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Claire Carlile is BrightLocal's Local Search Expert. Her work at Claire Carlile Marketing, where she helps businesses of all sizes make the most of the local search opportunity, allows her to provide real-world skills and expertise to what BrightLocal does. Claire Carlile Local Search Expert, BrightLocal Claire Carlile is BrightLocal's Local Search Expert. Her work at Claire Carlile Marketing, where she helps businesses of all sizes make the most of the local search opportunity, allows her to provide real-world skills and expertise to what BrightLocal does. Articles & Resources 10 Jan 2023 GBP Posts: What you need to know to get started 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

Alan has been involved in search for over 30 years, and eCommerce for over 10 at eBay and Magento. As part of the Google Search Relations team, Alan focused on educating merchants to get the most out of Google Search with documentation and videos. Alan Kent Technology Leader and Advisor Alan has been involved in search for over 30 years, and eCommerce for over 10 at eBay and Magento. As part of the Google Search Relations team, Alan focused on educating merchants to get the most out of Google Search with documentation and videos. Articles & Resources 10 May 2023 How to measure eCommerce improvements for users 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

Debbie Chew is an SEO manager and organic growth consultant with over 10 years of experience in digital marketing. She specializes in content and link building, and she's passionate about sharing her learnings with other marketers. Debbie Chew Global SEO Manager Debbie Chew is an SEO manager and organic growth consultant with over 10 years of experience in digital marketing. She specializes in content and link building, and she's passionate about sharing her learnings with other marketers. Articles & Resources 14 Jul 2025 Your guide to the first 90 days in a new SEO job 6 Feb 2024 Link building for SaaS: A niche-specific guide for better rankings and traffic 12 Oct 2023 How to measure your link building 27 Dec 2022 Why link building is important and how to get started 8 Sept 2022 The truth about link building for SMBs: 6 myths and misconceptions 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

Eli Schwartz is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy. A growth advisor and enterprise SEO consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the internet's top sites. Eli Schwartz Growth Advisor and SEO Consultant Eli Schwartz is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy . A growth advisor and enterprise SEO consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the internet's top sites. 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

Explore expert SEO insights and resources from Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Discover articles on AI, keyword research, SEO tools and more. Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix and the author of the Wix SEO Guide . Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education hosting webinars and podcasts ., Mordy is one of the organizers of #SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Articles & Resources 21 Jan 2025 Does brand support SEO or does SEO support brand? 6 Aug 2024 What is the Google algorithm? 11 Jun 2024 What are Google algorithm updates? 29 May 2024 GA4 lessons and tactics one year later 15 May 2024 The rise of situational content: Lessons from Google’s March 2024 core update 24 Apr 2024 Wix Studio: Top 5 features for SEOs & digital marketers 4 Jan 2024 The future of web content: Where AI, user preferences, and SEO meet 21 Aug 2023 Analyze your SEO competitors with the SE Ranking app on Wix 26 Jun 2023 Wix’s on-page SEO audit tool: The SEO Assistant 9 Mar 2023 What AI content generators mean for the future of search 9 Feb 2023 Wix’s SEO Dashboard makes GSC data available at a glance 9 Feb 2023 Monitor organic performance with GSC data in Wix Analytics Resources Mordy Oberstein Podcast planning template From guest scheduling to SEO, keep everything that goes into publishing a podcast on track with this template. 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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Does page experience still matter for ranking? What did Google say that brought confusion to the matter and what’s the real story? Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter dive headfirst into the critical role of page experience and where it fits into Google’s ranking systems. SEO legend Britney Muller joins the show to discuss the role of technical SEO now and in the future. Plus, Mordy and Crystal clue you in as to their top tool recommendation to help your page performance and optimization efforts. It’s all part of the “experience” on this week's episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Does page experience still matter? Does page experience still matter for ranking? What did Google say that brought confusion to the matter and what’s the real story? Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter dive headfirst into the critical role of page experience and where it fits into Google’s ranking systems. SEO legend Britney Muller joins the show to discuss the role of technical SEO now and in the future. Plus, Mordy and Crystal clue you in as to their top tool recommendation to help your page performance and optimization efforts. It’s all part of the “experience” on this week's episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 46 | July 12, 2023 | 35 MIN 00:00 / 35:30 This week’s guests Britney Muller Britney Muller, Founder of Data Sci 101 and a seasoned Marketing and Machine Learning (ML) Consultant, has carved out a unique niche in the industry with roles such as Marketing Manager at Hugging Face and Senior SEO Scientist at Moz. Her deep passion for ML and AI fuels her work, particularly her talent for breaking down complex tech concepts into understandable terms for non-technical people. With her blend of expertise, industry experience, and knack for communication, Britney is a compelling speaker, offering actionable insights on the intersection of marketing and technology. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up . Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I am joined by, now batting, number two, this shortstop, Crystal Carter. Number two, Head of SEO Communications. Crystal Carter: Thank you, Mordy for that introduction. I never played shortstop. I played outfield. I used to do a little bit of that when I was playing softball, when I was 12 years old. Yeah. On the Reds. We won no games that season. Mordy Oberstein: Not even the actual Reds. Crystal Carter: There you go. Yeah, there you go. We had a good time. Mordy Oberstein: That's all it counts. By the way, just that was my Bob Shep... Bob Sheppard is a legendary announcer for the Yankees. He literally announced the players from 1900 through 2014. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. He was 550 when he retired. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: He looked like the Crypt Keeper at that point. That's how he announced. He announced, "Now batting, the shortstop. Number two, Derek Jeter." Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know why you were the shortstop, because you're number two, which is Derek Jeter's number. The only person who's getting any of this is basically Glenn Gabe right now. Crystal Carter: Hey, we to cater to lots of folks, including our SEO friends, all of our SEO friends. Mordy Oberstein: Before we completely lose the audience on my baseball nonsense, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter , but where you can also measure site performance, including Core Web Vitals no matter what. No matter your site's level of traffic, yep. Probably the only place on the web, where to be honest, you can have field data without traffic thresholds, is right inside of the Wix Site Performance Dashboard. Crystal Carter: I love that site performance dashboard. It's one of my favorite things, because I also love field data, because field data is better than lab data. Lab data is useful, but field data is what actually happened. Mordy Oberstein: What position in the field did you play, shortstop? Crystal Carter: Ha, ha, ha. Mordy Oberstein: That was so perfect. I didn't even plan it. Crystal Carter: Ha, ha. The field data that I got when I was playing outfield was that I needed to run around a lot to make sure that I was in line with the shortstop, in order to get the ball back towards the home base so we didn't get so many runs in from the other team. Mordy Oberstein: Why are we talking about baseball today? Don't know. But why are we talking about performance? Well, performance, it's a little bit scandalous right now. Okay. Performance, as it pertains to SEO, needs a little bit of clarification, so today we're covering, what did Google say that brought the question of page experience and ranking back into question? What is the status of the page experience update? Performance and SEO? What's the deal with that? To help us, legend, legend, absolute legend, Britney Muller stops by to share her thoughts on the future of tech SEO, and we'll dive into a special little tool to help you go deep into page performance. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, take a bow and bask in the glory of a great performance, as Episode Number 46 of the SERP's Up Podcast pulls up the curtain on the significance of performance in SEO. Crystal Carter: So, many metaphors. Mordy Oberstein: I can't help myself. Crystal Carter: You're doing it over time. Mordy Oberstein: Literally the highlight of my week is writing that little section. Crystal Carter: I would say you need to get out more, but I know that's not your thing. Mordy Oberstein: No, not my thing. I have a Shakespeare one coming up, by the way. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. By the way, I hate Shakespeare for the record. Crystal Carter: To B2B or not to B2B? Mordy Oberstein: I obviously use that one because that's like- Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Mordy Oberstein: I only know three. Crystal Carter: Alas. Mordy Oberstein: I use all three. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Look for it wherever you consume your podcast in the future. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. Well, moving on to a non-Shakespearean topic. We're talking about page experience, and the reason why we're talking about page experience is because, basically in April, 2023, we had an update from Google on the page experience situation, which said that they were basically adding it into the Helpful Content Update . This got a lot of interest from different SEOs. So, essentially they said, in their blog post on Google Search Central , they said, "Helpful content generally offers a good page experience. That's why today we've added a section on page experience to our guidance on creating helpful content, and revise our help page about page experience. We think this will help site owners consider page experience more holistically, as part of their content creation process." They basically said, "It's not one thing, it's all part of the whole SEO experience." This was written by Danny Sullivan. They posted that onto the Google Search Central blog. Then later on, they added a note clarifying and they said, "We haven't introduced any major new aspects of page experience to consider versus our previous guidance. If you have been paying attention to these things we've talked about in the past, such as Core Web Vitals , all that remains as before." The reason why they had to make that clarification was because SEOs had a really big response to this, a really big response to this. Mordy Oberstein: Understatement. Crystal Carter: Understatement, to the point where some people were like, "Google's saying it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter at all. What were we doing spending all of our time worrying about that?" Marie Haynes was like, "No, I think it still matters. I think it's still important. It's just not their system anymore." Google went back to clarify after this, explaining that one of the reasons why they changed it... So, they wrote one of those... Twitter's allowing people to write really long posts now, and they wrote one of those really, really, really long posts all about this clarifying their guidance , and they said that, "If you want to be successful with the core ranking systems of Google, consider these and other aspects of page experience." So, not just Core Web Vitals, not just being mobile friendly, but consider these as well as other things. They also said that they should have never had page experience on their ranking systems page at all, because they've said that they are ranking signals. So, they're saying that, "We had some things that were listed there that shouldn't have been there, and they shouldn't have been on the ranking systems page. They're signals that contribute to systems." Mordy Oberstein: It's not one unified thing. Crystal Carter: No. Which is what they clarified when they said, "It's part of the helpful content system . It doesn't mean that it doesn't apply, it just means that it's part of the system." It's not its own- Mordy Oberstein: It's not a separate system. This is where it gets... You can see why people got really confused. Crystal Carter: People were really confused. So, I think that when we're thinking about this, it's really important to remember that, because at the end of the day, they said, "Google's core ranking systems looks for reward content that gives a good page experience," end of. I agree with that, and I always have, because the page experience thing, and with all of Google's ranking systems, they're all a metric of value for users. What the page experience system and the Core Web Vital situation was helping us to do was provide better value for users. Slow websites, websites are loading super slowly, they're annoying. Websites with cumulative layout shift, they're annoying. We didn't have a name for that before we had that. Interstitials that are popping up all the time and you can't close them and you can't find them- Mordy Oberstein: You said interstitials. I'm forever calling them that now forever. Forever interstitials. Crystal Carter: Oh, gosh. So, these things pop up all the time and they're everywhere, they're not good page experience. I think that these are things that we need to make sure that we're providing that for our users, that we're providing good page experience for our users, because that is genuinely helpful. It doesn't matter really whether or not it's a ranking signal or a ranking system, it's still valuable and it's still important and it's still worth measuring and worth looking at. The thing I think is interesting about this whole thing is that Google seems to be rolling back some of the elements that they're doing around this. So, for instance, they're deprecating the Mobile-Friendly tests at of the end of the year. They're also deprecating the Mobile-Friendly API. Then they also deprecated the Test My Site tool in 2022. This means that, SEOs will have different tools for accessing this, and SEOs who want to access web performance elements and want to improve web performance elements might have to invest in more dedicated tools, more specific tools. There are a number of web performance tools around this, rather than having them available as openly to everyone. But they've also added loads of these tools into Chrome, so the Chrome Web Dev tools as well. So, there's opportunities to see all these things. But I think that if you're an SEO and you're wondering, do I need to worry about Core Web Vitals? Do I need to worry about having good page experience? Yeah, you do. But do it because it's good for your users, and that's why you should be doing it. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that was always the thing. All the data studies show, and its been Barry Schwartz's big thing when he talks about the ranking impact has been minimal in aggregate. That doesn't mean in specific instances, because Google's talked about this, that if it's a tiebreaker between this page and that page, it could be a very big deal, or in certain instances it could be a very big deal. But as a broad impact across the web, meh on the rankings for basically whatever data study has come out. Which is a separate question, by the way. I think what's gone on here is so confusing at so many different levels. One is, the deprecation of a tool sends a signal. It sends a strong signal and it's very confusing. At the same time, it's very confusing that they said, "Wait. They're not one unified ranking system. That's why we're separating them out," because the way they marketed it, and I'm not being critical here, I'm just talking fact, the way that it was presented very, very strong was like, this is the new page experience update. It wasn't like, "Oh, we have this signal and that signal, and this is all going to contribute together." It was not presented that way. It was very, very much cohesively, "This is the page experience update." When they took that off the page, off their ranking systems page, it was very confusing because of that. At the same time, I think there's a third thing going on, which is I think Google doesn't want you to define page experience in terms of Core Web Vitals. I think it wants you to look at page experience much more holistically, which is why they added it to the Helpful Content Update Guidance , because they want you... By the way, when they did, they also added things like, making sure that you can easily access the main content on the page as part of experience, meaning they're trying to make you think of experience in a much wider way than just Core Web Vitals. Crystal Carter: I think that that's really interesting, because I think during all of the... There was a lot of furore about around getting ready for Core Web Vitals and all of that sort of stuff, and certainly at Wix we invested a lot in things to make sure that we... I mean, we increased the Core Web Vitals performance by tenfold . Mordy Oberstein: I think it's more than that. The tenfold number by the way, we came with that number years ago. I think it passed that at this point. Crystal Carter: I think that that's a prime example. So, I think, last time I checked it was something like 65% of US websites on Wix were passing Core Web Vitals . That's good. Fundamentally, that's a good thing. But it's a fundamentally good thing, and that is something that Google is giving people tools to measure, and help people measure those things, but they're not all of it. In the same way that if you were trying to get healthy, losing weight for instance could be a relevant metric for whether or not you are healthy, but it is not the only metric, for instance. So, if you lost a bunch of weight, that might be a sign that your lifestyle is healthier, that might not be a sign that your lifestyle is healthier. I've definitely lost weight in times of stress, where that was not good. That was not good. So, sometimes I think that it's a question of Google making sure that people are approaching page experience in a more nuanced way, and in a way that is more beneficial to the web overall, which is their general goal. All of these signals are tools for measuring value for users. I've seen it before where I've worked on sites, and this was before I think, even the page experience update came in, where at a site we improved page speed and we saw our rankings improve. But part of that can be because there are other signals that improve. Users are staying on the site longer, users are bouncing less often, users are moving through more pages because they're confident that the site is... Users are able to find the things that they want because they're able to see them more quickly, things like that. So, there's lots of ways that these things benefit you. I think that the skills that you develop in order to manage Core Web Vitals are useful, valuable, and really, really important as a business, because you end up talking to lots of different stakeholders about what is valuable to the website, how the user's experiencing it. You're going to have to test on lots of different devices in order to see these things. You're going to have to make sure it's compatible with different browsers in order to make sure that your page is performing well. All of that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: I think it goes back to that interesting point, talking to the user and what they're actually experiencing, because I think the CRO angle of page experience is stronger than the ranking angle, because again, the ranking angle hasn't been a very powerful narrative because a lot of people haven't seen a lot of improvement based upon the corporate files. A lot of people have. Again, I'm not saying that's not a thing, but it's not a widespread thing to get widespread adoption. What is, is CRO. If you tell a site owner that if this thing moves around, this button moves around, the user will not be able to click buy. That gets adoption. I think it's interesting, just as a meta-analysis, and we discussed this briefly before we were recording the show, that it's funny that page experience and the factors that go into page experience, or particularly Core Web Vitals, haven't been widely adopted across the web. Its been a big thing in SEO or I would say in certain corners of SEO, we haven't seen the web which was Google's real goal I think, we haven't seen the web really transform into being way faster and way more efficient. Which is, by the way, good for the environment also. But leaving that aside, I think that's because it doesn't really align with how people approach building webpages from a conversion point of view. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think the thing about it is, I talked about losing weight, and it's like if you were trying to lose weight, you might say to yourself, "Okay, I won't have a donut. I won't eat that cake. I won't eat that slab of cheese. I won't have that third tub of ice cream," or whatever. That's hard because, let's say the donut is just sitting there, the donut looks great, or maybe you love eating french fries and they're your favorite thing and it's really easy for you to get those. I think it's the same with when you're building a website. People are like, "Oh, yeah. Throw this extra third party app on there, put this on here. Let's have giant photos, let's put seven videos. Let's put all of these things on there." So, you have to be, in order to do performance, and I've had conversations like this when working on web projects, where I'm like, "Yeah. No, no video." They're like, "But..." I'm like, "Nobody can see it. It doesn't load. It's not working. No. We're going to lead with text." They're like- Mordy Oberstein: YouTube is one of the things that's really slow. YouTube embeds really slow a page down. YouTube is not fast. The embed is not fast. But it's like when you go... The food example is the perfect example. But when you're hosting an event, you're hosting a PTA event, your kid's school, whatever it is. A local meetup, the food that you're going to offer is going to be junk food. You might have a carrot in the corner, one carrot for that one person kind of thing. You're going to have donuts and cakes and cookies and snacks. That's really the problem, because our association to, "If I'm going to offer light refreshments, donuts." If I'm going to build a webpage that's going to try to convert and bring my users in, and create a robust experience for them, you're thinking videos, multiple layers, fancy design, animations. You're thinking all of the, from a page experience point of view, all of the junk food automatically. The way of thinking that goes into page experience and doing that well, and the way of thinking where the average person, the average designer, the average... Whoever it is, the average whatever, building a webpage are two totally different mindsets. I think that's why it doesn't work across the web. I think in order for Google to get widespread adoption, and to make the web faster, there's going to have to be an alignment with how I normally go about thinking about what a good webpage is, just my natural association. Two, what a good webpage is from a page experience point of view, they have to align. Crystal Carter: They have to align from the very beginning. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: So, when I've worked on projects where it works really well, it's ingrained already. So, the person who's building the website is building it, and their objective is to make sure that the website is fast, as well as is visually appealing, usable, and all of that sort of stuff. So, it has to be something that is at the forefront, because if you build and then you go back and try to... It's a whole drama. This is one of the reasons why Wix has invested so many elements into the CMS, for instance, that we convert images to WebP where- Mordy Oberstein: Auto compress images. Crystal Carter: Auto compressing, if you add your fonts to your theme, that's going to preload in the fonts. We crop the pictures. So, you might put a picture in your website and we'll crop it so that when it loads, it only loads what's visible on it. There's things where the dom orders should be... Lots of different elements that are cooked into the CMS, and anyone who's building a website should be thinking in that way, where they're building it so that it's built from the very beginning with the page experience in mind, with making sure that the page is able to load and able to function on the devices, and within the network that you have. Because for instance, in some places, people are mostly on mobile, mostly. I think the last time I looked at this, the stats for Nigeria was something like 89% of people are online via mobile. I think that it's much lower in the US, but that's a real big factor. I know places where the cost of data is extremely expensive. So, if you have a website that's trying to load a giant video or something, that's not good for your users, that's not good for their page experience, that's not good for your business. So, these are things that you need to think about when you're creating content, and it should be something that's fundamental to the building process. Mordy Oberstein: If you had to ask me what will change the game for this, I think it's on the format side, meaning there's a video embed format that is just inherently faster. There is an image format, Google Traffic Web that's inherently fast. So, I'm a person building a webpage, I'm just adding... The video embed, it's automatically optimized that way. I think we're a long way off from that. Crystal Carter: This is why the food example is there. So, people are like, "Don't eat french fries, don't eat donuts, don't eat..." It's like, you need a replacement. A classic example is cars. So, people were like, "Oh, gas guzzlers and cars are gas guzzlers and it's terrible." It's like, well, if I don't have public transport where I live, how am I supposed to get where I need to go? Then people started making better electric cars, better electric cars that looks better, and that worked well, and they made hybrid cars and they were more accessible to people. So, now people can have a better alternative for something to use. If you don't have an alternative, then the idea of just going without is a harder sell for people. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's just a harder thing altogether because you're really just trying to pick apart and pick at the little crumbs, figure out ways to improve the page, where it's really about the infrastructure itself needs to change, and that's the future of page experience. Now speaking of futures, the whole idea of oh, page experience not a thing anymore. It's not a ranking system anymore. It's not important anymore. Nothing anymore. Bottom to the whole question of, is technical SEO still important? There was a whole lot of commentary on that. So, we thought we'd bring in an absolute SEO legend in Britney Muller, and have her talk about what exactly is the future of tech SEO . Britney Muller: Technical SEOs are in one of the very best positions, in my opinion, to understand and really harness AI technology. SEO is not going away, it's simply evolving. The future of technical SEO really looks like a couple of clear areas to me. One is really understanding how large language models work at their core . With your technical background, people will lean on you and trust your opinions on more technical knowledge. So, I think a lot of technical SEOs have a responsibility to better familiarize themselves with this information, so that they can effectively communicate it to the people that they work with and key stakeholders. Also to make sure that this tech is used responsibly and in the right ways, and not used for the tasks that they're inherently not good at, like information retrieval, facts, current events, you name it, that's a long list. Another part of the future, is having really strong soft skills, human skills, especially effective communication and storytelling abilities. Another one is navigating how to better understand users. We are going to see more nuanced search behavior than ever before, painting an even clearer picture of customer journeys. Technical SEOs are in a wonderful spot to help teams make use of that data. Also, really strongly believe that foundational data science and statistics 101 knowledge, is going to be huge in navigating and understanding and investigating large data sets in the future. This will be a hugely valuable asset to have in a role, and it's been a big part of why I've been investing so much time and resources into my datasci101.com content, which will hopefully be coming out soon, that delivers all the essentials in a really easy to understand way. Also, the ability to fine tune or leverage few shot learning to accomplish specific SEO tasks. So, the ability to help you and your team automate some of the more boring and repetitive tasks that occur on a regular basis, so that you can all really level up and work on higher strategy thinking, higher strategy planning, better outreach, more strategic content, you name it. You can start to free up resources to do more and more powerful things. I have a couple of quick examples. You could say, here's a content currently performing well on our site, create 10 new article ideas that might also do well. Or improve this content. Or summarize the following articles for an email roundup newsletter. I've heard that those take tons of time. What topics are covered in these page titles and what are some related topic opportunities to create content for? These opportunities go on and on and on. Again, if you understand how large language models work, what they're inherently good at, you yourself can come up with a brilliant high value application of this technology for an SEO task that hasn't been thought of before. So, keep an open mind, play around with this stuff. Lastly, unpopular opinion, mentions will be the new back links. The way things are going in the generative space, having more and more impact on search results, understanding that the quality and the amount of brand product mentions will be more important in the future. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Britney. Definitely make sure that you give Britney a follow over on Twitter, and that's at Britney Muller on Twitter , that's B-R-I-T-N-E-Y M-U-L-L-E-R over on Twitter, give her a follow. We'll make sure to link their profile in the show notes. I love the point about large language models and really understanding them, being able to leverage them. That actually falls under technical SEO. If you're a technical person, you're going to be the one to be able to get into that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, exactly. I think that that's certainly something that I've been really interested in, and I think that there's a lot of crossover when you look at how to engage with some of those things. She's absolutely right. I've learned a lot from Britney about understanding large language models actually. I think that understanding of how entities work and understanding how large language models interpret language, interpret the language that they're modeling, is really important. I think also she was saying using it for some of the tools that it's good at for instance, I think is really, really important. What certainly what I found as a technical SEO, is that some of these tools are able to help you bridge gaps with some of the technical elements, that would normally have taken you longer to do. As a technical SEO sometimes you've got a new tech stack and maybe there's a new language, or maybe there's a new tool, or maybe there's a new way of coding or something, that the team that you're working with is using, and you have to learn how to unpack that or how to make the recommendation for the best way to do it. One of the things that's useful about some of these tools is that they've got a lot of coding libraries within them, particularly ChatGPT is pretty much built on the back of Stack Overflow, so it's got a lot of coding knowledge, a lot of spreadsheet knowledge for instance. A lot of these things will help you to get to your answer quicker, because it can fill some of the gaps and reduce some of the discovery time and exploratory time that you have to do to get up to speed on certain bits of code. I agree that there are some great opportunities coming forth as a technical SEO in this space. I think that it will be fascinating to see how it unfolds. I think Britney Muller's a great person to follow to see how that all pans out. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Speaking, by the way, of tools to help you with your technical SEO, we have a great tool recommendation for you. We haven't done this segment in a while actually, so let's go, Tool Time, as we help show you a tool that can help you with your SEO performance. So, Crystal, you actually threw this my way, and I think it's a really, really cool tool. It's over at webpagetest.org, and it's run by somebody that we're really connected with. Take it away, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So, this is a tool called WebPageTest , and Henri Helvetica on Twitter put me onto this, and they run this great tool that allows you to test your webpage for performance. They also have a number of different podcasts and a lot of events that they get involved with as well. But you can test your Core Web Vitals, you can do Lighthouse, you can do visual comparison. They also allow you to bury your location. You can test desktop, you can test mobile, and it's free. So, it's free to use. The way that they normally do it is that they'll run it through a few different scenarios and you'll get your waterfall tests, you can see what number of fonts you've got going on. You can see lots of different parts of your site, in order to make sure that you are getting a good performance. I know that there are a lot of people within the web perf community who are using this very regularly, and it's something that I've seen as being really super useful. Mordy Oberstein: So, big shout out to Henri over there. Give him a follow, we'll link to his Twitter profile in this show notes. It's a lot of follows this week, and we do have another follow coming for you, for our Follow of The Week, but in order to do that, we first have to do the SEO news. So, here's this week's, Snappy SEO News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Little bit of a slow week for SEO News with July 4th in the US last week, but still have a juicy one for you, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. Google to work on complimentary robot.txt protocols for AI and more. Essentially, Google put in an announcement saying, "Hey, we need to figure out how to give sites control over what AI can or can't access on the site and the current construct for telling bots what they can or can't access, IE the robot.txt file is 30 years old, so we need to have a conversation with you, the web, to figure out a better way." This was a little bit contentious, and the reaction I've seen out there from folks was a little bit mixed. For example, Barry Adams put out, "Yeah, great. Now that they've already scraped all the content and they've trained all of their systems, now they're saying we need to have control, and rather give you control over it." I think this is a good thing in general for the web to re-figure this out and to have some kind of way of giving instructions to the AI bots or programs out there, to tell them how they can or can't interact with your website. I think one of the points that has irked people over time has been, with Google we know the rules of engagement. If you don't know index the page, Google can crawl and index the content and it's out there. When, let's say open AI came out, we had no idea, for example, they were going through our content, they were running through the web and pulling in all this content to train their AI systems. So, the rules of engagement were unknown, and I think that's bothered some content creators. So, definitely going forward, having some kind of way of systematically and transparently having a way of blocking what the AI can or can't access is obviously a healthy thing for the web, regardless of where it's coming in the timeline. Okay. Item number two. Something not that practically important, but super interesting from an SEO point of view, from Matt Southern, over at Search Engine Journal. "Twitter's Google rankings plummet following actions by Elon Musk." So, basically what Twitter did was say, "Hey, if you're searching on the web and you're not logged in and you come across," only the Twitter that is, "And you come across, let's say a Twitter URL on Google, and you're not logged into Twitter, you won't be able to access that content." So, normally if I was searching on the web, I'm not logged into Twitter, I come across a Twitter URL on Google, I click on the Twitter link, I am still able to see that Tweet. When Twitter blocked you from doing that unless you were logged in, Google stopped indexing content. Tons of content was no longer being shown on the SERP from Twitter, and they lost a ton of traffic and a ton of ranking URLs, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Long story short, Twitter put a fix in for this so that they showed an overlay, but underneath the overlay was the actual Tweet and Google was able to see the actual content anyway. Once that happened, once that fix went into place, so then the rankings came back and all those URLs were now back in the index, and all of the metrics around Twitter, from the Google SERP, are back to relatively normal. So, super interesting little case study. We'll link to the article in the show notes. You should definitely have a look at it. It's just one of those weird SEO anomalies that happen. It's very rare for something like that to happen. So cool to read about it, cool to see about it. Definitely again, check out that URL, look at it because it is super unique and super interesting, and that is this week's, Snappy News. So, with Snappy News done now, we can actually get to... I hate putting it that way. Like, oh, we've just done the news, we can get to the Follow of The Week. Not true. But in terms of pivoting and continuity and flow of the show, here's this week's, Follow of The Week. It's the one, the only, Dan Shappir, Dan fricking Shappir, is our Follow of The Week. Dan Shappir used to work over here at Wix. I had many, many, many, many, many, many conversations about performance with Dan Shappir. If you're talking about Wix's improvements around Core Web Vitals, Dan was a major part of that, and he's got his own podcast, that's the JavaScript Jabber , putting that in the show notes as well so make sure you check out his podcast. And you check out his Twitter profile over at Dan Shappir, D-A-N S-H-A-P-P-I-R, where he's their tech lead perf... Tech lead rather, over at Next Insurance. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Dan Shappir's a great dude. He's not only incredibly smart, but he's very personable and funny and nice- Mordy Oberstein: Super funny. Crystal Carter: He's brilliant. We have on the SEO Hub , we have a webinar recording from back in the day, when he was talking about Core Web Vitals, when it was peak Core Web Vitals back in the day. He gets into a lot of the information there, and it's great to see him speak in the way that he thinks about performance and the way that he thinks about making sure that sites are performing well. He's very methodical, and again, like I said, and also very personable, and with a great sense of humor. So, shout out to Dan. Can't recommend him enough. Mordy Oberstein: An absolute great follow. You're absolutely right. If you ask Dan something, you go on Twitter, you follow Dan, you ask him a question, he will give you an answer. He will engage with you. He'll take the time for you. He's a really great guy. So, absolutely give Dan a follow. Cannot recommend him any higher. Crystal Carter: And he'll give you an answer in plain English. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. This is the thing. Crystal Carter: It can get very technical and stuff, but Dan's really great at explaining it in a way that makes sense, even if you're not in the weeds. So, yeah. Great. Mordy Oberstein: Let me also tell you something else in plain English, that now that we've done the Follow of The Week, that means that this is the end of the show. Crystal Carter: This is the end. The end is near. Mordy Oberstein: The end. Well, that went morbid real quick. Crystal Carter: Oh, gosh. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll tell you what's not morbid is that we'll be back next week. So, 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 niche sites and the web. Look for us wherever you consume your podcasts, or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, over at wix.com/seo/learn. Link to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn . Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Britney Muller Henri Helvetica Dan Shappir Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Google: Page experience is not a ranking system, but it is a ranking signal WebPageTest JavaScript Jabber News: Google To Work On Complementary Robots.txt Protocols For AI & More Twitter’s Google Rankings Plummet Following Actions By Elon Musk Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Britney Muller Henri Helvetica Dan Shappir Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Google: Page experience is not a ranking system, but it is a ranking signal WebPageTest JavaScript Jabber News: Google To Work On Complementary Robots.txt Protocols For AI & More Twitter’s Google Rankings Plummet Following Actions By Elon Musk Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up . Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I am joined by, now batting, number two, this shortstop, Crystal Carter. Number two, Head of SEO Communications. Crystal Carter: Thank you, Mordy for that introduction. I never played shortstop. I played outfield. I used to do a little bit of that when I was playing softball, when I was 12 years old. Yeah. On the Reds. We won no games that season. Mordy Oberstein: Not even the actual Reds. Crystal Carter: There you go. Yeah, there you go. We had a good time. Mordy Oberstein: That's all it counts. By the way, just that was my Bob Shep... Bob Sheppard is a legendary announcer for the Yankees. He literally announced the players from 1900 through 2014. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. He was 550 when he retired. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: He looked like the Crypt Keeper at that point. That's how he announced. He announced, "Now batting, the shortstop. Number two, Derek Jeter." Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know why you were the shortstop, because you're number two, which is Derek Jeter's number. The only person who's getting any of this is basically Glenn Gabe right now. Crystal Carter: Hey, we to cater to lots of folks, including our SEO friends, all of our SEO friends. Mordy Oberstein: Before we completely lose the audience on my baseball nonsense, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter , but where you can also measure site performance, including Core Web Vitals no matter what. No matter your site's level of traffic, yep. Probably the only place on the web, where to be honest, you can have field data without traffic thresholds, is right inside of the Wix Site Performance Dashboard. Crystal Carter: I love that site performance dashboard. It's one of my favorite things, because I also love field data, because field data is better than lab data. Lab data is useful, but field data is what actually happened. Mordy Oberstein: What position in the field did you play, shortstop? Crystal Carter: Ha, ha, ha. Mordy Oberstein: That was so perfect. I didn't even plan it. Crystal Carter: Ha, ha. The field data that I got when I was playing outfield was that I needed to run around a lot to make sure that I was in line with the shortstop, in order to get the ball back towards the home base so we didn't get so many runs in from the other team. Mordy Oberstein: Why are we talking about baseball today? Don't know. But why are we talking about performance? Well, performance, it's a little bit scandalous right now. Okay. Performance, as it pertains to SEO, needs a little bit of clarification, so today we're covering, what did Google say that brought the question of page experience and ranking back into question? What is the status of the page experience update? Performance and SEO? What's the deal with that? To help us, legend, legend, absolute legend, Britney Muller stops by to share her thoughts on the future of tech SEO, and we'll dive into a special little tool to help you go deep into page performance. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, take a bow and bask in the glory of a great performance, as Episode Number 46 of the SERP's Up Podcast pulls up the curtain on the significance of performance in SEO. Crystal Carter: So, many metaphors. Mordy Oberstein: I can't help myself. Crystal Carter: You're doing it over time. Mordy Oberstein: Literally the highlight of my week is writing that little section. Crystal Carter: I would say you need to get out more, but I know that's not your thing. Mordy Oberstein: No, not my thing. I have a Shakespeare one coming up, by the way. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. By the way, I hate Shakespeare for the record. Crystal Carter: To B2B or not to B2B? Mordy Oberstein: I obviously use that one because that's like- Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Mordy Oberstein: I only know three. Crystal Carter: Alas. Mordy Oberstein: I use all three. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Look for it wherever you consume your podcast in the future. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. Well, moving on to a non-Shakespearean topic. We're talking about page experience, and the reason why we're talking about page experience is because, basically in April, 2023, we had an update from Google on the page experience situation, which said that they were basically adding it into the Helpful Content Update . This got a lot of interest from different SEOs. So, essentially they said, in their blog post on Google Search Central , they said, "Helpful content generally offers a good page experience. That's why today we've added a section on page experience to our guidance on creating helpful content, and revise our help page about page experience. We think this will help site owners consider page experience more holistically, as part of their content creation process." They basically said, "It's not one thing, it's all part of the whole SEO experience." This was written by Danny Sullivan. They posted that onto the Google Search Central blog. Then later on, they added a note clarifying and they said, "We haven't introduced any major new aspects of page experience to consider versus our previous guidance. If you have been paying attention to these things we've talked about in the past, such as Core Web Vitals , all that remains as before." The reason why they had to make that clarification was because SEOs had a really big response to this, a really big response to this. Mordy Oberstein: Understatement. Crystal Carter: Understatement, to the point where some people were like, "Google's saying it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter at all. What were we doing spending all of our time worrying about that?" Marie Haynes was like, "No, I think it still matters. I think it's still important. It's just not their system anymore." Google went back to clarify after this, explaining that one of the reasons why they changed it... So, they wrote one of those... Twitter's allowing people to write really long posts now, and they wrote one of those really, really, really long posts all about this clarifying their guidance , and they said that, "If you want to be successful with the core ranking systems of Google, consider these and other aspects of page experience." So, not just Core Web Vitals, not just being mobile friendly, but consider these as well as other things. They also said that they should have never had page experience on their ranking systems page at all, because they've said that they are ranking signals. So, they're saying that, "We had some things that were listed there that shouldn't have been there, and they shouldn't have been on the ranking systems page. They're signals that contribute to systems." Mordy Oberstein: It's not one unified thing. Crystal Carter: No. Which is what they clarified when they said, "It's part of the helpful content system . It doesn't mean that it doesn't apply, it just means that it's part of the system." It's not its own- Mordy Oberstein: It's not a separate system. This is where it gets... You can see why people got really confused. Crystal Carter: People were really confused. So, I think that when we're thinking about this, it's really important to remember that, because at the end of the day, they said, "Google's core ranking systems looks for reward content that gives a good page experience," end of. I agree with that, and I always have, because the page experience thing, and with all of Google's ranking systems, they're all a metric of value for users. What the page experience system and the Core Web Vital situation was helping us to do was provide better value for users. Slow websites, websites are loading super slowly, they're annoying. Websites with cumulative layout shift, they're annoying. We didn't have a name for that before we had that. Interstitials that are popping up all the time and you can't close them and you can't find them- Mordy Oberstein: You said interstitials. I'm forever calling them that now forever. Forever interstitials. Crystal Carter: Oh, gosh. So, these things pop up all the time and they're everywhere, they're not good page experience. I think that these are things that we need to make sure that we're providing that for our users, that we're providing good page experience for our users, because that is genuinely helpful. It doesn't matter really whether or not it's a ranking signal or a ranking system, it's still valuable and it's still important and it's still worth measuring and worth looking at. The thing I think is interesting about this whole thing is that Google seems to be rolling back some of the elements that they're doing around this. So, for instance, they're deprecating the Mobile-Friendly tests at of the end of the year. They're also deprecating the Mobile-Friendly API. Then they also deprecated the Test My Site tool in 2022. This means that, SEOs will have different tools for accessing this, and SEOs who want to access web performance elements and want to improve web performance elements might have to invest in more dedicated tools, more specific tools. There are a number of web performance tools around this, rather than having them available as openly to everyone. But they've also added loads of these tools into Chrome, so the Chrome Web Dev tools as well. So, there's opportunities to see all these things. But I think that if you're an SEO and you're wondering, do I need to worry about Core Web Vitals? Do I need to worry about having good page experience? Yeah, you do. But do it because it's good for your users, and that's why you should be doing it. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that was always the thing. All the data studies show, and its been Barry Schwartz's big thing when he talks about the ranking impact has been minimal in aggregate. That doesn't mean in specific instances, because Google's talked about this, that if it's a tiebreaker between this page and that page, it could be a very big deal, or in certain instances it could be a very big deal. But as a broad impact across the web, meh on the rankings for basically whatever data study has come out. Which is a separate question, by the way. I think what's gone on here is so confusing at so many different levels. One is, the deprecation of a tool sends a signal. It sends a strong signal and it's very confusing. At the same time, it's very confusing that they said, "Wait. They're not one unified ranking system. That's why we're separating them out," because the way they marketed it, and I'm not being critical here, I'm just talking fact, the way that it was presented very, very strong was like, this is the new page experience update. It wasn't like, "Oh, we have this signal and that signal, and this is all going to contribute together." It was not presented that way. It was very, very much cohesively, "This is the page experience update." When they took that off the page, off their ranking systems page, it was very confusing because of that. At the same time, I think there's a third thing going on, which is I think Google doesn't want you to define page experience in terms of Core Web Vitals. I think it wants you to look at page experience much more holistically, which is why they added it to the Helpful Content Update Guidance , because they want you... By the way, when they did, they also added things like, making sure that you can easily access the main content on the page as part of experience, meaning they're trying to make you think of experience in a much wider way than just Core Web Vitals. Crystal Carter: I think that that's really interesting, because I think during all of the... There was a lot of furore about around getting ready for Core Web Vitals and all of that sort of stuff, and certainly at Wix we invested a lot in things to make sure that we... I mean, we increased the Core Web Vitals performance by tenfold . Mordy Oberstein: I think it's more than that. The tenfold number by the way, we came with that number years ago. I think it passed that at this point. Crystal Carter: I think that that's a prime example. So, I think, last time I checked it was something like 65% of US websites on Wix were passing Core Web Vitals . That's good. Fundamentally, that's a good thing. But it's a fundamentally good thing, and that is something that Google is giving people tools to measure, and help people measure those things, but they're not all of it. In the same way that if you were trying to get healthy, losing weight for instance could be a relevant metric for whether or not you are healthy, but it is not the only metric, for instance. So, if you lost a bunch of weight, that might be a sign that your lifestyle is healthier, that might not be a sign that your lifestyle is healthier. I've definitely lost weight in times of stress, where that was not good. That was not good. So, sometimes I think that it's a question of Google making sure that people are approaching page experience in a more nuanced way, and in a way that is more beneficial to the web overall, which is their general goal. All of these signals are tools for measuring value for users. I've seen it before where I've worked on sites, and this was before I think, even the page experience update came in, where at a site we improved page speed and we saw our rankings improve. But part of that can be because there are other signals that improve. Users are staying on the site longer, users are bouncing less often, users are moving through more pages because they're confident that the site is... Users are able to find the things that they want because they're able to see them more quickly, things like that. So, there's lots of ways that these things benefit you. I think that the skills that you develop in order to manage Core Web Vitals are useful, valuable, and really, really important as a business, because you end up talking to lots of different stakeholders about what is valuable to the website, how the user's experiencing it. You're going to have to test on lots of different devices in order to see these things. You're going to have to make sure it's compatible with different browsers in order to make sure that your page is performing well. All of that stuff. Mordy Oberstein: I think it goes back to that interesting point, talking to the user and what they're actually experiencing, because I think the CRO angle of page experience is stronger than the ranking angle, because again, the ranking angle hasn't been a very powerful narrative because a lot of people haven't seen a lot of improvement based upon the corporate files. A lot of people have. Again, I'm not saying that's not a thing, but it's not a widespread thing to get widespread adoption. What is, is CRO. If you tell a site owner that if this thing moves around, this button moves around, the user will not be able to click buy. That gets adoption. I think it's interesting, just as a meta-analysis, and we discussed this briefly before we were recording the show, that it's funny that page experience and the factors that go into page experience, or particularly Core Web Vitals, haven't been widely adopted across the web. Its been a big thing in SEO or I would say in certain corners of SEO, we haven't seen the web which was Google's real goal I think, we haven't seen the web really transform into being way faster and way more efficient. Which is, by the way, good for the environment also. But leaving that aside, I think that's because it doesn't really align with how people approach building webpages from a conversion point of view. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think the thing about it is, I talked about losing weight, and it's like if you were trying to lose weight, you might say to yourself, "Okay, I won't have a donut. I won't eat that cake. I won't eat that slab of cheese. I won't have that third tub of ice cream," or whatever. That's hard because, let's say the donut is just sitting there, the donut looks great, or maybe you love eating french fries and they're your favorite thing and it's really easy for you to get those. I think it's the same with when you're building a website. People are like, "Oh, yeah. Throw this extra third party app on there, put this on here. Let's have giant photos, let's put seven videos. Let's put all of these things on there." So, you have to be, in order to do performance, and I've had conversations like this when working on web projects, where I'm like, "Yeah. No, no video." They're like, "But..." I'm like, "Nobody can see it. It doesn't load. It's not working. No. We're going to lead with text." They're like- Mordy Oberstein: YouTube is one of the things that's really slow. YouTube embeds really slow a page down. YouTube is not fast. The embed is not fast. But it's like when you go... The food example is the perfect example. But when you're hosting an event, you're hosting a PTA event, your kid's school, whatever it is. A local meetup, the food that you're going to offer is going to be junk food. You might have a carrot in the corner, one carrot for that one person kind of thing. You're going to have donuts and cakes and cookies and snacks. That's really the problem, because our association to, "If I'm going to offer light refreshments, donuts." If I'm going to build a webpage that's going to try to convert and bring my users in, and create a robust experience for them, you're thinking videos, multiple layers, fancy design, animations. You're thinking all of the, from a page experience point of view, all of the junk food automatically. The way of thinking that goes into page experience and doing that well, and the way of thinking where the average person, the average designer, the average... Whoever it is, the average whatever, building a webpage are two totally different mindsets. I think that's why it doesn't work across the web. I think in order for Google to get widespread adoption, and to make the web faster, there's going to have to be an alignment with how I normally go about thinking about what a good webpage is, just my natural association. Two, what a good webpage is from a page experience point of view, they have to align. Crystal Carter: They have to align from the very beginning. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: So, when I've worked on projects where it works really well, it's ingrained already. So, the person who's building the website is building it, and their objective is to make sure that the website is fast, as well as is visually appealing, usable, and all of that sort of stuff. So, it has to be something that is at the forefront, because if you build and then you go back and try to... It's a whole drama. This is one of the reasons why Wix has invested so many elements into the CMS, for instance, that we convert images to WebP where- Mordy Oberstein: Auto compress images. Crystal Carter: Auto compressing, if you add your fonts to your theme, that's going to preload in the fonts. We crop the pictures. So, you might put a picture in your website and we'll crop it so that when it loads, it only loads what's visible on it. There's things where the dom orders should be... Lots of different elements that are cooked into the CMS, and anyone who's building a website should be thinking in that way, where they're building it so that it's built from the very beginning with the page experience in mind, with making sure that the page is able to load and able to function on the devices, and within the network that you have. Because for instance, in some places, people are mostly on mobile, mostly. I think the last time I looked at this, the stats for Nigeria was something like 89% of people are online via mobile. I think that it's much lower in the US, but that's a real big factor. I know places where the cost of data is extremely expensive. So, if you have a website that's trying to load a giant video or something, that's not good for your users, that's not good for their page experience, that's not good for your business. So, these are things that you need to think about when you're creating content, and it should be something that's fundamental to the building process. Mordy Oberstein: If you had to ask me what will change the game for this, I think it's on the format side, meaning there's a video embed format that is just inherently faster. There is an image format, Google Traffic Web that's inherently fast. So, I'm a person building a webpage, I'm just adding... The video embed, it's automatically optimized that way. I think we're a long way off from that. Crystal Carter: This is why the food example is there. So, people are like, "Don't eat french fries, don't eat donuts, don't eat..." It's like, you need a replacement. A classic example is cars. So, people were like, "Oh, gas guzzlers and cars are gas guzzlers and it's terrible." It's like, well, if I don't have public transport where I live, how am I supposed to get where I need to go? Then people started making better electric cars, better electric cars that looks better, and that worked well, and they made hybrid cars and they were more accessible to people. So, now people can have a better alternative for something to use. If you don't have an alternative, then the idea of just going without is a harder sell for people. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's just a harder thing altogether because you're really just trying to pick apart and pick at the little crumbs, figure out ways to improve the page, where it's really about the infrastructure itself needs to change, and that's the future of page experience. Now speaking of futures, the whole idea of oh, page experience not a thing anymore. It's not a ranking system anymore. It's not important anymore. Nothing anymore. Bottom to the whole question of, is technical SEO still important? There was a whole lot of commentary on that. So, we thought we'd bring in an absolute SEO legend in Britney Muller, and have her talk about what exactly is the future of tech SEO . Britney Muller: Technical SEOs are in one of the very best positions, in my opinion, to understand and really harness AI technology. SEO is not going away, it's simply evolving. The future of technical SEO really looks like a couple of clear areas to me. One is really understanding how large language models work at their core . With your technical background, people will lean on you and trust your opinions on more technical knowledge. So, I think a lot of technical SEOs have a responsibility to better familiarize themselves with this information, so that they can effectively communicate it to the people that they work with and key stakeholders. Also to make sure that this tech is used responsibly and in the right ways, and not used for the tasks that they're inherently not good at, like information retrieval, facts, current events, you name it, that's a long list. Another part of the future, is having really strong soft skills, human skills, especially effective communication and storytelling abilities. Another one is navigating how to better understand users. We are going to see more nuanced search behavior than ever before, painting an even clearer picture of customer journeys. Technical SEOs are in a wonderful spot to help teams make use of that data. Also, really strongly believe that foundational data science and statistics 101 knowledge, is going to be huge in navigating and understanding and investigating large data sets in the future. This will be a hugely valuable asset to have in a role, and it's been a big part of why I've been investing so much time and resources into my datasci101.com content, which will hopefully be coming out soon, that delivers all the essentials in a really easy to understand way. Also, the ability to fine tune or leverage few shot learning to accomplish specific SEO tasks. So, the ability to help you and your team automate some of the more boring and repetitive tasks that occur on a regular basis, so that you can all really level up and work on higher strategy thinking, higher strategy planning, better outreach, more strategic content, you name it. You can start to free up resources to do more and more powerful things. I have a couple of quick examples. You could say, here's a content currently performing well on our site, create 10 new article ideas that might also do well. Or improve this content. Or summarize the following articles for an email roundup newsletter. I've heard that those take tons of time. What topics are covered in these page titles and what are some related topic opportunities to create content for? These opportunities go on and on and on. Again, if you understand how large language models work, what they're inherently good at, you yourself can come up with a brilliant high value application of this technology for an SEO task that hasn't been thought of before. So, keep an open mind, play around with this stuff. Lastly, unpopular opinion, mentions will be the new back links. The way things are going in the generative space, having more and more impact on search results, understanding that the quality and the amount of brand product mentions will be more important in the future. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Britney. Definitely make sure that you give Britney a follow over on Twitter, and that's at Britney Muller on Twitter , that's B-R-I-T-N-E-Y M-U-L-L-E-R over on Twitter, give her a follow. We'll make sure to link their profile in the show notes. I love the point about large language models and really understanding them, being able to leverage them. That actually falls under technical SEO. If you're a technical person, you're going to be the one to be able to get into that. Crystal Carter: Yeah, exactly. I think that that's certainly something that I've been really interested in, and I think that there's a lot of crossover when you look at how to engage with some of those things. She's absolutely right. I've learned a lot from Britney about understanding large language models actually. I think that understanding of how entities work and understanding how large language models interpret language, interpret the language that they're modeling, is really important. I think also she was saying using it for some of the tools that it's good at for instance, I think is really, really important. What certainly what I found as a technical SEO, is that some of these tools are able to help you bridge gaps with some of the technical elements, that would normally have taken you longer to do. As a technical SEO sometimes you've got a new tech stack and maybe there's a new language, or maybe there's a new tool, or maybe there's a new way of coding or something, that the team that you're working with is using, and you have to learn how to unpack that or how to make the recommendation for the best way to do it. One of the things that's useful about some of these tools is that they've got a lot of coding libraries within them, particularly ChatGPT is pretty much built on the back of Stack Overflow, so it's got a lot of coding knowledge, a lot of spreadsheet knowledge for instance. A lot of these things will help you to get to your answer quicker, because it can fill some of the gaps and reduce some of the discovery time and exploratory time that you have to do to get up to speed on certain bits of code. I agree that there are some great opportunities coming forth as a technical SEO in this space. I think that it will be fascinating to see how it unfolds. I think Britney Muller's a great person to follow to see how that all pans out. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. Speaking, by the way, of tools to help you with your technical SEO, we have a great tool recommendation for you. We haven't done this segment in a while actually, so let's go, Tool Time, as we help show you a tool that can help you with your SEO performance. So, Crystal, you actually threw this my way, and I think it's a really, really cool tool. It's over at webpagetest.org, and it's run by somebody that we're really connected with. Take it away, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So, this is a tool called WebPageTest , and Henri Helvetica on Twitter put me onto this, and they run this great tool that allows you to test your webpage for performance. They also have a number of different podcasts and a lot of events that they get involved with as well. But you can test your Core Web Vitals, you can do Lighthouse, you can do visual comparison. They also allow you to bury your location. You can test desktop, you can test mobile, and it's free. So, it's free to use. The way that they normally do it is that they'll run it through a few different scenarios and you'll get your waterfall tests, you can see what number of fonts you've got going on. You can see lots of different parts of your site, in order to make sure that you are getting a good performance. I know that there are a lot of people within the web perf community who are using this very regularly, and it's something that I've seen as being really super useful. Mordy Oberstein: So, big shout out to Henri over there. Give him a follow, we'll link to his Twitter profile in this show notes. It's a lot of follows this week, and we do have another follow coming for you, for our Follow of The Week, but in order to do that, we first have to do the SEO news. So, here's this week's, Snappy SEO News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Little bit of a slow week for SEO News with July 4th in the US last week, but still have a juicy one for you, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. Google to work on complimentary robot.txt protocols for AI and more. Essentially, Google put in an announcement saying, "Hey, we need to figure out how to give sites control over what AI can or can't access on the site and the current construct for telling bots what they can or can't access, IE the robot.txt file is 30 years old, so we need to have a conversation with you, the web, to figure out a better way." This was a little bit contentious, and the reaction I've seen out there from folks was a little bit mixed. For example, Barry Adams put out, "Yeah, great. Now that they've already scraped all the content and they've trained all of their systems, now they're saying we need to have control, and rather give you control over it." I think this is a good thing in general for the web to re-figure this out and to have some kind of way of giving instructions to the AI bots or programs out there, to tell them how they can or can't interact with your website. I think one of the points that has irked people over time has been, with Google we know the rules of engagement. If you don't know index the page, Google can crawl and index the content and it's out there. When, let's say open AI came out, we had no idea, for example, they were going through our content, they were running through the web and pulling in all this content to train their AI systems. So, the rules of engagement were unknown, and I think that's bothered some content creators. So, definitely going forward, having some kind of way of systematically and transparently having a way of blocking what the AI can or can't access is obviously a healthy thing for the web, regardless of where it's coming in the timeline. Okay. Item number two. Something not that practically important, but super interesting from an SEO point of view, from Matt Southern, over at Search Engine Journal. "Twitter's Google rankings plummet following actions by Elon Musk." So, basically what Twitter did was say, "Hey, if you're searching on the web and you're not logged in and you come across," only the Twitter that is, "And you come across, let's say a Twitter URL on Google, and you're not logged into Twitter, you won't be able to access that content." So, normally if I was searching on the web, I'm not logged into Twitter, I come across a Twitter URL on Google, I click on the Twitter link, I am still able to see that Tweet. When Twitter blocked you from doing that unless you were logged in, Google stopped indexing content. Tons of content was no longer being shown on the SERP from Twitter, and they lost a ton of traffic and a ton of ranking URLs, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Long story short, Twitter put a fix in for this so that they showed an overlay, but underneath the overlay was the actual Tweet and Google was able to see the actual content anyway. Once that happened, once that fix went into place, so then the rankings came back and all those URLs were now back in the index, and all of the metrics around Twitter, from the Google SERP, are back to relatively normal. So, super interesting little case study. We'll link to the article in the show notes. You should definitely have a look at it. It's just one of those weird SEO anomalies that happen. It's very rare for something like that to happen. So cool to read about it, cool to see about it. Definitely again, check out that URL, look at it because it is super unique and super interesting, and that is this week's, Snappy News. So, with Snappy News done now, we can actually get to... I hate putting it that way. Like, oh, we've just done the news, we can get to the Follow of The Week. Not true. But in terms of pivoting and continuity and flow of the show, here's this week's, Follow of The Week. It's the one, the only, Dan Shappir, Dan fricking Shappir, is our Follow of The Week. Dan Shappir used to work over here at Wix. I had many, many, many, many, many, many conversations about performance with Dan Shappir. If you're talking about Wix's improvements around Core Web Vitals, Dan was a major part of that, and he's got his own podcast, that's the JavaScript Jabber , putting that in the show notes as well so make sure you check out his podcast. And you check out his Twitter profile over at Dan Shappir, D-A-N S-H-A-P-P-I-R, where he's their tech lead perf... Tech lead rather, over at Next Insurance. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Dan Shappir's a great dude. He's not only incredibly smart, but he's very personable and funny and nice- Mordy Oberstein: Super funny. Crystal Carter: He's brilliant. We have on the SEO Hub , we have a webinar recording from back in the day, when he was talking about Core Web Vitals, when it was peak Core Web Vitals back in the day. He gets into a lot of the information there, and it's great to see him speak in the way that he thinks about performance and the way that he thinks about making sure that sites are performing well. He's very methodical, and again, like I said, and also very personable, and with a great sense of humor. So, shout out to Dan. Can't recommend him enough. Mordy Oberstein: An absolute great follow. You're absolutely right. If you ask Dan something, you go on Twitter, you follow Dan, you ask him a question, he will give you an answer. He will engage with you. He'll take the time for you. He's a really great guy. So, absolutely give Dan a follow. Cannot recommend him any higher. Crystal Carter: And he'll give you an answer in plain English. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. This is the thing. Crystal Carter: It can get very technical and stuff, but Dan's really great at explaining it in a way that makes sense, even if you're not in the weeds. So, yeah. Great. Mordy Oberstein: Let me also tell you something else in plain English, that now that we've done the Follow of The Week, that means that this is the end of the show. Crystal Carter: This is the end. The end is near. Mordy Oberstein: The end. Well, that went morbid real quick. Crystal Carter: Oh, gosh. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I'll tell you what's not morbid is that we'll be back next week. So, 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 niche sites and the web. Look for us wherever you consume your podcasts, or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, over at wix.com/seo/learn. Link to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn . Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Do you need to show the value of your SEO work to executives? Often that’s the case and it can be a bit overwhelming if not scary. How should SEOs communicate their business contributions to the C-suite? Which SEO reports should be front and center when presenting to the C-suite and which ones can be appendicized? Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share how you can be successful in showcasing the value of your SEO work to the c-suite. Guest, Craig Dunham, CEO at Lumar, offers his take on SEOs interacting with the C-suite and board and why it’s best not to go too far in the data weeds. It’s time to talk SEO and the C-suite on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast. Back Is the c-suite any place for an SEO? Do you need to show the value of your SEO work to executives? Often that’s the case and it can be a bit overwhelming if not scary. How should SEOs communicate their business contributions to the C-suite? Which SEO reports should be front and center when presenting to the C-suite and which ones can be appendicized? Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein share how you can be successful in showcasing the value of your SEO work to the c-suite. Guest, Craig Dunham, CEO at Lumar, offers his take on SEOs interacting with the C-suite and board and why it’s best not to go too far in the data weeds. It’s time to talk SEO and the C-suite on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 27 | March 1, 2023 | 38 MIN 00:00 / 37:40 This week’s guests Craig Dunham Craig Dunham is a passionate marketing technology professional and serves as the Chief Executive Officer at Lumar, with responsibility for leading on the company vision and strategy globally. In his previous role, he served as General Manager of Financial Services and Hospitality verticals at Guild Education, responsible to lead client growth and retention strategy and execution; including marketing, sales, and client service organizations. In prior roles, Craig Dunham was the General Manager of Financial Services at Seismic (a leading sales and marketing technology platform). There he was responsible for driving go-to-market strategy, customer success and product innovation within Seismic’s Financial Services market vertical. During his time at Seismic, Craig was also responsible for leading Seismic through its 2018 acquisition of the Savo Group, integrating all business functions. Throughout his time at Seismic, Craig served as a member of Seismic’s executive leadership team that grew Seismic’s valuation from $15 million in 2013 to a $1.6 billion Series F in 2020. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some group new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous and not AI writer, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: How do you know I'm not AI? Mordy Oberstein: I'm looking at you right now. You don't look like AI to me. Crystal Carter: But I could be like auto-generated video, and then with the sound. I've seen those things on the internet. I saw a video where they made Snoop Dogg speak a completely different language. He did a Just Eat advert, but in another language that he didn't originally speak. Mordy Oberstein: Can I go full nerd on you? Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: There's a Star Trek Picard episode where he dies and he becomes an Android and his consciousness gets transferred from his body to this Android. So now Captain Picard is actually an Android in reality. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Yes, this happened. By the way, if you're listening to this and you like Star Trek, I have just spoiled the Picard series? Yeah. Crystal Carter: This is ridiculous. I haven't seen season two. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: You clearly haven't seen season one, it happened in season one. Crystal Carter: No it didn't. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, it did. Crystal Carter: Did it? Mordy Oberstein: He becomes the Android in the end. Crystal Carter: Then I watched it and didn't understand. Mordy Oberstein: It was very confusing. Season 2 was way better. Crystal Carter: I just remember Data with long hair being like all Zen and stuff. And also, it's just good to see old Riker. Riker's like- Mordy Oberstein: I love Riker. They're all coming back for three, all the old cast. Crystal Carter: Okay. The other thing that's great about Riker is like, have you ever seen the Rikering video? He never sits down in a chair. Mordy Oberstein: Right. He always sits backwards on it. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And after you see it, you never unsee it. It's very important. Mordy Oberstein: True. He's so tall. That's why. Crystal Carter: So tall. Mordy Oberstein: He's so tall. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we have the data, Google Search Console data. Google Search Console Data Insights in our new SEO home dashboard, and a heap of filterable GSC data inside of Wix Analytics. No red checks needed. So you can show off your prowess, your organization's C level folk, which I mentioned because this week we're diving into C-suite, and is it really a place for SEO? Yes, episode done. It is a place for... SEO belongs in the C-suite. We've solved that problem. We finished the episode in one second. Crystal Carter: You're not wrong. It's really important and I think that it's one of those things where there are some discussions that should be had before they filter down further into the organization that only an SEO can have in our very important, very special way. So yeah, I think it's really important and I'm really glad that we're talking about this because it's something I'm very passionate about. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why we're diving into how would you bring SEO up to the board? How valuable is SEO to top level decision makers and why C level should be a concern for any SEO agency? Plus very, very honorable and very, very special guests. C level guest has Craig Dunham, the CEO of Lumar, joins us to talk about what actually goes into communicating and helping C level folk understand SEO. Plus, we're going to go into why C level optimizing themselves for search is an actual SEO strategy, kind of sort of you'll have to see. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. This is the executive version of the SERP's Up podcast. Episode number 27 is on, or let's buy stock in episode number 27. So many C level things to say. Crystal Carter: So many C level things to say. I agree, I concur. I second that motion. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I always thought as a kid, it was I second that motion and that I second that emotion. Crystal Carter: The song? Mordy Oberstein: The song, yeah. I don't know why I thought that as a kid. Crystal Carter: So you took out the play on words that they put in? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I was like 10. Don't blame me. Okay. I'm a 10-year-old still. Crystal Carter: Okay. That's fine. Mordy Oberstein: So let's get into it. So you have a large organization, you work with a large organization, you work in a large organization and you need to get buy-in around your SEO. So clearly, getting SEO is relevant to you and you need to be relevant to C-level folk because those are the people who are going to be making the decision about let's say your budget and all of that good stuff. So getting C-level folk associated with SEO or SEO in front of them applies to everyone. It applies if you're in-house, obviously. It applies if you're in an agency because the POC that you're working with your client, your POC at the company at some point inevitably, it's going to get passed up the chain to C level. So you need to make them look good. That's your job. You're an agency, so you need to consider about C level. And C level is tricky because C level brings in the soft skills of SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And I know that many times SEOs will scoff at the soft skills side of SEO, but that's usually because those SEOs don't have them. Crystal Carter: Do you know what? I think one of the things that's tricky about it is that it's very difficult to optimize for soft skills. It's very difficult to quantify for soft skills. But those skills, building trust, being able to communicate well, being able to relate to your client, being able to relate to the C-suite, being able to have empathy for business struggles and challenges that they might be having, those can make the difference because lots of people are smart, but not everyone can communicate in a way that their client understands or that the business owner understands or that the board or the trustees or whoever understand. Those things can make the difference between making sure that you have a profitable and a good relationship overall. Mordy Oberstein: And it all comes down to fundamentally, like everything significant in life, you have to know your audience, from your kids to your clients to your C-level folk. And for example, I don't bribe my kids with episodes of Perfect Strangers. I bribe them with Pokemon, cousin Larry. Or Batman, they like Batman now, they're into Batman. You need to speak to your C-levels, not about SEO audits, not interested in how many broken back links you have. You need to speak about growth, about the brand and about revenue. Don't forget the brand part by the way, because CMOs are not dumb. CMOs know, especially at big companies, they know that money comes from brands. So if you only talk about SEO spitting up revenue, you're missing half of their considerations, by the way. So point of order around that. But yeah, you need to understand who your audience is to be talking to C-level and that's the tricky part of it. So let's take a step back and let's first ask, is C-level even pertinent to SEO? I think we've already answered that obviously, but only partially by saying that yes, SEO was a big part of brand awareness and we need to zoom out and discuss search as a channel because the importance of search as a channel is going to be what gets you into the boardroom. If 53% of all web traffic, which I saw once that say comes from organic search, then that's going to be the starting point with talking to C-level because it's going to be an inherent part of their success. Crystal Carter: Indeed. And I think that it can affect lots and lots of decisions across the board about how people are deciding to move forward with different business challenges. So we talked a bit about budget there. C-level suites, they'll decide, well, we need to buy a new piece of technology because of this, that or the other. We're having this challenge, like we're having a challenge hiring, for instance. You might be having a challenge hiring because you're not optimized for search, for instance, when people are looking for jobs. I've sat in C-level discussions and I was like, the site isn't optimized for job hires. People can't see that you have jobs to hire. So you're making a decision to allocate budget for recruiters or for this or for that and you haven't got this easy win that we could do with a few strokes of a code, we could sort that. And so with search, sometimes you're able to find solutions at help people to move forward in a business positive way. And you talked about remembering what the business objectives are, what people are trying to move forward through. Organizations that have boards of directors like trustees and things like that, and even smaller organizations, a lot of agencies might have a board of directors that they have to refer to. They're guiding principles, they'll have their objectives, they'll have vision statements, all of these things. And you can fine tune the way that you focus your SEO objectives and your SEO projects to align with those things. And that can help you get a lot closer to the things that you want to do on the site and the things that you think are going to be valuable to them. And the soft skills as well is a great point. This is something that Eli Schwartz talks a lot about. He speaks a lot in the enterprise SEO and in C-suites and speaking to folks about that. He says that it's really, really important to make friends with everyone. And this is important as well because different teams report to boards at different times. So if you are speaking with different teams and they understand the value of SEO and they understand the value of what you're doing, then when they speak to the C-suite, they will also speak your praises. That's really, really important. And also, if they come to you and they ask you for stats, they ask you for evidence that the SEO that you did brought on a business benefit, then if you're able to provide that, again, gets you in front of that. Even if you're not at the actual meeting necessarily, it allows people in the C-suite to keep the fact that SEO is valuable in their minds. And that's really important. And again, I think that Eli Schwartz in his article, which we have on the SEO hub, will link it in the show notes. He also talks about talking to them in words that they understand. So business terms, like you said, Mordy, they're not stupid. People who don't understand SEO jargon are not stupid. They understand their business and they understand what makes their business work and they remember their customers and they understand their customers. Talk to them about their customers, about how you're helping them to get more downloads, get more registrations, get more leads, get more sales and how SEO plays into that equation. That's really, really important. And I think that in a boardroom, people will have discussions. So give them things to talk about and understand that you can have a conversation about what this is. And I think that we sometimes think of a board level room as being like, oh, like a big giant, huge ginormous company. And sometimes they are, of course. But there are also, I've worked at agencies that had a board of directors and a board of directors can be a few people sometimes, but they need to be able to make a decision in a short span of time and they need to have the key points of what that is. And also, what generally happens at a board meeting is that you'll get the papers beforehand. So make sure that you're outlining your case in your documents explicitly and clearly and well before it goes to the boardroom because people will read those papers before they get to the meeting. And then there will be a short discussion at the meeting and then they will decide. And that's what happens. And if you're not able to make your case and paper very clearly, it's going to be trickier to get that budget approval, it's going to be trickier to get that project approval and all of that sort of stuff. So keep that in mind when you're talking to C-Suite folks. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to go all the way back to the first point you made. Crystal Carter: All the way back. All the way back. Mordy Oberstein: All the way back, back in time. 88 miles an hour. So when you talk about, let's say the jobs thing, they have a website, they need to bring in new clients, obviously need to bring in new clients. But you need to bring in new talent and the website is not built to do that. That's why SEO should be included in C-suite... I can't speak. SEO should be included in C-suite decisions because that can impact the health of the business. And the problem is that you need to get the buy-in to do that. That's not going to happen. They're not going to say, "You know what? We really like organic search. We need to make sure we're including that." Like you mentioned, you need to show the value and you need to do it in a way that resonates with them. And that means understanding who the people on the board are because they're going to be very, very, very, very different people. And I'm going to give you an example from our own SEO advisory boards. Do we have an SEO advisory board, we meet monthly, we go through the Wix product. We try to make it even better than it already is and we have so many different kinds of people on the board. We have people who work on very heavy on the Wix side and they're a Wix partner, let's say, like Mark Preston. We have somebody who's a very, very broad thinker about search in Kevin Indig. We have somebody's on the e-comm side, like Luke Carthy, somebody from the traditional SEO technical side, Niki Mosier. There's so many different kinds of people and it's on purpose. And it's the same thing with a regular board or a company board. There's different kinds of people for different reasons and you need to make sure that you address all of them actually. So if we're talking about the SEO tools in Wix, I need to make sure if I'm going to be addressing them to Luke Carthy, that I bring it from an e-comm point of view. Otherwise, I'm not going to be speaking his language. If they don't talk about the overall strategy and growth possibilities with the tool, it's not going to speak to Kevin Indig the same way. So you need to be able to speak to multiple audiences at one time, which as an SEO, you should be pretty good at doing. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. And to be honest, this applies for the C-suite. It also applies if you're an agency or if you're a marketing manager and you're doing SEO and people want to know your report or something, like what happened last month? How did that SEO campaign go? Remember that you need to have a space so that somebody who's the business owner can understand what you're talking about and you can drill down later on. Normally, if you're reporting to a board as an SEO, you'll have the top level so that they can understand exactly what's going on and then there'll be an appendix so that if somebody wants to dig into the details, they can. But make sure that you lead with a TLDR that makes sense, right? With something that makes sense, it's easily accessible, like sales are up. Don't bury that news. Lead with the fact that sales are up. Lead with the fact that rankings are up, lead with that. Detail it later on as well, but lead with the main thing. That's really important because that's going to be important to everybody and that's going to be useful for everybody. And going back to what you were saying about the C-suite and the business decisions, so there's a lot of change happening in search right now. As you're an SEO, you know that that's happening. We know that that's coming down the pipe. However, sometimes the business owners don't, the C-suite doesn't. They don't know necessarily that there are big changes coming in certain things. So for instance, like the jobs one for instance, when that came in, that completely changed how people are applying for jobs. And if you think about it's like sometimes Google will give us big announcements that we are building this new thing and it's happening and you're going to need to deal with it. So for instance, GA4, right? GA4 is coming in and it's changing stuff. If you're not in the weeds like an SEO, then you don't know that that's happening. And so the C-suite are going to need to know that the way we track our marketing and the way that we understand our sales and the way that we track what happens online is going to change and we have to change and we need to get buy-in for them to make a decision on what we need to do. So you can be the canary in the coal mine here for some of the things that rule have big impact. And when people don't respond to some of those changes, for instance, I remember when e-comm hit a sort of big peak and there was a bit of a slow change where some businesses were online and some businesses weren't selling online. Well, the people who got in there early, because they had leadership that was able to connect with people who are on the ground and could say, "Hey, this e-comm a big deal, we should get in there early, we should do more," those people who are able to talk all the way through the business, they will be an advantage to people who are not. So we need to make sure that you're able to tell them and to have a communication with your leadership about changes in search, changes in tech that are going to affect them. And that's really, really valuable. And it's something that people that are not in the details of search and information retrieval and all that sort of stuff aren't going to know. And that's really important for you to be able to have those conversations and to make sure that those lines of communications are open. Mordy Oberstein: To that point, you might be great at SEO, may be great at SEO strategy, you might not be the best communicator. And I think it's important to take a step back and check the ego, I am not the best communicator. Let me bring somebody in who is. And I think that's really the epitome of a good leader. A good leader is not threatened by other good people. They bring in better people than themselves. And that's what makes you a good leader. And if there's somebody better at you in communicating to the C-level, then bring them with you. Let's use a biblical reference. Bring Aaron. If you're Moses, bring Aaron with you. Crystal Carter: These are my tablets, Aaron explain them. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Yeah, yeah. Here's what we did. Aaron, go ahead. Junior, go ahead, explain it and do that. Crystal Carter: Right. And it's useful because you can have all the stats. So if somebody wants to know the big picture, like what's most important about the points, great. And if somebody wants to know, but what happened on the 3rd of June in 2022 or something, you can be like, "Well actually, it was up 17% and down 3%," and all that sort of stuff. So you can have the details and you can know all of those things. But yeah, if you need somebody to lead on the pitch or on the discussion, absolutely do that. And I think that with these meetings it's really important to be focused on achieving your goal and remember what's most effective for helping you achieve that goal. And remember that it's sometimes very important that you are able to have those conversations for businesses because sometimes they don't know that there's a helpful content coming up or a helpful content update, for instance coming up, and that maybe we should have a think about the way we've been thinking about content for instance, or there's plenty of other things that happen and they don't want to be broadsided and you can help them, and remember that. Mordy Oberstein: And also, if you bring somebody in to help you and to talk for you, you look well important like, "Ah yes, let me. Steven, go ahead, explain it to them." Crystal Carter: While you sip your coffee in the corner. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, yes. Now who is well important, the CEO of Lumar, which is one of the leading enterprise SEO platforms, who by the way has a wonderful integration with Wix, formally notice Deepcrawl, by the way. So if you're looking in the Wix at markets under Deepcrawl, not Lumar. But now it's Lumar, not Deepcrawl. Craig Dunham is here to share his insights of an actual C-level person and somebody who literally helps so many SEOs speak the C-level folk. He should to help you understand how SEOs add value to board level decisions. Take it away. Craig, Craig Dunham: Thanks for having me. This is a really great question. I'll open with It is absolutely essential, right for leaders to understand how their budget decisions are supporting larger business goals. And so SEOs are generally giving credit for brand discoverability awareness, but there's often a lack of knowledge at the board and leadership level around the particulars of SEO and website health more generally. And so let's be honest, right? If you're in a board meeting, you might lose some people or eyes may glaze over a bit if they're unfamiliar with the more technical concepts and terms that are being presented to them. Even if SEO is discussed or maybe some data is provided to leadership, if you start diving deep into discussions about URL redirects or no index rules, you're not going to keep this audience's attention for very long. And so you need to speak to be understood. And SEOs have to start to think about educating leadership on the value of their work, but in language that the board is familiar with. And so what that translates to is keeping the focus on how do the particular website efforts contribute to broader business outcomes like customer acquisition and connecting the technical aspects of SEO with specific commercial goals, right? Understanding the impact, tying it to revenue. Even if it's via traffic and conversion metrics, you ultimately need to make that connection to revenue or some other identified core business objective. Now, we've tried to make this easier for SEOs by introducing data visualizations and reporting options that are built to help with this, call it cross team collaboration, like the organic traffic funnel, something that we use which connects specific aspects of a website's technical health, for example, crawlability or indexability. And it connects it with the larger picture around brand discoverability. And so you'll find many leaders, especially those with a marketing background, are already familiar with this concept of funnels. And so organizing your data in a way that connects the technical aspects of SEO to frameworks that they understand creates this common ground of understanding. I think it's also worth noting that as we start 2023, there's this talk of potential recession in the business news and it's all over the place and it's a really important time for SEOs to make the case, I think for website optimization. And this means more directly that leaders are probably looking at how do we lower the cost of acquiring customers? And with the ongoing decline of third-party cookies, this over-reliance on more costly paid channels like digital ads, this is not sustainable, it won't offer the most cost-effective path forward. And so I suspect that many businesses are revisiting and reworking sort of this balance between paid and organic marketing. And as boards start to take a fresh look at organic marketing channels and their potential to reduce this cost of acquiring new customers, feels like a great time for SEOs to make the case for SEO and driving website health more broadly. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you Craig. That was incredibly crisp. The best way I could describe. It's a great point about contextualizing your SEO average. We talked about it earlier a few minutes ago. But you were talking about SEO being rolling for brand discovery and you're zooming out. As an SEO, you're often so narrowly focused on what you do, but the board, the CMO is not. He's very broadly focused, she's very broadly focused. And if you don't speak in that context or you don't contextualize SEO say in brand discovery and branding and in acquisition itself, obviously, then you're going to lose them because they're not narrowly focused the way you might be. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think the one phrase that stood out for that was speak to be understood. He also talked about people's eyes glazing over when you get into the details of some of the SEO stuff. I've definitely been in meetings when I've been like, "Oh, this is really important," and been very excited about it and people are like, "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know." And so speaking to be understood is so important. And he also talked about the timeliness with regards to economic situations and yeah, this is the time when everybody's coming to the board, asking for money, asking for resources and all of that sort of stuff. So you need to make sure that you can speak to be understood, and you need to make sure that you have a clear outline of how what you do can benefit the business currently and in the future. I think that's the other thing that's great about search and the thing that I love about search is discovering opportunities. There's almost always untapped opportunities within SEO and within a website, within a digital presence. There's almost always you can, a good SEO can look at it and they can say, "Hey, actually we're not using this completely free channel." For instance, we have a Google business profile or we have 17 Google business profiles and we're not using them to the full extent of what we could. It's free. We could do that right now and that would help improve our business outcomes and that would help us do more. Then they'll say, "Well, what do you need?" And it's like, "Well, we need one more person," or something. And it's like, "Well, what's the ROI on that? Well, we would expect to see this, this, and this." And then they can say, "Yeah, we can approve that and we can get that done. We can move that forward." And I think that remembering your role across the business. And I think he also talked about charts. Charts are useful. Everybody likes a chart. You want up and to the right green, that sort of thing. And charts are useful from having those conversations. And yeah, that's a great insights from Craig there. Mordy Oberstein: You know what else is useful? And speaking of CEOs, did you know that CEOs optimizing themselves for SEO was perhaps good for SEO? Crystal Carter: Really? Mordy Oberstein: But it's true. Yeah. CEOs optimizing themselves for search can play a role in organic success as we introduce to you a brand new segment on the SERP's Up podcast. And it is an ode to a baseball phrase, so I love it for two reasons because we're calling it Going, Going, Google. Speaker 4: And it's going, going, Google, it's out of here. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the first ever Going, Going, Google. I have to do a baseball announcer voice when I say it. Going, Going, Google. The crowd goes wild. Where we're going to look at where Google is heading so that you can update your focus in SEO strategy. And this case, we're talking about CEOs and beyond. Not just CEOs, but prominent members of your company and the optimization and the knowledge panels and all of that stuff. So let's get going with Going, Going, Google. Crystal Carter: Okay, so Going, Going, Google is essentially talking about the way that things are going on Google, like general trends that we're seeing around Google. And one of the trends that I thought was particularly interesting was essentially talking about biographical entities. Lily Ray, who we featured on the podcast previously, is somebody who's known for talking about E-A-T. Marie Haynes is another person who's known for talking about E-A-T. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trust. They've added another E recently. Mordy Oberstein: Another E, it's EE. Crystal Carter: E-E-A-T. So the other E is experience. And one of the things that you'll find, like if you look up a big corporation, so for instance, if you look up something like Microsoft, you might see a knowledge panel for that company. And when you look that up, they will list the people that are in that company. They will often list the founders. For instance, they will also list the chairperson for that company. So for instance, if you look up Microsoft, you will see that the chairperson is Satya Nadella. And then when you click on that, that person has a full sort of knowledge panel, or not a knowledge panel, I'm not sure what they're calling this at the moment, but it's SERP feature that includes pictures, biographical information, information about their education, information about their videos, all of this sort of stuff. Why? Because Google has a very good understanding of the biographical entity around that person. And what that means is that Google can also understand that that person is associated with that business. And so there's a lot of push for AI, which is an interesting why we're talking about Microsoft. But there's a lot of push for AI at the moment. But Google is also making a big push for making sure that they're very clear on who the people are behind different companies, different websites, different digital assets. And this is something that's part of that. And I think that the fact that they're giving this kind of treatment to not just people like Beyonce, not just people who are literal rock stars, but also to people who are on boards of directors, people who are professionals, is really, really important. And it shows the emphasis that they are putting on understanding biographical entities so that they can make better decisions and make better, not necessarily ranking decisions I guess I would say, but better insights around the E-A-T that's associated with a particular business or website. Mordy Oberstein: And what I think works you, take a company like Wix, right? So you search for Wix, you get our founders, you get the CEO, it's all great and it's all well. I think Google could contextualize Wix without that. They understand who we are because we such a big presence without that. But if you're a smaller company and you have a CEO or a founder or somebody, a C-level person of significance in the company, who has biographical, we'll say recognition, that part of the knowledge graph, that could, in many ways, affect how Google understands your business and where your business is relevant. You can piggyback, whereas with Microsoft, let's say, or Amazon, the particular people who work for the company might be benefiting from Amazon's authority. If you work for a smaller mid-size company, that company might piggyback its authority off the people who work for it. And that's where it comes into play. So if that person, for example, the CEO is writing a blog post, now, this recognition of, okay, we know who that is, they are an expert on this, they are writing it for this company, for this blog, for this website, rather, now this post benefits from their authority. So they give it a very narrow, simple, linear way of seeing that play out. Because I think it's way more than that narrow, simple way of playing out. It's a very holistic in and out, back and forth kind of dynamic. But just to give it a sort of define it, that would be one way of thinking about how the company benefits off and piggybacks off of the authority of the individuals who work for it. Crystal Carter: Right. So it's all a contributor. Is it Leviathan? It's a person that's made up of lots of little or lots of smaller people. Is that the one that I'm thinking of, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: Isn't a Leviathan a giant monster, the giant sea serpent from the Bible. Our second biblical reference today. Crystal Carter: Okay, so maybe that's not the one I'm thinking. Mordy Oberstein: I think you're thinking of the Megazord from Power Rangers, made of moving parts and transforms. Crystal Carter: No, I'm not thinking of the Megazord. I am. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan is sort of one person and it's got lots of smaller people. But basically, your company, your business is made up of people and Google knows that. And Google knows that and when they talked about their helpful content update for instance, they were talking about content written for people by people. They understand who those people are. And it's really important for you in a business of any size to think about who the people on your team are and to have an understanding of their digital presence. So I call it a biographical entity. Lots of people call it other things. But it's important that people know that you're related to the company and that they can verify your expertise. So one really, really simple, easy way is to actually spend a little bit of time on your LinkedIn profile, even if you're not posting every day about how you're thrilled about whatever it is you've done or making some long-winded metaphor that has nothing to do with being a tax attorney, but you've decided to put it out on a LinkedIn anyway. Even if you're not posting enormously. Most professionals' names, if you look up whatever their name is and their professional thing, one of the first entries that shows up on Google will be their LinkedIn profile for instance. And Google has said, I'm sure I've heard John Mueller say this. I can find the link in the show notes. But he said that that's one of the ways that they verify E-A-T, or one of the sources that they go to for thinking about that. And also, it's a case that the Google also uses this, often pulls LinkedIn content for saying what is so-and-so known for. It'll show up as a featured snippet for that. They'll say, so-and-so is known for being a fantastic figure skater or an amazing flutist. Mordy Oberstein: Artist. They're an artist. And also make sure you have it on the website itself because Google looks for multiple... LinkedIn, Crunchbase. Let's assume you don't have a Wikipedia entry that'll make things overly simple. There's none, right? You don't have to have a Wikipedia entry to be an entity. That's so not true at all. But if you put it on the website itself, Google might actually pull the website and make the connection between the entity which you want to and the entity you're trying to, which is the business, and connect them together because it's on the same website. That's where the entity exists. Whatever it is that you're doing, and it's a great business strategy overall, build up the people that are working for you, that are part of your company because you can create strong biographical connections or knowledge graph connection between them and the business, which impacts the visibility of that business in a lot of ways on Google search and well beyond. And now let us go well beyond by diving into what is going out there on the great beyond that we know as the SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy News. Well, it's been a while since we talked about an official Google update. So here it comes, or rather here it is. At the time of this recording, the February, 2023 product review update is live as reported by Barry Schwartz over a Search Engine Roundtable. 5:00 PM Eastern Time on February 21st saw the release of the latest iteration of the product review update. While this update only applies to pages reviewing products and even lists of best products, it can impact general shopping SERPs as product review pages that get shuffled around impact the overall rankings of URLs on those SERPs. So for example, you sell laptops and are ranking for the keyword by laptop, your pages might not be directly impacted by the product review update. But if the page reviewing laptops of all sorts of kinds gets a ranking boost at the hands of the update and happens to rank for that very same keyword, that might mean you now rank lower. So if you sell products, definitely keep your eyes peeled as the update continues to roll out. As of the day of this recording, the summer censure is showing multiple days of elevator ranking. Since the announcement, it would seem at least on the surface, that this update might have a little bit more teeth on it as compared to previous iterations of the product review update, or maybe even the more recent iterations of the product review updates. Best advice, showcase personal experience using the products when creating product review content. All right, this one's for all y'all AI nerds. Bing has pulled back the curtain... Try that again. Bing has pulled back the curtain in a recent blog post by VP of search and AI that explains how Bing's new AI chat shows relevant information when open AI's data source only goes through November, 2021. In a nutshell, Bing has something called Prometheus, sounds fancy, which feeds open AI relevant information from the actual Bing index, meaning now the AI has the latest and greatest and most updated information possible. It does so by breaking down the chat prompt the user enters into various subqueries. So for example, if UX being chat rather, how do you make bread and dessert for someone with an allergy to gluten? Bing would break that down in to, how do you make gluten-free bread and a separate query for, how do you make gluten-free dessert? It would feed open AI with any of the needed relevant information on that topic. By the way, by working it out in this way, Bing can also present citations for specific sections of the AI response, which it does, which is pretty cool. And last up, as reported from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, you can now better optimize LinkedIn articles for search as you have access to custom set the title tag and meta description, which is I guess nifty, if you write articles on LinkedIn. Which I don't, but maybe you do. So now you know. And with that, that is the snappiest of SEO news. So much news, but we only did a few stories. Crystal Carter: It's a really dynamic time in search. Mordy Oberstein: It was a busy week, a dynamic week in search, considering all that's been going on. Crystal Carter: So much. Mordy Oberstein: So much, so much going on. Do you know who also has so much going on? Our follow of the week? This week's follow of the week, who you should be following on. Social media is former member of Wix's own SEO advisory board, former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and current LinkedIn data nerd, Michelle fricking Robbins. Crystal Carter: Michelle Robbins. Michelle Robbins is a fantastic legend. Legendary, but also amazing. She was on the Wix SEO board previously and she is somebody who really understands the value of SEO for business and the value of SEO for business objectives. And she speaks with incredible clarity and knowledge around this. She's a great follow for lots of reasons. She was recently featured on the Search Off the Record podcast, talking about her career, her career journey. Mordy Oberstein: Which is Google's own podcast. Crystal Carter: Google's own podcast. And it's fascinating. And she's someone who is... yeah, she's so clear, so smart, and so laser focused on making sure that digital activity leads to business growth and that is what it's there for. We don't make websites for the sake of making websites. We make websites to achieve an objective. And it might be that we want to share something that we really, really love and that might be the objective. But the website, for instance, is a tool for achieving that objective and that she's very good at making sure that people are focused on moving forward with her objectives. Mordy Oberstein: So not to play down the other follows of the week that we've recommended in the past, but having worked with Michelle on the Wix successor advisory board, I'm thinking for like probably the better part of two years. I'm saying this to all genuineness. I left every meeting that she was a part of having learned something from her, and I always felt privileged to have been a part of that because I was able to learn from Michelle. So this is a very strong recommendation to follow Michelle Robbins online, on LinkedIn, on Twitter. On Twitter, it's @MichelleRobbins, M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E R-O-B-B-I-N-S, over on Twitter, of course, we'll link to it in the show notes. So I think that's it. Crystal Carter: I think that's it. Mordy Oberstein: We have reached the precipice. Crystal Carter: Okay, do we a... what is it? Mordy Oberstein: A Leviathan? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Megazord? Do you have a Megazord? I wish you had a Megazord. Crystal Carter: Do the eyes have it? Mordy Oberstein: The eyes? Yes. Crystal Carter: Nevermind. Mordy Oberstein: We have gone off the rails. Thank you for listening to the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into how to retain your SEO clients in 10 days. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or are waiting on Spotify or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Craig Dunham Michelle Robbins Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Lumar Enterprise SEO Tips News: Google Unwraps February 2023 Product Reviews Update With Language Support Building the New Bing LinkedIn Introduces SEO Tools For Articles Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Craig Dunham Michelle Robbins Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Lumar Enterprise SEO Tips News: Google Unwraps February 2023 Product Reviews Update With Language Support Building the New Bing LinkedIn Introduces SEO Tools For Articles Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some group new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous and not AI writer, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: How do you know I'm not AI? Mordy Oberstein: I'm looking at you right now. You don't look like AI to me. Crystal Carter: But I could be like auto-generated video, and then with the sound. I've seen those things on the internet. I saw a video where they made Snoop Dogg speak a completely different language. He did a Just Eat advert, but in another language that he didn't originally speak. Mordy Oberstein: Can I go full nerd on you? Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: There's a Star Trek Picard episode where he dies and he becomes an Android and his consciousness gets transferred from his body to this Android. So now Captain Picard is actually an Android in reality. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: Yes, this happened. By the way, if you're listening to this and you like Star Trek, I have just spoiled the Picard series? Yeah. Crystal Carter: This is ridiculous. I haven't seen season two. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: You clearly haven't seen season one, it happened in season one. Crystal Carter: No it didn't. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, it did. Crystal Carter: Did it? Mordy Oberstein: He becomes the Android in the end. Crystal Carter: Then I watched it and didn't understand. Mordy Oberstein: It was very confusing. Season 2 was way better. Crystal Carter: I just remember Data with long hair being like all Zen and stuff. And also, it's just good to see old Riker. Riker's like- Mordy Oberstein: I love Riker. They're all coming back for three, all the old cast. Crystal Carter: Okay. The other thing that's great about Riker is like, have you ever seen the Rikering video? He never sits down in a chair. Mordy Oberstein: Right. He always sits backwards on it. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And after you see it, you never unsee it. It's very important. Mordy Oberstein: True. He's so tall. That's why. Crystal Carter: So tall. Mordy Oberstein: He's so tall. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where we have the data, Google Search Console data. Google Search Console Data Insights in our new SEO home dashboard, and a heap of filterable GSC data inside of Wix Analytics. No red checks needed. So you can show off your prowess, your organization's C level folk, which I mentioned because this week we're diving into C-suite, and is it really a place for SEO? Yes, episode done. It is a place for... SEO belongs in the C-suite. We've solved that problem. We finished the episode in one second. Crystal Carter: You're not wrong. It's really important and I think that it's one of those things where there are some discussions that should be had before they filter down further into the organization that only an SEO can have in our very important, very special way. So yeah, I think it's really important and I'm really glad that we're talking about this because it's something I'm very passionate about. Mordy Oberstein: Which is why we're diving into how would you bring SEO up to the board? How valuable is SEO to top level decision makers and why C level should be a concern for any SEO agency? Plus very, very honorable and very, very special guests. C level guest has Craig Dunham, the CEO of Lumar, joins us to talk about what actually goes into communicating and helping C level folk understand SEO. Plus, we're going to go into why C level optimizing themselves for search is an actual SEO strategy, kind of sort of you'll have to see. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. This is the executive version of the SERP's Up podcast. Episode number 27 is on, or let's buy stock in episode number 27. So many C level things to say. Crystal Carter: So many C level things to say. I agree, I concur. I second that motion. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, I always thought as a kid, it was I second that motion and that I second that emotion. Crystal Carter: The song? Mordy Oberstein: The song, yeah. I don't know why I thought that as a kid. Crystal Carter: So you took out the play on words that they put in? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I was like 10. Don't blame me. Okay. I'm a 10-year-old still. Crystal Carter: Okay. That's fine. Mordy Oberstein: So let's get into it. So you have a large organization, you work with a large organization, you work in a large organization and you need to get buy-in around your SEO. So clearly, getting SEO is relevant to you and you need to be relevant to C-level folk because those are the people who are going to be making the decision about let's say your budget and all of that good stuff. So getting C-level folk associated with SEO or SEO in front of them applies to everyone. It applies if you're in-house, obviously. It applies if you're in an agency because the POC that you're working with your client, your POC at the company at some point inevitably, it's going to get passed up the chain to C level. So you need to make them look good. That's your job. You're an agency, so you need to consider about C level. And C level is tricky because C level brings in the soft skills of SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And I know that many times SEOs will scoff at the soft skills side of SEO, but that's usually because those SEOs don't have them. Crystal Carter: Do you know what? I think one of the things that's tricky about it is that it's very difficult to optimize for soft skills. It's very difficult to quantify for soft skills. But those skills, building trust, being able to communicate well, being able to relate to your client, being able to relate to the C-suite, being able to have empathy for business struggles and challenges that they might be having, those can make the difference because lots of people are smart, but not everyone can communicate in a way that their client understands or that the business owner understands or that the board or the trustees or whoever understand. Those things can make the difference between making sure that you have a profitable and a good relationship overall. Mordy Oberstein: And it all comes down to fundamentally, like everything significant in life, you have to know your audience, from your kids to your clients to your C-level folk. And for example, I don't bribe my kids with episodes of Perfect Strangers. I bribe them with Pokemon, cousin Larry. Or Batman, they like Batman now, they're into Batman. You need to speak to your C-levels, not about SEO audits, not interested in how many broken back links you have. You need to speak about growth, about the brand and about revenue. Don't forget the brand part by the way, because CMOs are not dumb. CMOs know, especially at big companies, they know that money comes from brands. So if you only talk about SEO spitting up revenue, you're missing half of their considerations, by the way. So point of order around that. But yeah, you need to understand who your audience is to be talking to C-level and that's the tricky part of it. So let's take a step back and let's first ask, is C-level even pertinent to SEO? I think we've already answered that obviously, but only partially by saying that yes, SEO was a big part of brand awareness and we need to zoom out and discuss search as a channel because the importance of search as a channel is going to be what gets you into the boardroom. If 53% of all web traffic, which I saw once that say comes from organic search, then that's going to be the starting point with talking to C-level because it's going to be an inherent part of their success. Crystal Carter: Indeed. And I think that it can affect lots and lots of decisions across the board about how people are deciding to move forward with different business challenges. So we talked a bit about budget there. C-level suites, they'll decide, well, we need to buy a new piece of technology because of this, that or the other. We're having this challenge, like we're having a challenge hiring, for instance. You might be having a challenge hiring because you're not optimized for search, for instance, when people are looking for jobs. I've sat in C-level discussions and I was like, the site isn't optimized for job hires. People can't see that you have jobs to hire. So you're making a decision to allocate budget for recruiters or for this or for that and you haven't got this easy win that we could do with a few strokes of a code, we could sort that. And so with search, sometimes you're able to find solutions at help people to move forward in a business positive way. And you talked about remembering what the business objectives are, what people are trying to move forward through. Organizations that have boards of directors like trustees and things like that, and even smaller organizations, a lot of agencies might have a board of directors that they have to refer to. They're guiding principles, they'll have their objectives, they'll have vision statements, all of these things. And you can fine tune the way that you focus your SEO objectives and your SEO projects to align with those things. And that can help you get a lot closer to the things that you want to do on the site and the things that you think are going to be valuable to them. And the soft skills as well is a great point. This is something that Eli Schwartz talks a lot about. He speaks a lot in the enterprise SEO and in C-suites and speaking to folks about that. He says that it's really, really important to make friends with everyone. And this is important as well because different teams report to boards at different times. So if you are speaking with different teams and they understand the value of SEO and they understand the value of what you're doing, then when they speak to the C-suite, they will also speak your praises. That's really, really important. And also, if they come to you and they ask you for stats, they ask you for evidence that the SEO that you did brought on a business benefit, then if you're able to provide that, again, gets you in front of that. Even if you're not at the actual meeting necessarily, it allows people in the C-suite to keep the fact that SEO is valuable in their minds. And that's really important. And again, I think that Eli Schwartz in his article, which we have on the SEO hub, will link it in the show notes. He also talks about talking to them in words that they understand. So business terms, like you said, Mordy, they're not stupid. People who don't understand SEO jargon are not stupid. They understand their business and they understand what makes their business work and they remember their customers and they understand their customers. Talk to them about their customers, about how you're helping them to get more downloads, get more registrations, get more leads, get more sales and how SEO plays into that equation. That's really, really important. And I think that in a boardroom, people will have discussions. So give them things to talk about and understand that you can have a conversation about what this is. And I think that we sometimes think of a board level room as being like, oh, like a big giant, huge ginormous company. And sometimes they are, of course. But there are also, I've worked at agencies that had a board of directors and a board of directors can be a few people sometimes, but they need to be able to make a decision in a short span of time and they need to have the key points of what that is. And also, what generally happens at a board meeting is that you'll get the papers beforehand. So make sure that you're outlining your case in your documents explicitly and clearly and well before it goes to the boardroom because people will read those papers before they get to the meeting. And then there will be a short discussion at the meeting and then they will decide. And that's what happens. And if you're not able to make your case and paper very clearly, it's going to be trickier to get that budget approval, it's going to be trickier to get that project approval and all of that sort of stuff. So keep that in mind when you're talking to C-Suite folks. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to go all the way back to the first point you made. Crystal Carter: All the way back. All the way back. Mordy Oberstein: All the way back, back in time. 88 miles an hour. So when you talk about, let's say the jobs thing, they have a website, they need to bring in new clients, obviously need to bring in new clients. But you need to bring in new talent and the website is not built to do that. That's why SEO should be included in C-suite... I can't speak. SEO should be included in C-suite decisions because that can impact the health of the business. And the problem is that you need to get the buy-in to do that. That's not going to happen. They're not going to say, "You know what? We really like organic search. We need to make sure we're including that." Like you mentioned, you need to show the value and you need to do it in a way that resonates with them. And that means understanding who the people on the board are because they're going to be very, very, very, very different people. And I'm going to give you an example from our own SEO advisory boards. Do we have an SEO advisory board, we meet monthly, we go through the Wix product. We try to make it even better than it already is and we have so many different kinds of people on the board. We have people who work on very heavy on the Wix side and they're a Wix partner, let's say, like Mark Preston. We have somebody who's a very, very broad thinker about search in Kevin Indig. We have somebody's on the e-comm side, like Luke Carthy, somebody from the traditional SEO technical side, Niki Mosier. There's so many different kinds of people and it's on purpose. And it's the same thing with a regular board or a company board. There's different kinds of people for different reasons and you need to make sure that you address all of them actually. So if we're talking about the SEO tools in Wix, I need to make sure if I'm going to be addressing them to Luke Carthy, that I bring it from an e-comm point of view. Otherwise, I'm not going to be speaking his language. If they don't talk about the overall strategy and growth possibilities with the tool, it's not going to speak to Kevin Indig the same way. So you need to be able to speak to multiple audiences at one time, which as an SEO, you should be pretty good at doing. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. And to be honest, this applies for the C-suite. It also applies if you're an agency or if you're a marketing manager and you're doing SEO and people want to know your report or something, like what happened last month? How did that SEO campaign go? Remember that you need to have a space so that somebody who's the business owner can understand what you're talking about and you can drill down later on. Normally, if you're reporting to a board as an SEO, you'll have the top level so that they can understand exactly what's going on and then there'll be an appendix so that if somebody wants to dig into the details, they can. But make sure that you lead with a TLDR that makes sense, right? With something that makes sense, it's easily accessible, like sales are up. Don't bury that news. Lead with the fact that sales are up. Lead with the fact that rankings are up, lead with that. Detail it later on as well, but lead with the main thing. That's really important because that's going to be important to everybody and that's going to be useful for everybody. And going back to what you were saying about the C-suite and the business decisions, so there's a lot of change happening in search right now. As you're an SEO, you know that that's happening. We know that that's coming down the pipe. However, sometimes the business owners don't, the C-suite doesn't. They don't know necessarily that there are big changes coming in certain things. So for instance, like the jobs one for instance, when that came in, that completely changed how people are applying for jobs. And if you think about it's like sometimes Google will give us big announcements that we are building this new thing and it's happening and you're going to need to deal with it. So for instance, GA4, right? GA4 is coming in and it's changing stuff. If you're not in the weeds like an SEO, then you don't know that that's happening. And so the C-suite are going to need to know that the way we track our marketing and the way that we understand our sales and the way that we track what happens online is going to change and we have to change and we need to get buy-in for them to make a decision on what we need to do. So you can be the canary in the coal mine here for some of the things that rule have big impact. And when people don't respond to some of those changes, for instance, I remember when e-comm hit a sort of big peak and there was a bit of a slow change where some businesses were online and some businesses weren't selling online. Well, the people who got in there early, because they had leadership that was able to connect with people who are on the ground and could say, "Hey, this e-comm a big deal, we should get in there early, we should do more," those people who are able to talk all the way through the business, they will be an advantage to people who are not. So we need to make sure that you're able to tell them and to have a communication with your leadership about changes in search, changes in tech that are going to affect them. And that's really, really valuable. And it's something that people that are not in the details of search and information retrieval and all that sort of stuff aren't going to know. And that's really important for you to be able to have those conversations and to make sure that those lines of communications are open. Mordy Oberstein: To that point, you might be great at SEO, may be great at SEO strategy, you might not be the best communicator. And I think it's important to take a step back and check the ego, I am not the best communicator. Let me bring somebody in who is. And I think that's really the epitome of a good leader. A good leader is not threatened by other good people. They bring in better people than themselves. And that's what makes you a good leader. And if there's somebody better at you in communicating to the C-level, then bring them with you. Let's use a biblical reference. Bring Aaron. If you're Moses, bring Aaron with you. Crystal Carter: These are my tablets, Aaron explain them. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Yeah, yeah. Here's what we did. Aaron, go ahead. Junior, go ahead, explain it and do that. Crystal Carter: Right. And it's useful because you can have all the stats. So if somebody wants to know the big picture, like what's most important about the points, great. And if somebody wants to know, but what happened on the 3rd of June in 2022 or something, you can be like, "Well actually, it was up 17% and down 3%," and all that sort of stuff. So you can have the details and you can know all of those things. But yeah, if you need somebody to lead on the pitch or on the discussion, absolutely do that. And I think that with these meetings it's really important to be focused on achieving your goal and remember what's most effective for helping you achieve that goal. And remember that it's sometimes very important that you are able to have those conversations for businesses because sometimes they don't know that there's a helpful content coming up or a helpful content update, for instance coming up, and that maybe we should have a think about the way we've been thinking about content for instance, or there's plenty of other things that happen and they don't want to be broadsided and you can help them, and remember that. Mordy Oberstein: And also, if you bring somebody in to help you and to talk for you, you look well important like, "Ah yes, let me. Steven, go ahead, explain it to them." Crystal Carter: While you sip your coffee in the corner. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes, yes. Now who is well important, the CEO of Lumar, which is one of the leading enterprise SEO platforms, who by the way has a wonderful integration with Wix, formally notice Deepcrawl, by the way. So if you're looking in the Wix at markets under Deepcrawl, not Lumar. But now it's Lumar, not Deepcrawl. Craig Dunham is here to share his insights of an actual C-level person and somebody who literally helps so many SEOs speak the C-level folk. He should to help you understand how SEOs add value to board level decisions. Take it away. Craig, Craig Dunham: Thanks for having me. This is a really great question. I'll open with It is absolutely essential, right for leaders to understand how their budget decisions are supporting larger business goals. And so SEOs are generally giving credit for brand discoverability awareness, but there's often a lack of knowledge at the board and leadership level around the particulars of SEO and website health more generally. And so let's be honest, right? If you're in a board meeting, you might lose some people or eyes may glaze over a bit if they're unfamiliar with the more technical concepts and terms that are being presented to them. Even if SEO is discussed or maybe some data is provided to leadership, if you start diving deep into discussions about URL redirects or no index rules, you're not going to keep this audience's attention for very long. And so you need to speak to be understood. And SEOs have to start to think about educating leadership on the value of their work, but in language that the board is familiar with. And so what that translates to is keeping the focus on how do the particular website efforts contribute to broader business outcomes like customer acquisition and connecting the technical aspects of SEO with specific commercial goals, right? Understanding the impact, tying it to revenue. Even if it's via traffic and conversion metrics, you ultimately need to make that connection to revenue or some other identified core business objective. Now, we've tried to make this easier for SEOs by introducing data visualizations and reporting options that are built to help with this, call it cross team collaboration, like the organic traffic funnel, something that we use which connects specific aspects of a website's technical health, for example, crawlability or indexability. And it connects it with the larger picture around brand discoverability. And so you'll find many leaders, especially those with a marketing background, are already familiar with this concept of funnels. And so organizing your data in a way that connects the technical aspects of SEO to frameworks that they understand creates this common ground of understanding. I think it's also worth noting that as we start 2023, there's this talk of potential recession in the business news and it's all over the place and it's a really important time for SEOs to make the case, I think for website optimization. And this means more directly that leaders are probably looking at how do we lower the cost of acquiring customers? And with the ongoing decline of third-party cookies, this over-reliance on more costly paid channels like digital ads, this is not sustainable, it won't offer the most cost-effective path forward. And so I suspect that many businesses are revisiting and reworking sort of this balance between paid and organic marketing. And as boards start to take a fresh look at organic marketing channels and their potential to reduce this cost of acquiring new customers, feels like a great time for SEOs to make the case for SEO and driving website health more broadly. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you Craig. That was incredibly crisp. The best way I could describe. It's a great point about contextualizing your SEO average. We talked about it earlier a few minutes ago. But you were talking about SEO being rolling for brand discovery and you're zooming out. As an SEO, you're often so narrowly focused on what you do, but the board, the CMO is not. He's very broadly focused, she's very broadly focused. And if you don't speak in that context or you don't contextualize SEO say in brand discovery and branding and in acquisition itself, obviously, then you're going to lose them because they're not narrowly focused the way you might be. Crystal Carter: Right. And I think the one phrase that stood out for that was speak to be understood. He also talked about people's eyes glazing over when you get into the details of some of the SEO stuff. I've definitely been in meetings when I've been like, "Oh, this is really important," and been very excited about it and people are like, "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know." And so speaking to be understood is so important. And he also talked about the timeliness with regards to economic situations and yeah, this is the time when everybody's coming to the board, asking for money, asking for resources and all of that sort of stuff. So you need to make sure that you can speak to be understood, and you need to make sure that you have a clear outline of how what you do can benefit the business currently and in the future. I think that's the other thing that's great about search and the thing that I love about search is discovering opportunities. There's almost always untapped opportunities within SEO and within a website, within a digital presence. There's almost always you can, a good SEO can look at it and they can say, "Hey, actually we're not using this completely free channel." For instance, we have a Google business profile or we have 17 Google business profiles and we're not using them to the full extent of what we could. It's free. We could do that right now and that would help improve our business outcomes and that would help us do more. Then they'll say, "Well, what do you need?" And it's like, "Well, we need one more person," or something. And it's like, "Well, what's the ROI on that? Well, we would expect to see this, this, and this." And then they can say, "Yeah, we can approve that and we can get that done. We can move that forward." And I think that remembering your role across the business. And I think he also talked about charts. Charts are useful. Everybody likes a chart. You want up and to the right green, that sort of thing. And charts are useful from having those conversations. And yeah, that's a great insights from Craig there. Mordy Oberstein: You know what else is useful? And speaking of CEOs, did you know that CEOs optimizing themselves for SEO was perhaps good for SEO? Crystal Carter: Really? Mordy Oberstein: But it's true. Yeah. CEOs optimizing themselves for search can play a role in organic success as we introduce to you a brand new segment on the SERP's Up podcast. And it is an ode to a baseball phrase, so I love it for two reasons because we're calling it Going, Going, Google. Speaker 4: And it's going, going, Google, it's out of here. Mordy Oberstein: Welcome to the first ever Going, Going, Google. I have to do a baseball announcer voice when I say it. Going, Going, Google. The crowd goes wild. Where we're going to look at where Google is heading so that you can update your focus in SEO strategy. And this case, we're talking about CEOs and beyond. Not just CEOs, but prominent members of your company and the optimization and the knowledge panels and all of that stuff. So let's get going with Going, Going, Google. Crystal Carter: Okay, so Going, Going, Google is essentially talking about the way that things are going on Google, like general trends that we're seeing around Google. And one of the trends that I thought was particularly interesting was essentially talking about biographical entities. Lily Ray, who we featured on the podcast previously, is somebody who's known for talking about E-A-T. Marie Haynes is another person who's known for talking about E-A-T. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trust. They've added another E recently. Mordy Oberstein: Another E, it's EE. Crystal Carter: E-E-A-T. So the other E is experience. And one of the things that you'll find, like if you look up a big corporation, so for instance, if you look up something like Microsoft, you might see a knowledge panel for that company. And when you look that up, they will list the people that are in that company. They will often list the founders. For instance, they will also list the chairperson for that company. So for instance, if you look up Microsoft, you will see that the chairperson is Satya Nadella. And then when you click on that, that person has a full sort of knowledge panel, or not a knowledge panel, I'm not sure what they're calling this at the moment, but it's SERP feature that includes pictures, biographical information, information about their education, information about their videos, all of this sort of stuff. Why? Because Google has a very good understanding of the biographical entity around that person. And what that means is that Google can also understand that that person is associated with that business. And so there's a lot of push for AI, which is an interesting why we're talking about Microsoft. But there's a lot of push for AI at the moment. But Google is also making a big push for making sure that they're very clear on who the people are behind different companies, different websites, different digital assets. And this is something that's part of that. And I think that the fact that they're giving this kind of treatment to not just people like Beyonce, not just people who are literal rock stars, but also to people who are on boards of directors, people who are professionals, is really, really important. And it shows the emphasis that they are putting on understanding biographical entities so that they can make better decisions and make better, not necessarily ranking decisions I guess I would say, but better insights around the E-A-T that's associated with a particular business or website. Mordy Oberstein: And what I think works you, take a company like Wix, right? So you search for Wix, you get our founders, you get the CEO, it's all great and it's all well. I think Google could contextualize Wix without that. They understand who we are because we such a big presence without that. But if you're a smaller company and you have a CEO or a founder or somebody, a C-level person of significance in the company, who has biographical, we'll say recognition, that part of the knowledge graph, that could, in many ways, affect how Google understands your business and where your business is relevant. You can piggyback, whereas with Microsoft, let's say, or Amazon, the particular people who work for the company might be benefiting from Amazon's authority. If you work for a smaller mid-size company, that company might piggyback its authority off the people who work for it. And that's where it comes into play. So if that person, for example, the CEO is writing a blog post, now, this recognition of, okay, we know who that is, they are an expert on this, they are writing it for this company, for this blog, for this website, rather, now this post benefits from their authority. So they give it a very narrow, simple, linear way of seeing that play out. Because I think it's way more than that narrow, simple way of playing out. It's a very holistic in and out, back and forth kind of dynamic. But just to give it a sort of define it, that would be one way of thinking about how the company benefits off and piggybacks off of the authority of the individuals who work for it. Crystal Carter: Right. So it's all a contributor. Is it Leviathan? It's a person that's made up of lots of little or lots of smaller people. Is that the one that I'm thinking of, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: Isn't a Leviathan a giant monster, the giant sea serpent from the Bible. Our second biblical reference today. Crystal Carter: Okay, so maybe that's not the one I'm thinking. Mordy Oberstein: I think you're thinking of the Megazord from Power Rangers, made of moving parts and transforms. Crystal Carter: No, I'm not thinking of the Megazord. I am. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan is sort of one person and it's got lots of smaller people. But basically, your company, your business is made up of people and Google knows that. And Google knows that and when they talked about their helpful content update for instance, they were talking about content written for people by people. They understand who those people are. And it's really important for you in a business of any size to think about who the people on your team are and to have an understanding of their digital presence. So I call it a biographical entity. Lots of people call it other things. But it's important that people know that you're related to the company and that they can verify your expertise. So one really, really simple, easy way is to actually spend a little bit of time on your LinkedIn profile, even if you're not posting every day about how you're thrilled about whatever it is you've done or making some long-winded metaphor that has nothing to do with being a tax attorney, but you've decided to put it out on a LinkedIn anyway. Even if you're not posting enormously. Most professionals' names, if you look up whatever their name is and their professional thing, one of the first entries that shows up on Google will be their LinkedIn profile for instance. And Google has said, I'm sure I've heard John Mueller say this. I can find the link in the show notes. But he said that that's one of the ways that they verify E-A-T, or one of the sources that they go to for thinking about that. And also, it's a case that the Google also uses this, often pulls LinkedIn content for saying what is so-and-so known for. It'll show up as a featured snippet for that. They'll say, so-and-so is known for being a fantastic figure skater or an amazing flutist. Mordy Oberstein: Artist. They're an artist. And also make sure you have it on the website itself because Google looks for multiple... LinkedIn, Crunchbase. Let's assume you don't have a Wikipedia entry that'll make things overly simple. There's none, right? You don't have to have a Wikipedia entry to be an entity. That's so not true at all. But if you put it on the website itself, Google might actually pull the website and make the connection between the entity which you want to and the entity you're trying to, which is the business, and connect them together because it's on the same website. That's where the entity exists. Whatever it is that you're doing, and it's a great business strategy overall, build up the people that are working for you, that are part of your company because you can create strong biographical connections or knowledge graph connection between them and the business, which impacts the visibility of that business in a lot of ways on Google search and well beyond. And now let us go well beyond by diving into what is going out there on the great beyond that we know as the SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy News. Well, it's been a while since we talked about an official Google update. So here it comes, or rather here it is. At the time of this recording, the February, 2023 product review update is live as reported by Barry Schwartz over a Search Engine Roundtable. 5:00 PM Eastern Time on February 21st saw the release of the latest iteration of the product review update. While this update only applies to pages reviewing products and even lists of best products, it can impact general shopping SERPs as product review pages that get shuffled around impact the overall rankings of URLs on those SERPs. So for example, you sell laptops and are ranking for the keyword by laptop, your pages might not be directly impacted by the product review update. But if the page reviewing laptops of all sorts of kinds gets a ranking boost at the hands of the update and happens to rank for that very same keyword, that might mean you now rank lower. So if you sell products, definitely keep your eyes peeled as the update continues to roll out. As of the day of this recording, the summer censure is showing multiple days of elevator ranking. Since the announcement, it would seem at least on the surface, that this update might have a little bit more teeth on it as compared to previous iterations of the product review update, or maybe even the more recent iterations of the product review updates. Best advice, showcase personal experience using the products when creating product review content. All right, this one's for all y'all AI nerds. Bing has pulled back the curtain... Try that again. Bing has pulled back the curtain in a recent blog post by VP of search and AI that explains how Bing's new AI chat shows relevant information when open AI's data source only goes through November, 2021. In a nutshell, Bing has something called Prometheus, sounds fancy, which feeds open AI relevant information from the actual Bing index, meaning now the AI has the latest and greatest and most updated information possible. It does so by breaking down the chat prompt the user enters into various subqueries. So for example, if UX being chat rather, how do you make bread and dessert for someone with an allergy to gluten? Bing would break that down in to, how do you make gluten-free bread and a separate query for, how do you make gluten-free dessert? It would feed open AI with any of the needed relevant information on that topic. By the way, by working it out in this way, Bing can also present citations for specific sections of the AI response, which it does, which is pretty cool. And last up, as reported from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, you can now better optimize LinkedIn articles for search as you have access to custom set the title tag and meta description, which is I guess nifty, if you write articles on LinkedIn. Which I don't, but maybe you do. So now you know. And with that, that is the snappiest of SEO news. So much news, but we only did a few stories. Crystal Carter: It's a really dynamic time in search. Mordy Oberstein: It was a busy week, a dynamic week in search, considering all that's been going on. Crystal Carter: So much. Mordy Oberstein: So much, so much going on. Do you know who also has so much going on? Our follow of the week? This week's follow of the week, who you should be following on. Social media is former member of Wix's own SEO advisory board, former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and current LinkedIn data nerd, Michelle fricking Robbins. Crystal Carter: Michelle Robbins. Michelle Robbins is a fantastic legend. Legendary, but also amazing. She was on the Wix SEO board previously and she is somebody who really understands the value of SEO for business and the value of SEO for business objectives. And she speaks with incredible clarity and knowledge around this. She's a great follow for lots of reasons. She was recently featured on the Search Off the Record podcast, talking about her career, her career journey. Mordy Oberstein: Which is Google's own podcast. Crystal Carter: Google's own podcast. And it's fascinating. And she's someone who is... yeah, she's so clear, so smart, and so laser focused on making sure that digital activity leads to business growth and that is what it's there for. We don't make websites for the sake of making websites. We make websites to achieve an objective. And it might be that we want to share something that we really, really love and that might be the objective. But the website, for instance, is a tool for achieving that objective and that she's very good at making sure that people are focused on moving forward with her objectives. Mordy Oberstein: So not to play down the other follows of the week that we've recommended in the past, but having worked with Michelle on the Wix successor advisory board, I'm thinking for like probably the better part of two years. I'm saying this to all genuineness. I left every meeting that she was a part of having learned something from her, and I always felt privileged to have been a part of that because I was able to learn from Michelle. So this is a very strong recommendation to follow Michelle Robbins online, on LinkedIn, on Twitter. On Twitter, it's @MichelleRobbins, M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E R-O-B-B-I-N-S, over on Twitter, of course, we'll link to it in the show notes. So I think that's it. Crystal Carter: I think that's it. Mordy Oberstein: We have reached the precipice. Crystal Carter: Okay, do we a... what is it? Mordy Oberstein: A Leviathan? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Megazord? Do you have a Megazord? I wish you had a Megazord. Crystal Carter: Do the eyes have it? Mordy Oberstein: The eyes? Yes. Crystal Carter: Nevermind. Mordy Oberstein: We have gone off the rails. Thank you for listening to the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episode as we dive into how to retain your SEO clients in 10 days. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or are waiting on Spotify or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Back Incorporating semantics into keyword research Learn to incorporate query semantics, advanced concepts, and actionable steps with the help of this SEO checklist. Get resource Full name* Agency name Business email* I want to receive news and updates from the Wix SEO team. * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix’s Privacy Policy . Get resource Use this asset to: Provides a clear overview of actions, their importance, instructions, and the tools needed Encourages marketers to go beyond traditional keyword research methods Integrates query semantics and an entity-driven understanding into the research process Explores advanced concepts like search intent and information gain to refine your strategy Lazarina Stoy Founder, MLForSEO LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Lazarina Stoy is an Organic Marketing Consultant, Trainer, and Speaker, specialising in SEO, Data Science/ML, and automation. She is also the Founder of MLforSEO - a training platform for Organic Search Marketers to learn how and why to incorporate machine learning for marketing process automation. More about this topic Read this post on how semantic & traditional keyword research come together for better SEO , on the Wix SEO Hub blog, for more information. Share this resource Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

