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February 28, 2023 The time has come: Google’s Universal Analytics is sunsetting on July 1 2023, and we’re ready to help you get started with GA4. Join digital analytics maven Krista Seiden on a walkthrough of the key information you need to facilitate a smooth transition and ensure you’re set up for success. In this webinar we will cover: How GA4 differs from Universal Analytics Top tips for using GA4 How to get started Meet your hosts: Krista Seiden Founder, KS Digital An experienced leader in digital analytics, Krista spent 7 years in product management for Google Marketing Platform. She served as VP Product Marketing & Growth at Quantcast before founding KS Digital in 2019, to help businesses make the most of their digital marketing investments. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: What you need to know about GA4 00:00 Crystal Welcome to our webinar. Today we're going to be talking about GA4 with myself, I am the Head of SEO Communications at Wix. And we are joined today by Krista Seiden, who is the queen bee, the person, the go-to person for all things GA4. You will recognize her from the internet, from all of the fantastic things she shares. But also you will recognize her from the Google Analytics training videos on YouTube where she shares her insights there as well. We're very pleased to have her here. And we're also joined by Mordy Oberstein, who is my my partner in crime and my co-host on the Surf's Up SEO podcast and our Head of SEO Branding here at Wix SEO. And we are both so so keen to hear from Krista today all about GA4 because we like everyone else got that email. 00:50 Crystal And thought to ourselves, wow we do need to get this going on. So welcome, Krista. Welcome, Mordy. 00:58 Krista Thank you, so great to be here. Thanks for having me. Mordy I literally ignored that email, said, I can’t handle this. Crystal We'll do fine. We've got this. We've got this. We've got Krista. We've got tools, we have all the things that we need. So as we go through just a little bit of housekeeping, this webinar is being recorded. Yes. And you will get a YouTube for the recording afterwards, where there'll be a link for you to watch this on YouTube at your leisure to pause and stop and think and have a go and try it again. Then we will also encourage you to ask questions in the Q&A panel, please do that. I can see some people have started asking some questions already which is great. And then also if you want to keep up with our future webinars, go to Wix.com, forward slash SEO, forward slash learn. We've got a brand new look for 2023 as well. So please enjoy that while you're there. And check out the Wix SEO webinars there. And then for the agenda, we're doing our introductions as we get some people filing through which is great. And then Krista is going to shed some light on this fantastic topic for us and help us to understand everything a lot better. And then also, we're going to get to, because Krista is going to be talking generally about GA4, about general top tips, general best practice, general really good things that you can do to make GA4 really sing. I'm going to share a few things for our Wix folks in the house. I'm going to share a few things about implementing GA4 on Wix, some top links and some top resources that you can peruse at your leisure. And we'll also share those things afterwards. And then we'll get into the Q&A with questions from you. We'll try to answer the questions in the chat as we go along if we can. And with that, I'm going to stop my share and I'm going to let Krista get in and tell us all the wonderful things about getting into GA4. Whoo. 02:49 Krista All right. Let's go ahead and start my share. 02:54 Krista Perfect, let me know you can see that. 02:58 Krista All good. All right. So today, we are going to talk about what you need to know to maximize your use of Google Analytics 4. I also have some tips at the end on how to get started. So don't worry, if you haven't started yet. We'll get there. But I want to walk you through all of the ways that I think that you can make the most out of GA4. 03:17 Krista So quick agenda for this talk. What is GA4? How does it compare to Universal Analytics, so probably the tool that you know and love currently. This is also being called GA3 these days, so you may hear me say that as well. I've got seven tips for you to help you maximize your use of GA4. And then we'll finish with how to get started. If you see a little star on any of the slides, that means there's a blog post or some additional detail in the link out to that as well. 03:44 Krista All right, first and foremost, let's rip off the band aid. Hopefully everybody here is aware that Google Analytics 3, Universal Analytics is going away on July 1 2023. Google has said we are stopping processing of data from Universal Analytics. So if you've not migrated to GA4 you essentially will not have any analytics data after July 1 2023. You don't want to be in that boat. So let's show you how you can make the most of this. 04:17 Krista Alright, so status check. Maybe in the chat, go ahead and let us know. Are you already using Google Analytics 4. Have you installed it? Are you actually actively using it? Are you still relying on Universal Analytics, kind of? Which boat do you fall into? One—you haven't installed it. You don't care. Two—you've installed it but you're only using Universal Analytics. Three—you've installed it and you're trying really hard to use it. 04:46 Krista All right, actually can't see the chat while we're going through here. But I'm gonna just, there's a lot of great answers in there. 04:54 Krista There's a nice mix. Yeah, we've got some people actually using GA4? Mordy Yep. Krista All right. Love it. 05:00 Krista All right. So just to level set everybody, let's quickly compare GA4 versus its predecessor, Universal Analytics, or GA3. So Universal Analytics, this is also sometimes known by its code name, Analytics JS or G Tag JS. But the more recent code base looks like what you see on the right, it was launched in October of 2012. So this is actually over a decade old, if you can believe it or not. And it was a migration from Classic Analytics, which came out in 2007, which was a migration from Urchin Analytics, which Google bought in 2005. But the code base actually started way back in 1998. So Universal Analytics is actually like, crazy old, like 25 plus years old is some of that code base. Hence why it's time to move on. 05:50 Krista We want something that is a little bit more fresh. It's centered around the concept of sessions. It focuses on metrics and dimensions, such as pageviews, sessions and bounce rate. 06:00 Krista It's highly customizable, but it lacks structure for things like events. So if you're used to using UA, and you're used to events, you'll be used to this format of category, action and label. All events in Universal Analytics are a combination, a unique combination of category, action and label. So if you have a robust event architecture on your website, you can have hundreds or even 1000s of events tagged with some unique combination here. I know I have done implementations for sites like that in the past. If you do it really well, it can be very useful. But if you have people do it over time, with different structures, this gets really unwieldy really, really fast. 06:39 Krista And of course, that deprecation date is looming for Universal Analytics. 06:44 Krista Okay, GA4 looks like what we see on the right, slightly different than that look and feel from UA. 06:51 Krista It was launched in July of 2019, under the name App + Web in public beta, quick check in the chat. Go ahead, let us know. Were you an early App + Web beta adopter? Did you start using it back then? I personally have been using it since sometime early in 2018. But you all wouldn't have had access back then. Just a little background, I used to work at Google, I actually helped to build GA4 for the first couple of years. So I was at in on all of these early days. 07:22 Krista It was renamed to Google Analytics 4 and became the default property type in Google Analytics in October 2020. So Google came out and said, okay, it's time to move in 2020, or in October 2020. We are now saying GA4 is ready for primetime. We're taking it out of beta. Whether or not that's actually true in most people's opinions is up for debate. But Google said, yes, it's ready, start using it. If you create a new property in Google Analytics, it's going to default to a GA4 property. You can still create UA properties at that time, but they're trying to push everyone starting all the way back over two years ago, two and a half years ago at this point, to GA4. So if you haven't been migrating over the last two and a half years, Google's been trying to subtly tell you it was time. 08:08 Krista It focuses on events and parameters. Everything is an event in GA4, even a pageview is considered an event. And it is highly customizable, but it actually offers a lot more structured data than Universal Analytics. Event names and parameter names are reusable, so you don't end up with implementations with hundreds or 1000s of these things. Most implementations, I do even for really, really large Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies have, you know, at most maybe 30 unique event names. There are cases where there may be more than that. But it actually makes it a lot more structured, a lot easier to work with, in my opinion. 08:45 Krista Okay, if you want to know all about how GA3 and GA4 compare side by side, I actually have a PDF that you can download, it's at that link there. I think Crystal is going to drop it in the chat as well so that you have that link. This is just a like six or seven page PDF that goes through feature by feature, what was in Universal Analytics, whether that was the free version or the 360 version, and if that is in Google Analytics 4 with some notes. 09:12 Krista Okay, now let's move on to the meat here. The seven tips I'm going to give you to maximize your use of Google Analytics 4. 09:20 Krista Tip one. And this might be the hardest for many people, is to learn the new reporting. I know that there's hesitation to jump in and start using GA4. It looks and feels very different, you don't really know how to get started. Hopefully some of the things we're going to talk about here will make that a little bit easier. 09:38 Krista So first is the new Real-Time. This looks and feels very different if you were a Firebase Analytics user or Google Analytics for Firebase, as it was renamed. This may look a little bit more familiar because this was kind of the Real-Time look and feel from there. 09:53 Krista What I really like about this, is the ability to dig into certain cards. 10:00 Krista Specifically the Event count by Event name card. So all of the events, remember everything in GA4 is an event, all of the events being collected will come in through here, in this Real-Time view. And you can actually click in and dive deeper into what is being collected. So you can click on an event name. 10:16 Krista For example, if I want to dig into my purchase, if I can click on that event name, it will open up the parameters that are being collected with those events. So for example, Transaction ID or Value, I can click into that parameter name. And I can actually see the real value. This is really, really great for troubleshooting, debugging, checking that you've implemented something correctly, checking that your data is actually collecting the way that you would hope it is, or really, for just watching all those purchases coming in on a nice eCommerce website, like we all know that Real-Time is used for. Okay, or Blog post view, I use that a lot as well. 10:52 Krista Okay, user and traffic acquisition, this is a big change from Universal Analytics, this is really important. In Universal Analytics, we only had one type of acquisition report, it was well, there was multiple reports, but it was all one type of acquisition, it was all session-based acquisition. 11:10 Krista Meaning that Source/Medium report that you're probably really familiar with or the Campaigns report or something like that, that you would find them the All Traffic section, that was all based on session data. In GA4, we actually have two types of acquisition attribution here, one for the user and one for the session, which is called Traffic Acquisition, you can switch between the two. And you can see the differences. User is going to be the very first campaign source medium, etc, that that user had or really that cookie had, that GA4 is looking at. Traffic Acquisition will be based on the session. So if they come back multiple times over the course of a few days, or a week, or a month, as long as that cookie lives on, then that may be different for each time they come, right. So you can see that we have in this little GIF that's playing the differences here, do you actually click on that first user default channel grouping where the mouse is right now. We're on the session one, you can change the primary dimension that's listed there. In GA4, it always starts with this default channel grouping, you may be more used to looking at this by Source/Medium, for example. If you click that drop down, you can actually change it to Source/Medium and get a little bit more of a familiar look. In fact, I can show you that right here. So this is what it would look like, the same Traffic Acquisition report with Source/Medium applied. And I've actually applied a secondary dimension here. I'm in my Traffic Acquisition report. So the session-based one, I’ve applied the secondary dimension of First User Source/Medium. So what that means, is I'm looking at the traffic or the session-based acquisition for Source/ Medium. 12:53 Krista And I'm looking, breaking it down by the first thing that brought them to my site. So you can see here, they first came by the SEO FOMO email that came back from organic search, and so on. I've also filtered this, as you can see, for organic traffic only. So there's a lot you can still do in all of these table reports. I know there's a lot of information being thrown at you real fast. But I want to show you kind of usefulness of this UI. 13:20 Krista Okay, pages and screens. This is most similar to what you're used to in Universal Analytics as the All Pages report. In Universal Analytics, that report is based on the Page Path. So the you know, the URL after the host name. In GA4 it defaults to the Page Title. But as you can see, in this little GIF, you just click that drop down, you can change it to Page Path, so that this looks a bit more familiar for you. I know I prefer Page Path, I’ll actually show you later how you can customize this to make Page Path, the default for you. But this is going to be a very useful report, similar to how you used it in Universal Analytics. 14:03 Krista Technology details, and this is going to be the same actually for Demographic details. In Universal Analytics, you are probably very familiar with having a ton of things down that left-hand nav, right. There are something crazy, like 150 plus different combinations of reports that you can get to through the left-hand nav of Universal Analytics. It's insane when you think about it. In GA4 this is way more streamlined. I think one of the biggest pieces of feedback that Google has heard, is that people log into GA4 and it just looks empty, right. It doesn't look like there's that much in there. Like where did all my reports go? They are almost all still here, believe it or not. They are just not hidden but more streamlined is how I like to think about it. And I'm trying to show you that here in this GIF. So we're under Technology details. A details report is just going to be a table report, an overview report. We didn't look at one yet. But an overview report is essentially like a dashboard with a bunch of little cards on kind of showing the highlights of the section. 15:00 Krista Personally, I almost always use the detail reports, I find them actionable. But it will default to one particular dimension. In this case, it defaults to, I think Browser. 15:14 Krista What we see here, you can click that drop down and change it to, I believe there's 10 dimensions that you can access through this one detailed report: Browser, OS, Screen Resolution, importantly Device Category, that was a default in the left-hand nav on Universal Analytics, probably something that you used a lot. I know I used it a lot. It's still here. It just lives now in this detail report. So rest assured, you still have access to probably 100 plus different reports, you just need to navigate to them. 15:48 Krista Okay, that was reporting. Now let's talk about tip two—take advantage of new metrics and dimensions. So there's some new things in GA4 that you haven't seen before. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's actually probably a good thing, right? It's progress that we have some new stuff to play around with. 16:06 Krista First is the idea of engaged sessions and engagement rate. Now I know there's a lot of confusion around engaged sessions. What does this mean? What it means is this session or this cookie, or this person has been on the site for either at least 10 seconds, or they have had more than one event. So they've done two things. Maybe they scrolled and they clicked, or they had a pageview and they clicked or they had two or more pageviews. 16:35 Krista So essentially this is trying to get at the idea of this is actually somebody on your site doing something rather than kind of a bounced session. And when GA4 first came out, there was no Bounce Rate. This is actually a big debate that we had internally at Google when I was still there. I fought really, really hard to get rid of Bounce Rate, we can talk about it later, if you want. I hate bounce rate, it's a terrible metric, you should not use it or count on it. The only thing that bounce rate is good for in my opinion, is to track over time just to make sure there's no crazy like changes. But in general, bounce rate is a terrible metric. So we won, and we got it removed from GA4. But of course, there's been so much feedback, Google actually brought it back. This is really, really important, though. And I think this is my next slide. Yes, the new Bounce Rate is not the same as Universal Analytics. It is actually literally the opposite of Engagement Rate, which is the rate of engaged sessions. You can see I actually have a table here where I have engaged sessions and then Engagement Rate and Bounce Rate right next to each other. So you can see, it is one minus the Engagement Rate. That's not the same as Universal Analytics, you cannot compare a Bounce Rate between GA4 and Universal Analytics. And it's not even a default metric in the report, you're only going to see it if you specifically add it to reports. So I still think that's a good thing. You can argue with me in the in the chat or in the questions if you want. And tell me all the reasons why you love Bounce Rate, but I think that this is a step forward. 18:08 Krista Default channel groups. Okay. So default channel groups are not a new concept. We have these in Universal Analytics, we also had custom channel groups. In GA4, there's actually a new default channel group, though, they took a look at the I believe it was 10, or 11 channels that we had in UA and said, we can do better with these definitions. We can make this more robust, we can add new channels so that it's a little bit more granular, people can get more information here. There are now 18 default channel groups in GA4. So I think Google's done a much better job here. And you can actually see those Paid Video, Organic Social, Paid Shopping, Organic Video, these are all new default channel groups available in Google Analytics 4. There's a whole Help Center article that breaks down all of these default channel groups. If you just Google GA4 default channel groups, it's the first thing that will come up. And so you can see all of these new channels, for example, all these new organic breakouts that you can look at: Organic Shopping, Organic Social, Organic Video, Organic Search, it's a lot more than just organic, it gives you a lot more granularity there. 19:10 Krista And then I did want to quickly comment, this is kind of under the radar, but custom channel groups, highly-requested feature for GA4 since it doesn't yet exist. 19:22 Krista It's in beta right now or it's in a secret alpha. So it should be coming very, very soon, so we can all rejoice for that, we will have custom channel groups in the near future. But please don't put that on social media. And don't tell Google I said that. Alright. 19:40 Krista Tip number three, um, report customizations. I have a lot of favorite parts of GA4. But I think this may be my actual favorite part of GA4. But I'm probably going to say that at least three more times throughout this presentation, so hold me to it. 19:54 Krista You can build almost any report that you want in GA4, so you're not limited to what is just out of the box in that left-hand nav, you're not even limited to the structure of the left-hand nav, you can change it all. This is something that is completely net new in GA4, you could never do this in Universal Analytics. And I think it's a huge step forward to making analytics really, really useful for your particular business or organization. 20:18 Krista Okay, how does this work? Here's an example. This is my blog, kristaseiden.com. I blog about go figure, analytics. 20:27 Krista And it's a blog, right? There's no revenue collected on this site in particular, but the default report that I get most of the default reports, right, have this Total Revenue column. Now, I know that I'm not collecting any revenue on this site. But if I were to give access to somebody else, and ask them to analyze my site, you know, they could come back and say, like, I think your eCommerce is broken, there's no revenue showing. And we don't need that, right. Like, I know that this is not a thing for my site. So I can actually remove this metric from my reports if I don't need it. And the way that I do that, is through customization. In the upper right-hand corner, there's this little pencil icon, it's the edit icon or customization icon. If I click it, it will open this report in a customization screen. 21:13 Krista I've clicked in on the right-hand side to metrics. And specifically, I'm now looking at this Total Revenue metric. And I can simply just click the X to remove it. When I do, it will refresh the report, you now see this report has no revenue metric column. This is a very, very simplistic example. But as you can see, I can make this report my own, right, I didn't need revenue in my reports, because there's no revenue on the site, I can get rid of it. 21:40 Krista And then I can save this report, either save it to overwrite the default that is already in the left-hand nav, or I can save it as net new. And name it something else if I want to have two versions. The other thing that I really love here is being able to add report filters. This launched, I don't know, maybe six months ago at this point, huge, huge addition to customization. Because now I can filter down my customized reports. 22:09 Krista One of the biggest complaints about GA4, especially early on is that everything's in one property, there's no views, I think report filters, and I'll show you in just a second are a really great option to help you kind of deal with some of that, to be able to create specific collections of reports that are just for certain audiences. What do I mean? Well, if I want to have a Pages report that is only looking at United States data, I know many of you are not from the US, I happen to be. So I'm going to use US in this example. But you can do it for whatever country you're interested in. So I'm building a filter here including the country United States. And then it shows me a summary that that's what is included here. 22:55 Krista And now actually, this is a really quick GIF to show you how simple this is just, I'm searching through here for country, I find it, I add my value of the United States, select OK, hit Apply. And now this report is filtered for only US data. So what does this give me, this gives me the ability to create several reports, not just this Pages report. But any reports I want that are going to be US only. So in the past, I may have had a US view in Universal Analytics from US data. Now I can have a set of reports that is US-only data within the same property. 23:32 Krista And to do that, once I've created all of those customized reports, I need to put them somewhere. I need to put them into what's called a collection. So all of the things that you see on the left-hand side where it says App Developer, Krista’s Faves, Lifecycle User, those are collections. And if you expand them, you would see the reports inside of them. For example, Krista’s Faves—this is just a collection of all my favorite reports or all the reports that I use the most often but I want quick access to, right. So I’ve created a collection of those reports. And I can do this for my US traffic. So I can create a collection of a bunch of reports that I have filtered down for only US traffic, I can have that live in my left-hand nav, and I can tell my US teams, my marketing team, whoever is analyzing data to go to this US section for data that's just already been filtered for them. So they don't have to filter it. They can just look at that data and know it's US-only data. So again, it's not you know, 100% of views replacement. It's not only US traffic in this whole property, but it's only US traffic in all of these reports. And that can get you, you know one step closer to being able to really help different groups of users in your organization. 24:50 Krista Okay, tip four is to go deep on Explore. Explore is an ad hoc analysis tool, kind of like a deep dive tool that lives in GA4 that you can essentially build more in than you can in the reporting UI. It's a little bit more complicated to use, it does take a little bit more practice. But I think there are some really great benefits here. 25:14 Krista The first one is Funnels, this is something that I think only really 360 customers could do in Universal Analytics, it's now available to everybody in GA4 to build funnels, you can build a funnel, that is up to 10 Steps long. 25:30 Krista I rarely see people that have 10-step funnels, I actually had a client the other day who wanted to have like 15 or 20 steps, I was like, I think I can consolidate these. 25:40 Krista It's a really long funnel, and you're limited to 10 steps. But I think for most use cases, that's pretty sufficient. And then you can do things like segment this funnel for different traffic. So here I've applied segments of looking at organic versus direct traffic, to see how those people go through. This is for the KS Digital website, which is my site where I sell consulting services and courses and stuff. So you can see I have my homepage, they've gotten to my academy page, and they've added to cart, that's the steps we're looking at in this funnel. And it looks like organic traffic performs slightly better for me, that's great. Um, other things I can do here in a Funnel report is I can actually create a segment of the abandonment. So if somebody, for example, comes to the site, goes to the academy site, adds something to their cart, but they don't actually end up purchasing, I can create a segment of users who dropped off who didn't end up purchasing but had added to cart, make it an audience and share that audience with Google Ads for retargeting or remarketing, which is really, really powerful, right. I can bring those users back users back to my site, through ads. 26:47 Krista If I know that they were interested or engaged, I can even add a special offer, you know, for $200 off or something like that, to hopefully entice them to buy. 26:59 Krista Pathing is another really cool report here that we get in Explore. 27:05 Krista I was famous for saying when I was internal at Google as a product manager that I absolutely hated all of the flow reports in Universal Analytics. It was especially hilarious because my product manager boss was responsible for building the user behavior flow at some point, like many, many years back, but he agreed, they're terrible. 27:26 Krista You may disagree, go ahead, let me know in the chat, why, but in my opinion, they're the worst. And because I would often say this, he came back to me one day, and he's like, great, you hate this so much, can you please go build something better. So he put it on my shoulders to think about how GA4 can actually do pathing in a meaningful way. So if you like the Pathing report, please let me know. If you don't, tell Google since I don't work there anymore. 