimize them separately. If audience and goals are the same, then subfolders are better for SEO, and that makes sense entirely. For instance, another one was Kindr Grindr, Grindr, the dating app, has a whole thing that talks about their CSR and how they do the corporate responsibility. They don't need to have that on their dating app thing that doesn't affect them things. It's useful- Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: ... information for people to have. If somebody wants to see your sustainability report, that's great for your team or whatever, but it can sometimes confuse your overall brand entity in that, if you have it on your main domain, if it's not specifically relevant to the general intent of your general website. So, that's something that's interesting there. Then, I think, also, here's something that was interesting. So, Alex Hartford was saying that, "I generally prefer subdomains only when it's poor content setup." A support product with a bad tech SEO or content-wise, for example, which I think is interesting because I think that's another point. Sometimes, with subdomain content, it's content that's not intended to rank anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Agreed. Crystal Carter: Sometimes it's content that is intended to serve a purpose, to provide value for your customers who know you and who know what you're doing, and things like that, but it's not necessarily intended to rank. So, a lot of people will have a lot of larger businesses. Enterprise businesses might have their corporate information online, they might have all their latest stock prices and things like that, and that's not necessarily going to rank. They don't need it to be competitive, they need it to be visible so that they're transparent and all of that sort of information. They need to have a link to it. It doesn't really matter if it ranks or not. So, it's important to remember that it provides business value. I was actually involved in a project where we had a client who wanted to move a large chunk of their main content onto a subdomain, and I was initially very hesitant. And I followed the SEO gospel, and they said, "No, this is a terrible idea. Do not do it. Oh, no, gosh, no, no, no." And what I found was that the client was like, "This subdomain product, the product that's going to be using the subdomain, has immense business value for us." It was one of those bells and whistles, fully integrated, so the back end was integrated with the front end. And it was a situation where it was providing them a lot of business value, and so they decided that even if there was an SEO risk, they were willing to take it in order to benefit from the overall business value. So, bearing that in mind and trying to keep my clients happy, we tried to mitigate the risk as much as possible. One of the things that was important was making sure that the tech spec between the subdomain and the main domain, or the top-level domain, were as close to each other as possible. So, when we initially got this subdomain product, the security level was much lower, and there was a lot of lag in the speed, and I was like, "This is terrible. If we're linking between the two, this is gonna be a terrible user experience, and it's not going to work." So, I campaigned and literally got the people, who built the product, to upgrade their security across the whole product so that they could fix it. And in the end, because we did the linking correctly and because we did lots of stuff, we actually saw a general benefit- Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: ... for the users, for the business, for everyone. So, I think that there's ways that you can do it. But one of the other things that someone mentioned was, they were having a discussion about subdomains and subfolders, and the client wanted to go forward with it. So, it's Ashley Thornhill . She was saying, "There are things we have to get done first and they want to jump into this new product," because I think that's another thing that people sometimes do with subdomain is they'll use it to patch up so that- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ...everything here. And I think that that brings to mind one of the other issues is that, with a subdomain, you do need to maintain it. It is like the garden shed or your external garage, somebody needs to maintain it. And if somebody comes to you and they say, "We wanna split the site into a top-level domain and a subdomain," well, essentially, from an SEO point of view, that's two websites to manage because they're two different CMSs or two different setups or two different routing situations, all of that sort of stuff. So- Mordy Oberstein: That's a huge consideration, by the way. Just the practical considerations are the fact that you now have two distinct properties to deal with is a major thing to consider, and long-term, how the client is going to evolve as a business, and then what's going to happen in a year from now that you have these two distinct properties that they're going to need to handle and they're really going to want to have to deal with that in a year. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. And this comes into international SEO as well. So, Lydia Infante , in her article about international SEO, she talks about that subdomains are sometimes the solution for international SEO. It's quite a common use for subdomains. We do it with Wix.com as well. And one of the things about that is that they have to evolve, be maintained. Each version of the site has to be maintained uniquely to make sure that it's working there as well, so it's something to think about that you've definitely got the chops to support your subdomain situation. Mordy Oberstein: I want to jump back to something you were saying before about links. I think it's a great thing we need to talk about. I've been involved in discussions with whether or not to go with a subfolder or a subdomain. The case was, it was a new product, the product was tangentially related to the core product that this company offered. And the question was, "What do you do with this thing?" Because from a brand point of view, it definitely helps to have it on a subdomain, but the product was going to be kept separate for different audiences, and they weren't going to interlink between the two. So, you run the risk of Google not realizing, because it wasn't like, "Okay, here's our core product, here's like a very, very close variant of the core product subdomain. Okay, Google will be able to get that." Different, but the same. Same, but different. You run the risk of Google not really understanding that the product on the subdomain is actually related to the core product on the main domain, and you're not going to have a lot of linking opportunities between the two because it's for different audiences, so now what? Then, you really run the risk of Google not realizing that this is all one story, because you're not linking. Crystal Carter: Right. The links are incredibly important. The links are incredibly important and should absolutely be factored into any decisions you make about how you're going to proceed with this subdomain or subfolder or whatever. So, when you see it work well, they're linking back and forth to each other and supporting each other where relevant. Mordy Oberstein: That's your power cable. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Precisely, precisely. That's your shed. Mordy Oberstein: That's your power cable. Going back. Crystal Carter: These are the things. So, I think it's really important, and I think that- Mordy Oberstein: Do you use a special outdoor cable or any cable? What happens when it rains? Crystal Carter: Well, exactly. You've got to shore that all up. And these are very- Mordy Oberstein: One of those orange cables. Crystal Carter: Yeah, with the little mat that you can walk over. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. That's how you want to handle your subdomain. Crystal Carter: So, links are really important. And I think, also, indented results... Are we going to- Mordy Oberstein: We're going to get... That's my spoiler. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. Mordy Oberstein: That's my spoiler. Hey SEOs, I have some proof for you that Google does understand the relationship between domain and the various subdomains, because they do it right on the SERP. I'm not revealing that. You have to keep listening. Crystal Carter: Okay, okay. I have one more thing that I wanted to share from the discussion we had on Twitter, which was Freddie Chat. And there's lots of people who have great examples of this, who shared that he actually saw a really big bump moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, of an increase of 20% from moving one of his brands into a subfolder, in an international SEO perspective, which I think is interesting. So, this is something that I find interesting considering that Google can sometimes find it a bit of a challenge with regards to international SEO. So, it's interesting to see that they've seen that increase, and that I think if they've done that well, then that's a really good example of somebody who managed that migration well, because essentially, if you're moving from a subfolder to a subdomain or moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, that's essentially a migration, and should be managed well. So, if you are seeing a bump or you're a client who has seen the fruits of some SEO labor, then thank your SEO for helping you with that and making sure that that was managed well. So, yeah, there's some great things there. I will link to the discussion because there was a really great, fantastic thread, which I cannot give into all the details of it, but it's fantastic, from @darth_na as well where he gets into all of the details of the nuances of subfolders, subdomains, et cetera, and particularly, one of the- Mordy Oberstein: I've already tweeted to take him to do it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he loves a thread. One of the ones that was particularly prescient, I thought, was, he mentioned, if you have risky content, including Adal or low value or high similarity or uncertain quality, et cetera, he said these are best for putting them on a subdomain. I think that's really interesting of using it as a risk-management thing, particularly if you have a brand that has a particular unique positioning or has a very curated positioning, for instance. So, you see this a lot with celebrities and things where they'll have their main website that's like, "Oh, yeah, look at me, I'm this person and I'm so great," and it's just lots of beauty shots, et cetera, et cetera, and then they'll have a subdomain that's their shop that's like, "And here's my merch." Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Crystal Carter: …all my lifestyle things buy this T-shirt, that sort of thing. So, I think that that's interesting as well. Also, if the merch thing fails or doesn't work, then you can just- Mordy Oberstein: Get rid with it. Crystal Carter: ... stop with the subdomain, and then it doesn't mess up the rest of your website. Mordy Oberstein: JLo, who's on Wix, does that, I believe. Crystal Carter: JLo does do that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, just in case you're looking to get more on international SEO, we did a whole interview with Aleyda Solis about this. