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Does AI content rank on the SERP? Can you count on AI content to rank in the future? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter investigate the place of AI content in Google’s ranking algorithm. Join them as they take a deep dive into how successful websites are delivering their content and what others in the SEO community think about AI-generated content. Listen as special guest John Wall, host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast, guides you through creating AI content that DOES rank with his generative AI for marketers framework. Please rank responsibly, as this week, we delve into Google’s evolving approach for ranking AI content here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Does AI content rank? Does AI content rank on the SERP? Can you count on AI content to rank in the future? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter investigate the place of AI content in Google’s ranking algorithm. Join them as they take a deep dive into how successful websites are delivering their content and what others in the SEO community think about AI-generated content. Listen as special guest John Wall, host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast, guides you through creating AI content that DOES rank with his generative AI for marketers framework. Please rank responsibly, as this week, we delve into Google’s evolving approach for ranking AI content here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 80 | March 27, 2024 | 53 MIN 00:00 / 52:35 This week’s guests John Wall "John J. Wall writes and practices at the intersection of marketing, sales, and technology. He is the producer of Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program that discusses marketing and technology. John is also a partner at Trust Insights and has been cited by CBS Evening News, The Associated Press, Inc. Magazine, Forbes, The Boston Globe, DM News, and Featured Apple Podcasts." Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO Podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm already overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the ever-constant, the ever-ranking, the ever-green. I say green because you have a plant in your background now. Head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: This is an audio-only experience. The people don't know that I have a green thing behind me. Mordy Oberstein: You do. You have a green... I like it because it's not green green. It's sage green. Is that the name of the green? Is that right? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's actually only green because it's a fake olive tree. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I should know that because I have an olive tree right next to my house. Crystal Carter: This is true. But my grandma used to have an orange tree in their backyard. That was nice. Mordy Oberstein: You want to hear a crazy story? I used to live in an apartment and it had a garden. Crystal Carter: That is crazy. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that is crazy, right? Living is crazy. It had an olive tree. And the way the garden was laid out, it was right next to a staircase, a publicly used staircase that went down to the next street. You can imagine the next street was a level lower, you had to go down the staircase. And the branches extended over the fence onto the staircase. And we come home one day, and the olive tree, all the branches are cut down. Some maniac, I guess, got upset that the branches were overhanging onto the stair- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And cut down almost the entire olive tree. Crystal Carter: Just from that side? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he must've climbed over the fence a little bit and... Crystal Carter: Whoa. Wowza. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Psycho, right? Crystal Carter: So I used to work for the parks department for the city, and legally, if it's over your side, that part of the tree is yours. Legally speaking, that side of the tree is yours. So I used to also... Really telling everybody my business here. This is totally relevant, but not. Anyway, basically, I used to forage for free apples and stuff around. And basically, if the apple tree was hanging over the sidewalk, those apples are mine. I can have those apples. They're mine and I'm going to eat them. So that's what I'm doing. You don't like your apples being in the public domain, get your tree out of the public domain. Mordy Oberstein: How do you like them apples? Crystal Carter: Basically. So yeah, it's very complex, trees. Mordy Oberstein: Trees are complex. They are complex. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tag-creator to spit up title tags and meta descriptions in no time flat because time is not flat, time is round. Also, I don't write meta descriptions anymore. I let the AI do it every time because when it comes to meta descriptions, I don't care. Why? Because AI content ranks. And also because meta descriptions, whatever, who cares, right? I'm saying that as Crystal's looking at me like, "Why are you saying that?" Because I don't care. I don't think they are impactful. One of my least important SEO tasks are meta descriptions. I guess it might help with clicks if Google didn't rewrite half of them. I'm real salty about meta descriptions, but you can use your AI meta tag writer to write them. How's that for a pitch? Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay, that's cool. Okay. So let's just clear this up. I have time for meta descriptions because I've seen them work, right? I've seen them work, but I don't think that you should be hand crafting them artisanally. I don't think- Mordy Oberstein: No, there's no reason. Either way, there's no reason. Just let the AI write that. Crystal Carter: Right. And if you're not using AI, you don't necessarily have to use AI. You can also just do programmatically. So in Wix, you have the option for both. You have the option for either the programmatic setup where you insert keyword for this- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Or take product description, make it meta description. Crystal Carter: Right. This is the title of the product, brand new, et cetera. You can set the template for it so that the template does the work for you. That I am all here for and following best practices, et cetera. But I have seen for good pages for your big money pages, putting a good CTA on there. Mordy Oberstein: No. It could be impactful for conversions. Fine. Yeah, I'm with that when Google's not rewriting them 99.9% of the time. I agree. We all agree to disagree. One thing we do agree on is that today we're talking about AI content and does it rank? Insert dramatic music. Why understanding if AI content ranks matters? Why understanding of AI content ranks on the SERP is just the beginning? And will AI content continue to rank on the SERP? Assuming it already does, but I feel like I'm giving it away there that we're telling you that it already does. Because we surveyed you, the SEOs, to see what you think. So y'all are our guests today, but also our guests that'd be Marketing Over Coffee's host, John Wall, who will talk about when and when not to use AI for content generation. Plus we have the Snappy SEO News for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So get out your best AI prompts and put on a funny little cone hat like you went to a birthday party as episode number 80 of the SERP's Up Podcast plays in the AI content on the rankings. Crystal Carter: Okay. Thank you for that exciting introduction. So let's just talk about why we're talking about this. Mordy Oberstein: Exciting introduction. Wow, sarcasm much. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: I was hallucinating because I was using AI. Crystal Carter: Okay. So why are we talking about this? The reason why we're talking about this is because it's been very up-and-down. When AI was in the backburner, Google was like, "Don't use AI, don't use AI everyone. I know you've heard about all these tools, but don't use AI. Be good little SEOs, don't use AI." And then ChatGPT broke virally, it was way more accessible. And then they were like, "Okay, you can use AI as long as it's helpful. You can use helpful AI. If it's helpful, that's fine, we won't penalize you. It's fine." And there's been up and down. People have been testing AI content for years, testing pretty much unedited AI content for years. There's a few people who've been doing a lot of experiments around this. Mark Williams-Cook has a very well-documented experiment that he's been running on this content as well. And for a while, people were saying, "Oh, yeah, it doesn't really rank," or "It ranks for a while and then it will completely tank." And that's something that people have said. However, it's my opinion and it's something that I've observed that basically, if people remember back around this time of year or around the spring of 2023 when Bing was like, "Yo, we have new Bing. We are putting AI in the SERP." And Google was going, "Oh, we also have AI," and they were trying to catch up, I've started to see a lot more content that is AI-generated being openly AI-generated and ranking. And so I'm going to share a couple of examples of that. One is a big example, which is LinkedIn's advice folder, which has been going gangbusters pretty much since they started doing it. They built this up in the springtime of 2023, and they've seen some incredible activities for this. If you haven't seen this, basically you haven't been on LinkedIn. And basically, when you go on LinkedIn, LinkedIn will ask you questions, "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?" And they call them collaborative articles in the folders under advice and things like, "What does a production coordinator do? What is regression testing and why is it important? What are the best practices for this?" Now, the way I stumbled upon this wasn't actually through LinkedIn; it was actually through a featured snippet. I found a featured snippet. It was talking about a technical SEO term, and it actually didn't have any contributions. But at the top of every article, it says that this article was created by AI and the LinkedIn community and they're doing incredibly well. So they started building up this folder around March 2023. They peaked with their traffic at 2.8 million globally in about 2023 September. And it went down a little bit, but it's got down to 1.7 million according to Semrush's stats. And I take that traffic. I'll take that. If that's where we're dropping back to, that's fine. And they're not the only ones. Another from a smaller example is a site called Wellnite.com, which is a site that's actually working more in the YMYL space. So they are something that talks about counseling and they've got lots of articles. One of them is bottling up emotions, how to let go, acknowledge your emotions, peaceful mind practice and things like that. And at the bottom, it says, "PS, this blog was created with AI software as a tool to supplement the author accompanied by Wellnite staff overview and supervision." And that is an example of a website that had been going, ticking along through 2020, 2021 at getting around global traffic according to Semrush of about 400 or so. There are lots of blogs that are like that, lots of company blogs that are like that for smaller websites. And theirs started ticking along. But then in 2023, they started adding in these AI-generated contents, and they were able to increase the number of articles that they were ranking. And they've now been able to double their traffic monthly because of that. And again, it's still fairly small traffic, but compared to where they were, that's a very significant jump. And the amount of traffic that they've seen increased between the start of 2023 and where we are in 2024 is significant. It's the most significant growth they've ever seen across their domain. So to my mind, AI content is doing just fine and there's lots of evidence to show that, but there's a few things that people can do to make it better. And I think the people who are doing it well are taking advantage of some of those elements. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. I think very much, it depends. The linked articles I think are a great case. First off, the linked articles are from LinkedIn, so you are not LinkedIn. So that's one thing to be careful of. But the second thing is the linked articles are interesting. I actually like them because they make me think because I don't like the answers. I don't like the content that they offer. I find I comment on them, so I get a little badge thing on LinkedIn because I'm being like that. And most of my takes are like, "Nah, that's not how you should actually think about it." But interestingly enough, and I wonder if this plays into it or how it plays into it, you're actually getting first-person experience on those articles in the comments themselves. And that's my point that it all depends with this kind of thing. For example, Mark Williams-Cook has an article on Search Engine Land where he talks about LLMs generating content. And when he ran an experience, he created 10,000 URLs on unsupervised AI. And you see it ranks and it just gets killed off. And there are a bunch of examples like that. So it's using this or thinking about, "Does it rank unequivocally?" The answer is it depends what you mean by that. If you're just spinning up random content or unsupervised content, the answer is it'll rank for a while. I think it's very much spam content in general. It ranks for a while, and then it falls off. So I was reading in Traffic Think Tank recently, was Andy Chapa talking about a case where I think someone all of a sudden got... They must have bought tons of links. And you see this, people buy tons of links, they start ranking for a while and then Google eventually figures it out and gets rid of it. I think it's very similar to that or any other kind of spam practice. If you're using AI in a spammy kind of way, you'll rank two, three, four months and then it'll fall off. And that's been a lot of the consensus around what's been shared in the SEO community about this. And we actually asked the SEO community on January 29th, "Does Google consistently regularly rank AI content?" And out of 120 so votes, 82% of people said yes, and around 70% of people said no. And then the comments are filled with these anecdotes. For example, Kristine Schachinger said, "It does and then it will not." And I think what she's talking about are those kind of cases where what Mark did, where you're just unsupervised, this doesn't make any sense, it's not good content, it's not helpful, it'll get killed off, which is what Google's saying. I think there's a lot of politics behind what Google's saying also, but whatever. We'll leave that aside. It's not for this podcast. Darth Autocrat, Lyndon NA. He wrote, "Yes, but it's kind of skewed due to the sheer volume of it and the overall scope of AI content. Even if you utterly ignore the spammer flood, legitimate networks are always, if not partially using, so it shows for news, et cetera." So that's a really good point, how you use it, how you go about using it, it's really important. Pedro Diaz wrote, "I anticipate the answers are all going towards experience people had and seen recently within their search bubble," which I think is a very good point to having broader views in a wider spectrum of experiences. And I don't think I've seen a wide study on AI content ranking. And I think that would be fascinating to see to address that point. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that there's so many different variations in the ways that people are using it because the other thing is that there's lots of people who aren't ranking with AI content. But there's also the case that, and we've seen this with the AI tools that we have in Wix, we've used AI tools to help people do things like the meta descriptions, for instance. We talked about those. And what we've seen with that is that there's a lot more people who have accessibility, with lowercase a, to some of these techniques because they don't have to worry about the barriers to entry regarding grammar, for instance, or regarding even sometimes the ideation. So that Wellnite website is a classic example. They were publishing occasionally, but they were able to increase the rate of publishing because they were using some of these AI tools. So I think that there's going to be a lot of people who are getting more access to these things, who are able to articulate themselves better with the help of some of these tools. And that I think is a win. I think that's a good thing that people who were previously not able to understand or use meta descriptions at all, for instance, are able to engage with that content. I think that's a benefit, and I think that that's something that will affect which pages are ranking and will affect how many pages are ranking. However, there's going to be a lot of people who are just putting out junk, but those people were putting out junk anyway before in lots of other ways. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's what I was going to say. It's really a matter of mindset, and we'll talk about it with John later on that how do you go about building the content utilizing AI and expediting your processes? Because at the same time, I think something very important to keep in the back of your mind when you're using AI to create content, which you should certainly be doing the right way, is where's Google trying to go? And this speaks to a lot of the Reddit controversy on the SERP at the moment as we're recording, and who knows if it'll fixed by the time we're done recording. But there's been a lot of pushback about the amount of Reddit results Google's showing on the SERP. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that Google's trying to push for first-person, first knowledge, experience-based content and Google's having a lot of issues with this. But you see this trend keep coming up with things like Reddit ranking, Gisele Navarro put out an interesting post about product review websites and how folks like Rolling Stone have jumped into the product review space. And one of the things that they're doing to rank is relying on first-person experience in a way. I'll put a little caveat, a little asterisk on that, by using first-person expressions, like I, we, our, which I've personally seen a huge influx of folks doing that over time. So we take the same product review page now, and you put it in the Wayback Machine, the amount of our, we, first-person language has increased exponentially. And there's a recent study that Cyrus Shepard did that shows, and again, it's a correlation study, so no one freak out like, "Oh, no, it's correlation." But correlation sometimes can point you in the right direction and correlation does mean something. And one of the things that he noticed in websites that are winning is the usage of first-person pronouns: me, we, I, that sort of thing. The direction where Google is trying to go kind of contradicts a lot of the things that people are doing with AI content. So when you're building AI content, you need to keep in mind where the ecosystem is shifting and leverage AI the right way within that context. Crystal Carter: Right. So I think that the first-person experience is super important for that. And there's a couple of reasons why writing... Whenever I'm doing content evaluations or making content recommendations, particularly to blog-facing content or customer service attributions and things, I very often say that people should speak in the second person, like, "You should do this, you can do that, you could do this. We do this for you because it is good and you will like it," and that sort of thing. And the reason why is because a lot of people are on their mobiles, and that is a one-person situation. That is a one-person thing. Even if you share that with somebody, even if you will share it to their mobile and they will read it personally on their mobile phone, individually. So it's like, "Hi, I am talking to you," it's very much an individual situation. So users are going to be responding to that in lots of ways. And I think that when we think about AI content, I don't think that AI content is necessarily opposed to that. I think it's a way to organize that sort of thing. One really good example that I saw in terms of product reviews was Spruce Pets. They had a great product review of dog carriers, and clearly they had people who were testing it with their dogs. They were like, "Here I am with my dog, here is my dog in the dog carrier," that sort of thing. But then here's where you use the AI. The AI is where you pull in how to organize all the product detail between the different ones. How you say, "Okay, this one has a carrier, this one has a pocket, this one has a thing for treats," all of that sort of stuff. That's what you use the AI for. And you maybe use the AI to pull out some of the common threads of some of the first-person things that you're using. So I don't think it's necessarily opposed, but I think you should use it to clean up some of the qualitative information. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's part of the problem with the discussion is that when you look at a zero-sum, either there's AI content or not AI content. So I'll tell you one of the things that I'm a big proponent of is what I'll call situational content writing. So one of the ways you can actually show expertise in a real way, other than just loading in the page with we, I, me, which anybody can do, an LLM can do that if you trick it to do that for you, it is actually predicting the situation the consumer's going to face and then writing about that situation. Because that actually demonstrates you actually know what the heck you're talking about and have actual experience. Because you can't predict the next scenario unless you have some kind of situational experience. However, if you're talking about let's go with a pet carrier thing, situation. How to get your pet into the pet carrier if they don't want to go in? You'll predict as someone who has a pet, you can try this. If that doesn't work, then try this. But the general like, "What is a pet carrier?" Let's say you wanted to put that there, but you probably don't need, but let's say you did, then you can have an AI spin out like, "What is the pet carrier?" Sure, go ahead and write that part. It's not a zero-sum. So let the AI save you time and let it make you more efficient in the right spots within the expert and the experience-driven content you want to create. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's also important to remember that there's going to be some content that people don't care what an AI thinks about it like, "Is your pet happy in the pet carrier?" for instance. That's something I don't really care what ChatGPT thinks about whether or not my Cocker Spaniel is happy in the carrier. If I hear from other people, "Yeah, my dog was really happy. He was wagging his tail, he kept sniffing my ear," or whatever, that sort of thing. That's something that I would like to hear first-person knowledge of and that's something that you should be aware of. And then that situational stuff is really important because that situational information is stuff that you can get from users, from real humans, from real human users and from real personal experience. And I think that you can use, again, if not zero-sum, you can use AI to help you collate and to help you organize some of the things that you're getting from user videos, user interviews, customer feedback reforms, that sort of stuff to help you bring some of that together. But you're going to be able to add value with a cyborg kind of approach, if that makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: And look, that's going to be the kind of content that ranks fundamentally. In fact, now at some point, Google's... Listen, there's two possibilities in my opinion. Either Google will figure this out to make sure that the content that has actual expertise and actual experience, which may be supplemented by AI ranks, or it won't be a search engine anymore that we'll go to. So either way, it doesn't matter. Okay. Well, since we're already talking about AI and content and ranking, I think it behooves us to talk about AI for content generation so that you know how to create the AI content that ranks and not the AI content that ranks, but really shouldn't rank. So rank responsibly. Please rank responsibly. To help us talk about this, we have a very special guest with the host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, John Wall, as we move beyond SEO and into the great beyond. Hey John, welcome to the podcast. How are you? John Wall: Great, thanks. Glad to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So you're the host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. You also work for Trust Insights and do a lot with AI. Now is the time on the podcast for you to pitch. John Wall: Yeah. So with Trust Insights, we've done a lot of stuff with generative AI. Our chief technologist, Christopher Penn, has been using AI in PR and marketing for over 15 years. So we already had a bunch of stuff that we were using AI for as far as attribution and predictive analysis for creating content calendars, things like that. And so yeah, generative AI has now spun up though and he is just in demand everywhere. In fact, he's speaking in London this week. Yeah, it's become huge. And so we actually have put together a framework of generative AI for marketers, stuff that you can do to create content, do better in SEO. There's a whole bunch of different avenues and strategies, everything just from the basic habit, my blog post, which is what you're talking about, stuff that comes out and is weak at best. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, you're trying to create stuff that nobody else is doing and actually has some novelty, and we'll get you to the higher amounts of traffic and positioning because it's quality stuff. Crystal Carter: I think that one of the things that stood out from that was you said you've been working in this space for years, and I think that that's one of the things that a lot of people don't realize. People say, "Oh, AI is new." Google's been using AI in the SERPs for years. But people like folks from your team have been using these tools for many, many years. And I think that that gives you particularly interesting insights on this. There's a lot of people who are just new to the game and just getting involved, but I think that there's going to be some things that you've tried and understand more than other people. John Wall: Yeah, I think it is very different than a lot of the other trends that come up through marketing. When we had cyber currency, it was a huge deal and NFTs and all this kind of stuff, they were created. But AI, as a concept, was created back in the 1950s, right? Crystal Carter: Right. John Wall: The academic community understood what this could do and where it was going, and it was just that the computing power wasn't there. Yeah. So idea of being able to figure out, "Identify the difference between human and AI, can you fool people?" And of course, there's always been turks, right? There's always machines that can make you think you're talking to a computer when you're really not, because there's still some human interaction in there on the back-end. But yeah, we're at least getting close to the point where ChatGPT could fool somebody for a little while for four or five prompts before you figure out that they're a person. But better customer service tools have already been able to do that to some point. They can get you there. But yeah, so now people have kind of jumped on the AI bandwagon and Gartner's peak hype right now where every product has AI attached to it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my gosh. John Wall: My tires were rotated last week with AI over at the gas station. Mordy Oberstein: I have AI tires. Yours were rotated with AI. I have actual AI tires. John Wall: You have AI in the tires. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Do they tell you when you're in the wrong lane? Mordy Oberstein: No, they don't do anything for me whatsoever. They hallucinate and tell me I'm in a desert on the highway and where I'm really driving in my actual driveway. So I don't know what's flying. I'm going to use my AI tires. John Wall: Yeah, it is everywhere. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So if we're going to actually use AI in a real way, we're going to say, "Okay, let's create content and let's use AI." Is it carte blanche, like just go wild? John Wall: No, no. There's a lot of ways to go. In fact, I would even back up. I would not start with generative AI. We did and have done predictive models. So for example, we've done a bunch of stuff in the food space, and it's worked so well we had to come up with a sample for the rest of the world. So we have the cheese report, which is an annual report that comes out and it talks about, "Okay, which cheeses are most searched for every week of the year?" And so you can- Crystal Carter: It's cheddar, right? Mordy Oberstein: American. John Wall: Cheddar. We're just coming off hot cheddar with the Super Bowl here in America. That's very popular. Mozzarella surges as we get close to Christmas. Mordy Oberstein: Kraft singles, American cheese is not- Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's cheddar. Cheddar is your best cheese. It's good for almost every situation. John Wall: Cheddar is always ranking high. It's definitely top 10 most of the year. But look, for a content marketer, the big one now you'd look at is halloumi where you've got grillable cheeses will be popular June, July when that time of the year comes. So if you've got your content calendar, you should be starting to script out those halloumi videos and recipes and all that stuff now, so that you've got that stuff dropping in May and you're able to get some Google juice to that before peak search season in June, July. Mordy Oberstein: Some hot cheese right there. John Wall: Yeah, that's the hot cheese. And we have it for a whole bunch of other foods, but the brands that get those reports don't let us share that with anybody else. So we're not able to share our food insight outside of cheese, but that gives you an example of using some predictive AI to actually create content that is in demand. And that way, you've got your stuff all updated when you hit peak search. Crystal Carter: And I think is there a little bit of overlap for content like that, for instance? Let's say, if you're running a stats tool throughout the year or something, for instance, the Billboard Hot 100 changes every day or that sort of thing. If you're running a SaaS tool like that, how much is there crossover between programmatic elements and AI elements with creating content around that? John Wall: It completely overlaps. AI is not going to come up with anything new. That's really what it is. It's just you're applying programmatic strategies to figuring out what's going to be coming on and where it goes. And there's a ton of ways to apply that too. Another way we see it all over the place is with reviews or other huge libraries of content where instead of generating, have it do summarization or classification. And take a huge batch of reviews, have it come up with, "Okay, what are the five most common things that people like/don't like about this product?" And now that's a blog post that's based on your data, that's proprietary that somebody else using GenAI can't just come up with that post. You're the only one that can do that and it's going to be on target, but it's unique and it's your voice and it's probably going to be stronger across the board. Crystal Carter: I think that's great because with something like that, you can summarize and hit some of the key points with the keywords there. And also, it's got good user value because me, as a user, if I'm trying to decide whether or not I should use halloumi cheese or Havarti cheese on my cheeseburger, for instance, it might be like, "Yeah, this was a good cheese, but it didn't quite melt as much on the burger, for instance." And I can get that summary without reading 400 reviews that include like, "Oh, I dropped the cheese on the ground and things. It's one star." It's like, "No, you dropped it. That's your problem." John Wall: That's like the Amazon classic of the products that suck because the box arrived destroyed. There's all these- Mordy Oberstein: Right. I love that. I don't care. John Wall: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Because you know who's going to destroy the box in three seconds anyway? My children. John Wall: That's just been part of the customer experience. Mordy Oberstein: But this is a similar point to something we discussed. We had a webinar with Mike King and Ross Hudgens where we talked about giving AI rules and confines to work within as opposed to, "Here's a very open, unconfined scenario. But if you give it parameters to work with, it does much better and it does what you want it to do. And that's where I feel like it can offer real insights and real ability to produce content for you that you couldn't have done otherwise or you couldn't have done otherwise as quickly." But again, it's giving an open prompt and just telling it to go without any borders or any confines, is probably a recipe for disaster. John Wall: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So we even have a whole course that's seven hours of training, and a huge chunk of it is writing effective prompts. And so that's where some of the artistry is. And we have a whole framework, we call it the RACE Framework where for any prompt you want to do R-A-C-E. So you give it the role, you say, "Hey, you are an engineer that is working with stereo equipment. A, is for action. Your task is to come up with a list of whatever. "You give it context. That's the C, where you're saying that the audience is this level of professional. Is it engineers with 10 years' experience? Or is it people that have no experience with audio equipment? And then execute." You actually give it the instructions as far as how to write this. It should be at X grade level, it should cover X number of bullet points, have a summary. Basically, the best prompts, you have these huge paragraphs of stuff that you're using. Mordy Oberstein: That's the thing. AI is great. You have to shape it to what you want it to be. And I think the problem is that it's so easy and there's no barrier to entry that people think, "Oh, I can do this." To me, it's like picking up a baseball bat. Yes, you can pick up a baseball bat and you can swing it, but if you look at what the pros are actually doing, there's so much more that goes into it: managing the load, and where's your weight shifting? And when is your weight shifting? And where's your elbow? And how is your wrist turning? There's a million things that go into actually swinging a baseball bat the real way versus you just taking a whack at it with your wonky-ass swing. And it's very similar to AI. Yes, you could put in a prompt and yes, you can get an output but that's not actually swinging the bat. John Wall: Yeah. Another way to think of it, you have that thing, we've always talked about this in software is tools for experts versus expert tools. Look, right now, the state of AI, it's like a router. If you're a carpenter, who knows what the heck they're doing, you can do amazing things with this tool. If you are somebody who's just playing around, you could end up losing some fingers. Mordy Oberstein: That's okay. The AI will add the fingers and some back for you. John Wall: Man, I hadn't thought about how much that hits. Yeah. But thankfully, AI has tons of fingers that it can spread around liberally to everyone. I even saw that on Amazon, they have a fake plastic finger you can buy so that you can wear it around and then you can tell people, "Oh, no, that's obviously AI-generated, because- Mordy Oberstein: People are interesting, huh? John Wall: Yeah. I'm thinking I don't need to go through the work of making sure the finger matches. That seems like a lot of effort to perpetrate a fraud, so I'm not going to bother with that. Mordy Oberstein: You have to really take on the next load because let's say, I don't know, you're out at the beach and your fingers get tanned. You're going to have to have a tanned finger. Crystal Carter: Also, sometimes they think arms in different places that shouldn't be there. The arms coming out in the middle and you're like, "What is going on there?" But I've seen pop stars, there was a whole thing. I'm going to show myself here, but there was a whole thing on Nicki Minaj as a popular rapper and she had a new album art. She had a song she put out unannounced. And the album art she used for, it was clearly generated with AI, and it clearly had not gone through QA. And it was supposed to be police tape and it didn't say police all the way through, and the things had different arms and they had all of this sort of stuff. And even people who have the means... She's a multi-millionaire, and she has a PR team, and she has many people available. But even people who have the means aren't going through the QA. In terms of process, you have your prompting thing, you have your data thing, how much is the QA of the AI part of your process of getting good quality stuff? John Wall: Yeah. For us, that's a huge part of it. Really, in fact, there's nothing that can be released or put out there until it's been pounded on by experts who know what it should be doing and where it should be going. That's the real challenge of this. And then people don't get this either, is that you don't just build it and start using it. No, you build it, you run it and then you train it. And it needs to be constantly trained. Training needs to be a permanent part of your process. Mordy Oberstein: You mean, like anything else, it requires hard work? John Wall: You don't just hire it and then fire your whole marketing team the next day. Mordy Oberstein: You completely kill what AI means to me, and I am now completely uninterested in it. Crystal Carter: It's magic. Isn't it just magic? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. If it's not magic, I don't care. John Wall: Yes. In fact, it gets your coffee right in the morning and it will drive you home at the end of the day. Yeah. No, it doesn't do all the things. Mordy Oberstein: If it doesn't watch my kids, I don't care. Crystal Carter: I think it's important to remember the learning part of the machine learning because that's the other thing. For marketers, PPC, for instance, has had machine learning going on for years, for years and years. Facebook has had it in there. Google Ads has had it in there. And you had to do the machine learning part of it. You'd have to, and you'd have to train it and train the model and retrain the model and retrain your parameters and all that sort of stuff. So for people who just think you can set it and forget it and it will just do magic, it's just a rude awakening, I think. Mordy Oberstein: It's not the Ronco slow cooker, set it and forget it, which is my favorite- Crystal Carter: Hey, I love my slow cooker. My slow cooker is that. I just put all the things and then... John Wall: Set it- Mordy Oberstein: And then forget it. John Wall: One thing that we've been doing that is pretty interesting because of this idea that these models do read everything that's out there, we've played around with actually doing press releases again. We had originally abandoned press releases as a complete waste of time because they were just lost in the five million other press releases that came out today. But now we've been working with some copy that's optimized for large language models to scan and grab. So you can write about unique content. And it's funny, it's classic spammer stuff in that these press releases don't read that well. A human reads them, they don't make a lot of sense. There's some thread there, but the key is you've got 15 or 20 phrases in there that you ultimately want a large language model to think that you are the answer for. Crystal Carter: Right. And to come into the corpus of their knowledge on that particular topic. John Wall: Right. Exactly. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that we find interesting, particularly with large language models that are public-facing, like SGE and banks, Bing chat for instance. So one of the things that they're doing, because it's so expensive to answer questions with AI, it's so expensive for them to run, a lot of times they will truncate the answer. So you might write a really long question about, "What was the breed of dog that Dorothy had in The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland? What exactly? Which kind of breed?" So you might write all of that, but they will truncate the answer. So even if you ask a similar question that's not exactly the same on the LLM, they'll essentially distill it to, "Dorothy's dog in The Wizard of Oz," and they'll distill it and give you, roughly, the same answers. When you're creating a PR release with those kinds of phrases and things, are you thinking for those questions in mind, those lowest common denominator questions? How are you identifying the phrases you want to surface for? John Wall: Yeah. So our analysis on that has been just analyzing what we're getting from answers now, and seeing the format and types of stuff that it wants to see. But yeah, you've hit upon a whole nother area of this study that is a big deal, this idea of managing your tokens. And for a lot of these systems, if you go with the paid version now, suddenly, you get to send larger queries and get larger queries back and get more in depth of. So it's a different level of information and quality. The other one is, as you're building prompts, we find that it's much more effective to do long strings. You keep continuing to correct an ad. And so one trick with that is after you've done four or five prompts, have the model summarize what you've learned so far so that it can boil down your previous 10 queries into one paragraph. And then, when you do more research, you start with that one summarized paragraph and you basically get to skip the initial round. Because yeah, these all have moving windows of after four or five prompts, they start to forget the original stuff and they will start hallucinating again on things that you've walled in. Crystal Carter: So say I want it without the hat on it, and they're like, "With a hat?" And you're like, "No, that's not what I said." And you have to go all the way back to the beginning. Mordy Oberstein: All the way. I find that with images. Using Copilot or Gemini, I find that it loses its train of thought like my grandmother. Crystal Carter: You're like, "Come back, come back." And it's like, "Right over here." And you're like, "No, no. No, this way." John Wall: Yeah. Yeah, they completely start to run afield. And I don't know. And then really, for this whole space, there is this question of they are just doing an obscene amount of background computing that costs money. And sooner or later- Mordy Oberstein: So much. John Wall: Now, thankfully... Well, not thankfully for me, but thankfully for folks in AI, all of the MarTech and cyber currency VC money has dumped to AI for this next year. So there is a pile of cash there now to give everybody a free ride. But the question is how long is that going to last? Sooner or later... And the good news is it's free and they're looking at $20 a month kind of things, which is great. It doesn't cover the cost, but at least will probably boil down to two or three champions and then yeah, maybe we can finally open up that Alzheimer's window a little bit wider so that they can remember where the heck we're going. Mordy Oberstein: If people want to keep track of this by keeping track of you, where can they find you? John Wall: Oh, I'm always over at marketingovercoffee.com. And then for work stuff, we're at trustinsights.ai. We have a Slack group, Analytics for Marketers. If analytics is your thing, come on over there. We're always talking about it every day, and it's a great place to- Mordy Oberstein: Do you know how to use GA4? John Wall: Oh, we are all about GA4. Actually, the big news for us now is we've been doing GA stuff forever, but we actually offer Matomo in-house for people that are sick of GA4 already, which is 98% of people. And we do a bunch of work with Adobe too. So yeah, it's funny, we do all this cool AI stuff, but the reality is 98% of our customers have problem with the plumbing, and so that's the dirty work that we get done. Mordy Oberstein: Even imagined as toilets. John Wall: This is true. Crystal Carter: You should get an AI to clean the.. John Wall: Siri, clean my basement. What's happening? Crystal Carter: Whenever I think of AI, I always think of the housekeeper from the Jetsons. When is that coming? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Rosey. John Wall: Rosey. Oh, yeah. Crystal Carter: When is Rosey coming to my house? That's what I'm- Mordy Oberstein: That's it. I need someone to watch my kids. Crystal Carter: She has a lot of sass though, but it's fine. John Wall: You want to read a crazy one, read about some of these disasters with the automated vacuuming machines. If the pet gets sick and then the machine hits it, and then spreads it around the whole house, fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. Okay. On that happy note, give John a follow and check out all the great stuff they're doing over there at Trust Insights and the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. Give that a listen as well. John, thank you so much. John Wall: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You know what I wonder? I wonder if there'll be some AI-related news in the SEO News. Crystal Carter: Maybe something about BARD or BERT. Mordy Oberstein: Or Ernie or Gemini or Scorpio. Crystal Carter: Or Elmo. Mordy Oberstein: Or Elmo or Barry Crystal Carter: Or MUM. Mordy Oberstein: Or Barry. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh! Mordy Oberstein: Is Barry a constellation? Crystal Carter: There should be a Barry algo. I think they keep- Mordy Oberstein: That would be amazing if Google, the most penalizing algorithm ever created, they called it Barry Schwartz. I think that would go over well. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: People already blame him for when they lose their rankings. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, all the time. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ask him. When Barry- Crystal Carter: Okay. I would like to just make a public service announcement, Barry's not responsible for your rankings. Mordy Oberstein: No. Barry's just reporting on what happened. There appears to be an update that Google didn't announce. He's just reporting. But there have been many times, Barry's... Actually, I've interviewed him about this. Barry's gotten death threats. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, over rankings. He's just reporting, people. Crystal Carter: He's not in charge of it. Mordy Oberstein: He's not in charge. Crystal Carter: He didn't do it. Mordy Oberstein: You shouldn't threaten anybody with death. Crystal Carter: Barry's a nice man. You shouldn't do that. Mordy Oberstein: I wouldn't go that far, but yeah. No, I'm kidding. Barry's a gem, which brings us to the Snappy SEO News. In case you haven't realized, this is our time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. The update is over. No, not that one. Not that one. For Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, the Google March 2024 spam update is done rolling out, the March 2024 core update is very much still alive, seeing a whole bunch of reversals in the second wave of volatility that came out. Treated it last week. If you want, check that out. But anyway, onto the spam update. It's done. After 15 days on March 20th, Google announced it's done, it's complete, it's rolled out. If you'll recall, Google announced there were three new elements that are being integrated into the spam algorithm. One of them is not hitting until May. And as part of these announcements, Google released the March 2024 spam update, which obviously heavily focused on the new things being integrated into its spam algorithms, which are scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse and site reputation abuse. Site reputation abuse, not happening until May. And that's parasite SEO. That's again where, I don't know, I want to push my content. I don't have a very authoritative website. I go to Sports Illustrated. I say, "I will buy a page on your website, write up an article, have nothing to do with sports and get traffic through that parasite SEO." The other elements, the expired domain abuse, where you say, "Hey, that domain, that used to be about whatever topic, which is I can get the domain, bring it back to life. Google will think, 'Oh, wow, it's so authoritative. That was such a great website way back when, and I can write whatever I want, whatever garbage I want, and it'll rank.'" So that and the scaled content abuse part of the algorithm is also live right now, and that's where basically you're just throwing up tons of just AI garbage, not curating it at all, not thinking about it at all. You're just pushing out content at scale without any thought whatsoever to essentially manipulate rank and users. So that was also in the March 2024 spam update, and we saw a lot of activity around that. Part of all of this were all of the manual actions, which we discussed on the podcast as well. Thousands of sites have seen manual actions. A lot of the examples being shared have to do with that scaled content abuse where Google's killing off the entire website because again, people are just spinning up random... Some of the cases I've seen, it's not even good AI. It's just bad garbage AI. It's nonsensical even. So those websites have been completely killed off. If you have been doing those kind of things, and you've seen your content and your rankings rather just falls to the bottom floor, that might be something you want to take a look at. If you are doing good, decent work, you shouldn't really be affected by a spam update. Now, one of the things that you're going to be thinking is, "How do I know if I was hit by the spam update or by the March 2024 core update?" Well, one way to know is if you're doing things like scaled content abuse or expired domain abuse, then it's probably the spam update. Again, if you're not doing these ridiculously spammy, absurd things and you're seeing a ranking loss, one, the March 2024 core update's still not done rolling out. Again, as I mentioned, I'm seeing tons of reversals. So don't do anything yet. As Google mentioned, be patient. If, after the March 2024 core update is done and rolled out and completed, and you're still trying to figure out was it the spam update or the core update, again, if you haven't been doing these ridiculously, overtly spammy... I don't even know how to... mind-boggling things, then it's probably the core update. That's my way of looking at it. Okay, onto article number two, again from Barry Schwartz, but this time over at Search Engine around it... By the way, got to say happy birthday to Barry Schwartz. March 22nd was Barry's birthday. I hope you got a lovely birthday cake. Anyway, Barry writes, "Google SGE feedback on affiliate results and Google News: Does This Interest You Pop-Up." Hope you all caught all of that in the headline. Let me explain. Google has done this for a while, but this is a different way of doing it. This one was picked up by a friend of the show, friend of baseball, Glenn Gabe, who saw that for an affiliate website ranking on the results, Google had a little widget there that says, "How helpful was the result above? One extreme being not helpful at all, the other extreme being extremely helpful." And you just selected the dot on the spectrum of how helpful you thought that it was. So that's really interesting to see that on affiliate stuff. Another example was within a Google News result. So there was a news card that showed up and there was a little pop-up thing that says, "Does this interest you? Thumbs up, thumbs down." Google has been doing these things for a long, long, long time. There's a bunch of iterations of this with feature snippets, "Did you find the feature snippet helpful? Yada, yada, yada." So this is not new to quote Barry, but it is interesting to see. Google, again, has done this many, many times in many, many different ways over the years. I think it's really interesting that it's happening now, especially for the affiliate result that Glenn showed. I just find it really interesting that you have all of these things going on in the ecosystem, the whole Reddit question, the spam updates, the core updates, the quality of results, AI content, SGE. And Google's now rolling out this little test of showing a widget, you can offer to your feedback to how helpful the result was. So I think that aligns to what's going on in the ecosystem overall and especially on something that's product review related or affiliate related. So definitely interesting to see Google doing that there. And that is this week's Snappy SEO News. It would be nice though if they had a Barry update, but it was one that was only helpful and rewarding to all websites that were good. Crystal Carter: And then afterwards everyone would go, "Thank you." Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. And they could say, "It's new. It's a new algorithm." Crystal Carter: Indeed. Indeed. You were saying, "Wouldn't it be nice?" And now I'm thinking of that Beach Boys song. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great song, actually. Crystal Carter: It's a great song. Mordy Oberstein: How did Beach Boys stand up? That's a good song. Crystal Carter: Generally, Beach Boys, they've got that good album. They've got one really, really good album. Mordy Oberstein: Right, Pet Shops. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's a great album. Listen to it start to finish. It's a great album. It's really well-produced. Great album. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You know what else is great? Our follow of the week. And our follow of the week is none other than Dale Bertrand. Crystal Carter: Dale Bertrand. If you've been following How to Rank with AI, then you must be following Dale Bertrand. If you're not following him, please do. He's very active on LinkedIn, and you can see him all over the place speaking all over in lots of different places. So he's a founder and president of Fire&Spark with over 15 years experience working out of Boston. And he talks and shares some great resources around AI and content and using it intelligently and using it in a way that really, really works. So highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: And just a super nice guy, super nice. I met him in BrightonSEO in November in San Diego and he was super nice. Crystal Carter: Super nice. And he's very often at BrightonSEO in the UK. So yeah, he's a great speaker, great writer, great SEO marketer, so highly recommend. Great follow. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to his profiles in the show notes. Now I realize, by the way, I completely botched... It was not called Pets Shops; it's called Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. What the hell am I talking about? I am ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Pet Shops. You're thinking of Pet Shop Boys. You hallucinated. Are you AI? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: I knew it. Mordy Oberstein: It explains a lot. Right? So I want to point out the irony of not saying we're not Beach Boy fans on a podcast built on surfing themes. That's not my favorite. I'll say another hot take, the Beatles aren't my favorite. Crystal Carter: Same. Mordy Oberstein: I enjoy the songs. I have Beatle albums or I had Beatle albums back in the day. Who has albums anymore? But they're historically super important. Crystal Carter: Sgt. Pepper's. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Even that, I don't know. I'm not... Crystal Carter: Come on. Their Come Together, that's a jam. Mordy Oberstein: They're not dark enough for me. They're too happy. All this music, it's just too happy. I need a little bit of an edge. I'm more of a Rolling Stones person than I am a Beatles and Beach Boys person. Crystal Carter: Okay, I can see that. Mordy Oberstein: I need sorrow in my music. Crystal Carter: They're good bands. I had a very long conversation on a car ride and we decided that Led Zeppelin was the best band. Mordy Oberstein: What? I like Led Zeppelin. Don't get me wrong. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of criteria that we went into. We discussed it for a very long time. Mordy Oberstein: It's just wrong. Crystal Carter: It's not wrong. It's not wrong. Mordy Oberstein: That's so Wrong. And I love Zeppelin. I actually saw Robert Plant live. Crystal Carter: Where? Mordy Oberstein: The lead singer of Led Zeppelin, I've seen him live. Crystal Carter: No, I know who he is. Where did you see him? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, where. At Madison Square Garden. He opened for The Who back in 2002. Crystal Carter: Oh, Zeppelin's definitely better than The Who. Mordy Oberstein: What? No, that's ridonkulous. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: Were the godfather's of punk. All right. Anyway, we'll talk about this the second we end this podcast, which we're going to do right now, so we can talk about this because this is ballistically insane. I think you've been smoking too much AI, Crystal. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Aren't you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week as we dive into Building Strong Operations for SEO and Beyond. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars and resources over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Kristine Sachinger Cyrus Shepard John Wall Dale Bertrand Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube SEO Resource Center Google Knowledge Panel: How to earn one for your name or brand InLinks Entity SEO: Moving from Things to Strings News: Google Search Console Adds INP Metric In Core Web Vitals Report Google Clarifies Page Experience & Core Web Vitals Related To Search Rankings Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Kristine Sachinger Cyrus Shepard John Wall Dale Bertrand Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube SEO Resource Center Google Knowledge Panel: How to earn one for your name or brand InLinks Entity SEO: Moving from Things to Strings News: Google Search Console Adds INP Metric In Core Web Vitals Report Google Clarifies Page Experience & Core Web Vitals Related To Search Rankings Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO Podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm already overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix and I'm joined by the ever-constant, the ever-ranking, the ever-green. I say green because you have a plant in your background now. Head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: This is an audio-only experience. The people don't know that I have a green thing behind me. Mordy Oberstein: You do. You have a green... I like it because it's not green green. It's sage green. Is that the name of the green? Is that right? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's actually only green because it's a fake olive tree. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, I should know that because I have an olive tree right next to my house. Crystal Carter: This is true. But my grandma used to have an orange tree in their backyard. That was nice. Mordy Oberstein: You want to hear a crazy story? I used to live in an apartment and it had a garden. Crystal Carter: That is crazy. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, that is crazy, right? Living is crazy. It had an olive tree. And the way the garden was laid out, it was right next to a staircase, a publicly used staircase that went down to the next street. You can imagine the next street was a level lower, you had to go down the staircase. And the branches extended over the fence onto the staircase. And we come home one day, and the olive tree, all the branches are cut down. Some maniac, I guess, got upset that the branches were overhanging onto the stair- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And cut down almost the entire olive tree. Crystal Carter: Just from that side? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he must've climbed over the fence a little bit and... Crystal Carter: Whoa. Wowza. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Psycho, right? Crystal Carter: So I used to work for the parks department for the city, and legally, if it's over your side, that part of the tree is yours. Legally speaking, that side of the tree is yours. So I used to also... Really telling everybody my business here. This is totally relevant, but not. Anyway, basically, I used to forage for free apples and stuff around. And basically, if the apple tree was hanging over the sidewalk, those apples are mine. I can have those apples. They're mine and I'm going to eat them. So that's what I'm doing. You don't like your apples being in the public domain, get your tree out of the public domain. Mordy Oberstein: How do you like them apples? Crystal Carter: Basically. So yeah, it's very complex, trees. Mordy Oberstein: Trees are complex. They are complex. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tag-creator to spit up title tags and meta descriptions in no time flat because time is not flat, time is round. Also, I don't write meta descriptions anymore. I let the AI do it every time because when it comes to meta descriptions, I don't care. Why? Because AI content ranks. And also because meta descriptions, whatever, who cares, right? I'm saying that as Crystal's looking at me like, "Why are you saying that?" Because I don't care. I don't think they are impactful. One of my least important SEO tasks are meta descriptions. I guess it might help with clicks if Google didn't rewrite half of them. I'm real salty about meta descriptions, but you can use your AI meta tag writer to write them. How's that for a pitch? Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay, that's cool. Okay. So let's just clear this up. I have time for meta descriptions because I've seen them work, right? I've seen them work, but I don't think that you should be hand crafting them artisanally. I don't think- Mordy Oberstein: No, there's no reason. Either way, there's no reason. Just let the AI write that. Crystal Carter: Right. And if you're not using AI, you don't necessarily have to use AI. You can also just do programmatically. So in Wix, you have the option for both. You have the option for either the programmatic setup where you insert keyword for this- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Or take product description, make it meta description. Crystal Carter: Right. This is the title of the product, brand new, et cetera. You can set the template for it so that the template does the work for you. That I am all here for and following best practices, et cetera. But I have seen for good pages for your big money pages, putting a good CTA on there. Mordy Oberstein: No. It could be impactful for conversions. Fine. Yeah, I'm with that when Google's not rewriting them 99.9% of the time. I agree. We all agree to disagree. One thing we do agree on is that today we're talking about AI content and does it rank? Insert dramatic music. Why understanding if AI content ranks matters? Why understanding of AI content ranks on the SERP is just the beginning? And will AI content continue to rank on the SERP? Assuming it already does, but I feel like I'm giving it away there that we're telling you that it already does. Because we surveyed you, the SEOs, to see what you think. So y'all are our guests today, but also our guests that'd be Marketing Over Coffee's host, John Wall, who will talk about when and when not to use AI for content generation. Plus we have the Snappy SEO News for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So get out your best AI prompts and put on a funny little cone hat like you went to a birthday party as episode number 80 of the SERP's Up Podcast plays in the AI content on the rankings. Crystal Carter: Okay. Thank you for that exciting introduction. So let's just talk about why we're talking about this. Mordy Oberstein: Exciting introduction. Wow, sarcasm much. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: I was hallucinating because I was using AI. Crystal Carter: Okay. So why are we talking about this? The reason why we're talking about this is because it's been very up-and-down. When AI was in the backburner, Google was like, "Don't use AI, don't use AI everyone. I know you've heard about all these tools, but don't use AI. Be good little SEOs, don't use AI." And then ChatGPT broke virally, it was way more accessible. And then they were like, "Okay, you can use AI as long as it's helpful. You can use helpful AI. If it's helpful, that's fine, we won't penalize you. It's fine." And there's been up and down. People have been testing AI content for years, testing pretty much unedited AI content for years. There's a few people who've been doing a lot of experiments around this. Mark Williams-Cook has a very well-documented experiment that he's been running on this content as well. And for a while, people were saying, "Oh, yeah, it doesn't really rank," or "It ranks for a while and then it will completely tank." And that's something that people have said. However, it's my opinion and it's something that I've observed that basically, if people remember back around this time of year or around the spring of 2023 when Bing was like, "Yo, we have new Bing. We are putting AI in the SERP." And Google was going, "Oh, we also have AI," and they were trying to catch up, I've started to see a lot more content that is AI-generated being openly AI-generated and ranking. And so I'm going to share a couple of examples of that. One is a big example, which is LinkedIn's advice folder, which has been going gangbusters pretty much since they started doing it. They built this up in the springtime of 2023, and they've seen some incredible activities for this. If you haven't seen this, basically you haven't been on LinkedIn. And basically, when you go on LinkedIn, LinkedIn will ask you questions, "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?" And they call them collaborative articles in the folders under advice and things like, "What does a production coordinator do? What is regression testing and why is it important? What are the best practices for this?" Now, the way I stumbled upon this wasn't actually through LinkedIn; it was actually through a featured snippet. I found a featured snippet. It was talking about a technical SEO term, and it actually didn't have any contributions. But at the top of every article, it says that this article was created by AI and the LinkedIn community and they're doing incredibly well. So they started building up this folder around March 2023. They peaked with their traffic at 2.8 million globally in about 2023 September. And it went down a little bit, but it's got down to 1.7 million according to Semrush's stats. And I take that traffic. I'll take that. If that's where we're dropping back to, that's fine. And they're not the only ones. Another from a smaller example is a site called Wellnite.com, which is a site that's actually working more in the YMYL space. So they are something that talks about counseling and they've got lots of articles. One of them is bottling up emotions, how to let go, acknowledge your emotions, peaceful mind practice and things like that. And at the bottom, it says, "PS, this blog was created with AI software as a tool to supplement the author accompanied by Wellnite staff overview and supervision." And that is an example of a website that had been going, ticking along through 2020, 2021 at getting around global traffic according to Semrush of about 400 or so. There are lots of blogs that are like that, lots of company blogs that are like that for smaller websites. And theirs started ticking along. But then in 2023, they started adding in these AI-generated contents, and they were able to increase the number of articles that they were ranking. And they've now been able to double their traffic monthly because of that. And again, it's still fairly small traffic, but compared to where they were, that's a very significant jump. And the amount of traffic that they've seen increased between the start of 2023 and where we are in 2024 is significant. It's the most significant growth they've ever seen across their domain. So to my mind, AI content is doing just fine and there's lots of evidence to show that, but there's a few things that people can do to make it better. And I think the people who are doing it well are taking advantage of some of those elements. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. I think very much, it depends. The linked articles I think are a great case. First off, the linked articles are from LinkedIn, so you are not LinkedIn. So that's one thing to be careful of. But the second thing is the linked articles are interesting. I actually like them because they make me think because I don't like the answers. I don't like the content that they offer. I find I comment on them, so I get a little badge thing on LinkedIn because I'm being like that. And most of my takes are like, "Nah, that's not how you should actually think about it." But interestingly enough, and I wonder if this plays into it or how it plays into it, you're actually getting first-person experience on those articles in the comments themselves. And that's my point that it all depends with this kind of thing. For example, Mark Williams-Cook has an article on Search Engine Land where he talks about LLMs generating content. And when he ran an experience, he created 10,000 URLs on unsupervised AI. And you see it ranks and it just gets killed off. And there are a bunch of examples like that. So it's using this or thinking about, "Does it rank unequivocally?" The answer is it depends what you mean by that. If you're just spinning up random content or unsupervised content, the answer is it'll rank for a while. I think it's very much spam content in general. It ranks for a while, and then it falls off. So I was reading in Traffic Think Tank recently, was Andy Chapa talking about a case where I think someone all of a sudden got... They must have bought tons of links. And you see this, people buy tons of links, they start ranking for a while and then Google eventually figures it out and gets rid of it. I think it's very similar to that or any other kind of spam practice. If you're using AI in a spammy kind of way, you'll rank two, three, four months and then it'll fall off. And that's been a lot of the consensus around what's been shared in the SEO community about this. And we actually asked the SEO community on January 29th, "Does Google consistently regularly rank AI content?" And out of 120 so votes, 82% of people said yes, and around 70% of people said no. And then the comments are filled with these anecdotes. For example, Kristine Schachinger said, "It does and then it will not." And I think what she's talking about are those kind of cases where what Mark did, where you're just unsupervised, this doesn't make any sense, it's not good content, it's not helpful, it'll get killed off, which is what Google's saying. I think there's a lot of politics behind what Google's saying also, but whatever. We'll leave that aside. It's not for this podcast. Darth Autocrat, Lyndon NA. He wrote, "Yes, but it's kind of skewed due to the sheer volume of it and the overall scope of AI content. Even if you utterly ignore the spammer flood, legitimate networks are always, if not partially using, so it shows for news, et cetera." So that's a really good point, how you use it, how you go about using it, it's really important. Pedro Diaz wrote, "I anticipate the answers are all going towards experience people had and seen recently within their search bubble," which I think is a very good point to having broader views in a wider spectrum of experiences. And I don't think I've seen a wide study on AI content ranking. And I think that would be fascinating to see to address that point. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I think that there's so many different variations in the ways that people are using it because the other thing is that there's lots of people who aren't ranking with AI content. But there's also the case that, and we've seen this with the AI tools that we have in Wix, we've used AI tools to help people do things like the meta descriptions, for instance. We talked about those. And what we've seen with that is that there's a lot more people who have accessibility, with lowercase a, to some of these techniques because they don't have to worry about the barriers to entry regarding grammar, for instance, or regarding even sometimes the ideation. So that Wellnite website is a classic example. They were publishing occasionally, but they were able to increase the rate of publishing because they were using some of these AI tools. So I think that there's going to be a lot of people who are getting more access to these things, who are able to articulate themselves better with the help of some of these tools. And that I think is a win. I think that's a good thing that people who were previously not able to understand or use meta descriptions at all, for instance, are able to engage with that content. I think that's a benefit, and I think that that's something that will affect which pages are ranking and will affect how many pages are ranking. However, there's going to be a lot of people who are just putting out junk, but those people were putting out junk anyway before in lots of other ways. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. That's what I was going to say. It's really a matter of mindset, and we'll talk about it with John later on that how do you go about building the content utilizing AI and expediting your processes? Because at the same time, I think something very important to keep in the back of your mind when you're using AI to create content, which you should certainly be doing the right way, is where's Google trying to go? And this speaks to a lot of the Reddit controversy on the SERP at the moment as we're recording, and who knows if it'll fixed by the time we're done recording. But there's been a lot of pushback about the amount of Reddit results Google's showing on the SERP. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that Google's trying to push for first-person, first knowledge, experience-based content and Google's having a lot of issues with this. But you see this trend keep coming up with things like Reddit ranking, Gisele Navarro put out an interesting post about product review websites and how folks like Rolling Stone have jumped into the product review space. And one of the things that they're doing to rank is relying on first-person experience in a way. I'll put a little caveat, a little asterisk on that, by using first-person expressions, like I, we, our, which I've personally seen a huge influx of folks doing that over time. So we take the same product review page now, and you put it in the Wayback Machine, the amount of our, we, first-person language has increased exponentially. And there's a recent study that Cyrus Shepard did that shows, and again, it's a correlation study, so no one freak out like, "Oh, no, it's correlation." But correlation sometimes can point you in the right direction and correlation does mean something. And one of the things that he noticed in websites that are winning is the usage of first-person pronouns: me, we, I, that sort of thing. The direction where Google is trying to go kind of contradicts a lot of the things that people are doing with AI content. So when you're building AI content, you need to keep in mind where the ecosystem is shifting and leverage AI the right way within that context. Crystal Carter: Right. So I think that the first-person experience is super important for that. And there's a couple of reasons why writing... Whenever I'm doing content evaluations or making content recommendations, particularly to blog-facing content or customer service attributions and things, I very often say that people should speak in the second person, like, "You should do this, you can do that, you could do this. We do this for you because it is good and you will like it," and that sort of thing. And the reason why is because a lot of people are on their mobiles, and that is a one-person situation. That is a one-person thing. Even if you share that with somebody, even if you will share it to their mobile and they will read it personally on their mobile phone, individually. So it's like, "Hi, I am talking to you," it's very much an individual situation. So users are going to be responding to that in lots of ways. And I think that when we think about AI content, I don't think that AI content is necessarily opposed to that. I think it's a way to organize that sort of thing. One really good example that I saw in terms of product reviews was Spruce Pets. They had a great product review of dog carriers, and clearly they had people who were testing it with their dogs. They were like, "Here I am with my dog, here is my dog in the dog carrier," that sort of thing. But then here's where you use the AI. The AI is where you pull in how to organize all the product detail between the different ones. How you say, "Okay, this one has a carrier, this one has a pocket, this one has a thing for treats," all of that sort of stuff. That's what you use the AI for. And you maybe use the AI to pull out some of the common threads of some of the first-person things that you're using. So I don't think it's necessarily opposed, but I think you should use it to clean up some of the qualitative information. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's part of the problem with the discussion is that when you look at a zero-sum, either there's AI content or not AI content. So I'll tell you one of the things that I'm a big proponent of is what I'll call situational content writing. So one of the ways you can actually show expertise in a real way, other than just loading in the page with we, I, me, which anybody can do, an LLM can do that if you trick it to do that for you, it is actually predicting the situation the consumer's going to face and then writing about that situation. Because that actually demonstrates you actually know what the heck you're talking about and have actual experience. Because you can't predict the next scenario unless you have some kind of situational experience. However, if you're talking about let's go with a pet carrier thing, situation. How to get your pet into the pet carrier if they don't want to go in? You'll predict as someone who has a pet, you can try this. If that doesn't work, then try this. But the general like, "What is a pet carrier?" Let's say you wanted to put that there, but you probably don't need, but let's say you did, then you can have an AI spin out like, "What is the pet carrier?" Sure, go ahead and write that part. It's not a zero-sum. So let the AI save you time and let it make you more efficient in the right spots within the expert and the experience-driven content you want to create. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it's also important to remember that there's going to be some content that people don't care what an AI thinks about it like, "Is your pet happy in the pet carrier?" for instance. That's something I don't really care what ChatGPT thinks about whether or not my Cocker Spaniel is happy in the carrier. If I hear from other people, "Yeah, my dog was really happy. He was wagging his tail, he kept sniffing my ear," or whatever, that sort of thing. That's something that I would like to hear first-person knowledge of and that's something that you should be aware of. And then that situational stuff is really important because that situational information is stuff that you can get from users, from real humans, from real human users and from real personal experience. And I think that you can use, again, if not zero-sum, you can use AI to help you collate and to help you organize some of the things that you're getting from user videos, user interviews, customer feedback reforms, that sort of stuff to help you bring some of that together. But you're going to be able to add value with a cyborg kind of approach, if that makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: And look, that's going to be the kind of content that ranks fundamentally. In fact, now at some point, Google's... Listen, there's two possibilities in my opinion. Either Google will figure this out to make sure that the content that has actual expertise and actual experience, which may be supplemented by AI ranks, or it won't be a search engine anymore that we'll go to. So either way, it doesn't matter. Okay. Well, since we're already talking about AI and content and ranking, I think it behooves us to talk about AI for content generation so that you know how to create the AI content that ranks and not the AI content that ranks, but really shouldn't rank. So rank responsibly. Please rank responsibly. To help us talk about this, we have a very special guest with the host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, John Wall, as we move beyond SEO and into the great beyond. Hey John, welcome to the podcast. How are you? John Wall: Great, thanks. Glad to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So you're the host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. You also work for Trust Insights and do a lot with AI. Now is the time on the podcast for you to pitch. John Wall: Yeah. So with Trust Insights, we've done a lot of stuff with generative AI. Our chief technologist, Christopher Penn, has been using AI in PR and marketing for over 15 years. So we already had a bunch of stuff that we were using AI for as far as attribution and predictive analysis for creating content calendars, things like that. And so yeah, generative AI has now spun up though and he is just in demand everywhere. In fact, he's speaking in London this week. Yeah, it's become huge. And so we actually have put together a framework of generative AI for marketers, stuff that you can do to create content, do better in SEO. There's a whole bunch of different avenues and strategies, everything just from the basic habit, my blog post, which is what you're talking about, stuff that comes out and is weak at best. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, you're trying to create stuff that nobody else is doing and actually has some novelty, and we'll get you to the higher amounts of traffic and positioning because it's quality stuff. Crystal Carter: I think that one of the things that stood out from that was you said you've been working in this space for years, and I think that that's one of the things that a lot of people don't realize. People say, "Oh, AI is new." Google's been using AI in the SERPs for years. But people like folks from your team have been using these tools for many, many years. And I think that that gives you particularly interesting insights on this. There's a lot of people who are just new to the game and just getting involved, but I think that there's going to be some things that you've tried and understand more than other people. John Wall: Yeah, I think it is very different than a lot of the other trends that come up through marketing. When we had cyber currency, it was a huge deal and NFTs and all this kind of stuff, they were created. But AI, as a concept, was created back in the 1950s, right? Crystal Carter: Right. John Wall: The academic community understood what this could do and where it was going, and it was just that the computing power wasn't there. Yeah. So idea of being able to figure out, "Identify the difference between human and AI, can you fool people?" And of course, there's always been turks, right? There's always machines that can make you think you're talking to a computer when you're really not, because there's still some human interaction in there on the back-end. But yeah, we're at least getting close to the point where ChatGPT could fool somebody for a little while for four or five prompts before you figure out that they're a person. But better customer service tools have already been able to do that to some point. They can get you there. But yeah, so now people have kind of jumped on the AI bandwagon and Gartner's peak hype right now where every product has AI attached to it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my gosh. John Wall: My tires were rotated last week with AI over at the gas station. Mordy Oberstein: I have AI tires. Yours were rotated with AI. I have actual AI tires. John Wall: You have AI in the tires. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Do they tell you when you're in the wrong lane? Mordy Oberstein: No, they don't do anything for me whatsoever. They hallucinate and tell me I'm in a desert on the highway and where I'm really driving in my actual driveway. So I don't know what's flying. I'm going to use my AI tires. John Wall: Yeah, it is everywhere. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So if we're going to actually use AI in a real way, we're going to say, "Okay, let's create content and let's use AI." Is it carte blanche, like just go wild? John Wall: No, no. There's a lot of ways to go. In fact, I would even back up. I would not start with generative AI. We did and have done predictive models. So for example, we've done a bunch of stuff in the food space, and it's worked so well we had to come up with a sample for the rest of the world. So we have the cheese report, which is an annual report that comes out and it talks about, "Okay, which cheeses are most searched for every week of the year?" And so you can- Crystal Carter: It's cheddar, right? Mordy Oberstein: American. John Wall: Cheddar. We're just coming off hot cheddar with the Super Bowl here in America. That's very popular. Mozzarella surges as we get close to Christmas. Mordy Oberstein: Kraft singles, American cheese is not- Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's cheddar. Cheddar is your best cheese. It's good for almost every situation. John Wall: Cheddar is always ranking high. It's definitely top 10 most of the year. But look, for a content marketer, the big one now you'd look at is halloumi where you've got grillable cheeses will be popular June, July when that time of the year comes. So if you've got your content calendar, you should be starting to script out those halloumi videos and recipes and all that stuff now, so that you've got that stuff dropping in May and you're able to get some Google juice to that before peak search season in June, July. Mordy Oberstein: Some hot cheese right there. John Wall: Yeah, that's the hot cheese. And we have it for a whole bunch of other foods, but the brands that get those reports don't let us share that with anybody else. So we're not able to share our food insight outside of cheese, but that gives you an example of using some predictive AI to actually create content that is in demand. And that way, you've got your stuff all updated when you hit peak search. Crystal Carter: And I think is there a little bit of overlap for content like that, for instance? Let's say, if you're running a stats tool throughout the year or something, for instance, the Billboard Hot 100 changes every day or that sort of thing. If you're running a SaaS tool like that, how much is there crossover between programmatic elements and AI elements with creating content around that? John Wall: It completely overlaps. AI is not going to come up with anything new. That's really what it is. It's just you're applying programmatic strategies to figuring out what's going to be coming on and where it goes. And there's a ton of ways to apply that too. Another way we see it all over the place is with reviews or other huge libraries of content where instead of generating, have it do summarization or classification. And take a huge batch of reviews, have it come up with, "Okay, what are the five most common things that people like/don't like about this product?" And now that's a blog post that's based on your data, that's proprietary that somebody else using GenAI can't just come up with that post. You're the only one that can do that and it's going to be on target, but it's unique and it's your voice and it's probably going to be stronger across the board. Crystal Carter: I think that's great because with something like that, you can summarize and hit some of the key points with the keywords there. And also, it's got good user value because me, as a user, if I'm trying to decide whether or not I should use halloumi cheese or Havarti cheese on my cheeseburger, for instance, it might be like, "Yeah, this was a good cheese, but it didn't quite melt as much on the burger, for instance." And I can get that summary without reading 400 reviews that include like, "Oh, I dropped the cheese on the ground and things. It's one star." It's like, "No, you dropped it. That's your problem." John Wall: That's like the Amazon classic of the products that suck because the box arrived destroyed. There's all these- Mordy Oberstein: Right. I love that. I don't care. John Wall: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Because you know who's going to destroy the box in three seconds anyway? My children. John Wall: That's just been part of the customer experience. Mordy Oberstein: But this is a similar point to something we discussed. We had a webinar with Mike King and Ross Hudgens where we talked about giving AI rules and confines to work within as opposed to, "Here's a very open, unconfined scenario. But if you give it parameters to work with, it does much better and it does what you want it to do. And that's where I feel like it can offer real insights and real ability to produce content for you that you couldn't have done otherwise or you couldn't have done otherwise as quickly." But again, it's giving an open prompt and just telling it to go without any borders or any confines, is probably a recipe for disaster. John Wall: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So we even have a whole course that's seven hours of training, and a huge chunk of it is writing effective prompts. And so that's where some of the artistry is. And we have a whole framework, we call it the RACE Framework where for any prompt you want to do R-A-C-E. So you give it the role, you say, "Hey, you are an engineer that is working with stereo equipment. A, is for action. Your task is to come up with a list of whatever. "You give it context. That's the C, where you're saying that the audience is this level of professional. Is it engineers with 10 years' experience? Or is it people that have no experience with audio equipment? And then execute." You actually give it the instructions as far as how to write this. It should be at X grade level, it should cover X number of bullet points, have a summary. Basically, the best prompts, you have these huge paragraphs of stuff that you're using. Mordy Oberstein: That's the thing. AI is great. You have to shape it to what you want it to be. And I think the problem is that it's so easy and there's no barrier to entry that people think, "Oh, I can do this." To me, it's like picking up a baseball bat. Yes, you can pick up a baseball bat and you can swing it, but if you look at what the pros are actually doing, there's so much more that goes into it: managing the load, and where's your weight shifting? And when is your weight shifting? And where's your elbow? And how is your wrist turning? There's a million things that go into actually swinging a baseball bat the real way versus you just taking a whack at it with your wonky-ass swing. And it's very similar to AI. Yes, you could put in a prompt and yes, you can get an output but that's not actually swinging the bat. John Wall: Yeah. Another way to think of it, you have that thing, we've always talked about this in software is tools for experts versus expert tools. Look, right now, the state of AI, it's like a router. If you're a carpenter, who knows what the heck they're doing, you can do amazing things with this tool. If you are somebody who's just playing around, you could end up losing some fingers. Mordy Oberstein: That's okay. The AI will add the fingers and some back for you. John Wall: Man, I hadn't thought about how much that hits. Yeah. But thankfully, AI has tons of fingers that it can spread around liberally to everyone. I even saw that on Amazon, they have a fake plastic finger you can buy so that you can wear it around and then you can tell people, "Oh, no, that's obviously AI-generated, because- Mordy Oberstein: People are interesting, huh? John Wall: Yeah. I'm thinking I don't need to go through the work of making sure the finger matches. That seems like a lot of effort to perpetrate a fraud, so I'm not going to bother with that. Mordy Oberstein: You have to really take on the next load because let's say, I don't know, you're out at the beach and your fingers get tanned. You're going to have to have a tanned finger. Crystal Carter: Also, sometimes they think arms in different places that shouldn't be there. The arms coming out in the middle and you're like, "What is going on there?" But I've seen pop stars, there was a whole thing. I'm going to show myself here, but there was a whole thing on Nicki Minaj as a popular rapper and she had a new album art. She had a song she put out unannounced. And the album art she used for, it was clearly generated with AI, and it clearly had not gone through QA. And it was supposed to be police tape and it didn't say police all the way through, and the things had different arms and they had all of this sort of stuff. And even people who have the means... She's a multi-millionaire, and she has a PR team, and she has many people available. But even people who have the means aren't going through the QA. In terms of process, you have your prompting thing, you have your data thing, how much is the QA of the AI part of your process of getting good quality stuff? John Wall: Yeah. For us, that's a huge part of it. Really, in fact, there's nothing that can be released or put out there until it's been pounded on by experts who know what it should be doing and where it should be going. That's the real challenge of this. And then people don't get this either, is that you don't just build it and start using it. No, you build it, you run it and then you train it. And it needs to be constantly trained. Training needs to be a permanent part of your process. Mordy Oberstein: You mean, like anything else, it requires hard work? John Wall: You don't just hire it and then fire your whole marketing team the next day. Mordy Oberstein: You completely kill what AI means to me, and I am now completely uninterested in it. Crystal Carter: It's magic. Isn't it just magic? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. If it's not magic, I don't care. John Wall: Yes. In fact, it gets your coffee right in the morning and it will drive you home at the end of the day. Yeah. No, it doesn't do all the things. Mordy Oberstein: If it doesn't watch my kids, I don't care. Crystal Carter: I think it's important to remember the learning part of the machine learning because that's the other thing. For marketers, PPC, for instance, has had machine learning going on for years, for years and years. Facebook has had it in there. Google Ads has had it in there. And you had to do the machine learning part of it. You'd have to, and you'd have to train it and train the model and retrain the model and retrain your parameters and all that sort of stuff. So for people who just think you can set it and forget it and it will just do magic, it's just a rude awakening, I think. Mordy Oberstein: It's not the Ronco slow cooker, set it and forget it, which is my favorite- Crystal Carter: Hey, I love my slow cooker. My slow cooker is that. I just put all the things and then... John Wall: Set it- Mordy Oberstein: And then forget it. John Wall: One thing that we've been doing that is pretty interesting because of this idea that these models do read everything that's out there, we've played around with actually doing press releases again. We had originally abandoned press releases as a complete waste of time because they were just lost in the five million other press releases that came out today. But now we've been working with some copy that's optimized for large language models to scan and grab. So you can write about unique content. And it's funny, it's classic spammer stuff in that these press releases don't read that well. A human reads them, they don't make a lot of sense. There's some thread there, but the key is you've got 15 or 20 phrases in there that you ultimately want a large language model to think that you are the answer for. Crystal Carter: Right. And to come into the corpus of their knowledge on that particular topic. John Wall: Right. Exactly. Crystal Carter: So one of the things that we find interesting, particularly with large language models that are public-facing, like SGE and banks, Bing chat for instance. So one of the things that they're doing, because it's so expensive to answer questions with AI, it's so expensive for them to run, a lot of times they will truncate the answer. So you might write a really long question about, "What was the breed of dog that Dorothy had in The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland? What exactly? Which kind of breed?" So you might write all of that, but they will truncate the answer. So even if you ask a similar question that's not exactly the same on the LLM, they'll essentially distill it to, "Dorothy's dog in The Wizard of Oz," and they'll distill it and give you, roughly, the same answers. When you're creating a PR release with those kinds of phrases and things, are you thinking for those questions in mind, those lowest common denominator questions? How are you identifying the phrases you want to surface for? John Wall: Yeah. So our analysis on that has been just analyzing what we're getting from answers now, and seeing the format and types of stuff that it wants to see. But yeah, you've hit upon a whole nother area of this study that is a big deal, this idea of managing your tokens. And for a lot of these systems, if you go with the paid version now, suddenly, you get to send larger queries and get larger queries back and get more in depth of. So it's a different level of information and quality. The other one is, as you're building prompts, we find that it's much more effective to do long strings. You keep continuing to correct an ad. And so one trick with that is after you've done four or five prompts, have the model summarize what you've learned so far so that it can boil down your previous 10 queries into one paragraph. And then, when you do more research, you start with that one summarized paragraph and you basically get to skip the initial round. Because yeah, these all have moving windows of after four or five prompts, they start to forget the original stuff and they will start hallucinating again on things that you've walled in. Crystal Carter: So say I want it without the hat on it, and they're like, "With a hat?" And you're like, "No, that's not what I said." And you have to go all the way back to the beginning. Mordy Oberstein: All the way. I find that with images. Using Copilot or Gemini, I find that it loses its train of thought like my grandmother. Crystal Carter: You're like, "Come back, come back." And it's like, "Right over here." And you're like, "No, no. No, this way." John Wall: Yeah. Yeah, they completely start to run afield. And I don't know. And then really, for this whole space, there is this question of they are just doing an obscene amount of background computing that costs money. And sooner or later- Mordy Oberstein: So much. John Wall: Now, thankfully... Well, not thankfully for me, but thankfully for folks in AI, all of the MarTech and cyber currency VC money has dumped to AI for this next year. So there is a pile of cash there now to give everybody a free ride. But the question is how long is that going to last? Sooner or later... And the good news is it's free and they're looking at $20 a month kind of things, which is great. It doesn't cover the cost, but at least will probably boil down to two or three champions and then yeah, maybe we can finally open up that Alzheimer's window a little bit wider so that they can remember where the heck we're going. Mordy Oberstein: If people want to keep track of this by keeping track of you, where can they find you? John Wall: Oh, I'm always over at marketingovercoffee.com. And then for work stuff, we're at trustinsights.ai. We have a Slack group, Analytics for Marketers. If analytics is your thing, come on over there. We're always talking about it every day, and it's a great place to- Mordy Oberstein: Do you know how to use GA4? John Wall: Oh, we are all about GA4. Actually, the big news for us now is we've been doing GA stuff forever, but we actually offer Matomo in-house for people that are sick of GA4 already, which is 98% of people. And we do a bunch of work with Adobe too. So yeah, it's funny, we do all this cool AI stuff, but the reality is 98% of our customers have problem with the plumbing, and so that's the dirty work that we get done. Mordy Oberstein: Even imagined as toilets. John Wall: This is true. Crystal Carter: You should get an AI to clean the.. John Wall: Siri, clean my basement. What's happening? Crystal Carter: Whenever I think of AI, I always think of the housekeeper from the Jetsons. When is that coming? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, Rosey. John Wall: Rosey. Oh, yeah. Crystal Carter: When is Rosey coming to my house? That's what I'm- Mordy Oberstein: That's it. I need someone to watch my kids. Crystal Carter: She has a lot of sass though, but it's fine. John Wall: You want to read a crazy one, read about some of these disasters with the automated vacuuming machines. If the pet gets sick and then the machine hits it, and then spreads it around the whole house, fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: No, no, no. Okay. On that happy note, give John a follow and check out all the great stuff they're doing over there at Trust Insights and the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. Give that a listen as well. John, thank you so much. John Wall: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: You know what I wonder? I wonder if there'll be some AI-related news in the SEO News. Crystal Carter: Maybe something about BARD or BERT. Mordy Oberstein: Or Ernie or Gemini or Scorpio. Crystal Carter: Or Elmo. Mordy Oberstein: Or Elmo or Barry Crystal Carter: Or MUM. Mordy Oberstein: Or Barry. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh! Mordy Oberstein: Is Barry a constellation? Crystal Carter: There should be a Barry algo. I think they keep- Mordy Oberstein: That would be amazing if Google, the most penalizing algorithm ever created, they called it Barry Schwartz. I think that would go over well. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: People already blame him for when they lose their rankings. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, all the time. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ask him. When Barry- Crystal Carter: Okay. I would like to just make a public service announcement, Barry's not responsible for your rankings. Mordy Oberstein: No. Barry's just reporting on what happened. There appears to be an update that Google didn't announce. He's just reporting. But there have been many times, Barry's... Actually, I've interviewed him about this. Barry's gotten death threats. Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, over rankings. He's just reporting, people. Crystal Carter: He's not in charge of it. Mordy Oberstein: He's not in charge. Crystal Carter: He didn't do it. Mordy Oberstein: You shouldn't threaten anybody with death. Crystal Carter: Barry's a nice man. You shouldn't do that. Mordy Oberstein: I wouldn't go that far, but yeah. No, I'm kidding. Barry's a gem, which brings us to the Snappy SEO News. In case you haven't realized, this is our time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. The update is over. No, not that one. Not that one. For Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, the Google March 2024 spam update is done rolling out, the March 2024 core update is very much still alive, seeing a whole bunch of reversals in the second wave of volatility that came out. Treated it last week. If you want, check that out. But anyway, onto the spam update. It's done. After 15 days on March 20th, Google announced it's done, it's complete, it's rolled out. If you'll recall, Google announced there were three new elements that are being integrated into the spam algorithm. One of them is not hitting until May. And as part of these announcements, Google released the March 2024 spam update, which obviously heavily focused on the new things being integrated into its spam algorithms, which are scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse and site reputation abuse. Site reputation abuse, not happening until May. And that's parasite SEO. That's again where, I don't know, I want to push my content. I don't have a very authoritative website. I go to Sports Illustrated. I say, "I will buy a page on your website, write up an article, have nothing to do with sports and get traffic through that parasite SEO." The other elements, the expired domain abuse, where you say, "Hey, that domain, that used to be about whatever topic, which is I can get the domain, bring it back to life. Google will think, 'Oh, wow, it's so authoritative. That was such a great website way back when, and I can write whatever I want, whatever garbage I want, and it'll rank.'" So that and the scaled content abuse part of the algorithm is also live right now, and that's where basically you're just throwing up tons of just AI garbage, not curating it at all, not thinking about it at all. You're just pushing out content at scale without any thought whatsoever to essentially manipulate rank and users. So that was also in the March 2024 spam update, and we saw a lot of activity around that. Part of all of this were all of the manual actions, which we discussed on the podcast as well. Thousands of sites have seen manual actions. A lot of the examples being shared have to do with that scaled content abuse where Google's killing off the entire website because again, people are just spinning up random... Some of the cases I've seen, it's not even good AI. It's just bad garbage AI. It's nonsensical even. So those websites have been completely killed off. If you have been doing those kind of things, and you've seen your content and your rankings rather just falls to the bottom floor, that might be something you want to take a look at. If you are doing good, decent work, you shouldn't really be affected by a spam update. Now, one of the things that you're going to be thinking is, "How do I know if I was hit by the spam update or by the March 2024 core update?" Well, one way to know is if you're doing things like scaled content abuse or expired domain abuse, then it's probably the spam update. Again, if you're not doing these ridiculously spammy, absurd things and you're seeing a ranking loss, one, the March 2024 core update's still not done rolling out. Again, as I mentioned, I'm seeing tons of reversals. So don't do anything yet. As Google mentioned, be patient. If, after the March 2024 core update is done and rolled out and completed, and you're still trying to figure out was it the spam update or the core update, again, if you haven't been doing these ridiculously, overtly spammy... I don't even know how to... mind-boggling things, then it's probably the core update. That's my way of looking at it. Okay, onto article number two, again from Barry Schwartz, but this time over at Search Engine around it... By the way, got to say happy birthday to Barry Schwartz. March 22nd was Barry's birthday. I hope you got a lovely birthday cake. Anyway, Barry writes, "Google SGE feedback on affiliate results and Google News: Does This Interest You Pop-Up." Hope you all caught all of that in the headline. Let me explain. Google has done this for a while, but this is a different way of doing it. This one was picked up by a friend of the show, friend of baseball, Glenn Gabe, who saw that for an affiliate website ranking on the results, Google had a little widget there that says, "How helpful was the result above? One extreme being not helpful at all, the other extreme being extremely helpful." And you just selected the dot on the spectrum of how helpful you thought that it was. So that's really interesting to see that on affiliate stuff. Another example was within a Google News result. So there was a news card that showed up and there was a little pop-up thing that says, "Does this interest you? Thumbs up, thumbs down." Google has been doing these things for a long, long, long time. There's a bunch of iterations of this with feature snippets, "Did you find the feature snippet helpful? Yada, yada, yada." So this is not new to quote Barry, but it is interesting to see. Google, again, has done this many, many times in many, many different ways over the years. I think it's really interesting that it's happening now, especially for the affiliate result that Glenn showed. I just find it really interesting that you have all of these things going on in the ecosystem, the whole Reddit question, the spam updates, the core updates, the quality of results, AI content, SGE. And Google's now rolling out this little test of showing a widget, you can offer to your feedback to how helpful the result was. So I think that aligns to what's going on in the ecosystem overall and especially on something that's product review related or affiliate related. So definitely interesting to see Google doing that there. And that is this week's Snappy SEO News. It would be nice though if they had a Barry update, but it was one that was only helpful and rewarding to all websites that were good. Crystal Carter: And then afterwards everyone would go, "Thank you." Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. And they could say, "It's new. It's a new algorithm." Crystal Carter: Indeed. Indeed. You were saying, "Wouldn't it be nice?" And now I'm thinking of that Beach Boys song. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great song, actually. Crystal Carter: It's a great song. Mordy Oberstein: How did Beach Boys stand up? That's a good song. Crystal Carter: Generally, Beach Boys, they've got that good album. They've got one really, really good album. Mordy Oberstein: Right, Pet Shops. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's a great album. Listen to it start to finish. It's a great album. It's really well-produced. Great album. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You know what else is great? Our follow of the week. And our follow of the week is none other than Dale Bertrand. Crystal Carter: Dale Bertrand. If you've been following How to Rank with AI, then you must be following Dale Bertrand. If you're not following him, please do. He's very active on LinkedIn, and you can see him all over the place speaking all over in lots of different places. So he's a founder and president of Fire&Spark with over 15 years experience working out of Boston. And he talks and shares some great resources around AI and content and using it intelligently and using it in a way that really, really works. So highly recommend. Mordy Oberstein: And just a super nice guy, super nice. I met him in BrightonSEO in November in San Diego and he was super nice. Crystal Carter: Super nice. And he's very often at BrightonSEO in the UK. So yeah, he's a great speaker, great writer, great SEO marketer, so highly recommend. Great follow. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to his profiles in the show notes. Now I realize, by the way, I completely botched... It was not called Pets Shops; it's called Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. What the hell am I talking about? I am ridiculous. Crystal Carter: Pet Shops. You're thinking of Pet Shop Boys. You hallucinated. Are you AI? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: I knew it. Mordy Oberstein: It explains a lot. Right? So I want to point out the irony of not saying we're not Beach Boy fans on a podcast built on surfing themes. That's not my favorite. I'll say another hot take, the Beatles aren't my favorite. Crystal Carter: Same. Mordy Oberstein: I enjoy the songs. I have Beatle albums or I had Beatle albums back in the day. Who has albums anymore? But they're historically super important. Crystal Carter: Sgt. Pepper's. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Even that, I don't know. I'm not... Crystal Carter: Come on. Their Come Together, that's a jam. Mordy Oberstein: They're not dark enough for me. They're too happy. All this music, it's just too happy. I need a little bit of an edge. I'm more of a Rolling Stones person than I am a Beatles and Beach Boys person. Crystal Carter: Okay, I can see that. Mordy Oberstein: I need sorrow in my music. Crystal Carter: They're good bands. I had a very long conversation on a car ride and we decided that Led Zeppelin was the best band. Mordy Oberstein: What? I like Led Zeppelin. Don't get me wrong. Crystal Carter: There's a lot of criteria that we went into. We discussed it for a very long time. Mordy Oberstein: It's just wrong. Crystal Carter: It's not wrong. It's not wrong. Mordy Oberstein: That's so Wrong. And I love Zeppelin. I actually saw Robert Plant live. Crystal Carter: Where? Mordy Oberstein: The lead singer of Led Zeppelin, I've seen him live. Crystal Carter: No, I know who he is. Where did you see him? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, where. At Madison Square Garden. He opened for The Who back in 2002. Crystal Carter: Oh, Zeppelin's definitely better than The Who. Mordy Oberstein: What? No, that's ridonkulous. Crystal Carter: Okay. All right. Mordy Oberstein: Were the godfather's of punk. All right. Anyway, we'll talk about this the second we end this podcast, which we're going to do right now, so we can talk about this because this is ballistically insane. I think you've been smoking too much AI, Crystal. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Aren't you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week as we dive into Building Strong Operations for SEO and Beyond. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn a little more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars and resources over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . 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Does SEO differ for niche sites? What is the current environment for niche sites on the SERP? How will Google’s SGE affect niche sites? How will AI impact niche site rankings? Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back this time to figure out how niche sites can use SEO to thrive. Special guest Arielle Phoenix gives her methods for how these specialized sites can create quality content and drive traffic in the age of AI. If you work with specialized sites then this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast will help you carve out a niche for yourself on the SERP. Back SGE & The SEO power of niche sites! Does SEO differ for niche sites? What is the current environment for niche sites on the SERP? How will Google’s SGE affect niche sites? How will AI impact niche site rankings? Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back this time to figure out how niche sites can use SEO to thrive. Special guest Arielle Phoenix gives her methods for how these specialized sites can create quality content and drive traffic in the age of AI. If you work with specialized sites then this week’s episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast will help you carve out a niche for yourself on the SERP. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 47 | July 19, 2023 | 51 MIN 00:00 / 50:58 This week’s guests Arielle Phoenix Arielle Phoenix is a content creator and the founder of Bulk Publishing AI. She runs a portfolio of niche sites monetised by display ads, affiliate offers and digital products. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha! Mahalo! We're joining the SERP's Up Podcast . We're pushing out some guru new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and joined by the incredible, the fantastic, the amazing, the marvelous, the spectacular head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Mordy Oberstein, how are you? Mordy Oberstein: I still have his cold, 12 months, months, brutal, ardent. Crystal Carter: We need Erin to play a little violin sound because I do genuinely feel some sadness for you. Mordy Oberstein: There's stuff in my nostrils that won't leave. Crystal Carter: Have you ever explained to a child about this? It's just like you need to go to sleep. They're like, "No, but my nose is stepped up." I'm like, "Hun, just lie on your side and it will all go to one side and then you'll have one clear one." This is what everyone does. Just wait for it. Mordy Oberstein: Doing the rest of the podcast with my head focused. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: We're done. Thank you. SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Nasonex. Just kidding. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter , but where you can also leverage the power of SEO and content with both the Wix Blog and Wix Content Manager. Create content at scale and optimize it at scale to get traffic at scale, to increase your presence on the SERP as a niche site. Why niche site? Because today, we're talking about niche sites, the web, and SEO. That's right. We're taking stock of what I think is increased stock in niche sites and SEO by talking about where niche sites fit into the new web, the opportunity niche sites present to users, how to set up your niche site to be an authority for SEO success and beyond. Plus, we have a special guest, Arielle Phoenix , to help us dive into what that all means and she'll share all that in just jiffy. We'll also take a deep pause as we take a deep thought into what content really is. That sounds mysterious. Of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, find your little corner of the web and get cozy. It's episode number 47 of the SERP's Up Podcast, carves out the niche that is niche site for SEO. Crystal Carter: That was very bespoke, very bijou, very targeted at a very specific market. Now here's the first question we should talk about. Is it niche or niche? Mordy Oberstein: I say niche. Crystal Carter: I also say niche, but this is because I am very continental. There are other people that say niche, which I find sounds too close to an itch for me personally, but to each their own. Mordy Oberstein: You say tomato, I also say tomato, and some other people say tomato. Crystal Carter: They're wrong. No. Mordy Oberstein: They're wrong. Crystal Carter: Anyway, okay. So, depending on whether or not you were thinking about a niche or a niche website, let's just get a little bit of few things straight. Let's talk about what we are actually talking about. So, in SEO, you use various tactics to make sure that your content is discoverable, make sure that people can find your content, make sure that websites can find your content, and you create content strategies around lots of topics that are related to whatever it's you do. So, sometimes what will happen, for instance, let's say you run a business where you have aquariums, right? Let's say you have an aquarium, but I don't know why I thought of that today, but that's the example we're going to go with. Mordy Oberstein: A giant or a little unit. Crystal Carter: No. Okay, so my aquarium is a place where all of the fish of the sea, well, maybe not all of the fish of the sea, but the ones that I was able to wrangle into my aquarium can come and hang out and have a really good time. I'm a big fan of wrasse. They're really fun at an aquarium. Also, clown fish. Clown fish are a good time at an aquarium. So, anyway, so it's an attraction aquarium. That's what I'm doing in my example. Anyway, so let's say I have this attraction aquarium, then I will probably want to make content around fish, right? Fish, the ocean, the sea, coral reefs, snapper turtles, all that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Fish sticks. Yeah. Crystal Carter: I think that they wouldn't like that, anyway, so I might want to do that thing. What a niche site would do, flipping that on the other side is their aim would be to sell things around aquariums, for instance. So, maybe they would look at the market and they would say there's a big market for people buying aquarium stuff, for instance. Then they would say, "I'm going to make content that appeals to people that are buying that so that I can get traffic through that way." So there's a great article on ahrefs.com, which talks about how to create a niche website . Their question, they say, "What is a niche site?" A niche said is any website that caters to a specific audience or topic. It can be about anything, health, business, relationships, food, travel, fashion, animals, or even more obscure all kinds of niche sites. In this one, they talk a lot about affiliate websites, which is what I'm talking about there. So, for instance, I looked up a niche site that I found, which was houseplants, houseplant.co.uk. You can guess what they talk about. They talk about houseplants almost exclusively. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say they talk about fish. Crystal Carter: No, they don't. They don't. So, they talk about houseplants almost exclusively. What a niche site team would do is they would make sure that their content was very, very tailored for an affiliate one. They would make sure it was tailored, and they'd also make sure that they had links that went off to affiliate content that was related to their particular niche. So, if it was houseplants.com, they might have affiliate content that went off to houseplant products or houseplant services or houseplants may be on Amazon or other sites where you can get affiliate traffic. We are going to be joined today by someone who works very much in this space, very much in this niche site space, creating content that's designed to be commercially viable on the web, either through affiliate traffic or potentially through display advertising traffic. There's lots of different tactics and it's an interesting way to approach online content and it's something that I thought would be worth exploring. Mordy Oberstein: I remember it was a couple of years ago. So, say in the health space, you have your non-niche players like WebMD, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, harvardhealth.org, and you have niche websites. When you start looking at certain keywords , they're just dominated by... I call them the superpowers of the health space. But as you look at certain types of keywords and for certain types of topics, I remember looking at autism for example. Google realizes as a topic, it's a far more niche topic conceptually than, let's say, I don't know, blood pressure. The SERP opens up, something like to the point where on your average top level head term for a health term, like a heart attack prevention, the entries dominated by 8 out of 10, if I remember correctly, were power players. But when you start opening up the SERP a little bit, half the SERP opens up to you as a niche site. I went through a couple hundred keywords doing this and you could just literally see the space for niche sites open up and blossom certain scenarios. Crystal Carter: I think where they thrive is with long-tail keywords , but a large volume of long-tail keywords. So, for instance, if you're thinking about autism for instance, autism has a spectrum of different situations, different scenarios, and each one of those is going to be its own set of keywords and there's going to be long-tail things for that. So, for instance, if you think about somebody who's on the autism spectrum, there might be a whole niche around being in the workplace as someone with autism for instance, and all of the different things that people might think about and might require, might consider, and might think about when they're writing those topics. What some of the niche site might do would be to focus on all of those. Again, it has to do with having laser focus in terms of your keywords and expecting that maybe one individual keyword might not yield you loads of traffic, but that the cumulative volume of all of your long-tail keywords would give you highly focused traffic that's highly focused on your niche and therefore potential opportunities for revenue and for audience engagement. Mordy Oberstein: In some of these cases, before we get to Arielle, Google, I think what it does is profile verticals or profile niches. So, for example, it knows that the content around autism is far more varied, far less, let's say, clear cut than other areas of health content. It's profiled to realize that there's far more websites talking about, far more different perspective, and far more nuanced ways to realize that even for some of the more headier terms, we should be ranking some more niche content or more nuanced content, because the nature of the topic is far more nuanced and far more harder to pin down than just having your WebMD ranking for everything. Crystal Carter: I think the other thing that's great about looking at different tactics within the SEO community is that there's going to be a lot of overlap and a lot of things that you can learn from say somebody who's going all the way laser focused on a particular niche like you're saying within this autism space and who's, let's say, picking up on the fact that things are wider, that there's more opportunities for more diverse perspectives and approaches to search and content. So, there's things you can learn about that will also apply to some of the more broader topic players and will also potentially apply to bigger companies. There's a charity called Cancer Research UK. They're a niche charity and they're looking at that specific things around cancer and research in the UK. So, they've got a long-tail sort of situation there as well. So, even if you're not working in a specific SEO industry or even if you're not generally applying all of the tactics, for instance, from a niche site approach or from a YMYL approach for instance, and looking widely at some of the ways that people are approaching SEO can be incredibly beneficial to how you get different results, get new results, and meet new audiences online. So, I'm really excited to be chatting about this today and I know that certainly when I've looked across some of these sites, I always learned something from them. I think that the other thing we've seen a lot with niche sites is that from their approach, they tend to rely a lot on content velocity. So, they tend to rely a lot on getting a lot of content out in an interesting way. I know that there are content writers who lean a lot on AI , for instance, and it's interesting to see how they're using that. It's interesting to see what results they're getting. It's interesting to see what works, what doesn't work. So, I think it's interesting to see how people are approaching that overall. Mordy Oberstein: Long story short, if you are running a niche site, there's room for you and opportunity for you. So, let's dive into this. We asked Arielle Phoenix a whole bunch of questions about niche sites and SEO. So, let's take this one first. We asked Arielle the difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic traffic perspective, and here's Arielle Phoenix on that. Arielle Phoenix: What is the difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic perspective? Personally, I don't think there is much of a difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic traffic perspective because what we're doing is essentially the same thing. We're targeting keywords or search terms and optimizing them for search traffic. So, on page SEO , technical SEO , we're doing the same things that you would be doing for a non-niche site to gain Google's traffic or Bing or any search engine really, but the main player, of course, is Google. What I will say though is not all niche sites are the same, and where the model generally was find long-tail keywords and create content for those keywords based on Google search engine. Now more people are looking at alternative search engines, because YouTube is a search engine and apparently TikTok is a search engine . So, focusing more on social traffic as opposed to just Google's search engine, because of course, of algorithm updates and various changes, SEO starts to look a bit shaky or fragile as a sole method, but for most of us, it is still the main method of traffic for our sites. Mordy Oberstein: I mean, yeah, that's a great point. Most of the foundational things you're doing are the same across whatever site for the most part, right? Crystal Carter: Sure, sure. Absolutely. I think it's the similar thing too, and I guess it has to do with your objectives. A lot of folks that I know who work in niche sites and particularly the community around niche site SEO on Twitter, anyway, focus a lot on traffic that yields results and focus a lot more on traffic that yields results in a monetary way. So, maybe there's that to think about, but yeah, she's absolutely right that the core tactics, the core methodology is very similar. I think it's interesting that she's talking about additional search engines as well because that's certainly something that we've seen across the general SEO landscape as well. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. So, let's go a little bit deeper with this and let's go into what's the current environment on the SERP for niche sites? Here again is Arielle. Arielle Phoenix: I think this is going to vary a lot depending on the age of the site and how well somebody's built out their brand and the backlink profile and all of those things are going to come into play. But as an industry or as a sector, I think it's become very competitive over the past few years. I've only been in the space for a few years, but at every six month interval, it's changed dramatically. So, with the competition, and of course, many of us who are in this space, we don't just have the one site. We have multiple sites and we're constantly coming up with new niche ideas and throwing sites up. So, the landscape is very, very competitive. The SERPs for niche sites, again, it's going to vary, because for some of us or for some sites, you're going to have solid growth trajectory. Others are going to be tracking sideways and others are going to be dropping out of the SERPs and being replaced by higher authority or better quality in some cases sites. Mordy Oberstein: So this the vision between, I call them the super authorities of the SERP and niche sites have always been a weird balance. People have always accused Google of defaulting to big name brands, because they're buying so many ads, that thing. I think what it has a lot to do with it and I think this is where niche sites can carve their space out, is that Google really trusts those big sites. It's not like, "Oh, they're a big site, therefore we rank them." It's that they're a big site, therefore we really understand and know them and therefore can trust them. If you can somehow do that as a niche site, you could also rank. Obviously knowing where Google is looking at things like, hey, heart attack prevention is the keyword. Trying to rank there no matter what, it's just Google's going to default to .govs like the NHS or the CDC. There isn't a lot you can do there with that, but that doesn't mean that you can't build up that same kind of authority in a way and rank for media keywords you thought you really could. Now this wouldn't be a conversation about niche sites if we didn't get into AI or in the Google case, SGE, search generative experience . So, here's Arielle on how the future is shaping up for niche sites, especially considering the advent of Google's SGE. Take it away, Arielle. Arielle Phoenix: For many people, the future looks bleak. Personally, I don't think, although I know we are just at the beginning of AI. This is the tip of the iceberg and it's definitely going to improve. SGE at the moment is not that great, and I'm going to explain. We are at the very beginning of it and it handles many queries well. So, it does a good job and it's going to continue to do a good job of things like best products and product roundups and give the searcher probably a better experience than a niche site's review post because it's going based on all the information it has and it's summarizing it, which is essentially what we would be doing, but it's got that data in real time. So, there are going to be types of content and queries that it makes very little sense for niche sites to focus on doing because SGE is just going to do a better job. Where we will shine or where a niche site can shine is in the space where they have genuine product experience. So, if you have the product and you've done the YouTube video and you've got the T-shirt to prove this is your experience, then you have a chance of doing better in that particular topic. But I think the focus on the long-tail, the basic answer queries, which SGE is already doing a good job fulfilling, those are probably short-lived or going to be short-lived for now. As I said, it's not that great and people do still need to a lot of the time click in to see the actual article if the SGE has not done a sufficient job, but we will notice that there is a dip in traffic in those types of posts. If we've got a variety of posts on our site, we'll definitely notice that those basic answer query type posts are going to be just dropping in traffic. But as I said, there are many different types of content, and for me personally, I'm not focusing so much on those answer query type posts. There are many different methods that you can use to create quality content that is going to be useful to the reader and more useful than the question with an extended answer to gain that long-tail traffic. So, really delving into content that allows you to be a bit more creative that's multi-leveled in many ways and that allows you to also add videos and really things to enrich the post in a way that the search engine or this SGE can't do. I think that's always been the case, but because long-tail was such an easy game to play, it was very, very easy to again, create lots of content for those queries and I guess do enough posts where you could generate enough traffic to your site to earn a good amount of income. So, I definitely think for the long term, I don't think SGE cancels niche sites out completely. I don't see that. I know many people have their opinions on that, but I don't see that happening if the niche site owner can identify the different types of content that can work in a way that the SGE can't. In some cases, some sites are just going to fail because they've been built on that long-tail keyword model, but there's still a huge opportunity to use the content creation or the keyword targeting model to build your brand and get ahead of this SGE AI curve. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'll be honest with you, if you're running a niche site, going all in on the AI seems like, "Wait a second, your entire unique value or unique value is the fact that you're not AI, is that you have the actual experience, you are the actual expert. You are able to deep dive into the topic the way that most people, let alone most AI writers can't do." So I feel if you are a niche site, no, leverage the fact that you have that expertise and that experience and go full on into that as a way of combating what's inevitably going to be a world filled with the same content spun up by the same AI writers. Crystal Carter: I think that what she's talking about there is absolutely on the money on being able to show that you have reviewed the product well, that you have the YouTube video to go with it, that you're able to add value. This is something that applies not just to niche sites, but to all sites. I think it's something that Google has been trying to nurture within the SEO space for ages with their product review updates. Then with them, they just started calling it the review update and they're basically wanting actual examples and actual real life evidence that you engage with the product to know what you're talking about there. When I think of good niche sites that I have used where it's somebody who's reviewing specific products that I'm looking to buy, for instance, and they've gone into it in depth, I'm like, "I want a cordless vacuum cleaner." There's somebody who's like, "Have I got a website for you?" They're going into all the cordless vacuum cleaners and all of the different things that they do and they've got all the different videos. She's absolutely on the money, but the people who are creating content strategically for their niche are going to do well, because I think that the SGE is going to be very much like featured snippets. You don't see featured snippet on every single SERP. Cyrus Shepherd’s talked about how often you see SGE on the SERP. It's not all the time. So, I think the long-tails will still add value, as she said. As she also pointed out, you also need to enrich the content with additional value. Mordy Oberstein: Especially because when you do that, you're building up your brand, which is a very unique thing to do, especially in a world that's filled with the generic content that's already out there, let alone the generic content that AI is going to put out there. Now, we're talking about niche sites. We have to talk about the question, which is how to create authority as a niche site so that you can compete with the bigger players. Ooh, scandalous and probably the most important question in my mind that we've asked Arielle. Here's what she had to say. Arielle Phoenix: Again, personally, I still take the approach of topical domination or topical authority . The topical domination is more covering the topic in depth, so not leaving anything. Previously, we would try to find gaps in the topic where you have the high traffic, high authority sites going for specific topics, and then you find your way in where they wouldn't bother touching those topics. But with topical domination, you're covering everything. So, every related question, every entity around the subject, and then moving on to another silo that links to it, but that's also covered in depth. So, I guess once upon a time, you could do a small niche site where you just focus on the topic and make 50 or so articles. I think now you need to make these micro topics and do the same thing, but hone in on that micro topic and then relate that to another micro topic and then use that to bolster that key topic that you would've just made 50 articles around in the past. So, still taking that velocity or that high velocity approach with content, but using that as the foundation to build your brand upon. But then using things like YouTube as a separate entity, so focusing on YouTube and allowing them to support each other and other social channels. Of course, you do have to find the social channels that work for that niche. You don't have to go and build a Twitter or LinkedIn for everything, but you do want to build that social proof and focus on EAT once you've got that strong foundation, but that's just my approach. That's what I'm doing to compete with the bigger players, having a solid content base, pairing that with a solid social base, mainly YouTube, and then focusing on the EAT. So, that is the guest post and the link building efforts. As taboo as that does still seem to be, we know the huge sites have a huge backlink profile, so going deeper in on the content and the internal linking, making sure that the site as an entity is as strong as possible, and then going in with the social media, the outreach, building things like link magnets if possible in your niche building applications, things that really build the brand, and of course, focusing then on the EAT. So, ensuring that there is an actual entity behind it and everything is connected, so it is a reputable source or at least appears to be when facing those bigger players. So, yeah, that's my take. That's my approach in the ever-changing niche site space, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts and thanks for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I really liked what she had to say there. It's similar to what I've always talked about when people ask me about targeting zero search volume keywords. Okay, let's assume that no one's searching for this. Okay, there's no value. No, there actually is value because you're building up authority around that topic. You need to start slow. You need to start from somewhere, and starting from these micro topics and then building out from there is just the logical sequence of how you build trusted authority with a search engine who doesn't until that point know who you are. Crystal Carter: Right, precisely. Sometimes you can even drive traffic by creating the traffic with what you're doing and what you're talking about. Then I think she also talked a lot about clustering keywords, and she talked about YouTube as well. She's got a great YouTube video about keyword clustering, keyword clustering tools, and how she works that into her general method, so that's definitely worth looking at. But the keyword clustering is a really great way to organize all of that content for Google because you are helping Google to understand what you're doing with your backlinks or say your site map and things like that and your hierarchy within your site, but also the way that you're linking your site and the way that you're connecting the content that you're creating will also help Google to understand what you're doing and help them to serve it on search result pages in a way that's really effective. I think that that is absolutely important to making sure that the content that you create is valuable to users, is discoverable by Google. So, when you're making lots more content around micro topics that Google can see the actual bulk of your content and that you have that topic authority and then it's really easy for them to access the whole stack. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You have to really think of it very holistically. You don't look at your pieces of content as individual pieces of content. It's one piece feeds the next piece, which feeds the next piece, which feeds the next piece, which creates a corpus. Content is a corpus, and you need a corpus of content. Thank you again, Arielle, for all of that amazing content. Definitely be sure to check out Arielle on Twitter, @ariellecpx. That's @A-R-I-E-L-L-ECPX on Twitter and ariellephoenix.com. Be sure to look in the show notes for the link to her site. Now, speaking about content and SGE and niche sites filling a void on the web, I like to go a little bit deeper into that. I spoil it a little bit on our episode with Mike King around CTR and SGE on the SERP. When I was talking about your content being Matlock, which I'm not going to go into that again. If you listen to that episode, you'll understand what I mean by it. Your content is Matlock. If you don't know who Matlock is, don't worry, ask your grandmother. So, let's dive in a little bit deeper as I'd like to talk about what the heck we mean when we ask that your content might not be as desirable as you might think it is and what that means in terms of SGE and CTR and traffic and clicks and the role of niche sites in all of this as Crystal and I share a deep thought. Okay, let me repose a question to you. So, you spin up content, you create content, it's content. Let's just leave it at that. It's content. You now expect rankings and you expect traffic and you expect conversions, but consider what we just talked about in terms of niche sites and their ability to go into micro topics and to really offer experience and to really offer expertise around really specific nuances within a larger area of the web. When you spin up content and you expect traffic, is that expectation really realistic? Crystal Carter: I mean, there's a reason why SEOs exist, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. To ignore John Mueller on Twitter. Crystal Carter: And Barry Schwartz, to be fair. Mordy Oberstein: To ignore Barry Schwartz on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Exactly. But we exist for a reason because there's lots of people who did that and got nothing. They were like, "Oh, I put up content, and just nothing happened." Sometimes it needs guidance, sometimes it needs help. Sometimes it needs... Mordy Oberstein: Well, let's say it gets the help. You've optimized all the things. Does it still deserve traffic? Just because it ranks, does it deserve traffic? That's what I'm really asking, I guess. Crystal Carter: No, I wouldn't say so. No, no. Google doesn't owe you anything. You could do your best, but Google doesn't owe you anything. Also, the clicks, the ranking, all of that, that's all a reflection of user value. Even if users are going to your site and they're not getting value, then they're not going to come back and Google won't rank you so well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and just because you rank really, really well doesn't mean the content is really, really good. It could just be there's nothing better. Crystal Carter: This is absolutely true. It could also be that maybe that search term was the search term for a while, but maybe nobody's searching it anymore. I don't think anybody's worried about who Jean-Claude Van Damme's girlfriend is right now or something. Mordy Oberstein: I was just Googling that the other day. Crystal Carter: Maybe people were Googling that back in the day when he was like that dude or whatever, but right now, nobody's particularly interested. Mordy Oberstein: What angle is Jean-Claude Van Damme's leg when he does a roundhouse kick? Is it 123 degrees? Crystal Carter: Maybe it was when he was doing pirouettes. Wasn't he a ballet too as well? Mordy Oberstein: Something like that. Yeah. I was watching a video about this recently. Actually, it's random. Just don't ask me why. When I say we, I mean I think the web has gotten to a point where we think, "Okay, this ranks or this should rank. It's good enough to rank, and therefore it deserves traffic." I'm not sure that that equation is entirely accurate. What I think is in many, many, many more cases than you would like to think is that the reason why a page would get traffic or a URL would rank is because there's nothing better. I think that there's an enormous shortage of content on the web. When I say shortage, I mean of good content. There's no shortage of content. There's a shortage of good content. What I think that AI and SGE is going to bring it to focus is that question, is the fact that just because in the past you've had traffic doesn't necessarily mean... I know this is a hot take, and I know SEOs are not going to be happy to be saying this. ... in terms of mathematical logic imply or demand that that traffic continue forever. Crystal Carter: Right. It might just be that nobody ever tried to tip you off a castle. It might be that nobody else tried to write that content. I sometimes find that I see content that's ranking number one, and then I go to check at the search volume up for it and it's not getting any traffic anyway. You're like the king of nothing. So, that happens too. Mordy Oberstein: Do you know what SGE is to me? It's a giant Local Pack. It's a giant Local Pack. Crystal Carter: I can see what you mean. Mordy Oberstein: Imagine it's 2003. I don't know if that's accurate or not. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Beforehand, there was no Local Pack. There's no three listings of a local business. When you search pizza near me, you had to go click on Yelp and run through all the listings there. Then all of a sudden, the Local Pack comes on the SERP and all of the organic results you have your typical 1 through 10 traditional listing, I don't say it becomes irrelevant or becomes less relevant. All things being equal, is that bad? Was that bad for the web? Was that bad for the users? Was that bad for businesses? Crystal Carter: It was different. I've been chatting about this a little while. Everyone's like, "Oh, SGE is completely new. AI and the search is completely new." Featured snippets have been run by AI and machine learning the entire time, the whole time. Featured snippets have been run by AI the entire time. It's been around for years. The image search, visual search with Vision AI has been around for years. All of these things have been around for ages. Yeah, like you're saying, it's different, but all of them are pulling from ranking content. So, the content has to rank in the first place before it can be considered for this new and shiny and fantastic feature. What we see is that the things that rank in SGE are also ranking in your needs SERP. So, what we see is the thing that ranks for the featured snippet or is included in the featured snippet, because sometimes featured snippets include content for one thing and content from another thing, content from another thing, they're all ranking content from the regular plain old blue link SERPS. So, that's important to think. I think also your Matlock scenario is really important. If you look at Internet Live Stats, startling statistics, in 2004, the number of websites according to Internet Live Stats was 51 million websites. Then by 2010, six years later, there were 206 million websites online. So, essentially, your Matlock thing is the same. That's a fourfold increase. Mordy Oberstein: Something's going to have to stop ranking or stop getting traffic at some point. My Matlock case, just for reference, there's a TV show back from the late '80s, early '90s called Matlock with Annie Griffith. When you were home sick as a kid, say a 10-year-old, you're watching The Price Is Right. Then at a certain point, there's nothing on, just Matlock. There was no cable. I'm dating myself here. There was no cable. There was five channel with the bunny rabbit ear antennas, and you were either watching General Hospital, which is soap opera, which I was not watching, or Matlock. So, Matlock had great numbers in the early afternoon because there was nothing else. That's my parallel with content. Maybe your content is getting all that traffic because there's nothing else. There's no other paradigm, but SGE brings in a new paradigm, which by the way, I think niche sites are built for SGE for two reasons. One is Google's trying to be a little bit more specific as the entire point of SGE to refine what people are looking for and they want to offer very refined, very specific results. That's one. The second is there's an explore feature or an expand feature within Google's SGE where it takes the SGE summary. So, it takes the five lines of SGE, of an AI content that they wrote. It breaks it down per line and it shows organic results per line, which are inherently going to be very specific. So, SGE in my mind is built for niche sites who may not have been able to capitalize on the SERP, who might now be able to capitalize on. I would love to see, thought, SGE rolls out in full a year later. Are the big players losing traffic and are niche sites increasing in traffic? That would be fascinating to see. Crystal Carter: I think it's really interesting because I think the reason why niche sites are going to do well out of this or could potentially do well is because of the way that you talk to a generative search experience. So, on a generative search, I am much more likely to write a very, very long-winded query. On a Google SERP, a standard traditional search, I'm probably going- Mordy Oberstein: Three words. Crystal Carter: Three words, right? I'm going to say TV on now. Mordy Oberstein: Van Damme leg kick. Crystal Carter: Right? Van Damme leg kick. Whereas let's say, "What kind of ballet did Jean-Claude Van Damme do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?" or whatever it may be So you'll get right into it, or you might even describe something that you don't even know the name for instance. Mordy Oberstein: The answer is the ballet where you get a roundhouse right to the face. Crystal Carter: I think that Arielle was talking about niching down and getting right into not just writing that one topic, but writing up, but making sure that your website represents an entity and that everything revolves around that entity and you're covering every different way to discover that entity and discover that information. Again, that works really, really well with a generative search experience because it's a situation where you're going to ask a question and then you're going to delve into it and delve into it and delve into it and delve into it more and more and more and more and more. I think I've discussed this previously, but one of the best ones I've had was I was trying to figure out what to do with my houseplant. My houseplant is dying. What do I do with it? It kept giving me lots of results from the same houseplant website. Now I'm like, "Okay, that's a good place to go for information about this houseplant because they have all of the information about that. So, why would I go to some other website? I'd go to that one." Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. You really build that trust, that branding. By the way, how was that houseplant? Crystal Carter: It's better. It's better actually. I took some advice. I put it in a north facing window. I gave it some more water. I haven't repotted it, but she's doing okay. Thanks for asking. That's so kind. Mordy Oberstein: Of course. Now, since we're talking about AI, I'm sure there's some AI news this week because there's always some AI news or not. Either way. Crystal Carter: There are bots. Mordy Oberstein: There's this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Come on, Barry. Light my fire. Barry Schwartz has been roll this week with a few hotly contested SEO issues. So, cue up some sappy soap opera music because it's about to get dramatic in here. First Barry Schwartz over at search engine round table, Google details, SEO guidance for content syndication partners. So, in a nutshell, the practice for years has been to use the canonical to tell Google, which is the real original article. So, you're syndicating content. Let's say you're Reuters. You're syndicating to ABC News, to CNN, to MSNBC, whatever it is. How do you know? How does Google supposed to know which is the real source, which is the real original article? By using the canonical tag pointing back to the original article, which has been difficult to get done because you have to get that done in an agreement with the syndicated partners. What are the chances that they actually want to tell Google, "Hey, don't rank us. Rank the original partner"? That aside, a few months ago, Google said, "We'll make it different. We're going to say, now you should use the no index instead of the canonical tag." Meaning if you want to rank and not your syndicated partners tell the syndicated partners, just apply a no index tag so they can't rank and only you can rank. So, you would need to get that into an agreement, which would be very, very difficult. There's a lot of back and forth. Was the guidance really that all along so forth and so forth and so forth? I don't want to get into any of that. The point is many SEOs feel stuck here to rock in a hard place and would like to see a different approach again, because you need to now tell the syndicated partners, "Hey, you need to apply a no index tag here." You're not going to rank at all, which again, if I'm, let's say MSNBC or ABC News, I want to rank. So, why would I agree to that? Google's Danny Sullivan did say he would take that feedback and bring it to the team, which is not always lip service. I know people sometimes feel that's lip service. It's not. I could say at Wix, we've done that many, many times. We've taken feedback from the SEO community, brought that to the team, and then made a product improvement. So, I would take that as a legitimate offer of, "Hey, I'm going to go bring that to the team. Let's see if we can figure that out." So maybe there will be something coming down the pike that would make syndication a little bit more advantageous from a ranking point of view. The point is, if you are going to syndicate your content, there are some hard conversations that you're going to need to have about the benefits of syndicating and the monetary gain you get from that versus the ability to rank and the monetary gain you would get from that. But wait, Barry was not done there. From search engine land, Barry goes, "Google's Core Web Vitals INP issues email is causing concern." So a few weeks ago, Google added INP, Interaction to Next Paint, which will replace FID, First Input Delay as one of the three Core Web Vitals Come March 2024. With that, Google started setting out the notifications. You have an issue for INP from search console. The issue is that the web is currently working to align with the new guidelines. So, for example, we at Wix have been working way before Google actually announced INP would be in the Core Web Vitals with Google to see what makes sense, what doesn't make sense when it comes to tracking websites and INP. So, for example, we've been working on this for a long time and now 83% of our website's mobile in the US pass INP, but the issue is that this is not coming due until March and really nothing changed on the website. Only that changed that Google brought INP into search console is now sending out notifications, but the website has been the same the entire time. So, if thing's been okay with the website, then there's really nothing to worry about. At the same time from a ranking point of view, nothing is changing until March 2024. Even with that, this is where Barry really went off in his weekly news recap on Search Engine Roundtable, which we'll link to, where Barry was saying, "Hey, look, there was a whole bunch of hype around Core Web Vitals that are ranking the first time around when Google initially integrated this into the algorithm and that didn't really pan out. There really wasn't any significant ranking impact as a result. In fact for many websites, there was literally zero. Nothing actually happened as a tiebreaker scenario." Barry was saying, "Hey, why are we trying to make this a big deal again, from a ranking point of view? You're now sending these issues out via email to websites. Website numbers are going to freak out and start prioritizing an INP from an SEO point of view." But that's not really the right thing to do because you're talking about a small issue within a small issue because a ranking impact is really, really minimal for Core Web Vitals. Now you're just talking about one of the Core Web Vitals. So, Barry was saying, "Hey, I think these emails are harmful because they're going to make people freak out and start prioritizing what might not be an SEO priority to begin with." That's not to say that INP is not important. It's super important from a user experience point of view. When your users get to the page, they should have a really seamless, fast integrated experience that doesn't hold them back from doing what they want to do. But the point about rank, I would have to agree with Barry about. The point is, if you've got these emails, nothing about your site actually changed. All that changes is Google's now sending the emails out. You don't know the significance of the INP issue. It could be a very small little thing that you need to change, right? But Google doesn't tell you that in the email, so take it slow. From a ranking point of view, none of this matters until March 2024, and even then, it's a very, very, very, very small issue most likely. The last thing you should really just understand is that this is something that the web itself is really aligning to, which is why I think people were upset. Hey, we're working towards aligning to your new guidelines. Why are we now getting emails that we're not there yet? Of course, we're not there yet, but again, many, many websites are there and should be fine. Again, for example, on the Wix site, 83% of mobile sites in the US already passed INP and we're not even anywhere close to March. Okay. Moving on, some AI news for you, again from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Just call him the monopoly man. He's got a monopoly on the SEO news. Barry writes, "Google expands Bard to more countries, more languages, and adds new features." So Bard is now available in more geolocations and there's a whole bunch of new features. For example, you can now listen to the prompt, which is great for accessibility. You can adjust the tone of the response, so how formal you want the response to be, how long you want the response to be and so forth. This comes, by the way, as Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern reports, "Is ChatGPT getting Dumber?" Usage drops as users complain. So, basically people are saying, "Hey, I've been using ChatGPT for a long time, and it seems to be the responses are not as good as they used to be." OpenAI said, which I very much align with, that nothing's really changed. It's probably noticing more and more issues as you use it more and more often. I totally agree with that. I don't think anything actually changed the... Why would the AI get dumber? It's only getting more refined and more refined and more refined. This goes back to what we've been saying on this podcast for a very, very, very long time. The technology is super cool and it is super amazing and it is super innovative and it is beyond words. But when you get past that and you're talking about actual usage in real life situations, there are gaps in this technology. So, now as a web, we've gotten past the initial wow factor and we're actually starting to use this thing in real life cases. We're like, "Wait a second, maybe this isn't as good as we thought it was, because you're looking at it from two different perspectives, the wow factor versus actual integration to your consumer base." So I don't think the AI has gotten any dumber. What I think, as OpenAI points out, is that you're starting to notice more and more flaws and thinking maybe this isn't as good and maybe we can't use it across the board the way we thought we could, which I hate to say this, but if you listen to the podcast regularly, we told you so. By the way, some of the data sources are showing a 10% drop-off in ChatGPT usage. Pulling Barry Schwartz back in on Twitter, he was talking about the hype is starting to wane. I think he ran a poll from Gary Sterling over at Search Engine Roundtable, showing that SEOs are using it significantly less often. The point is in marketing, there's all these things that come around in cycles, super hype things. I don't think AI is hype per se, as I've mentioned on the podcast many, many times. I think it's a great tool. It's not going anywhere, but that initial, "Oh, my goodness. This is amazing. It's a panacea for all things," I think that was hype. I think the web is starting to come out of that, and I think hopefully that will result in more mature adoption of the AI technology. With that, that is this week's not so snappy news. Always so snappy with that snappy news. Hey, Crystal, I always feel like coming back like a news show. Have a great weekend, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, I had a great, great weekend. I'm planning to go- Mordy Oberstein: All right. Okay, here where the weather is... I always wanted to be a news anchor. Not never. Anyway, I always found that news anchor thing so plastic, not my thing. Crystal Carter: Fair enough. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, Sue, of course, Bob. Anyway, Crystal Carter: I feel like you'd be more of a radio show guy for that. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely more of the afternoon drive home radio station for hard rock radio station thing. Speaking of music, by the way, it's time for our follow of the weekend. He's a very musical person. If we're talking about SGE, we're talking about the future of search as we talked about niche sites, who else could our follow of the week be than our previous guest, Mike King over @iPullRank on Twitter. That's I, the letter I, not the number I, the letter I. Just like what? The letter I-P-U-L-L-R-A-N-K, iPullRank. Crystal Carter: iPullRank, yeah. Mike is great. Mike is a fount of SEO knowledge. He's been SEO and thinking about AI for ages. We had him on a webinar talking about ChatGPT and AI content writers. He's got so much knowledge about the relationship between machine learning and entities and search and how that all works. So, he's a fantastic follow. He's also really, really engaged with the community and very much a pillar of the community. So, absolutely follow him. He's a fantastic follow. Mordy Oberstein: Must follow, I feel like. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely must follow. He is great at translating that information that's really complex in a really eye level way, which is fabulous. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and do check out the webinar. He dropped some fantastic, fantastic information there. Mordy Oberstein: The webinar with him and Ross Hudgins about AI content writers and SEO and the future of the web, we'll link to in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Everybody who joined it said it was fantastic. So, please, please do join along. Enjoy it, find it on YouTube, all of that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Well, we've come to the end of this road. I'll see you niche week. I've been holding that for like 20 minutes. Crystal Carter: Niche road will we take? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, niche. It doesn't work. Doesn't work. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with new episodes. We dive into repurposing your audio and video content for search. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Arielle Phoenix Mike King Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Areille Phoenix Website News: Google Details SEO Guidance For Content Syndication Partners Google’s Core Web Vitals INP issues email causing concern Is ChatGPT Getting “Dumber”? Usage Drops As Users Complain Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Arielle Phoenix Mike King Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Areille Phoenix Website News: Google Details SEO Guidance For Content Syndication Partners Google’s Core Web Vitals INP issues email causing concern Is ChatGPT Getting “Dumber”? Usage Drops As Users Complain Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha! Mahalo! We're joining the SERP's Up Podcast . We're pushing out some guru new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and joined by the incredible, the fantastic, the amazing, the marvelous, the spectacular head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Mordy Oberstein, how are you? Mordy Oberstein: I still have his cold, 12 months, months, brutal, ardent. Crystal Carter: We need Erin to play a little violin sound because I do genuinely feel some sadness for you. Mordy Oberstein: There's stuff in my nostrils that won't leave. Crystal Carter: Have you ever explained to a child about this? It's just like you need to go to sleep. They're like, "No, but my nose is stepped up." I'm like, "Hun, just lie on your side and it will all go to one side and then you'll have one clear one." This is what everyone does. Just wait for it. Mordy Oberstein: Doing the rest of the podcast with my head focused. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: We're done. Thank you. SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Nasonex. Just kidding. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter , but where you can also leverage the power of SEO and content with both the Wix Blog and Wix Content Manager. Create content at scale and optimize it at scale to get traffic at scale, to increase your presence on the SERP as a niche site. Why niche site? Because today, we're talking about niche sites, the web, and SEO. That's right. We're taking stock of what I think is increased stock in niche sites and SEO by talking about where niche sites fit into the new web, the opportunity niche sites present to users, how to set up your niche site to be an authority for SEO success and beyond. Plus, we have a special guest, Arielle Phoenix , to help us dive into what that all means and she'll share all that in just jiffy. We'll also take a deep pause as we take a deep thought into what content really is. That sounds mysterious. Of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, find your little corner of the web and get cozy. It's episode number 47 of the SERP's Up Podcast, carves out the niche that is niche site for SEO. Crystal Carter: That was very bespoke, very bijou, very targeted at a very specific market. Now here's the first question we should talk about. Is it niche or niche? Mordy Oberstein: I say niche. Crystal Carter: I also say niche, but this is because I am very continental. There are other people that say niche, which I find sounds too close to an itch for me personally, but to each their own. Mordy Oberstein: You say tomato, I also say tomato, and some other people say tomato. Crystal Carter: They're wrong. No. Mordy Oberstein: They're wrong. Crystal Carter: Anyway, okay. So, depending on whether or not you were thinking about a niche or a niche website, let's just get a little bit of few things straight. Let's talk about what we are actually talking about. So, in SEO, you use various tactics to make sure that your content is discoverable, make sure that people can find your content, make sure that websites can find your content, and you create content strategies around lots of topics that are related to whatever it's you do. So, sometimes what will happen, for instance, let's say you run a business where you have aquariums, right? Let's say you have an aquarium, but I don't know why I thought of that today, but that's the example we're going to go with. Mordy Oberstein: A giant or a little unit. Crystal Carter: No. Okay, so my aquarium is a place where all of the fish of the sea, well, maybe not all of the fish of the sea, but the ones that I was able to wrangle into my aquarium can come and hang out and have a really good time. I'm a big fan of wrasse. They're really fun at an aquarium. Also, clown fish. Clown fish are a good time at an aquarium. So, anyway, so it's an attraction aquarium. That's what I'm doing in my example. Anyway, so let's say I have this attraction aquarium, then I will probably want to make content around fish, right? Fish, the ocean, the sea, coral reefs, snapper turtles, all that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Fish sticks. Yeah. Crystal Carter: I think that they wouldn't like that, anyway, so I might want to do that thing. What a niche site would do, flipping that on the other side is their aim would be to sell things around aquariums, for instance. So, maybe they would look at the market and they would say there's a big market for people buying aquarium stuff, for instance. Then they would say, "I'm going to make content that appeals to people that are buying that so that I can get traffic through that way." So there's a great article on ahrefs.com, which talks about how to create a niche website . Their question, they say, "What is a niche site?" A niche said is any website that caters to a specific audience or topic. It can be about anything, health, business, relationships, food, travel, fashion, animals, or even more obscure all kinds of niche sites. In this one, they talk a lot about affiliate websites, which is what I'm talking about there. So, for instance, I looked up a niche site that I found, which was houseplants, houseplant.co.uk. You can guess what they talk about. They talk about houseplants almost exclusively. Mordy Oberstein: I was going to say they talk about fish. Crystal Carter: No, they don't. They don't. So, they talk about houseplants almost exclusively. What a niche site team would do is they would make sure that their content was very, very tailored for an affiliate one. They would make sure it was tailored, and they'd also make sure that they had links that went off to affiliate content that was related to their particular niche. So, if it was houseplants.com, they might have affiliate content that went off to houseplant products or houseplant services or houseplants may be on Amazon or other sites where you can get affiliate traffic. We are going to be joined today by someone who works very much in this space, very much in this niche site space, creating content that's designed to be commercially viable on the web, either through affiliate traffic or potentially through display advertising traffic. There's lots of different tactics and it's an interesting way to approach online content and it's something that I thought would be worth exploring. Mordy Oberstein: I remember it was a couple of years ago. So, say in the health space, you have your non-niche players like WebMD, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, harvardhealth.org, and you have niche websites. When you start looking at certain keywords , they're just dominated by... I call them the superpowers of the health space. But as you look at certain types of keywords and for certain types of topics, I remember looking at autism for example. Google realizes as a topic, it's a far more niche topic conceptually than, let's say, I don't know, blood pressure. The SERP opens up, something like to the point where on your average top level head term for a health term, like a heart attack prevention, the entries dominated by 8 out of 10, if I remember correctly, were power players. But when you start opening up the SERP a little bit, half the SERP opens up to you as a niche site. I went through a couple hundred keywords doing this and you could just literally see the space for niche sites open up and blossom certain scenarios. Crystal Carter: I think where they thrive is with long-tail keywords , but a large volume of long-tail keywords. So, for instance, if you're thinking about autism for instance, autism has a spectrum of different situations, different scenarios, and each one of those is going to be its own set of keywords and there's going to be long-tail things for that. So, for instance, if you think about somebody who's on the autism spectrum, there might be a whole niche around being in the workplace as someone with autism for instance, and all of the different things that people might think about and might require, might consider, and might think about when they're writing those topics. What some of the niche site might do would be to focus on all of those. Again, it has to do with having laser focus in terms of your keywords and expecting that maybe one individual keyword might not yield you loads of traffic, but that the cumulative volume of all of your long-tail keywords would give you highly focused traffic that's highly focused on your niche and therefore potential opportunities for revenue and for audience engagement. Mordy Oberstein: In some of these cases, before we get to Arielle, Google, I think what it does is profile verticals or profile niches. So, for example, it knows that the content around autism is far more varied, far less, let's say, clear cut than other areas of health content. It's profiled to realize that there's far more websites talking about, far more different perspective, and far more nuanced ways to realize that even for some of the more headier terms, we should be ranking some more niche content or more nuanced content, because the nature of the topic is far more nuanced and far more harder to pin down than just having your WebMD ranking for everything. Crystal Carter: I think the other thing that's great about looking at different tactics within the SEO community is that there's going to be a lot of overlap and a lot of things that you can learn from say somebody who's going all the way laser focused on a particular niche like you're saying within this autism space and who's, let's say, picking up on the fact that things are wider, that there's more opportunities for more diverse perspectives and approaches to search and content. So, there's things you can learn about that will also apply to some of the more broader topic players and will also potentially apply to bigger companies. There's a charity called Cancer Research UK. They're a niche charity and they're looking at that specific things around cancer and research in the UK. So, they've got a long-tail sort of situation there as well. So, even if you're not working in a specific SEO industry or even if you're not generally applying all of the tactics, for instance, from a niche site approach or from a YMYL approach for instance, and looking widely at some of the ways that people are approaching SEO can be incredibly beneficial to how you get different results, get new results, and meet new audiences online. So, I'm really excited to be chatting about this today and I know that certainly when I've looked across some of these sites, I always learned something from them. I think that the other thing we've seen a lot with niche sites is that from their approach, they tend to rely a lot on content velocity. So, they tend to rely a lot on getting a lot of content out in an interesting way. I know that there are content writers who lean a lot on AI , for instance, and it's interesting to see how they're using that. It's interesting to see what results they're getting. It's interesting to see what works, what doesn't work. So, I think it's interesting to see how people are approaching that overall. Mordy Oberstein: Long story short, if you are running a niche site, there's room for you and opportunity for you. So, let's dive into this. We asked Arielle Phoenix a whole bunch of questions about niche sites and SEO. So, let's take this one first. We asked Arielle the difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic traffic perspective, and here's Arielle Phoenix on that. Arielle Phoenix: What is the difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic perspective? Personally, I don't think there is much of a difference between niche sites and non-niche sites from an SEO and organic traffic perspective because what we're doing is essentially the same thing. We're targeting keywords or search terms and optimizing them for search traffic. So, on page SEO , technical SEO , we're doing the same things that you would be doing for a non-niche site to gain Google's traffic or Bing or any search engine really, but the main player, of course, is Google. What I will say though is not all niche sites are the same, and where the model generally was find long-tail keywords and create content for those keywords based on Google search engine. Now more people are looking at alternative search engines, because YouTube is a search engine and apparently TikTok is a search engine . So, focusing more on social traffic as opposed to just Google's search engine, because of course, of algorithm updates and various changes, SEO starts to look a bit shaky or fragile as a sole method, but for most of us, it is still the main method of traffic for our sites. Mordy Oberstein: I mean, yeah, that's a great point. Most of the foundational things you're doing are the same across whatever site for the most part, right? Crystal Carter: Sure, sure. Absolutely. I think it's the similar thing too, and I guess it has to do with your objectives. A lot of folks that I know who work in niche sites and particularly the community around niche site SEO on Twitter, anyway, focus a lot on traffic that yields results and focus a lot more on traffic that yields results in a monetary way. So, maybe there's that to think about, but yeah, she's absolutely right that the core tactics, the core methodology is very similar. I think it's interesting that she's talking about additional search engines as well because that's certainly something that we've seen across the general SEO landscape as well. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. So, let's go a little bit deeper with this and let's go into what's the current environment on the SERP for niche sites? Here again is Arielle. Arielle Phoenix: I think this is going to vary a lot depending on the age of the site and how well somebody's built out their brand and the backlink profile and all of those things are going to come into play. But as an industry or as a sector, I think it's become very competitive over the past few years. I've only been in the space for a few years, but at every six month interval, it's changed dramatically. So, with the competition, and of course, many of us who are in this space, we don't just have the one site. We have multiple sites and we're constantly coming up with new niche ideas and throwing sites up. So, the landscape is very, very competitive. The SERPs for niche sites, again, it's going to vary, because for some of us or for some sites, you're going to have solid growth trajectory. Others are going to be tracking sideways and others are going to be dropping out of the SERPs and being replaced by higher authority or better quality in some cases sites. Mordy Oberstein: So this the vision between, I call them the super authorities of the SERP and niche sites have always been a weird balance. People have always accused Google of defaulting to big name brands, because they're buying so many ads, that thing. I think what it has a lot to do with it and I think this is where niche sites can carve their space out, is that Google really trusts those big sites. It's not like, "Oh, they're a big site, therefore we rank them." It's that they're a big site, therefore we really understand and know them and therefore can trust them. If you can somehow do that as a niche site, you could also rank. Obviously knowing where Google is looking at things like, hey, heart attack prevention is the keyword. Trying to rank there no matter what, it's just Google's going to default to .govs like the NHS or the CDC. There isn't a lot you can do there with that, but that doesn't mean that you can't build up that same kind of authority in a way and rank for media keywords you thought you really could. Now this wouldn't be a conversation about niche sites if we didn't get into AI or in the Google case, SGE, search generative experience . So, here's Arielle on how the future is shaping up for niche sites, especially considering the advent of Google's SGE. Take it away, Arielle. Arielle Phoenix: For many people, the future looks bleak. Personally, I don't think, although I know we are just at the beginning of AI. This is the tip of the iceberg and it's definitely going to improve. SGE at the moment is not that great, and I'm going to explain. We are at the very beginning of it and it handles many queries well. So, it does a good job and it's going to continue to do a good job of things like best products and product roundups and give the searcher probably a better experience than a niche site's review post because it's going based on all the information it has and it's summarizing it, which is essentially what we would be doing, but it's got that data in real time. So, there are going to be types of content and queries that it makes very little sense for niche sites to focus on doing because SGE is just going to do a better job. Where we will shine or where a niche site can shine is in the space where they have genuine product experience. So, if you have the product and you've done the YouTube video and you've got the T-shirt to prove this is your experience, then you have a chance of doing better in that particular topic. But I think the focus on the long-tail, the basic answer queries, which SGE is already doing a good job fulfilling, those are probably short-lived or going to be short-lived for now. As I said, it's not that great and people do still need to a lot of the time click in to see the actual article if the SGE has not done a sufficient job, but we will notice that there is a dip in traffic in those types of posts. If we've got a variety of posts on our site, we'll definitely notice that those basic answer query type posts are going to be just dropping in traffic. But as I said, there are many different types of content, and for me personally, I'm not focusing so much on those answer query type posts. There are many different methods that you can use to create quality content that is going to be useful to the reader and more useful than the question with an extended answer to gain that long-tail traffic. So, really delving into content that allows you to be a bit more creative that's multi-leveled in many ways and that allows you to also add videos and really things to enrich the post in a way that the search engine or this SGE can't do. I think that's always been the case, but because long-tail was such an easy game to play, it was very, very easy to again, create lots of content for those queries and I guess do enough posts where you could generate enough traffic to your site to earn a good amount of income. So, I definitely think for the long term, I don't think SGE cancels niche sites out completely. I don't see that. I know many people have their opinions on that, but I don't see that happening if the niche site owner can identify the different types of content that can work in a way that the SGE can't. In some cases, some sites are just going to fail because they've been built on that long-tail keyword model, but there's still a huge opportunity to use the content creation or the keyword targeting model to build your brand and get ahead of this SGE AI curve. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'll be honest with you, if you're running a niche site, going all in on the AI seems like, "Wait a second, your entire unique value or unique value is the fact that you're not AI, is that you have the actual experience, you are the actual expert. You are able to deep dive into the topic the way that most people, let alone most AI writers can't do." So I feel if you are a niche site, no, leverage the fact that you have that expertise and that experience and go full on into that as a way of combating what's inevitably going to be a world filled with the same content spun up by the same AI writers. Crystal Carter: I think that what she's talking about there is absolutely on the money on being able to show that you have reviewed the product well, that you have the YouTube video to go with it, that you're able to add value. This is something that applies not just to niche sites, but to all sites. I think it's something that Google has been trying to nurture within the SEO space for ages with their product review updates. Then with them, they just started calling it the review update and they're basically wanting actual examples and actual real life evidence that you engage with the product to know what you're talking about there. When I think of good niche sites that I have used where it's somebody who's reviewing specific products that I'm looking to buy, for instance, and they've gone into it in depth, I'm like, "I want a cordless vacuum cleaner." There's somebody who's like, "Have I got a website for you?" They're going into all the cordless vacuum cleaners and all of the different things that they do and they've got all the different videos. She's absolutely on the money, but the people who are creating content strategically for their niche are going to do well, because I think that the SGE is going to be very much like featured snippets. You don't see featured snippet on every single SERP. Cyrus Shepherd’s talked about how often you see SGE on the SERP. It's not all the time. So, I think the long-tails will still add value, as she said. As she also pointed out, you also need to enrich the content with additional value. Mordy Oberstein: Especially because when you do that, you're building up your brand, which is a very unique thing to do, especially in a world that's filled with the generic content that's already out there, let alone the generic content that AI is going to put out there. Now, we're talking about niche sites. We have to talk about the question, which is how to create authority as a niche site so that you can compete with the bigger players. Ooh, scandalous and probably the most important question in my mind that we've asked Arielle. Here's what she had to say. Arielle Phoenix: Again, personally, I still take the approach of topical domination or topical authority . The topical domination is more covering the topic in depth, so not leaving anything. Previously, we would try to find gaps in the topic where you have the high traffic, high authority sites going for specific topics, and then you find your way in where they wouldn't bother touching those topics. But with topical domination, you're covering everything. So, every related question, every entity around the subject, and then moving on to another silo that links to it, but that's also covered in depth. So, I guess once upon a time, you could do a small niche site where you just focus on the topic and make 50 or so articles. I think now you need to make these micro topics and do the same thing, but hone in on that micro topic and then relate that to another micro topic and then use that to bolster that key topic that you would've just made 50 articles around in the past. So, still taking that velocity or that high velocity approach with content, but using that as the foundation to build your brand upon. But then using things like YouTube as a separate entity, so focusing on YouTube and allowing them to support each other and other social channels. Of course, you do have to find the social channels that work for that niche. You don't have to go and build a Twitter or LinkedIn for everything, but you do want to build that social proof and focus on EAT once you've got that strong foundation, but that's just my approach. That's what I'm doing to compete with the bigger players, having a solid content base, pairing that with a solid social base, mainly YouTube, and then focusing on the EAT. So, that is the guest post and the link building efforts. As taboo as that does still seem to be, we know the huge sites have a huge backlink profile, so going deeper in on the content and the internal linking, making sure that the site as an entity is as strong as possible, and then going in with the social media, the outreach, building things like link magnets if possible in your niche building applications, things that really build the brand, and of course, focusing then on the EAT. So, ensuring that there is an actual entity behind it and everything is connected, so it is a reputable source or at least appears to be when facing those bigger players. So, yeah, that's my take. That's my approach in the ever-changing niche site space, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts and thanks for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I really liked what she had to say there. It's similar to what I've always talked about when people ask me about targeting zero search volume keywords. Okay, let's assume that no one's searching for this. Okay, there's no value. No, there actually is value because you're building up authority around that topic. You need to start slow. You need to start from somewhere, and starting from these micro topics and then building out from there is just the logical sequence of how you build trusted authority with a search engine who doesn't until that point know who you are. Crystal Carter: Right, precisely. Sometimes you can even drive traffic by creating the traffic with what you're doing and what you're talking about. Then I think she also talked a lot about clustering keywords, and she talked about YouTube as well. She's got a great YouTube video about keyword clustering, keyword clustering tools, and how she works that into her general method, so that's definitely worth looking at. But the keyword clustering is a really great way to organize all of that content for Google because you are helping Google to understand what you're doing with your backlinks or say your site map and things like that and your hierarchy within your site, but also the way that you're linking your site and the way that you're connecting the content that you're creating will also help Google to understand what you're doing and help them to serve it on search result pages in a way that's really effective. I think that that is absolutely important to making sure that the content that you create is valuable to users, is discoverable by Google. So, when you're making lots more content around micro topics that Google can see the actual bulk of your content and that you have that topic authority and then it's really easy for them to access the whole stack. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. You have to really think of it very holistically. You don't look at your pieces of content as individual pieces of content. It's one piece feeds the next piece, which feeds the next piece, which feeds the next piece, which creates a corpus. Content is a corpus, and you need a corpus of content. Thank you again, Arielle, for all of that amazing content. Definitely be sure to check out Arielle on Twitter, @ariellecpx. That's @A-R-I-E-L-L-ECPX on Twitter and ariellephoenix.com. Be sure to look in the show notes for the link to her site. Now, speaking about content and SGE and niche sites filling a void on the web, I like to go a little bit deeper into that. I spoil it a little bit on our episode with Mike King around CTR and SGE on the SERP. When I was talking about your content being Matlock, which I'm not going to go into that again. If you listen to that episode, you'll understand what I mean by it. Your content is Matlock. If you don't know who Matlock is, don't worry, ask your grandmother. So, let's dive in a little bit deeper as I'd like to talk about what the heck we mean when we ask that your content might not be as desirable as you might think it is and what that means in terms of SGE and CTR and traffic and clicks and the role of niche sites in all of this as Crystal and I share a deep thought. Okay, let me repose a question to you. So, you spin up content, you create content, it's content. Let's just leave it at that. It's content. You now expect rankings and you expect traffic and you expect conversions, but consider what we just talked about in terms of niche sites and their ability to go into micro topics and to really offer experience and to really offer expertise around really specific nuances within a larger area of the web. When you spin up content and you expect traffic, is that expectation really realistic? Crystal Carter: I mean, there's a reason why SEOs exist, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. To ignore John Mueller on Twitter. Crystal Carter: And Barry Schwartz, to be fair. Mordy Oberstein: To ignore Barry Schwartz on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Exactly. But we exist for a reason because there's lots of people who did that and got nothing. They were like, "Oh, I put up content, and just nothing happened." Sometimes it needs guidance, sometimes it needs help. Sometimes it needs... Mordy Oberstein: Well, let's say it gets the help. You've optimized all the things. Does it still deserve traffic? Just because it ranks, does it deserve traffic? That's what I'm really asking, I guess. Crystal Carter: No, I wouldn't say so. No, no. Google doesn't owe you anything. You could do your best, but Google doesn't owe you anything. Also, the clicks, the ranking, all of that, that's all a reflection of user value. Even if users are going to your site and they're not getting value, then they're not going to come back and Google won't rank you so well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and just because you rank really, really well doesn't mean the content is really, really good. It could just be there's nothing better. Crystal Carter: This is absolutely true. It could also be that maybe that search term was the search term for a while, but maybe nobody's searching it anymore. I don't think anybody's worried about who Jean-Claude Van Damme's girlfriend is right now or something. Mordy Oberstein: I was just Googling that the other day. Crystal Carter: Maybe people were Googling that back in the day when he was like that dude or whatever, but right now, nobody's particularly interested. Mordy Oberstein: What angle is Jean-Claude Van Damme's leg when he does a roundhouse kick? Is it 123 degrees? Crystal Carter: Maybe it was when he was doing pirouettes. Wasn't he a ballet too as well? Mordy Oberstein: Something like that. Yeah. I was watching a video about this recently. Actually, it's random. Just don't ask me why. When I say we, I mean I think the web has gotten to a point where we think, "Okay, this ranks or this should rank. It's good enough to rank, and therefore it deserves traffic." I'm not sure that that equation is entirely accurate. What I think is in many, many, many more cases than you would like to think is that the reason why a page would get traffic or a URL would rank is because there's nothing better. I think that there's an enormous shortage of content on the web. When I say shortage, I mean of good content. There's no shortage of content. There's a shortage of good content. What I think that AI and SGE is going to bring it to focus is that question, is the fact that just because in the past you've had traffic doesn't necessarily mean... I know this is a hot take, and I know SEOs are not going to be happy to be saying this. ... in terms of mathematical logic imply or demand that that traffic continue forever. Crystal Carter: Right. It might just be that nobody ever tried to tip you off a castle. It might be that nobody else tried to write that content. I sometimes find that I see content that's ranking number one, and then I go to check at the search volume up for it and it's not getting any traffic anyway. You're like the king of nothing. So, that happens too. Mordy Oberstein: Do you know what SGE is to me? It's a giant Local Pack. It's a giant Local Pack. Crystal Carter: I can see what you mean. Mordy Oberstein: Imagine it's 2003. I don't know if that's accurate or not. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Beforehand, there was no Local Pack. There's no three listings of a local business. When you search pizza near me, you had to go click on Yelp and run through all the listings there. Then all of a sudden, the Local Pack comes on the SERP and all of the organic results you have your typical 1 through 10 traditional listing, I don't say it becomes irrelevant or becomes less relevant. All things being equal, is that bad? Was that bad for the web? Was that bad for the users? Was that bad for businesses? Crystal Carter: It was different. I've been chatting about this a little while. Everyone's like, "Oh, SGE is completely new. AI and the search is completely new." Featured snippets have been run by AI and machine learning the entire time, the whole time. Featured snippets have been run by AI the entire time. It's been around for years. The image search, visual search with Vision AI has been around for years. All of these things have been around for ages. Yeah, like you're saying, it's different, but all of them are pulling from ranking content. So, the content has to rank in the first place before it can be considered for this new and shiny and fantastic feature. What we see is that the things that rank in SGE are also ranking in your needs SERP. So, what we see is the thing that ranks for the featured snippet or is included in the featured snippet, because sometimes featured snippets include content for one thing and content from another thing, content from another thing, they're all ranking content from the regular plain old blue link SERPS. So, that's important to think. I think also your Matlock scenario is really important. If you look at Internet Live Stats, startling statistics, in 2004, the number of websites according to Internet Live Stats was 51 million websites. Then by 2010, six years later, there were 206 million websites online. So, essentially, your Matlock thing is the same. That's a fourfold increase. Mordy Oberstein: Something's going to have to stop ranking or stop getting traffic at some point. My Matlock case, just for reference, there's a TV show back from the late '80s, early '90s called Matlock with Annie Griffith. When you were home sick as a kid, say a 10-year-old, you're watching The Price Is Right. Then at a certain point, there's nothing on, just Matlock. There was no cable. I'm dating myself here. There was no cable. There was five channel with the bunny rabbit ear antennas, and you were either watching General Hospital, which is soap opera, which I was not watching, or Matlock. So, Matlock had great numbers in the early afternoon because there was nothing else. That's my parallel with content. Maybe your content is getting all that traffic because there's nothing else. There's no other paradigm, but SGE brings in a new paradigm, which by the way, I think niche sites are built for SGE for two reasons. One is Google's trying to be a little bit more specific as the entire point of SGE to refine what people are looking for and they want to offer very refined, very specific results. That's one. The second is there's an explore feature or an expand feature within Google's SGE where it takes the SGE summary. So, it takes the five lines of SGE, of an AI content that they wrote. It breaks it down per line and it shows organic results per line, which are inherently going to be very specific. So, SGE in my mind is built for niche sites who may not have been able to capitalize on the SERP, who might now be able to capitalize on. I would love to see, thought, SGE rolls out in full a year later. Are the big players losing traffic and are niche sites increasing in traffic? That would be fascinating to see. Crystal Carter: I think it's really interesting because I think the reason why niche sites are going to do well out of this or could potentially do well is because of the way that you talk to a generative search experience. So, on a generative search, I am much more likely to write a very, very long-winded query. On a Google SERP, a standard traditional search, I'm probably going- Mordy Oberstein: Three words. Crystal Carter: Three words, right? I'm going to say TV on now. Mordy Oberstein: Van Damme leg kick. Crystal Carter: Right? Van Damme leg kick. Whereas let's say, "What kind of ballet did Jean-Claude Van Damme do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?" or whatever it may be So you'll get right into it, or you might even describe something that you don't even know the name for instance. Mordy Oberstein: The answer is the ballet where you get a roundhouse right to the face. Crystal Carter: I think that Arielle was talking about niching down and getting right into not just writing that one topic, but writing up, but making sure that your website represents an entity and that everything revolves around that entity and you're covering every different way to discover that entity and discover that information. Again, that works really, really well with a generative search experience because it's a situation where you're going to ask a question and then you're going to delve into it and delve into it and delve into it and delve into it more and more and more and more and more. I think I've discussed this previously, but one of the best ones I've had was I was trying to figure out what to do with my houseplant. My houseplant is dying. What do I do with it? It kept giving me lots of results from the same houseplant website. Now I'm like, "Okay, that's a good place to go for information about this houseplant because they have all of the information about that. So, why would I go to some other website? I'd go to that one." Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. You really build that trust, that branding. By the way, how was that houseplant? Crystal Carter: It's better. It's better actually. I took some advice. I put it in a north facing window. I gave it some more water. I haven't repotted it, but she's doing okay. Thanks for asking. That's so kind. Mordy Oberstein: Of course. Now, since we're talking about AI, I'm sure there's some AI news this week because there's always some AI news or not. Either way. Crystal Carter: There are bots. Mordy Oberstein: There's this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Come on, Barry. Light my fire. Barry Schwartz has been roll this week with a few hotly contested SEO issues. So, cue up some sappy soap opera music because it's about to get dramatic in here. First Barry Schwartz over at search engine round table, Google details, SEO guidance for content syndication partners. So, in a nutshell, the practice for years has been to use the canonical to tell Google, which is the real original article. So, you're syndicating content. Let's say you're Reuters. You're syndicating to ABC News, to CNN, to MSNBC, whatever it is. How do you know? How does Google supposed to know which is the real source, which is the real original article? By using the canonical tag pointing back to the original article, which has been difficult to get done because you have to get that done in an agreement with the syndicated partners. What are the chances that they actually want to tell Google, "Hey, don't rank us. Rank the original partner"? That aside, a few months ago, Google said, "We'll make it different. We're going to say, now you should use the no index instead of the canonical tag." Meaning if you want to rank and not your syndicated partners tell the syndicated partners, just apply a no index tag so they can't rank and only you can rank. So, you would need to get that into an agreement, which would be very, very difficult. There's a lot of back and forth. Was the guidance really that all along so forth and so forth and so forth? I don't want to get into any of that. The point is many SEOs feel stuck here to rock in a hard place and would like to see a different approach again, because you need to now tell the syndicated partners, "Hey, you need to apply a no index tag here." You're not going to rank at all, which again, if I'm, let's say MSNBC or ABC News, I want to rank. So, why would I agree to that? Google's Danny Sullivan did say he would take that feedback and bring it to the team, which is not always lip service. I know people sometimes feel that's lip service. It's not. I could say at Wix, we've done that many, many times. We've taken feedback from the SEO community, brought that to the team, and then made a product improvement. So, I would take that as a legitimate offer of, "Hey, I'm going to go bring that to the team. Let's see if we can figure that out." So maybe there will be something coming down the pike that would make syndication a little bit more advantageous from a ranking point of view. The point is, if you are going to syndicate your content, there are some hard conversations that you're going to need to have about the benefits of syndicating and the monetary gain you get from that versus the ability to rank and the monetary gain you would get from that. But wait, Barry was not done there. From search engine land, Barry goes, "Google's Core Web Vitals INP issues email is causing concern." So a few weeks ago, Google added INP, Interaction to Next Paint, which will replace FID, First Input Delay as one of the three Core Web Vitals Come March 2024. With that, Google started setting out the notifications. You have an issue for INP from search console. The issue is that the web is currently working to align with the new guidelines. So, for example, we at Wix have been working way before Google actually announced INP would be in the Core Web Vitals with Google to see what makes sense, what doesn't make sense when it comes to tracking websites and INP. So, for example, we've been working on this for a long time and now 83% of our website's mobile in the US pass INP, but the issue is that this is not coming due until March and really nothing changed on the website. Only that changed that Google brought INP into search console is now sending out notifications, but the website has been the same the entire time. So, if thing's been okay with the website, then there's really nothing to worry about. At the same time from a ranking point of view, nothing is changing until March 2024. Even with that, this is where Barry really went off in his weekly news recap on Search Engine Roundtable, which we'll link to, where Barry was saying, "Hey, look, there was a whole bunch of hype around Core Web Vitals that are ranking the first time around when Google initially integrated this into the algorithm and that didn't really pan out. There really wasn't any significant ranking impact as a result. In fact for many websites, there was literally zero. Nothing actually happened as a tiebreaker scenario." Barry was saying, "Hey, why are we trying to make this a big deal again, from a ranking point of view? You're now sending these issues out via email to websites. Website numbers are going to freak out and start prioritizing an INP from an SEO point of view." But that's not really the right thing to do because you're talking about a small issue within a small issue because a ranking impact is really, really minimal for Core Web Vitals. Now you're just talking about one of the Core Web Vitals. So, Barry was saying, "Hey, I think these emails are harmful because they're going to make people freak out and start prioritizing what might not be an SEO priority to begin with." That's not to say that INP is not important. It's super important from a user experience point of view. When your users get to the page, they should have a really seamless, fast integrated experience that doesn't hold them back from doing what they want to do. But the point about rank, I would have to agree with Barry about. The point is, if you've got these emails, nothing about your site actually changed. All that changes is Google's now sending the emails out. You don't know the significance of the INP issue. It could be a very small little thing that you need to change, right? But Google doesn't tell you that in the email, so take it slow. From a ranking point of view, none of this matters until March 2024, and even then, it's a very, very, very, very small issue most likely. The last thing you should really just understand is that this is something that the web itself is really aligning to, which is why I think people were upset. Hey, we're working towards aligning to your new guidelines. Why are we now getting emails that we're not there yet? Of course, we're not there yet, but again, many, many websites are there and should be fine. Again, for example, on the Wix site, 83% of mobile sites in the US already passed INP and we're not even anywhere close to March. Okay. Moving on, some AI news for you, again from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Just call him the monopoly man. He's got a monopoly on the SEO news. Barry writes, "Google expands Bard to more countries, more languages, and adds new features." So Bard is now available in more geolocations and there's a whole bunch of new features. For example, you can now listen to the prompt, which is great for accessibility. You can adjust the tone of the response, so how formal you want the response to be, how long you want the response to be and so forth. This comes, by the way, as Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern reports, "Is ChatGPT getting Dumber?" Usage drops as users complain. So, basically people are saying, "Hey, I've been using ChatGPT for a long time, and it seems to be the responses are not as good as they used to be." OpenAI said, which I very much align with, that nothing's really changed. It's probably noticing more and more issues as you use it more and more often. I totally agree with that. I don't think anything actually changed the... Why would the AI get dumber? It's only getting more refined and more refined and more refined. This goes back to what we've been saying on this podcast for a very, very, very long time. The technology is super cool and it is super amazing and it is super innovative and it is beyond words. But when you get past that and you're talking about actual usage in real life situations, there are gaps in this technology. So, now as a web, we've gotten past the initial wow factor and we're actually starting to use this thing in real life cases. We're like, "Wait a second, maybe this isn't as good as we thought it was, because you're looking at it from two different perspectives, the wow factor versus actual integration to your consumer base." So I don't think the AI has gotten any dumber. What I think, as OpenAI points out, is that you're starting to notice more and more flaws and thinking maybe this isn't as good and maybe we can't use it across the board the way we thought we could, which I hate to say this, but if you listen to the podcast regularly, we told you so. By the way, some of the data sources are showing a 10% drop-off in ChatGPT usage. Pulling Barry Schwartz back in on Twitter, he was talking about the hype is starting to wane. I think he ran a poll from Gary Sterling over at Search Engine Roundtable, showing that SEOs are using it significantly less often. The point is in marketing, there's all these things that come around in cycles, super hype things. I don't think AI is hype per se, as I've mentioned on the podcast many, many times. I think it's a great tool. It's not going anywhere, but that initial, "Oh, my goodness. This is amazing. It's a panacea for all things," I think that was hype. I think the web is starting to come out of that, and I think hopefully that will result in more mature adoption of the AI technology. With that, that is this week's not so snappy news. Always so snappy with that snappy news. Hey, Crystal, I always feel like coming back like a news show. Have a great weekend, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, I had a great, great weekend. I'm planning to go- Mordy Oberstein: All right. Okay, here where the weather is... I always wanted to be a news anchor. Not never. Anyway, I always found that news anchor thing so plastic, not my thing. Crystal Carter: Fair enough. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, Sue, of course, Bob. Anyway, Crystal Carter: I feel like you'd be more of a radio show guy for that. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely more of the afternoon drive home radio station for hard rock radio station thing. Speaking of music, by the way, it's time for our follow of the weekend. He's a very musical person. If we're talking about SGE, we're talking about the future of search as we talked about niche sites, who else could our follow of the week be than our previous guest, Mike King over @iPullRank on Twitter. That's I, the letter I, not the number I, the letter I. Just like what? The letter I-P-U-L-L-R-A-N-K, iPullRank. Crystal Carter: iPullRank, yeah. Mike is great. Mike is a fount of SEO knowledge. He's been SEO and thinking about AI for ages. We had him on a webinar talking about ChatGPT and AI content writers. He's got so much knowledge about the relationship between machine learning and entities and search and how that all works. So, he's a fantastic follow. He's also really, really engaged with the community and very much a pillar of the community. So, absolutely follow him. He's a fantastic follow. Mordy Oberstein: Must follow, I feel like. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely must follow. He is great at translating that information that's really complex in a really eye level way, which is fabulous. Crystal Carter: Yeah, and do check out the webinar. He dropped some fantastic, fantastic information there. Mordy Oberstein: The webinar with him and Ross Hudgins about AI content writers and SEO and the future of the web, we'll link to in the show notes. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Everybody who joined it said it was fantastic. So, please, please do join along. Enjoy it, find it on YouTube, all of that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Well, we've come to the end of this road. I'll see you niche week. I've been holding that for like 20 minutes. Crystal Carter: Niche road will we take? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, niche. It doesn't work. Doesn't work. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with new episodes. We dive into repurposing your audio and video content for search. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back Looker Studio SEO report template Communicate SEO results and get stakeholder buy-in for future strategies with this customizable report. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this resource to: Customize your performance easily Integrate with leading reporting tools Format your data clearly Sophie Brannon Director of SEO, RushOrderTees LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Sophie Brannon is the Director of SEO at RushOrderTees . With agency, in-house, and freelance experience, she has led strategy, implementation, and communication for everything from local campaigns to multi-language international campaigns in the UK, US, and Australia. She’s an industry speaker and author, award-winner, and led the Web Almanac 2022 SEO chapter. More about this topic Read this post on how to create effective SEO reports on the Wix SEO Hub blog for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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

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

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

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