27:51 Krista But this is a little bit of my baby. I do love it. But I think it's very useful. Again, 10 steps is what you have here to path out. And essentially, you can keep clicking the dark ends of each step, those are called nodes to expand them out. And you can do that by: Page Title, Page Path was recently added, or Event Name. You can also segment this path, you can break it down. So I can look at just my organic traffic, I can look at what device category users were on as they're going through the site. For example, if I wanted to filter that just for organic, I can apply that segment. I can also do a backwards path, right. So here we're looking at how people go from a starting point. But if I click this Start Over button, this is really hidden. Sorry about this, you have to hit Start Over and then you get this screen where you can choose either a starting point or an ending point. So if you choose that ending point, you can path backwards. So for example, on my site, if my ending point is adding to cart, I would like to know what were the steps that somebody took to actually get to the decision point to add to cart. So I can start pathing backwards, okay, they looked at the course page, they looked at this page, they looked at the about me page, they looked at various things. And I can start to understand what might have been kind of the successful triggers to get somebody to actually add to cart and purchase a course. This is really great for things like add to cart purchase, getting to, you know, how do people get to a certain resource that you might have? Pathing is useful for kind of this exploratory look at things. Once you have a good idea of what paths people may take. That's when you might want to actually build that out into a funnel so that you can track that on a more consistent basis. 29:37 Krista Again, you can segment this, you can break it down so much, you can do with pathing. 29:43 Krista Okay, tip five is to take advantage of integrations, lots of integrations available in GA4. In fact, in Universal Analytics, the only integrations you had as a free user was Google Ads and Search Console. 30:00 Krista And in GA4 free in which all of the integrations are now available to free users as well as 360. So you get not just Google Ads, but you get search ads, 360, you get Search Console, of course, you get a free BigQuery export of your raw data, this is probably the most exciting, it's also the most technical. 30:19 Krista But for people who want to get it, that raw data, or who need to get it out of GA4 and have access to that raw data, this export to BigQuery is amazing. People would literally pay to upgrade to Universal Analytics 360, just to have this feature. And it is now available for free for everybody in GA4. So if you know, you know, this is a really great thing, even if you're not too interested here, but you may have some use for raw data in the future, this is a great thing to look into. Super easy to set up. It's literally a couple of clicks for all of these integrations in the UI. 30:55 Krista Tip six is to use UI based tools to improve your data. So I also really like these, not quite as much as customization, but I think that there's a lot of really great value here. 31:07 Krista The first is enhanced measurements. So this lives in your Admin panel under Data Streams. When you select a data stream, for example, I'm in my web stream details here, you can see Enhance Measurement. This is going to be on by default when you create a GA4 property. And this means that you are going to collect a handful of events out of the box. Essentially, Google is saying, hey, we can recognize the schema for this, we know when an outbound link is being clicked, we know when somebody is scrolling on your site. We know when they're doing site search. If you want us to collect that data for you, we can, you don't have to do anything, except for toggle on the settings. And actually they're toggled on by default. So if you don't want them, you just toggle them off. What I really like about this, is that it I think, democratizes data a lot more for GA4. These things all required in Universal Analytics, additional implementation. You would have had to set this up in Google Tag Manager and the code. Some things like scroll tracking have become easier over time in Universal Analytics, but previously, like required a mountain of code just to be able to do. And now it's as simple as a little toggle. So you don't have to be technical at all, this is going to be collected for you out of the box. So a lot more data is coming for you in GA4 just by implementing the you know, little code snippet for Google Analytics 4. This is great, I love this. 32:32 Krista Cross-domain tracking setup. This is pretty simple. You can do it all in the UI, you don't have to go into Tag Manager or into the code, as long as you're using the same Measurement ID, so the same GA4 Property ID on these different sites. So for example, if I have the same Property ID, Measurement ID on kristaseiden.com, on my blog and on ksdigital.co on the business site, then I could set them up here to be tracked as cross domain. 33:02 Krista This one, this one is great. So I'll give you just a second look at the screen. And you can recount all your greatest horrors of being an analyst and coming across a scenario like this. 33:16 Krista Okay, take a breath, because we're gonna get better here with GA4. 33:20 Krista All right, this and this is not new to me, I have encountered this so many times in my past lives as analysts in various situations, you may have had different developers implementing a button in different ways, at different times. For example, here a Start Now button on the website, one button was implemented as a start underscore now for the event name, the other was implemented with start now with the one word and a capital N. Therefore, it's going to collect as two separate events, two separate rows of data in my analytics account. This is literally the bane of every analyst’s existence, I know, I see head nodding, you can feel the same. 33:59 Krista Google Analytics 4 actually gives you tools in the UI to fix this. Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't fix the underlying source, I would highly recommend fixing the issue on the site or in Tag Manager. But if you either don't have the resources to do that, or the time or you just need a quick fix, this is an amazing quick fix. It will not fix historical data. So you'll still see this for everything in the past that you've collected already. But going forward, it will fix the issue. So how does it work, you're gonna go to the Modify Events feature. 34:32 Krista And when you click Modify Event, it's going to open up this screen for you. And you can see I've just given this name for my modification, I’m consolidating Start Now. And then I have matching conditions. My first condition is that my event name equals start now, one word with capital N. And then I'm going to say when you see that event, modify it with these parameters, my new thing should be event name is start underscore now. This is it, that’s literally all I have to do and then hit Create. 35:00 Krista Now every time GA4 sees start now one word come in, it is going to modify it to start underscore now before it processes into the data before it shows up in the UI. So it's going to fix everything going forward, and consolidate those down to just the one event name based on the rules that I've written here. This is so so cool. I can't stress this enough. I love this. 35:28 Krista All right, my last tip for you is to use the GA4 data model to your advantage. So I talked very briefly at the beginning about the data model, right? It's different between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4. Universal Analytics is based on sessions, pageviews, etc, you have the event model of category, action, label. GA4 is based on events and parameters. So every event is collected with a number of parameters to distinguish it. 35:57 Krista Let's go into detail a little bit more here. 36:00 Krista So this new data model, fully events based, there's four types of events. The first is automatically collected events. These you get out of the box just by installing the snippet for GA4. This is going to be things like: First Visitor, First Open, Page View, Screen View, User Engagement, and so on. 36:18 Krista We talked about enhanced measurement events, these are also essentially out of the box, you just can toggle them on and on or off. That’s: Scroll, Video Engagement, Site Search, Outbound Clicks, Form Interactions and so forth. 36:29 Krista Then, of course, there are additional events, if you don't have everything you need, which you probably won’t. There's probably additional things that you want to collect, and those come in two forms, recommended events. So Google has, if you just Google GA4 recommended events, there's a whole Help Center article that breaks it down by vertical, either eCommerce or retail, travel, games. And it's a whole list of event names and parameters that Google recommends. And essentially, if you use the event names and parameters as Google has recommended, they will have specific reporting available for you. For example, there's eCommerce reporting that's available only if you're using the eCommerce schema, as they've laid out. There is specific reporting for games that is available if you're using the event naming that they have laid out. And then of course, if you have things that you want to collect that don't have recommended event, no problem, you can always collect a custom event, which is anything that you want, in terms of how you would set that up. And it's going to be unique to your site or your app. 37:31 Krista Okay, let's put this into context. I know that's very like high level, let's actually make this real. So this is a screenshot from my blog from kristaseiden.com. It's a very typical blog, right, there's a homepage with a bunch of like snippets of articles, and a continue reading button to take you out to a full article page where you can read the whole thing. 37:53 Krista So when somebody clicks this Continue Reading button, I am collecting an event. And with that event, I have parameters that I'm sending. If you are a standard or free customer of Google Analytics 4, you can send up to 25 events, or sorry, up to 25 parameters per event that you're collecting. If you were a 360, or a paying client of Google Analytics 4, you can send up to 100 parameters for every event that you're collecting. This is a free account. So for this Continue Reading button, I'm going to be able to collect up to 25, I don't actually have 25. So let's break it down. 38:26 Krista There is a recommended event name in Google Analytics 4 called Select Content, which is essentially perfect for this Continue Eeading button. I could call this event continue reading. But then I wouldn't have specific reporting that might be available for this Select Content event. Since Select Content is essentially what I'm doing here, I'm going to use that event name. So that's the event name I've selected. This is the Google Tag Manager interface. By the way, I should have mentioned that I implement my website through Google Tag Manager, pretty easy to set up. But I have my event name of Select Content for when people click on that button and then I'm collecting some parameters with that. I have the button title. So that's going to be Continue Reading. Article Title, whatever the article itself was titled, Article Tag, Article Date, and the Link URL, which I'm collecting is the click URL. So I'm sending all of these pieces of information along with the Select Content event and when I collect all that data, now we're back over in Google Analytics 4, we're actually in the Explore section, looking at a Free-form report, which is essentially a table report on steroids. I can have tons and tons of metrics and dimensions added here. 39:35 Krista And you can see I have my event name Select Content, the Article Date, the Article Tag, the Article Title, and then the count of that event and the users doing it. So it can see a whole lot of informaion about every time somebody is clicking that Continue Reading button. And I can start to analyze which articles are being clicked on the most, which articles are essentially the most popular on my site. 40:00 Krista So this is article analysis using this one simple event that I collected five parameters on. So pretty useful, I think event schema here that you can get a lot of information out of. 40:12 Krista One more example. 40:14 Krista You can use this same architecture events and parameters to do testing on your site. It's not a testing tool, but you can collect information if you are running tests, right. So for example, on my KS Digital website, I have different signup boxes to sign up for my newsletter, to keep informed. And I can test out different copy for those signup boxes. So subscribe for course info and launch updates or get digital analytics resources in your box or in your inbox. 40:42 Krista And with this event, so my event is going to be newsletter signup. 40:48 Krista My parameters are going to be something like a subscription type or the academy page, the homepage, etc. subscription location. 40:59 Krista Experiment name, so this is my subscribe, headline, test, experiment ID, my variant ID, if I'm sending these types of things, I have these types of things. And then I can also send a user property. Is this person a prospect or a known customer? 41:14 Krista And then again, I can do my analysis once I've collected this data. So here we can see my event name. I said on the last slide, it was newsletter signup, I actually use the event name of signup, because that is a recommended event from Google. And then I have my subscription location and my subscription type. So you can see all this information that I'm collecting. And I can see which, you know, subscription buttons are doing the best. And if I'm testing the headline, I can add, you know, the experiment ID, the variant ID here, etc. So tons of information I can collect with the Simple Schema. 41:48 Krista Okay, that was a lot, we got a little technical there at the end, hopefully you were able to keep up. If not, you can watch the recording, you can go to lots of blogs, different articles about this stuff, tons of information out there. But I want to leave you with some tips on how to get started. So first and foremost, it is go time, you need to start now if you have not already started. 42:10 Krista You don't have time to waste is what I'm saying, you gotta get going with GA4. How do you get going? You want to set up a Google Analytics 4 property. And I'm going to say this very strongly. You want to do this manually. Why do I say that? Well, recently, Google has sent a notice. So the email that Crystal mentioned at the beginning that everybody got saying we are soon going to configure analytics, Google Analytics 4 for you. Essentially, they're saying, if you haven't set up a Google Analytics 4 property that we know of, by starting sometime in March, aka as early as this week, we're going to migrate one for you. And then, every time you log into analytics, or refresh, you probably have seen this pop up saying, hey, this is your GA4 property, is this linked to a UA property? If so, which property? 43:03 Krista Okay, all of these things essentially are being used to help Google auto migrate for you. So like I said, starting in March, they're going to create a property, even if you've created your own GA4 property already. If it's not linked via this modal or you didn't link it initially when you set up, Google won't know that you have a GA4 property for that UA property, so they might still migrate you. 43:28 Krista To avoid this, you want to opt out. 43:31 Krista You can opt out in your Universal Analytics property. So you go to Universal Analytics, you go to Admin, under the middle column, the Property column, you go to GA4 Setup Assistant, all the way at the bottom, there is this ability to toggle on this opt out. 43:52 Krista There are some good things about auto migration. There's a long tail of users who are not going to migrate, let's face it. So this is Google's, you know, kind of last-ditch effort to help you migrate. But I think all of you here, are here to learn and get ahead of the game. So I would highly recommend that you do this yourselves. That is because Google, when they are setting up the auto migration, is going to migrate a bunch of features for you based on your settings in Universal Analytics. And some of those settings, you may not want to migrate to UA, and you want to have a say over those, such as the conversions that you're using for bidding in Google Ads and the audiences that you're targeting for bidding in Google Ads or how those audiences or conversions are even set up. Or the users that you allow access to your GA4 property. If you don't migrate that for you and you don't turn off auto migration, Google's just gonna say great, you had 100 users in the UA we're gonna migrate all 100 users to your new GA4 property. You may not want all of those users to have access to your GA4 property. So think about this. I'm actually posting a long Twitter thread about this later today. So if you go to at Krista Seiden on Twitter, you will see a very detailed breakdown of this auto migration and what to avoid. 45:05 Krista And yes, I highly suggest you avoid it. Okay, if you have gotten started or even if you haven't, when you do, I've also created this resource. It is a Data Studio or sorry, a Looker Studio dashboard since that was rebranded. It's available at the link here, Crystal is going to drop that in the chat as well. 45:26 Krista What this is, you can select on the left, your Universal Analytics property, on the right, you select your Google Analytics 4 property. It is going to lay this data over itself side by side. And you can see how this data compares between your Universal Analytics setup, and your GA4 setup. Very, very useful to be able to see kind of how your implementations compare, should they be equal? No, not exactly. In fact, you don't want to aim for parity with your UA account because that's changed a lot over the years, and it's very different to how GA4 works. But this helps you understand what those differences might be in a lot of different categories. 46:04 Krista Also, lots of helpful blog content out there. So my blog, kristseiden.com, Simo Ahava is kind of the go to for everything technical and Google Tag Manager. Julius from Analytics Media writes a lot of great stuff. Essentially, there's so many resources out there, just Google GA4 and whatever your question is, and something will come up. 46:24 Krista And then last but not least, I mentioned this a few times throughout, as we're looking at various examples. On ksdigital.co, I do courses for Google Analytics 4 so I have courses for understanding the reporting and the Explore interface, understanding advanced features and settings, a technical implementation deep dive to help you actually implement Google Analytics 4 and bundles of those options. You can use the code Wix for $250 off any of the full courses or bundles. And that's valid until the end of March. So hopefully some of you may find that useful as well. 46:58 Krista With that, I want to say thank you very much. I think we've got some time for some Q&A. I'm sure I've seen a lot of questions come in. So I think there's a lot of Q&A to go there. 47:10 Crystal Thank you so much, Krista. That was absolutely fantastic. There were a lot of of things that I did not you know you could do, and a lot of things that were that were shared. Mordy, I think I saw you following along on your Google Analytics. 47:24 Krista Good. I'm glad. 47:27 Crystal It's good. That's the way to do it. 47:29 Crystal Yeah, thank you so much. I'm just gonna go through a few quick Wix things before I get into some of the Wix elements. Before we get into the Q&A. I just wanted to say that I know we covered loads, Krista is an incredible fountain of knowledge with regards to GA4. So we covered loads, but the best thing about a webinar is that you can listen and you can watch the playback afterwards. And you can follow along and pause and it's like having Krista coaching you through the whole thing. So I'm just going to share quickly, just a few resources from Wix and for Wix users. So these are a few of the Wix GA4 resources that we have around. So there is a, Wix has a special tool that allows you to learn integration that allows you to connect with with Google. So there is documentation from Google about how to connect your Wix property to GA4 on Wix and also how to connect Google Ads as well. So that's some documentation there. If you want to upgrade to GA4, our help documents have information about how you can do that. And we also have a document specifically dedicated to to tracking Wix Events on GA4. And you also have a bit of documentation about Tag Manager on Wix. So Krista mentioned Tag Manager as a really great tool for working with GA4 and, yeah, we've got some documentation on how to get involved with that. From a more strategic point of view, and we also have the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which has a lot of great resources, including a link for beginners, who might—this might be very, very new to them called Getting Started with GA4. We have information about conversions in GA4 and we also have a general sort of strategic thing about SEO reporting, which talks a little bit about Google Data Studio, Looker Studio, and some more. And with that, and there's links to all of those and we'll share that later but with that, I think we can get into the get into the Q&A. There were lots and lots of active questions in the session. So I think we can get into that, Mordy, have you got some questions for us? 49:43 Mordy A bunch of questions. I just want to say to folks you know GA4, and I'm with you on this. I really liked GA3. Universal Analytics was my friend and I'm having, I am struggling with GA4 myself. 49:55 Mordy It seems overwhelming and it is overwhelming, and just getting your foot into the door and building up intuition, I think building up your intuition around how to use an analytics platform is the way to do it. And it's not like, there's step one, step two, step three, it's really having an understanding and creating an intuition around how to use the platform. So if you saw this, and you're a little overwhelmed by it. It doesn't mean that there wasn't anything worthwhile for you to take away from it. But just starting to see that user experience and what's available in Google Analytics 4 starts to build that intuition. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, I am with you. That's fine. It will be okay. There's plenty of resources out there, Crystal just mentioned, but just seeing what's in there is a really good first step. Now with that. 50:40 Mordy I'm gonna, I was debating where to go with the first question, and I'm gonna go with Simon Cox's question. Simon is a former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board by the way, just to my point, a former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board has questions about GA4 because we're all in the same boat. 50:57 Mordy And I feel like Simon is perhaps, is channeling the entire SEO industry with this question. And this is a very Simon question. Simon is a wonderful individual, he also has a strong sense of humor. 51:07 Mordy He wrote, how can the ordinary SEO pivot to GA4? None of the reports every SEO uses matches anything in GA4. 51:19 Krista Great question. I think that, yes, there are going to be a lot of differences between Universal Analytics and GA4. The most similar things will be things like the Traffic Acquisition report, and I showed you how you can change that to look at Source/Medium, you can filter for organic traffic, etc. One thing I didn't show here, but I actually do have a blog post about it, is how to create an SEO Landing Pages report. Essentially, you take the Landing Page report, you customize it to add a filter to only show organic traffic. And now you have a report that's just looking at your SEO landing page data. I think there's a lot of useful features here. You have the Google Search Console integration, etc. So I think, you know, if you're seeing a lot of differences that might be down to your actual implementation of UA versus GA4 and how those things are collecting. There will be inherent differences, because the platforms are different. But you should still find very useful information for your analysis in GA4. 52:23 Mordy Which goes back to my earlier point, that we're all still having a hard time building that intuition around the platform. Crystal Also, I was really grateful when you showed off some of the dropdowns there of some of the new reports. That's really awesome, but sorry. 52:38 Mordy There's a bunch of questions, I will try to summarize it around the historical data. So the UA historical data will be entirely inaccessible after Universal Analytics is sunsetted, or will just cease to collect new data? 52:54 Krista Good question. Um, the answer is yes, and yes, and no, and yes. Um, so Google is going to stop processing data on July 1 2023 for free users of Universal Analytics. They have said that for a period of at least six months after, which takes us to January 1 2024, you will still have access to your Universal Analytics views. Meaning you can view all of the data that was collected and processed prior to July 1, but there's not going to be any new data starting July 1 onwards, only GA4 data will be available after that point. GA4 data will also not be available in your UA properties. UA data will not be available in your GA4 properties. They are a different data model, you actually cannot combine the data in a meaningful way. So no, they will not bring your historical data over for you. So you will lose access to that data sometime January 1 2024 or after. 53:54 Krista So you'll have access for a bit to do that historical data analysis. Highly recommend looking into ways to export that data from Universal Analytics using the API, using different connectors. I've just been chatting with a tool called Analytics Canvas. They actually are coming out with a really cool solution to help you get your data out of Universal Analytics and into like a Google Sheet to visualize with Looker Studio or something like that. I know that's the route that I'll be going for, you know, some of my properties. I think the idea of having the data in BigQuery, or a sheet or something that you can have Looker Studio on top of so you can set that side by side with your GA4 data is going to be the best path forward for most people. 54:36 Crystal Fantastic. I think that's really important. I think also because you were talking about some of the properties and some of the channels and they don't all exactly line up. So if you have a tool that allows you to have it in a sortable, filterable way, historical that can be really helpful. 54:52 Mordy I want to jump back to a foundation because I felt I should have asked this first. A couple people are asking how do you define an event in GA4? 55:00 Krista Yeah, so you have to set it up. Except for automatically collected or enhanced measurement events, those come out of the box. But you have to set it up and so I showed a couple of examples, setting up that Select Content event, or that Continue Reading button or the newsletter sign up event. So I've set mine up in Google Tag Manager, if you're not using a tag management system, you can set it up in the code. But you will have to manually set up these additional events. But that was also the same in Universal Analytics, right, you had to add all of the additional events that you wanted to collect. 55:35 Mordy On the Wix side of Universal Analytics, we did automatically fire and trigger some of the events. But you may be wondering, is that going to happen in GA4 because as Krista mentioned, the events that we were triggering, if I'm, unless I'm incorrect, I believe I'm right. The events we were triggering automatically for you in Universal Analytics, in GA3, they're automatic in GA4. You don't have to set them up. It's done for you by the platform. 55:59 Crystal I think some of the tools that Krista was showing with with Tag Manager allows you to sort of add some potentially, can allow you to add some customizations if you're an advanced user. But if you're still getting started, then you know, there's a lot of tools that are available within within GA4 to help you see what you need to see. 56:18 Mordy So let's jump to this one, because there's been a slew of [questions] of this variation. This question, how do I know what version of Google Analytics I have? 56:27 Krista The best way to know is looking at the left-hand nav, if there's a lot of like clickable things in the left-hand nav that open up and expand, and you see like dozens or hundreds of reports, you're in Universal Analytics. If there's not very much there, you're in GA4. Crystal The first time I opened it up, I was like, what, where is everything? Why I don't see anything? I felt exposed. 56:56 Krista Hopefully now you know where some of those things live. Crystal Yes. Thank you, honestly, brilliant. Mordy And I guess before we go, we have only a minute left. This was not a question but a few people have asked is using Google Analytics or Google Analytics 4 a ranking factor? The answer is no, it does not impact your ranking. If you don't connect Google Analytics to your site, your rankings will not be impacted. It's Google, not Yandex. 57:23 Crystal Thank you. 57:28 Crystal Lovely, thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much, Krista. We're going to be sending out lots of—you've got a lot of a love in the chat Mordy. 57:40 Crystal We're gonna to be sending out this recording and some links. Thank you to Krista so much for sharing those links with us. And you'll get a little bit of a roundup with some of the Wix resources as well from us. Thank you to everyone for joining us on this session. And hope to see you again our next webinar which is going to be next month and we're going to be talking about local SEO. So hope you can join us for that and thank you very much. 58:10 Krista Thanks, everyone. Mordy Bye.