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. It's Crystal's thread of all the high-of-mind talking about subdomain and subfolders in the show notes. But now we're going to circle back to what you mentioned before, which is migrating or moving subdomain content over to a subfolder. And we're going to ask Nikki Halliwell what's her top consideration for migrating subdomain content to a subfolder. Take it away, Nikki. Nikki Halliwell: This is an interesting one for me because I've done several pieces of work around migrating from subdomains to subfolders, and also, investigations into the benefits of both of those. And overwhelmingly, in my experience, I definitely do prefer a subfolder. I'm going to start this off and share, first of all, that subdomains definitely do have their place. I'm not saying you should never use them whatsoever, but I do think that you need to have a special case for using them. And that can be things like if there's a completely separate brand from the rest of the site, you're using an entirely different language, and there's not a particular reason why you can use a subfolder for that. I know that some CMSs limit the use of subfolders for international content. Also, if it's a help section, in cases like that, I think it's okay to use a subdomain, but certainly, for anything like a blog or newer areas of the website, in most cases I will always advocate for using a subfolder. And one of the most interesting projects that I worked on around this was for a very large international medical equipment website, and they had done an international migration as part of a redesign of their website, and all of their international sub photos got moved onto subdomains, and there was a tank in performance. And we did lots of investigations into this to see what had happened and everything else. And long story short, we were able to rule out everything else. And the only thing that remained was that the content was now on a subdomain. So, it was as if Google was seeing them as separate sites. Even though Google will tell you that they don't consider them as separate, it does tend to be the case, certainly in my experience. Then, I led the migration to move this content back onto the previous subfolders that it sat on. So, instead of UK.domain, we now had domain/UK, and so on, for all of the different international variations that we had. And the results were instant. They went straight back up to 23,000 impressions, I think, was what we saw at the time, on average each day. And some were patterns with clicks and the average positions as well. In terms of top considerations when you are migrating to a subfolder, do your investigations, make sure that you know that it is the right decision. Other things is just making sure that everyone is aware of what you're doing and why you are doing it. That includes everyone from internal stakeholders as well as the dev teams. Are they still able to sit on the same CMS as well? Sometimes, depending on what platform you have or how the website is built, if it's a custom CMS, they might need a bit more involvement from some of the dev teams. And other things to think about during a migration such as this involves things like just making sure that you are very carefully planning all of your redirects. I'd suggest getting multiple people to check over your final redirects when you've done it just so that there is that extra layer of validation so you can mitigate the risk of any additional drops as much as possible. Think about how you're redirecting. Obviously, you want to implement them in the right place, but also make sure that you're using 301 redirects and that they're all remaining on https. Again, that depends on how they're implemented. Then, one of the final points that I want to say to make sure that you consider when you are migrating from a subdomain to a subfolder is to take the time to update all of the internal links . These are now all going to be incorrect because obviously, before, they were pointing to the subdomain, so you now need to update them to point to the new version. But that also means that you need to update things like your canonicals. You might be able to get a plugin to help you do this, but also things like HREFLANG, those will also need updating across the site as well. And that can be quite a large amount of work, but if you don't do it, you can see yourself falling into a lot of issues, and you might not see the uptick in performance that perhaps you expected if you don't take the time to update your internal links like that. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Nikki. I love the point, by the way, about have to go check the redirects, multiple people check the redirects. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh, yeah. No, it's really important. And updating internal links is also such an important thing to do. I think a lot of people forget that step because it can be very tedious, upload, updating all of your internal links, but it is absolutely crucial, because even if you've got redirects, what happens is that all of the redirects are happening on your server and it's dragging down your server as people are moving between all of those different spaces. So, if you can update your internal links to go to the direct link that they're supposed to be, that's really important. But I think that the general takeaway from Nikki's fantastic advice is that all of these things should be done carefully and with care, and you should be making sure that anything you're implementing is technically sound. When she was talking about moving from the subfolder to the subdomain and seeing that they drop, I think one of the things that's interesting there is that, essentially, because they are treated as unique entities, the subdomain in the top-level domain, is, essentially you're starting from scratch. So, in terms of your back link profile in terms of what Google knows about that entity, if time is of the essence, if you don't have time to build the brand equity for that specific subdomain, then it might be best to keep it in a subfolder set up because it allows you to build on some of the equity of the overall domain if you're on a subfolder, which is, I think, again, one of the reasons why people tend to try to do it if they can. And I think that it's interesting that she was able to discern that that was the best thing to do in that situation because it takes a lot of data points to make that decision. Decisions like that shouldn't be made lightly because they require a lot of time and energy to implement. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of subdomains and subfolders and which one is better, which one is worse and what would you do, and all what we just said and all what Nikki just said, I have the proof- Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: ... sort of, maybe. I want to get into that. Yeah, and I want to get into also just, what this feature, that is my proof, does and shows about things in general. Anyway. This time we're going to take a look at a little SERP feature. I don't know what to call it. A feature, maybe it's a layout, I don't know, a format, I don't know. We'll call it a feature, because in the SEO tools they label it separately. We're taking a look at indented results for a very special Top of the SERP to show you how Google can or can't relate to subdomains and subfolders. So, let's take it away with indented results from the Top of the SERP. So, I think you pointed this out to me. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: You pointed it out to me, but I think I made the connection. I don't know, maybe I'm taking too much credit for myself. You were right, you're right. Indented results Google will show. Let's say you search for the latest news, and you'll have, for example, "The economic times of India." They will show with their domain, and they'll show with maybe their sports news. They're not a sports site, they're an economic site. Their financial news and stock news, market news, and they'll all be different organic results, or they're all from the same site, but to show that they're on their own, that they're connected to the initial site's ranking or organic result, they get indented, like an outlier. They get a bit indented, and they're indented results. Now, guess what? Sometimes there are subfolders that are part of the indented results, and this is what you pointed out, sometimes they're subdomains, which to me says, guess what, Google knows this domain and that and that subdomain and that subfolder and that other subdomain, it's all the same thing, because it shows it as all part of one organic result. Crystal Carter: This is what I've observed on a number of different occasions. This is something that I've experienced as a user. For instance, one of the classic ones is trying to figure out what the luggage allowance is on an airline, or something like that. If you look up "Ryanair suitcase allowance", for instance, then the top result will be from help.ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another result in the terms and conditions from ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another one from helpcenter.ryanair.com, and they're all talking about that baggage allowance. But Google knows that they're all talking about the same thing for the same brand, and they're all serving the same intent. And essentially, one of the things that I think Google likes about a subdomain, particularly like a KB subdomain, is that it is a very clear intent. Mordy Oberstein: Correct. Crystal Carter: So, with the baggage and suitcase allowance query, for instance, they know that if I'm looking at suitcase allowance, I want to know what is the suitcase allowance. I don't want to have a discussion about the value of suitcases and what is a suitcase. No, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Google loves documentation, loves documentation. Crystal Carter: They absolutely do. And what's really important for Abs, and particular for documentation and things like that, is that you're linking back and forth and in between some of the documentation information and also into maybe more conversational, maybe more informational information as well. But Google does this all the time. They are constantly pulling this through. Mordy Oberstein: I want to get into some of the trends around what Google's doing with the indented results. I don't want this to be just like, "I told you. See, Google does understand the connection." But one of the trends that I have seen, and same as you, is that Google loves to do this with knowledge-based content. And oftentimes that knowledge-based content that sits at a subdomain. For example, if you search for a Wix SEO, the first thing you get, the main non-indented result is our SEO gate where we go through all the features that we have for SEO, blah, blah, blah. Then, the first indented result is actually the SEO learning hub. Then, there's a second result on a subdomain... I'm sorry, it's a subfolder rather, I apologize. Then, there's one about an article from the blog about SEO, and that's also an indented result. And the third indented result is support.wix.com subdomain. But it's very often knowledge-based content. Google loves throwing that in the indented results. Crystal Carter: So, to my mind, there's an SEO value for this in that it's taking up a lot of real estate. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah- Crystal Carter: I think that- Mordy Oberstein: ... so big, huge, lot of real estate. Crystal Carter: Huge. I think it might be a bit of an overlooked SEO opportunity that a lot of people will ignore the subdomains. They'll ignore the support documentation, they'll ignore the help center, they'll ignore the jobs board, they'll ignore that sort of thing, for instance. But I'm sorry, if you're showing up for four search results across four domains under your brand- Mordy Oberstein: It's almost the entire above-the-fold. Spoiler alert, I'm spoiling some data that I got from nozzle.io, the average number of organic results that appear above the fold on the SERP is three and a half. And we're talking, there's four right here. Crystal Carter: Right. That's a lot, that's a lot. Also, sometimes you get subdomains that'll have the indented results, and then you'll have your top-level domain underneath that- Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: ... for some of those things. So, I think that if it's managed correctly, you can get a lot of good real estate, you can get a lot of good opportunities from those particular things. And again, it has to do with interlinking between the two, that has to do with having good clear connections between the two. For instance, you can declare, in your schema markup, that support documentation is run by this organization, @organization, et cetera, and you can link back to the main domain, you can have your footer that declares who you are, you can have your subdomains, et cetera, but there's lots of ways that you can do that. And the indented results... Semrush recently added in the feature where you can see what's an indented result and where they're spreading out, and they're updated their tools- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: ... so that you can see the SERP features reflected more clearly in the SERP write-up at the bottom. And I think it's really interesting because you can see the impact of it, and sometimes, with those indented results, which ones on top can affect what your click-through rate is. But I think that what's really important to think about this is, and you're a big advocate of this, but it's how your subdomains, how your domain domains, how the indented results all reflect your brand. What I see when I see a brand that has a robust knowledge base, has a solid blog, has good product pages, et cetera, et cetera, is I see a brand that has a commitment to delivering good content and is looking to provide good value for their customers, and I think if you can reflect that at all stages, you're onto a winner or whatever you're doing. Mordy Oberstein: One other place I really see that is with news content. If you're in the new space, there's a huge amount of opportunity for indented results. Why I was using the "economic times of India", because that was the result I was literally looking at on the SERP. It shows up all the time from news content. And just to your point about the branding, it shows you that I as a website, as a brand, as a company, handle this topic really well in a really organized way also. For example, one of the cases I was looking at, I think it was Yahoo, I think it was Yahoo. So, it was a query about financial news, and one of the indented results was something like finance.yahoo.com, and another one below it was money.yahoo.com, meaning, they've taken the topic of economics and finances, and they've parsed it out into multiple categories. And if you see that show up, I thought, initially, that's a bit repetitive, but when you dive into the content, it makes sense. It's taking it from a very different angle. They cover it from multiple perspectives for multiple users. And by the way, it does really reflect, in my mind, that you've taken your content, thought about the different intents and the different users and created content in an organized way to deal with both of those audiences or all of those audiences or all of those intents at the same time, which is why it really works well in the news. Just, by the way, back to our subdomain subfolder thing, the SERP for Europe and US News, you get US News and World Report. The first result is a subfolder for Europe news, so usnews.com/topics/locations, whatever it is, and then, one of the other results is travel.usnews.com. So, subdomain, subfolder, all in the same result. But if you're in the news space, and I find there are spaces, so know your space that don't have data, it's very anecdotal, but I find there are spaces that are more predisposed towards intended results than other spaces. So, make sure you know your space. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, it's really important, because I think the other thing is that you get into... Because you also have to think about this in terms of duplicate content. So, you have to think about this in terms of, if you've covered it on your KB, and your knowledge-based articles or your support documentation, or whatever you want to call it, is showing at the top of the indented results pack, for instance, and you're covering it on a blog, then you need to make sure that you're not duplicating that content as well. So, I think you also need to think about, when you're doing your audits to make sure that you're looking at whatever keyword and whatever positioning you're going to be doing when you're creating your content, you also need to think about that content as well so that you're taking into account all of the things that are associated with your brand that are showing on the SERP. So, pay attention to your indented results. If you see the indented results, that's your brand showing with your brand, so you need to just double check that you're showing with the things that are appropriate, and also that what's on those pages that Google is showing in that collection. So, do check those things out. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of checking things out, what you should always make sure to check out is the SEO news each and every week so that you are up-to-date on what's happening in the industry. This is why we cover the SEO news every week so you are up-to-date with what's happening in the industry. So, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First up, I have some perspective for you, Google Perspectives. As announced at Google I/O , the Perspectives filter is here. Well, if you're in the US. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google finally launches the Perspective Search Filter. Well, Barry, clearly impatient, it finally launches. I/O wasn't that long ago. But I'm glad that Barry got his wish, Perspectives is here. The idea of Perspectives is, well, to give you wider perspective on the topic that's reflected in your search query. Currently, there's a lot of social media results in there. I think this is very early on. It's going to evolve. For example, if you search for the Beatles, the band, you get some YouTube videos about different songs and some content around who the lead singer is. It's not very perspectivy yet. In this case, I think you would have things like perspectives if the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were the first real rock band, or which Beatle is the best. Clearly, it's George. But those kinds of things that really give you an extra layer of perspective on the topic. But again, it's very new. Okay. Google held a live search central event in Tokyo, and friend of the show, Kenichi Suzuki was sharing some great tweets from his attendance of the event. For example, Kenichi tweeted that per Google's Gary Ish, Illyes Ish, whatever, "Machine learning-based ranking algorithms and signals are trained on content by humans for humans. They understand and promote natural content better," which, by the way, is an absolutely brilliant point that Gary's pointing out through Kenichi here, that if Google's using machine learning to train itself on what to show via the algorithm, then what is training itself on is going to be a very important part of that. So, if Google's looking at saying, "Hey, great content is X," and in the data dataset it's focusing on content with, say, firsthand experience, then the output of that is going to be rewarding of firsthand experience. Anyway. We'll link to the tweets in the show notes, so check them out for sure. And last, but not least, Glen Gabe shared a fantastic case study showing that a site indeed thrived despite its abandoning of disavowing practices. Google has long said they ignore spammy links that are pointing to your sites, so you don't need to disavow them. Many SEOs have been skeptical about Google's transparency here for some reason that is well beyond me. I take Google out their word about this. It makes absolutely total sense. Anyway. Well, Glenn took a look at a site that was very involved in disavowing links very energetically. They were hit by an update. Glen worked with the site to improve the site, but said, "Hey, you don't need to do that disavowing stuff." And they stopped doing the disavowing stuff because it's not worth anybody's time. And lo and behold, as the case study shows, the site did return towards its former glory all without the disavowing of links. So, a great article. We'll link to it in the show notes, check it out. Glen, I hope us featuring your wonderful article is some consolation for the terrible way the Yankees have been playing. It's been depressing if you're a Yankees fan, like myself and Glen. Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. How does it feel to be updated? It's always a good feeling to be updated. Crystal Carter: I feel refreshed. Mordy Oberstein: I feel updated. Crystal Carter: I feel sublime. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's what the SEO-ners do for you. That's the effect it has. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Barry has an effect on people. Speaking of people, as I just plow through segways like it's butter. Crystal Carter: That was silky smooth. Mordy Oberstein: Silky smooth. I took like a machete to warm butter, that's how smooth it was. Speaking of people, here's this week's follower of the week, and this week's follower of the week is none other than Jess Joyce over on Twitter @JessJoyce . We'll link to her profile in the show notes, but if you want to spell it out, which I will do painfully. It's @J-E-S-S-J-O-Y-C-E, Jess Joyce on Twitter. She's full of knowledge, a little fun, a little snarkiness sometimes I will always appreciate, and that's what makes her an absolutely great follow. Crystal Carter: Jess Joyce, yes, she's fantastically dedicated to technical SEO, and she just loves getting into the details of it. It's fantastic the way- Mordy Oberstein: And jokes. Crystal Carter: ... she unpacks that. Yeah. And she's got a great sense of humor as well. So, she's a fantastic follower, and she shares some really good examples of her work and how she approaches what she does, and it's really incredible. So, yeah, she's a great person to follow, and yeah, cannot recommend enough. Mordy Oberstein: So, follow her. Crystal Carter: Already. Mordy Oberstein: Over on Twitter @JessJoyse, which brings us to the end of the episode. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Oberstein: How about that? Crystal Carter: Have we... Oh, no, don't scratch. Delete. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. Crystal Carter: I was going to make a sub joke, but I didn't. Mordy Oberstein: Is there a subliminal message in there that you wanted me to take away from that or... Crystal Carter: I think we have reached our conclusion- Mordy Oberstein: We wouldn't want to subjugate you to anymore. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh! Mordy Oberstein: Nailed it, nailed it, nailed it. Crystal Carter: It was superb. No, that's not one. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no, no. Crystal Carter: That's not sub. Mordy Oberstein: That's- Crystal Carter: It certainly wasn't subpar. Mordy Oberstein: It's an upside down B, so I guess it counts. Crystal Carter: A cute B. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Anyway, that's it for us this week's SEO. 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 we dive into, "How to grow from a junior to a senior at an SEO agency." Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning About at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO