Does influencer marketing lead to leads and converting conversions?  What type of influencer marketing gets signups and clicks, and which don't? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter welcome Nicole Ponce from Semrush, an expert in navigating the complex waters of B2B influencer marketing. Sara Adam, Head of Partnerships and Influencer Marketing at Wix Studio, also joins in on the conversation to discuss the importance of engagement metrics, the power of TikTok and LinkedIn, and the art of curating the perfect influencer partnership. From nano-influencers to micro-influencers, understand how partners can amplify your brand’s voice far beyond mere follower counts. Be sure to smash that button and like episode 115 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back How to drive conversions with influencer marketing Does influencer marketing lead to leads and converting conversions?  What type of influencer marketing gets signups and clicks, and which don't? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter welcome Nicole Ponce from Semrush, an expert in navigating the complex waters of B2B influencer marketing. Sara Adam, Head of Partnerships and Influencer Marketing at Wix Studio, also joins in on the conversation to discuss the importance of engagement metrics, the power of TikTok and LinkedIn, and the art of curating the perfect influencer partnership. From nano-influencers to micro-influencers, understand how partners can amplify your brand’s voice far beyond mere follower counts. Be sure to smash that button and like episode 115 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 115 | December 18, 2024 | 51 MIN 00:00 / 50:52 This week’s guests Sarah Adam With a strong passion for Partnerships and Marketing, Sarah has over 10 years experience in various B2C and B2B SaaS Marketing roles, from PR, Field Marketing and Content to Partner Marketing and Influencer Marketing. Today, Sarah heads Partnerships and Influencer Marketing at Wix, focusing on Wix's new end-to-end web creation platform for Agencies and Enterprises, called Wix Studio. Nicole Ponce Nicole Ponce is the Influencer and Communications Lead at Semrush, where she drives global influencer marketing strategies and helps elevate the brand to new audiences. With expertise in social media, communications, and negotiation, she stays at the forefront of industry trends and technologies. Nicole is passionate about diversity in tech and advocates for giving underrepresented voices. 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, where there's some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is quite influential, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I don't know who she is. Who is she? I've never heard of her. Mordy Oberstein: Crystal on the web? You never heard crystal on the web? Crystal on the web. Crystal Carter: Oh, that lady. Mordy Oberstein: She's an influencer. Crystal Carter: Who does she influence? I don't understand. Mordy Oberstein: All sorts of people. Crystal Carter: Do you know what? I think I once influenced my mom to buy a tiny handbag because I had a tiny handbag and she was jealous that I had this tiny handbag, so. Mordy Oberstein: What do you put inside of a tiny handbag? Crystal Carter: Wasn't super tiny. It was just wallet, keys, phone, that kind of size, because she had this big giant bag and I don't like big giant bags because I just fill them with junk. So if I have a small bag, then I can't fill it with junk and then I can just get on with my life. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, good life lesson. Small bags. Crystal Carter: Small bags. Mordy Oberstein: Unless they're money bags, in which case make them big. Crystal Carter: Hey. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP'S Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search labor at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter and see our great free SEO course, it's also where you can enhance your social strategy and track your social traffic with a wide array of inbuilt analytics and native integrations with Instagram, Facebook, and more, which is great for accelerating and tracking the impact of some of your influencer marketing efforts. As this week, we talk all about influencer marketing and conversions. Does influencer marketing lead to leads and converting conversions? What type of influencer marketing works for signups, clicks, and which don't? How influencer marketing has changed and is changing, and we'll be joined by Semrush's own influencer marketing lead, Nicole Ponce, who will help us dig on in, plus Wix Studio's own Head of Partnerships and Influencer Marketing, Sarah Adam, shares her top influencer marketing tips and her experience with you. And of course, we have your snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, turn your phone to vertical as we go like, oh my God, you won't even believe, you should totally buy this. Click the link button in the description below on the 115th episode of the SERP'S Up Podcast. Subscribe. Crystal Carter: Smash that like button. Mordy Oberstein: Smash that like button. I'm always afraid my kids will go take that, my little one will take it literally and smash. Crystal Carter: Oh man, I love it when you're in the middle of the video and they're like, "Hey, you join this video, you should subscribe to my channel while you're here." And you're like, okay, thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Click the bell for notifications. Crystal Carter: Right? You ding the bell, ding, ding, go. Mordy Oberstein: Can tell you, I never understood that maybe there's a reason. What's the point of subscribing without getting the notifications? Crystal Carter: I subscribe without getting the notifications I have too many- Mordy Oberstein: Me too, all the time, but does it do anything for me? I don't know. Crystal Carter: I don't know, it shows in your feed, but then you don't have... The notifications I sometimes find stressful. Mordy Oberstein: Right, no, I don't like them, but it would show up my feed anyway because I'm watching those videos. Crystal Carter: That's true, that's true. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Crystal Carter: This is true. Mordy Oberstein: You know who might know? Crystal Carter: Who? Mordy Oberstein: Nicole. Crystal Carter: Nicole? Mordy Oberstein: Nicole. Crystal Carter: It's a good thing we've got her on the show. Mordy Oberstein: So let's get right into it. So influencer marketing is one of those things that's kind of weird for me. Everyone kind of talks about it, a lot of people do it, but often not well. Is that spicy? Yeah, it's true, it's true. I'm just going to say because it's true. Everyone's like, oh, we're going to do influencer marketing, but then it's not always so great. So as someone who's done a boatload of influencer marketing over the course of my career, it's easy to get distracted by things that don't actually help you with the influencer. I'll just say, number of followers can be very distracting sometimes, it doesn't always matter the way that you think it does. Anywho, on top of that, there's also the disruption in the space. Over the years this whole thing of like, I'm a famous person, I'll promote your product and everyone will know I've never actually used it. That doesn't work anymore. Stevie Wonder doing a commercial for Zenni doesn't work. You know he's never used it. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Zenni, it's eyeglasses. Stevie Wonder is blind. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I order glasses online. Sorry. So, that whole celebrity thing, they're just going to promote it and just get a famous person on there, and that doesn't work. Everyone kind of sees through that a little bit. So I think that whole thing is the notion of influencer marketing being like, oh, it's about being famous people talking about my product is a bit of a misnomer, which is why I'm very happy, somebody I used to actually have the privilege of working with day in and day out on influencer marketing is here with us right now. Welcome to the show, Semrush's, Nicole Ponce. How are you? Nicole Ponce: Good. Hi, Mordy. Honestly, the pleasure is mine and whoever's listening probably doesn't know this or hopefully now they will know this, but Mordy and I used to work on the same team, so I also had the pleasure of working with Mordy in and out and brainstorm a lot of ideas. So, a lot of my ideas also come from Mordy's really great trajectory, so I give kudos to you back. Mordy Oberstein: That's way too much credit. If no one, an influencer promoting whatever product they never used, no one believes you. Nicole Ponce: Okay, perfect. Crystal Carter: He's going to be insufferable now, Nicole. I don't know what you've done, you're never going to live this down, I was just feel like. Nicole says, Nicole says. Mordy Oberstein: My giant ego just got bigger. Nicole Ponce: I love this, I love this. No, but truly mean it. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here to talk to you both, especially about influencer marketing, the B2B space, because I think B2B is such a new space to talk about influencer marketing and as Mordy was mentioning in the intro, it's hard to really show the impact for something that it's not a physical tangible thing to really showcase of how many people are purchasing it, but something that is a platform and is a service that you really need to showcase. What is the value of it for somebody to pay for it month to month? It's a really enticing, long tail effect of how to do it properly. So we've tested a lot at Semrush. I'm sure you guys have done, you guys do a great job at Wix also. I've had great conversations with Sarah about this, but yeah, it's definitely a different tactic and different strategies that need to be in place, but I'm curious to hear what we are going to talk about today, in terms of what that would look like in the future as well. Mordy Oberstein: So exactly just that. This whole idea of, and I'm curious about your opinion on this, where there's so much demand for influencer marketing and there's also demand for conversions. Does influencer marketing work for conversions? How strong is the connection between the influencer market and conversion? Is there a direct correlation or direct connection? How do you see that whole equation kind of thing? Nicole Ponce: Yeah, so a lot of people actually think about influencer marketing when it goes to conversions, they think affiliate marketing right away, which is not the case because yes, affiliate marketing does help you with conversion based directly. But in terms of the way that we work and the way that I see influencer marketing as impact for campaigns, it should definitely be enticed to conversion based. It doesn't mean that you'll see the conversions right away. I mean, ideally the goal is, because if you're investing some sort of specific budget on a campaign as a whole, if you're working with the right audience of influencer and that their audience is also somebody that is in need of the content that you're producing or what you're advertising, then obviously you did your job well in really looking through in the details of connecting the needs, the product, and how you can help. So I do see it as it should be a conversion based focus. Just measuring on impression says really nothing, especially if you're investing a lot of money, at least for me, right? Just speaking on behalf of what our team is doing, but just showing impression base. Yes, it's great to show brand awareness and I am a very huge believer. And sometimes you really can't quantify emotional connections or emotional value or even brand awareness and aspect of, I know that our brand is everywhere, but how do you put that in a factual number? But I think it definitely does help you showcase the value of influencer marketing if you're focusing as top level conversions and then obviously other measurable things will be like emotional value, brand awareness, etc, etc. But the answer in short is yes, absolutely. And obviously you need to just nurture the audience very well in order to see those conversions come through. It's not going to be like a one-off, especially when you're working in B2B, and, yeah. Crystal Carter: So B2B is a great point because the lead time on B2B can be very, very long. If you're talking to people, so you work in a SaaS team, if you're talking about people adopting a new SaaS platform, that could be months, negotiation, discussion, deliberation. And when you're talking about the conversions, can you just get into a little bit of the details of some of what a conversion looks like for an influencer marketing campaign? Because I think a lot of people think a conversion is a sale, but that's not necessarily the case, particularly for a long tail campaign or for a long sales cycle, for instance. Are you able to talk about some of the things that might make a conversion? Nicole Ponce: Yeah, so our main top funnel that we would basically measure is traffic. So anybody that lands onto Semrush's website we consider as not obviously a directly conversion, but a conversion for us is a first-time payment. So somebody that is going to, has not used Semrush at all and now is a new Semrush user, or even is potentially a Semrush user and has upgraded to one of our new apps, or is testing a new tool or a new add-on. So anything that converts into a new payment of some sort is considered a conversion for us. So it really depends on the campaign. It really depends on what the focus of the goal is in general for the company and as a whole, but we as a SaaS platform have so much to offer. We have 56 different apps, we have over 20 over tools, we have upgrades, we have add-ons, we have different tiers. And the way that we can see an increase of conversion is understanding your tool in and out and what that audience needs in order to educate them enough to say like, "Hey, you have this problem and we actually have something that can help you fix this," or, "We have something that you potentially might not know that you need, but it'll help you save X amount of time. So maybe upgrade or maybe test it out and see it as something that will help you in your workflow," and maybe they didn't know. And this is what's something that's interesting for me that we've been testing and I've been just talking about, because before we would just really directly work with SEOs, and we still do, but I've been testing working with influencers outside of the SEO space, but that are also in marketing. So they don't actually know the level of different tools and apps that we have to offer. So potentially, let's say they're just content marketers and they've just, I don't know, worked in our content toolkit, and then I share with them different apps that we have to offer and they're like, "Oh, wow, I didn't even know that you guys had this. I've been looking for something like this." So now it's just showing the value of all in one toolkit, which is what we are. But again, we're all marketers. We are so busy, we're just stuck in our every day. Sometimes we need to allocate more time to test something new, but if I'm already there in their face showing and making it easier for them to test it out in an easier, faster, all-in-one solution, it's just going to help that conversion aspect in terms of the life cycle, let's say. So obviously it's going to take a longer time, but it's just mostly like, and we're okay with that and we understand it's kind of like an investment. And we need to just be more present at all times because it's just how it is. We lose now attention with everything, like in a spam. Crystal Carter: One of the things you mentioned was picking up on lots of different parts of your platform. You've worked with Mordy, I worked with you when you were working with Mordy at Semrush, and I've had a relationship with Semrush for a while. I spoke at your fantastic Spotlight event recently. I've done one of your courses, I've done influencer marketing things where we did videos and things like that. We've done a webinar recently with your colleague, Eric, shout-out to Eric. And I think that what you're talking about there is that relationship of that long-term that with an influencer, it might not be just one thing that you're going to be marketing with them, but you might be marketing with them over a long period and you might be evolving with them and they might be evolving with you. Are you able to talk about how you maintain those relationships? Mordy Oberstein: That's right, really quick, that's so interesting because when we were working together that was one of the things we consciously tried to do is say, "Okay, let's not just go bing, bing, bing to all these different people, but let's find people and work with them over the course of many, many, many, many projects." Okay, sorry Nicole. Nicole Ponce: I was going to say, I 100% agree with this, and I think it showcases also not just the impact of the relationship with the actual influencer, but also with our audience. And it's just like now they're embedded as a, hey, they actually are an advocate for Semrush. It's not just, oh, I just see an ad and it removes the importance or the value for me as an audience. It's just seeing an ad one time is just, I'm going to forget about it. But if this person's actually continuously mentioning to their audience like, "Hey, I'm using this for this," or, "Hey, now I found out about this. Oh, look, now they've launched this." It's just now we're both working down the same avenue and it's kind of like an embedment, and now they're considered basically a brand ambassador, in our case. And the trust of them, by them is the audience of the influencer, is definitely what we need in order to see these type of conversions. But the way that we, sorry to answer your question Crystal, but basically the way that we build these long-term relationships is, I'm a huge believer in, if I can help wherever I can, I will. And then hopefully at some point when I need help, hopefully you can help me back. And that has helped in such a great aspect, and I know Mordy believes in this because we're huge advocates of this, but we believe in growing together. Not me running and then hopefully you can jump in the lane when I need to. That does not work at all. We're working with professionals, we're working with people. We're both trying to get at the same end goal. I'm very cautious also of the influencer's audience. There's sometimes I've gotten pushed back with the influencers like, hey, this does not align with my audience even though I love Semrush but we're talking about the PC, but I talk about SEO. By all means, I'm like, please tell me, push back because obviously we want it to be authentic. We want it to be real. We want to make sure that we're giving value to your audience. We don't want you to lower your engagement and the way that you actually interact with your audience because if you lose trust, we lose trust, and that obviously doesn't help me in my results. So, let's both work together to make sure that we keep whatever we need to do in a well road and then everyone wins. That's kind of like my motto. If you win, I win vice versa, so yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It makes the whole thing come off, it's so much more organic, it's so much more natural. And it makes it believable, it makes it that you can probably get a conversion out of it, because the audience, it's all very subtle. If the audience kind of feels like, wait a second... Because they know what's going on, everyone knows what's going on. This is part of, this person and Semrush, they're kind of together. But if it doesn't feel authentic, you focus on that part and not on the actual authentic part of it. So if it's too noticeable, you can't get the message across. So having that relationship, having that whole integration with them is what allows, I think, for eventually there to be a conversion. Nicole Ponce: Yeah, I 100% agree. And again, it goes all back to the basics. I feel sometimes that we overthink about how we can do our job properly when it's just the basics that it's people are going to buy from people. And a lot of people overthink the creative like, we need to make sure that we are like, bam, we need to make sure that we make a lot of noise. Yeah, but just go back to the basics. If you understand the need of the audience and you have a solution because you understand and you believe in your platform, just talk to the influencer. Be honest, like, "Hey, we have Z, Y, and Z. How can we work together? You know your audience best." And sometimes I do have an empty approach to an influencer like, I love what you're doing, I love your content. I don't know if we could potentially work on something together that might help because maybe they know about plans that I don't know about and vice versa. But a lot of people just automatically think like, okay, this person has 1,000 followers, sorry, 100,000 followers, almost a million followers and have great engagement. I'm just going to stick my tool in there and invest my whatever budget I have for influencer marketing and I know it's going to work. And a lot of brands do that when they work with athletes and it's just like, you're not speaking to the right audience/choir. So even though you're spending, I don't know, half a million dropping like a Superbowl ad, let's say in quotations, you really think that you're going to see the conversions if you're actually talking to the right audience? I don't know, it's a question mark. But if you understand how to communicate when get asked the right questions to these influencers to make sure you understand what the right audience that they're speaking to, I think it definitely does help a lot with your plans in terms of seeing these conversions long tail wise. Mordy Oberstein: I'm curious, on the conversion side, do you find that there's certain types of influencers who are better able to get certain types of conversions? Or in general, do different kind of assets convert better with influencer market? Like a sign up versus getting them to click to a blog? What works in terms of the conversion? Is there a difference between what your goal is? Are you trying to get a lead? Are you trying to get a click? What actually works for the conversion or what doesn't work? You're not going to get them obviously to influence a market and spend a million dollars right away, that ask wouldn't work. So what actually works to convert? Nicole Ponce: Right, that's a great question. It really depends on a lot of things obviously, because based on what we've tested, two things. Educational content, obviously because we're a platform and they're able to showcase the value of what they're going to be getting out of it helps a lot. Absolutely. So, educational content really helps. And if you're working with a thought leader that has been talking about this specific topic does help a lot because it just showcase like, hey, I want to be this person. I want to be at this educational value level, and if that means I need to benefit based off this tool that will help me get to that place, then potentially that will help. That's just the content aspect. But in terms of what else helps, it really depends on where we launch the campaign, so on the platform wise, especially because we're a SaaS platform that it's easier for us to work on desktop. And most of the influencer marketing campaigns that we launch our own social platforms. So the way and the user experience, for example, if you see a campaign on TikTok and then they have to actually go on the landing page to trial, and then we see the balance, how they're going to have to use it on Semrush's desktop, it's going to be a little bit harder, of course, as it is opposed to potentially on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn's another whole other story we talked about because of the way that traffic works on there. But yeah, it really depends, and this is why I believe in not just working with an influencer one time and then multiply working multiple content pieces for one specific campaign. And just so you can see the retention of the audience actually going from mobile to desktop. But yeah, it's things that you don't think about, but especially when you're working in SaaS and if you're working with an audience in social media, in order to see the trials come in. Crystal Carter: I think also, one of the things that from my experience of working with Semrush is that you very much take an approach of... I did a course, go check it out in the Semrush Academy on Mobile SEO. And like I was in the platform and I use Semrush regularly and if you are a Wix user and you're listening to this podcast or Wix studio user, then you can also use Semrush because it's built into your CMS, by the way. And basically, as part of it, I was like, well, I need to make sure I've got the latest thing. And so I upgraded, I had an upgrade during the time I was doing the course and so I could do extra stuff on top of that. And the thing that happens with that, when you have somebody who is speaking at conferences regularly, who's writing content regularly, who's doing content regularly, is that because we have the relationship that we are using the product and we're showcasing the product in those spaces with professionals, just again, an organic way. Mordy writes for Semrush regularly and does reports and uses Semrush data very often and has had a couple of things that are both on Semrush and on other platforms as well, where they're talking about things that are happening with Google updates and things that are happening with different keywords and how they're performing and things like that. And that is an ongoing visibility that comes from people using the platform genuinely in a genuine way. How do you identify someone who might have that kind of relationship with your product? And are those particularly valuable for the sort of exercise of working with an influencer? Nicole Ponce: The way that we actually look for potential influencers is, I do a lot of deep dive, and even though I don't post myself, which that's my bad on me, but I'm always everywhere, in the sense of conversations, what's happening, who's talking, what are they talking about? And that's how we recruit new influencers as well. There's a lot of people that they talk about Semrush as just an educational content piece, and I'm like, oh, I'm going to jump in your DMs and ask like, yeah, absolutely. And this is how the relationship starts. And I just, even sometimes people that talk about other competitors and Semrush and I just drop a conversation and say, "What are you lacking that we could potentially maybe have and you don't know about this?" So giving also educational value in terms of conversational wise directly and DMs, doesn't have to be in public, but privately. And also, yeah, being in the search that if your actual customers and users are your number one criteria of influencers, absolutely, they're going to be your advocates forever. And if you potentially help them in the sense of, hey, we have a new update and we can help you get first access and actually get your feedback. I love, love, love, and sometimes I feel like influencers feel bad and they're like, "Hey, sorry to bother you, but this is not working. This doesn't make any sense. You're making my job harder." I love when I get those messages because I'm like, thank you. You're taking time out of your day to make sure that I go back to our developers, make sure that I make your life easier, because if I make your life easier with our product and you're going to talk about your audience and you're also going to have a better relationship with us in sense, wow, they actually listen to me actually speaking out other the feedback and it just goes on. Yeah, exactly. Mordy Oberstein: I literally sent something in yesterday to Anna on the data team, like, "Hey, can we do this in Semrush? They're like, "No, and it might be really good if we could because it be super awesome, super helpful. So there you go. Literally having yesterday. Nicole Ponce: Exactly. I love that. Crystal Carter: I think that comes to something, and we had the SEO board, the Wix SEO board, and we've seen this, and that was lots of people who have influence in the community because that's the other thing. We say influencers, but these are people that have influence in the community and they have influence for a reason. And essentially, if you build a good relationship, then as you're saying, people can help you make do what you do better. So even if you were a restaurant owner and you had some local influencers, they might be like, "Oh my god, there's no place to take a selfie in this restaurant." And the restaurant owner might be like, "Oh, you're right. I should put some plants, fix the lighting, sort myself out," and then that's better for the business overall. So what you're saying is great, that you have a good relationship with people where they can help you make it better for everyone. That's amazing. Nicole Ponce: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's our job in the end. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of making lives better, if people wanted to connect with you and make their lives better by interacting with you on social media, where could they find you? Nicole Ponce: Ah, thank you. Well, best place I would say is LinkedIn. I'm under Nicole C. Ponce. And yeah, I think that's where I'm most active. Mordy Oberstein: All right. Oh, we'll link in the show notes. Nicole, thanks so much for coming on. It was really, really fun to chat with you about this. Nicole Ponce: Thank you both for having me, and it's such a pleasure to always chat with you both. Mordy Oberstein: See you out there on social. Again, thank you so much, Nicole, for coming on. Make sure to give her a big follow on social media. No one is more transparent about their influencing marketing tactics than our own Head of Partnerships and Influencer marketing, Sarah Adam. Just have a look at her LinkedIn profile, it's downright epic, which is why we thought we'd talk to Sarah and pick her brain as we travel across the Wix-verse. Speaker 5: Three, two, one, ignition lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the show, Sarah. How are you? Sarah Adam: I'm great. I'm so excited to be here. Crystal Carter: We are so excited to have you. We were doing a piece on influencer marketing and I was like, we have to talk to Sarah because you've become an influencer marketing influencer. Mordy Oberstein: That's so TV inside of TV… Sarah Adam: It's very meta. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Sarah Adam: It is. Yeah, cool. So what are we talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're talking about, first of all, how did that happen? We're talking about, first we're talking... This is free association where you kind of just go. Sarah Adam: Yeah, okay. Mordy Oberstein: How did that happen? Sarah Adam: What, me becoming an influencer of influencers? Mordy Oberstein: This influencer for the influencers. Sarah Adam: I don't know, somewhere in, actually, no, I do remember now that you asked me. It was January of 2024 and I was sitting on my couch, it was a Friday night, everyone was asleep. And I was going through my LinkedIn feed, refusing to go to bed, and it must have been like midnight. And my LinkedIn feed was full of posts of empty AI new year resolution posts. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Sarah Adam: It just me off and I was like, you know what? I've had it. LinkedIn on one hand has the best audience as far as I'm concerned, if you're in the professional working world. But on the other hand, the content is just so boring, so low. And I thought, you know what? People post about, people are busy telling other people what to do on LinkedIn. You should do this, you should do that, but they don't share what they do. And it could be that what they're talking about is real and it's not from ChatGPT and it's something that's based on a real thing that happened to them and these are their lessons learned, which is cool. But sometimes it's just missing that personal story, that real thing, what actually happened to you. And I always felt that's really missing. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to try and I'm going to post and I'm going to see how it goes. And every post I'm going to give something real, something that people can actually say, "Oh, wow, can relate to, can give credibility to the lessons learned, etc." So then instead of writing a New Year's resolution, I kind of summarized the 2023 and I said, "With numbers data, this is what I did in terms of influencer marketing. These are the numbers of influencers we worked with. We plan to scale in 2024 to X number," I can't even remember now what I wrote. And then I did have lessons, my top lessons learned from that year. And I just pressed publish and I went to bed, which is bad practice. You need to hang around, but I didn't. And then I remember waking up and I saw I had 20 new followers and I was like, oh, this is cool. So then I decided, okay, I'm going to take two weeks and I'm going to dedicate these next two weeks to posting, and after two weeks I'll decide if it's something I want to keep going at and I enjoyed it. So here I am, almost a year later, and I have, yeah, so it's been fun. Crystal Carter: And I think that, so it's one of the reasons why we were so excited to have you on this for the Across the Wix-verse first thing is because we know inside and out. We see the work that you're doing, we know you, we read your feed as well. And what's great- Mordy Oberstein: We're on the same team for a month. Crystal Carter: Yeah, right? Sarah Adam: Back in the day. Crystal Carter: What I think is crazy is I'm in a group chat and I remember seeing one of your, somebody shared one of your posts in the group chat. They were like, "Oh, is Wix doing all of this?" And I was like, yeah, Sarah, that's right. Okay. But I think that what I think is really great about the information that you share is you share money. You're like, first deal, I'm looking at one post from a month ago, first deal, 300 or $3,500 for three Instagram reels over one month. Second deal, $20,000, 20 reels over six months, that sort of thing. You're sharing money, you're sharing. You have a great one about LinkedIn versus TikTok. I'd love to hear what you can say about that. So in LinkedIn versus TikTok, you're saying that LinkedIn and TikTok had similar but TikTok had higher views, LinkedIn had higher engagement, things like that. How are you finding TikTok as a channel for B2B influencers? Sarah Adam: So that's exactly why I wrote the post, because I speak to many marketeers that are either already doing B2B influencer marketing or considering it for 2025, and TikTok usually does not come up in conversation. And I always kind of feel a need to prove those people wrong. And I also used to think that back in the day when we just started, I thought, it's not B2B, but it is. I mean, I don't know, I use TikTok. I don't know if, do you guys? Are you on TikTok? Crystal Carter: Yes, I TikTok. Mordy Oberstein: I just got on Instagram, give me some time. Sarah Adam: Okay, so you'll get there too. So many people I know that are B2B use it. And the truth is, and that's what I say to people who are skeptical, I say, "Just go on TikTok and search for the keywords within your niche. Search for your competitors, search for your brand name, and you'll see you're going to get results. You need to be there too." So that's why that specific post was to compare between LinkedIn, which is obviously B2B, to TikTok, which people think is not. And to just show that I kind of think in a way that they complete each other because we are seeing... I mean, and that was just analyzing, I think it was based on a specific month, I can't even remember. But we see the volume in TikTok, which is very valuable, and we see the engagement on LinkedIn, which is very valuable, so. Crystal Carter: Just for people who are curious about this. The stats on it were that they did in September 16% of their B2B influencer posts were on TikTok, 16% were on LinkedIn. Number of views was 960% higher on TikTok, but engagement rates were 20% higher on LinkedIn. Number of comments were 200% higher on LinkedIn. And the sentiment analysis, 55% positive on TikTok versus 80% positive on LinkedIn. And Mordy, I know you've got a question, so I'll let you jump in. Mordy Oberstein: No, I was just going to ask by the great stats, do you find that the overlap between or the unification of LinkedIn and TikTok has to do with the fact that I think that there's a move towards emotive branding B2B? Like what used to be so awkward to do B2B is now kind of okay, right? Sarah Adam: I think that- Mordy Oberstein: If people are not familiar with this, really, really quick. A lot of brands are going very emotive marketing, very emotive branding, B2B, and it's resonating. Okay, now that you've gotten the context, that was the reason why I asked the question. Sarah Adam: Yeah, no, I think it's particularly true with LinkedIn introducing their video feed this year. I think more and more, I mean, I see it among us also internally and with the influencers we're working with. More and more tendency to upload videos to LinkedIn that they wouldn't beforehand. So I can give example, if we are working with an influencer on Instagram and TikTok and I see that they have a LinkedIn and they have a decent following, it doesn't even have to be huge. Like 2,000 followers is enough, really. So we'll often pay them to reshare that same video on LinkedIn and kind of see how that performs. So I think so, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I have 15,000. You can pay me, I'll repost your stuff. Crystal Carter: I think also, I think that there's, in terms of TikTok LinkedIn, TikTok is having a big influence on LinkedIn because LinkedIn has started putting videos really very much in the form of their algorithm, certainly on mobile. They've got a whole video feed that's very, very prominent and so I think that that's helping as well. One of the things, you talked about follower numbers, and you very often share in your information, the number of followers people have and rates and fees. People talk about micro-influencers and macro-influencers. Do you find that there's actually a difference when you're working with influencers for Wix Studio? Sarah Adam: Yeah. Yeah, huge difference. So we actually work with nano-influencers, which is smaller than micro, and micro-influencers. So our influencers can be anywhere between 2K followers to 500K. The thing is, is that followers is not that important. What really matters is the engagement that they're getting, the impressions that they're getting on their content. It's like just the other day I had a call with someone from a FinTech company, someone who works with a friend of mine, and they shared with me a list of people they think are relevant influencers, because they wanted my opinion. And these influencers were all the same. They had a very big following, but when you actually dive into their content, they're not getting any likes or any comments, nothing. So you're not going to pay some... That's just a very bad business decision, you're not going to work with someone like that. And then on the other hand, and I often see this, especially on LinkedIn and on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where you have, let's say you're watching, you've come across a video that's gone viral, and then you're curious to see who the creator is, and you go into their profile to find that they hardly have any following. It doesn't mean following is important. It's some sort of indication that does show that people over time see value in following that individual, which is obviously based on the content that they have produced, but it doesn't mean that they're suitable for your campaign right now. Crystal Carter: Right, right. It's the same with like SEO things. People are like, yeah, we're going to get lots of traffic. It's like, yeah, but is it the right traffic? If you posted a blog that said free chocolate bars- Mordy Oberstein: Where? Crystal Carter: ... for everybody and you sell, I don't know, watches. You might get a lot of traffic but that's not the right traffic. So just because somebody has a big falling doesn't necessarily mean that they're right for you. Mordy Oberstein: Where are the free chocolate bars? I'm so confused. Sarah Adam: You lost him on chocolate. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and free. Sarah Adam: He's not listening anymore. Crystal Carter: I think the other question is, so what about conversions and what about those sorts of things? So when you do an influencer campaign, how do you make sure that it gets tied to some of your business deliverables and things like that? How do you connect those? Sarah Adam: So this is a very interesting and hot topic, right? Because, so we see for us, influencer marketing is for sure and always has been, and I don't see it changing, is a brand awareness play. So we're not measuring conversions, which I know is uncomfortable for people to hear, but it's, that's what it is. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing, right? I've talked about, because we do the same thing on our side, but we're all about the brand and less about the conversion. People looking at me like I'm nuts. Sarah Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, especially smaller companies with smaller budgets, they don't like that, but it's true. That's what's so beautiful about working with influencers is their impact in terms of brand awareness. So we measure each and every asset that goes live. We measure that success in comparison to the same influencers' previous content, to content from other influencers, maybe from the same campaign. So we get some sort of idea. We're able to look at a piece of content and say, "Did it serve the goal or not? Did it meet the KPIs that we set or not?" And also if it did, and if the influencer was professional and fun to work with, then that's the reason to work with them again. But then we also look at results at a much higher level where it's another, what we do, what my team does, the content that goes live, how it performs is another kind of piece of a bigger puzzle for brand awareness where we check things like search. We want to see that month over month, more and more people are searching for Wix Studio. So scaling influencers is aligned with the other very many brand awareness activities that we do. So it's very difficult. It's impossible even to just select one piece of content and say, "Hey, did this work or not?" It depends. It depends what you're measuring and etc, etc. So, it's interesting. Mordy Oberstein: It's such a good point because influencer marketing, to me, partnerships of which influencer marketing is a type of, to me it's all about generating cadence, momentum, and it's a way of distributing yourself. It's a way of getting yourself out there to new people in new ways and leveraging all of that to get a certain kind of cadence and inertia or momentum. So looking at it from a conversion point of view, to me, looks at influencer marketing as not really what it's really all about, which is, you expanding out of your own self to create new possibilities based on the momentum that you didn't have before. Sarah Adam: Yeah, although there are, there are many companies that use it for conversion, and they're not measuring. They're just measuring the sales they get from those specific things. Mordy Oberstein: There's also a lot of people who watch cricket, so. Sarah Adam: Exactly. Crystal Carter: Cricket's a great game, though. Cricket's a great game. Mordy Oberstein: Of course you could hit the ball though. The bat's flat. If I had a flat bat, I could hit anything too. Crystal Carter: Cricket's an amazing game. It goes on for three weeks. You can be like, I'm sorry, I'm busy for three weeks because you're playing cricket. And also, they have a- Mordy Oberstein: And with that, our audience has gone cricket, cricket. Crystal Carter: Okay, so my question to you, Sarah, is if you were say, managing cricket brand and you were looking for an influencer for your cricket brand or your cricket team and you were going to knock it for six with a new influencer, what are the signs that it's a good influencer for your project? You open up their page and you're like, no, or okay, what do you look for? Sarah Adam: So I always look for, it's naturally in the order of the page almost of the profile. The first thing I look at is the bio, the title, the bio. What's this person's profession? What do they do? Have they played cricket before? Do they cricket? Is it cricket coach, train? I don't know what the right terminology is. Do maybe they somehow specialize in the world of cricket? Maybe they're like a cricket therapist. So that's the first thing, and that's like a deal breaker or maker if it's someone who's not in cricket, so I'm just going to move on to the next person because if they are, then okay, chances are their content is as well, which could also not be... it maybe you'll have a great potential influencer that looks great, but their content is about their personal life or about politics. We don't want that. So we want to see that the actual content is consistent and relevant and of decent quality. It doesn't have to be... We all know what TikTok and Instagram looks like these days. It doesn't have to be something high quality. It has to be good enough. And the most important thing, which is a deal breaker or maker are the, how is that content performing until today? Not even until today, just to look at their last, say, five, eight posts. What's the engagement like? What are the views like? And the most critical thing for me is the bio and the performance. If those two match, then that's enough to reach out. Mordy Oberstein: So if people want to reach out to you and they're not just on LinkedIn, where else besides LinkedIn, might they find you, if anywhere? Sarah Adam: Yeah, I'm only on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, wow, wow. Crystal Carter: You said you were on TikTok. You've got an account somewhere. Sarah Adam: So I tried. I tried TikTok, and there's too much maintenance. I couldn't take it, it was stressing me out. Mordy Oberstein: That's how I feel about my kids. Tried that, it's too much maintenance. Crystal Carter: See that candor, that is what we come to appreciate about Sarah Adam content. That's what we like. Real talk. Mordy Oberstein: Follow and connect or just follow, whatever Sarah wants, on LinkedIn. Sarah Adam: Yes, I'll be waiting. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks so much and see you there. Speaker 5: Three, two, one, ignition. Lift off. Life off. Mordy Oberstein: Again, thanks so much, Sarah, and make sure to give her a big follow on social media to be influenced by all of her marketing. You know who's really influential in my life. Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry, legitimately. Barry has been very influential in my life. Crystal Carter: Aw. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. No, I didn't mean in a good way. No, I'm kidding. Barry has actually helped my life tremendously. He helps me each and every day with his coverage of the SEO news, which means it's time. Very valuable and very concise, which is why we're moving into this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News. Snappy News. So the November 2024 core update is over and now, and now there's a December 2024 core update. Okay, so from Barry Schwartz over at SE Roundtable, December, Google, December 2024 core update is live. What we're seeing, what we're seeing is madness. That's what we're seeing. So Google, this is on December 13th, Barry is writing an SE Roundtable. Google announced the 2024 core update. They said it'll take two weeks. And then they wrote, "If you're wondering why there's a core update this month after one last month, but technically still this month because November one ended in December. We have different core systems. We're always improving. This past blog post explains more." Well, that clarifies everything. I have no more questions. I have a lot of questions. People in the industry, Barry covers it in his article. We're not exactly happy. He covers the charts showing the increase in ring volatility. Greg Finn from It's New, which used to do Monday through Thursday to get the SEO news and we'll talk a lot about that this week, has a whole segment on his podcast Marketing O’Clock, going through Barry's charts that I found very insightful. Anywho, there's been a lot of chatter. I mean, Willie Ray, SEO, great SEO legend, wrote WTAF. That kind of sums it up for me. It's interesting. Okay, so part of this, Google announces they had some kind of meetup in Zurich and Danny Sullivan came on the screen and they announced this as something's kind of big moment. I don't know, it's not a big moment, it's kind of confusing moment. And they said expect more core updates this year. Something I would've liked to known yesterday. My issue with this is, okay, if there's going to be more updates, it's very confusing to now go through and analyze and see what was impacted and when it was impacted. Sidebar, Barry covered on searchengineland.com, what the data providers said about the November 2024 core update, one of which of those providers was Semrush, and the person who handled the Semrush data for Semrush was me. So I sent Barry the data and Semrush, and I said to Barry, I think he quotes it in the article that also linked to it in the show notes. "It's very confusing to try to analyze these updates because forget two core updates. The baseline period where you're trying to compare what happened during the update to a normal period of rank volatility, normal doesn't exist anymore. It's all bonkers and high. So how do you compare?" All right, there it is. I wrote, "As with the August 20 24 core update, this update saw an extensive period of high levels of rank volatility proceeded. This makes analyzing the update relative to its proceeding baseline period almost impossible, Mordy Oberstein told us." And Mordy Oberstein is telling you now the same thing. There are a bunch of charts in there also. You have a look at it, but now it's even more confusing because now you have a second core update all on top of this. I think this first off, it's really bad timing because you had a core update go over Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Now you're having one going over the holiday shopping season itself. Over the holidays probably, itself. It's going to make it to understand what exactly happened to who and when and where, which was the culprit, which may or may not makes such a practical difference, I guess, very difficult. And the optics are just really bad. And I usually don't put my thumb on the scale on this podcast this way, but if you knew there's going to be more updates coming, I think the better way to have communicated would've been before the November update saying, "Hey-o, listen up," it's my inner big man, "Hey-o, listen up, everybody. We're going to have a whole bunch of updates. So yes, the November one's rolling out, but don't be surprised if there's more to follow this." That's kind of getting ahead of the narrative. I feel Google sometimes loses the narrative because they don't get ahead of the narrative and narratives are important. Narratives are important, and on that, I'm going to end the news. If you're looking for more commentary on this, have a look back by the time this episode comes out, and what we covered on It's New, over on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub, or on the RustyBrick YouTube channel, probably on Monday the 16th, because I'm recording this on Sunday the 15th. We are definitely going to cover this then. I can't imagine is not covering it, and there'll probably be some interesting takes from myself, Greg Finn, Barry Schwartz himself, and Chris LaCarter. So until that time, this is the Snappy News. You know what's funny? On SMX, one of the recent SMXs, Barry wasn't on the banner. I'm like, dude's got 100 and gazillion followers, put him on the banner. So I fixed it, I added it in into like, here's Search Engine Land. I fixed it, here's Barry on the banner. Crystal Carter: Nice, nice. Totally. Mordy Oberstein: Barry, everyone just forgets about Barry. How do you forget about Barry? Crystal Carter: People shouldn't forget about Barry. Barry's like, you know he's that dude. Mordy Oberstein: No. No one puts Barry in a corner. Crystal Carter: He does have a corner office though. He kind of, he prefers it. Mordy Oberstein: He does. His whole setup is very corner-y looking. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think so. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, if you want to take a look at it and take a look at It's New every day, you can see Barry's corner-y set up. Crystal Carter: Right and his collection of button down shirts as well. Mordy Oberstein: Is it a collection or is it one he watches every day? Crystal Carter: I don't know. I've never seen him wear a T-shirt, let's just put it that way. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if he sleeps in them. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Now we're getting too far down the rabbit hole of Barry. What we should be doing is going down the rabbit hole of who you should be following this week, and your follow of the week is Mary-Anne Da'Marzo, who runs Firebelly Media and has a massive TikTok Instagram account. You should absolutely follow for some great information. On SEO marketing in general, tons of stuff. We've worked with her before with the Wix team a bunch of times. She's really, really, really, really a great follow. Crystal Carter: She's a great follow. She's really, really active and she has some great grasp on her audience and what her audience needs from her, and she's really, really good at connecting with them. And I think that that's something that shouldn't be underestimated when you're thinking about working with influencers, is whether or not they have a good understanding of their audience and a really strong respect for their audience, which I think she absolutely does. Mordy Oberstein: She did a cool thing, I think she wrote about or posted about and wrote about it, you don't write anything on Instagram, really. She deleted her LinkedIn account and made a new one because her audience, for that reason, I think she felt her audience on LinkedIn and wasn't aligned. She wanted to redo it and restart from scratch. Super interesting. Crystal Carter: Wow. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, have a look at it. It's somewhere either on TikTok or Instagram or maybe even on LinkedIn if she talks about it. So we'll link to her profiles in the show notes, so you can go check it out. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm really feeling influenced. I'm under the influence. Crystal Carter: Don't drive anywhere, please. Find a designated driver or server or whatever. Whatever you need to do for your things. Mordy Oberstein: I need to write a bunch of emails. Crystal Carter: Yes. Don't write emails under the influence. Mordy Oberstein: My social media posts. Crystal Carter: And certainly don't call any of your exes under the influence, that's not a good idea either. Mordy Oberstein: I don't think, I know I do not have any. I've been married for 17 years. I don't have exes anymore. Crystal Carter: What happened to them? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Maybe they deleted their LinkedIn accounts. Who knows? I remember one time years ago on Facebook, one popped up trying to friend me, I'm like, nope. Crystal Carter: That's healthy. That's also good life advice. Can we just say that? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. What? Are you serious? Why? Nope. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's good life advice. Just let it go. Mordy Oberstein: Well, if you want more life advice, tune in for next week SERP'S Up podcast, because are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, can you ever have too much SEO data and/or marketing data? The answer is, yes, I think. Anyway, we'll talk about it next week. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. To get a little more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guess 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 Nicole Ponce Sarah Adam Mary-Anne Da'Marzo Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course It's New: Daily SEO News Series Semrush Spotlight Conference News: Google December 2024 Core Update Is Live - What Are We Seeing Data providers: Google November 2024 core update was less volatile Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Nicole Ponce Sarah Adam Mary-Anne Da'Marzo Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course It's New: Daily SEO News Series Semrush Spotlight Conference News: Google December 2024 Core Update Is Live - What Are We Seeing Data providers: Google November 2024 core update was less volatile 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, where there's some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is quite influential, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I don't know who she is. Who is she? I've never heard of her. Mordy Oberstein: Crystal on the web? You never heard crystal on the web? Crystal on the web. Crystal Carter: Oh, that lady. Mordy Oberstein: She's an influencer. Crystal Carter: Who does she influence? I don't understand. Mordy Oberstein: All sorts of people. Crystal Carter: Do you know what? I think I once influenced my mom to buy a tiny handbag because I had a tiny handbag and she was jealous that I had this tiny handbag, so. Mordy Oberstein: What do you put inside of a tiny handbag? Crystal Carter: Wasn't super tiny. It was just wallet, keys, phone, that kind of size, because she had this big giant bag and I don't like big giant bags because I just fill them with junk. So if I have a small bag, then I can't fill it with junk and then I can just get on with my life. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, good life lesson. Small bags. Crystal Carter: Small bags. Mordy Oberstein: Unless they're money bags, in which case make them big. Crystal Carter: Hey. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP'S Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, search labor at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter and see our great free SEO course, it's also where you can enhance your social strategy and track your social traffic with a wide array of inbuilt analytics and native integrations with Instagram, Facebook, and more, which is great for accelerating and tracking the impact of some of your influencer marketing efforts. As this week, we talk all about influencer marketing and conversions. Does influencer marketing lead to leads and converting conversions? What type of influencer marketing works for signups, clicks, and which don't? How influencer marketing has changed and is changing, and we'll be joined by Semrush's own influencer marketing lead, Nicole Ponce, who will help us dig on in, plus Wix Studio's own Head of Partnerships and Influencer Marketing, Sarah Adam, shares her top influencer marketing tips and her experience with you. And of course, we have your snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, turn your phone to vertical as we go like, oh my God, you won't even believe, you should totally buy this. Click the link button in the description below on the 115th episode of the SERP'S Up Podcast. Subscribe. Crystal Carter: Smash that like button. Mordy Oberstein: Smash that like button. I'm always afraid my kids will go take that, my little one will take it literally and smash. Crystal Carter: Oh man, I love it when you're in the middle of the video and they're like, "Hey, you join this video, you should subscribe to my channel while you're here." And you're like, okay, thanks. Mordy Oberstein: Click the bell for notifications. Crystal Carter: Right? You ding the bell, ding, ding, go. Mordy Oberstein: Can tell you, I never understood that maybe there's a reason. What's the point of subscribing without getting the notifications? Crystal Carter: I subscribe without getting the notifications I have too many- Mordy Oberstein: Me too, all the time, but does it do anything for me? I don't know. Crystal Carter: I don't know, it shows in your feed, but then you don't have... The notifications I sometimes find stressful. Mordy Oberstein: Right, no, I don't like them, but it would show up my feed anyway because I'm watching those videos. Crystal Carter: That's true, that's true. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Crystal Carter: This is true. Mordy Oberstein: You know who might know? Crystal Carter: Who? Mordy Oberstein: Nicole. Crystal Carter: Nicole? Mordy Oberstein: Nicole. Crystal Carter: It's a good thing we've got her on the show. Mordy Oberstein: So let's get right into it. So influencer marketing is one of those things that's kind of weird for me. Everyone kind of talks about it, a lot of people do it, but often not well. Is that spicy? Yeah, it's true, it's true. I'm just going to say because it's true. Everyone's like, oh, we're going to do influencer marketing, but then it's not always so great. So as someone who's done a boatload of influencer marketing over the course of my career, it's easy to get distracted by things that don't actually help you with the influencer. I'll just say, number of followers can be very distracting sometimes, it doesn't always matter the way that you think it does. Anywho, on top of that, there's also the disruption in the space. Over the years this whole thing of like, I'm a famous person, I'll promote your product and everyone will know I've never actually used it. That doesn't work anymore. Stevie Wonder doing a commercial for Zenni doesn't work. You know he's never used it. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Zenni, it's eyeglasses. Stevie Wonder is blind. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I order glasses online. Sorry. So, that whole celebrity thing, they're just going to promote it and just get a famous person on there, and that doesn't work. Everyone kind of sees through that a little bit. So I think that whole thing is the notion of influencer marketing being like, oh, it's about being famous people talking about my product is a bit of a misnomer, which is why I'm very happy, somebody I used to actually have the privilege of working with day in and day out on influencer marketing is here with us right now. Welcome to the show, Semrush's, Nicole Ponce. How are you? Nicole Ponce: Good. Hi, Mordy. Honestly, the pleasure is mine and whoever's listening probably doesn't know this or hopefully now they will know this, but Mordy and I used to work on the same team, so I also had the pleasure of working with Mordy in and out and brainstorm a lot of ideas. So, a lot of my ideas also come from Mordy's really great trajectory, so I give kudos to you back. Mordy Oberstein: That's way too much credit. If no one, an influencer promoting whatever product they never used, no one believes you. Nicole Ponce: Okay, perfect. Crystal Carter: He's going to be insufferable now, Nicole. I don't know what you've done, you're never going to live this down, I was just feel like. Nicole says, Nicole says. Mordy Oberstein: My giant ego just got bigger. Nicole Ponce: I love this, I love this. No, but truly mean it. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here to talk to you both, especially about influencer marketing, the B2B space, because I think B2B is such a new space to talk about influencer marketing and as Mordy was mentioning in the intro, it's hard to really show the impact for something that it's not a physical tangible thing to really showcase of how many people are purchasing it, but something that is a platform and is a service that you really need to showcase. What is the value of it for somebody to pay for it month to month? It's a really enticing, long tail effect of how to do it properly. So we've tested a lot at Semrush. I'm sure you guys have done, you guys do a great job at Wix also. I've had great conversations with Sarah about this, but yeah, it's definitely a different tactic and different strategies that need to be in place, but I'm curious to hear what we are going to talk about today, in terms of what that would look like in the future as well. Mordy Oberstein: So exactly just that. This whole idea of, and I'm curious about your opinion on this, where there's so much demand for influencer marketing and there's also demand for conversions. Does influencer marketing work for conversions? How strong is the connection between the influencer market and conversion? Is there a direct correlation or direct connection? How do you see that whole equation kind of thing? Nicole Ponce: Yeah, so a lot of people actually think about influencer marketing when it goes to conversions, they think affiliate marketing right away, which is not the case because yes, affiliate marketing does help you with conversion based directly. But in terms of the way that we work and the way that I see influencer marketing as impact for campaigns, it should definitely be enticed to conversion based. It doesn't mean that you'll see the conversions right away. I mean, ideally the goal is, because if you're investing some sort of specific budget on a campaign as a whole, if you're working with the right audience of influencer and that their audience is also somebody that is in need of the content that you're producing or what you're advertising, then obviously you did your job well in really looking through in the details of connecting the needs, the product, and how you can help. So I do see it as it should be a conversion based focus. Just measuring on impression says really nothing, especially if you're investing a lot of money, at least for me, right? Just speaking on behalf of what our team is doing, but just showing impression base. Yes, it's great to show brand awareness and I am a very huge believer. And sometimes you really can't quantify emotional connections or emotional value or even brand awareness and aspect of, I know that our brand is everywhere, but how do you put that in a factual number? But I think it definitely does help you showcase the value of influencer marketing if you're focusing as top level conversions and then obviously other measurable things will be like emotional value, brand awareness, etc, etc. But the answer in short is yes, absolutely. And obviously you need to just nurture the audience very well in order to see those conversions come through. It's not going to be like a one-off, especially when you're working in B2B, and, yeah. Crystal Carter: So B2B is a great point because the lead time on B2B can be very, very long. If you're talking to people, so you work in a SaaS team, if you're talking about people adopting a new SaaS platform, that could be months, negotiation, discussion, deliberation. And when you're talking about the conversions, can you just get into a little bit of the details of some of what a conversion looks like for an influencer marketing campaign? Because I think a lot of people think a conversion is a sale, but that's not necessarily the case, particularly for a long tail campaign or for a long sales cycle, for instance. Are you able to talk about some of the things that might make a conversion? Nicole Ponce: Yeah, so our main top funnel that we would basically measure is traffic. So anybody that lands onto Semrush's website we consider as not obviously a directly conversion, but a conversion for us is a first-time payment. So somebody that is going to, has not used Semrush at all and now is a new Semrush user, or even is potentially a Semrush user and has upgraded to one of our new apps, or is testing a new tool or a new add-on. So anything that converts into a new payment of some sort is considered a conversion for us. So it really depends on the campaign. It really depends on what the focus of the goal is in general for the company and as a whole, but we as a SaaS platform have so much to offer. We have 56 different apps, we have over 20 over tools, we have upgrades, we have add-ons, we have different tiers. And the way that we can see an increase of conversion is understanding your tool in and out and what that audience needs in order to educate them enough to say like, "Hey, you have this problem and we actually have something that can help you fix this," or, "We have something that you potentially might not know that you need, but it'll help you save X amount of time. So maybe upgrade or maybe test it out and see it as something that will help you in your workflow," and maybe they didn't know. And this is what's something that's interesting for me that we've been testing and I've been just talking about, because before we would just really directly work with SEOs, and we still do, but I've been testing working with influencers outside of the SEO space, but that are also in marketing. So they don't actually know the level of different tools and apps that we have to offer. So potentially, let's say they're just content marketers and they've just, I don't know, worked in our content toolkit, and then I share with them different apps that we have to offer and they're like, "Oh, wow, I didn't even know that you guys had this. I've been looking for something like this." So now it's just showing the value of all in one toolkit, which is what we are. But again, we're all marketers. We are so busy, we're just stuck in our every day. Sometimes we need to allocate more time to test something new, but if I'm already there in their face showing and making it easier for them to test it out in an easier, faster, all-in-one solution, it's just going to help that conversion aspect in terms of the life cycle, let's say. So obviously it's going to take a longer time, but it's just mostly like, and we're okay with that and we understand it's kind of like an investment. And we need to just be more present at all times because it's just how it is. We lose now attention with everything, like in a spam. Crystal Carter: One of the things you mentioned was picking up on lots of different parts of your platform. You've worked with Mordy, I worked with you when you were working with Mordy at Semrush, and I've had a relationship with Semrush for a while. I spoke at your fantastic Spotlight event recently. I've done one of your courses, I've done influencer marketing things where we did videos and things like that. We've done a webinar recently with your colleague, Eric, shout-out to Eric. And I think that what you're talking about there is that relationship of that long-term that with an influencer, it might not be just one thing that you're going to be marketing with them, but you might be marketing with them over a long period and you might be evolving with them and they might be evolving with you. Are you able to talk about how you maintain those relationships? Mordy Oberstein: That's right, really quick, that's so interesting because when we were working together that was one of the things we consciously tried to do is say, "Okay, let's not just go bing, bing, bing to all these different people, but let's find people and work with them over the course of many, many, many, many projects." Okay, sorry Nicole. Nicole Ponce: I was going to say, I 100% agree with this, and I think it showcases also not just the impact of the relationship with the actual influencer, but also with our audience. And it's just like now they're embedded as a, hey, they actually are an advocate for Semrush. It's not just, oh, I just see an ad and it removes the importance or the value for me as an audience. It's just seeing an ad one time is just, I'm going to forget about it. But if this person's actually continuously mentioning to their audience like, "Hey, I'm using this for this," or, "Hey, now I found out about this. Oh, look, now they've launched this." It's just now we're both working down the same avenue and it's kind of like an embedment, and now they're considered basically a brand ambassador, in our case. And the trust of them, by them is the audience of the influencer, is definitely what we need in order to see these type of conversions. But the way that we, sorry to answer your question Crystal, but basically the way that we build these long-term relationships is, I'm a huge believer in, if I can help wherever I can, I will. And then hopefully at some point when I need help, hopefully you can help me back. And that has helped in such a great aspect, and I know Mordy believes in this because we're huge advocates of this, but we believe in growing together. Not me running and then hopefully you can jump in the lane when I need to. That does not work at all. We're working with professionals, we're working with people. We're both trying to get at the same end goal. I'm very cautious also of the influencer's audience. There's sometimes I've gotten pushed back with the influencers like, hey, this does not align with my audience even though I love Semrush but we're talking about the PC, but I talk about SEO. By all means, I'm like, please tell me, push back because obviously we want it to be authentic. We want it to be real. We want to make sure that we're giving value to your audience. We don't want you to lower your engagement and the way that you actually interact with your audience because if you lose trust, we lose trust, and that obviously doesn't help me in my results. So, let's both work together to make sure that we keep whatever we need to do in a well road and then everyone wins. That's kind of like my motto. If you win, I win vice versa, so yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It makes the whole thing come off, it's so much more organic, it's so much more natural. And it makes it believable, it makes it that you can probably get a conversion out of it, because the audience, it's all very subtle. If the audience kind of feels like, wait a second... Because they know what's going on, everyone knows what's going on. This is part of, this person and Semrush, they're kind of together. But if it doesn't feel authentic, you focus on that part and not on the actual authentic part of it. So if it's too noticeable, you can't get the message across. So having that relationship, having that whole integration with them is what allows, I think, for eventually there to be a conversion. Nicole Ponce: Yeah, I 100% agree. And again, it goes all back to the basics. I feel sometimes that we overthink about how we can do our job properly when it's just the basics that it's people are going to buy from people. And a lot of people overthink the creative like, we need to make sure that we are like, bam, we need to make sure that we make a lot of noise. Yeah, but just go back to the basics. If you understand the need of the audience and you have a solution because you understand and you believe in your platform, just talk to the influencer. Be honest, like, "Hey, we have Z, Y, and Z. How can we work together? You know your audience best." And sometimes I do have an empty approach to an influencer like, I love what you're doing, I love your content. I don't know if we could potentially work on something together that might help because maybe they know about plans that I don't know about and vice versa. But a lot of people just automatically think like, okay, this person has 1,000 followers, sorry, 100,000 followers, almost a million followers and have great engagement. I'm just going to stick my tool in there and invest my whatever budget I have for influencer marketing and I know it's going to work. And a lot of brands do that when they work with athletes and it's just like, you're not speaking to the right audience/choir. So even though you're spending, I don't know, half a million dropping like a Superbowl ad, let's say in quotations, you really think that you're going to see the conversions if you're actually talking to the right audience? I don't know, it's a question mark. But if you understand how to communicate when get asked the right questions to these influencers to make sure you understand what the right audience that they're speaking to, I think it definitely does help a lot with your plans in terms of seeing these conversions long tail wise. Mordy Oberstein: I'm curious, on the conversion side, do you find that there's certain types of influencers who are better able to get certain types of conversions? Or in general, do different kind of assets convert better with influencer market? Like a sign up versus getting them to click to a blog? What works in terms of the conversion? Is there a difference between what your goal is? Are you trying to get a lead? Are you trying to get a click? What actually works for the conversion or what doesn't work? You're not going to get them obviously to influence a market and spend a million dollars right away, that ask wouldn't work. So what actually works to convert? Nicole Ponce: Right, that's a great question. It really depends on a lot of things obviously, because based on what we've tested, two things. Educational content, obviously because we're a platform and they're able to showcase the value of what they're going to be getting out of it helps a lot. Absolutely. So, educational content really helps. And if you're working with a thought leader that has been talking about this specific topic does help a lot because it just showcase like, hey, I want to be this person. I want to be at this educational value level, and if that means I need to benefit based off this tool that will help me get to that place, then potentially that will help. That's just the content aspect. But in terms of what else helps, it really depends on where we launch the campaign, so on the platform wise, especially because we're a SaaS platform that it's easier for us to work on desktop. And most of the influencer marketing campaigns that we launch our own social platforms. So the way and the user experience, for example, if you see a campaign on TikTok and then they have to actually go on the landing page to trial, and then we see the balance, how they're going to have to use it on Semrush's desktop, it's going to be a little bit harder, of course, as it is opposed to potentially on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn's another whole other story we talked about because of the way that traffic works on there. But yeah, it really depends, and this is why I believe in not just working with an influencer one time and then multiply working multiple content pieces for one specific campaign. And just so you can see the retention of the audience actually going from mobile to desktop. But yeah, it's things that you don't think about, but especially when you're working in SaaS and if you're working with an audience in social media, in order to see the trials come in. Crystal Carter: I think also, one of the things that from my experience of working with Semrush is that you very much take an approach of... I did a course, go check it out in the Semrush Academy on Mobile SEO. And like I was in the platform and I use Semrush regularly and if you are a Wix user and you're listening to this podcast or Wix studio user, then you can also use Semrush because it's built into your CMS, by the way. And basically, as part of it, I was like, well, I need to make sure I've got the latest thing. And so I upgraded, I had an upgrade during the time I was doing the course and so I could do extra stuff on top of that. And the thing that happens with that, when you have somebody who is speaking at conferences regularly, who's writing content regularly, who's doing content regularly, is that because we have the relationship that we are using the product and we're showcasing the product in those spaces with professionals, just again, an organic way. Mordy writes for Semrush regularly and does reports and uses Semrush data very often and has had a couple of things that are both on Semrush and on other platforms as well, where they're talking about things that are happening with Google updates and things that are happening with different keywords and how they're performing and things like that. And that is an ongoing visibility that comes from people using the platform genuinely in a genuine way. How do you identify someone who might have that kind of relationship with your product? And are those particularly valuable for the sort of exercise of working with an influencer? Nicole Ponce: The way that we actually look for potential influencers is, I do a lot of deep dive, and even though I don't post myself, which that's my bad on me, but I'm always everywhere, in the sense of conversations, what's happening, who's talking, what are they talking about? And that's how we recruit new influencers as well. There's a lot of people that they talk about Semrush as just an educational content piece, and I'm like, oh, I'm going to jump in your DMs and ask like, yeah, absolutely. And this is how the relationship starts. And I just, even sometimes people that talk about other competitors and Semrush and I just drop a conversation and say, "What are you lacking that we could potentially maybe have and you don't know about this?" So giving also educational value in terms of conversational wise directly and DMs, doesn't have to be in public, but privately. And also, yeah, being in the search that if your actual customers and users are your number one criteria of influencers, absolutely, they're going to be your advocates forever. And if you potentially help them in the sense of, hey, we have a new update and we can help you get first access and actually get your feedback. I love, love, love, and sometimes I feel like influencers feel bad and they're like, "Hey, sorry to bother you, but this is not working. This doesn't make any sense. You're making my job harder." I love when I get those messages because I'm like, thank you. You're taking time out of your day to make sure that I go back to our developers, make sure that I make your life easier, because if I make your life easier with our product and you're going to talk about your audience and you're also going to have a better relationship with us in sense, wow, they actually listen to me actually speaking out other the feedback and it just goes on. Yeah, exactly. Mordy Oberstein: I literally sent something in yesterday to Anna on the data team, like, "Hey, can we do this in Semrush? They're like, "No, and it might be really good if we could because it be super awesome, super helpful. So there you go. Literally having yesterday. Nicole Ponce: Exactly. I love that. Crystal Carter: I think that comes to something, and we had the SEO board, the Wix SEO board, and we've seen this, and that was lots of people who have influence in the community because that's the other thing. We say influencers, but these are people that have influence in the community and they have influence for a reason. And essentially, if you build a good relationship, then as you're saying, people can help you make do what you do better. So even if you were a restaurant owner and you had some local influencers, they might be like, "Oh my god, there's no place to take a selfie in this restaurant." And the restaurant owner might be like, "Oh, you're right. I should put some plants, fix the lighting, sort myself out," and then that's better for the business overall. So what you're saying is great, that you have a good relationship with people where they can help you make it better for everyone. That's amazing. Nicole Ponce: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's our job in the end. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of making lives better, if people wanted to connect with you and make their lives better by interacting with you on social media, where could they find you? Nicole Ponce: Ah, thank you. Well, best place I would say is LinkedIn. I'm under Nicole C. Ponce. And yeah, I think that's where I'm most active. Mordy Oberstein: All right. Oh, we'll link in the show notes. Nicole, thanks so much for coming on. It was really, really fun to chat with you about this. Nicole Ponce: Thank you both for having me, and it's such a pleasure to always chat with you both. Mordy Oberstein: See you out there on social. Again, thank you so much, Nicole, for coming on. Make sure to give her a big follow on social media. No one is more transparent about their influencing marketing tactics than our own Head of Partnerships and Influencer marketing, Sarah Adam. Just have a look at her LinkedIn profile, it's downright epic, which is why we thought we'd talk to Sarah and pick her brain as we travel across the Wix-verse. Speaker 5: Three, two, one, ignition lift off. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the show, Sarah. How are you? Sarah Adam: I'm great. I'm so excited to be here. Crystal Carter: We are so excited to have you. We were doing a piece on influencer marketing and I was like, we have to talk to Sarah because you've become an influencer marketing influencer. Mordy Oberstein: That's so TV inside of TV… Sarah Adam: It's very meta. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Sarah Adam: It is. Yeah, cool. So what are we talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're talking about, first of all, how did that happen? We're talking about, first we're talking... This is free association where you kind of just go. Sarah Adam: Yeah, okay. Mordy Oberstein: How did that happen? Sarah Adam: What, me becoming an influencer of influencers? Mordy Oberstein: This influencer for the influencers. Sarah Adam: I don't know, somewhere in, actually, no, I do remember now that you asked me. It was January of 2024 and I was sitting on my couch, it was a Friday night, everyone was asleep. And I was going through my LinkedIn feed, refusing to go to bed, and it must have been like midnight. And my LinkedIn feed was full of posts of empty AI new year resolution posts. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Sarah Adam: It just me off and I was like, you know what? I've had it. LinkedIn on one hand has the best audience as far as I'm concerned, if you're in the professional working world. But on the other hand, the content is just so boring, so low. And I thought, you know what? People post about, people are busy telling other people what to do on LinkedIn. You should do this, you should do that, but they don't share what they do. And it could be that what they're talking about is real and it's not from ChatGPT and it's something that's based on a real thing that happened to them and these are their lessons learned, which is cool. But sometimes it's just missing that personal story, that real thing, what actually happened to you. And I always felt that's really missing. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to try and I'm going to post and I'm going to see how it goes. And every post I'm going to give something real, something that people can actually say, "Oh, wow, can relate to, can give credibility to the lessons learned, etc." So then instead of writing a New Year's resolution, I kind of summarized the 2023 and I said, "With numbers data, this is what I did in terms of influencer marketing. These are the numbers of influencers we worked with. We plan to scale in 2024 to X number," I can't even remember now what I wrote. And then I did have lessons, my top lessons learned from that year. And I just pressed publish and I went to bed, which is bad practice. You need to hang around, but I didn't. And then I remember waking up and I saw I had 20 new followers and I was like, oh, this is cool. So then I decided, okay, I'm going to take two weeks and I'm going to dedicate these next two weeks to posting, and after two weeks I'll decide if it's something I want to keep going at and I enjoyed it. So here I am, almost a year later, and I have, yeah, so it's been fun. Crystal Carter: And I think that, so it's one of the reasons why we were so excited to have you on this for the Across the Wix-verse first thing is because we know inside and out. We see the work that you're doing, we know you, we read your feed as well. And what's great- Mordy Oberstein: We're on the same team for a month. Crystal Carter: Yeah, right? Sarah Adam: Back in the day. Crystal Carter: What I think is crazy is I'm in a group chat and I remember seeing one of your, somebody shared one of your posts in the group chat. They were like, "Oh, is Wix doing all of this?" And I was like, yeah, Sarah, that's right. Okay. But I think that what I think is really great about the information that you share is you share money. You're like, first deal, I'm looking at one post from a month ago, first deal, 300 or $3,500 for three Instagram reels over one month. Second deal, $20,000, 20 reels over six months, that sort of thing. You're sharing money, you're sharing. You have a great one about LinkedIn versus TikTok. I'd love to hear what you can say about that. So in LinkedIn versus TikTok, you're saying that LinkedIn and TikTok had similar but TikTok had higher views, LinkedIn had higher engagement, things like that. How are you finding TikTok as a channel for B2B influencers? Sarah Adam: So that's exactly why I wrote the post, because I speak to many marketeers that are either already doing B2B influencer marketing or considering it for 2025, and TikTok usually does not come up in conversation. And I always kind of feel a need to prove those people wrong. And I also used to think that back in the day when we just started, I thought, it's not B2B, but it is. I mean, I don't know, I use TikTok. I don't know if, do you guys? Are you on TikTok? Crystal Carter: Yes, I TikTok. Mordy Oberstein: I just got on Instagram, give me some time. Sarah Adam: Okay, so you'll get there too. So many people I know that are B2B use it. And the truth is, and that's what I say to people who are skeptical, I say, "Just go on TikTok and search for the keywords within your niche. Search for your competitors, search for your brand name, and you'll see you're going to get results. You need to be there too." So that's why that specific post was to compare between LinkedIn, which is obviously B2B, to TikTok, which people think is not. And to just show that I kind of think in a way that they complete each other because we are seeing... I mean, and that was just analyzing, I think it was based on a specific month, I can't even remember. But we see the volume in TikTok, which is very valuable, and we see the engagement on LinkedIn, which is very valuable, so. Crystal Carter: Just for people who are curious about this. The stats on it were that they did in September 16% of their B2B influencer posts were on TikTok, 16% were on LinkedIn. Number of views was 960% higher on TikTok, but engagement rates were 20% higher on LinkedIn. Number of comments were 200% higher on LinkedIn. And the sentiment analysis, 55% positive on TikTok versus 80% positive on LinkedIn. And Mordy, I know you've got a question, so I'll let you jump in. Mordy Oberstein: No, I was just going to ask by the great stats, do you find that the overlap between or the unification of LinkedIn and TikTok has to do with the fact that I think that there's a move towards emotive branding B2B? Like what used to be so awkward to do B2B is now kind of okay, right? Sarah Adam: I think that- Mordy Oberstein: If people are not familiar with this, really, really quick. A lot of brands are going very emotive marketing, very emotive branding, B2B, and it's resonating. Okay, now that you've gotten the context, that was the reason why I asked the question. Sarah Adam: Yeah, no, I think it's particularly true with LinkedIn introducing their video feed this year. I think more and more, I mean, I see it among us also internally and with the influencers we're working with. More and more tendency to upload videos to LinkedIn that they wouldn't beforehand. So I can give example, if we are working with an influencer on Instagram and TikTok and I see that they have a LinkedIn and they have a decent following, it doesn't even have to be huge. Like 2,000 followers is enough, really. So we'll often pay them to reshare that same video on LinkedIn and kind of see how that performs. So I think so, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I have 15,000. You can pay me, I'll repost your stuff. Crystal Carter: I think also, I think that there's, in terms of TikTok LinkedIn, TikTok is having a big influence on LinkedIn because LinkedIn has started putting videos really very much in the form of their algorithm, certainly on mobile. They've got a whole video feed that's very, very prominent and so I think that that's helping as well. One of the things, you talked about follower numbers, and you very often share in your information, the number of followers people have and rates and fees. People talk about micro-influencers and macro-influencers. Do you find that there's actually a difference when you're working with influencers for Wix Studio? Sarah Adam: Yeah. Yeah, huge difference. So we actually work with nano-influencers, which is smaller than micro, and micro-influencers. So our influencers can be anywhere between 2K followers to 500K. The thing is, is that followers is not that important. What really matters is the engagement that they're getting, the impressions that they're getting on their content. It's like just the other day I had a call with someone from a FinTech company, someone who works with a friend of mine, and they shared with me a list of people they think are relevant influencers, because they wanted my opinion. And these influencers were all the same. They had a very big following, but when you actually dive into their content, they're not getting any likes or any comments, nothing. So you're not going to pay some... That's just a very bad business decision, you're not going to work with someone like that. And then on the other hand, and I often see this, especially on LinkedIn and on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where you have, let's say you're watching, you've come across a video that's gone viral, and then you're curious to see who the creator is, and you go into their profile to find that they hardly have any following. It doesn't mean following is important. It's some sort of indication that does show that people over time see value in following that individual, which is obviously based on the content that they have produced, but it doesn't mean that they're suitable for your campaign right now. Crystal Carter: Right, right. It's the same with like SEO things. People are like, yeah, we're going to get lots of traffic. It's like, yeah, but is it the right traffic? If you posted a blog that said free chocolate bars- Mordy Oberstein: Where? Crystal Carter: ... for everybody and you sell, I don't know, watches. You might get a lot of traffic but that's not the right traffic. So just because somebody has a big falling doesn't necessarily mean that they're right for you. Mordy Oberstein: Where are the free chocolate bars? I'm so confused. Sarah Adam: You lost him on chocolate. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and free. Sarah Adam: He's not listening anymore. Crystal Carter: I think the other question is, so what about conversions and what about those sorts of things? So when you do an influencer campaign, how do you make sure that it gets tied to some of your business deliverables and things like that? How do you connect those? Sarah Adam: So this is a very interesting and hot topic, right? Because, so we see for us, influencer marketing is for sure and always has been, and I don't see it changing, is a brand awareness play. So we're not measuring conversions, which I know is uncomfortable for people to hear, but it's, that's what it is. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing, right? I've talked about, because we do the same thing on our side, but we're all about the brand and less about the conversion. People looking at me like I'm nuts. Sarah Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, especially smaller companies with smaller budgets, they don't like that, but it's true. That's what's so beautiful about working with influencers is their impact in terms of brand awareness. So we measure each and every asset that goes live. We measure that success in comparison to the same influencers' previous content, to content from other influencers, maybe from the same campaign. So we get some sort of idea. We're able to look at a piece of content and say, "Did it serve the goal or not? Did it meet the KPIs that we set or not?" And also if it did, and if the influencer was professional and fun to work with, then that's the reason to work with them again. But then we also look at results at a much higher level where it's another, what we do, what my team does, the content that goes live, how it performs is another kind of piece of a bigger puzzle for brand awareness where we check things like search. We want to see that month over month, more and more people are searching for Wix Studio. So scaling influencers is aligned with the other very many brand awareness activities that we do. So it's very difficult. It's impossible even to just select one piece of content and say, "Hey, did this work or not?" It depends. It depends what you're measuring and etc, etc. So, it's interesting. Mordy Oberstein: It's such a good point because influencer marketing, to me, partnerships of which influencer marketing is a type of, to me it's all about generating cadence, momentum, and it's a way of distributing yourself. It's a way of getting yourself out there to new people in new ways and leveraging all of that to get a certain kind of cadence and inertia or momentum. So looking at it from a conversion point of view, to me, looks at influencer marketing as not really what it's really all about, which is, you expanding out of your own self to create new possibilities based on the momentum that you didn't have before. Sarah Adam: Yeah, although there are, there are many companies that use it for conversion, and they're not measuring. They're just measuring the sales they get from those specific things. Mordy Oberstein: There's also a lot of people who watch cricket, so. Sarah Adam: Exactly. Crystal Carter: Cricket's a great game, though. Cricket's a great game. Mordy Oberstein: Of course you could hit the ball though. The bat's flat. If I had a flat bat, I could hit anything too. Crystal Carter: Cricket's an amazing game. It goes on for three weeks. You can be like, I'm sorry, I'm busy for three weeks because you're playing cricket. And also, they have a- Mordy Oberstein: And with that, our audience has gone cricket, cricket. Crystal Carter: Okay, so my question to you, Sarah, is if you were say, managing cricket brand and you were looking for an influencer for your cricket brand or your cricket team and you were going to knock it for six with a new influencer, what are the signs that it's a good influencer for your project? You open up their page and you're like, no, or okay, what do you look for? Sarah Adam: So I always look for, it's naturally in the order of the page almost of the profile. The first thing I look at is the bio, the title, the bio. What's this person's profession? What do they do? Have they played cricket before? Do they cricket? Is it cricket coach, train? I don't know what the right terminology is. Do maybe they somehow specialize in the world of cricket? Maybe they're like a cricket therapist. So that's the first thing, and that's like a deal breaker or maker if it's someone who's not in cricket, so I'm just going to move on to the next person because if they are, then okay, chances are their content is as well, which could also not be... it maybe you'll have a great potential influencer that looks great, but their content is about their personal life or about politics. We don't want that. So we want to see that the actual content is consistent and relevant and of decent quality. It doesn't have to be... We all know what TikTok and Instagram looks like these days. It doesn't have to be something high quality. It has to be good enough. And the most important thing, which is a deal breaker or maker are the, how is that content performing until today? Not even until today, just to look at their last, say, five, eight posts. What's the engagement like? What are the views like? And the most critical thing for me is the bio and the performance. If those two match, then that's enough to reach out. Mordy Oberstein: So if people want to reach out to you and they're not just on LinkedIn, where else besides LinkedIn, might they find you, if anywhere? Sarah Adam: Yeah, I'm only on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, wow, wow. Crystal Carter: You said you were on TikTok. You've got an account somewhere. Sarah Adam: So I tried. I tried TikTok, and there's too much maintenance. I couldn't take it, it was stressing me out. Mordy Oberstein: That's how I feel about my kids. Tried that, it's too much maintenance. Crystal Carter: See that candor, that is what we come to appreciate about Sarah Adam content. That's what we like. Real talk. Mordy Oberstein: Follow and connect or just follow, whatever Sarah wants, on LinkedIn. Sarah Adam: Yes, I'll be waiting. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks so much and see you there. Speaker 5: Three, two, one, ignition. Lift off. Life off. Mordy Oberstein: Again, thanks so much, Sarah, and make sure to give her a big follow on social media to be influenced by all of her marketing. You know who's really influential in my life. Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry, legitimately. Barry has been very influential in my life. Crystal Carter: Aw. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. No, I didn't mean in a good way. No, I'm kidding. Barry has actually helped my life tremendously. He helps me each and every day with his coverage of the SEO news, which means it's time. Very valuable and very concise, which is why we're moving into this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News. Snappy News. So the November 2024 core update is over and now, and now there's a December 2024 core update. Okay, so from Barry Schwartz over at SE Roundtable, December, Google, December 2024 core update is live. What we're seeing, what we're seeing is madness. That's what we're seeing. So Google, this is on December 13th, Barry is writing an SE Roundtable. Google announced the 2024 core update. They said it'll take two weeks. And then they wrote, "If you're wondering why there's a core update this month after one last month, but technically still this month because November one ended in December. We have different core systems. We're always improving. This past blog post explains more." Well, that clarifies everything. I have no more questions. I have a lot of questions. People in the industry, Barry covers it in his article. We're not exactly happy. He covers the charts showing the increase in ring volatility. Greg Finn from It's New, which used to do Monday through Thursday to get the SEO news and we'll talk a lot about that this week, has a whole segment on his podcast Marketing O’Clock, going through Barry's charts that I found very insightful. Anywho, there's been a lot of chatter. I mean, Willie Ray, SEO, great SEO legend, wrote WTAF. That kind of sums it up for me. It's interesting. Okay, so part of this, Google announces they had some kind of meetup in Zurich and Danny Sullivan came on the screen and they announced this as something's kind of big moment. I don't know, it's not a big moment, it's kind of confusing moment. And they said expect more core updates this year. Something I would've liked to known yesterday. My issue with this is, okay, if there's going to be more updates, it's very confusing to now go through and analyze and see what was impacted and when it was impacted. Sidebar, Barry covered on searchengineland.com, what the data providers said about the November 2024 core update, one of which of those providers was Semrush, and the person who handled the Semrush data for Semrush was me. So I sent Barry the data and Semrush, and I said to Barry, I think he quotes it in the article that also linked to it in the show notes. "It's very confusing to try to analyze these updates because forget two core updates. The baseline period where you're trying to compare what happened during the update to a normal period of rank volatility, normal doesn't exist anymore. It's all bonkers and high. So how do you compare?" All right, there it is. I wrote, "As with the August 20 24 core update, this update saw an extensive period of high levels of rank volatility proceeded. This makes analyzing the update relative to its proceeding baseline period almost impossible, Mordy Oberstein told us." And Mordy Oberstein is telling you now the same thing. There are a bunch of charts in there also. You have a look at it, but now it's even more confusing because now you have a second core update all on top of this. I think this first off, it's really bad timing because you had a core update go over Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Now you're having one going over the holiday shopping season itself. Over the holidays probably, itself. It's going to make it to understand what exactly happened to who and when and where, which was the culprit, which may or may not makes such a practical difference, I guess, very difficult. And the optics are just really bad. And I usually don't put my thumb on the scale on this podcast this way, but if you knew there's going to be more updates coming, I think the better way to have communicated would've been before the November update saying, "Hey-o, listen up," it's my inner big man, "Hey-o, listen up, everybody. We're going to have a whole bunch of updates. So yes, the November one's rolling out, but don't be surprised if there's more to follow this." That's kind of getting ahead of the narrative. I feel Google sometimes loses the narrative because they don't get ahead of the narrative and narratives are important. Narratives are important, and on that, I'm going to end the news. If you're looking for more commentary on this, have a look back by the time this episode comes out, and what we covered on It's New, over on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub, or on the RustyBrick YouTube channel, probably on Monday the 16th, because I'm recording this on Sunday the 15th. We are definitely going to cover this then. I can't imagine is not covering it, and there'll probably be some interesting takes from myself, Greg Finn, Barry Schwartz himself, and Chris LaCarter. So until that time, this is the Snappy News. You know what's funny? On SMX, one of the recent SMXs, Barry wasn't on the banner. I'm like, dude's got 100 and gazillion followers, put him on the banner. So I fixed it, I added it in into like, here's Search Engine Land. I fixed it, here's Barry on the banner. Crystal Carter: Nice, nice. Totally. Mordy Oberstein: Barry, everyone just forgets about Barry. How do you forget about Barry? Crystal Carter: People shouldn't forget about Barry. Barry's like, you know he's that dude. Mordy Oberstein: No. No one puts Barry in a corner. Crystal Carter: He does have a corner office though. He kind of, he prefers it. Mordy Oberstein: He does. His whole setup is very corner-y looking. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think so. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, if you want to take a look at it and take a look at It's New every day, you can see Barry's corner-y set up. Crystal Carter: Right and his collection of button down shirts as well. Mordy Oberstein: Is it a collection or is it one he watches every day? Crystal Carter: I don't know. I've never seen him wear a T-shirt, let's just put it that way. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if he sleeps in them. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Now we're getting too far down the rabbit hole of Barry. What we should be doing is going down the rabbit hole of who you should be following this week, and your follow of the week is Mary-Anne Da'Marzo, who runs Firebelly Media and has a massive TikTok Instagram account. You should absolutely follow for some great information. On SEO marketing in general, tons of stuff. We've worked with her before with the Wix team a bunch of times. She's really, really, really, really a great follow. Crystal Carter: She's a great follow. She's really, really active and she has some great grasp on her audience and what her audience needs from her, and she's really, really good at connecting with them. And I think that that's something that shouldn't be underestimated when you're thinking about working with influencers, is whether or not they have a good understanding of their audience and a really strong respect for their audience, which I think she absolutely does. Mordy Oberstein: She did a cool thing, I think she wrote about or posted about and wrote about it, you don't write anything on Instagram, really. She deleted her LinkedIn account and made a new one because her audience, for that reason, I think she felt her audience on LinkedIn and wasn't aligned. She wanted to redo it and restart from scratch. Super interesting. Crystal Carter: Wow. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, have a look at it. It's somewhere either on TikTok or Instagram or maybe even on LinkedIn if she talks about it. So we'll link to her profiles in the show notes, so you can go check it out. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm really feeling influenced. I'm under the influence. Crystal Carter: Don't drive anywhere, please. Find a designated driver or server or whatever. Whatever you need to do for your things. Mordy Oberstein: I need to write a bunch of emails. Crystal Carter: Yes. Don't write emails under the influence. Mordy Oberstein: My social media posts. Crystal Carter: And certainly don't call any of your exes under the influence, that's not a good idea either. Mordy Oberstein: I don't think, I know I do not have any. I've been married for 17 years. I don't have exes anymore. Crystal Carter: What happened to them? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. Maybe they deleted their LinkedIn accounts. Who knows? I remember one time years ago on Facebook, one popped up trying to friend me, I'm like, nope. Crystal Carter: That's healthy. That's also good life advice. Can we just say that? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. What? Are you serious? Why? Nope. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's good life advice. Just let it go. Mordy Oberstein: Well, if you want more life advice, tune in for next week SERP'S Up podcast, because are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, can you ever have too much SEO data and/or marketing data? The answer is, yes, I think. Anyway, we'll talk about it next week. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. To get a little more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guess it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back Your resource is ready Use this user-first keyword ideation Google Sheet for a smoother SEO process. We’ve emailed you a link so it’s easy to access. Make a copy 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

When are best SEO practices not the best SEO strategy? As with everything in SEO, even following best practices all depends. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss the pros and cons of following the best practices of SEO. Find out when to and when not to adhere to best SEO practices as the duo explores real cases when following best SEO practices may not be ideal! SEO Consultant, Jono Alderson, shares scenarios where you should take off your SEO hat and alter certain best practices by not necessarily ignoring them but reshaping them to differentiate yourself from competitors. Plus, see how best practices relate to actual consumer expectations. Practice doesn’t always make perfect on this week’s SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back When to throw SEO best practices out the window When are best SEO practices not the best SEO strategy? As with everything in SEO, even following best practices all depends. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss the pros and cons of following the best practices of SEO. Find out when to and when not to adhere to best SEO practices as the duo explores real cases when following best SEO practices may not be ideal! SEO Consultant, Jono Alderson, shares scenarios where you should take off your SEO hat and alter certain best practices by not necessarily ignoring them but reshaping them to differentiate yourself from competitors. Plus, see how best practices relate to actual consumer expectations. Practice doesn’t always make perfect on this week’s SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 83 | April 17, 2024 | 47 MIN 00:00 / 46:34 This week’s guests Jono Alderson Jono Alderson is an award-winning SEO consultant. He helps brands to compete on technical SEO, performance, and structured data. He’s worked with startups, agencies, and enterprise brands to turbo-charge websites, implement growth strategies, prepare for the future, and win markets. Jono is happiest when neck-deep in code, presenting on stage, sightseeing, or reading a good book. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the best-in-class, the class of not telling you, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. I was wondering what the intro would be on this particular episode of SERP's Up podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I pivoted the last second. We were talking right before we started recording this. Crystal Carter: That's because you're a gentleman. That's why. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. I try. Crystal Carter: But yeah, I think- Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I totally botched it. I didn't say you were the head of SEO Communications at Wix. You are just the head of all SEO communications. Crystal Carter: You darn straight. That's right. That's right. People want to talk about SEO. You come through me. No, I'm kidding. No, you probably don't. There's other people, there are other people that you could talk to that we've mentioned them and they've been on the podcast before, so talk to those people. I do my best. Mordy Oberstein: I try. Or maybe Scott would say somehow I manage. Crystal Carter: All good, all good, all good. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our newsletter, our monthly newsletter, Search Light over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, where you can also manage your team and their clients with Wix Studio. From advanced team permission settings to customizable client resources, check out what Wix Studio can offer for your agency at wix.com/studio for all the things that keep your client and team management up to best practice and best standard. Because today we're talking about best practices for SEO, when to throw them out of the damn window. Crystal Carter: And when not to as well. Mordy Oberstein: And when not to, right. Also, very important. Crystal Carter: We're going to talk about both. Use your noggin, people. Mordy Oberstein: But it's better for Google Discover if we talk about how to throw them out of the damn window. Crystal Carter: That's right. That's right. Just like it's that meme of the girl throwing the money out the window or sometimes I feel like I want to throw my laptop out the window. Sometimes I have that feeling. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes I want to open up the window and just yell out of it like, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Crystal Carter: That's normally when the algorithms updates have come in and then come in again and then come in again and you're like, "Why aren't there 12 at once?" Mordy Oberstein: Because we're integrating into our systems, our ranking systems, and we're recording this right smack in the middle of the March 2024 core update. Anyway, we're talking about throwing best practices out of the damn window when we're not to do that from scenarios when best practices work and when they don't work best for rankings, to when best SEO practices don't work for your team and when best SEO practice might actually harm your relationship with your clients. Absolute SEO legend, Jono Alderson chimes in on a really, really, really interesting outlook on the value of SEO best practices as a concept these days. Plus we take a deep look at what the heck a best practice actually is to begin with. 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 forget everything you know about SEO. Well, not everything, as episode 83 of the SERP's Up podcast, Lee's Best SEO practices aside because at the end of the day, we talking about practice. We talking about practice, not the game we go out there and die for, not the game. We're talking about practice. How silly is that? Practice? Crystal Carter: I am loving the DeepCut AI throwback quote there. We're talking about the original AI. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Crystal Carter: Right. The original AI. Mordy Oberstein: Those who are not old school basketball fans. Allen Iverson, who's an OG of basketball, I love Allen Iverson, got called out. He's one of the greatest stars in NBA history, got called out for not showing up on time for practice. Crystal Carter: And he'd had some personal situations. I've seen the documentary about it. He'd had a bereavement or something like that and they were like, "You didn't come to practice." And he was like, "Talk about practice. I'm Allen Iverson." And I was like, you know what? Yeah. But yeah, Allen's right. Allen's right. Sometimes people go on about best practices and they've read it somewhere, they've read it in a blog, they've seen it on a video, they've done things like that. And don't get me wrong, let's just clarify right now. Best practices are called best practices for reason. Best practices are generally seen as solid advice for most people, for most people. And that is important. And they tend to be the things that you should absolutely tick off before you start getting into more advanced, more nuanced, more complex activities. And it can be really, really useful, particularly when you're at the beginning of your SEO journey to pay very close attention to best practices. And when you're thinking about technical SEO, it is almost, it's very, very critical to pay attention to best practices because- Mordy Oberstein: There's no leeway with that. Crystal Carter: There's no leeway. You have to make sure your sitemap needs to be readable. It just has to be. And that is best practice. Your sitemap needs to be readable, your sitemap needs to be discoverable, et cetera, et cetera. If your sitemap isn't, if your code isn't parsable, yo, you're not in the game. So those best practices absolutely pay attention to, but I think it's a little bit, I think sometimes, particularly when you get more advanced, it's a little bit like driving. When I learned how to drive, they were like, "You keep your hands at 10 and two and you never take both hands off the steering wheel when you're turning the car. You have to squeeze them together and then pull them apart and then squeeze them together and pull them apart." And I have watched my mother drive. When I was learning to drive, I'd watched my mother drive for years. She didn't drive like that. My mom had one hand, she had a big gulp in one hand. She had one hand on the other one. She was telling us to be quiet. Mordy Oberstein: That's better than my mom who was driving with her fricking knees while she's eating a sandwich. Crystal Carter: Okay, right. Now, did we all get to where we needed to go? Yes. Was that necessarily the best way to drive a car? If anybody's listening to this- Mordy Oberstein: If you're trying to eat a sandwich while drinking a coke, it is. Crystal Carter: Okay. Exactly. So you would not pass your test, driving with a sandwich and telling your kids off in the back. You're not going to pass your test like that and you would never teach anyone to do that. But as people get more skilled, they can get more creative and that they can get down into some of those things and they can assess the situation and figure out, they can assess the risk of trying something a little bit different. They can assess how complicated the situation is and whether or not this might be a time to ignore the best practice necessarily. As I say, this is something that you will grow into. So if you're just starting out, I highly recommend yes, follow best practices. However, there's lots of discussion around this and Christina LeVasseur, who's a great SEO and talks a lot towards folks who are growing up in their SEO or developing their SEO careers talks about this as well. She said, "Early in my SEO career, I would say we should do X, Y, and Z because it's best practice. With more time and experience out there to say, we should do X, Y, and Z because it's worked based on my previous test, or we should do this because the data suggests that we should do this." And that's really important. That's a really big difference and that takes a lot of confidence and takes a lot of experience as you mentioned, to be able to make that assumption because the best practices are yes, you probably won't go wrong with this practice, but you also need to be able to qualify them. Particularly if you're working with a client or you're working on a project, just to say it's best practice isn't always enough and best practice doesn't necessarily give you prioritization. So it's best practice not to have loads of 404s on your website. That's absolutely true. It is best practice not to have lots of 404s on your website, but whether or not you get to those first when you have lots of other technical issues to address or whether or not those are even a big deal necessarily depending on where they are on the website, is something that you'd need to assess. So you do your crawl assessment and if it's the case that yeah, there's a bunch of 404s on pages that nobody ever goes to or a part of the website that is old or part of archived or something like that that's low priority from a commercial point of view, then maybe that might be a second task after sorting out your landing pages, after sorting out some of the other technical issues, after maybe updating your structured data markup or something like that. So it's not to say that you're ignoring them entirely, but you're prioritizing them differently. Mordy Oberstein: There's a ton of cases where that kind of comes into play. And I think you're right, it does happen as you get more seasoned-ish or as you see more things happening. I will give you my classic example. The algo is super advanced. Google's algorithm I think is very, very, very advanced. I know sometimes that you get articles written by whatever publication and it's not, blah, blah, blah, the results are worse. That's not true. That just has to do with our perception of things. The algorithm incorporates way more machine learning now than it ever did before. Things are pretty advanced. That doesn't mean that Google doesn't have gaps. There's gaps all the time. So for example, I run another podcast, my personal little podcast called the SCRN. It's just like a fun little thing I do on the side. It's not a real thing at all. And I noticed that for SEO podcast queries, if you have the word best scrawled in everywhere, there's a gap in the algorithm. Google overweighs the term best, like it's 1995, like it's 2005, and it ranks things with that word best for best SEO podcast because of the keyword match. So literally on my home page, I have the SCRN, the Best SEO podcast because Google has a gap in its algorithm and weighs the keyword best too heavily for this vertical. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: That's not a best, you should not write that on your podcast website. Crystal Carter: No, no. Mordy Oberstein: That is not a best practice, but it does work in this particular case of the gap. And most importantly, I don't have any real branding on this website. I can do whatever I want with it. The branding on the website is that there's no branding, so I can do whatever I want. I wouldn't do it on the SERP's Up podcast. That would be terrible. That would be a terrible idea. Crystal Carter: Right. This goes back to a couple of things you mentioned there. So first of all, experience. So your experience showed you that there was a little bit of a gap in the thing and also tests and also risk assessment. So if you're trying something that is outside of the best practice, another quote I want to bring up is one from Ross Simmons who's fantastic SEO and content distribution, like king. And he says, "Remember, best practices are only best practice until someone comes along and finds success trying something new. So when you're trying something that's a little bit outside of the mold, if you're going off-piste, if you are traveling the path less traveled, the road less traveled, if you're trying that, it's useful to try it on a test site, on a low risk site to see what's going on with that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm doing. That's my site. It's a low risk website. Crystal Carter: So you're testing this in that space before you try it on clients. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I would if I had a podcast client, I do a podcast client, I do not recommend they do that. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So you wouldn't do that, but you would test it and you'd see where that is. And maybe you wouldn't put exactly that thing, but you might put somewhere on the page, let's just put best in there. Let's just put best podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, if I could fit it in organically ish, I would totally do that, but I wouldn't do it like that. I am blatantly being salty. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So you wouldn't put it like 25 times. So that's something to think about. So yeah, and testing, iterating. We have a great article in the Wix SEO Hub that talks about testing and testing is so important to SEO and partially because we get so much data back on it and your data will tell you which best practices are most applicable to you and which things are most important. And I think that using the data that you have and using the iteration and the testing is really important. Nick Leroy, who's also a fantastic SEO, talks about what should you include on your SEO tech audit? And he's like an overview of what was reviewed, why it was a problem, how you can fix it and prioritizing the things. You shouldn't just include things that are best practice. You shouldn't just include things that are best practice. You should also include the why am I recommending this? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, if you're selling services, they're not hiring you for your best practice, they're hiring you to catch them when they haven't aligned with the best practice, do that and then take them to where they actually need to go, which is beyond the best practice. Crystal Carter: And this is the other thing is that best practices are established practices, a little bit like a historic keyword volume. So historic keyword volume is looking at keywords from the past. In the past, lots of people have searched for, I don't know, banana cream pies particularly in June. And so you can say, "Oh, if I'm writing about banana cream pie, la, la, la, I'll write about this or the other." But maybe there's pie talk, maybe there's a whole- Mordy Oberstein: There's a banana shortage. There are no more bananas. Crystal Carter: And so there's not a keyword search volume, historic search volume on the banana shortage or whatever. Maybe there's that sort of thing, that's new ground and you're going to be able to move people forward by going onto new ground, combining some of the best practices, some of the information. The other thing I also want to throw out here, particularly from the tech SEO audit standpoint, is if you are using an audit tool, and I know this is one of your favorite bug bears, but if you are using an audit tool and they have what they are purporting or showing to be best practice like, "Oh, there's low HTML." Mordy Oberstein: That's my favorite one, that's my favorite one. Crystal Carter: Don't just blindly follow what they're telling you is or isn't an error. Mordy Oberstein: That's not actually a best practice. Crystal Carter: So use your noggin, people, use your brain to prioritize what works with what the business can do. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes. Crystal Carter: And what works with what they are able to look at. One of the other folks who was talking about this, who I thought had a really, really good take on this was someone who was saying that it's also important to look at what they can do. It's not just- Mordy Oberstein: I was going to touch on that, I just want to talk about that. Yeah. Crystal Carter: So Usman Akram, who's from Triple Dart, he was saying that a lot of people fail because they focus on best practice of what they should do because best practice is you should do this. Mordy Oberstein: Right. But they're not there yet. Crystal Carter: They're not there yet. Mordy Oberstein: So many times. Crystal Carter: So you should do this because it's best practice and they're two different things. You need to think about what you can do with your situation because even though he says what's really achievable with the resources that you have. If the answer is no, you can't achieve it, then it's not best for you. Mordy Oberstein: Not best for the business, and by the way, not best for you because you'll lose that money, you'll lose that client money, and that's not good for you either. That's not good for anybody. Are they going to benefit by not having your services long-term? No. I'm assuming you're doing good work. I've had a site where they needed an absolute total restructure. The pages were all over the place. There was no really best practice site hierarchy and site structure, and they needed to start creating new pages and reshuffling pages and there was a lot of work and they were nowhere near being bothered enough on SEO to do something like that. So I didn't recommend that yet. I brought it up in a report. That's what you do. You bring it up at a meeting, you stick it in a report, you say for the future, but let's now focus on these quick things that you can do that are really easy and let's get some momentum going. Otherwise, I would've lost that. They would've lost all of the things that you eventually did for SEO because we started off with something that it's a best practice, but they were not ready for. Crystal Carter: They weren't ready for it. So you need to take that with you. Andy Crestodina, who's also a great SEO, he's saying that they're very often hypotheses because best practices tend to be, again, for the best thing for most people. So for instance, Google very often recommends responsive design. And responsive design is great, responsive design is great. Our new product, Wix Studio has responsive design built in. It's fantastic. Wix Classic doesn't have responsive design. It has an adaptive dynamic rendering situation going on. And do you know what people say, "Oh, Google says it's best practice." Google doesn't do responsive design. Google's web page is not responsive. Why? Because they have different needs. Amazon is not responsive either. They have different needs because you know what? Yes, responsive is great for most websites, but for some websites where they have a completely different mobile experience, they might have a different kind of situation because if you just did responsive, it wouldn't be great. Mordy Oberstein: That's the whole Core Web Vitals saga. That's literally the whole Core Web Vitals saga. Go find me an e-commerce website where the home page has the Core Web Vitals. Crystal Carter: And so the best practice is to be super, super fast, but then you have business needs, so sometimes- Mordy Oberstein: You have to take up all this stuff. They want all the stuff for conversions, not there. By the way, in the beginning, Google's website, the travel website took them a long time because of the same issue. They had to restructure things in a way because they wanted the conversion, so they didn't pass Core Vitals. Crystal Carter: Right. Now, at the same time, there are some best practices which are critical. So Joe Hall was saying, "Most people ignore best practice because it's not sexy, but crawl optimization is critical to tech SEO best practice in a way. And way too many websites are failing at it." And that's absolutely true. Crawl optimization should be really important. Another one that comes up to me with regards to best practice is around the whole AI discussion that we're having in the middle of this big old update right now. So best practice has historically been that you should make good content, right? Good content. Mordy Oberstein: And then as is all over X, formally Twitter, they're like, "Oh, just write good content, huh?" Crystal Carter: So Natalie Slater on TikTok was talking about this how in the last 18 months, SEOs who adhere to best practice of making good content that is prioritized for humans and is not spammy and is not doing all of this sort of stuff, have felt a little bit of a wobble, right? Because that's been their best practice and that's what they've been telling their clients and that's what they've been focusing on. But this update, and there have been other people who have not really been paying attention to that best practice and have been doing what has been historically seen as spammy techniques, this parasite SEO things, some programmatic SEO isn't inherently spammy at all. Mordy Oberstein: Not inherently, but I gets they're real quick if you're not careful. Crystal Carter: But some people can if you want, with great power comes great responsibility. And so people have been seeing people winning with some of these tactics and they've been like, "I don't know what's going on. What about these best practices" But with this update, Google- Mordy Oberstein: Manual action here, manual action there. Crystal Carter: Manual actions, de-indexation, like things like that. Google seems to be saying, "Yeah, I worked for a little while, but we're adjusting this because we want people to adhere to the best practices, which is to do authoritative, expert trustworthy content and put that out." Mordy Oberstein: It's like driving with your knees. You can do it from stoplight to stoplight, but you can't drive from New York to California. Crystal Carter: That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Mordy Oberstein: I would like to see you try. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of best practices, we asked SEO OG, Jono Alderson when he throws away best practices. So here's Jono on when he ignores some of SEO's better practices. Jono Alderson: I'm going to go broad. I think I'm increasingly ignoring the idea that our day-to-day activities as SEOs should involve producing content to target keywords. I think I'm going to ignore the idea that we should be doing some kind of keyword research to do some kind of opportunity model based on some kind of domain authority or rating and search volume and cost per click, et cetera, and then writing or more likely outsourcing or using ChatGPT to write a bunch of articles probably in some kind of blog or resource center. I think that's probably a lot of what a lot of us do, but I think that's no longer best practice. I think it generally works okay-ish most of the time, but it's going to get harder. A few things to consider one, your competitors and the people who work for them have people who look like you doing the same research and the same opportunity model. So we're all chasing each other's tails. Simultaneously, the internet is increasingly full of very similar or derivative content thanks to SEOs doing this, and thanks to ChatGPT and the infinite amounts of just derivative content soup. And then because of that, Google has less and less need for your content, specifically yours. They can synthesize results in any vertical where they understand the query space and the number of verticals where they can do that is going to increase. If all you are doing is writing obvious stuff that aligns with some kind of basic keyword research or rewriting other people's stuff in a slightly marginally better way using different phrasing or slightly more words, you're not going to be ranking for anything. Now, I'm not saying don't do keyword research and don't produce content, but do keyword research and use these tools and processes and metrics to understand your audience's problems, to identify the kinds of questions that they have that you are able to support them on way earlier in the buying cycle than most conventional SEO strategies will target. Those are probably zero volume or zero CPC terms, but that's fine because the objective is to produce content that actually helps users to solve their problems. Give them the information they need to educate themselves and to take action to overcome their challenges without needing to buy from your convert. And if you do that well enough, you become a household name. You need to prioritize and measure how well your content solves the problems of your audience by adding value to the internet and to their lives. Super hard. But then you give Google a reason to index and rank your content. Then you give users a reason to engage and convert, and you give journalists and influencers a reason to link or share or cite your content without you having to run massive email and LinkedIn spamming engines to promote your infographics and dog jumpers to journalists. Now, the best version of this is to actually become a publisher, and that's been a trendy thing to say for ages in SEO, but many people just interpreted it to mean write lots of blog posts. You see, the difference is that real publishers do original research. They have editorial standards and processes. They employ people and journalists who have opinions and reputations and expertise, and they do that not just to tick some kind of EEAT box. They're also picky about what they write. They don't try and write for everybody. They define their audiences and explore their problems. And sometimes they're divisive and even controversial. If you're not doing this, then maybe it's time to start asking what your website is for and why Google, which is a search engine whose primary leading metric on revenue is user satisfaction would send visitors to your derivative blog posts and keyword soup. So this essentially boils down to when it comes to content, stop thinking like an SEO, think like an editor, like a product manager, even like a CMO. Consider the needs of your audience and the needs of Google in parallel and wrangle or build your content resource to produce material that's beneficial to both. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Jono. That was fabulous. We'll get to that in a second. Make sure you follow Jono on X over at Jono Alderson, that's J-O-N-O, A-L-D-E-R-S-O-N. Link in the show notes. So much to dive into about that. Okay, first off, I think we're entering an era where brand differentiation and getting people to come to you and being top of mind I think is going to be very, very important. Not just for your overall marketing success, but also for your SEO success where you're going to want people to be searching for your brand name, which I think will be something that Google's going to label a little bit more heavily going forward. But that's my personal speculation. But I do think that in five years from now, I'm going to invent a new term on this podcast. I think there's going to be something called brand first SEO, which is basically what he's talking about where you're basically not looking at starting with the keywords, starting with the search volumes, where you're basically starting with what does my audience need? How am I going to differentiate myself from all the AI content that's out there or from the other brands that are also trying to differentiate themselves because of all the AI content out there? And starting with that and you're targeting what's based on, and I think it's not even the best way to do it, but I think it's just knowing where the web is going to go, targeting based on what will differentiate you, which is much more aligned with targeting what your audience actually interested in than starting with an SEO tool. And the way I do this is then refining with the SEO tool. I kind of know why audience wants and what they're interested in very broadly. Let me refine that by using AlsoAsked, getting some questions about what the audience might also be searching for, running it through SEMrush, seeing what comes back from there and getting a better sense of the topic and understanding what are the historical trends? But that's secondary. Crystal Carter: Right. This is something I've been talking about a while. This is something, what's it called? Michel Fortin has a great article on user first SEO, and if I'm going to use shout out myself, I also have an article on a resource on where you can get that stuff. So he talks about low search volume stuff, about actually being helpful, about actually being useful, about actually serving your clients, your potential clientele, and actually providing a solution. And one of the best ways that you can do that is to get them from your clientele and from your potential folks. I have one about where to get user first keywords and topics. I have a resource in our SEO resource that talks about this. Talk to your sales team. Your sales team will tell you, people keep asking me this question and I don't have an answer. So write the content and then not only will your sales team will be able to refer it to, but if anybody has that question, they'll be able to find it. Look at your customer care queries, look at their training gaps. When you're training, people are like, "But I don't understand what that means." Guess what? Customers probably don't understand it neither. The questions that come through Google Business profile, the questions that show up on Amazon, those questions they won't have, like he's saying, you're making keyword soup. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Crystal Carter: Those questions may not have any search volume, but that doesn't mean that they don't have value. And it's also the differentiation point. It's always been about differentiation. SEO has always been about differentiation and marketing has always been about, the textbook definition of marketing is delivering customer value, and that is what you should be doing. That's what you should be doing with your content. That's what you should be doing with your website. And I think he's also bringing up the point, what is your website for? When you're thinking about what do I expect people to do on this website? Do I expect them to be able to get to know me, to know what kind of content I have, to be able to answer questions they have about how to use this thing that they just bought or to be able to learn something? What are we actually trying to do? We were discussing today, we were discussing an LP, Morty, weren't we? And I was like, "What is this page supposed to do? What do we want people to do?" We were looking at this draft and I was like, "Why can't I find?" Mordy Oberstein: No, and that page in particular came about because it wasn't thinking about user first. It was thinking let's say design first or whatever it was. Crystal Carter: And we were just like, but it needs to be able to achieve this goal, and if people have to hunt around to achieve the goal, they will give up and they will go somewhere else. Mordy Oberstein: It looked good. But they don't want to use it. Crystal Carter: No, they won't use it. You want something that actually makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Driving with your knees looks super cool, but you can't actually do it. Crystal Carter: Right. Are you really going to get where you need to go? Mordy Oberstein: On a sharp turn, like at a 90 degree turn, that's not going to work. I would like to see that. Crystal Carter: There be sandwich parts everywhere, lettuce on your elbows, it's going to be just chaos. Mordy Oberstein: Now what we should have done was gone in reverse order in this podcast episode. We want to talk about what are our best practices from a conceptual point of view, which probably would've made more logical sense to talk about that before we get into best practice about SEO. It's an SEO podcast? So we'll do the marketing, broader marketing stuff second and the SEO stuff first, even though that might not be best practice. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. I see what you did there. I see what you did there. Mordy Oberstein: For our audience, it makes much more sense. Crystal Carter: We're experimenting, we are iterating. Mordy Oberstein: Driving with the knees on the podcast. That's all we're basically doing. Crystal Carter: Until the wheels fall off. I don't know. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: So we're taking a deeper look at what is a best practice with a deep thought with Crystal and Morty. Best practices, best practices, fundamentally just what are they? So you can basically apply, we're talking about in SEO to other areas of not just marketing, but your life. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: I look at best practices, they're like the minimal. Two things. They're the minimal standard and they're also what keeps you in line from being too nuts. Crystal Carter: So some people say, or bare minimum, I think I've heard people say this. Taylor Merchinson quoted someone else saying the path to mediocrity is paved with best practices. Ouch. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great quote. Crystal Carter: Ouch. Now, don't get me wrong, like I said at the beginning, best practices can absolutely guide you, can keep you from going completely astray. Mordy Oberstein: That needs to be on a Hallmark card. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: You give them the card and it's all beautiful and it's like, yeah, the path to mediocrity is paved. Crystal Carter: It's a quote from Austin Knight apparently, who I don't follow on Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: It's brilliant. It should be a Hallmark card, very sassy Hallmark card. Crystal Carter: The thing about it is what best practices tend to be is they tend to be what everybody agrees on. If you think about best practices for a sandwich, we all agree that a best practice for a sandwich is it should be two pieces of bread with some stuff in the middle. That's a best practice, right? Then KFC came out with a sandwich that had no bread, had two pieces of chicken and a piece of cheese in the middle of them. Now, I think the other thing that's interesting- Mordy Oberstein: That's where the best practices are there to keep you in check, like a check in a balance. Crystal Carter: And I think that the other thing that's interesting about that is best practices, if you know what the best practice is, it's like you need to know the rules in order to break them. So if you know what the rules are and you know what the best practices are and you've studied the best practices, then you know when you're disrupting them and when you're deviating, it's like a benchmark. It's a benchmark for what should be covered at all times. If you think about customer service, the best practice for customer service is to smile when you greet someone and that sort of thing. And that's definitely something that- Mordy Oberstein: Have a great day now. Crystal Carter: And somebody enters it into your shop and you say, "Good morning, how are you?" That sort of thing. And then there's some people, there's a restaurant that I'm aware of and they have a thing where they're mean to their customers. Mordy Oberstein: That's good. I like this. Crystal Carter: It's a fun thing that people- Mordy Oberstein: Where do I go for that? Crystal Carter: I can't remember exactly what it's called, but yeah, there's a restaurant- Mordy Oberstein: My kind of a restaurant. Crystal Carter: They're actively mean to their customers and it's disrupting, but they still know the rules of engagement. You still get your food and there's all that sort of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: They don't spit on your food or anything like that? Crystal Carter: No, no, no, no. But there's a whole shtick that they banter in a way. Mordy Oberstein: Got it. Crystal Carter: And I think that sometimes when you disrupt it, it can get you attention, it can disrupt what people are thinking about, and I think that that can sometimes cause a change. They say what's insanity is doing the same thing lots and lots of times and expecting results. Mordy Oberstein: And expecting different results. Crystal Carter: And sometimes you just need to shake it up and see what happens. And I think that best practices definitely they're the benchmark, the place where you return to, the place where you start from, and you definitely need to get yourself up to a best practice standard at bare minimum. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. The whole thing is basic best practices indicate basic best quality. It's a testimony to you know what you're doing, you offer a quality product. So for example, if you implement best, I don't know, like technical SEO practices, it is a testimony like you've said many times in this podcast that you know what you're doing with a website and you offer a quality website. Crystal Carter: Even if you were to say, let's just say for argument's sake, even if the average website had best practice, only the average website had best practice, that's still better than 50% of websites. I think that that's important to remember that your best practice will get you going, will make sure that you've covered all the bases and that all the boxes are ticked, everything is covered, and then you can add on the extra stuff. If we talk about your sandwich or whatever, it's like your best practice... If I said to you, "Morty, I'm going to make you a sandwich." You would be a lucky fellow because I make a sandwich. Anyway, if I said to you, "I'm just going to make you a sandwich." You would expect at least two pieces of bread and some stuff in the middle. Mordy Oberstein: No, I expect two pieces of chicken with a piece of cheese in the middle. Crystal Carter: No, we're not doing that sandwich. Mordy Oberstein: I want two hamburger patties with a piece of a pickle in the middle. Crystal Carter: I'm Kato. Anyway, so yeah, if I said that, that would be the thing. Now, if I showed up and I was like, "Oh, I got homemade mayonnaise and I got this special cheese from over here, and this bread has been toasted and it's got seeds and it's this and it's dah, dah, dah, dah, dah." Then you'd be like, "Oh, wow." You hit the best practice and then you can add all the other stuff onto it. But if I showed up and I just said like, "Oh yeah, I'm making you a sandwich." And I just show up with the heirloom mayonnaise that I made, you'd be like, "That's not a sandwich." Mordy Oberstein: You are exactly reading my mind. Get out of my mind, Carter. Sometimes the best practice helps you when you don't know what the impact of something's going to be, where people are expecting. So in your case, the sandwich, I'm making a sandwich, I have two pieces of bread, I got a piece of ham. Should I add the cheese? I don't know. I don't know what to do. Best practice, add the cheese, because that'll most likely align with what people are expecting from a ham and cheese sandwich. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Best practices help you align to consumer expectations when you're not sure what the expectations actually are. Crystal Carter: And these are a great place to start, and they're a great place to make sure that you've checked everything off. It's a great place to just make sure that you've checked everything off. I don't know if you're thinking about a resume, for instance, a best practice on a resume, there's lots of best practices on resumes. I'm not a recruitment person or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: Four point font. Crystal Carter: And some people say it should be one page. Mordy Oberstein: Everything's squished together real. Crystal Carter: Right? Some people say you should put a picture on it, some people say you shouldn't. There's lots of best practices on a resume, but I'll tell you the bare minimum, no grammar or spelling mistakes, that's a best practice. If I'm looking at a resume and I see grammatical errors, spelling mistakes. No, we're done. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of bare minimums, we need to cover the SEO news, and Barry always at least covers the bare minimum of what's going on. Oh, he's Barry. He's Barry. When you're going to SEO round table or even searching the land where Barry also writes, you're getting the bare minimum. That didn't come out right. You are getting, let me rephrase this. You're definitely covering all of your bases. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. You're covering all of the bases of what you need and should be expecting to get in today's SEO news. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying to give a compliment. It's not coming out right. Crystal Carter: You're digging a hole over there. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not Barry good at this, which means that it's time for this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two articles for you this week. One from Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal. Google explains how it processes queries and ranks content. Gary from Google is doing a video series, and then this one, he talks about how Google goes about processing queries and ranking content from crawling and indexing to the ranking process. It's a short formative video. If you're not an SEO professional and you're looking to get a better understanding of how Google functions, this video can be helpful. If you are an SEO professional, you'll do what I did and watched it and instead of reading between the lines and started speculating about all sorts of things as you were listening to it. Some of which are tinfoil hat moments for me, some of which I think are actually legitimate. I'm not sure if I'll share them or not here, but I might on Twitter said Lloyd to get you to look at my Twitter account. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to share it, so don't bother. So I guess it's not a ploy. Anyway, article number two, this one from Barry Schwartz over at SCRoundtable.com. Reminder, Google's helpful content update is no more. It's core update. I feel like that should be read in movie voice. Anyway, this is courtesy of next week's guest. A little teaser for you there. Glenn Gabe, Google has talked about this multiple. I made this mistake. I will freely admit this. When Google first made the announcement about the helpful content update, it seemed to me like they were saying that they're going to be integrating the helpful content update into the core update. Danny Sullivan was very quick to correct me on that. Thank you Danny, by the way. I do actually appreciate that. And that's not exactly what's happening. It's an entirely new classifier. The helpful content update is gone. It's no more. It's not like there's the strain of the update in the core algorithm, it's a different classifiers. Glenn wrote on X, he wrote, "The old HCU classifiers going away completely. Now, multiple systems are assessing the helpfulness of content." So pause on Glenn's quote for a second. Before Google assessed helpful content by using the helpful content update. Now what Google is saying is we have a much more holistic system and a new way of assessing helpfulness, and that's now part of the core algorithm. Back to Glenn's quote, "I'm saying it looks like the old classifier is still applied as of now, so Google could remove it like it did when Penguin 4 rolled out and Penguin 4's suspension was removed." Glenn wrote that in parentheses. That's why I put the pause there. Anyway, so two thoughts here. One is in the documentation and some of the things that Danny Sullivan's been saying on X and in the documentation that Google has, it looks like one difference to me seems to be that the HCU was a domain level helpful content assessment, quality assessment. In the language that Danny's talking and in the documentation that Google has, they're now trying to assess helpfulness, not just on the domain level but also at the page level, which I think makes a lot of sense when you think about how websites are constructed and how the content on the website is constructed and the value of different types of pages on a website. It's a whole different conversation. I don't know what I mean by that exactly. Now ask me on Twitter. But I think it makes a lot of sense, so therefore it is a different beast altogether. And at the same time, I will say that don't throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one. Google invested a ton of time and technology, money, resources and whatever to create the technology that is or was the helpful content update. I don't think they just said, "Eh, that's going in the garbage can. Goodbye." I think they took the things they liked about the helpful content updates technology. I think they may be applying it in a different way and a different format and making that part of a much wider, more holistic way of assessing helpfulness. So I don't think you could say it's an entirely different paradigm shift. Exactly. I know Google has said that it is, and I think it actually might be, but I do suspect, and it just makes logical sense to me that some of the ways that the HCU looked at helpful content just didn't just disappear. Google perhaps rejiggered it, reformatted it, reconstructed it, whatever you want, however you want to describe it. I don't know. I don't work at Google, but to say they completely abandoned that technology after investing so much into it, I don't think makes entirely the most amount of sense. Again, I'm not arguing anything Google saying at all. I'm simply saying is that what Google may have done is borrowed some of the ways the HCU approached helpfulness, combined it, refigured it, reconstructed it, rebaked it so that it is an entirely different thing, but still baked in there or alluded to in the new system or in the core algorithm is the kernels of the HCU. I think I've said too much already. If you want more news each and every day, I'm going to do a little pitch here for you. Check out It's New. It's New is new and is a new daily series, actually Monday through Thursday series that we do, Crystal and myself, with Barry Schwartz Monday through Thursdays. We go through two or three stories in the SEO News, offer some commentary for them. You can find it on Barry's Rusty Bricks YouTube channel, and also syndicated right there for you on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. It's right on the home page of the SEO Learning Hub. So go to the SEO learning Hub, check out the daily videos, subscribe to Barry's YouTube channel, and if you love this snappy news once a week, then you'll probably enjoy those little clips that we do each and every day. And with that, that is this week's maybe not so snappy news. Thank you for bearing with me. Crystal Carter: You barely got through that. Mordy Oberstein: barely got through that. Thank you Barry for all of that. Speaking of Barry, this week's follow of the week is Barry. Crystal Carter: Is there really? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Go follow Barry and tell him that we sent you, and I hope you're all following him as well. Mordy Oberstein: Because there's a real reason why. He's at Rusty Brick on all the social media platforms from Macedon to Blue Sky to X. Crystal Carter: Is Barry on TikTok? Mordy Oberstein: I think on LinkedIn it's his actual name, Barry Schwartz. You can find him at BarryseoMemes.com. There's a lot of places you could follow Barry. The reason why Barry is our follow of the week is because Barry often covers SEO best practices periodically on SeRoundtable.com. So inevitably someone will ask John Mueller, "How many words do I need to rank?" And John will answer something very snarky back and Barry will cover that on SeRoundtable.com. But no, it's good. It's a good thing because people break into the SEO industry at all different times. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So you haven't seen that conversation from 10 years ago. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: So, oh, Barry's covering it again is actually incredibly helpful, which is why we're saying follow Barry. Crystal Carter: I would also say that it's an SEO best practice to follow Barry. Mordy Oberstein: It is absolutely. Crystal Carter: If you're planning to learn SEO, if you're planning to keep tracks of the algorithms, of updates, of announcements from Google, of various different things, I would say his best practice to follow Barry because he covers everything and Google have acknowledged him for this. He covers everything. I give a lot of talks. I talk about a lot of various different things, and I literally use Barry's articles as an archive of developments of different stuff. So I was looking at something around the helpful content update and around the Hidden Gems stuff, and I was literally going through Barry's- Mordy Oberstein: The timeline. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's like a timeline. I was like, "How many times did they mention Hidden Gems?" Because he would've covered it, but he hasn't covered it. It probably didn't happen. Mordy Oberstein: My online behavior each day basically consists of what happened in sports the previous evening and then going to check SeoRoundTable. Crystal Carter: Same. Mordy Oberstein: That's basically it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Best practice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely. So follow Barry and that will be best for you. Mordy Oberstein: It will be best. Barry is best. Crystal Carter: Pulling that back after the bare minimum there. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for saving me there. I was just digging a grave. Well, you're probably ready to write an obituary for me at that point. Crystal Carter: I went to a museum the other day and I was looking at this exhibition and this guy just was telling me about it, and he was telling me he worked there. He was telling me about this exhibit I was looking at, and I could have just read the thing on the side. They always put a thing on the side. Mordy Oberstein: I never read those things. Crystal Carter: This guy was telling me the thing, but he literally was just telling me wrong information. He said it was about World War II. It was about World War I. He said it was about, he couldn't remember where it was on loan from. He couldn't pronounce it, the person's artist's name. There was a bunch of stuff, and I just sat there going, "Uh huh." Mordy Oberstein: And it's right there on the placard. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's awesome. Crystal Carter: I just read it and you know what would've been best practice for him to say, "Would you like to know more about it? It's over there. Read the sign." Mordy Oberstein: My wife reads things at the museums. I never read them. I came here to look, not to read. Crystal Carter: What were you reading for? Mordy Oberstein: If I need to read, I would've stayed home and read a book. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: I want to see stuff. I'm at a museum. 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 the new episodes we dive into is SEO for affiliate sites in some real trouble? Look for wherever you can consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning about you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars and resources we have to offer on the Wix SEO learning hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Jono Alderson Natalie Slater Barry Schwartz Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Jono Alderson SEO Consulting User first SEO News: Google Explains How It Processes Queries & Ranks Content Reminder: Google's Helpful Content Update Is No More - It's A Core Update Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Jono Alderson Natalie Slater Barry Schwartz Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Jono Alderson SEO Consulting User first SEO News: Google Explains How It Processes Queries & Ranks Content Reminder: Google's Helpful Content Update Is No More - It's A Core Update Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the best-in-class, the class of not telling you, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you very much. I was wondering what the intro would be on this particular episode of SERP's Up podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I pivoted the last second. We were talking right before we started recording this. Crystal Carter: That's because you're a gentleman. That's why. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. I try. Crystal Carter: But yeah, I think- Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I totally botched it. I didn't say you were the head of SEO Communications at Wix. You are just the head of all SEO communications. Crystal Carter: You darn straight. That's right. That's right. People want to talk about SEO. You come through me. No, I'm kidding. No, you probably don't. There's other people, there are other people that you could talk to that we've mentioned them and they've been on the podcast before, so talk to those people. I do my best. Mordy Oberstein: I try. Or maybe Scott would say somehow I manage. Crystal Carter: All good, all good, all good. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our newsletter, our monthly newsletter, Search Light over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, where you can also manage your team and their clients with Wix Studio. From advanced team permission settings to customizable client resources, check out what Wix Studio can offer for your agency at wix.com/studio for all the things that keep your client and team management up to best practice and best standard. Because today we're talking about best practices for SEO, when to throw them out of the damn window. Crystal Carter: And when not to as well. Mordy Oberstein: And when not to, right. Also, very important. Crystal Carter: We're going to talk about both. Use your noggin, people. Mordy Oberstein: But it's better for Google Discover if we talk about how to throw them out of the damn window. Crystal Carter: That's right. That's right. Just like it's that meme of the girl throwing the money out the window or sometimes I feel like I want to throw my laptop out the window. Sometimes I have that feeling. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes I want to open up the window and just yell out of it like, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Crystal Carter: That's normally when the algorithms updates have come in and then come in again and then come in again and you're like, "Why aren't there 12 at once?" Mordy Oberstein: Because we're integrating into our systems, our ranking systems, and we're recording this right smack in the middle of the March 2024 core update. Anyway, we're talking about throwing best practices out of the damn window when we're not to do that from scenarios when best practices work and when they don't work best for rankings, to when best SEO practices don't work for your team and when best SEO practice might actually harm your relationship with your clients. Absolute SEO legend, Jono Alderson chimes in on a really, really, really interesting outlook on the value of SEO best practices as a concept these days. Plus we take a deep look at what the heck a best practice actually is to begin with. 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 forget everything you know about SEO. Well, not everything, as episode 83 of the SERP's Up podcast, Lee's Best SEO practices aside because at the end of the day, we talking about practice. We talking about practice, not the game we go out there and die for, not the game. We're talking about practice. How silly is that? Practice? Crystal Carter: I am loving the DeepCut AI throwback quote there. We're talking about the original AI. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Crystal Carter: Right. The original AI. Mordy Oberstein: Those who are not old school basketball fans. Allen Iverson, who's an OG of basketball, I love Allen Iverson, got called out. He's one of the greatest stars in NBA history, got called out for not showing up on time for practice. Crystal Carter: And he'd had some personal situations. I've seen the documentary about it. He'd had a bereavement or something like that and they were like, "You didn't come to practice." And he was like, "Talk about practice. I'm Allen Iverson." And I was like, you know what? Yeah. But yeah, Allen's right. Allen's right. Sometimes people go on about best practices and they've read it somewhere, they've read it in a blog, they've seen it on a video, they've done things like that. And don't get me wrong, let's just clarify right now. Best practices are called best practices for reason. Best practices are generally seen as solid advice for most people, for most people. And that is important. And they tend to be the things that you should absolutely tick off before you start getting into more advanced, more nuanced, more complex activities. And it can be really, really useful, particularly when you're at the beginning of your SEO journey to pay very close attention to best practices. And when you're thinking about technical SEO, it is almost, it's very, very critical to pay attention to best practices because- Mordy Oberstein: There's no leeway with that. Crystal Carter: There's no leeway. You have to make sure your sitemap needs to be readable. It just has to be. And that is best practice. Your sitemap needs to be readable, your sitemap needs to be discoverable, et cetera, et cetera. If your sitemap isn't, if your code isn't parsable, yo, you're not in the game. So those best practices absolutely pay attention to, but I think it's a little bit, I think sometimes, particularly when you get more advanced, it's a little bit like driving. When I learned how to drive, they were like, "You keep your hands at 10 and two and you never take both hands off the steering wheel when you're turning the car. You have to squeeze them together and then pull them apart and then squeeze them together and pull them apart." And I have watched my mother drive. When I was learning to drive, I'd watched my mother drive for years. She didn't drive like that. My mom had one hand, she had a big gulp in one hand. She had one hand on the other one. She was telling us to be quiet. Mordy Oberstein: That's better than my mom who was driving with her fricking knees while she's eating a sandwich. Crystal Carter: Okay, right. Now, did we all get to where we needed to go? Yes. Was that necessarily the best way to drive a car? If anybody's listening to this- Mordy Oberstein: If you're trying to eat a sandwich while drinking a coke, it is. Crystal Carter: Okay. Exactly. So you would not pass your test, driving with a sandwich and telling your kids off in the back. You're not going to pass your test like that and you would never teach anyone to do that. But as people get more skilled, they can get more creative and that they can get down into some of those things and they can assess the situation and figure out, they can assess the risk of trying something a little bit different. They can assess how complicated the situation is and whether or not this might be a time to ignore the best practice necessarily. As I say, this is something that you will grow into. So if you're just starting out, I highly recommend yes, follow best practices. However, there's lots of discussion around this and Christina LeVasseur, who's a great SEO and talks a lot towards folks who are growing up in their SEO or developing their SEO careers talks about this as well. She said, "Early in my SEO career, I would say we should do X, Y, and Z because it's best practice. With more time and experience out there to say, we should do X, Y, and Z because it's worked based on my previous test, or we should do this because the data suggests that we should do this." And that's really important. That's a really big difference and that takes a lot of confidence and takes a lot of experience as you mentioned, to be able to make that assumption because the best practices are yes, you probably won't go wrong with this practice, but you also need to be able to qualify them. Particularly if you're working with a client or you're working on a project, just to say it's best practice isn't always enough and best practice doesn't necessarily give you prioritization. So it's best practice not to have loads of 404s on your website. That's absolutely true. It is best practice not to have lots of 404s on your website, but whether or not you get to those first when you have lots of other technical issues to address or whether or not those are even a big deal necessarily depending on where they are on the website, is something that you'd need to assess. So you do your crawl assessment and if it's the case that yeah, there's a bunch of 404s on pages that nobody ever goes to or a part of the website that is old or part of archived or something like that that's low priority from a commercial point of view, then maybe that might be a second task after sorting out your landing pages, after sorting out some of the other technical issues, after maybe updating your structured data markup or something like that. So it's not to say that you're ignoring them entirely, but you're prioritizing them differently. Mordy Oberstein: There's a ton of cases where that kind of comes into play. And I think you're right, it does happen as you get more seasoned-ish or as you see more things happening. I will give you my classic example. The algo is super advanced. Google's algorithm I think is very, very, very advanced. I know sometimes that you get articles written by whatever publication and it's not, blah, blah, blah, the results are worse. That's not true. That just has to do with our perception of things. The algorithm incorporates way more machine learning now than it ever did before. Things are pretty advanced. That doesn't mean that Google doesn't have gaps. There's gaps all the time. So for example, I run another podcast, my personal little podcast called the SCRN. It's just like a fun little thing I do on the side. It's not a real thing at all. And I noticed that for SEO podcast queries, if you have the word best scrawled in everywhere, there's a gap in the algorithm. Google overweighs the term best, like it's 1995, like it's 2005, and it ranks things with that word best for best SEO podcast because of the keyword match. So literally on my home page, I have the SCRN, the Best SEO podcast because Google has a gap in its algorithm and weighs the keyword best too heavily for this vertical. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: That's not a best, you should not write that on your podcast website. Crystal Carter: No, no. Mordy Oberstein: That is not a best practice, but it does work in this particular case of the gap. And most importantly, I don't have any real branding on this website. I can do whatever I want with it. The branding on the website is that there's no branding, so I can do whatever I want. I wouldn't do it on the SERP's Up podcast. That would be terrible. That would be a terrible idea. Crystal Carter: Right. This goes back to a couple of things you mentioned there. So first of all, experience. So your experience showed you that there was a little bit of a gap in the thing and also tests and also risk assessment. So if you're trying something that is outside of the best practice, another quote I want to bring up is one from Ross Simmons who's fantastic SEO and content distribution, like king. And he says, "Remember, best practices are only best practice until someone comes along and finds success trying something new. So when you're trying something that's a little bit outside of the mold, if you're going off-piste, if you are traveling the path less traveled, the road less traveled, if you're trying that, it's useful to try it on a test site, on a low risk site to see what's going on with that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm doing. That's my site. It's a low risk website. Crystal Carter: So you're testing this in that space before you try it on clients. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I would if I had a podcast client, I do a podcast client, I do not recommend they do that. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So you wouldn't do that, but you would test it and you'd see where that is. And maybe you wouldn't put exactly that thing, but you might put somewhere on the page, let's just put best in there. Let's just put best podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, if I could fit it in organically ish, I would totally do that, but I wouldn't do it like that. I am blatantly being salty. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So you wouldn't put it like 25 times. So that's something to think about. So yeah, and testing, iterating. We have a great article in the Wix SEO Hub that talks about testing and testing is so important to SEO and partially because we get so much data back on it and your data will tell you which best practices are most applicable to you and which things are most important. And I think that using the data that you have and using the iteration and the testing is really important. Nick Leroy, who's also a fantastic SEO, talks about what should you include on your SEO tech audit? And he's like an overview of what was reviewed, why it was a problem, how you can fix it and prioritizing the things. You shouldn't just include things that are best practice. You shouldn't just include things that are best practice. You should also include the why am I recommending this? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, if you're selling services, they're not hiring you for your best practice, they're hiring you to catch them when they haven't aligned with the best practice, do that and then take them to where they actually need to go, which is beyond the best practice. Crystal Carter: And this is the other thing is that best practices are established practices, a little bit like a historic keyword volume. So historic keyword volume is looking at keywords from the past. In the past, lots of people have searched for, I don't know, banana cream pies particularly in June. And so you can say, "Oh, if I'm writing about banana cream pie, la, la, la, I'll write about this or the other." But maybe there's pie talk, maybe there's a whole- Mordy Oberstein: There's a banana shortage. There are no more bananas. Crystal Carter: And so there's not a keyword search volume, historic search volume on the banana shortage or whatever. Maybe there's that sort of thing, that's new ground and you're going to be able to move people forward by going onto new ground, combining some of the best practices, some of the information. The other thing I also want to throw out here, particularly from the tech SEO audit standpoint, is if you are using an audit tool, and I know this is one of your favorite bug bears, but if you are using an audit tool and they have what they are purporting or showing to be best practice like, "Oh, there's low HTML." Mordy Oberstein: That's my favorite one, that's my favorite one. Crystal Carter: Don't just blindly follow what they're telling you is or isn't an error. Mordy Oberstein: That's not actually a best practice. Crystal Carter: So use your noggin, people, use your brain to prioritize what works with what the business can do. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes. Crystal Carter: And what works with what they are able to look at. One of the other folks who was talking about this, who I thought had a really, really good take on this was someone who was saying that it's also important to look at what they can do. It's not just- Mordy Oberstein: I was going to touch on that, I just want to talk about that. Yeah. Crystal Carter: So Usman Akram, who's from Triple Dart, he was saying that a lot of people fail because they focus on best practice of what they should do because best practice is you should do this. Mordy Oberstein: Right. But they're not there yet. Crystal Carter: They're not there yet. Mordy Oberstein: So many times. Crystal Carter: So you should do this because it's best practice and they're two different things. You need to think about what you can do with your situation because even though he says what's really achievable with the resources that you have. If the answer is no, you can't achieve it, then it's not best for you. Mordy Oberstein: Not best for the business, and by the way, not best for you because you'll lose that money, you'll lose that client money, and that's not good for you either. That's not good for anybody. Are they going to benefit by not having your services long-term? No. I'm assuming you're doing good work. I've had a site where they needed an absolute total restructure. The pages were all over the place. There was no really best practice site hierarchy and site structure, and they needed to start creating new pages and reshuffling pages and there was a lot of work and they were nowhere near being bothered enough on SEO to do something like that. So I didn't recommend that yet. I brought it up in a report. That's what you do. You bring it up at a meeting, you stick it in a report, you say for the future, but let's now focus on these quick things that you can do that are really easy and let's get some momentum going. Otherwise, I would've lost that. They would've lost all of the things that you eventually did for SEO because we started off with something that it's a best practice, but they were not ready for. Crystal Carter: They weren't ready for it. So you need to take that with you. Andy Crestodina, who's also a great SEO, he's saying that they're very often hypotheses because best practices tend to be, again, for the best thing for most people. So for instance, Google very often recommends responsive design. And responsive design is great, responsive design is great. Our new product, Wix Studio has responsive design built in. It's fantastic. Wix Classic doesn't have responsive design. It has an adaptive dynamic rendering situation going on. And do you know what people say, "Oh, Google says it's best practice." Google doesn't do responsive design. Google's web page is not responsive. Why? Because they have different needs. Amazon is not responsive either. They have different needs because you know what? Yes, responsive is great for most websites, but for some websites where they have a completely different mobile experience, they might have a different kind of situation because if you just did responsive, it wouldn't be great. Mordy Oberstein: That's the whole Core Web Vitals saga. That's literally the whole Core Web Vitals saga. Go find me an e-commerce website where the home page has the Core Web Vitals. Crystal Carter: And so the best practice is to be super, super fast, but then you have business needs, so sometimes- Mordy Oberstein: You have to take up all this stuff. They want all the stuff for conversions, not there. By the way, in the beginning, Google's website, the travel website took them a long time because of the same issue. They had to restructure things in a way because they wanted the conversion, so they didn't pass Core Vitals. Crystal Carter: Right. Now, at the same time, there are some best practices which are critical. So Joe Hall was saying, "Most people ignore best practice because it's not sexy, but crawl optimization is critical to tech SEO best practice in a way. And way too many websites are failing at it." And that's absolutely true. Crawl optimization should be really important. Another one that comes up to me with regards to best practice is around the whole AI discussion that we're having in the middle of this big old update right now. So best practice has historically been that you should make good content, right? Good content. Mordy Oberstein: And then as is all over X, formally Twitter, they're like, "Oh, just write good content, huh?" Crystal Carter: So Natalie Slater on TikTok was talking about this how in the last 18 months, SEOs who adhere to best practice of making good content that is prioritized for humans and is not spammy and is not doing all of this sort of stuff, have felt a little bit of a wobble, right? Because that's been their best practice and that's what they've been telling their clients and that's what they've been focusing on. But this update, and there have been other people who have not really been paying attention to that best practice and have been doing what has been historically seen as spammy techniques, this parasite SEO things, some programmatic SEO isn't inherently spammy at all. Mordy Oberstein: Not inherently, but I gets they're real quick if you're not careful. Crystal Carter: But some people can if you want, with great power comes great responsibility. And so people have been seeing people winning with some of these tactics and they've been like, "I don't know what's going on. What about these best practices" But with this update, Google- Mordy Oberstein: Manual action here, manual action there. Crystal Carter: Manual actions, de-indexation, like things like that. Google seems to be saying, "Yeah, I worked for a little while, but we're adjusting this because we want people to adhere to the best practices, which is to do authoritative, expert trustworthy content and put that out." Mordy Oberstein: It's like driving with your knees. You can do it from stoplight to stoplight, but you can't drive from New York to California. Crystal Carter: That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Mordy Oberstein: I would like to see you try. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of best practices, we asked SEO OG, Jono Alderson when he throws away best practices. So here's Jono on when he ignores some of SEO's better practices. Jono Alderson: I'm going to go broad. I think I'm increasingly ignoring the idea that our day-to-day activities as SEOs should involve producing content to target keywords. I think I'm going to ignore the idea that we should be doing some kind of keyword research to do some kind of opportunity model based on some kind of domain authority or rating and search volume and cost per click, et cetera, and then writing or more likely outsourcing or using ChatGPT to write a bunch of articles probably in some kind of blog or resource center. I think that's probably a lot of what a lot of us do, but I think that's no longer best practice. I think it generally works okay-ish most of the time, but it's going to get harder. A few things to consider one, your competitors and the people who work for them have people who look like you doing the same research and the same opportunity model. So we're all chasing each other's tails. Simultaneously, the internet is increasingly full of very similar or derivative content thanks to SEOs doing this, and thanks to ChatGPT and the infinite amounts of just derivative content soup. And then because of that, Google has less and less need for your content, specifically yours. They can synthesize results in any vertical where they understand the query space and the number of verticals where they can do that is going to increase. If all you are doing is writing obvious stuff that aligns with some kind of basic keyword research or rewriting other people's stuff in a slightly marginally better way using different phrasing or slightly more words, you're not going to be ranking for anything. Now, I'm not saying don't do keyword research and don't produce content, but do keyword research and use these tools and processes and metrics to understand your audience's problems, to identify the kinds of questions that they have that you are able to support them on way earlier in the buying cycle than most conventional SEO strategies will target. Those are probably zero volume or zero CPC terms, but that's fine because the objective is to produce content that actually helps users to solve their problems. Give them the information they need to educate themselves and to take action to overcome their challenges without needing to buy from your convert. And if you do that well enough, you become a household name. You need to prioritize and measure how well your content solves the problems of your audience by adding value to the internet and to their lives. Super hard. But then you give Google a reason to index and rank your content. Then you give users a reason to engage and convert, and you give journalists and influencers a reason to link or share or cite your content without you having to run massive email and LinkedIn spamming engines to promote your infographics and dog jumpers to journalists. Now, the best version of this is to actually become a publisher, and that's been a trendy thing to say for ages in SEO, but many people just interpreted it to mean write lots of blog posts. You see, the difference is that real publishers do original research. They have editorial standards and processes. They employ people and journalists who have opinions and reputations and expertise, and they do that not just to tick some kind of EEAT box. They're also picky about what they write. They don't try and write for everybody. They define their audiences and explore their problems. And sometimes they're divisive and even controversial. If you're not doing this, then maybe it's time to start asking what your website is for and why Google, which is a search engine whose primary leading metric on revenue is user satisfaction would send visitors to your derivative blog posts and keyword soup. So this essentially boils down to when it comes to content, stop thinking like an SEO, think like an editor, like a product manager, even like a CMO. Consider the needs of your audience and the needs of Google in parallel and wrangle or build your content resource to produce material that's beneficial to both. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Jono. That was fabulous. We'll get to that in a second. Make sure you follow Jono on X over at Jono Alderson, that's J-O-N-O, A-L-D-E-R-S-O-N. Link in the show notes. So much to dive into about that. Okay, first off, I think we're entering an era where brand differentiation and getting people to come to you and being top of mind I think is going to be very, very important. Not just for your overall marketing success, but also for your SEO success where you're going to want people to be searching for your brand name, which I think will be something that Google's going to label a little bit more heavily going forward. But that's my personal speculation. But I do think that in five years from now, I'm going to invent a new term on this podcast. I think there's going to be something called brand first SEO, which is basically what he's talking about where you're basically not looking at starting with the keywords, starting with the search volumes, where you're basically starting with what does my audience need? How am I going to differentiate myself from all the AI content that's out there or from the other brands that are also trying to differentiate themselves because of all the AI content out there? And starting with that and you're targeting what's based on, and I think it's not even the best way to do it, but I think it's just knowing where the web is going to go, targeting based on what will differentiate you, which is much more aligned with targeting what your audience actually interested in than starting with an SEO tool. And the way I do this is then refining with the SEO tool. I kind of know why audience wants and what they're interested in very broadly. Let me refine that by using AlsoAsked, getting some questions about what the audience might also be searching for, running it through SEMrush, seeing what comes back from there and getting a better sense of the topic and understanding what are the historical trends? But that's secondary. Crystal Carter: Right. This is something I've been talking about a while. This is something, what's it called? Michel Fortin has a great article on user first SEO, and if I'm going to use shout out myself, I also have an article on a resource on where you can get that stuff. So he talks about low search volume stuff, about actually being helpful, about actually being useful, about actually serving your clients, your potential clientele, and actually providing a solution. And one of the best ways that you can do that is to get them from your clientele and from your potential folks. I have one about where to get user first keywords and topics. I have a resource in our SEO resource that talks about this. Talk to your sales team. Your sales team will tell you, people keep asking me this question and I don't have an answer. So write the content and then not only will your sales team will be able to refer it to, but if anybody has that question, they'll be able to find it. Look at your customer care queries, look at their training gaps. When you're training, people are like, "But I don't understand what that means." Guess what? Customers probably don't understand it neither. The questions that come through Google Business profile, the questions that show up on Amazon, those questions they won't have, like he's saying, you're making keyword soup. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Crystal Carter: Those questions may not have any search volume, but that doesn't mean that they don't have value. And it's also the differentiation point. It's always been about differentiation. SEO has always been about differentiation and marketing has always been about, the textbook definition of marketing is delivering customer value, and that is what you should be doing. That's what you should be doing with your content. That's what you should be doing with your website. And I think he's also bringing up the point, what is your website for? When you're thinking about what do I expect people to do on this website? Do I expect them to be able to get to know me, to know what kind of content I have, to be able to answer questions they have about how to use this thing that they just bought or to be able to learn something? What are we actually trying to do? We were discussing today, we were discussing an LP, Morty, weren't we? And I was like, "What is this page supposed to do? What do we want people to do?" We were looking at this draft and I was like, "Why can't I find?" Mordy Oberstein: No, and that page in particular came about because it wasn't thinking about user first. It was thinking let's say design first or whatever it was. Crystal Carter: And we were just like, but it needs to be able to achieve this goal, and if people have to hunt around to achieve the goal, they will give up and they will go somewhere else. Mordy Oberstein: It looked good. But they don't want to use it. Crystal Carter: No, they won't use it. You want something that actually makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Driving with your knees looks super cool, but you can't actually do it. Crystal Carter: Right. Are you really going to get where you need to go? Mordy Oberstein: On a sharp turn, like at a 90 degree turn, that's not going to work. I would like to see that. Crystal Carter: There be sandwich parts everywhere, lettuce on your elbows, it's going to be just chaos. Mordy Oberstein: Now what we should have done was gone in reverse order in this podcast episode. We want to talk about what are our best practices from a conceptual point of view, which probably would've made more logical sense to talk about that before we get into best practice about SEO. It's an SEO podcast? So we'll do the marketing, broader marketing stuff second and the SEO stuff first, even though that might not be best practice. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. I see what you did there. I see what you did there. Mordy Oberstein: For our audience, it makes much more sense. Crystal Carter: We're experimenting, we are iterating. Mordy Oberstein: Driving with the knees on the podcast. That's all we're basically doing. Crystal Carter: Until the wheels fall off. I don't know. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: So we're taking a deeper look at what is a best practice with a deep thought with Crystal and Morty. Best practices, best practices, fundamentally just what are they? So you can basically apply, we're talking about in SEO to other areas of not just marketing, but your life. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: I look at best practices, they're like the minimal. Two things. They're the minimal standard and they're also what keeps you in line from being too nuts. Crystal Carter: So some people say, or bare minimum, I think I've heard people say this. Taylor Merchinson quoted someone else saying the path to mediocrity is paved with best practices. Ouch. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great quote. Crystal Carter: Ouch. Now, don't get me wrong, like I said at the beginning, best practices can absolutely guide you, can keep you from going completely astray. Mordy Oberstein: That needs to be on a Hallmark card. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: You give them the card and it's all beautiful and it's like, yeah, the path to mediocrity is paved. Crystal Carter: It's a quote from Austin Knight apparently, who I don't follow on Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: It's brilliant. It should be a Hallmark card, very sassy Hallmark card. Crystal Carter: The thing about it is what best practices tend to be is they tend to be what everybody agrees on. If you think about best practices for a sandwich, we all agree that a best practice for a sandwich is it should be two pieces of bread with some stuff in the middle. That's a best practice, right? Then KFC came out with a sandwich that had no bread, had two pieces of chicken and a piece of cheese in the middle of them. Now, I think the other thing that's interesting- Mordy Oberstein: That's where the best practices are there to keep you in check, like a check in a balance. Crystal Carter: And I think that the other thing that's interesting about that is best practices, if you know what the best practice is, it's like you need to know the rules in order to break them. So if you know what the rules are and you know what the best practices are and you've studied the best practices, then you know when you're disrupting them and when you're deviating, it's like a benchmark. It's a benchmark for what should be covered at all times. If you think about customer service, the best practice for customer service is to smile when you greet someone and that sort of thing. And that's definitely something that- Mordy Oberstein: Have a great day now. Crystal Carter: And somebody enters it into your shop and you say, "Good morning, how are you?" That sort of thing. And then there's some people, there's a restaurant that I'm aware of and they have a thing where they're mean to their customers. Mordy Oberstein: That's good. I like this. Crystal Carter: It's a fun thing that people- Mordy Oberstein: Where do I go for that? Crystal Carter: I can't remember exactly what it's called, but yeah, there's a restaurant- Mordy Oberstein: My kind of a restaurant. Crystal Carter: They're actively mean to their customers and it's disrupting, but they still know the rules of engagement. You still get your food and there's all that sort of stuff. Mordy Oberstein: They don't spit on your food or anything like that? Crystal Carter: No, no, no, no. But there's a whole shtick that they banter in a way. Mordy Oberstein: Got it. Crystal Carter: And I think that sometimes when you disrupt it, it can get you attention, it can disrupt what people are thinking about, and I think that that can sometimes cause a change. They say what's insanity is doing the same thing lots and lots of times and expecting results. Mordy Oberstein: And expecting different results. Crystal Carter: And sometimes you just need to shake it up and see what happens. And I think that best practices definitely they're the benchmark, the place where you return to, the place where you start from, and you definitely need to get yourself up to a best practice standard at bare minimum. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. The whole thing is basic best practices indicate basic best quality. It's a testimony to you know what you're doing, you offer a quality product. So for example, if you implement best, I don't know, like technical SEO practices, it is a testimony like you've said many times in this podcast that you know what you're doing with a website and you offer a quality website. Crystal Carter: Even if you were to say, let's just say for argument's sake, even if the average website had best practice, only the average website had best practice, that's still better than 50% of websites. I think that that's important to remember that your best practice will get you going, will make sure that you've covered all the bases and that all the boxes are ticked, everything is covered, and then you can add on the extra stuff. If we talk about your sandwich or whatever, it's like your best practice... If I said to you, "Morty, I'm going to make you a sandwich." You would be a lucky fellow because I make a sandwich. Anyway, if I said to you, "I'm just going to make you a sandwich." You would expect at least two pieces of bread and some stuff in the middle. Mordy Oberstein: No, I expect two pieces of chicken with a piece of cheese in the middle. Crystal Carter: No, we're not doing that sandwich. Mordy Oberstein: I want two hamburger patties with a piece of a pickle in the middle. Crystal Carter: I'm Kato. Anyway, so yeah, if I said that, that would be the thing. Now, if I showed up and I was like, "Oh, I got homemade mayonnaise and I got this special cheese from over here, and this bread has been toasted and it's got seeds and it's this and it's dah, dah, dah, dah, dah." Then you'd be like, "Oh, wow." You hit the best practice and then you can add all the other stuff onto it. But if I showed up and I just said like, "Oh yeah, I'm making you a sandwich." And I just show up with the heirloom mayonnaise that I made, you'd be like, "That's not a sandwich." Mordy Oberstein: You are exactly reading my mind. Get out of my mind, Carter. Sometimes the best practice helps you when you don't know what the impact of something's going to be, where people are expecting. So in your case, the sandwich, I'm making a sandwich, I have two pieces of bread, I got a piece of ham. Should I add the cheese? I don't know. I don't know what to do. Best practice, add the cheese, because that'll most likely align with what people are expecting from a ham and cheese sandwich. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Best practices help you align to consumer expectations when you're not sure what the expectations actually are. Crystal Carter: And these are a great place to start, and they're a great place to make sure that you've checked everything off. It's a great place to just make sure that you've checked everything off. I don't know if you're thinking about a resume, for instance, a best practice on a resume, there's lots of best practices on resumes. I'm not a recruitment person or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: Four point font. Crystal Carter: And some people say it should be one page. Mordy Oberstein: Everything's squished together real. Crystal Carter: Right? Some people say you should put a picture on it, some people say you shouldn't. There's lots of best practices on a resume, but I'll tell you the bare minimum, no grammar or spelling mistakes, that's a best practice. If I'm looking at a resume and I see grammatical errors, spelling mistakes. No, we're done. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of bare minimums, we need to cover the SEO news, and Barry always at least covers the bare minimum of what's going on. Oh, he's Barry. He's Barry. When you're going to SEO round table or even searching the land where Barry also writes, you're getting the bare minimum. That didn't come out right. You are getting, let me rephrase this. You're definitely covering all of your bases. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. You're covering all of the bases of what you need and should be expecting to get in today's SEO news. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying to give a compliment. It's not coming out right. Crystal Carter: You're digging a hole over there. Mordy Oberstein: I'm not Barry good at this, which means that it's time for this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two articles for you this week. One from Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal. Google explains how it processes queries and ranks content. Gary from Google is doing a video series, and then this one, he talks about how Google goes about processing queries and ranking content from crawling and indexing to the ranking process. It's a short formative video. If you're not an SEO professional and you're looking to get a better understanding of how Google functions, this video can be helpful. If you are an SEO professional, you'll do what I did and watched it and instead of reading between the lines and started speculating about all sorts of things as you were listening to it. Some of which are tinfoil hat moments for me, some of which I think are actually legitimate. I'm not sure if I'll share them or not here, but I might on Twitter said Lloyd to get you to look at my Twitter account. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to share it, so don't bother. So I guess it's not a ploy. Anyway, article number two, this one from Barry Schwartz over at SCRoundtable.com. Reminder, Google's helpful content update is no more. It's core update. I feel like that should be read in movie voice. Anyway, this is courtesy of next week's guest. A little teaser for you there. Glenn Gabe, Google has talked about this multiple. I made this mistake. I will freely admit this. When Google first made the announcement about the helpful content update, it seemed to me like they were saying that they're going to be integrating the helpful content update into the core update. Danny Sullivan was very quick to correct me on that. Thank you Danny, by the way. I do actually appreciate that. And that's not exactly what's happening. It's an entirely new classifier. The helpful content update is gone. It's no more. It's not like there's the strain of the update in the core algorithm, it's a different classifiers. Glenn wrote on X, he wrote, "The old HCU classifiers going away completely. Now, multiple systems are assessing the helpfulness of content." So pause on Glenn's quote for a second. Before Google assessed helpful content by using the helpful content update. Now what Google is saying is we have a much more holistic system and a new way of assessing helpfulness, and that's now part of the core algorithm. Back to Glenn's quote, "I'm saying it looks like the old classifier is still applied as of now, so Google could remove it like it did when Penguin 4 rolled out and Penguin 4's suspension was removed." Glenn wrote that in parentheses. That's why I put the pause there. Anyway, so two thoughts here. One is in the documentation and some of the things that Danny Sullivan's been saying on X and in the documentation that Google has, it looks like one difference to me seems to be that the HCU was a domain level helpful content assessment, quality assessment. In the language that Danny's talking and in the documentation that Google has, they're now trying to assess helpfulness, not just on the domain level but also at the page level, which I think makes a lot of sense when you think about how websites are constructed and how the content on the website is constructed and the value of different types of pages on a website. It's a whole different conversation. I don't know what I mean by that exactly. Now ask me on Twitter. But I think it makes a lot of sense, so therefore it is a different beast altogether. And at the same time, I will say that don't throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one. Google invested a ton of time and technology, money, resources and whatever to create the technology that is or was the helpful content update. I don't think they just said, "Eh, that's going in the garbage can. Goodbye." I think they took the things they liked about the helpful content updates technology. I think they may be applying it in a different way and a different format and making that part of a much wider, more holistic way of assessing helpfulness. So I don't think you could say it's an entirely different paradigm shift. Exactly. I know Google has said that it is, and I think it actually might be, but I do suspect, and it just makes logical sense to me that some of the ways that the HCU looked at helpful content just didn't just disappear. Google perhaps rejiggered it, reformatted it, reconstructed it, whatever you want, however you want to describe it. I don't know. I don't work at Google, but to say they completely abandoned that technology after investing so much into it, I don't think makes entirely the most amount of sense. Again, I'm not arguing anything Google saying at all. I'm simply saying is that what Google may have done is borrowed some of the ways the HCU approached helpfulness, combined it, refigured it, reconstructed it, rebaked it so that it is an entirely different thing, but still baked in there or alluded to in the new system or in the core algorithm is the kernels of the HCU. I think I've said too much already. If you want more news each and every day, I'm going to do a little pitch here for you. Check out It's New. It's New is new and is a new daily series, actually Monday through Thursday series that we do, Crystal and myself, with Barry Schwartz Monday through Thursdays. We go through two or three stories in the SEO News, offer some commentary for them. You can find it on Barry's Rusty Bricks YouTube channel, and also syndicated right there for you on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. It's right on the home page of the SEO Learning Hub. So go to the SEO learning Hub, check out the daily videos, subscribe to Barry's YouTube channel, and if you love this snappy news once a week, then you'll probably enjoy those little clips that we do each and every day. And with that, that is this week's maybe not so snappy news. Thank you for bearing with me. Crystal Carter: You barely got through that. Mordy Oberstein: barely got through that. Thank you Barry for all of that. Speaking of Barry, this week's follow of the week is Barry. Crystal Carter: Is there really? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Go follow Barry and tell him that we sent you, and I hope you're all following him as well. Mordy Oberstein: Because there's a real reason why. He's at Rusty Brick on all the social media platforms from Macedon to Blue Sky to X. Crystal Carter: Is Barry on TikTok? Mordy Oberstein: I think on LinkedIn it's his actual name, Barry Schwartz. You can find him at BarryseoMemes.com. There's a lot of places you could follow Barry. The reason why Barry is our follow of the week is because Barry often covers SEO best practices periodically on SeRoundtable.com. So inevitably someone will ask John Mueller, "How many words do I need to rank?" And John will answer something very snarky back and Barry will cover that on SeRoundtable.com. But no, it's good. It's a good thing because people break into the SEO industry at all different times. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So you haven't seen that conversation from 10 years ago. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: So, oh, Barry's covering it again is actually incredibly helpful, which is why we're saying follow Barry. Crystal Carter: I would also say that it's an SEO best practice to follow Barry. Mordy Oberstein: It is absolutely. Crystal Carter: If you're planning to learn SEO, if you're planning to keep tracks of the algorithms, of updates, of announcements from Google, of various different things, I would say his best practice to follow Barry because he covers everything and Google have acknowledged him for this. He covers everything. I give a lot of talks. I talk about a lot of various different things, and I literally use Barry's articles as an archive of developments of different stuff. So I was looking at something around the helpful content update and around the Hidden Gems stuff, and I was literally going through Barry's- Mordy Oberstein: The timeline. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's like a timeline. I was like, "How many times did they mention Hidden Gems?" Because he would've covered it, but he hasn't covered it. It probably didn't happen. Mordy Oberstein: My online behavior each day basically consists of what happened in sports the previous evening and then going to check SeoRoundTable. Crystal Carter: Same. Mordy Oberstein: That's basically it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Best practice. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely. So follow Barry and that will be best for you. Mordy Oberstein: It will be best. Barry is best. Crystal Carter: Pulling that back after the bare minimum there. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for saving me there. I was just digging a grave. Well, you're probably ready to write an obituary for me at that point. Crystal Carter: I went to a museum the other day and I was looking at this exhibition and this guy just was telling me about it, and he was telling me he worked there. He was telling me about this exhibit I was looking at, and I could have just read the thing on the side. They always put a thing on the side. Mordy Oberstein: I never read those things. Crystal Carter: This guy was telling me the thing, but he literally was just telling me wrong information. He said it was about World War II. It was about World War I. He said it was about, he couldn't remember where it was on loan from. He couldn't pronounce it, the person's artist's name. There was a bunch of stuff, and I just sat there going, "Uh huh." Mordy Oberstein: And it's right there on the placard. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's awesome. Crystal Carter: I just read it and you know what would've been best practice for him to say, "Would you like to know more about it? It's over there. Read the sign." Mordy Oberstein: My wife reads things at the museums. I never read them. I came here to look, not to read. Crystal Carter: What were you reading for? Mordy Oberstein: If I need to read, I would've stayed home and read a book. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: I want to see stuff. I'm at a museum. 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 the new episodes we dive into is SEO for affiliate sites in some real trouble? Look for wherever you can consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning about you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars and resources we have to offer on the Wix SEO learning hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO. 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 you learn SEO from a course? Are SEO courses worth the hype? We put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test with Wix Studio SEO course instructors Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Celeste Gonzalez, and Judith Lewis. Tune is as our guests explain how SEO courses offer flexibility, shareable insights, learning structure, the ability to learn at your own pace, and offer practical guidance without being dry and encyclopedic. So spit out that gum. Sit up straight and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this, the 105th episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Why learn SEO from a course? Can you learn SEO from a course? Are SEO courses worth the hype? We put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test with Wix Studio SEO course instructors Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Celeste Gonzalez, and Judith Lewis. Tune is as our guests explain how SEO courses offer flexibility, shareable insights, learning structure, the ability to learn at your own pace, and offer practical guidance without being dry and encyclopedic. So spit out that gum. Sit up straight and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this, the 105th episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 105 | October 9, 2024 | 45:14 00:00 / 45:13 This week’s guests Celeste Gonzalez Celeste Gonzalez leads RooLabs, RicketyRoo's SEO testing division, where she drives innovative strategies and engages with the SEO community. She is passionate about pushing SEO boundaries and sharing insights on both successes and challenges in the industry. Judith Lewis Judith is a renowned international speaker and digital media consultant, specializing in digital technologies to help businesses innovate and optimize. With over 25 years of experience, she runs her own consultancy delivering actionable business insight for M2B, B2B, and B2C companies. Andrew Optimisey Andrew Cock-Starkey is an SEO consultant who prides himself on delivering the right kind of traffic to client sites. With decades of experience in digital marketing, he turns the complex side of SEO into plain English, but can still talk technical with the devs. Aleyda Solis Aleyda Solis is an SEO consultant and founder of Orainti, speaker, and author. She shares the latest news and resources in SEO in the #SEOFOMO newsletter with +25K subscribers and Digital Marketing in #MarketingFOMO, SEO tips in the Crawling Mondays video series, and a free SEO Learning Roadmap called LearningSEO.io. Awarded as the European Search Personality of the Year in 2018 and included as one of the 10 Most Influential SEO Experts of 2022 by List Wire from USA Today, she's also co-founder of Remoters.net, a remote work hub, featuring a free remote job board, tools, guides, and more to empower remote work. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm been joined by she who educates the masses with all sorts of profound SEO knowledge and insights, Head of SEO Comms here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, people of the internet. I am here, and yes, we're going to do a podcast, you said about educating. I was asked... there was a time when they were giving teacher discounts at a place where I went, and they were like, "Are you a teacher?" I was like, "I do teaching sometimes, but technically no. But many people have learned, I think..." I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: As a former actual teacher, let me tell you how teachers look. Because I would get the free Dunkin' Donuts thing on Teacher's Day. Let me tell you- Crystal Carter: Yo, that's a dub. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Let me tell you how a teacher'd look at it. "Oh, it's totally worth it now dealing with your children," because they got a free coffee. Crystal Carter: The coffee at Dunkin' is pretty good, so that's a win. I'll take it. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: I'll take the W. Mordy Oberstein: When I go back home, I bring back bags full of ground Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Very nice. Very nice. Mordy Oberstein: It's my life. Crystal Carter: Good choice. Mordy Oberstein: Dunkin' coffee packed in a suitcase. I'm always worried, by the way, they'll think I'm some sort of drug trafficker because that's how you hide drugs, in coffee, because it kills the smell of the marijuana and whatever. Crystal Carter: Okay, so you have more exciting friends than I do because I did not know that fact. Mordy Oberstein: A customs person told me this when he saw the coffee in the thing. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Sure, sure. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by the cartel. No, it's brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get an entire course of SEO awesomeness. How much does it cost? Nothing. What does it cover? Everything. Who's in it? Aleyda Solis, Andrew Cock-Starkey, Jill Quick, Judith Lewis, and so many others. Where can you find it? Over on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub. Link in the show note, which brings us to what we're covering today: what to look for in an SEO course. Of course, is there such thing as the best SEO course? Signs an SEO course may or may not be for you and what goes into creating a good course. To help the idea of learning SEO from a course take its course, we welcome Wix Studio course instructors, Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. I apologize for a little bit of a keyword stuffing there. Plus we put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test as more Wix Studio course instructors share their insights as Judith Lewis and Celeste Gonzalez grab the mic. And of course, we have the snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So spit out that gum, sit up straight, and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this the 105th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. That was a lot. Crystal Carter: There was definitely some teachable moments in there. Mordy Oberstein: If you want moments, write shorter intros. With that, please welcome to the podcast, the one, the only Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. Aleyda Solis: Hello. Hello everybody. Mordy, oh, my god. And Crystal, I had to restrict myself to not say anything. Oh, what we have already learned already. Andrew Optimisey: Aloha, Mordy. Aloha, Crystal. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, hi, Andrew. Crystal Carter: Hello. Mahalo. Thank you for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: How festive of you to steer into our vibe. Aleyda Solis: By the way, it's one thing, right? That's so very American of you, listening about the Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Last time that I went actually to the US in July, I bought one, the already cold prepare one that they sell at the supermarket that is so very American. So yeah, I had to try one frappuccino-like just to taste it. It was so good, but it was also 240 calories or something that high. Got so many calories in a single drink. It's yummy but yes, highly, highly... I think that you can get fat just drinking that. It's crazy. Mordy Oberstein: It's ridiculous. Pro-tip, when you go to Dunkin' Donuts, do not think about calories. Andrew Optimisey: If you're thinking about calories in Dunkin', you're in the wrong place, right? Mordy Oberstein: You're in the wrong place. I got to have the water. Crystal Carter: A hilarious SEO fact before we get into things, if you look up dunkin.com, which I did, it doesn't actually go to Dunkin' Donuts or they rebranded to Dunkin'. It goes to some random consultancy and then they have this holding screen that says, "If you're looking for Dunkin' Donuts, you have to go back to the internet because this isn't Dunkin' Donuts." And then after 15 seconds, it loads to this other website. And as an SEO, I was like, "Dude, you're sitting on a gold mine. Just cash the check. Just cash the check." Andrew Optimisey: Sell the domain. Crystal Carter: But somehow he's holding on. I don't know, Mr. Dunkin, really, really... Dunkin' Logistics really, really wants to keep that domain. Anyway- Mordy Oberstein: Dunkin' Logistics. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. There we go. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so let's get into it. Y'all are part of our Wix Studio SEO course and which... people are taking an SEO course. You sat down and you wrote up scripts for the course. What are you hoping, what were you hoping, what are you hoping that people will get out of an SEO course? Aleyda Solis: My expectation was to facilitate the learning process about technical SEO, because this is a topic that I cover in my course, and to make it very actionable in a way that it was very easy to grasp the importance of technical SEO, especially something that can quickly become very complex if you don't come from the web development world. So it is very clear, the why, why it is important, why you need to learn it, what are the key concepts to understand even if you are not going to specialize on becoming a technical SEO, and what makes or breaks a website technical configuration to focus on what's actually key or most impactful? So in the course, that was my expectation, to be... not necessarily make it the most comprehensive course ever. I think I can be a little bit... it's okay to be proud to say that I tried to really cover everything, what actually matters, but that was not necessarily as much of a point of there are so many resources and so much out there where they can learn already from that is also comprehensive, but let's make it meaningful. Let's make it easy to go through, make it a journey, and that it can be helpful for people who are just starting, people who are not already SEOs, as well as those who are SEOs and want to focus more on the technical side of things. So I believe that that is what makes a little bit of a difference between a course or other formats like a guide, a comprehensive guide, or a book even to make it easier to explain and give those details that you cannot necessarily as easily share in the text format. Mordy Oberstein: Before I let Angie reply, just a plug. If you're looking for a guide to SEO, check out the guide that Aleyda has at learnseo.io. Okay Andrew, take it away. Andrew Optimisey: So there was a couple of things for me that I really wanted to aim at, and one of the reasons it was great to work with Wix on this is because... so Wix is used by loads of different people. You get people who are building their own websites themselves who have never done any web dev before. They're running their own little shop like a bakery or whatever, and they have not a clue where to start with SEO. And then you've got big agencies who maybe know a little bit about SEO, enough to make them dangerous, but maybe they need a little bit of guidance on that kind of stuff. So that's where I thought working with Wix with this kind of stuff would be really good, and so I wanted to demystify it a little bit because everybody hears this thing about SEO and, "Oh, it's so complex and it's so tricky and I don't know where to start and how do I do these things? And it changes so fast," and that kind of stuff around... because you said about us writing scripts and we spend a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. As soon as you write stuff down in SEO, it's out date, right? Because it changes quickly and the minute you note it down, then there'll be some update or something will change or there'll be a new platform, a new system and stuff. So one of the things I wanted to do with the stuff that I was writing was teach people a sort of direction to travel, a way of thinking about things like... so if I'm going to show you this particular way to do keyword research and stuff, it's not that this way is the only way. It's that these are some of the things that you might want to think about and how you do this, how you think about customers and how you think about matching your content to intent and all those kinds of things where this is a good direction of travel. I always use the Wayne Gretzky thing all the time in SEO. It's don't go to where SEO is. Skate to where the puck is going. That's how you get really good as Wayne Gretzky as the ice hockey player. You go to where SEO is going. If you know where Google is heading and the directions that SEO generally is trying to go in, if you go in that direction too, you're going to be okay. Mordy Oberstein: That was, by the way, one of the things that we were making the course... and by the way, we didn't write the scripts. The people in our course, they wrote their own scripts. Obviously, we had a course instructor go through and they would tighten it up, whatever it is, but this is coming from... it's the latest focus on technical SEO. It's your focus on keyword research, but that was one of the things that we were thinking about when we made the course. How do we create a course in a way where if something changes, it's not out of data in an instant? Which is very tricky and very complicated. Sorry Crys, I feel like I cut you off. Crystal Carter: No, no. I think that the other thing that we were thinking about when... we were so grateful that you both agreed to do the course and we were so grateful that all the other folks on the course got involved with the course and everyone that has been working with us on this has a common goal, which is basically what you were talking about Aleyda and what you were talking about Andrew, which is demystifying this stuff. There are some people... we've talked about reputational things on this podcast before, but sometimes within the SEO industry people are like, "Oh, it's so complicated." They make it so that you couldn't possibly... people speak in really big words and they speak really convoluted or they speak in jargon or that sort of thing. And everyone, we were so grateful again, that was involved with this, has a focus of, "No, we can speak in plain English, we can speak in plain language, and we can speak in a way that you can understand it. If you stick with this, you'll understand it. It's a question of whether or not you want to learn and that will make it accessible to you." Aleyda Solis: And I think that a big role here, at least it was when I decided to go ahead with the course, and then that I could thankfully also validate through the whole process, was the production quality that you had. I was amazed from the beginning. When we were creating the strips with the examples, the feedback that I got from you it's true that yeah, I did it, but I got amazing feedback to make it super easy to go through first and then secondly, once that we were recording, I remember in London I was mind blown by the whole production around it. So I am delighted to see the outcome now that is going to be launched, because I believe that although there are so many courses out there, there are only so very few that have this not only quality. The content and insights also make it easy for people to understand independently of the complexity and additionally, the production value is so, so high. It's going to be beautiful and can't wait to watch it, too. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Big hearts to you as well. Andrew Optimisey: I think a quick note for all the other people in the Wix Studio team that worked on this kind of stuff, there was a whole bunch of your colleagues that came into town on this. Like Aleyda said, there was times when I'd been writing sections of my course and I'd get a note back saying, "This is great. How can we show it? We need something so it's not just a talking head lecturing you about SEO and here's what you should and shouldn't do. How can we demonstrate this? What does this look like?" And it was like, "Well, I can't really do... it doesn't really work with this." "Okay, well let's think of another example that's similar, that tells the same story, makes the same point, but we can demonstrate it with data. We can demonstrate it with..." If you watch my section of the course, I use a lot of silly rambling analogies and synonyms and silly stuff like stories and things to try and bring that kind of stuff to life. But that, working with the Wix team and your colleagues really help bring that kind of stuff out and make it more of a story so it's more engaging. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you read my mind. I literally wrote a note to myself while Aleyda was talking, "Oh, I need to shout out Natalie Hamouie for being the organizing force behind the entire course. Natalie, you're amazing. Both of you bring up a really good point and it's one of the things that I want to talk about in deciding whether or not to take an SEO course or not take an SEO course, or how do you know if an SEO course is a good course or not. Aleyda, you hinted at it before. When we made the course, we didn't want to make the best SEO course because there is no such thing as the best SEO course. It's a course that I think is good for you for where you're at and what you need right now for your learning journey kind of thing. In fact, to break the fourth wall, when we were making the landing page for the course, we decided, "Well, should we include the word best?" From a pure SEO point of view if you look at what Google's showing, there's a tendency for Google to rank pages that include the word best. Super old school SEO. We said, "No, we're not going to do that because, A, old school SEO and B, It's not on brand for what we want the course to be." I don't think, and maybe you'll disagree with me, that it really is a way to produce the best SEO course. There's only a way to produce something that you think is able to reach a targeted audience at that particular moment. Aleyda Solis: Yeah, one hundred percent, because even if I think that we tried with this course to make it as evergreen as possible... and I remember when we were recording, one of the core metrics was about to be updated and we already talk about it as something from the past, but eventually, something else will be updated that will unfortunately and hopefully not that soon, but at some point it will, so it won't be fresh anymore. So to make it the perfect course at every single point in time, it should be completely updated and potentially even discussing or tackling things that just happened. So I believe that potentially to have the best experience, not the best course, the best learning experience, you should take a course but also complement it with podcasts like this one where you discuss the latest in SEO, the trends, the updates, the news, what is happening, and what matters right now. And what I believe is critical to make the course a great learning experience is to tie it with the SEO day to day, to make it impactful and actionable. Because I believe that what it really let's say challenged me at the beginning of my SEO learning journey was that for me when learning, guides out there, it was very non-tangible and very hard to think of scenarios or circumstances where I will, for example, want to add a nofollow on links or willingly noindex pages at the time and things like that. So providing the scenarios, examples that are usual, common, that people will run into when doing audits or analyzing or assessing opportunities, and also given the very realistic and reasonable idea that it's too idealistic and potentially not reasonable to think that a website will be perfectly optimized ever, but to give a sense of this is the actual goal, this is how you should align everything, and you don't work in a silo too because it's not only about being technical optimized and this ties to revenue and this ties to major bigger goals that are not only SEO-related and stuff like that. I think that that makes all the difference. And many years ago I wrote an SEO fundamentals book in Spanish. And through the years I have gotten people who have told me, Spanish speakers telling me, "This is the book that made the difference when I learned it, not because it discusses new things, but the angle that you took was different, was actionable, and makes sense. All these concepts actually now made sense." So I believe that this is what makes a course or the learning journey through a course better in general and more impactful and actually helpful in your learning journey. Crystal Carter: I think that that's such an important point because there are a lot of people selling very expensive courses with terrible motivations right now. So I think the motivations that you're talking about are so important, to help people actually know how to do it and learn the fundamentals and learn tying it to value of the business and not to, "You can do SEO and you'll make $1 million tomorrow." There's so many people, particularly on TikTok, there's a lot of people selling this digital marketing course and, "I will make da da da da da, and just DM me and I'll tell you all of the secrets and da da da." And then you see there's 17 videos that are all the same thing of all these people saying this stuff. And I'm sorry, if you are somebody who's listening to this and you've seen one of those courses, I'm sorry, but it's a pyramid scheme. That's what's going on there. So they're not going to teach you how to do digital marketing properly. That's something else. Beware the motivations of the folks that are trying to sell you something. And our motivations are to help people learn SEO. That's our motivations. Andrew Optimisey: One of the things that I liked about, again, working with Natalie and the rest of the Wix team, was there was this effort to make the lessons stand alone. Although there is... again, they've made a lot of efforts to then join things up when it's been like, "If you learned a little bit about this, you might want to learn more about it in a later section or in Judith's section," those kind of things. But because they broke the courses up so I don't just rattle on about keywords for hours and hours, there's discrete chunks where it's like, "Here's some basic stuff and here's some middle of the road stuff, and then if you want to go even further with it, here's this bit too." And again, that was something the Wix team were really keen to push me on it. "How do you go even further?" "So this is the one-on-one stuff, this is..." But what if you're like, "This is all really basic," and you skip that because you're already fairly experienced in SEO, but you just want more? "Where do I go next?" So that's one of the things I quite liked about it and then you can cherry pick if you are completely new to SEO and you just want some fundamentals. So again, we talked about the baker that runs the shop. They've got a ten-page website. Technical SEO is probably not going to move the needle for them unless they're doing some absolutely fundamentally awful things, if they have noindex'd their website. So you're going to need some of the technical stuff. So you need enough to make you not completely invisible to Google, but if you're getting onto canonical tags and really complex technical stuff, that's probably not going to make the difference for a ten-page website. What might make the difference is some really good content or building your basic link structures, all those kinds of things. So that's the kind of thing we should build. "Right, you need two stories from this section, two from this section, and two from this, and that's enough for now. Then you can get going and then when you want more, there's more too. So you can come back for those things too." When you get to your 8 million page website because you scaled it up and you are now dominating the world, you're going to need the heck out of the technical section because if you've got that size site, there's no way you're getting anywhere without a solid technical structure. Crystal Carter: I think the other thing that's about that was when we were thinking about the structure of the course, they were like, "Oh, we need something for beginners or something for advanced." And the thing about it, in SEO, sometimes you're a beginner and advanced at the same time. When GA4 comes out, everyone's a beginner at GA4. They're just having to start again with this new piece of technology. We have AI stuff and there's people who are very, very advanced with one type of SEO skill, but maybe you're getting started with AI or maybe they're good at one part of creating content with AI and then they're not so great at this other part of AI. So it is important that you can jump across to different sections and it is important that you can jump to all of those. But I think certainly one of the things with learningseo.io, which is a great resource as well from Aleyda Solis, has a map of even if you jump around, you can see the gaps. So you can see like, "Oh, well I learned this part, but apparently I didn't learn these two parts that lead up to that." Similarly, our courses is that way as well. So you can see the whole and also you can also take it off and go, "All right, I know that. I know that. Okay, I don't know that. I will watch that one." Or you can take the whole thing all together. You have the option. Mordy Oberstein: It's very purposeful because way, way, way back when this was first a concept, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this was because when I started learning SEO, I started learning SEO and I think one of the first things I saw was... I don't know if they still have it or not. The periodic table that Search Engine Land had, that was one of the first things that I saw. And as I started diving into SEO more and more and more, I felt like, "I don't feel like I see the full picture. I feel like I see a little bit here, I see a little bit there, and I don't even know what I'm missing, but I feel like I'm missing something. There's a gap." So I wanted to do a course because when you do something like a course, you can at least walk away feeling like there's obviously going to be more to learn, but there shouldn't be these wide gaps anymore that I feel like, "I don't know where I'm supposed to go next," or, "What did I miss that I shouldn't have missed?" And to zoom out, it kind of goes back to what Crystal was saying before and what Aleyda and Andrew, you're both saying, it goes back to motivations. When you're looking at an SEO course, I'll give you a pointer. Whether you're taking our course or somebody else's course or whatever even that's not about SEO, look who's behind the course. Who are they and what are they about? Because that'll dictate everything about the course. That'll dictate whether or not... I gave Andrew a hard time about his assessment saying, "Drew, let's make it a little bit harder, a little more nuanced, and blah, blah blah." By the way, if you think you had it bad, I was giving Itamar Blauer the hardest time because he was doing a section on third-party SEO tools and it can be very straightforward. "No, let's give actual cases and examples and let's try to give scenarios so this way, you can take what he was talking about and apply it somewhere else." So you should talk to Itamar, Andrew, because I was giving him... putting through the ringer of trying to... no, but because of what Aleyda was saying before, you want to try to have it scenario-based whenever you can. You want to try to make it as practical and real-world whenever you can, because when you walk away learning SEO from a blog post or from whatever it might be, a webinar, that's one of those gaps. And the reason why I felt we did a good job with this was because the people behind the course, whether it's us on the Wix side or whether it's y'all as the instructors are people who at one point or another struggled with learning SEO and it was meaningful to do something for somebody who is currently struggling to learn SEO. Aleyda Solis: Just to also potentially close the circle regarding motivations, because I think that is also very, very important. When someone takes a course, you need to invest a little bit of more time, I have to say, and attention than what takes to go through a guide for example, or skim reading an e-book, something like that. But you actually need to put a lot of more focus, and many times also not a trivial investment for many people. And motivation is key here of what you want out of that. For many, it will be, "Okay to start understanding what is this about, complement my already existing experience, or because I feel that I need to take my skills on these topics to the next level, there are certain areas or configurations or elements that I don't know yet how they tie in or how I can connect them to what I do in the day to day." So these are fantastic. Also, I have to say something, right? It was a few years back when I was giving this pro bono course about technical SEO, and I asked a little bit about the feedback regarding the motivations of the people learning very honestly, and I think it's good, right? It's okay. It's understandable. Some of them say, "I want to start with technical SEO and focus more on technical SEO rather than content in all the areas, because I have heard that because it is more complex, it pays better, and I see the salary ranges out there and they are higher." And I was like, "Look, this is legit. This is completely reasonable." Just make sure that it's not only about the pay, because realistically it's true that many of these more specialized roles, depending a little bit on the type of specialization can end up paying more, but it pays more because these are on companies that have bigger SEO departments and hire very specialized people. These very specialized people have already had a very big journey and a lot of experience not only that area, but understand well the overall process, the fundamental... and how that area actually has an impact that makes money and drives revenue and achieves goals at... very likely at an enterprise level. So this ties in on how important it is to understand that you don't work on a silo, so even if you want to only focus on technical SEO or link building or content or whatever, it is fundamental that you have... how important is your specific or particular area within the SEO context and the context of the business that you're working in, because that is what actually makes a difference at the end of the day. Not necessarily how complex it is, only because... and you understanding the concepts and nailing the concepts and knowing how to code in case you do technical SEO, but actually moving the needle and changing what actually matters to drive the impact that these bigger companies are willing to pay big bucks for. And this is it, right? Crystal Carter: And I think the other thing that also comes with that is, of course, if you're working to get a job in the industry, having a course, doing a course can be super useful. And if you're trying to get a job or you're planning to increase your skillset so that you can get a pay raise or so you can get whatever, that's totally valid because we live in the world and then people got to pay the bills. I totally get that. But what's also important is that if that's only your motivation, very often you might get bored or tired of SEO fairly quickly. You have to be a little bit curious as well because it can be very complex and you have to be the person that goes, "But why? No, but why? No, but really, but why?" over and over and over again until you figure out what it is. And I think one of the only ways that you can do that alongside a course is to be building, be testing, be looking at things in real life. So throughout the course, we have examples of how you can implement things on Wix Studio, how you can implement things across your Wix website, et cetera, et cetera. These are ways that you can get started with trying out content. So if you don't have your own website, it's fairly straightforward to get set up on Wix to building a website. Pretty straightforward. And a lot of the technical things are built in to help you get going with that, and it means that you can test and you can iterate. If you don't have your own website, then I highly recommend while you're doing this course, getting involved with a website so you can say to the people who... your football team or your neighbor or something you volunteer with, "Can I help you with your website?" And chances are they'll go, "Yeah," because nine times out of 10 they're not doing anything with it. And you can have a look in their Google Search Console, you can set them up on GA4. You can have a look at whether their links are working. You can crawl their site map, you can use some of those tools, but it really helps to understand the concepts if you're able to see them in real time, particularly with technical SEO and also with content. When you're looking at how people respond to content and how Google ranks content, you can't see that without seeing that in the wild. And it's a live ecosystem, so you have to be involved with it. And I highly, highly, highly recommend doing SEO in parallel with the course. Andrew Optimisey: And one of the things I liked about it was... so when you work with people who are part of a digital marketing role rather than an SEO specialist, is that they have to wear lots of hats. And much as they would love to know all of SEO, I very much doubt anybody... there'll be some people that will sit there and just smash through the whole course in one go. They'll have a lot of free time, but it's like you can kind of cherry-pick a little bit. So there's going to be times when there's a project coming up where we have the budget and we have the developer time, and we have the resource to go after content, so this is the thing we're going to focus on, this particular topic area, and my boss has said, "Right, we've previously worked on dog food. Now we're doing cat food content." "We need content right now. How do we do the..." and so you can then go and if you've not done content, if you're more of a technically minded SEO and you haven't really done content stuff before, or maybe you are one of these T-shaped digital marketers who's good at lots of things but only super deep on one or two things, you can choose a bit of the course that best suits the project you're going to work on. And then maybe later down the line, there'll be more budget and it'll be, "Okay, well actually we found that there's all these issues going on in Search Console and technically our website's falling over and it's really slow, and what do we do with these kinds of things?" "Okay, I don't really know enough about... so I'm going to go and I'm going to watch this section of the course and I'm going to learn about these things that I need to scale up a little bit more on." So then you can make better use of your time. So when you do get that project that comes up and works in that particular area, you can make sure that you're thinking about all the things that you should need to cover in that section so that project really works. And so that works for, say, digital marketing teams, those mom and pop shops we talked about, but then also those people that are working in those bigger companies that maybe it helps to then have that sympathy and empathy with the people that you are working with. If you're a super great technical SEO and you've got these content people banging on you all the time about, "Can we get this done? Can we do this?" And you're like, "Oh." If you can watch that bit of the course, then maybe you can understand a bit more about where they're coming from and then you can have a bit more of a useful conversation rather than just banging heads all the time. Mordy Oberstein: You took our course and you transcended it from being learning about SEO to making the world a more harmonious and better place. There's no better place than- Andrew Optimisey: We can all be friends. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, other than saying thank you both so much for being a part of the course, thank you to Mike Stepney, to Itamar Blauer, to Jill Quick, to James Clark, to Judith Lewis, to Celeste Gonzalez, to everyone who helped on the back end of the course, and Debbie Chu obviously as well. Thank you so much for being a part of the course and thank you, Aleyda and Andrew, for not only being a part of the course, but being a part of our little podcast. Andrew Optimisey: Thanks. Aleyda Solis: Always a great time. Mordy Oberstein: All right, thanks again so much, Aleyda and Andrew, A, for sitting down with us here in this podcast and for of course being a part of our course. So we spent the entire episode until now talking about... or working with the assumption that taking an SEO course is a good idea and it represents a good way to learn SEO provided it's the right fit for you, if the course is the right fit for you. But is that actually the case? Let's challenge some assumptions about our new SEO course with a special edition of It's New. Mordy Oberstein: It's New, being the course is new, by the way. The SEO learning from a course is not new, but our course is new. Crystal Carter: It is new. We spent a lot of time on it and it's new, fresh out the box. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's funny? Because for me, it doesn't feel new because I've been working on this thing for months. It's old. Crystal Carter: I think that's because anything good takes a little while to cook. You got to let it cook. Mordy Oberstein: Really? My great popcorn is delicious. Takes, I don't know, a minute and a half. Crystal Carter: To be fair though, somebody prepped it beforehand. They put all that delicious buttery stuff in the bag. I don't know what's in that stuff, but it's delicious. I can't even cope. Mordy Oberstein: It's basically butter-flavored cancer. Crystal Carter: I don't know, but I literally... I've pulled it off before. Mordy Oberstein: Did you ever- Crystal Carter: And just eat the butter. Mordy Oberstein: You scraped... you take the popcorn and like a lunatic, scraping the inside of the bag like a scratch and sniff? Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It's delicious. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: No regrets. Mordy Oberstein: What are we talking about again? Courses. Crystal Carter: Courses, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So why is this a special edition of It's New? It's because we asked Celeste Gonzalez and Judith Lewis, who are another two of our course instructors, about why learning SEO from a course is a good idea. You might say that's biased. We say that's good marketing, but you can listen to what they had to say and make your own decision. Here's Celeste on why taking an SEO course is a good way to learn SEO. Celeste Gonzalez: Learning SEO through a course provides you with a structured foundation that hits all essential topics. A course offers expert guidance from knowledgeable professionals, so you'll get real insights and practical tips that you may not encounter until you can get hands-on experience. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Celeste. Yeah, that's a great point. But that last thing she mentioned is a really, really good point because the hands-on experience is where you fundamentally... you have to have hands-on experience. There's no way around that. However, if you don't have it, getting a course is good a foundation for when you do have it. But more importantly, I think is, while you are... let's say you're building your own website on Wix or Wix studio and you're doing that hands-on work to learn SEO. You do need reference points to go back to. It's like, "All right, I have it all in my head. Now I just have to implement it." If it were that easy, you wouldn't need a course, but you need to go back like, "Okay, now I ran into a situation. What does Celeste say in the course about that? Okay, fine. Now I'll do this." Crystal Carter: Right, and I think also sometimes when you do a course, particularly with SEO, you can layer your learning and you can layer your implementation. So maybe when you first go over the course, you're thinking about on-page SEO, and you're like, "Cool, I can do title tags," and you do title tags and then you learn more about the keyword research and stuff and you're like, "Oh, okay, I can add this to the title tags." Or you go back to the same piece of content after you learn more about technical SEO and maybe you're like, "Oh, I can add this technical element to this page as well." And there's basically... things will be fresher to you when you listen or when you go back to them again and they will appeal to you in different ways, so it's good to be able to go at your own pace. It's like listening to jazz. If you listen to jazz, sometimes you listen to the piano player, sometimes you listen to the saxophone player, and sometimes when you do that, it feels like a brand new song. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well first of all, it's like when I listen to my kids. Sometimes I listen to the one and I tune out the other one. But also, glad you said your point about what you just said because here's Judith Lewis about why you should take an SEO course, and I'll think you find great minds think alike. Judith Lewis: So I was asked, what are some of the advantages of learning SEO from a course? I used to teach courses in person and in the pre-pandemic days, and it was really difficult, I think, for some of the students to keep up, especially with the advanced elements of the course. When you're learning SEO from a course online though, you can pause, rewind, and listen to that section again. It's really hard to pause me, rewind me, and listen to that section again in a classroom, so one of the best advantages of learning SEO from a course online is that you get to pause, rewind, and listen again. And I might be biased, but I feel like my section of the course is one you're going to want to listen to over and over again, and it's my hope that you'll refer back to it time and time again. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, well first off, thank you Judith, and see? Great minds do think alike. That's just exactly what Crystal said. And by the way, Crystal did not know that Juidth said that. That's the first time Crystal heard the recording. Crystal Carter: This is true, but in my earlier discussion with Aleyda, I also said this: it's worth following along and going through some of the steps, going through some of the implementation if you can, while you're doing the course, and that's really great for rewinding and stuff. We also say this about some of the webinars is that, sometimes people say, "Oh, I'm not sure I understand the concept." I'm like, "Watch the whole thing." And this is one of the ways I learned personally. "Watch the whole thing, get the full scope of how it's all going to roll out, and then if there's the particular concept that you're not sure about, go back to that." But sometimes having a full idea of the full picture can help you to understand what one particular element might be, so it's great to be able to go at your own pace. I love online learning for that. It's really, really, really great value. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I like this... for an example, you can go and dive into one thing, come back out. You don't have to go in chronology... I learn like that. I don't like going in chronological order sometimes. I pop in here, pop out, pop in somewhere else. So courses are great for that, for the reasons that you're saying. You know who's basically an SEO course in his own right? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: seoroundtable.com is basically one giant, unorganized SEO course. Crystal Carter: It is really like a time capsule. He really just keeps all of the things that happen on Google is on there, so if you want to know when this feature came out, you will find it on Search Engine Roundtable. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure. Crystal Carter: If you want to know when Google announced this thing... whenever I have to do research on historical things of, "This came out here, this came out then, that happened then," if you want to see the evolution of a feature, that's where you go. Mordy Oberstein: That's why I like the old design of seoroundtable.com because it felt literally like a time capsule. And with that, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. This one comes at you from Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land: Google rolls out new AI organized search results, AI overview links. So there's a bunch of changes here. Some of these were announced previously at some of Google's events like first of the AI organized search results. Google announced they were going to do this... I think it was back at Google IO? I've seen a similar format when they were talking about releasing... or when they released Google Gemini itself, but basically we've seen this in local space before, by the way. So new, but not new-new. The example here, by the way, is from a recipe query. So you could get the SERP organized according to, let's say, different topics. I think the example they have is around cooking cherries, if I'm not mistaken? Or cherry tomatoes or sauce recipes or whatever it is. I think it was... right, vegetarian appetizer ideas. There we go. And you can see a carousel of top recipes. You could explore by ingredient, so they have cheese or crackers or avocado. You can explore by the ingredient that way. Then they lay out the SERP with maybe guides to cooking the best vegetarian appetizer. They're basically breaking down the SERP according to the various subtopics, the various intents. I like it. I think it all makes it very much more usable as a user trying to find something, trying to explore something, and I think this is a great case of AI being implemented the right way. I think you're going to see this expand all over the place. There're going to be Solace already in local. We're seeing it now with the recipe query. I like it. I think it's great. I think it aligns with Google, which I mentioned originally showed with Gemini in their demo, or its demo back then. Okay. Google also said the new way of linking and citations in AI overviews that we talked back in August. Barry says that that format's going live across the board, so that seems great. Also, here's an interesting one. Google's saying, "Yeah, going to get some ads in the AI overviews." In fact, if you head over to Search Engine Journal, Brookes Osmundson says, "Google officially launches ads in AI overviews." You can see, by the way, in the example that they have there, how it'll actually look. It looks pretty interesting. Basically you have a query for whatever, like... I don't know, how do you get a grass stain out? You have your AI overview summary, and in this case, at the bottom of the AI overview is a little sponsor label with that typical product carousel sponsor products. So that's what it looks like in this particular case, so that's really interesting. Should make folks like Greg Finn pretty happy. I suspect Google also announced updates to its Lens features and how you can search with Lens and shopping with Lens. So for example, yeah, you could have always taken a snapshot with the Lens of a product and said, "Hey, find me more examples of that product." But now Google's saying you can also do the same thing, but now get more context about the product along with it when you search for it. So that's great, a bunch of additions on the AI front. Super cool, super awesome. Links to the show notes. That's this week's Snappy News. Thank you again, Barry, for all the great news you provide. By the way, I'm going to break a fourth wall here. We record the news afterwards. After this, and I always thank Barry anyway because I know I'm going to inevitably use an article from Barry. Also thinking to anyone else I might have quoted in this week's episode. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Right. Thank you for the news and for being newsworthy. Well done. Mordy Oberstein: Did I tell you? Behind the scenes, when we did the hundredth episode, we had Barry on for the news and I'm like, "Oh, there's nothing going on this week." I'm like, "Barry, I don't know what to cover. There's nothing happening." It was Labor Day week, we lost a day. Barry was like, "No, I got you. Big news is coming." I'm like, "You know, you asked for SEO news and the great Barry in the sky makes it rain." Crystal Carter: He does. Mordy Oberstein: And it turns out there's a day the core update finished rolling out, so we covered that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Barry makes it rain SEO news. Crystal Carter: Every time. Mordy Oberstein: Every time. Okay, so that brings us to the last part of our podcast with the Follow of the Week. I'm cheating a little bit this week. Crystal Carter: Why? Mordy Oberstein: I'm having a lot of buttered popcorn from the microwave. I'm cheating. Crystal Carter: Are you not just going to shout out yourself? I think it's like that Snoop Dogg song where he's like- Mordy Oberstein: That would be so narcissistic. Crystal Carter: Snoop Dogg got that award and he was like, "Last of all, I'd like to thank... first of all, I'd like to thank me and myself for all the hard work that I did, for all the sleepless nights and for everything." And I was like, "You know what?" Mordy Oberstein: You're not wrong. Crystal Carter: "Sometimes you're like that." Mordy Oberstein: You're not wrong. Crystal Carter: "Sometimes you're like that." You do need... Obviously, thank other people as well, but you do need to thank yourself as well a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: All right. All right, so we'll do it like this then, okay? We're going to recommend you follow all of the course instructors, so Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Judith Lewis, James Clark, Jill Quick, Itamar Blauer, Mike Stephanie, Debbie Chu, Celeste Gonzales, Crystal Carter... Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And if you want, you can follow me at your own risk. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's right. Literally, we were so honored and one of the things that's great about working with this team is that we get to do cool stuff like this, and it's such an honor to be able to be like, "Hey, do y'all want to do our course?" And all of these fine SEOs said yes, which is amazing and I'm so honored because literally they're some of the best folks. Mordy Oberstein: And we didn't have to threaten anybody. That's such a Mordy comment to make. 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 in the new episode as we dive into AI overviews and the data behind them. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and whatnot over at the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Aleyda Solis Andrew Optimisey Judith Lewis Celeste Gonzalez Itamar Blauer Jill Quick James Clark Mike Stepney Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio SEO Course Orainti Optimisey News Google rolls out new AI-organized search results, AI Overview links Google Officially Launches Ads In AI Overviews Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Aleyda Solis Andrew Optimisey Judith Lewis Celeste Gonzalez Itamar Blauer Jill Quick James Clark Mike Stepney Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wix Studio SEO Course Orainti Optimisey News Google rolls out new AI-organized search results, AI Overview links Google Officially Launches Ads In AI Overviews Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm been joined by she who educates the masses with all sorts of profound SEO knowledge and insights, Head of SEO Comms here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, people of the internet. I am here, and yes, we're going to do a podcast, you said about educating. I was asked... there was a time when they were giving teacher discounts at a place where I went, and they were like, "Are you a teacher?" I was like, "I do teaching sometimes, but technically no. But many people have learned, I think..." I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: As a former actual teacher, let me tell you how teachers look. Because I would get the free Dunkin' Donuts thing on Teacher's Day. Let me tell you- Crystal Carter: Yo, that's a dub. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Let me tell you how a teacher'd look at it. "Oh, it's totally worth it now dealing with your children," because they got a free coffee. Crystal Carter: The coffee at Dunkin' is pretty good, so that's a win. I'll take it. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: I'll take the W. Mordy Oberstein: When I go back home, I bring back bags full of ground Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Very nice. Very nice. Mordy Oberstein: It's my life. Crystal Carter: Good choice. Mordy Oberstein: Dunkin' coffee packed in a suitcase. I'm always worried, by the way, they'll think I'm some sort of drug trafficker because that's how you hide drugs, in coffee, because it kills the smell of the marijuana and whatever. Crystal Carter: Okay, so you have more exciting friends than I do because I did not know that fact. Mordy Oberstein: A customs person told me this when he saw the coffee in the thing. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Sure, sure. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by the cartel. No, it's brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get an entire course of SEO awesomeness. How much does it cost? Nothing. What does it cover? Everything. Who's in it? Aleyda Solis, Andrew Cock-Starkey, Jill Quick, Judith Lewis, and so many others. Where can you find it? Over on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub. Link in the show note, which brings us to what we're covering today: what to look for in an SEO course. Of course, is there such thing as the best SEO course? Signs an SEO course may or may not be for you and what goes into creating a good course. To help the idea of learning SEO from a course take its course, we welcome Wix Studio course instructors, Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. I apologize for a little bit of a keyword stuffing there. Plus we put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test as more Wix Studio course instructors share their insights as Judith Lewis and Celeste Gonzalez grab the mic. And of course, we have the snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So spit out that gum, sit up straight, and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this the 105th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. That was a lot. Crystal Carter: There was definitely some teachable moments in there. Mordy Oberstein: If you want moments, write shorter intros. With that, please welcome to the podcast, the one, the only Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. Aleyda Solis: Hello. Hello everybody. Mordy, oh, my god. And Crystal, I had to restrict myself to not say anything. Oh, what we have already learned already. Andrew Optimisey: Aloha, Mordy. Aloha, Crystal. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, hi, Andrew. Crystal Carter: Hello. Mahalo. Thank you for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: How festive of you to steer into our vibe. Aleyda Solis: By the way, it's one thing, right? That's so very American of you, listening about the Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Last time that I went actually to the US in July, I bought one, the already cold prepare one that they sell at the supermarket that is so very American. So yeah, I had to try one frappuccino-like just to taste it. It was so good, but it was also 240 calories or something that high. Got so many calories in a single drink. It's yummy but yes, highly, highly... I think that you can get fat just drinking that. It's crazy. Mordy Oberstein: It's ridiculous. Pro-tip, when you go to Dunkin' Donuts, do not think about calories. Andrew Optimisey: If you're thinking about calories in Dunkin', you're in the wrong place, right? Mordy Oberstein: You're in the wrong place. I got to have the water. Crystal Carter: A hilarious SEO fact before we get into things, if you look up dunkin.com, which I did, it doesn't actually go to Dunkin' Donuts or they rebranded to Dunkin'. It goes to some random consultancy and then they have this holding screen that says, "If you're looking for Dunkin' Donuts, you have to go back to the internet because this isn't Dunkin' Donuts." And then after 15 seconds, it loads to this other website. And as an SEO, I was like, "Dude, you're sitting on a gold mine. Just cash the check. Just cash the check." Andrew Optimisey: Sell the domain. Crystal Carter: But somehow he's holding on. I don't know, Mr. Dunkin, really, really... Dunkin' Logistics really, really wants to keep that domain. Anyway- Mordy Oberstein: Dunkin' Logistics. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. There we go. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so let's get into it. Y'all are part of our Wix Studio SEO course and which... people are taking an SEO course. You sat down and you wrote up scripts for the course. What are you hoping, what were you hoping, what are you hoping that people will get out of an SEO course? Aleyda Solis: My expectation was to facilitate the learning process about technical SEO, because this is a topic that I cover in my course, and to make it very actionable in a way that it was very easy to grasp the importance of technical SEO, especially something that can quickly become very complex if you don't come from the web development world. So it is very clear, the why, why it is important, why you need to learn it, what are the key concepts to understand even if you are not going to specialize on becoming a technical SEO, and what makes or breaks a website technical configuration to focus on what's actually key or most impactful? So in the course, that was my expectation, to be... not necessarily make it the most comprehensive course ever. I think I can be a little bit... it's okay to be proud to say that I tried to really cover everything, what actually matters, but that was not necessarily as much of a point of there are so many resources and so much out there where they can learn already from that is also comprehensive, but let's make it meaningful. Let's make it easy to go through, make it a journey, and that it can be helpful for people who are just starting, people who are not already SEOs, as well as those who are SEOs and want to focus more on the technical side of things. So I believe that that is what makes a little bit of a difference between a course or other formats like a guide, a comprehensive guide, or a book even to make it easier to explain and give those details that you cannot necessarily as easily share in the text format. Mordy Oberstein: Before I let Angie reply, just a plug. If you're looking for a guide to SEO, check out the guide that Aleyda has at learnseo.io. Okay Andrew, take it away. Andrew Optimisey: So there was a couple of things for me that I really wanted to aim at, and one of the reasons it was great to work with Wix on this is because... so Wix is used by loads of different people. You get people who are building their own websites themselves who have never done any web dev before. They're running their own little shop like a bakery or whatever, and they have not a clue where to start with SEO. And then you've got big agencies who maybe know a little bit about SEO, enough to make them dangerous, but maybe they need a little bit of guidance on that kind of stuff. So that's where I thought working with Wix with this kind of stuff would be really good, and so I wanted to demystify it a little bit because everybody hears this thing about SEO and, "Oh, it's so complex and it's so tricky and I don't know where to start and how do I do these things? And it changes so fast," and that kind of stuff around... because you said about us writing scripts and we spend a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. As soon as you write stuff down in SEO, it's out date, right? Because it changes quickly and the minute you note it down, then there'll be some update or something will change or there'll be a new platform, a new system and stuff. So one of the things I wanted to do with the stuff that I was writing was teach people a sort of direction to travel, a way of thinking about things like... so if I'm going to show you this particular way to do keyword research and stuff, it's not that this way is the only way. It's that these are some of the things that you might want to think about and how you do this, how you think about customers and how you think about matching your content to intent and all those kinds of things where this is a good direction of travel. I always use the Wayne Gretzky thing all the time in SEO. It's don't go to where SEO is. Skate to where the puck is going. That's how you get really good as Wayne Gretzky as the ice hockey player. You go to where SEO is going. If you know where Google is heading and the directions that SEO generally is trying to go in, if you go in that direction too, you're going to be okay. Mordy Oberstein: That was, by the way, one of the things that we were making the course... and by the way, we didn't write the scripts. The people in our course, they wrote their own scripts. Obviously, we had a course instructor go through and they would tighten it up, whatever it is, but this is coming from... it's the latest focus on technical SEO. It's your focus on keyword research, but that was one of the things that we were thinking about when we made the course. How do we create a course in a way where if something changes, it's not out of data in an instant? Which is very tricky and very complicated. Sorry Crys, I feel like I cut you off. Crystal Carter: No, no. I think that the other thing that we were thinking about when... we were so grateful that you both agreed to do the course and we were so grateful that all the other folks on the course got involved with the course and everyone that has been working with us on this has a common goal, which is basically what you were talking about Aleyda and what you were talking about Andrew, which is demystifying this stuff. There are some people... we've talked about reputational things on this podcast before, but sometimes within the SEO industry people are like, "Oh, it's so complicated." They make it so that you couldn't possibly... people speak in really big words and they speak really convoluted or they speak in jargon or that sort of thing. And everyone, we were so grateful again, that was involved with this, has a focus of, "No, we can speak in plain English, we can speak in plain language, and we can speak in a way that you can understand it. If you stick with this, you'll understand it. It's a question of whether or not you want to learn and that will make it accessible to you." Aleyda Solis: And I think that a big role here, at least it was when I decided to go ahead with the course, and then that I could thankfully also validate through the whole process, was the production quality that you had. I was amazed from the beginning. When we were creating the strips with the examples, the feedback that I got from you it's true that yeah, I did it, but I got amazing feedback to make it super easy to go through first and then secondly, once that we were recording, I remember in London I was mind blown by the whole production around it. So I am delighted to see the outcome now that is going to be launched, because I believe that although there are so many courses out there, there are only so very few that have this not only quality. The content and insights also make it easy for people to understand independently of the complexity and additionally, the production value is so, so high. It's going to be beautiful and can't wait to watch it, too. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Big hearts to you as well. Andrew Optimisey: I think a quick note for all the other people in the Wix Studio team that worked on this kind of stuff, there was a whole bunch of your colleagues that came into town on this. Like Aleyda said, there was times when I'd been writing sections of my course and I'd get a note back saying, "This is great. How can we show it? We need something so it's not just a talking head lecturing you about SEO and here's what you should and shouldn't do. How can we demonstrate this? What does this look like?" And it was like, "Well, I can't really do... it doesn't really work with this." "Okay, well let's think of another example that's similar, that tells the same story, makes the same point, but we can demonstrate it with data. We can demonstrate it with..." If you watch my section of the course, I use a lot of silly rambling analogies and synonyms and silly stuff like stories and things to try and bring that kind of stuff to life. But that, working with the Wix team and your colleagues really help bring that kind of stuff out and make it more of a story so it's more engaging. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you read my mind. I literally wrote a note to myself while Aleyda was talking, "Oh, I need to shout out Natalie Hamouie for being the organizing force behind the entire course. Natalie, you're amazing. Both of you bring up a really good point and it's one of the things that I want to talk about in deciding whether or not to take an SEO course or not take an SEO course, or how do you know if an SEO course is a good course or not. Aleyda, you hinted at it before. When we made the course, we didn't want to make the best SEO course because there is no such thing as the best SEO course. It's a course that I think is good for you for where you're at and what you need right now for your learning journey kind of thing. In fact, to break the fourth wall, when we were making the landing page for the course, we decided, "Well, should we include the word best?" From a pure SEO point of view if you look at what Google's showing, there's a tendency for Google to rank pages that include the word best. Super old school SEO. We said, "No, we're not going to do that because, A, old school SEO and B, It's not on brand for what we want the course to be." I don't think, and maybe you'll disagree with me, that it really is a way to produce the best SEO course. There's only a way to produce something that you think is able to reach a targeted audience at that particular moment. Aleyda Solis: Yeah, one hundred percent, because even if I think that we tried with this course to make it as evergreen as possible... and I remember when we were recording, one of the core metrics was about to be updated and we already talk about it as something from the past, but eventually, something else will be updated that will unfortunately and hopefully not that soon, but at some point it will, so it won't be fresh anymore. So to make it the perfect course at every single point in time, it should be completely updated and potentially even discussing or tackling things that just happened. So I believe that potentially to have the best experience, not the best course, the best learning experience, you should take a course but also complement it with podcasts like this one where you discuss the latest in SEO, the trends, the updates, the news, what is happening, and what matters right now. And what I believe is critical to make the course a great learning experience is to tie it with the SEO day to day, to make it impactful and actionable. Because I believe that what it really let's say challenged me at the beginning of my SEO learning journey was that for me when learning, guides out there, it was very non-tangible and very hard to think of scenarios or circumstances where I will, for example, want to add a nofollow on links or willingly noindex pages at the time and things like that. So providing the scenarios, examples that are usual, common, that people will run into when doing audits or analyzing or assessing opportunities, and also given the very realistic and reasonable idea that it's too idealistic and potentially not reasonable to think that a website will be perfectly optimized ever, but to give a sense of this is the actual goal, this is how you should align everything, and you don't work in a silo too because it's not only about being technical optimized and this ties to revenue and this ties to major bigger goals that are not only SEO-related and stuff like that. I think that that makes all the difference. And many years ago I wrote an SEO fundamentals book in Spanish. And through the years I have gotten people who have told me, Spanish speakers telling me, "This is the book that made the difference when I learned it, not because it discusses new things, but the angle that you took was different, was actionable, and makes sense. All these concepts actually now made sense." So I believe that this is what makes a course or the learning journey through a course better in general and more impactful and actually helpful in your learning journey. Crystal Carter: I think that that's such an important point because there are a lot of people selling very expensive courses with terrible motivations right now. So I think the motivations that you're talking about are so important, to help people actually know how to do it and learn the fundamentals and learn tying it to value of the business and not to, "You can do SEO and you'll make $1 million tomorrow." There's so many people, particularly on TikTok, there's a lot of people selling this digital marketing course and, "I will make da da da da da, and just DM me and I'll tell you all of the secrets and da da da." And then you see there's 17 videos that are all the same thing of all these people saying this stuff. And I'm sorry, if you are somebody who's listening to this and you've seen one of those courses, I'm sorry, but it's a pyramid scheme. That's what's going on there. So they're not going to teach you how to do digital marketing properly. That's something else. Beware the motivations of the folks that are trying to sell you something. And our motivations are to help people learn SEO. That's our motivations. Andrew Optimisey: One of the things that I liked about, again, working with Natalie and the rest of the Wix team, was there was this effort to make the lessons stand alone. Although there is... again, they've made a lot of efforts to then join things up when it's been like, "If you learned a little bit about this, you might want to learn more about it in a later section or in Judith's section," those kind of things. But because they broke the courses up so I don't just rattle on about keywords for hours and hours, there's discrete chunks where it's like, "Here's some basic stuff and here's some middle of the road stuff, and then if you want to go even further with it, here's this bit too." And again, that was something the Wix team were really keen to push me on it. "How do you go even further?" "So this is the one-on-one stuff, this is..." But what if you're like, "This is all really basic," and you skip that because you're already fairly experienced in SEO, but you just want more? "Where do I go next?" So that's one of the things I quite liked about it and then you can cherry pick if you are completely new to SEO and you just want some fundamentals. So again, we talked about the baker that runs the shop. They've got a ten-page website. Technical SEO is probably not going to move the needle for them unless they're doing some absolutely fundamentally awful things, if they have noindex'd their website. So you're going to need some of the technical stuff. So you need enough to make you not completely invisible to Google, but if you're getting onto canonical tags and really complex technical stuff, that's probably not going to make the difference for a ten-page website. What might make the difference is some really good content or building your basic link structures, all those kinds of things. So that's the kind of thing we should build. "Right, you need two stories from this section, two from this section, and two from this, and that's enough for now. Then you can get going and then when you want more, there's more too. So you can come back for those things too." When you get to your 8 million page website because you scaled it up and you are now dominating the world, you're going to need the heck out of the technical section because if you've got that size site, there's no way you're getting anywhere without a solid technical structure. Crystal Carter: I think the other thing that's about that was when we were thinking about the structure of the course, they were like, "Oh, we need something for beginners or something for advanced." And the thing about it, in SEO, sometimes you're a beginner and advanced at the same time. When GA4 comes out, everyone's a beginner at GA4. They're just having to start again with this new piece of technology. We have AI stuff and there's people who are very, very advanced with one type of SEO skill, but maybe you're getting started with AI or maybe they're good at one part of creating content with AI and then they're not so great at this other part of AI. So it is important that you can jump across to different sections and it is important that you can jump to all of those. But I think certainly one of the things with learningseo.io, which is a great resource as well from Aleyda Solis, has a map of even if you jump around, you can see the gaps. So you can see like, "Oh, well I learned this part, but apparently I didn't learn these two parts that lead up to that." Similarly, our courses is that way as well. So you can see the whole and also you can also take it off and go, "All right, I know that. I know that. Okay, I don't know that. I will watch that one." Or you can take the whole thing all together. You have the option. Mordy Oberstein: It's very purposeful because way, way, way back when this was first a concept, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this was because when I started learning SEO, I started learning SEO and I think one of the first things I saw was... I don't know if they still have it or not. The periodic table that Search Engine Land had, that was one of the first things that I saw. And as I started diving into SEO more and more and more, I felt like, "I don't feel like I see the full picture. I feel like I see a little bit here, I see a little bit there, and I don't even know what I'm missing, but I feel like I'm missing something. There's a gap." So I wanted to do a course because when you do something like a course, you can at least walk away feeling like there's obviously going to be more to learn, but there shouldn't be these wide gaps anymore that I feel like, "I don't know where I'm supposed to go next," or, "What did I miss that I shouldn't have missed?" And to zoom out, it kind of goes back to what Crystal was saying before and what Aleyda and Andrew, you're both saying, it goes back to motivations. When you're looking at an SEO course, I'll give you a pointer. Whether you're taking our course or somebody else's course or whatever even that's not about SEO, look who's behind the course. Who are they and what are they about? Because that'll dictate everything about the course. That'll dictate whether or not... I gave Andrew a hard time about his assessment saying, "Drew, let's make it a little bit harder, a little more nuanced, and blah, blah blah." By the way, if you think you had it bad, I was giving Itamar Blauer the hardest time because he was doing a section on third-party SEO tools and it can be very straightforward. "No, let's give actual cases and examples and let's try to give scenarios so this way, you can take what he was talking about and apply it somewhere else." So you should talk to Itamar, Andrew, because I was giving him... putting through the ringer of trying to... no, but because of what Aleyda was saying before, you want to try to have it scenario-based whenever you can. You want to try to make it as practical and real-world whenever you can, because when you walk away learning SEO from a blog post or from whatever it might be, a webinar, that's one of those gaps. And the reason why I felt we did a good job with this was because the people behind the course, whether it's us on the Wix side or whether it's y'all as the instructors are people who at one point or another struggled with learning SEO and it was meaningful to do something for somebody who is currently struggling to learn SEO. Aleyda Solis: Just to also potentially close the circle regarding motivations, because I think that is also very, very important. When someone takes a course, you need to invest a little bit of more time, I have to say, and attention than what takes to go through a guide for example, or skim reading an e-book, something like that. But you actually need to put a lot of more focus, and many times also not a trivial investment for many people. And motivation is key here of what you want out of that. For many, it will be, "Okay to start understanding what is this about, complement my already existing experience, or because I feel that I need to take my skills on these topics to the next level, there are certain areas or configurations or elements that I don't know yet how they tie in or how I can connect them to what I do in the day to day." So these are fantastic. Also, I have to say something, right? It was a few years back when I was giving this pro bono course about technical SEO, and I asked a little bit about the feedback regarding the motivations of the people learning very honestly, and I think it's good, right? It's okay. It's understandable. Some of them say, "I want to start with technical SEO and focus more on technical SEO rather than content in all the areas, because I have heard that because it is more complex, it pays better, and I see the salary ranges out there and they are higher." And I was like, "Look, this is legit. This is completely reasonable." Just make sure that it's not only about the pay, because realistically it's true that many of these more specialized roles, depending a little bit on the type of specialization can end up paying more, but it pays more because these are on companies that have bigger SEO departments and hire very specialized people. These very specialized people have already had a very big journey and a lot of experience not only that area, but understand well the overall process, the fundamental... and how that area actually has an impact that makes money and drives revenue and achieves goals at... very likely at an enterprise level. So this ties in on how important it is to understand that you don't work on a silo, so even if you want to only focus on technical SEO or link building or content or whatever, it is fundamental that you have... how important is your specific or particular area within the SEO context and the context of the business that you're working in, because that is what actually makes a difference at the end of the day. Not necessarily how complex it is, only because... and you understanding the concepts and nailing the concepts and knowing how to code in case you do technical SEO, but actually moving the needle and changing what actually matters to drive the impact that these bigger companies are willing to pay big bucks for. And this is it, right? Crystal Carter: And I think the other thing that also comes with that is, of course, if you're working to get a job in the industry, having a course, doing a course can be super useful. And if you're trying to get a job or you're planning to increase your skillset so that you can get a pay raise or so you can get whatever, that's totally valid because we live in the world and then people got to pay the bills. I totally get that. But what's also important is that if that's only your motivation, very often you might get bored or tired of SEO fairly quickly. You have to be a little bit curious as well because it can be very complex and you have to be the person that goes, "But why? No, but why? No, but really, but why?" over and over and over again until you figure out what it is. And I think one of the only ways that you can do that alongside a course is to be building, be testing, be looking at things in real life. So throughout the course, we have examples of how you can implement things on Wix Studio, how you can implement things across your Wix website, et cetera, et cetera. These are ways that you can get started with trying out content. So if you don't have your own website, it's fairly straightforward to get set up on Wix to building a website. Pretty straightforward. And a lot of the technical things are built in to help you get going with that, and it means that you can test and you can iterate. If you don't have your own website, then I highly recommend while you're doing this course, getting involved with a website so you can say to the people who... your football team or your neighbor or something you volunteer with, "Can I help you with your website?" And chances are they'll go, "Yeah," because nine times out of 10 they're not doing anything with it. And you can have a look in their Google Search Console, you can set them up on GA4. You can have a look at whether their links are working. You can crawl their site map, you can use some of those tools, but it really helps to understand the concepts if you're able to see them in real time, particularly with technical SEO and also with content. When you're looking at how people respond to content and how Google ranks content, you can't see that without seeing that in the wild. And it's a live ecosystem, so you have to be involved with it. And I highly, highly, highly recommend doing SEO in parallel with the course. Andrew Optimisey: And one of the things I liked about it was... so when you work with people who are part of a digital marketing role rather than an SEO specialist, is that they have to wear lots of hats. And much as they would love to know all of SEO, I very much doubt anybody... there'll be some people that will sit there and just smash through the whole course in one go. They'll have a lot of free time, but it's like you can kind of cherry-pick a little bit. So there's going to be times when there's a project coming up where we have the budget and we have the developer time, and we have the resource to go after content, so this is the thing we're going to focus on, this particular topic area, and my boss has said, "Right, we've previously worked on dog food. Now we're doing cat food content." "We need content right now. How do we do the..." and so you can then go and if you've not done content, if you're more of a technically minded SEO and you haven't really done content stuff before, or maybe you are one of these T-shaped digital marketers who's good at lots of things but only super deep on one or two things, you can choose a bit of the course that best suits the project you're going to work on. And then maybe later down the line, there'll be more budget and it'll be, "Okay, well actually we found that there's all these issues going on in Search Console and technically our website's falling over and it's really slow, and what do we do with these kinds of things?" "Okay, I don't really know enough about... so I'm going to go and I'm going to watch this section of the course and I'm going to learn about these things that I need to scale up a little bit more on." So then you can make better use of your time. So when you do get that project that comes up and works in that particular area, you can make sure that you're thinking about all the things that you should need to cover in that section so that project really works. And so that works for, say, digital marketing teams, those mom and pop shops we talked about, but then also those people that are working in those bigger companies that maybe it helps to then have that sympathy and empathy with the people that you are working with. If you're a super great technical SEO and you've got these content people banging on you all the time about, "Can we get this done? Can we do this?" And you're like, "Oh." If you can watch that bit of the course, then maybe you can understand a bit more about where they're coming from and then you can have a bit more of a useful conversation rather than just banging heads all the time. Mordy Oberstein: You took our course and you transcended it from being learning about SEO to making the world a more harmonious and better place. There's no better place than- Andrew Optimisey: We can all be friends. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, other than saying thank you both so much for being a part of the course, thank you to Mike Stepney, to Itamar Blauer, to Jill Quick, to James Clark, to Judith Lewis, to Celeste Gonzalez, to everyone who helped on the back end of the course, and Debbie Chu obviously as well. Thank you so much for being a part of the course and thank you, Aleyda and Andrew, for not only being a part of the course, but being a part of our little podcast. Andrew Optimisey: Thanks. Aleyda Solis: Always a great time. Mordy Oberstein: All right, thanks again so much, Aleyda and Andrew, A, for sitting down with us here in this podcast and for of course being a part of our course. So we spent the entire episode until now talking about... or working with the assumption that taking an SEO course is a good idea and it represents a good way to learn SEO provided it's the right fit for you, if the course is the right fit for you. But is that actually the case? Let's challenge some assumptions about our new SEO course with a special edition of It's New. Mordy Oberstein: It's New, being the course is new, by the way. The SEO learning from a course is not new, but our course is new. Crystal Carter: It is new. We spent a lot of time on it and it's new, fresh out the box. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's funny? Because for me, it doesn't feel new because I've been working on this thing for months. It's old. Crystal Carter: I think that's because anything good takes a little while to cook. You got to let it cook. Mordy Oberstein: Really? My great popcorn is delicious. Takes, I don't know, a minute and a half. Crystal Carter: To be fair though, somebody prepped it beforehand. They put all that delicious buttery stuff in the bag. I don't know what's in that stuff, but it's delicious. I can't even cope. Mordy Oberstein: It's basically butter-flavored cancer. Crystal Carter: I don't know, but I literally... I've pulled it off before. Mordy Oberstein: Did you ever- Crystal Carter: And just eat the butter. Mordy Oberstein: You scraped... you take the popcorn and like a lunatic, scraping the inside of the bag like a scratch and sniff? Crystal Carter: Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: It's delicious. Mordy Oberstein: It's so good. Crystal Carter: No regrets. Mordy Oberstein: What are we talking about again? Courses. Crystal Carter: Courses, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. So why is this a special edition of It's New? It's because we asked Celeste Gonzalez and Judith Lewis, who are another two of our course instructors, about why learning SEO from a course is a good idea. You might say that's biased. We say that's good marketing, but you can listen to what they had to say and make your own decision. Here's Celeste on why taking an SEO course is a good way to learn SEO. Celeste Gonzalez: Learning SEO through a course provides you with a structured foundation that hits all essential topics. A course offers expert guidance from knowledgeable professionals, so you'll get real insights and practical tips that you may not encounter until you can get hands-on experience. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for that, Celeste. Yeah, that's a great point. But that last thing she mentioned is a really, really good point because the hands-on experience is where you fundamentally... you have to have hands-on experience. There's no way around that. However, if you don't have it, getting a course is good a foundation for when you do have it. But more importantly, I think is, while you are... let's say you're building your own website on Wix or Wix studio and you're doing that hands-on work to learn SEO. You do need reference points to go back to. It's like, "All right, I have it all in my head. Now I just have to implement it." If it were that easy, you wouldn't need a course, but you need to go back like, "Okay, now I ran into a situation. What does Celeste say in the course about that? Okay, fine. Now I'll do this." Crystal Carter: Right, and I think also sometimes when you do a course, particularly with SEO, you can layer your learning and you can layer your implementation. So maybe when you first go over the course, you're thinking about on-page SEO, and you're like, "Cool, I can do title tags," and you do title tags and then you learn more about the keyword research and stuff and you're like, "Oh, okay, I can add this to the title tags." Or you go back to the same piece of content after you learn more about technical SEO and maybe you're like, "Oh, I can add this technical element to this page as well." And there's basically... things will be fresher to you when you listen or when you go back to them again and they will appeal to you in different ways, so it's good to be able to go at your own pace. It's like listening to jazz. If you listen to jazz, sometimes you listen to the piano player, sometimes you listen to the saxophone player, and sometimes when you do that, it feels like a brand new song. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well first of all, it's like when I listen to my kids. Sometimes I listen to the one and I tune out the other one. But also, glad you said your point about what you just said because here's Judith Lewis about why you should take an SEO course, and I'll think you find great minds think alike. Judith Lewis: So I was asked, what are some of the advantages of learning SEO from a course? I used to teach courses in person and in the pre-pandemic days, and it was really difficult, I think, for some of the students to keep up, especially with the advanced elements of the course. When you're learning SEO from a course online though, you can pause, rewind, and listen to that section again. It's really hard to pause me, rewind me, and listen to that section again in a classroom, so one of the best advantages of learning SEO from a course online is that you get to pause, rewind, and listen again. And I might be biased, but I feel like my section of the course is one you're going to want to listen to over and over again, and it's my hope that you'll refer back to it time and time again. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, well first off, thank you Judith, and see? Great minds do think alike. That's just exactly what Crystal said. And by the way, Crystal did not know that Juidth said that. That's the first time Crystal heard the recording. Crystal Carter: This is true, but in my earlier discussion with Aleyda, I also said this: it's worth following along and going through some of the steps, going through some of the implementation if you can, while you're doing the course, and that's really great for rewinding and stuff. We also say this about some of the webinars is that, sometimes people say, "Oh, I'm not sure I understand the concept." I'm like, "Watch the whole thing." And this is one of the ways I learned personally. "Watch the whole thing, get the full scope of how it's all going to roll out, and then if there's the particular concept that you're not sure about, go back to that." But sometimes having a full idea of the full picture can help you to understand what one particular element might be, so it's great to be able to go at your own pace. I love online learning for that. It's really, really, really great value. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I like this... for an example, you can go and dive into one thing, come back out. You don't have to go in chronology... I learn like that. I don't like going in chronological order sometimes. I pop in here, pop out, pop in somewhere else. So courses are great for that, for the reasons that you're saying. You know who's basically an SEO course in his own right? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: seoroundtable.com is basically one giant, unorganized SEO course. Crystal Carter: It is really like a time capsule. He really just keeps all of the things that happen on Google is on there, so if you want to know when this feature came out, you will find it on Search Engine Roundtable. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, for sure. Crystal Carter: If you want to know when Google announced this thing... whenever I have to do research on historical things of, "This came out here, this came out then, that happened then," if you want to see the evolution of a feature, that's where you go. Mordy Oberstein: That's why I like the old design of seoroundtable.com because it felt literally like a time capsule. And with that, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. This one comes at you from Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land: Google rolls out new AI organized search results, AI overview links. So there's a bunch of changes here. Some of these were announced previously at some of Google's events like first of the AI organized search results. Google announced they were going to do this... I think it was back at Google IO? I've seen a similar format when they were talking about releasing... or when they released Google Gemini itself, but basically we've seen this in local space before, by the way. So new, but not new-new. The example here, by the way, is from a recipe query. So you could get the SERP organized according to, let's say, different topics. I think the example they have is around cooking cherries, if I'm not mistaken? Or cherry tomatoes or sauce recipes or whatever it is. I think it was... right, vegetarian appetizer ideas. There we go. And you can see a carousel of top recipes. You could explore by ingredient, so they have cheese or crackers or avocado. You can explore by the ingredient that way. Then they lay out the SERP with maybe guides to cooking the best vegetarian appetizer. They're basically breaking down the SERP according to the various subtopics, the various intents. I like it. I think it all makes it very much more usable as a user trying to find something, trying to explore something, and I think this is a great case of AI being implemented the right way. I think you're going to see this expand all over the place. There're going to be Solace already in local. We're seeing it now with the recipe query. I like it. I think it's great. I think it aligns with Google, which I mentioned originally showed with Gemini in their demo, or its demo back then. Okay. Google also said the new way of linking and citations in AI overviews that we talked back in August. Barry says that that format's going live across the board, so that seems great. Also, here's an interesting one. Google's saying, "Yeah, going to get some ads in the AI overviews." In fact, if you head over to Search Engine Journal, Brookes Osmundson says, "Google officially launches ads in AI overviews." You can see, by the way, in the example that they have there, how it'll actually look. It looks pretty interesting. Basically you have a query for whatever, like... I don't know, how do you get a grass stain out? You have your AI overview summary, and in this case, at the bottom of the AI overview is a little sponsor label with that typical product carousel sponsor products. So that's what it looks like in this particular case, so that's really interesting. Should make folks like Greg Finn pretty happy. I suspect Google also announced updates to its Lens features and how you can search with Lens and shopping with Lens. So for example, yeah, you could have always taken a snapshot with the Lens of a product and said, "Hey, find me more examples of that product." But now Google's saying you can also do the same thing, but now get more context about the product along with it when you search for it. So that's great, a bunch of additions on the AI front. Super cool, super awesome. Links to the show notes. That's this week's Snappy News. Thank you again, Barry, for all the great news you provide. By the way, I'm going to break a fourth wall here. We record the news afterwards. After this, and I always thank Barry anyway because I know I'm going to inevitably use an article from Barry. Also thinking to anyone else I might have quoted in this week's episode. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Right. Thank you for the news and for being newsworthy. Well done. Mordy Oberstein: Did I tell you? Behind the scenes, when we did the hundredth episode, we had Barry on for the news and I'm like, "Oh, there's nothing going on this week." I'm like, "Barry, I don't know what to cover. There's nothing happening." It was Labor Day week, we lost a day. Barry was like, "No, I got you. Big news is coming." I'm like, "You know, you asked for SEO news and the great Barry in the sky makes it rain." Crystal Carter: He does. Mordy Oberstein: And it turns out there's a day the core update finished rolling out, so we covered that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Barry makes it rain SEO news. Crystal Carter: Every time. Mordy Oberstein: Every time. Okay, so that brings us to the last part of our podcast with the Follow of the Week. I'm cheating a little bit this week. Crystal Carter: Why? Mordy Oberstein: I'm having a lot of buttered popcorn from the microwave. I'm cheating. Crystal Carter: Are you not just going to shout out yourself? I think it's like that Snoop Dogg song where he's like- Mordy Oberstein: That would be so narcissistic. Crystal Carter: Snoop Dogg got that award and he was like, "Last of all, I'd like to thank... first of all, I'd like to thank me and myself for all the hard work that I did, for all the sleepless nights and for everything." And I was like, "You know what?" Mordy Oberstein: You're not wrong. Crystal Carter: "Sometimes you're like that." Mordy Oberstein: You're not wrong. Crystal Carter: "Sometimes you're like that." You do need... Obviously, thank other people as well, but you do need to thank yourself as well a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: All right. All right, so we'll do it like this then, okay? We're going to recommend you follow all of the course instructors, so Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Judith Lewis, James Clark, Jill Quick, Itamar Blauer, Mike Stephanie, Debbie Chu, Celeste Gonzales, Crystal Carter... Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And if you want, you can follow me at your own risk. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's right. Literally, we were so honored and one of the things that's great about working with this team is that we get to do cool stuff like this, and it's such an honor to be able to be like, "Hey, do y'all want to do our course?" And all of these fine SEOs said yes, which is amazing and I'm so honored because literally they're some of the best folks. Mordy Oberstein: And we didn't have to threaten anybody. That's such a Mordy comment to make. 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 in the new episode as we dive into AI overviews and the data behind them. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and whatnot over at the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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