March 21, 2023 Now more than ever, local SEO can make or break a business. By optimizing your website for local search, you can gain a critical advantage over competitors in your area. Join our hosts, along with leading expert Kyrstal Taing, for a breakdown of the steps you can take to figuratively (and literally) put your business on the map. Check out the webinar's decks: Check out Crystal Carter's deck Check out Krystal Taing's deck In this webinar, we'll cover: The key differences between traditional and local SEO How to put local SEO trends to work for your business Tried-and-true tips for increasing your local traffic Meet your hosts: Krystal Taing Global Director of Pre-Sales Solutions at Uberall Krystal is the Global Director of Pre-Sales Solutions at Uberall, as well as being a Google Business Profile Platinum Product Expert and faculty member at LocalU. She helps brands deliver best-in-class hybrid experiences and is a respected authority on local search. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: Introduction to local SEO Mordy Oberstein 0:00 Welcome to intro to local SEO, I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the always amazing Crystal Carter, who's the Head of Communications here at Wix and by Uberall's own Krystal Taing. So many Crystals, two Crystals for the price of one. Crystal Carter 0:18 And you Mordy. Mordy Oberstein 0:27 Thank you for joining us. To answer the most pressing question, yes, the webinar is going to be recorded. It'll be up in a few days or so, you'll get an email with the link to the YouTube recording. It'll also be hosted on a post, the same URL where you registered on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. So definitely know it will be recorded, you can always go back to the recording, please ask questions. There's a Q&A panel, please ask your questions. We have moderators who have been so fortunate to join us and they will help answer your questions and those that we don't get to during the moderation period. We'll try to answer ourselves after we go through the presentation. So please, please ask questions. There's no such thing as a silly question. The only way we learn is by asking questions. So please ask questions. And again, we do a monthly webinar series. Please look for future webinars on the SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn/webinars. I think next month webinars about AI and content, and how to handle AI and content and SEO. So we're looking forward to that. Okay, so we've done the agenda, or we're doing the introductions, which is part of the agenda. We're going to hear from Krystal Taing, about local SEO, and then we're going to go through some local SEO resources from the great Crystal Carter. And then we'll have our Q&A. Crystal Carter 1:51 So the local SEO resources are going to be things on Wix. So Krystal Taing is gonna be talking a lot about things generally about SEO, and some things about Wix. But the last section I'll be covering at the end is how you can do it on Wix. So if you're wondering about that, just hang in there with us. And we'll get to it. Mordy Oberstein1 2:07 And then of course, the Q&A. By the way, if you're looking at me during the presentation and I'm looking around, it's because I'm looking at the Q&A doc that we're working on to make sure we answer your questions. I am absolutely participating and paying attention. Crystal Carter 2:22 And how could you not live with such fantastic guests that we've got here today? Krystal Taing 2:26 Absolutely. Awesome. Yes, we're excited to be here, I have to say thank you to Mordy and Crystal and the entire Wix team. So I'm excited to be here. So thank you for having me. Hopefully, we can geek out over some local SEO, which, you know, I'm just personally really passionate about, as Mordy mentioned, I am with Uberall. And I'm here today really just to talk about an overview of local SEO, what does it mean for local businesses around the world? What are some tips and best practices that you should follow? And then of course, as they mentioned, happy to take as many questions as we can answer. And then of course, if there's time to follow up afterwards, we can do that as well. So I think with that, I'm happy to go ahead and get started. So in terms of what we'll cover today, I'm going to provide a high level overview of why local SEO is important. I imagine, you know, it's very blatant to a lot of users. But also, I think there's some things to consider from a consumer perspective as well. And I'll touch a little bit on the differences, as well as overlaps between traditional and local SEO, because there's definitely a lot of blending. And I'll highlight a few best practices to improve your local rank ranking in the three packs. And that pack, you know, on Google Maps, some tips and tactics. And then of course, this would not be an SEO webinar in 2023 if we didn't touch on AI, because it's just really changing the game. So I wanted to share just some thoughts and discussion points around that and how we're thinking about it and how businesses can start considering leveraging AI in their day to day management. In terms of local SEO, in general, though, I wanted to share a few kind of initial stats to really set the stage and discuss why we're talking about this. So if I take off my marketer hat, my SEO hat, and I really just think about myself as a customer and a searcher like I am on my phone all the time searching restaurants near me, convenience store near me, pharmacies near me, all of this stuff. And there's actually a really, really insightful review survey and consumer report from BrightLocal that says 78% of consumers use the internet to find info about local businesses more than once a week. Like I said, for me, I know that's dozens of times a week. And then also there's a lot of considerations that they take whenever they are deciding once they find that business, how to choose them. One of those is reviews as you can see in a stat that we shared about a review survey, but there's a lot of other things that we want to dive into as well. So really, just to put it into plain terms, we want to make sure and help educate businesses on why this is important, why we're talking about it. It's really to help serve customers that are looking for a product or service nearby. And it's also essential for businesses with physical locations. So you can be a market, a pharmacy, you know, a salon, and you want people to come into your physical business. But it's also incredibly relevant if you are delivering a service to your end user as well. So you can be, you know, a garage door repair service, of course, people aren't going to likely show up to your office with their garage door saying, can you fix it, you have to go visit them. But you still need to rank and there's quite different tactics to consider when you don't have a physical business that people are searching, but you're delivering that service to the user. So when we think about local SEO versus traditional SEO, as I mentioned, there's actually a lot of blending that goes on. But if we take a step back, typically local SEO just means some type of local intent, this can be explicit. So that means someone that is taking out their cell phone or going online and doing a search. And they say, you know, taco shop San Diego, because I put the term San Diego in there, Google knows or, you know, plenty of other search engines, we can throw Bing in the mix, we can throw Apple in the mix at this point, they know that you are looking for somewhere to visit when you say the word San Diego or when you say near me. However, these companies are also smart enough to know that there's a lot of search terms that are implied local searches. So again, you know, I want to book a massage or something like that. They're also assuming that you do not want a Wikipedia article on how to become a massage therapist that you likely want some local results in there as well. So anytime we talk about local SEO, oftentimes, this means surfacing a business where a customer can visit or you can deliver the service to them. Oftentimes, when we think about traditional SEO, this covers the gamut of everything that can be on the website on the internet. So yes, there can be traditional SEO tactics that are applied to local businesses, of course, but also what traditional SEO can serve that local SEO doesn't, or online only businesses, businesses where maybe you're just trying to deliver information. That's where we'll see some of those kinds of typical standard traditional SEO tactics. So if we were to break it down, and we were to kind of bucket all the topics into traditional and local SEO, we wanted to provide this kind of output. I will mention as well, because a lot of these are blended, while the targets for local and traditional SEO are different. They definitely can be shared across the board. But if you think of traditional SEO, it can be online customers for anywhere. Again, you're thinking of something like, you know, a Wikipedia article, someone wants that to rank, no matter where they're located, you don't have to be in a particular area to find value from finding this article. Whereas local SEO is really targeting that consumer that is nearby, or planning to be nearby. So oftentimes thinking not just your immediate crowd, but maybe people traveling through, or you offer a product or service that people are willing to travel to get. These are things potentially like lawyers, oftentimes someone is going to travel farther to get services or meet with a lawyer, or potentially like a mortgage broker than they are to go buy milk at the grocery store. So sometimes your local consumer can be a little bit broader than the immediate neighborhood or area that you're serving. Oftentimes, the keywords that you're targeting between traditional and local SEO are often different. And so you think traditional SEO, you might have broad terms, whereas in local SEO, not only are you targeting, you know, components like near me and the area, but oftentimes your services and your products are going to be a lot more specific to your market as well. You know, maybe there's, for example, like trends or you know, different types of ways that people refer to your product and services in your area that may be a lot more relevant to those local consumers, then, you know, someone's searching for information across the web. In terms of devices, traditional SEO Of course, you can target both desktop and mobile, local SEO of course, you can target both desktop and mobile, but the amount of searches that are taking place on mobile is continuing continuously increasing year over year when it comes to a local aspect. And again, when you think about yourself as a consumer, oftentimes, I will use my cell phone to just geo locate me and look nearby. And I'll zoom in on the map to find this information. But if it's a product or service that I want to do more research on, I may then just go naturally take that to my desktop to find a little bit more, maybe I need to see if it's in stock, maybe I feel more comfortable completing my order on a desktop than I do on my cell phone. You know, that kind of thing. But in terms of just that first step of showing up, mobile is hugely important for local SEO, in terms of what happens on the SERP or the search engine result page. So this is basically the results that show on Google and traditional SEO, you're really targeting basically everything that shows below the map. Whereas with local SEO, your main target is really going to be your Google Business Profile listing that displays in the map pack. We will show you that and we'll talk about that a little bit more. But making sure your business is present there. And of course, that only qualifies if you have a brick and mortar location, or a service area business. So if you just operate a website, if you're just you know, running a blog or something like that, then, you know, maybe local is not the most relevant. So the Google Business Profile and map locations are really going to target those, you know, physical businesses. Of course, you want to think about things like search intent conversion rates, and how these vary based on what people are looking for. Again, same thing here is taking the difference between what a consumer is looking for near them compared to just general information online. And then of course, the way the results are delivered to users. And when you look at a local result, compared to a result that's not local, you're going to see different elements in the SERP that users are going to engage with. And just to mention, again, the differences and types of businesses, you know, ecommerce, SaaS, basically, any business can do traditional SEO, and only those brick and mortar and service area businesses are really relevant for that local intent. So to really focus a little bit more on the map packs, the three pack, I mean, I feel like you'll hear about it, I think it's even called the snack pack at some point in time. But this is kind of the goldmine for all businesses, this is where you want to show if someone searches, salon near me, massage near me, you want to be one of those three results. The amount of clicks that happen on those first three results is astronomical compared to any others on there. So this is really the target and the goldmine for businesses. And it's also nice, because it's a snapshot, kind of like a digital storefront for your business when you display there. So it's not just getting there, of course, that's the target. But it's also making sure that that small little snapshot is as impactful as possible to the eyes that see it to give you the chances of users clicking on you. But this is really the target, getting your business in the map pack. So if we talk a little bit about some best practices to improve your chances of getting there, there are some basics. So one of the things that should always be considered is just keeping your data and your Google Business Profile accurate. And while customers may not know at the moment, whether or not your name or address, or phone number is accurate, Google does. Google is consistently getting user feedback. They're consistently scraping the web for additional information to validate whether or not this is a good result that they trust to deliver to a user. So as a business owner, you have to kind of influence Google's trust by saying yes, my data is accurate. You can validate it against my website, you can validate it against Bing and Apple and anywhere else that Google is going to check and validate your information. So having that, you know, really good source of truth, making sure it's consistent is going to ensure that Google doesn't distrust your information, and they will qualify you to rank in the top map pack. Of course, once it's correct, you want to make sure you have everything filled out. I think this is oftentimes one of the things that maybe small businesses may not take the most advantage of, because it can be cumbersome, you may not know the right things, you may get some errors, but really taking the opportunity to fill out that entire real estate, add all your images, your content, your text, to a user and allowing it to represent your business is going to be really, really helpful. And again, it sends all the signals to Google about your business. It tells them how and when they should show you by adding images of your location of your employees of your products and services. Google is smart enough to read that and say, oh, there's a lot of pictures from this business for this product, that means I should probably start ranking them when people search this product, they are a relevant result, outside of just completing your data, and we'll go into details in just a few slides about all of the elements. Of course, reviews and ratings on your profile are hugely important. This is really, I think, what allows you to stand out whenever you do rank in that three pack or in the top five? Oftentimes, the first thing I do, especially when I'm thinking of particular industries, is look at the ratings. It's not just are they three, four, or five, it's how many reviews do they have? How many do they have compared to the other two businesses I'm looking at? Oftentimes, your reviews and ratings are really going to be what tipped the scale for a user engaging with you. And then, of course, you know, you don't stop there, of course, you want to start with a really solid profile and local visibility for your location on Google and on all the directories we mentioned. But you have to also implement your on page local SEO, it's not just important for ranking in organic, it really does impact the way you show on Google. And again, sends Google more information about your business, when they should show you, how they should show you and oftentimes even pulling information from your website to justify why they displayed you to users. So getting into the three pack we talked about, you know some of the high level tips. But really optimizing your Google Business Profile, I will say if you have one strategy that you can focus on this week, this month, it is definitely starting. They're not where you should end, but it really makes a huge impact. It's where all of your competitors are. And it's really the most visible to consumers. 90 or more percent of the world's searches happen on Google still, today, they are huge, they have a huge market share. So making sure your business is here and is complete and accurate, is definitely going to move the needle for you. Also improving not just your reviews but the amount you have. The volume of reviews you have. And your responses to those reviews is going to be impactful. And I think when you respond to reviews, oftentimes we see customers come in and possibly change their rating, or they're evaluating the way a business responds in terms of engaging with them. So responding to reviews absolutely has an impact to the conversions that customers are taking on your profile. And then of course, the more people clicking on your profile and doing business with you is going to be a positive signal to improve your ranking on Google. And then also, I just want to highlight this as one of my favorite tactics, again, depending on your industry, is high quality photos. And when I say high quality, I don't mean that you need to go hire a 360 photographer, or buy a fancy camera, like every smartphone has a really, really nice camera. And it could just be focusing once a month, taking a handful of pictures of your office space, your products, you know your services, especially if you're doing home services, like what does your equipment look like or a repair job and adding these to your business. There's just been a tonne of development about how these display to users and also the information Google gets behind the photos, especially due to the strong AI they have in evaluating the information image. And I will mention here, if you are in a restaurant industry, I can't mention enough how impactful this is. If you take your phone out and search a restaurant near me, I oftentimes say the results look a lot more like Pinterest than they do a Google search because images are really, really at the forefront. So I always like to recommend going and doing a search that your customer would do. And look at what that result looks like and kind of set your target for a business you would engage with. So we've been talking a lot about Google Business Profile, so just to make sure everyone's clear, Google business search results looks just like this and your profile is what shows here. So I mentioned it is a snapshot of your business. It is not like your website, your homepage where you have endless space and endless functionality to describe and show your business. You get a very limited view of information that Google determines is relevant for users to fill in. And I cannot mention enough to fill it all in to make sure you are giving customers everything they need to decide in that moment. So you know, you can go into things like just starting with your name and your category. I'll mention we published a really great article on Wix with their SEO Hub earlier this year about selecting your Google category, because I don't think businesses realize how impactful and important that is. So when Crystal shares some of the resources later, that'll be a great one to review, if you just had considerations about that. But you can see here, address information, hours, a handful of attributes. And then again, on every single one of these, you're going to see an image, you're going to see reviews, you're going to see some high level detail. So again, thinking about the information a customer wants, or needs, at the moment, when they're ready to make a decision, make sure that it's published on your profile. When we talk about getting your data to Google, and then where it's going to rank when Google is considering ranking it, I think it's important to be aware of where this is. So we talked about local and traditional SEO a little bit. And there are what we refer to kind of as the blue links, those are organic results. That is where your website link will show up. Where we are targeting with the map pack is right there in the middle. On the map, you'll typically see red dots or map pins or branded pins showing your business on the map. But then you'll have the nice map pack showing your business details. It's usually three results. Sometimes there are paid results in the map. So sometimes you'll see four or five with a very, very discreet word that says ad next to it. That's one of the map pack ads. And then of course, at the top, there's also other areas of Google, where you can do paid organic, there's LSAs, there's a few other different Google SERP features that might show above the map pack as well. But if you see and you do any local searches, Google is really drawing as much attention as they can to those main listings that are ranking on the map pack. And when we think about why we're targeting that, it's just because most people are clicking there. So of course, you want to show up as much as possible on a search result page when a user does their search, they take their query, but really, they're clicking primarily on the map pack. Of course, some of the ads are going to gather and garner a lot of those clicks. So if you are in home services, or a category that offers any local service ads, and you're looking to drive the needle, I would definitely recommend looking into that. But also, if you're not in there, or it's not something that you want to prioritize, really targeting the map pack as your first focus is going to be helpful. Of course, then there's other search features. And then the organic links that display below, you cannot forget the importance that your actual website has not just in helping display on your Google profile, but ranking in addition. So if you can score that top backpack position, or one of those three, and then also get your website to rank for that, you are pretty much golden. So I do want to highlight a little bit of the local pack ranking factors. I am going to caveat this, and I think it's official. But Darren Shaw, who runs the White Spark Ranking Factors actually is publishing the new edition tomorrow. So it'll be the 2023 local ranking factors that comes out tomorrow. So these numbers may change slightly. For anyone that doesn't know it's a survey of dozens, or even at this point, it might be hundreds of local SEO practitioners that basically answer all of these questions about what moves the needle for their clients and their customers that they work with. And I think the report is about 10 years in history. So it's been released every few years, since I think 2012. And so the new one is coming out. But what this gives us is an idea of what is most impactful to customers. What is most impactful to Google when they are ranking and displaying a business. But then also it gives businesses and marketers something to focus on. So again, there's not just you know, I'm not just saying focus on Google first because it's fun or you know, it's easy. It really is because it makes the most impact when you are thinking about showing up first to customers. Then it's followed by reviews. There's a lot of different factors within reviews. This covers the content and reviews, the volume of reviews, the speed at which you get reviews, the recency, so many different things, but that's all taken into account. And that is kind of the number two local search ranking factor followed quickly by on page elements. Very much like reviews. This covers so much, its content, its structure, its title tags, its headers, it's basically just having a really strong on-page strategy and how that influences you ranking in the map pack. Outside of that, there's a lot of backlinking strategies that you can implement. So Google seeing your business mentioned in reputable articles and sites around the web, linking to your website, and the page that's mapped to your Google Business Profile really does send strong signals to Google to say, okay, not only do we trust this business, but all of these other reputable companies and websites, also trust them because they're publishing them. So we are going to influence and increase where we're ranking this business. Outside of that we have behavioral and citations that rank right at the same. So behavioral really just means how users engage with your business, I will say this oftentimes this gets a little bit missed, because behavioral is a huge influence for conversion rate. So ranking just means you show, conversion means who's clicking. And so oftentimes, the more people who click, the more Google is going to say okay, this was a really good result. And you know, we should start showing this more because a lot of users are engaging with the content. So while behavioral isn't an immediate and huge impact to ranking, it is really, really strong when it comes to conversion. Citations, this is what I just like to kind of call like the vegetables of the food pyramid, it's the thing that most businesses just have to do. It's not super exciting, or you know, the prettiest of it. But it's just that thing that tells Google that your data is consistent, it allows you to ensure that there's no breaks in the consumer journey. So yes, you might have someone searching for your business on Bing, on Yellow Pages, on you know, some of these sites around the web. It's important for that to be consistent, because if they don't see the right phone number, there weren't the right hours or the right address. While it might not be the lion's share of traffic, Google is going to see and track that information is not accurate. And you know, that's going to impact your ranking negatively. But then also a consumer who might be engaging with your content, there's also potential to have a bad experience. So making sure your data is published on all the sites your customers are on is definitely a ranking factor. And then what we have kind of trickling down at the end of the list is personalization. This really just happens to be the person that is searching for the business or service, do they have preferences, languages, any settings on their browser app that is influencing the results that Google is giving you, I think this is one of the ones that is becoming less relevant, and we're not seeing as often. But it's still important to be aware that sometimes that impacts the results. To touch a little bit on on-page SEO and how that segues into local SEO. There's a couple of high level things that I actually mentioned, for any Wix users. Crystal is going to dive into some really nice tips about how to manage some of this stuff on Wix if you're leveraging that. I can't talk about local SEO, if we don't talk about content, that's what you hear. Google wants information, not just to rank you locally, but just to understand your business. So really having a strong on-page content strategy, especially that includes local components is going to be helpful, structured data, it's just a really helpful way to teach Google how to navigate your information. Otherwise, you're leaving it up to chance, like if you don't have structured data, they're going to crawl and they're going to think they have the right idea about your business. But structured data is really the map to get them the information that you need. And then of course, local specific pages. So if you're a single business, you know, targeting different areas, especially service areas, it's great to have pages that represent each of the service areas. And then of course, if you're a multi location business, ensuring that you have a page that represents each store location, and has relevant content to that specific area is going to be impactful to Google. And then of course, whatever page you create, making sure that it's on your GBP profile to connect the dots. We talked a little bit about citation building. I just want to highlight here that this is going to vary by industry and by region. And really here just mentioning that you should identify and evaluate where your customers are. So I think restaurants and hotels definitely need to consider Yelp. But if you are, I don't know a grocery store, I don't know that it's important for you to be on Yelp. Same thing with TripAdvisor. That's huge when it comes to travel. That's going to be a really critical site. You need to ensure your business is accurate, you're responding to those reviews, if you are in the travel industry, or rely on travel business, and then of course, you know, industry specific sites like Avvo, there's a tonne of home services sites that you should make sure you're on. In addition to those regional directories, every area has different sites, there are different sites in Canada that a lot of the businesses up there rely on. Same thing when you think about businesses in Europe as well, that there's very specific, niche directories that are relevant. So making sure that your basic information is there, it's accurate, and you have a seamless way to update it. And the last topic, before I highlight, the Wix App is really just touching on AI. And I think this one is actually really interesting, because I just love reading everyone's ideas, and tests of what they're doing and thinking of what AI. But oftentimes, for me, I'm thinking, okay, what could be helpful for a business owner? How can they leverage AI? So I don't know if anyone's used ChatGPT, or tested any of these. I've seen some really, really interesting use cases, things like saying, hey, I have a cafe in this area, can you evaluate other cafes nearby and tell me what their average rating is? Or tell me what their categories are and what my category should be? Oftentimes, there's ways to mine information with AI, to help you and to help inform some of your decisions. So I think it's also like, you know, one of those areas where you have to be cautious because it's a new model, things are changing, and it only knows as much information is put into it. So I think it's helpful to do a lot of research. So whether you are looking to target new customers, and you're trying to get additional information, ideas for content, which you will all see I loved. I actually played around with it recently, there is an AI text editor in the Wix App that helps you build some content based on some topics that's really, really interesting. I love AI for content optimization and providing that. And then also, I just think it's really interesting, something we're doing at Uberall is leveraging AI to connect the dots in the consumer journey. So we have messages, for example, someone sends you a message on Google, they say is this product in stock? If we have that information, our platform, not only will we pull it out and say yes, we have this in stock, would you like to place an order for it to be picked up at your nearest location, here's the address. Those are the types of ways that I think AI really can help move the needle for local business owners, and create efficiencies, but also help drive a little bit more revenue, which I think is what everyone is focused on. So I just love hearing about some of the the tests and developments with AI. And as a local marketer, understanding where this can impact business owners is tremendously exciting. And the other thing I will just mention is our overall app that we have in the Wix Marketplace. So for those of you that have maybe started managing your Google Business Profile, and you're looking to maybe see where do we go to the next level, we have an app that allows you to manage your listings, and then also your listings and reviews. And so this is going to publish that data across a network of a number of directories in your area. It also comes with manual cleansing. So one of the things that is quite annoying is if you go into Google and try to publish your business, and they say your address is incorrect, or your map pin is off, we have a process that as soon as the data comes into our system, it is cleansed by a team of experts to ensure it publishes quickly to all of these sites, because they all have their preferences. There's also a number of metrics and a performance score. So you can track not just how your Google listings are doing, but how your listings and data is performing across the line, of course, the ability to add and publish photos for your business as well. And then if you're interested in reviews, there's a lot of really nice review tools and features that are available within the app, pulling in your reviews, responding to reviews, creating offers and social posts and managing that Q&A. So I think definitely, if you're looking to take your local SEO to the next level, taking a look at the overall app in the Wix Marketplace would be quite interesting. And we have a handy little QR code here that'll take you directly to it. Awesome. And with that, Crystal I think it's back to you to share some of the local SEO resources. Crystal Carter 34:55 Fantastic. Thank you so