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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

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Change. It's the one constant in life…and Google. What we relied on back years ago on the SERP (10 Blue Links) is a distant memory as search engines have added features to match the customer’s intent and journey. Mordy and Crystal tackle the challenges and opportunities of SERP features with Kevin Indig, creator of the Growth Memo newsletter and host of the Tech Bound podcast. Jump in as we look at the SERP and all of the boxes and rectangles and squares and expandable carousels, and tabs, and more. Learn what Google’s SERP features say about users and Google itself… and how you can leverage them both tactically and strategically. The team also has Fun with People Also Asked again this week with a case that shows maybe you shouldn’t tie all your content to the questions inside of the PAA box! Back SERP Features - Google's secret sauce Change. It's the one constant in life…and Google. What we relied on back years ago on the SERP (10 Blue Links) is a distant memory as search engines have added features to match the customer’s intent and journey. Mordy and Crystal tackle the challenges and opportunities of SERP features with Kevin Indig, creator of the Growth Memo newsletter and host of the Tech Bound podcast. Jump in as we look at the SERP and all of the boxes and rectangles and squares and expandable carousels, and tabs, and more. Learn what Google’s SERP features say about users and Google itself… and how you can leverage them both tactically and strategically. The team also has Fun with People Also Asked again this week with a case that shows maybe you shouldn’t tie all your content to the questions inside of the PAA box! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 11 | November 2, 2022 | 42 MIN 00:00 / 41:34 This week’s guests Kevin Indig Kevin Indig is a strategic Growth Advisor, creator of the Growth Memo newsletter and host of the Tech Bound podcast. He ran SEO organizations for companies like Shopify, G2 and Atlassian, consulted for big brands like Ramp, Eventbrite, or Finder and is an active angel investor. Kevin believes is on a quest to accelerate technology that can solve impactful problems. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha, mahalo, for joining this SERPs Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our one, our only, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, all you groovy internet people. It's me, it's you, it's all of us. We're here. Hello. Mordy Oberstein: And it's another special groovy internet person, but I'm not going to tell you who it is. But he'll be joining us shortly. He's quite groovy. Crystal Carter: Very groovy, very groovy. Mordy Oberstein: He might have a massive hangover at this point, but he's quite groovy. Crystal Carter: Groovy, insightful. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder who could it be? Who could it be? Crystal Carter: Who could it be? Who could it be? Who could it possibly be? It's very interesting, it's our first time having a guest on this portion of the show, so it's great. Mordy Oberstein: It is, which reminds us that this podcast and this portion of the show, as all the rest of the portions of the show, are brought to you by Wix, where you can pragmatically build, create custom site functionality. Integrate with all sorts of tools, customize and scale the heck out of your Wix website with our own full stack dev tool, Velo. By the way, shout out to Colt Sliver for writing an awesome post, I'll link to it in the show notes, about doing that. Check it out at wix.com/velo. Okay, crazy show today. We're talking about boxes, lots of boxes. Boxes, boxes everywhere and not a URL to spare. Hi, I'm an SEO poet. Crystal Carter: You can't keep me in a box. Don't fence me in. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, I guess you can keep us in a box, because basically this week we're diving into the squares, rectangles, carousels, drop down menus that Google loves showing us on the results page as we take a very special dive into Google's special SERP features. We'll talk which features matter, how to best leverage Google's SERP features, what they mean for the SERP and for you and your competitors and your family and your family of your competitors. You get a SERP feature, you get a SERP feature, we all get a SERP feature. Hopefully, we all get a SERP feature. Crystal, do you have SERP feature? Crystal Carter: Do I have SERP feature? Like a featured snippet? Mordy Oberstein: Mm-hmm, maybe. Crystal Carter: Or a feature about crystals? There's probably a feature about crystals. If you look up crystals, there's probably lots of those sorts of things. Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot of SERP features about crystals. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's special crystals that you can get that will help you to do better on your SEO. I know. Mordy Oberstein: We're going to get into all of that. We will not, however, have our usual guests share their usual thoughts in our usual clip of SEO exquisiteness. No, no, no, no, no. Rather, we're going to have a guest co-host for the majority of this podcast. Again, who can it be? Wait and see. Plus, we'll take a look at what I call the universal SERP feature, the People Also Ask box, as we explore a possible scenario where I think you should not target the questions inside the People Also Ask box, and we'll see why we have some fun with the old PAA box. And of course, of Snappy SEO News and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. Episode number 11 of the SERPs Up Podcast is live. So back in the day when you searched for something on Google, you got a list of results and ads. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we call them the plain blue links. Mordy Oberstein: Right. The 10 blue links, which we still call them the 10 blue links, even though there are not 10 anymore. Crystal Carter: No, there's not 10. You can expand it if you try and change your settings to show 100 at a time if you want. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, right and there's also the scrolling. However, well, the question I guess is, why are there not 10 anymore? Part of the reason is, well, there's a bunch of reasons, but a big part of them is SERP features. So type in pizza near me and you get a big old square block thingy with usually three local businesses where you can grab a slice, and we call this the local pack. Google, how many home runs did Babe Ruth hit? 714 in case you cared. And Google gives you the answer in a box. Same if you type in Tom Hanks movies, you get a carousel listing his movies or the weather in New York, Google gives you the forecast right there at the top of the result page. And of course, no URL's, meaning Google giving you the answer, and you don't need to visit a website anymore, which has caused a lot of perhaps needless controversy around it. I think a little bit is legit. I think a lot of the controversy around the lack of URLs is not legit, but different conversation for a different time because today we're talking about the plenty of SERP features that do and don't have a link as Google has things like, I don't know, feature snippets for when you search for how to install Windows. Google will give you a snippet with the initial steps to follow, followed by a URL with a full process. Search for your favorite sports team, and to the right of the organic results, you get a knowledge panel giving you all sorts of information on the team, including a link to their social media profiles or Wikipedia page, and even a link to the team's website. The point is, Google's results are far richer than they used to be. They're far more than just the standard organic results. SERP features play a huge role, which is why we have a very, very, very, very special guest to help sift through all of the SERP feature noise. You may know him from his very popular newsletter, Growth Memo. He's also one of the most prominent, most respected, brightest thought leaders in all of SEO land. Welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast, Kevin Indig. Kevin Indig: Mahalo. Hey. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, jumping right in with the Hawaiian theme. Kevin Indig: I'm trying to match your energy here, man. I've been to October Fest, I'm still feeling groggy. Just trying to get back to life here. Mordy Oberstein: We're glad you're plowing through the hangover to join us and talk about SERP features. It's one of the topics that you've written a lot about, and feel free to plug away at all the pieces that you wrote about, and we will link them in the show notes. But I want to start off with one thing. We've talked about in the past, the SEO world's been hyper focused on feature snippets or direct answers that have no URL, and Google, quote, unquote, "stealing clicks." But when I look at their SERP now and I see the SERP features that are there now, one of the things that stands out to me is how many filters there are, different carousels, different bubble filters, different expandable tabs that sort of get you from your initial query to other queries. And it seems to me like Google's like, we kind of understand that users, you may search for a head term or a very top level keyword, but we know you want something more specific and they're trying to get users through the SERP features to those more specific results. Crystal Carter: And in many ways, they're sort of guiding the searches. I think one of the things you see with this is, it's sort of an evolution of the mobile first thing, because essentially you're on a mobile, it can be sometimes very difficult to type out something really, really long. Whereas, it's much easier to just click the suggested, the related searches, or to click one of the SERP features that has an image and has a card and that sort of thing. How do you think that mobile plays into the evolution of SERP features, Kevin? Kevin Indig: Yeah, I think it plays into the evolution a lot. And the way that I explain this whole kind of thing with SERP features and filters to myself is that basically every user is on a journey. Every search is kind of part of a journey. And Google actually thinks about that the same way. They're very vocal and public about this. There was this very interesting case study that Google published on Think with Google. So Think with Google is their, it's a little bit of a marketing think tank. It's actually like a blog. But they published some really cool insights. And there was one case study where they showed that people who are booking a flight have over hundreds, sometimes over 500 touchpoints with Google search. And it can be small little things like how is the weather in Rome? Or do I need a Visa for Rome? Very small searches that could be yes or no. But also very long searches like booking the flight or booking a hotel or putting together an itinerary. Basically, what Google's trying to do with SERP features is they're trying to shorten the time that it takes for people to complete their search journey. And as you already correctly pointed out, sometimes you have to refine your search or change your search, and that's a little bit of friction. And instead, Google provides you little apps or little features in the search results to click on a different result or to filter results in a way that they make more sense for you. So it's all about shortening the time for people to complete their journey. And in the context of websites, that could also mean few people clicking through to websites and people staying in the search results longer where Google shows them more ads. Crystal Carter: I think that can be the case. I mean, one of the ways that I tend to advise people about trying to navigate this is to try to get more involved with the SERP feature. So you mentioned hotels and travel, Google Hotels, Google Travel, that sort of space. If you're not on the board, if you're in that space, if that's your niche, then it will be behoove you to make sure that you're eligible for that content and that you're eligible to show on that content so that even if they don't click through to you, they're seeing you regularly in that SERP feature. And it's similar for Google for Jobs and for other features as well. Have you seen that work for people or brands? Kevin Indig: For certain SERP features, absolutely. So there's some SERP features that you can quote, unquote, "rank in" or be visible in, like image carousels, video carousels, featured snippets, people also asked, those kind of things. But then there are others where you just, as a brand, sometimes you can bid, you can pay for being visible in the case of the Google Flights search module, for example, you can literal bid to be visible, but there are also some where you just can't do anything at all, like a Google Knowledge card, for example. And that's when the only thing you can do is just be aware that this happens in the search results, and understand what the impact on your traffic could be. A lot of the conversation about SERP features, it really starts with understanding. And that's not that easy because I don't think there are many tools that have a very, very accurate reflection of what's happening with SERP results. Two, there's a lot of change. So Google does a lot of testing with these SERP features. They might be seasonal even. And then three, there are all sorts of different consolations. So sometimes you'll see a featured snippet and top ads and a map pack, and then sometimes it will be just a map pack, and then other times it will be product listing ads. So there's a lot of different permutations and combinations that make all of this a bit more difficult. Crystal Carter: We think about one SERP feature at a time, but oftentimes you see a combination. So you'll see a featured snippet that also has an image carousel or also has a video, or also has an accordion dropdown. So if you're showing for one of those, then that'll affect how many people are coming to your website and you're showing for other ones as well. And yeah, I think you're entirely right about how often it changes. Looking on how search works, and they have a section about rigorous testing, and it says they're launching 750,000 search quality tests, 11,000 traffic experiments, and that sort of thing where they're testing different parts of the SERP, and they'll try features, they'll remove them, they'll add them, they'll take them away. So it can be tricky to track. Mordy Oberstein: They're super strategic about it too. For example, when they went to infinite scroll to not really infinite scroll. So two, three weeks before that, they started implementing much larger and many more visual images on mobile, which makes a lot of sense because if you're going to start infinite scroll, if you're scrolling down and it's just a standard 10 blue links kind of feel to it, it's not really engaging. So infinite scroll needs to have a more visual SERP. So what they did was they first rolled that out because they knew they were, I think, because they knew they were going to roll out infinite scroll afterwards. Now, when you go through a mobile and you scroll through after scroll, after scroll, after scroll, it kind of has almost like a social media feel to it because the SERP is so visual. Kevin Indig: Yep, totally. I think that the search results are more of a feed these days than the classic 10 blue links and use it as an intro. Matter of fact, even though desktop Google doesn't show 10 blue links anymore for most of the searches, less than a half. Actually, most of the times they show eight or nine results.. But yeah, the search results are constantly changing, it makes a lot of sense. Most platforms, and especially consumer platforms these days are feeds where if you're not happy with a result that you see right now, you just swipe or you just scroll. So it's a very, very normal behavior. And as you said, it makes a lot of sense to also visualize the search results a bit more because everything is getting more visual. Everything is also getting more oriented around videos. If you look at some of the most successful platforms, consumer platforms these days, it's all about video, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, even Spotify added more videos for podcasts and songs and all that kind of stuff. So video's kind of the format of the hour. And Google is thinking about how can they bring more video to the search results in a way that it feels native and it makes sense. And so for example, another SERP feature that has been shown up lately that's been really killing it are short videos. They're often dominated by TikTok, not always, but that's going to be another playing field where people are just going to look for the... I have a search query, or I'm on a journey, what's the one minute video answer to my problem? So that's something that brands will have to think about. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's funny to me because the SERP is one of these places where you see something like that, where they're adding on shorts like that. And you could say, as a marketer, that's a moment to say, "Stop. Wait a second. If Google's doing that, reverse that." Oh, that must mean people are looking for that kind of content. I don't have that kind of content. I should probably be creating that kind of content, and SERP features and what Google does on the SERP, to me at least, it's great to reverse engineer that to figure out what you should be doing with your own website. Kevin Indig: A hundred percent. Crystal Carter: I think also with video, a lot of people will say, "Oh, but the thing I do is really boring." I don't know, not to say anything about tax attorneys, but you don't think about tax attorneys when you think about video, for instance. And you might say, "Oh, nobody wants to..." But that is precisely the time to make that kind of content because your competition is going to be incredibly low. So if you make any kind of content, you're going to get a lot more air time than somebody who's trying to make dance routine videos. It's going to be very difficult to compete there. But I mean, if you're a dancing tax attorney, that's even better. But yeah, I think that even if you think that it might not be a vertical that lends itself to video, be creative, try some interesting things there. And just one more thing about video and about SERP features, Google Search Console is a really good place also to get information about how you're performing on different SERP features. And Google recently updated the information that they share about videos, which is another sign that they're leaning more heavily on this type of media, and it's something to pay attention to. It's something that you can track much better now. Kevin Indig: Yeah, absolutely. But one thing that they said, Mordy, that's really smart, we wanted to comment on very quickly is that the SERP features can be compass for us. So one thing that's super important for all sorts of brands and websites to understand is this concept of user intent, which just means what are people really trying to accomplish? And since Google is trying to understand user intent as well, sometimes it can be very clear, other times very ambiguously, we can kind of use the SERP features that appear for certain keywords to understand what the actual user intent is. Are people trying to buy something? Are they trying to learn something? Are they looking for inspiration? And then tune our content toward that user intent. That's incredibly valuable. And a little bit of a hack to understand user intent at scale for lots of keywords. Mordy Oberstein: Looking back at doing that, looking at the SERP, seeing what's there now, what features Google's showing, what that means for what people are looking for, because I know you've been studying this for a long, long time. Going back, if you look back at what Google used to do and you fast forward to now, how would you describe what's changed? Kevin Indig: That's a great question. I think the SERP features themselves have become a lot better. One example are people also asked where the questions are just so much more relevant to the actual search query that people are looking for. And those little questions, those little guys, they're tuned for engagement. So oftentimes when you search, for example, for a brand and the SERP feature is, the big question is like, oh, is this brand legit? Is this brand legal? All this kind of stuff. So very tuned to engagement, and so much more relevance. Another thing that I noticed is that Google rank so much better to seasonality. One of my favorite examples is the search query or the search term Independence Day that most of the time of the year means the movie with Will Smith. But once a year, of course it means the holiday in the US, and you see that Google is very good at just finding the right time to switch the layout of the search results when people start having more of an intent that's related to the holiday, and just being present at the right time. So I feel like this whole SERP feature construct has been very, very choppy in the beginning, and now it's very smooth. It's like it's very tailored to users and it makes a lot of sense. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've definitely seen some really cool things they do dynamically. For example, knowledge panels. Let's say you Google a sports team, if it's during their season or it's before their season, there's different news around the team. Different things are important to that team, depending upon what's going on. If you're, before the season, signing new players, contracts might be really important. During the season, stats might be really important. I'm making this up. Google changes the bubble filters there on the knowledge panel, depending on what's going on with the team at the time. So all of a sudden contracts will show up as a tab in the knowledge panel because yeah, it's the preseason. Everyone's trying to sign new players. It's amazing what they do dynamically. Crystal Carter: And I think also another one is, so within the Google business profile, you can see if a place is busy before you decide to go to the beer hall, you can see if it's busy and if you're going to have to wait in line or not, for instance. And I think that's something that's fantastic as well. And I think that's another good example of ways that Google combines some of their systems. So they're able to look at information from Google Maps, if lots of people are asking for directions to that place, then they'll know more information about that, you're also able to layer that with information on the SERP and lots of other content. So for instance, if you query something, the example I always use is vegan donuts. I like donuts. So if you're looking at vegan donuts, they'll give you a Google business profile result that says on their website, they talk about vegan donuts, even if it doesn't say it in their Google business profile. So they're able to layer lots of different parts of their tools to create dynamic information that serves the user, because Google wants to serve the user at the end of the day. Kevin Indig: It's a great call out. And while we're talking about maps, I recently did an analysis of 20,000 e-commerce keywords, and I noticed that over 80% of these keywords show a map pack. So Google is leaning very heavily into maps in general. It's a new avenue. First of all, I mean, it's very helpful product. Second of all, it's a new area where they can show a lot more ads to drive more revenue and all that good stuff. And that has a profound impact on how much traffic you can get if you're not present in a map pack. Not every business is local, but if you compete in e-commerce, then that means you also compete against local businesses, and that's kind of a new dimension of competition that a lot of businesses don't have on their radar that is really, really important to understand and track. So it might be that if Google shows a map pack at the top of the SERPs, the percentage of clicks you get from all the searches can be minimal, can be as low as even 5%, even if you rank number one. So it adds a new flavor to SERPs. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, SERP feature's great in a scenario where you really have to qualify your rankings. Ranking number one might be great, but now you might be actually below the fold, so it might not be so great. But you actually beat me to it. I was going to ask you about e-com, because it's such an interesting space when it comes to SERP features, and it's kind of what, generally speaking, what you see happening out there in the e-com space. Obviously, now you talking about the map packs, but just there's so many. There's PLAs and product carousel with multiple kinds out there. Google seems to really be immersive. And of course, that ties into Google shopping and all its efforts to beat out Amazon. So just kind of curious what you're seeing out there in the space. Kevin Indig: So the one in charge you already called is the product listings that are coming from the organic feed of Google shopping and sometimes from image search. So that is getting, it's really important. And even more poignant on mobile search. So one thing to always keep in mind is difference between desktop and mobile. And on mobile, these carousels just stick out so much more, they're so much more interactive. Mordy Oberstein: So much space. Kevin Indig: Yeah, so much more space. It's nuts. So if you can look at the difference between desktop and mobile when it comes to your keyword performance, keyword ranks, keyword click-through rate, that's a great first step to do to just get a better understanding of what's happening in keywords that are important to you. So there's one trend. Second trend what we talk about is maps. Third trend is just more image carousels, especially when it comes to inspiration. So one interesting search that I came across is smiley face nails. So apparently you can kind of, I don't know, paint emojis on your fingernails. Mordy Oberstein: I must have this now. Crystal Carter: I'll get right on that. Kevin Indig: But no, it's very interesting. And you see that there are a lot of images obviously popping up because Google wants to help people with inspiration. But some of the image search is also connected to Google shopping. So sometimes Google will mix products in image search, and that gets really interesting. That means that you might have a shortcut to compete in a very competitive search result with an image instead of an organic listing. And it opens up a whole new playing field for SEOs and for driving traffic and maybe even conversions. So image search, getting really important. And then a fourth trend that I would add is product listing ads. Product listing ads are very different than the classic top ads, which are just text, product listing ads have images, they might have reviews, pricing, shipping information. They're very, very engaging for users. Users love to click them, and they have a very different kind of feel than the classic ads because they already show the product, they already show a lot of information about the product. So people are much more likely to click on product listing ads than the classic ads, which means less traffic for organic results as well. Crystal Carter: And I think it's interesting with those ads, how to differentiate when you have similar products, because you have to figure out which part of the SERP feature will make the difference with the click-through. So you talked about some of the things they showed, and sometimes they don't show the review for the product, sometimes it'll show the review for the shop, and there's images, there's prices, you can have promotions on it. Lots of information there. In my experience, I've seen it where I had a client who was doing some of that, and we had it where everyone was selling the same product, everybody pretty much had the same product. So I just picked one that had a ridiculous picture. So everyone was selling, it was like a uniform, and everyone's uniforms were gray and black and beige, and they had a polka-dotted one. And I was like, "We put that one in the picture." And they were like, "What?" I was like, "You put that one in the picture because it'll stand out." And it did. And they got loads of traffic to the other stuff. But it's important to figure out ways to differentiate yourself and to make yourself look unique. Kevin Indig: A hundred percent. Yep, I think this whole idea of image optimization is going to become much more important. Not in the classic sense of alt tag and file name and surrounding text, but much more like what can you see in the image? What does a background look like? How can you stand out just a little more than your competition? It's going to be a thing. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I've done a lot on visual search in the last few months, but yeah I agree. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to it in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I agree. Mordy Oberstein: So I'll sum this up, because we're running out of time, unfortunately. We could talk about this literally for another hour or two hours. If you're serious about ranking and you're serious about doing well organically and bringing in traffic, you need to go to the SERP and look at all the boxes and rectangles and squares, and expandable carousel and tabs and whatnot, because if you don't, you really don't know what's happening and you really don't know what opportunities are there waiting for you. Crystal Carter: Say it louder, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Don't dare me to do that because you know that I will. Crystal Carter: Look at the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: Look at the SERP. Crystal Carter: Just actually Google it. Actually follow the user journey that someone would follow to find your product or website or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: And when you do, search for Kevin Indig so you can find him. Of course, we'll link to all of your wonderful assets you produce, your social profiles, everything, you just let us know. Follow the links Kevin, let us know what you want us to link to and we'll link to it in the show notes. Kevin Indig: Thanks so much. I'll send you a Google Talk or a spreadsheet. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, please if you could, keep it at a minimum of like two or three tabs. Seriously, Kevin, thank you so much. Always great talking with you, and I'm not sure how to end this, because we've never had a guest on this show before. I'm so lost, we didn't even thank you. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much, Kevin, it's been an absolute pleasure. Kevin Indig: Thank you as well. Maybe we just don't end this, maybe we just stay on for a day or something. Mordy Oberstein: Just silence for a second. Kevin Indig: Until we go to sleep. Mordy Oberstein: Perfect. That was absolutely amazing. You should definitely follow Kevin on social media. He is not our follow of the week, not that he doesn't qualify to be, but he's already here. We have another follow of the week, but that's later. But first, here's a fun little game we play. Both to sort of mess with each other by a tad to understand what's happening with Google. And in this case, I think it highlights some of Google's shortcomings, which by the way, everyone has shortcomings, search engines included. We're all just people. Crystal Carter: They're handling thousands and thousands and thousands of searches every day. And my entire back catalog of every image I've ever taken a screenshot on my phone, they're busy. It's a lot to manage. Mordy Oberstein: It's a lot. So we feel, oh, Google's going to get it right. They're not supposed to get it right every time. So when I say I don't think they got it right this time, I don't mean it in a negative way. I mean, they're just being human. Crystal Carter: Google's being human. Is that okay? Mordy Oberstein: I'm taking this to a new level, I don't want SEOs to get upset at me for saying that, but I said it, and we're just going to leave it at that for a minute. But first off, wouldn't it be super scary if they always got it right? I'd be freaked out if every single time Google got it exactly right, I would think something's not right here. Crystal Carter: Well, and also they can only work with the material they got. So if other people haven't written anything that's decent, what are you going to do? Mordy Oberstein: People gloss over that point all the time. I just spoke about that in the conference in Brazil, can't remember the name. Terrible. But I literally spoke about it, it's our fault. It's not Google's fault, it's our fault. But anyway- Crystal Carter: Make better content. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Make better content. Say it louder, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Make better content. Mordy Oberstein: Yo, make better content. Anyway, we're looking at the four, well usually four, questions Google lists on the results page, when you expand the tabs, they sit and reveal a secret answer along with the URL. Well, usually it's with a URL, sometimes not. And it's not really a secret answer. Anyway, let's have some fun with, People Also Ask. Crystal, this time you're on the hot seat. Crystal Carter: Okay all right, I'm ready. What are we doing? Mordy Oberstein: Are you ready? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm going to ask Crystal, I typed in a keyword, and this has to do with Crystal's background. Crystal can elaborate or not elaborate, it's not my business. But the keyword is- Crystal Carter: I'm surprised, I don't know what you're going to ask me. Mordy Oberstein: I know you don't know. I know you don't know. This could be terrible and horrible or fantastic. We don't know how it's going to go yet. We're doing it live. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Is it fair that military families have to move so often? That's the key word. Crystal Carter: Oh, this is... Okay. So just the background on the background is that I'm a military brat. So yes, I would say... Oh, I don't know. Yes, might the answer be? Or they might have two because it's not easy for families and stuff, but likes families often move because of …. Mordy Oberstein: Right, that's true. Crystal Carter: So yeah, I would say they might have... What does is say? Mordy Oberstein: Let's see what Google asks. They have four questions. Crystal Carter: Oh, I thought that was the question. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm sorry. That was the keyword I put in. Crystal Carter: Okay, got you. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. That keyword brought up what people also asked, So there are four questions, and when I expand any of the tabs, I get an answer. So let's start with the first one, I have a whole point to this, at the end of this. It's not just silliness for the sake of silliness. There is an SEO point to all of this. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. First question. How often do military families have to move? Crystal Carter: Ooh. In my experience, one to two years. Mordy Oberstein: Well, not bad. About every three years. Military families move about every three years, but sometimes more frequently. The move is called a PCS or a Permanent Change of Station. Okay. Crystal Carter: Okay, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: All right, so far so good. Okay. Second question. Why do military families have to move so much? Crystal Carter: Because whoever's in the military, the adult who's in the family, who's in the military, will change where they're based. So they might be based in Hawaii, they might be based in Florida, they might be based in San Diego, but when they switch where they're based, then the family has to move. Mordy Oberstein: And that's basically what Google says. So far we're so good. Google's asking questions, Crystal's giving the answers. We're all locked up here. How often do military spouses move? Crystal Carter: They tend to move with their spouse. So the same as the family, if they'd said three years for the first one, I would guess they would say three years for the …. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they say every two to three years. Okay, fine. They give a whole thing. How about this question, last one. Do military spouses have to move? Crystal Carter: Well, the answer is no. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Well, no one. Yeah, they could say, "I want a divorce, I'm not doing this." Crystal Carter: I mean, to give you real insight to it, sometimes people decide like, "Oh, we'll stay. You'll go for a little while," because , don't know if you want to get into it, but sometimes sailors are out to sea for most of the time anyway, so it doesn't make much difference whether they're there or not. Anyway, it's a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Crystal, Google says the good news is that the military will pay for your spouse to move as long as you live in the same home together, depending on the amount of leave you have, your spouse may be the one making most of the moving arrangements, which doesn't really answer the question, but okay. So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Crystal Carter: Yeah, I'm interested in where you're going. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. First off, I need to ask Crystal, where was the coolest place you lived? Crystal Carter: Oh, this is what this is. This is the setup for the whole thing. This is the whole reason why this is. The coolest place I ever lived was in Hawaii. I lived in Hawaii, I lived in O'ahu. So yes, I did mayday presentations and learned how to do the hula, and we did mele kalikimaka, and all of that stuff. So yeah, that- Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. And was it frustrating? So, setting you up here. I'm setting you up. But was it frustrating to have to move so often? Was that fun? Crystal Carter: It was tricky, but it was fun sometimes. When we moved to Hawaii, I lived in a hotel for three months when we first got there, and we were right next to the Hilton. And so we got to see the fireworks every Friday night. Mordy Oberstein: That is actually awesome. Okay, fireworks are awesome. So two points here, and this kind of goes about what I was just saying a second, one is, okay, Google's a little bit redundant with the whole spouse moving thing. And Google. People also ask sometimes they do that, and that happens. But what I was really interested in, when I was searching this, imagine I was putting myself in your shoes. I'm a kid, I'm going to have to move. Think of the keyword. Is it fair that military families have to move so often and Google totally missed a word fair. Crystal Carter: That's very interesting, you're right. That is interesting. So there's an emotion there. Mordy Oberstein: There's an emotion. There's a bias in the question. The question assumes it's not fair. And what I'm already looking for is either information about why this has to be this way or some sort of emotional support of an identification. So maybe a blog. I would've thought better than a People Also Ask, what would've been cool to show here, which they didn't show, would be a carousel from Quora or Reddit or one of the other social media platforms where I can see other people's answers, not Google's answer to the question, which goes back to my original point. Sometimes, which by the way, on mobile, they do have a bunch of those carousels there, whatever. My original point is, sometimes we say, "People also ask, take those questions, great keyword research tool, use them, write a blog post, take those four questions and write a blog post for each one of them." In this case, I don't know, maybe you shouldn't use them. Crystal Carter: So I sometimes find, when I'm searching, that sometimes the People Also Ask doesn't make sense. Sometimes I'm like, "I'm not asking that at all. I don't know why anyone would ask that, that's nothing to do with it." And I think it's interesting because when he first asked me the question I thought you were asking me the People Also Ask, and I said, "Sometimes it's tricky." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, see. Sometimes it's part of it. It's part of the intent. Crystal Carter: So yeah, because sometimes it's tricky. And I think that that question is asking for some empathy, isn't it? It's asking for some empathy about a situation that is sometimes tricky. I think to your point, if that is a query that you're seeing that people are actually asking, if you're finding that people are asking that in your conversations with people, or that you've seen it show up in a tool, that people are genuinely asking that or that's a query people have, answer the question. Create content that answers the question, not necessarily content that the shows in People Also Ask because the People Also Ask questions are generated, regularly. So they will generate new ones if they're finding that people aren't actually engaging with the People also ask questions that they have, and also with regards to which content they show in the answers, they change around what that is. So if you're able to better answer that question than the content that's currently there, then you can move into that spot and they might also even create a question based on your content. So I think that as you say, it's worth referencing it, but also thinking with your own brain, and- Mordy Oberstein: And think a little bit, does this actually solve the person's question? If they expand the tab, Like why's this question even here? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Think qualitatively, not just quantitative. SEO is not linear. That's the lesson for today, from the SERP features to the people also ask box, which is a SERP feature, don't think linearly about the SERP. Crystal Carter: There we go. Thank you very much. That was quite the journey for me, Mordy. I was …. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry to make you relive your childhood, just for the sake of a podcast. Crystal Carter: You're just like, "Hey there. How about some childhood trauma?" No, I'm kidding. My childhood was lovely. I had a lovely childhood. It was very nice. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Well, every time you've talked about it, it's only been positive, things like going to Hawaii. So I figured I can go there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, it's fine. It's fine. But no, I think you're right about empathy. But also I think sometimes with content, you are talking about sensitive issues, and it's important to approach that content sensitively to be able to help users. And if you're able to show compassion in your content, then that is something that will engage with clients, with users, and with the people that are engaging with that content a lot more than just a keyword because they'll think, oh, this company, this person, this author, has some empathy with my situation. And that's a really good thing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, empathy is always good. I think that's the moral of the story; empathy is always good. You know what else is always good? Crystal Carter: What's always good? Mordy Oberstein: News. Crystal Carter: News. Mordy Oberstein: News is always good. Everyone loves news. So here is some Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Been a hot minute since I've come across a really nice SEO study, but our dear friends at Semrush and the author of the... Been a hot minute since I've come across a really nice SEO study. But our dear friends at Sun Rush, by the way, plug for the Wix, Semrush integration, check that out, have a really nice study for us authored by Marcus Tober. This one looks at zero click searches. Let me take y'all back in time a little bit. A few years ago, Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, and SparkToro, did a study showing that 50% of all Google searches do not result in a click, and the SEO world went nuts. "Google is stealing clicks." "No one needs websites the way Google is set up." "They're answering all the questions themselves," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The most recent data Rand put out was that Google searches result in, 65% of them, result in zero clicks. Now, nothing against the study itself or Rand, who has contributed greatly to the SEO community over the years, but this was not my favorite study for two reasons. One, 50% of searches not resulting in a click to a URL on the Google results page isn't entirely helpful. For example, how many of those no clicks were actually query refinement or keyword refinement, meaning you search, you don't find exactly what you're looking for on that set of Google results. So you search again, that's a zero click, or clicks where you don't click a URL, for example, but you click on one of the other filters Google has on the page. So for example, you move from the traditional Google SERP and you click on where it says images, and you look at all the images there, that's technically a zero click search. So how many of those zero clicks that we studied way back when were actually those, which is not the zero click, the nefarious zero click that people are all upset about. The other reason why I didn't really love the study is that not every time there's no click on a set of Google results, is that a bad thing? I don't want a website, when I type in weather in New York City or Yankees score, I don't want to go to a website. I'll be honest with you. As a user, I just want the answer. And that's just the evolution of content delivery. Which is, by the way, Semrush in their study does a really good job of explaining. So the end of the whole study itself, there's a whole nice piece on the analysis of the study, so check that part of the study out as well. Now, the Semrush study was a little bit more nuanced, or a lot of bit more nuanced. It tried to better explain the data categories than split them up as much as possible. For example, as opposed to saying, "65% of all searches on Google do not result into a... Do not result." Let's try that again. "Do not result in a click to a URL." Semrush showed, well, about 10% of searches were users moving from one SERP to the next. For example, they were on the main SERP. They typed in, Tom Brady, they went to the main SERP obviously, and then they clicked maybe on images and looked at all the pictures of Tom Brady, whatever it is. Semrush separated those out, and those were about 10% of the time that was happening. So that's 10% of zero clicks are just people moving from maybe the main SERP to, let's say, the shopping results. Now, 18% were zero clicks, but were actually query refinement, where you maybe entered another new keyword. Meaning, you searched for one thing, didn't see what you found, didn't click on anything, and typed in a new keyword or a more specific keyword. Now within that, there might be some actual zero search, zero click searches in there, mixed in with that, according to the Semrush data, but fine. On top of that, there are a legit 25% of cases where it's a real zero click, where you just maybe found the answer on the SERP. Technically speaking, the way the data's structured, you could have just left the page open for two minutes and not have done anything, the Semrush data would've counted a zero click. But leave that aside, the bottom line is, around 25% of the time, perhaps a little more, if you look at the data the way it's structured, perhaps. I'll try that again, bottom line is, around 25% of the time, perhaps a little bit more, based upon how the data is structured, you're not seeing a click to organic result or an organic URL, when someone searches on Google, which is far, far less than 65%. So great job, Semrush, love the nuance. Have a look at the study. We'll obviously link to it in the show notes. It's really important to understand. I will say this, it's really important to understand the Google ecosystem, how things are set up, whether you're an SEO, whether you're a digital marketer, whether you're a business owner, whether you're a site... Whatever it is, super important to understand the ecosystem, and this study does a great job of doing that. So thank you Semrush, and that's all this week for the Snappy News. Now, before we duly depart, we have one last little treat for you, and that's our follow of the week. And do we have a treat for you this week? We do. Crystal Carter: We do. Mordy Oberstein: Isn't every week>? Let's be honest. Crystal Carter: It's all a gift, you're welcome people. No, I'm kidding. Mordy Oberstein: Our gift this week from a data scientist at Moz, he's the doctor of SEO, Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz. Crystal Carter: Is there a doctor in the house? I think there is. Mordy Oberstein: There is now. Crystal Carter: Dr. Pete. Mordy Oberstein: Dr. Pete. He's amazing. Crystal Carter: He's so smart and so nice. I love his writing because he talks about some fantastic things around SERP features, around things that are happening, and around what's happening with Google algorithms and all sorts of things. But he always writes with such humility and such empathy to people who are trying to figure out what's happening. He had an article about featured snippets. He was like, "Featured snippets are down this much." And then the next week he was like, "They're back. What was that about?" And that was the first time I was like, "Yeah, okay, Dr. Pete. I'm with you on this." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, there should be a button, like a sticker, "I'm with Dr. Pete." Crystal Carter: I'm with Dr. Pete. I'm not sure if he wants all of us with him. I'm sure that sometimes he'd like to just go places by himself and not have hoards of SEOs tagging along. Mordy Oberstein: Well, we are all following him now. Crystal Carter: We all follow him. Everyone should follow him. Also, follow him because he has some amazing cleaning tips. He's really into wipes. Mordy Oberstein: Remember his tweet about baby wipes? And it's true. Always use baby wipes to clean because they're great at cleaning everything. Crystal Carter: I did not know this. I did not see that one. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's a good tip from Dr. Pete. Crystal Carter: I think I saw one about handheld vacuum cleaners, which like the handheld vacuum cleaner literally changed my life. It's literally a life-changing device. You heard it here first people. Mordy Oberstein: And also because he happens to be one of the most honest people in the SEO industry. When Dr. Pete gets something... We all get things wrong but Dr. Pete will say, "Yeah, in that study I did, that was a mistake," and he'll correct it. So you can trust that the data that you're looking at from Dr. Pete has been thoroughly analyzed, questioned, and if there's a problem with it, Dr. Pete will be the first one to point that out, which is very rare and unusual. It's a great trait. Crystal Carter: He's clever, he's kind, he's a good dude. And apparently his house is like clean AF. I've never been there, but from what I hear, he keeps it very clean. Mordy Oberstein: Runs a clean ship, huh? Crystal Carter: Clean ship. Mordy Oberstein: Like they do in the military, like you did in Hawaii, going back full circle. Anyway, Dr. Pete, you could find him on Twitter. We'll link to it in the show notes. But his Twitter handle is @dr, as in doctor, underscore, Pete, P-E-T-E. So, D-R underscore P-E-T-E, check it out on Twitter. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERPs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into Google Search Console. Is it the most important SEO tool? Crystal Carter: We'll find out. Mordy Oberstein: We'll find out. Look for, wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and 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: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Kevin Indig Dr. Pete Meyers Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Programmatic content expansion with Python and Velo Growth Memo News: Zero-Clicks Study Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Kevin Indig Dr. Pete Meyers Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Programmatic content expansion with Python and Velo Growth Memo News: Zero-Clicks Study Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERPs Up. Aloha, mahalo, for joining this SERPs Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our one, our only, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, all you groovy internet people. It's me, it's you, it's all of us. We're here. Hello. Mordy Oberstein: And it's another special groovy internet person, but I'm not going to tell you who it is. But he'll be joining us shortly. He's quite groovy. Crystal Carter: Very groovy, very groovy. Mordy Oberstein: He might have a massive hangover at this point, but he's quite groovy. Crystal Carter: Groovy, insightful. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder who could it be? Who could it be? Crystal Carter: Who could it be? Who could it be? Who could it possibly be? It's very interesting, it's our first time having a guest on this portion of the show, so it's great. Mordy Oberstein: It is, which reminds us that this podcast and this portion of the show, as all the rest of the portions of the show, are brought to you by Wix, where you can pragmatically build, create custom site functionality. Integrate with all sorts of tools, customize and scale the heck out of your Wix website with our own full stack dev tool, Velo. By the way, shout out to Colt Sliver for writing an awesome post, I'll link to it in the show notes, about doing that. Check it out at wix.com/velo. Okay, crazy show today. We're talking about boxes, lots of boxes. Boxes, boxes everywhere and not a URL to spare. Hi, I'm an SEO poet. Crystal Carter: You can't keep me in a box. Don't fence me in. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, I guess you can keep us in a box, because basically this week we're diving into the squares, rectangles, carousels, drop down menus that Google loves showing us on the results page as we take a very special dive into Google's special SERP features. We'll talk which features matter, how to best leverage Google's SERP features, what they mean for the SERP and for you and your competitors and your family and your family of your competitors. You get a SERP feature, you get a SERP feature, we all get a SERP feature. Hopefully, we all get a SERP feature. Crystal, do you have SERP feature? Crystal Carter: Do I have SERP feature? Like a featured snippet? Mordy Oberstein: Mm-hmm, maybe. Crystal Carter: Or a feature about crystals? There's probably a feature about crystals. If you look up crystals, there's probably lots of those sorts of things. Mordy Oberstein: There's a lot of SERP features about crystals. Crystal Carter: Yeah, there's special crystals that you can get that will help you to do better on your SEO. I know. Mordy Oberstein: We're going to get into all of that. We will not, however, have our usual guests share their usual thoughts in our usual clip of SEO exquisiteness. No, no, no, no, no. Rather, we're going to have a guest co-host for the majority of this podcast. Again, who can it be? Wait and see. Plus, we'll take a look at what I call the universal SERP feature, the People Also Ask box, as we explore a possible scenario where I think you should not target the questions inside the People Also Ask box, and we'll see why we have some fun with the old PAA box. And of course, of Snappy SEO News and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. Episode number 11 of the SERPs Up Podcast is live. So back in the day when you searched for something on Google, you got a list of results and ads. Crystal Carter: Yeah, we call them the plain blue links. Mordy Oberstein: Right. The 10 blue links, which we still call them the 10 blue links, even though there are not 10 anymore. Crystal Carter: No, there's not 10. You can expand it if you try and change your settings to show 100 at a time if you want. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, right and there's also the scrolling. However, well, the question I guess is, why are there not 10 anymore? Part of the reason is, well, there's a bunch of reasons, but a big part of them is SERP features. So type in pizza near me and you get a big old square block thingy with usually three local businesses where you can grab a slice, and we call this the local pack. Google, how many home runs did Babe Ruth hit? 714 in case you cared. And Google gives you the answer in a box. Same if you type in Tom Hanks movies, you get a carousel listing his movies or the weather in New York, Google gives you the forecast right there at the top of the result page. And of course, no URL's, meaning Google giving you the answer, and you don't need to visit a website anymore, which has caused a lot of perhaps needless controversy around it. I think a little bit is legit. I think a lot of the controversy around the lack of URLs is not legit, but different conversation for a different time because today we're talking about the plenty of SERP features that do and don't have a link as Google has things like, I don't know, feature snippets for when you search for how to install Windows. Google will give you a snippet with the initial steps to follow, followed by a URL with a full process. Search for your favorite sports team, and to the right of the organic results, you get a knowledge panel giving you all sorts of information on the team, including a link to their social media profiles or Wikipedia page, and even a link to the team's website. The point is, Google's results are far richer than they used to be. They're far more than just the standard organic results. SERP features play a huge role, which is why we have a very, very, very, very special guest to help sift through all of the SERP feature noise. You may know him from his very popular newsletter, Growth Memo. He's also one of the most prominent, most respected, brightest thought leaders in all of SEO land. Welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast, Kevin Indig. Kevin Indig: Mahalo. Hey. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, jumping right in with the Hawaiian theme. Kevin Indig: I'm trying to match your energy here, man. I've been to October Fest, I'm still feeling groggy. Just trying to get back to life here. Mordy Oberstein: We're glad you're plowing through the hangover to join us and talk about SERP features. It's one of the topics that you've written a lot about, and feel free to plug away at all the pieces that you wrote about, and we will link them in the show notes. But I want to start off with one thing. We've talked about in the past, the SEO world's been hyper focused on feature snippets or direct answers that have no URL, and Google, quote, unquote, "stealing clicks." But when I look at their SERP now and I see the SERP features that are there now, one of the things that stands out to me is how many filters there are, different carousels, different bubble filters, different expandable tabs that sort of get you from your initial query to other queries. And it seems to me like Google's like, we kind of understand that users, you may search for a head term or a very top level keyword, but we know you want something more specific and they're trying to get users through the SERP features to those more specific results. Crystal Carter: And in many ways, they're sort of guiding the searches. I think one of the things you see with this is, it's sort of an evolution of the mobile first thing, because essentially you're on a mobile, it can be sometimes very difficult to type out something really, really long. Whereas, it's much easier to just click the suggested, the related searches, or to click one of the SERP features that has an image and has a card and that sort of thing. How do you think that mobile plays into the evolution of SERP features, Kevin? Kevin Indig: Yeah, I think it plays into the evolution a lot. And the way that I explain this whole kind of thing with SERP features and filters to myself is that basically every user is on a journey. Every search is kind of part of a journey. And Google actually thinks about that the same way. They're very vocal and public about this. There was this very interesting case study that Google published on Think with Google. So Think with Google is their, it's a little bit of a marketing think tank. It's actually like a blog. But they published some really cool insights. And there was one case study where they showed that people who are booking a flight have over hundreds, sometimes over 500 touchpoints with Google search. And it can be small little things like how is the weather in Rome? Or do I need a Visa for Rome? Very small searches that could be yes or no. But also very long searches like booking the flight or booking a hotel or putting together an itinerary. Basically, what Google's trying to do with SERP features is they're trying to shorten the time that it takes for people to complete their search journey. And as you already correctly pointed out, sometimes you have to refine your search or change your search, and that's a little bit of friction. And instead, Google provides you little apps or little features in the search results to click on a different result or to filter results in a way that they make more sense for you. So it's all about shortening the time for people to complete their journey. And in the context of websites, that could also mean few people clicking through to websites and people staying in the search results longer where Google shows them more ads. Crystal Carter: I think that can be the case. I mean, one of the ways that I tend to advise people about trying to navigate this is to try to get more involved with the SERP feature. So you mentioned hotels and travel, Google Hotels, Google Travel, that sort of space. If you're not on the board, if you're in that space, if that's your niche, then it will be behoove you to make sure that you're eligible for that content and that you're eligible to show on that content so that even if they don't click through to you, they're seeing you regularly in that SERP feature. And it's similar for Google for Jobs and for other features as well. Have you seen that work for people or brands? Kevin Indig: For certain SERP features, absolutely. So there's some SERP features that you can quote, unquote, "rank in" or be visible in, like image carousels, video carousels, featured snippets, people also asked, those kind of things. But then there are others where you just, as a brand, sometimes you can bid, you can pay for being visible in the case of the Google Flights search module, for example, you can literal bid to be visible, but there are also some where you just can't do anything at all, like a Google Knowledge card, for example. And that's when the only thing you can do is just be aware that this happens in the search results, and understand what the impact on your traffic could be. A lot of the conversation about SERP features, it really starts with understanding. And that's not that easy because I don't think there are many tools that have a very, very accurate reflection of what's happening with SERP results. Two, there's a lot of change. So Google does a lot of testing with these SERP features. They might be seasonal even. And then three, there are all sorts of different consolations. So sometimes you'll see a featured snippet and top ads and a map pack, and then sometimes it will be just a map pack, and then other times it will be product listing ads. So there's a lot of different permutations and combinations that make all of this a bit more difficult. Crystal Carter: We think about one SERP feature at a time, but oftentimes you see a combination. So you'll see a featured snippet that also has an image carousel or also has a video, or also has an accordion dropdown. So if you're showing for one of those, then that'll affect how many people are coming to your website and you're showing for other ones as well. And yeah, I think you're entirely right about how often it changes. Looking on how search works, and they have a section about rigorous testing, and it says they're launching 750,000 search quality tests, 11,000 traffic experiments, and that sort of thing where they're testing different parts of the SERP, and they'll try features, they'll remove them, they'll add them, they'll take them away. So it can be tricky to track. Mordy Oberstein: They're super strategic about it too. For example, when they went to infinite scroll to not really infinite scroll. So two, three weeks before that, they started implementing much larger and many more visual images on mobile, which makes a lot of sense because if you're going to start infinite scroll, if you're scrolling down and it's just a standard 10 blue links kind of feel to it, it's not really engaging. So infinite scroll needs to have a more visual SERP. So what they did was they first rolled that out because they knew they were, I think, because they knew they were going to roll out infinite scroll afterwards. Now, when you go through a mobile and you scroll through after scroll, after scroll, after scroll, it kind of has almost like a social media feel to it because the SERP is so visual. Kevin Indig: Yep, totally. I think that the search results are more of a feed these days than the classic 10 blue links and use it as an intro. Matter of fact, even though desktop Google doesn't show 10 blue links anymore for most of the searches, less than a half. Actually, most of the times they show eight or nine results.. But yeah, the search results are constantly changing, it makes a lot of sense. Most platforms, and especially consumer platforms these days are feeds where if you're not happy with a result that you see right now, you just swipe or you just scroll. So it's a very, very normal behavior. And as you said, it makes a lot of sense to also visualize the search results a bit more because everything is getting more visual. Everything is also getting more oriented around videos. If you look at some of the most successful platforms, consumer platforms these days, it's all about video, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, even Spotify added more videos for podcasts and songs and all that kind of stuff. So video's kind of the format of the hour. And Google is thinking about how can they bring more video to the search results in a way that it feels native and it makes sense. And so for example, another SERP feature that has been shown up lately that's been really killing it are short videos. They're often dominated by TikTok, not always, but that's going to be another playing field where people are just going to look for the... I have a search query, or I'm on a journey, what's the one minute video answer to my problem? So that's something that brands will have to think about. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and it's funny to me because the SERP is one of these places where you see something like that, where they're adding on shorts like that. And you could say, as a marketer, that's a moment to say, "Stop. Wait a second. If Google's doing that, reverse that." Oh, that must mean people are looking for that kind of content. I don't have that kind of content. I should probably be creating that kind of content, and SERP features and what Google does on the SERP, to me at least, it's great to reverse engineer that to figure out what you should be doing with your own website. Kevin Indig: A hundred percent. Crystal Carter: I think also with video, a lot of people will say, "Oh, but the thing I do is really boring." I don't know, not to say anything about tax attorneys, but you don't think about tax attorneys when you think about video, for instance. And you might say, "Oh, nobody wants to..." But that is precisely the time to make that kind of content because your competition is going to be incredibly low. So if you make any kind of content, you're going to get a lot more air time than somebody who's trying to make dance routine videos. It's going to be very difficult to compete there. But I mean, if you're a dancing tax attorney, that's even better. But yeah, I think that even if you think that it might not be a vertical that lends itself to video, be creative, try some interesting things there. And just one more thing about video and about SERP features, Google Search Console is a really good place also to get information about how you're performing on different SERP features. And Google recently updated the information that they share about videos, which is another sign that they're leaning more heavily on this type of media, and it's something to pay attention to. It's something that you can track much better now. Kevin Indig: Yeah, absolutely. But one thing that they said, Mordy, that's really smart, we wanted to comment on very quickly is that the SERP features can be compass for us. So one thing that's super important for all sorts of brands and websites to understand is this concept of user intent, which just means what are people really trying to accomplish? And since Google is trying to understand user intent as well, sometimes it can be very clear, other times very ambiguously, we can kind of use the SERP features that appear for certain keywords to understand what the actual user intent is. Are people trying to buy something? Are they trying to learn something? Are they looking for inspiration? And then tune our content toward that user intent. That's incredibly valuable. And a little bit of a hack to understand user intent at scale for lots of keywords. Mordy Oberstein: Looking back at doing that, looking at the SERP, seeing what's there now, what features Google's showing, what that means for what people are looking for, because I know you've been studying this for a long, long time. Going back, if you look back at what Google used to do and you fast forward to now, how would you describe what's changed? Kevin Indig: That's a great question. I think the SERP features themselves have become a lot better. One example are people also asked where the questions are just so much more relevant to the actual search query that people are looking for. And those little questions, those little guys, they're tuned for engagement. So oftentimes when you search, for example, for a brand and the SERP feature is, the big question is like, oh, is this brand legit? Is this brand legal? All this kind of stuff. So very tuned to engagement, and so much more relevance. Another thing that I noticed is that Google rank so much better to seasonality. One of my favorite examples is the search query or the search term Independence Day that most of the time of the year means the movie with Will Smith. But once a year, of course it means the holiday in the US, and you see that Google is very good at just finding the right time to switch the layout of the search results when people start having more of an intent that's related to the holiday, and just being present at the right time. So I feel like this whole SERP feature construct has been very, very choppy in the beginning, and now it's very smooth. It's like it's very tailored to users and it makes a lot of sense. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I've definitely seen some really cool things they do dynamically. For example, knowledge panels. Let's say you Google a sports team, if it's during their season or it's before their season, there's different news around the team. Different things are important to that team, depending upon what's going on. If you're, before the season, signing new players, contracts might be really important. During the season, stats might be really important. I'm making this up. Google changes the bubble filters there on the knowledge panel, depending on what's going on with the team at the time. So all of a sudden contracts will show up as a tab in the knowledge panel because yeah, it's the preseason. Everyone's trying to sign new players. It's amazing what they do dynamically. Crystal Carter: And I think also another one is, so within the Google business profile, you can see if a place is busy before you decide to go to the beer hall, you can see if it's busy and if you're going to have to wait in line or not, for instance. And I think that's something that's fantastic as well. And I think that's another good example of ways that Google combines some of their systems. So they're able to look at information from Google Maps, if lots of people are asking for directions to that place, then they'll know more information about that, you're also able to layer that with information on the SERP and lots of other content. So for instance, if you query something, the example I always use is vegan donuts. I like donuts. So if you're looking at vegan donuts, they'll give you a Google business profile result that says on their website, they talk about vegan donuts, even if it doesn't say it in their Google business profile. So they're able to layer lots of different parts of their tools to create dynamic information that serves the user, because Google wants to serve the user at the end of the day. Kevin Indig: It's a great call out. And while we're talking about maps, I recently did an analysis of 20,000 e-commerce keywords, and I noticed that over 80% of these keywords show a map pack. So Google is leaning very heavily into maps in general. It's a new avenue. First of all, I mean, it's very helpful product. Second of all, it's a new area where they can show a lot more ads to drive more revenue and all that good stuff. And that has a profound impact on how much traffic you can get if you're not present in a map pack. Not every business is local, but if you compete in e-commerce, then that means you also compete against local businesses, and that's kind of a new dimension of competition that a lot of businesses don't have on their radar that is really, really important to understand and track. So it might be that if Google shows a map pack at the top of the SERPs, the percentage of clicks you get from all the searches can be minimal, can be as low as even 5%, even if you rank number one. So it adds a new flavor to SERPs. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, SERP feature's great in a scenario where you really have to qualify your rankings. Ranking number one might be great, but now you might be actually below the fold, so it might not be so great. But you actually beat me to it. I was going to ask you about e-com, because it's such an interesting space when it comes to SERP features, and it's kind of what, generally speaking, what you see happening out there in the e-com space. Obviously, now you talking about the map packs, but just there's so many. There's PLAs and product carousel with multiple kinds out there. Google seems to really be immersive. And of course, that ties into Google shopping and all its efforts to beat out Amazon. So just kind of curious what you're seeing out there in the space. Kevin Indig: So the one in charge you already called is the product listings that are coming from the organic feed of Google shopping and sometimes from image search. So that is getting, it's really important. And even more poignant on mobile search. So one thing to always keep in mind is difference between desktop and mobile. And on mobile, these carousels just stick out so much more, they're so much more interactive. Mordy Oberstein: So much space. Kevin Indig: Yeah, so much more space. It's nuts. So if you can look at the difference between desktop and mobile when it comes to your keyword performance, keyword ranks, keyword click-through rate, that's a great first step to do to just get a better understanding of what's happening in keywords that are important to you. So there's one trend. Second trend what we talk about is maps. Third trend is just more image carousels, especially when it comes to inspiration. So one interesting search that I came across is smiley face nails. So apparently you can kind of, I don't know, paint emojis on your fingernails. Mordy Oberstein: I must have this now. Crystal Carter: I'll get right on that. Kevin Indig: But no, it's very interesting. And you see that there are a lot of images obviously popping up because Google wants to help people with inspiration. But some of the image search is also connected to Google shopping. So sometimes Google will mix products in image search, and that gets really interesting. That means that you might have a shortcut to compete in a very competitive search result with an image instead of an organic listing. And it opens up a whole new playing field for SEOs and for driving traffic and maybe even conversions. So image search, getting really important. And then a fourth trend that I would add is product listing ads. Product listing ads are very different than the classic top ads, which are just text, product listing ads have images, they might have reviews, pricing, shipping information. They're very, very engaging for users. Users love to click them, and they have a very different kind of feel than the classic ads because they already show the product, they already show a lot of information about the product. So people are much more likely to click on product listing ads than the classic ads, which means less traffic for organic results as well. Crystal Carter: And I think it's interesting with those ads, how to differentiate when you have similar products, because you have to figure out which part of the SERP feature will make the difference with the click-through. So you talked about some of the things they showed, and sometimes they don't show the review for the product, sometimes it'll show the review for the shop, and there's images, there's prices, you can have promotions on it. Lots of information there. In my experience, I've seen it where I had a client who was doing some of that, and we had it where everyone was selling the same product, everybody pretty much had the same product. So I just picked one that had a ridiculous picture. So everyone was selling, it was like a uniform, and everyone's uniforms were gray and black and beige, and they had a polka-dotted one. And I was like, "We put that one in the picture." And they were like, "What?" I was like, "You put that one in the picture because it'll stand out." And it did. And they got loads of traffic to the other stuff. But it's important to figure out ways to differentiate yourself and to make yourself look unique. Kevin Indig: A hundred percent. Yep, I think this whole idea of image optimization is going to become much more important. Not in the classic sense of alt tag and file name and surrounding text, but much more like what can you see in the image? What does a background look like? How can you stand out just a little more than your competition? It's going to be a thing. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. I've done a lot on visual search in the last few months, but yeah I agree. Mordy Oberstein: We'll link to it in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I agree. Mordy Oberstein: So I'll sum this up, because we're running out of time, unfortunately. We could talk about this literally for another hour or two hours. If you're serious about ranking and you're serious about doing well organically and bringing in traffic, you need to go to the SERP and look at all the boxes and rectangles and squares, and expandable carousel and tabs and whatnot, because if you don't, you really don't know what's happening and you really don't know what opportunities are there waiting for you. Crystal Carter: Say it louder, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Don't dare me to do that because you know that I will. Crystal Carter: Look at the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: Look at the SERP. Crystal Carter: Just actually Google it. Actually follow the user journey that someone would follow to find your product or website or whatever. Mordy Oberstein: And when you do, search for Kevin Indig so you can find him. Of course, we'll link to all of your wonderful assets you produce, your social profiles, everything, you just let us know. Follow the links Kevin, let us know what you want us to link to and we'll link to it in the show notes. Kevin Indig: Thanks so much. I'll send you a Google Talk or a spreadsheet. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, please if you could, keep it at a minimum of like two or three tabs. Seriously, Kevin, thank you so much. Always great talking with you, and I'm not sure how to end this, because we've never had a guest on this show before. I'm so lost, we didn't even thank you. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much, Kevin, it's been an absolute pleasure. Kevin Indig: Thank you as well. Maybe we just don't end this, maybe we just stay on for a day or something. Mordy Oberstein: Just silence for a second. Kevin Indig: Until we go to sleep. Mordy Oberstein: Perfect. That was absolutely amazing. You should definitely follow Kevin on social media. He is not our follow of the week, not that he doesn't qualify to be, but he's already here. We have another follow of the week, but that's later. But first, here's a fun little game we play. Both to sort of mess with each other by a tad to understand what's happening with Google. And in this case, I think it highlights some of Google's shortcomings, which by the way, everyone has shortcomings, search engines included. We're all just people. Crystal Carter: They're handling thousands and thousands and thousands of searches every day. And my entire back catalog of every image I've ever taken a screenshot on my phone, they're busy. It's a lot to manage. Mordy Oberstein: It's a lot. So we feel, oh, Google's going to get it right. They're not supposed to get it right every time. So when I say I don't think they got it right this time, I don't mean it in a negative way. I mean, they're just being human. Crystal Carter: Google's being human. Is that okay? Mordy Oberstein: I'm taking this to a new level, I don't want SEOs to get upset at me for saying that, but I said it, and we're just going to leave it at that for a minute. But first off, wouldn't it be super scary if they always got it right? I'd be freaked out if every single time Google got it exactly right, I would think something's not right here. Crystal Carter: Well, and also they can only work with the material they got. So if other people haven't written anything that's decent, what are you going to do? Mordy Oberstein: People gloss over that point all the time. I just spoke about that in the conference in Brazil, can't remember the name. Terrible. But I literally spoke about it, it's our fault. It's not Google's fault, it's our fault. But anyway- Crystal Carter: Make better content. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Make better content. Say it louder, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Make better content. Mordy Oberstein: Yo, make better content. Anyway, we're looking at the four, well usually four, questions Google lists on the results page, when you expand the tabs, they sit and reveal a secret answer along with the URL. Well, usually it's with a URL, sometimes not. And it's not really a secret answer. Anyway, let's have some fun with, People Also Ask. Crystal, this time you're on the hot seat. Crystal Carter: Okay all right, I'm ready. What are we doing? Mordy Oberstein: Are you ready? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm going to ask Crystal, I typed in a keyword, and this has to do with Crystal's background. Crystal can elaborate or not elaborate, it's not my business. But the keyword is- Crystal Carter: I'm surprised, I don't know what you're going to ask me. Mordy Oberstein: I know you don't know. I know you don't know. This could be terrible and horrible or fantastic. We don't know how it's going to go yet. We're doing it live. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Is it fair that military families have to move so often? That's the key word. Crystal Carter: Oh, this is... Okay. So just the background on the background is that I'm a military brat. So yes, I would say... Oh, I don't know. Yes, might the answer be? Or they might have two because it's not easy for families and stuff, but likes families often move because of …. Mordy Oberstein: Right, that's true. Crystal Carter: So yeah, I would say they might have... What does is say? Mordy Oberstein: Let's see what Google asks. They have four questions. Crystal Carter: Oh, I thought that was the question. Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm sorry. That was the keyword I put in. Crystal Carter: Okay, got you. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. That keyword brought up what people also asked, So there are four questions, and when I expand any of the tabs, I get an answer. So let's start with the first one, I have a whole point to this, at the end of this. It's not just silliness for the sake of silliness. There is an SEO point to all of this. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. First question. How often do military families have to move? Crystal Carter: Ooh. In my experience, one to two years. Mordy Oberstein: Well, not bad. About every three years. Military families move about every three years, but sometimes more frequently. The move is called a PCS or a Permanent Change of Station. Okay. Crystal Carter: Okay, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: All right, so far so good. Okay. Second question. Why do military families have to move so much? Crystal Carter: Because whoever's in the military, the adult who's in the family, who's in the military, will change where they're based. So they might be based in Hawaii, they might be based in Florida, they might be based in San Diego, but when they switch where they're based, then the family has to move. Mordy Oberstein: And that's basically what Google says. So far we're so good. Google's asking questions, Crystal's giving the answers. We're all locked up here. How often do military spouses move? Crystal Carter: They tend to move with their spouse. So the same as the family, if they'd said three years for the first one, I would guess they would say three years for the …. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they say every two to three years. Okay, fine. They give a whole thing. How about this question, last one. Do military spouses have to move? Crystal Carter: Well, the answer is no. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Well, no one. Yeah, they could say, "I want a divorce, I'm not doing this." Crystal Carter: I mean, to give you real insight to it, sometimes people decide like, "Oh, we'll stay. You'll go for a little while," because , don't know if you want to get into it, but sometimes sailors are out to sea for most of the time anyway, so it doesn't make much difference whether they're there or not. Anyway, it's a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: Crystal, Google says the good news is that the military will pay for your spouse to move as long as you live in the same home together, depending on the amount of leave you have, your spouse may be the one making most of the moving arrangements, which doesn't really answer the question, but okay. So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Crystal Carter: Yeah, I'm interested in where you're going. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. First off, I need to ask Crystal, where was the coolest place you lived? Crystal Carter: Oh, this is what this is. This is the setup for the whole thing. This is the whole reason why this is. The coolest place I ever lived was in Hawaii. I lived in Hawaii, I lived in O'ahu. So yes, I did mayday presentations and learned how to do the hula, and we did mele kalikimaka, and all of that stuff. So yeah, that- Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. And was it frustrating? So, setting you up here. I'm setting you up. But was it frustrating to have to move so often? Was that fun? Crystal Carter: It was tricky, but it was fun sometimes. When we moved to Hawaii, I lived in a hotel for three months when we first got there, and we were right next to the Hilton. And so we got to see the fireworks every Friday night. Mordy Oberstein: That is actually awesome. Okay, fireworks are awesome. So two points here, and this kind of goes about what I was just saying a second, one is, okay, Google's a little bit redundant with the whole spouse moving thing. And Google. People also ask sometimes they do that, and that happens. But what I was really interested in, when I was searching this, imagine I was putting myself in your shoes. I'm a kid, I'm going to have to move. Think of the keyword. Is it fair that military families have to move so often and Google totally missed a word fair. Crystal Carter: That's very interesting, you're right. That is interesting. So there's an emotion there. Mordy Oberstein: There's an emotion. There's a bias in the question. The question assumes it's not fair. And what I'm already looking for is either information about why this has to be this way or some sort of emotional support of an identification. So maybe a blog. I would've thought better than a People Also Ask, what would've been cool to show here, which they didn't show, would be a carousel from Quora or Reddit or one of the other social media platforms where I can see other people's answers, not Google's answer to the question, which goes back to my original point. Sometimes, which by the way, on mobile, they do have a bunch of those carousels there, whatever. My original point is, sometimes we say, "People also ask, take those questions, great keyword research tool, use them, write a blog post, take those four questions and write a blog post for each one of them." In this case, I don't know, maybe you shouldn't use them. Crystal Carter: So I sometimes find, when I'm searching, that sometimes the People Also Ask doesn't make sense. Sometimes I'm like, "I'm not asking that at all. I don't know why anyone would ask that, that's nothing to do with it." And I think it's interesting because when he first asked me the question I thought you were asking me the People Also Ask, and I said, "Sometimes it's tricky." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, see. Sometimes it's part of it. It's part of the intent. Crystal Carter: So yeah, because sometimes it's tricky. And I think that that question is asking for some empathy, isn't it? It's asking for some empathy about a situation that is sometimes tricky. I think to your point, if that is a query that you're seeing that people are actually asking, if you're finding that people are asking that in your conversations with people, or that you've seen it show up in a tool, that people are genuinely asking that or that's a query people have, answer the question. Create content that answers the question, not necessarily content that the shows in People Also Ask because the People Also Ask questions are generated, regularly. So they will generate new ones if they're finding that people aren't actually engaging with the People also ask questions that they have, and also with regards to which content they show in the answers, they change around what that is. So if you're able to better answer that question than the content that's currently there, then you can move into that spot and they might also even create a question based on your content. So I think that as you say, it's worth referencing it, but also thinking with your own brain, and- Mordy Oberstein: And think a little bit, does this actually solve the person's question? If they expand the tab, Like why's this question even here? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Think qualitatively, not just quantitative. SEO is not linear. That's the lesson for today, from the SERP features to the people also ask box, which is a SERP feature, don't think linearly about the SERP. Crystal Carter: There we go. Thank you very much. That was quite the journey for me, Mordy. I was …. Mordy Oberstein: I'm sorry to make you relive your childhood, just for the sake of a podcast. Crystal Carter: You're just like, "Hey there. How about some childhood trauma?" No, I'm kidding. My childhood was lovely. I had a lovely childhood. It was very nice. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Well, every time you've talked about it, it's only been positive, things like going to Hawaii. So I figured I can go there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, no, it's fine. It's fine. But no, I think you're right about empathy. But also I think sometimes with content, you are talking about sensitive issues, and it's important to approach that content sensitively to be able to help users. And if you're able to show compassion in your content, then that is something that will engage with clients, with users, and with the people that are engaging with that content a lot more than just a keyword because they'll think, oh, this company, this person, this author, has some empathy with my situation. And that's a really good thing. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, empathy is always good. I think that's the moral of the story; empathy is always good. You know what else is always good? Crystal Carter: What's always good? Mordy Oberstein: News. Crystal Carter: News. Mordy Oberstein: News is always good. Everyone loves news. So here is some Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Been a hot minute since I've come across a really nice SEO study, but our dear friends at Semrush and the author of the... Been a hot minute since I've come across a really nice SEO study. But our dear friends at Sun Rush, by the way, plug for the Wix, Semrush integration, check that out, have a really nice study for us authored by Marcus Tober. This one looks at zero click searches. Let me take y'all back in time a little bit. A few years ago, Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, and SparkToro, did a study showing that 50% of all Google searches do not result in a click, and the SEO world went nuts. "Google is stealing clicks." "No one needs websites the way Google is set up." "They're answering all the questions themselves," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The most recent data Rand put out was that Google searches result in, 65% of them, result in zero clicks. Now, nothing against the study itself or Rand, who has contributed greatly to the SEO community over the years, but this was not my favorite study for two reasons. One, 50% of searches not resulting in a click to a URL on the Google results page isn't entirely helpful. For example, how many of those no clicks were actually query refinement or keyword refinement, meaning you search, you don't find exactly what you're looking for on that set of Google results. So you search again, that's a zero click, or clicks where you don't click a URL, for example, but you click on one of the other filters Google has on the page. So for example, you move from the traditional Google SERP and you click on where it says images, and you look at all the images there, that's technically a zero click search. So how many of those zero clicks that we studied way back when were actually those, which is not the zero click, the nefarious zero click that people are all upset about. The other reason why I didn't really love the study is that not every time there's no click on a set of Google results, is that a bad thing? I don't want a website, when I type in weather in New York City or Yankees score, I don't want to go to a website. I'll be honest with you. As a user, I just want the answer. And that's just the evolution of content delivery. Which is, by the way, Semrush in their study does a really good job of explaining. So the end of the whole study itself, there's a whole nice piece on the analysis of the study, so check that part of the study out as well. Now, the Semrush study was a little bit more nuanced, or a lot of bit more nuanced. It tried to better explain the data categories than split them up as much as possible. For example, as opposed to saying, "65% of all searches on Google do not result into a... Do not result." Let's try that again. "Do not result in a click to a URL." Semrush showed, well, about 10% of searches were users moving from one SERP to the next. For example, they were on the main SERP. They typed in, Tom Brady, they went to the main SERP obviously, and then they clicked maybe on images and looked at all the pictures of Tom Brady, whatever it is. Semrush separated those out, and those were about 10% of the time that was happening. So that's 10% of zero clicks are just people moving from maybe the main SERP to, let's say, the shopping results. Now, 18% were zero clicks, but were actually query refinement, where you maybe entered another new keyword. Meaning, you searched for one thing, didn't see what you found, didn't click on anything, and typed in a new keyword or a more specific keyword. Now within that, there might be some actual zero search, zero click searches in there, mixed in with that, according to the Semrush data, but fine. On top of that, there are a legit 25% of cases where it's a real zero click, where you just maybe found the answer on the SERP. Technically speaking, the way the data's structured, you could have just left the page open for two minutes and not have done anything, the Semrush data would've counted a zero click. But leave that aside, the bottom line is, around 25% of the time, perhaps a little more, if you look at the data the way it's structured, perhaps. I'll try that again, bottom line is, around 25% of the time, perhaps a little bit more, based upon how the data is structured, you're not seeing a click to organic result or an organic URL, when someone searches on Google, which is far, far less than 65%. So great job, Semrush, love the nuance. Have a look at the study. We'll obviously link to it in the show notes. It's really important to understand. I will say this, it's really important to understand the Google ecosystem, how things are set up, whether you're an SEO, whether you're a digital marketer, whether you're a business owner, whether you're a site... Whatever it is, super important to understand the ecosystem, and this study does a great job of doing that. So thank you Semrush, and that's all this week for the Snappy News. Now, before we duly depart, we have one last little treat for you, and that's our follow of the week. And do we have a treat for you this week? We do. Crystal Carter: We do. Mordy Oberstein: Isn't every week>? Let's be honest. Crystal Carter: It's all a gift, you're welcome people. No, I'm kidding. Mordy Oberstein: Our gift this week from a data scientist at Moz, he's the doctor of SEO, Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz. Crystal Carter: Is there a doctor in the house? I think there is. Mordy Oberstein: There is now. Crystal Carter: Dr. Pete. Mordy Oberstein: Dr. Pete. He's amazing. Crystal Carter: He's so smart and so nice. I love his writing because he talks about some fantastic things around SERP features, around things that are happening, and around what's happening with Google algorithms and all sorts of things. But he always writes with such humility and such empathy to people who are trying to figure out what's happening. He had an article about featured snippets. He was like, "Featured snippets are down this much." And then the next week he was like, "They're back. What was that about?" And that was the first time I was like, "Yeah, okay, Dr. Pete. I'm with you on this." Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, there should be a button, like a sticker, "I'm with Dr. Pete." Crystal Carter: I'm with Dr. Pete. I'm not sure if he wants all of us with him. I'm sure that sometimes he'd like to just go places by himself and not have hoards of SEOs tagging along. Mordy Oberstein: Well, we are all following him now. Crystal Carter: We all follow him. Everyone should follow him. Also, follow him because he has some amazing cleaning tips. He's really into wipes. Mordy Oberstein: Remember his tweet about baby wipes? And it's true. Always use baby wipes to clean because they're great at cleaning everything. Crystal Carter: I did not know this. I did not see that one. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's a good tip from Dr. Pete. Crystal Carter: I think I saw one about handheld vacuum cleaners, which like the handheld vacuum cleaner literally changed my life. It's literally a life-changing device. You heard it here first people. Mordy Oberstein: And also because he happens to be one of the most honest people in the SEO industry. When Dr. Pete gets something... We all get things wrong but Dr. Pete will say, "Yeah, in that study I did, that was a mistake," and he'll correct it. So you can trust that the data that you're looking at from Dr. Pete has been thoroughly analyzed, questioned, and if there's a problem with it, Dr. Pete will be the first one to point that out, which is very rare and unusual. It's a great trait. Crystal Carter: He's clever, he's kind, he's a good dude. And apparently his house is like clean AF. I've never been there, but from what I hear, he keeps it very clean. Mordy Oberstein: Runs a clean ship, huh? Crystal Carter: Clean ship. Mordy Oberstein: Like they do in the military, like you did in Hawaii, going back full circle. Anyway, Dr. Pete, you could find him on Twitter. We'll link to it in the show notes. But his Twitter handle is @dr, as in doctor, underscore, Pete, P-E-T-E. So, D-R underscore P-E-T-E, check it out on Twitter. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERPs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into Google Search Console. Is it the most important SEO tool? Crystal Carter: We'll find out. Mordy Oberstein: We'll find out. Look for, wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and 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. 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Are you using generative AI to help create content yet? Do you wholesale copy and paste its output or use it for inspiration and content organization? Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein welcome special guest Ryan Laws of Animalz to discuss AI writers, SEO, and content creation. Join them as they dive into the right way and the wrong way to use AI for content creation and its potential implications for the web as a whole moving forward. Listen in with us as we discuss how generative AI will change search and the web as we know it on the SERP’s Up SEO podcast. Back The ChatGPT episode Are you using generative AI to help create content yet? Do you wholesale copy and paste its output or use it for inspiration and content organization? Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein welcome special guest Ryan Laws of Animalz to discuss AI writers, SEO, and content creation. Join them as they dive into the right way and the wrong way to use AI for content creation and its potential implications for the web as a whole moving forward. Listen in with us as we discuss how generative AI will change search and the web as we know it on the SERP’s Up SEO podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 29 | March 15, 2023 | 45 MIN 00:00 / 44:55 This week’s guests Ryan Laws Ryan Law is VP of Content at Animalz, a content marketing agency for SaaS companies. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're proofing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding at Wix, and I'm joined by the incredible, the fabulous, the absolutely amazing, the incomparable Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people, and thank you, Mordy, for that fantastic introduction. I'm sure that you wrote that entirely yourself and did not get an AI writer to help you craft that introduction. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, more shadowing there. No. No AI writer is as good as me. Which is not saying much, I don't think, at this point yet about me. Crystal Carter: I don't know, you've written so much content, Mordy. I mean, they could have been trained on all those words. You are a wordsmith, sir. You are someone who writes many, many words. Mordy Oberstein: Has it really been me this entire time? We don't know. Crystal Carter: What? What? Where am I? Is this even real? How do I know any of this is happening at all? Mordy Oberstein: It's all a dream and/or a nightmare, depending upon how you look at it. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can add all sorts of variables to your title tags in bulk at the folder level with Wix. It's almost as if you had an AI writer writing them for you. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh. I mean- Mordy Oberstein: Oh my gosh, so amazing. Crystal Carter: Put those bots to work, that's what I say. Don't do all these things yourself. Why are we breaking a sweat? Put those bots to work. Set up your syntax so that they do it for you. Mordy Oberstein: They don't mind. That's what they're there for. Crystal Carter: That's what they're there for. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, in case you haven't realized, this week's episode is all about SEO, the web, and AI writers. Perhaps you've heard about them on TV. Perhaps you use an AI writer from the comfort of your own home. The question is, should you? We're diving into everything, AI writers, what AI-written content means for the web, what AI-written content means for SEO, what AI writers should and shouldn't be writing. And to help us navigate all of this, we're going to bring in a very special guest for you shortly, Ryan Laws, the VP of Content over at Animalz, one of the most prestigious content marketing agencies out there, will join us shortly. Plus, we'll dive into the various ways search engines have already integrated AI writers into their result pages. And, of course, with the snappiest of news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. Episode number 29 of the SERP's Up podcast is spinning up right now. So, content is hard. Wouldn't it be amazing if someone came along, and for a very, very low cost, almost free, created a ton of content for you? Wouldn't that free up your time? Wouldn't that save you money? Wouldn't it to help you if writing just isn't your thing? You almost see the temptation there to have a bot write all of your content for you, because it actually solves real pain points, serious pain points that many, many, many of us have. The question is, "Well, what about product quality? What about the quality of that content?" And that's really the crux of the issue here that we're going to explore today because imagine a computer program backed by artificial intelligence is writing content for you. It might seem like a great solution, but is it the right solution? And I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this decision, how we all collectively decide to deal with AI-written content, is going to reshape the web for better or for worse. For worse, spoiler. So it's a serious topic, which is why we thought it would be prudent to bring someone who I've been following for a long time on the content side of things. His blog is amazing. Check it out. Obviously, a link to it in the show notes. It's of incredible quality, which is why we're having him here, because quality is the name of this game. What better person to discuss AI-written content and the future of the web and content than Ryan Laws, VP of Content over at Animalz? Welcome, Ryan. Ryan Laws: You so much for having me in this terrifying post-truth world that we find ourselves in now. Mordy Oberstein: It's an apocalypse. It's apocalyptic. Ryan Laws: Yeah, if I would not have put money on this being the kind of thing I'd be talking about this year a couple of years ago, but hey, that's how technology tends to unfold, I think. Crystal Carter: Honestly, I think there's a lot of people who are saying that if you're speaking at a conference this year, it's almost impossible to plan ahead at all because between the autumn, and I think I saw you talking on a podcast about how ChatGPT was the first time where you were like, "Okay, this is actually a viable thing," and I'm sure you'll get into that a little bit later, but I think that there was somebody who shared a script where somebody was able to write an email, a very, very well formatted email without actually writing it. They just said, "Write this email that says this," and then it just formatted that and it went. And at that point I was like, "Okay, this is something to pay attention to." And I think that so much has changed between then and now. And we're recording this in February time, and, I mean, in the next six months, I imagine it's going to change even more. Ryan Laws: By the time this airs, it will all be completely redundant and nothing we've said will have made any sense whatsoever. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just worried if we'll still exist or not. Using ChatGPT to have an email written or whatever, that seems like a good use of time. I have been using ChatGPT to try to admit to me that it's Skynet trying to take over the world. Crystal Carter: Okay. Ryan Laws: There does seem to be a whole genre of people that are trying to work out, "Is this sentient? Is this artificial general intelligence? Is there something much bigger and more terrifying going on?" And I'm just trying to stay in my lane and think about content and SEO, and that's frying my brain as it is, to be honest. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. I'm staying in my lane trying to break it and trying to get to admit all sorts of horrible things. Crystal Carter: But I think that both of those things are the way to look at this new technology, and I think that's something that SEOs are able to bring to the fore. So within the SEO industry and the content industry and the PPC industry, if you're working in it across any of this digital marketing things, if you've been around the block a few times, you've seen the new fancy toy show up and you've learned how to assess it and how to kick the tires to see what it can do. And so I think that it's important to learn and to find the limitations of whatever the new technology is. And I know that you've been experimenting with it within a few ways. What things have you found ChatGPT and content writers to be good at, and what things have you found it to be terrible at or not so good at? Mordy Oberstein: Writing. Ryan Laws: Oh, yeah. It's good at writing and it's terrible at writing. Yeah. Well, yeah, obviously, as somebody who personally has tried to make a living off of writing and works for a company that makes a living off of writing and helping companies grow through writing, we were very, very interested to see, "What can this do? Are we going to have to replace parts of our workflow? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? How do we add value on top of these things?" So over the past couple of years, actually, since GPT-3 was enclosed beta, we've been trying different use cases for it. We've learned quite a lot about the strengths and weaknesses so far. And probably the most bullish use case we're seeing at the moment that I know lots of people are doing, but not necessarily talking about, is actually trying to scale up search content in increasing publishing frequencies to levels that previously just not tenable when you were using people to do that. I think a lot of it comes down to this question of quality, exactly as you say. Is this stuff good? I think it's really important to remember that quality is a totally subjective piece of terminology. If you think about SEO content, you're going to have something that maybe it's a very non-competitive search, maybe people are looking for very pragmatic, utilitarian information. And you can have something that is very basic, just gets the nuts and bolts information across, and that can be quality, that can do the job, that can meet the intent, and that can help companies rank for it. And in those cases, in those non-competitive SERPs, I basically don't see an issue with trying to get an AI writer involved in that part of the process. Crystal Carter: And I think that some of those things appeal to the kinds of things that Google will generally often replace with a quick answer, like, "What is it distance between the Earth and the sun?" If you're using an AI writer to write that up, maybe you want that as something that's of value on your website so that people don't have to leave your website and so people stay within your ecosystem. But from a search point of view, Google's like, "We can just tell you how many kilometers that is or how many miles that is, or how many light years that is. We can just tell you that in the SERP." So from a search point of view, that doesn't add tons of value, but from a user experience point of view within your website ecosystem, that might add value, in which case an AI writer might be something that might be useful to spin up something that's nice to read that doesn't just go, "This many parsecs." Ryan Laws: Yeah, exactly. Mordy Oberstein: That's how I like thinking about this, where there's so much content out there that I can't, as a person, people in general can't add any more unique value anymore. I don't know, what is a tire? It's been done four million times. You're not going to add anything new that hasn't been, no pun intended, written under the sun before. Crystal Carter: We could reinvent the wheel. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, but not the tire. You can't reinvent the tire. Ryan Laws: Well, I think that's a good point, and that brings us to the other end of the quality spectrum, which is a hyper-competitive search where maybe they're big behemoth brands slogging it out with their 10,000 word meticulously optimized skyscraper posts. And in those cases, anyone that is pumping out a very utilitarian, largely unedited AI output are just going to lose. There's nothing more to be added there. So I think a good way of thinking about this technology is a bifurcation of search generally. What is the really simple utilitarian, non-competitive stuff that you can and probably should outsource and just have AI handle? And where should you actually focus your energy and your skill and your expertise? What are the handful of really competitive, really important topics that you should be adding opinion or original research and data and perspective and matter analysis to? Because I think pretty much every company will have both ends of those spectrum they will need to create content for. Mordy Oberstein: So I have a theory about this. What's inevitably going to happen is let's say, for example, everyone writes a piece about, "What is a tire?" And they're using the same AI writers, putting out the same thing. How is Google going to know what to rank at that point for "What is a tire?" And what I think what it's going to do is it's going to look at the domain overall and say, "Hey, you know what? This website is about donuts. It happens to talk about a donut tire. This website is about tires and not about donuts. It's the same snippet of content. Let's take it from the one that's more authoritative topically and show that snippet from that website." So it won't be about the snippet of content anymore, but it'll be about all the other pages and all the other human-created content that you did that builds up the authority so you can rank for that top level keyword like, "What is a tire?" Ryan Laws: I totally agree with that, and I think basically, Google's only method of response to this ... I think as we've seen, it's not hugely tenable to plug every bit of content into a machine to say whether it's AI generated or not. I don't think that's doable. So actually, we're going to see even more emphasis placed on the non-word parts of search, like domain authority, topical authority, those kinds of things, which I think is perhaps slightly problematic because there is a big incumbent's advantage if you're a big established brand. It's probably going to make dominating even easier, and it might make it harder for new entrant into the market. But ultimately, yeah, I don't really see what other choice Google has. You just have to devalue the importance of the words on the page when you can create words on the page so easily, I think. Crystal Carter: So there's a couple of things that occur to me about this, like QA. I think that quality assessment, quality control and content curation, I think will potentially not necessarily be a ranking factor, but I think will be a point of differentiation because, essentially, while we're talking about general knowledge topics, for instance, that you could spin up, like let's say you had a knowledge hub that was a dictionary or something of terms about tires. Let's say we're thinking about terms. This is a hubcap and this is a tread. I don't know. I don't know anything about tires. But anyway, so let's say you have a knowledge hub all about tires for those people who really love tires, and let's say you use an AI writer to write that. One of the tricky things and one of the challenges that I've seen are from my use of AI writers and looking at some of the results that we've seen from being AI's beta and from ChatGPT, and also I was looking at You.com as well, which is a really good one as well, is even for simple things, the facts that they put out sometimes are just nonsense. And the word "AI hallucinations" is now in common parlance because AI writers will just make these things up. I asked it to write a meta description, and I said, "I would like you to summarize this piece of text in a meta description that is 150 characters." And it summarized it in 244 characters, but at the end of it, it said it was 155 characters. And I was like, "That is not 155 characters. That is 244," because I read it through another tool that told me that. And then they said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I will adjust." And then it made another one that was even longer, and I was like, "Okay, that is not what I asked you for. That's wrong." Ryan Laws: It's my Skynet theory. Crystal Carter: Right, so then I asked it another one. So You.com is a generative search tool and it's a lower level of doing what Bing AI is trying to do, but it's doing it now. And I said to it, I said, "Can you name some of the guests from the SERP's Up SEO Podcast?" And what it does is on the side, it generates search results, and then it has the chat, and it will give you comments and it will even provide links as well. But it was saying like, "Oh, Bill Slosky was on our podcast." And with all due respect to Bill Slosky, we started the podcast after he had dearly departed, and so that is not true. That is fundamentally not true, and there's ways that you can verify that just from dates. So the content curation and understanding the limitations of the tools that you're using is really important. How do you advise that people can, at scale ... Because that's the other thing is that you can do lots at once. So how do you check all of that at once? Ryan Laws: Yeah, it's a wonderful point, and I think probably the biggest mistake I see people make thinking about this technology is assuming that it is designed to serve as facts, and that is fundamentally not what it is designed to do. It's basically designed to take whatever disparate prompts or information you give it, smooth them together and create an output that sounds coherent. So in that instance, having somebody that's well known for SEO on a podcast about SEO, that makes sense within its understanding of what should be expected there. But at no point has it gone to try and find what actually happened. And that's just not what this technology does, and that's not something I think it is going to do because who has the resources to vet billions of generated outputs almost every day at this point? You can't do it. So I can't say this is something I've solved at grand scale, not like programmatic SEO where you're publishing hundreds, thousands of articles at once, but we're working at a slightly smaller scale where we are basically having a human in the loop using generative AI as a force multiplier for their already great writing. So we basically think to get the most out of this technology you need a subject matter expert who can review, who can structure, who can critically evaluate what is being generated from the generative AI, and that process is still faster than it would otherwise be. I think sometimes it's a lot more fun for the writer because you get to outsource parts of your thinking, and it can even be better in some instances because it can recommend ideas that you might not otherwise have. It doesn't have the same mental ruts and creative bottlenecks that humans do. But I think to your point, exactly that, having a person to evaluate that and actually stand behind and be willing to put their name to a piece of generated content is absolutely crucial. Otherwise, yeah, we will just very quickly descend into dystopian Wild West if we're just all publishing the outputs of these models wholesale. Mordy Oberstein: What's interesting there is that there's so much talk about AI writers and how it'll impact the content writing job market, and what you're basically describing is a new workflow of how writers will come into the process, which makes me wonder, just to zoom even out from there, how do you feel this whole advent of the AI writer is going to impact, forget SEO for a second, but the web as a whole? Ryan Laws: I think the thought experiment we have to run is we basically have to assume, "What if everything on the internet has in some way been touched by AI generation? How do we navigate that? How do we work forward?" Because I think that is just how we're going to have to think about this. I think it's a dead end trying to work out what is and what isn't AI generated. We have to assume everything is, and at that point, I think provenance becomes the most important thing. When you've got 100 people saying the same thing, you will generally seek out the person you think is most credible on that topic, and that is what we're going to do. I think that is what search engines are going to encourage, and I think we're starting to see that with the addition of extra ease to Google's E-A-T acronym as well. Crystal Carter: They should pick other letters. They could make it a nice acronym, because at the moment it's just E-A-T. Tasty. It's just like, "Come on." Mordy Oberstein: They're just screwing with us because now they know we're going to say that, and now we're going to be stuck, like, "What are you saying?" They're like, "Ah, look at all these SEOs walking around going 'E-A-T' anything." Ryan Laws: Oh, you mean eat or do you mean E-A-T? Mordy Oberstein: There's some Googler laughing at all this, like, "Ah, see what I did there? Ha ha ha!" Crystal Carter: I think that there's still going to be people who are making high quality content, but people who are high authority, I think we might end up in a situation like what we've seen with big scale publishers, with people like the New York Times, like The Atlantic, et cetera, where they gate their content. And this happens on YouTube as well. A lot of YouTubers have gone to a subscription model where you have to pay for their content or you have to sponsor them on Patreon or that sort of thing. So yeah, I think that it's likely to see that sort of thing. When we talk about AI, everybody's using AI in lots of ways already. I use Grammarly all the time. I cannot spell without Grammarly. I use Grammarly all the time. We use visual search tools to generate tags that's just built into Wix. There's lots of things like that. So I think we're using them in lots of different ways. I think it's just a lot more mainstream. Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah, also more narrow. I don't think if you gave an AI writer, "Here's a paragraph. Regurgitate it, re-summarize it, or write a heading for it," that, to me, seems like a no-brainer. It's a quick thing. It's just taking a very closed input and putting out a very closed output. So those kind of tasks, like no-brainer, go for them. Obviously, you need to check it. I think now that we're seeing things like ChatGPT where we're talking about, "It's an ocean." It's not an enclosed environment anymore, and that's a huge qualitative shift. Crystal Carter: There's so much AI art at the moment, and I think from your perspective, you were saying that we should all assume that everything's AI written. Well, I mean, as somebody who writing for me can sometimes take a long time, it doesn't come naturally to me necessarily, it can sometimes take a long time. So the idea that thing that took me hours and hours and hours to do will now be perceived as being AI-written even though that was blood, sweat and tears for me. I'll be honest, I have some feelings about that. I have some feelings about that. But if that's how things are going forward, I guess that's how things are going forward. But I feel that this must be how artists have felt for the last, I don't know, six, 12 months where a lot of the dolly stuff and mid-journey stuff has been coming to the fore because if I see a picture now, I'm like, "Did you do that or did an AI do that?" I'm not sure. Ryan Laws: Yeah. Probably the thing I hear most from people that are writers or artists is, "We didn't choose this. We've been forced into a world that has ..." in some cases, people think devalued the thing they have invested their entire lives in. There's a lot of that personal meaning imbued in writing and creativity, and I find that, and if I could put this technology back in the bottle, I would be tempted to do it. But again, that's generally not how technology operates, and at least in my capacity as somebody that helps growing companies, I have to use this if there's an advantage to be had. On the art point, though, I do think something can still be beautiful and meaningful and incredible even if it has been generated by AI because there is still a lot of human involvement and curation and process that has gone into that. And actually, I'm sure people felt very skeptical about, "Oh, I can't believe that printing press. This wasn't written by hand. This is devalued. Content should be smaller scale." Or even the emergence of the internet. This democratizing thing of writing where anyone could suddenly write. There was a big influx of terrible writing in addition to great writing as well, and I think it just changes our experience and our perception of it. I don't necessarily think it has to be better or worse in some cases. This is just the new world we find ourselves in, and the composition of what art and creativity means will probably change on the back of that. Crystal Carter: I think there's opportunity there as well. So for instance, speaking on the art point, I've seen people who paint live. They'll paint live in the street as a street performer. They'll paint live, and you know that thing has been created by hand. So if that's something that you value, then you can create that by values. And I think there's potentially opportunities for people to connect in a live setting to- Mordy Oberstein: Watch me write. Pay five dollars to watch me write. Crystal Carter: Well, not necessarily what I was saying. Right. But to connect with that knowledge because the written word, for instance, is a vehicle for a conveying knowledge, and that's what people fundamentally want is knowledge. So the publishing industry, similarly in books, had a decline in people buying non-fiction books. Well, part of that was because people were getting that on YouTube because why would you buy ... You wouldn't buy a book on how to change a tire if you can see a video that you can pause that shows you how to change the tire and has more information even if there was no words on it than if somebody writing and you trying to understand what they're explaining from what they're saying. So I think that there are potentially additional opportunities that come from the way that people are changing how they are accessing information. Mordy Oberstein: I also think it'll create an opportunity for brands to really stick out. If a brand is really dedicating the resources to create really good content, which is even the new space now happening the same way, just at a different angle, you'll start seeing people realize, "Hey, wait a second. While this website, it counted probably a bunch of AI's content, this website looks like really they're putting in the effort to create really unique content," and that'll be a branding asset. Ryan Laws: I'll say on that point, I do think even at that top end of the spectrum, the incredible, unique, amazing content, AI is still going to be involved in that. Probably a different part of the process, probably in terms of ideation and brainstorming and that kind of thing, but I think this technology is just too good. It's going to touch every part of writing that exists within a company within the world. I think it's just too good to not use and not find its way into those processes. Mordy Oberstein: True. Before we have to let you go, I'm curious, with all that, with it's not going anywhere, it's going to touch the process, are we looking at a scenario where at least temporarily the quality of the web's content is going to fall off a cliff? Ryan Laws: My instinct is to say yes, but then I'm reminded of the status quo, and I think we talk about the perils of AI-generated content, but actually it is pretty much the same problems, the same issues that most of the world's current SEO content written by humans has already. Mordy Oberstein: You're saying it can't get much worse. Ryan Laws: No, I think we're already there. We're already at that point. This is going to exacerbate the existing traits of search content, and search content today generally is pretty bad and pretty unhelpful and pretty faceless and very duplicative. Mordy Oberstein: I have ways to build backlinks . Crystal Carter: The content mill model has definitely created a lot of repetitive content with limited value. So I feel like there's opportunities to differentiate, and it's very interesting that also one of the ways that Google can tell whether or not a piece of content is written by AI, or one of the ways they say they can, is whether or not there are videos and other assets to verify some of the content that they have there. So these are things we should see. Ryan Laws: Give me a few days to spin up an AI video workflow, and I can add that into the process and job done. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you? Ryan Laws: I spend too much time on Twitter @thinking_slow and The Animalz blog. That's where I channel all of the writing, all the energies and creative output of our team into talking about content search and AI at the moment as well. Mordy Oberstein: Real human insights on the Animalz blog. Ryan Laws: There's a little bit of machine creeping in there, not going to lie. Crystal Carter: Have you named your AI for your Animalz blogs? I feel like everybody should have a name for the AI tool that they use. Obviously, not how obviously they think they be a nice robot name. Ryan Laws: I haven't yet. No, no. It's probably naming me at this point. Crystal Carter: Was it Sydney? Was that what Chat- Mordy Oberstein: Good morning, Bob. Crystal Carter: I think Bing's AI says it's called Sydney. That's the- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? That's- Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's sentiment. It has named itself. Crystal Carter: I know Barry said that that's what he's called. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, if Barry said, then it must be true. Awesome. Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. Ryan Laws: Yeah, thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Talk to you soon. So thank you again, Ryan, for stopping by and sharing your really cool insights about what's going on in the world of AI and content and SEO. Again, follow Ryan on Twitter @thinking_slow, that's thinking_slow on Twitter. Of course, we'll link to Ryan's profile in the show notes. Well, now that we're talking about AI and search engines, did you know there's multiple search engines that have incorporated AI writers or AI chat, rather, into their own results pages? So wouldn't you care to explore what they look like, what they're doing? You would? Yes. Yay! With that, let's dive into search engines integrating with AI chat as we go into so many search engines. Automated: Google's latest update. Popular search engine, Bing. Duck, Duck, Go. Yahoo. AltaVista. Jeeves. Mordy Oberstein: Before we get started, imagine a world where machines have the ability to craft words, to tell stories, and to paint pictures with language where the very essence of human creativity is at the mercy of code and circuitry. Welcome to the world of AI writers, a place where the line between man and machine blurs and the outcomes are both strange and wondrous. You are entering the Twilight Zone. That was the intro I asked ChatGPT to write for this segment. Crystal Carter: Oh my God. Mordy Oberstein: I said, "Write a segment for the SERP's Up Podcast where we talk about AI writers in this tone of the Twilight Zone," and that's what it gave me. Crystal Carter: Okay. Thanks, Gene Roddenberry. Mordy Oberstein: Hm? Gene Roddenberry? That's not Gene Roddenberry, that's Rod Serling or whatever his name is. Crystal Carter: Rod Serling. My bad. No, ChatGPT told me it was Gene. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, ChatGPT. Right, right, right. ChatGPT was wrong. No, anytime I'm wrong about something, I be like, "Oh, AI told me. AI said. The AI was wrong. I would've been right." Crystal Carter: That's what the AI said. They told me that. Mordy Oberstein: So while that intro was incomprehensible, thank you ChatGPT, what essentially we're they're going to do here is there's a bunch of search engines that have integrated AI chats into their SERP's. Google announced they're going to be introducing Bard at some point. Bing already has one. NEVA already has one. You.com already has one, and they all function a little bit differently. So we thought we'd just share with you what we're seeing out there. For example, if I'm on NEVA and I type in SEO, I get a whole thing, "A search engine optimization as a set of practices, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," and it has footnotes where it tells me where these pieces of information came from. So for example, as part of its writeup, it says, "SEO involves making small modifications to a part of a website." It got that from Google's documentation in Spanish. Crystal Carter: Oh, wow. It got it in Spanish? Mordy Oberstein: I think so because it's giving me ... Well, actually, it's pulling in ... So when you hover over, so what it does is it gives you a footnote to the corresponding sentence. So every sentence has a footnote, and when you highlight the sentence, where you hover over the sentence, it brings up an aside panel, like Google where the knowledge panel is, it brings up the full link and it says, "Photo number three. Here's a link," and it's in a giant box. And it pulls up an image from that blog also, from that URL also. And the URL is showing me here is from Google, but the image is of Google's search central in Spanish. Crystal Carter: Right. Very interesting. So I did a similar query. So I went into You.com, which is a tool that has a lot of different options, actually. So they have options for using AI for content generation, they have it for generating images, they also have it for queries. And I typed in, "What is SEO," and they gave me a featured snippet paragraph, so a short paragraph describing what SEO is. And they've also referenced an article. So in this case they referenced AA Trusts as well, and as they're generating that content, as they're answering the query, they give you a list of links on the side of that particular query. So on the top, you can see something from Search Engine Land, then from Moz, then from Semrush, then from Mailchimp, then from You. And then also underneath of that, they also put a link to a Wikipedia article that references what SEO is. So in that case, I think on that particular one, I think they've done a good job for that particular query, and I've seen this for other ones. I think we discussed this earlier with Ryan. I've seen mixed results from You.com, but they have explained that the product is in beta and they have a disclaimer underneath their chat. It says, "This product is in beta and its accuracy may be limited. You.com is not liable for content generated." So I think that's important to remember as well. Mordy Oberstein: It's totally true. The answers you're going to get, for example, I asked NEVA, "Is SEO good?" And it gave me pretty much the same answer as "What is SEO?" The last line was, "SEO is an important tool for improving visibility of a website and can be beneficial for a businesses looking to increase our online presence." So it's pretty generic. The first half is totally irrelevant. They gave me a whole thing of "SEO is a practice." It's the same thing as the other one when I asked, "What is SEO?" So it's all going to be improving, I hope. A lot of it's pretty generic, I find. It's not super deep. I think the URLs are pulling from at this point are not super deep. If you're going anything SEO wise, it's basically pulling from Search Engine Land to Moz, at least on the NEVA side. And what's interesting is on the second half of the answer where I'm asking, "Is SEO good?" and it gives me that first part where it tells me what SEO is, there are three citations, two from Moz, one from Backlinko. Where it tells me, "SEO is an important tool, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," there's no citation. I don't know where it got that from. So even though there is citation, it's not citing everything. Crystal Carter: Right. So yeah, that's a similar ... So You.com, I said, "Is SEO good?" It says, "SEO is generally considered to be a good practice as it helps increase visibility, et cetera, et cetera," and goes along those lines. And then they've got a similar sort of thing. So they're pulling from Digital Marketing Institute, from SEJ, from Google, from Forbes. So that's top there. Then they also have a panel that's pulling from Reddit that has some Reddit examples saying, "Is it a good career investment? Is it worth it these days? Is it good for this or that?" So when I compare those search results for "Is SEO good?" on Google, I get roughly the same results that showed up in the sidebar of You.com, which was using generative, and if I go into Bing- Mordy Oberstein: Well, while you're doing that, I do like the way that You.com is putting in the URLs one is you see the organic results. There's a set of results right there. It's not like it's below the fold, underneath the chat box. Also, it does the footnotes, but it has the actual URLs there. On NEVA, it just tells you the name of the site. You.com is giving you, basically, the title tag and the URL, and it's much more prominent. You really notice it that much more. And again, you have the thing on the side, also. Crystal Carter: Right. I was playing around this the other day, and I was like, "Actually, this is pretty good." And again, they're in beta, they're still working things through. But the thing that I found interesting about it was that I think that this is a really good opportunity to see an expansion in a differentiation of search capabilities. So generally speaking, if you wanted to get video searches, you would go on YouTube. But what we're seeing right now is an explosion of people creating their own search engines, using different configurations in order to surface information. And I think that we're living in a really fascinating time for search. It would be interesting to see which ones come out of the end of it and how it all works out, but it's very fascinating. Mordy Oberstein: It is super interesting. I do speculate or wonder that NEVA and You, they have the search, they have the chat, the AI chats, I don't know how much more relevant that makes them the search engine. I saw, for example, someone did a poll in the SEO industry, I forgot who it was, I apologize. But does Bing having a really seemingly good AI experience, does that make Bing more relevant to you as a search engine? And the numbers weren't great. It is interesting, by the way, on the Bing side, and this is going to be something to keep an eye on, I think, again, and we've been focusing on this in the last few minutes, to me this citation is the most important part of all this from an SEO point of view. without the citation, your links are not there, it's a bad practice in general, I don't think it's necessarily an ethical practice. But without it, you don't have traffic coming to the site from those AI experiences, and I do think you will. It's the same thing as a feature snippet. The same thing as direct answer. I type in, "How many home runs did Babe Ruth have?" 714. Let's say there was this part of a featured snippet and there's a URL there. If I feel curious now to learn more about those 714 home runs that Babe Ruth hit, I will click on the URL. If not, not. It's the same thing here. For example, one of the templated answers that Bing has, because I don't have access yet to the beta, if you're listening from Bing, please could I? But one of them is- Crystal Carter: Yes, same. Mordy Oberstein: ... they give you a sample. They give you samples, you can see it. And it's about creating a dinner menu for six people who are vegetarian. And it is cool. It has a whole list of what you should start with as a starter or main and a desert, and it has a bunch of footnotes. And I saw Barry Schwartz report on this recently. Who knows if it'll change or not, but you can't actually see the URLs now until you click, "See more." Crystal Carter: Right, right. You say this is from an SEO point of view, but literally from a skeptical and just from a knowledge base, if I want to know something about something, I want to know where you got that information from, I mean, I need somebody to be able to answer that. And so you say like, "Oh, Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs." Mordy Oberstein: How do you know that? Crystal Carter: How do you know that? Like, "Oh, well, I've got this card, or I read it on this or I saw it on that," because there's lots of people who spout lots of facts and it's important to have a trail for that information in order to qualify how somebody knows one thing or another. So I asked the Babe Ruth question, for instance, into You.com and they pulled up Quora, and that said it was this much. And I could say, "Well, I don't think that's a valid source, for instance. There must be a better source than Quora for a query like that." But to be fair, they've got that ... Oh, and to be fair to them, to You.com, they have an article, they have the SERP showing next to them that says, "Did he actually hit 715 home runs?" Mordy Oberstein: Aha. Aha. Crystal Carter: So is this a debate? Is there something to think about? Mordy Oberstein: By the way, to that point, the chats could be the starting point for a click. So for example, I just searched for, "How many home runs did Aaron Judge hit?" And it without any citations from You.com, "Aaron Judge hit a total of six C2 home runs in the 2022 season." Now I didn't tell You.com I wanted the last season. I really wanted his whole career. So there's a link right next to it from Aaron Judge Statcast and Visuals, blah blah blah. It's a stat website. I'm going to go click on that next. So just because there's no URL or entry point from the chat itself, it could lead to, "Okay, now I need to go to the website that you're showing me right next to it because the AI chat didn't answer the question." Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that the UX here is important. So for the Bing, lots of people have been sharing screenshots and videos and things around and also doing tear-downs of some of the answers. So for instance, Bing previewed their chat bot, their Bing AI, and there was somebody who did an article, Lily Ray shared it recently, and they talked about fact checking some of the things. So I think one of the things they demoed was like, "Oh, plan a trip to Mexico and some great night spots in a town in Mexico." And somebody went through all of these places and they're like, "This place hasn't had any reviews since 2014. This place seems to be completely closed. This place is not a place that a tourist should go to at all." And so they went through and they were like, "That's doesn't really work." But when you look at the way that Bing AI is planning to showcase some of the links that would help you to verify some of the things that they're talking about, from what I've seen, they seem to be putting it below the chat and potentially outside of You or showing the conversation above the search results. And I think this is turning into a You.com love letter, but I think that what You is doing with the side panel I think is working really well. And I think that there- Mordy Oberstein: Showing the results on the side- Crystal Carter: I think is good. Mordy Oberstein: ... next to the chat is great. I love the You. Crystal Carter: I think that's great. And I think also Bing is planning to do side panel, I think, as well with their chat where you're allowed to do that, and I think Google also has a pop-out side panel or something. Mordy Oberstein: There's going to have be something because you're absolutely right, and I think especially in the beginning when people are still skeptical of the answers they're getting from these AI chats, you need to have the URLs there so people can be like, "You know what? Before I actually go ahead and click pay or do this, I'm just going to go to the website." And if it's annoying to get to the URLs, it's going to make your search engine annoying to use. So there's incentive to have the URLs there. I don't think we're heading to 100% zero-click universe because of the AI chat experience on search engine. So don't worry. Check out You.com. Check out NEVA.com. They have some really cool experiences there. You can see what's happening. It's going to get better. I think what you see there now is only the beginning. So it's like, "Oh, this is not good," I think it's only the beginning of all these things. You can check out. If you're using Edge, you can see the examples that Bing has also and interact with them, and you can sign up for the wait list, unless they already opened it up for everyone by the time this comes out. But that will be news. That'll be new. Crystal Carter: And the people that I've been following who've been chatting about this consistently, Barry's been talking a lot about this, Brady Clark as well. Glenn Gabe has also been talking about some of the different features that he's seen on ThinkChat. So if you ask them very nicely, they might query something for you, maybe. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Not to put them to work. Mordy Oberstein: Follow them first. "Hey, I followed you." Crystal Carter: Follow them first. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Now, if Bing did open up its AI chat experience for everybody, that would be in the news. Would it be in this week's news? I don't know. But there most likely will be something related to AI in the news. Most likely. Who knows? Well, let's find out as we get into the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Well, this is the AI episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast. So what better time than now? And to let you know that GPT-4 is coming. If you love AI writers, then yay! If you hate AI writers, then the sky is about to fall. For Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal, open AI is about to release ChatGPT 4, or GPT-4, rather. What makes GPT-4 better than GPT-3? Well, it has a four, and four is higher than three. Also, it's a multi-modal model, which means that the one area of AI where most of us still saw Google as visibly ahead, i.e, MUM, multimodal unified model, will now be part of the Bing-verse. What is multimodal? What is this multimodal thing that I speak of? Well, usually with machine learning, which by the way, all this stuff is not AI, all of it is machine learning. But why split hairs anyway? The usual case with machine learning is you have one input and one output. So you input text, you get back text, much like ChatGPT is now. Well, multimodal means you can get back all sorts of media, say video, for instance. Google does this with Lens, if you want to see what this actually looks like in reality. So for example, you take a picture of some bike part that you have no idea what its name is. For me, that's all of the bike parts, other than the pedals and the brakes, and you write a text input, let's say, "How to fix?" Because again, you don't know what the thing is called, so you're taking a picture of it and you're hoping Google can match it up. And Google does match up the image, which it identifies, let's say, as the chain. And then it gives you results on how to fix a bike chain because you didn't know, like me, that that was called the chain. Well, clearly I knew it was called the chain because I just said it was called the chain. How did I know? Fourth walls aside, multimodal means a multimedia synergy. And that's the direction of the new GPT-4. Also, like Google MUM, it'll have a focus on working across multiple languages. I've always wanted Google to do more with MUM, it's multimodal technology. Well, MUM is open source, but Google MUM. Again, splitting hairs. I really hope they will reshape the Google results page and I think it eventually will. But now Microsoft is involved with open AI as well with this whole multimodal thing. So I guess let the multi-modal wars begin. Anyway, on a totally separate note, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, the February 2023 product review update is over. Goodbye and good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, or if your site did well, nice seeing you. Come again. Either way, the chances that your site was impacted with this product of the You update was far greater than with the recent iterations of the more recent product of You updates per a heap of Semrush data that I pulled, which you could see in the article from Barry, which is linked to in the show notes. Personally, I've looked at hundreds of keywords, and the ranking trajectories here, you could see it in the trends, are way more significant. There's way more significant drop-offs. Where you see a page ranking for a keyword, dive 10 or 15 positions down off of page one and onto page two, I tend to see the increases being less drastic here, but that is more than a little anecdotal. So take that as you will. And last up, and again from he, the great Barry in the sky over at Search Engine Land, Google rolled out new site names, Favicon and Sponsor Label on Desktop Search. Barry, if ever a headline set up the entire article, that is it. So you go to Desktop on Google, you will now see favicons, a label that re-sponsored and not ads for the ads, and site names above the URL, meaning the name of the site, or if you've been using the desktop version of the SERP over the last month or so, nothing has changed. It just officially rolled out. For this site name, by the way, Google has a few ways to make the determination, but one way is via website structured data markup, so make sure you have that set up. And with that, that is this week's version of the Snappy News. So was the news, so was the news. And before we do depart, we do need to tell you who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. And because we're talking about AI and AI writers and SEO, you should be following DataChaz on Twitter. That's @DataChaz, and that would be Charly Wargnier, who does an absolute ton around AI and SEO, who's constantly talking about it. He's been all over it. Crystal Carter: He's been on board since as far as ... Since it's broke, as a big thing, he's been all about it. And he's always been about data and things anyway. Mordy Oberstein: And technology. Crystal Carter: And a bit of a technologist. But he's been fully on board. So if you are planning to keep track of how things are developing, he's a great follow. He shares great resources for that, including different kinds of prompts you can try, different tools that are using it, different things that are working. And I think while he's very enthusiastic about the technology, I think he also has a healthy skepticism. So he's aware that there are challenges, and he's very much aware about having those conversations and making sure that we're having conversations that are talking about all of the fantastic things, but also all of the things that are still in the works. So I think he's a good follow for that. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. And he's one of the forerunners of the SEO Python world. He's got a great website called seopythonistas.com, which happens to be a WIx website where he honors the work that Hamlet Batista of Blessed Memory contributed around Python to the SEO community. There's an enormous amount of resources at seopythonistas on Hamlet's work and other SEOs contributing to the Python conversation. So check out that website, and of course, follow Charly on Twitter @DataChaz. That's D-A-T-A-C-H-A-Z on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So hopefully you'll do that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, do that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And I would have a snazzy outro where I said the AI writer is going to write the outro, but I don't feel like that would be fair to our audience because they didn't do a great job with the ... The Twilight Zone theme was great and hilarious, but I don't think it was the best intro for our last segment. Crystal Carter: How did they used to end The Twilight Zone? Mordy Oberstein: They just had the music. Pick out to music. Do, do, do! Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into building a solid SEO team with a very special guest contribution. Who will it be? You'll have to see. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a reading on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Ryan Law Charly Wargnier Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Animalz Content Marketing SEO Pythonistas How AI will impact SEO News: OpenAI GPT-4 Arriving Mid-March 2023 Google February 2023 product reviews update more volatile than previous updates, say data providers Google rolled out new site names, favicon and sponsored label on desktop search Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Ryan Law Charly Wargnier Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Animalz Content Marketing SEO Pythonistas How AI will impact SEO News: OpenAI GPT-4 Arriving Mid-March 2023 Google February 2023 product reviews update more volatile than previous updates, say data providers Google rolled out new site names, favicon and sponsored label on desktop search Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're proofing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding at Wix, and I'm joined by the incredible, the fabulous, the absolutely amazing, the incomparable Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people, and thank you, Mordy, for that fantastic introduction. I'm sure that you wrote that entirely yourself and did not get an AI writer to help you craft that introduction. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, more shadowing there. No. No AI writer is as good as me. Which is not saying much, I don't think, at this point yet about me. Crystal Carter: I don't know, you've written so much content, Mordy. I mean, they could have been trained on all those words. You are a wordsmith, sir. You are someone who writes many, many words. Mordy Oberstein: Has it really been me this entire time? We don't know. Crystal Carter: What? What? Where am I? Is this even real? How do I know any of this is happening at all? Mordy Oberstein: It's all a dream and/or a nightmare, depending upon how you look at it. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can add all sorts of variables to your title tags in bulk at the folder level with Wix. It's almost as if you had an AI writer writing them for you. Crystal Carter: Oh, my gosh. I mean- Mordy Oberstein: Oh my gosh, so amazing. Crystal Carter: Put those bots to work, that's what I say. Don't do all these things yourself. Why are we breaking a sweat? Put those bots to work. Set up your syntax so that they do it for you. Mordy Oberstein: They don't mind. That's what they're there for. Crystal Carter: That's what they're there for. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, in case you haven't realized, this week's episode is all about SEO, the web, and AI writers. Perhaps you've heard about them on TV. Perhaps you use an AI writer from the comfort of your own home. The question is, should you? We're diving into everything, AI writers, what AI-written content means for the web, what AI-written content means for SEO, what AI writers should and shouldn't be writing. And to help us navigate all of this, we're going to bring in a very special guest for you shortly, Ryan Laws, the VP of Content over at Animalz, one of the most prestigious content marketing agencies out there, will join us shortly. Plus, we'll dive into the various ways search engines have already integrated AI writers into their result pages. And, of course, with the snappiest of news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. Episode number 29 of the SERP's Up podcast is spinning up right now. So, content is hard. Wouldn't it be amazing if someone came along, and for a very, very low cost, almost free, created a ton of content for you? Wouldn't that free up your time? Wouldn't that save you money? Wouldn't it to help you if writing just isn't your thing? You almost see the temptation there to have a bot write all of your content for you, because it actually solves real pain points, serious pain points that many, many, many of us have. The question is, "Well, what about product quality? What about the quality of that content?" And that's really the crux of the issue here that we're going to explore today because imagine a computer program backed by artificial intelligence is writing content for you. It might seem like a great solution, but is it the right solution? And I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this decision, how we all collectively decide to deal with AI-written content, is going to reshape the web for better or for worse. For worse, spoiler. So it's a serious topic, which is why we thought it would be prudent to bring someone who I've been following for a long time on the content side of things. His blog is amazing. Check it out. Obviously, a link to it in the show notes. It's of incredible quality, which is why we're having him here, because quality is the name of this game. What better person to discuss AI-written content and the future of the web and content than Ryan Laws, VP of Content over at Animalz? Welcome, Ryan. Ryan Laws: You so much for having me in this terrifying post-truth world that we find ourselves in now. Mordy Oberstein: It's an apocalypse. It's apocalyptic. Ryan Laws: Yeah, if I would not have put money on this being the kind of thing I'd be talking about this year a couple of years ago, but hey, that's how technology tends to unfold, I think. Crystal Carter: Honestly, I think there's a lot of people who are saying that if you're speaking at a conference this year, it's almost impossible to plan ahead at all because between the autumn, and I think I saw you talking on a podcast about how ChatGPT was the first time where you were like, "Okay, this is actually a viable thing," and I'm sure you'll get into that a little bit later, but I think that there was somebody who shared a script where somebody was able to write an email, a very, very well formatted email without actually writing it. They just said, "Write this email that says this," and then it just formatted that and it went. And at that point I was like, "Okay, this is something to pay attention to." And I think that so much has changed between then and now. And we're recording this in February time, and, I mean, in the next six months, I imagine it's going to change even more. Ryan Laws: By the time this airs, it will all be completely redundant and nothing we've said will have made any sense whatsoever. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just worried if we'll still exist or not. Using ChatGPT to have an email written or whatever, that seems like a good use of time. I have been using ChatGPT to try to admit to me that it's Skynet trying to take over the world. Crystal Carter: Okay. Ryan Laws: There does seem to be a whole genre of people that are trying to work out, "Is this sentient? Is this artificial general intelligence? Is there something much bigger and more terrifying going on?" And I'm just trying to stay in my lane and think about content and SEO, and that's frying my brain as it is, to be honest. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. I'm staying in my lane trying to break it and trying to get to admit all sorts of horrible things. Crystal Carter: But I think that both of those things are the way to look at this new technology, and I think that's something that SEOs are able to bring to the fore. So within the SEO industry and the content industry and the PPC industry, if you're working in it across any of this digital marketing things, if you've been around the block a few times, you've seen the new fancy toy show up and you've learned how to assess it and how to kick the tires to see what it can do. And so I think that it's important to learn and to find the limitations of whatever the new technology is. And I know that you've been experimenting with it within a few ways. What things have you found ChatGPT and content writers to be good at, and what things have you found it to be terrible at or not so good at? Mordy Oberstein: Writing. Ryan Laws: Oh, yeah. It's good at writing and it's terrible at writing. Yeah. Well, yeah, obviously, as somebody who personally has tried to make a living off of writing and works for a company that makes a living off of writing and helping companies grow through writing, we were very, very interested to see, "What can this do? Are we going to have to replace parts of our workflow? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? How do we add value on top of these things?" So over the past couple of years, actually, since GPT-3 was enclosed beta, we've been trying different use cases for it. We've learned quite a lot about the strengths and weaknesses so far. And probably the most bullish use case we're seeing at the moment that I know lots of people are doing, but not necessarily talking about, is actually trying to scale up search content in increasing publishing frequencies to levels that previously just not tenable when you were using people to do that. I think a lot of it comes down to this question of quality, exactly as you say. Is this stuff good? I think it's really important to remember that quality is a totally subjective piece of terminology. If you think about SEO content, you're going to have something that maybe it's a very non-competitive search, maybe people are looking for very pragmatic, utilitarian information. And you can have something that is very basic, just gets the nuts and bolts information across, and that can be quality, that can do the job, that can meet the intent, and that can help companies rank for it. And in those cases, in those non-competitive SERPs, I basically don't see an issue with trying to get an AI writer involved in that part of the process. Crystal Carter: And I think that some of those things appeal to the kinds of things that Google will generally often replace with a quick answer, like, "What is it distance between the Earth and the sun?" If you're using an AI writer to write that up, maybe you want that as something that's of value on your website so that people don't have to leave your website and so people stay within your ecosystem. But from a search point of view, Google's like, "We can just tell you how many kilometers that is or how many miles that is, or how many light years that is. We can just tell you that in the SERP." So from a search point of view, that doesn't add tons of value, but from a user experience point of view within your website ecosystem, that might add value, in which case an AI writer might be something that might be useful to spin up something that's nice to read that doesn't just go, "This many parsecs." Ryan Laws: Yeah, exactly. Mordy Oberstein: That's how I like thinking about this, where there's so much content out there that I can't, as a person, people in general can't add any more unique value anymore. I don't know, what is a tire? It's been done four million times. You're not going to add anything new that hasn't been, no pun intended, written under the sun before. Crystal Carter: We could reinvent the wheel. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, but not the tire. You can't reinvent the tire. Ryan Laws: Well, I think that's a good point, and that brings us to the other end of the quality spectrum, which is a hyper-competitive search where maybe they're big behemoth brands slogging it out with their 10,000 word meticulously optimized skyscraper posts. And in those cases, anyone that is pumping out a very utilitarian, largely unedited AI output are just going to lose. There's nothing more to be added there. So I think a good way of thinking about this technology is a bifurcation of search generally. What is the really simple utilitarian, non-competitive stuff that you can and probably should outsource and just have AI handle? And where should you actually focus your energy and your skill and your expertise? What are the handful of really competitive, really important topics that you should be adding opinion or original research and data and perspective and matter analysis to? Because I think pretty much every company will have both ends of those spectrum they will need to create content for. Mordy Oberstein: So I have a theory about this. What's inevitably going to happen is let's say, for example, everyone writes a piece about, "What is a tire?" And they're using the same AI writers, putting out the same thing. How is Google going to know what to rank at that point for "What is a tire?" And what I think what it's going to do is it's going to look at the domain overall and say, "Hey, you know what? This website is about donuts. It happens to talk about a donut tire. This website is about tires and not about donuts. It's the same snippet of content. Let's take it from the one that's more authoritative topically and show that snippet from that website." So it won't be about the snippet of content anymore, but it'll be about all the other pages and all the other human-created content that you did that builds up the authority so you can rank for that top level keyword like, "What is a tire?" Ryan Laws: I totally agree with that, and I think basically, Google's only method of response to this ... I think as we've seen, it's not hugely tenable to plug every bit of content into a machine to say whether it's AI generated or not. I don't think that's doable. So actually, we're going to see even more emphasis placed on the non-word parts of search, like domain authority, topical authority, those kinds of things, which I think is perhaps slightly problematic because there is a big incumbent's advantage if you're a big established brand. It's probably going to make dominating even easier, and it might make it harder for new entrant into the market. But ultimately, yeah, I don't really see what other choice Google has. You just have to devalue the importance of the words on the page when you can create words on the page so easily, I think. Crystal Carter: So there's a couple of things that occur to me about this, like QA. I think that quality assessment, quality control and content curation, I think will potentially not necessarily be a ranking factor, but I think will be a point of differentiation because, essentially, while we're talking about general knowledge topics, for instance, that you could spin up, like let's say you had a knowledge hub that was a dictionary or something of terms about tires. Let's say we're thinking about terms. This is a hubcap and this is a tread. I don't know. I don't know anything about tires. But anyway, so let's say you have a knowledge hub all about tires for those people who really love tires, and let's say you use an AI writer to write that. One of the tricky things and one of the challenges that I've seen are from my use of AI writers and looking at some of the results that we've seen from being AI's beta and from ChatGPT, and also I was looking at You.com as well, which is a really good one as well, is even for simple things, the facts that they put out sometimes are just nonsense. And the word "AI hallucinations" is now in common parlance because AI writers will just make these things up. I asked it to write a meta description, and I said, "I would like you to summarize this piece of text in a meta description that is 150 characters." And it summarized it in 244 characters, but at the end of it, it said it was 155 characters. And I was like, "That is not 155 characters. That is 244," because I read it through another tool that told me that. And then they said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I will adjust." And then it made another one that was even longer, and I was like, "Okay, that is not what I asked you for. That's wrong." Ryan Laws: It's my Skynet theory. Crystal Carter: Right, so then I asked it another one. So You.com is a generative search tool and it's a lower level of doing what Bing AI is trying to do, but it's doing it now. And I said to it, I said, "Can you name some of the guests from the SERP's Up SEO Podcast?" And what it does is on the side, it generates search results, and then it has the chat, and it will give you comments and it will even provide links as well. But it was saying like, "Oh, Bill Slosky was on our podcast." And with all due respect to Bill Slosky, we started the podcast after he had dearly departed, and so that is not true. That is fundamentally not true, and there's ways that you can verify that just from dates. So the content curation and understanding the limitations of the tools that you're using is really important. How do you advise that people can, at scale ... Because that's the other thing is that you can do lots at once. So how do you check all of that at once? Ryan Laws: Yeah, it's a wonderful point, and I think probably the biggest mistake I see people make thinking about this technology is assuming that it is designed to serve as facts, and that is fundamentally not what it is designed to do. It's basically designed to take whatever disparate prompts or information you give it, smooth them together and create an output that sounds coherent. So in that instance, having somebody that's well known for SEO on a podcast about SEO, that makes sense within its understanding of what should be expected there. But at no point has it gone to try and find what actually happened. And that's just not what this technology does, and that's not something I think it is going to do because who has the resources to vet billions of generated outputs almost every day at this point? You can't do it. So I can't say this is something I've solved at grand scale, not like programmatic SEO where you're publishing hundreds, thousands of articles at once, but we're working at a slightly smaller scale where we are basically having a human in the loop using generative AI as a force multiplier for their already great writing. So we basically think to get the most out of this technology you need a subject matter expert who can review, who can structure, who can critically evaluate what is being generated from the generative AI, and that process is still faster than it would otherwise be. I think sometimes it's a lot more fun for the writer because you get to outsource parts of your thinking, and it can even be better in some instances because it can recommend ideas that you might not otherwise have. It doesn't have the same mental ruts and creative bottlenecks that humans do. But I think to your point, exactly that, having a person to evaluate that and actually stand behind and be willing to put their name to a piece of generated content is absolutely crucial. Otherwise, yeah, we will just very quickly descend into dystopian Wild West if we're just all publishing the outputs of these models wholesale. Mordy Oberstein: What's interesting there is that there's so much talk about AI writers and how it'll impact the content writing job market, and what you're basically describing is a new workflow of how writers will come into the process, which makes me wonder, just to zoom even out from there, how do you feel this whole advent of the AI writer is going to impact, forget SEO for a second, but the web as a whole? Ryan Laws: I think the thought experiment we have to run is we basically have to assume, "What if everything on the internet has in some way been touched by AI generation? How do we navigate that? How do we work forward?" Because I think that is just how we're going to have to think about this. I think it's a dead end trying to work out what is and what isn't AI generated. We have to assume everything is, and at that point, I think provenance becomes the most important thing. When you've got 100 people saying the same thing, you will generally seek out the person you think is most credible on that topic, and that is what we're going to do. I think that is what search engines are going to encourage, and I think we're starting to see that with the addition of extra ease to Google's E-A-T acronym as well. Crystal Carter: They should pick other letters. They could make it a nice acronym, because at the moment it's just E-A-T. Tasty. It's just like, "Come on." Mordy Oberstein: They're just screwing with us because now they know we're going to say that, and now we're going to be stuck, like, "What are you saying?" They're like, "Ah, look at all these SEOs walking around going 'E-A-T' anything." Ryan Laws: Oh, you mean eat or do you mean E-A-T? Mordy Oberstein: There's some Googler laughing at all this, like, "Ah, see what I did there? Ha ha ha!" Crystal Carter: I think that there's still going to be people who are making high quality content, but people who are high authority, I think we might end up in a situation like what we've seen with big scale publishers, with people like the New York Times, like The Atlantic, et cetera, where they gate their content. And this happens on YouTube as well. A lot of YouTubers have gone to a subscription model where you have to pay for their content or you have to sponsor them on Patreon or that sort of thing. So yeah, I think that it's likely to see that sort of thing. When we talk about AI, everybody's using AI in lots of ways already. I use Grammarly all the time. I cannot spell without Grammarly. I use Grammarly all the time. We use visual search tools to generate tags that's just built into Wix. There's lots of things like that. So I think we're using them in lots of different ways. I think it's just a lot more mainstream. Mordy Oberstein: Well, yeah, also more narrow. I don't think if you gave an AI writer, "Here's a paragraph. Regurgitate it, re-summarize it, or write a heading for it," that, to me, seems like a no-brainer. It's a quick thing. It's just taking a very closed input and putting out a very closed output. So those kind of tasks, like no-brainer, go for them. Obviously, you need to check it. I think now that we're seeing things like ChatGPT where we're talking about, "It's an ocean." It's not an enclosed environment anymore, and that's a huge qualitative shift. Crystal Carter: There's so much AI art at the moment, and I think from your perspective, you were saying that we should all assume that everything's AI written. Well, I mean, as somebody who writing for me can sometimes take a long time, it doesn't come naturally to me necessarily, it can sometimes take a long time. So the idea that thing that took me hours and hours and hours to do will now be perceived as being AI-written even though that was blood, sweat and tears for me. I'll be honest, I have some feelings about that. I have some feelings about that. But if that's how things are going forward, I guess that's how things are going forward. But I feel that this must be how artists have felt for the last, I don't know, six, 12 months where a lot of the dolly stuff and mid-journey stuff has been coming to the fore because if I see a picture now, I'm like, "Did you do that or did an AI do that?" I'm not sure. Ryan Laws: Yeah. Probably the thing I hear most from people that are writers or artists is, "We didn't choose this. We've been forced into a world that has ..." in some cases, people think devalued the thing they have invested their entire lives in. There's a lot of that personal meaning imbued in writing and creativity, and I find that, and if I could put this technology back in the bottle, I would be tempted to do it. But again, that's generally not how technology operates, and at least in my capacity as somebody that helps growing companies, I have to use this if there's an advantage to be had. On the art point, though, I do think something can still be beautiful and meaningful and incredible even if it has been generated by AI because there is still a lot of human involvement and curation and process that has gone into that. And actually, I'm sure people felt very skeptical about, "Oh, I can't believe that printing press. This wasn't written by hand. This is devalued. Content should be smaller scale." Or even the emergence of the internet. This democratizing thing of writing where anyone could suddenly write. There was a big influx of terrible writing in addition to great writing as well, and I think it just changes our experience and our perception of it. I don't necessarily think it has to be better or worse in some cases. This is just the new world we find ourselves in, and the composition of what art and creativity means will probably change on the back of that. Crystal Carter: I think there's opportunity there as well. So for instance, speaking on the art point, I've seen people who paint live. They'll paint live in the street as a street performer. They'll paint live, and you know that thing has been created by hand. So if that's something that you value, then you can create that by values. And I think there's potentially opportunities for people to connect in a live setting to- Mordy Oberstein: Watch me write. Pay five dollars to watch me write. Crystal Carter: Well, not necessarily what I was saying. Right. But to connect with that knowledge because the written word, for instance, is a vehicle for a conveying knowledge, and that's what people fundamentally want is knowledge. So the publishing industry, similarly in books, had a decline in people buying non-fiction books. Well, part of that was because people were getting that on YouTube because why would you buy ... You wouldn't buy a book on how to change a tire if you can see a video that you can pause that shows you how to change the tire and has more information even if there was no words on it than if somebody writing and you trying to understand what they're explaining from what they're saying. So I think that there are potentially additional opportunities that come from the way that people are changing how they are accessing information. Mordy Oberstein: I also think it'll create an opportunity for brands to really stick out. If a brand is really dedicating the resources to create really good content, which is even the new space now happening the same way, just at a different angle, you'll start seeing people realize, "Hey, wait a second. While this website, it counted probably a bunch of AI's content, this website looks like really they're putting in the effort to create really unique content," and that'll be a branding asset. Ryan Laws: I'll say on that point, I do think even at that top end of the spectrum, the incredible, unique, amazing content, AI is still going to be involved in that. Probably a different part of the process, probably in terms of ideation and brainstorming and that kind of thing, but I think this technology is just too good. It's going to touch every part of writing that exists within a company within the world. I think it's just too good to not use and not find its way into those processes. Mordy Oberstein: True. Before we have to let you go, I'm curious, with all that, with it's not going anywhere, it's going to touch the process, are we looking at a scenario where at least temporarily the quality of the web's content is going to fall off a cliff? Ryan Laws: My instinct is to say yes, but then I'm reminded of the status quo, and I think we talk about the perils of AI-generated content, but actually it is pretty much the same problems, the same issues that most of the world's current SEO content written by humans has already. Mordy Oberstein: You're saying it can't get much worse. Ryan Laws: No, I think we're already there. We're already at that point. This is going to exacerbate the existing traits of search content, and search content today generally is pretty bad and pretty unhelpful and pretty faceless and very duplicative. Mordy Oberstein: I have ways to build backlinks . Crystal Carter: The content mill model has definitely created a lot of repetitive content with limited value. So I feel like there's opportunities to differentiate, and it's very interesting that also one of the ways that Google can tell whether or not a piece of content is written by AI, or one of the ways they say they can, is whether or not there are videos and other assets to verify some of the content that they have there. So these are things we should see. Ryan Laws: Give me a few days to spin up an AI video workflow, and I can add that into the process and job done. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you? Ryan Laws: I spend too much time on Twitter @thinking_slow and The Animalz blog. That's where I channel all of the writing, all the energies and creative output of our team into talking about content search and AI at the moment as well. Mordy Oberstein: Real human insights on the Animalz blog. Ryan Laws: There's a little bit of machine creeping in there, not going to lie. Crystal Carter: Have you named your AI for your Animalz blogs? I feel like everybody should have a name for the AI tool that they use. Obviously, not how obviously they think they be a nice robot name. Ryan Laws: I haven't yet. No, no. It's probably naming me at this point. Crystal Carter: Was it Sydney? Was that what Chat- Mordy Oberstein: Good morning, Bob. Crystal Carter: I think Bing's AI says it's called Sydney. That's the- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? That's- Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, it's sentiment. It has named itself. Crystal Carter: I know Barry said that that's what he's called. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, if Barry said, then it must be true. Awesome. Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. Ryan Laws: Yeah, thank you for having me. Mordy Oberstein: Talk to you soon. So thank you again, Ryan, for stopping by and sharing your really cool insights about what's going on in the world of AI and content and SEO. Again, follow Ryan on Twitter @thinking_slow, that's thinking_slow on Twitter. Of course, we'll link to Ryan's profile in the show notes. Well, now that we're talking about AI and search engines, did you know there's multiple search engines that have incorporated AI writers or AI chat, rather, into their own results pages? So wouldn't you care to explore what they look like, what they're doing? You would? Yes. Yay! With that, let's dive into search engines integrating with AI chat as we go into so many search engines. Automated: Google's latest update. Popular search engine, Bing. Duck, Duck, Go. Yahoo. AltaVista. Jeeves. Mordy Oberstein: Before we get started, imagine a world where machines have the ability to craft words, to tell stories, and to paint pictures with language where the very essence of human creativity is at the mercy of code and circuitry. Welcome to the world of AI writers, a place where the line between man and machine blurs and the outcomes are both strange and wondrous. You are entering the Twilight Zone. That was the intro I asked ChatGPT to write for this segment. Crystal Carter: Oh my God. Mordy Oberstein: I said, "Write a segment for the SERP's Up Podcast where we talk about AI writers in this tone of the Twilight Zone," and that's what it gave me. Crystal Carter: Okay. Thanks, Gene Roddenberry. Mordy Oberstein: Hm? Gene Roddenberry? That's not Gene Roddenberry, that's Rod Serling or whatever his name is. Crystal Carter: Rod Serling. My bad. No, ChatGPT told me it was Gene. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, ChatGPT. Right, right, right. ChatGPT was wrong. No, anytime I'm wrong about something, I be like, "Oh, AI told me. AI said. The AI was wrong. I would've been right." Crystal Carter: That's what the AI said. They told me that. Mordy Oberstein: So while that intro was incomprehensible, thank you ChatGPT, what essentially we're they're going to do here is there's a bunch of search engines that have integrated AI chats into their SERP's. Google announced they're going to be introducing Bard at some point. Bing already has one. NEVA already has one. You.com already has one, and they all function a little bit differently. So we thought we'd just share with you what we're seeing out there. For example, if I'm on NEVA and I type in SEO, I get a whole thing, "A search engine optimization as a set of practices, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," and it has footnotes where it tells me where these pieces of information came from. So for example, as part of its writeup, it says, "SEO involves making small modifications to a part of a website." It got that from Google's documentation in Spanish. Crystal Carter: Oh, wow. It got it in Spanish? Mordy Oberstein: I think so because it's giving me ... Well, actually, it's pulling in ... So when you hover over, so what it does is it gives you a footnote to the corresponding sentence. So every sentence has a footnote, and when you highlight the sentence, where you hover over the sentence, it brings up an aside panel, like Google where the knowledge panel is, it brings up the full link and it says, "Photo number three. Here's a link," and it's in a giant box. And it pulls up an image from that blog also, from that URL also. And the URL is showing me here is from Google, but the image is of Google's search central in Spanish. Crystal Carter: Right. Very interesting. So I did a similar query. So I went into You.com, which is a tool that has a lot of different options, actually. So they have options for using AI for content generation, they have it for generating images, they also have it for queries. And I typed in, "What is SEO," and they gave me a featured snippet paragraph, so a short paragraph describing what SEO is. And they've also referenced an article. So in this case they referenced AA Trusts as well, and as they're generating that content, as they're answering the query, they give you a list of links on the side of that particular query. So on the top, you can see something from Search Engine Land, then from Moz, then from Semrush, then from Mailchimp, then from You. And then also underneath of that, they also put a link to a Wikipedia article that references what SEO is. So in that case, I think on that particular one, I think they've done a good job for that particular query, and I've seen this for other ones. I think we discussed this earlier with Ryan. I've seen mixed results from You.com, but they have explained that the product is in beta and they have a disclaimer underneath their chat. It says, "This product is in beta and its accuracy may be limited. You.com is not liable for content generated." So I think that's important to remember as well. Mordy Oberstein: It's totally true. The answers you're going to get, for example, I asked NEVA, "Is SEO good?" And it gave me pretty much the same answer as "What is SEO?" The last line was, "SEO is an important tool for improving visibility of a website and can be beneficial for a businesses looking to increase our online presence." So it's pretty generic. The first half is totally irrelevant. They gave me a whole thing of "SEO is a practice." It's the same thing as the other one when I asked, "What is SEO?" So it's all going to be improving, I hope. A lot of it's pretty generic, I find. It's not super deep. I think the URLs are pulling from at this point are not super deep. If you're going anything SEO wise, it's basically pulling from Search Engine Land to Moz, at least on the NEVA side. And what's interesting is on the second half of the answer where I'm asking, "Is SEO good?" and it gives me that first part where it tells me what SEO is, there are three citations, two from Moz, one from Backlinko. Where it tells me, "SEO is an important tool, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," there's no citation. I don't know where it got that from. So even though there is citation, it's not citing everything. Crystal Carter: Right. So yeah, that's a similar ... So You.com, I said, "Is SEO good?" It says, "SEO is generally considered to be a good practice as it helps increase visibility, et cetera, et cetera," and goes along those lines. And then they've got a similar sort of thing. So they're pulling from Digital Marketing Institute, from SEJ, from Google, from Forbes. So that's top there. Then they also have a panel that's pulling from Reddit that has some Reddit examples saying, "Is it a good career investment? Is it worth it these days? Is it good for this or that?" So when I compare those search results for "Is SEO good?" on Google, I get roughly the same results that showed up in the sidebar of You.com, which was using generative, and if I go into Bing- Mordy Oberstein: Well, while you're doing that, I do like the way that You.com is putting in the URLs one is you see the organic results. There's a set of results right there. It's not like it's below the fold, underneath the chat box. Also, it does the footnotes, but it has the actual URLs there. On NEVA, it just tells you the name of the site. You.com is giving you, basically, the title tag and the URL, and it's much more prominent. You really notice it that much more. And again, you have the thing on the side, also. Crystal Carter: Right. I was playing around this the other day, and I was like, "Actually, this is pretty good." And again, they're in beta, they're still working things through. But the thing that I found interesting about it was that I think that this is a really good opportunity to see an expansion in a differentiation of search capabilities. So generally speaking, if you wanted to get video searches, you would go on YouTube. But what we're seeing right now is an explosion of people creating their own search engines, using different configurations in order to surface information. And I think that we're living in a really fascinating time for search. It would be interesting to see which ones come out of the end of it and how it all works out, but it's very fascinating. Mordy Oberstein: It is super interesting. I do speculate or wonder that NEVA and You, they have the search, they have the chat, the AI chats, I don't know how much more relevant that makes them the search engine. I saw, for example, someone did a poll in the SEO industry, I forgot who it was, I apologize. But does Bing having a really seemingly good AI experience, does that make Bing more relevant to you as a search engine? And the numbers weren't great. It is interesting, by the way, on the Bing side, and this is going to be something to keep an eye on, I think, again, and we've been focusing on this in the last few minutes, to me this citation is the most important part of all this from an SEO point of view. without the citation, your links are not there, it's a bad practice in general, I don't think it's necessarily an ethical practice. But without it, you don't have traffic coming to the site from those AI experiences, and I do think you will. It's the same thing as a feature snippet. The same thing as direct answer. I type in, "How many home runs did Babe Ruth have?" 714. Let's say there was this part of a featured snippet and there's a URL there. If I feel curious now to learn more about those 714 home runs that Babe Ruth hit, I will click on the URL. If not, not. It's the same thing here. For example, one of the templated answers that Bing has, because I don't have access yet to the beta, if you're listening from Bing, please could I? But one of them is- Crystal Carter: Yes, same. Mordy Oberstein: ... they give you a sample. They give you samples, you can see it. And it's about creating a dinner menu for six people who are vegetarian. And it is cool. It has a whole list of what you should start with as a starter or main and a desert, and it has a bunch of footnotes. And I saw Barry Schwartz report on this recently. Who knows if it'll change or not, but you can't actually see the URLs now until you click, "See more." Crystal Carter: Right, right. You say this is from an SEO point of view, but literally from a skeptical and just from a knowledge base, if I want to know something about something, I want to know where you got that information from, I mean, I need somebody to be able to answer that. And so you say like, "Oh, Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs." Mordy Oberstein: How do you know that? Crystal Carter: How do you know that? Like, "Oh, well, I've got this card, or I read it on this or I saw it on that," because there's lots of people who spout lots of facts and it's important to have a trail for that information in order to qualify how somebody knows one thing or another. So I asked the Babe Ruth question, for instance, into You.com and they pulled up Quora, and that said it was this much. And I could say, "Well, I don't think that's a valid source, for instance. There must be a better source than Quora for a query like that." But to be fair, they've got that ... Oh, and to be fair to them, to You.com, they have an article, they have the SERP showing next to them that says, "Did he actually hit 715 home runs?" Mordy Oberstein: Aha. Aha. Crystal Carter: So is this a debate? Is there something to think about? Mordy Oberstein: By the way, to that point, the chats could be the starting point for a click. So for example, I just searched for, "How many home runs did Aaron Judge hit?" And it without any citations from You.com, "Aaron Judge hit a total of six C2 home runs in the 2022 season." Now I didn't tell You.com I wanted the last season. I really wanted his whole career. So there's a link right next to it from Aaron Judge Statcast and Visuals, blah blah blah. It's a stat website. I'm going to go click on that next. So just because there's no URL or entry point from the chat itself, it could lead to, "Okay, now I need to go to the website that you're showing me right next to it because the AI chat didn't answer the question." Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that the UX here is important. So for the Bing, lots of people have been sharing screenshots and videos and things around and also doing tear-downs of some of the answers. So for instance, Bing previewed their chat bot, their Bing AI, and there was somebody who did an article, Lily Ray shared it recently, and they talked about fact checking some of the things. So I think one of the things they demoed was like, "Oh, plan a trip to Mexico and some great night spots in a town in Mexico." And somebody went through all of these places and they're like, "This place hasn't had any reviews since 2014. This place seems to be completely closed. This place is not a place that a tourist should go to at all." And so they went through and they were like, "That's doesn't really work." But when you look at the way that Bing AI is planning to showcase some of the links that would help you to verify some of the things that they're talking about, from what I've seen, they seem to be putting it below the chat and potentially outside of You or showing the conversation above the search results. And I think this is turning into a You.com love letter, but I think that what You is doing with the side panel I think is working really well. And I think that there- Mordy Oberstein: Showing the results on the side- Crystal Carter: I think is good. Mordy Oberstein: ... next to the chat is great. I love the You. Crystal Carter: I think that's great. And I think also Bing is planning to do side panel, I think, as well with their chat where you're allowed to do that, and I think Google also has a pop-out side panel or something. Mordy Oberstein: There's going to have be something because you're absolutely right, and I think especially in the beginning when people are still skeptical of the answers they're getting from these AI chats, you need to have the URLs there so people can be like, "You know what? Before I actually go ahead and click pay or do this, I'm just going to go to the website." And if it's annoying to get to the URLs, it's going to make your search engine annoying to use. So there's incentive to have the URLs there. I don't think we're heading to 100% zero-click universe because of the AI chat experience on search engine. So don't worry. Check out You.com. Check out NEVA.com. They have some really cool experiences there. You can see what's happening. It's going to get better. I think what you see there now is only the beginning. So it's like, "Oh, this is not good," I think it's only the beginning of all these things. You can check out. If you're using Edge, you can see the examples that Bing has also and interact with them, and you can sign up for the wait list, unless they already opened it up for everyone by the time this comes out. But that will be news. That'll be new. Crystal Carter: And the people that I've been following who've been chatting about this consistently, Barry's been talking a lot about this, Brady Clark as well. Glenn Gabe has also been talking about some of the different features that he's seen on ThinkChat. So if you ask them very nicely, they might query something for you, maybe. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Not to put them to work. Mordy Oberstein: Follow them first. "Hey, I followed you." Crystal Carter: Follow them first. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Now, if Bing did open up its AI chat experience for everybody, that would be in the news. Would it be in this week's news? I don't know. But there most likely will be something related to AI in the news. Most likely. Who knows? Well, let's find out as we get into the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Well, this is the AI episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast. So what better time than now? And to let you know that GPT-4 is coming. If you love AI writers, then yay! If you hate AI writers, then the sky is about to fall. For Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal, open AI is about to release ChatGPT 4, or GPT-4, rather. What makes GPT-4 better than GPT-3? Well, it has a four, and four is higher than three. Also, it's a multi-modal model, which means that the one area of AI where most of us still saw Google as visibly ahead, i.e, MUM, multimodal unified model, will now be part of the Bing-verse. What is multimodal? What is this multimodal thing that I speak of? Well, usually with machine learning, which by the way, all this stuff is not AI, all of it is machine learning. But why split hairs anyway? The usual case with machine learning is you have one input and one output. So you input text, you get back text, much like ChatGPT is now. Well, multimodal means you can get back all sorts of media, say video, for instance. Google does this with Lens, if you want to see what this actually looks like in reality. So for example, you take a picture of some bike part that you have no idea what its name is. For me, that's all of the bike parts, other than the pedals and the brakes, and you write a text input, let's say, "How to fix?" Because again, you don't know what the thing is called, so you're taking a picture of it and you're hoping Google can match it up. And Google does match up the image, which it identifies, let's say, as the chain. And then it gives you results on how to fix a bike chain because you didn't know, like me, that that was called the chain. Well, clearly I knew it was called the chain because I just said it was called the chain. How did I know? Fourth walls aside, multimodal means a multimedia synergy. And that's the direction of the new GPT-4. Also, like Google MUM, it'll have a focus on working across multiple languages. I've always wanted Google to do more with MUM, it's multimodal technology. Well, MUM is open source, but Google MUM. Again, splitting hairs. I really hope they will reshape the Google results page and I think it eventually will. But now Microsoft is involved with open AI as well with this whole multimodal thing. So I guess let the multi-modal wars begin. Anyway, on a totally separate note, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, the February 2023 product review update is over. Goodbye and good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, or if your site did well, nice seeing you. Come again. Either way, the chances that your site was impacted with this product of the You update was far greater than with the recent iterations of the more recent product of You updates per a heap of Semrush data that I pulled, which you could see in the article from Barry, which is linked to in the show notes. Personally, I've looked at hundreds of keywords, and the ranking trajectories here, you could see it in the trends, are way more significant. There's way more significant drop-offs. Where you see a page ranking for a keyword, dive 10 or 15 positions down off of page one and onto page two, I tend to see the increases being less drastic here, but that is more than a little anecdotal. So take that as you will. And last up, and again from he, the great Barry in the sky over at Search Engine Land, Google rolled out new site names, Favicon and Sponsor Label on Desktop Search. Barry, if ever a headline set up the entire article, that is it. So you go to Desktop on Google, you will now see favicons, a label that re-sponsored and not ads for the ads, and site names above the URL, meaning the name of the site, or if you've been using the desktop version of the SERP over the last month or so, nothing has changed. It just officially rolled out. For this site name, by the way, Google has a few ways to make the determination, but one way is via website structured data markup, so make sure you have that set up. And with that, that is this week's version of the Snappy News. So was the news, so was the news. And before we do depart, we do need to tell you who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. And because we're talking about AI and AI writers and SEO, you should be following DataChaz on Twitter. That's @DataChaz, and that would be Charly Wargnier, who does an absolute ton around AI and SEO, who's constantly talking about it. He's been all over it. Crystal Carter: He's been on board since as far as ... Since it's broke, as a big thing, he's been all about it. And he's always been about data and things anyway. Mordy Oberstein: And technology. Crystal Carter: And a bit of a technologist. But he's been fully on board. So if you are planning to keep track of how things are developing, he's a great follow. He shares great resources for that, including different kinds of prompts you can try, different tools that are using it, different things that are working. And I think while he's very enthusiastic about the technology, I think he also has a healthy skepticism. So he's aware that there are challenges, and he's very much aware about having those conversations and making sure that we're having conversations that are talking about all of the fantastic things, but also all of the things that are still in the works. So I think he's a good follow for that. Mordy Oberstein: For sure. And he's one of the forerunners of the SEO Python world. He's got a great website called seopythonistas.com, which happens to be a WIx website where he honors the work that Hamlet Batista of Blessed Memory contributed around Python to the SEO community. There's an enormous amount of resources at seopythonistas on Hamlet's work and other SEOs contributing to the Python conversation. So check out that website, and of course, follow Charly on Twitter @DataChaz. That's D-A-T-A-C-H-A-Z on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So hopefully you'll do that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, do that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And I would have a snazzy outro where I said the AI writer is going to write the outro, but I don't feel like that would be fair to our audience because they didn't do a great job with the ... The Twilight Zone theme was great and hilarious, but I don't think it was the best intro for our last segment. Crystal Carter: How did they used to end The Twilight Zone? Mordy Oberstein: They just had the music. Pick out to music. Do, do, do! Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into building a solid SEO team with a very special guest contribution. Who will it be? You'll have to see. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a reading 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

