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What industry developments are affecting the way SEO agencies operate? What industry developments are affecting the way SEO agencies operate? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by the founder and managing director of Blink SEO, Sam Wright, as they investigate the difficult changes SEO agencies are facing. Find out how you can provide the best value for your clients in today’s digital paradigm. Additionally, Wincher’s Oscar Lima stops by to give his two cents on how to manage SEO in a way that will help your agency thrive despite today’s changing landscape. Come gather around SEOs in whatever niche of the web you roam, as today we examine how the times they are a-changin’ for SEO agencies. It’s episode #94 of the SERP’s UP SEO Podcast! Back The change coming for SEO agencies What industry developments are affecting the way SEO agencies operate? What industry developments are affecting the way SEO agencies operate? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are joined by the founder and managing director of Blink SEO, Sam Wright, as they investigate the difficult changes SEO agencies are facing. Find out how you can provide the best value for your clients in today’s digital paradigm. Additionally, Wincher’s Oscar Lima stops by to give his two cents on how to manage SEO in a way that will help your agency thrive despite today’s changing landscape. Come gather around SEOs in whatever niche of the web you roam, as today we examine how the times they are a-changin’ for SEO agencies. It’s episode #94 of the SERP’s UP SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 94 | July 3, 2024 | 46 MIN 00:00 / 45:41 This week’s guests Sam Wright Sam is the founder and MD of Blink, a specialist eCommerce SEO agency, and Macaroni, a new end-to-end SEO platform. He has been working in SEO since 2007, and is a regular speaker and writer on the subject of eCommerce digital marketing. Oscar Lima Oscar Lima is the Head of Growth and product specialist at Wincher, an SEO platform to help marketers and business owners improve their SEO performance through better and easy to read ranking data. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at WIX. And I'm joined by the always adaptable, the ever-changing, and aligning with the times and ahead of the times herself, the Head of SEO Communications here at WIX, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: In case anyone is going to ask me about flex capacitors or anything of that nature, no, I cannot time travel. Thank you very much, Mordy, for that lovely introduction. Mordy Oberstein: You know what the problem with that movie is? It's a perfect movie except for the 88 miles per hour because back in the day, that was fast. That's what my grandmother does on the street now. Crystal Carter: Why you putting your grandmother on blast? If she wants to get to bingo quickly, that's her business. Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: She's not going to bingo, she's going to shuffleboard. Crystal Carter: Okay, shuffleboard. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Shuffleboard. Mordy Oberstein: No, none of this is... it's all made up. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I've never shuffleboarded, but I can imagine Grandma overseeing doing the shuffle as it were. Mordy Oberstein: Knowing Grandma Oberstein, I'm picturing this in my mind, it's a little bit disturbing. Anyway, the SERP 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 see who on your team is changing what on what site in real-time with shared working features found on WIX Studio. As today we're talking about how agency SEO, like your websites, are changing. How platform evolution changes the SEO scenario, something Crystal and I noticed a wee bit about. And how the emerges of AI changes the SEO agency paradigm, plus how it all adds up to more digital democratization and what that means for agencies. Sam Wright of Blink SEO will join us in just a Jiffy to weigh in on the matter. Speaking of platform evolution, we'll also talk to Wincher's, Oscar Lima, about why they've doubled down on platform integration. Plus, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So come gather around agency SEOs wherever you roam and emit the service around you have grown. And except that soon you'll be drenched in the digital unknown, for the agency SEO is a-changing on this the 94th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Queue harmonica. I am challenging my inner Dylan. You want to hear my Bob Dylan impression? No, we're not doing that. Crystal Carter: No, go for it. I mean, you set it up. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, hey SEO's, are you ready to see what's a-changing? From one nasally Jewish person to another. So this is our second... sorry, scratch that. This is our first episode of our WIX Studio Series. WIX Studio is a platform that helps digital marketers better manage clients, projects, and teams that has all sorts of advanced features such as reusable assets or an AI code assistant to help you do that, which is why this series is focused on helping agency side SEOs and digital marketers gain more knowledge. Now, I've had a heap of conversations with people lately, and it's been so weird because when you talk to SEO and digital marketing people, and I talk to all of them except for the PPC people less so... I'm not a PPC person- Crystal Carter: What are you talking about? We do the thing with Greg every day. Mordy Oberstein: Well, Greg's not a PPC person. So okay, plug, every single day except for Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays so not every day, four out of seven days, you can check out it's new, which myself, Crystal, Greg Finn, and Barry Schwartz do each end every day, except again Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we cover the news. The SEO news and PPC news. Look for it in the SEO Hub or on the Rusty Brick YouTube channel. I forget what we were talking about because I was plugging so much. No, but it's hard. I don't talk to as many SEO PPC people and in general, it's hard to get people to agree and share the same sentiments. One sentiment I've seen people talking about, and this is off-the-record conversations, it's just getting harder. It's harder to get clients, it's harder to keep clients. It's just everything is just suddenly harder. I think people are having a hard time figuring out exactly why that is, but if there's one thing I keep hearing, it's that things are just different. So it's hard to get your finger on the pulse of that, which is why I think this episode is really important, which is why we're honored to have Sam Wright, the managing director of Blink SEO at Macaroni Software on the show. Welcome, Sam. Sam Wright: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Mordy Oberstein: Great having you. So plug away, we're marketers, you're a marketer, marketer's going to market. What do you got for us? Sam Wright: So I'm the founder of Blink and we're a specialist e-commerce marketing agency with a focus on SEO. Our focus really is on Shopify. That's our platform. And I think that ties into a lot of stuff probably we're going to talk about. I'm also the founder of Macaroni as well, which is our SaaS platform built for Shopify. So it's essentially a platform that we've built that takes all of the kind of processes that we've developed over the years and automates them as much as possible and allows us to deliver SEO work on Shopify a lot faster. Currently, around 20 times faster and improving as of our last impact study. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. So a while back, I found this on Traffic Think Tank, which you're currently wearing this sweatshirt for. Sam Wright: Yes, I am indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Look at that. It all ties together Sam Wright: Wearing it today. It's a sign. Mordy Oberstein: It's in the stars. Sam Wright: It is indeed. Mordy Oberstein: And this is why people should promote themselves because in the Traffic Think Tank Slack channel, you shared this post on LinkedIn that you did about how agency SEO is changing and I thought it was brilliant and said we should have you on the show to talk about it. Maybe let's start with just running through what were you talking about on that post and what made you write it. Sam Wright: Yeah, of course. You've summed up what the sentiment is for a lot of people out there at the moment that it is tough. In the agency world, people are taking longer and longer to make decisions, there's less appetite of risk for risk. We've got macro-economic challenges worldwide going on at the moment, particularly in the e-commerce space, which is so kind of susceptible to consumer confidence and things like that. It really is filtering down. So over the last six months, we've seen buying cycles get longer and longer, kind of like sales resistance getting stronger and stronger. And all the time, our kind of attitude has always been we want to understand what the problems are for businesses and help them solve them. It's not a case of us. In the agency space, there's often a kind of self-serve nature of just trying to push all the problems back on the clients. Budgets aren't big enough, you are not good enough for what we need. And that's never kind of sat right with me because a lot of the problems with the sales resistance in terms of SEO is people have concerns about whether it will work, whether it can show a decent ROI. And a lot of people really struggle to answer these questions. And I think that's a whole separate subject in it. Crystal Carter: Right. Sam Wright: But in this environment where people are being much more resistant or that appetite for risk is completely gone, the whole post was triggered around the reasons for that, how we've got to this point. And I think there's a few things that have happened along with all of the macro stuff that's kind of led us there. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And this is something I've heard from a few people, particularly about the sales cycles and I think that SEO is something that they can lend itself to be vulnerable to that long sales cycle as well because if people are seeing that maybe their projections just business-wide are not giving them necessarily what they would normally see as a healthy mark, it's tricky for them to invest in something that might pay off in three months or six months or even a little bit longer in some cases. So I think that you're absolutely right, and Alyeda has talked about this a lot, about the no more it depends so we need to be able to give people information that will help them to make those decisions. Sam Wright: Exactly. Essentially, it's a discretionary purchase for lots of people at the moment. It talks about search being like a nuclear fission before. It sounds amazing, doesn't it? But getting there is really, really hard. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen. But a lot of the work that we're doing with Macaroni is answering those questions like does it work? How fast can you make it work? Being super clear. And again, that's a whole different subject that maybe we don't want to get into the weeds on this one. Crystal Carter: I think that that's something that we've tried to do on the WIX side as well. So with a lot of the tools that we have, we've built that in mind, and you're probably doing this on your side as well, but we have schema markup built into the CMS, we have loads of GVP, you can set up your GVP from the CMS. We have lots of things that are built into the CMS so that people don't have to wait so long for that tooling to be built, for that tooling to be implemented, for that tooling to be validated, to be all of that sort of stuff so that people can cut down on some of those friction points. You mentioned AI in your element as well, and we've built AI into our tools as well, and we've seen an incredible uptick in the number of people who are accessing those SEO tools as a result of including AI. And so I think that where you can reduce some of the friction and show results more quickly, people are more likely to engage. Mordy Oberstein: That was kind of the thrust of the LinkedIn post was that the CMSs, like Crystal's mentioned in the case of our case, they've evolved and they're not the same thing relatively across the board than they were just a few years ago. I'm a certain case, I like to think that we've done an incredible job advancing our SEO side. At the same time, you have all these AI implementations available. So in our case, for example, you can create title tags and meta descriptions just using AI and it's a pretty good job doing it. I use it for all my meta descriptions at this point, I don't feel like I need to write a meta description. And you said that kind of democratizes all that together, democratizes SEO a little bit, and that changes the paradigm for SEO agencies. What did you mean by that? Sam Wright: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. One of the reasons that we chose to focus on Shopify was the lack of technical debt that you get on that platform. If you are using Magento or some of the other big e-commerce platforms, up to 50, 60% of e-commerce work is stopping things breaking or just unseen variables. And from a productivity point of view, that's an absolute nightmare. It means that you're not doing growth. And so our kind of view has always been, there's certain activity that actually makes an impact, whether that's internal linking, on-page optimization, blah, blah, blah. And the problem is people don't do it at scale enough to tip that over into growth. So through Macaroni, one of the things we do is we track each change. If you make an internal link or add a keyword to a page, it all gets timestamped and then run across your data and analytics and Search Console. We run rolling averages before and after, benchmark everything because you can see the impact. And at a granular level, we can see that updating an internal link might impact impressions by 50, 60%. But you need to do that at scale to really make an impact, especially when we're in an environment where say search demand is, or consumer demands down 20% year-on-year. So to tip to growth, you combine that with rising costs. Really you need to see a 50% increase year-on-year for a lot brands to be better than where they were last year. So that's a huge amount of work. So making a few updates here and there is not really going to move the needle. So it's about this kind of scale that you do it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely as a technical SEO, when you have a CMS like WIX for instance, which has dynamic site maps built in, there was times as a technical SEO where I was making site maps for people, adding them to them, uploading- Sam Wright: I don't think I've done that for years now. Crystal Carter: Right. But there was a time when I was doing it, there was a lot of people and it was fairly common where they didn't. And I think that there's a lot of stuff that's taken for granted. And so then when you have a CMS that's like that has a lot of these things built in like in WIX and others, I think that as a technical SEO for instance, your skills are different. You have to have different skills. You have to be able to make sure that everything works correctly as it should. You need to be able to fix some of the things that you know are default and making sure that they're working correctly and that sort of thing. But those checks will take a lot less time. So for instance, I'll say, oh, this CMS has this, I'll check this, this, this, this, and this, great, that's all fine, next, and then you can move on. So the acceleration, the growth part, you're able to get to, as you said, much more quickly. And I think you still need to have those skills, I think you still need to have them, but you maybe don't need to have them in the same way as you did before. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, no, it seems more than... I'll pull down the fourth wall. When we talk about how do we position WIX for SEO agencies, one of the ways that we've talked about positioning is that you can focus on growth. You don't have to focus on the things that you don't want to do. Back in the day, there was concerns internally. Maybe if we push position in that way, then SEOs who are charging for installing this plugin and that plugin, it'll be like, wow, I can't do that. But I think serious and substantial SEOs and SEO agencies who are focused on client satisfaction and client growth will look at the fact that we implement auto redirects, that we produce almost all of your structured data for you automatically on all your most important pages. We automatically compress images, we automatically cache pages. It's endless, endless. The things that we automate is endless at this point. But that lets you focus on the real thing, which is actually growing the website, which kind of goes into the next question that I had anyways. If you have things like AI and I don't need to write a title tag for my clients anymore necessarily, they can use the AI writer inside of the WIX SEO, but go ahead, write your title tag, I'll have a quick look at it then. Then where is the value for SEO agencies going forward? Sam Wright: Well, I think a lot of people are going to be caught out in this new world because they can't provide unique value. And I think there's a lot of magical thinking that goes on in the industry at the moment where people are taking a view that AI isn't that good at the moment and it's going to stay that way and it's not. There's going to be a pretty big wake-up call, I think. And where we see the real moat and the expertise is... well, we're an eCommerce SEO, which is different to any other kind of segment, and we also specialize in large catalogs. So 80% of our work is around taxonomy and architecture and things like that. So we do fasted navigation and that's our kind of area of focus. So the future's going to be different for SaaS or whatever. Because SaaS is all about content and probably links because you've got five sites that all do the same thing. So it's going to be a kind of different world for all of them. Where we see the kind of value is it's really around data engineering. And this is a concept that I feel like lots of people in the SEO world don't really understand. They still lump all of this in with just Python, which is we do Python stuff and they don't really understand the difference between data science, data engineering, and blah blah, blah. Where I'm going with all of this is AI is about input. You put something good in and you get something good out. The way you do that at scale is largely a data engineering challenge. And when we're talking about building a moat around something, what I mean by that is... one example of the things that we do at Macaroni is it generates content for a page, but you need to feed in the primary and secondary keywords that may have been generated using a different process. But then we feed in sales data, we feed in brand positioning, various other metrics to ensure that the quality of the output is unique. So what we're feeding in is unique data to get a kind of unique thing out. And that's essentially the kind of moat around a lot of this stuff. You need to have access to some unique data and process it in a kind of... yeah. Crystal Carter: In an intelligent way, an actually intelligent way, not just from some AI and think, so somebody's looking at the data, assessing the data. And I think you're absolutely right, that that data piece is so critical and it's what good SEOs have been doing the whole time. Anyone can look at a list of keywords and can go, those are keywords with the top search volume, but you have to have data analysis to go, the search volume here is high, the keyword volume here is low, so we won't do that one or this, and pulling out which ones are the seed boards and which ones are the long tail and which ones are combined with all the other things. And I'm actually starting to see a lot of people who have been very good SEOs over the years move into a data role. I can think of two off the top of my head who are top agents, top... no, three actually who are folks who've moved from being SEOs into being data analysts or marketing data folks directly and bringing in all of those skills. And I think as you say, it is manipulating the data. And certainly, from an e-commerce point of view, you're absolutely coming from that because working with all the feeds and all of that sort of stuff is a whole nother thing in itself. Sam Wright: I think what you said there, a lot of that data though is those human insights in it, a lot of those can be automated though. There's like a logic tree for when you are... there's a limited amount of scenarios to go through. And this is kind of something that we call... it's such a big thing in this industry. You go and look on LinkedIn and everyone's got this 20-step post to get some insight. We'll pull some data from Search Console, we compare it to the HTML and analytics data, and blah, blah, blah. That is essentially data engineering by hand. A data pipeline can do that process for you. And that's been kind of like our view. And we're getting to the point now with all of these other parameters being minimized, not having to build site apps anymore or the site's not breaking, you end up with a pool... like, the possibilities of things that can go wrong or get smaller and smaller into the point that you can just build it out into a process. Does that make some kind of sense? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. No, it does, it does. And I think that agencies in the future, do you think that there's going to be more agencies that are building in that way, that it's not just a question of having... a lot of agencies are sort of service-led businesses, do you think there's going to be a lot more tool-led businesses in that way? Sam Wright: I think we're at a really interesting point where coming back to that idea of democratization, it is going to happen quite fast and the playing field's going to be really, really level. Now, we speak to a lot of marketing people in house and they know how to optimize a page, they know how to do some internal linking. If they're given the tools to be able to do that properly, there's no need for them to hire an agency whatsoever. And that's the kind of market that we're going at with Macaroni. We're kind of enabling them to do that process on Shopify. I'm sure that's the direction WIX is going to be heading in as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's what we've been doing for the better part of three years. On the data side, we pulled in Google Search Console Analytics. So basically if you don't know how to Regex, it's fine, we have all sorts of analytics that help you just pull it right out for you like that. Even for example, you log in... and this is a case where most clients that I initially talked to, smaller clients, at least, they have no idea what Search Console is, right? So we have a one-click connection to Search Console. Just doing this the other week for somebody. And so we'll automatically, for example, pull out which pages and queries are the most incline or decline for clicks and impressions. You don't have to do anything. It's like automatically... you know the email you get from Search Console, here's... I think you still get them. These are your fastest-growing queries. That data is pulled out basically right into the WIX dashboard. So they see it right away. They don't need me anymore to tell them what are the big focuses that I should be focusing on based on my Search Console data. WIX tells them, it's right there, there's no need. Sam Wright: Yeah. And more and more of this is going to happen. Mordy Oberstein: Which is, by the way, I'm fine with because it's like one less hassle I have to worry about. Sam Wright: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And a lot of SEO stuff isn't hard. If you're given the right information, you can make good decisions. And now it's getting to the point where the information is being presented in a much more accessible way, and that's not a problem. But for agencies, it really means can you provide some kind of value that no one else can. Crystal Carter: Yes. Sam Wright: Most of them can't. And that's the problem. Mordy Oberstein: That's the problem. Crystal Carter: This is the thing, I think that the days of being a website mechanic, I think are- Sam Wright: I like that. Crystal Carter: Right. I used to call myself that. I'd be like, oh yeah, I'm a website mechanic. Someone would say, oh, we're not ranking and I'd go and I'd go fix it, and blah, blah, blah. And I think that sometimes there's something... and you've done all the tools and all the tools are working, and sometimes you need a specialist. You had a health problem and your GP was like, I don't know what this is, I need to refer you to a specialist. So sometimes there's somebody who's a specialist who's like, oh, okay, I know how to diagnose this one thing. I know every single thing there is to know about Google Merchant Center or every single single thing there is to know about whatever it is. And those specialist folks who are the people that are, who you going to call when you've got that issue? That's great, that's fine. But I think that- Sam Wright: We might need 10 of them as opposed to hundreds of thousands. Crystal Carter: Right, as everybody doing that for everyone all the time. I think there's also, the other thing you start to see is that there's a lot of agencies who are moving into the education space of being able to upskill new execs, new folks within an in-house team to be able to handle that day-to-day thing. Because the other thing is, it's not super profitable to have 40 people in your team updating meta descriptions necessarily. And I think that that's going to change as well. Mordy Oberstein: I mean, I wrote a whole article about this for advanced web ranking a while back, and it's really long and it's all about how agencies are going to thrive in the AI scenario. And I'll tell you what the article's about in three seconds, you'll make money by using your own brain. That's how you're going to make money. Because the AI can't think for you. It can do stuff for you, but it can't think. Sam Wright: Yeah, absolutely. For now. Crystal Carter: But I think also I've heard people say that, and I'm sure I've said this on the podcast before, you won't be replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by somebody using AI really, really well. You said that how much it's changed. I remember when ChatGPT sort of first hit the mainstream, people were showing videos of, I think it's like a pool party or something with video AI and there's red cups and people with weird faces and it just looks an absolute hot mess. And now there's stuff and you couldn't tell the difference. You really, if you were just glancing by this video while you were scrolling or something, you would just assume it was a standard video that was animated by whatever. And then the other thing is that the AI facilitates, the AI facilitates the AI getting faster and all of that sort of stuff. So it's a really fascinating time. And I think the other thing I think is that I think, do you think... I'm thinking... but do you think that clients are feeling this as well? That they're seeing all of this change and sort of maybe hedging in terms of where they're going to put their chips down in terms of tactics? Sam Wright: So I think a lot of them feel like they can do it themselves and a lot of them can as well now. That's a very different environment. And again, if you've got some value to add, there's plenty of room. But yeah, a lot of people do definitely feel like they can do it themselves. I think part of the problem is, in this environment where this cost of pressure is coming from all angle, that really it's because no one can... it's hard to get a clear ROI. That seems to be the kind of big message that we get. There's so many problems with... and solving that is a complex problem as well. Search Console data is poor quality, analytics data is poor quality. Attribution is an industry full of cowboys and sharks, and there's all of those challenges to get around it. As a kind of side note, we're looking more and more at using things like Matomo for analytics reporting because it's open source. They've got no skin in the game about reporting where revenue comes from. But I don't feel the industry really has a handle on how to answer those difficult questions. Clients are always going to ask, is this actually going to make me any more money? And if you don't have a compelling answer to that, it's hard to get through. Mordy Oberstein: So if people are looking and trying to find answers to difficult questions and want to seek your advice, where could they find you? Sam Wright: That's a lovely segue, isn't it? Crystal Carter: Segue King. Sam Wright: I guess on LinkedIn. So do I share the URL here? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. We'll link through the show notes. We'll do the hard work for you. It's all automated for your side. Sam Wright: Amazing. This is magic. So yeah, LinkedIn is great. Our website is terrible, but you can get through us on that. Crystal Carter: What's the thing you say? A cobbler's children's- Mordy Oberstein: Shoemakers kids go shoeless. Sam Wright: That's it. There we go. That's it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I know that all too well. Sam Wright: Actually, we decided to do an experiment with Headless a few years ago and we ended up with some very, very experimental, quite fun thing that's really impossible to maintain. And that's a really good kind of... yeah, in the context of what we're speaking about, yeah, I think it's quite an interesting point. Crystal Carter: The more you know. You live and you learn. Mordy Oberstein: Well thank you so much for coming on the show and really appreciate your insights. Again, that was an amazing post and it's right on target. Thanks again. Sam Wright: Yeah, pleasure. Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: One thing we took notice of when looking at the changing landscape has been Wincher's focus. The famed SEO toolset, popular Yoast is now available inside of WIX's keyword selection process, the SEO assistant, and the SEO setup checklist, which got us thinking what are they seeing out there that has them taking this route. So we're taking a directional look with a segment that we usually focus on with Google, but today Wincher, a segment we call going, going, going Google. Mordy Oberstein: To help us today, I would like to introduce you to Wincher's own Oscar Lima. Welcome to the SERP's UP Podcast, Oscar. Oscar Lima: Thank you. Thank you, Mordy. It's great to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So first off, tell us, pitch Wincher. What do you guys do? What are you all about? Oscar Lima: Yeah, sure. So we started basically as a rank tracker. That was our main focus for a long time. And we just focused on being the best rank tracker out there, which I believe we were able to achieve somewhat, at least being among the best rank trackers. Lately, we've been seeing the need of many users to have access to more advanced tools. And for that reason, we have been evolving Wincher into other segments inside the SEO tools as well. So now we provide other tools such as the on-page SEO Checker, Keyword Explorer tool, which gives you a lot of insights. And we have been improving this tool a lot in order to deliver the most reliable data possible for the keywords research. And there are a lot of other things that we are developing in order to just offer more value to the SEO community in general. Mordy Oberstein: I have to ask you because again, we mentioned that WIX is a new integration that we have with Wincher. What made you decide to take this route? You don't see many other tools... because you've done this consistently of going out there and making our strategy about integrating with other platforms. Oscar Lima: Yeah, exactly. So we have had a really great experience partnering with other platforms before. One very successful one is with Yoast, for example, which has been really great just to share the knowledge between the companies and trying to... well, together offer more value to the users. And what Wincher is trying to do is to find other companies that would be a great fit for Wincher in order to expand our reach and basically make Wincher available for as many users as possible since we are trying to make it so easy to manage your SEO efforts when it comes to search engine optimization. Yeah. So basically, when we saw this opportunity with WIX, it was mostly because we saw the great effort that you guys have been making when it comes to SEO. We saw that there were a lot of changes being made in WIX. And we believe that, all right, these guys are now serious about SEO. We want to, well basically join them in on that path. So yeah, so we saw this opportunity of, all right, they are trying to bring value to the SEO community that's aligned with what we are trying to do in our own way, which is delivering good tools to the community. Yeah, so basically what we see is that if we can manage to offer our data or our tools inside WIX without your users having to leave your platform, that's just awesome because then you can centralize all your efforts inside one tool only. Crystal Carter: And I think there's some great things that you've got in the tool and a really nice SERP preview tool within there that gives you a lot of information on SERP features. Also gives you an idea of averages, which I really, really like. So within this preview, you give an average breakdown of word count and anyone listening word count is not a ranking factor, but it is useful to give you an idea of whether or not people are really getting into the content expect a long word count or whether or not things can be fairly concise. That's really useful. Gives you an idea of load speed, gives you an idea of the average domain strength, the average backlinks, the average referring domains. And I think that's really interesting from a sort of trend of Google of understanding the competitive landscape because if you can get the average, then you can figure out where you're sitting, where your piece of content sits in that benchmark. I think that's really great. Oscar Lima: Yeah, exactly. And we did a lot of research before coming up with this SERP review and we also questioned ourselves about exactly that, what you just mentioned about the word count. It's not a ranking factor. And a lot of people just, when we mention that, people just say, oh, why would you do that? But you need to look beyond the data like, all right, what does the word count tell me? It'll tell you that, all right, if it's a long content, it's probably a comprehensive one and people are getting a lot of detail. So the content needs to be really well done if you want to compete. Yeah, so we have new stuff coming soon when it comes to that SERP reviewing specific. I can't tell much, but imagine you being able to compare your pages with the averages that- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Oscar Lima: Yeah, exactly. Crystal Carter: So for case in point, I was looking for Beyonce stuff, so Beyonce has her new country music album and I was in the market for a cowboy hat and I looked up women's cowboy hats or cowgirl hats even. And the average SERP that I saw in Wincher said that it had 647 words. The number one ranking page had 3,200 words. The number two one had 61 words. A big difference. And then the one after that was 152, and then you have 549, 727. That tells me that there isn't really a hard and fast in terms of Google in terms of the word count, but it also tells me that the one that's ranking number one has a very comprehensive collection of cowgirl hats, for instance. And what's also interesting, the way that people think about... because you also have the loading speed there, the number one one is their loading time is like 2,600 milliseconds. The 61 word one is 258 milliseconds. Number four is coming in at 798 milliseconds, and number five is coming in at 566 milliseconds. And that's telling you that there's lots of different contributing factors of why something ranks. It's not just word count, it's not just page feed, it's not just backlinks, it's not just that sort of thing. So for instance, the number four there is coming in with more backlinks than the number one, but Google's figuring out, they're trying to balance where they see value there. And you can get all of that just from that little dashboard, which I think is super useful and super helpful to planning out your SEO. Oscar Lima: Yeah, exactly. And well, circling back to what Mordy was saying or asking about the partnerships, these are the types of tools that we want to deliver to just speed up the process. I think that the time people spend on certain tasks and certain stuff that needs to be done like just researching the landscape or the SERPs, if we can manage to make it easier and faster for users to complete those tasks in a streamlined way, well that's exactly what we want. And then they can just focus on what really matters. Like, all right, this is a boring task to be done, let me focus on writing content, on doing the stuff I actually want to do. Yeah, and that's how we believe that we can provide value through these partnerships. Just streamlining these tasks that usually would take a lot of time to be accomplished. Mordy Oberstein: And just before I remind you to check out the Wincher integration inside of WIX, this is to swing full circle back around, it kind of speaks of a marketing lesson from all of this. The power of building brand and perception, creates new opportunities. If we didn't heavily focus on showcasing that WIX is a serious place for serious SEO, this partnership never would've taken place. And I think sometimes people miss that opportunity. Positioning yourself in a very strong way opens up new doors. It's that simple. Oscar Lima: Totally, totally, totally agree. And I can say that if it wasn't for all this great work that you guys have been doing, probably we wouldn't cross our paths. And well, not because we wouldn't be interested, but the awareness that you guys brought, it totally took our attention. Mordy Oberstein: So good brand building opens up new opportunities. And on that note, I will now direct you to check out the Wincher tool inside of WIX and the Wincher tool outside of WIX. Oscar Lima: Yeah, perfect. Mordy Oberstein: Oscar, thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find you if they have any questions about Wincher? Oscar Lima: Yeah, so you can just find everything related to Wincher in our website, wincher.com. If you guys have any questions, we have our chat support always available. If you want to reach me personally and if you have questions that you want to ask myself, you can find me on LinkedIn, Oscar Lima, and yeah, I'll be happy to just talk to everyone. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. Thanks so much for stopping by. Oscar Lima: Yeah, thank you, Mordy. Thank you, Chrystal. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's always changing, easiest pivot ever, the SEO news is always changing. Crystal Carter: I mean, they set it up, knock it down. Mordy Oberstein: Just the low-hanging fruit, just right there. So here's this week's Snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news 3. This week from Barry, but from different places. First up from Search Engine Roundtable, Google, June 2024 spam update finished rolling out. That's basically, it sums up in one line, the June 2024 spam update has finished rolling out. If you're not a spammer, you should be totally fine. Obviously, check your rankings, whatnot. If you are doing the various spammy things, don't. Onto search engine land. Google dropping continuous scroll in search results reports, Barry Schwarz. Google launched mobile infinite scroll in October 2021 and desktop infinite scroll search results not in all markets in December 2022. Desktop continuous scroll is gone and Google says that it is coming in the next month or so for mobile. What does that mean? Well, what it basically means, and particularly on more on the mobile side, I think, you could have flick your thumb. Well, I guess you still can because as of the recording of this, Google didn't kill it yet, you can flick your thumb and fly down the search results on mobile really quickly, which means that there's definitely increase in impressions that comes from that possibly clicks because again, you just flying down the SERP. If you have to click to the next page because Google is going to be reinstating classic pagination on mobile, they already did it on desktop, you have to be pretty intentful. That's the word. You have to be intentful, I guess that's the word, whatever, to click onto the next page as opposed to flicking your thumb and seeing more results. So you may see less clicks, probably some less impressions. It is definitely worth making a note of in your reporting. Like, Hey, why did impressions go down? Oh, Google killed infinite scroll. Okay, last upfront, Barry Schwartz over on SEO Roundtable. We're going back to SEO Roundtable with the stop to search engine land in between. Google tests AI overview link cards at the top, which is, you don't need to read the rest of the story, but Barry tells you right there in the headline what it is. Google is testing link cards. So the links to organic results in the AI overviews, not at the bottom of the overview, but at the very top of the overview. This is great news for y'all if this is going to be rolled out, and this is going to be the exclusive or the predominant format of the AI overviews. We don't know. It's a test. It is interesting. I noted this on it's new, which is our Monday through Thursday daily news series with Crystal Carter, myself, Barry Schwartz, and Greg Finn. Then it's a little fun because Google saying, Hey, users want the AI overview because that's what they're looking for and that's what they want, but it's first now giving them the URLs at the top, like a traditional results in a way again. So which one is it? Do the users want the traditional results that show those at the top, or do they want the AI overview, show that at the top? Again, I'm not complaining, I'm happy the URLs are up at the top. It just a little bit of an interesting, I guess, user experience contradiction. And on that happy note, that is this week's snappy news. Now the beauty of the news is, you'll know that you'll need to check it out next week because it'll always be changing or each day if you would like to check out our series, it's new with us and Barry Schwartz and Greg Finn. Look forward on the WIX SEO Learning Hub or on Barry's YouTube channel. You know what's also always changing, our follow of the week is why would recommend the same follow of the week every week. That wouldn't make any sense. It should naturally change. So this week's follow of the week is Jay Cowell. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I wanted to shout out Jay Cowell. She is an agency owner based in southwest of the UK working with clients globally. And she is a really interesting fellow because I was having a really interesting conversation with her and she was talking about how her team has for many years been doing sort of PPC. They're like a Google Ads certified premium partner or whatever it is, and they do some great Google Ads things. But they've recently started taking the approach of being sort of platform-agnostic, which I think is really, really interesting. So generally, they will talk to clients and they're like, we will help you with your paid marketing wherever you need to have clients. And I think that that's a really interesting shift that I'm starting to see from folks. And I think that that goes to the kind of landscape that we're seeing and the fact that users are more dispersed and the online experience is more dispersed. And I think that that's really interesting and I thought that was a really forward-thinking, strategic move on Jay's part. And she also shared some great content, generally speaking, and she's a great agency leader. So yeah, shout out to Jay. Mordy Oberstein: Shout out. And link to her profile in the show notes. I'm all out of changing pivots so I don't have a- Crystal Carter: Change, change, change. No, that's chain. That's not change. Mordy Oberstein: It's changing. Crystal Carter: *Crystal Singing* Mordy Oberstein: Behind the scenes. I'm making a bar mitzvah for my kids in a few weeks, so my wife wants to do a video montage thing. Crystal Carter: Aw. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So I had to Google what are video montage songs for life events and changes came up. I'm like, oh, that's a good one. Crystal Carter: Yeah. That is a good song. That's a good song. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good song. A bunch of other stuff came up that wasn't so good, but whatever. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: These listicles. Anyway, I always end with something spicy. Thanks for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode we dive into how to new SEO clients, low and inside. That's a baseball reference. 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... I can't do it today. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the WIX SEO Learning Hub at you guessed at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Sam Wright Oscar Lima Jaye Cowle Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wincher Blink SEO Macaroni SEO Software News: Google June 2024 Spam Update Finished Rolling Out Google dropping continuous scroll in search results Google Tests AI Overview Link Cards At The Top Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Sam Wright Oscar Lima Jaye Cowle Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube It's New: Daily SEO News Series Wincher Blink SEO Macaroni SEO Software News: Google June 2024 Spam Update Finished Rolling Out Google dropping continuous scroll in search results Google Tests AI Overview Link Cards At The Top Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at WIX. And I'm joined by the always adaptable, the ever-changing, and aligning with the times and ahead of the times herself, the Head of SEO Communications here at WIX, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: In case anyone is going to ask me about flex capacitors or anything of that nature, no, I cannot time travel. Thank you very much, Mordy, for that lovely introduction. Mordy Oberstein: You know what the problem with that movie is? It's a perfect movie except for the 88 miles per hour because back in the day, that was fast. That's what my grandmother does on the street now. Crystal Carter: Why you putting your grandmother on blast? If she wants to get to bingo quickly, that's her business. Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: She's not going to bingo, she's going to shuffleboard. Crystal Carter: Okay, shuffleboard. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Shuffleboard. Mordy Oberstein: No, none of this is... it's all made up. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I've never shuffleboarded, but I can imagine Grandma overseeing doing the shuffle as it were. Mordy Oberstein: Knowing Grandma Oberstein, I'm picturing this in my mind, it's a little bit disturbing. Anyway, the SERP 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 see who on your team is changing what on what site in real-time with shared working features found on WIX Studio. As today we're talking about how agency SEO, like your websites, are changing. How platform evolution changes the SEO scenario, something Crystal and I noticed a wee bit about. And how the emerges of AI changes the SEO agency paradigm, plus how it all adds up to more digital democratization and what that means for agencies. Sam Wright of Blink SEO will join us in just a Jiffy to weigh in on the matter. Speaking of platform evolution, we'll also talk to Wincher's, Oscar Lima, about why they've doubled down on platform integration. Plus, we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So come gather around agency SEOs wherever you roam and emit the service around you have grown. And except that soon you'll be drenched in the digital unknown, for the agency SEO is a-changing on this the 94th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Queue harmonica. I am challenging my inner Dylan. You want to hear my Bob Dylan impression? No, we're not doing that. Crystal Carter: No, go for it. I mean, you set it up. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, hey SEO's, are you ready to see what's a-changing? From one nasally Jewish person to another. So this is our second... sorry, scratch that. This is our first episode of our WIX Studio Series. WIX Studio is a platform that helps digital marketers better manage clients, projects, and teams that has all sorts of advanced features such as reusable assets or an AI code assistant to help you do that, which is why this series is focused on helping agency side SEOs and digital marketers gain more knowledge. Now, I've had a heap of conversations with people lately, and it's been so weird because when you talk to SEO and digital marketing people, and I talk to all of them except for the PPC people less so... I'm not a PPC person- Crystal Carter: What are you talking about? We do the thing with Greg every day. Mordy Oberstein: Well, Greg's not a PPC person. So okay, plug, every single day except for Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays so not every day, four out of seven days, you can check out it's new, which myself, Crystal, Greg Finn, and Barry Schwartz do each end every day, except again Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we cover the news. The SEO news and PPC news. Look for it in the SEO Hub or on the Rusty Brick YouTube channel. I forget what we were talking about because I was plugging so much. No, but it's hard. I don't talk to as many SEO PPC people and in general, it's hard to get people to agree and share the same sentiments. One sentiment I've seen people talking about, and this is off-the-record conversations, it's just getting harder. It's harder to get clients, it's harder to keep clients. It's just everything is just suddenly harder. I think people are having a hard time figuring out exactly why that is, but if there's one thing I keep hearing, it's that things are just different. So it's hard to get your finger on the pulse of that, which is why I think this episode is really important, which is why we're honored to have Sam Wright, the managing director of Blink SEO at Macaroni Software on the show. Welcome, Sam. Sam Wright: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Mordy Oberstein: Great having you. So plug away, we're marketers, you're a marketer, marketer's going to market. What do you got for us? Sam Wright: So I'm the founder of Blink and we're a specialist e-commerce marketing agency with a focus on SEO. Our focus really is on Shopify. That's our platform. And I think that ties into a lot of stuff probably we're going to talk about. I'm also the founder of Macaroni as well, which is our SaaS platform built for Shopify. So it's essentially a platform that we've built that takes all of the kind of processes that we've developed over the years and automates them as much as possible and allows us to deliver SEO work on Shopify a lot faster. Currently, around 20 times faster and improving as of our last impact study. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. So a while back, I found this on Traffic Think Tank, which you're currently wearing this sweatshirt for. Sam Wright: Yes, I am indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Look at that. It all ties together Sam Wright: Wearing it today. It's a sign. Mordy Oberstein: It's in the stars. Sam Wright: It is indeed. Mordy Oberstein: And this is why people should promote themselves because in the Traffic Think Tank Slack channel, you shared this post on LinkedIn that you did about how agency SEO is changing and I thought it was brilliant and said we should have you on the show to talk about it. Maybe let's start with just running through what were you talking about on that post and what made you write it. Sam Wright: Yeah, of course. You've summed up what the sentiment is for a lot of people out there at the moment that it is tough. In the agency world, people are taking longer and longer to make decisions, there's less appetite of risk for risk. We've got macro-economic challenges worldwide going on at the moment, particularly in the e-commerce space, which is so kind of susceptible to consumer confidence and things like that. It really is filtering down. So over the last six months, we've seen buying cycles get longer and longer, kind of like sales resistance getting stronger and stronger. And all the time, our kind of attitude has always been we want to understand what the problems are for businesses and help them solve them. It's not a case of us. In the agency space, there's often a kind of self-serve nature of just trying to push all the problems back on the clients. Budgets aren't big enough, you are not good enough for what we need. And that's never kind of sat right with me because a lot of the problems with the sales resistance in terms of SEO is people have concerns about whether it will work, whether it can show a decent ROI. And a lot of people really struggle to answer these questions. And I think that's a whole separate subject in it. Crystal Carter: Right. Sam Wright: But in this environment where people are being much more resistant or that appetite for risk is completely gone, the whole post was triggered around the reasons for that, how we've got to this point. And I think there's a few things that have happened along with all of the macro stuff that's kind of led us there. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And this is something I've heard from a few people, particularly about the sales cycles and I think that SEO is something that they can lend itself to be vulnerable to that long sales cycle as well because if people are seeing that maybe their projections just business-wide are not giving them necessarily what they would normally see as a healthy mark, it's tricky for them to invest in something that might pay off in three months or six months or even a little bit longer in some cases. So I think that you're absolutely right, and Alyeda has talked about this a lot, about the no more it depends so we need to be able to give people information that will help them to make those decisions. Sam Wright: Exactly. Essentially, it's a discretionary purchase for lots of people at the moment. It talks about search being like a nuclear fission before. It sounds amazing, doesn't it? But getting there is really, really hard. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen. But a lot of the work that we're doing with Macaroni is answering those questions like does it work? How fast can you make it work? Being super clear. And again, that's a whole different subject that maybe we don't want to get into the weeds on this one. Crystal Carter: I think that that's something that we've tried to do on the WIX side as well. So with a lot of the tools that we have, we've built that in mind, and you're probably doing this on your side as well, but we have schema markup built into the CMS, we have loads of GVP, you can set up your GVP from the CMS. We have lots of things that are built into the CMS so that people don't have to wait so long for that tooling to be built, for that tooling to be implemented, for that tooling to be validated, to be all of that sort of stuff so that people can cut down on some of those friction points. You mentioned AI in your element as well, and we've built AI into our tools as well, and we've seen an incredible uptick in the number of people who are accessing those SEO tools as a result of including AI. And so I think that where you can reduce some of the friction and show results more quickly, people are more likely to engage. Mordy Oberstein: That was kind of the thrust of the LinkedIn post was that the CMSs, like Crystal's mentioned in the case of our case, they've evolved and they're not the same thing relatively across the board than they were just a few years ago. I'm a certain case, I like to think that we've done an incredible job advancing our SEO side. At the same time, you have all these AI implementations available. So in our case, for example, you can create title tags and meta descriptions just using AI and it's a pretty good job doing it. I use it for all my meta descriptions at this point, I don't feel like I need to write a meta description. And you said that kind of democratizes all that together, democratizes SEO a little bit, and that changes the paradigm for SEO agencies. What did you mean by that? Sam Wright: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. One of the reasons that we chose to focus on Shopify was the lack of technical debt that you get on that platform. If you are using Magento or some of the other big e-commerce platforms, up to 50, 60% of e-commerce work is stopping things breaking or just unseen variables. And from a productivity point of view, that's an absolute nightmare. It means that you're not doing growth. And so our kind of view has always been, there's certain activity that actually makes an impact, whether that's internal linking, on-page optimization, blah, blah, blah. And the problem is people don't do it at scale enough to tip that over into growth. So through Macaroni, one of the things we do is we track each change. If you make an internal link or add a keyword to a page, it all gets timestamped and then run across your data and analytics and Search Console. We run rolling averages before and after, benchmark everything because you can see the impact. And at a granular level, we can see that updating an internal link might impact impressions by 50, 60%. But you need to do that at scale to really make an impact, especially when we're in an environment where say search demand is, or consumer demands down 20% year-on-year. So to tip to growth, you combine that with rising costs. Really you need to see a 50% increase year-on-year for a lot brands to be better than where they were last year. So that's a huge amount of work. So making a few updates here and there is not really going to move the needle. So it's about this kind of scale that you do it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, definitely as a technical SEO, when you have a CMS like WIX for instance, which has dynamic site maps built in, there was times as a technical SEO where I was making site maps for people, adding them to them, uploading- Sam Wright: I don't think I've done that for years now. Crystal Carter: Right. But there was a time when I was doing it, there was a lot of people and it was fairly common where they didn't. And I think that there's a lot of stuff that's taken for granted. And so then when you have a CMS that's like that has a lot of these things built in like in WIX and others, I think that as a technical SEO for instance, your skills are different. You have to have different skills. You have to be able to make sure that everything works correctly as it should. You need to be able to fix some of the things that you know are default and making sure that they're working correctly and that sort of thing. But those checks will take a lot less time. So for instance, I'll say, oh, this CMS has this, I'll check this, this, this, this, and this, great, that's all fine, next, and then you can move on. So the acceleration, the growth part, you're able to get to, as you said, much more quickly. And I think you still need to have those skills, I think you still need to have them, but you maybe don't need to have them in the same way as you did before. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, no, it seems more than... I'll pull down the fourth wall. When we talk about how do we position WIX for SEO agencies, one of the ways that we've talked about positioning is that you can focus on growth. You don't have to focus on the things that you don't want to do. Back in the day, there was concerns internally. Maybe if we push position in that way, then SEOs who are charging for installing this plugin and that plugin, it'll be like, wow, I can't do that. But I think serious and substantial SEOs and SEO agencies who are focused on client satisfaction and client growth will look at the fact that we implement auto redirects, that we produce almost all of your structured data for you automatically on all your most important pages. We automatically compress images, we automatically cache pages. It's endless, endless. The things that we automate is endless at this point. But that lets you focus on the real thing, which is actually growing the website, which kind of goes into the next question that I had anyways. If you have things like AI and I don't need to write a title tag for my clients anymore necessarily, they can use the AI writer inside of the WIX SEO, but go ahead, write your title tag, I'll have a quick look at it then. Then where is the value for SEO agencies going forward? Sam Wright: Well, I think a lot of people are going to be caught out in this new world because they can't provide unique value. And I think there's a lot of magical thinking that goes on in the industry at the moment where people are taking a view that AI isn't that good at the moment and it's going to stay that way and it's not. There's going to be a pretty big wake-up call, I think. And where we see the real moat and the expertise is... well, we're an eCommerce SEO, which is different to any other kind of segment, and we also specialize in large catalogs. So 80% of our work is around taxonomy and architecture and things like that. So we do fasted navigation and that's our kind of area of focus. So the future's going to be different for SaaS or whatever. Because SaaS is all about content and probably links because you've got five sites that all do the same thing. So it's going to be a kind of different world for all of them. Where we see the kind of value is it's really around data engineering. And this is a concept that I feel like lots of people in the SEO world don't really understand. They still lump all of this in with just Python, which is we do Python stuff and they don't really understand the difference between data science, data engineering, and blah blah, blah. Where I'm going with all of this is AI is about input. You put something good in and you get something good out. The way you do that at scale is largely a data engineering challenge. And when we're talking about building a moat around something, what I mean by that is... one example of the things that we do at Macaroni is it generates content for a page, but you need to feed in the primary and secondary keywords that may have been generated using a different process. But then we feed in sales data, we feed in brand positioning, various other metrics to ensure that the quality of the output is unique. So what we're feeding in is unique data to get a kind of unique thing out. And that's essentially the kind of moat around a lot of this stuff. You need to have access to some unique data and process it in a kind of... yeah. Crystal Carter: In an intelligent way, an actually intelligent way, not just from some AI and think, so somebody's looking at the data, assessing the data. And I think you're absolutely right, that that data piece is so critical and it's what good SEOs have been doing the whole time. Anyone can look at a list of keywords and can go, those are keywords with the top search volume, but you have to have data analysis to go, the search volume here is high, the keyword volume here is low, so we won't do that one or this, and pulling out which ones are the seed boards and which ones are the long tail and which ones are combined with all the other things. And I'm actually starting to see a lot of people who have been very good SEOs over the years move into a data role. I can think of two off the top of my head who are top agents, top... no, three actually who are folks who've moved from being SEOs into being data analysts or marketing data folks directly and bringing in all of those skills. And I think as you say, it is manipulating the data. And certainly, from an e-commerce point of view, you're absolutely coming from that because working with all the feeds and all of that sort of stuff is a whole nother thing in itself. Sam Wright: I think what you said there, a lot of that data though is those human insights in it, a lot of those can be automated though. There's like a logic tree for when you are... there's a limited amount of scenarios to go through. And this is kind of something that we call... it's such a big thing in this industry. You go and look on LinkedIn and everyone's got this 20-step post to get some insight. We'll pull some data from Search Console, we compare it to the HTML and analytics data, and blah, blah, blah. That is essentially data engineering by hand. A data pipeline can do that process for you. And that's been kind of like our view. And we're getting to the point now with all of these other parameters being minimized, not having to build site apps anymore or the site's not breaking, you end up with a pool... like, the possibilities of things that can go wrong or get smaller and smaller into the point that you can just build it out into a process. Does that make some kind of sense? Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. No, it does, it does. And I think that agencies in the future, do you think that there's going to be more agencies that are building in that way, that it's not just a question of having... a lot of agencies are sort of service-led businesses, do you think there's going to be a lot more tool-led businesses in that way? Sam Wright: I think we're at a really interesting point where coming back to that idea of democratization, it is going to happen quite fast and the playing field's going to be really, really level. Now, we speak to a lot of marketing people in house and they know how to optimize a page, they know how to do some internal linking. If they're given the tools to be able to do that properly, there's no need for them to hire an agency whatsoever. And that's the kind of market that we're going at with Macaroni. We're kind of enabling them to do that process on Shopify. I'm sure that's the direction WIX is going to be heading in as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, that's what we've been doing for the better part of three years. On the data side, we pulled in Google Search Console Analytics. So basically if you don't know how to Regex, it's fine, we have all sorts of analytics that help you just pull it right out for you like that. Even for example, you log in... and this is a case where most clients that I initially talked to, smaller clients, at least, they have no idea what Search Console is, right? So we have a one-click connection to Search Console. Just doing this the other week for somebody. And so we'll automatically, for example, pull out which pages and queries are the most incline or decline for clicks and impressions. You don't have to do anything. It's like automatically... you know the email you get from Search Console, here's... I think you still get them. These are your fastest-growing queries. That data is pulled out basically right into the WIX dashboard. So they see it right away. They don't need me anymore to tell them what are the big focuses that I should be focusing on based on my Search Console data. WIX tells them, it's right there, there's no need. Sam Wright: Yeah. And more and more of this is going to happen. Mordy Oberstein: Which is, by the way, I'm fine with because it's like one less hassle I have to worry about. Sam Wright: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And a lot of SEO stuff isn't hard. If you're given the right information, you can make good decisions. And now it's getting to the point where the information is being presented in a much more accessible way, and that's not a problem. But for agencies, it really means can you provide some kind of value that no one else can. Crystal Carter: Yes. Sam Wright: Most of them can't. And that's the problem. Mordy Oberstein: That's the problem. Crystal Carter: This is the thing, I think that the days of being a website mechanic, I think are- Sam Wright: I like that. Crystal Carter: Right. I used to call myself that. I'd be like, oh yeah, I'm a website mechanic. Someone would say, oh, we're not ranking and I'd go and I'd go fix it, and blah, blah, blah. And I think that sometimes there's something... and you've done all the tools and all the tools are working, and sometimes you need a specialist. You had a health problem and your GP was like, I don't know what this is, I need to refer you to a specialist. So sometimes there's somebody who's a specialist who's like, oh, okay, I know how to diagnose this one thing. I know every single thing there is to know about Google Merchant Center or every single single thing there is to know about whatever it is. And those specialist folks who are the people that are, who you going to call when you've got that issue? That's great, that's fine. But I think that- Sam Wright: We might need 10 of them as opposed to hundreds of thousands. Crystal Carter: Right, as everybody doing that for everyone all the time. I think there's also, the other thing you start to see is that there's a lot of agencies who are moving into the education space of being able to upskill new execs, new folks within an in-house team to be able to handle that day-to-day thing. Because the other thing is, it's not super profitable to have 40 people in your team updating meta descriptions necessarily. And I think that that's going to change as well. Mordy Oberstein: I mean, I wrote a whole article about this for advanced web ranking a while back, and it's really long and it's all about how agencies are going to thrive in the AI scenario. And I'll tell you what the article's about in three seconds, you'll make money by using your own brain. That's how you're going to make money. Because the AI can't think for you. It can do stuff for you, but it can't think. Sam Wright: Yeah, absolutely. For now. Crystal Carter: But I think also I've heard people say that, and I'm sure I've said this on the podcast before, you won't be replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by somebody using AI really, really well. You said that how much it's changed. I remember when ChatGPT sort of first hit the mainstream, people were showing videos of, I think it's like a pool party or something with video AI and there's red cups and people with weird faces and it just looks an absolute hot mess. And now there's stuff and you couldn't tell the difference. You really, if you were just glancing by this video while you were scrolling or something, you would just assume it was a standard video that was animated by whatever. And then the other thing is that the AI facilitates, the AI facilitates the AI getting faster and all of that sort of stuff. So it's a really fascinating time. And I think the other thing I think is that I think, do you think... I'm thinking... but do you think that clients are feeling this as well? That they're seeing all of this change and sort of maybe hedging in terms of where they're going to put their chips down in terms of tactics? Sam Wright: So I think a lot of them feel like they can do it themselves and a lot of them can as well now. That's a very different environment. And again, if you've got some value to add, there's plenty of room. But yeah, a lot of people do definitely feel like they can do it themselves. I think part of the problem is, in this environment where this cost of pressure is coming from all angle, that really it's because no one can... it's hard to get a clear ROI. That seems to be the kind of big message that we get. There's so many problems with... and solving that is a complex problem as well. Search Console data is poor quality, analytics data is poor quality. Attribution is an industry full of cowboys and sharks, and there's all of those challenges to get around it. As a kind of side note, we're looking more and more at using things like Matomo for analytics reporting because it's open source. They've got no skin in the game about reporting where revenue comes from. But I don't feel the industry really has a handle on how to answer those difficult questions. Clients are always going to ask, is this actually going to make me any more money? And if you don't have a compelling answer to that, it's hard to get through. Mordy Oberstein: So if people are looking and trying to find answers to difficult questions and want to seek your advice, where could they find you? Sam Wright: That's a lovely segue, isn't it? Crystal Carter: Segue King. Sam Wright: I guess on LinkedIn. So do I share the URL here? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, no. We'll link through the show notes. We'll do the hard work for you. It's all automated for your side. Sam Wright: Amazing. This is magic. So yeah, LinkedIn is great. Our website is terrible, but you can get through us on that. Crystal Carter: What's the thing you say? A cobbler's children's- Mordy Oberstein: Shoemakers kids go shoeless. Sam Wright: That's it. There we go. That's it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I know that all too well. Sam Wright: Actually, we decided to do an experiment with Headless a few years ago and we ended up with some very, very experimental, quite fun thing that's really impossible to maintain. And that's a really good kind of... yeah, in the context of what we're speaking about, yeah, I think it's quite an interesting point. Crystal Carter: The more you know. You live and you learn. Mordy Oberstein: Well thank you so much for coming on the show and really appreciate your insights. Again, that was an amazing post and it's right on target. Thanks again. Sam Wright: Yeah, pleasure. Thank you very much. Mordy Oberstein: One thing we took notice of when looking at the changing landscape has been Wincher's focus. The famed SEO toolset, popular Yoast is now available inside of WIX's keyword selection process, the SEO assistant, and the SEO setup checklist, which got us thinking what are they seeing out there that has them taking this route. So we're taking a directional look with a segment that we usually focus on with Google, but today Wincher, a segment we call going, going, going Google. Mordy Oberstein: To help us today, I would like to introduce you to Wincher's own Oscar Lima. Welcome to the SERP's UP Podcast, Oscar. Oscar Lima: Thank you. Thank you, Mordy. It's great to be here. Mordy Oberstein: So first off, tell us, pitch Wincher. What do you guys do? What are you all about? Oscar Lima: Yeah, sure. So we started basically as a rank tracker. That was our main focus for a long time. And we just focused on being the best rank tracker out there, which I believe we were able to achieve somewhat, at least being among the best rank trackers. Lately, we've been seeing the need of many users to have access to more advanced tools. And for that reason, we have been evolving Wincher into other segments inside the SEO tools as well. So now we provide other tools such as the on-page SEO Checker, Keyword Explorer tool, which gives you a lot of insights. And we have been improving this tool a lot in order to deliver the most reliable data possible for the keywords research. And there are a lot of other things that we are developing in order to just offer more value to the SEO community in general. Mordy Oberstein: I have to ask you because again, we mentioned that WIX is a new integration that we have with Wincher. What made you decide to take this route? You don't see many other tools... because you've done this consistently of going out there and making our strategy about integrating with other platforms. Oscar Lima: Yeah, exactly. So we have had a really great experience partnering with other platforms before. One very successful one is with Yoast, for example, which has been really great just to share the knowledge between the companies and trying to... well, together offer more value to the users. And what Wincher is trying to do is to find other companies that would be a great fit for Wincher in order to expand our reach and basically make Wincher available for as many users as possible since we are trying to make it so easy to manage your SEO efforts when it comes to search engine optimization. Yeah. So basically, when we saw this opportunity with WIX, it was mostly because we saw the great effort that you guys have been making when it comes to SEO. We saw that there were a lot of changes being made in WIX. And we believe that, all right, these guys are now serious about SEO. We want to, well basically join them in on that path. So yeah, so we saw this opportunity of, all right, they are trying to bring value to the SEO community that's aligned with what we are trying to do in our own way, which is delivering good tools to the community. Yeah, so basically what we see is that if we can manage to offer our data or our tools inside WIX without your users having to leave your platform, that's just awesome because then you can centralize all your efforts inside one tool only. Crystal Carter: And I think there's some great things that you've got in the tool and a really nice SERP preview tool within there that gives you a lot of information on SERP features. Also gives you an idea of averages, which I really, really like. So within this preview, you give an average breakdown of word count and anyone listening word count is not a ranking factor, but it is useful to give you an idea of whether or not people are really getting into the content expect a long word count or whether or not things can be fairly concise. That's really useful. Gives you an idea of load speed, gives you an idea of the average domain strength, the average backlinks, the average referring domains. And I think that's really interesting from a sort of trend of Google of understanding the competitive landscape because if you can get the average, then you can figure out where you're sitting, where your piece of content sits in that benchmark. I think that's really great. Oscar Lima: Yeah, exactly. And we did a lot of research before coming up with this SERP review and we also questioned ourselves about exactly that, what you just mentioned about the word count. It's not a ranking factor. And a lot of people just, when we mention that, people just say, oh, why would you do that? But you need to look beyond the data like, all right, what does the word count tell me? It'll tell you that, all right, if it's a long content, it's probably a comprehensive one and people are getting a lot of detail. So the content needs to be really well done if you want to compete. Yeah, so we have new stuff coming soon when it comes to that SERP reviewing specific. I can't tell much, but imagine you being able to compare your pages with the averages that- Crystal Carter: Yeah. Oscar Lima: Yeah, exactly. Crystal Carter: So for case in point, I was looking for Beyonce stuff, so Beyonce has her new country music album and I was in the market for a cowboy hat and I looked up women's cowboy hats or cowgirl hats even. And the average SERP that I saw in Wincher said that it had 647 words. The number one ranking page had 3,200 words. The number two one had 61 words. A big difference. And then the one after that was 152, and then you have 549, 727. That tells me that there isn't really a hard and fast in terms of Google in terms of the word count, but it also tells me that the one that's ranking number one has a very comprehensive collection of cowgirl hats, for instance. And what's also interesting, the way that people think about... because you also have the loading speed there, the number one one is their loading time is like 2,600 milliseconds. The 61 word one is 258 milliseconds. Number four is coming in at 798 milliseconds, and number five is coming in at 566 milliseconds. And that's telling you that there's lots of different contributing factors of why something ranks. It's not just word count, it's not just page feed, it's not just backlinks, it's not just that sort of thing. So for instance, the number four there is coming in with more backlinks than the number one, but Google's figuring out, they're trying to balance where they see value there. And you can get all of that just from that little dashboard, which I think is super useful and super helpful to planning out your SEO. Oscar Lima: Yeah, exactly. And well, circling back to what Mordy was saying or asking about the partnerships, these are the types of tools that we want to deliver to just speed up the process. I think that the time people spend on certain tasks and certain stuff that needs to be done like just researching the landscape or the SERPs, if we can manage to make it easier and faster for users to complete those tasks in a streamlined way, well that's exactly what we want. And then they can just focus on what really matters. Like, all right, this is a boring task to be done, let me focus on writing content, on doing the stuff I actually want to do. Yeah, and that's how we believe that we can provide value through these partnerships. Just streamlining these tasks that usually would take a lot of time to be accomplished. Mordy Oberstein: And just before I remind you to check out the Wincher integration inside of WIX, this is to swing full circle back around, it kind of speaks of a marketing lesson from all of this. The power of building brand and perception, creates new opportunities. If we didn't heavily focus on showcasing that WIX is a serious place for serious SEO, this partnership never would've taken place. And I think sometimes people miss that opportunity. Positioning yourself in a very strong way opens up new doors. It's that simple. Oscar Lima: Totally, totally, totally agree. And I can say that if it wasn't for all this great work that you guys have been doing, probably we wouldn't cross our paths. And well, not because we wouldn't be interested, but the awareness that you guys brought, it totally took our attention. Mordy Oberstein: So good brand building opens up new opportunities. And on that note, I will now direct you to check out the Wincher tool inside of WIX and the Wincher tool outside of WIX. Oscar Lima: Yeah, perfect. Mordy Oberstein: Oscar, thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find you if they have any questions about Wincher? Oscar Lima: Yeah, so you can just find everything related to Wincher in our website, wincher.com. If you guys have any questions, we have our chat support always available. If you want to reach me personally and if you have questions that you want to ask myself, you can find me on LinkedIn, Oscar Lima, and yeah, I'll be happy to just talk to everyone. Mordy Oberstein: Amazing. Thanks so much for stopping by. Oscar Lima: Yeah, thank you, Mordy. Thank you, Chrystal. Mordy Oberstein: You know what's always changing, easiest pivot ever, the SEO news is always changing. Crystal Carter: I mean, they set it up, knock it down. Mordy Oberstein: Just the low-hanging fruit, just right there. So here's this week's Snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news 3. This week from Barry, but from different places. First up from Search Engine Roundtable, Google, June 2024 spam update finished rolling out. That's basically, it sums up in one line, the June 2024 spam update has finished rolling out. If you're not a spammer, you should be totally fine. Obviously, check your rankings, whatnot. If you are doing the various spammy things, don't. Onto search engine land. Google dropping continuous scroll in search results reports, Barry Schwarz. Google launched mobile infinite scroll in October 2021 and desktop infinite scroll search results not in all markets in December 2022. Desktop continuous scroll is gone and Google says that it is coming in the next month or so for mobile. What does that mean? Well, what it basically means, and particularly on more on the mobile side, I think, you could have flick your thumb. Well, I guess you still can because as of the recording of this, Google didn't kill it yet, you can flick your thumb and fly down the search results on mobile really quickly, which means that there's definitely increase in impressions that comes from that possibly clicks because again, you just flying down the SERP. If you have to click to the next page because Google is going to be reinstating classic pagination on mobile, they already did it on desktop, you have to be pretty intentful. That's the word. You have to be intentful, I guess that's the word, whatever, to click onto the next page as opposed to flicking your thumb and seeing more results. So you may see less clicks, probably some less impressions. It is definitely worth making a note of in your reporting. Like, Hey, why did impressions go down? Oh, Google killed infinite scroll. Okay, last upfront, Barry Schwartz over on SEO Roundtable. We're going back to SEO Roundtable with the stop to search engine land in between. Google tests AI overview link cards at the top, which is, you don't need to read the rest of the story, but Barry tells you right there in the headline what it is. Google is testing link cards. So the links to organic results in the AI overviews, not at the bottom of the overview, but at the very top of the overview. This is great news for y'all if this is going to be rolled out, and this is going to be the exclusive or the predominant format of the AI overviews. We don't know. It's a test. It is interesting. I noted this on it's new, which is our Monday through Thursday daily news series with Crystal Carter, myself, Barry Schwartz, and Greg Finn. Then it's a little fun because Google saying, Hey, users want the AI overview because that's what they're looking for and that's what they want, but it's first now giving them the URLs at the top, like a traditional results in a way again. So which one is it? Do the users want the traditional results that show those at the top, or do they want the AI overview, show that at the top? Again, I'm not complaining, I'm happy the URLs are up at the top. It just a little bit of an interesting, I guess, user experience contradiction. And on that happy note, that is this week's snappy news. Now the beauty of the news is, you'll know that you'll need to check it out next week because it'll always be changing or each day if you would like to check out our series, it's new with us and Barry Schwartz and Greg Finn. Look forward on the WIX SEO Learning Hub or on Barry's YouTube channel. You know what's also always changing, our follow of the week is why would recommend the same follow of the week every week. That wouldn't make any sense. It should naturally change. So this week's follow of the week is Jay Cowell. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I wanted to shout out Jay Cowell. She is an agency owner based in southwest of the UK working with clients globally. And she is a really interesting fellow because I was having a really interesting conversation with her and she was talking about how her team has for many years been doing sort of PPC. They're like a Google Ads certified premium partner or whatever it is, and they do some great Google Ads things. But they've recently started taking the approach of being sort of platform-agnostic, which I think is really, really interesting. So generally, they will talk to clients and they're like, we will help you with your paid marketing wherever you need to have clients. And I think that that's a really interesting shift that I'm starting to see from folks. And I think that that goes to the kind of landscape that we're seeing and the fact that users are more dispersed and the online experience is more dispersed. And I think that that's really interesting and I thought that was a really forward-thinking, strategic move on Jay's part. And she also shared some great content, generally speaking, and she's a great agency leader. So yeah, shout out to Jay. Mordy Oberstein: Shout out. And link to her profile in the show notes. I'm all out of changing pivots so I don't have a- Crystal Carter: Change, change, change. No, that's chain. That's not change. Mordy Oberstein: It's changing. Crystal Carter: *Crystal Singing* Mordy Oberstein: Behind the scenes. I'm making a bar mitzvah for my kids in a few weeks, so my wife wants to do a video montage thing. Crystal Carter: Aw. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So I had to Google what are video montage songs for life events and changes came up. I'm like, oh, that's a good one. Crystal Carter: Yeah. That is a good song. That's a good song. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good song. A bunch of other stuff came up that wasn't so good, but whatever. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: These listicles. Anyway, I always end with something spicy. Thanks for joining us on the SERPs Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with a new episode we dive into how to new SEO clients, low and inside. That's a baseball reference. 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... I can't do it today. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the WIX SEO Learning Hub at you guessed at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us your 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