much Krystal. That was brilliant. Really, really insightful. Well, thank you so, so much. A few people asked a few questions about some acronyms. A few people said, what's the GBP again? That's Google Business Profile. Someone said, what's AI? That is artificial intelligence. And yeah, there's a lot of great tools. And also someone said, will this be shared? Yes, it will be shared, it's being recorded, it will be shared on YouTube. We will also be sharing the decks afterwards. So if you weren't able to scan the QR code, because you're watching on your phone, and you can scan, you can get the QR code after we finish. I'm just going to share my screen now. And we're gonna go quickly through a few resources on Wix. So we have a few things that are useful for you to know. So first things first, and when you create a Wix website, you can add your address into the business info panel on your Wix website, and it will create structured data automatically. Somebody asked what structured data is, unstructured data is essentially a little bit of code that sits behind your website that humans can't see. But bots can see it, and they love it. Because it's essentially like giving them the recipe for your website, rather than just giving them the whole pizza or the whole bowl of soup or whatever. There'll be a link on this deck, so you can see that later as well. And also the other thing you want to think about is adding your name, address, phone number, also known as NYP, in the local SEO circles, to your footer and your about page. So if you're wondering how to do this with a Wix website, there's a section where it says "Add a Section" and we have a whole section that talks about adding your business info, and it includes your business, name, address, and phone number. We also have sections that allow you to incorporate Google Maps onto your About page. So you can add in your business info, you can add in a little bit of information about yourself, and you can add in your address. So Krystal was talking about your pins on your maps. Make sure that you've got the same address and your business info as you've got here. And you can point that there. Krystal also mentioned our AI tool. So let's say you get to your About page and you're not sure what to put for it. And you want to make sure that you've got your local business information information there, you can use the AI text creator, you click create AI text, and then you would click About for this particular one. And then you'd add in some of the things including some of the location information and your service information. And then you would get a few options on this particular one, I thought option three was good. So I clicked to use text, and I've added to page and then you can adjust it, it's very important that you check your AI texts when you're using AI because they it's very much like it's generative, and things like that. So it's important to double check it and make sure that it fits exactly what you need, and that it's accurate for your uses. The other thing we want to think about is setting up your Google Business Profile. I saw a few people in the discussions talking about how do I set this up. If you're on Wix, and you don't have a Google Business Profile, you can do this from within Wix. So you would go to your Marketing and SEO Settings, you click on Google Business Profiles, and you start typing in your business name. And it'll give you a few options. In this particular case, the business that I had wasn't listed because it's not listed. But if it was, then it, for instance, would show on the list. So I would type in the business name, and then I'd start filling in my details. So as Krystal was saying, it's really important to fill in all of your business details. For this particular one, I started writing and I wrote in 79 characters about my business but to be honest, I should add in more details than that. And also, we have the business category as well, that is in a drop down. So there'll be other categories that you can choose from in there, and it's worth trying them out and testing them. The other thing that you can add into it is you can add photos from within Wix, you can also adjust your business hours. And you can add in some of the attributes, Google Business Profile gives you the option to say that it's a women led business or that you have WiFi that's paid or you have curbside delivery or that sort of thing that's really useful. So that's worth checking out as well. And finally, we have some information about your business data. So Krystal was also talking about business data. Within your Wix CMS, you can see the traffic by location report to see visitors by region, city and postcode. So on this particular one, I filtered it by New York. But you can see it's showing a few entries for Brooklyn and a few entries for New York. But you'll notice that they're both different postcodes. So let's say you're targeting a hyperlocal pizza place and you deliver really locally, you can see who is seeing you there. And you can also see it on a map if you want to get a bit more information there. That's not New York, but here we go. The other thing I would say is to check out the Wix SEO Learning Hub, as Krystal was saying there's a lot of overlap between classic SEO and local SEO so you can get a full overview on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. You can also dive into all her local SEO resources including Krystal's fantastic guide to the introduction to local SEO, and her other articles as well. And lots of Google Business Profile webinars and more. And with that I'll say thank you and we can go into a very lively Q&A and get some more fantastic informations from Krystal. Mordy Oberstein 40:15 Thank you Crystal and thank you Krystal. I've been waiting the whole webinar to say that. There's been a lot of questions, we're trying to monitor the Q&A section and I'm going to try to unify a bunch of questions by theme. So we can answer as many questions as we possibly can all in one shot in the limited time that we have. So one question I saw a lot was, I don't have a physical store. I'm a service business. So I don't know if I'm a mobile mechanic or I do home medical testing. How does it work to set up a Google Business Profile? What's the deal? Krystal Taing 40:49 Awesome, that's a great question. So the requirements for having a Google Business Profile is either the customer can visit you, or you deliver your service to the customer in person, like you just have to make in person contact, you can't be a virtual therapist that never meets your customers in person, although I think Google is going to think about that, in the future, how things change. But that's currently the requirements. So a mobile mechanic, as you mentioned, absolutely qualifies. There's a feature within Google where you have to hide your address. And there are parameters around when you can and when you have to. So if you have an office space, and technically someone could come visit you or maybe you want your address published so that you could get deliveries easy or something like that, you can publish it, but then market your business as a hybrid. So you can say also I accept people at my location, but I also deliver goods and services to them. And so Google won't hide your address. But they'll add features that say you serve a very specific area. Now, if you are someone that practices out of your home, and your home has no signage, and then you just go meet your customers or clients where there are, Google guidelines state you have to hide your address, a residential address cannot be published on Google as a business, again, unless there's clear signage, and then that would just be a feature within Google that you do, you hide your address, and then Google publishes kind of this little polygon on the map and you add your service areas that you serve. And that one will will be published that way, but your address won't be displayed. Mordy Oberstein 42:34 Perfect. Now, let me ask you a different question. Let's say I have multiple service areas. So let's say Miami and Jacksonville and Tallahassee, I don't know how far Tallahassee is from Jacksonville. But I know that Jacksonville and Miami are far away. How does that work? Is it one giant service area? Do I have multiple locations? And each one has its own service area? How does that work? Krystal Taing 42:59 So typically, you're gonna still just have a single business profile on Google. And then in the field where it says area served, you list all of the zip codes, counties, cities, however you deliver it, Google's guidelines are just if you put a city in there, you have to accept customers from everywhere in that city. So you have the ability to expand it. Guidelines are quite grey, about qualifying for an additional listing if you're a service area business, but a good rule of thumb is if you're just one business, everything operates the same as a single business profile with additional service areas. Mordy Oberstein 43:37 Is there a radius like, if the area is five hours away? Can I do a service area for New York and all the way to California? Krystal Taing 43:48 So Google guidelines state two hours, I will mention, they are a guideline, that is not a rule. So that's one thing too, because there's examples where a wedding photographer would be willing to travel to a different state, they don't qualify for another listing in the states that they're willing to travel to. So it is one of those things that you know, don't make a judgment call as a business owner, unless you have two separate businesses operating, I would say keep a single profile. Mordy Oberstein 44:22 Okay, the last follow up question. I can answer all the questions around this. I think, by the way, there are a bunch of questions about hiding my address. I don't see you answer those people. Like you know, it's my home. I don't want people to actually show up so you hide the address, so you avoid that problem. But let's say okay, I have set my service area. Great. Google has a two hour guideline. But I set it from New York to Miami. Now someone's searching for mobile mechanic Miami will hurt my rankings if I'm sent from New York all the way down to Miami because Google will think well, maybe I'm not relevant for Miami because most of them are in New York. Krystal Taing 44:55 Yeah. So this is also really important. Setting your service areas in Google, it doesn't matter if they're just a bunch of zip codes in New York, like Crystal is showing, or they're multiple states, that does not impact where Google displays you. Google is going to display you, one, based on your physical address that you have, even if you hid it, they still know where you were verified. But then also, they're going to lean on a lot of these other local SEO signals. So this is where on page content and on page SEO is going to be hugely impactful, because for a service area business, you're going to have limited things in GPP, that will tell Google, hey, I'm relevant in New York, but I'm also relevant in Miami. That's where they're going to need to see, you know, backlink mentions and different publications around the country. They're going to need to see content on your page that serves all of those markets. But that's where I would start with GBP, but you definitely need to leverage on page and other tactics to actually influence Google and rank you in the right areas. Mordy Oberstein 45:59 Right. So I think in that case, if you have an attorney in New York or Miami, have a page on your website, mobile mechanic, New York, mobile mechanic Miami, send a signal that way. Krystal Taing 46:09 Yeah, yeah. But I will say it's not going to be detrimental. You know, it's just not probably going to be as successful if you don't have a strong SEO strategy broadly. Mordy Oberstein 46:20 That was therapeutic, we really dived deep into the service area. Krystal Taing 46:25 It's a fun topic. Mordy Oberstein 46:26 It is. It is also a very confusing topic. Because again, Google's guidelines are a little bit not so clear sometimes about this. Another question I've seen is about optimizing my Google Business Profile, what goes into optimizing my Google Business Profile? What category or categories do I pick? What matters? For example, a question I have seen, and been asked multiple times is, can I schedule and create Google posts out of Wix? And I think you'd be able to do that with the Uberall app. But are Google posts a ranking factor, if I post more often, is that going to rank me higher? What goes into optimizing this mysterious Google Business Profile? Krystal Taing 47:03 Awesome. So I don't want to take the shortcut out of here. But this is a very detailed answer, because there's a lot and we could be here for another hour. What I will say is that the new local search ranking factors report comes out tomorrow. I'm also happening to be on a webinar with Darren Shaw on Thursday to discuss the new changes. And a lot of it's going to be about GBP. But I would definitely recommend just to search local search ranking factors. It's White Spark that does it I know, he's contributed to the Wix SEO hub as well. But that dives into every feature of GBP and ranks the importance of it. So there's things like your name, your category, what are the things that people think you should pay attention to that you really shouldn't. So there's a section on myths that really don't have an impact. So I think that is definitely a good starting point resource, because it is actually quite complicated. In terms of posts and other content that you can add to Google. It's definitely impactful and important. This is where I would say it definitely toggles the line between ranking, which is showing up and conversions. I would say thinking about Google posts to drive action is going to be more impactful than thinking about it for Google to show you higher. But yes, to your point, the Uberall app does allow you to schedule as many posts as you want, not just to Google, but to Facebook, to Twitter, to Instagram, to other places, as much to a year in advance. So if you're like, hey, I've got a couple of hours this month, you can go in and set your calendar for quite a while. Crystal Carter 48:43 I think that the categories point is really useful. In my local SEO workings, I've seen posts make a big difference to sort of getting a little bit of visibility. I'm sure the ranking factors will go into that. But certainly getting involved in posts can make a big deal or make a big difference. I'd be interested to hear you talk a bit about categories. I've worked with a recruitment client, for instance and there was one where you could schedule it as a recruiter and another where you could say the category was employment agency, and we had different search results, depending on which one it was. I think I had another client who was a tennis center and they were a real leisure center. Are we a sports center? Are we that sort of thing? So if you could expand on how you choose the best category? Krystal Taing 49:33 This is why I wrote an entire article on it because it's important. It is a huge driver of how you display and changing your category can almost immediately have an impact on how Google understands you. It's also something you shouldn't change all the time because it could trigger suspensions if you're going back and forth between it so you want to be thoughtful about how you're choosing it. So oftentimes one of the first things to do is to do a couple searches on Google, see what your local and maybe even national competitors have as their categories. And start that as your list, these are the five ones that typically display. And you'll start to get trends. And then I would say, go do a couple of searches that you want to show up for, see the businesses that Google is already ranking for those of those queries, and see what their categories are, and see where they vary and add to your list. I always think that's a really good starting point. And then one of the really important things is your category controls a lot of the other information you have access to inside Google. So your attributes, the way your reviews look like there's so much stuff that is controlled based on your category. So going and validating what's available, like are there particular URLs you want to publish, that maybe a mortgage broker has, but a loan office does not have? So you want to be mindful. Do I want to be a professional or a business? But yeah, that's what I would say is outside of getting your information correct. Doing solid research on your categories is really important. Because basically Google reads your name and then your category. And then they're like, oh, do we show this business or not? And it's quite interesting. So starting with those searches, I think is really helpful. Mordy Oberstein 51:26 By the way, in the chat, I was gonna mention this, but someone just threw it into the chat. I'm looking right now, we have a resource on the SEO learning of how to select your GBP pattern category. So look for the URL in the chat. If you can't find in the chat because there's so many messages ,look on the SEO Learning Hub for that article. By the way someone asked about Google posts, Google posts are basically almost like social media kind of updates about your business. You can showcase products and offers and all sorts of information. From my point of view, when I see someone or a biz has Google posts and makes me feel comfortable, like this business is taking care of their business, they're concerned about their online visibility. When you see a full Google Business Profile it makes me as a consumer feel, okay, this company and this business is on the ball, I trust them as weird as that sounds. It's almost like as a whole, optimizing your Google Business Profiles, is almost a way to convert people, because it makes them feel comfortable with who you are, and the fact that you are on top of things. Krystal Taing 52:29 I always describe it if you were to think, I don't know, back in the 90s, the 2000s, when people frequented malls, what attracted you was that store window, because they were showing their products, they had this display, they had a full name and full font, or the lighting was good, like imagine that as your Google business profile, but just digitally. And I think that you should always take that into account. Someone has a small area to get a snapshot of your business, give them everything they can to really have an understanding. Crystal Carter 53:00 Yeah, I think you mentioned filling out all of the different things. And so for some verticals like restaurants, for instance, you can catalog every single item on your menu, interior, exterior, things like that. For hotels, they have amenities, and they have all these sorts of different things. And it really makes a big difference. Krystal Taing 53:20 Yeah, and I mean, again, that is where I feel like I take my hat off, when I go, I know I'm going to go to a restaurant, one of the first things they do is look at the menu. And it's great. If it's on Google, I don't have to click another link to get to another website. If I can scan and lmake sure they have options for the group of people I'm going with it's incredibly helpful. Mordy Oberstein 53:39 The same with images. When I look at a restaurant or whatever local business, I always look through the images and see, okay, what's the atmosphere? Do we really want to go? What does that food look like? Someone asked it in the chat at one point, what images do I show? Really anything I've seen, I've seen property management companies who don't think their office is the commodity, they have properties out there. So they're showing the property, they're showing the maintenance staff, they're showing them, fixing things, all that. You can really put a 360 degree view of your business (I don't literally mean 360 because you could do that also) a holistic look at what your business is and what it is visually, what to expect when they engage with you. Basically, anything right around that. I want to talk about structured data markup really quickly, because there's a lot of questions about structured data markup which is code that you can add to your site that helps Google better understand explicitly what is on this page and it can alter how you appear on the Google results page. So one question I saw around this was, do I need to put local business structured data markup on all my pages, on my homepage? A question that wasn't asked that I will ask that does matter is let's say I'm a service area business, and my address is not shown, do I add local business structured data markup or is there another markup I should be using? Krystal Taing 55:02 Yes. So a few different questions in there. I will say in general, yes. You should add structured data to as many pages as you want Google to understand. But they don't always have to follow the same thing. It's like there is structured data for you to markup reviews, there is structured data for you to add information about your products and services and prices. And then yes, there's local business structured data, which I'd suggest there's a lot of elements underneath local structured business data, that is likely a lot more detail than what you need, because local business is a little bit broader. But absolutely, if you're a service area business, there are ways to display your address and not display it in structured data. So absolutely structured data for the win, as much as you can. And as much makes sense for your business. Crystal Carter 55:54 And I should just say, if you're a Wix user, if you input your address into the business info, your structured data gets added to the most appropriate pages, and you don't have to worry about which pages they're on. So they go straight into the places that they should be. Mordy Oberstein 56:11 As Simon Cox mentioned in the chat, we automatically add it for your blog and your products. One last quick, quick question we have another minute, I saw people asking you about citations. Where? Everything? Everywhere? Does it matter? You know, just the main ones? How crazy do I have to go with managing my citations? Krystal Taing 56:30 This is where I just love the technology at Uberall because we have packages based on your business and where your location is. And your service area. So our technology basically says if this user that's leveraging the Wix Uberall app has a hidden address, we are only submitting your business to directories and sites that allow hidden addresses. Because if you don't, then they're going to publish your address to those sites. And same thing, if you're a business that's in Canada, we have a tonne of direct integrations with specific Canada directories, you don't have to think about it. It's all based in the backend. So typically a good volume, especially for small businesses that don't have this huge brand recognition to live on. If you're not Walmart, having more citations is better. 20, 30, 40. I think ours comes by default with 50 based on your region. But the idea is that you hopefully can leverage automation, because keeping them up to date, they're not always the most savvy websites to edit your information on. So leveraging the Uberall app is really helpful. Mordy Oberstein 57:41 Yes, absolutely. Do check out the Uberall app and a big shout out, by the way to Jason Brown, for helping to answer some of those questions on citations. And I love the local SEO community, local SEO for the win. With that, just reminder again, the Google app, check that out, check out the SEO tools inside of Wix around local SEO, and there will be a recording sent out to you. So if you came late or if you miss something you want to go back to it, you will be able to rewatch this as many times as you would like. And last but, oh second to last, catch us again next month as we talk about AI writers and how to handle content from a content creation point of view and from an SEO point of view with Ross Hudgens and Mike King. It's an amazing group of people right there. Crystal and Krystal. Thank you both so much. Krystal Taing 58:32 Thank you so much. I will mention find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or anywhere if you have more questions. Thank you so much, Crystal. Thanks so much for having me. Bye. Mordy Oberstein 58:42 Bye, everyone. Bye

April 17, 2023 ChatGPT offers a seemingly neat solution to the pain points that come with SEO content creation. But what does this groundbreaking technology mean for the future of the web? It’s the question on every SEO’s mind—and what our hosts will be getting to the bottom of in this upcoming discussion with Michael King and Ross Hudgens. Check out the webinar's decks: Ross's deck Michael's deck Crystal's deck In this webinar, we'll cover: When to use AI writers (and when not to) What AI-generated content means for SEO The implications for the state of the web overall Meet your hosts: Michael King Founder and CEO, iPullRank An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Twitter | LinkedIn Ross Hudgens Founder and CEO, Siege Media Founded and led by Ross, content marketing agency Siege Media has made the Inc. 5000 List for the last five years running. Before this, Ross built websites from launch to #1 rankings for extremely competitive queries. He’s been featured on the likes of Moz, Search Engine Land and Forbes and is also a frequent speaker at conferences such as MozCon and LearnInbound. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: ChatGPT and AI writers in SEO content Crystal Carter 0:00 Today we have myself and Mordy Oberstein who are permanent fixtures here on the Wix webinar scene. And then we also are joined today by Mike King, who is the founder and CEO of iPullRank. He is an artist and technologist all rolled into one. He runs a fantastic digital marketing agency, he consults with companies all over the world, and he's been working in AI and LLM models for years. We're so pleased to have you here today, Michael, thank you very much. Mike King 0:32 Yeah, of course. Crystal Carter 0:35 We are also joined today by Ross Hudgens. Ross is the founder and CEO of Siege media andhas made the Inc 5000 list for the last five years running. He's done some fantastic work with Moz and Search Engine Land and forums. He's a frequent speaker at LearnInBound, he is also someone who works in the AI space quite significantly, and has some fantastic 49ers memorabilia, we're so so pleased to have Ross here. Thank you for joining us Ross. Ross Hudgens 1:12 Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. Crystal Carter 1:13 So we're gonna get into it in just a moment. We are working on some of those admin things, we'll sort those out shortly. But just to let you know the webinar is being recorded. Absolutely, it's being recorded, it will not only be shared on the page that you signed up for the webinar on, but it will also be shared on YouTube. So find it in all of the places where you've enjoyed regular content. And you'll get a link to the YouTube page on email as well. And you are all very familiar with the Q&A panel, as we're working on sorting out the chat panel. So ask your questions in the Q&A panel, as we go along, and we will curate those and answer them at the end. If you want to know more about our future Wix webinars, then visit Wix.com/SEO/ learn/ webinars and you'll find all of those there. And moving on to our agenda for the day, I'm gonna hand it over to Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein 2:02 So before we get started, you know, I come from the from the content side of SEO. So AI writers were an interesting avenue, AI generated content is fascinating, and it's novel, and it solves a lot of pain points. For those who are not on the writing side of the world, writing is difficult, and it's time consuming, and AI writers came along, and AI generated content seemingly has solved that problem. Writing is no longer hard, and it's no longer extremely time consuming, it would seem. So we thought it'd be really, really important to have a webinar to really dive into just when do you use AI written content? When is it not appropriate? What are the best ways to use it? How does it impact SEO going forward? Because it does seem like a panacea. But generally, things that are too good to be true or sound too good to be true, are generally too good to be true. And while AI writers are an amazing tool, I think it's worthwhile to have a look at how to use them responsibly because, I try to think about the web as a child, it goes through stages. It could be a child, it could be a toddler, it grows up, it becomes a preteen, it becomes a teenager. I would say the web is somewhere around like a teenager right now, if I had to like put my finger on where's the web, and teenagers are generally, just thinking about my own my own life, not the most responsible. And I think that there's a tremendous amount of opportunity with AI generated content. But I also think there's a tremendous amount of potential problems that come with it. So we thought it'd be really, really, really important to dive into how AI writers will impact the web and SEO. And for that we're gonna turn it over to Ross Hudgens who's going to handle AI for content creation, then dive into the impact of AI on search with Mike. And then of course, we'll have your questions at the end of that, if you see me, by the way, and I'm I'm scrambling around it's because I'm looking through the Q&A, as the webinar goes along, to try to take down the questions that are most pertinent. And with that, let's hand it over to Ross. Crystal Carter 4:18 Fantastic. I'm just gonna stop sharing my screen. Ross Hudgens 4:22 Thank you Mordy. Great. I will screen my share on my side. I'm excited to be here to talk about AI generated content, as Marty was kind of setting up there. I mean, as he nicely described, I think some of the initial reaction a lot of people can have is, you can press a button and create content with AI--why don't I do this with every keyword I'm trying to rank for? And can I go about doing that using these tools, that seems so possible and feasible to do that? So that's going to be essentially what I'm going to get into, with that in mind, maybe that's not really the case, unfortunately. But maybe there's a middle ground where we can still use this very powerful tool to help our businesses be successful through search, and what are some of the ways we can do that. So before I get into it, I've got a good introduction already, but just to kind of restate it, we've been around for 10 years, we're a content marketing agency with SEO specialization, so creating content online to rank on Google is pretty much all we do. So this is our sweet spot. And I founded the company as well. So I've been thinking about strategy on this side for a long, long time, as I was teed up previously, worked with a lot of great ecommerce brands across the web. And that's sort of some of the context for some of the companies we work with in terms of the advice I might give today. So first, essentially I want to start with the idea that the goal of SEO is not simply to publish content. If the goal of SEO was just to publish content, then creating content with AI would be optimal. But unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead, the goal of SEO is not to publish, it's to win is to build the absolute best thing or have the goal of doing so in order to achieve that goal. So really, to achieve the number one ranking, you need to have that argument that it's the best content, not the same content as everyone else, because if you're simply generating the exact same thing everyone else has generated, there's no way you can truly make the argument that you're the best thing for that result. So that is part of the conundrum here with AI content. The issue is that essentially, content is a commodity. If all of us go to ChatGPT or your tool of choice, and you ask it's similar things in terms of creating a blog post, you're gonna get a very similar result, it's at that point, very hard to argue that you're truly making the best thing in that case. So to kind of give some examples and in flavor there, if we're searching for something like, "what is SEO", and we input it into ChatGPT, you end up with very similar feeling content, not that I'm saying these four on the left did that. But you can sense how sort of it ends up repurposing a lot of what exists, and you end up with very similar things. But there is a solution here. What you do want to do with these tools is to not use them as output engines in isolation. Don't just go to these tools and say, give me a blog post meant to rank for what is SEO, without providing anything, if we provide it something, or rather something great, that's when magic is possible. But before we get there, just want to show an example of this in practice, of just how sameness can occur with very simplistic prompts and inputs for the tool. So if we go there and say, hey, I'd love a guide to rank for Wix SEO, please give me some recommended URLs and maybe metadata and maybe some supporting images, I might add to that result as well, we get a rough looking blog post like this, we won't read through the whole thing. But for the most part, it's a relatively simple article that if you go search these things, Wix is ranking, good job Wix, so that makes sense. But the other articles as well feel very similar to this, but I'd say a little bit better on average. And some of the issues beyond just some SEO practices being signed off, at least from our definition, putting the keyword far to the right, or putting the keyword at the end of URL. One of the things that occurs on this suggestion from them, is that really the only Wix specific thing and the entire blog post is this first section of the Wix SEO Wiz. So that's not very Wix SEO specific, it's not additive, necessarily. It's not finding anything novel to add to this, it's essentially repurposing what already is there. And that, for that reason, is going to not allow an article