Can publishers thrive on the web? How can publishers optimize their content for SEO? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss digital strategies media publishers can use to grow organic traffic across the web. We assess the state of the SERP (and the web overall) to see if and how publishers can indeed thrive in today’s ecosystem. Giselle Navarro of HouseFresh joins to weigh in on the SERP landscape for small to mid-sized publishers. Content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, also stops by to give further analysis into the overall web health of the publishing community. Learn why publishers are turning the page to digital as we evaluate the environment for media publishers on Google and across the web this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Does the SEO still work for online publishers? Can publishers thrive on the web? How can publishers optimize their content for SEO? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss digital strategies media publishers can use to grow organic traffic across the web. We assess the state of the SERP (and the web overall) to see if and how publishers can indeed thrive in today’s ecosystem. Giselle Navarro of HouseFresh joins to weigh in on the SERP landscape for small to mid-sized publishers. Content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, also stops by to give further analysis into the overall web health of the publishing community. Learn why publishers are turning the page to digital as we evaluate the environment for media publishers on Google and across the web this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 90 | June 5, 2024 | 56 MIN 00:00 / 56:14 This week’s guests Gisele Navarro Gisele Navarro is the Managing Editor of HouseFresh, an independent publication about indoor air quality committed to informing consumers looking to purchase air quality products by thoroughly testing air purifiers, dehumidifiers, humidifiers, fans and sensors to uncover the devices that don't live up to the marketing hype. She is also the CEO of NeoMam Studios, a team on a mission to create content people want to share. Alli Berry Alli Berry is a Fractional SEO Director and Consultant. Over the last decade, she has helped businesses develop content strategies to grow their acquisition funnel through organic search in a variety of industries including finance, education, retail, automotive, and healthcare. Before starting her own business, she served as the SEO Director of The Motley Fool and Senior Director of Content Marketing for TheStreet. She was named to Inc Magazine and Masthead Media's Top 10 Women in Content Marketing, and has been featured on Search Engine Journal's list of Top SEO Experts to Follow. Recently, Alli has been a featured speaker at Content Marketing World, Semrush Summer Jam, and the Digital Summit Series. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Obertstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Obertstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I am joined by the prolific, should not be understated. She won't take credit for it, but she is prolific head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hi, everybody. I'm trying to remember what prolific means. I'm think it means you do a lot of stuff. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, and particularly writing and I don't like writing. I don't do a lot of writing, but you think about it, you actually do a lot of writing and publishing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I do a little bit, sometimes more than not. Do you know what it is? It's like I go through phases. Sometimes I have nothing, and then sometimes I'm just like, "And this and this and that and this and this and this and this." So you go through ebbs and flows. Mordy Obertstein: I'll break the fourth wall. I schedule a lot of my tweets and LinkedIn posts, and I try to sit down for an hour or so on a Sunday and plan it all out. There are weeks where I got 30,000 things to say, and that's good because everybody's like, "I have nothing to write." Crystal Carter: Right? This is it, but that's a good way to do it. It's a good way to do it though. You plan it, you do the things, but I think also I got to be in the mood. I feel clear. Also, I find my favorite time of writing is on a train. Mordy Obertstein: On a plane, in a box with a fox? Crystal Carter: Here or there or anywhere. Mordy Obertstein: I do not love writing anywhere. Crystal Carter: But no, I love writing on a train. You just sit down. Also, I like writing when there's no WiFi, because I love Grammarly. I love being able to look stuff up, but when there's no WiFi, you can just write. You can just get it all out, brain dump, and there's nothing going. Did you spell that right? And then I get distracted and that's truth. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, you get distracted. Truth. It is annoying. Crystal Carter: Yeah. There'll be two things at the same time. You'll have the document. We'll give you, "Oh, I don't know that spelling," and then Grammarly will say something to you as well. Then it's like I can't. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, better off not spelling things correctly or having good grammar. It works for Barry. Anyway, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. You can only subscribe to your SEO newsletter search like each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. To clarify, you can subscribe whenever you want. It releases every month, but it's also where you can use our winter integration within the Wix and Wix Studio SEO setup checklist and SEO assistant to find the healthiest keywords for your site and your pages. Because today, we're evaluating the health of Google's ecosystem for media publishers, because after all, if the Rolling Stone is writing articles about the best fridges in 2024 and not about this best singer songwriters from 1964, perhaps there's a problem. We'll get into big publishers publishing out of their lane, the forum frenzy on the SERP and what it all means for publishers, and Google's push for publishers to use AI. Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of HouseFresh, has a thing or two to say about the state of the SERPs for publishers as she'll stop by to share what the SERP currently looks like for small and medium-sized publishers. Alli Berry will also pop in to share her outlook on publishers being able to thrive on the web beyond just SEO. Of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and you should be following for more awesomeness on social media. So, breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in. Okay. You can probably breathe out now as episode 90 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you assess your publishing health on that crazy little thing we call the internet. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic introduction. Mordy Obertstein: It's one of those classic things. I don't know if that reference holds true for everybody. When you go to the doctor as a kid, breathe in, breathe out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they got the stethoscope. They get to see all that. Mordy Obertstein: They can do that now. Crystal Carter: If you listen to a stethoscope, you can hear all stuff. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, my wife is a nurse. So, my kids walk around all the time. She doesn't use a stethoscope anymore so much anyway. Crystal Carter: Okay, but then somebody shouts into the stethoscope, it's like, "Oh!" Mordy Obertstein: That's not a good idea. Crystal Carter: Oh no, don't do that. That would be bad. Mordy Obertstein: You know what's bad? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Obertstein: The state of the SERP publishers. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Obertstein: Is that too much? Too heavy? Crystal Carter: Oh, that was hard. Mordy Obertstein: Too early. That's the answer, too early. Too early for that. Crystal Carter: Talk about Knicks in the playoffs. Wow. Mordy Obertstein: Playoffs. That's a sport, deep cut right there. Playoffs. We're not getting into that. Anyway, anyway, anyway, back on track. A few months ago, Giselle Navarro, who we'll hear from in just a bit, wrote a piece that took the SEO world by storm and it basically showed how large publishers dominate the product review SERP. Product reviews meaning best microwaves 2024. These big publishers were not who you thought they were. It wasn't the Wirecutter who you would expect, who I would expect, who I love. Love the Wirecutter. It's not the Wirecutter. It's sites like the Rolling Stone and Popular Science writing product review content. So, Giselle working for a review site obviously took issue with the Rolling Stone writing about fridges as well as she should, but it got me wondering why is the Rolling Stone not writing about Bob Dylan but Bob Vance? For all you, Office fans, Bob Vance sells refrigerators. I think I had to explain that, but basically, why is the rolling still not writing about Bob Dylan and writing about refrigerators? So I did a little bit of digging, and according to Vanity Fair, revenue for the iconic music and lifestyle magazine is projected at a total of around $46 million. That was back in 2017. A print advertising revenue was expected to drop to just $10.9 million in 2020 as compared to ad revenue of $28 million in 2015. So, the circulation revenue was projected to fall by 50% by 2020 according to the Street. So, again, I don't have current numbers. Those are the last numbers that I have, but basically what I'm trying to tell you is that the forecasting numbers were showing that print magazines were losing ad revenue like crazy, which makes sense, because people stopped reading printed magazines and started consuming web content. Now if you go to 2014, Popular Science had a print circulation of 1.3 million. By 2021, it was only digital. It no longer had an actual physical magazine. So, what I'm trying to point out is that these publishers like the Rolling Stone writing about best refrigerators, they're not nefarious, because I want to dominate the SERP and takeaways from small sites. They're trying to pivot because they've all been bought up by huge conglomerates who need to produce some ROI. They need to produce revenue, and they can't do that with print magazines anymore. I don't think the web, by the way, is a better place for any of all of this. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is it hasn't been sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies or whatever for these giant publishers. The reason why they're now out of their lane and talking about product reviews and not about science or music is because they need to find a way to pull in revenue. I'll take it just one step further. If you look at Rolling Stone's web traffic, it's not great either. It went in 2022 from about 44 million searches a month hitting the site from Google, according to Semrush, to about 22 million in 2024, January 2024. They lost half of their organic traffic. Popular Science also doesn't have huge numbers. They bring in under two million users a month from Google. So, they have to expand. They have to find new ways to bring in users, to get eyeballs, to either get subscriptions or to get ad revenue, which I will compare this... By the way, so there's basically two models. There's two ways these people can get revenue. Either they get it through ad revenue or through subscribers, paid subscribers. If it's through the ad revenue per se, the display ads, you need to have the eyeballs. If you're looking at Rolling Stone losing half their organic traffic, they need to new channels or new content areas to write about to pull in that traffic. Now it is possible to get paid subscribers, but that's not easy- Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Obertstein: ... at all. So, check out Rolling Stone. The New York Times is great at this. So, the New York Times in 2023, according to sources, has 10 million total subscribers, 9.7 million of them are digital subscribers. So, less than a million are actual paid subscribers. The New York Times has knocked it out of the park. Compare that to Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone has only 400,000 paid subscribers, which means what? They need the display ad revenue, which means what? They need to find new topics to write about, which is why, which is my last point, which is why they're writing product review content. So, the question is, Crystal, if the Rolling Stone's not a bad actor, they're doing this because they need to find ways to improve organic traffic, to improve their ability to earn from display ads because they're not getting the digital subscribers that they think they should be getting, what are they supposed to do and what's Google supposed to do and what's the web supposed? What are we all supposed to do? Crystal Carter: So I think that the New York Times, I think you mentioned that they have a really big subscriber base, and I think one of the things that the New York Times has been very good is that they have lots of branches of the New York Times and they also have a really, really rock solid IP. So, in terms of intellectual property, people know the brand, people understand the brand, people appreciate the brand. They've also got a lot of legacy content. So, if you're a subscriber, you also get access to that legacy content and it's seen as if you were going to get a new subscription, they will cover most of the bases. Not only will they cover your current events, but they'll also have a great food section, for instance, which is really good. They cover news or they cover sports really well as well. I think that one of the tricky things is that we're in a situation where users have many, many, many options for discovering information, for discovering new content, for finding out what the news is. In fact, you don't even have to go and look for the news. Google sends it to you. I get notifications about different things that are happening all the time, whether I want them or not. So, I think that in that space, there's some tricky space to navigate. So, for a business like the Rolling Stone Magazine for instance, one of the tricky things they have is that they're a music magazine. Well, musicians have their own platforms that are huge. So, if I look up the Rolling Stone for instance on... I keep saying the Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stone Magazine. Mordy Obertstein: Rolling Stones. Crystal Carter: If they look up Rolling Stone Magazine, I can see on Instagram for instance, I can see that they have 7.5 million followers on Instagram for instance. Let's just take that as just a little bit of a benchmark. Their cover star at the moment is Billy Eilish, right? Billy Eilish has 119 million followers. So, I think that the thing is, if you're Rolling Stone and you're trying to publicize your magazine, you're trying to tell people about news, people who are fans of Billy Eilish will follow Billy Eilish and they will get that news probably faster and directly than they would from Rolling Stone. So, I think that in that space, people have to remember the ecosystem for users and the ecosystem for how users are discovering information. In order to do that, you have to have exclusive content. You need to have exclusive information, things that people cannot get from anywhere else. I think that the New York Times is really good at doing that. The Economist I think is really good at that. I don't know their subscriber numbers in particular, but I know that The Economist are a publication that have a very unique perspective in terms of news and you will get content there that you will not get in other places. So, I think it's important to think about that. So, yeah, I mean I'm not knocking the hustle in terms of these big publishers trying to throw the net wide, trying to capture new content funnels, because I think that they're up against a lot of different competition for information for access to the newest, latest thing. Mordy Obertstein: So that's why actually I really wanted to do this episode, because really as you point out, it's an ecosystem question. The way users are consuming content, it's not a pure SEO. It has enormous SEO implications, but it's fundamentally not an SEO question. How do people consume content? Like you mentioned, they're going right to Billy Eilish's Instagram or whatever, and I think it means a few things. One, I think it means that we are due for a market correction around web content. I think it's going to be very painful because I think that the current system or the current contract is not sustainable. It's not sustainable to have a brand so far out of its lane talking about best microwaves and not best albums of the year. That's not a sustainable paradigm. That's not a sustainable model. I don't think it'll fundamentally work, and I don't think it's fundamentally what people want. In a way, they're gaming this system. This will bring me to next point, they know Google's not looking at the Rolling Stone and it's like, "Okay, you talk about music, we're going to rank you for music and only music or whatever entertainment stuff." They're like, "Well, Google's a meritocracy when it comes to pages. So, if we have pages that talk about microwaves and we can rank those pages because Google's not looking at our identity the way that it should be, we can get around this and we can rank for microwaves, pull in people from the SERP, have them look at the ads, perhaps click on the ads, and earn revenue that way." Because by the way, as I mentioned, the Rolling Stone is gated except for product review content. That's not that gated. They're using to get the display ads. I'm not going to call it a manipulation. There's too much negative connotation attached to that, but that is getting around the system. Crystal Carter: Don't hate the player, hate the game. That's what that is. Mordy Obertstein: Exactly, but that's not what fundamentally you want as a user. That's not the way. If you were to envision the web, you would want the web to function, which is my next point that I think what Google needs to do is to rely more on site identity, and I think that's good for everybody. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because here's the thing. Giselle Navarro's article is fantastic. She gets really into all the details. I'm sure we'll link it in the show notes as well, but on the example that she talks about Rolling Stone, she talks about them ranking for air purifiers for pets in 2024. Now, as someone who knows people who are into music and knows people who have extensive record collections and maybe who have very expensive guitars and things like that, air purifiers is not something that people who are musos are not uninterested in. So, if somebody has very expensive vinyl collection, if somebody has very expensive guitars that they do not want to collect dust, they do not want to have damaging their very expensive perfect collection, an air purifier might be something that they're interested in. So, it's very interesting that they're going for something that's so basic and that's not even related to their- Mordy Obertstein: They know the search volumes. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Obertstein: They know the search volumes. Crystal Carter: They know the search volume. So, it's really interesting though that they haven't aligned it to something that is relevant to their audience. I think that that's something that's more long term, I think that's something that could make it valuable to their audience. Mordy Obertstein: That's how they should pivot eventually, but what I think they're trying to do now is saying, "We want to hit X number, X revenue number. We need to hit X revenue." When they got bought out by whoever who I think in 2018 they got bought out by somebody, they need to justify the purchase. They need to hit X dollars and cents, mainly dollars, and no one cares about the cents. We're going to do that. If we can do that, we will do that and that's what they're doing. If Google gets it right and if Google says we're going to rely more on site identity, so if you are a website that focuses on product reviews or on air purifiers, or in the case of Rolling Stone, music and instruments, so the best guitars of 2024, which guitars did you buy? Forget the air purifier. Which guitars did you buy? Then they'll be forced to do that. But what that'll mean for them as an organization unfortunately is they'll have to slim down, which they're trying to, or whoever bought them will have to incur a loss if they haven't made up the money already. That's what I mean, there's no way around the pain for these big publishers in my opinion. My prediction to quote Mr. T, pain. Crystal Carter: We had Barry Adams talking about SEO as a team sport on our last podcast. Barry Adams is somebody who's been working with news publishers for years for the majority of his career, and he talks about that they've been dealing with this since probably about 2018. Particularly UK publishers were hit really, really hard in 2018. Mordy Obertstein: I remember him talking about it. Crystal Carter: They have not seen the return to prominence or to visibility on the SERP since then. I think that that has created a really complex situation for some of these publishers. I think that where you see high quality publishing, then I think that it's really valuable for the web overall. I think it's really, really valuable for everyone. So, I hope that people are able to find something that's not just talking about air purifiers that are nothing to do with their core audience, but yeah, I do agree that it's something that's going to be very, very difficult to address in the next one. Mordy Obertstein: There's no easy solution. There's like either this continues on and Google doesn't address it, in which case Google will experience pain, because this doesn't reflect well on Google. It's like something somewhere has to give. Either the publishers are going to have to refine their focus because Google's going to force them to, or Google's going to be like, "Yeah, do what you want," which it's basically doing now, but Google will experience pain. Crystal Carter: But I think also there are a lot of publications who are leaning towards a multichannel approach. So, for instance, I follow British Vogue and Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is a fantastic publication. They don't just talk about teen stuff. They talk about lots of really interesting stuff. They're fantastic publications and they publish some great stuff across their social as well. They published some great stuff on YouTube as well. So, I think that there's lots of news publishers that are essentially using their brand. So, they're leveraging their brand across multiple channels, and I think that that brand legacy, particularly for some of these high legacy publications like Rolling Stone, like Vogue, like Grazia even, that brand recognition allows them to make a splash in some of those channels that would be much more difficult to do for other publications as well. Mordy Obertstein: Great minds because I was going to say the way out of this for publishers is to do what the New York Times did because the New York Times has done this successfully. As I mentioned before, something like 95% of their subscriptions are digital and they have an enormous amount of revenue from their digital subscriptions. Semrush did an event, Global Marketing Day in 2022, I don't remember 2023, one of those years. I was on a panel with someone from the New York Times. They talked about how they did this and basically it was brand building. They basically created a brand campaign basically showing you why you should want to pay for quality journalism, why that's not free and why you shouldn't expect it. If you want good stuff, you got to pay for it thing. That's what these brands need to do, but that's the issue. The real fundamental issue in my mind is that these brands, because they have all these metrics to meet, overvalue performance marketing. They're not thinking of the longer brand play and how the brand play will allow them to tap into the performance market they so deeply and desperately want, but it's going to be a brand play first and then it's going to be a performance play. They're not willing to do that yet because they're not willing to take the immediate repercussions of, okay, it's going to be difficult for a period of time. We are the Rolling Stone. We need to create content that's worthy of you paying for a subscription and we need to build a brand around that and we need to build a desire around that that's going to take time. They're it seems like not willing to invest in that time and resources to do that so that they can have a model that's actually sustainable, not relying on Google's algorithm to not care the fact they're running about microwaves and not guitars. Crystal Carter: I know that there are some people who have some interesting opinions on how Forbes do things, for instance, but Forbes have a lot of really interesting strands of the way that they generate income and the way that they connect with their community because I think that's another point as well. So, people who subscribe to Rolling Stone, people who are reading Rolling Stone are people who are interested in music, right? They're very interested in music and that stuff. There's some great brand partnerships that you can do across that. Forbes for instance has a lot of communities that they run. They have CMO communities. They have communities for different people with different intersectionalities and they have a series of events that they run across the year that are really, really well attended and really, really interesting. They also have their Forbes panel and people are like, "Oh, I'm on the Forbes panel and I do that thing." So I think that they also have a really interesting strand that they're pulling through and all of that helps to build up their brand. So, that IRL interaction with the brand, you can be a part of it, part of the brand, also brings that together. But I think if I go to rollingstone.com for instance, it doesn't really feel very interactive when I go in there. It doesn't feel like I could contribute. It doesn't feel like it's something that I could be a part of particularly. It's just like here's some stuff that Billy Eilish has done. Here's Drake mostly made himself look bad on his latest diss. I don't know. It's just opinion pieces about music and that's fine. That's fine, but I think that if you want to cut through, for instance, if you want to cut through to a very two-way internet that we have these days, it's both ways. Your people are reading your stuff, people are responding to your stuff. They're replying in the comments. There's people who on YouTube, on Instagram, on any of the video things, on literally any post on social media, people are like, "I'm just here for the comments. I literally just came here for the comments." So people expect to have that instant feedback, that instant participation in whatever media they're consuming. I think that brands that are able to make people feel connected to them, either in person or online or both are going to get a lot more out of that. Mordy Obertstein: 100%, I could not possibly agree more, but to weigh in now on what the SERP currently looks like or means for smaller, mid-sized publishers is the aforementioned wonderful Giselle Navarro. So, here's Giselle and what the SERP currently looks like for small to mid-sized publishers. Giselle Navarro: I can only answer this question confidently from the point of view of being the manager data of HouseFresh and being a small publisher within the air quality space. So, that's where I'm going to be answering it from. I don't know if this is the case for every other small publisher in every other niche, but it definitely is something I've seen in our space. That is that on top of what everybody already knows of big media sites being pushed to the top across different types of queries, a trend that I've noticed increasingly since September, October last year is a big push from Google site to get searchers to just buy from the SERPs. So, whether that is adding a sidebar filter product as if it were to be a shopping filter within search that perhaps are not a product search or they are a recommendation, what are the best amplifiers for bedrooms or something like that, and then suddenly, you already immediately get a filter pop up to your left, the sidebar that is just giving you options for you to filter by brand, by this, by that. Obviously, at that point, you don't know. That's why you're searching. Within that, it's not just that. There's also the topics at the top. So, when you're making searches like, "Oh, now what are the best budget amplifiers?" Suddenly, you get all these tags at the top, which when you were to add them to your search, the search gets regenerated again, and then the top results are always products. Then there's also shopping listings within subs and huge blocks like six rows of products, eight rows in some cases. Again, these are queries that are not people looking specifically for a brand and a product or a specific model. They are looking for information to try to make a decision and they're being pushed. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of these are sponsored shopping ads and they're not very good products at all. In many cases, they don't even satisfy the actual queries. So, if somebody's looking for best HEPA air purifier, I'm going a bit nerd here, but if somebody is looking for that, which is a specific air filtration technology, some of the products that get surfaced, and a lot of them actually are not even... They have other technologies. So, it's not even that Google is serving products and these products are the right products or that are useful products. Actually, they're misinforming people and confusing people and we get a lot of emails from readers who are confused and they would say, "I spent all this time and I was reading this and I was reading that. I just don't understand anymore and I was so happy to found your article." We interact with a lot of people on Reddit and it happens a lot that they are very confused. I think the reason why people are confused is because the searches are not really clarifying anything and just pushing more products at them. So, definitely, that's something that I have noticed. I don't know if every other small publisher is seeing the same, but that definitely has been a trend that I see growing of Google trying to push searchers to buy directly from Google, which is not great, because you wouldn't go to find information inside of Amazon or inside of Target or Walmart. So, if they're forgetting about the information part of what they're doing, then they're just trying to become a retailer. Obviously, they're not because they have deals with brands that pay ads and all this stuff. So, they're not even familiarizing themselves with the products, which is unfortunate, because at least that maybe they would do a better job. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much, Giselle. Make sure to give Giselle a follow over at I-C-H-B-I-N-G-I-S-E-L-E over on X and look for her on LinkedIn as well. I think Aleyda Solís was talking about this, maybe I'm getting this wrong, back at the SEOFOMO event we did with her at the Wix Playground in New York where just the e-com SERP is such a problem in a way. It's an opportunity, it's also a problem. It's interesting because you don't think of her product reviews and publishers, but those sites overlap with product buying intent. If I'm talking about best microwave, Google can interpret that as okay, here's a bunch of articles about choosing the best microwave or here are the best microwaves. That puts publishers at a very, very, very serious disadvantage, because if you look at the way, if you're not familiar, if you Google something like buy a microwave, at least in the US and other markets, the whole SERP changes. There are sidebar filters and PLA ads. It's a very different looking SERP and the organic results get lost in there. Crystal Carter: Giselle is coming from this place where she's looking after her brand. She's trying to make sure that everything's being displayed the way that she expects it to be, and she's trying to make sure that she understands her competitor landscape. So, she's looking at this and she's like, "The competitors that I'm seeing here are not the competitors that I would normally expect to see here." That's really, really tricky. Like you're saying, it's a really complex SERP. If you're doing buy a microwave, you expect to be maybe competing with other people who are selling microwaves. If you're suddenly competing with Rolling Stone for instance, it's tricky to figure out your strategy for that because you can't be everything for everyone. If they're looking for articles instead, that's going to change the way that you approach that particular digital marketing strategy. So, yeah, I think that it is tricky and they're constantly tinkering with that SERP. So, they're adding in things via Google Lens and they're adding in competitor aggregator thing. So, for instance, if you see one type of a Samsung microwave, I think they make microwaves. Yeah, if you see a Samsung microwave, they'll show a few different listings underneath it, which is slightly different from the way they were doing it before. Like you said, you get lots of filters. Sometimes you pretty much land on the shopping page for some things. So, yeah, it's really complexer. I think that those working in e-comm have a lot to think about at the moment. Mordy Obertstein: It's like a mini Amazon. The query I'm looking at, I'm doing best microwave, it's not even a full on transactional query and it looks like Amazon. It's hard. Give yourself a big thank you, Giselle, for contributing and for all the work you've been doing in this area for the SEO community over the past how many number of years already. Anyway, the SERP aside and that's no small thing, but there's a wider web out there just over yonder, past Google, skip it a stone, past Google. The question is how healthy is the web overall for the publishing community? To help us, we ask famed content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, how she see things as we move past pure SEO and go into the great beyond. Alli Berry: I will say that I think the state of online publishing is a little unpredictable at the moment. I think it really depends on what kind of online publishing we're talking about. I can tell you for affiliate for example, I have a client right now who has great organic rankings in certain financial verticals and is losing traffic not necessarily to competitors, but mostly to new SERP features. It looks like Google is adding SERP features that are providing their own set of recommendations based on who is popular for queries that have best or review or what have you in the query. Instead of seeing affiliate reviews for various products, I think you're going to see more brands that Google is associating with those terms, which is going to make it harder for affiliates to do well. I think you'll also see so much more Reddit everywhere, which is enraging, because so much of it is frankly shit. There are some sites that I think are doing affiliate the right way and actually testing products, and I think a lot of them are getting buried now for Reddit results. So, I think next to the question of can publishers still thrive? If you're trying to get into affiliate or build an affiliate publishing program, it's going to be a tough time for you. I don't know what else to say there. It's possible, especially if your brand already has some clout, but it's tough out there. I would be looking to diversify my revenue sources if I were you because it feels like Google is trying to bury affiliate sites from my perspective. There are some very authoritative sites that have gained ground in affiliate. Rarely do they have the best content on the topic, which is really frustrating for some of the smaller sites, but I think the opposite of diversification seems to be happening in the SERPs. So, if you're new, it's going to be tough. For bigger news publishers, so affiliate aside, I think it's also a strange time from what I've been seeing and hearing. Certainly, the big publishers are looking for ways to use AI to help them be more efficient, which really means they're trying to use AI to write certain types of articles and get away with it. I do think SGE has the potential to disrupt the news game a little bit. I think it's going to be more important than ever for news outlets to be the first to report something before AI can regurgitate it. I think interviews are going to be more valuable. Anything that is actually unique and human driven is the best way to combat SGE. Many publishers are moving away from content syndication, which to me feels long overdue. Google hasn't made any changes that would really cause publishers to make this change other than they keep saying, you should really ask your syndication partners to de-index the syndicated version of the article, which is wild and ridiculous and would never happen. Maybe everyone syndicating is finally starting to see how they were getting outranked by partners and the economics weren't really working out for them. It's definitely no longer as lucrative as it once was, especially since Yahoo has been pedaling down syndication and made the decision to bring content in house. It's an interesting decision too. If you look at Yahoo today, they're trying to be more of a news source than a search engine, which I think is interesting. I've also been looking at some smaller publishers that are more focused on niche topics, so local happenings, mommy blogs. There's been a lot of drop off in traffic for many of these sites that I've been looking at. The Pioneer Woman, My Dallas Mommy, Your Brooklyn Guide, et cetera, a lot of these sites do product promotions, event promotions for kickbacks. They have commissionable links. I'm wondering if Google is finally coming after those, but then if you look at food blogs, there's some really great SERP diversification that's present and happening there. New York Times Cooking is actually losing ground, which surprised me. All recipes has been steady but not growing and there are some really cool smaller sites with visibility like Love and Lemons, Once Upon a Chef. I don't really know what to make of it all. I think in certain verticals, there is a lot of hope for success for newer publishers. In others, a lot of them being in the YMYL space, maybe run far, far away. I do think though that the key to success doesn't seem that different than it did a decade ago. Really, I think if you're starting a new online publication, you should start with a unique angle, have a niche, build a small, engaged audience, do whatever you're going to do content wise, consistently learn from what's working, double down on it. You really should be able to build an audience over time. If you have that audience and go in your site directly and they're spreading the word and all of that good stuff, I do think you can still grow a site today, but it's definitely harder than it once was. I think you're going to do better if you're not in the YMYL space because it does seem like Google is doing the opposite of diversification there. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much for that, Alli. There's so much to chew on there. First up, that war on affiliates, we actually spoke about that a few episodes ago with Glenn Gabe. So, it's nice to hear some concurrence around that issue, around that topic because I think it's definitely what's going on. I think it's also interesting that she's talking about, and we're going to be talking about in another episode or two, about the value of brand ranking as opposed to affiliates ranking. I think that's where things are going to go. Again, it goes into this whole topic of Google's war in affiliate marketing or affiliate websites rather. It makes sense in a way that Google's going to double down on ranking those brands that have that identity, that are well established, that are well known, that have a strong digital presence and ranking them about their own stuff in the end, which is interesting because of the conflict of interest. But I think for Google's point of view, it's the lesser of two evils. If I have to rely on affiliate strike, the conflict of interest in a brand themselves and the conflict of interest in an affiliate trying to generate revenue, I would say that the lesser of those two evils is the brand themselves. I think they're more reliable. I think they're less likely to push things, less likely to lie for lack of a better word. I think it might be a little too harsh, but skew the truth, less likely to skew the truth. In that sense, I think she might be right that Google's going to say, "You know what? Forget all this. Let's just go with the brand." If that's by the way what happens, then folks like the Rolling Stone like we were talking about earlier are going to see their ranking slip away and it's going to increase the focus on doubling down on brand authority, brand presence, and all things brand, which we'll talk about in a later podcast. Crystal Carter: It's such a complex space for Google. It's such a complex space for brands. I think that everyone really needs to knuckle down on doing high quality content and that's for their users. I think one of the things that she touched upon was moving away from syndicated content, moving towards unique content, moving towards stuff that really differentiates yourself. I think that that is really a return to the core of what the web has been about for a good amount of time or what it should be about anyway. Give Google a reason to rank you. Give people a reason to actually visit your page that is unique to you, and I think that that's really important. I think that think about the unique perspective that you have on it, even if it is product reviews, even if it is the best microwave. Why is your best microwave page interesting? People often bring up that The Verge article that's about the printer. Mordy Obertstein: The printer, the Brother printer. Crystal Carter: They're like, "Oh, just buy the Brother printer." Don't get me wrong, they do- Mordy Obertstein: I did by the way. That's literally what I did. That's literally what I did. Crystal Carter: So those ones, that article is really actually interesting because it's both doing all of the things that you expect to see, but it's actually poking fun at that in an interesting way. It's breaking the fourth wall really on that content and that makes it unique. I think that that's where we need to think about. Be actually unique. Take that risk, be unique. Mordy Obertstein: It's interesting and it's something that we'll talk about on a later podcast episode. I know because we recorded a little bit out of order, so breaking the fourth wall for you, but I'm interested to see if brands will be able to do this because it's going to be taking your foot off the gas pedal a little bit. It's the same question we talked about the affiliate marketers. If brands are going to be searching for best microwave and it's ranking Samsung and their post about their best microwaves, they're going to have to do a little more on the informational side and a little less on the conversion side. Just like affiliate marketers are facing that same problem, will brands think about the overall brand value that that will bring and take the foot off the conversion performance marketing for just a bit? Who knows? Crystal Carter: Who knows? That's the question. Mordy Obertstein: You know what I do know? I know that when we cover the SEO news, we might cover Search Engine Journal and Matt Southern and Roger Monty who do a great job and even Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Obertstein: But I know we're going to cover at least one article from Barry. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Obertstein: So this is week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Whoa, that's a lot going on, but two big stories, one bigger than the next. I'm so flustered, I don't know where to start. Okay, here we go. From Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Roundtable, Google AI overviews are here to stay with improvements, the Ray AIO update, named after Lilly Ray. It's awesome. Anyway, Barry writes that "Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid wrote a blog post about AI overviews and how they're basically improving them and how they can make improvements and what they're doing to improve them," and so forth and so forth and so forth. I'll get into that in a second, but this comes with a blizzard of critique across the internet about the AI overviews and they're hallucinating. They're not accurate. They're recommending ridiculous things, yada, yada, yada, yada. So, this is Google essentially, I think, responding to that. Google made a whole bunch of claims. I'll read what Barry quoted Liz is saying here. We found a content policy violation on less than one in every seven million unique queries on which AIO reviews appeared and that they will keep improving, when and how we show AIO reviews and strengthening our protections and yada, yada, yada, yada, and yada. Some of the things that Liz Reid went on to say are a little bit, I guess, controversial. For example, she said that AI overviews are as accurate and as good as featured snippets or the accuracy is as good as feature snippets rather. They seem to be saying that a lot of these cases being shared across the internet of AI overviews going off the deep end are fake. That's a pretty heavy accusation to make, but Google did admit and they write, but some odd, inaccurate, unhelpful AI overview certainly did show up. The long story short is Google has heard of the web complaining about the AI overviews. They are responding. They are making improvements, and they're not going anywhere. There's going to be more AIO reviews. It's part of the core search experience, they said. I guess we'll have to keep an eye on what happens and how they improve or don't improve. Share your thoughts out there on the ether because it's a very controversial topic. Even more controversial topic, if you can imagine that. Oh boy, this from iPullRank, friend of the show, friend of the Wix SEO Learning Hub, friend of SEO in general, Mike King wrote an article, Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search's Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked. So, there was some leak internal documentation from Google searches content warehouse API that show theoretically what's happening in the algorithm. I'll talk about it from a top level TLDR point of view really quick. A lot of the things that Google has said they don't do or have indicated perhaps they don't do are shown in the API. Meaning that, oh, maybe they are actually doing these things. Google responded back basically saying, "This leak is real. However, you don't know just on reading the leak if this was a test, what exactly it means, how to interpret it, how heavy to weight any of these things and so forth." That is true. I'll get to some of the specifics in a minute. We don't know if they were part of a one-time test. We don't know. It's hard to piece this together. I'm going to try my best to piece it together the best that I possibly can in a snappy manner. This is not going to be snappy. I'm just letting you know right now. The second thing I want to say before I get into some of the details, people have started to question Google's honesty and whether or not some of their search advocates are good people. The answer is they are good people. Being a public spokesperson for a public company as large and as complicated as Google is not easy. I don't want to put words in any of this search advocate's mouths. This is my take. A lot of the time, I think you have what you have and you have to do the best with what you have and be as transparent with what you have and with what you are allowed and not allowed to say. You just have to do your best to be as transparent as possible with what you have to work with. I think the search advocates have done that the best they possibly could. So, I think a lot of the rhetoric or the negative rhetoric around the particular search advocates needs to be toned down. We need to be realistic and understanding of what it means for them to be in that role, what they are allowed to say, what they're not allowed to say, and what the best they possibly can do with what they have to work with. That aside, there was a lot of juicy information inside of this. Mike runs through it here in the original article. He also wrote an article on search engine land entitled, "How SEO Moves Forward with Google Content Warehouse API Leak." I'll link to both of those in the show notes. You can read through them on your own. Where do I start? Where do I start? Where do I start? Okay. So, I'm going to start with my approach to this is we don't know exactly what Google is using, what they're not using, how much of it they're using, to what extent they're weighing it and so forth. I like to look at these things a bit directionally. If you were to paint a picture, what direction does this show you where Google is going? In other words, what is Google at least trying to do? Because at a minimum, they're using these things in testing. So, what are they trying to do? That we do know. So, I look at this very directionally and what direction should we go based upon the direction that Google seems to be going with what was shown in the API leaks. With that, and I have just a bunch of random, random stuff to run through here, oh boy, okay. There is information that indicates that Google is using clicks. They have calls for metrics for bad clicks, good clicks, last longest clicks and so forth. If you combine that with the leak from the DOJ trial where they indicated there's something called Nav Boost that's looking at user behavior and in fact doing that into ranking, you do see that user behavior does really factor into the ranking equation in my opinion. It has been an issue of debate in front of the SEO for a while. I've actually personally, I'll call myself out, have gone back and forth on this over the years. It does very much seem that Google is incorporating user behavior into the algorithm. That doesn't mean you should be manipulating for clicks. What it does mean is that you need to think about the experience the user has on the website. Is the UX navigatable? Is that a word? I don't know. Can it be navigated easily? Does the content engage them? Does it satisfy their needs? Does it make them want to read another article from you and so forth? I think a lot of the things we're going to talk about here really quickly have to do with how strong your branding is, how strong of a website you are. When people go to the SERP and they see you ranking, let's say you're ranking number five and not number two or number one, do they click on you anyway because you have such a strong brand around that topic? To that, and again, I'm trying to go in some logical order here because there's so much to cover. So, part of what we've seen from the leaks that Google is looking to determine how on target your content is with your overall site and with what you're trying to do, or if it's not, which means as Mike writes in his article, actually content needs to be more focused. He writes, "We've learned definitively that Google uses vector embedding to determine how far off a given page is from the rest of what you talk about. This indicates that it'll be challenging to go far into upper funnel content successfully without a structured expansion or without authors who have demonstrated expertise in that subject area. Encourage your authors to call expertise in what they publish across the web and treat it to the gold standard that it is." Meaning Google's looking at the embeddings to see how far off they do or do it online with what you're writing about, and I've talked about this for years already. Google is able to look at and see what you're writing about and how much it does or doesn't align with who you are as an entity, with who you are as a brand or a business and so forth. One of the other interesting things along this line is that Google seems to have some commercial scoring where it's saying, "Okay, is this content commercial or not?" I speculate and that gives it something I've seen for a long time that might be because a lot of blog content tries to pretend that it's informational content, but really it's commercial content or backhanded commercial content. So, perhaps I have seen Google do this algorithmically. Perhaps this is the element that's doing that where they're able to say, "Okay, wait a second. This is not an actual information piece. This is actually a commercial piece. We can profile it like that." Which again goes back to the earlier point. Make sure your content meets the user need. It's more targeted and more specific and more, I'll say, transparent than anything else. There's a site authority score that came out of this. Google say, "We don't look at domain authority, blah, blah, blah," but there is a site authority score. I think we all knew there was an overall quality score to the website. Google said that there is an overall quality score. I know we talked about topic authority, so that would align with that as well. There's things in there around navigation demotions. This goes back to what we said before. If the UX isn't great, you could tell the user is not having successful experience with the website, that UX can impact rank. Again, make sure you're keeping your users in mind first and foremost. On short content, there seems to be some originality scoring, whether it's actively being used or not being used, but you see where Google is trying to go. So, much short content is just replicated over and over and over and over again. Google's looking to make sure that that content when they rank it has some originality to it. Whether or not they're actually doing it, whether or not that's a test, you do see where Google is directionally trying to go with something like that, which I think is the most important thing. Where is Google trying to go? I look at this again, like the quality rate guidelines are not in the algorithm per se, but it's definitely a clear statement of where Google wants to go. There's a lot about mentions in there. There's a whole slew of information about results getting re-ranked last second. Meaning last second factors or last second read jiggering of the results that happen as the query is being processed can happen. It's why you might see rank fluctuations being inconsistent perhaps sometimes for you and so forth and so forth and so forth. There is a lot in there. I think, again, my general takeaway is that there's a lot in there that points to content being more specific, content being aligned to what the site wants to do or what they say they do. Glenn Gabe actually recently talked about this in a case study that he did on the March 2024 core update. I'll link to that in the show notes also. So, again, the directionally see that things with navigation, user experience, user behavior, meaning making sure the user is satisfied. Google's trying to find ways to measure that. Make sure your users are satisfied. Make sure that you are recognizable as a brand because again, if Google is looking at what's happening on the SERP and you are recognized entity out there in that niche that can help you, it would seemingly help you with rankings. But again, read these articles but look at it again, like the quality reader's guidelines in many ways. What does it show you about where Google is trying to go? This is the very much not very snappy news. All right. News aside, well, not news aside actually, because our follower of the week comes from the news world. She actually recently spoke by the time this episode airs at the first New York City SEO for NEWS Meetup hosted at the Wix Playground in New York City by NewzDash and former guest of this podcast, John Shehata. She is the Senior Director of SEO at ESPN. I can't help myself. That sound is so nostalgic for me by the way. She is Louisa Frahm. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Fantastic follow. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, give her a big follow over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her in the show notes. ESPN does some amazing... That is a lot of content to run through. They run a double model. They have a paywall model and they have a pure open, organic, go ahead and read it model. It's really interesting what they're able to do, what they're able to rank for. She shares a lot of knowledge. So, follow Louisa over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I think that it's great to follow publishers as well. So, follow her. Absolutely, there's some great publishers to follow because they are, like you said, dealing with a lot of content and they to get really creative with the way that they present content. Sometimes Google has different features as well. So, if you think about sports for instance, sometimes you can get the sports scores on Google itself. So, publishers, for instance, for ESPN will have to think about how they capture content or how they capture traffic in new ways as they respond to those new SERP features. I think that it's great to pay attention to the ways that some of the big players do that. Mordy Obertstein: Interesting. By the way, pro tip, one way to do that is being more reliable. So, I consume a lot of sports and I go to that Google Box all the time. Sometimes because it defaults to an American time zone and I don't live in America anymore. It'll still default the game sometimes to the American Times. I'm like, "No, that doesn't look right." I'll go to ESPN and they do a better job of adjusting the times automatically. So, I know what I'm actually looking at. Crystal Carter: Unique and adding value. Mordy Obertstein: Added value and reliability. It's such an under thing, reliability. Crystal Carter: It's so important. Mordy Obertstein: So important. It's good for your website. It's good for your relationships. Reliability, it's good for everything. Crystal Carter: Not just SEO tips, people. Life skills, life tips. Mordy Obertstein: Right. We should do a life skills episode. Crystal Carter: Optimize your life. Mordy Obertstein: Optimize your life, the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: What is your life H1? Mordy Obertstein: Me? Crystal Carter: Any thoughts? Mordy Obertstein: Oh, off the cuff? Hide. Crystal Carter: So your H1 is white text on a white background. Is that what you're telling me? Mordy Obertstein: Hide. Get a screaming hide somewhere. Hide. Crystal Carter: I'm going to have to think about what mine is. Mordy Obertstein: I see a lot of neighbors. Hide. It's so good. Time to reveal too much. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next time with the new episode as we dive into why branded search matters more than you think it does. 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 and webinars on the Wix 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 Gisele Navarro Alli Berry Louisa Frahm Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Housefresh News: Google AI Overviews Are Here To Stay With Improvements - The Ray AIO Update Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked How SEO moves forward with the Google Content Warehouse API leak Google March 2024 Core Update Case Study: A tale of four tremors, reversals, and a great example of the counterbalancing of systems Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gisele Navarro Alli Berry Louisa Frahm Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Housefresh News: Google AI Overviews Are Here To Stay With Improvements - The Ray AIO Update Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked How SEO moves forward with the Google Content Warehouse API leak Google March 2024 Core Update Case Study: A tale of four tremors, reversals, and a great example of the counterbalancing of systems Transcript Mordy Obertstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Obertstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I am joined by the prolific, should not be understated. She won't take credit for it, but she is prolific head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hi, everybody. I'm trying to remember what prolific means. I'm think it means you do a lot of stuff. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, and particularly writing and I don't like writing. I don't do a lot of writing, but you think about it, you actually do a lot of writing and publishing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I do a little bit, sometimes more than not. Do you know what it is? It's like I go through phases. Sometimes I have nothing, and then sometimes I'm just like, "And this and this and that and this and this and this and this." So you go through ebbs and flows. Mordy Obertstein: I'll break the fourth wall. I schedule a lot of my tweets and LinkedIn posts, and I try to sit down for an hour or so on a Sunday and plan it all out. There are weeks where I got 30,000 things to say, and that's good because everybody's like, "I have nothing to write." Crystal Carter: Right? This is it, but that's a good way to do it. It's a good way to do it though. You plan it, you do the things, but I think also I got to be in the mood. I feel clear. Also, I find my favorite time of writing is on a train. Mordy Obertstein: On a plane, in a box with a fox? Crystal Carter: Here or there or anywhere. Mordy Obertstein: I do not love writing anywhere. Crystal Carter: But no, I love writing on a train. You just sit down. Also, I like writing when there's no WiFi, because I love Grammarly. I love being able to look stuff up, but when there's no WiFi, you can just write. You can just get it all out, brain dump, and there's nothing going. Did you spell that right? And then I get distracted and that's truth. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, you get distracted. Truth. It is annoying. Crystal Carter: Yeah. There'll be two things at the same time. You'll have the document. We'll give you, "Oh, I don't know that spelling," and then Grammarly will say something to you as well. Then it's like I can't. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, better off not spelling things correctly or having good grammar. It works for Barry. Anyway, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. You can only subscribe to your SEO newsletter search like each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. To clarify, you can subscribe whenever you want. It releases every month, but it's also where you can use our winter integration within the Wix and Wix Studio SEO setup checklist and SEO assistant to find the healthiest keywords for your site and your pages. Because today, we're evaluating the health of Google's ecosystem for media publishers, because after all, if the Rolling Stone is writing articles about the best fridges in 2024 and not about this best singer songwriters from 1964, perhaps there's a problem. We'll get into big publishers publishing out of their lane, the forum frenzy on the SERP and what it all means for publishers, and Google's push for publishers to use AI. Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of HouseFresh, has a thing or two to say about the state of the SERPs for publishers as she'll stop by to share what the SERP currently looks like for small and medium-sized publishers. Alli Berry will also pop in to share her outlook on publishers being able to thrive on the web beyond just SEO. Of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and you should be following for more awesomeness on social media. So, breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in. Okay. You can probably breathe out now as episode 90 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you assess your publishing health on that crazy little thing we call the internet. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic introduction. Mordy Obertstein: It's one of those classic things. I don't know if that reference holds true for everybody. When you go to the doctor as a kid, breathe in, breathe out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they got the stethoscope. They get to see all that. Mordy Obertstein: They can do that now. Crystal Carter: If you listen to a stethoscope, you can hear all stuff. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, my wife is a nurse. So, my kids walk around all the time. She doesn't use a stethoscope anymore so much anyway. Crystal Carter: Okay, but then somebody shouts into the stethoscope, it's like, "Oh!" Mordy Obertstein: That's not a good idea. Crystal Carter: Oh no, don't do that. That would be bad. Mordy Obertstein: You know what's bad? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Obertstein: The state of the SERP publishers. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Obertstein: Is that too much? Too heavy? Crystal Carter: Oh, that was hard. Mordy Obertstein: Too early. That's the answer, too early. Too early for that. Crystal Carter: Talk about Knicks in the playoffs. Wow. Mordy Obertstein: Playoffs. That's a sport, deep cut right there. Playoffs. We're not getting into that. Anyway, anyway, anyway, back on track. A few months ago, Giselle Navarro, who we'll hear from in just a bit, wrote a piece that took the SEO world by storm and it basically showed how large publishers dominate the product review SERP. Product reviews meaning best microwaves 2024. These big publishers were not who you thought they were. It wasn't the Wirecutter who you would expect, who I would expect, who I love. Love the Wirecutter. It's not the Wirecutter. It's sites like the Rolling Stone and Popular Science writing product review content. So, Giselle working for a review site obviously took issue with the Rolling Stone writing about fridges as well as she should, but it got me wondering why is the Rolling Stone not writing about Bob Dylan but Bob Vance? For all you, Office fans, Bob Vance sells refrigerators. I think I had to explain that, but basically, why is the rolling still not writing about Bob Dylan and writing about refrigerators? So I did a little bit of digging, and according to Vanity Fair, revenue for the iconic music and lifestyle magazine is projected at a total of around $46 million. That was back in 2017. A print advertising revenue was expected to drop to just $10.9 million in 2020 as compared to ad revenue of $28 million in 2015. So, the circulation revenue was projected to fall by 50% by 2020 according to the Street. So, again, I don't have current numbers. Those are the last numbers that I have, but basically what I'm trying to tell you is that the forecasting numbers were showing that print magazines were losing ad revenue like crazy, which makes sense, because people stopped reading printed magazines and started consuming web content. Now if you go to 2014, Popular Science had a print circulation of 1.3 million. By 2021, it was only digital. It no longer had an actual physical magazine. So, what I'm trying to point out is that these publishers like the Rolling Stone writing about best refrigerators, they're not nefarious, because I want to dominate the SERP and takeaways from small sites. They're trying to pivot because they've all been bought up by huge conglomerates who need to produce some ROI. They need to produce revenue, and they can't do that with print magazines anymore. I don't think the web, by the way, is a better place for any of all of this. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is it hasn't been sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies or whatever for these giant publishers. The reason why they're now out of their lane and talking about product reviews and not about science or music is because they need to find a way to pull in revenue. I'll take it just one step further. If you look at Rolling Stone's web traffic, it's not great either. It went in 2022 from about 44 million searches a month hitting the site from Google, according to Semrush, to about 22 million in 2024, January 2024. They lost half of their organic traffic. Popular Science also doesn't have huge numbers. They bring in under two million users a month from Google. So, they have to expand. They have to find new ways to bring in users, to get eyeballs, to either get subscriptions or to get ad revenue, which I will compare this... By the way, so there's basically two models. There's two ways these people can get revenue. Either they get it through ad revenue or through subscribers, paid subscribers. If it's through the ad revenue per se, the display ads, you need to have the eyeballs. If you're looking at Rolling Stone losing half their organic traffic, they need to new channels or new content areas to write about to pull in that traffic. Now it is possible to get paid subscribers, but that's not easy- Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Obertstein: ... at all. So, check out Rolling Stone. The New York Times is great at this. So, the New York Times in 2023, according to sources, has 10 million total subscribers, 9.7 million of them are digital subscribers. So, less than a million are actual paid subscribers. The New York Times has knocked it out of the park. Compare that to Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone has only 400,000 paid subscribers, which means what? They need the display ad revenue, which means what? They need to find new topics to write about, which is why, which is my last point, which is why they're writing product review content. So, the question is, Crystal, if the Rolling Stone's not a bad actor, they're doing this because they need to find ways to improve organic traffic, to improve their ability to earn from display ads because they're not getting the digital subscribers that they think they should be getting, what are they supposed to do and what's Google supposed to do and what's the web supposed? What are we all supposed to do? Crystal Carter: So I think that the New York Times, I think you mentioned that they have a really big subscriber base, and I think one of the things that the New York Times has been very good is that they have lots of branches of the New York Times and they also have a really, really rock solid IP. So, in terms of intellectual property, people know the brand, people understand the brand, people appreciate the brand. They've also got a lot of legacy content. So, if you're a subscriber, you also get access to that legacy content and it's seen as if you were going to get a new subscription, they will cover most of the bases. Not only will they cover your current events, but they'll also have a great food section, for instance, which is really good. They cover news or they cover sports really well as well. I think that one of the tricky things is that we're in a situation where users have many, many, many options for discovering information, for discovering new content, for finding out what the news is. In fact, you don't even have to go and look for the news. Google sends it to you. I get notifications about different things that are happening all the time, whether I want them or not. So, I think that in that space, there's some tricky space to navigate. So, for a business like the Rolling Stone Magazine for instance, one of the tricky things they have is that they're a music magazine. Well, musicians have their own platforms that are huge. So, if I look up the Rolling Stone for instance on... I keep saying the Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stone Magazine. Mordy Obertstein: Rolling Stones. Crystal Carter: If they look up Rolling Stone Magazine, I can see on Instagram for instance, I can see that they have 7.5 million followers on Instagram for instance. Let's just take that as just a little bit of a benchmark. Their cover star at the moment is Billy Eilish, right? Billy Eilish has 119 million followers. So, I think that the thing is, if you're Rolling Stone and you're trying to publicize your magazine, you're trying to tell people about news, people who are fans of Billy Eilish will follow Billy Eilish and they will get that news probably faster and directly than they would from Rolling Stone. So, I think that in that space, people have to remember the ecosystem for users and the ecosystem for how users are discovering information. In order to do that, you have to have exclusive content. You need to have exclusive information, things that people cannot get from anywhere else. I think that the New York Times is really good at doing that. The Economist I think is really good at that. I don't know their subscriber numbers in particular, but I know that The Economist are a publication that have a very unique perspective in terms of news and you will get content there that you will not get in other places. So, I think it's important to think about that. So, yeah, I mean I'm not knocking the hustle in terms of these big publishers trying to throw the net wide, trying to capture new content funnels, because I think that they're up against a lot of different competition for information for access to the newest, latest thing. Mordy Obertstein: So that's why actually I really wanted to do this episode, because really as you point out, it's an ecosystem question. The way users are consuming content, it's not a pure SEO. It has enormous SEO implications, but it's fundamentally not an SEO question. How do people consume content? Like you mentioned, they're going right to Billy Eilish's Instagram or whatever, and I think it means a few things. One, I think it means that we are due for a market correction around web content. I think it's going to be very painful because I think that the current system or the current contract is not sustainable. It's not sustainable to have a brand so far out of its lane talking about best microwaves and not best albums of the year. That's not a sustainable paradigm. That's not a sustainable model. I don't think it'll fundamentally work, and I don't think it's fundamentally what people want. In a way, they're gaming this system. This will bring me to next point, they know Google's not looking at the Rolling Stone and it's like, "Okay, you talk about music, we're going to rank you for music and only music or whatever entertainment stuff." They're like, "Well, Google's a meritocracy when it comes to pages. So, if we have pages that talk about microwaves and we can rank those pages because Google's not looking at our identity the way that it should be, we can get around this and we can rank for microwaves, pull in people from the SERP, have them look at the ads, perhaps click on the ads, and earn revenue that way." Because by the way, as I mentioned, the Rolling Stone is gated except for product review content. That's not that gated. They're using to get the display ads. I'm not going to call it a manipulation. There's too much negative connotation attached to that, but that is getting around the system. Crystal Carter: Don't hate the player, hate the game. That's what that is. Mordy Obertstein: Exactly, but that's not what fundamentally you want as a user. That's not the way. If you were to envision the web, you would want the web to function, which is my next point that I think what Google needs to do is to rely more on site identity, and I think that's good for everybody. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because here's the thing. Giselle Navarro's article is fantastic. She gets really into all the details. I'm sure we'll link it in the show notes as well, but on the example that she talks about Rolling Stone, she talks about them ranking for air purifiers for pets in 2024. Now, as someone who knows people who are into music and knows people who have extensive record collections and maybe who have very expensive guitars and things like that, air purifiers is not something that people who are musos are not uninterested in. So, if somebody has very expensive vinyl collection, if somebody has very expensive guitars that they do not want to collect dust, they do not want to have damaging their very expensive perfect collection, an air purifier might be something that they're interested in. So, it's very interesting that they're going for something that's so basic and that's not even related to their- Mordy Obertstein: They know the search volumes. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Obertstein: They know the search volumes. Crystal Carter: They know the search volume. So, it's really interesting though that they haven't aligned it to something that is relevant to their audience. I think that that's something that's more long term, I think that's something that could make it valuable to their audience. Mordy Obertstein: That's how they should pivot eventually, but what I think they're trying to do now is saying, "We want to hit X number, X revenue number. We need to hit X revenue." When they got bought out by whoever who I think in 2018 they got bought out by somebody, they need to justify the purchase. They need to hit X dollars and cents, mainly dollars, and no one cares about the cents. We're going to do that. If we can do that, we will do that and that's what they're doing. If Google gets it right and if Google says we're going to rely more on site identity, so if you are a website that focuses on product reviews or on air purifiers, or in the case of Rolling Stone, music and instruments, so the best guitars of 2024, which guitars did you buy? Forget the air purifier. Which guitars did you buy? Then they'll be forced to do that. But what that'll mean for them as an organization unfortunately is they'll have to slim down, which they're trying to, or whoever bought them will have to incur a loss if they haven't made up the money already. That's what I mean, there's no way around the pain for these big publishers in my opinion. My prediction to quote Mr. T, pain. Crystal Carter: We had Barry Adams talking about SEO as a team sport on our last podcast. Barry Adams is somebody who's been working with news publishers for years for the majority of his career, and he talks about that they've been dealing with this since probably about 2018. Particularly UK publishers were hit really, really hard in 2018. Mordy Obertstein: I remember him talking about it. Crystal Carter: They have not seen the return to prominence or to visibility on the SERP since then. I think that that has created a really complex situation for some of these publishers. I think that where you see high quality publishing, then I think that it's really valuable for the web overall. I think it's really, really valuable for everyone. So, I hope that people are able to find something that's not just talking about air purifiers that are nothing to do with their core audience, but yeah, I do agree that it's something that's going to be very, very difficult to address in the next one. Mordy Obertstein: There's no easy solution. There's like either this continues on and Google doesn't address it, in which case Google will experience pain, because this doesn't reflect well on Google. It's like something somewhere has to give. Either the publishers are going to have to refine their focus because Google's going to force them to, or Google's going to be like, "Yeah, do what you want," which it's basically doing now, but Google will experience pain. Crystal Carter: But I think also there are a lot of publications who are leaning towards a multichannel approach. So, for instance, I follow British Vogue and Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is a fantastic publication. They don't just talk about teen stuff. They talk about lots of really interesting stuff. They're fantastic publications and they publish some great stuff across their social as well. They published some great stuff on YouTube as well. So, I think that there's lots of news publishers that are essentially using their brand. So, they're leveraging their brand across multiple channels, and I think that that brand legacy, particularly for some of these high legacy publications like Rolling Stone, like Vogue, like Grazia even, that brand recognition allows them to make a splash in some of those channels that would be much more difficult to do for other publications as well. Mordy Obertstein: Great minds because I was going to say the way out of this for publishers is to do what the New York Times did because the New York Times has done this successfully. As I mentioned before, something like 95% of their subscriptions are digital and they have an enormous amount of revenue from their digital subscriptions. Semrush did an event, Global Marketing Day in 2022, I don't remember 2023, one of those years. I was on a panel with someone from the New York Times. They talked about how they did this and basically it was brand building. They basically created a brand campaign basically showing you why you should want to pay for quality journalism, why that's not free and why you shouldn't expect it. If you want good stuff, you got to pay for it thing. That's what these brands need to do, but that's the issue. The real fundamental issue in my mind is that these brands, because they have all these metrics to meet, overvalue performance marketing. They're not thinking of the longer brand play and how the brand play will allow them to tap into the performance market they so deeply and desperately want, but it's going to be a brand play first and then it's going to be a performance play. They're not willing to do that yet because they're not willing to take the immediate repercussions of, okay, it's going to be difficult for a period of time. We are the Rolling Stone. We need to create content that's worthy of you paying for a subscription and we need to build a brand around that and we need to build a desire around that that's going to take time. They're it seems like not willing to invest in that time and resources to do that so that they can have a model that's actually sustainable, not relying on Google's algorithm to not care the fact they're running about microwaves and not guitars. Crystal Carter: I know that there are some people who have some interesting opinions on how Forbes do things, for instance, but Forbes have a lot of really interesting strands of the way that they generate income and the way that they connect with their community because I think that's another point as well. So, people who subscribe to Rolling Stone, people who are reading Rolling Stone are people who are interested in music, right? They're very interested in music and that stuff. There's some great brand partnerships that you can do across that. Forbes for instance has a lot of communities that they run. They have CMO communities. They have communities for different people with different intersectionalities and they have a series of events that they run across the year that are really, really well attended and really, really interesting. They also have their Forbes panel and people are like, "Oh, I'm on the Forbes panel and I do that thing." So I think that they also have a really interesting strand that they're pulling through and all of that helps to build up their brand. So, that IRL interaction with the brand, you can be a part of it, part of the brand, also brings that together. But I think if I go to rollingstone.com for instance, it doesn't really feel very interactive when I go in there. It doesn't feel like I could contribute. It doesn't feel like it's something that I could be a part of particularly. It's just like here's some stuff that Billy Eilish has done. Here's Drake mostly made himself look bad on his latest diss. I don't know. It's just opinion pieces about music and that's fine. That's fine, but I think that if you want to cut through, for instance, if you want to cut through to a very two-way internet that we have these days, it's both ways. Your people are reading your stuff, people are responding to your stuff. They're replying in the comments. There's people who on YouTube, on Instagram, on any of the video things, on literally any post on social media, people are like, "I'm just here for the comments. I literally just came here for the comments." So people expect to have that instant feedback, that instant participation in whatever media they're consuming. I think that brands that are able to make people feel connected to them, either in person or online or both are going to get a lot more out of that. Mordy Obertstein: 100%, I could not possibly agree more, but to weigh in now on what the SERP currently looks like or means for smaller, mid-sized publishers is the aforementioned wonderful Giselle Navarro. So, here's Giselle and what the SERP currently looks like for small to mid-sized publishers. Giselle Navarro: I can only answer this question confidently from the point of view of being the manager data of HouseFresh and being a small publisher within the air quality space. So, that's where I'm going to be answering it from. I don't know if this is the case for every other small publisher in every other niche, but it definitely is something I've seen in our space. That is that on top of what everybody already knows of big media sites being pushed to the top across different types of queries, a trend that I've noticed increasingly since September, October last year is a big push from Google site to get searchers to just buy from the SERPs. So, whether that is adding a sidebar filter product as if it were to be a shopping filter within search that perhaps are not a product search or they are a recommendation, what are the best amplifiers for bedrooms or something like that, and then suddenly, you already immediately get a filter pop up to your left, the sidebar that is just giving you options for you to filter by brand, by this, by that. Obviously, at that point, you don't know. That's why you're searching. Within that, it's not just that. There's also the topics at the top. So, when you're making searches like, "Oh, now what are the best budget amplifiers?" Suddenly, you get all these tags at the top, which when you were to add them to your search, the search gets regenerated again, and then the top results are always products. Then there's also shopping listings within subs and huge blocks like six rows of products, eight rows in some cases. Again, these are queries that are not people looking specifically for a brand and a product or a specific model. They are looking for information to try to make a decision and they're being pushed. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of these are sponsored shopping ads and they're not very good products at all. In many cases, they don't even satisfy the actual queries. So, if somebody's looking for best HEPA air purifier, I'm going a bit nerd here, but if somebody is looking for that, which is a specific air filtration technology, some of the products that get surfaced, and a lot of them actually are not even... They have other technologies. So, it's not even that Google is serving products and these products are the right products or that are useful products. Actually, they're misinforming people and confusing people and we get a lot of emails from readers who are confused and they would say, "I spent all this time and I was reading this and I was reading that. I just don't understand anymore and I was so happy to found your article." We interact with a lot of people on Reddit and it happens a lot that they are very confused. I think the reason why people are confused is because the searches are not really clarifying anything and just pushing more products at them. So, definitely, that's something that I have noticed. I don't know if every other small publisher is seeing the same, but that definitely has been a trend that I see growing of Google trying to push searchers to buy directly from Google, which is not great, because you wouldn't go to find information inside of Amazon or inside of Target or Walmart. So, if they're forgetting about the information part of what they're doing, then they're just trying to become a retailer. Obviously, they're not because they have deals with brands that pay ads and all this stuff. So, they're not even familiarizing themselves with the products, which is unfortunate, because at least that maybe they would do a better job. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much, Giselle. Make sure to give Giselle a follow over at I-C-H-B-I-N-G-I-S-E-L-E over on X and look for her on LinkedIn as well. I think Aleyda Solís was talking about this, maybe I'm getting this wrong, back at the SEOFOMO event we did with her at the Wix Playground in New York where just the e-com SERP is such a problem in a way. It's an opportunity, it's also a problem. It's interesting because you don't think of her product reviews and publishers, but those sites overlap with product buying intent. If I'm talking about best microwave, Google can interpret that as okay, here's a bunch of articles about choosing the best microwave or here are the best microwaves. That puts publishers at a very, very, very serious disadvantage, because if you look at the way, if you're not familiar, if you Google something like buy a microwave, at least in the US and other markets, the whole SERP changes. There are sidebar filters and PLA ads. It's a very different looking SERP and the organic results get lost in there. Crystal Carter: Giselle is coming from this place where she's looking after her brand. She's trying to make sure that everything's being displayed the way that she expects it to be, and she's trying to make sure that she understands her competitor landscape. So, she's looking at this and she's like, "The competitors that I'm seeing here are not the competitors that I would normally expect to see here." That's really, really tricky. Like you're saying, it's a really complex SERP. If you're doing buy a microwave, you expect to be maybe competing with other people who are selling microwaves. If you're suddenly competing with Rolling Stone for instance, it's tricky to figure out your strategy for that because you can't be everything for everyone. If they're looking for articles instead, that's going to change the way that you approach that particular digital marketing strategy. So, yeah, I think that it is tricky and they're constantly tinkering with that SERP. So, they're adding in things via Google Lens and they're adding in competitor aggregator thing. So, for instance, if you see one type of a Samsung microwave, I think they make microwaves. Yeah, if you see a Samsung microwave, they'll show a few different listings underneath it, which is slightly different from the way they were doing it before. Like you said, you get lots of filters. Sometimes you pretty much land on the shopping page for some things. So, yeah, it's really complexer. I think that those working in e-comm have a lot to think about at the moment. Mordy Obertstein: It's like a mini Amazon. The query I'm looking at, I'm doing best microwave, it's not even a full on transactional query and it looks like Amazon. It's hard. Give yourself a big thank you, Giselle, for contributing and for all the work you've been doing in this area for the SEO community over the past how many number of years already. Anyway, the SERP aside and that's no small thing, but there's a wider web out there just over yonder, past Google, skip it a stone, past Google. The question is how healthy is the web overall for the publishing community? To help us, we ask famed content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, how she see things as we move past pure SEO and go into the great beyond. Alli Berry: I will say that I think the state of online publishing is a little unpredictable at the moment. I think it really depends on what kind of online publishing we're talking about. I can tell you for affiliate for example, I have a client right now who has great organic rankings in certain financial verticals and is losing traffic not necessarily to competitors, but mostly to new SERP features. It looks like Google is adding SERP features that are providing their own set of recommendations based on who is popular for queries that have best or review or what have you in the query. Instead of seeing affiliate reviews for various products, I think you're going to see more brands that Google is associating with those terms, which is going to make it harder for affiliates to do well. I think you'll also see so much more Reddit everywhere, which is enraging, because so much of it is frankly shit. There are some sites that I think are doing affiliate the right way and actually testing products, and I think a lot of them are getting buried now for Reddit results. So, I think next to the question of can publishers still thrive? If you're trying to get into affiliate or build an affiliate publishing program, it's going to be a tough time for you. I don't know what else to say there. It's possible, especially if your brand already has some clout, but it's tough out there. I would be looking to diversify my revenue sources if I were you because it feels like Google is trying to bury affiliate sites from my perspective. There are some very authoritative sites that have gained ground in affiliate. Rarely do they have the best content on the topic, which is really frustrating for some of the smaller sites, but I think the opposite of diversification seems to be happening in the SERPs. So, if you're new, it's going to be tough. For bigger news publishers, so affiliate aside, I think it's also a strange time from what I've been seeing and hearing. Certainly, the big publishers are looking for ways to use AI to help them be more efficient, which really means they're trying to use AI to write certain types of articles and get away with it. I do think SGE has the potential to disrupt the news game a little bit. I think it's going to be more important than ever for news outlets to be the first to report something before AI can regurgitate it. I think interviews are going to be more valuable. Anything that is actually unique and human driven is the best way to combat SGE. Many publishers are moving away from content syndication, which to me feels long overdue. Google hasn't made any changes that would really cause publishers to make this change other than they keep saying, you should really ask your syndication partners to de-index the syndicated version of the article, which is wild and ridiculous and would never happen. Maybe everyone syndicating is finally starting to see how they were getting outranked by partners and the economics weren't really working out for them. It's definitely no longer as lucrative as it once was, especially since Yahoo has been pedaling down syndication and made the decision to bring content in house. It's an interesting decision too. If you look at Yahoo today, they're trying to be more of a news source than a search engine, which I think is interesting. I've also been looking at some smaller publishers that are more focused on niche topics, so local happenings, mommy blogs. There's been a lot of drop off in traffic for many of these sites that I've been looking at. The Pioneer Woman, My Dallas Mommy, Your Brooklyn Guide, et cetera, a lot of these sites do product promotions, event promotions for kickbacks. They have commissionable links. I'm wondering if Google is finally coming after those, but then if you look at food blogs, there's some really great SERP diversification that's present and happening there. New York Times Cooking is actually losing ground, which surprised me. All recipes has been steady but not growing and there are some really cool smaller sites with visibility like Love and Lemons, Once Upon a Chef. I don't really know what to make of it all. I think in certain verticals, there is a lot of hope for success for newer publishers. In others, a lot of them being in the YMYL space, maybe run far, far away. I do think though that the key to success doesn't seem that different than it did a decade ago. Really, I think if you're starting a new online publication, you should start with a unique angle, have a niche, build a small, engaged audience, do whatever you're going to do content wise, consistently learn from what's working, double down on it. You really should be able to build an audience over time. If you have that audience and go in your site directly and they're spreading the word and all of that good stuff, I do think you can still grow a site today, but it's definitely harder than it once was. I think you're going to do better if you're not in the YMYL space because it does seem like Google is doing the opposite of diversification there. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much for that, Alli. There's so much to chew on there. First up, that war on affiliates, we actually spoke about that a few episodes ago with Glenn Gabe. So, it's nice to hear some concurrence around that issue, around that topic because I think it's definitely what's going on. I think it's also interesting that she's talking about, and we're going to be talking about in another episode or two, about the value of brand ranking as opposed to affiliates ranking. I think that's where things are going to go. Again, it goes into this whole topic of Google's war in affiliate marketing or affiliate websites rather. It makes sense in a way that Google's going to double down on ranking those brands that have that identity, that are well established, that are well known, that have a strong digital presence and ranking them about their own stuff in the end, which is interesting because of the conflict of interest. But I think for Google's point of view, it's the lesser of two evils. If I have to rely on affiliate strike, the conflict of interest in a brand themselves and the conflict of interest in an affiliate trying to generate revenue, I would say that the lesser of those two evils is the brand themselves. I think they're more reliable. I think they're less likely to push things, less likely to lie for lack of a better word. I think it might be a little too harsh, but skew the truth, less likely to skew the truth. In that sense, I think she might be right that Google's going to say, "You know what? Forget all this. Let's just go with the brand." If that's by the way what happens, then folks like the Rolling Stone like we were talking about earlier are going to see their ranking slip away and it's going to increase the focus on doubling down on brand authority, brand presence, and all things brand, which we'll talk about in a later podcast. Crystal Carter: It's such a complex space for Google. It's such a complex space for brands. I think that everyone really needs to knuckle down on doing high quality content and that's for their users. I think one of the things that she touched upon was moving away from syndicated content, moving towards unique content, moving towards stuff that really differentiates yourself. I think that that is really a return to the core of what the web has been about for a good amount of time or what it should be about anyway. Give Google a reason to rank you. Give people a reason to actually visit your page that is unique to you, and I think that that's really important. I think that think about the unique perspective that you have on it, even if it is product reviews, even if it is the best microwave. Why is your best microwave page interesting? People often bring up that The Verge article that's about the printer. Mordy Obertstein: The printer, the Brother printer. Crystal Carter: They're like, "Oh, just buy the Brother printer." Don't get me wrong, they do- Mordy Obertstein: I did by the way. That's literally what I did. That's literally what I did. Crystal Carter: So those ones, that article is really actually interesting because it's both doing all of the things that you expect to see, but it's actually poking fun at that in an interesting way. It's breaking the fourth wall really on that content and that makes it unique. I think that that's where we need to think about. Be actually unique. Take that risk, be unique. Mordy Obertstein: It's interesting and it's something that we'll talk about on a later podcast episode. I know because we recorded a little bit out of order, so breaking the fourth wall for you, but I'm interested to see if brands will be able to do this because it's going to be taking your foot off the gas pedal a little bit. It's the same question we talked about the affiliate marketers. If brands are going to be searching for best microwave and it's ranking Samsung and their post about their best microwaves, they're going to have to do a little more on the informational side and a little less on the conversion side. Just like affiliate marketers are facing that same problem, will brands think about the overall brand value that that will bring and take the foot off the conversion performance marketing for just a bit? Who knows? Crystal Carter: Who knows? That's the question. Mordy Obertstein: You know what I do know? I know that when we cover the SEO news, we might cover Search Engine Journal and Matt Southern and Roger Monty who do a great job and even Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Obertstein: But I know we're going to cover at least one article from Barry. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Obertstein: So this is week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Whoa, that's a lot going on, but two big stories, one bigger than the next. I'm so flustered, I don't know where to start. Okay, here we go. From Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Roundtable, Google AI overviews are here to stay with improvements, the Ray AIO update, named after Lilly Ray. It's awesome. Anyway, Barry writes that "Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid wrote a blog post about AI overviews and how they're basically improving them and how they can make improvements and what they're doing to improve them," and so forth and so forth and so forth. I'll get into that in a second, but this comes with a blizzard of critique across the internet about the AI overviews and they're hallucinating. They're not accurate. They're recommending ridiculous things, yada, yada, yada, yada. So, this is Google essentially, I think, responding to that. Google made a whole bunch of claims. I'll read what Barry quoted Liz is saying here. We found a content policy violation on less than one in every seven million unique queries on which AIO reviews appeared and that they will keep improving, when and how we show AIO reviews and strengthening our protections and yada, yada, yada, yada, and yada. Some of the things that Liz Reid went on to say are a little bit, I guess, controversial. For example, she said that AI overviews are as accurate and as good as featured snippets or the accuracy is as good as feature snippets rather. They seem to be saying that a lot of these cases being shared across the internet of AI overviews going off the deep end are fake. That's a pretty heavy accusation to make, but Google did admit and they write, but some odd, inaccurate, unhelpful AI overview certainly did show up. The long story short is Google has heard of the web complaining about the AI overviews. They are responding. They are making improvements, and they're not going anywhere. There's going to be more AIO reviews. It's part of the core search experience, they said. I guess we'll have to keep an eye on what happens and how they improve or don't improve. Share your thoughts out there on the ether because it's a very controversial topic. Even more controversial topic, if you can imagine that. Oh boy, this from iPullRank, friend of the show, friend of the Wix SEO Learning Hub, friend of SEO in general, Mike King wrote an article, Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search's Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked. So, there was some leak internal documentation from Google searches content warehouse API that show theoretically what's happening in the algorithm. I'll talk about it from a top level TLDR point of view really quick. A lot of the things that Google has said they don't do or have indicated perhaps they don't do are shown in the API. Meaning that, oh, maybe they are actually doing these things. Google responded back basically saying, "This leak is real. However, you don't know just on reading the leak if this was a test, what exactly it means, how to interpret it, how heavy to weight any of these things and so forth." That is true. I'll get to some of the specifics in a minute. We don't know if they were part of a one-time test. We don't know. It's hard to piece this together. I'm going to try my best to piece it together the best that I possibly can in a snappy manner. This is not going to be snappy. I'm just letting you know right now. The second thing I want to say before I get into some of the details, people have started to question Google's honesty and whether or not some of their search advocates are good people. The answer is they are good people. Being a public spokesperson for a public company as large and as complicated as Google is not easy. I don't want to put words in any of this search advocate's mouths. This is my take. A lot of the time, I think you have what you have and you have to do the best with what you have and be as transparent with what you have and with what you are allowed and not allowed to say. You just have to do your best to be as transparent as possible with what you have to work with. I think the search advocates have done that the best they possibly could. So, I think a lot of the rhetoric or the negative rhetoric around the particular search advocates needs to be toned down. We need to be realistic and understanding of what it means for them to be in that role, what they are allowed to say, what they're not allowed to say, and what the best they possibly can do with what they have to work with. That aside, there was a lot of juicy information inside of this. Mike runs through it here in the original article. He also wrote an article on search engine land entitled, "How SEO Moves Forward with Google Content Warehouse API Leak." I'll link to both of those in the show notes. You can read through them on your own. Where do I start? Where do I start? Where do I start? Okay. So, I'm going to start with my approach to this is we don't know exactly what Google is using, what they're not using, how much of it they're using, to what extent they're weighing it and so forth. I like to look at these things a bit directionally. If you were to paint a picture, what direction does this show you where Google is going? In other words, what is Google at least trying to do? Because at a minimum, they're using these things in testing. So, what are they trying to do? That we do know. So, I look at this very directionally and what direction should we go based upon the direction that Google seems to be going with what was shown in the API leaks. With that, and I have just a bunch of random, random stuff to run through here, oh boy, okay. There is information that indicates that Google is using clicks. They have calls for metrics for bad clicks, good clicks, last longest clicks and so forth. If you combine that with the leak from the DOJ trial where they indicated there's something called Nav Boost that's looking at user behavior and in fact doing that into ranking, you do see that user behavior does really factor into the ranking equation in my opinion. It has been an issue of debate in front of the SEO for a while. I've actually personally, I'll call myself out, have gone back and forth on this over the years. It does very much seem that Google is incorporating user behavior into the algorithm. That doesn't mean you should be manipulating for clicks. What it does mean is that you need to think about the experience the user has on the website. Is the UX navigatable? Is that a word? I don't know. Can it be navigated easily? Does the content engage them? Does it satisfy their needs? Does it make them want to read another article from you and so forth? I think a lot of the things we're going to talk about here really quickly have to do with how strong your branding is, how strong of a website you are. When people go to the SERP and they see you ranking, let's say you're ranking number five and not number two or number one, do they click on you anyway because you have such a strong brand around that topic? To that, and again, I'm trying to go in some logical order here because there's so much to cover. So, part of what we've seen from the leaks that Google is looking to determine how on target your content is with your overall site and with what you're trying to do, or if it's not, which means as Mike writes in his article, actually content needs to be more focused. He writes, "We've learned definitively that Google uses vector embedding to determine how far off a given page is from the rest of what you talk about. This indicates that it'll be challenging to go far into upper funnel content successfully without a structured expansion or without authors who have demonstrated expertise in that subject area. Encourage your authors to call expertise in what they publish across the web and treat it to the gold standard that it is." Meaning Google's looking at the embeddings to see how far off they do or do it online with what you're writing about, and I've talked about this for years already. Google is able to look at and see what you're writing about and how much it does or doesn't align with who you are as an entity, with who you are as a brand or a business and so forth. One of the other interesting things along this line is that Google seems to have some commercial scoring where it's saying, "Okay, is this content commercial or not?" I speculate and that gives it something I've seen for a long time that might be because a lot of blog content tries to pretend that it's informational content, but really it's commercial content or backhanded commercial content. So, perhaps I have seen Google do this algorithmically. Perhaps this is the element that's doing that where they're able to say, "Okay, wait a second. This is not an actual information piece. This is actually a commercial piece. We can profile it like that." Which again goes back to the earlier point. Make sure your content meets the user need. It's more targeted and more specific and more, I'll say, transparent than anything else. There's a site authority score that came out of this. Google say, "We don't look at domain authority, blah, blah, blah," but there is a site authority score. I think we all knew there was an overall quality score to the website. Google said that there is an overall quality score. I know we talked about topic authority, so that would align with that as well. There's things in there around navigation demotions. This goes back to what we said before. If the UX isn't great, you could tell the user is not having successful experience with the website, that UX can impact rank. Again, make sure you're keeping your users in mind first and foremost. On short content, there seems to be some originality scoring, whether it's actively being used or not being used, but you see where Google is trying to go. So, much short content is just replicated over and over and over and over again. Google's looking to make sure that that content when they rank it has some originality to it. Whether or not they're actually doing it, whether or not that's a test, you do see where Google is directionally trying to go with something like that, which I think is the most important thing. Where is Google trying to go? I look at this again, like the quality rate guidelines are not in the algorithm per se, but it's definitely a clear statement of where Google wants to go. There's a lot about mentions in there. There's a whole slew of information about results getting re-ranked last second. Meaning last second factors or last second read jiggering of the results that happen as the query is being processed can happen. It's why you might see rank fluctuations being inconsistent perhaps sometimes for you and so forth and so forth and so forth. There is a lot in there. I think, again, my general takeaway is that there's a lot in there that points to content being more specific, content being aligned to what the site wants to do or what they say they do. Glenn Gabe actually recently talked about this in a case study that he did on the March 2024 core update. I'll link to that in the show notes also. So, again, the directionally see that things with navigation, user experience, user behavior, meaning making sure the user is satisfied. Google's trying to find ways to measure that. Make sure your users are satisfied. Make sure that you are recognizable as a brand because again, if Google is looking at what's happening on the SERP and you are recognized entity out there in that niche that can help you, it would seemingly help you with rankings. But again, read these articles but look at it again, like the quality reader's guidelines in many ways. What does it show you about where Google is trying to go? This is the very much not very snappy news. All right. News aside, well, not news aside actually, because our follower of the week comes from the news world. She actually recently spoke by the time this episode airs at the first New York City SEO for NEWS Meetup hosted at the Wix Playground in New York City by NewzDash and former guest of this podcast, John Shehata. She is the Senior Director of SEO at ESPN. I can't help myself. That sound is so nostalgic for me by the way. She is Louisa Frahm. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Fantastic follow. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, give her a big follow over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her in the show notes. ESPN does some amazing... That is a lot of content to run through. They run a double model. They have a paywall model and they have a pure open, organic, go ahead and read it model. It's really interesting what they're able to do, what they're able to rank for. She shares a lot of knowledge. So, follow Louisa over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I think that it's great to follow publishers as well. So, follow her. Absolutely, there's some great publishers to follow because they are, like you said, dealing with a lot of content and they to get really creative with the way that they present content. Sometimes Google has different features as well. So, if you think about sports for instance, sometimes you can get the sports scores on Google itself. So, publishers, for instance, for ESPN will have to think about how they capture content or how they capture traffic in new ways as they respond to those new SERP features. I think that it's great to pay attention to the ways that some of the big players do that. Mordy Obertstein: Interesting. By the way, pro tip, one way to do that is being more reliable. So, I consume a lot of sports and I go to that Google Box all the time. Sometimes because it defaults to an American time zone and I don't live in America anymore. It'll still default the game sometimes to the American Times. I'm like, "No, that doesn't look right." I'll go to ESPN and they do a better job of adjusting the times automatically. So, I know what I'm actually looking at. Crystal Carter: Unique and adding value. Mordy Obertstein: Added value and reliability. It's such an under thing, reliability. Crystal Carter: It's so important. Mordy Obertstein: So important. It's good for your website. It's good for your relationships. Reliability, it's good for everything. Crystal Carter: Not just SEO tips, people. Life skills, life tips. Mordy Obertstein: Right. We should do a life skills episode. Crystal Carter: Optimize your life. Mordy Obertstein: Optimize your life, the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: What is your life H1? Mordy Obertstein: Me? Crystal Carter: Any thoughts? Mordy Obertstein: Oh, off the cuff? Hide. Crystal Carter: So your H1 is white text on a white background. Is that what you're telling me? Mordy Obertstein: Hide. Get a screaming hide somewhere. Hide. Crystal Carter: I'm going to have to think about what mine is. Mordy Obertstein: I see a lot of neighbors. Hide. It's so good. Time to reveal too much. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next time with the new episode as we dive into why branded search matters more than you think it does. 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 and webinars on the Wix 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. 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Barry Schwartz is the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and has covered search for over 20 years. He is also a news editor at Search Engine Land and is a speaker, moderator, and coordinator at many industry conferences, including SMX, PubCon, and many other marketing and technology events. Barry Schwartz CEO, RustyBrick Barry Schwartz is the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and has covered search for over 20 years. He is also a news editor at Search Engine Land and is a speaker, moderator, and coordinator at many industry conferences, including SMX, PubCon, and many other marketing and technology events. Articles & Resources 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

James Clark is a web analyst from London, with a background in the publishing sector. When he isn't helping businesses with their analytics, he's usually writing how-to guides over on his website Technically Product. James Clark Web Analyst James Clark is a web analyst from London, with a background in the publishing sector. When he isn't helping businesses with their analytics , he's usually writing how-to guides over on his website Technically Product . Articles & Resources 12 May 2026 How to get started with Google Analytics 4 5 Feb 2026 Google Search Console: Your complete guide 11 Jun 2025 GA4 and beyond for better business benchmarking 15 Oct 2024 Meta tags for SEO & social media: Control how your content gets shown to users 23 Jul 2024 Customize reports in GA4 to inform clients and secure buy-in 12 Mar 2024 XML sitemaps: Help Google discover your pages and improve your SEO 23 Jan 2024 When to use 404s for SEO 2 Nov 2023 How to use real-time analytics 6 Dec 2022 Key events and conversions in GA4: Your quick start guide 2 Jun 2022 Canonicalization and why it matters 8 Dec 2021 How to get started with Google Analytics 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

Abby Gleason is an SEO leader driving organic growth for SaaS and eCommerce brands since 2017. She is currently a senior SEO product manager at Upwork. Abby loves to share what she learns, and her insights have been featured in Moz, Search Engine Land, and Women in Tech SEO. Abby Gleason Senior SEO Product Manager at Upwork Abby Gleason is an SEO leader driving organic growth for SaaS and eCommerce brands since 2017. She is currently a senior SEO product manager at Upwork. Abby loves to share what she learns, and her insights have been featured in Moz, Search Engine Land, and Women in Tech SEO. Articles & Resources 7 May 2024 SEO lessons from Reddit: Takeaways for your own content strategy 19 Oct 2023 What is keyword difficulty and why does it matter for SEO? 13 Jun 2023 How to use TikTok for SEO keyword research 13 Apr 2023 How to find trending keywords for SEO campaigns Resources Abby Gleason Keyword difficulty assessment matrix Complete this matrix to get a fully-reasoned breakdown of how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keywords in the SERPs. 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

Lily is a content marketing consultant for brands like Zapier and HubSpot. For seven years, she has built and managed content sites (including three of her own) that rely on SEO as the main distribution channel. In her spare time, she writes the marketing newsletter Marketing Cyborg. Lily Ugbaja Fractional Content & Growth Manager Lily is a content marketing consultant for brands like Zapier and HubSpot. For seven years, she has built and managed content sites (including three of her own) that rely on SEO as the main distribution channel. In her spare time, she writes the marketing newsletter Marketing Cyborg . Articles & Resources 27 Jul 2023 How to find SEO keywords to rank a new domain quickly 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

Michael is a multi-disciplinary data expert with over ten years of agency-side experience in paid media and analytics. He has a passion for problem solving and skill for demystifying data, which he uses to help businesses of all shapes and sizes create enhanced, actionable insights. Michael Patten Analytics Manager at PMG Michael is a multi-disciplinary data expert with over ten years of agency-side experience in paid media and analytics. He has a passion for problem solving and skill for demystifying data, which he uses to help businesses of all shapes and sizes create enhanced, actionable insights. Articles & Resources 22 Aug 2024 Create a compliant cookie banner for user data privacy and ethical data collection 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

A recognized global expert, Michelle Goodall works with B2B and B2C brands that place community at the heart of their growth. She trains, coaches, and consults, sharing insights and learnings publicly, and is the host of ‘Meet the Community Builders.’ Michelle Goodall Community and Marketing Expert A recognized global expert, Michelle Goodall works with B2B and B2C brands that place community at the heart of their growth. She trains, coaches, and consults, sharing insights and learnings publicly, and is the host of ‘Meet the Community Builders.’ Articles & Resources 22 Oct 2024 Community-based marketing: Rally your audience, bolster your brand, and improve search visibility 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