What is seasonality, and how does it affect SEO? In what ways does the holiday season shape the user mindset? What impact do the holidays have on shaping brand positioning? The holidays are upon us, so it’s time for you to start thinking about the nuances of seasonal shifts in SEO. Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter along with the Chief Growth Officer of Sharma Brands, Ari Murray, as they weigh in on how to approach SEO for the holiday season and how you can get creative with holiday season campaigns. Unwrap insights beyond SEO, and learn how to position your brand so that it doesn’t miss the mark and aligns with the unique user mindset seen during the holidays. ‘Tis the season to rank highly, as we are dashing through the holiday SERP this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back 'Tis the season for SEO What is seasonality, and how does it affect SEO? In what ways does the holiday season shape the user mindset? What impact do the holidays have on shaping brand positioning? The holidays are upon us, so it’s time for you to start thinking about the nuances of seasonal shifts in SEO. Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter along with the Chief Growth Officer of Sharma Brands, Ari Murray, as they weigh in on how to approach SEO for the holiday season and how you can get creative with holiday season campaigns. Unwrap insights beyond SEO, and learn how to position your brand so that it doesn’t miss the mark and aligns with the unique user mindset seen during the holidays. ‘Tis the season to rank highly, as we are dashing through the holiday SERP this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 66 | December 13, 2023 | 39 MIN 00:00 / 39:15 This week’s guests Ari Murray Hi! I’m Ari Murray! By night, I write my love letter to ecommerce (oops, I mean my DTC newsletter that's read by 42,000 Go-to-Millionaires). By day, I'm Chief Growth Officer at Sharma Brands, a DTC consultancy that launches the biggest brands in the world. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo, for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights on what's happening in SEO. I am Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the festive, the fabulously festive, the incredibly festive, the oh, so festive head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Welcome and hello to all you SEO, oh, oh people. Mordy Oberstein: It's Festivus for the rest of us. Crystal Carter: Festivus, indeed, all of the things. I wish you all of the holiday loveliness, and I hope you eat too much food because that's... Mordy Oberstein: That's a great wish. Crystal Carter: ... the whole point of the whole thing. Like Viva la Carbs, enjoy all of the potatoes and bread and cake and various other carbohydrates. Mordy Oberstein: Whatever holiday you're celebrating, we want you to eat too much. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed, indeed. Like 'tis the season for stuffing your face. Mordy Oberstein: Just not the season for hopping on a scale. Crystal Carter: Oh, me. Honestly, honestly, they will tell all your business. They'll just be like, yeah, I'm doing fine. I'm feeling good about myself. And then the scale's like, nah, nah. Mordy Oberstein: It's not Scalability Season, that little SEO. Okay, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter search slide over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tags generator to add 2024 to all of your title tags. Actually, don't do that. That was a joke. Crystal Carter: Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Don't do that. But if you do want to update your title tags for the holiday season in a real way, and if you're running specific campaigns and want to create new pages and create title tags for those new pages and meta descriptions, you can use our AI meta tags generator to do it, which is why today we're talking about SEO for the holiday season as we ho, ho, ho, all the way to the top of the serp while we look at keyword research for seasonal topics, updating content for your campaigns and when to get started with holiday season SEO. Spoiler alert, by the time you're listening to this podcast, it's too late. But anyway, Ari Murray of Sharma Brands weighs in on how to get creative with the holiday season campaigns. Plus, we talked about how to position your brand during the holiday season, and of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So hop on the sleigh as we take flight to light up the holiday season or holiday season SEO brighter than your annoying neighbor who goes way too far with their holiday season decor on episode number 66 of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: Fantastic intro as ever, as ever, as ever. Okay, so seasonality. Seasonality, what are we talking about? Seasonality is essentially like when you see regular increases or decreases in organic traffic in line with annual or occasional events. And so the seasonal traffic's patterns can mean that you see traffic increased loads on particular blogs or across your whole website depending on what you're doing. I've worked with a few seasonal businesses and it can be very much night and day in terms of traffic. So for instance, I worked with an amusement park client and in the wintertime, they were based in a place where they had Halloween, they had a Christmas sort of thing, and then pretty much in Q1 or January to March, it was pretty quiet, very, very, very quiet, and then things would start ramping up in the summer. And it's really important to think about that when you're working with a business and to understand your traffic trends because this can affect lots of things. This can affect how you do your reporting. This can affect when you invest your time, when you start asking people for questions. So for instance, with a seasonal business where they're peaking in summer or they're peaking in other times of year, that's not the time to ask them to review a bunch of blog posts. That's not the time to ask them to sort of, let's do a content refresh of everything. That's the time for you to carry out stuff that you can do without them being involved, that you can do on your own, and you can let them know that it's done and they can be happy with that. But I think also there's a couple of other things to think about. A seasonality, there's weekly cadence. So B2B businesses, for instance, will see a lot of their traffic Monday to Friday. I've worked with retail clients and they often see a spike over the weekend, for instance. So they start seeing their spikes coming in on the sort of Friday, and then they see people increasing their shopping over to Saturday and Sunday. So that's really important to think about. And again, that can affect when you do your reporting. If you're reporting everything on Monday, say, and let's say that the sales from Saturday or Sunday haven't actually come in yet, then that's not a good time to do your reporting. You might want to do your reporting later in the week. You might want to do your reporting on a Wednesday so that they can make any actions on Thursday so that they can be ready for Friday, for instance. Then there's quarterly trends. So for instance, some traffic patterns don't follow a specific month. So things like Easter or Passover, Chinese New Year, school vacation, Diwali, things like that, they change from year to year. So these are all dates that will change over year to year. So for instance, for things like that, you'll need to think about maybe let's compare the quarter to the quarter, not necessarily the month, year-on-year, for instance. So that's something to think about as well. And then you have annual spikes that happen, which are your typical seasonality. And I think the other thing that I find about this is that with B2B businesses, for instance, people tend to think that B2B businesses don't have seasonality, that this is all B2C, with hotels, with summer stuff. Mordy Oberstein: It's not true. Crystal Carter: It's not true. So for instance, divorce lawyers, and I didn't know this until I was working with a lawyer client, but they will see a peak following school vacations and public holidays. So after big seasonal, end of the year, for instance. So there's a lot of people stop at the end of the year, there's often a big spike in divorces after that, and it's sad but true. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: Right. I think also you see in January, for instance, Wix often sees a surge in people wanting to build websites. Maybe people thought, you know what, this year I'm going to start that new thing. Mordy Oberstein: I'll give you a quarter's ending or the financial year ending. My uncle does title closings, and at the end of the quarter, the end of the year, it's a huge spike and everyone wants to get it, right? So it's across the board. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: It impacts everybody and everything in a way. You cannot escape seasonality. Crystal Carter: No, you can't. So it's really important to understand the business and to chat to them about that because you might not realize those things until you actually speak to the team. For instance, if you're working in the public sector, one phenomena that I've seen is that towards the end of the financial year, there's some situations where in the public sector, if you don't spend your budget, you don't get the budget for the next year. Mordy Oberstein: And governments sometimes have different financial years or points of the year than the average quarter. I think their financial year might start in September or something like that. Crystal Carter: Right. So for instance, I worked with the university before, in the university, their financial year ended in the summer time, for instance, because that had a thing. So that's important to think about, and that will impact all of your SEO activity, because when the season- Mordy Oberstein: Money always does. Crystal Carter: Right. So when peak season hits, you should already be live with whatever you need. You should be preparing in the off season, just like if you were on a sports team, you prepare on the off season, you prepare all your content, you get everything ready so that when peak season hits, you're already ranking and maybe you're ranking 20, right? Maybe you updated the content and it's just hanging around at number 20. But by the time people are sort of getting into search, Google seeing your content, they're coming back to your content, they're seeing that you're getting some activity on your content, and then you will move up the ranks very quickly. I've seen this happen. I've done this before and it works really, really well. So you want to be thinking about how you can manage that. But in order to do that, you need to understand your data and you need to understand the seasonality of your business. Mordy Oberstein: So let's get started again with the SEO stuff. I think the natural place you want to start is keywords. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And I'll give you a stupid example. Like outdoor ceiling fans, probably not a big thing in the winter time, by the way, unless your market is in Arizona, which because it's summertime all the time. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, so those are the things you need to think about. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: You may be dealing with a seasonal product, but your market is not seasonal, or you have an international market and it's always summer somewhere. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So things like Google trends come into play as opposed to looking at additional keyword tool, for example. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think that when we think about the keywords, it's also important to understand that some of those keywords can give you viral seasonality. So I asked a few people on Women in Tech SEO about this, and I had some folks come back to me, and essentially what you get is you sometimes get a situation, and I've seen this before as well, where you basically have something that... So I was working with a client and they were a financial client, and they had this particular account that they talked about, this particular financial account or whatever, and every time there was a new regulation around that, or every time it was updated, if you think about mortgage rates, for instance, that's something that we'll say, oh, mortgage rates are up. So every time that hit the news, they would see a big spike on this particular article. They didn't have to update it all the time, but they would see a big spike on that particular article. If you were looking at that particular thing and you wanted to see whether or not that had a good impact on your SEO, you wouldn't want to necessarily compare it to last month necessarily. I mean, last month you say, oh, this month we did it well, last month we did it not so well. But if you wanted to look at it, you'd want to look at the pattern of how much- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the pattern's more important than anything else. Crystal Carter: Right. So you want to see the last time this spiked, we got this much traffic, and this time it spiked, we got that much traffic. And then you want to look and you want to compare the things there. So I think that people think about seasonality literally as winter or summer or things like that, but there are nuances, and the keywords can make a really big difference. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I'm trying to say before. There is no such a thing as escaping seasonality. If you're in the financial world, your season is whenever the Fed makes an update. That's your season. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. It's definitely going to go up and down, and you need to understand that. Also, if you're working with different teams, you need to understand the different seasonality of the different parts of the team. So for instance, if you're working with a law firm, the divorce lawyer folks are going to be busy in January. The people who are working with financial stuff or the people who do, like tax attorneys, et cetera, they're going to be busy at the end of the year. And you need to think about, you can need to stagger your updates. You need to stagger your part of your partnership. Mordy Oberstein: That's my point where I mentioned the ceiling fans. So imagine no one just sells outdoor... Maybe somebody does, I don't know. Maybe someone sells outdoor ceiling fans. Crystal Carter: Outdoorceilingfans.com. Mordy Oberstein: That's your whole bit, outdoorceilingfans.com. But usually something like Home Depot. If you're on the Home Depot team or something like the Home Depot team, your job is to understand seasonality. Your job is to understand where on the website seasonality will impact it, because hammers might not be impacted by winter or summertime. Maybe it is. I don't know. Maybe people will do more home repairs in the summertime. Again, I'm not an expert, especially not home repairs. But all things being equal, hammers would seemingly be something that's pretty consistent across the board. But outdoor ceiling fans, you need to identify where... And you have also need to qualify like what's the proportion of sales and traffic that come from hammers versus what's the proportion of sale and traffic that come from outdoor ceiling fans? And when you see a decline, you're like, oh, no, there's a decline. No, because if you have an over proportionate amount of sales and traffic and performance that come from outdoor ceiling fans relative to hammers, that's actually logical and probably healthy. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Right. And if you want to keep things rolling in a business like that, for instance, then you figure out which ones are the seasonal things that are going to flow through. And this is where you also need to coordinate your SEO with your sales teams, for instance. So if you have a shop like say Home Depot or something where they actually have a physical venue, they will know what things they're going to be displaying over the course of the year. For instance, it's autumn, right now. I'm in the Northern Hemisphere. It is flu season, right? I have a little bit of a cold right now. Okay so- Mordy Oberstein: You feel clumped? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I'm feeling a little bit clumped. So I was at a shop today and in their display they had sunscreen. And I was like, why y'all got sunscreen out? There's no need for sunscreen. And then they had some of the cold and flu things. Like that's what people are looking for. People are looking for cold and flu. People are not looking for sunscreen right now in the Northern Hemisphere particularly. And so I think it's important to think about that so that your online stuff can reflect what's going on right now in store and in the zeitgeist and in what people are talking about because that is what's front of mind. Mordy Oberstein: The other thing I wanted to talk about is content. Because inevitably, you're going to update, create content, do something with content around the holiday season. For example, is a good one, we're talking about holiday season SEO or any sort of seasonality. But let's just sit with holiday season, for example, because it is such a clear case. You're going to update content inevitably. You're going to have different sales and specials and whatever. And I find a big mistake that SEOs make is in not realizing that you can't just change content at one point. It has to go all the way through. So let's just say for argument's sake, and I'm not advocating you do this, you update your title tag to say holiday season. So our outdoor ceiling fans for the holiday season, because what I want for Christmas is an outdoor ceiling fan, because I live in Arizona. I don't actually live in Arizona. I don't even celebrate Christmas. So whatever. But let's just say that was the case and you updated the title tag there, but when you get to the actual page, nothing changed. So make sure that all along the way, all of the pain points, all the touch points actually align to what you're doing on the SEO side, because inevitably, what's going to happen is you'll get the click, because oh, it's a holiday season, ceiling fan. Grandma wants a holiday season... She wants a festive outdoor ceiling fan. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I will click on this. And then you get to the page and it's your regular commercial outdoor ceiling fan. Where's the festivity in this? And folks will be like, hey, you got me the traffic, thank you, but nothing's actually converting, what's going on? And that's because you didn't think about the full touch point. Crystal Carter: Right. So there are tons of seasonal cues that you can do. So, again, you can think about your title tag. I've done this before. We had a shop and they generally had like, oh, buy sustainable clothing, candles and more, was in their title tag or whatever. And I was like, well, we can change that to gifts, because that's what people are looking for. So we'll just change it. So it says, gifts, and yeah, we saw a big impact for that. So that's a title tag that you can update. Also, your OG tags. I'll tell you what, Starbucks is updating everything in store and all of their online stuff to pumpkin spice as soon as a leaf turns yellow, okay? As soon as- Mordy Oberstein: They have a scout. They have someone looking at leaves, like, do you see a change of yellow? I do. I do. I see yellow. Crystal Carter: I do. Go. Go. Mordy Oberstein: Update, go, pumpkin spice. Crystal Carter: Everything's pumpkin spice. Go, go, go. Mordy Oberstein: They have one button and then it changes everything to pumpkin spice. Crystal Carter: Right. So they know this. And basically, this is really important because when people are sharing, when people are saying, oh, hey, I saw this thing. I really think that grandma's going to love it, or whatever. It's got the little festive thing, that's going to give people signals without them even reading anything, without them even clicking through, you know that they're ready, et cetera, et cetera. So your OG image is super, super easy to change. Changing the banner images on your website, updating those images so that they're more festive can make a really big difference. And also you want to think about updating your links and so updating comments and also consolidating content. So for instance, I had a client and they had a seasonal thing and they did every year, and I see this all the time, and something I've seen work for multiple clients is that there's an awareness day or there's a holiday or there's whatever. And every year, they go, Groundhog Day, 2021. Groundhog Day, 2022. Groundhog Day, whatever, whatever. Don't do that. Don't do that. Okay, make a page. If you're doing it every year. If you are an Owl Sanctuary, and every year there's National Owl Day. I have no idea if there's National Owl Day or who celebrates it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I see what you did there. Crystal Carter: If there is a National Owl Day, for instance, and you're an Owl Sanctuary, and every year you do something for a National Owl day, you can have one page that on your website that's National Owl Day. And you can update that with National Owl Day. You can put the content, the content can be about 2024, 2025, whatever it may be. But you can update that. And as soon as the event finishes, you can say, National Owl Day 2025 is going to be on this day. And then if anybody's looking for that over the course of the year, if you have any other owl enthusiasts who are looking for that, they'll be able to find that on your website, and you'll be able to keep that link warm in the off season before things come back. So then when it is time to go full steam ahead with whatever it is, then you can add your links from there. But treat it as a pillar page. And so before National Owl Day or Groundhog Day, or whatever it is, start consolidating your links. Go through any content that you have that's older or that maybe is from years ago. Consolidate that content into something that makes sense. Get rid of old content that you don't need. Update the links across there so that Google, so that users are focused on the content that's happening right now. Because if it is that you have this fantastic, wonderful day planned for this year, and the page from two years ago is ranking, that's not going to help you. That's going to confuse users, and that's going to confuse Google. So make sure that you go through and you update all your links, and you update all of the things that are going on and all of the content, and consolidate any content where you can. Mordy Oberstein: And with the holiday season, it's important not just to go through and make sure you've updated everything, everything gets checked off, and you have all your ducks in a row or owls in a row, just to keep with that. I don't know if owls go in a row, but they... Crystal Carter: You know in England they say twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: In England, what say? Crystal Carter: Owls say twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: No, the English people talking or mimicking an owl goes... Crystal Carter: They say, twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: ... an owl goes hoot, hoot. Crystal Carter: No, no, they go, twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: I will die in this hill. But it's not as important to have all your ducks or owls in a row, as I was saying, it's important to get creative with your holiday content campaigns and even your holiday SEO. To help us talk about getting creative, we have Ari Murray, who's the chief growth officer over at Sharma Brands, and who runs the Go-to-Millions newsletter to talk about how to get creative with your holiday season campaigns. Ari Murray: So every holiday I think about first how I shop, and how I shop is how everyone shops, which is I go to Google and I search my heart out. I think that we always forget that when you're running any sort of campaign on paid social or even on organic social, when you're running on paid social and you're thinking about Google and you're thinking about Meta and you're thinking about LinkedIn or wherever you're running your campaign, when I'm thinking about paid social, I always first think to Meta because that's where I spend most of my time, but I know that if I'm running an Instagram ad that my audience is being interrupted at what they do. We have to show them a flashy video, and we need them to stop and really understand and click, and we need their thumb stop to be there. But for search, it's so different. And for me, I think about when I shop, I am searching for something. And so I'm really quick to look for terms that I wouldn't use to describe the brand if I was making an ad for that brand. So let's pretend I'm working on a really expensive glassware company. If I was this glassware company, I would have a lot of rules. I would have, we don't use the word luxury, we don't use the word elegant. We don't even use the word necessarily holiday or gifting. We want to speak of ourselves as something that can be for every day and not for this temporary season. So for search and for SEO, we would write a listicle and an advertorial that lives as long form content on the site. And the sole purpose is for you to search extensive gifts for the woman who has it all, or fancy glassware for mother-in-law, or what to get the person who has everything. And those are the terms, and those are the words that I would incorporate into my long form content. But then when they take the click and once they find us and they've found us, then it's really about making sure that they actually get to read what we said we were going to give them, which is a really cheeky article that has a lot of content and shoppable links, but also just a deep understanding of they're here to shop and they're here searching for something for this person. And that's what we're writing. So my whole technique here is I don't want you as a brand to shy away from a word that you don't feel is brand safe. Just because it's not on brand doesn't make it off brand. And for SEO and for SEM, it's always about what can we do to really meet our customer where they are? And they're trying to shop and discern through all of the things that Google and search can feed them. And I don't want them to not find us because we don't want to call ourselves luxury, or we don't want to call ourselves elegant, or we don't want to call ourselves designer. That's what people are looking for if they're looking for this brand, because their price range. And so maybe not on an Instagram ad would this be comfortable, but for search, it's something we're willing to bend on. So for holiday campaigns, I guess my single tip is to be creative, you have to break the brand guidelines so long as you're not off brand. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Ari. Really love that point at the end too for a second. But just make sure you give Ari a follow over @arihappywick, That's A-R-I-H-A-P-P-Y-W-I-C-K over on X, formerly known as Twitter, or I like to call it, Twitter, still known as Twitter, and not X. A link to their profile in the show notes. I just want to say amen to that. By the way, that whole, not the Twitter thing, what she was saying, just talk to the audience. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Just talk to the audience. And by the way, it is a good point because sometimes you can do things that in the pages that you find through search, because they are like two or three clicks deep that you may not want to say on your homepage or use the brand terms on your homepage. But I've done this a gazillion times. We're like, hey, you know what, it's three clicks deep. No one other than people finding us on search or maybe through social media, depending on how you want to run your campaigns, aren't going to find this. So it's okay to be a little bit more flexible and it just talk to them the way your audience wants to be talked to, not the way, like, oh, I'm going to position my brand this way. That's great. But if nobody's looking for that and nobody wants that and no one's talking about that product in that way... Crystal Carter: They're not going to find it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I don't want to call our car an SUV. I want to call it a four by four, then does anybody still call them four by fours anymore, like is the '90s? Crystal Carter: I don't know. But if you find that people aren't calling it that anymore, then you have to change it because people won't know what you're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: But it's not on brand, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Well, maybe your brand should have to think about- Mordy Oberstein: You know what's on brand? Making money, that's what's on brand. Crystal Carter: Your brand needs to think about what it is. So for instance, if we were in England and I said, oh yeah, the owl goes hoo-hoo or toot-toot or hoot-hoot, people would be like, what are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: That's not a good example. We go for accuracy. Crystal Carter: What are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: And there has to be a line somewhere, Crystal. You can't just spread lies and say owls say things they don't say. Crystal Carter: Look, look, look. They call it coriander in England, for instance, rather than cilantro. But if I started talking about coriander all over the place, people would be like, I don't know what you mean. If I was in, I don't know, Poughkeepsie or something, and I was like, who wants some coriander? Nobody would say anything, because nobody knows what we're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: It's like calling an eggplant, an eggplant in England. What do they call it? Crystal Carter: Aubergine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, say that in Jersey, see what happens. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they would be like, you call me what? Mordy Oberstein: Did you just say to me? Say that to my face. Crystal Carter: With a nice Parmesan. Mordy Oberstein: So it's such a basic point, but it's something that I think sometimes brands... She's right. Sometimes brands can get a little caught up into that's not our brand language, which is a little bit snobbish, I'll say. Crystal Carter: Yeah. But I think with content, you can be clever with that. I think you can be creative. Again, if you put something on, it doesn't have to be the homepage. You don't have to hit people over the head with it as soon as they get to website. Mordy Oberstein: No, don't do it on the homepage. Yeah. Like fine. Do your thing on the homepage, fine. Crystal Carter: Right. But you could have a blog that addresses that and links off to other comments and other content that is more on brand or whatever, and you can say, hey, this isn't what we normally do, but we found that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just be honest. I think that's the other thing is that consumers are so much more sophisticated these days because a lot of consumers are also content creators as well. So it's most important to think about that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, a hundred percent. And with that, so I think, and well, Ari said, and we were talking before about creating content on the SEO side itself, we keep coming back to a point of your brand and how it uses content to relate to the audience. So with all of this talk about SEO strategies and a wider a brand strategy and in getting creative, Chris and I thought, let's take a deep look at what it means for your brand to actually speak to their audience during the holiday season. So here is a deep thought about your brand talking to your actual consumers during the holiday season, so a Deep Thought with Crystal and me, Mordy. So okay. I see a lot of on social media or top five ways to align your brand to the holiday season or whatever, whatever, and it talks about product all the time. Make sure your product... Whatever it is, it's very... When we talk about seasonality, I find, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's my personal bias, but I find we get very product-focused. But I want to talk about that your brand and the messaging and the positioning and the tone it takes should also adjust to this season. So I'll say, for example... And by the way, the product side, it's super easy to see. During the summer, IPA sales go up a ton because everyone wants an IPA during... It's refreshing. It's not refreshing in the middle of the winter. It's just like weird. I would drink an IPA in- Crystal Carter: You want a stout in the middle of the- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you feel your beer. In the summer, you're fun, you have an IPA. In the wintertime, it's time for a Guinness, which is a meal, it's not even a drink. But it's the same thing with the way you speak. So for example, let's just say for argument's sake, your audience are cutthroat business people. So you're going to speak to them in a cutthroat business kind of way. Let's get right to the bottom line. But during the holiday season, even your most cutthroat executives, I would hope their heart is warm, just a tinge. Crystal Carter: And I think it has to do with value. I think it has to do with the value of something and how you articulate value. Google is trying to deliver customer value. So people search for something and then they're trying to give them a valuable search result that will either get them to the good information or help them to achieve a goal or something to that effect. And all of the things on your website should be helping to point people to the value of it. Now, the value of something will change depending on seasonality, but also depending on how you speak to them. So for instance, if you had, I think there's a lot of these exciting nightlights for kids, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: My kids have a dinosaur one. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay, and some of them do other things. For the child, the value for that is like, oh, it's shaped like a dinosaur. Oh, it'll sing you a song. For the parent, the value of that is that it might get your kid to actually go to sleep on time. And when you're talking to those two different audiences, it's still the same product, but you need to make sure that you're illustrating the value to them in a way that it resonates with them. Mordy Oberstein: So what I'm saying is sometimes that same person, sometimes they're the kid and sometimes they're the parent. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes even as a parent, I want a dinosaur nightlight. No, but I'm saying you change throughout the year. It's summertime, I don't want to go like, don't bog me down with business details. It's summertime, I want to have fun. It should be a little fun. I'm not saying you got to go crazy, but speak to your audience where they're at. If it's the holiday season time, it's not like blow the competition out of the water time. That's not the vibe. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right, right, right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: So just make sure that you're adjusting. Just like you would adjust your product, make sure you're adjusting your brand terminology, your brand tone, the way your brand is positioning itself. It's not time to talk about how competitive and great... It might be time to show like, hey, we're donating to a charity, which you should do for a legit reason, not just because I want to get more customers. But those are the kind of things that you should be doing to reach people where they're at, not where you think they're at. Crystal Carter: Read the room, people. Mordy Oberstein: Read the room. Crystal Carter: Read the room. Mordy Oberstein: Read the room. But we do it all the time. I'm not saying anything complicated, but we do it all the time with product. We read the room with a product. We change the title tag and say, holiday season. We add, I don't know, a peppermint cane to the image of the cell phone. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Because just like there's a pumpkin spice button, there's also a peppermint cane button that you push. It's the leaves have turned brown, it's peppermint cane time. Crystal Carter: Right. It's great. Mordy Oberstein: Hit the button. Crystal Carter: And I think also your customers will be at different points in their life as well. So I think it's important to think about that. So for instance, I work with a library, Libraries Unlimited, shout out to them. England's been having what they call a cost of living crisis, for instance. And there's been a lot of trouble with people having warm spaces and things. So the library's library all the time. But what they started doing was they were saying, hey, just in case you need a warm place to hang out, we are also that as well. Like, hey, there customer. If you're having trouble with any of that sort of stuff, we can help. Did you know that we also offer this thing that we can help you with? And it's the same customers. They're talking to the same customer, and they have the same offering that they always did. It was always a nice, warm, cozy place to be in the library. But just reminding people that we also have this, that is also a value to you at this particular time. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, this particular time. There's seasonality in the product. There's seasonality in the brand, positioning, language, marketing, all of it needs to change to match seasonality. You know what never changes though? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: The SEO news. Not that the news hasn't changed, but who covers it and what he does, and how he does it does not change. He's as constant as the North Star, then pretty sure is not the idiom, but it doesn't matter. He is Barry Schwartz, and he is this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. It's in the stars this week as Google announced Gemini. Inserts Oracle sounds. For Christie Hines at Search Engine Journal, Google introduces Gemini and updates Bard with Gemini Pro. So a few things to note. Gemini is a competitor of GPT-4, and always at the Chat and can't help myself of GPT-4, and according to studies, seemingly performs better perform than GPT-4. Gemini aims at making multimodal connections. That's fancy talk for saying it can understand audio, video and text inputs and all other sorts of inputs in combination. Bard is now powered by Gemini Pro. There are different levels of Gemini. I'm making the quotation marks of when I say levels with my hands, you can't see that. I just realize, but I'm making quotation marks for levels of Gemini. And Gemini Pro is what is now powering Bard. And, this is where I think it's super interesting, it can also create custom UX to address user questions. So basically, let's say you're searching for, tell me a good recipe for cornbread. It'll adjust the layout and format to help you better explore that type of query as opposed to, let's say, you search for who are the top five best baseball players ever. It might produce a different kind of format for that. I think something like this allows for what I like to call content portals where you can dive down or dive deep down a rabbit hole of a particular subset of topics in a way that kind of aligns with what you're trying to do, come out of that rabbit hole and then explore something else, which is helped by the fact that anything on the screen that Gemini shows you, you can sort of click on and say, okay, let me know about this a little bit more. So you can sort of really dive down the rabbit hole. The way the UX is set up, I think it's super interesting, and I think something like that would be fascinating on the SERP. I know everyone will kind of freak out about that, but I do think it's fascinating. Okay, back to Barry. And this one is nuts. From Search Engine Roundtable report, Google local rankings now look if a business is open or closed, i.e business hours. This came from a study done by Joy Hawkins at the great Sterling Sky agency in Toronto. And what they basically saw was that when a business is closed, it kind of gets pulled out of the local packs. Let's say I'm searching for, I don't know, a pizza near me, and there are a bunch of listings that are now closed and some that are open. The ones that are open will appear. The ones that are closed will not appear. If later in the day, some close and I search forward again, and now there's different ones that are now open, I'll get the ones that are now open in the local pack and not the ones that are closed. Barry himself tested it out for a bunch of different types of queries and pretty much saw the same thing. I am not a big fan of this, to be honest with you. I think, for example, I might be searching for... Let's break it down. If I'm searching for pizza near me, okay, probably I want the restaurant that's open right now. If I'm searching for something like, I don't know, lawyer near me, if it's 12 o'clock at night, I'm not looking to call a lawyer. I'm probably looking just to do some research and maybe call them tomorrow. So I don't think this, as a ranking, factor, quote, unquote, "really" meets user needs in the way that it's supposed to. Anyway. And lastly, from Barry Schwartz again, and from, again, from Search Engine Roundtable, Google, November 2023 reviews update completes after 29 days. That is a long rollout. Check your rankings. It's a reviews update. It's not limited anymore to just products. So check your rankings out. Going to be hard to pull data on this at the aggregate level because you had an overlap between the November 2023 core update and the reviews update. I'm not really sure how you separate that out. I'm actually in conversation with December team to see, maybe somehow we could, but I don't know. And with that ambiguity, this is this week's version of the Snappy News. I want to say something. So we record the main part of the podcast before we actually record the news, but we are so confident that we're going to cover at least one article from Barry that I am confident saying your news from this week is from Barry. Hope you had a nice holiday, Barry. Hope you're having a nice holiday, Barry, and we appreciate you and thank you and love you. Now you feel awkward, Barry. You know what's not awkward? Following people on social media? That's never awkward. I think it's always a good thing. Crystal Carter: No, it's never... It's always- Mordy Oberstein: No, you're like, yeah, follow? Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: That's not awkward. That's a good thing. This week's follow of the week is none other than the founder and CEO of Rise at Seven, a fabulous agency based out of the UK and I think now globally around the world, if I'm not- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The US as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay, there we go. And it is one of the only Carrie Rose who you can follow over on Twitter. I'll not call it X. @CarrieRosePR. At C-A-R-R-I-R-O-S-E-P-R. Link in the show notes. But give her a great follow. She's fabulous. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. Do follow her. She's got some great case studies. She's great for this particular episode. She did something with Game called The Christmas Tinner or something like that. And essentially it was a Christmas dinner in a can, and they did a fantastic- I know. Exactly. Your face. Mordy Oberstein: I'm making a face that sounds like Spam. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you're making a face. No. So it was a fantastic, incredible campaign. They got some really good traction for it. And when we were thinking about seasonality, that was the first campaign that came to my mind. At Rise at Seven, they do a lot of creative campaigns that are connected with SEO. That's really sort of their bread and butter. That's a great example of it. They also had one with dog sweaters as well, where you could wear a matching sweater with your dog, which is another campaign that they did that went really well, which is kind of seasonal as well, because sweaters are cozy and stuff. But yeah, Carrie and the team do some great work. Follow her. She also shares a lot of digital PR examples. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ton of stuff. Crystal Carter: Which are great, particularly for seasonal ideas. Mordy Oberstein: So give her a follow. Again, it's @CarrieRosePR. That's Carrie with a C on Twitter, whatever, X, link in the show notes. And well, by the way, bread and butter, that's an underrated meal. Think of meal and talking like her bread and butter. Crystal Carter: I love bread. We talked about carbs. We talked about carbs. When I came to visit you, I was like, bring me carbs. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. And I did. Crystal Carter: You did and I was like, yeah... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I brought you carbs. Crystal Carter: ... this is a good colleague. I was like, you see, you see. Mordy Oberstein: But you ever go to a restaurant and they don't do it where I live now, but they give the basket bread with the little like, the restaurant butters. And the pumpernickel! Crystal Carter: But when they're warm. When they're warm, that's great. I mean, Olive Garden made their entire, the whole thing about Olive Garden is bread. Mordy Oberstein: Here's some bread. Crystal Carter: Right? They're just like, I ate the bread. Also, Red Lobster have very good cheese rolls as well. Those are good as well. But yeah, I love carbs. I love bread. Mordy Oberstein: Best part, okay. I have my cheat days on my diet. I'm like, carbs. I don't want to go like the fanciest... I want carbs. Crystal Carter: Yeah, pumpernickel, pretzels. I love their pretzels. Mordy Oberstein: Hot pretzels, bagels. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. With good mustard. You got to have the good mustard with the pretzel. People put other stuff on it, but I'm like, nah, it's about the mustard. Mordy Oberstein: And it can't be like, it's more than sitting in the case. You go buy a hot pretzel for weeks on end, that's all crusty. That's not good. Mordy Oberstein: That's not what you want. What you do want though, is check us out next week. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Sorry you're going to miss us. Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to hand off your SEO work to clients. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning up 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: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ari Murray Carrie Rose Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Go-To-Millions Newsletter Sharma Brands Rise at seven News: Google Introduces Gemini And Updates Bard With Gemini Pro Report: Google Local Ranking Now Looks If A Business Is Open Or Closed (Business Hours) Google November 2023 Reviews Update Completed After 29 Days Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Ari Murray Carrie Rose Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Go-To-Millions Newsletter Sharma Brands Rise at seven News: Google Introduces Gemini And Updates Bard With Gemini Pro Report: Google Local Ranking Now Looks If A Business Is Open Or Closed (Business Hours) Google November 2023 Reviews Update Completed After 29 Days Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo, for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights on what's happening in SEO. I am Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the festive, the fabulously festive, the incredibly festive, the oh, so festive head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Welcome and hello to all you SEO, oh, oh people. Mordy Oberstein: It's Festivus for the rest of us. Crystal Carter: Festivus, indeed, all of the things. I wish you all of the holiday loveliness, and I hope you eat too much food because that's... Mordy Oberstein: That's a great wish. Crystal Carter: ... the whole point of the whole thing. Like Viva la Carbs, enjoy all of the potatoes and bread and cake and various other carbohydrates. Mordy Oberstein: Whatever holiday you're celebrating, we want you to eat too much. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed, indeed. Like 'tis the season for stuffing your face. Mordy Oberstein: Just not the season for hopping on a scale. Crystal Carter: Oh, me. Honestly, honestly, they will tell all your business. They'll just be like, yeah, I'm doing fine. I'm feeling good about myself. And then the scale's like, nah, nah. Mordy Oberstein: It's not Scalability Season, that little SEO. Okay, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter search slide over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use our AI meta tags generator to add 2024 to all of your title tags. Actually, don't do that. That was a joke. Crystal Carter: Don't do that. Mordy Oberstein: Don't do that. But if you do want to update your title tags for the holiday season in a real way, and if you're running specific campaigns and want to create new pages and create title tags for those new pages and meta descriptions, you can use our AI meta tags generator to do it, which is why today we're talking about SEO for the holiday season as we ho, ho, ho, all the way to the top of the serp while we look at keyword research for seasonal topics, updating content for your campaigns and when to get started with holiday season SEO. Spoiler alert, by the time you're listening to this podcast, it's too late. But anyway, Ari Murray of Sharma Brands weighs in on how to get creative with the holiday season campaigns. Plus, we talked about how to position your brand during the holiday season, and of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So hop on the sleigh as we take flight to light up the holiday season or holiday season SEO brighter than your annoying neighbor who goes way too far with their holiday season decor on episode number 66 of the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: Fantastic intro as ever, as ever, as ever. Okay, so seasonality. Seasonality, what are we talking about? Seasonality is essentially like when you see regular increases or decreases in organic traffic in line with annual or occasional events. And so the seasonal traffic's patterns can mean that you see traffic increased loads on particular blogs or across your whole website depending on what you're doing. I've worked with a few seasonal businesses and it can be very much night and day in terms of traffic. So for instance, I worked with an amusement park client and in the wintertime, they were based in a place where they had Halloween, they had a Christmas sort of thing, and then pretty much in Q1 or January to March, it was pretty quiet, very, very, very quiet, and then things would start ramping up in the summer. And it's really important to think about that when you're working with a business and to understand your traffic trends because this can affect lots of things. This can affect how you do your reporting. This can affect when you invest your time, when you start asking people for questions. So for instance, with a seasonal business where they're peaking in summer or they're peaking in other times of year, that's not the time to ask them to review a bunch of blog posts. That's not the time to ask them to sort of, let's do a content refresh of everything. That's the time for you to carry out stuff that you can do without them being involved, that you can do on your own, and you can let them know that it's done and they can be happy with that. But I think also there's a couple of other things to think about. A seasonality, there's weekly cadence. So B2B businesses, for instance, will see a lot of their traffic Monday to Friday. I've worked with retail clients and they often see a spike over the weekend, for instance. So they start seeing their spikes coming in on the sort of Friday, and then they see people increasing their shopping over to Saturday and Sunday. So that's really important to think about. And again, that can affect when you do your reporting. If you're reporting everything on Monday, say, and let's say that the sales from Saturday or Sunday haven't actually come in yet, then that's not a good time to do your reporting. You might want to do your reporting later in the week. You might want to do your reporting on a Wednesday so that they can make any actions on Thursday so that they can be ready for Friday, for instance. Then there's quarterly trends. So for instance, some traffic patterns don't follow a specific month. So things like Easter or Passover, Chinese New Year, school vacation, Diwali, things like that, they change from year to year. So these are all dates that will change over year to year. So for instance, for things like that, you'll need to think about maybe let's compare the quarter to the quarter, not necessarily the month, year-on-year, for instance. So that's something to think about as well. And then you have annual spikes that happen, which are your typical seasonality. And I think the other thing that I find about this is that with B2B businesses, for instance, people tend to think that B2B businesses don't have seasonality, that this is all B2C, with hotels, with summer stuff. Mordy Oberstein: It's not true. Crystal Carter: It's not true. So for instance, divorce lawyers, and I didn't know this until I was working with a lawyer client, but they will see a peak following school vacations and public holidays. So after big seasonal, end of the year, for instance. So there's a lot of people stop at the end of the year, there's often a big spike in divorces after that, and it's sad but true. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: Right. I think also you see in January, for instance, Wix often sees a surge in people wanting to build websites. Maybe people thought, you know what, this year I'm going to start that new thing. Mordy Oberstein: I'll give you a quarter's ending or the financial year ending. My uncle does title closings, and at the end of the quarter, the end of the year, it's a huge spike and everyone wants to get it, right? So it's across the board. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: It impacts everybody and everything in a way. You cannot escape seasonality. Crystal Carter: No, you can't. So it's really important to understand the business and to chat to them about that because you might not realize those things until you actually speak to the team. For instance, if you're working in the public sector, one phenomena that I've seen is that towards the end of the financial year, there's some situations where in the public sector, if you don't spend your budget, you don't get the budget for the next year. Mordy Oberstein: And governments sometimes have different financial years or points of the year than the average quarter. I think their financial year might start in September or something like that. Crystal Carter: Right. So for instance, I worked with the university before, in the university, their financial year ended in the summer time, for instance, because that had a thing. So that's important to think about, and that will impact all of your SEO activity, because when the season- Mordy Oberstein: Money always does. Crystal Carter: Right. So when peak season hits, you should already be live with whatever you need. You should be preparing in the off season, just like if you were on a sports team, you prepare on the off season, you prepare all your content, you get everything ready so that when peak season hits, you're already ranking and maybe you're ranking 20, right? Maybe you updated the content and it's just hanging around at number 20. But by the time people are sort of getting into search, Google seeing your content, they're coming back to your content, they're seeing that you're getting some activity on your content, and then you will move up the ranks very quickly. I've seen this happen. I've done this before and it works really, really well. So you want to be thinking about how you can manage that. But in order to do that, you need to understand your data and you need to understand the seasonality of your business. Mordy Oberstein: So let's get started again with the SEO stuff. I think the natural place you want to start is keywords. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: And I'll give you a stupid example. Like outdoor ceiling fans, probably not a big thing in the winter time, by the way, unless your market is in Arizona, which because it's summertime all the time. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, so those are the things you need to think about. Right? Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: You may be dealing with a seasonal product, but your market is not seasonal, or you have an international market and it's always summer somewhere. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Precisely. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So things like Google trends come into play as opposed to looking at additional keyword tool, for example. Crystal Carter: And I think also, I think that when we think about the keywords, it's also important to understand that some of those keywords can give you viral seasonality. So I asked a few people on Women in Tech SEO about this, and I had some folks come back to me, and essentially what you get is you sometimes get a situation, and I've seen this before as well, where you basically have something that... So I was working with a client and they were a financial client, and they had this particular account that they talked about, this particular financial account or whatever, and every time there was a new regulation around that, or every time it was updated, if you think about mortgage rates, for instance, that's something that we'll say, oh, mortgage rates are up. So every time that hit the news, they would see a big spike on this particular article. They didn't have to update it all the time, but they would see a big spike on that particular article. If you were looking at that particular thing and you wanted to see whether or not that had a good impact on your SEO, you wouldn't want to necessarily compare it to last month necessarily. I mean, last month you say, oh, this month we did it well, last month we did it not so well. But if you wanted to look at it, you'd want to look at the pattern of how much- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, the pattern's more important than anything else. Crystal Carter: Right. So you want to see the last time this spiked, we got this much traffic, and this time it spiked, we got that much traffic. And then you want to look and you want to compare the things there. So I think that people think about seasonality literally as winter or summer or things like that, but there are nuances, and the keywords can make a really big difference. Mordy Oberstein: That's what I'm trying to say before. There is no such a thing as escaping seasonality. If you're in the financial world, your season is whenever the Fed makes an update. That's your season. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. It's definitely going to go up and down, and you need to understand that. Also, if you're working with different teams, you need to understand the different seasonality of the different parts of the team. So for instance, if you're working with a law firm, the divorce lawyer folks are going to be busy in January. The people who are working with financial stuff or the people who do, like tax attorneys, et cetera, they're going to be busy at the end of the year. And you need to think about, you can need to stagger your updates. You need to stagger your part of your partnership. Mordy Oberstein: That's my point where I mentioned the ceiling fans. So imagine no one just sells outdoor... Maybe somebody does, I don't know. Maybe someone sells outdoor ceiling fans. Crystal Carter: Outdoorceilingfans.com. Mordy Oberstein: That's your whole bit, outdoorceilingfans.com. But usually something like Home Depot. If you're on the Home Depot team or something like the Home Depot team, your job is to understand seasonality. Your job is to understand where on the website seasonality will impact it, because hammers might not be impacted by winter or summertime. Maybe it is. I don't know. Maybe people will do more home repairs in the summertime. Again, I'm not an expert, especially not home repairs. But all things being equal, hammers would seemingly be something that's pretty consistent across the board. But outdoor ceiling fans, you need to identify where... And you have also need to qualify like what's the proportion of sales and traffic that come from hammers versus what's the proportion of sale and traffic that come from outdoor ceiling fans? And when you see a decline, you're like, oh, no, there's a decline. No, because if you have an over proportionate amount of sales and traffic and performance that come from outdoor ceiling fans relative to hammers, that's actually logical and probably healthy. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Right. And if you want to keep things rolling in a business like that, for instance, then you figure out which ones are the seasonal things that are going to flow through. And this is where you also need to coordinate your SEO with your sales teams, for instance. So if you have a shop like say Home Depot or something where they actually have a physical venue, they will know what things they're going to be displaying over the course of the year. For instance, it's autumn, right now. I'm in the Northern Hemisphere. It is flu season, right? I have a little bit of a cold right now. Okay so- Mordy Oberstein: You feel clumped? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I'm feeling a little bit clumped. So I was at a shop today and in their display they had sunscreen. And I was like, why y'all got sunscreen out? There's no need for sunscreen. And then they had some of the cold and flu things. Like that's what people are looking for. People are looking for cold and flu. People are not looking for sunscreen right now in the Northern Hemisphere particularly. And so I think it's important to think about that so that your online stuff can reflect what's going on right now in store and in the zeitgeist and in what people are talking about because that is what's front of mind. Mordy Oberstein: The other thing I wanted to talk about is content. Because inevitably, you're going to update, create content, do something with content around the holiday season. For example, is a good one, we're talking about holiday season SEO or any sort of seasonality. But let's just sit with holiday season, for example, because it is such a clear case. You're going to update content inevitably. You're going to have different sales and specials and whatever. And I find a big mistake that SEOs make is in not realizing that you can't just change content at one point. It has to go all the way through. So let's just say for argument's sake, and I'm not advocating you do this, you update your title tag to say holiday season. So our outdoor ceiling fans for the holiday season, because what I want for Christmas is an outdoor ceiling fan, because I live in Arizona. I don't actually live in Arizona. I don't even celebrate Christmas. So whatever. But let's just say that was the case and you updated the title tag there, but when you get to the actual page, nothing changed. So make sure that all along the way, all of the pain points, all the touch points actually align to what you're doing on the SEO side, because inevitably, what's going to happen is you'll get the click, because oh, it's a holiday season, ceiling fan. Grandma wants a holiday season... She wants a festive outdoor ceiling fan. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: So I will click on this. And then you get to the page and it's your regular commercial outdoor ceiling fan. Where's the festivity in this? And folks will be like, hey, you got me the traffic, thank you, but nothing's actually converting, what's going on? And that's because you didn't think about the full touch point. Crystal Carter: Right. So there are tons of seasonal cues that you can do. So, again, you can think about your title tag. I've done this before. We had a shop and they generally had like, oh, buy sustainable clothing, candles and more, was in their title tag or whatever. And I was like, well, we can change that to gifts, because that's what people are looking for. So we'll just change it. So it says, gifts, and yeah, we saw a big impact for that. So that's a title tag that you can update. Also, your OG tags. I'll tell you what, Starbucks is updating everything in store and all of their online stuff to pumpkin spice as soon as a leaf turns yellow, okay? As soon as- Mordy Oberstein: They have a scout. They have someone looking at leaves, like, do you see a change of yellow? I do. I do. I see yellow. Crystal Carter: I do. Go. Go. Mordy Oberstein: Update, go, pumpkin spice. Crystal Carter: Everything's pumpkin spice. Go, go, go. Mordy Oberstein: They have one button and then it changes everything to pumpkin spice. Crystal Carter: Right. So they know this. And basically, this is really important because when people are sharing, when people are saying, oh, hey, I saw this thing. I really think that grandma's going to love it, or whatever. It's got the little festive thing, that's going to give people signals without them even reading anything, without them even clicking through, you know that they're ready, et cetera, et cetera. So your OG image is super, super easy to change. Changing the banner images on your website, updating those images so that they're more festive can make a really big difference. And also you want to think about updating your links and so updating comments and also consolidating content. So for instance, I had a client and they had a seasonal thing and they did every year, and I see this all the time, and something I've seen work for multiple clients is that there's an awareness day or there's a holiday or there's whatever. And every year, they go, Groundhog Day, 2021. Groundhog Day, 2022. Groundhog Day, whatever, whatever. Don't do that. Don't do that. Okay, make a page. If you're doing it every year. If you are an Owl Sanctuary, and every year there's National Owl Day. I have no idea if there's National Owl Day or who celebrates it. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I see what you did there. Crystal Carter: If there is a National Owl Day, for instance, and you're an Owl Sanctuary, and every year you do something for a National Owl day, you can have one page that on your website that's National Owl Day. And you can update that with National Owl Day. You can put the content, the content can be about 2024, 2025, whatever it may be. But you can update that. And as soon as the event finishes, you can say, National Owl Day 2025 is going to be on this day. And then if anybody's looking for that over the course of the year, if you have any other owl enthusiasts who are looking for that, they'll be able to find that on your website, and you'll be able to keep that link warm in the off season before things come back. So then when it is time to go full steam ahead with whatever it is, then you can add your links from there. But treat it as a pillar page. And so before National Owl Day or Groundhog Day, or whatever it is, start consolidating your links. Go through any content that you have that's older or that maybe is from years ago. Consolidate that content into something that makes sense. Get rid of old content that you don't need. Update the links across there so that Google, so that users are focused on the content that's happening right now. Because if it is that you have this fantastic, wonderful day planned for this year, and the page from two years ago is ranking, that's not going to help you. That's going to confuse users, and that's going to confuse Google. So make sure that you go through and you update all your links, and you update all of the things that are going on and all of the content, and consolidate any content where you can. Mordy Oberstein: And with the holiday season, it's important not just to go through and make sure you've updated everything, everything gets checked off, and you have all your ducks in a row or owls in a row, just to keep with that. I don't know if owls go in a row, but they... Crystal Carter: You know in England they say twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: In England, what say? Crystal Carter: Owls say twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: No, the English people talking or mimicking an owl goes... Crystal Carter: They say, twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: ... an owl goes hoot, hoot. Crystal Carter: No, no, they go, twit-twoo. Mordy Oberstein: I will die in this hill. But it's not as important to have all your ducks or owls in a row, as I was saying, it's important to get creative with your holiday content campaigns and even your holiday SEO. To help us talk about getting creative, we have Ari Murray, who's the chief growth officer over at Sharma Brands, and who runs the Go-to-Millions newsletter to talk about how to get creative with your holiday season campaigns. Ari Murray: So every holiday I think about first how I shop, and how I shop is how everyone shops, which is I go to Google and I search my heart out. I think that we always forget that when you're running any sort of campaign on paid social or even on organic social, when you're running on paid social and you're thinking about Google and you're thinking about Meta and you're thinking about LinkedIn or wherever you're running your campaign, when I'm thinking about paid social, I always first think to Meta because that's where I spend most of my time, but I know that if I'm running an Instagram ad that my audience is being interrupted at what they do. We have to show them a flashy video, and we need them to stop and really understand and click, and we need their thumb stop to be there. But for search, it's so different. And for me, I think about when I shop, I am searching for something. And so I'm really quick to look for terms that I wouldn't use to describe the brand if I was making an ad for that brand. So let's pretend I'm working on a really expensive glassware company. If I was this glassware company, I would have a lot of rules. I would have, we don't use the word luxury, we don't use the word elegant. We don't even use the word necessarily holiday or gifting. We want to speak of ourselves as something that can be for every day and not for this temporary season. So for search and for SEO, we would write a listicle and an advertorial that lives as long form content on the site. And the sole purpose is for you to search extensive gifts for the woman who has it all, or fancy glassware for mother-in-law, or what to get the person who has everything. And those are the terms, and those are the words that I would incorporate into my long form content. But then when they take the click and once they find us and they've found us, then it's really about making sure that they actually get to read what we said we were going to give them, which is a really cheeky article that has a lot of content and shoppable links, but also just a deep understanding of they're here to shop and they're here searching for something for this person. And that's what we're writing. So my whole technique here is I don't want you as a brand to shy away from a word that you don't feel is brand safe. Just because it's not on brand doesn't make it off brand. And for SEO and for SEM, it's always about what can we do to really meet our customer where they are? And they're trying to shop and discern through all of the things that Google and search can feed them. And I don't want them to not find us because we don't want to call ourselves luxury, or we don't want to call ourselves elegant, or we don't want to call ourselves designer. That's what people are looking for if they're looking for this brand, because their price range. And so maybe not on an Instagram ad would this be comfortable, but for search, it's something we're willing to bend on. So for holiday campaigns, I guess my single tip is to be creative, you have to break the brand guidelines so long as you're not off brand. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Ari. Really love that point at the end too for a second. But just make sure you give Ari a follow over @arihappywick, That's A-R-I-H-A-P-P-Y-W-I-C-K over on X, formerly known as Twitter, or I like to call it, Twitter, still known as Twitter, and not X. A link to their profile in the show notes. I just want to say amen to that. By the way, that whole, not the Twitter thing, what she was saying, just talk to the audience. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Just talk to the audience. And by the way, it is a good point because sometimes you can do things that in the pages that you find through search, because they are like two or three clicks deep that you may not want to say on your homepage or use the brand terms on your homepage. But I've done this a gazillion times. We're like, hey, you know what, it's three clicks deep. No one other than people finding us on search or maybe through social media, depending on how you want to run your campaigns, aren't going to find this. So it's okay to be a little bit more flexible and it just talk to them the way your audience wants to be talked to, not the way, like, oh, I'm going to position my brand this way. That's great. But if nobody's looking for that and nobody wants that and no one's talking about that product in that way... Crystal Carter: They're not going to find it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I don't want to call our car an SUV. I want to call it a four by four, then does anybody still call them four by fours anymore, like is the '90s? Crystal Carter: I don't know. But if you find that people aren't calling it that anymore, then you have to change it because people won't know what you're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: But it's not on brand, Crystal. Crystal Carter: Well, maybe your brand should have to think about- Mordy Oberstein: You know what's on brand? Making money, that's what's on brand. Crystal Carter: Your brand needs to think about what it is. So for instance, if we were in England and I said, oh yeah, the owl goes hoo-hoo or toot-toot or hoot-hoot, people would be like, what are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: That's not a good example. We go for accuracy. Crystal Carter: What are you talking about? Mordy Oberstein: And there has to be a line somewhere, Crystal. You can't just spread lies and say owls say things they don't say. Crystal Carter: Look, look, look. They call it coriander in England, for instance, rather than cilantro. But if I started talking about coriander all over the place, people would be like, I don't know what you mean. If I was in, I don't know, Poughkeepsie or something, and I was like, who wants some coriander? Nobody would say anything, because nobody knows what we're talking about. Mordy Oberstein: It's like calling an eggplant, an eggplant in England. What do they call it? Crystal Carter: Aubergine. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, say that in Jersey, see what happens. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they would be like, you call me what? Mordy Oberstein: Did you just say to me? Say that to my face. Crystal Carter: With a nice Parmesan. Mordy Oberstein: So it's such a basic point, but it's something that I think sometimes brands... She's right. Sometimes brands can get a little caught up into that's not our brand language, which is a little bit snobbish, I'll say. Crystal Carter: Yeah. But I think with content, you can be clever with that. I think you can be creative. Again, if you put something on, it doesn't have to be the homepage. You don't have to hit people over the head with it as soon as they get to website. Mordy Oberstein: No, don't do it on the homepage. Yeah. Like fine. Do your thing on the homepage, fine. Crystal Carter: Right. But you could have a blog that addresses that and links off to other comments and other content that is more on brand or whatever, and you can say, hey, this isn't what we normally do, but we found that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just be honest. I think that's the other thing is that consumers are so much more sophisticated these days because a lot of consumers are also content creators as well. So it's most important to think about that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, a hundred percent. And with that, so I think, and well, Ari said, and we were talking before about creating content on the SEO side itself, we keep coming back to a point of your brand and how it uses content to relate to the audience. So with all of this talk about SEO strategies and a wider a brand strategy and in getting creative, Chris and I thought, let's take a deep look at what it means for your brand to actually speak to their audience during the holiday season. So here is a deep thought about your brand talking to your actual consumers during the holiday season, so a Deep Thought with Crystal and me, Mordy. So okay. I see a lot of on social media or top five ways to align your brand to the holiday season or whatever, whatever, and it talks about product all the time. Make sure your product... Whatever it is, it's very... When we talk about seasonality, I find, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's my personal bias, but I find we get very product-focused. But I want to talk about that your brand and the messaging and the positioning and the tone it takes should also adjust to this season. So I'll say, for example... And by the way, the product side, it's super easy to see. During the summer, IPA sales go up a ton because everyone wants an IPA during... It's refreshing. It's not refreshing in the middle of the winter. It's just like weird. I would drink an IPA in- Crystal Carter: You want a stout in the middle of the- Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, you feel your beer. In the summer, you're fun, you have an IPA. In the wintertime, it's time for a Guinness, which is a meal, it's not even a drink. But it's the same thing with the way you speak. So for example, let's just say for argument's sake, your audience are cutthroat business people. So you're going to speak to them in a cutthroat business kind of way. Let's get right to the bottom line. But during the holiday season, even your most cutthroat executives, I would hope their heart is warm, just a tinge. Crystal Carter: And I think it has to do with value. I think it has to do with the value of something and how you articulate value. Google is trying to deliver customer value. So people search for something and then they're trying to give them a valuable search result that will either get them to the good information or help them to achieve a goal or something to that effect. And all of the things on your website should be helping to point people to the value of it. Now, the value of something will change depending on seasonality, but also depending on how you speak to them. So for instance, if you had, I think there's a lot of these exciting nightlights for kids, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: My kids have a dinosaur one. Crystal Carter: Right. Okay, and some of them do other things. For the child, the value for that is like, oh, it's shaped like a dinosaur. Oh, it'll sing you a song. For the parent, the value of that is that it might get your kid to actually go to sleep on time. And when you're talking to those two different audiences, it's still the same product, but you need to make sure that you're illustrating the value to them in a way that it resonates with them. Mordy Oberstein: So what I'm saying is sometimes that same person, sometimes they're the kid and sometimes they're the parent. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes even as a parent, I want a dinosaur nightlight. No, but I'm saying you change throughout the year. It's summertime, I don't want to go like, don't bog me down with business details. It's summertime, I want to have fun. It should be a little fun. I'm not saying you got to go crazy, but speak to your audience where they're at. If it's the holiday season time, it's not like blow the competition out of the water time. That's not the vibe. Crystal Carter: Right. Right, right, right, right, right, right. Mordy Oberstein: So just make sure that you're adjusting. Just like you would adjust your product, make sure you're adjusting your brand terminology, your brand tone, the way your brand is positioning itself. It's not time to talk about how competitive and great... It might be time to show like, hey, we're donating to a charity, which you should do for a legit reason, not just because I want to get more customers. But those are the kind of things that you should be doing to reach people where they're at, not where you think they're at. Crystal Carter: Read the room, people. Mordy Oberstein: Read the room. Crystal Carter: Read the room. Mordy Oberstein: Read the room. But we do it all the time. I'm not saying anything complicated, but we do it all the time with product. We read the room with a product. We change the title tag and say, holiday season. We add, I don't know, a peppermint cane to the image of the cell phone. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Because just like there's a pumpkin spice button, there's also a peppermint cane button that you push. It's the leaves have turned brown, it's peppermint cane time. Crystal Carter: Right. It's great. Mordy Oberstein: Hit the button. Crystal Carter: And I think also your customers will be at different points in their life as well. So I think it's important to think about that. So for instance, I work with a library, Libraries Unlimited, shout out to them. England's been having what they call a cost of living crisis, for instance. And there's been a lot of trouble with people having warm spaces and things. So the library's library all the time. But what they started doing was they were saying, hey, just in case you need a warm place to hang out, we are also that as well. Like, hey, there customer. If you're having trouble with any of that sort of stuff, we can help. Did you know that we also offer this thing that we can help you with? And it's the same customers. They're talking to the same customer, and they have the same offering that they always did. It was always a nice, warm, cozy place to be in the library. But just reminding people that we also have this, that is also a value to you at this particular time. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly, this particular time. There's seasonality in the product. There's seasonality in the brand, positioning, language, marketing, all of it needs to change to match seasonality. You know what never changes though? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Oberstein: The SEO news. Not that the news hasn't changed, but who covers it and what he does, and how he does it does not change. He's as constant as the North Star, then pretty sure is not the idiom, but it doesn't matter. He is Barry Schwartz, and he is this week's Snappy SEO News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. It's in the stars this week as Google announced Gemini. Inserts Oracle sounds. For Christie Hines at Search Engine Journal, Google introduces Gemini and updates Bard with Gemini Pro. So a few things to note. Gemini is a competitor of GPT-4, and always at the Chat and can't help myself of GPT-4, and according to studies, seemingly performs better perform than GPT-4. Gemini aims at making multimodal connections. That's fancy talk for saying it can understand audio, video and text inputs and all other sorts of inputs in combination. Bard is now powered by Gemini Pro. There are different levels of Gemini. I'm making the quotation marks of when I say levels with my hands, you can't see that. I just realize, but I'm making quotation marks for levels of Gemini. And Gemini Pro is what is now powering Bard. And, this is where I think it's super interesting, it can also create custom UX to address user questions. So basically, let's say you're searching for, tell me a good recipe for cornbread. It'll adjust the layout and format to help you better explore that type of query as opposed to, let's say, you search for who are the top five best baseball players ever. It might produce a different kind of format for that. I think something like this allows for what I like to call content portals where you can dive down or dive deep down a rabbit hole of a particular subset of topics in a way that kind of aligns with what you're trying to do, come out of that rabbit hole and then explore something else, which is helped by the fact that anything on the screen that Gemini shows you, you can sort of click on and say, okay, let me know about this a little bit more. So you can sort of really dive down the rabbit hole. The way the UX is set up, I think it's super interesting, and I think something like that would be fascinating on the SERP. I know everyone will kind of freak out about that, but I do think it's fascinating. Okay, back to Barry. And this one is nuts. From Search Engine Roundtable report, Google local rankings now look if a business is open or closed, i.e business hours. This came from a study done by Joy Hawkins at the great Sterling Sky agency in Toronto. And what they basically saw was that when a business is closed, it kind of gets pulled out of the local packs. Let's say I'm searching for, I don't know, a pizza near me, and there are a bunch of listings that are now closed and some that are open. The ones that are open will appear. The ones that are closed will not appear. If later in the day, some close and I search forward again, and now there's different ones that are now open, I'll get the ones that are now open in the local pack and not the ones that are closed. Barry himself tested it out for a bunch of different types of queries and pretty much saw the same thing. I am not a big fan of this, to be honest with you. I think, for example, I might be searching for... Let's break it down. If I'm searching for pizza near me, okay, probably I want the restaurant that's open right now. If I'm searching for something like, I don't know, lawyer near me, if it's 12 o'clock at night, I'm not looking to call a lawyer. I'm probably looking just to do some research and maybe call them tomorrow. So I don't think this, as a ranking, factor, quote, unquote, "really" meets user needs in the way that it's supposed to. Anyway. And lastly, from Barry Schwartz again, and from, again, from Search Engine Roundtable, Google, November 2023 reviews update completes after 29 days. That is a long rollout. Check your rankings. It's a reviews update. It's not limited anymore to just products. So check your rankings out. Going to be hard to pull data on this at the aggregate level because you had an overlap between the November 2023 core update and the reviews update. I'm not really sure how you separate that out. I'm actually in conversation with December team to see, maybe somehow we could, but I don't know. And with that ambiguity, this is this week's version of the Snappy News. I want to say something. So we record the main part of the podcast before we actually record the news, but we are so confident that we're going to cover at least one article from Barry that I am confident saying your news from this week is from Barry. Hope you had a nice holiday, Barry. Hope you're having a nice holiday, Barry, and we appreciate you and thank you and love you. Now you feel awkward, Barry. You know what's not awkward? Following people on social media? That's never awkward. I think it's always a good thing. Crystal Carter: No, it's never... It's always- Mordy Oberstein: No, you're like, yeah, follow? Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: That's not awkward. That's a good thing. This week's follow of the week is none other than the founder and CEO of Rise at Seven, a fabulous agency based out of the UK and I think now globally around the world, if I'm not- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The US as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Okay, there we go. And it is one of the only Carrie Rose who you can follow over on Twitter. I'll not call it X. @CarrieRosePR. At C-A-R-R-I-R-O-S-E-P-R. Link in the show notes. But give her a great follow. She's fabulous. Crystal Carter: She's fantastic. Do follow her. She's got some great case studies. She's great for this particular episode. She did something with Game called The Christmas Tinner or something like that. And essentially it was a Christmas dinner in a can, and they did a fantastic- I know. Exactly. Your face. Mordy Oberstein: I'm making a face that sounds like Spam. Crystal Carter: Yeah, you're making a face. No. So it was a fantastic, incredible campaign. They got some really good traction for it. And when we were thinking about seasonality, that was the first campaign that came to my mind. At Rise at Seven, they do a lot of creative campaigns that are connected with SEO. That's really sort of their bread and butter. That's a great example of it. They also had one with dog sweaters as well, where you could wear a matching sweater with your dog, which is another campaign that they did that went really well, which is kind of seasonal as well, because sweaters are cozy and stuff. But yeah, Carrie and the team do some great work. Follow her. She also shares a lot of digital PR examples. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, ton of stuff. Crystal Carter: Which are great, particularly for seasonal ideas. Mordy Oberstein: So give her a follow. Again, it's @CarrieRosePR. That's Carrie with a C on Twitter, whatever, X, link in the show notes. And well, by the way, bread and butter, that's an underrated meal. Think of meal and talking like her bread and butter. Crystal Carter: I love bread. We talked about carbs. We talked about carbs. When I came to visit you, I was like, bring me carbs. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, yeah. And I did. Crystal Carter: You did and I was like, yeah... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I brought you carbs. Crystal Carter: ... this is a good colleague. I was like, you see, you see. Mordy Oberstein: But you ever go to a restaurant and they don't do it where I live now, but they give the basket bread with the little like, the restaurant butters. And the pumpernickel! Crystal Carter: But when they're warm. When they're warm, that's great. I mean, Olive Garden made their entire, the whole thing about Olive Garden is bread. Mordy Oberstein: Here's some bread. Crystal Carter: Right? They're just like, I ate the bread. Also, Red Lobster have very good cheese rolls as well. Those are good as well. But yeah, I love carbs. I love bread. Mordy Oberstein: Best part, okay. I have my cheat days on my diet. I'm like, carbs. I don't want to go like the fanciest... I want carbs. Crystal Carter: Yeah, pumpernickel, pretzels. I love their pretzels. Mordy Oberstein: Hot pretzels, bagels. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. With good mustard. You got to have the good mustard with the pretzel. People put other stuff on it, but I'm like, nah, it's about the mustard. Mordy Oberstein: And it can't be like, it's more than sitting in the case. You go buy a hot pretzel for weeks on end, that's all crusty. That's not good. Mordy Oberstein: That's not what you want. What you do want though, is check us out next week. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Sorry you're going to miss us. Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to hand off your SEO work to clients. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO learning over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning up 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

There’s a lot of SEO tools out there and navigating which ones to invest in can be a challenge. Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein set sail into the SEOtool universe, with must-follow tips on what to consider when choosing the best SEO tool for your needs. The SERP’s Up SEO Podcast welcomes Ahrefs’ own Patrick Stox to give his expert insights on SEO tools. Nati Elimelech, Wix’s Head of SEO, also joins to chat about a less-discussed but highly relevant topic–SEO implementation tools and the nuances in building them. Listen in as we help you put the right SEO tools in your toolbelt! Back How to pick the right SEO tool for you? There’s a lot of SEO tools out there and navigating which ones to invest in can be a challenge. Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein set sail into the SEOtool universe, with must-follow tips on what to consider when choosing the best SEO tool for your needs. The SERP’s Up SEO Podcast welcomes Ahrefs’ own Patrick Stox to give his expert insights on SEO tools. Nati Elimelech, Wix’s Head of SEO, also joins to chat about a less-discussed but highly relevant topic–SEO implementation tools and the nuances in building them. Listen in as we help you put the right SEO tools in your toolbelt! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 24 | February 8, 2023 | 49 MIN 00:00 / 48:43 This week’s guests Patrick Stox Patrick Stox is a Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. He was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and a reviewer for the 2022 SEO chapter. He’s an organizer for several groups including the Raleigh SEO Meetup (the most successful SEO Meetup in the US), the Beer and SEO Meetup, the Raleigh SEO Conference, runs a Technical SEO Slack group, and is a moderator for /r/TechSEO on Reddit Nati Elimelech With over 15 years of experience and a focus in large scale website optimization, Nati was the CEO of a prominent SEO agency catering to some of Israel’s biggest brands. As the Head of SEO at Wix, he focuses on helping platforms be search-engine friendly and building SEO products. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fantastic, the incredible, Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hello, my good friends online. Welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast with me and Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: You sound like me. That nasalness. I'm still sick. I can't shake this cold. Crystal Carter: I sound nasal? Mordy Oberstein: Well, you did a nasal voice there. "Hello, internet people." Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hi. Mordy Oberstein: We come from Mars. Crystal Carter: That's a great movie. I love that movie. Mordy Oberstein: Great, great movie. Coneheads, we're referring to Coneheads Saturday Night Live skit turned movie. Crystal Carter: I was talking about Mars Attacks. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I was talking about Coneheads. I was doing Coneheads, fine. But Mars Attacks is also a great movie. Crystal Carter: Also a great movie. Mordy Oberstein: Also a great movie. Crystal Carter: These are great movies. Tune into SERP's Up for all of the best movie recommendations. We're also in IMDB. Did you know that? Mordy Oberstein: We are because we're- Crystal Carter: We're in IMDB. Mordy Oberstein: Because that's part of SEO. Crystal Carter: Exactly. That's part of SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Entity-based SEO. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. So do check us out there, as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Which reminds me. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, "Where we have the tools." Check out our site inspection tool, redirect manager and more and I say tools because in this episode we're talking all about SEO tools. Tools, tools everywhere and not a insight to spare. Crystal, I was warning you, for the audience. I used to work for multiple SEO tools. I have the inside scoop on the SEO tools. Crystal, you're going to have to hold me back. Hold me back! Crystal Carter: Hold you back. Mordy Oberstein: Hold me back! Crystal Carter: Like every Saturday night when you were growing up, I'm sure you were like "Hold me back!" Mordy Oberstein: Have I gone too far already? Probably, and I don't care because tool, tools everywhere and not an insight to spare. So many tools, so many things, so little bang for your buck. I am so jaded. But that's because choosing a good SEO tool is not easy. There are a lot of tools out there and they are not all exactly equal and/or beneficial, which is why we're here to discuss the finer points of what you should consider when looking to use and dare I say spend money on an SEO tool. Plus someone who knows a lot about SEO tools, Patrick Stox stops by to share what he thinks makes a great SEO tool. Plus someone else who knows a lot about SEO tools stops by to share his insight about SEO tools that actually implement as Wix's own head of SEO, Nati Elimelech joins us, and of course we have the Snappy News. We have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness so whiz, clang, bang and other tool noises as episode 24 of the SERP's Up Podcast is under construction. Crystal Carter: I got my hard hat. We're going to dive right in. Mordy Oberstein: I got my tool belt, snap. Crystal Carter: I love a tool belt. I'd love to have a tool belt. Mordy Oberstein: I've never had one. Crystal Carter: You should totally get one. Also, I really like the measuring tapes. When you pull out the measuring tape and then you let it go, that's so satisfying. Mordy Oberstein: My kids like that, but I have to tell them, be careful, you can slice up your whole hand doing that. Crystal Carter: You can. I did that as a child, it was unpleasant, I would say. Mordy Oberstein: My kids don't listen, so they'll probably end up like you, in general, which is a great thing. But for the hand slicing, not so good. Crystal Carter: Not so great. Not so great. You can use the shovel to dig yourself out of that hole. That's a great tool. Mordy Oberstein: I have a spade in my tool belt. Crystal Carter: I'm kidding. Anyway, okay, so today we're going to talk about what you need to decide which SEO tools to use. And actually looking at this, I was thinking that a lot of this can be really useful for deciding for any sort of digital tool. And certainly in my time in consulting clients and consulting people on what to do on the web, I've very often been asked, what do you think of this tool we're considering? What do we think of this platform or this apparatus that we are considering adding to our MarTech stack? Mordy Oberstein: Good word. Crystal Carter: Apparatus is a good word, isn't it? One of the things that's really important is to have a deep understanding of what's going on. So you need to understand what you actually want to achieve, what the scope of the project is and how often you're going to need this tool and that sort of thing is really, really useful. So think about the thing you want to do and how you might find a tool to help you do that. So a good tool that I use is the SEO Pro Tools Chrome extension for instance. That's a tool that I use really regularly and that tool helps me to get a quick snapshot of what's going on on a webpage before I do a deep dive. And that's a great tool because it's really handy for me and really useful. But if I wanted to do something bigger, on a bigger scale, I might need a different tool. So think about that. The other thing that's really useful is thinking about what your capabilities are and what your requirements are as a team. So for instance, if you're a big business, you might want to think about a tool that includes an API capability that allows you to scale and integrate with other tools that you're using. If you have a team that's really fast-paced and that's out and about a lot, you might want to think about something that has a mobile app, you also want to think about integrations for instance. So if your team is heavily reliant on something like Google Workspace and you're using Google Data Studio a lot, or you're using Slack a lot, or you're using Google Sheets a lot or something like that, you might want to think about tools that are integrating with those tools that you're using regularly. Also, data portability and accessibility with a lowercase A there. So if you've got higher ups that need to see bits of data regularly, that's really useful. And also budget, with a big old B, the budget. So you're going to want to know what your budget is for what you're trying to do and where that goes. Then, once you've done all of that, you want to think about the actual tool itself. So understand what the capabilities are and what the limitations are. So a really good example is thinking about, it's something that everyone's used, a tool that almost everyone in web has used, is tools for Core Web Vitals, for instance. So if you think about page feed insights, the Lighthouse tools versus CrUX, for instance, those two tools have two different sets of criteria that they're measuring, and they're both useful to help you understand what you need to understand about your page speed and your insights and things like that. But they have different criteria. So it's very important to understand how the tool is assessing what you need it to assess or how it is helping you to get that information that you're trying to get. Crawling tools, for instance, will crawl in different ways and even within them, they'll have different defaults that you should consider, as well. So understanding the capabilities of the tool, understanding the limitations of the tool can make a really big difference to how you approach whether or not a tool is good for you and how it feeds into the capabilities and the requirements that you have as a team. Mordy Oberstein: That's really good. I'm with you. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Thank you. I saw lots of nodding along, especially when it got to the budget part. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, the budget is, sometimes you'll think, oh, that's too expensive or this one's not as good. It's cheaper, but it's not as good. It's not as good because it doesn't have this graph. It doesn't have the graph. But sometimes, you know what, forgo the graph and go with the cheaper model because the graph's not really that important, which leads me to all of this. SEO tools love shoving graphs into things. They love shoving the same graph into multiple places, but it looks different, so you're not sure it's the same thing, but maybe it's different, but it's really the same exact thing. So they might have 400 reports, but only 40 unique ones, but they make you feel like you got to buy this thing, it's got 400 reports, but it only has 40 unique ones. So maybe you don't really need to buy that tool. You could buy the cheaper one that doesn't have all the things because it's really the one that has all the things, has all the same things. So don't get caught up in the shiny graph. But you do sometimes need to think about the shiny graphs because you have to think about the reporting. So this tool might have four million things that it can do, but its reporting stinks and the person you report to is not going to understand anything that you sent them. Crystal Carter: And those graphs can be really overwhelming for people, particularly if you're talking to decision makers, business owners or the C-suite and things like that. If they're looking at 25 different graphs and they want one piece of information, that is too much information. And that turns people off and it can make people not trust the data that you're giving them because they can't interpret it themselves. Mordy Oberstein: What you might need to do is go with the tool that's a little bit simpler, with a little bit better reporting. And if you really need the extra capabilities of the other tool, then all right, maybe you want to spring for a second tool, but understand where your money comes from. And that's usually from a client or an internal person. So be wary. Crystal Carter: And I think this goes back to the integration part of it. So for instance, there's a lot of tools that have Slack integrations or Data Studio integrations and things like that. So if you have something that's fairly simple, you can easily export it into certain things. So I know there was a nanny app, Little Warden for instance, that has a Slack integration and they will ping you in your Slack channel when there's an issue on your site. That's really useful. That's really, really useful. It's not like that particular, I think there are whizzier apps, it's a great app, tool, but I think there are apps that do more, but that particular one does that. And that can be really useful information. And if you're deciding between that one or another one, but the app in question maybe is less fancy or has fewer graphs but has an element that makes it more actionable for you, then that's going to be really, really useful. And I think that's something to consider. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of accessibility of the data, here's something that no one talks about and that no one considers. Are you ready? How easy is it to migrate the data out of that platform should you choose to cancel that platform? Because having worked at one of these platforms, they are not all equal. Some of the platforms may get incredibly complicated to take the data out and import it into a new tool and they do it on purpose because they don't want you to have to leave. Yes, they are spiteful, some of these SEO tools. So you need to be careful and ask, if I ever decide, heaven forbid, to cancel my subscription with your amazing tool, am I screwed? Crystal Carter: And also even on a day-to-day basis, if you need to make the information liquid, if you need to export it, if you have limited exportability capabilities, then that will limit the value of the tool. So Screaming Frog is something that is a tool that almost every SEO uses, or particularly for technical SEO. And on that tool you download it and it's on your local device, it's not a cloud tool, but you can export the data to Google Sheets really, really easily. So somebody can say, oh, can you crawl this? And I can say, yes, crawl it, export it. So within a couple of minutes I can export it to someone, which can make it really, really easy. There are some tools where it's a lot more difficult to export the information about a site and that means that that puts a lot of barriers to making the tool accessible to the wider part of your team. So yeah, if you can't get your data, let's say that the tool says that they can give you historical data for going back, I don't know, five years or something like that on our website, but they won't give it to you. Mordy Oberstein: Big problem, big, big, problem. Because one day you will need it and you will not be able to get it and it will not be there. And they'll be like, whoa, well whatever, you're canceling anyway. We don't care. Crystal Carter: These things are very tricky. So I think that, yeah that's something that you should consider and sometimes you can find workarounds, sometimes you can export on a regular basis or something like that. But if that's the case, then you've got to make allowances for that. And also I think that you have the time to learn the tool because that's the other thing. There are so many tools and there's so many tools- Mordy Oberstein: If there's a demo. My recommendation is take it. Because I've seen this a million times, you think you understand the tool, you're an SEO expert, you're wonderful, you're amazing. But the people who develop the tool are an expert on their tool. And sometimes these tools could be a little bit layered and you don't know what exactly is in there. So go for the demo. Crystal Carter: And there's so many, there's tools that I use all the time and then somebody's like, oh, there's that part of it. I'm like, what are you talking about? I didn't even know that that was, what? Mordy Oberstein: Literally, when I was at Semrush, I'd do once a week. I'm like, here, let me show you something about the tool you probably didn't even know existed. Crystal Carter: And they add things all the time. I mean at Wix we add SEO capabilities all the time. Just this month, and we're recording this at the beginning of the year. And then we're a few weeks into 2023 and we've had three or four different updates to just the Google Search Console site inspection tool. Mordy Oberstein: I went into a meeting late, my bad, I got caught up in another meeting. You all know how that happens. Forgiveness please. And I missed an update. So even I didn't know what was going on in one of the tools, so I saw it in another meeting someone was using, I'm like, wait, when did we add that? Crystal Carter: Right? Precisely. So if that's happening just on one platform imagine of all the tools that you're using across the different things. So we have an updates section, SEO updates part of our website that helps you understand. Sitebulb is renowned for their release notes. They add a lot of color to their release notes. So they're a good one to keep up with. But if you have a tool that you use regularly, that is something that your marketing team, your SEO team relies on, it's worth keeping track of when their updates are rolled out. We did a whole webinar on our 2022 releases at the end of 2022, which is on YouTube, which is great. And I know a lot of other teams do similar things as well. So take some time, grab a cup of coffee and tuck in so that you know more about your tools. Mordy Oberstein: Now you'll be asking, why do I care? Here's why you care because you're going to buy a tool now. You're locked in, let's say for a year, two years, whatever it is, or even monthly, whatever it is. Let's say you're locked in, you get a better deal that way. If the tool is not constantly developing, then that's what you're getting and that's it. If the tool you see has a log where there's adding new reports, adding new things all the time, then you're paying the same amount but you're getting more. Crystal Carter: Having an active and engaged tool team is really, really important. There's a couple of ways to tell that, again, the release notes, like you're saying where they're constantly updating, but also how responsive they are to user requests. So for instance, on a lot of tool download things like on Product Hunt or on Google Chrome, Chrome extensions things, and even in our Wix app market, we have places where people can leave reviews and the people who've built the app can respond to the reviews. Google App Market does this as well. And if you're seeing that the team, even if they're work in progress, even if they're early days or even if they're still leaning forward, if you can see that they're actively responding to user requests, user comments, and things, that's a good sign of a good team. A lot of teams will also be very active online. So Slack for instance, when they first launched, they were really active on Twitter and people were going, I wish I'd had this and I think it should have that and that sort of thing. That's really useful. The team from Candor, the team from AlsoAsked the team- Mordy Oberstein: Offered by Candor. Crystal Carter: Offered by Candor, they recently were "what sort of updates should we be making to AlsoAsked let us know, please tell us what you think". At Wix for instance, we're constantly asking people what things do you need? And we have a request thing. And when the requests are filled, we say, we've filled this, this has been updated. Chrome does this as well. The Chrome team will say this was an issue and they'll say, we solved this. This has been resolved. You can now see this. And that's really useful. So having a team that's actively engaged with keeping the tool performing well and performing for you helps you make it, means that it's more value for money. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Now my last point, which I agree with all of that and if you see there's nothing dynamic about the tool and how they were communicating, that's a signal. It's like an empty Google business profile. Do you really trust that? Crystal Carter: Bring your Toyota Camry over there and just, yeah it'll be fine. It'll be great. Maybe they'll be open, maybe they won't, but it'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: Probably not. So my last hot take today is if this tool doesn't let you use it for free in some way, shape, or form, do not use it. Crystal Carter: Do not use it. Mordy Oberstein: Do not use it. Let me rephrase this because that's a little bit of a hot take. Do not pay them money. Crystal Carter: Do not. Okay. So what are we- Mordy Oberstein: We're talking, usually a tool will either let you see it through a demo or they'll let you, let's say try a couple of keywords. Like AlsoAsked, so you got I think three free searches a day so you understand what this thing is. The main SEO tools offer a freemium model. Or like Summers has the freebie model. Ahrefs lets you have free access to their site audit tool. Crystal Carter: Mazda has something as well where you can see a lot of stuff before you have to get to- Mordy Oberstein: Or the Explorer. You can run a bunch of searches. So most of the tools, they won't let you do everything, which makes good sense because then you're going to pay for it. But they'll let you look at what's underneath the hood, just a bits. You get a sense of what this thing is. Because if you don't know what this thing is, you should not be giving them your money. And it is impossible to understand what this thing is from a blog post. Crystal Carter: But the blog post looks so good, Mordy, the blog post tells me that it'll solve all my problems. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, repetitive analysis like you've never seen before and you'll never see again once you buy it. Crystal Carter: Like look, I saw the battle cards and there's like tick, tick, tick for all of the things that I need. And it says that it'll work. Mordy Oberstein: All the things that they want you to see they've ticked all the things that they don't want you to see are not even on the list. I am so salty about this. Crystal Carter: Why would they not show me all of the things? Mordy Oberstein: Because these are the same people who are trying to sell you links. Crystal Carter: No they're not. I think that there's- Mordy Oberstein: I've gotten too far. I told you to hold me back. Crystal Carter: I didn't. I'm sorry. I instigated that. I'm an enabler. What have I done? I think that most all of the tools that I absolutely love and adore and I love Screaming Frog. I adore the SEO probe Chrome extension. There's tons of other tools that I use all the time that I really, really love and adore. And they all let you have a certain level of- Mordy Oberstein: A week's trial, three day trial, whatever it is. Crystal Carter: And what I do find is that sometimes in my experience that if the team wants you to have a demo of the, let's say they don't have a neat freemium mode. For instance, AHrefs recently launched a freemium version of AHrefs, which is actually really cool and you can see a lot from it. Marie Hans, when it first launched, she did a nice deep dive into what you can get on the free AHrefs and it's really solid. And I would say that before that it was a little bit more behind the scenes. And I would say that if you were really interested in a tool that you can sometimes just ask them. So you can sometimes ask the team, you can say, hey, if it just says, oh, get in touch for a demo, you can sometimes ask them, can I have a one-month something or other? And they'll give you a voucher or something somehow like that. Mordy Oberstein: I've done that multiple times. Crystal Carter: That'll let you log in and then they'll check in and see how you got in. So as well as that, and I would say do check in. And I have definitely been someone who has, there was a tool that I'm not going to name, but sometimes I've definitely done the thing where I've done the one-month trial and set an alarm to make sure that I finished. Because sometimes when you're doing stuff for clients, you need this one thing. This one time I think it was something that was like, yeah it was like an influencer or something. Mordy Oberstein: That's fine, because if you needed that down the line again, now you know that that would be a great solution for you. Crystal Carter: And I think also as a consultant, if you're consulting clients or if you're working across an agency or if you're doing a sort of technical overview of different tools, sometimes being able to have had a look around and assess it for yourself and be able to do write up on whether or not the benefits or the drawbacks of a particular tool can be really, really useful and can also help you to understand other parts of the tools that you use more as well. So it's always good to keep up with the different capabilities of tech. There's a diagram from MarTech Alliance that talks about some of the different MarTech tools that are available. And it grows every year because there's so much. And I think that in the last few months we're starting to see an explosion of AI tools at the moment, for instance. So I'm sure it will grow even more in the coming days. So being able to understand how you pick a tool and how you spend your time with those tools whether or not they give you the demo. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Crystal Carter: It's really important. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, speaking of artificial intelligence, we have some real intelligence for you. I'm just kidding. We have human intelligence as AHrefs own Patrick Stox is here to tell us what makes an SEO tool a great SEO tool. Patrick Stox: Tools are just there to save you time and kind of make your life easier. Imagine how much time it would take to find broken links on a website. If you had to go through every single page on the site and click every single link. On larger websites, you could have multiple people staffed that would just do this every hour of every day for weeks at a time and you may not get through everything. Whereas you can run that same site through a crawler and probably in a matter of minutes or hours, you're going to have the answer to what links are broken and so much more information. Or if you're creating content, you can write the things that you think people are searching for or you can look at the data from these tools and actually see what they're searching for. Having the data like that is kind of like having a superpower, you cut right to it, you know exactly what your audience wants, you know exactly what you need to write, and everything is kind of prioritized for you. So all you have to do now is start writing rather than trying to guess and see if this is actually going to resonate up with my audience. Is this something they're actually looking for? It's all just laid out for you. With the tools you're also going to get bigger data. We used to do a whole lot of manual processes. We do a bunch of different searches, a bunch of data gathering. It was a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of work just spent getting a fraction of the data that modern SEO tools provide. The tools are really just making this data more accessible to people. The people that can't really build their own tools or don't have time to go through all those processes to get all that data. The modern tools are really just like, here's the answer, here's all the data, do with it what you will. Here's the answer to any of the questions that you have. And they're really just trying to have whatever data that they think people are going to need, ways to get that data out, ways for you to slice and dice that data in the tool and really just have all the features that you're probably going to need to really be successful. Mordy Oberstein: Patrick, I know you're listening. I just want to say you said that so well. Crystal Carter: So well. Mordy Oberstein: And one of the ways that you do want to create a metric for yourself is does the tool make it easy to do what I want to do? It's a great basic foundational way of base lining that. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Why are you spending time on tools that don't do what you need them to do? Sometimes tools are like, we can do this and we can do that and we can do that and we can do this and we can do that. And it's like, mate, I need it to do one thing. Mordy Oberstein: Make my life easier. Crystal Carter: So get the tool that does the one thing rather than the tool that does 45 different things. Mordy Oberstein: That's the beauty of automation. Now, you know who also likes automation, a good friend of ours. So I'm going to give a little introduction first. He does love automation, by the way, Crystal, he's so into it. It's his thing. There are so many SEO tools that focus on analyzing and monitoring things like rain tracking or crawling. There's a ton of tools that do that. There are, I guess less tools, fewer tools that do implementation itself. I know Edge SEO is becoming more of a thing, so that is becoming more of a mainstream kind of SEO tool universe. So I thought it'd be really cool to pick the brain of somebody who's a well smart individual who oversees a massive team of other well smart individuals to talk about what makes a good SEO tool, but from an implementation point of view. So join us as we talk to Wix's own head of SEO, lover of all SEO automation, nati Elimelech, as we move across the Wix first. Speaker 4: 3, 2, 1 ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast, Nati. How are you? Nati Elimelech: I'm good, thank you, Mordy. Thank you, Crystal. How are you two? Mordy Oberstein: We're good. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. And I'm more happy now that you're here Nati. Nati Elimelech: I do not buy that, but thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, you don't believe that about Crystal or myself? Nati Elimelech: So I would believe that about Crystal. But judging by your Twitter profile, I wouldn't believe you if you said it. Mordy Oberstein: My Twitter profile does not represent who I actually am. Crystal Carter: To all the listeners who follow along with the ongoing Nati and Mordy like SEO hip hop peeve like- Mordy Oberstein: We're like brothers who never wish we were brothers. Crystal Carter: The dance I can report from internal, the dance is like legit. They're the bands never stop. So it's authentic. I'm just letting people know. Mordy Oberstein: I think Nati put it the best. You're both on Twitter, which you are in real life. It's the same thing. Crystal Carter: Really. To be fair to both of you, you're both brilliant as well. So this is also true. Nati Elimelech: Ah, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: So today we're talking about SEO tools and we're talking about SEO tools to actually implement versus track and monitor and so forth. Because there's so many tools that do that. But there are so few tools that actually let you implement something and Nati he runs an entire team of people who create tools that let you implement stuff. So we figured what a great thing. What a great time to bring you on the podcast. I've been meaning to bring you on for a long time, but I finally found the perfect topic I think. Nati Elimelech: Yeah, yeah. I think we finally found it. Mordy Oberstein: Found it like nailed it. Nice. The question is to you, what goes into building tools the right way? Or when you are building these tools that implement, what goes into the process? What goes into your mindset? What goes into it all? Nati Elimelech: So that's a good question. So when we're talking about tools or features in an SEO product, we're talking about the enablement. We want to give users the ability to change whatever they want or change the configuration when it comes to SEO, right? That sounds simple, but as usual reality is a bit more complex than that. Almost everyone with a website or with a business behind it cares about SEO or at least recognizes the importance of SEO as a traffic channel. But we're talking about a very, very wide range of different levels of knowledge or proficiency. Some of these users are novices. They know SEO is important, they kind of know how to spell it, they've heard some stuff about it, but that's where it stops. On the other hand, there are seasoned professionals. They know exactly what they want to be able to do and they have very clear expectations about the features they expect a platform to have. So that means that when you create an SEO tool, because SEO is important to a lot of types of users, there are many considerations you have to take in order to make a good tool. In general, I think the first consideration is what do people expect you to have as a platform? It's not necessarily what Nati wants, or our great product managers want or our UX or engineers or our tech SEOs. It's what about what the user wants. Now the simplest example is being able to edit your title tags or meta descriptions. This is a basic action that's applicable to all types of users, but more professional users expect you to have a more robust and advanced set of features. So the first consideration is what do people expect you to have as a platform? The simplest example is being able to edit your title tags or meta descriptions or any other SEO tag. This is a basic feature that applicable to all types of users. Both beginners want to edit their title tags and obviously professionals when they want to optimize certain pages. But the more professional users expect you to have a much more robust set of features. For example, editing robots.txt, those professionals, they will also probably know what to do with it. But most of all they're aware of the dangers of misusing robots.txt and the implications of making such a mistake. Like blocking certain pages from crawling or God forbid, an entire site. The beginners are definitely not aware of that and they could potentially cause self-harm. So after you've considered everything that users expected to have, and those are different levels of features that will require different levels of proficiency, this leads us to the next consideration. How do we make sure users who aren't proficient or don't know much about SEO practices aren't shooting themselves in the foot. After all, we want them to succeed. Crystal Carter: We want them to be on both good feet. We want them to start off on a good foot. Nati Elimelech: Super important. Crystal Carter: Super important. Nati Elimelech: There's an average of 1.8 feet per person in the world. So I think the numbers speak for themselves. Mordy Oberstein: About a bicycle. They started off rolling on wheels. Crystal Carter: We don't want them to get a flat tire? Mordy Oberstein: Right. Nati Elimelech: I don't actually know how to ride a bicycle. I have to- Mordy Oberstein: Do you really not? I'll teach you next time I see you. Nati Elimelech: No, it's more because I don't want to know. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, in that case I'll definitely teach you next time I see you. Nati Elimelech: So tackling this is a bit more complex. You need to have built-in safeguards. How do you safeguard the user whenever there's a risk of users making mistakes that could lead to an undesired outcome. You want to try and protect them as much as you can, but you also don't want to take away that ability to customize the setting. Meaning that if it puts your beginner in harm's way potentially, but your advanced user, your professional SEO knows what to do it with it, you can't just take it away. So there are a few ways to tackle that. I like to call this the self and protect methodology without the negative connotations of being police. Crystal Carter: We don't have that just so everyone's aware. If you're using Wix, you don't get Nati with the hat going, Nina, Nina, what are you doing? Mordy Oberstein: If you wanted to- Crystal Carter: You can't. Nati Elimelech: But if you want to vote for this feature- Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you really break down the unique consideration of implementation because wait until you're in a tool like Semrush or DeepCrawl, there's nothing you're really going to do that's going to screw up your website if you misuse the tool. Crystal Carter: It's more of an analysis tool. Mordy Oberstein: If you missing our tools, you could theoretically really screw up the website. Nati Elimelech: Definitely the worst you could do is misinterpret a report, but that's not going to do anything to your website. Crystal Carter: But I think that probably one of the best examples that I can think of. You mentioned robots.txt and in Wix you can edit your robots.txt. But before you do that, it says, do you want to do this? Do you know what you're doing? And you also have an option to restore to default, which is something that just like, let's say you do make a pig's ear of it, let's say you do mess it up, you can just restore to default to the thing that is correct and you can try again. You can liquefy to another day rather than losing all of that code again. Another one is with the structured data presets, we have structured data presets for lots of different types of pages, but the syntax on all of that is correct, like fully correct. And it will help you with rich results. If you want to optimize it in a different way, if you want to add new properties or types or whatever to your skin and markup, go for it. Cool. If you make a pig's ear of it, you can restore it to default, the default is always there and you can always go back. So that means that, yeah it's like you said, you're giving people the option to grow, but also supporting them in that journey as well. Nati Elimelech: Yeah. So you touched on two different ways to safeguard users. Basically when you spoke about the robots.txt, what we do is introduce friction. That's first. Basically friction can take many forms, but what you do is you have a feature but you maybe make it less accessible or you kind of really need to dig to find it or you have to make a couple more clicks or read something. And that's definitely one thing we're doing with robots.txt. But there are other things we do and you need to do when you are safeguarding users when it comes to a platform. Let's take another example, we are very data driven, so we looked at the data and we discovered that after changing the slug for an existing page, only 4% of the users added redirect. Basically you change a URL, only 4% of all the URLs that were changed had redirect in place. Crystal Carter: Why didn't you do the redirect Nati? Like whatever, who cares? It's not a big deal. Mordy Oberstein: First world problems. Nati Elimelech: So that's crazy though. Obviously there are cases which it doesn't matter if it's a fresh page and you just messed around with it. But if you have a page that Google knows and maybe tracks and you have signals and you don't redirect, then you lose all of it. So what we did was we introduced auto redirect on slug change. Now in most places when you change your slug, we'll give you the ability to redirect. It's on by default and you can even opt out. Another example of protecting the user but not taking away the ability to choose what to do. You may have a good reasoning for not wanting to perform a leader. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. And that's up to you. You might be like, you know what I'm throwing caution to the wind, I don't even care. But- Mordy Oberstein: It's interesting because a lot of the things that we're doing or you in particular are doing and you and your team are doing, it helps on one, protecting the user, but at the same time you're also automating things for advanced users, which is really interesting to see how that plays itself out in terms of implementation. Nati Elimelech: I think that's a very, very important aspect of how people experience a product, how it fits into their workflows. How many clicks do they have to perform to do a certain action, how repetitive detection is. So yeah, we definitely take that into account whenever we can, but it's not just about saving them time. Crystal, you brought up structured data markup and that you can restore defaults. So what if you use structured data markup or use a schema that isn't valid, that isn't validation, or you are missing a comma or a parenthesis? Crystal Carter: You're using the wrong quotation marks, which is my favorite ever. Nati Elimelech: Exactly. So then it won't even validate, it won't let you save it, for example. So there are many, many, many ways. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's amazing by the way. Crystal Carter: That is one of my favorite features because there's a lot of things that will give you an open field where you can add in whatever schema you want, but it doesn't tell you whether it's valid or not. And then you have to go to an external tool and validate it. Whereas within the Wix SEO, your panel, you could add in your schema and it will tell you like, nah, you missed something try it again, do it again. And we also have it in Velo as well. So if you got schema using the Wix SEO API, then it also tells you, no, not yet. Try it again one more time until- Mordy Oberstein: You're this close. Crystal Carter: You get it right. Mordy Oberstein: We used to make it so- Crystal Carter: So close and you're like, where- Mordy Oberstein: You're like this close, you're almost there. Keep going. Try one more time. Crystal Carter: Spot the difference. You're like, where did I miss? Please send me help with- Nati Elimelech: Yeah, so we have many more examples of how we save our users. When you manually add the redirect and we can see, we could calculate, it will cause a redirect loop then we'll warn you. So there are many, many, many things you could do about that for advance users and for beginners. I think those, even though there are many directed at beginners, they serve everyone, which is great. You make it safer for the beginners and you make it more convenient and efficient for your professionals. But we also touched on having good default settings. A lot of users, a lot of people won't even touch your SEO settings. They don't know enough, especially early stages to decide what's right or not. So we do what I call kind of SEO activism, which we do look at everything and decide what the proper default is. For a product you have the default, structured data markup with images and everything you need and we'll update it as needed. And if you haven't touched it, then it will be updated as long as we do that. But we also do stuff like no index blog tag pages by default because we know that for most users with tiny blogs, that's not usually a high quality page. So we also take into account, no, not only how would users use our tools and how we can safeguard or make it more efficient for them, but what do we need to do when they don't use our tools? We automatically generate stuff. So even if they don't know what to do or intend to do, stuff kind of works without them having to know that. So that's a big aspect I think of safeguarding the user as well. It's not just about the actions they take, but about the actions that they don't take. Crystal Carter: And I think also that onboarding is something that's really important with regards to using tools generally. And I've been in a lot of discussions with the SEO team about how we think about the onboarding process for when people get involved with the Wix SEO tools. So it says, you know should probably have a keyword in the old homepage. And it's like, no, I think just, nope, you should probably have your business name on your homepage as well. And I think that that onboarding process is something that sets people up for success. I know that the team thinks a lot about that and reviews it regularly. And I think also, I don't know if you can touch on a little bit about the testing. You talked about some of the stats that you use, but I know that there's a lot of testing and refinement. I don't know if you can talk quickly about that before we wrap up. Nati Elimelech: So yeah, we do a lot of testing and refinement. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Is it helpful? Nati Elimelech: It is helpful. Mordy Oberstein: That is great. Nati Elimelech: Okay, so one other thing we haven't touched on, you did touch on it, but you spoke about onboarding, but I think, and UX writers will agree, and our product managers will agree in product education is super, super, super important. You need to educate on why it was important. You need to educate on how to use specific features. And most important, I think all tools, especially reporting tools, need to read that one, do not overpromise. And tools tend to do that. If you do this and that, then you'll rank higher. And users believe that and they take that to heart and that's not always the case. So we always try not to oversell or overpromise and make sure users understand that SEO is a process and not just a set of checklists to complete. And that there isn't usually one specific action or a set of actions that will lead you to the promised land. Tools without educations are just tools. Now if I give you a drill Mordy you'll probably know how to use it without having to use a manual. Mordy Oberstein: Not a clue. Nati Elimelech: Yeah. I gave you way too much credit here. If I give you a fork Mordy- Mordy Oberstein: These hands are so smooth. They're so soft. Nati Elimelech: Yeah. So if I give Crystal a drill, she'll definitely know how to use it. But if I give her a massive power tool that can take down walls, she'll need to go through the manual, I guess, and through a wall, apparently. So education is super important. The more advanced feature you have, the more potential impact they may have. Education becomes even more important. So it's about, if we sum up, because we don't have time, and Mordy's making face, nevermind that Mordy's regular face. But if you want to wake up first, give users the feature they want, then protect them from what they don't know or the ways they can misuse your features and all the time teach them how to use those features, teach them why those features are important and teach them when to not use those features. I think that those are the main pillars of making a good SEO product. There are many, many nuances, but we try to take everything into consideration here. Mordy Oberstein: Nati keep pounding the table on that. Just literally keep pounding the table because it's going to make our post-production of this podcast way easier now. Thanks Nati. Nati Elimelech: You're welcome. Mordy Oberstein: It's an honor to have you here, the head of SEO at Wix developing so many products. It is amazing the work that you and your team have done, and particularly over the last, I would say, three or so years. If you're looking to follow Nati, follow him on Twitter at netanel, N-E-T-A-N-E-L and we'll link to his profile in the show notes. Again, Nati, thank you so much for coming on, man. Nati Elimelech: Thank you, Crystal. You're welcome Mordy. Crystal Carter: You're so welcome Nati. Always a pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: Bye bye. Crystal Carter: Bye. Nati Elimelech: B-bye. Speaker 4: 3-2-1 Ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: He has a way, you know that Billy Joel song, "She's Got a Way"? Nati has a way. Crystal Carter: He has a way. When I first joined Nati, Nati was like, check this out. And showed me the scorecard that he uses to helping reduce siloing across SEO performance across the massive Wix team. And it's literally, it's a thing of beauty and it's incredibly considered and incredibly effective for helping to drive SEO innovation. So as well as leading an incredibly efficient team. So the team at Wix are like, I love it when we add a new feature to the tool because everyone is so hyped about it. They're like, we added a search feature on the Google Search Console dash. Mordy Oberstein: Slash the emoji spot. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And people are like yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Motorless Slack channel- Crystal Carter: You can search the URL. Mordy Oberstein: Always surprised me. I didn't know we had that emoji, Crystal Carter: Right? They're just like, oh my God, you can search URLs now. Everyone is so hyped. And I'm literally so hyped and go on Twitter and I'm so hyped. And literally it's true. We really hyped about making the tools better for everybody. Mordy Oberstein: I want to share the Slack, all the different emojis on Twitter one time. Crystal Carter: All of them literally, so there's like fire signs and mic drops and literally everybody goes crazy because we- Mordy Oberstein: Goes bonkers, it's bonkers. Emojis are bonkers. Crystal Carter: I know. But everybody's really about it. And I think that that's brilliant and I think that that's what you need. When we were talking about teams that are engaged with their tool, that's what makes the difference is the people behind the tool want to make the tool really, really good. And Nati's not only fantastic at running his team or leading his team, not running, leading his team, but also is very, very good at nurturing talent and helping the team and the people in his team to do cool stuff, which I think is really, really great. Mordy Oberstein: It's absolutely amazing. What's also amazing is what's going on in the news this week. Well, let's dive into the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Sick of news about AI writers and search. No. Great because both of this week's stories are about AA writers and search because like the Depeche Mode, I just can't get enough. Number one, Sundar Pichai confirms Google is working on AI's search feature users can engage directly with per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Or as a movie phone guy would say, this time it's for real, as there has been much speculation about Google's plans. However, this time officially, CEO Google Sundar Pichai said quote "in the coming weeks and months, we'll make these language models available starting with Lambda so that people can engage directly with them. This will help us continue to get feedback tests and safely improve them. These models are particularly amazing for composing, constructing and summarizing. They will become even more useful for people as they provide up to date or factual information. Lambda, by the way, is a chat interface technology that will let you have a conversation with AI in order to find the info that you otherwise probably would've gotten through search." I'm curious that he mentioned that you can compose content with the AI writer. That's interesting to me. I think that probably would be best qualified by somebody over at Google, because anyone can take that and run with that, which I don't advise to do. Also, from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Microsoft Bing's chat, GPT interface spotted in the wild. Or again, as movie phone guy would say, this time it's for real, as we've heard Bing is going to do this. But now we see that they're doing this test show a chat interface on being with a prompt ask me anything. Which sounds like a recipe for disaster. Ask me anything. That has never gone wrong on a date before, ask me anything. However, it is really interesting to see that Bing is testing this. It would obviously be a safe assumption to say this is coming to being searched in the relatively near future. And then I'll do it for this version of this snappy news. All right, so before we leave you, as we always do, we have to share with you who you should potentially be following out there on the social media to get more SEO awesomeness. And for this week we have Chris Johnson who's at defaced on Twitter, that's at D-E-F-A-C-E-D on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Chris Johnson. In my first ever podcast, I interviewed Chris Johnson when I was doing a podcast for Optics way back in the day. And he is fantastic. He builds his own tools all the time. On his website Defaced he has a whole collection of things that he's built. He gets involved with SEO but also considers himself to be something of a technologist and is incredibly creative and inventive with the kinds of tools that he makes. And I think that that's one of the things that's great about the SEO space is that you can see a need for a tool and make one. And he's somebody who does this a lot. So when there was lots of stuff going on with Core Web Vitals, I was interviewing him about a Chrome extension that he made for Core Web Vitals things. And also about his tool that he made for being able to visualize cumulative layout shift with a gift, which was really great. And he continues to build it and always does. Mordy Oberstein: That's amazing. Sue Ross. Crystal Carter: That's awesome. Mordy Oberstein: So make sure to follow him over on Twitter again at defaced. So I'm all tooled out. I'm exhausted. I have so much of that, like pent-up energy. Crystal Carter: I think you really nailed it though with the- Mordy Oberstein: My hammer out. Bang. Nailed it. Crystal Carter: Nailed it. Mordy Oberstein: Nailed it. Well, thank you for joining us on the Serfs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, do not let PPC kill your landing pages. Oh my goodness. That is such a hot take right there in the title itself. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all 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 over on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Patrick Stox Nati Elimelech Chris Johnson Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub AHREFS Wix SEO Tools AlsoAsked News: Sundar Pichai confirms Google is working on AI search feature users can “engage directly with” Microsoft Bing’s ChatGPT interface spotted in the wild Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Patrick Stox Nati Elimelech Chris Johnson Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub AHREFS Wix SEO Tools AlsoAsked News: Sundar Pichai confirms Google is working on AI search feature users can “engage directly with” Microsoft Bing’s ChatGPT interface spotted in the wild Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fantastic, the incredible, Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hello, my good friends online. Welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast with me and Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: You sound like me. That nasalness. I'm still sick. I can't shake this cold. Crystal Carter: I sound nasal? Mordy Oberstein: Well, you did a nasal voice there. "Hello, internet people." Crystal Carter: Hello, internet people. Hi. Mordy Oberstein: We come from Mars. Crystal Carter: That's a great movie. I love that movie. Mordy Oberstein: Great, great movie. Coneheads, we're referring to Coneheads Saturday Night Live skit turned movie. Crystal Carter: I was talking about Mars Attacks. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I was talking about Coneheads. I was doing Coneheads, fine. But Mars Attacks is also a great movie. Crystal Carter: Also a great movie. Mordy Oberstein: Also a great movie. Crystal Carter: These are great movies. Tune into SERP's Up for all of the best movie recommendations. We're also in IMDB. Did you know that? Mordy Oberstein: We are because we're- Crystal Carter: We're in IMDB. Mordy Oberstein: Because that's part of SEO. Crystal Carter: Exactly. That's part of SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Entity-based SEO. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. So do check us out there, as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Which reminds me. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, "Where we have the tools." Check out our site inspection tool, redirect manager and more and I say tools because in this episode we're talking all about SEO tools. Tools, tools everywhere and not a insight to spare. Crystal, I was warning you, for the audience. I used to work for multiple SEO tools. I have the inside scoop on the SEO tools. Crystal, you're going to have to hold me back. Hold me back! Crystal Carter: Hold you back. Mordy Oberstein: Hold me back! Crystal Carter: Like every Saturday night when you were growing up, I'm sure you were like "Hold me back!" Mordy Oberstein: Have I gone too far already? Probably, and I don't care because tool, tools everywhere and not an insight to spare. So many tools, so many things, so little bang for your buck. I am so jaded. But that's because choosing a good SEO tool is not easy. There are a lot of tools out there and they are not all exactly equal and/or beneficial, which is why we're here to discuss the finer points of what you should consider when looking to use and dare I say spend money on an SEO tool. Plus someone who knows a lot about SEO tools, Patrick Stox stops by to share what he thinks makes a great SEO tool. Plus someone else who knows a lot about SEO tools stops by to share his insight about SEO tools that actually implement as Wix's own head of SEO, Nati Elimelech joins us, and of course we have the Snappy News. We have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness so whiz, clang, bang and other tool noises as episode 24 of the SERP's Up Podcast is under construction. Crystal Carter: I got my hard hat. We're going to dive right in. Mordy Oberstein: I got my tool belt, snap. Crystal Carter: I love a tool belt. I'd love to have a tool belt. Mordy Oberstein: I've never had one. Crystal Carter: You should totally get one. Also, I really like the measuring tapes. When you pull out the measuring tape and then you let it go, that's so satisfying. Mordy Oberstein: My kids like that, but I have to tell them, be careful, you can slice up your whole hand doing that. Crystal Carter: You can. I did that as a child, it was unpleasant, I would say. Mordy Oberstein: My kids don't listen, so they'll probably end up like you, in general, which is a great thing. But for the hand slicing, not so good. Crystal Carter: Not so great. Not so great. You can use the shovel to dig yourself out of that hole. That's a great tool. Mordy Oberstein: I have a spade in my tool belt. Crystal Carter: I'm kidding. Anyway, okay, so today we're going to talk about what you need to decide which SEO tools to use. And actually looking at this, I was thinking that a lot of this can be really useful for deciding for any sort of digital tool. And certainly in my time in consulting clients and consulting people on what to do on the web, I've very often been asked, what do you think of this tool we're considering? What do we think of this platform or this apparatus that we are considering adding to our MarTech stack? Mordy Oberstein: Good word. Crystal Carter: Apparatus is a good word, isn't it? One of the things that's really important is to have a deep understanding of what's going on. So you need to understand what you actually want to achieve, what the scope of the project is and how often you're going to need this tool and that sort of thing is really, really useful. So think about the thing you want to do and how you might find a tool to help you do that. So a good tool that I use is the SEO Pro Tools Chrome extension for instance. That's a tool that I use really regularly and that tool helps me to get a quick snapshot of what's going on on a webpage before I do a deep dive. And that's a great tool because it's really handy for me and really useful. But if I wanted to do something bigger, on a bigger scale, I might need a different tool. So think about that. The other thing that's really useful is thinking about what your capabilities are and what your requirements are as a team. So for instance, if you're a big business, you might want to think about a tool that includes an API capability that allows you to scale and integrate with other tools that you're using. If you have a team that's really fast-paced and that's out and about a lot, you might want to think about something that has a mobile app, you also want to think about integrations for instance. So if your team is heavily reliant on something like Google Workspace and you're using Google Data Studio a lot, or you're using Slack a lot, or you're using Google Sheets a lot or something like that, you might want to think about tools that are integrating with those tools that you're using regularly. Also, data portability and accessibility with a lowercase A there. So if you've got higher ups that need to see bits of data regularly, that's really useful. And also budget, with a big old B, the budget. So you're going to want to know what your budget is for what you're trying to do and where that goes. Then, once you've done all of that, you want to think about the actual tool itself. So understand what the capabilities are and what the limitations are. So a really good example is thinking about, it's something that everyone's used, a tool that almost everyone in web has used, is tools for Core Web Vitals, for instance. So if you think about page feed insights, the Lighthouse tools versus CrUX, for instance, those two tools have two different sets of criteria that they're measuring, and they're both useful to help you understand what you need to understand about your page speed and your insights and things like that. But they have different criteria. So it's very important to understand how the tool is assessing what you need it to assess or how it is helping you to get that information that you're trying to get. Crawling tools, for instance, will crawl in different ways and even within them, they'll have different defaults that you should consider, as well. So understanding the capabilities of the tool, understanding the limitations of the tool can make a really big difference to how you approach whether or not a tool is good for you and how it feeds into the capabilities and the requirements that you have as a team. Mordy Oberstein: That's really good. I'm with you. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Thank you. I saw lots of nodding along, especially when it got to the budget part. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, the budget is, sometimes you'll think, oh, that's too expensive or this one's not as good. It's cheaper, but it's not as good. It's not as good because it doesn't have this graph. It doesn't have the graph. But sometimes, you know what, forgo the graph and go with the cheaper model because the graph's not really that important, which leads me to all of this. SEO tools love shoving graphs into things. They love shoving the same graph into multiple places, but it looks different, so you're not sure it's the same thing, but maybe it's different, but it's really the same exact thing. So they might have 400 reports, but only 40 unique ones, but they make you feel like you got to buy this thing, it's got 400 reports, but it only has 40 unique ones. So maybe you don't really need to buy that tool. You could buy the cheaper one that doesn't have all the things because it's really the one that has all the things, has all the same things. So don't get caught up in the shiny graph. But you do sometimes need to think about the shiny graphs because you have to think about the reporting. So this tool might have four million things that it can do, but its reporting stinks and the person you report to is not going to understand anything that you sent them. Crystal Carter: And those graphs can be really overwhelming for people, particularly if you're talking to decision makers, business owners or the C-suite and things like that. If they're looking at 25 different graphs and they want one piece of information, that is too much information. And that turns people off and it can make people not trust the data that you're giving them because they can't interpret it themselves. Mordy Oberstein: What you might need to do is go with the tool that's a little bit simpler, with a little bit better reporting. And if you really need the extra capabilities of the other tool, then all right, maybe you want to spring for a second tool, but understand where your money comes from. And that's usually from a client or an internal person. So be wary. Crystal Carter: And I think this goes back to the integration part of it. So for instance, there's a lot of tools that have Slack integrations or Data Studio integrations and things like that. So if you have something that's fairly simple, you can easily export it into certain things. So I know there was a nanny app, Little Warden for instance, that has a Slack integration and they will ping you in your Slack channel when there's an issue on your site. That's really useful. That's really, really useful. It's not like that particular, I think there are whizzier apps, it's a great app, tool, but I think there are apps that do more, but that particular one does that. And that can be really useful information. And if you're deciding between that one or another one, but the app in question maybe is less fancy or has fewer graphs but has an element that makes it more actionable for you, then that's going to be really, really useful. And I think that's something to consider. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking of accessibility of the data, here's something that no one talks about and that no one considers. Are you ready? How easy is it to migrate the data out of that platform should you choose to cancel that platform? Because having worked at one of these platforms, they are not all equal. Some of the platforms may get incredibly complicated to take the data out and import it into a new tool and they do it on purpose because they don't want you to have to leave. Yes, they are spiteful, some of these SEO tools. So you need to be careful and ask, if I ever decide, heaven forbid, to cancel my subscription with your amazing tool, am I screwed? Crystal Carter: And also even on a day-to-day basis, if you need to make the information liquid, if you need to export it, if you have limited exportability capabilities, then that will limit the value of the tool. So Screaming Frog is something that is a tool that almost every SEO uses, or particularly for technical SEO. And on that tool you download it and it's on your local device, it's not a cloud tool, but you can export the data to Google Sheets really, really easily. So somebody can say, oh, can you crawl this? And I can say, yes, crawl it, export it. So within a couple of minutes I can export it to someone, which can make it really, really easy. There are some tools where it's a lot more difficult to export the information about a site and that means that that puts a lot of barriers to making the tool accessible to the wider part of your team. So yeah, if you can't get your data, let's say that the tool says that they can give you historical data for going back, I don't know, five years or something like that on our website, but they won't give it to you. Mordy Oberstein: Big problem, big, big, problem. Because one day you will need it and you will not be able to get it and it will not be there. And they'll be like, whoa, well whatever, you're canceling anyway. We don't care. Crystal Carter: These things are very tricky. So I think that, yeah that's something that you should consider and sometimes you can find workarounds, sometimes you can export on a regular basis or something like that. But if that's the case, then you've got to make allowances for that. And also I think that you have the time to learn the tool because that's the other thing. There are so many tools and there's so many tools- Mordy Oberstein: If there's a demo. My recommendation is take it. Because I've seen this a million times, you think you understand the tool, you're an SEO expert, you're wonderful, you're amazing. But the people who develop the tool are an expert on their tool. And sometimes these tools could be a little bit layered and you don't know what exactly is in there. So go for the demo. Crystal Carter: And there's so many, there's tools that I use all the time and then somebody's like, oh, there's that part of it. I'm like, what are you talking about? I didn't even know that that was, what? Mordy Oberstein: Literally, when I was at Semrush, I'd do once a week. I'm like, here, let me show you something about the tool you probably didn't even know existed. Crystal Carter: And they add things all the time. I mean at Wix we add SEO capabilities all the time. Just this month, and we're recording this at the beginning of the year. And then we're a few weeks into 2023 and we've had three or four different updates to just the Google Search Console site inspection tool. Mordy Oberstein: I went into a meeting late, my bad, I got caught up in another meeting. You all know how that happens. Forgiveness please. And I missed an update. So even I didn't know what was going on in one of the tools, so I saw it in another meeting someone was using, I'm like, wait, when did we add that? Crystal Carter: Right? Precisely. So if that's happening just on one platform imagine of all the tools that you're using across the different things. So we have an updates section, SEO updates part of our website that helps you understand. Sitebulb is renowned for their release notes. They add a lot of color to their release notes. So they're a good one to keep up with. But if you have a tool that you use regularly, that is something that your marketing team, your SEO team relies on, it's worth keeping track of when their updates are rolled out. We did a whole webinar on our 2022 releases at the end of 2022, which is on YouTube, which is great. And I know a lot of other teams do similar things as well. So take some time, grab a cup of coffee and tuck in so that you know more about your tools. Mordy Oberstein: Now you'll be asking, why do I care? Here's why you care because you're going to buy a tool now. You're locked in, let's say for a year, two years, whatever it is, or even monthly, whatever it is. Let's say you're locked in, you get a better deal that way. If the tool is not constantly developing, then that's what you're getting and that's it. If the tool you see has a log where there's adding new reports, adding new things all the time, then you're paying the same amount but you're getting more. Crystal Carter: Having an active and engaged tool team is really, really important. There's a couple of ways to tell that, again, the release notes, like you're saying where they're constantly updating, but also how responsive they are to user requests. So for instance, on a lot of tool download things like on Product Hunt or on Google Chrome, Chrome extensions things, and even in our Wix app market, we have places where people can leave reviews and the people who've built the app can respond to the reviews. Google App Market does this as well. And if you're seeing that the team, even if they're work in progress, even if they're early days or even if they're still leaning forward, if you can see that they're actively responding to user requests, user comments, and things, that's a good sign of a good team. A lot of teams will also be very active online. So Slack for instance, when they first launched, they were really active on Twitter and people were going, I wish I'd had this and I think it should have that and that sort of thing. That's really useful. The team from Candor, the team from AlsoAsked the team- Mordy Oberstein: Offered by Candor. Crystal Carter: Offered by Candor, they recently were "what sort of updates should we be making to AlsoAsked let us know, please tell us what you think". At Wix for instance, we're constantly asking people what things do you need? And we have a request thing. And when the requests are filled, we say, we've filled this, this has been updated. Chrome does this as well. The Chrome team will say this was an issue and they'll say, we solved this. This has been resolved. You can now see this. And that's really useful. So having a team that's actively engaged with keeping the tool performing well and performing for you helps you make it, means that it's more value for money. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Now my last point, which I agree with all of that and if you see there's nothing dynamic about the tool and how they were communicating, that's a signal. It's like an empty Google business profile. Do you really trust that? Crystal Carter: Bring your Toyota Camry over there and just, yeah it'll be fine. It'll be great. Maybe they'll be open, maybe they won't, but it'll be fine. Mordy Oberstein: Probably not. So my last hot take today is if this tool doesn't let you use it for free in some way, shape, or form, do not use it. Crystal Carter: Do not use it. Mordy Oberstein: Do not use it. Let me rephrase this because that's a little bit of a hot take. Do not pay them money. Crystal Carter: Do not. Okay. So what are we- Mordy Oberstein: We're talking, usually a tool will either let you see it through a demo or they'll let you, let's say try a couple of keywords. Like AlsoAsked, so you got I think three free searches a day so you understand what this thing is. The main SEO tools offer a freemium model. Or like Summers has the freebie model. Ahrefs lets you have free access to their site audit tool. Crystal Carter: Mazda has something as well where you can see a lot of stuff before you have to get to- Mordy Oberstein: Or the Explorer. You can run a bunch of searches. So most of the tools, they won't let you do everything, which makes good sense because then you're going to pay for it. But they'll let you look at what's underneath the hood, just a bits. You get a sense of what this thing is. Because if you don't know what this thing is, you should not be giving them your money. And it is impossible to understand what this thing is from a blog post. Crystal Carter: But the blog post looks so good, Mordy, the blog post tells me that it'll solve all my problems. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, repetitive analysis like you've never seen before and you'll never see again once you buy it. Crystal Carter: Like look, I saw the battle cards and there's like tick, tick, tick for all of the things that I need. And it says that it'll work. Mordy Oberstein: All the things that they want you to see they've ticked all the things that they don't want you to see are not even on the list. I am so salty about this. Crystal Carter: Why would they not show me all of the things? Mordy Oberstein: Because these are the same people who are trying to sell you links. Crystal Carter: No they're not. I think that there's- Mordy Oberstein: I've gotten too far. I told you to hold me back. Crystal Carter: I didn't. I'm sorry. I instigated that. I'm an enabler. What have I done? I think that most all of the tools that I absolutely love and adore and I love Screaming Frog. I adore the SEO probe Chrome extension. There's tons of other tools that I use all the time that I really, really love and adore. And they all let you have a certain level of- Mordy Oberstein: A week's trial, three day trial, whatever it is. Crystal Carter: And what I do find is that sometimes in my experience that if the team wants you to have a demo of the, let's say they don't have a neat freemium mode. For instance, AHrefs recently launched a freemium version of AHrefs, which is actually really cool and you can see a lot from it. Marie Hans, when it first launched, she did a nice deep dive into what you can get on the free AHrefs and it's really solid. And I would say that before that it was a little bit more behind the scenes. And I would say that if you were really interested in a tool that you can sometimes just ask them. So you can sometimes ask the team, you can say, hey, if it just says, oh, get in touch for a demo, you can sometimes ask them, can I have a one-month something or other? And they'll give you a voucher or something somehow like that. Mordy Oberstein: I've done that multiple times. Crystal Carter: That'll let you log in and then they'll check in and see how you got in. So as well as that, and I would say do check in. And I have definitely been someone who has, there was a tool that I'm not going to name, but sometimes I've definitely done the thing where I've done the one-month trial and set an alarm to make sure that I finished. Because sometimes when you're doing stuff for clients, you need this one thing. This one time I think it was something that was like, yeah it was like an influencer or something. Mordy Oberstein: That's fine, because if you needed that down the line again, now you know that that would be a great solution for you. Crystal Carter: And I think also as a consultant, if you're consulting clients or if you're working across an agency or if you're doing a sort of technical overview of different tools, sometimes being able to have had a look around and assess it for yourself and be able to do write up on whether or not the benefits or the drawbacks of a particular tool can be really, really useful and can also help you to understand other parts of the tools that you use more as well. So it's always good to keep up with the different capabilities of tech. There's a diagram from MarTech Alliance that talks about some of the different MarTech tools that are available. And it grows every year because there's so much. And I think that in the last few months we're starting to see an explosion of AI tools at the moment, for instance. So I'm sure it will grow even more in the coming days. So being able to understand how you pick a tool and how you spend your time with those tools whether or not they give you the demo. Mordy Oberstein: There you go. Crystal Carter: It's really important. Mordy Oberstein: By the way, speaking of artificial intelligence, we have some real intelligence for you. I'm just kidding. We have human intelligence as AHrefs own Patrick Stox is here to tell us what makes an SEO tool a great SEO tool. Patrick Stox: Tools are just there to save you time and kind of make your life easier. Imagine how much time it would take to find broken links on a website. If you had to go through every single page on the site and click every single link. On larger websites, you could have multiple people staffed that would just do this every hour of every day for weeks at a time and you may not get through everything. Whereas you can run that same site through a crawler and probably in a matter of minutes or hours, you're going to have the answer to what links are broken and so much more information. Or if you're creating content, you can write the things that you think people are searching for or you can look at the data from these tools and actually see what they're searching for. Having the data like that is kind of like having a superpower, you cut right to it, you know exactly what your audience wants, you know exactly what you need to write, and everything is kind of prioritized for you. So all you have to do now is start writing rather than trying to guess and see if this is actually going to resonate up with my audience. Is this something they're actually looking for? It's all just laid out for you. With the tools you're also going to get bigger data. We used to do a whole lot of manual processes. We do a bunch of different searches, a bunch of data gathering. It was a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of work just spent getting a fraction of the data that modern SEO tools provide. The tools are really just making this data more accessible to people. The people that can't really build their own tools or don't have time to go through all those processes to get all that data. The modern tools are really just like, here's the answer, here's all the data, do with it what you will. Here's the answer to any of the questions that you have. And they're really just trying to have whatever data that they think people are going to need, ways to get that data out, ways for you to slice and dice that data in the tool and really just have all the features that you're probably going to need to really be successful. Mordy Oberstein: Patrick, I know you're listening. I just want to say you said that so well. Crystal Carter: So well. Mordy Oberstein: And one of the ways that you do want to create a metric for yourself is does the tool make it easy to do what I want to do? It's a great basic foundational way of base lining that. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Why are you spending time on tools that don't do what you need them to do? Sometimes tools are like, we can do this and we can do that and we can do that and we can do this and we can do that. And it's like, mate, I need it to do one thing. Mordy Oberstein: Make my life easier. Crystal Carter: So get the tool that does the one thing rather than the tool that does 45 different things. Mordy Oberstein: That's the beauty of automation. Now, you know who also likes automation, a good friend of ours. So I'm going to give a little introduction first. He does love automation, by the way, Crystal, he's so into it. It's his thing. There are so many SEO tools that focus on analyzing and monitoring things like rain tracking or crawling. There's a ton of tools that do that. There are, I guess less tools, fewer tools that do implementation itself. I know Edge SEO is becoming more of a thing, so that is becoming more of a mainstream kind of SEO tool universe. So I thought it'd be really cool to pick the brain of somebody who's a well smart individual who oversees a massive team of other well smart individuals to talk about what makes a good SEO tool, but from an implementation point of view. So join us as we talk to Wix's own head of SEO, lover of all SEO automation, nati Elimelech, as we move across the Wix first. Speaker 4: 3, 2, 1 ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: So welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast, Nati. How are you? Nati Elimelech: I'm good, thank you, Mordy. Thank you, Crystal. How are you two? Mordy Oberstein: We're good. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. And I'm more happy now that you're here Nati. Nati Elimelech: I do not buy that, but thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, you don't believe that about Crystal or myself? Nati Elimelech: So I would believe that about Crystal. But judging by your Twitter profile, I wouldn't believe you if you said it. Mordy Oberstein: My Twitter profile does not represent who I actually am. Crystal Carter: To all the listeners who follow along with the ongoing Nati and Mordy like SEO hip hop peeve like- Mordy Oberstein: We're like brothers who never wish we were brothers. Crystal Carter: The dance I can report from internal, the dance is like legit. They're the bands never stop. So it's authentic. I'm just letting people know. Mordy Oberstein: I think Nati put it the best. You're both on Twitter, which you are in real life. It's the same thing. Crystal Carter: Really. To be fair to both of you, you're both brilliant as well. So this is also true. Nati Elimelech: Ah, thank you. Mordy Oberstein: So today we're talking about SEO tools and we're talking about SEO tools to actually implement versus track and monitor and so forth. Because there's so many tools that do that. But there are so few tools that actually let you implement something and Nati he runs an entire team of people who create tools that let you implement stuff. So we figured what a great thing. What a great time to bring you on the podcast. I've been meaning to bring you on for a long time, but I finally found the perfect topic I think. Nati Elimelech: Yeah, yeah. I think we finally found it. Mordy Oberstein: Found it like nailed it. Nice. The question is to you, what goes into building tools the right way? Or when you are building these tools that implement, what goes into the process? What goes into your mindset? What goes into it all? Nati Elimelech: So that's a good question. So when we're talking about tools or features in an SEO product, we're talking about the enablement. We want to give users the ability to change whatever they want or change the configuration when it comes to SEO, right? That sounds simple, but as usual reality is a bit more complex than that. Almost everyone with a website or with a business behind it cares about SEO or at least recognizes the importance of SEO as a traffic channel. But we're talking about a very, very wide range of different levels of knowledge or proficiency. Some of these users are novices. They know SEO is important, they kind of know how to spell it, they've heard some stuff about it, but that's where it stops. On the other hand, there are seasoned professionals. They know exactly what they want to be able to do and they have very clear expectations about the features they expect a platform to have. So that means that when you create an SEO tool, because SEO is important to a lot of types of users, there are many considerations you have to take in order to make a good tool. In general, I think the first consideration is what do people expect you to have as a platform? It's not necessarily what Nati wants, or our great product managers want or our UX or engineers or our tech SEOs. It's what about what the user wants. Now the simplest example is being able to edit your title tags or meta descriptions. This is a basic action that's applicable to all types of users, but more professional users expect you to have a more robust and advanced set of features. So the first consideration is what do people expect you to have as a platform? The simplest example is being able to edit your title tags or meta descriptions or any other SEO tag. This is a basic feature that applicable to all types of users. Both beginners want to edit their title tags and obviously professionals when they want to optimize certain pages. But the more professional users expect you to have a much more robust set of features. For example, editing robots.txt, those professionals, they will also probably know what to do with it. But most of all they're aware of the dangers of misusing robots.txt and the implications of making such a mistake. Like blocking certain pages from crawling or God forbid, an entire site. The beginners are definitely not aware of that and they could potentially cause self-harm. So after you've considered everything that users expected to have, and those are different levels of features that will require different levels of proficiency, this leads us to the next consideration. How do we make sure users who aren't proficient or don't know much about SEO practices aren't shooting themselves in the foot. After all, we want them to succeed. Crystal Carter: We want them to be on both good feet. We want them to start off on a good foot. Nati Elimelech: Super important. Crystal Carter: Super important. Nati Elimelech: There's an average of 1.8 feet per person in the world. So I think the numbers speak for themselves. Mordy Oberstein: About a bicycle. They started off rolling on wheels. Crystal Carter: We don't want them to get a flat tire? Mordy Oberstein: Right. Nati Elimelech: I don't actually know how to ride a bicycle. I have to- Mordy Oberstein: Do you really not? I'll teach you next time I see you. Nati Elimelech: No, it's more because I don't want to know. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, in that case I'll definitely teach you next time I see you. Nati Elimelech: So tackling this is a bit more complex. You need to have built-in safeguards. How do you safeguard the user whenever there's a risk of users making mistakes that could lead to an undesired outcome. You want to try and protect them as much as you can, but you also don't want to take away that ability to customize the setting. Meaning that if it puts your beginner in harm's way potentially, but your advanced user, your professional SEO knows what to do it with it, you can't just take it away. So there are a few ways to tackle that. I like to call this the self and protect methodology without the negative connotations of being police. Crystal Carter: We don't have that just so everyone's aware. If you're using Wix, you don't get Nati with the hat going, Nina, Nina, what are you doing? Mordy Oberstein: If you wanted to- Crystal Carter: You can't. Nati Elimelech: But if you want to vote for this feature- Mordy Oberstein: By the way, you really break down the unique consideration of implementation because wait until you're in a tool like Semrush or DeepCrawl, there's nothing you're really going to do that's going to screw up your website if you misuse the tool. Crystal Carter: It's more of an analysis tool. Mordy Oberstein: If you missing our tools, you could theoretically really screw up the website. Nati Elimelech: Definitely the worst you could do is misinterpret a report, but that's not going to do anything to your website. Crystal Carter: But I think that probably one of the best examples that I can think of. You mentioned robots.txt and in Wix you can edit your robots.txt. But before you do that, it says, do you want to do this? Do you know what you're doing? And you also have an option to restore to default, which is something that just like, let's say you do make a pig's ear of it, let's say you do mess it up, you can just restore to default to the thing that is correct and you can try again. You can liquefy to another day rather than losing all of that code again. Another one is with the structured data presets, we have structured data presets for lots of different types of pages, but the syntax on all of that is correct, like fully correct. And it will help you with rich results. If you want to optimize it in a different way, if you want to add new properties or types or whatever to your skin and markup, go for it. Cool. If you make a pig's ear of it, you can restore it to default, the default is always there and you can always go back. So that means that, yeah it's like you said, you're giving people the option to grow, but also supporting them in that journey as well. Nati Elimelech: Yeah. So you touched on two different ways to safeguard users. Basically when you spoke about the robots.txt, what we do is introduce friction. That's first. Basically friction can take many forms, but what you do is you have a feature but you maybe make it less accessible or you kind of really need to dig to find it or you have to make a couple more clicks or read something. And that's definitely one thing we're doing with robots.txt. But there are other things we do and you need to do when you are safeguarding users when it comes to a platform. Let's take another example, we are very data driven, so we looked at the data and we discovered that after changing the slug for an existing page, only 4% of the users added redirect. Basically you change a URL, only 4% of all the URLs that were changed had redirect in place. Crystal Carter: Why didn't you do the redirect Nati? Like whatever, who cares? It's not a big deal. Mordy Oberstein: First world problems. Nati Elimelech: So that's crazy though. Obviously there are cases which it doesn't matter if it's a fresh page and you just messed around with it. But if you have a page that Google knows and maybe tracks and you have signals and you don't redirect, then you lose all of it. So what we did was we introduced auto redirect on slug change. Now in most places when you change your slug, we'll give you the ability to redirect. It's on by default and you can even opt out. Another example of protecting the user but not taking away the ability to choose what to do. You may have a good reasoning for not wanting to perform a leader. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. And that's up to you. You might be like, you know what I'm throwing caution to the wind, I don't even care. But- Mordy Oberstein: It's interesting because a lot of the things that we're doing or you in particular are doing and you and your team are doing, it helps on one, protecting the user, but at the same time you're also automating things for advanced users, which is really interesting to see how that plays itself out in terms of implementation. Nati Elimelech: I think that's a very, very important aspect of how people experience a product, how it fits into their workflows. How many clicks do they have to perform to do a certain action, how repetitive detection is. So yeah, we definitely take that into account whenever we can, but it's not just about saving them time. Crystal, you brought up structured data markup and that you can restore defaults. So what if you use structured data markup or use a schema that isn't valid, that isn't validation, or you are missing a comma or a parenthesis? Crystal Carter: You're using the wrong quotation marks, which is my favorite ever. Nati Elimelech: Exactly. So then it won't even validate, it won't let you save it, for example. So there are many, many, many ways. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's amazing by the way. Crystal Carter: That is one of my favorite features because there's a lot of things that will give you an open field where you can add in whatever schema you want, but it doesn't tell you whether it's valid or not. And then you have to go to an external tool and validate it. Whereas within the Wix SEO, your panel, you could add in your schema and it will tell you like, nah, you missed something try it again, do it again. And we also have it in Velo as well. So if you got schema using the Wix SEO API, then it also tells you, no, not yet. Try it again one more time until- Mordy Oberstein: You're this close. Crystal Carter: You get it right. Mordy Oberstein: We used to make it so- Crystal Carter: So close and you're like, where- Mordy Oberstein: You're like this close, you're almost there. Keep going. Try one more time. Crystal Carter: Spot the difference. You're like, where did I miss? Please send me help with- Nati Elimelech: Yeah, so we have many more examples of how we save our users. When you manually add the redirect and we can see, we could calculate, it will cause a redirect loop then we'll warn you. So there are many, many, many things you could do about that for advance users and for beginners. I think those, even though there are many directed at beginners, they serve everyone, which is great. You make it safer for the beginners and you make it more convenient and efficient for your professionals. But we also touched on having good default settings. A lot of users, a lot of people won't even touch your SEO settings. They don't know enough, especially early stages to decide what's right or not. So we do what I call kind of SEO activism, which we do look at everything and decide what the proper default is. For a product you have the default, structured data markup with images and everything you need and we'll update it as needed. And if you haven't touched it, then it will be updated as long as we do that. But we also do stuff like no index blog tag pages by default because we know that for most users with tiny blogs, that's not usually a high quality page. So we also take into account, no, not only how would users use our tools and how we can safeguard or make it more efficient for them, but what do we need to do when they don't use our tools? We automatically generate stuff. So even if they don't know what to do or intend to do, stuff kind of works without them having to know that. So that's a big aspect I think of safeguarding the user as well. It's not just about the actions they take, but about the actions that they don't take. Crystal Carter: And I think also that onboarding is something that's really important with regards to using tools generally. And I've been in a lot of discussions with the SEO team about how we think about the onboarding process for when people get involved with the Wix SEO tools. So it says, you know should probably have a keyword in the old homepage. And it's like, no, I think just, nope, you should probably have your business name on your homepage as well. And I think that that onboarding process is something that sets people up for success. I know that the team thinks a lot about that and reviews it regularly. And I think also, I don't know if you can touch on a little bit about the testing. You talked about some of the stats that you use, but I know that there's a lot of testing and refinement. I don't know if you can talk quickly about that before we wrap up. Nati Elimelech: So yeah, we do a lot of testing and refinement. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Is it helpful? Nati Elimelech: It is helpful. Mordy Oberstein: That is great. Nati Elimelech: Okay, so one other thing we haven't touched on, you did touch on it, but you spoke about onboarding, but I think, and UX writers will agree, and our product managers will agree in product education is super, super, super important. You need to educate on why it was important. You need to educate on how to use specific features. And most important, I think all tools, especially reporting tools, need to read that one, do not overpromise. And tools tend to do that. If you do this and that, then you'll rank higher. And users believe that and they take that to heart and that's not always the case. So we always try not to oversell or overpromise and make sure users understand that SEO is a process and not just a set of checklists to complete. And that there isn't usually one specific action or a set of actions that will lead you to the promised land. Tools without educations are just tools. Now if I give you a drill Mordy you'll probably know how to use it without having to use a manual. Mordy Oberstein: Not a clue. Nati Elimelech: Yeah. I gave you way too much credit here. If I give you a fork Mordy- Mordy Oberstein: These hands are so smooth. They're so soft. Nati Elimelech: Yeah. So if I give Crystal a drill, she'll definitely know how to use it. But if I give her a massive power tool that can take down walls, she'll need to go through the manual, I guess, and through a wall, apparently. So education is super important. The more advanced feature you have, the more potential impact they may have. Education becomes even more important. So it's about, if we sum up, because we don't have time, and Mordy's making face, nevermind that Mordy's regular face. But if you want to wake up first, give users the feature they want, then protect them from what they don't know or the ways they can misuse your features and all the time teach them how to use those features, teach them why those features are important and teach them when to not use those features. I think that those are the main pillars of making a good SEO product. There are many, many nuances, but we try to take everything into consideration here. Mordy Oberstein: Nati keep pounding the table on that. Just literally keep pounding the table because it's going to make our post-production of this podcast way easier now. Thanks Nati. Nati Elimelech: You're welcome. Mordy Oberstein: It's an honor to have you here, the head of SEO at Wix developing so many products. It is amazing the work that you and your team have done, and particularly over the last, I would say, three or so years. If you're looking to follow Nati, follow him on Twitter at netanel, N-E-T-A-N-E-L and we'll link to his profile in the show notes. Again, Nati, thank you so much for coming on, man. Nati Elimelech: Thank you, Crystal. You're welcome Mordy. Crystal Carter: You're so welcome Nati. Always a pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: Bye bye. Crystal Carter: Bye. Nati Elimelech: B-bye. Speaker 4: 3-2-1 Ignition. Lift off. Mordy Oberstein: He has a way, you know that Billy Joel song, "She's Got a Way"? Nati has a way. Crystal Carter: He has a way. When I first joined Nati, Nati was like, check this out. And showed me the scorecard that he uses to helping reduce siloing across SEO performance across the massive Wix team. And it's literally, it's a thing of beauty and it's incredibly considered and incredibly effective for helping to drive SEO innovation. So as well as leading an incredibly efficient team. So the team at Wix are like, I love it when we add a new feature to the tool because everyone is so hyped about it. They're like, we added a search feature on the Google Search Console dash. Mordy Oberstein: Slash the emoji spot. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And people are like yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Motorless Slack channel- Crystal Carter: You can search the URL. Mordy Oberstein: Always surprised me. I didn't know we had that emoji, Crystal Carter: Right? They're just like, oh my God, you can search URLs now. Everyone is so hyped. And I'm literally so hyped and go on Twitter and I'm so hyped. And literally it's true. We really hyped about making the tools better for everybody. Mordy Oberstein: I want to share the Slack, all the different emojis on Twitter one time. Crystal Carter: All of them literally, so there's like fire signs and mic drops and literally everybody goes crazy because we- Mordy Oberstein: Goes bonkers, it's bonkers. Emojis are bonkers. Crystal Carter: I know. But everybody's really about it. And I think that that's brilliant and I think that that's what you need. When we were talking about teams that are engaged with their tool, that's what makes the difference is the people behind the tool want to make the tool really, really good. And Nati's not only fantastic at running his team or leading his team, not running, leading his team, but also is very, very good at nurturing talent and helping the team and the people in his team to do cool stuff, which I think is really, really great. Mordy Oberstein: It's absolutely amazing. What's also amazing is what's going on in the news this week. Well, let's dive into the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Sick of news about AI writers and search. No. Great because both of this week's stories are about AA writers and search because like the Depeche Mode, I just can't get enough. Number one, Sundar Pichai confirms Google is working on AI's search feature users can engage directly with per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Or as a movie phone guy would say, this time it's for real, as there has been much speculation about Google's plans. However, this time officially, CEO Google Sundar Pichai said quote "in the coming weeks and months, we'll make these language models available starting with Lambda so that people can engage directly with them. This will help us continue to get feedback tests and safely improve them. These models are particularly amazing for composing, constructing and summarizing. They will become even more useful for people as they provide up to date or factual information. Lambda, by the way, is a chat interface technology that will let you have a conversation with AI in order to find the info that you otherwise probably would've gotten through search." I'm curious that he mentioned that you can compose content with the AI writer. That's interesting to me. I think that probably would be best qualified by somebody over at Google, because anyone can take that and run with that, which I don't advise to do. Also, from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Microsoft Bing's chat, GPT interface spotted in the wild. Or again, as movie phone guy would say, this time it's for real, as we've heard Bing is going to do this. But now we see that they're doing this test show a chat interface on being with a prompt ask me anything. Which sounds like a recipe for disaster. Ask me anything. That has never gone wrong on a date before, ask me anything. However, it is really interesting to see that Bing is testing this. It would obviously be a safe assumption to say this is coming to being searched in the relatively near future. And then I'll do it for this version of this snappy news. All right, so before we leave you, as we always do, we have to share with you who you should potentially be following out there on the social media to get more SEO awesomeness. And for this week we have Chris Johnson who's at defaced on Twitter, that's at D-E-F-A-C-E-D on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Chris Johnson. In my first ever podcast, I interviewed Chris Johnson when I was doing a podcast for Optics way back in the day. And he is fantastic. He builds his own tools all the time. On his website Defaced he has a whole collection of things that he's built. He gets involved with SEO but also considers himself to be something of a technologist and is incredibly creative and inventive with the kinds of tools that he makes. And I think that that's one of the things that's great about the SEO space is that you can see a need for a tool and make one. And he's somebody who does this a lot. So when there was lots of stuff going on with Core Web Vitals, I was interviewing him about a Chrome extension that he made for Core Web Vitals things. And also about his tool that he made for being able to visualize cumulative layout shift with a gift, which was really great. And he continues to build it and always does. Mordy Oberstein: That's amazing. Sue Ross. Crystal Carter: That's awesome. Mordy Oberstein: So make sure to follow him over on Twitter again at defaced. So I'm all tooled out. I'm exhausted. I have so much of that, like pent-up energy. Crystal Carter: I think you really nailed it though with the- Mordy Oberstein: My hammer out. Bang. Nailed it. Crystal Carter: Nailed it. Mordy Oberstein: Nailed it. Well, thank you for joining us on the Serfs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, do not let PPC kill your landing pages. Oh my goodness. That is such a hot take right there in the title itself. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all 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 over on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

What skillsets make the perfect SEO team? Hard skills, soft skills, communication skills, etc.? What should you consider when making new SEO hires to build a solid SEO team for yourself? Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein discuss what they look for when putting together the perfect SEO team. Plus, a very special guest as Google’s own John Mueller joins in to add his thoughts on the traits that make up a strong SEO team. Come join us as we help you put together an all-star SEO squad on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Back Building your SEO team, the right way What skillsets make the perfect SEO team? Hard skills, soft skills, communication skills, etc.? What should you consider when making new SEO hires to build a solid SEO team for yourself? Hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein discuss what they look for when putting together the perfect SEO team. Plus, a very special guest as Google’s own John Mueller joins in to add his thoughts on the traits that make up a strong SEO team. Come join us as we help you put together an all-star SEO squad on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 31 | March 29, 2023 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 42:59 This week’s guests John Mueller John is a Search Advocate at Google in Switzerland. He connects the world that's creating websites, with the Google-internal world of search engineering. He works with almost all teams on the search side, helping to make life easier for those making websites. He does not have a SEO team. 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 pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazingly fabulously, oh no, don't put pineapple on my pizza, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Thank you so much and thank you for reminding the world that pineapple on pizza is literally the worst thing that's ever happened to pizza, and also to mankind. It's like it's a terrible thing that I don't know who decided that was something. Mordy Oberstein: The plague, pineapple on pizza. Crystal Carter: Pineapple on pizza. It's worse. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple on pizza. Crystal Carter: It's worse. I think that, yeah, it's awful. Mordy Oberstein: We were recently together at the Wix offices and- Crystal Carter: We were. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, biyearly occurrence. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's something like that, and I wanted to bring you a can of pineapple so you can put it on your pizza. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that wouldn't happen. I would eat the pineapple separately. Pineapple's fine on its own, it's fine on its own. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple's delicious. Crystal Carter: It's that the two don't need to go together. I don't know. Me and skateboard. I don't need to skateboard. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Hot sauce. Crystal Carter: Hot sauce is good. I would even have hot sauce on pizza. I'll tell you that. Mordy Oberstein: Hot sauce pizza's amazing. Crystal Carter: Right. This is good. I like broccoli on pizza. I don't mind- Mordy Oberstein: Also good. Crystal Carter: Do you know why? Because broccoli and cheese, that's a solid combination. You can have broccoli and cheese. That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Cheese goes with everything. Maybe peanut butter and cheese would be a little weird. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I can see that, but nobody puts pineapple in pasta. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you could totally make a sauce that has pineapple and put it in your pasta. Pasta is like paper, it goes with everything. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but with garlic and basil and pineapple, it wouldn't. It's not a thing. It's fine. No one's going to convince me. People are like, "Oh, I'll-" You will not. No one will convince me. Mordy Oberstein: My subjective reality is greater than your subjective reality. Crystal Carter: I'm just saying like, no one's going to convince me that pineapple on pizza is ever a good idea. It's not. It's just not. I tried it. It's not that I have a closed mind, it's that I have an informed opinion. These are different things. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple and yogurt. Would you eat pineapple and yogurt? Crystal Carter: I have. It wasn't an enjoyable flavor sensation. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. I'll throw one last curveball at you. I enjoy pineapple pie. Crystal Carter: Pineapple pie? Mordy Oberstein: Pie. Yes. I was a kid growing a combination pie. It was a third blueberry, a third cherry and a third pineapple. The best slice was the part where the pineapple was connected to the cherry half. Crystal Carter: This- Mordy Oberstein: It's the New York thing. Crystal Carter: I'm not even sure if I know how to respond to that. It's- Mordy Oberstein: Blasphemous? Crystal Carter: It's something that I did not know existed, and so my brain is trying to take in a lot of new information right now. Mordy Oberstein: I have completely blown your mind with pineapple pie. Crystal Carter: Basically. I am literally speechless about this particular topic, which is perfect for a podcast to leave your co-host literally speechless. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's a good point to remind you that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Let's just put it right out of that, where you can leave notes for your clients and even tag team members within the Wix blog. Nifty little feature not many know about, but if you have multiple hands, say optimizing a client's blog, it comes in handy, which is topical because today we're talking about how to build a strong SEO team with notes in your blog. That's how you do it. Crystal Carter: You can also bribe them with snacks that don't include pineapple pizza. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple pie would be fine. Crystal Carter: Pineapple pie. It's really important to know your audience and to connect with your team in lots of different ways, including notes and including collaborative documents and other things. Mordy Oberstein: That's right, because today we're talking about what you want to consider when constructing your own megazord of SEOs to unite in the form of an ultimate SEO team. Power Rangers reference. They all climbed together to make one big robot thing. If you're not a fan, which I wasn't, but that's where I went. Crystal Carter: Go, go, go Power Rangers. Not pirate Rangers, Power Rangers. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, pirate rangers. That's interesting. Anyway, we're diving into specialists or generalists, whom should you hire? Spoiler alert. It depends. Don't forget the softer side of soft skills. Why you should not undervalue the SEO who knows how to communicate well, and doers and thinkers, why a good SEO team has a balance of both. Plus a very special and most honorable guest from the depth of the internet will stop by to share his thoughts on the traits of a strong SEO team. That person, by the way, drum roll please, is John Mueller. John Mueller is here to take us through a metaphysical journey towards SEO team strength. We'll also dive into Google's Looker to see how data centralization can help strengthen your SEO team. Of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Team up because episode number 31 of the SERP's Up podcast is taking you on a digital team retreat. We're going digital camping. Crystal Carter: I feel like, are we going to play some digital laser tag or do you some digital team building? Mordy Oberstein: We play laser tag at our little team. Who won? Crystal Carter: Who won? Mordy Oberstein: I won. Crystal Carter: What? No, I mean yes, that's true. I mean, okay. Basically to the people of the internet, let me just let you know that Mordy Oberstein essentially found himself a little spot and just like- Mordy Oberstein: Just snipering, lasering from a little corner. Crystal Carter: I realized that there were about five minutes left and went and sat down and had a nice drink. That's what I did. Mordy Oberstein: Fine. I guess George won because he was the most accurate, but I'm always a big believer that you miss all the shots you don't take. Crystal Carter: It's a prime example of one of the things that's really important when you're thinking about teams, is making sure you have complementary skills. There are ways that you can sort of, some person does one thing, another person does another thing, another person decides that that's enough now. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: We've completed this task. I have team built and we're done. That's fine as well. Mordy Oberstein: We have strength in our team. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Laser tag is over. Crystal Carter: That's important. I think that these are things you got to think about when you're thinking about your team. Mordy Oberstein: You're just sorry you didn't win, that's all. Anyway. Getting a strong team together is very hard, which is why you need laser tag. I can very much tell you the struggle of finding the right people, finding quality people. In previous roles, it was a very focused pain point for me. It is very hard to find the right fit, the right person for the right job. It's almost impossible. I think we all know that problem. It's just really not easy to find talented people, and of course every niche has its own idiosyncrasies, and SEO is not different in any way, shape or form. There are a variety of things you want to consider when you're building a team from what your focus area is, the types of SEO that you are doing or that you focus on, the various types of tasks that you have that come into focus for you, that has to be done either on your team as an agency or your in-house team. Of course, there are all sorts of, dare I say, financial considerations to think about, like your budget and what can cause a conflict when bringing up SEO teams when that goes into hiring. From a budgetary point of view. I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck by the way, between hiring an employee they feel fits a certain task or whether... Try that again, I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck between hiring the employee they feel they need to hire from a task or work point of view and the employee they feel they need to hire from financial point of view, which we'll get into later. That's a major problem for agencies in particular. The point is building a strong SEO team is much more than a little bit complicated. It's a lot of complicated, and to me it hinges on those complexities and it's about bringing those complexities that we're going to talk about to the conscious level, which is literally what we're doing here. I feel like with this episode, I'm not saying anything novel. I'm just taking what's very latent and trying to bring it to the conscious level. Crystal Carter: I think also when we think about what an SEO team is, an SEO team can include people who work at the same company. Let's say you've got an in-house team for a brand, so the marketing manager, the marketing assistant, the marketing executive for instance, they're part of the team. If you have an agency that helps you with your PPC or your SEO or your design or whatever, they are also part of your team and vice versa as well. Let's say you're a freelancer and you work with a few other freelancers on a regular basis, they're also part of your team. I think that how everyone works together and the tools that you use and the people that you choose to bring in the fold, these are all things, as you say, that you need to be conscious of. The more conscious you are of what you need from your team, the better you'll be able to perform. Mordy Oberstein: What makes that really hard though is that there are certain points where what you need and what you want and what you're able to do or able to hire are not the same thing. I don't have a good answer for that. This comes down, I think in SEO in particular, I think what made it hard is that SEO has become a little bit more specialized. That means that in theory, and that's what makes it hard for an in-house team or an agency, you would need to have more specialized people, which means more people on your team, which means more money going to salaries than in the past. Where you could hire a generalist back in the day when SEO, I'll say was in its infancy, but back in the day when SEO was a little bit more straightforward perhaps, for lack of a better word, you could have one person to do it all. That's not necessarily the case anymore, and now what do you do? Because now you need to hire two people, but you're not necessarily bringing in more money because of it. You're just doing better work. Crystal Carter: I think that this is something that comes down to, so I asked on Twitter, I asked, I got 113 votes about this sort of thing and I said, "What's the secret ingredient for a good SEO team?" 33% of people said complementary skills, like you're saying. You've got a technical SEO, you have a content SEO, you have an e-commerce SEO, you have a so-and-so. Another 33% said ability to manage change. Then the next option that I gave was clear leadership. Then 10% of people said other. I also had somebody sub-tweet me saying, "What about skills for the job?" I think a lot of people, I've heard a lot of agency teams and a lot of other people say that acumen is really important because a lot of times you can teach some of the more technical skills. You can teach someone how to optimize content. If somebody has a general grasp of how to work with language, you can teach them how to optimize content for search, that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: I guess as somebody who's hired many people over the course of my various careers at this point, the thing I was always looking for was not whether or not... I knew for the most part whether or not the person's skills were kind of in the ballpark of what I was looking for from the paper that I got from them. What I didn't know was their personality. Were they somebody who could fit into the team? Were they somebody who had that sort of it factor who I knew would work out well? It's almost like, I'll give a bad sports analogy. In football, American football, there's a person called the quarterback and that person is the most important person. They hold the ball the most, they distribute the ball to the other people. They're the central figure on the team. There are many different types of quarterbacks. Some quarterbacks are really fast. Some quarterbacks can throw the ball really far. What the good teams do is they find someone who has a lot of talent, whether it be a good runner, whether it be somebody who's really smart, whether it be somebody who makes good decisions with that smartness. This example would be Tom Brady, that kind of quarterback. Whether somebody's got a huge arm/ they design the system around them. They know, this person has a lot of good skills and a lot of things to offer, so let me build the system around them. I've always felt that. Find somebody who is a good, they're a team player, they're really intelligent, they're really adaptable, they have all those, I don't know what you want to call them, not personality skills, but persona skills I guess, and fit them into a place in your organization where they can thrive. Crystal Carter: Right. In the Twitter discussion, Jamar Ramos, who has managed an agency, who's managed teams, who works with developing SEOs, he said, "Critical thinking and a desire to grow are really important." He says, "Everything else can be taught." Similarly, Daniel K. Cheung said something similar. He said, "Mutual respect, overlapping work ethic and a similar hunger for learning." These are the things that you can build around, that you can, if you've got somebody who, let's say your team is really good at working on a particular CMS, you can say, "We're really good at this. We can build around that." Let's say your team is really good at content and and you're like, "We can make knockout content." You're like, "Ooh. What we really need though is some help with somebody who can get into back links, who can get us back links for this great content." It's like, I'm throwing you the ball and you can catch it and you can take it someplace where we're going to win. I mean, I recently watched a documentary about, it's interesting you're talking about sports teams because when we were thinking about this, I was thinking about the Michael Jordan's Bulls. I was also thinking about the Showtime Lakers. I recently saw there's a TV show about the Showtime Lakers that's actually pretty good. Have you seen it? John C. Reilly? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: It's pretty good. Mordy Oberstein: Crazy show. Crystal Carter: I think Kareem and Magic are a classic example. They're very different players and they were both at very different points in their career when they were working together, but they complemented each other really well. Because Magic could get the ball anywhere, and Kareem had a shot that was undefendable. They worked really well together. I think that that's really useful in teams. It also means that you can learn from each other, and that was a prime example. There was one point where Magic took over from Kareem because Kareem was injured and they still won because they learned from each other. This is a really good thing that you see in teams and it builds trust in teams and it helps you do well. It means that you celebrate your wins, and that's fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: I love that point about Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar being very different kinds of players because you do need that on a team. You sometimes don't need the most brilliant strategist. Sometimes you need somebody who can organize things, take it and execute that really well. It's always good to have that really great strategy person we always kind of focus on, I feel like, but you also need that person who can do all of the things and execute all of the things. One is not better than the other one. You kind of need both. You need people who can really see the bigger picture, and then you need people who can do. Sometimes I feel like at agencies, or I maybe even broaden out, I think at companies we often don't value the doer to the extent that we should. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that the implementation work can sometimes go to executives or juniors and stuff like that. I feel like I've had it before where I had a junior and they're like, "Oh, I'm just doing this thing over and over and over again." I'm like, "I did that." The work that you're doing is so valuable. It's so valuable and it's so important. I had an exec who was helping me with a bunch of reports or whatever and I was like, "Thank you, thank you so much." Also in that process of doing that thing 400 times or whatever it is, you learn so much about that process and you learn how to fine tune that process and you know how to be more efficient with that process. That can help the whole team. The person who's doing the reports, for instance, who's doing 45 reports a month or something like that, they're going to look at that and they're going to go, "Oh my God, why aren't we automating this?" Then the team will go, "What do you mean?" They'll go, "We could use this and we could automate this and we can save ourselves four hours a month or something, and then we could use that doing more for our clients." That is brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: That's brilliant. I remember talking to Nick LeRoy about this. I don't know, a podcast I used to do or still do. He was saying, because Nick used to work at an agency and he was saying that one of the things that was hard for him at an agency was all the after hours stuff. He had a family, they lived far away, and he remembers valuing juniors who are new, let's say, and it wasn't their career. They would come at nine, they would leave at five, and that was just their thing. He remembers them not being valued by the particular agency where he was working, but to him as the top level strategist, he didn't need that person to feel like I got to be here at eight in the morning and be done at seven o'clock at night. He needed the person who didn't want it to be a career, who just wanted a job, who wanted to do and execute and write meta descriptions, update title. He needed somebody like that. Just because it's somebody who may not see SEO as a career, they're just doing, we'll call it grunt work for a really lack of a better word, because I don't want to put that down at all. Because I'm trying to say the absolute opposite. You need somebody like that a lot of the times at an agency. Crystal Carter: I do a lot of that stuff and I'll tell you what, I think there's times when you're like, oh, good, I did all this planning, I did all this sorting out, and now I'm going to go hard on the copy and paste. I'm going to put on some music, and I'm just going to get all these things that I spent all this time writing and spent all these time strategizing and spent all this time, whatever. I'm going to put it in the computer, like we were saying before. This is something that Joseph Silber was talking about this as well for things that he looks for in team members. An eagerness to test, learn, build, rinse, and repeat. Again, you test, you learn, you build, you do it again and that sort of thing. I think that also what you're talking about, somebody who's solid and stable and can deliver and will deliver the things that you need when you need them. Going back to the sports analogy, this is Steve Kerr in that one shot. Everybody's looking at Michael Jordan to be this, that and the other, and everybody knows Steve Kerr is like, he's a rock. He does what he does, but he's not super flashy. Michael Jordan's like, "I'm going to give you the ball." Steve's like, "I got you." Mordy Oberstein: He used to click his heels together when he shot. This weird little tick. Yeah, I only know that because I used to do the same thing. It's a weird thing that Steve Kerr did. Now we haven't even gotten into the soft skills side of what you need on SEO team because that is incredibly valuable, but we don't have to get to it because guess who's here? Crystal Carter: Who's here? Mordy Oberstein: Guess who's here? Crystal Carter: Who's here? Who's it, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: I already told you, John Mueller's here from the depths of the internet. We asked John what he thought goes into building a strong SEO team, and John sent back a prolific amount of information, which we're now going to explore together with John, but we're not actually together, but we're going to do it together. Here's John. John Mueller: Hey, it's me, John, coming to you from the depth of the internet. Hello. Is anyone listening? Oh, you are. Oops, sorry. Anyway, Crystal and Mordy asked me, what are the traits of a strong SEO team? I mean, they asked me and how should I know? I don't even have an SEO team per se. My team does do awesome things and the content does end up in search engines, and of course we kind of optimize one particular search engine. Does that count? I don't know. Anyway, apparently I should know because I once dropped a fun tweet on everyone saying, "Curiosity and persistence are the skills that SEO should have in 2023." I mean, it's a tweet. How serious can you take this? Anyway, I still kind of like that and I'll map this to a smaller team, which I guess isn't really realistic, but honestly, what is a team anyway? Are we talking about a hundred person organization? Come on, Mordy and Crystal, give me something to work with. Persistence, the one I mentioned there, is all about waiting and all about those nitty-gritty details that you have to track and get right. You could say it's kind of a code name for technical SEO. If you want to get anything done with SEO, you need to stay on top of all of those technical details. You need to dot the I's and cross all the T's. You need to track all the URLs, all the structured data and make sure you get all of the details right. It's possible that Google or some tool will alert you if you get it wrong, but it's also possible that these tools don't even realize what you're trying to do and then they can't alert you. You or your SEO team, if you will, you need to stay on top of all of these things. You need to find more details and track them. If you make changes, you need to be able to monitor them clearly over time without having to worry about unknown quirks thrown your way. Obviously in reality, nothing is ever so controlled. Especially with larger websites, there are a lot of dark corners which no frog has ever visited or documented, but still, the more you know, the more you can spot and the more you can check when you later see changes. Be persistent, be complete, have attention to detail, make your lists and check them twice. What also comes with this is kind of the willingness to dive deep into technical topics to figure out how things tick. One way to know what to be nitpicky about is to take things apart and see how they work. The cool part about SEO is that not everything is documented, but a lot of technical things can be worked out. Mordy Oberstein: I found it really interesting that the first thing that John wanted to talk about was the tech SEO side of it and how he did, when John put out that tweet that persistence is part of a building a strong SEO team, I did not take him to mean that they're diving into the technical part of the SEO side of things, but it does make sense where you're trying to dig in to see what's actually going on with the website and then testing things in order to understand what does or what doesn't move the needle. Persistence does make sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think he talked about different tools and tracking changes and things like that, and absolutely one of the things that is really important, particularly with tech SEO, is that you've got a lot of eyes on the ground when there are new rollouts and things like that. The tools that people use in order to facilitate technical SEO changes, track, monitor, optimize technical SEO changes, will dictate how good and how effective your team is. A lot of people will be using Slack. A lot of people might be using GitHub. There's ways where you can track changes, and in some of those sort of code to playing things as well. There's lots of ways where you can think... People add annotations into their code, specifically into the code. If you download something, there's a README that tells you things like that. It's important to pay attention to which tools that you're using and make sure that they are enabling you in order to work well as a team, both technically and so that you've got a sort of paper trail. Because one of the things that happens a lot of times, particularly in tech stuff, is that your team might be, he talked about small teams and big teams. For instance, if there's a tech change on a website, a lot of times your team can be global, so your server team might be in another country on a different time zone. You might have people locally who are looking at things. You might have an SEO team who's doing something else. The tools that you have to communicate what you're doing is really important. If you can't communicate in real time, then that's the big challenge. I know people who are using Slack and then they'll have a bot that comes into Slack and then people will have a discussion about what they've seen in that. I was in a discussion the other day with some teams from the Wix SEO team who were talking about how they can work better with ContentKing and Conductor to monitor changes and things like that. Yeah, those things are really important. Mordy Oberstein: Now I told you that John was going to talk about the soft skills side of SEO and I am not a liar. He will, so let's get back to John as we start to dive less so on the technical side of the team and more on the softer side of the team. John Mueller: What's the best form of pagination for your site? What are the options even? How does it have any effect? How can you test the effect? From there, what are the things that you need to watch out for versus the things that some tool currently flags? You can test a lot of this and sometimes with your own sites, sometimes with a test site, sometimes with a random blog that you happen to run on the side. I mean, who doesn't have that? There are a lot of these details and systematically testing can lead you to figuring out a little bit more. With all of these trials, you need to figure out how strong the individual effects are. It might be that linking from the top or the bottom of the page for pagination has an effect, but it might also be that the effect is so tiny that it's not worth considering. This kind of leads into the whole discussion around prioritization. Then there's kind of the curiosity part from my tweet, which is more I'd say the creative part. Like I suggested, sometimes you need to take things apart to see how things work when it comes to SEO. This includes looking at old things that you newly discover and all of the new things that constantly pop up. How do they work? Do they work at all? Should I care about them? Should I care about them in the future at some point? All of these things aren't pieces of information that you can just look up when you need it. You kind of need to be curious and dig for it yourself. Maybe there's a new Sitemaps extension that just came out. What does that actually mean for me? It might mean a lot of things to the SEO community out there, but you're working on one specific site or one specific set of sites, and you kind of want to know what does this is actually have as an effect for me? There's also WebAssembly that came out a couple of years ago, and this is kind of in addition to JavaScript, a way to make an interactive website. I haven't seen any SEOs talk about WebAssembly. What does it mean for SEO? How can you figure this out? This is something that you can test, that you can try out. The same goes for the more fad type things. Well, I don't know if they're a fad, we'll see. Things like ChatGPT, where you kind of have to look at it and think about, well, what could this actually mean for us? Is this something that we have to plan for? Is this something we have to do something urgently for, or is this something where maybe it's worthwhile to just wait and see? To see how things settle down and then try things out and see where that fits in. Without digging into any of these details, you'll never know. It's trivial to keep chasing squirrels all day without making a move. You kind of need to figure out what it is that makes a lot of sense for your site and then be able to focus on that a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, this is similar to what we were talking about before where you mentioned something that Jamar mentioned, Jamar Ramos, that you want somebody who's going to be persistent, who's going to be a critical thinker. All those sort of underlying skills or traits is kind of what you're looking for when constructing your team. Crystal Carter: I think, yeah. The curiosity element is really important. I've had someone intern for me, and she was completely new to doing SEO, to doing digital marketing and things like that, but she asked great questions. When somebody asks the question and you're like, yes, that is the question that you need to ask in order to do this well. I'm sorry I missed it, and I will come and I will explain to you in great detail because that is a fantastic question. I think that what he's talking about, that curiosity of trying to figure out if something works for you, trying to test it, trying to see what we can do, trying to explore, that's a really great tool for teams and a really great exercise for teams to be able to be creative together and to be able to try things together and to be able to understand new things together. Because in the digital space, things are constantly changing. There's constantly new tools, there's constantly new techniques, there's constantly new information. If you have a team that's able to explore these new things, new social media platforms or new tools like ChatGPT or other things, then that means that you can grow together well and create new things. I mean, Wix for instance, is very innovation focused, and Dayful, for instance, is something that came out of something that Wix people were building and working on and things. They were able to create something new from that. Similarly, we have a logo maker that's very similar as well. Those things are really great for your team, for your bottom line, and for keeping your team vibrant and active. Mordy Oberstein: Now let's get back to John one last time as we go into the actual communication side of the SEO team. John Mueller: The other part when it comes to SEO, especially when I think about an SEO team, is you need to be able to engage a broad audience internally. On the one hand, obviously you need to be able to tweet in ways that drive a lot of engagement in ways that makes people face palm publicly so they're like, "Oh God, look what this person wrote and let me link to their tweets while I discuss it." I think the more important part is actually that you're able to engage internally. It starts with maybe the marketing team who can give you a heads-up on what is about to happen or about the target audience, or just generally maybe they're the ones that tell you what to do actually. Then there's the developers who actually make the websites that you work on. This includes everyone from someone who's creating some HTML, who's maybe installing WordPress, who is configuring a CDN for the whole website. All of these technical aspects there, you need to be able to talk with them. Then of course, there are the people who make the decisions, who decide when you get money or when you don't get money. All of the managers internally that kind of want to know what it is that you've been working on and they want to see kind of the effects that you've had on the website, or they want to know from you what are the trends, what is happening on the web that they should be watching out for. Maybe you want to go to them and say, "Well, actually we need to create a new VR based website, and this is why." All of these things are things that you need to be able to package up in a way that your management chain will be able to understand. In short, I think for SEO folks, this means you need to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people. You can't just be geeks that speak in canonicals amongst yourselves. You need to have at least one person who can converse fluently in pagination, developer, marketing and manager talk. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Thank you, John. If you're not following John Mueller on Twitter, you most definitely should be following John Mueller on Twitter. He is also on LinkedIn and Mastadon as well. Crystal's nodding her head, like don't forget that part, Mordy. I did not. On Twitter, it's @JohnMU. So @-J-O-H-N-M-U. Mastadon, I don't remember, I'll be honest. On LinkedIn, you just look for John Mueller, Google. Crystal Carter: On his Twitter, he tells you where his Mastadon is. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there we go. Perfect. Of course, we'll link to all of John's profiles, his many profiles, in the show notes. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I think we need to say, thank you, John, for putting up with the entire SEO industry and all that you do for the industry. You have an extreme amount of patience, insights, and virtue. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much, John, and thank you for those fantastic insights. Brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking about building a strong SEO team and speaking about Google, because again, John is a search advocate at Google, there are a lot of tools that help your team collaborate and remain strong. You can call them SEO team building tools. One of these tools is Looker, formally known as Google Data Studio. Join us now for a special tool time as we have a look at Looker. Looker, the artist formerly known as Google Data Studio, is a very lovely tool if you would like to collaborate with data across your entire team. In fact, you can custom create all sorts of data and segments and reports to speak to various types of team members doing various different things, even beyond, dare I say, just SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fantastic. The other thing that I think is great about Looker Studio is that it also allows you to collaborate with other people that you've never even met. Some of my favorite Data Studio, Looker Studio tools have actually come from other people. Christina [inaudible 00:32:50], she had a fantastic reporting tool that I've used regularly. Also the crux, there's a crux tool that allows you to sort of track, so like HTTP archive has their core vitals technology report that is publicly available and you can see core vitals report reports from all over the world, filtered down to all different things. It allows you to create collaborative documents that you can customize yourself and that you can share with others, and it helps the web overall. Mordy Oberstein: It's basically taking data that would be behind a wall and putting it out there for the public to see. The Crux data is a great example of that. You're showing core web vitals data, and everyone has the link to that dashboard, and now look at that. You can segment all sorts of things. It lets you manipulate the data. For example, you could take Google Search Console data and turn into trends data. If running through a whole table or a whole spreadsheet is not on your team's radar, or the person that you're sharing it with on your team, it's not their jam, you could turn a lot of that data into trends data. Unless you manipulate data, unless you connect multiple sources, so you connect search console, Google Analytics, or even your SEMRush data, or any other million other source of data points into the reports. You can create internal reports, even external reports that speak to whoever it is that you're trying to target with the data. Again, another great point of it is that there's a lot of templates already out there that you don't have to do anything. People have created for you and you just plug in your data source. Crystal Carter: Yeah. They have some templates that exist in the first space, or some templates that just exist that are already in the tool section. You can also, there are people who will share with you. I'm looking at, Lazarina Stoy has a fantastic Google search console URL inspection API dashboard. She has a few different dashboards on her website. She's a contributor to the Wix SEO hub. Shout out to Lazarina. Her dashboard that she made is really useful. I'm sure that lots of other SEOs share them as well. Looking at how other people are configuring their dashboards can be really useful to help you understand both the kinds of data that you could be reporting, but also some of the functionalities of some the sort of data sets that we have. We have a lot. You get information from Google Search Console. You're getting information from GA4, you're getting information from other... From YouTube you can also connect really easily. If you're looking at other people's reports, it can help you make sense of that. I mentioned Christina earlier, and Christina had a really great GA4 dashboard that she shared. Having a look at her GA4 dashboard helped me to better understand GA4 because of the parameters that she was using. Mordy Oberstein: Literally same here on that. Crystal Carter: Right. I think she was showing page view or page path. She was showing page path, and I was like, oh, okay, so I understand that. That's the equivalent of this and that makes sense of that and da, da, da. These are really useful. It's also great for creating customer reports. If push comes to shove, if you've got some manual data that's in a data silo somewhere, and I don't know, how many people are walking through a door at your cafe or something like that. Let's say there's a little ticker and somebody has to go and look at the little thing and see what it says. If you've got something manual like that, you can connect it to Google Sheets for instance. You can still present it in a really accessible way via a Google Looker studio, but it can still work with your manual data. Let's say you've had to export some data from something that doesn't exist anymore, like say Universal Analytics come this autumn. Let's say you've got some old data from somewhere, you can add that into a Google Sheet and you can use it as a benchmark and present it how you need to do it as well. It's a fantastic tool. It's amazing that it's free and it's really worth learning. It can be a little bit of a learning curve getting used to it, but as I say, there's a lot of templates that you can start with and all of the templates are fully customizable. If you're not using Looker Studio, I highly recommend that you start with something simple and build on it. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely dive into it. From what you heard here, sounds a little bit interesting, also a little bit confusing. We're basically telling you what a nutshell is. Dive into Google Looker. I'm calling it Data Studio, Google Looker, have a look around and see what's there. I would be remiss, by the way, if we didn't mention that Daniel Waisberg, also a search advocate over at Google, not as great as John, but another wonderful search advocate over at Google, has some really cool Google search console templates that he built. Scatter plots inside of Looker that you can access and plug in your own data for. We'll try to link to all of these different templates in the show notes. Now, if Google Looker was new to you, you know what else might be new to you? Crystal Carter: What might be new to you? Mordy Oberstein: Is this new? The actual news. Crystal Carter: The actual news. Mordy Oberstein: Who would've thought? Who would've thought it would've been new? Crystal Carter: There's so many surprises today. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like there's a Barry Schwartz reference in every single podcast episode that we do. As well there should be, by the way. As well there should be, considering, by the way, that most of the articles we cover in the news are from Barry Schwartz. Barry this week, who knows? As we get into the snappy news. We're back, and before we go, we have one more little surprise for you. It's not a surprise, we do it every week. It's who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. This week, since we're going all Google all episode, we have Lizzi Sassman. Crystal Carter: Lizzi's fantastic. I met her at the Women in Tech SEO Festival in London, and also Cherry from her team as well. They're just fantastic. I'm a big fan of Lizzi on the Search Off The Record podcast as well, and also a big fan of her crochet skills. I had a great chat with her about crochet because I also do a little bit of crochet myself. I'm not as talented as Lizzi is, but it's great to have her on the team. If you're going to follow any other podcasts about search, it should absolutely be Search Off The Record. She's fantastic on it and shares some really great information in some new ways. Mordy Oberstein: She's one of these people who you can reach out to, have a conversation with out there on the social media space, whether it's Twitter or Mastadon. For example, Glenn Gabe and I were having a conversation about how Wix handles favicons and what Google's guidelines say, and what Wix does. Does it align, does it not align to the guidelines? Glen actually asked Lizzi what the story was and she clarified it and they even updated the documentation based upon what she updated Glenn about. It's real information, it's serious information, and it's official information. Crystal Carter: We've been talking about soft skills and we've been talking about team dynamics and things, and I think that the team at Google, they are very good at having a sort of spread of people, and they're all very much committed to making sure that people understand information. The way that Lizzi talks about it, she very much nurtures the sort of documentation space and making sure that people find the documentation really accessible. They created a document that explained exactly what, and I spoke to her about this and said how great it was, how much I really liked it, how they explained exactly what the things are called on the SERP. SEOs give lots of things lots of fun names, indented results, and like, oh, we saw this carousel thingy, and Lizzi did an update where she was like, "No, this is what it's actually called everyone. This is what we call it." Mordy Oberstein: It's less fun that way, to be honest. Little less fun that way. Crystal Carter: It's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: We'll make sure to link to Lizzi's social profile in the show notes and make sure you give her a follow and that'll do it. Crystal Carter: That's it, team. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Crystal Carter: All right. Go on three. Mordy Oberstein: One, two, three, go team. Crystal Carter: That was terrible. Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was good. Wow. Some team builder you are telling me it's terrible. I'm going to go sulk in a corner now. I though it was wonderful. Crystal Carter: Maybe we need another team building activity to re- Mordy Oberstein: How about laser tag again? No. Crystal Carter: How about pizza making without- Mordy Oberstein: Pizza making. I'll bring the pineapple. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. 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 gates, paywalls and exclusive content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning 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 of at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify or both. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein John Mueller Nick LeRoy Lizzi Sassman Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Google Looker Google Search Console Bubble Chart Core Web Vitals Technology Report in Google Looker Lazarina Stoy Google Looker Resources Search Off the Record News: Bing Chat Image Creator Now Working Google Bard: Everything You Need To Know Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content Google March 2023 Broad Core Update Tremors & Fluctuations Continue Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein John Mueller Nick LeRoy Lizzi Sassman Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Google Looker Google Search Console Bubble Chart Core Web Vitals Technology Report in Google Looker Lazarina Stoy Google Looker Resources Search Off the Record News: Bing Chat Image Creator Now Working Google Bard: Everything You Need To Know Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content Google March 2023 Broad Core Update Tremors & Fluctuations Continue 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 pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazingly fabulously, oh no, don't put pineapple on my pizza, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much. Thank you so much and thank you for reminding the world that pineapple on pizza is literally the worst thing that's ever happened to pizza, and also to mankind. It's like it's a terrible thing that I don't know who decided that was something. Mordy Oberstein: The plague, pineapple on pizza. Crystal Carter: Pineapple on pizza. It's worse. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple on pizza. Crystal Carter: It's worse. I think that, yeah, it's awful. Mordy Oberstein: We were recently together at the Wix offices and- Crystal Carter: We were. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, biyearly occurrence. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. It's something like that, and I wanted to bring you a can of pineapple so you can put it on your pizza. Crystal Carter: Yeah, that wouldn't happen. I would eat the pineapple separately. Pineapple's fine on its own, it's fine on its own. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple's delicious. Crystal Carter: It's that the two don't need to go together. I don't know. Me and skateboard. I don't need to skateboard. It's fine. Mordy Oberstein: Hot sauce. Crystal Carter: Hot sauce is good. I would even have hot sauce on pizza. I'll tell you that. Mordy Oberstein: Hot sauce pizza's amazing. Crystal Carter: Right. This is good. I like broccoli on pizza. I don't mind- Mordy Oberstein: Also good. Crystal Carter: Do you know why? Because broccoli and cheese, that's a solid combination. You can have broccoli and cheese. That makes sense. Mordy Oberstein: Cheese goes with everything. Maybe peanut butter and cheese would be a little weird. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I can see that, but nobody puts pineapple in pasta. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you could totally make a sauce that has pineapple and put it in your pasta. Pasta is like paper, it goes with everything. Crystal Carter: Yeah, but with garlic and basil and pineapple, it wouldn't. It's not a thing. It's fine. No one's going to convince me. People are like, "Oh, I'll-" You will not. No one will convince me. Mordy Oberstein: My subjective reality is greater than your subjective reality. Crystal Carter: I'm just saying like, no one's going to convince me that pineapple on pizza is ever a good idea. It's not. It's just not. I tried it. It's not that I have a closed mind, it's that I have an informed opinion. These are different things. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple and yogurt. Would you eat pineapple and yogurt? Crystal Carter: I have. It wasn't an enjoyable flavor sensation. Mordy Oberstein: Okay. I'll throw one last curveball at you. I enjoy pineapple pie. Crystal Carter: Pineapple pie? Mordy Oberstein: Pie. Yes. I was a kid growing a combination pie. It was a third blueberry, a third cherry and a third pineapple. The best slice was the part where the pineapple was connected to the cherry half. Crystal Carter: This- Mordy Oberstein: It's the New York thing. Crystal Carter: I'm not even sure if I know how to respond to that. It's- Mordy Oberstein: Blasphemous? Crystal Carter: It's something that I did not know existed, and so my brain is trying to take in a lot of new information right now. Mordy Oberstein: I have completely blown your mind with pineapple pie. Crystal Carter: Basically. I am literally speechless about this particular topic, which is perfect for a podcast to leave your co-host literally speechless. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's a good point to remind you that the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix. Let's just put it right out of that, where you can leave notes for your clients and even tag team members within the Wix blog. Nifty little feature not many know about, but if you have multiple hands, say optimizing a client's blog, it comes in handy, which is topical because today we're talking about how to build a strong SEO team with notes in your blog. That's how you do it. Crystal Carter: You can also bribe them with snacks that don't include pineapple pizza. Mordy Oberstein: Pineapple pie would be fine. Crystal Carter: Pineapple pie. It's really important to know your audience and to connect with your team in lots of different ways, including notes and including collaborative documents and other things. Mordy Oberstein: That's right, because today we're talking about what you want to consider when constructing your own megazord of SEOs to unite in the form of an ultimate SEO team. Power Rangers reference. They all climbed together to make one big robot thing. If you're not a fan, which I wasn't, but that's where I went. Crystal Carter: Go, go, go Power Rangers. Not pirate Rangers, Power Rangers. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh, pirate rangers. That's interesting. Anyway, we're diving into specialists or generalists, whom should you hire? Spoiler alert. It depends. Don't forget the softer side of soft skills. Why you should not undervalue the SEO who knows how to communicate well, and doers and thinkers, why a good SEO team has a balance of both. Plus a very special and most honorable guest from the depth of the internet will stop by to share his thoughts on the traits of a strong SEO team. That person, by the way, drum roll please, is John Mueller. John Mueller is here to take us through a metaphysical journey towards SEO team strength. We'll also dive into Google's Looker to see how data centralization can help strengthen your SEO team. Of course, we have the snap piece of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Team up because episode number 31 of the SERP's Up podcast is taking you on a digital team retreat. We're going digital camping. Crystal Carter: I feel like, are we going to play some digital laser tag or do you some digital team building? Mordy Oberstein: We play laser tag at our little team. Who won? Crystal Carter: Who won? Mordy Oberstein: I won. Crystal Carter: What? No, I mean yes, that's true. I mean, okay. Basically to the people of the internet, let me just let you know that Mordy Oberstein essentially found himself a little spot and just like- Mordy Oberstein: Just snipering, lasering from a little corner. Crystal Carter: I realized that there were about five minutes left and went and sat down and had a nice drink. That's what I did. Mordy Oberstein: Fine. I guess George won because he was the most accurate, but I'm always a big believer that you miss all the shots you don't take. Crystal Carter: It's a prime example of one of the things that's really important when you're thinking about teams, is making sure you have complementary skills. There are ways that you can sort of, some person does one thing, another person does another thing, another person decides that that's enough now. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: We've completed this task. I have team built and we're done. That's fine as well. Mordy Oberstein: We have strength in our team. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Laser tag is over. Crystal Carter: That's important. I think that these are things you got to think about when you're thinking about your team. Mordy Oberstein: You're just sorry you didn't win, that's all. Anyway. Getting a strong team together is very hard, which is why you need laser tag. I can very much tell you the struggle of finding the right people, finding quality people. In previous roles, it was a very focused pain point for me. It is very hard to find the right fit, the right person for the right job. It's almost impossible. I think we all know that problem. It's just really not easy to find talented people, and of course every niche has its own idiosyncrasies, and SEO is not different in any way, shape or form. There are a variety of things you want to consider when you're building a team from what your focus area is, the types of SEO that you are doing or that you focus on, the various types of tasks that you have that come into focus for you, that has to be done either on your team as an agency or your in-house team. Of course, there are all sorts of, dare I say, financial considerations to think about, like your budget and what can cause a conflict when bringing up SEO teams when that goes into hiring. From a budgetary point of view. I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck by the way, between hiring an employee they feel fits a certain task or whether... Try that again, I've spoken to more than a few SEO agency owners who feel stuck between hiring the employee they feel they need to hire from a task or work point of view and the employee they feel they need to hire from financial point of view, which we'll get into later. That's a major problem for agencies in particular. The point is building a strong SEO team is much more than a little bit complicated. It's a lot of complicated, and to me it hinges on those complexities and it's about bringing those complexities that we're going to talk about to the conscious level, which is literally what we're doing here. I feel like with this episode, I'm not saying anything novel. I'm just taking what's very latent and trying to bring it to the conscious level. Crystal Carter: I think also when we think about what an SEO team is, an SEO team can include people who work at the same company. Let's say you've got an in-house team for a brand, so the marketing manager, the marketing assistant, the marketing executive for instance, they're part of the team. If you have an agency that helps you with your PPC or your SEO or your design or whatever, they are also part of your team and vice versa as well. Let's say you're a freelancer and you work with a few other freelancers on a regular basis, they're also part of your team. I think that how everyone works together and the tools that you use and the people that you choose to bring in the fold, these are all things, as you say, that you need to be conscious of. The more conscious you are of what you need from your team, the better you'll be able to perform. Mordy Oberstein: What makes that really hard though is that there are certain points where what you need and what you want and what you're able to do or able to hire are not the same thing. I don't have a good answer for that. This comes down, I think in SEO in particular, I think what made it hard is that SEO has become a little bit more specialized. That means that in theory, and that's what makes it hard for an in-house team or an agency, you would need to have more specialized people, which means more people on your team, which means more money going to salaries than in the past. Where you could hire a generalist back in the day when SEO, I'll say was in its infancy, but back in the day when SEO was a little bit more straightforward perhaps, for lack of a better word, you could have one person to do it all. That's not necessarily the case anymore, and now what do you do? Because now you need to hire two people, but you're not necessarily bringing in more money because of it. You're just doing better work. Crystal Carter: I think that this is something that comes down to, so I asked on Twitter, I asked, I got 113 votes about this sort of thing and I said, "What's the secret ingredient for a good SEO team?" 33% of people said complementary skills, like you're saying. You've got a technical SEO, you have a content SEO, you have an e-commerce SEO, you have a so-and-so. Another 33% said ability to manage change. Then the next option that I gave was clear leadership. Then 10% of people said other. I also had somebody sub-tweet me saying, "What about skills for the job?" I think a lot of people, I've heard a lot of agency teams and a lot of other people say that acumen is really important because a lot of times you can teach some of the more technical skills. You can teach someone how to optimize content. If somebody has a general grasp of how to work with language, you can teach them how to optimize content for search, that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein: I guess as somebody who's hired many people over the course of my various careers at this point, the thing I was always looking for was not whether or not... I knew for the most part whether or not the person's skills were kind of in the ballpark of what I was looking for from the paper that I got from them. What I didn't know was their personality. Were they somebody who could fit into the team? Were they somebody who had that sort of it factor who I knew would work out well? It's almost like, I'll give a bad sports analogy. In football, American football, there's a person called the quarterback and that person is the most important person. They hold the ball the most, they distribute the ball to the other people. They're the central figure on the team. There are many different types of quarterbacks. Some quarterbacks are really fast. Some quarterbacks can throw the ball really far. What the good teams do is they find someone who has a lot of talent, whether it be a good runner, whether it be somebody who's really smart, whether it be somebody who makes good decisions with that smartness. This example would be Tom Brady, that kind of quarterback. Whether somebody's got a huge arm/ they design the system around them. They know, this person has a lot of good skills and a lot of things to offer, so let me build the system around them. I've always felt that. Find somebody who is a good, they're a team player, they're really intelligent, they're really adaptable, they have all those, I don't know what you want to call them, not personality skills, but persona skills I guess, and fit them into a place in your organization where they can thrive. Crystal Carter: Right. In the Twitter discussion, Jamar Ramos, who has managed an agency, who's managed teams, who works with developing SEOs, he said, "Critical thinking and a desire to grow are really important." He says, "Everything else can be taught." Similarly, Daniel K. Cheung said something similar. He said, "Mutual respect, overlapping work ethic and a similar hunger for learning." These are the things that you can build around, that you can, if you've got somebody who, let's say your team is really good at working on a particular CMS, you can say, "We're really good at this. We can build around that." Let's say your team is really good at content and and you're like, "We can make knockout content." You're like, "Ooh. What we really need though is some help with somebody who can get into back links, who can get us back links for this great content." It's like, I'm throwing you the ball and you can catch it and you can take it someplace where we're going to win. I mean, I recently watched a documentary about, it's interesting you're talking about sports teams because when we were thinking about this, I was thinking about the Michael Jordan's Bulls. I was also thinking about the Showtime Lakers. I recently saw there's a TV show about the Showtime Lakers that's actually pretty good. Have you seen it? John C. Reilly? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: It's pretty good. Mordy Oberstein: Crazy show. Crystal Carter: I think Kareem and Magic are a classic example. They're very different players and they were both at very different points in their career when they were working together, but they complemented each other really well. Because Magic could get the ball anywhere, and Kareem had a shot that was undefendable. They worked really well together. I think that that's really useful in teams. It also means that you can learn from each other, and that was a prime example. There was one point where Magic took over from Kareem because Kareem was injured and they still won because they learned from each other. This is a really good thing that you see in teams and it builds trust in teams and it helps you do well. It means that you celebrate your wins, and that's fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: I love that point about Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar being very different kinds of players because you do need that on a team. You sometimes don't need the most brilliant strategist. Sometimes you need somebody who can organize things, take it and execute that really well. It's always good to have that really great strategy person we always kind of focus on, I feel like, but you also need that person who can do all of the things and execute all of the things. One is not better than the other one. You kind of need both. You need people who can really see the bigger picture, and then you need people who can do. Sometimes I feel like at agencies, or I maybe even broaden out, I think at companies we often don't value the doer to the extent that we should. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think that the implementation work can sometimes go to executives or juniors and stuff like that. I feel like I've had it before where I had a junior and they're like, "Oh, I'm just doing this thing over and over and over again." I'm like, "I did that." The work that you're doing is so valuable. It's so valuable and it's so important. I had an exec who was helping me with a bunch of reports or whatever and I was like, "Thank you, thank you so much." Also in that process of doing that thing 400 times or whatever it is, you learn so much about that process and you learn how to fine tune that process and you know how to be more efficient with that process. That can help the whole team. The person who's doing the reports, for instance, who's doing 45 reports a month or something like that, they're going to look at that and they're going to go, "Oh my God, why aren't we automating this?" Then the team will go, "What do you mean?" They'll go, "We could use this and we could automate this and we can save ourselves four hours a month or something, and then we could use that doing more for our clients." That is brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: That's brilliant. I remember talking to Nick LeRoy about this. I don't know, a podcast I used to do or still do. He was saying, because Nick used to work at an agency and he was saying that one of the things that was hard for him at an agency was all the after hours stuff. He had a family, they lived far away, and he remembers valuing juniors who are new, let's say, and it wasn't their career. They would come at nine, they would leave at five, and that was just their thing. He remembers them not being valued by the particular agency where he was working, but to him as the top level strategist, he didn't need that person to feel like I got to be here at eight in the morning and be done at seven o'clock at night. He needed the person who didn't want it to be a career, who just wanted a job, who wanted to do and execute and write meta descriptions, update title. He needed somebody like that. Just because it's somebody who may not see SEO as a career, they're just doing, we'll call it grunt work for a really lack of a better word, because I don't want to put that down at all. Because I'm trying to say the absolute opposite. You need somebody like that a lot of the times at an agency. Crystal Carter: I do a lot of that stuff and I'll tell you what, I think there's times when you're like, oh, good, I did all this planning, I did all this sorting out, and now I'm going to go hard on the copy and paste. I'm going to put on some music, and I'm just going to get all these things that I spent all this time writing and spent all these time strategizing and spent all this time, whatever. I'm going to put it in the computer, like we were saying before. This is something that Joseph Silber was talking about this as well for things that he looks for in team members. An eagerness to test, learn, build, rinse, and repeat. Again, you test, you learn, you build, you do it again and that sort of thing. I think that also what you're talking about, somebody who's solid and stable and can deliver and will deliver the things that you need when you need them. Going back to the sports analogy, this is Steve Kerr in that one shot. Everybody's looking at Michael Jordan to be this, that and the other, and everybody knows Steve Kerr is like, he's a rock. He does what he does, but he's not super flashy. Michael Jordan's like, "I'm going to give you the ball." Steve's like, "I got you." Mordy Oberstein: He used to click his heels together when he shot. This weird little tick. Yeah, I only know that because I used to do the same thing. It's a weird thing that Steve Kerr did. Now we haven't even gotten into the soft skills side of what you need on SEO team because that is incredibly valuable, but we don't have to get to it because guess who's here? Crystal Carter: Who's here? Mordy Oberstein: Guess who's here? Crystal Carter: Who's here? Who's it, Mordy? Mordy Oberstein: I already told you, John Mueller's here from the depths of the internet. We asked John what he thought goes into building a strong SEO team, and John sent back a prolific amount of information, which we're now going to explore together with John, but we're not actually together, but we're going to do it together. Here's John. John Mueller: Hey, it's me, John, coming to you from the depth of the internet. Hello. Is anyone listening? Oh, you are. Oops, sorry. Anyway, Crystal and Mordy asked me, what are the traits of a strong SEO team? I mean, they asked me and how should I know? I don't even have an SEO team per se. My team does do awesome things and the content does end up in search engines, and of course we kind of optimize one particular search engine. Does that count? I don't know. Anyway, apparently I should know because I once dropped a fun tweet on everyone saying, "Curiosity and persistence are the skills that SEO should have in 2023." I mean, it's a tweet. How serious can you take this? Anyway, I still kind of like that and I'll map this to a smaller team, which I guess isn't really realistic, but honestly, what is a team anyway? Are we talking about a hundred person organization? Come on, Mordy and Crystal, give me something to work with. Persistence, the one I mentioned there, is all about waiting and all about those nitty-gritty details that you have to track and get right. You could say it's kind of a code name for technical SEO. If you want to get anything done with SEO, you need to stay on top of all of those technical details. You need to dot the I's and cross all the T's. You need to track all the URLs, all the structured data and make sure you get all of the details right. It's possible that Google or some tool will alert you if you get it wrong, but it's also possible that these tools don't even realize what you're trying to do and then they can't alert you. You or your SEO team, if you will, you need to stay on top of all of these things. You need to find more details and track them. If you make changes, you need to be able to monitor them clearly over time without having to worry about unknown quirks thrown your way. Obviously in reality, nothing is ever so controlled. Especially with larger websites, there are a lot of dark corners which no frog has ever visited or documented, but still, the more you know, the more you can spot and the more you can check when you later see changes. Be persistent, be complete, have attention to detail, make your lists and check them twice. What also comes with this is kind of the willingness to dive deep into technical topics to figure out how things tick. One way to know what to be nitpicky about is to take things apart and see how they work. The cool part about SEO is that not everything is documented, but a lot of technical things can be worked out. Mordy Oberstein: I found it really interesting that the first thing that John wanted to talk about was the tech SEO side of it and how he did, when John put out that tweet that persistence is part of a building a strong SEO team, I did not take him to mean that they're diving into the technical part of the SEO side of things, but it does make sense where you're trying to dig in to see what's actually going on with the website and then testing things in order to understand what does or what doesn't move the needle. Persistence does make sense. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I think he talked about different tools and tracking changes and things like that, and absolutely one of the things that is really important, particularly with tech SEO, is that you've got a lot of eyes on the ground when there are new rollouts and things like that. The tools that people use in order to facilitate technical SEO changes, track, monitor, optimize technical SEO changes, will dictate how good and how effective your team is. A lot of people will be using Slack. A lot of people might be using GitHub. There's ways where you can track changes, and in some of those sort of code to playing things as well. There's lots of ways where you can think... People add annotations into their code, specifically into the code. If you download something, there's a README that tells you things like that. It's important to pay attention to which tools that you're using and make sure that they are enabling you in order to work well as a team, both technically and so that you've got a sort of paper trail. Because one of the things that happens a lot of times, particularly in tech stuff, is that your team might be, he talked about small teams and big teams. For instance, if there's a tech change on a website, a lot of times your team can be global, so your server team might be in another country on a different time zone. You might have people locally who are looking at things. You might have an SEO team who's doing something else. The tools that you have to communicate what you're doing is really important. If you can't communicate in real time, then that's the big challenge. I know people who are using Slack and then they'll have a bot that comes into Slack and then people will have a discussion about what they've seen in that. I was in a discussion the other day with some teams from the Wix SEO team who were talking about how they can work better with ContentKing and Conductor to monitor changes and things like that. Yeah, those things are really important. Mordy Oberstein: Now I told you that John was going to talk about the soft skills side of SEO and I am not a liar. He will, so let's get back to John as we start to dive less so on the technical side of the team and more on the softer side of the team. John Mueller: What's the best form of pagination for your site? What are the options even? How does it have any effect? How can you test the effect? From there, what are the things that you need to watch out for versus the things that some tool currently flags? You can test a lot of this and sometimes with your own sites, sometimes with a test site, sometimes with a random blog that you happen to run on the side. I mean, who doesn't have that? There are a lot of these details and systematically testing can lead you to figuring out a little bit more. With all of these trials, you need to figure out how strong the individual effects are. It might be that linking from the top or the bottom of the page for pagination has an effect, but it might also be that the effect is so tiny that it's not worth considering. This kind of leads into the whole discussion around prioritization. Then there's kind of the curiosity part from my tweet, which is more I'd say the creative part. Like I suggested, sometimes you need to take things apart to see how things work when it comes to SEO. This includes looking at old things that you newly discover and all of the new things that constantly pop up. How do they work? Do they work at all? Should I care about them? Should I care about them in the future at some point? All of these things aren't pieces of information that you can just look up when you need it. You kind of need to be curious and dig for it yourself. Maybe there's a new Sitemaps extension that just came out. What does that actually mean for me? It might mean a lot of things to the SEO community out there, but you're working on one specific site or one specific set of sites, and you kind of want to know what does this is actually have as an effect for me? There's also WebAssembly that came out a couple of years ago, and this is kind of in addition to JavaScript, a way to make an interactive website. I haven't seen any SEOs talk about WebAssembly. What does it mean for SEO? How can you figure this out? This is something that you can test, that you can try out. The same goes for the more fad type things. Well, I don't know if they're a fad, we'll see. Things like ChatGPT, where you kind of have to look at it and think about, well, what could this actually mean for us? Is this something that we have to plan for? Is this something we have to do something urgently for, or is this something where maybe it's worthwhile to just wait and see? To see how things settle down and then try things out and see where that fits in. Without digging into any of these details, you'll never know. It's trivial to keep chasing squirrels all day without making a move. You kind of need to figure out what it is that makes a lot of sense for your site and then be able to focus on that a little bit. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, this is similar to what we were talking about before where you mentioned something that Jamar mentioned, Jamar Ramos, that you want somebody who's going to be persistent, who's going to be a critical thinker. All those sort of underlying skills or traits is kind of what you're looking for when constructing your team. Crystal Carter: I think, yeah. The curiosity element is really important. I've had someone intern for me, and she was completely new to doing SEO, to doing digital marketing and things like that, but she asked great questions. When somebody asks the question and you're like, yes, that is the question that you need to ask in order to do this well. I'm sorry I missed it, and I will come and I will explain to you in great detail because that is a fantastic question. I think that what he's talking about, that curiosity of trying to figure out if something works for you, trying to test it, trying to see what we can do, trying to explore, that's a really great tool for teams and a really great exercise for teams to be able to be creative together and to be able to try things together and to be able to understand new things together. Because in the digital space, things are constantly changing. There's constantly new tools, there's constantly new techniques, there's constantly new information. If you have a team that's able to explore these new things, new social media platforms or new tools like ChatGPT or other things, then that means that you can grow together well and create new things. I mean, Wix for instance, is very innovation focused, and Dayful, for instance, is something that came out of something that Wix people were building and working on and things. They were able to create something new from that. Similarly, we have a logo maker that's very similar as well. Those things are really great for your team, for your bottom line, and for keeping your team vibrant and active. Mordy Oberstein: Now let's get back to John one last time as we go into the actual communication side of the SEO team. John Mueller: The other part when it comes to SEO, especially when I think about an SEO team, is you need to be able to engage a broad audience internally. On the one hand, obviously you need to be able to tweet in ways that drive a lot of engagement in ways that makes people face palm publicly so they're like, "Oh God, look what this person wrote and let me link to their tweets while I discuss it." I think the more important part is actually that you're able to engage internally. It starts with maybe the marketing team who can give you a heads-up on what is about to happen or about the target audience, or just generally maybe they're the ones that tell you what to do actually. Then there's the developers who actually make the websites that you work on. This includes everyone from someone who's creating some HTML, who's maybe installing WordPress, who is configuring a CDN for the whole website. All of these technical aspects there, you need to be able to talk with them. Then of course, there are the people who make the decisions, who decide when you get money or when you don't get money. All of the managers internally that kind of want to know what it is that you've been working on and they want to see kind of the effects that you've had on the website, or they want to know from you what are the trends, what is happening on the web that they should be watching out for. Maybe you want to go to them and say, "Well, actually we need to create a new VR based website, and this is why." All of these things are things that you need to be able to package up in a way that your management chain will be able to understand. In short, I think for SEO folks, this means you need to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people. You can't just be geeks that speak in canonicals amongst yourselves. You need to have at least one person who can converse fluently in pagination, developer, marketing and manager talk. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Thank you, John. If you're not following John Mueller on Twitter, you most definitely should be following John Mueller on Twitter. He is also on LinkedIn and Mastadon as well. Crystal's nodding her head, like don't forget that part, Mordy. I did not. On Twitter, it's @JohnMU. So @-J-O-H-N-M-U. Mastadon, I don't remember, I'll be honest. On LinkedIn, you just look for John Mueller, Google. Crystal Carter: On his Twitter, he tells you where his Mastadon is. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, there we go. Perfect. Of course, we'll link to all of John's profiles, his many profiles, in the show notes. Crystal Carter: There you go. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I think we need to say, thank you, John, for putting up with the entire SEO industry and all that you do for the industry. You have an extreme amount of patience, insights, and virtue. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much, John, and thank you for those fantastic insights. Brilliant. Mordy Oberstein: Now, speaking about building a strong SEO team and speaking about Google, because again, John is a search advocate at Google, there are a lot of tools that help your team collaborate and remain strong. You can call them SEO team building tools. One of these tools is Looker, formally known as Google Data Studio. Join us now for a special tool time as we have a look at Looker. Looker, the artist formerly known as Google Data Studio, is a very lovely tool if you would like to collaborate with data across your entire team. In fact, you can custom create all sorts of data and segments and reports to speak to various types of team members doing various different things, even beyond, dare I say, just SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's fantastic. The other thing that I think is great about Looker Studio is that it also allows you to collaborate with other people that you've never even met. Some of my favorite Data Studio, Looker Studio tools have actually come from other people. Christina [inaudible 00:32:50], she had a fantastic reporting tool that I've used regularly. Also the crux, there's a crux tool that allows you to sort of track, so like HTTP archive has their core vitals technology report that is publicly available and you can see core vitals report reports from all over the world, filtered down to all different things. It allows you to create collaborative documents that you can customize yourself and that you can share with others, and it helps the web overall. Mordy Oberstein: It's basically taking data that would be behind a wall and putting it out there for the public to see. The Crux data is a great example of that. You're showing core web vitals data, and everyone has the link to that dashboard, and now look at that. You can segment all sorts of things. It lets you manipulate the data. For example, you could take Google Search Console data and turn into trends data. If running through a whole table or a whole spreadsheet is not on your team's radar, or the person that you're sharing it with on your team, it's not their jam, you could turn a lot of that data into trends data. Unless you manipulate data, unless you connect multiple sources, so you connect search console, Google Analytics, or even your SEMRush data, or any other million other source of data points into the reports. You can create internal reports, even external reports that speak to whoever it is that you're trying to target with the data. Again, another great point of it is that there's a lot of templates already out there that you don't have to do anything. People have created for you and you just plug in your data source. Crystal Carter: Yeah. They have some templates that exist in the first space, or some templates that just exist that are already in the tool section. You can also, there are people who will share with you. I'm looking at, Lazarina Stoy has a fantastic Google search console URL inspection API dashboard. She has a few different dashboards on her website. She's a contributor to the Wix SEO hub. Shout out to Lazarina. Her dashboard that she made is really useful. I'm sure that lots of other SEOs share them as well. Looking at how other people are configuring their dashboards can be really useful to help you understand both the kinds of data that you could be reporting, but also some of the functionalities of some the sort of data sets that we have. We have a lot. You get information from Google Search Console. You're getting information from GA4, you're getting information from other... From YouTube you can also connect really easily. If you're looking at other people's reports, it can help you make sense of that. I mentioned Christina earlier, and Christina had a really great GA4 dashboard that she shared. Having a look at her GA4 dashboard helped me to better understand GA4 because of the parameters that she was using. Mordy Oberstein: Literally same here on that. Crystal Carter: Right. I think she was showing page view or page path. She was showing page path, and I was like, oh, okay, so I understand that. That's the equivalent of this and that makes sense of that and da, da, da. These are really useful. It's also great for creating customer reports. If push comes to shove, if you've got some manual data that's in a data silo somewhere, and I don't know, how many people are walking through a door at your cafe or something like that. Let's say there's a little ticker and somebody has to go and look at the little thing and see what it says. If you've got something manual like that, you can connect it to Google Sheets for instance. You can still present it in a really accessible way via a Google Looker studio, but it can still work with your manual data. Let's say you've had to export some data from something that doesn't exist anymore, like say Universal Analytics come this autumn. Let's say you've got some old data from somewhere, you can add that into a Google Sheet and you can use it as a benchmark and present it how you need to do it as well. It's a fantastic tool. It's amazing that it's free and it's really worth learning. It can be a little bit of a learning curve getting used to it, but as I say, there's a lot of templates that you can start with and all of the templates are fully customizable. If you're not using Looker Studio, I highly recommend that you start with something simple and build on it. Mordy Oberstein: Definitely dive into it. From what you heard here, sounds a little bit interesting, also a little bit confusing. We're basically telling you what a nutshell is. Dive into Google Looker. I'm calling it Data Studio, Google Looker, have a look around and see what's there. I would be remiss, by the way, if we didn't mention that Daniel Waisberg, also a search advocate over at Google, not as great as John, but another wonderful search advocate over at Google, has some really cool Google search console templates that he built. Scatter plots inside of Looker that you can access and plug in your own data for. We'll try to link to all of these different templates in the show notes. Now, if Google Looker was new to you, you know what else might be new to you? Crystal Carter: What might be new to you? Mordy Oberstein: Is this new? The actual news. Crystal Carter: The actual news. Mordy Oberstein: Who would've thought? Who would've thought it would've been new? Crystal Carter: There's so many surprises today. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like there's a Barry Schwartz reference in every single podcast episode that we do. As well there should be, by the way. As well there should be, considering, by the way, that most of the articles we cover in the news are from Barry Schwartz. Barry this week, who knows? As we get into the snappy news. We're back, and before we go, we have one more little surprise for you. It's not a surprise, we do it every week. It's who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. This week, since we're going all Google all episode, we have Lizzi Sassman. Crystal Carter: Lizzi's fantastic. I met her at the Women in Tech SEO Festival in London, and also Cherry from her team as well. They're just fantastic. I'm a big fan of Lizzi on the Search Off The Record podcast as well, and also a big fan of her crochet skills. I had a great chat with her about crochet because I also do a little bit of crochet myself. I'm not as talented as Lizzi is, but it's great to have her on the team. If you're going to follow any other podcasts about search, it should absolutely be Search Off The Record. She's fantastic on it and shares some really great information in some new ways. Mordy Oberstein: She's one of these people who you can reach out to, have a conversation with out there on the social media space, whether it's Twitter or Mastadon. For example, Glenn Gabe and I were having a conversation about how Wix handles favicons and what Google's guidelines say, and what Wix does. Does it align, does it not align to the guidelines? Glen actually asked Lizzi what the story was and she clarified it and they even updated the documentation based upon what she updated Glenn about. It's real information, it's serious information, and it's official information. Crystal Carter: We've been talking about soft skills and we've been talking about team dynamics and things, and I think that the team at Google, they are very good at having a sort of spread of people, and they're all very much committed to making sure that people understand information. The way that Lizzi talks about it, she very much nurtures the sort of documentation space and making sure that people find the documentation really accessible. They created a document that explained exactly what, and I spoke to her about this and said how great it was, how much I really liked it, how they explained exactly what the things are called on the SERP. SEOs give lots of things lots of fun names, indented results, and like, oh, we saw this carousel thingy, and Lizzi did an update where she was like, "No, this is what it's actually called everyone. This is what we call it." Mordy Oberstein: It's less fun that way, to be honest. Little less fun that way. Crystal Carter: It's really useful. Mordy Oberstein: We'll make sure to link to Lizzi's social profile in the show notes and make sure you give her a follow and that'll do it. Crystal Carter: That's it, team. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. Crystal Carter: All right. Go on three. Mordy Oberstein: One, two, three, go team. Crystal Carter: That was terrible. Mordy Oberstein: I thought it was good. Wow. Some team builder you are telling me it's terrible. I'm going to go sulk in a corner now. I though it was wonderful. Crystal Carter: Maybe we need another team building activity to re- Mordy Oberstein: How about laser tag again? No. Crystal Carter: How about pizza making without- Mordy Oberstein: Pizza making. I'll bring the pineapple. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. 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 gates, paywalls and exclusive content. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning 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 of at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify or both. 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