like this to rank, even if it's a decent article, all things considered. So what you need to rank though, is the best content that does exist for that topic. So if we take this further, what do we need to get there? Essentially, the magic is when you can give this tool or these tools unique inputs, you can create content faster and better and get new things that would allow you to get to content that actually can win. So in this left chart, let's say we have a unique data set of 50 or whatever number of populated cities in the United States with unique data points around how many five star restaurants and bars they have, how many popular events are there are to maybe create a study on like the best cities to visit or best cities for things to do per capita, hypothetically, if we had and curated this dataset, brought it together and then put provided it to the tool, we then could ask it to create a blog post, or even a summary on this concept and get something that no one else ever had. Because we are bringing it something that nobody else ever has asked. So in this case, we do that. We ask it ChatGPT, can you please summarize my data, and you can see now it's actually immediately coming up with insights based on the data that's provided in that chart, we don't even need to think about it, it creates copying in a pretty well done way. And this is just a summary. It's definitely capable of taking that same unique data set, and if I go to it and say, hey, I'd like to create a study of the 10 best cities for things to do in the United States, please write in the brand voice of Trulia, 400 500 words that could be pretty solid, you'd probably likely need to improve it. But because you brought it unique insights from the start, rather than just asking for a blog post of things to do, you're more likely to actually create something that's great because you brought it something great up front. Another example of this is if you bring it unique things about your company, and then ask it to describe that so ChatGPT4 can now interpret and view images when you share a URL with the interface. So if I share this shoulder bag, and then ask it to write 150 words of branded sales copy in the brand voice and tone of this brand, it does a very strong job of that. So what we're doing here is we're giving it something unique. This is a unique photo from our unique product line that we spent a tonne of time and effort to curate and get right and also define our own brand. And we're asking it something specific that only we as a business could ask. This is not something competitor Y is going to ask in the same way ever again. So this is going to give us unique, novel, well done content that otherwise if we had not given a unique, well done input, we would have never gotten out as an output. So we can see here where we're getting to, if we give it the right things, which can be data which can be designed, which can be our products, it can then get to a place where it can actually create high quality content that might be able to support ranking in many instances. Another example is simply editing. So it's a very good line editor on average. So if you input copy that has issues or just barely any copy, it's pretty good at editing that at a high level. So if we think about the elements of content, that's essentially the same idea, we are given an input to get an output that's unique, no one else will only give ChatGPT, this exact same set of copy. So it's now going to take what I had and further improve it, rather than simply asking it to create a blog post on post structure for SEO, I'm now saying edit my blog post. So you can see that difference in mindset means I get something that Google's happy with, and users are happy with, and hopefully you can rank because of that. So I have a few little different typos in here, it might be possible to quickly pick up on that. But that's part of the potential value add of a tool like this for sure. So sort of recapping that I think you can use it as an output engine using information you feed it. If you simply ask it to be an output engine without feeding information, that's where we get stuck. We create content that's like everyone else is that has risk for all of our businesses. Another way of saying that is you can use it as an editor summarizer. Rather than simply creating from scratch. If you're using it for that kind of thought process, you're more likely to again, get to things that Google and users like, all things considered equal. Another tool we like for line editing and sheets and the like, and I'm sure Mike will get into a lot of this good stuff, I would guess. But this is good on the content creation side, plugs into Google Docs pretty easily and allows you to input your ChatGP, the AI is really well done. I know Wix has versions of this too, that sort of definitely ties into some of this concept where if you have a well done landing page, it essentially has the AI then create content based on what is already there, you've essentially applied this concept that I previously described in a well done way. So use AI to create content that supports SEO. Also, this is another way of doing it using input: so you could technically create content from scratch for things that aren't trying to rank directly for SEO without many inputs and be relatively okay as long as it's not trying to rank itself. So some examples of that would be things like a privacy policy or return policy, terms and conditions, you probably would still want to customize those for your business, but you could reasonably ask these tools to generate those for you. But these other pages are all good examples of areas where you could feed it inputs, depending on the kind of content, to get pretty good content back. So we saw the example of data for the data studies, what if you gave it 30 different images for your category, and then said create 100, 200 words of copy that describe this category for Stella store, which is another brand that uses Wix, and then create that copy, that's gonna be well done in terms of output that can definitely support SEO. So we talked about product pages as well, it could reasonably create and help you develop a career page. It's not going to rank directly for SEO, but it's going to be a valuable place to build a page like that. Social media copy is another great place and generally, more and more thinking about visual content, a lot of the brands on Wix, you have great visuals, from your products, photography, video, etc. So if you share that URL with the tool, and then have it interpret that design in your brand voice, you can get pretty well done work where really the main weight is being carried by your images rather than the text. And that's where this can have a lot of value. So we see in this left example, for Stella Store's top left image, I fed that into GPT4 and asked for Instagram social media copy. And comparing to the existing Instagram, it's relatively solid, using similar use of emojis, it seems to be relatively on point with the hashtags used as well. And as we hopefully we would generally all agree most of the weight in social media, Instagram type content, is the image itself. So you can get to high quality content a lot faster when you think about what is the most important part of this content and the least important areas, those are very clearly opportunities today to use tools like this to kind of fill out that experience while maintaining your brand advantages. So to kind of restate that there are many places where high quality content needs to be some more supported by text content. But that text content itself is relatively a commodity, or just not adding that much value. That's where AI really has a great place to then round out those non commoditized areas. So we're referencing back to this handbag, or shoulder bag. It's the product here, it's the site design here that carries, I would argue the majority of the weight and importance, they do a great job with copy in the bottom left, they even have a little poem that occurs down there. But if you fed that to AI, I would pretty confidently say it can output a very similar framing or theme around that while maintaining the core most important elements, which of course, are those product photos, which you still need to do by hand, at least for now. And the overall site design and aesthetic that is maintained there. So with that thought process in mind, there's a lot of great things that can occur. So to kind of sum it up, if you stick to this idea that to be productive with AI, give it best in class inputs, that's the goal of SEO is you need to have the best in class things. So if you believe you have the best in class handbags, and you give it the best in class photos of those handbags, and ask it for supportive copy, you realistically can rank with that page. But if you simply ask it to create content from scratch without much guidance, that's not best in class, you can't realistically do that in a way that's going to reliably help you rank consistently in search. So use it as an output engine using your best in class inputs. And that's how you're going to consistently win with SEO using this great new technology. That's it for me. Thank you for the time. Crystal Carter 19:10 Thank you so much, Ross. That was brilliant, some really great insights there. And I saw a lot of people commenting in the chat that was really great to see some practical applications there. So thank you so much for that. I'm sure we'll get to the questions afterwards but I guess we can jump straight in for Mike's section for the wider scope. But thank you so much for that, really good, you've got lots of big thumbs up in the chat. So thank you. Michael, let's get you up next. Mike King 19:46 Confirming that you can see my screen? Good? Cool. All right. So let's talk about what generative AI means for SEO. So real quick. I'm Mike King. And you know, despite popular expectation, I am not the real estate agent for that house back there. But you can follow me on all the things for iPullRank. I'm from an agency called iPullRank. You know, we do all the SEO and content strategy work and so on. And we've actually been using GPT technology since 2020. Here's a quick example, where we drove $300 million in incremental revenue for our client just by, you know, getting more generative copy on to product listing pages. So let's talk about how Google is under a lot of threats right now. One of which is that TikTok supplanted Google as being the site that gets the most traffic on the web. ChatGPT, in general, was a code red for Google, they said, like, hey, we gotta figure this thing out, which is so remarkable because the T in GPT is from a technology that Google invented. We've also got users believing that Google search quality is on a steep decline, you know, people are adding Reddit to the end of queries, because they feel like without it, Google isn't giving you good results. And so all of these are threats that are going to impact your content marketing and SEO. So the TikTok threat means that Google is going to rank more visual content, you're seeing more examples where people are looking up queries, like how to tie a tie, and it's not your blog post that turns it into 30 steps of how you do a Windsor knot, it's three videos that are ranking at the top. And so if you're not, you know, creating content that's going to be there, you're just not going to get the clicks. And so short form video is gonna get a lot more competitive, we're seeing that, you know, more and more people are about to ramp that effort up, because they feel like that's how they reach Gen Z. And so if you're going to be doing short form video, don't forget to put it on your website, most people just put it in the channel, Instagram, YouTube, or whatever, you really want to have it on your website, and there's a great guide on the Wix website, it talks about how to how to do video optimization that I think you should check out. But the other thing is that ad sales are actually down for Google as well as a function of the economy, and also as a function of people going more towards other platforms like TikTok to spend their money. And so what does that mean for organic search, it means that you're going to be in situations like this, where Mesothelioma, one of the most expensive if not the most expensive keyword, at least in the States has, you know, more whitespace around these ads, you're seeing the feature snippet take up more space. And so the user is going to most likely click on those ads. And so what that means is that the real estate is going to get smaller, and you're gonna have to be more effective as early as your metadata in order to be, you know, driving those clicks. But the last time that people were saying that Google search quality wasn't so good, we got two things that changed SEO forever, which were the Panda and Penguin updates. And so really, what this is telling us is that Google is coming at us with this or not us coming at people who are making bad content with this helpful content update, that we are likely to see something like we saw before, where they're just demoting content that's not valuable. So if you leave with one thing today, leave with this idea on here that you have on the screen, right? You should only be creating content that's at the intersection of your audience persona expectations, your buyer persona expectations, and then search engine expectations. So I kind of split the audience persona from the buyer persona, because there are people that will, you know, consume your content and may influence your buyer personas, but will never become buyer personas. I think we all know what buyer personas are. And beyond that, you know, search engines are another persona that you need to account for, because they have a lot of expectations of your content in order to rank for your target queries. And so that's what I want to talk to you about today, pretty much, but through the lens of the threat of generative AI. So if you're a local business, small business, or what have you, you probably shouldn't know about what's going on in the local search space. And what we were finding is that content is still a lot of the top factors when it comes to ranking for a local business. And so this is from the latest local ranking factors from Whitespark. Obviously, this is also true in standard organic search as well. But the whole point here is that a lot more people are going to be making content this year. And this stat right here 54% of businesses, comes from Ross's team. So thanks for putting that together for me, Ross. We're also seeing that 47% of people are going to be increasing their blog, blog content. And of course, SEO is more than just blogs. But typically, when we're thinking about SEO, we're like, Okay, well, how do we write more stuff? Right? Well, here's the other part, marketers have the highest adoption of generative AI and it makes sense because we're the people that have to create the most content right? And so there's this growing list of generative AI tools, there's a tonne of them out there. They're all effectively just using, you know, the API's for ChatGPT or GPT4 or whatever, and then putting their spin on it with their own sorts of prompts. If you're using chat GPT directly, which I would actually recommend over any of those tools, I recommend you check out a tool called AI PRM, which is effectively like a prompt management tool. And it's also a community of prompt engineers. So you can pull from prompts that they've already written, and use that to generate your own content. And so one of the things that I've noticed by playing with this is that some of these prompts are like a paragraph long, and they generate really good copy. Whereas in most cases, people are just like, hey, give me a blog post about x. And they kind of leave it at that. And so if your prompt is one sentence, and you get back garbage, it's what you pretty much should expect. And so I would say just play with that tool, and also look at other people's prompts and see what you can learn from it and creating your content. But the reality of it is that every tool on the planet is integrating ChatGPT in some form or fashion, including Wix. And I actually spent five minutes last night, building a website using Wix AI. And in fact, like, literally, it took five minutes only because I had to figure out which pictures I wanted to use, because the process is so easy. And so here's the example, right, like, I'm setting up my site, I'm generating my About copy, I'm giving the things that I want to include in that. So enterprise experience, full-stack developer, over $4 billion in incremental revenue driven, and then it gives me three different options to choose from, didn't love the first one, second one a lot better, selected it and then I've got my website. And so you know, I think that this is the sort of thing we're going to see a lot more of where people can really get to the point of generating content so that they can create the presence that they want. And in fact, things are already moving well beyond that, in that we have this new technology called AutoGPT, which is still kind of nascent at this point. But it can, you can just say like, Hey, I want you to act as let's say, a marketer, and figure out how to build me a presence that is going to make me money. And what it does is that just continues to make new prompts and do new things, to figure out what you want it to do without you having to prompt that every time. And so that just gives us a glimpse of where the future is going. But a big result of that is we're gonna get a whole lot more crap too. And so there's a gentleman named Doug Kessler, he gave a really compelling talk about this back in 2013. This idea that more and more brands, we're going to get into content marketing, is going to really be like a race to the bottom for constant quality. But another thing you can get is people giving you the answers of how to fix your chat while you're on a webinar. Who knew? Thanks, Steve. But Google actually loosened their stance on generated content as well, a few months ago, actually about a month or two ago. And I think this is one of the things that was holding up this big deluge of content before, because so many people were like, oh, you might get penalized by Google. Well, they're saying like, you know, as long as it's made for humans, it doesn't matter how was created. And if you look at the guidelines and more depth, they're just like, hey, we're actually really good at detecting spam anyway. So make it however you want, you can't really beat us, which I don't know is true. In fact, I don't think Google can reliably detect LLM continent or generative AI content. Because, you know, I've played with all the tools, and they all give a lot of false positives and false negatives. And so it's not really a strong enough signal to rely on by itself. In fact, open AI can't even reliably detect it, their tool only detects correctly 26% of the time. And so what Google has to do is combine any detection like that with the other signals that they have. So you may or may not be familiar with E-A-T, which I refused to say as EAT, I call it E-T instead. But anyway, if they layer those signals with, you know, whether or not they believe something is generated or not, then they can say, okay, well, it's generated. And plus, it's off the baseline for this given author for this given website. And so they're seeing a lot of, or we're seeing a lot of reports in the SEO community where people are saying, like, hey, I've been trying this out, my site got crushed. I guarantee you that those are also sites that just like, you know, spun up the content, didn't edit it, and just straight up published it. If you do that, you deserve what you get. Now to the point that Ross was making, a lot of us are doing copycat content. You know, we're using tools like Surfer and Phrase and it's saying, like, hey, anything on this keyword features these keywords, has these headings and so on. And it's always been weird to me that because marketing is very much about differentiating yourself and standing out, but instead, people just copy each other endlessly. I don't get it as an artist, but you know, it is what it is. So if you want to survive, what you also really need to do is make better content than what's out there. And so, also, I feel like we need to update our understanding of search because it's very much out of date. And yes, this is going to be one of those like, oh, this guy's talking about patents but really, it's all about content and links. So how Google works and all sorts of things actually work is what's called the vector space model. So you take a query, and you plot it in a multi dimensional space, you also take the document or webpages, and you plot those in multi dimensional space, and whichever ones are closer to the query are considered more relevant. So relevance is not like a qualitative idea. It's very much a quantitative idea. And so Google has a whole pipeline when they do they're crawling, they're processing, rendering, indexing, and ultimately ranking. That's not a shock to you, if you've been following SEO. But if you haven't, or even if you have been following SEO, the one key change that Google made, starting in about 2013 that really was like a quantum leap in better performance. And that was their switch from what's called lexical search to semantic search. So lexical search is really about counting words. Are these words on the page? How often are they on the page? How do they relate to other words that should be on the page, whereas semantic search is very much about meaning. And the way that that works is through that idea that I just talked to you about of converting words into multi dimensional coordinates in vector space. So as an example, here, you take the phrase, "how old are you?" It's converted into a series of decimal numbers, and then you can compare against other words in that same way. So here's an example from what's called the words of vector methodology that Google built back in 2013. So in the example, you take the vector for the word King, you subtract the vector for the word man, and then you add the vector for the word woman, and you get the vector for the word queen. So effectively, you can do mathematical operations, to determine the relevance and the relatedness of subjects, topics, keywords, and so on. So relevance is a function of a mathematical operation called cosine similarity. And so when the cosine similarity between these two vectors is close to one, that means that they're very close together or similar. When it's close to zero, that means they're orthogonal or not related. And if it's close to negative one, then it means they're opposites. And so Google came up with something called Bert, which allows them to have better vectors basically, where those relationships and the context was really captured. And what do I mean by that? Well, previously, the way that that was built, the word bank in both of these sentences would be considered the same. But with Bert, the word bank is understanding that river bank means something different than making a deposit in the bank. And so now that they can do that, they have a better understanding of the meaning and your content. And so you get these, what we call higher dimensionality vectors that allows you to really capture the information. And so that's how all of Google search works across YouTube images, everything, they're just looking at these different numbers that represent content, and then determining which is closest to the actual query. And so where Google has improved here, so this idea was called dense retrieval, where they can better understand the different aspects within your copy, not just looking at the copy in aggregate, but also, what does this paragraph mean versus what this other paragraph might mean. And so when you're seeing the feature snippets where they're highlighting, specifically in the paragraph where it is, that's this work, that's this methodology at work. So the whole thing to take away here is these vectors, these embeddings, is how Google really understands content relevance in a way that they never did before. And so your website has a vector, your author, or you as an author has one. And so Google can associate things with your representation in this mathematical way. So another thing to know about this is that they're able to understand the relationships between different pages. So you're gonna want to build any links to your site, from pages that are actually relevant to what you're discussing, that's something that we've said in SEO for forever. But it's really why you're seeing that link building is working differently than it did before. Other things that if you're doing any sort of content marketing, your byline is an asset. So don't just be writing on random topics, because Google is associating your expertise based on this author vector that they're creating about you. So the last thing I want to really talk about here is that relevance is not a qualitative measure. I've built a tool called Orbitwise, you can measure this and compare yourself to other, you know, websites. And so this is a free tool that you can try out. So here's my friend Vanessa. She's actually a brand strategist and a Wix user. I was looking at her website because she hit me up, she saw that I was doing So I was like, oh, let me see if I can bring her site into this. And so she, there's a keyword that she ranks for, which is how to build brand awareness. And I look to see who ranked number one for that. It's a site called Wordstream. And I wanted to see, is her page less relevant than Wordstreams because it doesn't rank as well, or is it just a function of authority. And so you put it in, you put the keyword into the tool, "how to build brand awareness", you put her website in, you put your email address, because you know, lead generation, and then you put in your URL, if it doesn't make it a top 10. And so what it's doing is it's scoring everything in that same idea that I just talked about that vector space model. And each of these dots represents one of those websites that's ranking for that keyword, but you're also getting these relevance scores. What you can see here is that the average score for was ranking in the top 10 is 72.42, or 7.43 and Vanessa's page is actually a 73, whereas Wordstream's pages a 72. And all these other ones are, you know, varying in that range. And so in this case, it isn't a function of her page being less relevant, it's more a function of her needing more authority. And so this is a good thing for you to know. Because you never know, do I need to, you know, optimize my content, or do I need to build more links? Now you can know. And so you can just check out the tool here. Alright, last point is the future of content and links. So we moved here, this is still a question that people are asking, like, how long should my content be for SEO? That actually should have never been the question because we've always been evolved beyond the word count idea. In fact, the guy that used to run search a gentleman I met named Tsingtao. Back in the early 90s, he wrote a paper about why you shouldn't just look at the length of content to determine whether or not it should rank, what they do is what's called document length normalization, so everything is effectively compared, as though it's the same length. And, you know, again, marketers are still copying, we're all doing the Skyscraper Technique, except we're skipping the part where you make better content, because we're just going in and looking at what these tools tell us to do, and then inserting more keywords. And in fact, ChastGPT too can do that, or ChatGPT can do that for you. This is an example where I had written something about generative AI and I said, hey, put the keyword in here more in places where it makes sense and it does it quite well. So there's no reason that you should be toiling over there. Just give it after you've written your content over and then it can do it for you. But the reality is that everyone is going to be creating what we call like perfectly optimized content. That's an example of the integration between Jasper and Surfer. And you can literally drag and drop different headings and say, write me something about this. So really, we need to evolve beyond this complex version of keyword density, because Google has to sort all this out, you know, if everybody's writing the same stuff, who do they rank, right? Obviously, authority comes into play. But nevertheless, if everything else is equal, who do they rank? And so that's where this idea of information gain comes into play. And basically, what that saying is, if I've got 100 pages to choose from, which of these pages is saying something new that the other ones don't, and then based on that, I can give it a booster, so it ranks better. Google has a whole patent around this, they have a whole score for it. And I think as part of the helpful content update, they are kind of giving more weight to the score. So it's definitely something that you need to account for. So really, you want to cover all the bases for whatever expectations people have. But you also want to focus on saying something new. So we've got a guide on AI and content and SEO. So check it out. Just want to wrap it up real quick. Your relevance and authority needs to be your primary focuses so you can survive and always create your content at this intersection of audience personas, buyer personas and search engine expectations. I'm from iPullrank, we got a show called The SEO Weekly, check it out. And I got a book, you should buy it. That's all I got. Crystal Carter 39:04 Thank you so much, Mike. That was fantastic. That was a whirlwind tour for anyone for anyone who was thinking that was that's a lot of information, and it was, this is all being recorded. It will be on YouTube. So you can go to YouTube, you can slow it down because Mike was moving quickly through a lot of a lot of some great concepts there and if you need to look down that fine, and the links will be shared. So we will share the decks with you as well, if you can see the link there. And a lot of people were really interested in Orbitwise. So that's great to see as well. And we've had a lot of questions. So I'm going to hand it over to Mordy to wrangle the questions from our very active audience. We always have a very engaged audience here for webinars. And so I'll hand it over to Mordy and we can have a little bit of a discussion. Mordy Oberstein 39:51 So before I get into the questions plus one for The SEO Weekly with Garrett Sussman. Garrett is amazing, a fan favorite, so definitely check it out as a great way to keep up with what's going on in the wide world of SEO. There are a gazillion questions. I don't know where to start. Let me piggyback on one of the later points that Mike was actually talking about information gain. What about a scenario where and this is a common question around just creating content with AI, where it's already been done before a million times over? Can I use AI for that? And where's the added benefit that I'm going to be able to add? If the topic's already been covered before a 100 times over, I'm only covering it because I need to cover as part of my corpus of content. How does that work? Mike King 40:41 Yeah, I actually kind of disagree with that idea that just because it's been, you know, kind of comprehensively covered that there's nothing new to say, as an example, me and Ross just talked about the same thing. We both had different takes on it, right? Like, I think it really comes down to the level of expertise. But what I generally will say to people, is that you can take a look at the entity graph and figure out what's related there. And then based on that, talk about something new, right? Like, you can use a tool like it's a tree, or even looking at Wiki data, or whatever, and then put in your topic and then see what else is relevant to it, and then figure out how you can work in something related to that, to whatever is related to it. So as an example, let's say I'm talking about vinyl records, right? You know, there are different types of vinyl records. If I was just going to talk about vinyl records in general, you know, you're just saying like, a record player and listening to music and so on. But then you can see, okay, well, the 78s, there's 33s and 45s. Like, there are different elements to that and then when you keep traversing the entity graph, there are more things to talk about that you may not be aware of. That's generally where I tell people to start if they just can't find an expert to talk about the subject. Crystal Carter 41:56 And I think if we have a few beginners who are with us who are unaware of what an entity is, it's essentially, the way I normally describe it is it's pretty much a noun, or something that Google knows exists in real life online, but it's essentially essentially a noun. So something that has a Wikipedia page Disneyland, or wherever, these are things that are considered entities. And when you get knowledge graph that says that this is Disneyland and it's here and it's founde there, blah blah blah. Ross Hudgens 42:31 Yeah, love that. We have a concept we tell our team to use called Vines, it's sort of like how to think outside the box different areas to look to, news experts, social, images, video, did that backwards, but I dropped the link in the chat. That's some different areas to kind of like think through and yeah, potentially find some additional entities as well. Right. Mordy Oberstein 42:50 And that's one of the things a little bit dangerous about one method that people do to analyze the results pages. Let's see, okay, what's ranking for the keyword? And you can only tell what Google's already ranking, but you can't tell what doesn't exist yet that Google would rank should it exist. Let's look at a more general question. How is AI going to improve? And do you think it will ever get to a point where it'll be consistently updated? I think what that question meant was ChatGPT, the data set has ended in 2021. I think it may have updated it. But will it ever be to a point where the data set that the AI is being trained on will be in real time? And if so what does that mean for the future of the web? Mike King 43:34 Yeah, I definitely think it's going to improve. I mean, that's just like the nature of technology, right? Like, and so many people are focused on this, like, every day, there's some new tool that people are building, like, I can't even keep up. But as far as like, you know, will it ever be trained in real time? I don't know how realistic that is, as far as like, you know, in the near future, because the way training works is like, distributed across a tonne of different websites, and obviously, not websites, computers, and then you've got to, like, you know, curate the data to some degree. But at the same time, I don't think it matters as long as the base layer of the language model is good, which it very much is and you're seeing that they're doing what's called retrieval augmented generation where they're pulling in results from search and then using that to inform what the answer is. So you don't necessarily need it to have real time data. You just need it to be able to pull in stuff when it doesn't know if it has something accurate. Ross Hudgens 44:31 I know new plugins are available that you can add crawl ChatGPT that allow you to crawl the web to that direct URL. I believe I don't have access to that yet but. Mike King 44:43 Yeah, AIPRM does that. Crystal Carter 44:45 And then Bing's new thing or whatever they ground ChatGPT in their chatbot with Bing result results. I recently tested it to ask it if Zedaya had gone to the Oscars. And there was a photo that was circulating of Zendaya at the Oscars and she was not, she was in London with her boyfriend. And yeah, Bing backed with ChatGPT said no, she was not in at the Oscars. So that's something that does seem to be working so far. Mordy Oberstein 45:18 Sort of, I've had a lot of experiences where it's if the news is very, very, very current, it's still a little bit stale. So be careful. Check the citations. This brings us to the next question. What will be the future of organic traffic? Should AI become a prominent feature in search engines? Such as it already is in Bing? Yeah, I think that landmine. Mike King 45:44 I mean, we don't really know. Like, I think the reality is that people prefer answers. But at the same time, I think what we saw with the feature snippets is that it displaces the search volume. And what I mean by that is like, let's say you used to just search for, you know, Eiffel Tower, right? And you would go to some random page and read facts about the Eiffel Tower. But now you're getting those facts right there in the SERP. So it's not that you like, close Google, you're feeling like okay, well, what's my next question? And so they get sent somewhere else? And so I think the issue is that there may be situations where the Chatbot doesn't give a good enough answer. And then in that situation, people are going to go back to search. But also I don't know that, you know, this, this mode is going to be what everyone prefers all the time. Because you don't always want to have a conversation. Sometimes you just want an answer. Mordy Oberstein 46:39 Yeah, I always thought that was interesting. Because to me, the novel of the AI experience is the chat itself, not the answer. I can get a featured snippet. I have a direct answer. I do think that it's interesting; I have a controversial take on this, I guess. I think that things like Peters did with direct answers, I guess now the AI chat experience, they incentivize now the secondary layer of knowledge. So the first the first layer of knowledge is basically handled by whether it's a feature snippet, whether it's an AI chat experience, whatever it is, and it's really the secondary layer of content that needs to be handled on an actual website, which means that the incentive to create content should be a little bit more specific. But that's just my personal controversial take on the lack of incentive to write top level content in 2023. Okay, who was the author? If AI writes content? Who is the author? I think that's a good question for Ross. Ross Hudgens 47:39 I mean some of my presentation was actually arguing, don't have it write that much content, you're sort of the base layer, in some ways it might be rounding you out. And if someone's contributing 20% 30%, I wouldn't probably call them an author in that case. I think that's probably the most powerful use. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein 47:59 That was the beauty of your presentation, I think. Like if you if you look at AI as being open, and you just give it a prompt and go and you have no borders around it and you don't give it a controlled environment: disaster. And impersonal. But if you give it constraints, and you give it delineation, you give it a context to work out of then it's an amazing tool. Okay. Do you think there are going to be people who are going to specifically seek out brands who write human content? I think that question was more about do you think that there will be cases where brands will up their level of content to distinguish themselves from other brands that are predominantly using AI? And will people be able to recognise that and seek that out? Mike King 48:47 I think that's definitely going to happen as far as people can. As far as people being able to recognise it, I don't know. Because the way that these things work, is all in like mimicking how we write. And even if even once people start creating other new, interesting, original stuff, then it just gets fed back in and it learns again, and then copies how we write. So I don't know that it's going to be the sort of thing where people can naturally detect it and I think if we think about Cambridge Analytica and how all that went down, and how people couldn't discern the difference between like real social posts and fake ones, it tells you everything you need to know as far as that, but I do think that people are going to start saying things like, yeah, this was generated with no AI as an example on 60 minutes last night, at the end of the segment about AI with Google, they were like, yeah, just so you know, this wasn't made with AI and I think we're gonna see a lot more of that and people are going to embrace that. Crystal Carter 49:45 I think the tricky thing with it is like, where do you draw the line because I use Grammarly, for instance, and they're adding a lot of this stuff into into Google Docs, they're adding it into into Microsoft Word for instance. So it if that helped you, does that mean that you had some AI? Similarly, I very often will dictate, and that is using voice chat or voice recognition to create the text. So I think that can be a bit tricky. I'm not sure if Ross has an opinion. Ross Hudgens 50:16 Yeah, I mean, I generally agree with all that it's sort of up to us to guide it. I think today, you could go to content sites and see very bad SEO content. And you just feel that and it's sort of getting to that best result thing. If that's done with a lot of AI content in there, I don't think people are gonna know the difference. But if you go to someone who's misapplied using the tool, it's a lot of junk it'll just read just like that same kind of bad SEO content today. So as long as they're achieving that goal, I don't think it should matter too much. Mordy Oberstein 50:51 Yeah, let's point out the state of content now isn't great already. Crystal Carter 50:57 I think also what you were saying about the different prompts and how you have people who are prompt engineers, like there is definitely a skill in writing a prompt. If you ever, if you log into MIT journey, you can see like, if I log into MIT journey and say, oh, I want to see a dog riding a skateboard, and the picture comes that awful, terrible, and I see other people who are making you know, Rembrandt, you know, the Sistine Chapel over here. And I'm like, how did you do that? And they've got these really complicated, really complex prompts. So I think you're right that you know, you both talked about the value of the input. There's the traditional adage for AI garbage in, garbage out. And it's very important that you that you finetune that Mordy Oberstein 51:36 Ross, this one's right up your alley, would you repurpose content with ChatGPT? Ross Hudgens 51:44 I think so I mean, that social media example I shared is a relatively reasonable example of that, where you're using a product photo that lives on your website, you're now asking it to create social media copy, I think that's a reasonable way to do that, where essentially, you're still using that base layer of best in class thing, which is the image and then supporting it in some way where I know I haven't tested it. I didn't do with my own presentation, but apparently you could have it take a blog post and make a presentation out of it. I think that'd be a powerful thing to do. Mordy Oberstein 52:13 Someone pointed out in the chat that in your example, the AI even added in the emojis. Yeah, exactly. They got it. Nailed it. What's going to happen with Google, if there's going to be a plethora of mediocre content coming into into the ecosystem? A deluge of it, an enormous amount of, maybe not spam content, but what's basically out there right now, but a lot more of it. How will Google respond? Mike King 52:46 Yeah, I mean, I think it's what I was saying before, you know, that's where the E-A-T thing comes into play. Andyou can spin up all the content you want but if you don't have the authority, it kind of stops it right there. And then you can go into the longtail of course, but you know, less people see that. So they probably don't care as much. But at the same time, there's gonna be a lot more bad content and a lot more good content as well. And so as a result of that, all of those signals that Google already uses is going to make the good content continue to perform better. So I don't think that Google is going to be under attack, because they've getting millions more pages. But I think that they are already mitigating that with E-A-T, the helpful content update, and so on. Mordy Oberstein 53:34 Yeah that makes a lot of sense. If you look at the site, overall, the authority of the website overall, they can help you with the various pages. So again, if you're competing with two pages that are competing against each other that are relatively similar, if one website is far more authoritative, and far more topical, that's another bit of a boost for that particular page, and also, what Google can do. In terms of his language profiling, I personally believe that it's able to profile language in order to understand whether or not you have a first hand experience with the product that you're reviewing. It's not far-fetched to realize that Google can profile language or to say, hey, this is closer to what language would look like if you actually use the product versus if you're just randomly spun it up with AI. I feel like I have to ask this question. And I'm almost dreading it. But I'm gonna ask it anyway. Because someone asked it, and we're just gonna do it. Will AI gain consciousness? I have strong feelings about this. Ross Hudgens 54:37 I'm not the expert for that question. Will it achieve AGI I think is the right word? Probably. Mike's way more technical than me. Mike King 54:47 I definitely think AGI is realistic. You know, probably not as soon as everyone's predicting like, you know, there are tool or libraries out right now called like, Baby AGI like I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. But, you know, I think it's really a function more of computing power, which we have a tonne of, and we're just getting more as we go. So I think that it's possible. But I think that at some point, our regulators are going to step in and slow things down. Like the EU is already trying to ban ChatGPT. So you know, I think it's possible, it's just will we see it anytime soon is a different story. Mordy Oberstein 55:25 Fun Mordy fact is that I'm a little bit of a philosophy nerd. And I think we're talking about human consciousness. I don't personally, and this is just my honest opinion, I don't think that's possible. I think the human human mind that persona is ineffable and you can't qualify it, and therefore you can't pass it on. And generally speaking, that which is the created thing can never surpass the creator of it. So personally, I don't think it's possible. Mike King 55:59 I think there's flaws in your argument Mordy Oberstein 56:02 We should have a conversation about this at another time. I'll pull out my Aristotle and my Kierkegaard and we'll have a long conversation about this. But I saved it for last, so we wouldn't be able to have a philosophical conversation on our webinar. So I think we're out of time. Sorry, Mike. Crystal Carter 56:27 Alright. Well, thank you to everyone. Thank you Mordy for bringing the philosophy to the discussion. Thank you, to Mike for bringing in the algebra. I wasn't expecting to have to remember my vectors. I was like, oh, snap, we're getting mathematical over here. Okay. And thank you to Ross for bringing so many practical examples. It's been a fantastic session. Thank you to everyone for being really involved in the chat and for sharing your information. Again, it's going to be online, it will be on YouTube, it will be on our website. And we'll be sharing it on social media as well. So if you missed anything, please go back. Rewatch slow it down if you need to pause it, rewind all of that stuff. Thank you very much for joining us. Our next webinar will be next month. We'll be talking about Google Search Console with Daniel Waisberg from Google and it will be fantastic. So I hope to see you there. Thank you both. Thank you all and good evening. Good afternoon. Goodnight. Mordy Oberstein 57:25 Oh wait, don't forget to sign up for our newsletters Searchlight over on the Wix SEO hub. Hey, marketers gonna market. Thanks, everyone. Ross Hudgens 57:33 Thanks, everybody.

Reverse-engineer a strong backlinking strategy by taking stock of what’s working for your competitors. Join Ahrefs’ Patrick Stox and Dialpad’s Debbie Chew to learn how to uncover valuable backlink opportunities that can help your sites rank higher. In this webinar, we'll cover: Identifying competitor link strategies with SEO tools How to spot the best backlink opportunities Tips for link outreach and acquisition Meet your hosts: Patrick Stox Product Advisor, Technical SEO, Ahrefs As well as lending his expertise to internal product teams, Patrick shares his technical SEO knowledge further afield as an Ahrefs brand ambassador. Previously a lead author and reviewer for the SEO chapter of the Web Almanac, he also organizes several SEO groups, including the Raleigh SEO Meetup. Twitter | LinkedIn Debbie Chew, Global SEO Manager, Dialpad With almost a decade of digital marketing experience, Debbie leads the global SEO strategy at Dialpad and is deeply passionate about sharing her SEO knowledge with other marketers. She has previously spoken at MozCon and SearchLove, while her work has been featured on BuzzSumo and Ahrefs. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: SEO competitor backlink analysis Crystal Carter 0:00 Today we're going to be talking about SEO competitor backlink analysis. And y'all are in for a treat because we have two panelists here who are fantastic at backlinks, at all aspects of backlinks and we're going to cover it from lots of different angles. So you're going to get a really well rounded introduction, or top up of your knowledge around backlinks. So to give a little roll call, we're going to be joined today by Debbie Chew. Debbie is a fantastic backlink and link building expert. My name is Crystal Carter. I'm head of SEO Communications here at Wix, we're joined by Patrick Stox of Ahrefs. And we're also joined by Mordy Oberstein, my partner in crime, my podcast co-host, writer on the Wix SEO Hub, international speaker, Yankees fan, Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein 0:51 Thank you for the last one, that was the most important one. Thank you for that. Crystal Carter 0:56 Okay, so in this session, it's important to know and please tell anyone who joined late because they always ask. We love you all. But they always ask the same question. Yes, the webinar is being recorded. The YouTube link of the recording will be sent to you via email after the webinar. So I know that we're going to cover a lot of stuff during this webinar, don't worry, you'll get the link, you can go back and watch it on YouTube. And you could stop and start and play along as you go later on. So don't worry if things don't make sense just in the first instance, you can stop and start and go through it, as well as questions in the q&a panel. We have people who are going to be answering those as we go along as best we can. We are also going to be curating some of the themes to ask our panelists at the end. If you liked this webinar, join next month. Actually, we're not doing August. We are doing July. So join us next month for our next webinar. And then join us again in September for webinars after that and you can find those on the Wix SEO Learning Hub afterward. And without further ado, we're going to get into some of our presentations. So we've done our introductions. We're now going to hear some insights from Patrick Stox. Then we're going to hear some insights from lovely Debbie Chew. And then I'm going to tell you a few different things that you can do to support your backlink campaigns and your backlink activity on Wix. And then we're going to do the q&a as led by the wonderful, fantastic Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein 2:24 Quick point of order, marketers have to market, don't forget to check out our SEO newsletter Searchlight over at the Wix SEO Hub and our podcast SERP's Up. Crystal Carter 2:34 Yes, where you can hear all of this information, and more. So with that, we're gonna head over and over to Patrick. Patrick, if you'd like to share your screen. Patrick Stox 2:46 Can you enable screen sharing? Crystal Carter 2:50 That would be a great, great thing for you. Just a second. Mordy Oberstein 2:55 I think I got it. Yep, got it. Cool. Crystal Carter 3:00 That does it. Patrick Stox 3:03 All right. Hey, everyone. Excited to be here. Thank you for the awesome introduction, Crystal. Mordy always, always a fan. As Crystal already said, I work at Ahrefs. I'm pretty active in the SEO community, I'm really not going to cover any of this. For those that don't know, a link basically, is when you click something that takes you to another page, that's a link. There are different things that make some links better than others, you know, the page that it's on how relevant it is to the pages linking to the anchor text, or like what the link says that kind of thing. Links are like votes, they help you rank better in Google, you're basically saying I trust this site. I like this site, I'm gonna link to it. I think that content is good. So you should rank them higher. And Google uses that. According to Google, one of their folks has said that it's literally one of the top two ranking factors, content and links. We've run tons of studies because we have more link data probably than anyone Ahrefs. We found that generally better links correlate with more traffic. Now, warning, correlation is not causation. Anyone that does any data analysis will tell you. But generally, if you've got a page with good content and good links, you're going to rank better than a page with good content, but no links. I actually proved this a couple years ago, I used what's called the disavow file in Google and I basically said don't count links for a bunch of my posts, and the results kind of speak for themselves. We lost a bunch of traffic, we lost a bunch of rankings. It hurt us, don't do that. It's a bad idea. So bad, that I think I was the first one to actually try this. And we've also run big studies. I think this study was over a billion pages. And we found that 92% of pages have almost no links. Now, two thirds of those actually had zero. But another 26% had one to three referring domains, like one to three different sites that link to them. So there aren't that many pages on the web that really have good links that are viewed as kind of authoritative that people are vouching for, that people think the content is good. It's a surprisingly small subset of pages. And those pages answer a lot of user queries, so they tend to get a lot more traffic. If you're going to start link building, the one thing that I always recommend, especially for like local service companies, which typically I've worked with a lot in the past, start with your competitors, look at the links they have. First off, find your competitors, we've got a way to do this for free. The whole competitor report lists dozens of competitors. Within Ahrefs it's Ahrefs.com/awt, which is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. This will show you in a nice, competitive view chart. But if you don't want to do that, it's fine. You can just search on Google and see who your competitors are. And this is actually just a random page on my own website about purple laser pointers. And my competitors are some niche laser sites and Amazon and eBay, basically. But yeah, just pick a few terms that you know are relevant to you and you can find who your competitors are. With that, you want to see what links they actually have. So again, this is another free tool Ahrefs.com/backlinkchecker, you put it in any domain you want, you'll get, I think it's 100 that it's limited to, it tells you what links are going to your pages. With that, what you want to do is just look at common links, it's basically links to companies to pages that are in the same niche as you are probably the links that you also want, they're probably the ones that are easiest for you to get. So this is kind of your low hanging fruit. I'm going to show you a better example here using accountants. So like some local accountants to me, I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina. So I just picked a few. A link intersect tool, there's several of these out there, but basically, you can enter a bunch of competitors, and get the co-occurrence of their links. So five of these sites have a link from whatever domain, you can do this again for free. And there's a bunch of free backlink checkers too. It's just a lot more trouble to go through one at a time and unlimited data. So these guys have helped speed up the process of it. And this is kind of what that looks like. So goodfirms.co, a website, probably about accounting firms, there's three of these companies here locally that have links from them. So that's probably a link that I want to go after. Same thing like us paa.org, I'm sure that's an accounting organization of some kind, probably already a member, may not have filled in the website information when filling out the form and signing up for that. So more than likely, I might have a profile there, my client does, I can just go in and say like, oh, this is my website, and boom, got a link from there. That's the kind of thing you want to look for. You want to work your way through the individual links, see what they're getting, look at the sites and find patterns for that. Now I have a much more scaled process I use personally, I put a link to this blog article. This hasn't with exporting sites. I did this for I believe whoever is in the top 10 in the top 50 US cities. And also as a way to do it with local markets to find local specific links. So I basically said don't just look at accountants, go look at lawyers, go look at dentists, go look at other service industry folks in the same market and look at what kind of links they're using. I personally even use an API for this. So this takes me like all of 10 minutes to do. If you're exporting, I would say a couple of hours and then another hour or so on the classification. So it's more work upfront. Well, I would still say less work than trying to go through one at a time but in general more work upfront but a faster process when you start to go looking at the links that you want to get. So patterns, certain things you'll find niche specific. So these are basically all the links that I found that I would classify as niche specific for accountant links. I could probably go through the sites and look at how and get these in an afternoon. So it's not that it's gonna take you forever to go through these. It's not that it's a tonne of work, I would say these links are some of the most valuable you can get whatever links are niche specific to your industry. They're probably some of the easiest ones for you to get, but also they're the most relevant links. So they're going to be valuable, they're going to help move the needle and help you rank better. Lots of other ways to look at patterns, you'll see things like directory sites, local citations, coupon websites. That's about all I found, actually, when I was looking at just the accountant links. But when I started to look at the city specific links, I found a world of different opportunities. So again, this is relevant in Raleigh, but we have a bunch of colleges and universities here. I found that their forum, their websites, people are getting links from jobs, from scholarships, from clubs, sponsorships, from discount codes, these are all opportunities for you to get locally relevant links. Tons of city specific magazines, different event type sites that I found stuff on for the surrounding area, the greater state North Carolina, tons of opportunities, these are folks that are generally looking for content. Then it might be that they want to feature a local business, it might be that you're doing good in the community, you donated something, you spend your time volunteering, any number of reasons can show up for why they're getting these links. But in general, if other local companies are getting these, that is an opportunity that you can probably get into. There are also tons of local news magazine sites, food blogs. Some interesting other patterns that I saw were people involved with weddings here. Basically every DJ, every photographer, every event planner, they were all talking about the weddings and the events that they were doing, and they were all linking to each other, which I thought was pretty fascinating. You know, if I was, say, a dentist here, I might even get involved with weddings, do some kind of thing like, oh, get your teeth whitened, bride and groom. Because more than likely, I could probably get some links for some other local companies out of that. Just being involved with the wedding. It was very similar for real estate. So like realtors, apartments, HOA communities, they were all linking to local restaurants, local things to do. So if I'm an event space, if I'm a restaurant, more than likely, I'm going to reach out to some of these folks and be like, hey, I'm here. We're awesome. Do you want to add me to the list you already have? There's just a tonne of patterns. These are again, common ones. I've seen it across like different niches. But any suppliers, affiliations, meetups are popular, especially if you're sponsoring a meetup, buying them some pizza or something or some sodas, you typically will get a link out of that. Local podcasts, charities, sponsorships, different awards, like city awards, who's got the best burger in town? Who does the best landscaping? All kinds of options are opportunities for that. Coupons, different directories for things in the city. Again, these aren't super complicated, or super hard to get. They're things that your competitors are already getting links to, or folks in your city are already getting links from. So more than likely, you can get these, these are kind of low hanging fruit, they should be fairly easy. I would say, again, if you spend a day, two days, three days, you'll probably cover most of the links that you can get within your city and within your niche. So it's not super time consuming. It is time consuming, but it's not as bad as I think a lot of people think. And I've done this many times over the years with different companies. And usually I would say results are shown within a couple months. They tend to go right, right up towards the top if they were, say like middle of page two, middle of page three for some of their main terms. So it does work. And that's all I've got. I'm excited to see what Debbie is sharing and Crystal after that. So thank you all, appreciate your time. Crystal Carter 14:48 Thank you so much, Patrick. That was really, really cool. I think we have a lot of great questions in the chat, a lot of people who are interested in links. So we were talking in that section about how, now you can understand the sort of linking environment, the kinds of links that other people in your space are getting to help their content rank. As Patrick was saying, a link from another website to your website is like a vote. It's like somebody saying this person is good. And I think this person is good. And I think that person is good when they link to you, when they post a URL from their website and to your website. And yeah, you've explained it really well. Debbie is now going to talk to us about a couple of examples and a couple of ways that once you've done that research, once you've had a look at all of the different kinds of links that people are getting in your space, how you can go about getting some of those links to your website in order to help you get some great SEO results. Debbie Chew 15:47 Awesome. So let me share my screen now. Thank you, Patrick. I think we have a good segue into my talk today. So basically, hi, everyone. My name is Debbie. I'm the Global SEO manager at Dialpad. Of course, thank you, Crystal and Mordy, and everyone at Wix for having me to talk about links today. I do want to kind of expand on a few things that I think will be helpful for everyone to help you have a better understanding of what really works for your competitors. But I do want to also remind you to also look beyond your competitors, which Patrick touched on a little bit as well. So earlier, we've kind of talked about that link intersect or a link gap analysis to see, you know, what are domains that are linking to your competitors, but aren't linking to you. If we have a better idea about what works in your industry, I think that's gonna be really, really helpful information that you can use to guide your own link building strategy. So in order to figure that out, the big question that we want to figure out is, what are your competitors best pages by links? Right? So Patrick earlier shared about like, where are the sites you can get links from, but I also want you to look at what are the pages you want to get links to. So when you are able to figure out what is this valuable, link worthy asset that you can create for your website, that's going to be something that can really help increase your chances of getting links, you can use that as a way to maybe pitch journalists, or share it on social media, and it kind of goes viral. And that might be a way for it to increase its visibility and get links that way. So I wanted to go with an example. So let's say we have this dog walking service. And so we use Ahrefs, and then we're looking at who are our competitors. And we identify rover.com as a potential competitor, or Angie's List for pet sitters. So in Ahrefs, we can go to the Site Explorer at the top, and then enter in the URL rover.com. And then on the left, there's the best buy links, we can click on that. And then you'll see the results here. What we're going to do is ignore some of the pages like the homepage or like the signup page, but we're going to focus on some of the remaining pages that you see. So we have dog friendly cities, I'll share the pages in the next slide that's coming up. So there are a few and then there if we keep scrolling down, there's a lot more that we can look at. And what I did was I pulled all those URLs into this table. So I have the title of the page, the URL of the pages, and then also the referring domains. So I can see which ones have gotten a lot of links. And then the most important thing here is to look at each page, and then categorize them by the content or page type. So for example, the first one is on top emerging dog friendly cities. This is a research that rover did with I believe it was Zillow, they looked at which cities in the US are going to be really dog friendly. And so if you're a dog lover, you can potentially consider renting or buying a house in those cities. So that was kind of the purpose of that research. And the insights is kind of something that you might not have ever heard of before. But it's also very interesting. So it's unique, new and interesting, and that gets people's attention, essentially. Aside from that, we have a tool. So they have this tool where, for example, if you see some sort of plant and you're not sure if it's going to be poisonous or not to your pet, you can look it up and there's this really cool tool that Rover has to help you understand that. And so I think this is another content type that can really help people get links, as well as it's just a very informative piece of content that is helpful. And that's why I've gotten links. Another one that I wanted to quickly talk about is the listicle type of page. So they have 100 most popular dog names. So you know, if you're a pet dog owner, and you just got a new puppy, you might be looking for a name for your dog, right. And so having that listicle is just a super helpful resource for you. And if someone else is writing a blog post about, I don't know, some tips for when you first have, or how to take care of a puppy. If you're a first time dog owner, I might link to this 100 most popular dog names because it's relevant to the topic that I'm writing about. So from my experience, topics are pages that are based