Constance Chen is the Director of Search Marketing at Moving Traffic Media in New York. She specializes in marketing strategy, building Gen AI-driven marketing systems, technical SEO, and content strategy. She studies and explores AI developments and machine learning, writing about industry advancements and providing insights on emerging innovations. Constance Chen Director of Search Marketing at Moving Traffic Media Constance Chen is the Director of Search Marketing at Moving Traffic Media in New York. She specializes in marketing strategy, building Gen AI-driven marketing systems, technical SEO, and content strategy. She studies and explores AI developments and machine learning, writing about industry advancements and providing insights on emerging innovations. Articles & Resources 18 Aug 2025 10 ways Gemini Live can supercharge your SEO tasks 20 Jun 2025 9 ways to use MCP and agentic AI in your marketing stack 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

Kiera is the editorial director of Wix Studio and oversees content on the AI Search Lab and SEO Learning Hub. She has 15 years of experience in SEO and content strategy. Kiera Carter Editorial Director, Wix Studio Kiera is the editorial director of Wix Studio and oversees content on the AI Search Lab and SEO Learning Hub. She has 15 years of experience in SEO and content strategy. In a past life, she held editorial leadership positions at companies like Hearst and People Inc. Her journalism has been published by The New York Times , Wall Street Journal , Marie Claire , and others. Articles & Resources 2 Dec 2025 The content marketing advice you'll need in 2026, according to MozCon speakers 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

Goodness is an SEO analyst that specializes in technical and on-page SEO for eCommerce brands, helping them improve their organic visibility. She enjoys SEO audits, data analysis, and reading novels. Goodness Azubuogu SEO Analyst at Trek Marketing Goodness is an SEO analyst that specializes in technical and on-page SEO for eCommerce brands, helping them improve their organic visibility. She enjoys SEO audits, data analysis, and reading novels. Articles & Resources 29 Jun 2023 The fundamentals of internal linking for SEO Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back Your resource is ready Use this SEO toolkit for Wix web design for a smoother SEO process. We’ve emailed you a link so it’s easy to access. Download 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

Atiba de Souza is a prominent figure in the digital marketing industry, known for his expertise in video content marketing and search engine optimization. He is the founder and CEO of Client Attraction Pros, a video marketing agency based in Rockville, Maryland. Atiba de Souza CEO at Client Attraction Pros Atiba de Souza is a prominent figure in the digital marketing industry, known for his expertise in video content marketing and search engine optimization. He is the founder and CEO of Client Attraction Pros , a video marketing agency based in Rockville, Maryland. Articles & Resources 20 Mar 2025 Video SEO: Engage users and dominate the new search landscape 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

Where does brand authority play into search visibility? How do you measure brand authority on the SERP? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back for more as they discuss the power of branded search and why it matters way more than you think. SEO and Brand Marketing specialist Ronell Smith joins to share aspects of brand visibility he’s seen most commonly overlooked in his 15+ years of experience. Founder of Adapting Social, John Vagueiro, stops by to share how you can turn brand success into revenue. Learn how to articulate your brand in a concise manner on your website as we discover the power of associations from brand to consumer this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Why downplaying branded keywords is costing you big Where does brand authority play into search visibility? How do you measure brand authority on the SERP? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back for more as they discuss the power of branded search and why it matters way more than you think. SEO and Brand Marketing specialist Ronell Smith joins to share aspects of brand visibility he’s seen most commonly overlooked in his 15+ years of experience. Founder of Adapting Social, John Vagueiro, stops by to share how you can turn brand success into revenue. Learn how to articulate your brand in a concise manner on your website as we discover the power of associations from brand to consumer this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 91 | June 12, 2024 | 56 MIN 00:00 / 58:31 This week’s guests Ronell Smith Ronell Smith is a digital marketing strategist helping brands do amazing things with content, including growing their audience, increasing qualified web traffic to their websites, and outwitting the competition. He has extensive experience with enterprise and small business branding and content strategy, having worked with household names, including ESPN, HubSpot, Moz, WordPress, Horizon Fitness, CMXHub, and numerous others. 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 produce some groovy to insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is always on brand , our head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everyone. Hi. How's everyone doing? I think that we are all being true to our core identities and making sure that we are being consistent in our tone of voice and the way that we present ourselves to the world, and I think that that's really important. Mordy Oberstein: I really like your messaging and the way you're positioning the podcast. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. It's something that we have crafted and worked really hard to make sure that we're recognizable and that we have a clear USP. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it sounds like a whole framework. We just keep going. This is SERP's Up Podcast, is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you could also track rank for not just Google, but also for Bing, but also for YouTube and Amazon with RankiX , a new app in the Wix App Market from the people who brought you Pro Rank Tracker. Look forward in the Wix App Market because it can help you track your discovery keywords as well as your branded keywords as today we're talking about the power of branded search and why it matters way more than you think. For example, what happens when you forget about branded searches and it costs you millions and millions and millions of dollars. Literally, we'll get to it. Why being branded first is going to come into SEO focus and how to measure brand on the SERP. SEO and brand marketing OG Ronell Smith joins us to share some common aspects of brand building and brand visibility that folks often miss the mark on. And Crystal and I share a deep thought about how to turn brand success into actual revenue. And of course we have your snap piece of SEO news who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So like the sports field court and/or uniform that you once held to be sacred, let us help you on this 91st episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Tattoo your brand here, there, and everywhere that is the Google SERP. Did you notice that? When I was a kid, you maybe had a brand logo, I don't know, like on the scoreboard at a stadium. Now, hockey rinks, the ads you see in the hockey rink live at NHL game, for example, are not what you see on TV. They're rotating through on TV because the boards are all white and the ice is white. They can just swap... It's an overlay of ads. It's not the actual ad. Crystal Carter: Dude, why are you assuming that I'm watching hockey? Mordy Oberstein: No, I assume you're not. No one watches hockey. I'm just assuming that's an example. As an example. I'm assuming you're not because explaining it assuming that no one watches hockey. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. I've never watched a hockey match in my life. The most hockey I've ever watched is... Oh, a game? Hockey game? Okay. And when they hit the hockey ball, I don't know why they do that, but okay, the most hockey I've ever seen is on the Mighty Ducks and Mighty Ducks 2. Mordy Oberstein: My kids don't appreciate that movie. They're like, "This is boring." Crystal Carter: Yeah, I'm going to say my kids said the same thing. I was like, "Oh wow, this didn't do it." Mordy Oberstein: You know my grandfather got a color TV back in the day because they wanted to see the blood from hockey fights in color. Crystal Carter: Your grandfather had a very dark sense of humor. Okey-dokey. Cool. On that bombshell. Okay, so basically we are talking about branded search. The reason why I wanted to talk about this is because sometimes people overlook the importance of branded search. People will say to you as an SEO person, they'll say, "Oh, you got... Yeah, there search coming through, but it's all brand or a lot of it is brand. So what about this?" And don't get me wrong, there's definitely... There are definitely different values to branded search, non-branded search. So for instance, there's a great article that was just published on the Moz blog that talks about branded search and non-branded search. And they were saying that according to Statistia? Mordy Oberstein: I always get that wrong. I'm not the only one who gets that name. That's not good branding right there. Crystal Carter: It's hard to pronounce. You know the one I'm talking about. If you don't know, Google will correct you on the internet. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Statistica? Crystal Carter: Yeah, Statista, I think Statista. Mordy Oberstein: There's no C in there, sorry. Crystal Carter: Okay. Statista says that 58% of searches for global brands are non-branded with, and that means that the other amount is branded, 42% are branded for global brands. And that's good, that's interesting. But what I think people worry about is they say, "Oh, but they're all branded search" and they take it as if it's for granted, as if branded search is something that just comes out of nowhere. But I'll tell you right now, having worked with money brands that branded search is not something that you should take for granted. Branded search is not something that just happens by magic. And if you have somebody who's working for you, who's doing your SEO for you, and they've got you some branded search, then you're welcome. Okay. That's something that is valuable and it's useful for you and it tells you a lot of things. If your branded search is increasing, that means more people know about your brand and more people are searching directly for your brand. This is something that the team at Rise at Seven have seen happen really, really well. They've been able to drive branded search so that branded searches increase. You can also see in Google Trends whether or not for your brand are increasing over time, which is useful as well. And this can be really, really important indicator for whether or not campaigns are working. So for instance, if you have a big billboard campaign or big television campaigns or things like that, you should see your branded search increase. If you're using radio for instance in a certain local area, you should also see branded searches increase there. And that means that your offsite marketing is working in tandem with your onsite marketing. The other thing that's really important about branded search is that the people who are searching for you have a place to land. And that is really, really important and also is something that should not be taken for granted. I've seen it a number of times where I've gone and searched very often for smaller brands, but sometimes for larger brands as well. And I've gone to find out what their new thing that is that they're doing, a new product or their main brand, themselves, and I'm not able to find it on Google by searching for their particular brand. And if I cannot find you, and if I search once and I think, "Oh, maybe it's me, maybe I misentered it," I check the thing again and I search and I still can't find it, then I'm going to give up. Okay. And I think that it's important that people realize not only that you need to make sure that your brand is clear on the website, because I've had it before where smaller brands have said to me, "Oh, I'm not ranking on Google, and I do the site search, the search modifier on Google, and I can say, yes, you are ranking on Google. I can see your pages are indexed on Google based on the search." And then they say, "Oh, but when I search my name, I can't find me." And I go, "Because you don't have your name on your website." And so for those people, branded search is incredibly important to them, and yet they haven't made the investment on them. And that's something that an SEO person can help you with, can help make sure that you've got all of those branded searches there. The other thing that's super important for branded search is when you have, my favorite SERP, which is when somebody googles your brand and it's all your brand. Mordy Oberstein: It's all yours. Crystal Carter: And all your brand, all of the channels. And I've had it where it's been my name or whatever, and I'm like, "Oh, it's all me. It's all me." And basically when you have that, that's your brand. You have your website at the top very often. Sometimes it might be your social depending on what's going on. So it'll be your website, your social media, your LinkedIn, maybe an article about you, maybe a listing on a niche directory, something like that. And that's great because that means that nobody else is sneaking in. What you don't want when somebody googles your brand is somebody else showing up there, somebody else showing up there with an article about you or with some other information about you. That is not what you want. That's not great at all. And that's something, again, that should not be taken for granted. That's something that has to be crafted with SEO support. Mordy Oberstein: And that goes... It can literally cost you millions of dollars. And I'm not joking. So I was talking about this with Eli Schwartz who a friend of the podcast, friend of SEO Hub, contributor. People paid millions, brands, companies paid millions upon millions upon million dollars on Super Bowl ads. And there were a few of them this year where I never heard of the company before. They're new, they're trying to bust into the market, by doing a big splash thing. I never heard of them before. I'm not going to say who it is, I don't want to disparage anybody. You google them and they don't rank for their branded keywords, so you just spend millions of dollars. Everyone's like, "I don't know who you are. That's an interesting commercial. Let's go to Google and figure who you are." And you don't rank for your branded keywords, you just flushed millions of dollars down the digital toilet. Crystal Carter: Yo. And that is just... It breaks my heart. It breaks my heart. Whenever I see that somebody's not ranking for their brand name, it breaks my heart. And I think that I say people just take it for granted. They just assume that it just happens. Mordy Oberstein: Or SEOs will assume. Businesses will assume SEOs will downplay it. Business' like, "Oh yeah, of course I will rank for my branded name." Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: No, particularly, especially because sometimes you might think your brand name is very unique, but it might not be as unique as you think it is. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Secondly, SEOs will be like, "Oh, I will rank," no, millions of dollars. You can cost your clients millions of dollars if you don't handle. The SEO, who's supposed to handle that... If they have an SEO, maybe they don't have an SEO, but assuming they do have an SEO, drop the ball and cost them millions of dollars. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. And I think that sometimes you have the case where your SERP is tricky or maybe they didn't think about the name or maybe they didn't think about the website or something like that to make it particularly unique. And that can be a challenge, but that's what your SEO is supposed to make it happen for you. Your SEO is supposed to bring that together for you. And I think that that's really important because, like I say, it doesn't happen by magic. Mordy Oberstein: Let's say that I'm making it up, I'm just going to search this as we're doing it. Say your name of your company is Connect Marketing. Google might understand, "Do you want to learn about connecting marketing to something or is actually your brand, and actually a name of a company?" In this case Google knows the name of the company, but it's quite possible not. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it can change for different things. So for instance, for branded products, that's also something to consider as well, because there's different channels that are going to be better for different products and different things as well. So for instance, for non-branded products, people tend to go to Amazon. So if I just want some leggings for instance, I will go to Amazon. If I want Fabletic leggings, if I want, I don't know, Savage Fenty leggings or something, I will go to Google for instance to find the right website to make sure it's authentic, to make sure it's this, that, or the other. And I think that that's really important to think about as well about that customer journey because Google will have additional points to help people to verify that the brand that they're looking at online is really important. So if you think about knowledge panels, if you think about reviews, if you think about the schema markup, if you think about the way that your business is displaying as a local business, for instance, markup so that people know that this is the actual real site, because I think that people forget that there's a lot of fakes out there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, there's a big deal on the finance industry, for example like Capital One. There's I think fake websites out there because if you... There's a different character that looks like an actual A that's not an actual A. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And it makes it look like that's the actual website, but it's not. Crystal Carter: Right. And that's something that people have to consider as well. So you need to make sure that your legit website looks legit, and this is why Google is leaning into the EEAT stuff. On social, there are so many people... I've had it a couple of times where people are like, "Hey, I'm going to follow you." And I was like, "Oh, that's so-and-so," and then I get these weird DMs and then I look at it again and I'm like, "Oh, that's not so-and-so, that's some random person who is duplicating that social media site." And there was a really interesting study where somebody was on... It's a YouTube video actually, and they were talking about TikTok ads and there was this TikTok campaign with these particular summer dress. All the ads had the same images, all the ads had the same videos and all the ads had the same dresses, but she ordered from all these different places, from all these different websites that were selling this dress, and she got seven different dresses from all of these different folks. So I think you have to remember that consumers are in a space where there's lots of people trying to trick them online. And so you need to make sure that your brand is really clear, your brand is really articulate, your brand is very robust in terms of trust signals so that people understand that. And guiding that branded search and curating your branded search is a very, very important part of that. Mordy Oberstein: I think establishing that brand by the way is going to become much more part of the algorithmic picture than people give it credit for. First of in an area, I think on the podcast before or we did it in a blog post, I can't... We do so much stuff, I can't remember what we did anymore. We've definitely talked about this before where Google's going to have to look at brands differentiating themselves because that's what the consumer wants. The consumer wants a brand that's a little bit differentiated because an influx of content out there already. A lot of it is garbage. And I say content, I mean both products and actually informational content. And with the whole AI extravaganza is going out at the same time, the brands that differentiate themselves are going to align with what consumers want and Google knows that. So brands that differentiate themselves are going to be rewarded on the SERP and it's going to factor into the algorithm. It's similar to what we spoke about with the whole Reddit thing. I’m sorry not with the Reddit thing, with the news publisher ecosystem thing. Again, we're talking about so many things. Google's going to, I think... One of the ways they're going to handle some of the problems on the SERP, including this problem, is by focusing on brand identity. What's your website identity? Who are you as a website? What are you focused on? What are you doing? Is that aligned with the queries that you're ranking for? So having that strong branding and owning those branded SERPs will help you rank for the other things and it's going to come into focus. Having that strong branding and that... Because branding means a lot, which we are not going to get into right now. It's much more than just like, "Here's my brand name." Branding is everything. It's all of your communications, it's all of your ways that you're resonating with audiences. Your content is your brand, and being able to differentiate that content, and by having strong brand identity will I think give you that authority and give you that differentiation the algorithm's going to be rewarding in the future. That's like my SEO prediction for 2025, and we're not done in 2024 yet. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that in the era of LLMs and of generative search via being Copilot, via Gemini, via the SGE, via Perplexity, via all of those sorts of things, if these tools have a good understanding of what your brand is, then they're going to be able to make recommendations to people looking for something in that space. I talked about schema markup in an article, a schema markup primer, and one of the things I was pointing out is that your entity has articulated in your schema, as articulated as part of your brand identity, as part of your brand entity, your knowledge panel, et cetera, et cetera, is something that LLMs are aware of. So if I said like, what is Dairy queen? It is a fast food chain in the United States. If I go to Wikipedia, it will say, "Dairy Queen is a fast food chain in the United States." And they understand that, and I think that it's really important for you to think about and to use tools like Wikipedia or whatever, like the schema properties that guide you of what things these tools need to know about you to make sure that you have a clear sense of what your brand is. And I think that if you don't know what your brand is, it's very difficult for other people to, and it's certainly going to be very difficult for search engines and generative search to do that. And if they don't understand, they can't send people to your site in that space. When people are looking for things in less of a guided way than a traditional search engine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. As a concept, what's going to come into focus, whether it's Google, whether it's an LLM, is having a presence, you have to have a presence, and presence means having an identity. You can't have a digital presence or online presence, whatever you want to call it, without having strong identity. And identity comes from branding. So brand-first optimization or brand-first SEO is going to mean creating or establishing a web presence that's built on strong identity, which is done via branding. I want to give it to something you were saying before about measuring branded search, which there are tools to do. For example, if you throw a domain into Semrush, one of the metrics that they give you is the percentage of branded versus non-branded search, and they'll give you trend as branded search going up. And you could use that, as you mentioned, as a way to see is your brand resonating? Because Google is the source of web traffic and it's not even close. If you see more people searching for your brand, over time, you can use that as... I wouldn't rely on this as the only metric by the way. I think it's very linear. But you can use it as part of painting the picture of how well is your brand doing. I'll also say, and I've done this for many a clients, you can use the breakdown of branded versus non-branded keywords, but most importantly, the brand traffic trend, is brand traffic going up to assess a market? So if I was doing, let's say... I don't know, I'm an advertising agency and I have a sport, I have... The NBA is my client and I want to understand where is the NBA right now. I can look at their social media followers relative to the NFL. I can look at their social media followers relative to major league baseball. Whatever it is. I could also look at is there interest over time? Is brand search going up? Is it going down? Is it going up, is it going down versus other leagues? For example, the NBA's branded search traffic has basically been stagnant for the better part of a year. Obviously it'll be seasonal because when it's in season it'll go up and down, but overall it's been static for a year. Major League baseball and the NFL have both seen an increase over the past year, so that might be a problem, obviously then again. Or you can look at the percentage of branded search terms. For example, 79% of the NFL's traffic comes through branded search. That's a very, very powerful brand. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think it's worth thinking about some of the other ways that people are talking about your brand. Because it might be that there's something that's very specific to you that might not show. For instance, Semrush will give you branded search and it might be associated with your particular brand name, but there's going to be products within your product set as well that are going to be in there. And there's also going to be things that are unique to you as well. So if you're thinking about like the MLB for instance, there's going to be stuff that's very specific to that like the World Series, so there's going to be Major League Baseball or something like that. The World Series is something that is Major League baseball. That's their property, that's their brand property, and that's important to think about as well. When you're thinking about your brand, not only you're going to need to map the things that are literally your brand name, but also the things that are unique to that as well because that will also give you that shape of whether or not the things are moving and how they're moving through as well. Mordy Oberstein: To that point, you can also filter through. If you go to Semrush. If you go through the Organic Research tool and you filter by the branded terms, the MLB, so you could see all the terms, like do playoffs come up? For example, with MLB, like MLB news pops up a lot. MLB standings, MLB playoffs. Oh playoffs, that's a big deal. Power rankings, that's a big deal. So you can see what exactly is your audience actually interested in or not interested in by what they're adding onto your branded name. If you ran the same thing for like... If you saw, for example with NFL, they're searching for sucks next to it, that would be a problem. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Right. That would be a problem. And I think also we've had Ross Simmonds on talking about Reddit. Reddit is a great tool for getting a guide on your brand in terms of how people are feeling about your brand because you can go into a tool like Semrush for instance. You can put in the Reddit domain and then you can filter by your brand name. And then you get all of the questions that people have about your brand name. That's super useful. Also, if you go to something called AlsoAsked, you can also get some of the people also asked questions about your brand and you should be answering those questions. Similarly, if you go into Google Search Console, you can see all the questions that people are asking about your brand products and all of those things as well, and you should be answering those questions. If you're looking at your brand, when you think about... For instance, People Also Ask shows on the majority of searches on Google, and if people are going and they're seeing your brand, and the people also ask questions are all being answered by other folks, that's a challenge for you. You should be thinking about how can we do that? How can we partner with those people if we're not answering it directly? Because sometimes there are comparison things and that's okay, so we can see that. But you should have a relationship with every single thing that's on there and/or you should be creating something yourself. The other thing about branded search, particularly when people are looking for your actual products and they want to know answers for your actual products, is that the chances of you ranking for a piece that somebody is asking a question about your product, like if somebody is saying, I don't know, "Can I get box seats for the World Series?" For instance, and like, "At Yankee Stadium." Yankee Stadium should be ranking for that and it should be really easy for them to rank for that. Because they are the authority on box seats at Yankee Stadium because they have the box seats at Yankee Stadium. So that makes sense. And also the chances of you having competition for some of those terms are going to be really, really low. There's going to be a lot less competition for some of those things. And also if you're... I'm going to shout out to my resource in the resource center about looking at the questions that you can get from your customers. If you're getting those questions directly from your customers, they're not even in search tools, so other people aren't seeing those. Only you are seeing those. But you know that there's a need for it. So again, you're going to be out there ranking for stuff that nobody else is competing for your brand and that is great for the search and that's great for users as well. Google loves when you're able to answer something that nobody else is able to answer and users love it too. Mordy Oberstein: Also, the last point I'll say about this before we move on to Ronell is if you're seeing all this data and all this information, you should use this to leverage your position in the company and your organization to help the brand. I'll give you a clear case. So the NFL cut down on preseason games because they wanted to increase a number of regular season games and that was a trade-off they made. They said to the players, "We'll take away a preseason game and we'll add on a regular season game." And the preseason like meh, really weak. It was already weak. By the way, it also makes a regular season the beginning a little bit weak because this game's just not as good. They haven't had much practice. And you might think if I'm the NFL, no one cares about the preseason, no one cares that we took away a game. No one wants to... What do they care, is just a preseason game? If you run the branded searches through this a tool like Semrush, you'll see that some of the top performing keywords with the most search volumes for the term NFL have to do with the preseason. There's a tremendous, and I can't explain it because it makes no sense, there's a tremendous amount of interest in preseason football. So now you as an SEO to go to the branding and say, "Look, we understand what you're doing, but you need to understand that your audience is actually interested in this and they're probably a little bit ticked off that you killed the preseason to whatever extent you killed the preseason." Crystal Carter: Right. So we need to do something. Mordy Oberstein: We as a company need to do something and now you as the SEO are the hero that save the company. Crystal Carter: Right. This is something that's really, really worth looking at because yeah, absolutely, those brand new searches are worth money. Mordy Oberstein: With that, we need to talk about some of the common aspects of brand building that people miss and who better than Ronell Smith to share some of the common aspects of brand building that people miss. Here's Ronell. Ronell Smith: In my experience of working with hundreds of brands over the last 15 plus years, there are three things businesses get wrong when it comes to brand building. And these are businesses of all sizes, not simply small businesses. The number one thing businesses get wrong is in not clearly understanding the value of having a brand. They think having a strong brand is important only for the Apples or the Teslas or the Nikes of the world, which is wrong. First, you must understand that a brand is simply a set of associations or beliefs that consumers have about your products or services. It serves as a shorthand or rubric to help them identify and select offerings based on their needs. Most importantly, you need a strong resonant brand because consumers before, during, and after the sale, are attracted to what are called aspirational brands. That is brands that make them feel or look better by association. For example, people buy Nikes not because they're the best shoe, they buy them in large part because of the signal they send. Athleticism, quality, style. That's why it's important for businesses to think of the positive associations they want to create for consumers when building a brand. The second issue I see is businesses thinking of branding as something they do, like sharing images or video on social media, as opposed to being about who they are in the minds of consumers and potential consumers. Sure, sharing information on the web, especially via social media is important. That's not branding. Branding, as NYU Professor Scott Galloway says, refers to the perception of value, specifically the creation of the perception of value. It's the feeling people have when they see, interact with, or own your products or services. For example, a local designer who creates themselves a unique client of products that are beloved by her audience, can use an online platform such as Facebook or Twitter to market her products, but branding is the story or vision created in the audience's mind in advance of them owning those products or services. The third area too often neglected by businesses regarding branding is in not understanding the value of branding search, branded search. In the digital world, many times when folks go looking for items online, they search using the name of a product or company based on the feedback from others or an association they've had in the past with the brand. So if you've invested in building a brand, you often aren't having to compete for the click with other companies in the search engine results pages, you are the query being typed into the search bar. Also, and this is very important, even if you aren't part of the query, if yours is the brand consumers know and trust, they're more likely to click the link to your site in the SERPs even if you aren't to one of the top results. That's the real power of branding. You don't simply get found. You get chosen. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Ronell. Follow Ronell out there on LinkedIn at Ronell Smith. We'll link to his profile in the show notes. I loved listening to that. We were both sitting here like that was a gospel. That was- Crystal Carter: Honestly. Mordy Oberstein: So good, and I think that I know where to start. There's so many points. I have notes. I have so many notes I wrote down while it was happening, the power of that association. Fundamentally what's happening when you're building a brand is you are creating an association between the consumer and you or you and the consumer. So if everyone has a brand, you either don't exist or you have a brand. The question is who's controlling that narrative? Is it you or is it just like whatever people happen to think about you, which may be good or may not be good? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And what companies do, or what brands do when they make a mistake is they don't realize the power of associations. There's a whole psychology, the whole school of psychology built on it. It's called Fortean psychology, is built on the power of associations. The power of associations is so strong and people want to see themselves and whoever they're associating with or the opposite of themselves, we're not getting into that psychology. Crystal Carter: Like Mike. I want to be like Mike. You mentioned Nike. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but so like when you marry somebody, you see yourself in them. One of the psychological reasons why, and it's going to sound horrible when I put it this way, that you loved your kids so is that you see yourself in your kids. They're a continuation of you. But that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing. But that's how the human psyche functions fundamentally. And what brands do is building associations takes a very long time to do. It's repetitive over and over and over and over and over and over again, consistency throughout time and throughout all channels. And what brands tend to do is skip that step and go right to performance marketing, but you can't actually perform the way you really want to unless you do all of that association and/or brand building beforehand. I'm done. Drop the mic. Crystal Carter: And I think one of the points that really stuck out for me, and this goes to what you're saying as well, but one of the things that he mentioned was that everybody thinks that there's for giant brands like Apple or Nike or all of these sort of stuff, but I think I've mentioned on this podcast before I recently got a shed, I got a new shed and- Mordy Oberstein: Something was against the wall and it was bad. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So the team that built my shed, they don't have a big complicated brand, like online presence, but they definitely have a brand. I know if I talk to them, I will get a certain level of service. I know that they will give me a certain level of professionalism. I know they will do a good job. I know that they will show up on time. I know that... And all of those things, when I think of them, that is what I think of them. That is the first thing that comes to mind is that, "I will go to them because this will be reliable, will be like this will be, that will be like etc." And they don't have to have a big complicated thing, but they have demonstrated that through their actions, through the way that they behave. And that is something that you can do with your content with the way your website is... If your website is janky, people will think you are janky. If your content is inaccurate, people will think you're inaccurate. If your web SERP, if people search you and they can't find you when they search your name, they will think, "Why haven't these people sorted this out?" It will make them question your brand. It doesn't have to be this giant expensive thing. It's like it's show, don't tell. That's how you build brand. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's all those latent associations that you don't realize are being created. I'll tell you a great example. Recently, when we were recording this, there was a sports today, sorry. There was a Dodgers-Diamondbacks baseball game that got delayed because there was a giant swarm of bees stuck under the fence and they had to call a beekeeper in to come spray the bees before they could play the game because if someone hit that part of the fence, let's say with the ball, the bees would start stinging everybody. The guy who showed up the exterminator, just a random guy they happened to get, was a superstar. He's waving to the crowd. He ended up throwing up the first pitch to the game. He got interviewed. And this guy, he was just super suave and super confident. I will put all my money that brand, and you see the brand right on the shirt, and the announcers are mentioning the name of the brand over and over and over again, have so much more business the day after because of the way that guy handled that, because of the association. They now associate that company with that super awesome exterminator guy who was waving at all the fans, throwing out the first pitch. Crystal Carter: Right. Who has a great demeanor, is able to get the job done, is able to show up and be professional, but also relatable, all of that sort of stuff. And those are the things that you learned from that, just from that one interaction. Mordy Oberstein: Now imagine that someone else came, did the same thing, spray the bees, the bees are gone, but he showed up all upset like, "I got to come out in the middle of the night and spray this bee thing at this baseball game." Now imagine how much extra revenue would've been created for that extermination company. Zero. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly, exactly. I think that's another prime example of when to shoot your shot. You don't need to know that this is an opportunity and sometimes it might seem like it's only a little thing, but this is an opportunity. Take the opportunity for your brand. Mordy Oberstein: But that's what brand building does. It creates new opportunities that you never know which is the one that's going to pay off, but because you don't know, people are like, "I don't know which one it's going to be so I won't pay attention to it." Big mistake. Big mistake. Crystal Carter: Could be one little... And if you're thinking about a brand, it could be a little podcast, could be a big podcast, could be an event, could be this and that. I know somebody, he did an event that a speaking event and it was a smaller event, but the photography was fantastic afterwards. So the photography for this small event got him incredible brand value out of it. So always show up. My mom always said, she's like, "Always show up 100%. Whether you're washing cars or whether you're talking to the CEO, always show up 100%. Always give your best for yourself, for your brand, for all of that stuff." Mordy Oberstein: Truth. Mom's smart. Crystal Carter: She is. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, perfect pivot. So being that we're already talking about brand driving revenue, brand should help drive revenue. I know in marketing we often separate brand marketing versus performance marketing, but they're really not separate. One should lead right into the other in my opinion, and to help us see what that actually would look like from the SERP, Crystal and I will explore a deep thought about brand leading to revenue. So okay, I think it's one of those weird things. I think it's not just an SEO, I think it's one of those performance marketing versus brand marketing things where the brand marketers will separate themselves out from the performance marketers and the performance marketers will separate themselves out from the brand marketers. What I mean by that, if you're not familiar with all this jargon is performance market would be like trying to get clicks and impressions and conversion and brand marketers are trying to get messaging and perception and sentiment and associations created and they're very different ways of thinking. I will definitely grant you that. I think there are a few people who can do both, but generally speaking one mindset works in one way. Almost like in a way like content versus technical SEO, remember we did like a comparison, just different ways of thinking about things, left versus right side of the brain I guess. But in reality, while you might need two people to do each one of these things, they should flow back and forth between the other ones. So the way I look at brand is that it should create the opportunity for you to perform. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that there's a great opportunity for brands there because essentially when people are seeing an increase in brand, that means that you've got a little bit of customer loyalty, you've got a little bit of a warm lead because people know something about you in order to search for your brand. And that means that you can either go more in depth with how you're talking about your product because they already know you a little bit or you can take a little bit of a risk, you can do something that's a little bit more complex maybe because people already know you, so you don't have to explain the basics of what you do to them to begin with. And that means that you have different opportunities to connect with people, which is great. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it also means for example, because with ranking, "Oh, I rank number five and someone else ranks number three. Oh, they're going to get the click because they rank number three." That's necessarily true. If you can establish yourself... Let's just focus solely on Sal for a minute. If you can establish yourself on the other SERPs where the same person was doing research or is doing queries the week before in order to get to this point where they're ready to convert, and they saw you or they saw a piece of content from you, or maybe they saw you on social media even, and now they come to this point where they're going to buy, they're not searching, "For how do I buy a new microwave? What is the best microwave?" They're searching for, "I want to you buy a new microwave right freaking now." That's the query. I wonder what would happen if you did that, if you added the word like right freaking now into a query. If the competitor ranks number three or even number one, but they've seen you multiple times at this point, guess who really ranks number one in that instance? And that's turning brand into revenue and it's also equalizing the game. Because I will tell you a little secret. It's not always possible to rank number one for everything. You have to find ways to get around that. If you are competing with, I don't know, like the super authority. You're trying to compete for Nike and you're not Nike. In situations where you just can't rank number one or number two, if you can establish a brand presence in other areas of the SERP or on other channels altogether, you can level the playing field on a result page where it's a money keyword but you don't rank as high as you want to or maybe not as high as you want to right now. Crystal Carter: Right. I think that where people recognize the brand, they go, "Oh, I'll buy from them." At the end of the day it's like, oh yeah, they rank number three, but people know the brand so they'll go, "I'll just buy from them because I know them." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And that's super important in the world of mistrust of platforms, mistrust of AI, mistrust of content, just general consumer mistrust, super important. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that this translates lots of things. So one... And people sometimes say, "Oh, you can't measure brand value. Oh, you can't see the revenue correlation." But you can. So a prime example is Airbnb. So Airbnb very famously was like, "We're cutting all of our ad spend" at one point. They said, "We're cutting all of our ad spend because we're just going to do organic" and stuff like that and that sort of thing. What's interesting is that you can look at Airbnb's profit or their revenue between around 2001, 2022 and if you compare that with their Google trends for their brand, it's really interesting actually. In 2022 the revenue increased by 77% compared to the year before. And if you look at the Google trends graph for them, you see that there's a big dip in 2022 or in 2020, we can guess why, get out your hand sanitizer and guess why. And so there's a big dip, it goes up and down. It's very volatile. In 2022, their increase was smaller than it was in 2021. So they increased by 40%, which is still good. Don't get me wrong, they still- Mordy Oberstein: I'll take 40%. Crystal Carter: I'll take 40%. So they increased from 5 billion to 8 billion and you can see that their volatility is less and their average brand rating is higher. And then as they go into 2023, branded search increases some but not as much as it did between the year before and they saw an 18% increase during that time. So the branded search is actually helping you to track their overall revenue increase. So there is something there if you pay attention to the right things. And I think that by nurturing your brand and making sure that your brand is solid, like you said, it can be the deciding factor on a search. It can be the deciding factor in a supermarket. If you're in a supermarket and you're going to go pick up some window cleaner or something like that and you're there between the brand you've never heard of, the brand for the supermarket, and Windex. If I don't know that supermarket, if I don't know those other ones and I want my windows clean, I'm getting the Windex. I'm getting the Windex. That's what I'm getting. Mordy Oberstein: And that's the whole thing you have... And you do this by doing just that. How do you do this? You have to be in the right place at the right time, meaning you have to be where your audience is at, whether it be social media on other SERPs they are researching. And you have to create that association, like Ronell was saying before, between who you are and what they want, that you are fundamentally a trustworthy place to get what they want. And it's very complicated to do that. I think a lot of that has to do with you understanding who you are, understanding who the audience is and understanding where who you are and who they are overlap. Crystal Carter: And I think that in terms of closing the deal, I think it's also important to make sure that that experience, it goes all the way through the buying process, all the way through the sales funnel, all the way through even after the sales funnel. So for instance, we talked about the fact that Amazon is a place where a lot of people go for non-branded search, but the brand there is Amazon. The brand there is Amazon. So they're competing with places like Temu or Wish or Shein or Shein, I don't know which way you pronounce it, but they're competing with those sort... Or Alibaba. They're competing with those sorts of places. And the thing about Amazon as a brand is that I know if I order from Amazon that I will get it, that I will get whatever it is. It may or may not be the best product I've ever had, but I definitely know that if I give them my money they will give me something at the other end. And there's definitely the case with some of these non-branded products where you're taking a little bit of a risk and it's definitely been the case where I've purchased something and never got anything at the end. So the brand that Amazon has, you know how they will treat your details, the information that you give them, you know that they will give you the products and they won't throw them over the hedge like Hermes will, and you know that there's a return policy. And all of that sort of stuff, that's the brand for the Amazon experience. So that goes all the way through and that's nuts and bolts stuff. That's the selling process. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's a great example. Amazon's branding is very nuts and bolts. "We will get it to you, you can trust us, we are not going to mess you over. You have a problem, we got you." Crystal Carter: Right. They do a little bit of branding, they have Prime Day or something like that. Their packaging is really low-key and all of that sort of stuff, but they are very understanding of what their customer needs. Mordy Oberstein: Make a big deal out of like, "Oh, I have to do brand campaigns, big shiny campaigns." And it might get awareness, it might cause you to think about them, but what really gets you to associate and trust them and to be connected to a brand is that long-term relationship over time where you really trust them, you know that they're not going away, that they're going to be there and they're going to handle that. And if you are talking about from an SEO point of view, to me that means if the user is going... Before they buy the microwave right freaking now, they're reviewing and analyzing and researching all these things, that you are there offering lots of really helpful information and not trying to nudge them along the way, giving them the space to do that so that they know when they have to actually buy the microwave, you sell microwaves, is like, "Oh, they had a great piece about how I should choose it. It was really helpful. Let me go back and buy it from them because I trust them." Crystal Carter: And I think also thinking about the full funnel when somebody buys something from them, if you're requesting a review, the review request should be nice. The review request should be like, "Hey, heard you had that microwave for a week, would you be interested in reviewing that for us? That would be great." Something like that. I don't know, whichever. This is another reason why for high ticket electronics, people often have a really nice box so you'll have a really nice box for your iPhone or whatever, and that's part of the experience, that's part of the way that you extend your brand even though you're online. So if you are thinking about making your brand profitable for you, it's important to think about all of those touch points all the way along the line because that's what makes people who notice your brand, recommend your brand, come back to your brand, and genuinely engage with your brand. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's all one song. If you send that product out and it's like, "Wow, this has really done really well," and that person goes online and they share a review or they recommend it to their neighbor, good branding builds growth opportunities. They're not separate, they build growth opportunities. Or now that person goes online and they might have a really big review website and they review your company and you get a follow link from there which improves your SEO. It just builds upon itself and it's micro moments. It's not the big flashy brand campaign that you're doing. It's all the micro moments that add up. Branding is aggregate. What's the word I'm looking for? It compounds on itself. Crystal Carter: Right. And it's why people like Eli Schwartz who works in enterprise thing, and indeed our own SEO team are like, "The product is part of your brand, product branding, it's part of your brand." You need to make sure that your product is good because I've watched a lot of hair videos on YouTube and people will be like, "This is my favorite shampoo. I'm not getting paid for this. This is just my favorite shampoo." And that, that, "I'm not getting paid for this, but this is my favorite thing," that's gold dust. That's when you know it's really working for you. One of the best brand marketers that I've heard speak was a chap that I cannot remember his name right now, but he was from STATSports. And he was talking about like, "I watched..." Stat Sports, it's a GPS tracker that pro athletes wear. They track their brand very, very consistently. And he was saying like, "I can see my brand searches go up and that means that we are increasing our visibility in the market." They are a prime example of something that was completely new product. Nobody ever had a GPS tracker that people would wear on their backs and use it to track how they were doing on soccer or whatever. They were able to translate that into sales, into deals, into all of that sort of stuff. And because people like the product, he was having pro athletes who were just running around practicing in the product and other people are like, "What is that? What is that?" It's like it's a good product and the good product helps to enable the brand, helps to help the brand to thrive. He also had a great talk, some great information, I'll send the links to you, about how they were able to not just take that visibility just from a brand point of view, but also to convert that into sales, to when those moments happen that they were ready with their digital marketing campaign. They were ready to be like, "Oh, hey, did you see so-and-so in this sports tracker? Here's what it is, here's the landing pages, here's how you can be just like your favorite pro athlete. Here's all of that stuff." And so you can take all of the great brand stuff, you can marry that to your digital marketing stuff and that's where you're really winning. Mordy Oberstein: You know who's got a great brand for himself? He does it just so naturally by being who he is. Crystal Carter: And consistently, he’s published like, over 900 articles. Mordy Oberstein: It's not new. Crystal Carter: On- Mordy Oberstein: 900. Right. Crystal Carter: Over 900. Mordy Oberstein: I think you mean... Right. Closer to 9,000. And in case you haven't checked out our “It's New” series, check out It's New with myself, Crystal, Greg Finn, and Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: Each and every day except for Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays. So Monday through Thursday. Over on the Wix SEO Hub it's called It's New and it's all about the news and it's with Barry, which is also what this is. This is the Snappy News. It doesn't have to be with Barry, but by default it's with Barry. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First up for you from Barry Schwartz over at seroundtable.com. Google AI Overview shows for only 15% of queries down from 84%. That's for some BrightEdge data that show that the AI Overview, the thing formerly known as SGE, went from showing on 84% of the queries in their dataset to just 15%. The actual numbers here I think are suspect. Semrush has different numbers. Mark Traphagen from SEO Clarity showed different numbers. He showed, for example, that the trend went from the AI Overview showing on 17% of his data set to 2.5%. The actual numbers are really hard to pinpoint. You have to be logged in to Google to access the AI Overviews and these tools are not really built for that in my honest opinion. Oh, they're not built for that. It's not an opinion. They're not built for that. So I would take the actual numbers with a grain of salt as we covered on It's New, it's really the trend that's more important and you're seeing across the multiple datasets a trend where Google is showing less AI Overviews. Interestingly, in the BrightEdge dataset, they showed the most likely vertical to get the AI Overview, is the health vertical, which is where they're getting the most flak. So that's interesting, but again, I'm not overly extensively familiar with that dataset. Take it with a grain of salt, but the fact that the numbers are coming down makes sense to me. Google's gotten a lot of pushback about it. I don't think... And this is again my personal opinion, it is just my opinion, what do I know? I don't think they really wanted to release it as is right now. I felt for various reasons they had to release it right now and announce it at Google I/O When they did release it. So I think that scaling it back, refining it, and I think what you're ultimately going to see is a completely different looking AI Overview that we currently have right now. I really do think the current one we have doesn't work for the web and that's a whole different conversation for a whole different time. Ask me on social media why I think that. I think we covered on It's New a few times. I'm going to keep plugging It's New, by the way, a great daily dose of SEO news each and every day on the Wix SEO Hub, and also on the RustyBrick YouTube channel. Anyway. Also, from Barry Schwartz, also from Search Engine Roundtable, Google Search Shopping Filter Top Bar. I'm going to help you out here, Barry. Let's add Google tests search shopping filter top bar. Barry caught a test from Brodie Clark where basically above the bubble filters that you normally have on the SERP is another set of filters that help you refine what type product you're looking for. The case that Brodie shows was running shoes, and now you have a top bar of the show is walking shoes, hiking shoes, tennis shoes, track shoes, fitness trackers, and so forth. Again, covering It's New, we talked about this a little bit on It's New last week where Google was testing almost people also ask like feature on the E-commerce SERP, and I said, "I'm really surprised Google doesn't have a better way of showing you related products on the actual SERP itself." Lo and behold, here's a test that does exactly just that. Maybe they're listening to It's New. Anyway. This from, not Barry Schwartz, but Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land. Perplexity Pages showing in Google AI Overviews, featured snippets. So Perplexity, which is a search engine based on AI, they started to create a feature where you basically can create a page. You type in a topic, I don't know, like how to run the 100-meter dash and it creates a whole page for you. And those pages built on AI content are indexable, so it's just spitting up tons of AI content, then indexing it. Now it seems like Google is indexing this stuff, showing it even in feature snippets and in AI Overviews. I usually don't get this emotional on this podcast. I get emotional on other podcasts, but not on this one. The web is broken. We lost our minds. Anyway. Moving on, because I don't want to get too crazy. If I stay in this topic, I will rant. Onto another article from Danny Goodwin over on Search Engine Lens. Study, 96% of sites in Google's top 10 positions have 1000 plus links from unique domains. Oh, my. Links better, more than ever. So this is a study from Internet Marketing Ninjas showing that you need to have tons of links or you're not going to rank. I actually take issue with this study. Why, I'm really offering hot takes on this news section, which I generally don't do. I try just to cover the news, but I'm telling you my perso... This is my personal opinion. Other people will look at this differently. I think that what they did with the study was take a look at 200 keywords and they'll take a look at the top 10 results and they're saying, "We have 1200 data points." Sort of kind of. You have 200 keywords, and the type of keyword that you are looking at is very limited when you're only looking at 200 keywords. In my opinion, in this kind of data study, you not only need to have multiple data points in the number of URLs, so they have like 1100 or so URLs, but you need to have a lot more actual keywords to make sure that you're getting an accurate look at the web. So I'm not saying the data here is bad. What I am saying is I think it's limited to short-tail heavy search volume keywords and it doesn't reflect the wider web overall. And you see that, by the way, when you look at the actual study, which Danny links to in his article, which will to in the show notes, that they're looking at keywords even when they're... They quote their analysis of keyword phrases with fewest backlinks, which they say, "Oh, it's still a lot of backlinks," but the keywords are still very high search volume-ish and very short tail, top level kind of keywords, like surfboards for sale or golf clubs. If you were to take a look, I don't even have to look at data to do this. I'm telling you, if you looked at longer tail or even medium tail, that's not a real word, but you get what I'm saying, keywords, a more diversified look at the web, you would find that Google would be ranking a lot of URLs that have far less links. So I would take this study with a grain of salt and I would really only apply it towards those very top level, high search volume kind of keywords, which is why they're saying Amazon shows up because that's the kind of keyword profile that you're looking at. Very important in these kind of studies to make sure you have very diverse keyword profile. That's my opinion. But I do have done a gazillion studies in my SEO life, so it's my educated opinion. Anyway, before I say things I'm not supposed to say, this is this version of the Snappy News. Another fine brand performance by Barry- Crystal Carter: And by yourself. Mordy Oberstein: Who always covers that news so well. Crystal Carter: And you as well. You as well. You have your radio podcast voice brand. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, because I always dreamed of being the guy calling the game during a swarm of bees being stuck on the fence. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's my brand. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. That's a long hive. No. Mordy Oberstein: You know who does a lot of brand marketing and SEO? Crystal Carter: And beekeeping. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know about the beekeeping. We should really ask her. Erika Varangouli. Erika, do you do beekeeping on the side? Crystal Carter: I'm sure she appreciates bees. Bees are lovely. Mordy Oberstein: I have a bush and it's got a lot of bees and it's really scary to walk by. I'll just say that. Crystal Carter: No, they're friendly. Bees are friendly. Mordy Oberstein: No, they're fine. At this point, we're used to it. We just walk right by there. They don't bother you, we don't bother them. We're fine. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's not fine? If you don't follow Erika Varangouli. That's not fine. Crystal Carter: Right. She's such a great marketer and she's got such great insight and she's worked with some incredible teams and has a lot of experience of connecting brand in international spaces and also with other enterprise teams as well. She's- Mordy Oberstein: Where did they get her, at Semrush? Very, very smart. I think she’s at Riverside, so she's working with some major brands. Again, one of these people who if you talk to her, and I have had many conversations with her, you'll really get a sense that she understands the holistic SEO picture, which does include things like your brand, but give her a follow over on LinkedIn for sure, and also on X @finderika. That's F-I-N-D-E-R-I-K-A over on X. And you'll be some brand new followers for her. I never understood that, by the way. Why is it called brand new? That wasn't to do with word brand? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Isn't that weird? Crystal Carter: I also wonder about bear with me. I know that it's like bear me in thought. I know bear it in mind. Or I know it's that kind of thing, but whenever I hear bear with me, I just think of like Yogi. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but I don't think... It's not spelled the same way. Crystal Carter: No? But I still think of it when I hear it. Mordy Oberstein: It also makes no sense. B-A-R-E, like what is- Crystal Carter: Is that bear in mind? Is that bear in mind, B-A-R-E? Mordy Oberstein: Bear with me is. Bear in mind, I don't know. Hold on. Bear... Right. Bear in mind. Crystal Carter: That's literally what I think of. I literally have a bear in my mind who's just like, "Yes?" Mordy Oberstein: Is it a grizzly bear or a brown bear? Crystal Carter: It's like a Bear. I'm a big fan of Whinnie the Pooh. Yeah. He's like eating honey, it's chilling out. It's like it's all good. Eeyore is also like... We stand Eeyore. Eeyore is such a like grumpy king. I love it. Eeyore's just like the man. He's like, "I'm not interested in any of the things y'all are doing here in this forest." Mordy Oberstein: "Leave me alone." Crystal Carter: Right? He is like, "I got my little stick house and I'm chilling out." Mordy Oberstein: Right? Stick house. Crystal Carter: Then he was like, "What? Somebody move my stick house. Oh man." Mordy Oberstein: Oh boy. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcasts. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into why just writing good content sounds easy, but it's in reality incredibly hard. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars, and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ronell Smith Erika Varangouli Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube It's New: Daily SEO News Series Ronell Smith Consultancy Erika Varangouli News: Google AI Overviews Shows For Only 15% Queries, Down From 84% Google Search Shopping Filter Top Bar Perplexity Pages showing in Google AI Overviews, featured snippets Study: 96% of sites in Google’s top 10 positions have 1,000+ links from unique domains Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ronell Smith Erika Varangouli Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube It's New: Daily SEO News Series Ronell Smith Consultancy Erika Varangouli News: Google AI Overviews Shows For Only 15% Queries, Down From 84% Google Search Shopping Filter Top Bar Perplexity Pages showing in Google AI Overviews, featured snippets Study: 96% of sites in Google’s top 10 positions have 1,000+ links from unique domains 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 produce some groovy to insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is always on brand , our head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everyone. Hi. How's everyone doing? I think that we are all being true to our core identities and making sure that we are being consistent in our tone of voice and the way that we present ourselves to the world, and I think that that's really important. Mordy Oberstein: I really like your messaging and the way you're positioning the podcast. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. It's something that we have crafted and worked really hard to make sure that we're recognizable and that we have a clear USP. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it sounds like a whole framework. We just keep going. This is SERP's Up Podcast, is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you could also track rank for not just Google, but also for Bing, but also for YouTube and Amazon with RankiX , a new app in the Wix App Market from the people who brought you Pro Rank Tracker. Look forward in the Wix App Market because it can help you track your discovery keywords as well as your branded keywords as today we're talking about the power of branded search and why it matters way more than you think. For example, what happens when you forget about branded searches and it costs you millions and millions and millions of dollars. Literally, we'll get to it. Why being branded first is going to come into SEO focus and how to measure brand on the SERP. SEO and brand marketing OG Ronell Smith joins us to share some common aspects of brand building and brand visibility that folks often miss the mark on. And Crystal and I share a deep thought about how to turn brand success into actual revenue. And of course we have your snap piece of SEO news who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So like the sports field court and/or uniform that you once held to be sacred, let us help you on this 91st episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Tattoo your brand here, there, and everywhere that is the Google SERP. Did you notice that? When I was a kid, you maybe had a brand logo, I don't know, like on the scoreboard at a stadium. Now, hockey rinks, the ads you see in the hockey rink live at NHL game, for example, are not what you see on TV. They're rotating through on TV because the boards are all white and the ice is white. They can just swap... It's an overlay of ads. It's not the actual ad. Crystal Carter: Dude, why are you assuming that I'm watching hockey? Mordy Oberstein: No, I assume you're not. No one watches hockey. I'm just assuming that's an example. As an example. I'm assuming you're not because explaining it assuming that no one watches hockey. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. I've never watched a hockey match in my life. The most hockey I've ever watched is... Oh, a game? Hockey game? Okay. And when they hit the hockey ball, I don't know why they do that, but okay, the most hockey I've ever seen is on the Mighty Ducks and Mighty Ducks 2. Mordy Oberstein: My kids don't appreciate that movie. They're like, "This is boring." Crystal Carter: Yeah, I'm going to say my kids said the same thing. I was like, "Oh wow, this didn't do it." Mordy Oberstein: You know my grandfather got a color TV back in the day because they wanted to see the blood from hockey fights in color. Crystal Carter: Your grandfather had a very dark sense of humor. Okey-dokey. Cool. On that bombshell. Okay, so basically we are talking about branded search. The reason why I wanted to talk about this is because sometimes people overlook the importance of branded search. People will say to you as an SEO person, they'll say, "Oh, you got... Yeah, there search coming through, but it's all brand or a lot of it is brand. So what about this?" And don't get me wrong, there's definitely... There are definitely different values to branded search, non-branded search. So for instance, there's a great article that was just published on the Moz blog that talks about branded search and non-branded search. And they were saying that according to Statistia? Mordy Oberstein: I always get that wrong. I'm not the only one who gets that name. That's not good branding right there. Crystal Carter: It's hard to pronounce. You know the one I'm talking about. If you don't know, Google will correct you on the internet. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Statistica? Crystal Carter: Yeah, Statista, I think Statista. Mordy Oberstein: There's no C in there, sorry. Crystal Carter: Okay. Statista says that 58% of searches for global brands are non-branded with, and that means that the other amount is branded, 42% are branded for global brands. And that's good, that's interesting. But what I think people worry about is they say, "Oh, but they're all branded search" and they take it as if it's for granted, as if branded search is something that just comes out of nowhere. But I'll tell you right now, having worked with money brands that branded search is not something that you should take for granted. Branded search is not something that just happens by magic. And if you have somebody who's working for you, who's doing your SEO for you, and they've got you some branded search, then you're welcome. Okay. That's something that is valuable and it's useful for you and it tells you a lot of things. If your branded search is increasing, that means more people know about your brand and more people are searching directly for your brand. This is something that the team at Rise at Seven have seen happen really, really well. They've been able to drive branded search so that branded searches increase. You can also see in Google Trends whether or not for your brand are increasing over time, which is useful as well. And this can be really, really important indicator for whether or not campaigns are working. So for instance, if you have a big billboard campaign or big television campaigns or things like that, you should see your branded search increase. If you're using radio for instance in a certain local area, you should also see branded searches increase there. And that means that your offsite marketing is working in tandem with your onsite marketing. The other thing that's really important about branded search is that the people who are searching for you have a place to land. And that is really, really important and also is something that should not be taken for granted. I've seen it a number of times where I've gone and searched very often for smaller brands, but sometimes for larger brands as well. And I've gone to find out what their new thing that is that they're doing, a new product or their main brand, themselves, and I'm not able to find it on Google by searching for their particular brand. And if I cannot find you, and if I search once and I think, "Oh, maybe it's me, maybe I misentered it," I check the thing again and I search and I still can't find it, then I'm going to give up. Okay. And I think that it's important that people realize not only that you need to make sure that your brand is clear on the website, because I've had it before where smaller brands have said to me, "Oh, I'm not ranking on Google, and I do the site search, the search modifier on Google, and I can say, yes, you are ranking on Google. I can see your pages are indexed on Google based on the search." And then they say, "Oh, but when I search my name, I can't find me." And I go, "Because you don't have your name on your website." And so for those people, branded search is incredibly important to them, and yet they haven't made the investment on them. And that's something that an SEO person can help you with, can help make sure that you've got all of those branded searches there. The other thing that's super important for branded search is when you have, my favorite SERP, which is when somebody googles your brand and it's all your brand. Mordy Oberstein: It's all yours. Crystal Carter: And all your brand, all of the channels. And I've had it where it's been my name or whatever, and I'm like, "Oh, it's all me. It's all me." And basically when you have that, that's your brand. You have your website at the top very often. Sometimes it might be your social depending on what's going on. So it'll be your website, your social media, your LinkedIn, maybe an article about you, maybe a listing on a niche directory, something like that. And that's great because that means that nobody else is sneaking in. What you don't want when somebody googles your brand is somebody else showing up there, somebody else showing up there with an article about you or with some other information about you. That is not what you want. That's not great at all. And that's something, again, that should not be taken for granted. That's something that has to be crafted with SEO support. Mordy Oberstein: And that goes... It can literally cost you millions of dollars. And I'm not joking. So I was talking about this with Eli Schwartz who a friend of the podcast, friend of SEO Hub, contributor. People paid millions, brands, companies paid millions upon millions upon million dollars on Super Bowl ads. And there were a few of them this year where I never heard of the company before. They're new, they're trying to bust into the market, by doing a big splash thing. I never heard of them before. I'm not going to say who it is, I don't want to disparage anybody. You google them and they don't rank for their branded keywords, so you just spend millions of dollars. Everyone's like, "I don't know who you are. That's an interesting commercial. Let's go to Google and figure who you are." And you don't rank for your branded keywords, you just flushed millions of dollars down the digital toilet. Crystal Carter: Yo. And that is just... It breaks my heart. It breaks my heart. Whenever I see that somebody's not ranking for their brand name, it breaks my heart. And I think that I say people just take it for granted. They just assume that it just happens. Mordy Oberstein: Or SEOs will assume. Businesses will assume SEOs will downplay it. Business' like, "Oh yeah, of course I will rank for my branded name." Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: No, particularly, especially because sometimes you might think your brand name is very unique, but it might not be as unique as you think it is. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Secondly, SEOs will be like, "Oh, I will rank," no, millions of dollars. You can cost your clients millions of dollars if you don't handle. The SEO, who's supposed to handle that... If they have an SEO, maybe they don't have an SEO, but assuming they do have an SEO, drop the ball and cost them millions of dollars. Crystal Carter: Right, right, right. And I think that sometimes you have the case where your SERP is tricky or maybe they didn't think about the name or maybe they didn't think about the website or something like that to make it particularly unique. And that can be a challenge, but that's what your SEO is supposed to make it happen for you. Your SEO is supposed to bring that together for you. And I think that that's really important because, like I say, it doesn't happen by magic. Mordy Oberstein: Let's say that I'm making it up, I'm just going to search this as we're doing it. Say your name of your company is Connect Marketing. Google might understand, "Do you want to learn about connecting marketing to something or is actually your brand, and actually a name of a company?" In this case Google knows the name of the company, but it's quite possible not. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that it can change for different things. So for instance, for branded products, that's also something to consider as well, because there's different channels that are going to be better for different products and different things as well. So for instance, for non-branded products, people tend to go to Amazon. So if I just want some leggings for instance, I will go to Amazon. If I want Fabletic leggings, if I want, I don't know, Savage Fenty leggings or something, I will go to Google for instance to find the right website to make sure it's authentic, to make sure it's this, that, or the other. And I think that that's really important to think about as well about that customer journey because Google will have additional points to help people to verify that the brand that they're looking at online is really important. So if you think about knowledge panels, if you think about reviews, if you think about the schema markup, if you think about the way that your business is displaying as a local business, for instance, markup so that people know that this is the actual real site, because I think that people forget that there's a lot of fakes out there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, there's a big deal on the finance industry, for example like Capital One. There's I think fake websites out there because if you... There's a different character that looks like an actual A that's not an actual A. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And it makes it look like that's the actual website, but it's not. Crystal Carter: Right. And that's something that people have to consider as well. So you need to make sure that your legit website looks legit, and this is why Google is leaning into the EEAT stuff. On social, there are so many people... I've had it a couple of times where people are like, "Hey, I'm going to follow you." And I was like, "Oh, that's so-and-so," and then I get these weird DMs and then I look at it again and I'm like, "Oh, that's not so-and-so, that's some random person who is duplicating that social media site." And there was a really interesting study where somebody was on... It's a YouTube video actually, and they were talking about TikTok ads and there was this TikTok campaign with these particular summer dress. All the ads had the same images, all the ads had the same videos and all the ads had the same dresses, but she ordered from all these different places, from all these different websites that were selling this dress, and she got seven different dresses from all of these different folks. So I think you have to remember that consumers are in a space where there's lots of people trying to trick them online. And so you need to make sure that your brand is really clear, your brand is really articulate, your brand is very robust in terms of trust signals so that people understand that. And guiding that branded search and curating your branded search is a very, very important part of that. Mordy Oberstein: I think establishing that brand by the way is going to become much more part of the algorithmic picture than people give it credit for. First of in an area, I think on the podcast before or we did it in a blog post, I can't... We do so much stuff, I can't remember what we did anymore. We've definitely talked about this before where Google's going to have to look at brands differentiating themselves because that's what the consumer wants. The consumer wants a brand that's a little bit differentiated because an influx of content out there already. A lot of it is garbage. And I say content, I mean both products and actually informational content. And with the whole AI extravaganza is going out at the same time, the brands that differentiate themselves are going to align with what consumers want and Google knows that. So brands that differentiate themselves are going to be rewarded on the SERP and it's going to factor into the algorithm. It's similar to what we spoke about with the whole Reddit thing. I’m sorry not with the Reddit thing, with the news publisher ecosystem thing. Again, we're talking about so many things. Google's going to, I think... One of the ways they're going to handle some of the problems on the SERP, including this problem, is by focusing on brand identity. What's your website identity? Who are you as a website? What are you focused on? What are you doing? Is that aligned with the queries that you're ranking for? So having that strong branding and owning those branded SERPs will help you rank for the other things and it's going to come into focus. Having that strong branding and that... Because branding means a lot, which we are not going to get into right now. It's much more than just like, "Here's my brand name." Branding is everything. It's all of your communications, it's all of your ways that you're resonating with audiences. Your content is your brand, and being able to differentiate that content, and by having strong brand identity will I think give you that authority and give you that differentiation the algorithm's going to be rewarding in the future. That's like my SEO prediction for 2025, and we're not done in 2024 yet. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that in the era of LLMs and of generative search via being Copilot, via Gemini, via the SGE, via Perplexity, via all of those sorts of things, if these tools have a good understanding of what your brand is, then they're going to be able to make recommendations to people looking for something in that space. I talked about schema markup in an article, a schema markup primer, and one of the things I was pointing out is that your entity has articulated in your schema, as articulated as part of your brand identity, as part of your brand entity, your knowledge panel, et cetera, et cetera, is something that LLMs are aware of. So if I said like, what is Dairy queen? It is a fast food chain in the United States. If I go to Wikipedia, it will say, "Dairy Queen is a fast food chain in the United States." And they understand that, and I think that it's really important for you to think about and to use tools like Wikipedia or whatever, like the schema properties that guide you of what things these tools need to know about you to make sure that you have a clear sense of what your brand is. And I think that if you don't know what your brand is, it's very difficult for other people to, and it's certainly going to be very difficult for search engines and generative search to do that. And if they don't understand, they can't send people to your site in that space. When people are looking for things in less of a guided way than a traditional search engine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. As a concept, what's going to come into focus, whether it's Google, whether it's an LLM, is having a presence, you have to have a presence, and presence means having an identity. You can't have a digital presence or online presence, whatever you want to call it, without having strong identity. And identity comes from branding. So brand-first optimization or brand-first SEO is going to mean creating or establishing a web presence that's built on strong identity, which is done via branding. I want to give it to something you were saying before about measuring branded search, which there are tools to do. For example, if you throw a domain into Semrush, one of the metrics that they give you is the percentage of branded versus non-branded search, and they'll give you trend as branded search going up. And you could use that, as you mentioned, as a way to see is your brand resonating? Because Google is the source of web traffic and it's not even close. If you see more people searching for your brand, over time, you can use that as... I wouldn't rely on this as the only metric by the way. I think it's very linear. But you can use it as part of painting the picture of how well is your brand doing. I'll also say, and I've done this for many a clients, you can use the breakdown of branded versus non-branded keywords, but most importantly, the brand traffic trend, is brand traffic going up to assess a market? So if I was doing, let's say... I don't know, I'm an advertising agency and I have a sport, I have... The NBA is my client and I want to understand where is the NBA right now. I can look at their social media followers relative to the NFL. I can look at their social media followers relative to major league baseball. Whatever it is. I could also look at is there interest over time? Is brand search going up? Is it going down? Is it going up, is it going down versus other leagues? For example, the NBA's branded search traffic has basically been stagnant for the better part of a year. Obviously it'll be seasonal because when it's in season it'll go up and down, but overall it's been static for a year. Major League baseball and the NFL have both seen an increase over the past year, so that might be a problem, obviously then again. Or you can look at the percentage of branded search terms. For example, 79% of the NFL's traffic comes through branded search. That's a very, very powerful brand. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think it's worth thinking about some of the other ways that people are talking about your brand. Because it might be that there's something that's very specific to you that might not show. For instance, Semrush will give you branded search and it might be associated with your particular brand name, but there's going to be products within your product set as well that are going to be in there. And there's also going to be things that are unique to you as well. So if you're thinking about like the MLB for instance, there's going to be stuff that's very specific to that like the World Series, so there's going to be Major League Baseball or something like that. The World Series is something that is Major League baseball. That's their property, that's their brand property, and that's important to think about as well. When you're thinking about your brand, not only you're going to need to map the things that are literally your brand name, but also the things that are unique to that as well because that will also give you that shape of whether or not the things are moving and how they're moving through as well. Mordy Oberstein: To that point, you can also filter through. If you go to Semrush. If you go through the Organic Research tool and you filter by the branded terms, the MLB, so you could see all the terms, like do playoffs come up? For example, with MLB, like MLB news pops up a lot. MLB standings, MLB playoffs. Oh playoffs, that's a big deal. Power rankings, that's a big deal. So you can see what exactly is your audience actually interested in or not interested in by what they're adding onto your branded name. If you ran the same thing for like... If you saw, for example with NFL, they're searching for sucks next to it, that would be a problem. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Right. That would be a problem. And I think also we've had Ross Simmonds on talking about Reddit. Reddit is a great tool for getting a guide on your brand in terms of how people are feeling about your brand because you can go into a tool like Semrush for instance. You can put in the Reddit domain and then you can filter by your brand name. And then you get all of the questions that people have about your brand name. That's super useful. Also, if you go to something called AlsoAsked, you can also get some of the people also asked questions about your brand and you should be answering those questions. Similarly, if you go into Google Search Console, you can see all the questions that people are asking about your brand products and all of those things as well, and you should be answering those questions. If you're looking at your brand, when you think about... For instance, People Also Ask shows on the majority of searches on Google, and if people are going and they're seeing your brand, and the people also ask questions are all being answered by other folks, that's a challenge for you. You should be thinking about how can we do that? How can we partner with those people if we're not answering it directly? Because sometimes there are comparison things and that's okay, so we can see that. But you should have a relationship with every single thing that's on there and/or you should be creating something yourself. The other thing about branded search, particularly when people are looking for your actual products and they want to know answers for your actual products, is that the chances of you ranking for a piece that somebody is asking a question about your product, like if somebody is saying, I don't know, "Can I get box seats for the World Series?" For instance, and like, "At Yankee Stadium." Yankee Stadium should be ranking for that and it should be really easy for them to rank for that. Because they are the authority on box seats at Yankee Stadium because they have the box seats at Yankee Stadium. So that makes sense. And also the chances of you having competition for some of those terms are going to be really, really low. There's going to be a lot less competition for some of those things. And also if you're... I'm going to shout out to my resource in the resource center about looking at the questions that you can get from your customers. If you're getting those questions directly from your customers, they're not even in search tools, so other people aren't seeing those. Only you are seeing those. But you know that there's a need for it. So again, you're going to be out there ranking for stuff that nobody else is competing for your brand and that is great for the search and that's great for users as well. Google loves when you're able to answer something that nobody else is able to answer and users love it too. Mordy Oberstein: Also, the last point I'll say about this before we move on to Ronell is if you're seeing all this data and all this information, you should use this to leverage your position in the company and your organization to help the brand. I'll give you a clear case. So the NFL cut down on preseason games because they wanted to increase a number of regular season games and that was a trade-off they made. They said to the players, "We'll take away a preseason game and we'll add on a regular season game." And the preseason like meh, really weak. It was already weak. By the way, it also makes a regular season the beginning a little bit weak because this game's just not as good. They haven't had much practice. And you might think if I'm the NFL, no one cares about the preseason, no one cares that we took away a game. No one wants to... What do they care, is just a preseason game? If you run the branded searches through this a tool like Semrush, you'll see that some of the top performing keywords with the most search volumes for the term NFL have to do with the preseason. There's a tremendous, and I can't explain it because it makes no sense, there's a tremendous amount of interest in preseason football. So now you as an SEO to go to the branding and say, "Look, we understand what you're doing, but you need to understand that your audience is actually interested in this and they're probably a little bit ticked off that you killed the preseason to whatever extent you killed the preseason." Crystal Carter: Right. So we need to do something. Mordy Oberstein: We as a company need to do something and now you as the SEO are the hero that save the company. Crystal Carter: Right. This is something that's really, really worth looking at because yeah, absolutely, those brand new searches are worth money. Mordy Oberstein: With that, we need to talk about some of the common aspects of brand building that people miss and who better than Ronell Smith to share some of the common aspects of brand building that people miss. Here's Ronell. Ronell Smith: In my experience of working with hundreds of brands over the last 15 plus years, there are three things businesses get wrong when it comes to brand building. And these are businesses of all sizes, not simply small businesses. The number one thing businesses get wrong is in not clearly understanding the value of having a brand. They think having a strong brand is important only for the Apples or the Teslas or the Nikes of the world, which is wrong. First, you must understand that a brand is simply a set of associations or beliefs that consumers have about your products or services. It serves as a shorthand or rubric to help them identify and select offerings based on their needs. Most importantly, you need a strong resonant brand because consumers before, during, and after the sale, are attracted to what are called aspirational brands. That is brands that make them feel or look better by association. For example, people buy Nikes not because they're the best shoe, they buy them in large part because of the signal they send. Athleticism, quality, style. That's why it's important for businesses to think of the positive associations they want to create for consumers when building a brand. The second issue I see is businesses thinking of branding as something they do, like sharing images or video on social media, as opposed to being about who they are in the minds of consumers and potential consumers. Sure, sharing information on the web, especially via social media is important. That's not branding. Branding, as NYU Professor Scott Galloway says, refers to the perception of value, specifically the creation of the perception of value. It's the feeling people have when they see, interact with, or own your products or services. For example, a local designer who creates themselves a unique client of products that are beloved by her audience, can use an online platform such as Facebook or Twitter to market her products, but branding is the story or vision created in the audience's mind in advance of them owning those products or services. The third area too often neglected by businesses regarding branding is in not understanding the value of branding search, branded search. In the digital world, many times when folks go looking for items online, they search using the name of a product or company based on the feedback from others or an association they've had in the past with the brand. So if you've invested in building a brand, you often aren't having to compete for the click with other companies in the search engine results pages, you are the query being typed into the search bar. Also, and this is very important, even if you aren't part of the query, if yours is the brand consumers know and trust, they're more likely to click the link to your site in the SERPs even if you aren't to one of the top results. That's the real power of branding. You don't simply get found. You get chosen. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Ronell. Follow Ronell out there on LinkedIn at Ronell Smith. We'll link to his profile in the show notes. I loved listening to that. We were both sitting here like that was a gospel. That was- Crystal Carter: Honestly. Mordy Oberstein: So good, and I think that I know where to start. There's so many points. I have notes. I have so many notes I wrote down while it was happening, the power of that association. Fundamentally what's happening when you're building a brand is you are creating an association between the consumer and you or you and the consumer. So if everyone has a brand, you either don't exist or you have a brand. The question is who's controlling that narrative? Is it you or is it just like whatever people happen to think about you, which may be good or may not be good? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And what companies do, or what brands do when they make a mistake is they don't realize the power of associations. There's a whole psychology, the whole school of psychology built on it. It's called Fortean psychology, is built on the power of associations. The power of associations is so strong and people want to see themselves and whoever they're associating with or the opposite of themselves, we're not getting into that psychology. Crystal Carter: Like Mike. I want to be like Mike. You mentioned Nike. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but so like when you marry somebody, you see yourself in them. One of the psychological reasons why, and it's going to sound horrible when I put it this way, that you loved your kids so is that you see yourself in your kids. They're a continuation of you. But that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing. But that's how the human psyche functions fundamentally. And what brands do is building associations takes a very long time to do. It's repetitive over and over and over and over and over and over again, consistency throughout time and throughout all channels. And what brands tend to do is skip that step and go right to performance marketing, but you can't actually perform the way you really want to unless you do all of that association and/or brand building beforehand. I'm done. Drop the mic. Crystal Carter: And I think one of the points that really stuck out for me, and this goes to what you're saying as well, but one of the things that he mentioned was that everybody thinks that there's for giant brands like Apple or Nike or all of these sort of stuff, but I think I've mentioned on this podcast before I recently got a shed, I got a new shed and- Mordy Oberstein: Something was against the wall and it was bad. Crystal Carter: Exactly. So the team that built my shed, they don't have a big complicated brand, like online presence, but they definitely have a brand. I know if I talk to them, I will get a certain level of service. I know that they will give me a certain level of professionalism. I know they will do a good job. I know that they will show up on time. I know that... And all of those things, when I think of them, that is what I think of them. That is the first thing that comes to mind is that, "I will go to them because this will be reliable, will be like this will be, that will be like etc." And they don't have to have a big complicated thing, but they have demonstrated that through their actions, through the way that they behave. And that is something that you can do with your content with the way your website is... If your website is janky, people will think you are janky. If your content is inaccurate, people will think you're inaccurate. If your web SERP, if people search you and they can't find you when they search your name, they will think, "Why haven't these people sorted this out?" It will make them question your brand. It doesn't have to be this giant expensive thing. It's like it's show, don't tell. That's how you build brand. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's all those latent associations that you don't realize are being created. I'll tell you a great example. Recently, when we were recording this, there was a sports today, sorry. There was a Dodgers-Diamondbacks baseball game that got delayed because there was a giant swarm of bees stuck under the fence and they had to call a beekeeper in to come spray the bees before they could play the game because if someone hit that part of the fence, let's say with the ball, the bees would start stinging everybody. The guy who showed up the exterminator, just a random guy they happened to get, was a superstar. He's waving to the crowd. He ended up throwing up the first pitch to the game. He got interviewed. And this guy, he was just super suave and super confident. I will put all my money that brand, and you see the brand right on the shirt, and the announcers are mentioning the name of the brand over and over and over again, have so much more business the day after because of the way that guy handled that, because of the association. They now associate that company with that super awesome exterminator guy who was waving at all the fans, throwing out the first pitch. Crystal Carter: Right. Who has a great demeanor, is able to get the job done, is able to show up and be professional, but also relatable, all of that sort of stuff. And those are the things that you learned from that, just from that one interaction. Mordy Oberstein: Now imagine that someone else came, did the same thing, spray the bees, the bees are gone, but he showed up all upset like, "I got to come out in the middle of the night and spray this bee thing at this baseball game." Now imagine how much extra revenue would've been created for that extermination company. Zero. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly, exactly. I think that's another prime example of when to shoot your shot. You don't need to know that this is an opportunity and sometimes it might seem like it's only a little thing, but this is an opportunity. Take the opportunity for your brand. Mordy Oberstein: But that's what brand building does. It creates new opportunities that you never know which is the one that's going to pay off, but because you don't know, people are like, "I don't know which one it's going to be so I won't pay attention to it." Big mistake. Big mistake. Crystal Carter: Could be one little... And if you're thinking about a brand, it could be a little podcast, could be a big podcast, could be an event, could be this and that. I know somebody, he did an event that a speaking event and it was a smaller event, but the photography was fantastic afterwards. So the photography for this small event got him incredible brand value out of it. So always show up. My mom always said, she's like, "Always show up 100%. Whether you're washing cars or whether you're talking to the CEO, always show up 100%. Always give your best for yourself, for your brand, for all of that stuff." Mordy Oberstein: Truth. Mom's smart. Crystal Carter: She is. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, perfect pivot. So being that we're already talking about brand driving revenue, brand should help drive revenue. I know in marketing we often separate brand marketing versus performance marketing, but they're really not separate. One should lead right into the other in my opinion, and to help us see what that actually would look like from the SERP, Crystal and I will explore a deep thought about brand leading to revenue. So okay, I think it's one of those weird things. I think it's not just an SEO, I think it's one of those performance marketing versus brand marketing things where the brand marketers will separate themselves out from the performance marketers and the performance marketers will separate themselves out from the brand marketers. What I mean by that, if you're not familiar with all this jargon is performance market would be like trying to get clicks and impressions and conversion and brand marketers are trying to get messaging and perception and sentiment and associations created and they're very different ways of thinking. I will definitely grant you that. I think there are a few people who can do both, but generally speaking one mindset works in one way. Almost like in a way like content versus technical SEO, remember we did like a comparison, just different ways of thinking about things, left versus right side of the brain I guess. But in reality, while you might need two people to do each one of these things, they should flow back and forth between the other ones. So the way I look at brand is that it should create the opportunity for you to perform. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that there's a great opportunity for brands there because essentially when people are seeing an increase in brand, that means that you've got a little bit of customer loyalty, you've got a little bit of a warm lead because people know something about you in order to search for your brand. And that means that you can either go more in depth with how you're talking about your product because they already know you a little bit or you can take a little bit of a risk, you can do something that's a little bit more complex maybe because people already know you, so you don't have to explain the basics of what you do to them to begin with. And that means that you have different opportunities to connect with people, which is great. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it also means for example, because with ranking, "Oh, I rank number five and someone else ranks number three. Oh, they're going to get the click because they rank number three." That's necessarily true. If you can establish yourself... Let's just focus solely on Sal for a minute. If you can establish yourself on the other SERPs where the same person was doing research or is doing queries the week before in order to get to this point where they're ready to convert, and they saw you or they saw a piece of content from you, or maybe they saw you on social media even, and now they come to this point where they're going to buy, they're not searching, "For how do I buy a new microwave? What is the best microwave?" They're searching for, "I want to you buy a new microwave right freaking now." That's the query. I wonder what would happen if you did that, if you added the word like right freaking now into a query. If the competitor ranks number three or even number one, but they've seen you multiple times at this point, guess who really ranks number one in that instance? And that's turning brand into revenue and it's also equalizing the game. Because I will tell you a little secret. It's not always possible to rank number one for everything. You have to find ways to get around that. If you are competing with, I don't know, like the super authority. You're trying to compete for Nike and you're not Nike. In situations where you just can't rank number one or number two, if you can establish a brand presence in other areas of the SERP or on other channels altogether, you can level the playing field on a result page where it's a money keyword but you don't rank as high as you want to or maybe not as high as you want to right now. Crystal Carter: Right. I think that where people recognize the brand, they go, "Oh, I'll buy from them." At the end of the day it's like, oh yeah, they rank number three, but people know the brand so they'll go, "I'll just buy from them because I know them." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And that's super important in the world of mistrust of platforms, mistrust of AI, mistrust of content, just general consumer mistrust, super important. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think that this translates lots of things. So one... And people sometimes say, "Oh, you can't measure brand value. Oh, you can't see the revenue correlation." But you can. So a prime example is Airbnb. So Airbnb very famously was like, "We're cutting all of our ad spend" at one point. They said, "We're cutting all of our ad spend because we're just going to do organic" and stuff like that and that sort of thing. What's interesting is that you can look at Airbnb's profit or their revenue between around 2001, 2022 and if you compare that with their Google trends for their brand, it's really interesting actually. In 2022 the revenue increased by 77% compared to the year before. And if you look at the Google trends graph for them, you see that there's a big dip in 2022 or in 2020, we can guess why, get out your hand sanitizer and guess why. And so there's a big dip, it goes up and down. It's very volatile. In 2022, their increase was smaller than it was in 2021. So they increased by 40%, which is still good. Don't get me wrong, they still- Mordy Oberstein: I'll take 40%. Crystal Carter: I'll take 40%. So they increased from 5 billion to 8 billion and you can see that their volatility is less and their average brand rating is higher. And then as they go into 2023, branded search increases some but not as much as it did between the year before and they saw an 18% increase during that time. So the branded search is actually helping you to track their overall revenue increase. So there is something there if you pay attention to the right things. And I think that by nurturing your brand and making sure that your brand is solid, like you said, it can be the deciding factor on a search. It can be the deciding factor in a supermarket. If you're in a supermarket and you're going to go pick up some window cleaner or something like that and you're there between the brand you've never heard of, the brand for the supermarket, and Windex. If I don't know that supermarket, if I don't know those other ones and I want my windows clean, I'm getting the Windex. I'm getting the Windex. That's what I'm getting. Mordy Oberstein: And that's the whole thing you have... And you do this by doing just that. How do you do this? You have to be in the right place at the right time, meaning you have to be where your audience is at, whether it be social media on other SERPs they are researching. And you have to create that association, like Ronell was saying before, between who you are and what they want, that you are fundamentally a trustworthy place to get what they want. And it's very complicated to do that. I think a lot of that has to do with you understanding who you are, understanding who the audience is and understanding where who you are and who they are overlap. Crystal Carter: And I think that in terms of closing the deal, I think it's also important to make sure that that experience, it goes all the way through the buying process, all the way through the sales funnel, all the way through even after the sales funnel. So for instance, we talked about the fact that Amazon is a place where a lot of people go for non-branded search, but the brand there is Amazon. The brand there is Amazon. So they're competing with places like Temu or Wish or Shein or Shein, I don't know which way you pronounce it, but they're competing with those sort... Or Alibaba. They're competing with those sorts of places. And the thing about Amazon as a brand is that I know if I order from Amazon that I will get it, that I will get whatever it is. It may or may not be the best product I've ever had, but I definitely know that if I give them my money they will give me something at the other end. And there's definitely the case with some of these non-branded products where you're taking a little bit of a risk and it's definitely been the case where I've purchased something and never got anything at the end. So the brand that Amazon has, you know how they will treat your details, the information that you give them, you know that they will give you the products and they won't throw them over the hedge like Hermes will, and you know that there's a return policy. And all of that sort of stuff, that's the brand for the Amazon experience. So that goes all the way through and that's nuts and bolts stuff. That's the selling process. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's a great example. Amazon's branding is very nuts and bolts. "We will get it to you, you can trust us, we are not going to mess you over. You have a problem, we got you." Crystal Carter: Right. They do a little bit of branding, they have Prime Day or something like that. Their packaging is really low-key and all of that sort of stuff, but they are very understanding of what their customer needs. Mordy Oberstein: Make a big deal out of like, "Oh, I have to do brand campaigns, big shiny campaigns." And it might get awareness, it might cause you to think about them, but what really gets you to associate and trust them and to be connected to a brand is that long-term relationship over time where you really trust them, you know that they're not going away, that they're going to be there and they're going to handle that. And if you are talking about from an SEO point of view, to me that means if the user is going... Before they buy the microwave right freaking now, they're reviewing and analyzing and researching all these things, that you are there offering lots of really helpful information and not trying to nudge them along the way, giving them the space to do that so that they know when they have to actually buy the microwave, you sell microwaves, is like, "Oh, they had a great piece about how I should choose it. It was really helpful. Let me go back and buy it from them because I trust them." Crystal Carter: And I think also thinking about the full funnel when somebody buys something from them, if you're requesting a review, the review request should be nice. The review request should be like, "Hey, heard you had that microwave for a week, would you be interested in reviewing that for us? That would be great." Something like that. I don't know, whichever. This is another reason why for high ticket electronics, people often have a really nice box so you'll have a really nice box for your iPhone or whatever, and that's part of the experience, that's part of the way that you extend your brand even though you're online. So if you are thinking about making your brand profitable for you, it's important to think about all of those touch points all the way along the line because that's what makes people who notice your brand, recommend your brand, come back to your brand, and genuinely engage with your brand. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's all one song. If you send that product out and it's like, "Wow, this has really done really well," and that person goes online and they share a review or they recommend it to their neighbor, good branding builds growth opportunities. They're not separate, they build growth opportunities. Or now that person goes online and they might have a really big review website and they review your company and you get a follow link from there which improves your SEO. It just builds upon itself and it's micro moments. It's not the big flashy brand campaign that you're doing. It's all the micro moments that add up. Branding is aggregate. What's the word I'm looking for? It compounds on itself. Crystal Carter: Right. And it's why people like Eli Schwartz who works in enterprise thing, and indeed our own SEO team are like, "The product is part of your brand, product branding, it's part of your brand." You need to make sure that your product is good because I've watched a lot of hair videos on YouTube and people will be like, "This is my favorite shampoo. I'm not getting paid for this. This is just my favorite shampoo." And that, that, "I'm not getting paid for this, but this is my favorite thing," that's gold dust. That's when you know it's really working for you. One of the best brand marketers that I've heard speak was a chap that I cannot remember his name right now, but he was from STATSports. And he was talking about like, "I watched..." Stat Sports, it's a GPS tracker that pro athletes wear. They track their brand very, very consistently. And he was saying like, "I can see my brand searches go up and that means that we are increasing our visibility in the market." They are a prime example of something that was completely new product. Nobody ever had a GPS tracker that people would wear on their backs and use it to track how they were doing on soccer or whatever. They were able to translate that into sales, into deals, into all of that sort of stuff. And because people like the product, he was having pro athletes who were just running around practicing in the product and other people are like, "What is that? What is that?" It's like it's a good product and the good product helps to enable the brand, helps to help the brand to thrive. He also had a great talk, some great information, I'll send the links to you, about how they were able to not just take that visibility just from a brand point of view, but also to convert that into sales, to when those moments happen that they were ready with their digital marketing campaign. They were ready to be like, "Oh, hey, did you see so-and-so in this sports tracker? Here's what it is, here's the landing pages, here's how you can be just like your favorite pro athlete. Here's all of that stuff." And so you can take all of the great brand stuff, you can marry that to your digital marketing stuff and that's where you're really winning. Mordy Oberstein: You know who's got a great brand for himself? He does it just so naturally by being who he is. Crystal Carter: And consistently, he’s published like, over 900 articles. Mordy Oberstein: It's not new. Crystal Carter: On- Mordy Oberstein: 900. Right. Crystal Carter: Over 900. Mordy Oberstein: I think you mean... Right. Closer to 9,000. And in case you haven't checked out our “It's New” series, check out It's New with myself, Crystal, Greg Finn, and Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: Each and every day except for Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays. So Monday through Thursday. Over on the Wix SEO Hub it's called It's New and it's all about the news and it's with Barry, which is also what this is. This is the Snappy News. It doesn't have to be with Barry, but by default it's with Barry. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First up for you from Barry Schwartz over at seroundtable.com. Google AI Overview shows for only 15% of queries down from 84%. That's for some BrightEdge data that show that the AI Overview, the thing formerly known as SGE, went from showing on 84% of the queries in their dataset to just 15%. The actual numbers here I think are suspect. Semrush has different numbers. Mark Traphagen from SEO Clarity showed different numbers. He showed, for example, that the trend went from the AI Overview showing on 17% of his data set to 2.5%. The actual numbers are really hard to pinpoint. You have to be logged in to Google to access the AI Overviews and these tools are not really built for that in my honest opinion. Oh, they're not built for that. It's not an opinion. They're not built for that. So I would take the actual numbers with a grain of salt as we covered on It's New, it's really the trend that's more important and you're seeing across the multiple datasets a trend where Google is showing less AI Overviews. Interestingly, in the BrightEdge dataset, they showed the most likely vertical to get the AI Overview, is the health vertical, which is where they're getting the most flak. So that's interesting, but again, I'm not overly extensively familiar with that dataset. Take it with a grain of salt, but the fact that the numbers are coming down makes sense to me. Google's gotten a lot of pushback about it. I don't think... And this is again my personal opinion, it is just my opinion, what do I know? I don't think they really wanted to release it as is right now. I felt for various reasons they had to release it right now and announce it at Google I/O When they did release it. So I think that scaling it back, refining it, and I think what you're ultimately going to see is a completely different looking AI Overview that we currently have right now. I really do think the current one we have doesn't work for the web and that's a whole different conversation for a whole different time. Ask me on social media why I think that. I think we covered on It's New a few times. I'm going to keep plugging It's New, by the way, a great daily dose of SEO news each and every day on the Wix SEO Hub, and also on the RustyBrick YouTube channel. Anyway. Also, from Barry Schwartz, also from Search Engine Roundtable, Google Search Shopping Filter Top Bar. I'm going to help you out here, Barry. Let's add Google tests search shopping filter top bar. Barry caught a test from Brodie Clark where basically above the bubble filters that you normally have on the SERP is another set of filters that help you refine what type product you're looking for. The case that Brodie shows was running shoes, and now you have a top bar of the show is walking shoes, hiking shoes, tennis shoes, track shoes, fitness trackers, and so forth. Again, covering It's New, we talked about this a little bit on It's New last week where Google was testing almost people also ask like feature on the E-commerce SERP, and I said, "I'm really surprised Google doesn't have a better way of showing you related products on the actual SERP itself." Lo and behold, here's a test that does exactly just that. Maybe they're listening to It's New. Anyway. This from, not Barry Schwartz, but Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land. Perplexity Pages showing in Google AI Overviews, featured snippets. So Perplexity, which is a search engine based on AI, they started to create a feature where you basically can create a page. You type in a topic, I don't know, like how to run the 100-meter dash and it creates a whole page for you. And those pages built on AI content are indexable, so it's just spitting up tons of AI content, then indexing it. Now it seems like Google is indexing this stuff, showing it even in feature snippets and in AI Overviews. I usually don't get this emotional on this podcast. I get emotional on other podcasts, but not on this one. The web is broken. We lost our minds. Anyway. Moving on, because I don't want to get too crazy. If I stay in this topic, I will rant. Onto another article from Danny Goodwin over on Search Engine Lens. Study, 96% of sites in Google's top 10 positions have 1000 plus links from unique domains. Oh, my. Links better, more than ever. So this is a study from Internet Marketing Ninjas showing that you need to have tons of links or you're not going to rank. I actually take issue with this study. Why, I'm really offering hot takes on this news section, which I generally don't do. I try just to cover the news, but I'm telling you my perso... This is my personal opinion. Other people will look at this differently. I think that what they did with the study was take a look at 200 keywords and they'll take a look at the top 10 results and they're saying, "We have 1200 data points." Sort of kind of. You have 200 keywords, and the type of keyword that you are looking at is very limited when you're only looking at 200 keywords. In my opinion, in this kind of data study, you not only need to have multiple data points in the number of URLs, so they have like 1100 or so URLs, but you need to have a lot more actual keywords to make sure that you're getting an accurate look at the web. So I'm not saying the data here is bad. What I am saying is I think it's limited to short-tail heavy search volume keywords and it doesn't reflect the wider web overall. And you see that, by the way, when you look at the actual study, which Danny links to in his article, which will to in the show notes, that they're looking at keywords even when they're... They quote their analysis of keyword phrases with fewest backlinks, which they say, "Oh, it's still a lot of backlinks," but the keywords are still very high search volume-ish and very short tail, top level kind of keywords, like surfboards for sale or golf clubs. If you were to take a look, I don't even have to look at data to do this. I'm telling you, if you looked at longer tail or even medium tail, that's not a real word, but you get what I'm saying, keywords, a more diversified look at the web, you would find that Google would be ranking a lot of URLs that have far less links. So I would take this study with a grain of salt and I would really only apply it towards those very top level, high search volume kind of keywords, which is why they're saying Amazon shows up because that's the kind of keyword profile that you're looking at. Very important in these kind of studies to make sure you have very diverse keyword profile. That's my opinion. But I do have done a gazillion studies in my SEO life, so it's my educated opinion. Anyway, before I say things I'm not supposed to say, this is this version of the Snappy News. Another fine brand performance by Barry- Crystal Carter: And by yourself. Mordy Oberstein: Who always covers that news so well. Crystal Carter: And you as well. You as well. You have your radio podcast voice brand. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, because I always dreamed of being the guy calling the game during a swarm of bees being stuck on the fence. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's my brand. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. That's a long hive. No. Mordy Oberstein: You know who does a lot of brand marketing and SEO? Crystal Carter: And beekeeping. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know about the beekeeping. We should really ask her. Erika Varangouli. Erika, do you do beekeeping on the side? Crystal Carter: I'm sure she appreciates bees. Bees are lovely. Mordy Oberstein: I have a bush and it's got a lot of bees and it's really scary to walk by. I'll just say that. Crystal Carter: No, they're friendly. Bees are friendly. Mordy Oberstein: No, they're fine. At this point, we're used to it. We just walk right by there. They don't bother you, we don't bother them. We're fine. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's not fine? If you don't follow Erika Varangouli. That's not fine. Crystal Carter: Right. She's such a great marketer and she's got such great insight and she's worked with some incredible teams and has a lot of experience of connecting brand in international spaces and also with other enterprise teams as well. She's- Mordy Oberstein: Where did they get her, at Semrush? Very, very smart. I think she’s at Riverside, so she's working with some major brands. Again, one of these people who if you talk to her, and I have had many conversations with her, you'll really get a sense that she understands the holistic SEO picture, which does include things like your brand, but give her a follow over on LinkedIn for sure, and also on X @finderika. That's F-I-N-D-E-R-I-K-A over on X. And you'll be some brand new followers for her. I never understood that, by the way. Why is it called brand new? That wasn't to do with word brand? Crystal Carter: I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Isn't that weird? Crystal Carter: I also wonder about bear with me. I know that it's like bear me in thought. I know bear it in mind. Or I know it's that kind of thing, but whenever I hear bear with me, I just think of like Yogi. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but I don't think... It's not spelled the same way. Crystal Carter: No? But I still think of it when I hear it. Mordy Oberstein: It also makes no sense. B-A-R-E, like what is- Crystal Carter: Is that bear in mind? Is that bear in mind, B-A-R-E? Mordy Oberstein: Bear with me is. Bear in mind, I don't know. Hold on. Bear... Right. Bear in mind. Crystal Carter: That's literally what I think of. I literally have a bear in my mind who's just like, "Yes?" Mordy Oberstein: Is it a grizzly bear or a brown bear? Crystal Carter: It's like a Bear. I'm a big fan of Whinnie the Pooh. Yeah. He's like eating honey, it's chilling out. It's like it's all good. Eeyore is also like... We stand Eeyore. Eeyore is such a like grumpy king. I love it. Eeyore's just like the man. He's like, "I'm not interested in any of the things y'all are doing here in this forest." Mordy Oberstein: "Leave me alone." Crystal Carter: Right? He is like, "I got my little stick house and I'm chilling out." Mordy Oberstein: Right? Stick house. Crystal Carter: Then he was like, "What? Somebody move my stick house. Oh man." Mordy Oberstein: Oh boy. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcasts. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into why just writing good content sounds easy, but it's in reality incredibly hard. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars, and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

What is good content and how quickly does its definition change? Why is rank more volatile than it was before? How will SGE ultimately play itself out on the SERP? Get ready to experience the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast live from BrightonSEO in San Diego, as we uncover the most critical unsolved SEO mysteries. We evaluate the role of content trends in SEO with George Nguyen, the state of rank volatility with Cindy Krum, how to communicate with clients in a more complex environment with Greg Gifford, and take up the future of SGE on the SERP with the great Mike King. We’re doing it live this week as we “dance”’ our way into solving SEO mysteries right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! *Mordy’s rank dancing gif available soon* Back Unsolved SEO Mysteries What is good content and how quickly does its definition change? Why is rank more volatile than it was before? How will SGE ultimately play itself out on the SERP? Get ready to experience the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast live from BrightonSEO in San Diego, as we uncover the most critical unsolved SEO mysteries. We evaluate the role of content trends in SEO with George Nguyen, the state of rank volatility with Cindy Krum, how to communicate with clients in a more complex environment with Greg Gifford, and take up the future of SGE on the SERP with the great Mike King. We’re doing it live this week as we “dance”’ our way into solving SEO mysteries right here on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! *Mordy’s rank dancing gif available soon* Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 63 | November 22, 2023 | 78 MIN 00:00 / 1:18:09 This week’s guests Mike King An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Cindy Krum Cindy Krum is the Founder & CEO of MobileMoxie (previously Rank-Mobile). She has been bringing fresh and creative ideas about SEO & ASO to consulting clients and digital marketing stages around the world since 2005. She regularly speaks at national and international trade events, and launched MobileMoxie in 2008 to address mobile-specific marketing needs within the traditional digital marketing specialty. Cindy’s leadership helped MobileMoxie launch the first mobile-focused SEO toolset, to help SEO's see what actual mobile search results & pages look like from anywhere and to provide insights about the impact of Mobile-First Indexing on search results; Now, free versions of these great tools are also available to all digital marketers as two easy to use Chrome Extensions. Greg Gifford Greg Gifford is the Chief Operating Officer at SearchLab, a boutique marketing agency specializing in Local SEO and PPC. He’s one of the most in-demand speakers at digital marketing and automotive conferences all over the world, with dynamic movie-themed presentations packed full of actionable tactics and information. He's got over 20 years of online marketing and web design experience, and his expertise in Local SEO has helped countless businesses gain more visibility in local searches. Greg graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Cinema and Communications, and has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining us on this episode of the SERP's Up podcast everybody, we have some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, SEO brand here and I’m joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the unequivocally, unparalleled greatest person on the planet. Too far. Crystal Carter: I think so. Mordy Oberstein: Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: There are definitely better people than myself. Mordy Oberstein: Just because my wife is listening. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Also, I've met better people than me. It's fine, I do my best. I think we all do our best. I think we can sum it up as Crystal Carter, doing her best. I'm fine with that. Mordy Oberstein: I can think of some people who do not do their best. Crystal Carter: That's true, that's true. Mordy Oberstein: That's going to those people. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. I think maybe they're doing their best and maybe they still need to grow. There we go. I aim for some positives there. Mordy Oberstein: That's good. Yeah. We're still going to put a positive spin on things. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. That's a lot of slashes. But we can also take the mystery out of writing a good title tag and meta description with Wix's brand new AI meta-tag creator. Run the tag creation process with more efficiency using the new AI tag creator tool. Okay, fine, doesn't really solve any mystery of writing at all. Crystal Carter: Not particularly, but we're getting some great feedback on it. I had somebody on the Wix blog was like, "There are several things I love about Wix blog. I'll list them here for you. The SEO optimization tool just keeps getting better with AI. The editor is easy to use and yet powerful." Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Wow. Crystal Carter: That's good. Mordy Oberstein: That's quite-. Two likes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's like my washing machine. My washing machine broke and I got a new one and I said to my husband, "You hear that?" He was like, "No." I was like, "Exactly. Exactly." Mordy Oberstein: The same thing. I just got a new washing machine two weeks ago, I know exactly what you're talking about. Crystal Carter: By the time it's done, when it's on the spin cycle, you're like, "What'd you say? What was that?" Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the old one looks like it went through something real serious. Crystal Carter: Shoes. Shoes is the worst. Mordy Oberstein: My kids' laundry. Okay, so the AI tag creator tool we have on Wix doesn't solve any mysteries, but you know what does solve some mysteries? Our session from Brighton SEO, in San Diego, we talked about unsolved SEO mysteries. See what I did there? Crystal Carter: I see, I do see that. The pivot. It was fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, just for clarification, we didn't actually solve anything at the session either. We just added more nuance and clarification and contextualization to some troubling SEO issues. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but we had a lot of fun doing it. It's about the journey. Mordy Oberstein: It was, and it was very insightful, I like to say. I like to think it was very insightful. Crystal Carter: Literally, it's just an excuse for me to fan-girl at Cindy Krum and Mike King and Greg Gifford. They're great folks. It was a real honor to be on the stage with them, you were there as well. Oh yes, George as well. I see you and George all the time, so I feel if I fan-girled at you all every day, that would be weird. Mordy Oberstein: That would be weird. Crystal Carter: "Oh my God, thank you for reading my email." That'd be so weird. Mordy Oberstein: You should totally do that. "Thank you so much for reading this email. I can't believe you. Oh my gosh, you are the greatest." Crystal Carter: Every time I log into a meeting with George, I'm like, "oh my God, can I get a selfie? Can I get a selfie with you? Do you mind if I just..." Yeah, he'd lose mind. Mordy Oberstein: We sat down with some brilliant folks at Brighton SEO, in San Diego from our own Head of SEO Editorial here at Wix, George Nguyen, to MobileMoxie CEO, Cindy Krum. The COO of Search Lab Digital, Greg Gifford, to the founder of iPullRank, Mike King. Plus, we got insights straight from the live audience sitting right there at Brighton SEO, that I mentioned was in San Diego. Also, there was dancing. Crystal Carter: There was dancing. Mordy Oberstein: There was dancing. Crystal Carter: There were a few different dance moves happening during the episode. Mordy Oberstein: It was epic. It was the best dances ever. Crystal Carter: I know that you all can't see it over the podcast, however, the dance booths were- Mordy Oberstein: They were videoed. Crystal Carter: -inspiring, You could use that. Like nothing I've ever seen before. Mordy Oberstein: It was interpretive dance for SEO. Crystal Carter: It was interpretive dance. I think sometimes if you want to make it rain rankings, you need to do a dance and maybe that's the thing you need to do. Mordy Oberstein: When it rains, it pours, and that's what you got, a deluge of terrible dancing. Anyway, this is our very special live version of SERP's Up from Brighton SEO, in San Diego. We hope you enjoy it. Crystal Carter: All right, thank you so much for joining us for this session. My name is Crystal, the is Mordy, thank you for joining us for SERP's Up live. Mordy Oberstein: This is a live recording of our podcast SERP's Up, so that means that we're talking to you, our live audience, but also to our recorded audience who doesn't exist yet, but they will in two weeks when this comes out. This by the way, is not just shameless advertising, but we're actually going to use these during the session to ask you questions. Crystal and I'll be asking you questions, it's a yes no question. I'll tell you, "Hey, hold up green for yes and purple for no." We can survey you, we can interact with you, we can have a good time together. By the way, I will forget which one I say is yes or no, and I will switch them up, so stay on your toes. Crystal Carter: Do we want to do a trial run? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, let's do it, okay. Do you like SEO? Green for Yes. Purple for-who said No? Seriously? Crystal Carter: Do we have some PPC people in the place? No. Mordy Oberstein: The way this works is, we have multiple segments on our podcast and we're going to intro or integrate some of our segments to this live podcast recording with a cool set of guests. First up, from our own SEO Hub is the editor of the Hub, our head of SEO Editorial, the one, the only former editor of Search Engine Land, George Nguyen. Welcome to the show. This is unsolved, SEO mysteries, and if you walk out today's session feeling like we solved these mysteries, then we've done a horrible job. Go walk away with some context about some mysteries and maybe a bit of answers, but we're not going to solve anything definitively. That's just not how SEO works. It all depends, right? The first thing we wanted to talk about were content trends, I think that sets the stage for today. We're going to be talking about Google updates, we're talking about how to deal with your clients, we're talking about SGE because we obviously have to talk about AI at some point or I'll just walk out. We wanted to start off with content trends and George is the master of creating content and we thought, Hey George, let's talk to you about content and that'll set the stage for algorithm updates because algorithms impact content and clients need content and SEO revolves around content SGEs. George Nguyen: Are you trying to sell me on content? Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying to say content's really important. George Nguyen: I understand that. Mordy Oberstein: Do you? George Nguyen: I mean... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's good. That mystery is solved. That brings us to our first question, basically what is good content and how quickly does it change? I think that's something that we don't really appreciate, just how much content changes, how quickly it changes. What was good yesterday might not be good tomorrow. What do you think, George? George Nguyen: Think about your audience. If you're in the B2B audience, B2B folk, just raise up the thingy, the flag. Maybe 5% of you are B2B, your audience probably isn't going to change that much. It will change over time as technology is developed, but if you're direct to consumer, you are literally changing, it feels like every year. Think about how popular TikTok has become, right? We have some content on TikTok. Mordy Oberstein: I don't do TikTok. George Nguyen: Crystal does. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, Crystal does. George Nguyen: Yeah, that's the whole thing. Good content. It might be good for somebody who's like me in their mid-thirties, a millennial, somebody who likes to read, but for somebody much younger, if I had a kid, maybe that's not the right thing here. You really have to think about what your audience is, and I feel like it's changing constantly. It's just what are you able to produce that really changes the lens. What you're able to do dictates what you consider to be good content no matter whatever your role is. If you're in an agency or in-house, you view what your success can be primarily through what you're able to accomplish. But you have to be more aspirational than that, because you look at all those other brands and that's what they're doing. Crystal Carter: Would you say that you define good content by whether or not it's helpful? George Nguyen: Yes. Definitely relevance, all the stuff that Google says, but I feel like we're at a point where how much more optimizing, how much more helpful. If you ask me a question, right now, there's a million ways I can answer it just like I am answering it for this podcast. Are you going to write content that same way? You have to choose a way, and that all comes down to your audience. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, because what's helpful for one audience is not helpful for the other audience. I think to answer what is helpful content, Google's not going to tell us what helpful content is exactly. It really all depends on what you're trying to achieve, who your target audience is. I think it comes down to empathy. If you can really understand and really empathize with your audience and I think predict what their needs are going to be. When I write content, I guess I'm okay at content, but then George edits it makes it much better. One of the things I try to do is really predict, okay, so if someone's reading this and are they going to have a difficult time with this sentence? Does this concept need to be explained? Does it maybe need to have a link so that they can go explore what exactly I'm talking about because I can't cover it right here. I think being able to predict the pain points and the problems that your audience is going to have with your content makes it helpful. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Is that helpful? Crystal Carter: I think that's helpful, but here's a question to the audience. Do you think that helpful content actually ranks? Mordy Oberstein: Loaded question. Crystal Carter: Green for Yes, purple for no. Okay, so I think we have a lot of greens. We have a lot of greens. I'd probably say that was 75% green on that. That, I think is good. I think that that comes down to people seeing the way that users respond to content that adds value in a helpful way. Is that something you've seen as well, George? George Nguyen: I think that the fundamental basis of what helpful content is isn't going to change between me and you talking about it to what it is on the internet. Are you answering the question? Think about all that relevance. When your partner is just asking a question, "Hey, what do you want to have for dinner?" And you start contextualizing, "Well, I had this for lunch." That's not helpful. Remember, the same thing, you have a question, "What is a meta title?" "Well, before the internet." That's not helpful. You need the answer upfront, those things aren't going to change. The way that we approach that has changed a little bit, but we demand answers immediately and so that's always going to be what's happening. Mordy Oberstein: But on that idea of it not changing, at a certain point things do evolve and things do change. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the idea of does SEO impact content trends or do wider content trends impact SEO? George Nguyen: It's like a chicken and the egg thing, right? The listicle. How many of you, just raise the flag here if you spend time optimizing listicles still in this day and age? Don't lie to me. We're not above this. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you for saying no. George Nguyen: Yeah, okay. Crystal Carter: I love listicles. I'm not going to lie. I love them. Mordy Oberstein: We have a debate about this. Crystal Carter: I love listicles, I love a list. Mordy Oberstein: I hate listicles, they're the worst. Crystal Carter: I love a list. I like to be able to scan and then pick the thing I want to invest my time in. Mordy Oberstein: When Danny Sullivan goes on Twitter? X? Whatever? He's like, "Yeah, unhelpful, let me show you an example." It's a listicle. Crystal Carter: I find them helpful. I will go through and I go, "I know all of those. I don't know that one. I'll check that out." Mordy Oberstein: Agree to disagree. Crystal Carter: There we go. George Nguyen: You always have these situations, okay, listicles, where is that in this debate? Or even recipes, like your blog recipes. All the SEO in the world, all the guidance that we tell people, well you're not leading with the main content and that's for other considerations. I feel like there's a giant influence, especially nowadays, think about what's ranking in terms of Axios. They publish incredibly concise short content, it's well optimized and that's what it's built to do. I don't know if you can hear this from the recording, but there's this Star Wars theme playing back now it's both fueling me but also making it very hard to concentrate. If you're distracted, I don't blame you for that. Yeah, there's definitely an overlap here, especially as the publishers, the people, the C-suite becomes more aware of SEO and the importance of ranking that one position might be millions of dollars for you on the SERP rate. Of course, it's going to influence because you need to make money ultimately, but then it's different if you're doing it for branding, then it looks different. Then there's Google's vision of it, and Bing's vision of it where it's Index now. There's so much there. Mordy Oberstein: I think one of the things that's interesting though, like RankBrain. RankBrain is a Google machine learning property and part of what its built to do is basically look at how users are behaving and assimilate that into their machine learning process and now change what ranks based upon what people want. I was doing an article or something, I don't remember, and I went to the way back machine and it was a product review, best microwave content. The page now, has the word "our" and "we" 150 times, if you go back, I don't know, two, three years ago, it only had it eight times. I don't know if that was an SEO saying, we think Google has the E for experience, let's add a bunch of "our" and "we" to the content, but it could also just be content has changed and people are writing in a different style. Google does realize that, that's literally what RankBrain is built to do and those things get assimilated into the algorithm and the algorithm is changing based upon what users are doing. Crystal Carter: I think it has a lot to do with the competitive landscape. I think we're all, as SEOs, we're all working in a competitive landscape. The content that we make doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you see that there's a trend that lots of people in your sector or in your vertical are using lots of video for instance, and then you are not using video, then it becomes a question of satisfying customer demand, satisfying customer expectations and remaining competitive there. I think that content trends, like you said, it's like a chicken and an egg. I think they pull and push at the same time with those things. George Nguyen: We will develop any tactic, we will test any tactic working with content at scale. If that's the case and you just want to outrank someone and you have all this time to try to do that, of course SEOs are going to find a way to push the limits of content, create new formats, and that's how we're going to affect it. Then, eventually we're going to take that and be like, "Look at what I did." Then speak about it on stage at a conference. That's how the game works essentially. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you George for coming on our podcast. I'll see you around the office. George Nguyen: Every meeting is like this pretty much, ladies and gentlemen. Mordy Oberstein: We get nothing done. For the first 10 minutes, the other people in the meeting are like, "Okay, enough jokes. You have to stop. We have to do work now." George Nguyen: Can I go? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you can go. George Nguyen: I did want to say one thing. This is the first session of the morning. I really appreciate you showing up here. I'll be at the Wix booth in between sessions and if you don't know anyone, if you're here alone, feel free to come by. Say hi, you know me. Mordy Oberstein: With candy. George Nguyen: Why do you-? Mordy Oberstein: Although we have coconut candy. George Nguyen: It was all good until you said that. Thank you everyone. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much George. Mordy Oberstein: We do a little segment on the podcast, we call, Is It New? All about Barry Schwartz. We sometimes go through different changes to the SERP and wonder if they're new. They never are, by the way, but we try to explore the impact of their new-ish status. In this case, we're doing something a little bit different with the segment. We're taking a look at algorithm updates because I think the entire landscape is new. This is a very special version of, Is This New? It's the Google algorithm update version of Is This New? To help us, we have the founder of MobileMoxie herself, she's an SEO legend, I would say an SEO-G. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. I met Cindy, I met- Mordy Oberstein: It's Cindy Krum, by the way. Crystal Carter: It's Cindy Krum. I met her yesterday and I literally screamed a full fan girl, which I'm not ashamed of. Mordy Oberstein: Can we reenact that? Crystal Carter: No, I'm not going to. Yeah, I'm so honored, so pleased, and you're in for a real treat because Cindy's amazing and here she comes to the stage now. Cindy Krum: Hello, I'm excited to be here. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: That chair is really comfortable by the way. Cindy Krum: It's pretty good. Yeah, I like it. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the podcast. Cindy Krum: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the show. Cindy Krum: Thank you. How are you guys doing? Mordy Oberstein: I'm jet-lagged. Cindy Krum: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You? Cindy Krum: Yeah, not as jet-lagged as you. Mordy Oberstein: You all had snow last week. Cindy Krum: We did, a lot of snow. Mordy Oberstein: That's nuts. Cindy Krum: It got down to 11 degrees. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Okay, it's a podcast. We have the banter, I feel like I have to explain that. Let's kick this off about the algorithm updates. Let's ask the audience first. Do you see more rank volatility? Is rank more volatile than it normally is? Green if you think rank is more volatile, purple if you think it's not. Everyone from the audio audience, everyone except for Michelle Ford said the rank is more volatile than it was before. I feel like it's always that way. Crystal Carter: I think we've had another core update since the conference started. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: There's been five in the last five minutes. Cindy Krum: It's constant. Mordy Oberstein: And a review update, another spam update. It's been crazy, right? Cindy Krum: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: There was the August core update, then there was a helpful content update in September, then a spam update in October, another core update in October, another core update in November, and now we're review update. Cindy Krum: Now they're overlapping them, so you can't really identify or know for sure which impacted what and when, and stuff like that, if it did at all. Although the good news is, I think in general, the rule for me at least still seems to be if you're doing really good clean SEO strategy and not really pushing the boundaries of the guidelines, then you don't get impacted by these things. Is that what you guys are seeing? Can I ask audience questions? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: Green for if that's what you're seeing, okay. Crystal Carter: Generally keeping it- Mordy Oberstein: Good content. Cindy Krum: There's some purple, people who disagree. You're doing good content and following all the rules, but you're getting bouncy stuff. Crystal Carter: That's interesting. That's interesting. I think some verticals are finding that more than others. Cindy Krum: That's true, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Also, sometimes keywords are just like that. Cindy Krum: Yes, some keywords are more volatile. Mordy Oberstein: There's just volatile keywords. Cindy Krum: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Definitely, and I think that it's something that you've talked about being able to diagnose the impact of the different updates. I know that you can be very scientific with the way you break all of that down. Do you find that to be challenging for clients and things like that? Cindy Krum: Like I said, I haven't had a lot of clients who've been massively impacted, but I do find that clients are getting bored of hearing me freak out and be like, "There's an update and I just checked and everything looks fine, don't worry about it." They're like, "Yeah, yeah, it's always fine." It's the boy who cried wolf story, we used to have a couple updates a year or a couple major updates a year and we would make a big deal and be like, "No, I think everything's fine." We'd look really, really detailed. Now they're coming so fast that you can look but you can't get too detailed and you're like, "Nope, looks fine, looks fine. It's good." Mordy Oberstein: Is that the new norm? Is this the new norm? Cindy Krum: What I've been saying is that I think that part of what Google was going for when they switched from old school crawling indexing to mobile first indexing was this ability to make changes faster. Because remember, if it was about crawling, they would've called it mobile first crawling. It was about indexing, and they've changed the index to make it, I think more flexible and easier to change. Mordy Oberstein: The review update is going to be real time, basically. They're not going to announce future updates and it's going to just be basically constant, ongoing. It's almost like Penguin. Cindy Krum: I think that we should expect to see more of that with regular updates too. It'll just be, they don't necessarily have to announce everything. I think we're already seeing that things are going live and things are changing in an ongoing way. They're not always announcing it. Mordy Oberstein: You heard it here first, the core updates. I don't think they're going to keep announcing them, I think they're just going to put them real time, like the review update, which is going to be scary because you're not going to be able to figure out what's going on exactly. Cindy Krum: I think they may try and pull back and slow them down just so that people don't freak out, but they're still doing them, they're just not announcing all of them. I think Google's fighting an interesting battle because they're trying to look like they're being more transparent in ways that get them out of legal problems that they might or might not be having. They want to look like they're being transparent, but without being too transparent to make things too gameable, so they roll things out quietly sometimes. Then, if there's a risk, it's going to be a big fuss, then they'll give you a heads-up and be like, "Hey, next week this is happening." So they can say, "Oh no, we warned you." Crystal Carter: Sometimes within SEO chatter, you hear people talk about unconfirmed updates. Is that something that you pay attention to? Is that something that you think about. Cindy Krum: Yes, I definitely have seen unconfirmed updates, especially around things that are highly regulated. You see Google change their mind about how they feel about this topic or that topic, or changing just their understanding of a topic. Is this an informational query versus is this a e-commerce query. Mordy Oberstein: Unconfirmed update, Google, it's supposed to say a core update where they now announce them and they say, "Okay, it's coming." There's constant volatility, and we generally either see that in our own rankings or the SEO weather tools. You have MozCast and SEMrush Sensor and the Grumper, whatever. There are all these names for all these tools. I'm curious, this is a controversial question and if you're from one of the tools in here, this is probably one you want to pay attention to. Do you trust the SEO weather tools when they say, "There's a spike in rank volatility, there's an update, there's something going on." Do you believe them? Green for I believe the SEO weather tools. Purple for no, and it's a mixed bag. Cindy Krum: That's more purple than I expected. Mordy Oberstein: That's a lot more purple than I expected. By the way, each tool is a little bit problematic, and I've worked on two of them. The inside scoop is there's different keyword sets. Moz is very transparent by the way, they'll tell you that MozCast is built in high search volume keywords. The SEMrush Sensor is much more diverse with the type of keyword, and there's a case for each way of doing it. It is interesting that people don't trust them as much as they used to. I think part of the reason is that they're always on, there's always something going on and you really believe something's really happening. I have a wild theory about some of this, I'm curious what you think. I think a lot of the spikes in volatility that are not part of a confirmed update is machine learning, basically recalibrating. It's saying, okay, I'm implementing X. Let me try see if that works. Let's try Y and reverse it and see which one is better. Okay, let's go with the X. Cindy Krum: You hit a threshold and that threshold is a signal to the algorithm to recalibrate or reevaluate. I think that's true. I think though, that let's say we have a tool that measures these things and we realize that we've totally missed this whole industry or there's a new industry popping up that didn't exist, like TikTok, creator studios, whatever, and we have to add a bunch of keywords. Adding this infusion of new keywords changes the model entirely, and unless there's a lot of transparency about that you don't realize. I think the weather tools also sometimes miss some things that might be very important to people, to SEOs, because they are trying to find signal from noise. They omit what they think is noise but might not be noise for you. Something that I'm going to show in my talk tomorrow is I have a tool that grabs a screenshot, full screenshot of mobile search results every single day for a particular keyword in a particular area on the same phone, pretty standardized. What I saw in testing is that even if your position can stay the same, the presentation of the position can change day by day. Where today it's one big picture, tomorrow it's two pictures, then it's a grid of four with a thing over here. It's always potentially in the same position, not always in the same position, but I think that the weather tools might call that noise not signal, but for you that's signal. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. Mordy Oberstein: They totally miss them and they don't track that. Cindy Krum: Or because they have to show something that's statistically relevant for everyone and that's only relevant for you. So you have to take everything with a grain of salt with the weather tools. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, and I think particularly on mobile, there's only so much real estate on a screen as you know. If there's a new SERP feature that pops up that takes up 30% of the screen, that's really going to affect your click-through rate. Even if you're ranking number one, if you're below the SERP feature, then that's not really going to happen. Cindy Krum: You can see situations where they're ranking number one consistently, but the click-through rate is all over the place. Maybe it's because of the images or how it's presented or things that might not come into every single weather tool. What if the weather tools aren't checking pixels from the top and there's a knowledge graph that shows up all of a sudden? Or there's People Also Ask above it today and so click through and it tanks because everyone's clicking on People Also Ask. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I like to look at all that data very directionally. It's not telling you anything in specific. It's okay, something might be going on here. It's a red flag thing. I wouldn't put too much stock in what they show. I know it's a little controversial. Cindy Krum: I think you can take stock and say when they're red, stuff's changing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, right. That's true. Cindy Krum: When they're green, stuff might still be changing. Mordy Oberstein: Something to know about the weather tools, they all recalibrate after 20 or 30 days, because if they didn't, what would never really happen is it would be read the entire way through. I actually just looked at a bunch of data on this. If you look at 2022 and 2021, there's not much of a difference in the rank fluctuations. They're on average. If you go into 2023, the beginning part of 2023 looked very similar to 2022, and this actually ties into what I want to get into in a minute about AI. When you hit the summer, the end of the spring in 2023, ranks started going bonkers. Let's say on a scale of one to 10, how high was rank volatility? January through March, January through April was a three. When you got to May and you started going through the summer on a scale of one to 10, the level of volatility was an eight. The tools were still green because they recalibrate, eight was a new normal. You're looking at the tool, you're like, "Oh, it's green, everything's fine." But if you compare it to what rank was a few months ago, it's extreme. The green now, is way more volatile than the red back in January. Cindy Krum: Okay, so that's fascinating. But also, I think I want to talk a little bit about your choice of terms, rank volatility versus cert volatility because rank is specifying a numeric evaluation that used to be one through 10 or whatever. I think that Google has persuaded us to ignore things that matter when we're counting ranks because they're like, "Don't worry about the paid stuff up there and don't worry about the knowledge graph and don't worry about People Also Ask, those things don't rank." But they do. They push everything down. I think talking about rank volatility versus cert volatility, and maybe pixels from the top or some more universal metric where we can agree that every pixel counts. Pretending that a knowledge graph that's above you doesn't count is a lie. It counts and it's taking traffic. Mordy Oberstein: Right, and when you're tracking by pixel, you don't see it because on the desktop, it's on the right-hand side. Cindy Krum: Right, but on mobile, pssh. Mordy Oberstein: Did you see, by the way, it was a Search Engine Land article. It was part of the whole antitrust DOJ trial thing which was going on, which is fascinating. Some document came out where it was Ben Gomes, I think, a former VP of search there. "We can get more ad clicks if we add refinement to the SERP and more filter." If you fast-forward to now, the SERP is filled with filters. Broaden this search, refine this search, the bubble filters on top, People Also Ask, there's tons of filtering going on. Cindy Krum: What you need to notice when you click any of those filters that are on your screen, especially desktop, is that it's executing a new search and showing new ads. This is a monetization strategy. Don't ever forget that Google's a business that's trying to make money. Mordy Oberstein: I do like the filters though. Cindy Krum: The filters can be nice. Mordy Oberstein: Do you like the filters on the SERP? Green for Yes. See people like filters. Cindy Krum: Okay, but here's the thing. Filters do two things for Google, filters get them the ability to show a new search result, increase their search volume and say, "Oh, we're getting loads more searches because that's a new search because you filtered it and show more ads." Also, filters I think, and people can tell me I'm wrong and people can make fun of me. I've always been bullish on voice search. But, filters are the future of voice search, because if you think about a phone tree when you're calling in to change your insurance or whatever, they're like press one for this or press two for that. Those are filters and you're going to be able to do that with voice with your Google Assistant or whatever, where they say, "Do you want to do this or that, or do you want to see this kind of filter versus that kind of filter." When they predetermine what your choices are, it's easier for them to latch in and preload or know what they're going to show. Then you don't go off the rails and come up with something that they hadn't thought of. They're coaxing you into something that they can answer instead of something that they potentially can't. Mordy Oberstein: As a serial podcaster, I pride myself on my pivots and I don't have one right now. Cindy Krum: Is my time up? Is that what you're saying? Mordy Oberstein: No, I want to talk about AI. I feel we have to talk about AI. Do you think that the rank is incredibly more volatile since the summer, basically. How much of that do you think is AI? Before we answer that, dear audience, do you believe Google when they say that they're not targeting AI content? Green, if you believe Google, purple if you don't. There's one person. Cindy Krum: Not a lot of trust- Mordy Oberstein: It's way in the back, who trust Google, that they're not targeting AI content. Even Michelle doesn't believe Google. I don't believe them either, by the way. They're definitely targeting AI content. Cindy Krum: They like to mince words and get really detailed in what targeting means. They're just saying, "We like the best content and we make AI content too, and if we're going to show AI content, why not ours?" Mordy Oberstein: I have a theory about this, that Google can't say for their stock pricing that we're anti AI. Cindy Krum: Yes, they cannot. Mordy Oberstein: So, we'll just say, "No, we're not targeting AI content. We're targeting low quality content." Pre-med, pre-law, same difference. Cindy Krum: Yes, exactly. Speaker 5: What I think is interesting about this though is that what I've seen is that on the one hand that I know that there's a lot of people within the affiliate space who have been really struggling with this. They've been making a lot of bulk content by AI and they've been getting a lot of traffic and then a lot of volatility. What I've also seen is teams, for instance, LinkedIn, they have these community posts and it says right at the top, this is an AI generated article. If people haven't seen these, essentially they have a collection and they'll say the topic is AI content, for instance. Then they'll have machine generated content and then they'll have spaces for people to contribute answers, individual answers. Those pages rank for tons of keywords and they have done since April. It's very interesting, they seem to be trying to hedge how they're managing that content. Are you seeing that across the space as well? Cindy Krum: Yes, but I don't know if it's an intentional effort to hedge. I think that they will also be studying what's ranking in their algorithm and then they'll do it better because that's their model and they can show ads on that. When you get to a LinkedIn, then LinkedIn's making money instead of Google. Google, they've said for years that they don't always know exactly how an algorithm is going to impact results. It's not a guaranteed thing and it can change over time. When they push the button to roll something out, they're watching too and that's why there are rollbacks where they're like, "That went a little bit too far." Mordy Oberstein: By the way, another piggyback on the ring volatility. When you see the tools go, you don't know if that's a reversal and there's really no net gain or loss. Cindy Krum: Yeah, I mean it's still bad for the month or whatever, that you were down. Yeah, for Google, they're looking at things in a much longer term and they're like, "Whatever." Mordy Oberstein: There's been again, a ton of rank volatility on the SERP since the summer basically, and you know what it reminds me of? Because I've been tracking stuff religiously for years, it reminds me of Covid, when Covid hit the SERP bonkers. Cindy Krum: It totally did. Mordy Oberstein: Because they couldn't figure it out. Cindy Krum: Totally new industries popping up, new things. Mordy Oberstein: Terms didn't mean the same things anymore- Cindy Krum: Terms meant different things. Mordy Oberstein: -and can totally switch. I think what's happening is the perfect storm, there's a ton of more content because of AI and it needs to figure out, do we want to actually rank this and there's a method to my madness, to tie into what George was talking about before. Content trends are changing. People are looking, they didn't pull experience out of their ass for EEAT. Cindy Krum: Content trends and content and creation trends are both changing, and so the algorithm has to keep up. Mordy Oberstein: People want experience and Google's like, "Okay, let's integrate into the algorithm." Everything's changing, and I think Google's having a really hard time figuring it out. Cindy Krum: I think that what's going to make the difference in the future potentially is, Google has this horrible situation where they have, let's say there's 5,000 dentists in the United States, and every one of those 5,000 dentists think that they have to write an article about why it's important to floss. Okay, and how different are those- Mordy Oberstein: Nobody flosses anyway, no matter how many times they write it, right? Green if you floss, I'm just kidding. Cindy Krum: I floss. So, all 5,000 are writing basically the same article about why it's important to floss. How is Google going to choose which of those 5,000 should rank? Maybe it could, maybe one or two of those dentists is writing a vastly superior article or maybe one or two of the dentists has a song that's going to get stuck in your head to remind you to floss. Or maybe there's only three dentists in this area, so they want to rank a local dentist. I think context and connection is going to be the new ranking factor that they're going to try and do. So, influencer marketing, super important, but not something we talk about as much in SEO. I think that for a listicle, if I was writing a listicle about my favorite travel hacks and things on Amazon that you could buy, you would be like, "I know Cindy and she travels like a mad woman and she knows this." But, if you knew someone else who had five kids, which I do not, by the way, and you had five kids, you'd be like, "I know that woman and she has to deal with what I have to deal with." So, more personalization, more context of who you are and who is recommending whatever, or where they are or what's going to resonate with you like the song to remember flossing or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: Is there a song? Do you know a song? Cindy Krum: No. Does anyone? Mordy Oberstein: I wish there was a song. If you're doing SEO for a dentist, it would totally help to have a song. Cindy Krum: It would help, something like Going to the Chapel, that going to get stuck in everyone's head. You're welcome. Crystal Carter: As long as it doesn't get stuck in your teeth. There you go. On that bombshell, thank you so much for joining us and for talking about this fantastic subject. Give us a big hand for Cindy. Cindy Krum: Yay. Now you want me over there, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. With rank being bonkers and with content changing, one of the problems are clients and communicating all of this to clients. So we're going to take a deep thought into how you're going to be communicating with clients and how to get buy-in for clients and how to deal with the clients and all the stuff for the clients with the master of disaster himself. The one, the only, the COO of Search Lab Digital, give it up for Greg-fricking-Gifford. Greg Gifford: I feel like you moved over because you don't want to sit by me. Cindy Krum: I want to sit by you. Mordy Oberstein: I need to razz you, you're C level now? Greg Gifford: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. You have your own corner office and stuff? Greg Gifford: Yeah, only because I'm on the corner of a hallway. Mordy Oberstein: Is it in your house? Greg Gifford: No, no. I have an office. I can't work out of my house. I have too many kids and pets and my wife doesn't get that I'm working and I can't go do stuff. Mordy Oberstein: I have the same problem, my kids will bang on the door. Greg Gifford: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: They regularly just come into the meetings. Mordy Oberstein: They come into our meetings all the time. Crystal Carter: All the time. Mordy Oberstein: All the time. I just give up. Greg Gifford: I'm old school. I need to be somewhere separate where I can mentally separate work from home. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: That's good. Greg Gifford: When I'm home, anyway. Mordy Oberstein: C levelness aside, clients, it's a little complicated because if there's so much volatility, the SERP is changing, content is changing, everything's always changing. Like Cindy was talking about, two November updates, three October updates. At a certain point, do they just not believe you anymore? Greg Gifford: Yeah, we get the vast majority of our clients call us freaking out. "Oh my God, I saw that there's an update today. What are we doing to address it?" We're like, "Bro, we don't even know that it's affecting you yet. Slow your roll, calm down, it's fine." Then they're like, "Ah." We're like, "Okay." We don't share. Can I do a question? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Greg Gifford: Green, if you share ranking data with clients, how many people do?Purple, if you don't. Mordy Oberstein: Lots of greens. Greg Gifford: We do not share ranking data with clients. We in fact refuse to if even if clients ask for it, we say we won't. Crystal Carter: Why? Greg Gifford: Because, can I use adult language on this? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. We'll edit it out of the podcast. Greg Gifford: This will be lots of beeps right here, folks. No, I think ranking data is a complete bull vanity metric and it doesn't mean anything to a client's bottom line. What's the point of sharing rank data? I've had clients in the past that in a space of 12 months tripled their organic traffic, doubled their leads, every month was a record setting month for sales, yet they still canceled with us because the owner of the company wanted to rank for some vanity term that wouldn't have gotten traffic anyway. No human would ever search for it, but all he cared about was, do I rank number one for this term? So he cancels. That's why we don't get into ranking data. When our clients freak out, they're like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're like, "Look, we have rank tracking running, you know we won't share it with you. You're fine. Nothing even changed." Crystal Carter: Yeah, honestly I'm having PTSD over this because I've definitely had clients like that who it was a little financial firm and they wanted to rank for financial advisors. I'm like, "You're not going to rank for that." Greg Gifford: Yeah, we had this one guy that was like, "I want to rank number one for Toyota Camry." Mordy Oberstein: Are you Toyota? Greg Gifford: This was also the guy that was complaining that $3,000 a month for SEO was too expensive and he spent $1,500 a month on paid search, so in his mind between the 3000 of SEO and the 1500 for management fee, and then I think it was a $500 management fee at that agency. He's like, "I'm spending $5,000 a month, I should be number one for Toyota Camry." We're like, "Bro, it doesn't work that way." Then we tried to explain to him like, "Hey man, look, Toyota's going to rank for that. You don't have more money." He goes, "No, it doesn't matter, because there's no way Toyota's spending $6,000 a month on SEO. I should be number one." We're like, "Buddy, no, no, no." Yeah, so we do get those calls where clients are freaking out because they hear about all these updates lately, but I think we're a little bit insulated because we only do local SEO and a lot of these updates, you'll get a lot of fluctuation for maybe a day or two when the update's rolling out. But, a week later, once everything's settled in, we really don't see much of an effect for our clients. Mordy Oberstein: Are you seeing Cindy, is it harder for you to communicate with the clients because there's so many updates? Cindy Krum: I do it a little bit differently, so I don't have clients coming to me going, "oh my God, there's an update." They're not paying attention to SEO. I go to them and be like, "Hey guys, there was an update. I've checked, it seems like you're fine, but let's just keep an eye on things and watch closely." It's a little bit different, but then I don't have anyone who thinks that they should rank for Toyota Camry, so it might be just a different kind of client. Greg Gifford: The day that SGE was released to beta where we could finally all apply to get in and see it. We had three clients call us and go, "What's your SGE strategy for us? What are you doing?" I'm like, "Bro, it came out today. We don't have a strategy for you." We still had a client last week call us and go, "What's my SGE strategy?" I'm like, "Bro, we do not care about SGE and we're not going to talk about it with you because most likely it is not coming out for at least another year or two. it's still SEO, let's do marketing. Let's release this stuff that answers the client's questions. That's going to bring them to you because you have the solution." It's just like the voice search thing years ago where everybody's like, "Oh my god, voice search, what do we do?" Nothing changed. Cindy Krum: It's so funny because your approach is the opposite of my approach. My approach should be like, "Dude, we've been doing SGE strategy, everything that we've been doing to get featured snippets and to have stuff that's easy to parse and easy to understand, that is what's going to help SGE, this is baked in." Greg Gifford: Our clients don't get featured snippets. We're like, "Bro, we just got you this amazing snippet, look at it." Okay, another question, let's be interactive. Green, if you think getting a featured snippet takes traffic away. Purple, if you think getting a featured snippet gives you more traffic. I'm really curious. More purples. Mordy Oberstein: I love this. Greg Gifford: I'm a purple too, because we've tracked it and we'll get a featured snippet for how do you hook up Apple car play in a Kia Soul or something related to a car. You get it and you can track because it's going to that page and all of a sudden your traffic just goes like this. We tell them, "Hey, we got this." They're like, "Nobody's going to search for that. I don't care. I want to rank number one for this. Crystal Carter: Where's the Toyota Camry, Greg? Greg Gifford: That's why we just don't get into the rank tracking stuff. Mordy Oberstein: If I can ask the audience, do you have a harder time communicating with all these things going on with your clients now, because of all this stuff? Green, if you have a harder time communicating with clients and purple, if you have an easier time. Crystal Carter: Got a lot of arms up very high with the green. Mordy Oberstein: It's a lot of green. Crystal Carter: A lot of purple. Greg Gifford: We had a client that was a little bit more advanced, they understand the SERP layout more. This was April or May, they called us up. They're like, "Hey man, this People Also Ask section, do you guys have a strategy for that? Are you doing anything for that?" I'm like, "No." Mordy Oberstein: Did they ask you for every SERP feature and what your strategy is? Greg Gifford: They're like, "What's our strategy?" Mordy Oberstein: Do you have a related search strategy? Greg Gifford: Not, oh my god, I'm awesome, I'm C-suite, but I don't really talk to clients anymore, which is actually really badass that I don't have to talk to clients. I don't deal with a lot of this crap. This was a guy that I've known for 10 years who is a client, so yeah I'll talk to you. He's like, "What's our strategy there?" I'm like, "I don't have a strategy." He's like, "What? You guys are awesome. You've done so much good work. How are you ignoring this?" I'm like, "All right bro, let's jump on a Zoom." We jump on a Zoom. I'm like, "Let's do a screen share. Let's do a search for whatever your term is." It was a dealership term, and he shows up and there's five PAA questions and I'm like, "Let's click on this one. Look who ranks number one for that? Let's go back. Let's click on a second. Look who ranks number one for that?" I'm like, "Dude, you already rank because we are doing SEO the right way. We're not doing SEO for Google. We're doing SEO for your clients so that you're going to be the answer for what people are looking for and that's the right way to do it. You don't have to worry about what is this tricky thing that we're doing now just for this one update that just happened because that's not sustainable for long-term." Mordy Oberstein: I feel like you have strong feelings about clients. Greg Gifford: I love clients. Mordy Oberstein: Is anybody else getting that vibe? Greg Gifford: I love clients. I just get really spun up when I just keep getting these really asinine questions and I get it, they're curious, but what are you doing for SGE when it came out four hours ago? Come on, don't waste my time with questions like that. Mordy Oberstein: What kind of client do you think is going to be more successful now? Greg Gifford: I think for us, the clients that are the most successful are the ones that are actually engaged. There's a lot of people that will do SEO and do paid search and do marketing because they know they need to. But it's pulling teeth to get them on the phone to actually talk strategy. They're just like, "Just do it for me. I'm hiring you to do it." You need to tell us what's going on. You need to help us. What are the questions you're getting? Are these leads the right kind of leads because we can get you more leads. People are always like, "Your traffic's going up, your leads going up, SEO's winning, but sales are going down." You want to have those conversations and really dial in the customization of what you're doing but these people are too busy to talk to you. Those, I don't think are anywhere near as successful as the ones that are engaged and they do want to talk strategy and they do want to look forward. Even though we don't have contracts, we're month to month, we have to earn business every month. Some people treat it as month to month and they're like, "All right, cool. I'm here." Some people are like, "I'm not going anywhere. Let's talk about what our strategy is for the next two years." I think those are the ones that are more successful, because they're more engaged, they're more bought into this SEO thing is helping my business. Mordy Oberstein: Do you find the same thing, Cindy? Cindy Krum: Yes, to some degree. We have different models of business a little bit, but I do think that the customers that are the most successful are the ones that are wanting to work collaboratively and understand that I don't wish, pray, and do dances to make the rankings improve. Mordy Oberstein: I do have a whole dance. You don't do it? Cindy Krum: I mean, I do it. Greg Gifford: Show of green, if you want to see the dance right now, come on, help me out. Put those greens up, now you have to show us, the crowd wants it. Mordy Oberstein: My ranking dance. Then, automatic feature snippet. You have to nail the turn. For the audio audience, I just did a terrible dance, I'm so happy you're not here to see it. Greg Gifford: Please, can we somehow get the video team to make that into an animated GIF. Cindy Krum: It's like the baby dancing GIF. Mordy Oberstein: I forget where I am right now. Cindy Krum: Wait, so yes. Collaboration is important because the clients that just hire you and be like, "I paid you 5,000, why am I not ranking for Toyota Camry?" It's like, "Because, you didn't do what I said to do." Or because your developer tried but screwed it up and then pretended that they didn't do anything wrong. Crystal Carter: I do think it has to be collaborative because like you were saying, I've definitely had it with clients where I look at all the data and all the data's telling me we're winning. Yeah, we have tons of leads, tons of clicks, whatever. Then I talk to them and I was like, "So, how did those leads go?" I literally had a client that was like, "We didn't get more calls, did we, Julie?" She was like, "I'm not sure. I was on vacation." They're like, "Oh, I didn't." Literally, there was no one there to answer the phone. We were sending phone calls and there was no one there to answer the phone. If they don't tell you what's happening on the other end of the funnel, you can't complete the funnel, and if they don't make money, you don't make money. You have to work in collaboration and yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Mordy Oberstein: We have a lot of people who are clients listening to this podcast. Not right now, eventually when this comes out. If you're listening to the podcast, talking to the audio audience, you're all here, but if you're a client, communicate with your SEOs. Cindy Krum: I've had clients, I was going to jump in. I've had clients that try and sneak things by me intentionally and they're like, "Oh yeah, we didn't want SEO for this, so we duplicated all our product pages and put them on a separate domain. But, we don't want SEO for that, so don't worry about it." Keeping secrets from your SEO team is like keeping secrets from your doctor. It's not going to help you. Crystal Carter: It's not good for you. "Oh yeah, we're going to migrate the site tomorrow." I was like, "What?" Speaker 7: Surprise. Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: If you have clients and they're communicating with you but they're a little bit concerned about what's going on. How do you walk them off that cliff? Greg Gifford: Again, I think because of our model of we're months to month, we are really centered in on the relationship that we build with our clients. It's not always rainbows and unicorns, you're going to have months where traffic goes down. Some of our clients have a very ,seasonal business where it'll be up for a few months and then they know it's going to be down for the next six months. It's more about on our side, we found that it's better to build that relationship so that they trust us and they know that, "Hey, if my traffic just dropped 20% since last month for whatever reason, I trust that this team is there to help me." So many people have bad experiences from other agencies in the past that just do the BS checklist, SEO, that doesn't do anything. If you're lucky to get on a call once a month with some account manager who probably changes every two months and you just have this bad experience, so then you inherently mistrust all digital marketing moving forward. We work really hard to establish that trust so that they know we are the experts, we are in this with you. We are a partner, we're not a vendor because we care, because we have to earn that business every month so that we don't have to fire people or lay people off. So we work on that customer service and I think that really overcomes. I was joking about the weird customer calls, we don't get that often because the people that work with us choose to work with us because they trust that we are the solution and we are on top of these massive changes in volatility of the SERPs and different features that pop up and what's going on with local and new things that are coming out specifically just for car dealers in the business profile that other businesses can't do. They just trust that we are on top of things for them. I think where I work now, that's a different frame of mind than agencies I've worked for in the past where it was more about, "Your leads are up, your traffic's up. Hey, this is working guys." Then people are mad and they're leaving. It's the same checklist stuff for everybody due to the nature of some of the things that happen in automotive, and so I love where I am now where it's more about let's build this mutually beneficial long-term relationship. Even though it's a month to month thing, we assume that clients are going to be with us for a minimum of two, to two and a half years and we operate that way. It gets into their head that like, "Oh yeah, this is a long-term relationship and they are on our team. They're not just some vendor that we pay money to." I think that's made the biggest difference for us. Mordy Oberstein: It's a huge deal. It's the EEAT for your clients, I hate to use an SEO term, but it's an SEO conference. Crystal Carter: I think in terms of the audience, do you find that from a month to month, so purple for the stats and green for the relationship makes the difference for the outcomes for your clients. Got a lot of green. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. It's all pretty much green. Crystal Carter: A lot of green, a lot of green. I have Sean, who's in our customer relationships, manages that and he's like, "Yep, green." Mordy Oberstein: He's still holding up the green. You can't see it. Crystal Carter: All day the green. Thanks. I think you talked about the partnership element of the customer relationship things, and you also talked a little bit about marketing as well. Do you find that you need to help clients to navigate a few different channels in order to manage all of the different things that are happening in the SERP and on Google? Greg Gifford: Yeah, a hundred percent. A lot of our clients, they work with us because they know that we have a lot of top level experts. I'm not like, "Oh my God, I'm the best SEO in the world." But, I speak at a lot of conferences, I'm friends with all of the other top experts. We just have a better level of connection to what's going on than a lot of the crappy checklist SEO people they've worked with in the past. They come to us knowing that, "I know I need SEO, I know I need Facebook ads, I know I need YouTube pre-roll or whatever it would be, but I don't know how to do it and we haven't had success before. Can you help us?" They also trust us that when something comes out that's new, we can say, "Hey, look, here's this new thing that you can do. That's awesome." They just released LSAs for auto repair in California and Florida, so we came to all of our clients we're like, "Look, LSAs are a crapshoot. Maybe it's great, maybe it's not. Sometimes it's expensive, sometimes it's cheap, but this just came out for you and it's the first time you can do it. You need to be a first in the market, so that people are going to see you first and it's going to be amazing." They're all like, "Oh my gosh, thanks. I never would've known that was available if you hadn't come to us with that." Our team specifically wants to do that collaborative partnership approach as opposed to we're getting on a call, we're looking you up in our CRM to remember what the last call was about so we can pretend like we know you. We're really focused on, we want to build that long-term relationship with the clients we work with so they get that trust. We don't really have a lot of that, "Oh my gosh, there was an update. What do I do?" Or, "Oh my gosh, what happened here?" Crystal Carter: I think I see you nodding alon, Cindy. I know that you've been a big proponent of Google Merchant Center and people using additional channels to mix in with the SEO. Cindy Krum: Absolutely. I think that looking at LSA, even though it's not SEO, looking at just what's available is super important. Our job as SEOs is not just to do SEO, but to know the things that affect SEO. When LSAs come in, they push organic rankings down. That's not to say that we just need to get mad about it. We say, "Okay, that's pushing organic down, so do LSAs." It's not a pie where SEO loses because there's something new in there, you can leverage all of it for a huge benefit. Yeah, keeping an eye on everything that's coming into a search result should be part of how you envision your job. Whether you can impact it with organic stuff or not, you need to know what's there that might be taking traffic. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of what's coming into search, I don't know if you saw, but SGE has been released in 120 countries. Our last unsolved SEO mystery is going to be about SGE. We're doing it a little segue that we call from the top of the SERP. I think we both like analyzing what's happened, what's working for sites that are ranking, what's changing at the top, something like LSAs. We have a little segue we do where we run through what's changing, what sites are doing that are ranking, what they're not doing and how you can improve. In this case, our from the top of the SERP is SGE because it's literally at the top of the SERP. To help us, you see what I did. Greg Gifford: That's clever. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm a master of pivots. As a podcast, you have to pat yourself on the back for the pivoting, which yeah, thank you. Which ruins the whole pivot, but it doesn't matter. To help us navigate the wide world of SGE, he's the only person outside of Joe Biden who could rock aviator shades the way he does. He's sitting right there. He is the one, the only, Mike or drop the Mike King. Mike King: Where's my band? Mordy Oberstein: You're not mic'd up. I forgot. Mike King: What up. What are we talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Aviator shades. Mike King: It's bright up here. Mordy Oberstein: It's so bright. It's so bright, I'm blinded. Mike King: Hey Cindy. Cindy Krum: Hey, good to see you. Mike King: You guys, Cindy is the smartest SEO ever. I've been saying it for years. It's a fact. Clap for that. Mordy Oberstein: What do you feel about Greg though? Mike King: Greg's cool. Mordy Oberstein: I love that you're holding the mic like you're rapping, man. Mike King: That's the only way to hold it. Nah, I love Greg too because he's such a great energetic presenter and he's been riding the whole movie thing for 10 years and it doesn't get old. I'm not even playing. Greg Gifford: I really just do that to keep myself entertained more than anything else. Mike King: It's dope. It's dope. Crystal Carter: Get out of the USP. Mordy Oberstein: There are new movies, right? Greg Gifford: Yeah, I have to update it every year. Mike King: Of course, of course. Crystal Carter: It's good. Mordy Oberstein: So, SGE. Mike King: Heard of it. Mordy Oberstein: You all in the audience. Are you worried about it? Green, if you're worried about SGE. Mike King: Green is not a worry color. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry. Mike King: Purple's more a worry color. Mordy Oberstein: I was saying we should switch it up, see? Crystal Carter: We just have to pick one. There's two options. Mordy Oberstein: No, purple if you're worried. Mike King: Now they're confused, they're like, we're not doing this. Crystal Carter: Purple, if you're worried. Green, if you're not. Mordy Oberstein: Sean's worried. Crystal Carter: Sean's worried. Mordy Oberstein: Sean's very worried about the SGE. Are you worried? Mike King: No. Mordy Oberstein: Do you worry about anything? Mike King: No, I don't. Mordy Oberstein: So that's a bad question then, huh? Mike King: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mike King: I think it's an opportunity. Just like when feature snippets came out and everyone was like, "Oh, our traffic's going to die, blah, blah, blah." I think the reality of it is one, how people are meeting their information needs is changing dramatically. So it's not just Google, it's Chat GPT, it's TikTok, it's all these things. I think we as SEOs need to grow or evolve into these findability experts where we have to learn the interplay of channels and how to optimize for the different channels and so on. Undoubtedly, your clients are going to be like, "Hey, TikTok has a search, what do we do?" You can't just be like, "We only do local search." I mean, you can do it. You're going to have to have an answer to some degree and I'm not saying you need to be an expert in every channel, but search fundamentally works the same everywhere. There's a determination of relevance, there's a determination of user signals to reinforce those things. What is it that happens in TikTok that we need to be doing? Findability is definitely our future, but I think for SGE, users never wanted 10 results. They wanted an answer. Google is like, "Cool, let's give you an answer." It's not perfect right now, but it's a good step in that direction. There was a paper written by this guy, his name is Andre, I can't remember his last name. Mordy Oberstein: The Giant? Mike King: No. He's been at Google. He came from Alta Vista to Google with people like Jeff Dean and all these people. He's the guy that invented the informational transactional navigational query classification. He wrote this paper recently about what are called Delphic costs, and so Delphic costs is effectively the mental costs that you go through to get a search result. What he's talking about is no one ever wanted to have to go through 10 results and be like, "Is this right? Is this what I'm looking for?" Google has always tried to answer your question and it makes sense that they're going more in this direction. Crystal Carter: I think it's interesting. I think they're competing with so many more search engines now, we used to have a segment on the podcast called So Many Search Engines. Mordy Oberstein: We still have it. Crystal Carter: We haven't done it in ages, but there's so many different ways to answer a question now. The prime example I use for Chat GPT, I use a lot because George, who was on here earlier tried to teach me how to play Magic the Gathering and- Mike King: Get your manna. Crystal Carter: This is the thing, I was struggling. I'm like, "Can I play this with summoning sickness? Is there trample? I don't understand. I'm very confused. Am I a wizard? I don't know what's going on." Basically there's been a lot of SEOed content around Magic the Gathering, 4,000, 7,000 words about the thing. I'm like, "Can I play this turn?" It's much easier for me to just literally talk into my phone and go, "I have this guy with this manna. Can I play this on this turn or can I not?" Then Chat GPT will just go, yes or no. Rather than me having to read through 17 pages of content. The SGE, if it's able to do that for some of that content, that's a win. Mordy Oberstein: Are you saying we've ruined the internet? Crystal Carter: No. Mike King: Put up a green if you're a content goblin. Nobody read that shit. Cindy Krum: Wait, wait. Can we do a green if we ruined the internet? Mordy Oberstein: Did SEOs ruin the internet? Green, if we've ruined the internet, according to the verdict, we have. Crystal Carter: Purple, No. Cindy Krum: Some people think so. Crystal Carter: Some people say yes. Cindy Krum: Maybe just you ruined the internet. Mordy Oberstein: It's that guy. Crystal Carter: He woke up in the morning, he was like, "You know what I'm going to do today?" Mordy Oberstein: It's like Pinky and the Brain. Mike King: Yeah, but I think to your point Crystal. We as SEOs, we can't unsee what it is that we do. When you're looking for something important and you're like, "Well, someone clearly optimized this. Some junior copywriter wrote this about whether or not I have cancer, I'm skipping this result." I think that is a reality of the internet, and people do have a sense of is this authentic? It's why we are like, "Okay, I have this ailment, where's the WebMD? Or where's Mayo Clinic or something like that." You don't trust what's on the web, but there's a lot of people that do, which is a problem. I think the standard audience is like, "If Google says it, it must be real." Crystal Carter: Right. Mike King: I think that's one of the problems with SGE is because sometimes it's not right. It being Google, you inherently trust it, and so you're going to get bad information in those cases. Greg Gifford: Don't you think, right now it's not out, it's still beta because they want people to start thinking that way. By the time it's really officially out and in use, it's going to be way better than what it is right now. Mike King: I agree with that. Greg Gifford: Or do not think that. Mike King: No, I agree with that, but language models inherently have the ability to hallucinate. The way that SGE is built, it's taking the results and then using that to fine tune the language model to give you the actual response. It can still be wrong. `I don't know that the current generation of that technology is good enough to solve that problem. Greg Gifford: I totally agree. Everybody talks about SGE with us and we're like, "It's not coming out soon. Stop worrying about it. It's got to get better before it's going to be public." Mordy Oberstein: What does it look like in the end? When it goes live, it's out of beta. Forget the type of content, what does it even freaking look like? Because they've changed it 10 times. Greg Gifford: It looks Star Trek, man. Mordy Oberstein: I'm wearing Star Trek socks. Greg Gifford: We're going to talk to our computer in a conversational way and get the answer that we want for most of this stuff. If you just want an answer like you said a minute ago, you don't want to read, you want the answer. Cindy Krum: I think it looks like a Google Home Hub with a knowledge graph and an answer and filters so you can drill down more and not 10 blue links or maybe any blue links or just a couple blue links. I wanted to build on what Mike was saying, I think when SGE came out, Google created part of its own problem by not doing citations. When you cite someone, then you could be like, "We didn't say it. They said it." But, when Google wasn't doing citations, then it's Google's fault and they're going to have to do citations for any number of reasons but the legal one and the getting it right or wrong is going to be a big part of that. Mordy Oberstein: Can I ask, about the citations and about updating content, if publishers are now going to block things like Bard- Mike King: Why? That's so shortsighted. Mordy Oberstein: I agree, but I think it's spiteful. I think because they can. Mike King: They can't, because if you block Bard, which you have to block Googlebot in general for, you're still going to get crawled by the common crawl, which is a data source that's used for training. It's a pyrrhic victory for you to do that. Cindy Krum: You're just going to get ripped off, someone's going to crawl and republish. Mordy Oberstein: No, I am with you. Mike King: Agree, but one of the things that I think we don't pay enough attention to is that search is also a branding channel. If you are searching for something and then there's a featured snippet and your brand is mentioned amongst other brands that are in that consideration set, that is a good thing for Mindshare. If you're not there because you want to just block Google from learning from your content as though it's so precious, you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's stupid. Mordy Oberstein: I think it's the most under-talked about thing in the SEO world that is a personal, I am on a soapbox about this. Content fundamentally, yes, there's acquisitional content, but a lot of your content is branding content, a lot, and it's important to think about it like that. Crystal Carter: I think you talked about how that shows on the SERP and how that shows with things. I think that brings me to a question for the audience in terms of the SERP and SGE, can you optimize for SGE? Are you optimizing for SGE? Green for Yes, and purple for No. Mordy Oberstein: The people who said green, it's mostly green, maybe want to offer Greg some strategies so we can…. Greg Gifford: Okay, can we adjust the question? Okay, if you had a green, hold it up higher still. Keep the green up, so you're optimizing for SGE. Keep it up. How many of you that have it up, you're answering this because you're doing something different than you were doing before, specifically for SGE or you have it up because you're like, "I was doing good SEO anyway." Everybody put their cards down. Mike King: He didn't. Mordy Oberstein: For the audio audience, there was three people who said yes. Greg Gifford: But for the audio audience, most of the people that had it up, put it back down because doing the stuff for SGE, if you're doing legitimate SEO now, you're not really having to change that much. Mordy Oberstein: Not really. I can see you squirming in your seat right now. Mike King: I don't squirm. Come on. Don't make the people in listener world think that. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry, I take it back. Hey Aaron, can we edit that part out. Jury, forget what I just said, stricken from the record. Greg Gifford: I'm curious what you have to say about this. Mike King: No, I mean I think it goes back to things again about Cindy being the smartest SEO ever. She was talking about fraggles five years ago. Fraggles are basically the components of the content, the passages of the content that Google has identified as most relevant and is then serving it to the language model to then determine what to say in the response. In SGE, if you click on the carousel, the links in the carousel, it has the fraggle, what do you call it? The component at the end of the URL, it's the anchor link to the actual fraggle. Cindy Krum: Fragment. Mike King: Then it'll take you specifically to the line of text that Google has used. What I've done in my analysis of this is we've pulled those fraggle for a bunch of pages and then compared it against the AI snapshot. The one that has the highest cosign similarity, the one that's most relevant is the one that ranks best in the carousel. So it's really about optimizing those fraggles and identifying them if you want to get more visibility in those. Mordy Oberstein: Ultimately speaking, when- Mike King: Should I just drop the mic then? Mordy Oberstein: No, in nine minutes and 53 seconds. Mike King: He's like, no, don't break my equipment. Mordy Oberstein: You break it, you buy it, by the way. Mike King: I can afford it. Mordy Oberstein: Ultimately speaking then, I have to ask, I hate this question, we're going to ask it anyway. How does SGE impact traffic? Mike King: We don't know yet. Mordy Oberstein: What do you think? Mike King: Yeah, we've been modeling it and it's 30 to 40% based on a variety of different factors, but there's no way to know. We don't have any user behavior data on it. We don't have anything in GSE, I don't even know that SimilarWeb has anything yet. If they do holler at me, let's figure it out. We don't know. We have to wait and see until we get actual data. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, code red for the SEO tools, either they need to figure this out, because they're becoming- Mike King: It's already a code red for them. I was just talking about this in the other room, google shifted to semantic search 10 years ago. All of our SEO tools are still on the Lexical model, so really we are not doing something relevant to how stuff works right now. Effectively, we are still just making great content and Google is figuring it out and we're just messing around with all these tools that still do T-F-I-D-F. It's actually silly what we're doing as an industry right now. Cindy Krum: Also, all those tools and the weather tools and stuff like that, as far as I know, they're still focusing a lot on desktop results when more searches are happening on mobile, just more. Mike King: Facts. Mordy Oberstein: Also their keyword data sets are years old. They're almost irrelevant. Mike King: Sorry guys. Everything you're paying for is waste of money. Cindy Krum: The tools suck. Crystal Carter: I think in terms of click-through rate, and here's a question, maybe to the audience as well, do you think that for the SGE that brands who have a well-established brand will be less affected by a drop in clicks on the SGE? Green for Yes, purple for No. Is that too complicated a question? Cindy Krum: Say it again. Mordy Oberstein: Green, if it's too complicated. Crystal Carter: Basically, what I've experienced going through some of these AI SERPs and tools is that you sometimes get a repeat of people on a certain topic. I was trying to use Bard to figure out why my plant was dying, and what I found was that there was the same website that kept getting referenced for all of the different questions that I had about this plant. At the end of the day I was like, "I'm just going to go to the website because they've answered three of the questions already. So they probably have the whole bit of information there." Do you think that the brand overlap where people are getting that visibility in the circle lot, if that's going to make a difference between actually getting the click through? Mike King: Yes and no. What you're describing is actually a function of the context window. If you're asking Bard a bunch of questions about the same thing, all of those answers and questions are informing the next response. Whatever they looked up, because Bard is effectively a retrieval augmented generation implementation where it's just searching Google, the same way that SGE does based on your question, which is using its as a prompt. Then it's saying, "Okay, these are the pages that are most relevant to it." The original pages from your first questions remain in that context as you ask subsequent questions. That's part of why that same website kept coming up over and over. Is that going to impact SGE? Yes, it will on the follow-up questions, because again, the follow-up questions is bringing that context window concept to search. Crystal Carter: Then do you think it'll be more important for people to rank for those first questions? Mike King: Absolutely, and I think it's going to require that the content you create be more robust. Rather than the whole long tail strategy where it's like, "I'm going to make a hundred pages for a hundred queries." You may need to make 20 pages for five queries each, so that page answers several of those questions and remains in that context window. Cindy Krum: Google is crowdsourcing what they call these journeys. This came out when we started talking about MUM. They're looking at people who are using Bard or just using regular search to understand why their plant is dying. They're saying, "Lots of people have an Aloe plant and it's looking like this and here's the right journey." I think they'll fine tune, and I think at some point we'll get to a point where Google will try and add diversity to not just show the same website over and over again and then a QDF query deserves freshness or whatever. They're going to be honing these things in a similar model to what we've seen them go through historically with the current results. Don't you think so? Mike King: Yep. Crystal Carter: Then do you think as part of thinking about the way we create content within this space, that understanding the user journey rather than just the keyword as you were saying, or even just the semantics is going to be a critical point? Mike King: Yeah, and I think to Greg's point, at least at iPullRank, we've been on that for a long time. I was on that persona driven keyword research back in 2012, and that's been how we've always done it. Google is just making it more explicit like, "These search journeys actually matter, and we are building around that because we understand that people are searching to fulfill a specific need." They're not just keywords. They are people doing a series of things so they can do something in the real world. Mordy Oberstein: It's almost trying to do an entity-based optimization, which I know you're going to- Cindy Krum: Also, when they've mapped that journey and they've modeled the journey, their processors don't have to work so hard for the estimation of what's going to come next. They can be working in the background to get that information, serve it faster, which they're always trying to serve things faster. Mike King: To Greg's earlier point, SGE being a test is largely so that they can get the data that they need and also cache a lot of these responses, which is another reason why it's gotten a lot faster since it first rolled out. Greg Gifford: Wait a minute, so are you saying Google does something and tells SEOs about it to get us to give them more data? No way. No way. Mordy Oberstein: So, go back to what you said earlier before about whether or not the LMs are even capable of spitting out content that's going to be good, ultimately speaking. At a certain point I feel like they're going to end up with a problem. I don't think it's going to be, and they're not going to backtrack on using SGE and putting it out there. You're going to end up, I think in a situation where you're going to have a lot of great answers coming out of the SGE and you're going to have a lot of garbage coming out of the SGE. Mike King: I feel like you just led me in your question. What do you want me to say to you? Mordy Oberstein: What happens to the ecosystem? How are they going to handle that? Mike King: I think the bigger problem is that we're at a space where all content moving forward is inherently polluted. What I mean by that, is there's a cutoff on what content is from November of last year because it's pre-Chat GPT. Crystal Carter: Right. Mike King: There's a lot of stuff out there that's not accurate. There already was, but it's accelerating at such a rate that Google has had to solve that and that's where the helpful content update comes into play. I think that the primary mechanism that they have to use to understand this is information gain because with Chat GPT, you're regurgitating things in different ways more or less unless you're doing a rag model or something like that. Google is trying to sift through to say, where is the net new information here? It can't just be like, "Okay, well we have 500 pages about flossing." Like you said, and everyone is just like, "Here's how you floss." So what do you rank? Yes, we can go back to links and all of that, but Google has to understand where is there something new, otherwise users aren't going to feel like search quality is good enough. Crystal Carter: I think that's great. I'm just conscious that we need to wrap up and I think it's fantastic and thank you so, so much. So, a big hand to all of our guests who have given us such amazing conversations. Before we wrap up, to the audience, green for Yes and purple for No. If you'd like to see Mordy do his ranking dance again. Greg Gifford: You all better put your greens up. Crystal Carter: Green. Mordy Oberstein: I don't remember what I did. Greg Gifford: Now we'll have two different GIFs to show. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on, I got to get in the zone. Wait, can I do a different one? Greg Gifford: Please do. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to do my Axl Rose. Cindy Krum: Do the featured snippet dance. Greg Gifford: Oh my gosh. Please make a GIF of this. Mike King: This is Donald Trump campaign energy right now. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Crystal. I really appreciate that. Crystal Carter: Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful, fantastic Brighton SEO. Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter George Nguyen Cindy Krum Greg Gifford Mike King Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Mobile Moxie Search Lab Digital iPullRank Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter George Nguyen Cindy Krum Greg Gifford Mike King Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Mobile Moxie Search Lab Digital iPullRank Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining us on this episode of the SERP's Up podcast everybody, we have some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, SEO brand here and I’m joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the unequivocally, unparalleled greatest person on the planet. Too far. Crystal Carter: I think so. Mordy Oberstein: Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: There are definitely better people than myself. Mordy Oberstein: Just because my wife is listening. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Also, I've met better people than me. It's fine, I do my best. I think we all do our best. I think we can sum it up as Crystal Carter, doing her best. I'm fine with that. Mordy Oberstein: I can think of some people who do not do their best. Crystal Carter: That's true, that's true. Mordy Oberstein: That's going to those people. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. I think maybe they're doing their best and maybe they still need to grow. There we go. I aim for some positives there. Mordy Oberstein: That's good. Yeah. We're still going to put a positive spin on things. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. That's a lot of slashes. But we can also take the mystery out of writing a good title tag and meta description with Wix's brand new AI meta-tag creator. Run the tag creation process with more efficiency using the new AI tag creator tool. Okay, fine, doesn't really solve any mystery of writing at all. Crystal Carter: Not particularly, but we're getting some great feedback on it. I had somebody on the Wix blog was like, "There are several things I love about Wix blog. I'll list them here for you. The SEO optimization tool just keeps getting better with AI. The editor is easy to use and yet powerful." Mordy Oberstein: There we go. Wow. Crystal Carter: That's good. Mordy Oberstein: That's quite-. Two likes. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's like my washing machine. My washing machine broke and I got a new one and I said to my husband, "You hear that?" He was like, "No." I was like, "Exactly. Exactly." Mordy Oberstein: The same thing. I just got a new washing machine two weeks ago, I know exactly what you're talking about. Crystal Carter: By the time it's done, when it's on the spin cycle, you're like, "What'd you say? What was that?" Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the old one looks like it went through something real serious. Crystal Carter: Shoes. Shoes is the worst. Mordy Oberstein: My kids' laundry. Okay, so the AI tag creator tool we have on Wix doesn't solve any mysteries, but you know what does solve some mysteries? Our session from Brighton SEO, in San Diego, we talked about unsolved SEO mysteries. See what I did there? Crystal Carter: I see, I do see that. The pivot. It was fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. By the way, just for clarification, we didn't actually solve anything at the session either. We just added more nuance and clarification and contextualization to some troubling SEO issues. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but we had a lot of fun doing it. It's about the journey. Mordy Oberstein: It was, and it was very insightful, I like to say. I like to think it was very insightful. Crystal Carter: Literally, it's just an excuse for me to fan-girl at Cindy Krum and Mike King and Greg Gifford. They're great folks. It was a real honor to be on the stage with them, you were there as well. Oh yes, George as well. I see you and George all the time, so I feel if I fan-girled at you all every day, that would be weird. Mordy Oberstein: That would be weird. Crystal Carter: "Oh my God, thank you for reading my email." That'd be so weird. Mordy Oberstein: You should totally do that. "Thank you so much for reading this email. I can't believe you. Oh my gosh, you are the greatest." Crystal Carter: Every time I log into a meeting with George, I'm like, "oh my God, can I get a selfie? Can I get a selfie with you? Do you mind if I just..." Yeah, he'd lose mind. Mordy Oberstein: We sat down with some brilliant folks at Brighton SEO, in San Diego from our own Head of SEO Editorial here at Wix, George Nguyen, to MobileMoxie CEO, Cindy Krum. The COO of Search Lab Digital, Greg Gifford, to the founder of iPullRank, Mike King. Plus, we got insights straight from the live audience sitting right there at Brighton SEO, that I mentioned was in San Diego. Also, there was dancing. Crystal Carter: There was dancing. Mordy Oberstein: There was dancing. Crystal Carter: There were a few different dance moves happening during the episode. Mordy Oberstein: It was epic. It was the best dances ever. Crystal Carter: I know that you all can't see it over the podcast, however, the dance booths were- Mordy Oberstein: They were videoed. Crystal Carter: -inspiring, You could use that. Like nothing I've ever seen before. Mordy Oberstein: It was interpretive dance for SEO. Crystal Carter: It was interpretive dance. I think sometimes if you want to make it rain rankings, you need to do a dance and maybe that's the thing you need to do. Mordy Oberstein: When it rains, it pours, and that's what you got, a deluge of terrible dancing. Anyway, this is our very special live version of SERP's Up from Brighton SEO, in San Diego. We hope you enjoy it. Crystal Carter: All right, thank you so much for joining us for this session. My name is Crystal, the is Mordy, thank you for joining us for SERP's Up live. Mordy Oberstein: This is a live recording of our podcast SERP's Up, so that means that we're talking to you, our live audience, but also to our recorded audience who doesn't exist yet, but they will in two weeks when this comes out. This by the way, is not just shameless advertising, but we're actually going to use these during the session to ask you questions. Crystal and I'll be asking you questions, it's a yes no question. I'll tell you, "Hey, hold up green for yes and purple for no." We can survey you, we can interact with you, we can have a good time together. By the way, I will forget which one I say is yes or no, and I will switch them up, so stay on your toes. Crystal Carter: Do we want to do a trial run? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, let's do it, okay. Do you like SEO? Green for Yes. Purple for-who said No? Seriously? Crystal Carter: Do we have some PPC people in the place? No. Mordy Oberstein: The way this works is, we have multiple segments on our podcast and we're going to intro or integrate some of our segments to this live podcast recording with a cool set of guests. First up, from our own SEO Hub is the editor of the Hub, our head of SEO Editorial, the one, the only former editor of Search Engine Land, George Nguyen. Welcome to the show. This is unsolved, SEO mysteries, and if you walk out today's session feeling like we solved these mysteries, then we've done a horrible job. Go walk away with some context about some mysteries and maybe a bit of answers, but we're not going to solve anything definitively. That's just not how SEO works. It all depends, right? The first thing we wanted to talk about were content trends, I think that sets the stage for today. We're going to be talking about Google updates, we're talking about how to deal with your clients, we're talking about SGE because we obviously have to talk about AI at some point or I'll just walk out. We wanted to start off with content trends and George is the master of creating content and we thought, Hey George, let's talk to you about content and that'll set the stage for algorithm updates because algorithms impact content and clients need content and SEO revolves around content SGEs. George Nguyen: Are you trying to sell me on content? Mordy Oberstein: I'm trying to say content's really important. George Nguyen: I understand that. Mordy Oberstein: Do you? George Nguyen: I mean... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's good. That mystery is solved. That brings us to our first question, basically what is good content and how quickly does it change? I think that's something that we don't really appreciate, just how much content changes, how quickly it changes. What was good yesterday might not be good tomorrow. What do you think, George? George Nguyen: Think about your audience. If you're in the B2B audience, B2B folk, just raise up the thingy, the flag. Maybe 5% of you are B2B, your audience probably isn't going to change that much. It will change over time as technology is developed, but if you're direct to consumer, you are literally changing, it feels like every year. Think about how popular TikTok has become, right? We have some content on TikTok. Mordy Oberstein: I don't do TikTok. George Nguyen: Crystal does. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, Crystal does. George Nguyen: Yeah, that's the whole thing. Good content. It might be good for somebody who's like me in their mid-thirties, a millennial, somebody who likes to read, but for somebody much younger, if I had a kid, maybe that's not the right thing here. You really have to think about what your audience is, and I feel like it's changing constantly. It's just what are you able to produce that really changes the lens. What you're able to do dictates what you consider to be good content no matter whatever your role is. If you're in an agency or in-house, you view what your success can be primarily through what you're able to accomplish. But you have to be more aspirational than that, because you look at all those other brands and that's what they're doing. Crystal Carter: Would you say that you define good content by whether or not it's helpful? George Nguyen: Yes. Definitely relevance, all the stuff that Google says, but I feel like we're at a point where how much more optimizing, how much more helpful. If you ask me a question, right now, there's a million ways I can answer it just like I am answering it for this podcast. Are you going to write content that same way? You have to choose a way, and that all comes down to your audience. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, because what's helpful for one audience is not helpful for the other audience. I think to answer what is helpful content, Google's not going to tell us what helpful content is exactly. It really all depends on what you're trying to achieve, who your target audience is. I think it comes down to empathy. If you can really understand and really empathize with your audience and I think predict what their needs are going to be. When I write content, I guess I'm okay at content, but then George edits it makes it much better. One of the things I try to do is really predict, okay, so if someone's reading this and are they going to have a difficult time with this sentence? Does this concept need to be explained? Does it maybe need to have a link so that they can go explore what exactly I'm talking about because I can't cover it right here. I think being able to predict the pain points and the problems that your audience is going to have with your content makes it helpful. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Is that helpful? Crystal Carter: I think that's helpful, but here's a question to the audience. Do you think that helpful content actually ranks? Mordy Oberstein: Loaded question. Crystal Carter: Green for Yes, purple for no. Okay, so I think we have a lot of greens. We have a lot of greens. I'd probably say that was 75% green on that. That, I think is good. I think that that comes down to people seeing the way that users respond to content that adds value in a helpful way. Is that something you've seen as well, George? George Nguyen: I think that the fundamental basis of what helpful content is isn't going to change between me and you talking about it to what it is on the internet. Are you answering the question? Think about all that relevance. When your partner is just asking a question, "Hey, what do you want to have for dinner?" And you start contextualizing, "Well, I had this for lunch." That's not helpful. Remember, the same thing, you have a question, "What is a meta title?" "Well, before the internet." That's not helpful. You need the answer upfront, those things aren't going to change. The way that we approach that has changed a little bit, but we demand answers immediately and so that's always going to be what's happening. Mordy Oberstein: But on that idea of it not changing, at a certain point things do evolve and things do change. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the idea of does SEO impact content trends or do wider content trends impact SEO? George Nguyen: It's like a chicken and the egg thing, right? The listicle. How many of you, just raise the flag here if you spend time optimizing listicles still in this day and age? Don't lie to me. We're not above this. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you for saying no. George Nguyen: Yeah, okay. Crystal Carter: I love listicles. I'm not going to lie. I love them. Mordy Oberstein: We have a debate about this. Crystal Carter: I love listicles, I love a list. Mordy Oberstein: I hate listicles, they're the worst. Crystal Carter: I love a list. I like to be able to scan and then pick the thing I want to invest my time in. Mordy Oberstein: When Danny Sullivan goes on Twitter? X? Whatever? He's like, "Yeah, unhelpful, let me show you an example." It's a listicle. Crystal Carter: I find them helpful. I will go through and I go, "I know all of those. I don't know that one. I'll check that out." Mordy Oberstein: Agree to disagree. Crystal Carter: There we go. George Nguyen: You always have these situations, okay, listicles, where is that in this debate? Or even recipes, like your blog recipes. All the SEO in the world, all the guidance that we tell people, well you're not leading with the main content and that's for other considerations. I feel like there's a giant influence, especially nowadays, think about what's ranking in terms of Axios. They publish incredibly concise short content, it's well optimized and that's what it's built to do. I don't know if you can hear this from the recording, but there's this Star Wars theme playing back now it's both fueling me but also making it very hard to concentrate. If you're distracted, I don't blame you for that. Yeah, there's definitely an overlap here, especially as the publishers, the people, the C-suite becomes more aware of SEO and the importance of ranking that one position might be millions of dollars for you on the SERP rate. Of course, it's going to influence because you need to make money ultimately, but then it's different if you're doing it for branding, then it looks different. Then there's Google's vision of it, and Bing's vision of it where it's Index now. There's so much there. Mordy Oberstein: I think one of the things that's interesting though, like RankBrain. RankBrain is a Google machine learning property and part of what its built to do is basically look at how users are behaving and assimilate that into their machine learning process and now change what ranks based upon what people want. I was doing an article or something, I don't remember, and I went to the way back machine and it was a product review, best microwave content. The page now, has the word "our" and "we" 150 times, if you go back, I don't know, two, three years ago, it only had it eight times. I don't know if that was an SEO saying, we think Google has the E for experience, let's add a bunch of "our" and "we" to the content, but it could also just be content has changed and people are writing in a different style. Google does realize that, that's literally what RankBrain is built to do and those things get assimilated into the algorithm and the algorithm is changing based upon what users are doing. Crystal Carter: I think it has a lot to do with the competitive landscape. I think we're all, as SEOs, we're all working in a competitive landscape. The content that we make doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you see that there's a trend that lots of people in your sector or in your vertical are using lots of video for instance, and then you are not using video, then it becomes a question of satisfying customer demand, satisfying customer expectations and remaining competitive there. I think that content trends, like you said, it's like a chicken and an egg. I think they pull and push at the same time with those things. George Nguyen: We will develop any tactic, we will test any tactic working with content at scale. If that's the case and you just want to outrank someone and you have all this time to try to do that, of course SEOs are going to find a way to push the limits of content, create new formats, and that's how we're going to affect it. Then, eventually we're going to take that and be like, "Look at what I did." Then speak about it on stage at a conference. That's how the game works essentially. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you George for coming on our podcast. I'll see you around the office. George Nguyen: Every meeting is like this pretty much, ladies and gentlemen. Mordy Oberstein: We get nothing done. For the first 10 minutes, the other people in the meeting are like, "Okay, enough jokes. You have to stop. We have to do work now." George Nguyen: Can I go? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you can go. George Nguyen: I did want to say one thing. This is the first session of the morning. I really appreciate you showing up here. I'll be at the Wix booth in between sessions and if you don't know anyone, if you're here alone, feel free to come by. Say hi, you know me. Mordy Oberstein: With candy. George Nguyen: Why do you-? Mordy Oberstein: Although we have coconut candy. George Nguyen: It was all good until you said that. Thank you everyone. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much George. Mordy Oberstein: We do a little segment on the podcast, we call, Is It New? All about Barry Schwartz. We sometimes go through different changes to the SERP and wonder if they're new. They never are, by the way, but we try to explore the impact of their new-ish status. In this case, we're doing something a little bit different with the segment. We're taking a look at algorithm updates because I think the entire landscape is new. This is a very special version of, Is This New? It's the Google algorithm update version of Is This New? To help us, we have the founder of MobileMoxie herself, she's an SEO legend, I would say an SEO-G. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. I met Cindy, I met- Mordy Oberstein: It's Cindy Krum, by the way. Crystal Carter: It's Cindy Krum. I met her yesterday and I literally screamed a full fan girl, which I'm not ashamed of. Mordy Oberstein: Can we reenact that? Crystal Carter: No, I'm not going to. Yeah, I'm so honored, so pleased, and you're in for a real treat because Cindy's amazing and here she comes to the stage now. Cindy Krum: Hello, I'm excited to be here. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for joining us. Mordy Oberstein: That chair is really comfortable by the way. Cindy Krum: It's pretty good. Yeah, I like it. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the podcast. Cindy Krum: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the show. Cindy Krum: Thank you. How are you guys doing? Mordy Oberstein: I'm jet-lagged. Cindy Krum: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: You? Cindy Krum: Yeah, not as jet-lagged as you. Mordy Oberstein: You all had snow last week. Cindy Krum: We did, a lot of snow. Mordy Oberstein: That's nuts. Cindy Krum: It got down to 11 degrees. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Okay, it's a podcast. We have the banter, I feel like I have to explain that. Let's kick this off about the algorithm updates. Let's ask the audience first. Do you see more rank volatility? Is rank more volatile than it normally is? Green if you think rank is more volatile, purple if you think it's not. Everyone from the audio audience, everyone except for Michelle Ford said the rank is more volatile than it was before. I feel like it's always that way. Crystal Carter: I think we've had another core update since the conference started. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: There's been five in the last five minutes. Cindy Krum: It's constant. Mordy Oberstein: And a review update, another spam update. It's been crazy, right? Cindy Krum: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: There was the August core update, then there was a helpful content update in September, then a spam update in October, another core update in October, another core update in November, and now we're review update. Cindy Krum: Now they're overlapping them, so you can't really identify or know for sure which impacted what and when, and stuff like that, if it did at all. Although the good news is, I think in general, the rule for me at least still seems to be if you're doing really good clean SEO strategy and not really pushing the boundaries of the guidelines, then you don't get impacted by these things. Is that what you guys are seeing? Can I ask audience questions? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: Green for if that's what you're seeing, okay. Crystal Carter: Generally keeping it- Mordy Oberstein: Good content. Cindy Krum: There's some purple, people who disagree. You're doing good content and following all the rules, but you're getting bouncy stuff. Crystal Carter: That's interesting. That's interesting. I think some verticals are finding that more than others. Cindy Krum: That's true, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Also, sometimes keywords are just like that. Cindy Krum: Yes, some keywords are more volatile. Mordy Oberstein: There's just volatile keywords. Cindy Krum: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Definitely, and I think that it's something that you've talked about being able to diagnose the impact of the different updates. I know that you can be very scientific with the way you break all of that down. Do you find that to be challenging for clients and things like that? Cindy Krum: Like I said, I haven't had a lot of clients who've been massively impacted, but I do find that clients are getting bored of hearing me freak out and be like, "There's an update and I just checked and everything looks fine, don't worry about it." They're like, "Yeah, yeah, it's always fine." It's the boy who cried wolf story, we used to have a couple updates a year or a couple major updates a year and we would make a big deal and be like, "No, I think everything's fine." We'd look really, really detailed. Now they're coming so fast that you can look but you can't get too detailed and you're like, "Nope, looks fine, looks fine. It's good." Mordy Oberstein: Is that the new norm? Is this the new norm? Cindy Krum: What I've been saying is that I think that part of what Google was going for when they switched from old school crawling indexing to mobile first indexing was this ability to make changes faster. Because remember, if it was about crawling, they would've called it mobile first crawling. It was about indexing, and they've changed the index to make it, I think more flexible and easier to change. Mordy Oberstein: The review update is going to be real time, basically. They're not going to announce future updates and it's going to just be basically constant, ongoing. It's almost like Penguin. Cindy Krum: I think that we should expect to see more of that with regular updates too. It'll just be, they don't necessarily have to announce everything. I think we're already seeing that things are going live and things are changing in an ongoing way. They're not always announcing it. Mordy Oberstein: You heard it here first, the core updates. I don't think they're going to keep announcing them, I think they're just going to put them real time, like the review update, which is going to be scary because you're not going to be able to figure out what's going on exactly. Cindy Krum: I think they may try and pull back and slow them down just so that people don't freak out, but they're still doing them, they're just not announcing all of them. I think Google's fighting an interesting battle because they're trying to look like they're being more transparent in ways that get them out of legal problems that they might or might not be having. They want to look like they're being transparent, but without being too transparent to make things too gameable, so they roll things out quietly sometimes. Then, if there's a risk, it's going to be a big fuss, then they'll give you a heads-up and be like, "Hey, next week this is happening." So they can say, "Oh no, we warned you." Crystal Carter: Sometimes within SEO chatter, you hear people talk about unconfirmed updates. Is that something that you pay attention to? Is that something that you think about. Cindy Krum: Yes, I definitely have seen unconfirmed updates, especially around things that are highly regulated. You see Google change their mind about how they feel about this topic or that topic, or changing just their understanding of a topic. Is this an informational query versus is this a e-commerce query. Mordy Oberstein: Unconfirmed update, Google, it's supposed to say a core update where they now announce them and they say, "Okay, it's coming." There's constant volatility, and we generally either see that in our own rankings or the SEO weather tools. You have MozCast and SEMrush Sensor and the Grumper, whatever. There are all these names for all these tools. I'm curious, this is a controversial question and if you're from one of the tools in here, this is probably one you want to pay attention to. Do you trust the SEO weather tools when they say, "There's a spike in rank volatility, there's an update, there's something going on." Do you believe them? Green for I believe the SEO weather tools. Purple for no, and it's a mixed bag. Cindy Krum: That's more purple than I expected. Mordy Oberstein: That's a lot more purple than I expected. By the way, each tool is a little bit problematic, and I've worked on two of them. The inside scoop is there's different keyword sets. Moz is very transparent by the way, they'll tell you that MozCast is built in high search volume keywords. The SEMrush Sensor is much more diverse with the type of keyword, and there's a case for each way of doing it. It is interesting that people don't trust them as much as they used to. I think part of the reason is that they're always on, there's always something going on and you really believe something's really happening. I have a wild theory about some of this, I'm curious what you think. I think a lot of the spikes in volatility that are not part of a confirmed update is machine learning, basically recalibrating. It's saying, okay, I'm implementing X. Let me try see if that works. Let's try Y and reverse it and see which one is better. Okay, let's go with the X. Cindy Krum: You hit a threshold and that threshold is a signal to the algorithm to recalibrate or reevaluate. I think that's true. I think though, that let's say we have a tool that measures these things and we realize that we've totally missed this whole industry or there's a new industry popping up that didn't exist, like TikTok, creator studios, whatever, and we have to add a bunch of keywords. Adding this infusion of new keywords changes the model entirely, and unless there's a lot of transparency about that you don't realize. I think the weather tools also sometimes miss some things that might be very important to people, to SEOs, because they are trying to find signal from noise. They omit what they think is noise but might not be noise for you. Something that I'm going to show in my talk tomorrow is I have a tool that grabs a screenshot, full screenshot of mobile search results every single day for a particular keyword in a particular area on the same phone, pretty standardized. What I saw in testing is that even if your position can stay the same, the presentation of the position can change day by day. Where today it's one big picture, tomorrow it's two pictures, then it's a grid of four with a thing over here. It's always potentially in the same position, not always in the same position, but I think that the weather tools might call that noise not signal, but for you that's signal. Crystal Carter: Yeah, entirely. Mordy Oberstein: They totally miss them and they don't track that. Cindy Krum: Or because they have to show something that's statistically relevant for everyone and that's only relevant for you. So you have to take everything with a grain of salt with the weather tools. Crystal Carter: Absolutely, and I think particularly on mobile, there's only so much real estate on a screen as you know. If there's a new SERP feature that pops up that takes up 30% of the screen, that's really going to affect your click-through rate. Even if you're ranking number one, if you're below the SERP feature, then that's not really going to happen. Cindy Krum: You can see situations where they're ranking number one consistently, but the click-through rate is all over the place. Maybe it's because of the images or how it's presented or things that might not come into every single weather tool. What if the weather tools aren't checking pixels from the top and there's a knowledge graph that shows up all of a sudden? Or there's People Also Ask above it today and so click through and it tanks because everyone's clicking on People Also Ask. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I like to look at all that data very directionally. It's not telling you anything in specific. It's okay, something might be going on here. It's a red flag thing. I wouldn't put too much stock in what they show. I know it's a little controversial. Cindy Krum: I think you can take stock and say when they're red, stuff's changing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, right. That's true. Cindy Krum: When they're green, stuff might still be changing. Mordy Oberstein: Something to know about the weather tools, they all recalibrate after 20 or 30 days, because if they didn't, what would never really happen is it would be read the entire way through. I actually just looked at a bunch of data on this. If you look at 2022 and 2021, there's not much of a difference in the rank fluctuations. They're on average. If you go into 2023, the beginning part of 2023 looked very similar to 2022, and this actually ties into what I want to get into in a minute about AI. When you hit the summer, the end of the spring in 2023, ranks started going bonkers. Let's say on a scale of one to 10, how high was rank volatility? January through March, January through April was a three. When you got to May and you started going through the summer on a scale of one to 10, the level of volatility was an eight. The tools were still green because they recalibrate, eight was a new normal. You're looking at the tool, you're like, "Oh, it's green, everything's fine." But if you compare it to what rank was a few months ago, it's extreme. The green now, is way more volatile than the red back in January. Cindy Krum: Okay, so that's fascinating. But also, I think I want to talk a little bit about your choice of terms, rank volatility versus cert volatility because rank is specifying a numeric evaluation that used to be one through 10 or whatever. I think that Google has persuaded us to ignore things that matter when we're counting ranks because they're like, "Don't worry about the paid stuff up there and don't worry about the knowledge graph and don't worry about People Also Ask, those things don't rank." But they do. They push everything down. I think talking about rank volatility versus cert volatility, and maybe pixels from the top or some more universal metric where we can agree that every pixel counts. Pretending that a knowledge graph that's above you doesn't count is a lie. It counts and it's taking traffic. Mordy Oberstein: Right, and when you're tracking by pixel, you don't see it because on the desktop, it's on the right-hand side. Cindy Krum: Right, but on mobile, pssh. Mordy Oberstein: Did you see, by the way, it was a Search Engine Land article. It was part of the whole antitrust DOJ trial thing which was going on, which is fascinating. Some document came out where it was Ben Gomes, I think, a former VP of search there. "We can get more ad clicks if we add refinement to the SERP and more filter." If you fast-forward to now, the SERP is filled with filters. Broaden this search, refine this search, the bubble filters on top, People Also Ask, there's tons of filtering going on. Cindy Krum: What you need to notice when you click any of those filters that are on your screen, especially desktop, is that it's executing a new search and showing new ads. This is a monetization strategy. Don't ever forget that Google's a business that's trying to make money. Mordy Oberstein: I do like the filters though. Cindy Krum: The filters can be nice. Mordy Oberstein: Do you like the filters on the SERP? Green for Yes. See people like filters. Cindy Krum: Okay, but here's the thing. Filters do two things for Google, filters get them the ability to show a new search result, increase their search volume and say, "Oh, we're getting loads more searches because that's a new search because you filtered it and show more ads." Also, filters I think, and people can tell me I'm wrong and people can make fun of me. I've always been bullish on voice search. But, filters are the future of voice search, because if you think about a phone tree when you're calling in to change your insurance or whatever, they're like press one for this or press two for that. Those are filters and you're going to be able to do that with voice with your Google Assistant or whatever, where they say, "Do you want to do this or that, or do you want to see this kind of filter versus that kind of filter." When they predetermine what your choices are, it's easier for them to latch in and preload or know what they're going to show. Then you don't go off the rails and come up with something that they hadn't thought of. They're coaxing you into something that they can answer instead of something that they potentially can't. Mordy Oberstein: As a serial podcaster, I pride myself on my pivots and I don't have one right now. Cindy Krum: Is my time up? Is that what you're saying? Mordy Oberstein: No, I want to talk about AI. I feel we have to talk about AI. Do you think that the rank is incredibly more volatile since the summer, basically. How much of that do you think is AI? Before we answer that, dear audience, do you believe Google when they say that they're not targeting AI content? Green, if you believe Google, purple if you don't. There's one person. Cindy Krum: Not a lot of trust- Mordy Oberstein: It's way in the back, who trust Google, that they're not targeting AI content. Even Michelle doesn't believe Google. I don't believe them either, by the way. They're definitely targeting AI content. Cindy Krum: They like to mince words and get really detailed in what targeting means. They're just saying, "We like the best content and we make AI content too, and if we're going to show AI content, why not ours?" Mordy Oberstein: I have a theory about this, that Google can't say for their stock pricing that we're anti AI. Cindy Krum: Yes, they cannot. Mordy Oberstein: So, we'll just say, "No, we're not targeting AI content. We're targeting low quality content." Pre-med, pre-law, same difference. Cindy Krum: Yes, exactly. Speaker 5: What I think is interesting about this though is that what I've seen is that on the one hand that I know that there's a lot of people within the affiliate space who have been really struggling with this. They've been making a lot of bulk content by AI and they've been getting a lot of traffic and then a lot of volatility. What I've also seen is teams, for instance, LinkedIn, they have these community posts and it says right at the top, this is an AI generated article. If people haven't seen these, essentially they have a collection and they'll say the topic is AI content, for instance. Then they'll have machine generated content and then they'll have spaces for people to contribute answers, individual answers. Those pages rank for tons of keywords and they have done since April. It's very interesting, they seem to be trying to hedge how they're managing that content. Are you seeing that across the space as well? Cindy Krum: Yes, but I don't know if it's an intentional effort to hedge. I think that they will also be studying what's ranking in their algorithm and then they'll do it better because that's their model and they can show ads on that. When you get to a LinkedIn, then LinkedIn's making money instead of Google. Google, they've said for years that they don't always know exactly how an algorithm is going to impact results. It's not a guaranteed thing and it can change over time. When they push the button to roll something out, they're watching too and that's why there are rollbacks where they're like, "That went a little bit too far." Mordy Oberstein: By the way, another piggyback on the ring volatility. When you see the tools go, you don't know if that's a reversal and there's really no net gain or loss. Cindy Krum: Yeah, I mean it's still bad for the month or whatever, that you were down. Yeah, for Google, they're looking at things in a much longer term and they're like, "Whatever." Mordy Oberstein: There's been again, a ton of rank volatility on the SERP since the summer basically, and you know what it reminds me of? Because I've been tracking stuff religiously for years, it reminds me of Covid, when Covid hit the SERP bonkers. Cindy Krum: It totally did. Mordy Oberstein: Because they couldn't figure it out. Cindy Krum: Totally new industries popping up, new things. Mordy Oberstein: Terms didn't mean the same things anymore- Cindy Krum: Terms meant different things. Mordy Oberstein: -and can totally switch. I think what's happening is the perfect storm, there's a ton of more content because of AI and it needs to figure out, do we want to actually rank this and there's a method to my madness, to tie into what George was talking about before. Content trends are changing. People are looking, they didn't pull experience out of their ass for EEAT. Cindy Krum: Content trends and content and creation trends are both changing, and so the algorithm has to keep up. Mordy Oberstein: People want experience and Google's like, "Okay, let's integrate into the algorithm." Everything's changing, and I think Google's having a really hard time figuring it out. Cindy Krum: I think that what's going to make the difference in the future potentially is, Google has this horrible situation where they have, let's say there's 5,000 dentists in the United States, and every one of those 5,000 dentists think that they have to write an article about why it's important to floss. Okay, and how different are those- Mordy Oberstein: Nobody flosses anyway, no matter how many times they write it, right? Green if you floss, I'm just kidding. Cindy Krum: I floss. So, all 5,000 are writing basically the same article about why it's important to floss. How is Google going to choose which of those 5,000 should rank? Maybe it could, maybe one or two of those dentists is writing a vastly superior article or maybe one or two of the dentists has a song that's going to get stuck in your head to remind you to floss. Or maybe there's only three dentists in this area, so they want to rank a local dentist. I think context and connection is going to be the new ranking factor that they're going to try and do. So, influencer marketing, super important, but not something we talk about as much in SEO. I think that for a listicle, if I was writing a listicle about my favorite travel hacks and things on Amazon that you could buy, you would be like, "I know Cindy and she travels like a mad woman and she knows this." But, if you knew someone else who had five kids, which I do not, by the way, and you had five kids, you'd be like, "I know that woman and she has to deal with what I have to deal with." So, more personalization, more context of who you are and who is recommending whatever, or where they are or what's going to resonate with you like the song to remember flossing or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: Is there a song? Do you know a song? Cindy Krum: No. Does anyone? Mordy Oberstein: I wish there was a song. If you're doing SEO for a dentist, it would totally help to have a song. Cindy Krum: It would help, something like Going to the Chapel, that going to get stuck in everyone's head. You're welcome. Crystal Carter: As long as it doesn't get stuck in your teeth. There you go. On that bombshell, thank you so much for joining us and for talking about this fantastic subject. Give us a big hand for Cindy. Cindy Krum: Yay. Now you want me over there, right? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. With rank being bonkers and with content changing, one of the problems are clients and communicating all of this to clients. So we're going to take a deep thought into how you're going to be communicating with clients and how to get buy-in for clients and how to deal with the clients and all the stuff for the clients with the master of disaster himself. The one, the only, the COO of Search Lab Digital, give it up for Greg-fricking-Gifford. Greg Gifford: I feel like you moved over because you don't want to sit by me. Cindy Krum: I want to sit by you. Mordy Oberstein: I need to razz you, you're C level now? Greg Gifford: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. You have your own corner office and stuff? Greg Gifford: Yeah, only because I'm on the corner of a hallway. Mordy Oberstein: Is it in your house? Greg Gifford: No, no. I have an office. I can't work out of my house. I have too many kids and pets and my wife doesn't get that I'm working and I can't go do stuff. Mordy Oberstein: I have the same problem, my kids will bang on the door. Greg Gifford: Oh yeah. Crystal Carter: They regularly just come into the meetings. Mordy Oberstein: They come into our meetings all the time. Crystal Carter: All the time. Mordy Oberstein: All the time. I just give up. Greg Gifford: I'm old school. I need to be somewhere separate where I can mentally separate work from home. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Crystal Carter: That's good. Greg Gifford: When I'm home, anyway. Mordy Oberstein: C levelness aside, clients, it's a little complicated because if there's so much volatility, the SERP is changing, content is changing, everything's always changing. Like Cindy was talking about, two November updates, three October updates. At a certain point, do they just not believe you anymore? Greg Gifford: Yeah, we get the vast majority of our clients call us freaking out. "Oh my God, I saw that there's an update today. What are we doing to address it?" We're like, "Bro, we don't even know that it's affecting you yet. Slow your roll, calm down, it's fine." Then they're like, "Ah." We're like, "Okay." We don't share. Can I do a question? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Greg Gifford: Green, if you share ranking data with clients, how many people do?Purple, if you don't. Mordy Oberstein: Lots of greens. Greg Gifford: We do not share ranking data with clients. We in fact refuse to if even if clients ask for it, we say we won't. Crystal Carter: Why? Greg Gifford: Because, can I use adult language on this? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. We'll edit it out of the podcast. Greg Gifford: This will be lots of beeps right here, folks. No, I think ranking data is a complete bull vanity metric and it doesn't mean anything to a client's bottom line. What's the point of sharing rank data? I've had clients in the past that in a space of 12 months tripled their organic traffic, doubled their leads, every month was a record setting month for sales, yet they still canceled with us because the owner of the company wanted to rank for some vanity term that wouldn't have gotten traffic anyway. No human would ever search for it, but all he cared about was, do I rank number one for this term? So he cancels. That's why we don't get into ranking data. When our clients freak out, they're like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're like, "Look, we have rank tracking running, you know we won't share it with you. You're fine. Nothing even changed." Crystal Carter: Yeah, honestly I'm having PTSD over this because I've definitely had clients like that who it was a little financial firm and they wanted to rank for financial advisors. I'm like, "You're not going to rank for that." Greg Gifford: Yeah, we had this one guy that was like, "I want to rank number one for Toyota Camry." Mordy Oberstein: Are you Toyota? Greg Gifford: This was also the guy that was complaining that $3,000 a month for SEO was too expensive and he spent $1,500 a month on paid search, so in his mind between the 3000 of SEO and the 1500 for management fee, and then I think it was a $500 management fee at that agency. He's like, "I'm spending $5,000 a month, I should be number one for Toyota Camry." We're like, "Bro, it doesn't work that way." Then we tried to explain to him like, "Hey man, look, Toyota's going to rank for that. You don't have more money." He goes, "No, it doesn't matter, because there's no way Toyota's spending $6,000 a month on SEO. I should be number one." We're like, "Buddy, no, no, no." Yeah, so we do get those calls where clients are freaking out because they hear about all these updates lately, but I think we're a little bit insulated because we only do local SEO and a lot of these updates, you'll get a lot of fluctuation for maybe a day or two when the update's rolling out. But, a week later, once everything's settled in, we really don't see much of an effect for our clients. Mordy Oberstein: Are you seeing Cindy, is it harder for you to communicate with the clients because there's so many updates? Cindy Krum: I do it a little bit differently, so I don't have clients coming to me going, "oh my God, there's an update." They're not paying attention to SEO. I go to them and be like, "Hey guys, there was an update. I've checked, it seems like you're fine, but let's just keep an eye on things and watch closely." It's a little bit different, but then I don't have anyone who thinks that they should rank for Toyota Camry, so it might be just a different kind of client. Greg Gifford: The day that SGE was released to beta where we could finally all apply to get in and see it. We had three clients call us and go, "What's your SGE strategy for us? What are you doing?" I'm like, "Bro, it came out today. We don't have a strategy for you." We still had a client last week call us and go, "What's my SGE strategy?" I'm like, "Bro, we do not care about SGE and we're not going to talk about it with you because most likely it is not coming out for at least another year or two. it's still SEO, let's do marketing. Let's release this stuff that answers the client's questions. That's going to bring them to you because you have the solution." It's just like the voice search thing years ago where everybody's like, "Oh my god, voice search, what do we do?" Nothing changed. Cindy Krum: It's so funny because your approach is the opposite of my approach. My approach should be like, "Dude, we've been doing SGE strategy, everything that we've been doing to get featured snippets and to have stuff that's easy to parse and easy to understand, that is what's going to help SGE, this is baked in." Greg Gifford: Our clients don't get featured snippets. We're like, "Bro, we just got you this amazing snippet, look at it." Okay, another question, let's be interactive. Green, if you think getting a featured snippet takes traffic away. Purple, if you think getting a featured snippet gives you more traffic. I'm really curious. More purples. Mordy Oberstein: I love this. Greg Gifford: I'm a purple too, because we've tracked it and we'll get a featured snippet for how do you hook up Apple car play in a Kia Soul or something related to a car. You get it and you can track because it's going to that page and all of a sudden your traffic just goes like this. We tell them, "Hey, we got this." They're like, "Nobody's going to search for that. I don't care. I want to rank number one for this. Crystal Carter: Where's the Toyota Camry, Greg? Greg Gifford: That's why we just don't get into the rank tracking stuff. Mordy Oberstein: If I can ask the audience, do you have a harder time communicating with all these things going on with your clients now, because of all this stuff? Green, if you have a harder time communicating with clients and purple, if you have an easier time. Crystal Carter: Got a lot of arms up very high with the green. Mordy Oberstein: It's a lot of green. Crystal Carter: A lot of purple. Greg Gifford: We had a client that was a little bit more advanced, they understand the SERP layout more. This was April or May, they called us up. They're like, "Hey man, this People Also Ask section, do you guys have a strategy for that? Are you doing anything for that?" I'm like, "No." Mordy Oberstein: Did they ask you for every SERP feature and what your strategy is? Greg Gifford: They're like, "What's our strategy?" Mordy Oberstein: Do you have a related search strategy? Greg Gifford: Not, oh my god, I'm awesome, I'm C-suite, but I don't really talk to clients anymore, which is actually really badass that I don't have to talk to clients. I don't deal with a lot of this crap. This was a guy that I've known for 10 years who is a client, so yeah I'll talk to you. He's like, "What's our strategy there?" I'm like, "I don't have a strategy." He's like, "What? You guys are awesome. You've done so much good work. How are you ignoring this?" I'm like, "All right bro, let's jump on a Zoom." We jump on a Zoom. I'm like, "Let's do a screen share. Let's do a search for whatever your term is." It was a dealership term, and he shows up and there's five PAA questions and I'm like, "Let's click on this one. Look who ranks number one for that? Let's go back. Let's click on a second. Look who ranks number one for that?" I'm like, "Dude, you already rank because we are doing SEO the right way. We're not doing SEO for Google. We're doing SEO for your clients so that you're going to be the answer for what people are looking for and that's the right way to do it. You don't have to worry about what is this tricky thing that we're doing now just for this one update that just happened because that's not sustainable for long-term." Mordy Oberstein: I feel like you have strong feelings about clients. Greg Gifford: I love clients. Mordy Oberstein: Is anybody else getting that vibe? Greg Gifford: I love clients. I just get really spun up when I just keep getting these really asinine questions and I get it, they're curious, but what are you doing for SGE when it came out four hours ago? Come on, don't waste my time with questions like that. Mordy Oberstein: What kind of client do you think is going to be more successful now? Greg Gifford: I think for us, the clients that are the most successful are the ones that are actually engaged. There's a lot of people that will do SEO and do paid search and do marketing because they know they need to. But it's pulling teeth to get them on the phone to actually talk strategy. They're just like, "Just do it for me. I'm hiring you to do it." You need to tell us what's going on. You need to help us. What are the questions you're getting? Are these leads the right kind of leads because we can get you more leads. People are always like, "Your traffic's going up, your leads going up, SEO's winning, but sales are going down." You want to have those conversations and really dial in the customization of what you're doing but these people are too busy to talk to you. Those, I don't think are anywhere near as successful as the ones that are engaged and they do want to talk strategy and they do want to look forward. Even though we don't have contracts, we're month to month, we have to earn business every month. Some people treat it as month to month and they're like, "All right, cool. I'm here." Some people are like, "I'm not going anywhere. Let's talk about what our strategy is for the next two years." I think those are the ones that are more successful, because they're more engaged, they're more bought into this SEO thing is helping my business. Mordy Oberstein: Do you find the same thing, Cindy? Cindy Krum: Yes, to some degree. We have different models of business a little bit, but I do think that the customers that are the most successful are the ones that are wanting to work collaboratively and understand that I don't wish, pray, and do dances to make the rankings improve. Mordy Oberstein: I do have a whole dance. You don't do it? Cindy Krum: I mean, I do it. Greg Gifford: Show of green, if you want to see the dance right now, come on, help me out. Put those greens up, now you have to show us, the crowd wants it. Mordy Oberstein: My ranking dance. Then, automatic feature snippet. You have to nail the turn. For the audio audience, I just did a terrible dance, I'm so happy you're not here to see it. Greg Gifford: Please, can we somehow get the video team to make that into an animated GIF. Cindy Krum: It's like the baby dancing GIF. Mordy Oberstein: I forget where I am right now. Cindy Krum: Wait, so yes. Collaboration is important because the clients that just hire you and be like, "I paid you 5,000, why am I not ranking for Toyota Camry?" It's like, "Because, you didn't do what I said to do." Or because your developer tried but screwed it up and then pretended that they didn't do anything wrong. Crystal Carter: I do think it has to be collaborative because like you were saying, I've definitely had it with clients where I look at all the data and all the data's telling me we're winning. Yeah, we have tons of leads, tons of clicks, whatever. Then I talk to them and I was like, "So, how did those leads go?" I literally had a client that was like, "We didn't get more calls, did we, Julie?" She was like, "I'm not sure. I was on vacation." They're like, "Oh, I didn't." Literally, there was no one there to answer the phone. We were sending phone calls and there was no one there to answer the phone. If they don't tell you what's happening on the other end of the funnel, you can't complete the funnel, and if they don't make money, you don't make money. You have to work in collaboration and yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Mordy Oberstein: We have a lot of people who are clients listening to this podcast. Not right now, eventually when this comes out. If you're listening to the podcast, talking to the audio audience, you're all here, but if you're a client, communicate with your SEOs. Cindy Krum: I've had clients, I was going to jump in. I've had clients that try and sneak things by me intentionally and they're like, "Oh yeah, we didn't want SEO for this, so we duplicated all our product pages and put them on a separate domain. But, we don't want SEO for that, so don't worry about it." Keeping secrets from your SEO team is like keeping secrets from your doctor. It's not going to help you. Crystal Carter: It's not good for you. "Oh yeah, we're going to migrate the site tomorrow." I was like, "What?" Speaker 7: Surprise. Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: If you have clients and they're communicating with you but they're a little bit concerned about what's going on. How do you walk them off that cliff? Greg Gifford: Again, I think because of our model of we're months to month, we are really centered in on the relationship that we build with our clients. It's not always rainbows and unicorns, you're going to have months where traffic goes down. Some of our clients have a very ,seasonal business where it'll be up for a few months and then they know it's going to be down for the next six months. It's more about on our side, we found that it's better to build that relationship so that they trust us and they know that, "Hey, if my traffic just dropped 20% since last month for whatever reason, I trust that this team is there to help me." So many people have bad experiences from other agencies in the past that just do the BS checklist, SEO, that doesn't do anything. If you're lucky to get on a call once a month with some account manager who probably changes every two months and you just have this bad experience, so then you inherently mistrust all digital marketing moving forward. We work really hard to establish that trust so that they know we are the experts, we are in this with you. We are a partner, we're not a vendor because we care, because we have to earn that business every month so that we don't have to fire people or lay people off. So we work on that customer service and I think that really overcomes. I was joking about the weird customer calls, we don't get that often because the people that work with us choose to work with us because they trust that we are the solution and we are on top of these massive changes in volatility of the SERPs and different features that pop up and what's going on with local and new things that are coming out specifically just for car dealers in the business profile that other businesses can't do. They just trust that we are on top of things for them. I think where I work now, that's a different frame of mind than agencies I've worked for in the past where it was more about, "Your leads are up, your traffic's up. Hey, this is working guys." Then people are mad and they're leaving. It's the same checklist stuff for everybody due to the nature of some of the things that happen in automotive, and so I love where I am now where it's more about let's build this mutually beneficial long-term relationship. Even though it's a month to month thing, we assume that clients are going to be with us for a minimum of two, to two and a half years and we operate that way. It gets into their head that like, "Oh yeah, this is a long-term relationship and they are on our team. They're not just some vendor that we pay money to." I think that's made the biggest difference for us. Mordy Oberstein: It's a huge deal. It's the EEAT for your clients, I hate to use an SEO term, but it's an SEO conference. Crystal Carter: I think in terms of the audience, do you find that from a month to month, so purple for the stats and green for the relationship makes the difference for the outcomes for your clients. Got a lot of green. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. It's all pretty much green. Crystal Carter: A lot of green, a lot of green. I have Sean, who's in our customer relationships, manages that and he's like, "Yep, green." Mordy Oberstein: He's still holding up the green. You can't see it. Crystal Carter: All day the green. Thanks. I think you talked about the partnership element of the customer relationship things, and you also talked a little bit about marketing as well. Do you find that you need to help clients to navigate a few different channels in order to manage all of the different things that are happening in the SERP and on Google? Greg Gifford: Yeah, a hundred percent. A lot of our clients, they work with us because they know that we have a lot of top level experts. I'm not like, "Oh my God, I'm the best SEO in the world." But, I speak at a lot of conferences, I'm friends with all of the other top experts. We just have a better level of connection to what's going on than a lot of the crappy checklist SEO people they've worked with in the past. They come to us knowing that, "I know I need SEO, I know I need Facebook ads, I know I need YouTube pre-roll or whatever it would be, but I don't know how to do it and we haven't had success before. Can you help us?" They also trust us that when something comes out that's new, we can say, "Hey, look, here's this new thing that you can do. That's awesome." They just released LSAs for auto repair in California and Florida, so we came to all of our clients we're like, "Look, LSAs are a crapshoot. Maybe it's great, maybe it's not. Sometimes it's expensive, sometimes it's cheap, but this just came out for you and it's the first time you can do it. You need to be a first in the market, so that people are going to see you first and it's going to be amazing." They're all like, "Oh my gosh, thanks. I never would've known that was available if you hadn't come to us with that." Our team specifically wants to do that collaborative partnership approach as opposed to we're getting on a call, we're looking you up in our CRM to remember what the last call was about so we can pretend like we know you. We're really focused on, we want to build that long-term relationship with the clients we work with so they get that trust. We don't really have a lot of that, "Oh my gosh, there was an update. What do I do?" Or, "Oh my gosh, what happened here?" Crystal Carter: I think I see you nodding alon, Cindy. I know that you've been a big proponent of Google Merchant Center and people using additional channels to mix in with the SEO. Cindy Krum: Absolutely. I think that looking at LSA, even though it's not SEO, looking at just what's available is super important. Our job as SEOs is not just to do SEO, but to know the things that affect SEO. When LSAs come in, they push organic rankings down. That's not to say that we just need to get mad about it. We say, "Okay, that's pushing organic down, so do LSAs." It's not a pie where SEO loses because there's something new in there, you can leverage all of it for a huge benefit. Yeah, keeping an eye on everything that's coming into a search result should be part of how you envision your job. Whether you can impact it with organic stuff or not, you need to know what's there that might be taking traffic. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of what's coming into search, I don't know if you saw, but SGE has been released in 120 countries. Our last unsolved SEO mystery is going to be about SGE. We're doing it a little segue that we call from the top of the SERP. I think we both like analyzing what's happened, what's working for sites that are ranking, what's changing at the top, something like LSAs. We have a little segue we do where we run through what's changing, what sites are doing that are ranking, what they're not doing and how you can improve. In this case, our from the top of the SERP is SGE because it's literally at the top of the SERP. To help us, you see what I did. Greg Gifford: That's clever. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'm a master of pivots. As a podcast, you have to pat yourself on the back for the pivoting, which yeah, thank you. Which ruins the whole pivot, but it doesn't matter. To help us navigate the wide world of SGE, he's the only person outside of Joe Biden who could rock aviator shades the way he does. He's sitting right there. He is the one, the only, Mike or drop the Mike King. Mike King: Where's my band? Mordy Oberstein: You're not mic'd up. I forgot. Mike King: What up. What are we talking about? Mordy Oberstein: Aviator shades. Mike King: It's bright up here. Mordy Oberstein: It's so bright. It's so bright, I'm blinded. Mike King: Hey Cindy. Cindy Krum: Hey, good to see you. Mike King: You guys, Cindy is the smartest SEO ever. I've been saying it for years. It's a fact. Clap for that. Mordy Oberstein: What do you feel about Greg though? Mike King: Greg's cool. Mordy Oberstein: I love that you're holding the mic like you're rapping, man. Mike King: That's the only way to hold it. Nah, I love Greg too because he's such a great energetic presenter and he's been riding the whole movie thing for 10 years and it doesn't get old. I'm not even playing. Greg Gifford: I really just do that to keep myself entertained more than anything else. Mike King: It's dope. It's dope. Crystal Carter: Get out of the USP. Mordy Oberstein: There are new movies, right? Greg Gifford: Yeah, I have to update it every year. Mike King: Of course, of course. Crystal Carter: It's good. Mordy Oberstein: So, SGE. Mike King: Heard of it. Mordy Oberstein: You all in the audience. Are you worried about it? Green, if you're worried about SGE. Mike King: Green is not a worry color. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry. Mike King: Purple's more a worry color. Mordy Oberstein: I was saying we should switch it up, see? Crystal Carter: We just have to pick one. There's two options. Mordy Oberstein: No, purple if you're worried. Mike King: Now they're confused, they're like, we're not doing this. Crystal Carter: Purple, if you're worried. Green, if you're not. Mordy Oberstein: Sean's worried. Crystal Carter: Sean's worried. Mordy Oberstein: Sean's very worried about the SGE. Are you worried? Mike King: No. Mordy Oberstein: Do you worry about anything? Mike King: No, I don't. Mordy Oberstein: So that's a bad question then, huh? Mike King: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mike King: I think it's an opportunity. Just like when feature snippets came out and everyone was like, "Oh, our traffic's going to die, blah, blah, blah." I think the reality of it is one, how people are meeting their information needs is changing dramatically. So it's not just Google, it's Chat GPT, it's TikTok, it's all these things. I think we as SEOs need to grow or evolve into these findability experts where we have to learn the interplay of channels and how to optimize for the different channels and so on. Undoubtedly, your clients are going to be like, "Hey, TikTok has a search, what do we do?" You can't just be like, "We only do local search." I mean, you can do it. You're going to have to have an answer to some degree and I'm not saying you need to be an expert in every channel, but search fundamentally works the same everywhere. There's a determination of relevance, there's a determination of user signals to reinforce those things. What is it that happens in TikTok that we need to be doing? Findability is definitely our future, but I think for SGE, users never wanted 10 results. They wanted an answer. Google is like, "Cool, let's give you an answer." It's not perfect right now, but it's a good step in that direction. There was a paper written by this guy, his name is Andre, I can't remember his last name. Mordy Oberstein: The Giant? Mike King: No. He's been at Google. He came from Alta Vista to Google with people like Jeff Dean and all these people. He's the guy that invented the informational transactional navigational query classification. He wrote this paper recently about what are called Delphic costs, and so Delphic costs is effectively the mental costs that you go through to get a search result. What he's talking about is no one ever wanted to have to go through 10 results and be like, "Is this right? Is this what I'm looking for?" Google has always tried to answer your question and it makes sense that they're going more in this direction. Crystal Carter: I think it's interesting. I think they're competing with so many more search engines now, we used to have a segment on the podcast called So Many Search Engines. Mordy Oberstein: We still have it. Crystal Carter: We haven't done it in ages, but there's so many different ways to answer a question now. The prime example I use for Chat GPT, I use a lot because George, who was on here earlier tried to teach me how to play Magic the Gathering and- Mike King: Get your manna. Crystal Carter: This is the thing, I was struggling. I'm like, "Can I play this with summoning sickness? Is there trample? I don't understand. I'm very confused. Am I a wizard? I don't know what's going on." Basically there's been a lot of SEOed content around Magic the Gathering, 4,000, 7,000 words about the thing. I'm like, "Can I play this turn?" It's much easier for me to just literally talk into my phone and go, "I have this guy with this manna. Can I play this on this turn or can I not?" Then Chat GPT will just go, yes or no. Rather than me having to read through 17 pages of content. The SGE, if it's able to do that for some of that content, that's a win. Mordy Oberstein: Are you saying we've ruined the internet? Crystal Carter: No. Mike King: Put up a green if you're a content goblin. Nobody read that shit. Cindy Krum: Wait, wait. Can we do a green if we ruined the internet? Mordy Oberstein: Did SEOs ruin the internet? Green, if we've ruined the internet, according to the verdict, we have. Crystal Carter: Purple, No. Cindy Krum: Some people think so. Crystal Carter: Some people say yes. Cindy Krum: Maybe just you ruined the internet. Mordy Oberstein: It's that guy. Crystal Carter: He woke up in the morning, he was like, "You know what I'm going to do today?" Mordy Oberstein: It's like Pinky and the Brain. Mike King: Yeah, but I think to your point Crystal. We as SEOs, we can't unsee what it is that we do. When you're looking for something important and you're like, "Well, someone clearly optimized this. Some junior copywriter wrote this about whether or not I have cancer, I'm skipping this result." I think that is a reality of the internet, and people do have a sense of is this authentic? It's why we are like, "Okay, I have this ailment, where's the WebMD? Or where's Mayo Clinic or something like that." You don't trust what's on the web, but there's a lot of people that do, which is a problem. I think the standard audience is like, "If Google says it, it must be real." Crystal Carter: Right. Mike King: I think that's one of the problems with SGE is because sometimes it's not right. It being Google, you inherently trust it, and so you're going to get bad information in those cases. Greg Gifford: Don't you think, right now it's not out, it's still beta because they want people to start thinking that way. By the time it's really officially out and in use, it's going to be way better than what it is right now. Mike King: I agree with that. Greg Gifford: Or do not think that. Mike King: No, I agree with that, but language models inherently have the ability to hallucinate. The way that SGE is built, it's taking the results and then using that to fine tune the language model to give you the actual response. It can still be wrong. `I don't know that the current generation of that technology is good enough to solve that problem. Greg Gifford: I totally agree. Everybody talks about SGE with us and we're like, "It's not coming out soon. Stop worrying about it. It's got to get better before it's going to be public." Mordy Oberstein: What does it look like in the end? When it goes live, it's out of beta. Forget the type of content, what does it even freaking look like? Because they've changed it 10 times. Greg Gifford: It looks Star Trek, man. Mordy Oberstein: I'm wearing Star Trek socks. Greg Gifford: We're going to talk to our computer in a conversational way and get the answer that we want for most of this stuff. If you just want an answer like you said a minute ago, you don't want to read, you want the answer. Cindy Krum: I think it looks like a Google Home Hub with a knowledge graph and an answer and filters so you can drill down more and not 10 blue links or maybe any blue links or just a couple blue links. I wanted to build on what Mike was saying, I think when SGE came out, Google created part of its own problem by not doing citations. When you cite someone, then you could be like, "We didn't say it. They said it." But, when Google wasn't doing citations, then it's Google's fault and they're going to have to do citations for any number of reasons but the legal one and the getting it right or wrong is going to be a big part of that. Mordy Oberstein: Can I ask, about the citations and about updating content, if publishers are now going to block things like Bard- Mike King: Why? That's so shortsighted. Mordy Oberstein: I agree, but I think it's spiteful. I think because they can. Mike King: They can't, because if you block Bard, which you have to block Googlebot in general for, you're still going to get crawled by the common crawl, which is a data source that's used for training. It's a pyrrhic victory for you to do that. Cindy Krum: You're just going to get ripped off, someone's going to crawl and republish. Mordy Oberstein: No, I am with you. Mike King: Agree, but one of the things that I think we don't pay enough attention to is that search is also a branding channel. If you are searching for something and then there's a featured snippet and your brand is mentioned amongst other brands that are in that consideration set, that is a good thing for Mindshare. If you're not there because you want to just block Google from learning from your content as though it's so precious, you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's stupid. Mordy Oberstein: I think it's the most under-talked about thing in the SEO world that is a personal, I am on a soapbox about this. Content fundamentally, yes, there's acquisitional content, but a lot of your content is branding content, a lot, and it's important to think about it like that. Crystal Carter: I think you talked about how that shows on the SERP and how that shows with things. I think that brings me to a question for the audience in terms of the SERP and SGE, can you optimize for SGE? Are you optimizing for SGE? Green for Yes, and purple for No. Mordy Oberstein: The people who said green, it's mostly green, maybe want to offer Greg some strategies so we can…. Greg Gifford: Okay, can we adjust the question? Okay, if you had a green, hold it up higher still. Keep the green up, so you're optimizing for SGE. Keep it up. How many of you that have it up, you're answering this because you're doing something different than you were doing before, specifically for SGE or you have it up because you're like, "I was doing good SEO anyway." Everybody put their cards down. Mike King: He didn't. Mordy Oberstein: For the audio audience, there was three people who said yes. Greg Gifford: But for the audio audience, most of the people that had it up, put it back down because doing the stuff for SGE, if you're doing legitimate SEO now, you're not really having to change that much. Mordy Oberstein: Not really. I can see you squirming in your seat right now. Mike King: I don't squirm. Come on. Don't make the people in listener world think that. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry, I take it back. Hey Aaron, can we edit that part out. Jury, forget what I just said, stricken from the record. Greg Gifford: I'm curious what you have to say about this. Mike King: No, I mean I think it goes back to things again about Cindy being the smartest SEO ever. She was talking about fraggles five years ago. Fraggles are basically the components of the content, the passages of the content that Google has identified as most relevant and is then serving it to the language model to then determine what to say in the response. In SGE, if you click on the carousel, the links in the carousel, it has the fraggle, what do you call it? The component at the end of the URL, it's the anchor link to the actual fraggle. Cindy Krum: Fragment. Mike King: Then it'll take you specifically to the line of text that Google has used. What I've done in my analysis of this is we've pulled those fraggle for a bunch of pages and then compared it against the AI snapshot. The one that has the highest cosign similarity, the one that's most relevant is the one that ranks best in the carousel. So it's really about optimizing those fraggles and identifying them if you want to get more visibility in those. Mordy Oberstein: Ultimately speaking, when- Mike King: Should I just drop the mic then? Mordy Oberstein: No, in nine minutes and 53 seconds. Mike King: He's like, no, don't break my equipment. Mordy Oberstein: You break it, you buy it, by the way. Mike King: I can afford it. Mordy Oberstein: Ultimately speaking then, I have to ask, I hate this question, we're going to ask it anyway. How does SGE impact traffic? Mike King: We don't know yet. Mordy Oberstein: What do you think? Mike King: Yeah, we've been modeling it and it's 30 to 40% based on a variety of different factors, but there's no way to know. We don't have any user behavior data on it. We don't have anything in GSE, I don't even know that SimilarWeb has anything yet. If they do holler at me, let's figure it out. We don't know. We have to wait and see until we get actual data. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, code red for the SEO tools, either they need to figure this out, because they're becoming- Mike King: It's already a code red for them. I was just talking about this in the other room, google shifted to semantic search 10 years ago. All of our SEO tools are still on the Lexical model, so really we are not doing something relevant to how stuff works right now. Effectively, we are still just making great content and Google is figuring it out and we're just messing around with all these tools that still do T-F-I-D-F. It's actually silly what we're doing as an industry right now. Cindy Krum: Also, all those tools and the weather tools and stuff like that, as far as I know, they're still focusing a lot on desktop results when more searches are happening on mobile, just more. Mike King: Facts. Mordy Oberstein: Also their keyword data sets are years old. They're almost irrelevant. Mike King: Sorry guys. Everything you're paying for is waste of money. Cindy Krum: The tools suck. Crystal Carter: I think in terms of click-through rate, and here's a question, maybe to the audience as well, do you think that for the SGE that brands who have a well-established brand will be less affected by a drop in clicks on the SGE? Green for Yes, purple for No. Is that too complicated a question? Cindy Krum: Say it again. Mordy Oberstein: Green, if it's too complicated. Crystal Carter: Basically, what I've experienced going through some of these AI SERPs and tools is that you sometimes get a repeat of people on a certain topic. I was trying to use Bard to figure out why my plant was dying, and what I found was that there was the same website that kept getting referenced for all of the different questions that I had about this plant. At the end of the day I was like, "I'm just going to go to the website because they've answered three of the questions already. So they probably have the whole bit of information there." Do you think that the brand overlap where people are getting that visibility in the circle lot, if that's going to make a difference between actually getting the click through? Mike King: Yes and no. What you're describing is actually a function of the context window. If you're asking Bard a bunch of questions about the same thing, all of those answers and questions are informing the next response. Whatever they looked up, because Bard is effectively a retrieval augmented generation implementation where it's just searching Google, the same way that SGE does based on your question, which is using its as a prompt. Then it's saying, "Okay, these are the pages that are most relevant to it." The original pages from your first questions remain in that context as you ask subsequent questions. That's part of why that same website kept coming up over and over. Is that going to impact SGE? Yes, it will on the follow-up questions, because again, the follow-up questions is bringing that context window concept to search. Crystal Carter: Then do you think it'll be more important for people to rank for those first questions? Mike King: Absolutely, and I think it's going to require that the content you create be more robust. Rather than the whole long tail strategy where it's like, "I'm going to make a hundred pages for a hundred queries." You may need to make 20 pages for five queries each, so that page answers several of those questions and remains in that context window. Cindy Krum: Google is crowdsourcing what they call these journeys. This came out when we started talking about MUM. They're looking at people who are using Bard or just using regular search to understand why their plant is dying. They're saying, "Lots of people have an Aloe plant and it's looking like this and here's the right journey." I think they'll fine tune, and I think at some point we'll get to a point where Google will try and add diversity to not just show the same website over and over again and then a QDF query deserves freshness or whatever. They're going to be honing these things in a similar model to what we've seen them go through historically with the current results. Don't you think so? Mike King: Yep. Crystal Carter: Then do you think as part of thinking about the way we create content within this space, that understanding the user journey rather than just the keyword as you were saying, or even just the semantics is going to be a critical point? Mike King: Yeah, and I think to Greg's point, at least at iPullRank, we've been on that for a long time. I was on that persona driven keyword research back in 2012, and that's been how we've always done it. Google is just making it more explicit like, "These search journeys actually matter, and we are building around that because we understand that people are searching to fulfill a specific need." They're not just keywords. They are people doing a series of things so they can do something in the real world. Mordy Oberstein: It's almost trying to do an entity-based optimization, which I know you're going to- Cindy Krum: Also, when they've mapped that journey and they've modeled the journey, their processors don't have to work so hard for the estimation of what's going to come next. They can be working in the background to get that information, serve it faster, which they're always trying to serve things faster. Mike King: To Greg's earlier point, SGE being a test is largely so that they can get the data that they need and also cache a lot of these responses, which is another reason why it's gotten a lot faster since it first rolled out. Greg Gifford: Wait a minute, so are you saying Google does something and tells SEOs about it to get us to give them more data? No way. No way. Mordy Oberstein: So, go back to what you said earlier before about whether or not the LMs are even capable of spitting out content that's going to be good, ultimately speaking. At a certain point I feel like they're going to end up with a problem. I don't think it's going to be, and they're not going to backtrack on using SGE and putting it out there. You're going to end up, I think in a situation where you're going to have a lot of great answers coming out of the SGE and you're going to have a lot of garbage coming out of the SGE. Mike King: I feel like you just led me in your question. What do you want me to say to you? Mordy Oberstein: What happens to the ecosystem? How are they going to handle that? Mike King: I think the bigger problem is that we're at a space where all content moving forward is inherently polluted. What I mean by that, is there's a cutoff on what content is from November of last year because it's pre-Chat GPT. Crystal Carter: Right. Mike King: There's a lot of stuff out there that's not accurate. There already was, but it's accelerating at such a rate that Google has had to solve that and that's where the helpful content update comes into play. I think that the primary mechanism that they have to use to understand this is information gain because with Chat GPT, you're regurgitating things in different ways more or less unless you're doing a rag model or something like that. Google is trying to sift through to say, where is the net new information here? It can't just be like, "Okay, well we have 500 pages about flossing." Like you said, and everyone is just like, "Here's how you floss." So what do you rank? Yes, we can go back to links and all of that, but Google has to understand where is there something new, otherwise users aren't going to feel like search quality is good enough. Crystal Carter: I think that's great. I'm just conscious that we need to wrap up and I think it's fantastic and thank you so, so much. So, a big hand to all of our guests who have given us such amazing conversations. Before we wrap up, to the audience, green for Yes and purple for No. If you'd like to see Mordy do his ranking dance again. Greg Gifford: You all better put your greens up. Crystal Carter: Green. Mordy Oberstein: I don't remember what I did. Greg Gifford: Now we'll have two different GIFs to show. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on, I got to get in the zone. Wait, can I do a different one? Greg Gifford: Please do. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to do my Axl Rose. Cindy Krum: Do the featured snippet dance. Greg Gifford: Oh my gosh. Please make a GIF of this. Mike King: This is Donald Trump campaign energy right now. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Crystal. I really appreciate that. Crystal Carter: Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful, fantastic Brighton SEO. Thank you so much. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. 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