on research, or like a tool or even a listicle. It can be dog names, it can be even a list of different stats for a specific topic. Those are really great ways to get links, no matter what industry you're in. So definitely look into what exactly your industry is doing. Make sure you don't only look at one competitor. But we're also going to do this process for two or three competitors. And if you know, if you have the time, you know, look at more of the pages that have gone links and really categorize them and Tally those up. The end goal is to really get a pulse on, you know, how is your industry or how's your niche building links. So the more competitors you analyze, you can avoid potential bias. So for example, if you only look at one competitor, and they only rely on creating a lot of guides for their website, and that's what has gotten links in the past, that might not be the best way for you to get links, you also want to look at what other competitors are doing. I wanted to kind of quickly share that I have done something like this for six different industries in the past. And I shared my findings. In a talk that I did back in March at Searchlove. I wanted to share one key finding that I think would be helpful for this audience. With the study that I did, I looked at six different industries that are really competitive in terms of buildings to see for competitive niches, what exactly are people trying to do? What types of pages have people gotten links to? And therefore what pages should your website also have. And so I kind of separated out the DR90 Plus websites and I found out the top three types of pages that have gotten a lot of links are number one, a product or service page, it's like a dog walking page. Number two is a guide. So maybe like how to choose a dog harness for your dog. And then number three is research. So the Zillow and rover piece that I mentioned before. So make sure if you will try this methodology, do it for your industry, and really see what shows up in terms of what is your industry? How are they building links, it's going to be typically different from other industries. And you know, if you do this research, make sure to give me a shout out, let me know, what are some of your findings, happy to talk about that. Another thing I wanted to quickly go over was, that's aside from just looking at your competitors and your specific niche, as Patrick mentioned, you should also look at what are some of the complementary businesses to yours. So two reasons I recommend this, number one, there might be really cool and unique ideas that other companies are doing in terms of link building that you can repurpose for your own niche. And then another thing is also, if you're able to identify the different partners, you can kind of build a network around and you're able to sort of create Win Win relationships with these people, they can help potentially distribute your content. You can also do co-marketing with them to collaborate on link worthy assets. One quick thing to kind of help you ideate who these competitors are, you can just ask ChatGPT so this is what I did. And so they gave me a bunch of potential other businesses for me to reach out to and try to create a relationship with. So last thing I wanted to touch on before you start doing your link building and make sure to also understand Google's guidelines in terms of like, what are things that they want you to avoid what is considered spammy link building. So if you see any of your competitors, or complementary businesses engage in any of these. So like excessive link exchanges, buying or selling links, which is relatively common, or like forums, man, spam, you should avoid doing that. Because they're essentially against Google's guidelines. So a lot of times when it comes to link building, you need to try it out for yourself to see what tactics actually works for your company, what might work for someone else might not actually apply to you. And so you need to just try it out yourself, and see the results and iterate from there. So you know, again, if you see there's a bunch of foreign comments that are linking to your competitor, that doesn't necessarily mean that this is actually links that help their website, it might actually be hurting their website. So you need to really be careful when you do all this analysis and decide, you know, what is next. So that was what I wanted to share today. Feel free to find me on Twitter. And I also write for Wix as well. Yeah, happy to answer any questions during the q&a section. Thank you. Crystal Carter 26:26 Fantastic, thank you so much. And there's some great examples of ways that you can do link building there. We have got some great chat questions. Mordy, are you getting the questions ready for everyone? Mordy Oberstein 26:39 I've got a notebook full of quick questions. Crystal Carter 26:42 Lots of questions. Okay. So what's gonna happen now is I'm gonna go through a few Wix resources for helping you to manage some of your link building activity, I'm gonna go quickly so that we have time to get to your questions. And you're gonna get this deck after the webinar finishes, and there are links to everything that I'm talking about, so that you can explore it in a bit more depth afterwards. So I'm going to talk to you about a few of the backlink management resources that we have on Wix. So one of the things that we were talking about is when you're getting links, it's really important for you to track the links that are coming in and whether or not your link building efforts are going well. So Debbie was talking about, for instance, if you did a report, and if you were getting lots of traffic to your report, and let's say that the news, the local newspaper, picked up on your report on like, how many dog walkers are there are in the city of San Francisco. For instance, let's say you did a big survey of all the dog walkers in San Francisco. And they wanted to see that well, you know that it was on the news, the local newspaper, but it might have been on other websites as well. So when you go into your Marketing Overview Report you can see your referral growth over time. Now sometimes, traffic from external links is referred to as referral traffic. And in Google Analytics, you'll see this and also in Wix Analytics. And here, if you select organic social, which are those link building signals, they're not exactly the same. And you would also select referral, and you can see your growth, for instance, on this one. And you can also see, for instance, the different channels that you're getting across that as you're going through as well. And the other thing that you can see is the value of your links. So for instance, it might be that newspaper, and then all of the people who come from that newspaper buy something. That means that's a really valuable backlink for you for lots of different reasons. So, for instance, if you go to the order conversion by traffic source report, then you can filter by referral, which tells you where the link came from. So this is the external website that has a link to this website. And then you can also see information about the traffic source. And you can also see information about those sales that were related to that over that period of time within that report. The other thing that's useful to think about when you're doing backlinks, some of the comments were saying how can I add a link to my website? Well, the thing about backlinks is that once it's on their site, you're not in charge of it so you don't exactly add it, they add it. Sometimes people add it wrong. Sometimes they might add it without the www or they might misspell something or they might do something to that effect. And if that happens then the links are not as valuable to you as it might be if they've done it properly. Now if that happens, you can use the URL redirect manager to redirect their misspelled link to your properly spelled link. So here I have communities with two ends. And thank you for the link. I wish you'd spelled it properly. Here's a redirect to my actual page that has the community. So in the Wix URL Redirect Manager, you can manage that. And you can find that in your Wix SEO tools. Another thing that's useful is to track your links. Sometimes people use something like a coupon code or, or a promo code if you're doing a campaign or you are working with an influencer or doing something to that effect. It might be that you use a coupon code. We have coupon code generators, and you can generate a coupon and you can give them the code. And then you can see, for instance, if something was working there. We also have something that automates canonical tagging. And for the beginners out there, don't be afraid of that word. It's not a big deal. It sounds more technical than it is. It's basically like stamping, saying that the content is yours and you are the original writer of the content. And what happens on Wix is when you make your blog, or whatever content you had, we automatically canonicalize your page. So if you do something called content syndication, for instance, if you publish your page on a different place, or if somebody else publishes your page, or your content on a different place, we have the canonical that tells Google that you are the original poster of that content, and it helps you to help with your content syndication. Additionally, we also have lots of resources on the Wix SEO Hub. There are a few people asking about backlinks and learning more about backlinks. For the beginner point we have a great article from Ashwin that talks about backlinks 101. Once you get to grips with that, you can have a peruse through Debbies's web articles about link building, about how to get started, she shares some great examples there. She also talks about sort of the link building myths and things there and we also had Debbie join us for a podcast as well. In fact, I'm realizing we need to get you on the podcast Patrick. Don't worry about links. And with that, I'm going to jump into your questions. And again, we're going to send links to all of them. So I'm going to stop sharing, and we're just going to get to your questions. Mordy Oberstein 31:47 We did, by the way, give Patrick a backlink on the episode there. He talked about how to choose the right SEO tool. There's so many questions. Thank you Patrick that was really interesting. Someone asked about the T shirts, why are you both wearing matching T shirts. That is the very famous Ahref shirt that just says t-shirt. It's a classic, classic SEO t-shirt. Thank you for mentioning about traffic Crystal, I think one of these gets lost in the discussion about links is that links are good, because they bring traffic to your website. Not just further, quote unquote, SEO link juice, which helps Google find you and be able to crawl your pages as well. Yeah, another benefit. So one of the other benefits really quick about links is, Google's let's say, you have a link from ESPN.com. And Google is crawling ESPN's website and they stumble across your link to your website, they will theoretically follow that link, see your website and start crawling and indexing and reading your content as well. So it's a great way for pages to be discovered. Link building tags, Debbie touched on it. Link building sometimes can be relationship building, especially the local scene. If you're a local business, and you go, say at the local county fair, you can make relationships with other people at that fair who are related to your business. And you can theoretically evolve to the point where you're like, oh, you do that? And you do that? Great. I'll link to you on my website. Oh, really, it makes sense for me to link to you as well. Don't do an exchange on purpose that way. But if it comes out naturally, that's another issue. That's a great way to get links. It's the teammate technique. And it's where I see that maybe you have done something on your website, you talk about a certain topic, I could help you spruce that up a little bit, and make that even better, and add on some points you might have missed. And I might even have a blog post on my website that talks about that which you would naturally link to, because I helped you with it. It's content. It's about literally what you're talking about, and the natural result is going to be a link. So relationship building and link building really kind of go hand in hand. Crystal Carter 34:11 I agree with that. I mean, I'm sure Patrick and Debbie would agree with that as well. I think it's a really great place for beginners. If you have sponsored the cupcakes at the church picnic, then ask for a shout out on the church website. I'm just saying. Patrick, I don't know if you have any insights on things like that for beginners to get started with some links that are based on their relationships. Patrick Stox 34:34 What Mordy said, especially for local links. You know, you want to be on a podcast, go meet the person and go to a meet up that they're at. Yeah, it's that way really, no matter what it is, you know, I got the link from the podcast apparently because I did the podcasts. I'm active in the community more. He's a great guy. He hooked me up there. So that kind of stuff helps me, I'm sure that's probably how I like it. All of the links to my own website or a lot of the stuff to Ahrefs, people share my content when I write because I've established those relationships. So it really does help. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein 35:14 Social media, by the way, is a great way to get links. Patrick did a post before that mentioned disavowing links. And that it didn't really make a difference. I saw that. I said, hey, let's cover that in a podcast I do called Edge of the Web, it's an SEO news podcast. And we covered that on the podcast. And we linked to Patrick's article, which I saw from Patrick's social media. So social media is a great avenue to build links. Okay. With that, there are a lot of questions. One of the questions I got is, are all links equal? Crystal Carter 35:52 I think that's great, what do we think, Debbie? Debbie Chew 35:56 I would say no. So there are spammy links that I kind of talked about earlier. Like, for those typically, if you're not familiar with what disavow does, please do not use it. Like that's what John Mueller at Google has said many, many times. So I mean, naturally for, all websites out there, they have some random spammy website that links to them, you can just ignore that because Google is already ignoring that. But in terms of are all links the same? I would say there are the links that can potentially drive traffic, but they may not be from very authoritative sites, perhaps they're from a really relevant site. So with the dog walking example, maybe in another county, another dog walker, there are links to you that's really relevant, and potentially could drive traffic to your website. Whereas if it's ESPN linking to your dog walking website that seems kind of odd, I guess. Yeah. So I think you need to have a look at it from different angles, and also figure out like, what are your goals in terms of SEO? Are you trying to build links to improve the rankings of your pages? Are you trying to build links to actually just drive traffic to your website? Or potentially drive leads? And people who are actually your audience? So those are a few things that I would look at. You can also look at metrics. The traffic of that website that's driving links. There's just a lot of different things to look at. So it's definitely not all the same. Right? Crystal Carter 37:41 And Patrick, in your tool, you class the links in different ways, don't you? Patrick Stox 37:45 Yeah, depending on the size they are, the strength. We have UR which is a page level strength metric. But then there's all the other data. I think, in general, Google counts links more where they're more likely to be clicked. So a link in the header or footer is worth less than a link in the body. So I mentioned the anchor text right to start with. So what that link actually says, it's kind of a pet peeve of mine, when people link with, learn more, click here, read here. So all that is basically saying to Google like, this page is about learn more. If it says the service, that's useful information. Crystal Carter 38:44 So anchor text is when you have a hyperlink, anchor text is the word that's underneath the link. So essentially, I try to think of it as almost like the door or the label or the door. So let's say it's like what's behind the door. And if the door just says, open, you have no idea what's behind the door. If the door says kitchen, then you're like, great, that's the kitchen, I want to go to the kitchen. So you will go through the kitchen. But if you're just labeling with nothing, then that's not really giving them details. And so all of the anchor text gives Google information about your site, which helps them to understand your site as well. And yeah, it's really, really, really...I can't agree with you more about click here. Mordy Oberstein 39:30 Conceptually speaking, I think what you're trying to say is, the websites that are linking to you and the text that they're using to link to you create a semantic relationship between you and the other websites. We're talking about relationships, Google's trying to establish a relationship, saying okay, what's your relationship to this topic that this website is talking about that's linking to you--is your relationship. Is this random? It's trying to better understand and contextualize who you are, what you do and how relevant you are for that topic by your associate. Who are you friends, basically. And if your friends are nothing to do with what you're talking about, then maybe there's something going on here that's a little bit weird. Another question that comes up often, that's come up in the chat is, is there a magic number? Is there a magic number of links that you need? Is there a magic number of websites that you need linking to you? What's the magic number to get the rankings? Debbie Chew 40:26 First, the limit does not exist. Mordy Oberstein 40:29 Does it not exist or are you just not sharing it? Patrick Stox 40:33 I mean, potentially more than your competitors. But there's so many other factors too, content and, you know, Google's other 200 ranking factors. So links are just like one one part of it. Again, they're kind of a major part. But if you're not doing external linking, at least do internal linking, links from one page on your site to another, you control them, those are easy to add, so all this stuff adds up. And I don't think anyone would legitimately give you a number that says you need 578 links. It just doesn't work that way. Crystal Carter 41:11 I think also, Mordy you touched on this about crawling. When we think about links, if somebody writes a piece of content, and it has no links internally and has no links externally linking to it, that's kind of like a tree falling in the woods making no sound is what that is, it's a lonely, lonely page. Rather than a number, think about competitors, have a good look at competitors to give you an idea of the kinds of links you should be getting. If you think about something that's like a news post, good news articles will tend to have lots of links coming off of them. Whereas if you have one piece of content that doesn't have one, that's a news article, and it doesn't have any links to it, that's kind of saying that this piece of content doesn't have any votes, that's good. There aren't that many people linking to it. I don't know if you'd agree, Patrick, that it can vary by industry. For some industries, it's really important to have a good volume of links. And for some industries, it's less important. Patrick Stox 42:19 Oh, yeah. A lot of what I focused on here was local service businesses. And sometimes the folks even ranking in the top five, they have 20 or 30 links. And that's it. Right? You know, someone like Google is gonna have billions. Mordy Oberstein 42:34 And I think that's something to keep in mind. Patrick mentioned before, that links are not the only factor. I think what happens with links is it's so quantitative, I can get 100 of them, I can get 1000. Now I'm going to win. We get hyper focused on getting the links, when really, links are one part of the equation I have. I've literally outranked Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and you know all the other websites with a small little website that has no links, because that made sense for that particular query with those particular pages in that particular instance. And really, me running around trying to get links wouldn't really have been the most beneficial use of my time. So don't think that now that I've listened to this great webinar, I have to go out there and I have to get a million links. That's not how it works. Question, Debbie, which is more important, internal links, meaning one page on your website, linking to another page on your own website, or external links, meaning another website, linking to your website. Debbie Chew 43:45 I think in terms of priority, definitely, the internal links is just such an easy sort of low hanging fruit for you to do, no matter what content that you create on your website, you should always have internal links from other pages, so that you make sure like Google can crawl your website and make sure to find those pages and its relevance. So at the very bare minimum, when you publish a new piece of blog, or a new blog, for example, try to find other places within your website that you can link to there. And then let's say, assuming that you've written the best piece of content on this topic, you've added some internal links within your website, you can kind of let it sit for a little bit, maybe give it a few weeks or a month or so and see how it ranks. So let's say, a month later, you're ranking on the first page, but you're at the bottom of the first page. At that point, you might want to consider maybe trying to build a few links to it so that Google understands like okay, this is a piece of content that people feel is trustworthy and good. And I'm not going to now make it go from 10 to the first page, number one on Google. So that's kind of my recommended approach to it. You don't have to put in 1000s of links to this page. Crystal Carter 45:15 I think in my experience, I found that sometimes depending on how your website's configured, it can depend as well. For some big sites making sure you're very strategic about your internal links can be important for how you show on the SERP. Because if you have lots of content around a similar topic, then it can affect whether or not you showed in results and how you show there and which content gets the priority as well. So yeah, I think that they're absolutely both important. Mordy Oberstein 45:51 If you're looking to learn more about internal linking, we have some posts added. We did a webinar with Cryus Shepherd about it. So check out the Wix SEO Hub for more on internal linking, check out the Ahrefs blog, I'm sure they also have a bunch of resources on internal linking. Hey, Patrick, do social media links count? Patrick Stox 46:09 Generally no. Pretty much every social media platform uses what's called no-follow, which in the past has told Google like, don't pass value through these, I'm not gonna say they don't help because like what Mordy mentioned earlier, he saw one of my posts there, he linked to it from his podcast. So for exposure, you can reach an audience that you wouldn't have ever reached, some writer for a newspaper or Search Engine Land or something might see that and write it up, and then boom, you just got a link because of the social. So I wouldn't discount it. But the links themselves on social, no. Mordy Oberstein 46:57 With that, we touched on it just a second ago about the different types of links, there's a no-follow link. And that relates to a question that someone asked regarding: I sponsored something and I paid to have my logo, let's say appear up on their website, and that image links back to my site. Does that link out? If I paid for it? Patrick Stox 47:26 That's complicated. Technically, it shouldn't. Technically that should be marked, sponsored or no-follow. Google does have some systems to look to try and identify whether that is a paid for link and discounted if it is. But there's always a chance that it actually could be counted as well. Like if their systems don't care, if it's not marked up. Potentially, it could. But hopefully, you're sponsoring something because you want to be sponsoring it and not and not doing that just for the links. Mordy Oberstein 48:04 Can we quickly run through what it means when we say no-follow link or sponsored link versus what we'd call a follow link? Crystal Carter 48:15 I was just gonna say I dropped a link in the chat. I'll drop it again. We have an article on the Wix SEO Hub also about no-follow links. So I'll drop the link there as well. Debbie Chew 48:25 Cool. So basically, by default, all the links on the web are follow. So basically, if I'm linking to this other page, I'm showing Google I vote for this content, I think it's good. Now, there are situations where if that person paid me money to sponsor something that I'm hosting, then I should actually let Google know that this link was through a sponsorship. And I can mark that link as a sponsor. And then there are other situations where, let's say, people are able to comment on my website. And for some reason, they are able to get a link from my website to their website and I don't want that to count. That's a situation where I would add a no-follow. Basically, if you think about user generated content. So a random blogger goes on Debbie's blog and comments. There's no vote of confidence there. I just want to make sure that link is a no-follow. Or for example, I think some higher domain rating websites like Forbes, maybe, or Huffington Post, they might also just no-follow their links because they don't want people manipulating their authority and showing Google mixed signals basically. Crystal Carter 50:02 I think it's kind of like you don't vouch for everyone. The bigger your site gets, the trickier it is to check every single link that comes through the door. Something like the Huffington Post, or like everybody who comments on your blog, you can't check everyone to see if every single link that they share is a good quality link. And you don't want people to think that this link is great. Because it may or may not be and you don't know. So that is kind of what the no-follow is supposed to signal. It's supposed to say,either that Mariah Carey meme like, I don't know her, or, I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not this content is decent. That's kind of what it's supposed to say. Mordy Oberstein 50:51 Yeah, because you know, it's a two way street if you're linking out to other sites. So if I have a baseball blog, and I'm linking to ESPN, Google's looking at who I'm linking to. I'm linking out to a bunch of really shady sites that are trying to steal money from people. I'm betting maybe that's not a great website to rank. So what you link to also says something about who you are. So if you write a blog post, and people put whatever link they want in the comments. Oh, no. Now Google's gonna think I'm not reputable. Because the people in the comments are linking out to all these crazy websites. But there's a label or there's a status, you can attach to the link called user generated. It goes like Okay, we got it. These are random blog comments, and we're not going to hold it against you, kind of thing. Which brings us to another question, let's say a bunch of really non reputable websites, and obviously we spoke about it before, but let's just discuss it. A bunch of non reputable websites are linking to me. The exact question was, how can I remove links people have established that I don't want right? So Joe is a terrible person. He's got a terrible website, and he's linking to your website. Oh, no. What do I do, Joe's linking to me? How do I get rid of that link? Crystal Carter 52:07 What do you think? What do you say, Patrick? You use that disavow thing, I think that's what some people think that's for? Patrick Stox 52:13 I mean, I think that's what it was originally for. But years ago, Google kind of changed the way they worked. Where before you would want to remove any bad links or you might be penalized. Now, Google plays a lot nicer rather than penalizing people, giving the manual penalties. You either have to do outreach and say like, please remove this link and then anything you can't get removed, that was what the disavow file was for. The disavow tool was to remove anything extra, to say like, please don't count these against me, I screwed up. I made this mistake. But their systems changed. I don't even know six, seven years ago, probably, where they just tend to ignore any spammy links now or any bad links. So I would not touch a disavow tool unless I had a manual penalty these days. But I know a lot of people do it as a routine maintenance thing. I personally think they're shooting themselves in the foot, they're probably getting rid of some links that are helping them. So this is not something that I would do. Crystal Carter 53:23 Yeah, I've seen this situation, I think somebody mentioned something like this. Somebody had some malicious traffic coming through. So they had some really spammy links coming into them that were sort of like bad bot traffic or something to that effect. I don't know if you've seen other ways of addressing this, but in the end, they migrated their site. So they changed their domain. And rather than doing a straight 301, they actually had a page that was like, we have a new page at this page. So if it was a human who got there, they would go to the new link. And if it wasn't a human, then they wouldn't, they would just end there. So that was an extreme case. And I doubt that many people are going to be in that sort of situation. But you know, I think it is also a question of thinking about the page that they're linking to. So if they're linking to a specific page, you have control over the page that they're linking to, you have control over the content that they're linking to. So there's potential opportunities that you can take some action on that side if you're getting terrible traffic, but I think it's unlikely that's happening to you. Mordy Oberstein 54:38 So TLDR for the most part, if you know bad actors are linking to you from their websites, Google's pretty good at just ignoring it. So you should too. The last thing that I really want to talk about which people have brought up is, we mentioned Google's guidelines. Can we maybe just run through a couple of scenarios or situations or aspects that violate these guidelines because that line of trying to build links, and violating Google's guidelines is a very thin line. I'll get you started off. Somebody comes on LinkedIn and says, hey, would you like to guest post on my website, and I will guest post on your website, and we'll trade links. Technically that's a violation of Google's guidelines. That's how thin the line is. Debbie Chew 55:36 Yeah. So I think the way that I approach something like that is...my company is Dialpad. We are a SaaS company so we integrate with a lot of different tools. And let's say so, for example, like HubSpot, we integrate with them. If for some reason, HubSpot wants to create this content that's super relevant to Dialpad and our audience. I wouldn't say no. I don't have a reason to say no, because I know the content that they write is really high quality. So in that case, I would accept it. And if I can write something that's super high quality for HubSpot, and it goes through their editing process, and they kind of vet everything that I write, including the links, and they find it acceptable. I don't see why not. Or why Google should discredit that relationship. So there are specific situations. So I usually think of it more like, if I'm genuinely writing good content for this other blog and they're also writing it for us and it's not just for the backlink, we also want to write something that's helpful for each other's audience. I think it's okay in that situation. Crystal Carter 56:53 Do you think it's the question of user value? Debbie Chew 56:56 Yeah, user value, and not doing the guest posts for the link, but more of the user value there. It's all about intent. Mordy Oberstein 57:08 If the intent is to get links or whether it's, I have something good to say, let's share with our mutual audiences. Patrick, I'll give you the last word. Patrick Stox 57:20 So I would say a lot of new folks, they'll just go to like fiverr.com and buy a package of 100,000 links, do not do that. Anything that is at some crazy scale, if it sounds too good to be true, if it's some automated process, if they're like, we're gonna add you to 500 websites or whatever, don't do it. It's not going to help you, at worst it could very well hurt you, you could actually get a manual penalty from that kind of thing. Links take work, they take relationships. Really, if it sounds too easy, just think twice. Mordy Oberstein 58:04 Don't buy links, I think is the bottom line. If someone has to sell you a link, don't buy it. Crystal Carter 58:11 Well, thank you all. Thank you all for coming. Thank you, Mordy, for fielding all those fantastic questions from our fantastic audience. Thank you, everyone. We have lots of backlink content on the Wix SEO Hub. So please go and check that out. We have podcasts. We have this fantastic webinar, we have loads of articles. Do visit Patrick on the Ahrefs blog where he has lots more content on links and a lot of the studies that he referenced as well. And you can see lots of content from Debbie on links and she also has a website with some great work that she's done there. So yes, thank you to Patrick. Thank you to Debbie. Thank you to Mordy, thank you to everyone in the audience. And we'll see you again at our next webinar in July. Mordy Oberstein 58:57 Thank you everyone. Debbie Chew 58:58 Bye everyone.

Monday, July 22, 2024 | 5 - 8 PM Wix Playground, NYC  100 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014 Refreshments served  About the event Brand marketing can create the momentum your digital marketing agency or consultancy needs to attract quality leads and grow.  Mingle with other brilliant digital marketers and learn how to build and leverage your brand during this in-person meetup. This event is brought to you by Wix Studio and Search Engine Journal, featuring a lineup of some of the world’s most prominent digital marketers, ready to help you take your agency’s or consultancy’s brand to new heights. Get actionable insights into: • Leveraging personal branding effectively for your agency or consultancy • Harnessing the power of community to elevate your brand • Building a brand in the AI-era with timely and relevant content • Converting branding efforts into tangible leads and revenue Join us as we go deep into how brand marketing can help grow your digital marketing business. Session details:   Personal branding for agency & consultancy growth Learn how to effectively and efficiently leverage personal branding—both yours and your employees'—to enhance your business's digital presence, authority, and lead generation. Gain insider advice to avoid potential pitfalls along the way. Panelists: Lily Ray and Carrie Rose Leveraging communities for growth opportunities Learn how to engage with your target communities to position your digital marketing agency and consultancy for new growth opportunities.  Panelists: Nick Eubanks and Erica Schneider . Get growing with an editorial-first focus Learn from top content publishers in the digital marketing space about how and why they leverage straightforward content creation to position their brands for new opportunities and revenue streams.   Panelists: John Shehata , Katie Morton , Ray Martinez , Claudio Cabrera . Converting branding into actual leads How do you take all of your good branding work and convert it into actual leads and revenue growth? Explore how digital marketing agencies and consultancies can best leverage branding for pure lead generation.    Panelists: Domenica D’Ottavio and Terry Rice . Session Moderators Katie Morton Mordy Oberstein George Nguyen

June 25, 2024 Get up to speed with the latest strategies for GA4. How has this new era of analytics transformed how we think about website data—and most importantly, what new insights does it reveal about your customers?  In this webinar, we'll cover: New GA4 features and must-know functionality Common problems—and solutions How to find growth opportunities You can also explore Crystal's deck  for more resources on what was discussed during the webinar. Meet your hosts: Navah Hopkins Consultant & Paid Media Strategist Navah is a s ought-after paid media strategist with more than a decade of experience advising brands and agencies. Passionate about helping businesses unlock the full value of digital advertising, she is a popular industry speaker and also serves as an evangelist for Optmyzer. X (Twitter) | LinkedIn Dana DiTomaso Founder, KP Playbook President & Partner, Kick Point Dana is founder and lead instructor at KP Playbook, and president and partner at Kick Point. She shows marketers how to set smart goals and track results so that they understand what strategies bring real value. Dana also teaches analytics at the University of Alberta.  X (Twitter) | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more . X (Twitter) | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Brand, Wix In addition to leading SEO branding at Wix, Mordy serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. A passionate SEO educator, Mordy authored the Wix SEO Guide  and is a popular industry speaker. Catch him chatting all things SEO on SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web . X (Twitter) | LinkedIn

Tuesday, May 28, 2024 | 1PM ET The rollout of Google Search Generative Experience has seismic implications for SEO. Join this expert-led webinar for a breakdown of the business verticals set to be most impacted and learn what actions you can take to prepare for the new AI-powered world of search. In this webinar, we’ll shed light on: How user journeys will change What this means for CTR Tactics for ranking in SGE Explore Crystal's deck , Ann's deck  and Eli's deck  for more resources on what was discussed during the webinar. Meet your hosts: Eli Schwartz Growth Advisor and SEO Consultant Eli  is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy . A growth advisor and enterprise SEO consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the world’s top sites. X (Twitter) | LinkedIn Ann Smarty SEO Analyst, Internet Marketing Ninjas Ann  is an SEO analyst and founder of Viral Content Bee. With more than two decades of experience in the digital marketing landscape, she is also the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and a popular writer for prominent blogs such as Moz and Mashable. X (Twitter) | LinkedIn George Nguyen Director of SEO Editorial, Wix George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works and how to use Wix SEO tools . He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. X (Twitter) | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. X (Twitter) | LinkedIn

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 | 1PM ET Our panel of SEO and content experts will be live auditing sites in this session. Submit your site on sign-up for the chance to receive invaluable feedback. In addition to live auditing, this webinar will cover: How can you make AI content unique  The keys that make good AI content–great How to identify opportunities for differentiation Meet your hosts: Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Ben Steele Managing Editor, Search Engine Journal Ben is a proud content goblin with over 10 years of experience as a writer, editor, and content strategist. At SEJ, Ben manages the ebooks program and assists the Editor-in-Chief with editorial operations. You'll find his personal touch on every new ebook SEJ releases. LinkedIn

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 | 1PM ET Market smarter by leveraging AI and automation in your workflows. Join industry-leading growth strategists, Duane Brown and Menachem Ani, to learn how to build data-driven digital marketing campaigns that drive max conversions.  In this webinar, we’ll cover: Tips for getting started with automation Using AI to ramp up marketing productivity How to put time-saving tools like Zapier to work Meet your hosts: Duane Brown, CEO & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk Inc. Duane heads up ad agency Take Some Risk Inc., where he helps brands drive growth through strategy, data, and PPC. He has more than 17 years’ digital marketing experience advising global clients like ASOS, Walmart and Jack Wills.  His LinkedIn Learning course has been taken by 25K+ people LinkedIn Menachem Ani, Founder & CEO, JXT Group Menachem is the founder of JXT Group, an agency that specializes in multi-channel online advertising. A pro-automation, paid media specialist, he’s one of today’s leading authorities on Google Ads tactics. He has written for many publications including Search Engine Journal. X (Twitter) | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. X (Twitter)  |  LinkedIn George Nguyen,  Director of SEO Editorial, Wix As Director of SEO Editorial at Wix, George creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. Formerly a search news journalist, he has spoken at many industry events and endeavors to improve the general public’s knowledge of search engines. X (Twitter)  | LinkedIn

Author: Mordy Oberstein It’s impossible for Google to manually sort through billions of web pages in order to match the best ones to a given search term. That’s why Google employs algorithms to provide searchers with a relevant set of results in a scalable manner. More accurately, Google uses a collection of algorithms that work harmoniously to offer the right kind of information for the given search term.  That makes understanding what Google’s algorithms are and why they exist vital for every digital marketer, brand, business owner, or person that needs to get traffic to their website from search.  Let’s get started with what you need to know. Table of contents: What is the Google algorithm? Why SEOs pay attention to Google’s algorithms Why Google updates its algorithms Google’s most important algorithms and ranking systems PageRank Hummingbird & RankBrain BERT MUM Helpful Content & the Core Algorithm Do ranking factors affect Google’s algorithms? What is the Google algorithm? What digital marketers refer to as the “Google Algorithm” is a collection of integrated algorithms and ranking systems that determine which results and features Google shows for a given search term or keyword.  These systems use data from web crawls, user behavior, machine learning, and other signals to sort and rank web content. So rather than being a static entity, the so-called “Google Algorithm” is made up of many constantly moving parts. Why SEOs pay attention to Google’s algorithms Changes to the Google algorithm (also known as “algorithm updates”) can sometimes result in sudden traffic and visibility drops for websites. The professionals supporting search engine optimization (SEO) clients at digital marketing agencies or consultancies keep track of these updates to fine-tune their SEO strategies and approach. By monitoring and assessing the impact of Google algorithm updates  on your website, you can create a plan to address changes in your organic traffic. Why Google updates its algorithms Since new content is constantly getting added to the web, the machine learning behind the algorithms constantly recalibrates how it understands content, adds additional considerations to the mix, and makes changes.  Google also wants to ensure that it meets the changing needs of users and attempts to align its algorithm with evolving consumption trends. When Google makes changes to its ranking systems, big or small, these are called algorithm updates. Google’s most important algorithms and ranking systems Though Google has never disclosed a complete list of the criteria it uses for ranking, the company does share some information around some of its most important ranking systems.  For those working in SEO today, knowledge of the following algorithms can help you better manage your SEO priorities: PageRank Hummingbird & RankBrain BERT MUM Helpful Content System & the Core Algorithm  PageRank Google’s original search algorithm is called PageRank and it has been a central part of the company’s algorithm since it was founded. This algorithm heavily relies on the number and quality of backlinks  a site/page receives to rank content. This model views links as an affirmation of a page’s content quality—if high-quality sites linked to a page often, then Google assumed it must contain quality content.  The problem, however, is that links are a secondary signal. The number of links doesn’t tell the search engine about the actual content quality, only the probability that it contains quality content (since many people linked to it). Websites could easily game the algorithm through spammy links and illicit content practices.  Hummingbird & RankBrain In 2013, Google essentially restructured its core algorithm to focus less on linear interpretation and more on semantic understanding. The update, known as Hummingbird, introduced the concept of “things, not strings” to the SEO vernacular.  In short, Hummingbird gave Google the ability to understand context to better connect various concepts and “things” together. This resulted in the search engine being able to move beyond directly matching the terms used in a search query with the content on a page.  In this way, Google was able to understand that when someone searched for [New York’s oldest pro hockey team], for example, that the intent was to find the New York Rangers. Moreover, the ranking pages would not need to necessarily include the term “New York’s oldest pro hockey team” to rank, as Hummingbird was able to make the semantic connection. Then in 2015, RankBrain’s release ushered in the age of machine learning. RankBrain extended and amplified what was possible with Hummingbird (to the best of our understanding, RankBrain operates “within” HummingBird ).  With RankBrain, Google could analyze a massive amount of user data to see what pages satisfied users’ intent when searching for a specific query. With this information, RankBrain could build models to understand which on-page factors or content signals were more (or less) important to a searcher and use them to structure search results. For example, when you searched for [buy car insurance] prior to RankBrain, the search results page would list car insurance providers. However, Google quickly realized that, for such queries, users often wanted information about buying the product or service (in this case, car insurance). Now, Google shows a healthy mix of providers that educate users on how to choose the best insurance: Similarly, because of RankBrain, Google discovered that users preferred an image of the finished dish alongside recipe results. To now rank for a recipe-related keyword, a page must contain an image (all things other considerations being equal): Moving beyond secondary signals, Google has implemented technology like  neural matching , Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) and Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to better understand user queries. BERT Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers) is a machine learning algorithm that helps Google codify the relationships between words and word sequences to better interpret the meaning of content. This is considered to be a foundational algorithm and is used to identify sentiment, questions, and predict text with more natural language.  Formally introduced to Google Search in 2019, Pandu Nayak, the company’s VP of search, explained that BERT  models can “consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries.” For SEOs, this change signals the introduction of more emphasis on semantic search , the intent behind keywords , and also the implicit intent of a given search . MUM Publicly launched in 2021, Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM)  has 1000x more machine learning power than BERT and signaled an intention from Google to better integrate multimedia into its search queries and user journeys .  The company teased the potential applications of this new algorithm via significant integrations with Google Lens and visual search as ways to search Google. Like BERT before it, this algorithm is designed to help Google better understand content, including multimedia, rather than to assess the quality of a website. To date, MUM’s application has been limited compared to other algorithms and ranking systems. MUM was first implemented to better help Google understand the various ways searchers were referencing COVID vaccines across the globe. MUM also helps Google improve quality by  identifying consensus on the web . As time goes on, the most logical assumption is that Google will find additional ways for MUM to play a role in the ranking process.  Helpful Content & the Core Algorithm  In August 2022, Google released the Helpful Content Update  (HCU), an algorithm designed to target low-quality “that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.” The HCU follows in the tradition of historic, now-retired algorithms, like Panda, which tended to reward (and devalue) domains based on perceived quality. But unlike those updates, the Helpful Content classifier “runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones,” Google explained , “As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.” At Pubcon in February 2023, Gary Illyes , analyst on the Google Search team, suggested that recovering organic visibility  after being negatively impacted by the HCU may be particularly difficult. And although SEOs observed minimal impact from the HCU’s initial release, following updates in 2023 showed this algorithm’s significance.  In March 2024, Google announced it would no longer rely on one system to determine “helpfulness” but rather would assess sites for “helpfulness in a multitude of ways, following the path of previous heavy-weight algorithms such as the aforementioned Panda update as well as Penguin (which focuses on devaluing spammy link practices ). Having the core algorithm determine helpfulness prevents a scenario where the HCU competes with other algorithms. Think of the “core algorithm” as a stew, where each spice and ingredient works in relative harmony with the others. An update to the core algorithm might mean a change in how those various ingredients factor into each other and the role they play in the overall stew—among other things (such as advancements that enable the elements within the core algorithm to function at a higher level). Do ranking factors affect Google’s algorithms? Don’t get confused: While the  SEO  industry has long discussed specific “ranking factors” or “ranking signals,” there’s a lot of misinformation out there and I strongly advocate for a holistic approach. Google allegedly uses more than 200 official ranking signals to decide what content should (or should not) rank for a query. These factors include anything from links to content relevance. Many SEO professionals debate one ranking factor’s importance over another, while others will try to “optimize” for as many “factors” as possible. This is a mistake. For starters, there is no universal list of the most weighted factors. The factors Google uses vary from query to query and from vertical to vertical. Google uses a complex process to evaluate content, employing machine learning to understand language and better classify and profile content to determine its quality: “It’s something where, if you have an overview of the whole web (or kind of a large part of the web) and you see which type of content is reasonable for which individual topics, then that is something where you could potentially infer from that. Like for this particular topic, we need to cover these subtopics, we need to have this information, we need to add more images or fewer images on a page. That is something that perhaps you can look at something like that. I am sure our algorithms are quite a bit more complicated than that, though.” — John Mueller, Senior Search Analyst at Google via Search Engine Roundtable For example, trustworthy medical content can greatly impact a reader’s health, so it should look, sound, and feel different than a gossip column. So for health information, Google trains a machine learning model to identify a content profile based on its leaders, such as the Mayo Clinic. The assessment of “good” vs. “bad” content happens in what I’ll call the “pre-algorithmic” or “meta-algorithmic” stage and impacts what kinds of pages rank beyond a specific ranking factor. Simply put, don’t worry about “ranking factors.” Instead, write highly-targeted, substantial content. Cater your content to your target audience’s needs, knowledge level, and frame of reference. Make sure your content genuinely helps them. That’s the most important thing. Google aligns its algorithms to users Though the tooling may change, ultimately each Google algorithm works to more closely understand user behavior, to put users first. So to better understand Google’s algorithms, it helps to look at your site and its pages from the perspective of a new user.  What signals are you latently sending? If your tone is not serious enough (or perhaps too serious given the niche), what will users feel?  When you take a step back and look at the subtle signals your pages give off, you are aligning with Google. You’re putting yourself in a position to go beyond Google’s current capabilities, which, in turn, puts your site in a prime position to improve its rankings as algorithms change or when a core update releases. Mordy Oberstein - Head of SEO Branding, Wix   Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Twitter  | Linkedin

Monday, January 22, 2024 | 1PM ET Speed up the process of getting your pages crawled and indexed . Join Microsoft Bing’s Fabrice Canel and Wix’s Crystal Carter to learn about tools that help you manage indexing more efficiently—and hear real user questions get answered.  In this webinar, we'll cover: IndexNow and tools that support quicker indexing  Troubleshooting common indexing challenges Tips for optimizing your crawl on Wix Meet your hosts: Fabrice Canel Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Bing A 25-year search veteran at Microsoft, Fabrice leads the team crawling, processing and indexing at Bing. He drives the evolution of the Bing Web Data platform to maximize index freshness and comprehensiveness. He’s also responsible for search protocols and standards.  Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn

July 16, 2024 Google leaks, AI overviews, new Google algorithm ranking systems —2024 has been a year. It’s time to ask some real questions about the future of Search as we rocket towards a whole new frontier. In this webinar, we'll cover: The arrival and staying power of 2024’s major SEO changes What additional trends our experts are  observing Practical, future-proofing advice for the new search paradigm You can also explore Crystal's deck  for more resources on what was discussed during the webinar. Meet your hosts: Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Michael King Founder & CEO, iPullRank An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Twitter | LinkedIn Lily Ray Sr. Director of SEO & Head of Organic Research , Amsive Digital Lily has been making waves in the SEO industry since 2010. Shifting from start-up to agency–she has helped develop and establish an award-winning SEO department at Amsive Digital, delivering high impact work for a long-list of notable clients, including several Fortune 500 companies. Twitter | LinkedIn