Audits are always fun, right? SEO Audits doubly so! On this episode of the SERP’s Up Podcast, we dive into the different types of SEO audits. Learn how deep you should go with your site audits, how to handle all the information these audits throw your way, and when to ignore half the information. Specializing in technical SEO audits with 10+ years of experience and over 100+ audits, Olga Zarr’s the one to join the SERP’s Up team this week. She breaks down SEO audits in a simple manner so you can do it right the first time and with ultimate efficiency. Join Mordy and Crystal and learn how to audit your SEO efforts with less friction. Back How far do you go down the site audit wormhole? Audits are always fun, right? SEO Audits doubly so! On this episode of the SERP’s Up Podcast, we dive into the different types of SEO audits. Learn how deep you should go with your site audits, how to handle all the information these audits throw your way, and when to ignore half the information. Specializing in technical SEO audits with 10+ years of experience and over 100+ audits, Olga Zarr’s the one to join the SERP’s Up team this week. She breaks down SEO audits in a simple manner so you can do it right the first time and with ultimate efficiency. Join Mordy and Crystal and learn how to audit your SEO efforts with less friction. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 19 | January 4, 2023 | 28 MIN 00:00 / 27:33 This week’s guests Olga Zarzeczna Olga Zarzeczna is an SEO consultant with 10+ years of experience. She has experience working as an in-house SEO, at an SEO agency, as a freelancer, and as an SEO consultant. Olga specializes in technical SEO and conducting in-depth SEO audits. She is the founder and CEO of SEOSLY. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast reporting. Got some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding over here at Wix, and I'm joined by our wonderful, fantastic, our fabulous head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, glorious Internet people. I hope you're having a wonderful, fantastic, incredible, top-ranking day. Mordy Oberstein: We are. Crystal Carter: We are. Mordy Oberstein: We just talked about the SERP's Up podcast and where we're ranking on Google and in the Google variant, the multiple carousels that show SEO podcast. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's a really cool carousel. And yeah, we're on there. We're very pleased. We've done some work on that. We've optimized ourselves. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP’s Up is up. Always important to celebrate wins in SEO. Crystal Carter: This is true. It's very important. I literally do a dance at my desk whenever I win, and that's cool. Mordy Oberstein: So you're always dancing at your desk? Crystal Carter: I'm always dancing. It's really good for you. It's good for the lumbar, it's good for making sure you keep everything circulating. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. All right. That's a way to optimize your life right here. Crystal Carter: Life hacks. Yeah. Do you know what, actually, I did give a live hack. I found one the other day and I was like, oh my God, I should post this. The world needs to know, basically, if you have something that you want to send as a gift and it's got a price tag on it, one of those little sticker price tags, take a nice hot cup of coffee or something and sit it on the price tag and it'll warm up the adhesive and then you can... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's also great for when my kids put stickers on the floor, on the tile floor. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Like if you got a mug of coffee, it's got a flat bottom on the mug, like stick it on there. Mordy Oberstein: All right, SEO tips and life hacks here on the service sub podcast, which by the way is brought to you by Wix, where you can audit your site's accessibility with ease, with our very own and very novel accessibility wizard. So you can see things like where your color contrast is not suited for the visually impaired, where you're missing alt texts, which is also really important for those relying on TTS readers and more all of the accessibility wizard inside of Wix and a good thing we're talking about accessibility audits, because today's show is all about SEO audits. Wow, look at that. Totally right into that. Crystal Carter: Almost as if you planned it. Mordy Oberstein: Celebrate your wins. Celebrate your wins. Crystal Carter: Every day. Mordy Oberstein: Every time you celebrate your wins, check this one out. You might say, we're running an audible today. Get it, an audible? As in an audible, it's a terrible American football joke. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Should I celebrate a win there? Crystal Carter: Yeah, no. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe not. Okay. Okay. Jokes aside, SEO audits are no joke. And for many they are no fun, but have no fear. We're all about fun here as we dive into the different types of SEO audits, how deep you should go with your site audits, how to handle all the information these audits throw your way and when to know when ignore half of all the information these audits throw your way. Don't you feel better already, don't you feel better already? Crystal Carter: I feel like we've done an exhaustive survey and I feel much better, and I feel like we have some actionable things that we can do… Mordy Oberstein: And we're telling you not to worry about half the stuff, so it's perfect. Plus, we'll look at a great tool to help you as you march towards site audit success. And of course, we have your snappy news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness as we open an investigation that is Episode 19 of the SERP'Up SEO podcast. Hooray. Crystal Carter: Cool. Okay, so today we're going to be talking about SEO audits. And essentially when we think about as an intro to auditing, I think it's important to think about the different kinds of SEO audit types that there are. So broadly speaking, speaking super broadly, because of course it depends because this is SEO, there tends to be three different kinds of SEO sections shall we say, so there's like on-page SEO, there's off-page SEO, and there's technical SEO just as a super broad thing so we can move forward. I know it gets very nuanced, but just stay with me here. So within each of those, there's different kinds of audits within that. So if you think about on-page SEO for instance, there are content audits. So you might do a content audit around the content quality. So you might look at the keywords and whether or not they're relevant, you might look at the performance of the pages that have the content on them. You might also look at the visibility compared to your competitors. You might also look at the visibility compared to different SERP features and things like that. In the on-page space, there's also things like your content framework. So things like your H-1s, your H-2s, your titles, your meta descriptions, your images, whether you have images, whether you should have images, that sort of thing. So that on-page SEO can have a lot of different audits. And even within that there are further audits that you can do drilling down into some of those things. But those two tend to be some of the main ones, the main types of audits that people will get into. We think about off-page SEO, this tends to be about backlinks and referral traffic and referrers, so those two can tend to fall into two categories. One is sort of backlink quality and quantity, which is essentially where you're looking at the number of back links that you have and you're looking at whether or not they're relevant, and you're looking at how they compare to your competitors and things like that. And the other one kind of going on from that is backlink gaps. So it might be that you're looking at your vertical, let's say you're in, I don't know, biking and you have a bike shop and you might see that across your vertical lots of people have backlinks from mountain bike.com or Mountain Bike Magazine or something like that. That's a backlink gap that you might need to think about and think about maybe getting on there. So finding that information is really, really valuable going forward. And then you get into technical SEO, and technical SEO can have a couple of different audits, but I think as somebody who's done a lot of these segment SEO audits, I think you can split them into essentially two camps. And then again they get more nuanced after that, but the things that are around your tech stack, which is essentially the tools that connect to your website to make your website work all together, which they tend to be lots of different things. So this might include your security framework, like your RSS and your server security might also have to do with your server configuration, and whether or not that works for what you need or whether you not you should be on a cloud server or that sort of thing. And also things around page feed and performance, which again can have to do with on-page things, can have to do with your infrastructure elements, things like that. Then we have within that also tech implementation, so things like schema validation and whether or not your schema is working on your site or if it should be on your site. Things like crawl management, whether pages are being indexed and that sort of thing. So from that description you can understand that there's lots of different types of audits. And within SEO you can have somebody who does a full deep dive on one thing or another depending on what's required and depending on what they see from their initial audit. But what's really important for any kind of audit is that it gives you a broad overview of what you're looking but that also gives you actionables. One thing that I cannot stand that drives me absolutely mad is when people do an audit and they just say, "Oh, all these things are broken," an audit without recommendations is not helpful to anyone. It's really, really useful to include in an audit, you should always include some recommendation and you should always include some priorities of what to do next. And that I think is really, really valuable. And I think it's a really great thing about a good SEO audit. Mordy Oberstein: So the one thing about SEO audits is, by the way, that was prolific in an explanation, we should take that out and frame it somewhere. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know how you'd frame an audio clip, but I would love to try. But I think one of the things about audits are, because there's so vast, there's so many things we can do with it that, and you get so much information back, it could be a little bit overwhelming. Even if you're running your traditional, we'll call it a "site audit." You take a tool, you take in your Semrush, aHREFs or Lumars of the world, there's plenty of tools out there, Screaming Frog, and you can get a ton of information back. You get information back related to are you missing title tags or are you missing meta descriptions? But do you have real errors, do you have broken links? So you have duplicate content, thin content, structured, it's kind of overwhelming. And then beyond that, there's all sorts of, they're typically called "warnings" inside of the tools and the warnings, I have warnings about warnings. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. The warnings are interesting, because sometimes they can be dependent on each other. So sometimes it can say like, "Oh, you have a broken image on this." And then it'll also say like, "Oh, you have a 404 on this." So it'll say you've got two errors or warnings, but actually there's just one, there's one broken link that's an image link and it's causing, it's flagging up two errors. So it's important to understand when you're auditing what they're looking at and what they're covering. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and then so when you look at all of that and you see these astronomical numbers, 5 million errors and 300 warnings and blah, blah, blah, blah, it's a little overwhelming, and my best advice to you is it's all about opportunity cost. You don't get a medal or a star or trophy for whatever it is for getting a zero in all these audits saying "No, no errors, no warnings. You get an award, you get an award and you get an award." It's all about what's the value to the site, and what's important to the site. And it might be that ignoring a whole bunch of warnings, even some of the errors, and writing a new piece of content or putting your blast blog post on social media and it has nothing to do with the site audit is actually more of an opportunity cost, more valuable than fixing that particular error or warning. Crystal Carter: I did a recent video with Google and I was talking about redirect loops that I found out on a site, and I've had people who were junior SEOs ring their hands being like, oh, I have to fix all these 404s. How do I fix all these 404s? And again, thinking about opportunity costs, and I talked about this on the Google session, was that sometimes you can just delete the link. Instead of going through and fixing all those 404s, ask yourself, do I need to have that link there anyway? If not, just delete it. If you delete it, it's not broken because it ain't there. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Crystal Carter: Sometimes it's just like you don't actually need to fix it, you can just get rid of it. Mordy Oberstein: And a great framework for what I was asking, I talked to Ari Zilberstein about this one time on Twitter, ask why it's important. Ask like, why this like oh, oh, broken links, broken links, okay, why is that a problem? Crystal Carter: So I do a lot of stuff around schema and Google's rich results testing tool. I always get a lot of people who are super confused about that because it will give you warnings. It'll say, "Oh, you don't have the offer on this particular product," or "Oh, you don't have this brand," or "Oh, you don't have that," or "Oh, you don't have this." And it'll say "yellow, warning." Well, the thing about yellow warning is that it's optional. It says a lot of times it'll say optional. And sometimes having something that has some of the information is better than having nothing. And sometimes if it says optional, sometimes you don't need it. Sometimes a lot of those tools will... They're great and fantastic tools and I use them all the time, but they're trying to serve everyone on the web and not everyone on the web needs every single line of schema. Sometimes they just need the essentials. And that's fine. You need to make that quality assessment and judgment. Mordy Oberstein: And speaking to everyone on the web, I feel like a lot of the tools are trying to speak to everybody on the web and that could be a little bit problematic. And I'm not trying to make any judgments on any of the tools out there, but one of the things that they try to do is they try to speak to everybody about all the various things on their website. And because by the way, I think historically speaking, a lot of these tools were developed during an era of SEO that was a lot more spammy-ish than it is now, I think, putting my foot on a landmine there, but there'll be things that they'll come back to you on that just aren't real. Low code to text A to HTML ratio, blah, blah, blah is not a thing. You can go on Twitter, you can find John Mueller saying, "Not a thing." Crystal Carter: And then sometimes I've seen it where people will flag you on duplicate content for having the same meta title, the same page title, and the same like H-1. And I'm like, "That's not really a big deal." You could argue that, you could argue that there's an opportunity to add another keyword or something to that effect. You could argue that, but it's not really that big a deal. It's not really something that you should be keeping yourself up at night about. Mordy Oberstein: Brace yourself. I mean, maybe you'll disagree with me, but when the tools come back and they say, "Oh, meta description too long," I say, "Snore, don't care." Crystal Carter: This is the reason why I think it's important to prioritize your audit findings, because there's going to be tons of those things where that are a snore or that are not a big deal, or that historically speaking, so for instance, there's sometimes tech debt on websites where they tried it one time or there's just a thing that they just can't fix because it's not a thing. And that happens on lots of websites. So somebody who knows the tech debt for instance can go, "No, we don't even want to go down that route." I know somebody who used to live in a really old house, but do you know people that have ever done remodeling where you think, "Oh, we'll just change the wallpaper and you pull the wallpaper off and half the wall comes out." That's the thing that can happen with websites, essentially. So sometimes if you know the tech debt of the website, you can say, "No, we're just not going to poke that bear today, but we can do this other thing." Like you said, we can do this other thing. We're going to write this content, we can keep moving forward. That's what I find generally is when you do an audit, you want to find ways where you can just keep moving forward. And some of the things in your audit might be things that you can work at, work towards over a long term fixing, but you want to find things that you can prior- and this is again where the prioritizing comes from, where you say, well this thing will give us a big impact fairly quickly and then this thing will take us a little bit longer to do, but will give us a big impact after that. And so if you just keep building and keep building momentum, then that can help you to see SEO growth because Google can see that you're constantly improving the website. Mordy Oberstein: It's not about being perfect, it's about making progress. It's about prioritizing and scrutinizing the tools. And how deep do you have to go into your SEO audit? It depends on what you're looking to do and what you need. Crystal Carter: And also use multiple tools. Mordy Oberstein: That's true too. And there are a lot of tools out there. There are free tools out there. Crystal Carter: There's free tools out there. So always compare any third party tool, always compare it to the Google Search console, always check Google Search Console on another tool. If you have no money at all, if you have no budget, zero budget, you can use Google Search Console and you can use Bing Webmaster Tools and you can compare those two and see a lot of information from that. And there's a lot of tools that are freemium as well that will allow you to get some good audits. Mordy Oberstein: And pro tip, if you run an audit and you're like, "Something looks weird here," run it again instead of using a third party tool, because sometimes they are a little wonky, for lack of better word. Crystal Carter: Right. And also for a cloud configuration, sometimes when people connect to a cloud server, you might see different activity at one time or another. So run it a few times, check it a few different ways. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of prioritizing your site audit recommendations, we have the wonderful Olga Zarr from SEO Sly here to share her thoughts on how do you prioritize your SEO audit recommendations. Olga Zarr: We need to take a lot of things into account. First, the most important thing is what type of site you are dealing with and how possible, how likely it is that all or most of your SEO recommendations will be implemented. It is of course a different case if you're dealing with a huge e-comm site and where there is five or 10 people who are going to decide whether they're okay with implementing those changes. And it is a totally different story if you are dealing with a small site over which you have a total control and you yourself can implement all of those recommendations. So in most cases we can assume that just some of them will be implemented. So the way I suggest doing that is always start with the most critical ones, then go to quick SEO wins, and then the things that are kind of nice to have. So the critical optimizations are the ones that actually hinder the site right away, that make the site definitely not realize its full potential or even prevents it from ranking like a no index tag or something on some page where it definitely shouldn't be. Or for example, some crawlability issues where Google is not able to crawl the site or render it correctly. So these are those types of things that have to be implemented right away, and they usually can bring relatively quick effects. For example, if the site is not indexed and the client is coming to you to fix the problem because they're not getting any impressions or any, for example, clicks. And if you just fix that usually you will be able to bring relatively of course, quick results. The second type of optimizations prioritization you should do is quick SEO wins. Again, SEO is not for quick results, but with quick SEO wins, uncovering some hidden potential you usually can bring quicker results. What are quick SEO wins? For example, you can try to find pages which are ranking relatively highly already. For example, on the top of page two or on top of page one. And even with position one, they will actually be able to get some traffic. But because of course you have to take into account like how the SERP looks, because not always position one is going to get you traffic. But there are cases where it's definitely worth being one or you may also try to get this featured snippet or move the site to the map pack, to the carousel, whatever. So those quick wins usually are a good idea and are usually something that will let your audit have biggest and quicker effect. Another type of those prioritizations, quick SEO optimizations is when you work on internal linking, especially if internal linking hasn't been worked on, usually this is a quick, quick SEO win. And then the third part of optimization, nice to have, which are of course will help the site or will help the site in the long run, but those two are the ones you should be paying attention to the most, the critical mistakes and the quick SEO wins. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Olga. I totally agree. And leave SEO aside for a quick second. When you're dealing with a website and you have all these tasks, whether it be from the site art itself or whatever you're trying to work on, it can feel overwhelming and sometimes as a person, as a human being, you need to have some things that you feel like I can accomplish and do and kind of check off the box. So don't ignore that factor of it because it's so true. Crystal Carter: It's so valuable. And I think that when you're working with clients or you're working with a team, it's also really important to think about, because if people don't see, she talked a little bit about quick wins and about things that are beating you. And if people can't see green shoots within the first sort of month or two of what you're doing, then people start to lose interest. And it can be tricky because if you're working on an SEO project where you want to show that the value of the SEO and things like that. So if you can identify things that are going to be able to show some results, it doesn't have to be, you don't have to set the world on fire straight away, but if you can show that it's moving things forward, that's really, really useful. And again, I think this is one of the places where somebody who has some SEO experience can be really, really of value because they can know not only what to audit and what to prioritize, but also how to evidence it after the fact as well. Mordy Oberstein: Totally true. So don't forget to take that advice and don't forget to follow Olga Zarr over on Twitter at O-L-G-A Z-A-R-R on Twitter. We'll link to it in the show notes. So as we're talking about site audits, obviously we're talking about site audits if you've been listening thus far. There are many, many, many tools out there and we figured out what we would do on this episode is kind of highlight just one of those tools that are out there for you. Again, there's a lot of tools, but here's one for you as we go Tool Time on the SERP's UP Podcast. This week we're looking at a tool that used to be called DeepCrawl. It's kind of like Prince, the artist formerly known as DeepCrawl. Now it's called Lumar. So Lumar has been around, or DeepCrawl previously it's been around, they were, I would say one of the first, first really serious SEO tools that ran all kinds of audits and really deep audits. And you can kind of get lost in it because there's so many different audits that they're offering you, which is why we're recommending that you have a look at Lumar and dive into it because they do things like tell you not just on the technical side, they'll do things on the content side as well. Again, do you have thin content? Which on the content side, again, I don't worry about meta descriptions too much, but if thin content comes back, I might want to look at that. Sometimes you just have thin content, it's a page where you sign up for a newsletter, it's going to be thin, but sometimes maybe I really do need to flush that out. And that by the way, I've personally seen where you find those kind of things, and there's a correlation between that and pages that are not indexed because they're too thin. Crystal Carter: What I really like about Lumar is that they get really into the details, particularly on some of the technical elements and they break it down and you can configure the crawl really easily to your tech configuration. So if you have a site that's using a lot of JavaScript for instance, and you can configure it to show that sort of thing. So they have a really good tool that talks about render count so you can see whether the links are rendered and whether that matches how many links are on the page. And these are things that get right into the details of your website. So I think that's really great, and I think thinking about how you can configure your crawl is absolutely important for any auditing session because it's so easy to pat yourself on the back for a hundred percent when you've only crawled three pages Mordy Oberstein: And they make it real easy on the setup to configure that crawl. It's really something with the tools. You have to dive into a settings button in order to configure the crawl. But it's right as you set up the new project, they walk you through the configuration right there. And they have a really cool internal link reporting, which I think is super valuable to tell you if you have orphan pages and so forth. And it's a whole separate report. So the way they break it down is really nice. And I feel like we have to mention if you're using Wix, it's not called Lumar yet, it's still called DeepCrawl, apologies, I guess there's a DeepCrawl app. It offers you a really nice, pretty simplistic breakdown. I say "simplistic" in a good way because we don't want to get overly involved and overly caught up in the whole reporting world about site audits, if you're an SMB, if you're like, "Hey, I got this thing covered, but I do want to do an audit." It's a pretty inexpensive nice way of getting both the technical breakdown of the website and the content breakdown audit of the website as well. So definitely check out the Wix app market for the DeepCrawl app there. Nice. Lumar. Crystal Carter: It's great. It's a great tool. Mordy Oberstein: I like their design language now. Crystal Carter: I like their design language too. I think they've done some really great stuff. They've got a great team there as well. So I've done a webinar with their team recently actually on site audits and there's a great writeup on it and I think the deck is available there as well. So we did the webinar in the summer, so please check that out because it's really awesome. I'm not just saying that, but I mean there's a lot of, not just saying that it's awesome because of me, but also because there's a lot of good information there and their team is just so knowledgeable and they do some great … Mordy Oberstein: Now have featured them in Indigo in weeks past as a Follow of the Week, so full circle right there. With that, let's audit the latest in what's going on in the SEO news because it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, just one tidbit of news for you this week because although it's been relatively quiet because of the holiday season. Happy New Year's to you all from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google helpful content update and link spam update delayed rollout due to holidays. According to Barry, Google officially confirmed that the helpful content update needs more time to roll out, but now the link spam update is also past the two-week mark and it is not done rolling out yet either. John Mueller of Google said these updates may take longer to complete due to the holidays and for safety reasons. So before the holidays, Google is running the helpful content update and the link spam update, the helpful content update's roll-out was prolonged. It did not finish yet, neither did the link spam update. It's going to finish sometime, I guess now-ish. Now the holiday season is over. There were reports of elevated rank volatility as seen on tools like the December sensor and Moscas around New Year's time. That clearly is not the link spam update or the helpful content update because Google said they paused that. So you may expect to see some increase in rank volatility either happening right now as we speak, or in the coming days perhaps, who knows? But theoretically it's coming. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on this new year, but I don't control the news. I just report on it. And with that, that is the snappiest of Snappy News. Back to the show. All right, that was the Snappiest News. Crystal Carter: That news was great, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, I love auditing the news. I love auditing everything except for my taxes. But audits are great til the IRS The which I have been audited, it's not fun. Crystal Carter: Oh my God. Mordy Oberstein: It's not fun. I'm an expat, so my taxes are kind of complicated and by default, I didn't do anything wrong. Everything was fine in the end, but they told me I owe $10,000 dollars, "I'm like, oh my God, I cannot, I cannot..." In the end, it was fine. We're good. So audit your sites. Audit your client sites. Don't be audited by the IRS, that's not fun. Yeah, real life advice, again on the SERP's Up SEO Podcast. Anyway, before we do leave the park, we do need to talk about our Follow of the Week because that's what we do. We leave you with somebody who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness each and every week on social media. And this week your follow of the week is Dan White. Crystal Carter: So yeah, Dan White is a fantastic SEO, I worked with him on my previous team and he is also the president of the DMU, which is the Digital Marketers Union. And he is a great SEO. He has a fantastic article about site audits and he's incredibly knowledgeable. I've seen his work firsthand. I've seen how meticulous he is about updating and auditing websites firsthand. He's a great follow for lots of reasons. And the DMU is a fantastic resource for freelancers and for other SEOs who are involved in the SEO community. And it allows you to sort of connect with other SEOs and it allows you to share resources and share information. So yeah, he's a great follow for lots of reasons. He's also a nice guy. Mordy Oberstein: That's another reason to follow him. I always like following nice people. Crystal Carter: Obviously, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it's not so obvious in social media sometimes, but I'm glad that works out this time. All right, well, I guess that's it. We're done auditing. Crystal Carter: We're done. Do we have some actionables? Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: Surely the actionable is to tune in next week for the next episode of the SERP's Up podcast... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love that! Crystal Carter: Where you will have lots more... Mordy Oberstein: We're going to be covering how to adapt the changes on the SERP, look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, checking all the great content 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 we're running on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Olga Zarr Dan White Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Lumar Lumar (Formerly DeepCrawl) on Wix News: Google Helpful Content Update & Link Spam Update Delayed Rollout Due To Holidays Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Olga Zarr Dan White Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Lumar Lumar (Formerly DeepCrawl) on Wix News: Google Helpful Content Update & Link Spam Update Delayed Rollout Due To Holidays Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast reporting. Got some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding over here at Wix, and I'm joined by our wonderful, fantastic, our fabulous head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, glorious Internet people. I hope you're having a wonderful, fantastic, incredible, top-ranking day. Mordy Oberstein: We are. Crystal Carter: We are. Mordy Oberstein: We just talked about the SERP's Up podcast and where we're ranking on Google and in the Google variant, the multiple carousels that show SEO podcast. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's a really cool carousel. And yeah, we're on there. We're very pleased. We've done some work on that. We've optimized ourselves. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP’s Up is up. Always important to celebrate wins in SEO. Crystal Carter: This is true. It's very important. I literally do a dance at my desk whenever I win, and that's cool. Mordy Oberstein: So you're always dancing at your desk? Crystal Carter: I'm always dancing. It's really good for you. It's good for the lumbar, it's good for making sure you keep everything circulating. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. All right. That's a way to optimize your life right here. Crystal Carter: Life hacks. Yeah. Do you know what, actually, I did give a live hack. I found one the other day and I was like, oh my God, I should post this. The world needs to know, basically, if you have something that you want to send as a gift and it's got a price tag on it, one of those little sticker price tags, take a nice hot cup of coffee or something and sit it on the price tag and it'll warm up the adhesive and then you can... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, that's also great for when my kids put stickers on the floor, on the tile floor. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Like if you got a mug of coffee, it's got a flat bottom on the mug, like stick it on there. Mordy Oberstein: All right, SEO tips and life hacks here on the service sub podcast, which by the way is brought to you by Wix, where you can audit your site's accessibility with ease, with our very own and very novel accessibility wizard. So you can see things like where your color contrast is not suited for the visually impaired, where you're missing alt texts, which is also really important for those relying on TTS readers and more all of the accessibility wizard inside of Wix and a good thing we're talking about accessibility audits, because today's show is all about SEO audits. Wow, look at that. Totally right into that. Crystal Carter: Almost as if you planned it. Mordy Oberstein: Celebrate your wins. Celebrate your wins. Crystal Carter: Every day. Mordy Oberstein: Every time you celebrate your wins, check this one out. You might say, we're running an audible today. Get it, an audible? As in an audible, it's a terrible American football joke. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Should I celebrate a win there? Crystal Carter: Yeah, no. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe not. Okay. Okay. Jokes aside, SEO audits are no joke. And for many they are no fun, but have no fear. We're all about fun here as we dive into the different types of SEO audits, how deep you should go with your site audits, how to handle all the information these audits throw your way and when to know when ignore half of all the information these audits throw your way. Don't you feel better already, don't you feel better already? Crystal Carter: I feel like we've done an exhaustive survey and I feel much better, and I feel like we have some actionable things that we can do… Mordy Oberstein: And we're telling you not to worry about half the stuff, so it's perfect. Plus, we'll look at a great tool to help you as you march towards site audit success. And of course, we have your snappy news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness as we open an investigation that is Episode 19 of the SERP'Up SEO podcast. Hooray. Crystal Carter: Cool. Okay, so today we're going to be talking about SEO audits. And essentially when we think about as an intro to auditing, I think it's important to think about the different kinds of SEO audit types that there are. So broadly speaking, speaking super broadly, because of course it depends because this is SEO, there tends to be three different kinds of SEO sections shall we say, so there's like on-page SEO, there's off-page SEO, and there's technical SEO just as a super broad thing so we can move forward. I know it gets very nuanced, but just stay with me here. So within each of those, there's different kinds of audits within that. So if you think about on-page SEO for instance, there are content audits. So you might do a content audit around the content quality. So you might look at the keywords and whether or not they're relevant, you might look at the performance of the pages that have the content on them. You might also look at the visibility compared to your competitors. You might also look at the visibility compared to different SERP features and things like that. In the on-page space, there's also things like your content framework. So things like your H-1s, your H-2s, your titles, your meta descriptions, your images, whether you have images, whether you should have images, that sort of thing. So that on-page SEO can have a lot of different audits. And even within that there are further audits that you can do drilling down into some of those things. But those two tend to be some of the main ones, the main types of audits that people will get into. We think about off-page SEO, this tends to be about backlinks and referral traffic and referrers, so those two can tend to fall into two categories. One is sort of backlink quality and quantity, which is essentially where you're looking at the number of back links that you have and you're looking at whether or not they're relevant, and you're looking at how they compare to your competitors and things like that. And the other one kind of going on from that is backlink gaps. So it might be that you're looking at your vertical, let's say you're in, I don't know, biking and you have a bike shop and you might see that across your vertical lots of people have backlinks from mountain bike.com or Mountain Bike Magazine or something like that. That's a backlink gap that you might need to think about and think about maybe getting on there. So finding that information is really, really valuable going forward. And then you get into technical SEO, and technical SEO can have a couple of different audits, but I think as somebody who's done a lot of these segment SEO audits, I think you can split them into essentially two camps. And then again they get more nuanced after that, but the things that are around your tech stack, which is essentially the tools that connect to your website to make your website work all together, which they tend to be lots of different things. So this might include your security framework, like your RSS and your server security might also have to do with your server configuration, and whether or not that works for what you need or whether you not you should be on a cloud server or that sort of thing. And also things around page feed and performance, which again can have to do with on-page things, can have to do with your infrastructure elements, things like that. Then we have within that also tech implementation, so things like schema validation and whether or not your schema is working on your site or if it should be on your site. Things like crawl management, whether pages are being indexed and that sort of thing. So from that description you can understand that there's lots of different types of audits. And within SEO you can have somebody who does a full deep dive on one thing or another depending on what's required and depending on what they see from their initial audit. But what's really important for any kind of audit is that it gives you a broad overview of what you're looking but that also gives you actionables. One thing that I cannot stand that drives me absolutely mad is when people do an audit and they just say, "Oh, all these things are broken," an audit without recommendations is not helpful to anyone. It's really, really useful to include in an audit, you should always include some recommendation and you should always include some priorities of what to do next. And that I think is really, really valuable. And I think it's a really great thing about a good SEO audit. Mordy Oberstein: So the one thing about SEO audits is, by the way, that was prolific in an explanation, we should take that out and frame it somewhere. Crystal Carter: Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know how you'd frame an audio clip, but I would love to try. But I think one of the things about audits are, because there's so vast, there's so many things we can do with it that, and you get so much information back, it could be a little bit overwhelming. Even if you're running your traditional, we'll call it a "site audit." You take a tool, you take in your Semrush, aHREFs or Lumars of the world, there's plenty of tools out there, Screaming Frog, and you can get a ton of information back. You get information back related to are you missing title tags or are you missing meta descriptions? But do you have real errors, do you have broken links? So you have duplicate content, thin content, structured, it's kind of overwhelming. And then beyond that, there's all sorts of, they're typically called "warnings" inside of the tools and the warnings, I have warnings about warnings. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah. The warnings are interesting, because sometimes they can be dependent on each other. So sometimes it can say like, "Oh, you have a broken image on this." And then it'll also say like, "Oh, you have a 404 on this." So it'll say you've got two errors or warnings, but actually there's just one, there's one broken link that's an image link and it's causing, it's flagging up two errors. So it's important to understand when you're auditing what they're looking at and what they're covering. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and then so when you look at all of that and you see these astronomical numbers, 5 million errors and 300 warnings and blah, blah, blah, blah, it's a little overwhelming, and my best advice to you is it's all about opportunity cost. You don't get a medal or a star or trophy for whatever it is for getting a zero in all these audits saying "No, no errors, no warnings. You get an award, you get an award and you get an award." It's all about what's the value to the site, and what's important to the site. And it might be that ignoring a whole bunch of warnings, even some of the errors, and writing a new piece of content or putting your blast blog post on social media and it has nothing to do with the site audit is actually more of an opportunity cost, more valuable than fixing that particular error or warning. Crystal Carter: I did a recent video with Google and I was talking about redirect loops that I found out on a site, and I've had people who were junior SEOs ring their hands being like, oh, I have to fix all these 404s. How do I fix all these 404s? And again, thinking about opportunity costs, and I talked about this on the Google session, was that sometimes you can just delete the link. Instead of going through and fixing all those 404s, ask yourself, do I need to have that link there anyway? If not, just delete it. If you delete it, it's not broken because it ain't there. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Crystal Carter: Sometimes it's just like you don't actually need to fix it, you can just get rid of it. Mordy Oberstein: And a great framework for what I was asking, I talked to Ari Zilberstein about this one time on Twitter, ask why it's important. Ask like, why this like oh, oh, broken links, broken links, okay, why is that a problem? Crystal Carter: So I do a lot of stuff around schema and Google's rich results testing tool. I always get a lot of people who are super confused about that because it will give you warnings. It'll say, "Oh, you don't have the offer on this particular product," or "Oh, you don't have this brand," or "Oh, you don't have that," or "Oh, you don't have this." And it'll say "yellow, warning." Well, the thing about yellow warning is that it's optional. It says a lot of times it'll say optional. And sometimes having something that has some of the information is better than having nothing. And sometimes if it says optional, sometimes you don't need it. Sometimes a lot of those tools will... They're great and fantastic tools and I use them all the time, but they're trying to serve everyone on the web and not everyone on the web needs every single line of schema. Sometimes they just need the essentials. And that's fine. You need to make that quality assessment and judgment. Mordy Oberstein: And speaking to everyone on the web, I feel like a lot of the tools are trying to speak to everybody on the web and that could be a little bit problematic. And I'm not trying to make any judgments on any of the tools out there, but one of the things that they try to do is they try to speak to everybody about all the various things on their website. And because by the way, I think historically speaking, a lot of these tools were developed during an era of SEO that was a lot more spammy-ish than it is now, I think, putting my foot on a landmine there, but there'll be things that they'll come back to you on that just aren't real. Low code to text A to HTML ratio, blah, blah, blah is not a thing. You can go on Twitter, you can find John Mueller saying, "Not a thing." Crystal Carter: And then sometimes I've seen it where people will flag you on duplicate content for having the same meta title, the same page title, and the same like H-1. And I'm like, "That's not really a big deal." You could argue that, you could argue that there's an opportunity to add another keyword or something to that effect. You could argue that, but it's not really that big a deal. It's not really something that you should be keeping yourself up at night about. Mordy Oberstein: Brace yourself. I mean, maybe you'll disagree with me, but when the tools come back and they say, "Oh, meta description too long," I say, "Snore, don't care." Crystal Carter: This is the reason why I think it's important to prioritize your audit findings, because there's going to be tons of those things where that are a snore or that are not a big deal, or that historically speaking, so for instance, there's sometimes tech debt on websites where they tried it one time or there's just a thing that they just can't fix because it's not a thing. And that happens on lots of websites. So somebody who knows the tech debt for instance can go, "No, we don't even want to go down that route." I know somebody who used to live in a really old house, but do you know people that have ever done remodeling where you think, "Oh, we'll just change the wallpaper and you pull the wallpaper off and half the wall comes out." That's the thing that can happen with websites, essentially. So sometimes if you know the tech debt of the website, you can say, "No, we're just not going to poke that bear today, but we can do this other thing." Like you said, we can do this other thing. We're going to write this content, we can keep moving forward. That's what I find generally is when you do an audit, you want to find ways where you can just keep moving forward. And some of the things in your audit might be things that you can work at, work towards over a long term fixing, but you want to find things that you can prior- and this is again where the prioritizing comes from, where you say, well this thing will give us a big impact fairly quickly and then this thing will take us a little bit longer to do, but will give us a big impact after that. And so if you just keep building and keep building momentum, then that can help you to see SEO growth because Google can see that you're constantly improving the website. Mordy Oberstein: It's not about being perfect, it's about making progress. It's about prioritizing and scrutinizing the tools. And how deep do you have to go into your SEO audit? It depends on what you're looking to do and what you need. Crystal Carter: And also use multiple tools. Mordy Oberstein: That's true too. And there are a lot of tools out there. There are free tools out there. Crystal Carter: There's free tools out there. So always compare any third party tool, always compare it to the Google Search console, always check Google Search Console on another tool. If you have no money at all, if you have no budget, zero budget, you can use Google Search Console and you can use Bing Webmaster Tools and you can compare those two and see a lot of information from that. And there's a lot of tools that are freemium as well that will allow you to get some good audits. Mordy Oberstein: And pro tip, if you run an audit and you're like, "Something looks weird here," run it again instead of using a third party tool, because sometimes they are a little wonky, for lack of better word. Crystal Carter: Right. And also for a cloud configuration, sometimes when people connect to a cloud server, you might see different activity at one time or another. So run it a few times, check it a few different ways. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of prioritizing your site audit recommendations, we have the wonderful Olga Zarr from SEO Sly here to share her thoughts on how do you prioritize your SEO audit recommendations. Olga Zarr: We need to take a lot of things into account. First, the most important thing is what type of site you are dealing with and how possible, how likely it is that all or most of your SEO recommendations will be implemented. It is of course a different case if you're dealing with a huge e-comm site and where there is five or 10 people who are going to decide whether they're okay with implementing those changes. And it is a totally different story if you are dealing with a small site over which you have a total control and you yourself can implement all of those recommendations. So in most cases we can assume that just some of them will be implemented. So the way I suggest doing that is always start with the most critical ones, then go to quick SEO wins, and then the things that are kind of nice to have. So the critical optimizations are the ones that actually hinder the site right away, that make the site definitely not realize its full potential or even prevents it from ranking like a no index tag or something on some page where it definitely shouldn't be. Or for example, some crawlability issues where Google is not able to crawl the site or render it correctly. So these are those types of things that have to be implemented right away, and they usually can bring relatively quick effects. For example, if the site is not indexed and the client is coming to you to fix the problem because they're not getting any impressions or any, for example, clicks. And if you just fix that usually you will be able to bring relatively of course, quick results. The second type of optimizations prioritization you should do is quick SEO wins. Again, SEO is not for quick results, but with quick SEO wins, uncovering some hidden potential you usually can bring quicker results. What are quick SEO wins? For example, you can try to find pages which are ranking relatively highly already. For example, on the top of page two or on top of page one. And even with position one, they will actually be able to get some traffic. But because of course you have to take into account like how the SERP looks, because not always position one is going to get you traffic. But there are cases where it's definitely worth being one or you may also try to get this featured snippet or move the site to the map pack, to the carousel, whatever. So those quick wins usually are a good idea and are usually something that will let your audit have biggest and quicker effect. Another type of those prioritizations, quick SEO optimizations is when you work on internal linking, especially if internal linking hasn't been worked on, usually this is a quick, quick SEO win. And then the third part of optimization, nice to have, which are of course will help the site or will help the site in the long run, but those two are the ones you should be paying attention to the most, the critical mistakes and the quick SEO wins. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Olga. I totally agree. And leave SEO aside for a quick second. When you're dealing with a website and you have all these tasks, whether it be from the site art itself or whatever you're trying to work on, it can feel overwhelming and sometimes as a person, as a human being, you need to have some things that you feel like I can accomplish and do and kind of check off the box. So don't ignore that factor of it because it's so true. Crystal Carter: It's so valuable. And I think that when you're working with clients or you're working with a team, it's also really important to think about, because if people don't see, she talked a little bit about quick wins and about things that are beating you. And if people can't see green shoots within the first sort of month or two of what you're doing, then people start to lose interest. And it can be tricky because if you're working on an SEO project where you want to show that the value of the SEO and things like that. So if you can identify things that are going to be able to show some results, it doesn't have to be, you don't have to set the world on fire straight away, but if you can show that it's moving things forward, that's really, really useful. And again, I think this is one of the places where somebody who has some SEO experience can be really, really of value because they can know not only what to audit and what to prioritize, but also how to evidence it after the fact as well. Mordy Oberstein: Totally true. So don't forget to take that advice and don't forget to follow Olga Zarr over on Twitter at O-L-G-A Z-A-R-R on Twitter. We'll link to it in the show notes. So as we're talking about site audits, obviously we're talking about site audits if you've been listening thus far. There are many, many, many tools out there and we figured out what we would do on this episode is kind of highlight just one of those tools that are out there for you. Again, there's a lot of tools, but here's one for you as we go Tool Time on the SERP's UP Podcast. This week we're looking at a tool that used to be called DeepCrawl. It's kind of like Prince, the artist formerly known as DeepCrawl. Now it's called Lumar. So Lumar has been around, or DeepCrawl previously it's been around, they were, I would say one of the first, first really serious SEO tools that ran all kinds of audits and really deep audits. And you can kind of get lost in it because there's so many different audits that they're offering you, which is why we're recommending that you have a look at Lumar and dive into it because they do things like tell you not just on the technical side, they'll do things on the content side as well. Again, do you have thin content? Which on the content side, again, I don't worry about meta descriptions too much, but if thin content comes back, I might want to look at that. Sometimes you just have thin content, it's a page where you sign up for a newsletter, it's going to be thin, but sometimes maybe I really do need to flush that out. And that by the way, I've personally seen where you find those kind of things, and there's a correlation between that and pages that are not indexed because they're too thin. Crystal Carter: What I really like about Lumar is that they get really into the details, particularly on some of the technical elements and they break it down and you can configure the crawl really easily to your tech configuration. So if you have a site that's using a lot of JavaScript for instance, and you can configure it to show that sort of thing. So they have a really good tool that talks about render count so you can see whether the links are rendered and whether that matches how many links are on the page. And these are things that get right into the details of your website. So I think that's really great, and I think thinking about how you can configure your crawl is absolutely important for any auditing session because it's so easy to pat yourself on the back for a hundred percent when you've only crawled three pages Mordy Oberstein: And they make it real easy on the setup to configure that crawl. It's really something with the tools. You have to dive into a settings button in order to configure the crawl. But it's right as you set up the new project, they walk you through the configuration right there. And they have a really cool internal link reporting, which I think is super valuable to tell you if you have orphan pages and so forth. And it's a whole separate report. So the way they break it down is really nice. And I feel like we have to mention if you're using Wix, it's not called Lumar yet, it's still called DeepCrawl, apologies, I guess there's a DeepCrawl app. It offers you a really nice, pretty simplistic breakdown. I say "simplistic" in a good way because we don't want to get overly involved and overly caught up in the whole reporting world about site audits, if you're an SMB, if you're like, "Hey, I got this thing covered, but I do want to do an audit." It's a pretty inexpensive nice way of getting both the technical breakdown of the website and the content breakdown audit of the website as well. So definitely check out the Wix app market for the DeepCrawl app there. Nice. Lumar. Crystal Carter: It's great. It's a great tool. Mordy Oberstein: I like their design language now. Crystal Carter: I like their design language too. I think they've done some really great stuff. They've got a great team there as well. So I've done a webinar with their team recently actually on site audits and there's a great writeup on it and I think the deck is available there as well. So we did the webinar in the summer, so please check that out because it's really awesome. I'm not just saying that, but I mean there's a lot of, not just saying that it's awesome because of me, but also because there's a lot of good information there and their team is just so knowledgeable and they do some great … Mordy Oberstein: Now have featured them in Indigo in weeks past as a Follow of the Week, so full circle right there. With that, let's audit the latest in what's going on in the SEO news because it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, just one tidbit of news for you this week because although it's been relatively quiet because of the holiday season. Happy New Year's to you all from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google helpful content update and link spam update delayed rollout due to holidays. According to Barry, Google officially confirmed that the helpful content update needs more time to roll out, but now the link spam update is also past the two-week mark and it is not done rolling out yet either. John Mueller of Google said these updates may take longer to complete due to the holidays and for safety reasons. So before the holidays, Google is running the helpful content update and the link spam update, the helpful content update's roll-out was prolonged. It did not finish yet, neither did the link spam update. It's going to finish sometime, I guess now-ish. Now the holiday season is over. There were reports of elevated rank volatility as seen on tools like the December sensor and Moscas around New Year's time. That clearly is not the link spam update or the helpful content update because Google said they paused that. So you may expect to see some increase in rank volatility either happening right now as we speak, or in the coming days perhaps, who knows? But theoretically it's coming. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on this new year, but I don't control the news. I just report on it. And with that, that is the snappiest of Snappy News. Back to the show. All right, that was the Snappiest News. Crystal Carter: That news was great, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, I love auditing the news. I love auditing everything except for my taxes. But audits are great til the IRS The which I have been audited, it's not fun. Crystal Carter: Oh my God. Mordy Oberstein: It's not fun. I'm an expat, so my taxes are kind of complicated and by default, I didn't do anything wrong. Everything was fine in the end, but they told me I owe $10,000 dollars, "I'm like, oh my God, I cannot, I cannot..." In the end, it was fine. We're good. So audit your sites. Audit your client sites. Don't be audited by the IRS, that's not fun. Yeah, real life advice, again on the SERP's Up SEO Podcast. Anyway, before we do leave the park, we do need to talk about our Follow of the Week because that's what we do. We leave you with somebody who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness each and every week on social media. And this week your follow of the week is Dan White. Crystal Carter: So yeah, Dan White is a fantastic SEO, I worked with him on my previous team and he is also the president of the DMU, which is the Digital Marketers Union. And he is a great SEO. He has a fantastic article about site audits and he's incredibly knowledgeable. I've seen his work firsthand. I've seen how meticulous he is about updating and auditing websites firsthand. He's a great follow for lots of reasons. And the DMU is a fantastic resource for freelancers and for other SEOs who are involved in the SEO community. And it allows you to sort of connect with other SEOs and it allows you to share resources and share information. So yeah, he's a great follow for lots of reasons. He's also a nice guy. Mordy Oberstein: That's another reason to follow him. I always like following nice people. Crystal Carter: Obviously, of course. Mordy Oberstein: Well, it's not so obvious in social media sometimes, but I'm glad that works out this time. All right, well, I guess that's it. We're done auditing. Crystal Carter: We're done. Do we have some actionables? Mordy Oberstein: No. Crystal Carter: Surely the actionable is to tune in next week for the next episode of the SERP's Up podcast... Mordy Oberstein: Oh, I love that! Crystal Carter: Where you will have lots more... Mordy Oberstein: We're going to be covering how to adapt the changes on the SERP, look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, checking all the great content 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 we're running 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

Rob Peck is a T-shaped digital marketer with 14+ years of SEO experience. Specializing in the SERP (organic and paid), Rob consults independently and in collaboration with marketing and branding agencies to drive performance marketing for brands and publishers alike. Rob Peck Performance Digital Marketer Rob Peck is a T-shaped digital marketer with 14+ years of SEO experience. Specializing in the SERP (organic and paid), Rob consults independently and in collaboration with marketing and branding agencies to drive performance marketing for brands and publishers alike. Articles & Resources 26 Nov 2024 Holistic SEO for holistic health: How an SMB site grew during tumultuous algorithm updates [Case study] Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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Colt Sliva is a technical SEO who has experience working with SaaS, eCommerce, UGC Platforms, and News Publishers across the Fortune 500. His main area of study is SEO at scale, automations, and breaking things to see how they really work. Colt Sliva Senior Technical SEO Analyst Colt Sliva is a technical SEO who has experience working with SaaS, eCommerce, UGC Platforms, and News Publishers across the Fortune 500. His main area of study is SEO at scale, automations, and breaking things to see how they really work. Articles & Resources 18 May 2023 How to use Google Trends for SEO: Your quick start guide 1 Sept 2022 Programmatic content expansion with Python and Velo 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 Keyword difficulty assessment matrix Complete this matrix to get a fully-reasoned breakdown of how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keywords in the SERPs. Get 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 matrix to: Assess the true competition of the SERPs Analyze and track the SERPs landscape Understand keyword difficulty in clear language Abby Gleason SEO Product Manager LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Abby Gleason is a content-focused SEO with 7+ years experience leading successful organic search strategies for SaaS and eCommerce brands. She loves to share her learnings and has been published on Moz, Semrush, Search Engine Land and more. More about this topic Read this article about keyword difficulty 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

Back SEO landing page copywriting template Ensure your landing page copy is set up to convert and perform well on search with this SEO template. 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 SEO template to: Ensure your landing pages highlight trustworthiness with features like case studies, and relevant business KPIs Structure landing pages in a way that’s readable See how to create a targeted brief for content writers Outline relevant keyword research Learn how to write SEO-friendly meta data, URLs and headings Understand how to condense and apply research to your content Adriana Stein CEO & Founder, AS Marketing LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and Founder of the marketing agency AS Marketing. She leads a team of multi-language SEO experts who develop holistic international marketing strategies in 30+ languages for global companies. More about this topic Listen to this episode of the SERPs Up podcast for more information on creating pages that work for search. 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

Be indispensable to your clients. Find out how SEO’s and marketers can provide indispensable value to your clients. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter welcome Ignite Visibility’s VP of SEO, Jen Cornwell to talk about the indispensable impact SEO’s and marketers alike bring to their clients. Understand the depth of value SEO agencies can provide to clients, transcending the general SEO perception. Plus, we evaluate what the Google leaks expose about the future of SEO. We have the essentials on being essential on this, the 98th epsiode, of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Being indispensable to your SEO clients Be indispensable to your clients. Find out how SEO’s and marketers can provide indispensable value to your clients. Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter welcome Ignite Visibility’s VP of SEO, Jen Cornwell to talk about the indispensable impact SEO’s and marketers alike bring to their clients. Understand the depth of value SEO agencies can provide to clients, transcending the general SEO perception. Plus, we evaluate what the Google leaks expose about the future of SEO. We have the essentials on being essential on this, the 98th epsiode, of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 98 | July 31, 2024 | 49 MIN 00:00 / 48:46 This week’s guests Jen Cornwell As Ignite Visibility's VP of SEO, Jen Cornwell keeps her team to the forefront of search innovation. With over a decade of experience, she spearheads cutting-edge SEO tactics and pioneering AI integration in search campaigns for clients and the agency. Jen's expertise spans various site types and verticals, ensuring her user-first approach—fueled by a passion for understanding people and connecting them with the right solutions—delivers exceptional results for clients. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm already overseeing the head of SEO brand at Wix. And I'm joined by the fabulously amazing, the incredible, the always differentiated and always essential head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I try to keep it... You can stand up from the crowd. There was years ago that I used to worry when I was a kid, when I was like high school or whatever. "Oh, people are staring at me." And I was like, you know what? What's it Bonnie Raitt says, "Let's give them something to talk about." It was like, yeah, I'm going to wear a stupid ridiculous shirt or ridiculous whatever. Because if you're looking, feast your eyes. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Something like that makes you sound like a total idiot. It took me a long time to realize that was Bonnie Raitt, even though I love 80s music. Crystal Carter: Bonnie Raitt singing about something. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I didn't realize that was her other stuff- Crystal Carter: No, that's 90s. Mordy Oberstein: ... was other stuff. No, it's a 90s, right. It's a 90s song. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, yeah. Bonnie Raitt's great. But it's 90s. It's 90s, because it was on a Julia Roberts movie. Mordy Oberstein: Pretty Woman, no? No. Crystal Carter: No. It wasn't Pretty Women. Mordy Oberstein: No. I don't know. Crystal Carter: It was one of her other rom-coms. I'm sure. I'm going to have to Google it now. Please, talk amongst yourselves. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Julia Roberts movies. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also show your clients how much they really need you with inbuilt reporting found in Wix Studio. And in addition to all of the analytics available to you in Wix Analytics. As today, we continue our Wix Studio series as we talk how SEOs and marketers can show how indispensable they are to their clients. Why in today's environment, you need to show your value across the board, not just in one marketing discipline. Do you hear that SEO folks? Proving your value as an SEO or marketing agency versus a consultancy, is there a difference? And yes, we'll get into AI and how to deal with clients who feel they don't need you because they have an LLM that tells them to drink urine to prevent kidney stones. Ignite Visibility's, own VP of SEO, Jennifer Cornwell will be here in just a few minutes as she helps us show you why you're indispensable to your clients, why you are your client's very own air supply, and why they be so lost without you. Plus, we take a hard look at how the Google leaks are starting to broaden SEO. Again, you hear that SEO, folks? Plus we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So stick with us as we show you how to become like a band-Aid, too painful for your clients to pull off on this, the 98th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. By the way, not an actual strategy you should use. Bad strategy. Don't be too painful. I was just taking poetic license. Yes, I am a poet. You wouldn't know a first glance, but I am quite the poet. I'm a wordsmith. Crystal Carter: Okay. One of my favorite Mordy Oberstein things is when you drop a $5 word. Every now and then, Mordy's like, "Oh, I have the vocabulary just in case you're wondering." Mordy Oberstein: For my birthday one year... Again, I terrible with time. You put out tweets of things I've said I didn't realize I said. And one of them was, "If talk is cheap, I'm fine to talk a lot," or something like that. Crystal Carter: Something like that. This is true. This is true. This is true. They weren't hard to find them, you got a lot of tweets. You are prolific, as it were. By the way, just for people who were wondering or who were in suspense. This Something to Talk About song was from a Julia Roberts movie called Something to Talk About. Mordy Oberstein: We just completely... Just ignorance built upon ignorance, built upon ignorance. Crystal Carter: That's such an SEO thing to do though. Mordy Oberstein: Near me. Something to talk about near me. Crystal Carter: Right. What's the song? It's Something to Talk About. What's the movie? Something to Talk About. What are we going to talk about? Mordy Oberstein: Before we bring our guest on, I will tell you the truth, as opposed to when I lie to you. Which is such a weird idiom, by the way. Like, "Oh, tell you the truth." Because before I was lying. Crystal Carter: Yeah, what was going on before? I thought we were in a circle of trust. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Honestly, like before you weren't being? Anyway, but it's an idiom. Anywho. There are times where I, as a marketer and as someone who's self-deprecating, feel like, come on, what do I know about marketing and SEO? It's like, what I'm saying is so obvious. Do I actually provide any unique value? But I do then meet folks who maybe don't have a marketing background that are maybe just marketing enthusiasts who are talking to me about marketing, or maybe they're just new to market... They are marketers or SEOs, and they're just new to the industry and they're still learning. And I do then realize that I do have actual experience and a unique outlook on marketing, and a unique outlook on SEO that I've built up through the years. That no, I of course didn't have when I first started, or was even in SEO marketing altogether, but that I have built up over the many years that I have been in marketing. And that does actually provide something that's unique and invaluable to the people that I work with. I think. I hope. Right? And with that, please welcome to the show Ignite Visibility's VP of SEO, Jennifer Cornwell. How are you? Jen Cornwell: Hi. I'm good, thanks. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Mordy Oberstein: You're indispensable to this podcast now. Jen Cornwell: Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. That's a big title. Big title for a one-time guest. Mordy Oberstein: No, that means you can't leave. It's like Hotel California. Yeah, you're stuck. That's it. Crystal Carter: And I think it's really interesting you said seasoned. Because I think that one of the things that makes people indispensable is the special sauce that you bring as an SEO, really. I think that's something, Would you say that you and your team have cultivated a little bit of a special sauce that you bring to new clients or new projects? Jen Cornwell: Yeah. I think that the reason clients really like working with us a lot of the time is we are... A lot of businesses, I think they're going to say, "We're the startup mentality." But I do actually feel like we work that way, and we work that way with our clients because we worked that way for such a long time. We just hit our 11-year anniversary in this last year. I've been there for six, and the team has grown. I was like, 65 people when we got hired, and now we're 220 or something. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my goodness. Wow. Jen Cornwell: Yeah, grown a lot as a company. But I think even though we've done that, it's still coming to the table for our clients, for these relationships that we've built ultimately. We talk about the seasoning, that's important. But there's also this, your clients have gotten in this rhythm of talking to you all the time, and you are their marketing person now. And the reasons why, as an SEO, yes, you need to talk about SEO, but there's all this opportunity to talk about these other things they aren't thinking about. We try to keep our team really well-rounded and well-versed in a lot of what's going on. They're not paid media experts, but have enough of an understanding to be able to talk to it. And that kind of thing, it's part of it, the indispensableness. Mordy Oberstein: When we're deciding what should we discuss for the podcast, and we were saying how there's just so much more going on in marketing in general, there's just not one facet of marketing. And to be indispensable in today's environment means being a little bit more, I don't know, broad about what you cover and how you cover. Or what you're thinking about or what you're discussing with clients. How has that factored into what you feel makes y'all indispensable to your clients? Jen Cornwell: Part of it is making a better SEO, I think understanding all their marketing channels, because so much of what we do funnels down to us. Even not digital space, stuff we don't do as an agency. I've had a client where we saw an impression decrease for their brand and they're like, "Oh yeah, we stopped running our commercial." And so knowing that and being able to go into conversations with clients when they see something similar and be able to at least ask those questions, I think what's really important. But yeah, I think that's really where it comes from. It's baking it into the experience of the special sauce of situational things we've been in to open up those doors to ask the right questions at the right time. Crystal Carter: I think that's a great example. I've had clients where they've run print advertising or they've run television advertising. And if you're talking to them regularly, then you can bring that all together with the SEO, you can really unlock the real value of some of that. And if you are in an agency situation, all the better. Because you'll have people, you can be like, right, if you're running a television ad on, I don't know, ESPN or something. We can bring in our social team to target people who follow ESPN, we can link everything together. And even if it's on a project basis, even if it's just, you're doing this campaign on ESPN this week, and we'll bring in somebody to help with that, with the social shares or whatever this week or whatever, that sort of thing. But I think that having those conversations, keeping those conversations and really reading the data. Like you were saying, how we saw the impressions, what's going on? Really, really valuable. Jen Cornwell: The client piece that you mentioned is really important, because we talk about that a lot with our clients. I have prospects who come to me and they're like, "What makes a good client?" And I'm like, "When you talk to us." We want you to actually see this as a partnership where we want to help you. And yeah, sometimes they don't even tell you about new pages they add. Or, "Oh yeah, we did change the entire URL structure of the site segment." And you find out in your reporting that everything is way different than the last time you looked at it. But yeah, the clients who tell us about the little stuff, the small things going on, that's where we can actually come in and ask the right questions and be helpful. Mordy Oberstein: Do you notice a change with your clients? We're going to talk later in the podcast about how SEO might be broadening, and the Google leaks and how now there's a whole idea of branding factoring into SEO, and yada, yada, yada. But do you find, I don't know, over the years that the clients themselves have changed? Are they less focused just an SEO or just PPC? Are they starting to broaden a bit? Jen Cornwell: A little bit, I think. We still get a handful of clients who read one SEO blog. They come in and they say, "I do SEO." And they did SEO in 2012. And you're like, "Okay, so you kind of know what it is, but also it's been 10 years." That happens a lot still. But we do have clients who are, they understand that SEO... Their understanding of it is keyword stuffing. They're like, "Oh, yeah, well, I don't want my content to look all weird. I want my content to read weird." And so having to hurdle that. But even that's new, because that's like they understand that there's keywords that need to be implemented in a certain way. And they know it needs to happen for SEO, but they just want to figure out what the middle ground is for user experience. I think that we're having more of those conversations and less of, "How many keywords are on this page, and why aren't there more of them?" conversations. I guess a little bit. There's also some... It depends. It really just depends on the most common SEO answer of all. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, the graph. It depends. It depends in orange. Jen Cornwell: Yes. Yeah. No, it depends on the marketer that's coming in and what their background is. But it's gotten better. I think the understanding of SEO has gotten better. Crystal Carter: And I think a lot of people are starting to say that... And I don't know if you're seeing this trend, is that they're starting to see clients come to them less for implementation support and more for strategic support. Are you seeing that trend as well? Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Yeah. Especially more recently, I think it's a little bit of economic and bandwidth availability resources within their own team in the conversations that we're having. But definitely they're like, "Oh, okay, this is stuff a developer can do," and you can just pass it over to somebody who's in-house who has some SEO experience so we're not doing as much explaining as we have to do. But yeah, it's definitely more on the strategic side. And I think that's where they know enough to know that SEO is different than it was 10 years ago, where they know there needs to be more strategy involved and less "keyword stuffing", as an example. Mordy Oberstein: Or they could have the AI to implement all of it, right? Jen Cornwell: Right. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's a smooth transition into the other elephant in the room that I wanted to discuss, which is, how does AI affect you being indispensable? Both in reality, and I think more importantly... Because I think in reality not much has changed, but that's just me. But the perception of that reality with clients. Are they coming in, "Well, I could just LLM this thing."? Jen Cornwell: As soon as ChatGPT was announced and a thing, we had a client who said, "Okay, send me pricing for how to write more content for less money, with AI." And I was like, "Oh, my God." So we go through all that, and it turns out, actually, especially at the time when it was first rolling out, there was no cost savings. The hard costs of a writer were actually implemented in time and trying to get the LLM to get what we needed on the other side, that was not going to work out for that client. But yeah, we had a lot of those conversations. The way we've positioned it with our clients now is, we use AI in our processes for analysis, we use it for blind spots. It's like, as SEOs you get very situational sometimes with your own references. So having something that can double check some other things for you just in case you forget. Stuff that it's more appropriate use. But yeah, we still have clients. I had a client last wee, this week I was on the phone with. And they're like, "Yeah, we're going to hook Jasper up so we can put a bunch of content up on the site." And so I screen shared this screenshot of this client we had that just did AI content. You can see every single algorithm update where it just fell off September, January, then again in March, just stair steps down. I've used that a lot actually as reference point. Crystal Carter: That's one of the things that I think is so valuable about an agency relationship is that as somebody who's working in an agency, and as you said, you have eyes... You've grown from a team of 60 to team of over 100. Across your team you will be having conversations about different trends that you're seeing from clients, and things like that. When a client comes to you and they say, "I want to do this," it won't be your first time doing this. You can say to the wider team, "If you have any examples, have you seen anything?" And they'll go, "Yeah, actually, I do. Watch this drop." And I think that visibility is something that a lot of in-house teams really struggle with a little bit, because you might just have your blinders on and you might not see what's happening in different verticals. Mordy's done so much algorithm research and stuff, and sometimes the algorithms, if you think about the reviews algorithm, the product reviews update. That was initially working in a certain space. And now, I'm pontificating here, but I think that some of the stuff that we saw with that is kind of what we're seeing with the helpful content update rolled out wider. And I think that the knowledge that you get from working across different clients that have been affected by different algorithms, different approaches, different techniques can be super, super valuable. And it's something that you can't get if somebody's working on one client at a time, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Is that something you feel differentiates you as an agency versus a consultancy? Where you have so much experience and so many different verticals and so many different areas of marketing. If you're going to get consultants it's like, all right, they have your SEO handled, but the second you have a PPC problem come up, or a content issue come up, or whatever it has come up, now you have to go find somebody else. Jen Cornwell: Yeah, we've never been vertical specific, we've always done the variety. We probably lean more toward lead gen, maybe a little bit B2B versus e-comm. But I think what happens, we have clients who come on and they're like, "Oh, do you have experience in our industry?" And that matters for writers and that kind of thing, getting the context of their business together. But I think there's a lot of things that are applicable across verticals. The way Google indexes content for a storage facility site is not any different than the skincare brand that we work on. And the things it's looking for are not intrinsically different, but it is two different audiences. And that's where I think you start to get into the indispensable marketing mindset of, I'm not just an SEO, I'm thinking about user journey, I'm thinking about conversion points. I'm thinking about the user journey for a storage site versus a skin care brand, that's two different things that can be important in your strategy. But yeah, the variety I think is really critical, really helps. Crystal Carter: And when I was working agency side, I really liked this. I was working with clients similarly, skincare, storage, people that different, some of the clients that I was working with. And I thought that was really interesting. Because particularly on the local side, for instance, there will be features that are available within local SEO, for instance, that are applicable to certain verticals that are not applicable to other verticals. And if you're working on product stuff, then there will be different things that you'll use for that, like Google Merchant Center and stuff. But what you find when you're working across all of them is you get more of a sense of how these things work. Because very often maybe they'll have lots of product schema on... Maybe they'll have one vertical that's got lots of schema, and so then you learn how to do schema. So then when they add schema to a different vertical, then you're completely ready for that because you've already done it on this other one. Whereas, everybody who's just been working on the other vertical and has never seen rich results for that particular vertical might be very surprised. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. No, I think SEO is so situational anyway, that having that diverse experience... Or being able to have it, I guess, within our team and not being necessarily... I joke that I want to retire to in-house, that's my retirement plan day. I'm going to leave agency life and I'm going to go to in-house and have a nice little in-house job. But not to disregard the in-house people, I'm sure that is hard in its own way. But I do think, yeah, when you're in-house you're dialed in on maybe one site or a few sites, or one specific vertical. And it's great, maybe it makes you a specialist there, but doesn't exactly open up the experience. And I think the time too, over five years, over six years. What I was doing five or six years ago is very different than now, and the experience over that time. Yeah, your in-house person who's been there for three years maybe hasn't stepped out of the SEO bubble or SEO world in a different way, just because they're only looking at certain things and trying to solve the one problem. This is what I hear about in-house, trying to solve the one problem that you've been trying to push across the line for two years, or whatever it is. And it's always adding site maps to the robots.txt file, and it's going to take seven months to implement. Yeah, I think it's easy to get lost in some of that and maybe lose sight of some of the other stuff that you would get to see agency side. Mordy Oberstein: Do you think that... Because you mentioned this a few times already, the marketing mindset and the marketing mindset. Do you think that maybe that's one of the reasons why maybe SEOs don't necessarily have that marketing mindset that seems to be indispensable to clients? Jen Cornwell: It's probably a little bit of experience, for sure. I think it's really, I refer to it a lot as our SEO vacuum. I go and I can propose all kinds of things to clients like, "Oh yeah, I work on these keywords and these pages," but it doesn't really matter if their audience doesn't care about it or if they don't care about it as a business either. And ultimately, being able to prioritize your recommendations, I think that comes from marketing mindset as well. I'm not just passing over an audit checklist of "here's all the stuff that's wrong and here's some recommendations to fix it". But I'm not necessarily going to tell you what's going to impact your business the most or what you should prioritize first based on your resources. And so I think navigating... That's one example, but being able to navigate their entire marketing plan in the same way. My favorite example, I had a pediatric dentist client, he's got five or six locations in San Diego. And I've worked at a lot of dentists, they love marketing. Mordy Oberstein: They got to figure out how to get you in that chair and pull out your teeth. Jen Cornwell: Yeah, yeah. No, he loved it. And I used to go into the meetings and I would suggest things that I knew I was never going to touch. I would build the landing page. I'll write some content, we'll make the landing page, but there's 5 million other steps to this idea. And those conversations were always really fun for me because I got to talk about stuff other than keywords. But also made us really valuable to him because he's like, "Oh, here's another brain, basically, that can be in this room with me and has the marketing perspective to be able to talk about what we could potentially do." Yeah, I think navigating those situations, the small conversation that turns into a big idea just because you came in with a little bit of extra experience goes a long way. Crystal Carter: That's great. It sounds like a great partnership. The kind of partnership you were talking about before, where everything is back and forth. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Was like the name of the dentist, like, Bright Smiles? Jen Cornwell: No. Actually, they have a really strong brand. They were one of the biggest pediatric dentists in San Diego. And one of my favorite idea that I suggested them that they did was try to set a world record at a baseball game. They were trying to get as many people to floss at once, or something. Crystal Carter: Were they into that? Jen Cornwell: Oh, my God, yeah. They thought that was awesome. Crystal Carter: I love it. Jen Cornwell: ... ever. Well, and it was something that John Lincoln, our CEO, suggested for a night. He's like, "Maybe we could try to get in the world record book." And so I came into this meeting and I was like, "What if they …?” Mordy Oberstein: Could you imagine? They did it? Jen Cornwell: They did it, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: At a baseball game? Jen Cornwell: I don't think they set the record, but they did do it at Padres. At Petco Stadium. Mordy Oberstein: They were all flossing. That sounds, first off, brilliant, but also disgusting. Jen Cornwell: I know. But it was like, they do kids games, so it was like the kids were there and it was like a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: That just makes it grosser. The kids, I don't know. Oh, my gosh. I'm not a germophobe, but I'm freaking out on the other side of the screen. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. No, it was questionable. But people participated and they did it and got some exposure. Mordy Oberstein: That's awesome. Jen Cornwell: I wrote the blog. That's a... Mordy Oberstein: That is a great idea, by the way. That would make me feel like you're indispensable. Crystal Carter: Right. Unique, showing up with unique ideas. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. I'm going to go Google this now. Got to find people flossing at Petco Park. Jen Cornwell: I give enough details. I give enough details. I think those are more fun conversations to have anyway, honestly. So it's a little bit of my own personal amusement of... And we don't get those opportunities with a lot of our clients. And clients really just look at us as, "You are the SEO partner, so your suggestions about CRO for this form, we don't actually care that much. Just get us the keywords and get us the content." And that works in some relationships. But really strong partnerships you get to have those fun conversations. Crystal Carter: And I think that's also important to being a good partner for your clients is understanding who's like, "I just want this one thing." And you're like, "Cool, here you go." And the people who are like, "Yeah, let's get in. Let's brainstorm." There's going to be some people who really want to be all about it. And I used to have some clients who were just like, "Did you do the internet?" And I'd be like, "Yeah, I did it." They'd be like, "Great." And they don't want anything to do... They don't want to be involved. You're just working with... They're happy, they trust you to handle whatever you need to do. Jen Cornwell: Sometimes that's indispensable too. You're right- Crystal Carter: Exactly. Jen Cornwell: ... it's relative. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I feel like I have to go floss my teeth now. So, if people want to brainstorm with you or brainstorm with Ignite, how could they find you and your company? Jen Cornwell: I'm on LinkedIn. Ignite is also on LinkedIn. And then, I'm also on Twitter. I think it's JenCornwell_. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, don't worry, I'll find it. I'll link to it in the profile. In the profile, in the show notes. Jen Cornwell: Sweet. But yeah, those are two good places. I'm sometimes on Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: Twitter these days is not indispensable. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. And LinkedIn, I don't know, it's a weird mix over there sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: There's nothing great. I'll be honest with you, we can go on a whole different tangent about there's nothing great on social media anymore. I don't TikTok, but Crystal TikToks now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah. You were at Moscon. I did tons of Moscon TikToks. Jen Cornwell: Oh, did you? I've not done any work TikToks. Crystal Carter: You could call it working. No, I'm kidding. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe another podcast. I did make a TikTok where I built a house out of Taco Bell. And got a lot of views and Taco Bell saw it and sent me a whole box full of swag. Crystal Carter: Yo, these are the kind of ideas we need, Jen. Jen Cornwell: My claim to fame. Mordy Oberstein: Floss and the taco. This is- Crystal Carter: Tacos. You need to find a taco client. Jen Cornwell: Oh yeah, I know. Mordy Oberstein: Like Taco Bell. Jen Cornwell: Taco Bell, maybe. Yeah. Del Taco will take. I had El Pollo Loco. Crystal Carter: I used to go to Alberto's in San Diego. Jen Cornwell: Oh yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: It has taquitos. Jen Cornwell: Rigoberto's, hit all the Berto's. Crystal Carter: Oh, there's the Filiberto's is also very good. They have a gigantic burrito that's amazing. But also I'm thinking, let's brainstorm right now taquitos, they're very much like Lincoln Logs. Jen Cornwell: Oh, Lincoln Logs. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Could build a whole to taquito fort. Jen Cornwell: Taquito. And you got to come up with a fun name. Mine was from Taco Bell Townhouse was because I saw a charcuterie chalet. This was during COVID, people were making little houses out of charcuterie. So yeah, did one out of french fries. Crystal Carter: Why didn't we make the podcast about- Jen Cornwell: We could have started with that. Crystal Carter: About literal food pyramids. Just saying. Mordy Oberstein: You make Lincoln Log, you can make out of asparagus. Crystal Carter: This is true. Jen Cornwell: We had somebody do hot dogs. Mordy Oberstein: Hot dogs. Jen Cornwell: This was all over a work competition. Mordy Oberstein: Work shopping this year. Jen Cornwell: Yeah, the gingerbread house kits. So it was just make anything out of food. And so, yeah, people showed up with some interesting pickles. Crystal Carter: I feel like the easiest thing is going to be carrot sticks because they're already made into things, whatever. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Yeah, that's cheap. Crystal Carter: Tater Tots though, I feel like you could brick those. Pickles are good. They're kind of juicy. Tater Tots, you could use hummus or something sticky as the mortar to keep it put together. Mordy Oberstein: Right. It could be like a stone cottage thing. Crystal Carter: Right. Or like a slightly melted cheese, which will then congeal and then go... You see what I'm saying? Do you see? Mordy Oberstein: I think we've gone completely off the rails. Jen Cornwell: Best bet. Mordy Oberstein: ... so much for coming on the show, and we'll see you out there on TikTok building asparagus, Tater Tot houses. Jen Cornwell: Thank you. Bye. Mordy Oberstein: Anywho, you may have heard this whole thing a little while back that there was a Google leak. Google's algorithm leaked. There was a nut that needed to be tightened, and it was dripping water. There was a Google leak, which everyone I'm assuming heard something about that. And one of the offshoots of that is a lot of SEOs are now talking about, "Oh, we need to be thinking about wider digital presence and brand marketing because of things in the leaks." Such as, oh, Google might be, emphasis on might be, looking at user behavior metrics or Chrome data. Or might be looking at mentions across the web, yada, yada, yada. Again, Amazon might be, we don't know how they're actually doing it, even with the leaks. So SEO is talking about a lot of these wider marketing topics all of a sudden. Which brings up the question that we alluded to earlier, is SEO starting to broaden? Join us now as we explore this fascinating and intriguing question with a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. I guess another way to phrase this question, is SEO starting to die? Is that too spicy? Crystal Carter: I think SEO is trying to use different tools, and also to utilize the tools that we have in different ways. I recently shared a post on LinkedIn, because I recently rewrote, remixed an article on long tail keywords. And historically speaking, the ways that SEOs have talked about long tail keywords is that we have long tail keywords and they've got good search volume accumulatively, and they allow you to connect with different parts of search, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. All the things that great SEOs do, right? This is perfectly good SEO practice. But, and this is what I think SEOs need to do. We need to look at what we've got, the resources that we've got in a different way. The long tail keywords are not just about the search volume, the long tail keywords, an example that I use, was vegan pizza and pizza delivery in Brooklyn after midnight. This article's on the Wix SEO learning hub. And the thing that long tail keyword gives you is a full campaign. That gives you a full marketing campaign. Vegan tells you that you should be talking to vegan influencers or vegan magazines or vegan YouTube channels, or whatever. Pizza delivery tells you people want pizza, people want it delivered. They tell you that you need to have a Google business profile. They tell you that you need to have the location, your name, address, phone number on your website, et cetera, et cetera. And the after midnight tells you that it's late night. So if you have ads, you only want to show them late at night. You're not going to show people who are looking for pizza delivery at two o'clock in the afternoon those ads, you want to show them at 12 o'clock at night so that they can see those ads and get that pizza straight away. You also might want to take out... You know the quiet storm that goes on the radio at midnight or something, or the late night show on the radio. If you sell pizza after midnight and there's a late night radio show in your area. Guess what, the ad spot for that's probably not going to be that expensive because most people are not looking to buy stuff in middle of the night. However, if somebody's listening to the radio at 12:30 and you're like, "Hey, you want a tasty slice," they might call you. Mordy Oberstein: ... how you phrase that on a late night radio show. Crystal Carter: I mean- Mordy Oberstein: Remembering my youth of what's on the radio at 12 o'clock at night. Crystal Carter: It's a good thing. After midnight in Brooklyn, obviously geolocates you. You might want to sponsor the local basketball team, the local fantasy football team, whatever it may be. But that long tail keyword is data, it's search data. There's somebody who recently shared, they're looking at how search is growing, and the way that they're talking about SEO is slightly different. He was talking about how we can drive search demand. He was talking about how search demand gives you an insight into consumer demand. And that's different from going like, oh, these keywords, oh, blah, blah, blah. We just need to use the tools we have in a new way. Mordy Oberstein: I don't think anything's actually changed, everything that you're saying are things we should have been doing anyway. I think the only thing that's actually changed... And it will change the industry, by the way, because perception is everything. Is that SEOs are now starting to think about this because they're realizing that the wider, I'll call it holistic or whatever kind of marketing, brand marketing. Could, should, probably does, definitely does in some way, shape, or form, impact performance marketing. And they're like, "Oh, snap. Now we have to think about this." But you should be thinking about this the whole time. Growing your digital presence, I like to call it grow your digital light, has a tremendous impact on your SEO efforts and what you're able to do and not able to do. Whether it's SEO super directly, like we're saying now with the leaks are indirectly. So nothing is actually true, but the mindset has changed. And I think that... I can't find it, I was searching for this. And I post too much on social media, this is my problem. And I was in a Slack group and I put it on a LinkedIn. I have no clue. Look, I can't find it. It's one of the things you're going hear more about, or a segment of SEO, is brand SEO. I don't mean getting your branded keywords, I mean looking at brand as a way to summon your SEO effort. And then, lo and behold, a month later the leaks come out and now all of a sudden we're talking... But none of this is new. None of it's new. Crystal Carter: Yeah. One of the reasons why you didn't find that tweet, Mordy, is because you've been saying that for years. Because, Mordy, if you were trying to find that tweet, that's like trying to find- Mordy Oberstein: A lot of people have. The Kevin Indigs of the world come to mind, Lily Ray comes to mind. Crystal Carter: Have you ever found something out, or learned a new word or something like that, and then all of a sudden you see it everywhere? And it's always been there, but you didn't know necessarily what that word was, or didn't necessarily know what that idea was, or something like that. And you find that it's like, "Oh, this has unlocked a whole new perspective for me." And I think that's kind of what some people are coming to. But yeah, it has always been there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's like Taylor Swift for me. She started dating Travis Kelce, Taylor who? Oh, there's this whole Swift-y thing. I had no clue. But now that I’ve heard of football, now I know. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: My world has changed. Crystal Carter: And if you learn a new tool, it can really open things up. Or also, I think when we think about the skills that we had and the resources that we had, sometimes it's a case of taking stuff that you already know and looking at it differently. There's some people like avocados. Let's talk about avocados. Mordy Oberstein: Love avocados. Crystal Carter: You like avocados. Avocados are delicious. I love avocados. You can literally just... I could literally eat it with a spoon. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Crystal Carter: Perfectly happy. Mordy Oberstein: Don't even use a spoon, just take your fingers. Crystal Carter: Just- Mordy Oberstein: Just dive in. Crystal Carter: Just get involved. You don't have to do anything to an avocado. Vegans looked at that and they were like, "I'm going to make that chocolate mousse." And people were like, "What?" And vegans were like, "I'm going to make a chocolate mousse." It's the same avocado everybody's been looking at, but they were like, "I'm going to make a chocolate mousse." Completely different vibe. Yeah, it's a completely different vibe. It's a completely different thing. It's the same avocado that you always liked, completely different vibe. Mordy Oberstein: I think the only problem or issue I take is that it's possibly happening in SEO for the wrong reasons. We're like, we're taking the avocado, we're making it into chocolate mousse because I want to shake chocolate mousse and I want to throw it at people on the street. That's fun for me. Crystal Carter: I did a webinar the other day and the audience was super engaged, but I was talking about internal linking. And I was like, "You should have internal links. Make sure you use line links. Line links, they're high priority in the crawl, and they're really useful and they're really helpful, and they add context and they have words before them and words after them," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And somebody was like, "Oh, but if I do use the links, will Google penalize me? And what about this one?" And I was like, "Yo, put the links on your page because they're helpful. They're helpful, they're useful." I cannot stand it if I'm reading an article that's like, "Oh my God, avocado mousse is so delicious. It's the best thing I've ever tried. And gosh, I tried this brand of avocado mousse and it just really blew my mind." And I'm like, "Link me, bro." I'm like, "Where's the link?" And there's no link, I'm mad. I'm big mad. I'm mad, I want to go somewhere else. So link me. Link me to the recipe, link me to the picture, link me to... Pixlr didn't happen. I want to see the stuff. Why? Because it's helpful. That's helpful. It's helpful to Google, it's helpful to users. So the things that we need to do in terms of brand should be helpful. You want to pull your brand forward, you want to use your data wisely. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, momentum and cadence and presence, all that good stuff. Oh, no, more it's going to happen is what happens now on LinkedIn. I connect with somebody, "Hi, how are you?" Oh, here it comes. "Would you like to buy links?" But in a year from now it's going to be, would you like to buy mentions? Because what guest? He was like, "Oh, the leaks talk about mentions, and now we need to be concerned about mentions. I have a good idea, I'll sell mentions." Who needs to get the lie to sell mentions? And you should be worrying about mentions. You don't mentions do? I'm reading an article, they say, "You know what's a really great thing? Avocados. Avocados from whatever company, from Bob's Avocados," and there's no link. But you know what I might do if I want an avocado? I might type in Bob's Avocado into Google. And do you think for a second Google's not looking at the fact that lots of people looking for avocados and Bob at the same time? Did a link do that? No, a mentioned did that. Did a mention do that only after the leaks happened? No, a mention did that many, many years before the leaks came out. But now SEOs are going to try selling mentions. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that really, generally speaking, and I've heard this from good SEOs. People say, "How do you weather the algorithm updates and things like that?" Nine times out of 10, it's just keeping your nose clean. But nine times out of 10, it's like keeping your nose clean doing solid SEO, doing stuff that helps your users, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that it seems really... Okay, so I learned to snowboard, right? Mordy Oberstein: Wait, you know how to snowboard? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I'm a mediocre snowboarder, but I've been on a few mountains in my time. And I don't fall over. Last time I was in Switzerland, I didn't fall over. I did all right. And I was riding Switch. So people who know that, your girl has to moves. Anyway, when I was learning to snowboard, my instructor told me, he was like, "You just look where you want to go." And I was like, "No, because it's got to be this and you have to do that, and you have to go over here, and got to..." And I was doing the most, I was doing too much. But literally, I will tell you, if you want to snowboard, and I tell this to people now. Literally, look where you want to go. It's literally that simple. It's that simple. You're on the board, your feet are planted, you turn your head and your body will go where it needs to go. And that's all it is. So we like, oh, what if I do this, and what if I do that? And da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And don't get me wrong, there are absolutely technical things you need to consider. You need to make sure your website's crawlable. You need to have lots of things that are in there. You need to coordinate your digital PR, et cetera, so that it makes sense for your brand. You need to have a coherent strategy. But essentially, if your goal is to add value for your users, for your audience, then you will be fine. And if your goal is to add value consistently for them, then that will support your brand, as long as you know what your brand is. That's not rocket science. We try to make it so it's super complicated, but it's not. It's not. Mordy Oberstein: It's just tuning out that noise, that's the hard part. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: You know who tunes out a lot of noise, keeps his nose clean, and always provides value? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: It's Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: That's the cleanest nose I've ever seen. Really, it's sparkling. Crystal Carter: I mean, sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: Which means, as we pay homage to Barry, that it's time for this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a whole bunch of stuff for you, it's all a AI related. Or actually, AI adjacent. Let's start with Search Engine Roundtables, Barry Schwartz. Well, I don't know why I said Search Engine Roundtables, Barry Schwartz. There only is Barry Schwartz as Search Engine Roundtable, which is an existential feeling. There only is Barry Schwartz. Anyway, Reddit blocked Bing search and others, but not Google. So, Reddit has blocked basically all other search engine, I'm pretty sure, from crawling them via the robot.txt file. I don't know if that applies to Perplexity actually. I thought somewhere I saw Perplexity was fine. Anyway, I'm definitely Bing. Bing is definitely out. Reddit is no longer allowing other search engines to crawl them. That's interesting, right? I never know. What do you say about that? It's an interesting look. What's basically happening is that Reddit is basically saying, "Hey, if you want our content, be like Google and pay for it." I personally don't like Reddit, so I don't know why anybody would pay for it. But, okay. It's really interesting. It's a new paradigm on the web, I guess. I don't know if this deal will work out well for Reddit. I'm highly suspect that making this kind of deal is in their long-term benefit. It's weird, by the way. I'll just say it's weird because, yeah, Bing's not the biggest search engine, it's only got whatever percent of market share. Let's say it's got 5% of market share. I don't remember the exact numbers, nor do I particularly care. 5% of that market share is saying, yeah, I have 5% market share of the entire world. That's a lot of people. I guess Reddit doesn't care about your grandmother going to Reddit anymore. I guess the lesson to take from that. That's a little snarky for this podcast. Anyway, just weird. Let's head over to Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land, where Google will soon test search shopping ads in AI overviews. So Google has talked about having an ad experience in the AI overviews for a while. Now they're saying you're going to see the tests coming up soon. The quote was, "And as you've probably noticed at GML, Google Marketing Live, we announced that soon we'll actually start testing search and shopping ads in AI overviews for users in the US," yada, yada, yada. So they're going to be testing them soon. Interesting. Let's see how that goes. Obviously, the ability to earn ad revenue is what will indicate if the AI overviews are going to work or not from a business point of view. All this is just interesting to me. Anyway. Now back to Search Engine Roundtable, Google Gemini adds related content and verification links. So the LLM formerly known as Bard, now known as Gemini, now contains links again. This is a weird week. I'm finding the news weird this week. Bard, now known as Gemini, used to show links to the content that the summary was based on. Much the way an AI overview does. But then stopped doing that. Well, now links are back inside of Gemini. Which is interesting, because now covering again from Search Engine Roundtable, SearchGPT, OpenAI search tool is out. It's announced. Like ChatGPT, you can now use SearchGPT to get answers to your questions. But here, with SearchGPT, you'll get citations that the content is based on. So it's basically Gemini. So it's basically the same thing. It's now you can search using OpenAI's platform much the way you would use Gemini. Again, get the summary and now get citations and links to content and so forth within the ecosystem. Will this disrupt the search engine market? Probably not. Because it's basically the same thing as Gemini, and kind of the same thing as the AI overview. So carry on as usual, I guess. I don't know. It's a weird week. It's a weird week. By the way, that article is brought to you by Barry Schwartz. Because, again, who else is writing at SE Roundtable? Actually, not true. Not true. I take that back. Sometimes Glenn Gabe actually writes an article over at SE Roundtable. You can always tell by the headline. Anyway, that's this week's weird and snappy news. It is hard to keep the noise out with the news sometimes. There's a lot of noise in the news. Crystal Carter: I'll be completely honest, I used to get a lot of my news from Twitter, and that is not a use a useful- Mordy Oberstein: Not a good place. Crystal Carter: ... source to get news from anymore. Barry's a great source. And I think a lot of times... There's certain people that I follow to keep on top of things like that as well. Lily Ray's a great person to follow for that, she's really on top of the news, and particularly for stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Glenn. Crystal Carter: Glenn is great as well, and Mike is great as well. Mike King is also a good one who jumps in. And Mike covers a lot of topics as well. So a lot of search, but also a few other topics as well, which is cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. That's why I like, by the way, I mentioned Glenn Gabe before, because he covers all tech news. I saw yesterday he posted about... This is insane. By the time this comes out, this will be old news. It's basically a social media thing where you can create an AI persona and then have all the AIs talking to each other. Crystal Carter: I heard the story about a comedian. Opinions on him aside, it was an interesting story. Dave Chappelle apparently had a Twitter account that was not his Twitter account, but this person was posting stuff. Kat Williams, and again, another controversial comedian or whatever. But he also had- Mordy Oberstein: All comedians are kind of controversial, it's what they do. Crystal Carter: He also had a... These two Twitter accounts were arguing with each other. The two of them actually met, these two comedians actually met, and they were like, "I'm sorry." Or, no. And Dave Chappelle apparently said to this other comedian, "I'm so sorry, that's not actually me that's been arguing with you." And Kat Williams was like, "I don't have a Twitter account either." And basically- Mordy Oberstein: Well, that was my comment back to Glenn when he posted about this. I'm like, yeah, AI, but people aren't so great either. So, there you go. You know who is a great person with the perfect pivot possible? Our follow of the week, Sam Rush's own head of influencer marketing, Nicole Ponce. Nicole is amazing. I work with Nicole. I still work with Nicole. Absolutely one of the greatest people you'll ever meet. Super incredible, super smart, super nice, helpful, everything. Give her a follow across all social media platforms. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely do. Not only is she super awesome, super smart, she also has all of the latest info and all the cool stuff that Sam Rush gets up to. They've got some cool events going on, they've got some interesting projects going on, and she's very much a part of that. She's really supportive of the SEO community as well. She supported stuff that Aletis put on. They've also supported things, different events. And they supported Search 'n Stuff, which is another great event as well. And I've worked with Nicole as well, and cannot speak highly enough of her. Big hearts to Nicole. Mordy Oberstein: We're all making heart signs. Crystal Carter: We're making those little hearts. Mordy Oberstein: ... the two of us here. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's just us. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. What an interesting selection of people today. We talked about Barry, Cole… Crystal Carter: ... all the other folks we were just mentioning as well. Mordy Oberstein: We've talked a lot of people on today's show, mentions of people. Mentions, you know what? No one even asked to buy them. We should sell them. We should sell mentions on the podcast. I found a new niche for us. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay, cool. Can we start a fun agency? Just, Mention. Mordy Oberstein: Mentions. Crystal Carter: Got to have a good name. Mordy Oberstein: With dollar signs. The brand, you be like dollar signs everywhere. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. Mordy Oberstein: Good idea. This is the thing, by the way, that we're joking. Obviously. And before we continue and go down this rabbit hole forever, because I will, because I'm salty about this topic. 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 the wonderful world of podcasting, on a podcast with podcasters who do marketing and marketing podcasts. So many fourth walls. So many fourth walls. 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 all of the great content and webinars and whatnot over on the Wix SEO learning at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Please 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 Jen Cornwell Nicole Ponce Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Ignite Visibility Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Jen Cornwell Nicole Ponce Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center It's New: Daily SEO News Series Ignite Visibility Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm already overseeing the head of SEO brand at Wix. And I'm joined by the fabulously amazing, the incredible, the always differentiated and always essential head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: I try to keep it... You can stand up from the crowd. There was years ago that I used to worry when I was a kid, when I was like high school or whatever. "Oh, people are staring at me." And I was like, you know what? What's it Bonnie Raitt says, "Let's give them something to talk about." It was like, yeah, I'm going to wear a stupid ridiculous shirt or ridiculous whatever. Because if you're looking, feast your eyes. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Something like that makes you sound like a total idiot. It took me a long time to realize that was Bonnie Raitt, even though I love 80s music. Crystal Carter: Bonnie Raitt singing about something. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. I didn't realize that was her other stuff- Crystal Carter: No, that's 90s. Mordy Oberstein: ... was other stuff. No, it's a 90s, right. It's a 90s song. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, yeah. Bonnie Raitt's great. But it's 90s. It's 90s, because it was on a Julia Roberts movie. Mordy Oberstein: Pretty Woman, no? No. Crystal Carter: No. It wasn't Pretty Women. Mordy Oberstein: No. I don't know. Crystal Carter: It was one of her other rom-coms. I'm sure. I'm going to have to Google it now. Please, talk amongst yourselves. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Julia Roberts movies. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also show your clients how much they really need you with inbuilt reporting found in Wix Studio. And in addition to all of the analytics available to you in Wix Analytics. As today, we continue our Wix Studio series as we talk how SEOs and marketers can show how indispensable they are to their clients. Why in today's environment, you need to show your value across the board, not just in one marketing discipline. Do you hear that SEO folks? Proving your value as an SEO or marketing agency versus a consultancy, is there a difference? And yes, we'll get into AI and how to deal with clients who feel they don't need you because they have an LLM that tells them to drink urine to prevent kidney stones. Ignite Visibility's, own VP of SEO, Jennifer Cornwell will be here in just a few minutes as she helps us show you why you're indispensable to your clients, why you are your client's very own air supply, and why they be so lost without you. Plus, we take a hard look at how the Google leaks are starting to broaden SEO. Again, you hear that SEO, folks? Plus we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So stick with us as we show you how to become like a band-Aid, too painful for your clients to pull off on this, the 98th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. By the way, not an actual strategy you should use. Bad strategy. Don't be too painful. I was just taking poetic license. Yes, I am a poet. You wouldn't know a first glance, but I am quite the poet. I'm a wordsmith. Crystal Carter: Okay. One of my favorite Mordy Oberstein things is when you drop a $5 word. Every now and then, Mordy's like, "Oh, I have the vocabulary just in case you're wondering." Mordy Oberstein: For my birthday one year... Again, I terrible with time. You put out tweets of things I've said I didn't realize I said. And one of them was, "If talk is cheap, I'm fine to talk a lot," or something like that. Crystal Carter: Something like that. This is true. This is true. This is true. They weren't hard to find them, you got a lot of tweets. You are prolific, as it were. By the way, just for people who were wondering or who were in suspense. This Something to Talk About song was from a Julia Roberts movie called Something to Talk About. Mordy Oberstein: We just completely... Just ignorance built upon ignorance, built upon ignorance. Crystal Carter: That's such an SEO thing to do though. Mordy Oberstein: Near me. Something to talk about near me. Crystal Carter: Right. What's the song? It's Something to Talk About. What's the movie? Something to Talk About. What are we going to talk about? Mordy Oberstein: Before we bring our guest on, I will tell you the truth, as opposed to when I lie to you. Which is such a weird idiom, by the way. Like, "Oh, tell you the truth." Because before I was lying. Crystal Carter: Yeah, what was going on before? I thought we were in a circle of trust. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Honestly, like before you weren't being? Anyway, but it's an idiom. Anywho. There are times where I, as a marketer and as someone who's self-deprecating, feel like, come on, what do I know about marketing and SEO? It's like, what I'm saying is so obvious. Do I actually provide any unique value? But I do then meet folks who maybe don't have a marketing background that are maybe just marketing enthusiasts who are talking to me about marketing, or maybe they're just new to market... They are marketers or SEOs, and they're just new to the industry and they're still learning. And I do then realize that I do have actual experience and a unique outlook on marketing, and a unique outlook on SEO that I've built up through the years. That no, I of course didn't have when I first started, or was even in SEO marketing altogether, but that I have built up over the many years that I have been in marketing. And that does actually provide something that's unique and invaluable to the people that I work with. I think. I hope. Right? And with that, please welcome to the show Ignite Visibility's VP of SEO, Jennifer Cornwell. How are you? Jen Cornwell: Hi. I'm good, thanks. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Mordy Oberstein: You're indispensable to this podcast now. Jen Cornwell: Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. That's a big title. Big title for a one-time guest. Mordy Oberstein: No, that means you can't leave. It's like Hotel California. Yeah, you're stuck. That's it. Crystal Carter: And I think it's really interesting you said seasoned. Because I think that one of the things that makes people indispensable is the special sauce that you bring as an SEO, really. I think that's something, Would you say that you and your team have cultivated a little bit of a special sauce that you bring to new clients or new projects? Jen Cornwell: Yeah. I think that the reason clients really like working with us a lot of the time is we are... A lot of businesses, I think they're going to say, "We're the startup mentality." But I do actually feel like we work that way, and we work that way with our clients because we worked that way for such a long time. We just hit our 11-year anniversary in this last year. I've been there for six, and the team has grown. I was like, 65 people when we got hired, and now we're 220 or something. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my goodness. Wow. Jen Cornwell: Yeah, grown a lot as a company. But I think even though we've done that, it's still coming to the table for our clients, for these relationships that we've built ultimately. We talk about the seasoning, that's important. But there's also this, your clients have gotten in this rhythm of talking to you all the time, and you are their marketing person now. And the reasons why, as an SEO, yes, you need to talk about SEO, but there's all this opportunity to talk about these other things they aren't thinking about. We try to keep our team really well-rounded and well-versed in a lot of what's going on. They're not paid media experts, but have enough of an understanding to be able to talk to it. And that kind of thing, it's part of it, the indispensableness. Mordy Oberstein: When we're deciding what should we discuss for the podcast, and we were saying how there's just so much more going on in marketing in general, there's just not one facet of marketing. And to be indispensable in today's environment means being a little bit more, I don't know, broad about what you cover and how you cover. Or what you're thinking about or what you're discussing with clients. How has that factored into what you feel makes y'all indispensable to your clients? Jen Cornwell: Part of it is making a better SEO, I think understanding all their marketing channels, because so much of what we do funnels down to us. Even not digital space, stuff we don't do as an agency. I've had a client where we saw an impression decrease for their brand and they're like, "Oh yeah, we stopped running our commercial." And so knowing that and being able to go into conversations with clients when they see something similar and be able to at least ask those questions, I think what's really important. But yeah, I think that's really where it comes from. It's baking it into the experience of the special sauce of situational things we've been in to open up those doors to ask the right questions at the right time. Crystal Carter: I think that's a great example. I've had clients where they've run print advertising or they've run television advertising. And if you're talking to them regularly, then you can bring that all together with the SEO, you can really unlock the real value of some of that. And if you are in an agency situation, all the better. Because you'll have people, you can be like, right, if you're running a television ad on, I don't know, ESPN or something. We can bring in our social team to target people who follow ESPN, we can link everything together. And even if it's on a project basis, even if it's just, you're doing this campaign on ESPN this week, and we'll bring in somebody to help with that, with the social shares or whatever this week or whatever, that sort of thing. But I think that having those conversations, keeping those conversations and really reading the data. Like you were saying, how we saw the impressions, what's going on? Really, really valuable. Jen Cornwell: The client piece that you mentioned is really important, because we talk about that a lot with our clients. I have prospects who come to me and they're like, "What makes a good client?" And I'm like, "When you talk to us." We want you to actually see this as a partnership where we want to help you. And yeah, sometimes they don't even tell you about new pages they add. Or, "Oh yeah, we did change the entire URL structure of the site segment." And you find out in your reporting that everything is way different than the last time you looked at it. But yeah, the clients who tell us about the little stuff, the small things going on, that's where we can actually come in and ask the right questions and be helpful. Mordy Oberstein: Do you notice a change with your clients? We're going to talk later in the podcast about how SEO might be broadening, and the Google leaks and how now there's a whole idea of branding factoring into SEO, and yada, yada, yada. But do you find, I don't know, over the years that the clients themselves have changed? Are they less focused just an SEO or just PPC? Are they starting to broaden a bit? Jen Cornwell: A little bit, I think. We still get a handful of clients who read one SEO blog. They come in and they say, "I do SEO." And they did SEO in 2012. And you're like, "Okay, so you kind of know what it is, but also it's been 10 years." That happens a lot still. But we do have clients who are, they understand that SEO... Their understanding of it is keyword stuffing. They're like, "Oh, yeah, well, I don't want my content to look all weird. I want my content to read weird." And so having to hurdle that. But even that's new, because that's like they understand that there's keywords that need to be implemented in a certain way. And they know it needs to happen for SEO, but they just want to figure out what the middle ground is for user experience. I think that we're having more of those conversations and less of, "How many keywords are on this page, and why aren't there more of them?" conversations. I guess a little bit. There's also some... It depends. It really just depends on the most common SEO answer of all. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, the graph. It depends. It depends in orange. Jen Cornwell: Yes. Yeah. No, it depends on the marketer that's coming in and what their background is. But it's gotten better. I think the understanding of SEO has gotten better. Crystal Carter: And I think a lot of people are starting to say that... And I don't know if you're seeing this trend, is that they're starting to see clients come to them less for implementation support and more for strategic support. Are you seeing that trend as well? Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Yeah. Especially more recently, I think it's a little bit of economic and bandwidth availability resources within their own team in the conversations that we're having. But definitely they're like, "Oh, okay, this is stuff a developer can do," and you can just pass it over to somebody who's in-house who has some SEO experience so we're not doing as much explaining as we have to do. But yeah, it's definitely more on the strategic side. And I think that's where they know enough to know that SEO is different than it was 10 years ago, where they know there needs to be more strategy involved and less "keyword stuffing", as an example. Mordy Oberstein: Or they could have the AI to implement all of it, right? Jen Cornwell: Right. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's a smooth transition into the other elephant in the room that I wanted to discuss, which is, how does AI affect you being indispensable? Both in reality, and I think more importantly... Because I think in reality not much has changed, but that's just me. But the perception of that reality with clients. Are they coming in, "Well, I could just LLM this thing."? Jen Cornwell: As soon as ChatGPT was announced and a thing, we had a client who said, "Okay, send me pricing for how to write more content for less money, with AI." And I was like, "Oh, my God." So we go through all that, and it turns out, actually, especially at the time when it was first rolling out, there was no cost savings. The hard costs of a writer were actually implemented in time and trying to get the LLM to get what we needed on the other side, that was not going to work out for that client. But yeah, we had a lot of those conversations. The way we've positioned it with our clients now is, we use AI in our processes for analysis, we use it for blind spots. It's like, as SEOs you get very situational sometimes with your own references. So having something that can double check some other things for you just in case you forget. Stuff that it's more appropriate use. But yeah, we still have clients. I had a client last wee, this week I was on the phone with. And they're like, "Yeah, we're going to hook Jasper up so we can put a bunch of content up on the site." And so I screen shared this screenshot of this client we had that just did AI content. You can see every single algorithm update where it just fell off September, January, then again in March, just stair steps down. I've used that a lot actually as reference point. Crystal Carter: That's one of the things that I think is so valuable about an agency relationship is that as somebody who's working in an agency, and as you said, you have eyes... You've grown from a team of 60 to team of over 100. Across your team you will be having conversations about different trends that you're seeing from clients, and things like that. When a client comes to you and they say, "I want to do this," it won't be your first time doing this. You can say to the wider team, "If you have any examples, have you seen anything?" And they'll go, "Yeah, actually, I do. Watch this drop." And I think that visibility is something that a lot of in-house teams really struggle with a little bit, because you might just have your blinders on and you might not see what's happening in different verticals. Mordy's done so much algorithm research and stuff, and sometimes the algorithms, if you think about the reviews algorithm, the product reviews update. That was initially working in a certain space. And now, I'm pontificating here, but I think that some of the stuff that we saw with that is kind of what we're seeing with the helpful content update rolled out wider. And I think that the knowledge that you get from working across different clients that have been affected by different algorithms, different approaches, different techniques can be super, super valuable. And it's something that you can't get if somebody's working on one client at a time, for instance. Mordy Oberstein: Is that something you feel differentiates you as an agency versus a consultancy? Where you have so much experience and so many different verticals and so many different areas of marketing. If you're going to get consultants it's like, all right, they have your SEO handled, but the second you have a PPC problem come up, or a content issue come up, or whatever it has come up, now you have to go find somebody else. Jen Cornwell: Yeah, we've never been vertical specific, we've always done the variety. We probably lean more toward lead gen, maybe a little bit B2B versus e-comm. But I think what happens, we have clients who come on and they're like, "Oh, do you have experience in our industry?" And that matters for writers and that kind of thing, getting the context of their business together. But I think there's a lot of things that are applicable across verticals. The way Google indexes content for a storage facility site is not any different than the skincare brand that we work on. And the things it's looking for are not intrinsically different, but it is two different audiences. And that's where I think you start to get into the indispensable marketing mindset of, I'm not just an SEO, I'm thinking about user journey, I'm thinking about conversion points. I'm thinking about the user journey for a storage site versus a skin care brand, that's two different things that can be important in your strategy. But yeah, the variety I think is really critical, really helps. Crystal Carter: And when I was working agency side, I really liked this. I was working with clients similarly, skincare, storage, people that different, some of the clients that I was working with. And I thought that was really interesting. Because particularly on the local side, for instance, there will be features that are available within local SEO, for instance, that are applicable to certain verticals that are not applicable to other verticals. And if you're working on product stuff, then there will be different things that you'll use for that, like Google Merchant Center and stuff. But what you find when you're working across all of them is you get more of a sense of how these things work. Because very often maybe they'll have lots of product schema on... Maybe they'll have one vertical that's got lots of schema, and so then you learn how to do schema. So then when they add schema to a different vertical, then you're completely ready for that because you've already done it on this other one. Whereas, everybody who's just been working on the other vertical and has never seen rich results for that particular vertical might be very surprised. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. No, I think SEO is so situational anyway, that having that diverse experience... Or being able to have it, I guess, within our team and not being necessarily... I joke that I want to retire to in-house, that's my retirement plan day. I'm going to leave agency life and I'm going to go to in-house and have a nice little in-house job. But not to disregard the in-house people, I'm sure that is hard in its own way. But I do think, yeah, when you're in-house you're dialed in on maybe one site or a few sites, or one specific vertical. And it's great, maybe it makes you a specialist there, but doesn't exactly open up the experience. And I think the time too, over five years, over six years. What I was doing five or six years ago is very different than now, and the experience over that time. Yeah, your in-house person who's been there for three years maybe hasn't stepped out of the SEO bubble or SEO world in a different way, just because they're only looking at certain things and trying to solve the one problem. This is what I hear about in-house, trying to solve the one problem that you've been trying to push across the line for two years, or whatever it is. And it's always adding site maps to the robots.txt file, and it's going to take seven months to implement. Yeah, I think it's easy to get lost in some of that and maybe lose sight of some of the other stuff that you would get to see agency side. Mordy Oberstein: Do you think that... Because you mentioned this a few times already, the marketing mindset and the marketing mindset. Do you think that maybe that's one of the reasons why maybe SEOs don't necessarily have that marketing mindset that seems to be indispensable to clients? Jen Cornwell: It's probably a little bit of experience, for sure. I think it's really, I refer to it a lot as our SEO vacuum. I go and I can propose all kinds of things to clients like, "Oh yeah, I work on these keywords and these pages," but it doesn't really matter if their audience doesn't care about it or if they don't care about it as a business either. And ultimately, being able to prioritize your recommendations, I think that comes from marketing mindset as well. I'm not just passing over an audit checklist of "here's all the stuff that's wrong and here's some recommendations to fix it". But I'm not necessarily going to tell you what's going to impact your business the most or what you should prioritize first based on your resources. And so I think navigating... That's one example, but being able to navigate their entire marketing plan in the same way. My favorite example, I had a pediatric dentist client, he's got five or six locations in San Diego. And I've worked at a lot of dentists, they love marketing. Mordy Oberstein: They got to figure out how to get you in that chair and pull out your teeth. Jen Cornwell: Yeah, yeah. No, he loved it. And I used to go into the meetings and I would suggest things that I knew I was never going to touch. I would build the landing page. I'll write some content, we'll make the landing page, but there's 5 million other steps to this idea. And those conversations were always really fun for me because I got to talk about stuff other than keywords. But also made us really valuable to him because he's like, "Oh, here's another brain, basically, that can be in this room with me and has the marketing perspective to be able to talk about what we could potentially do." Yeah, I think navigating those situations, the small conversation that turns into a big idea just because you came in with a little bit of extra experience goes a long way. Crystal Carter: That's great. It sounds like a great partnership. The kind of partnership you were talking about before, where everything is back and forth. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Was like the name of the dentist, like, Bright Smiles? Jen Cornwell: No. Actually, they have a really strong brand. They were one of the biggest pediatric dentists in San Diego. And one of my favorite idea that I suggested them that they did was try to set a world record at a baseball game. They were trying to get as many people to floss at once, or something. Crystal Carter: Were they into that? Jen Cornwell: Oh, my God, yeah. They thought that was awesome. Crystal Carter: I love it. Jen Cornwell: ... ever. Well, and it was something that John Lincoln, our CEO, suggested for a night. He's like, "Maybe we could try to get in the world record book." And so I came into this meeting and I was like, "What if they …?” Mordy Oberstein: Could you imagine? They did it? Jen Cornwell: They did it, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: At a baseball game? Jen Cornwell: I don't think they set the record, but they did do it at Padres. At Petco Stadium. Mordy Oberstein: They were all flossing. That sounds, first off, brilliant, but also disgusting. Jen Cornwell: I know. But it was like, they do kids games, so it was like the kids were there and it was like a whole thing. Mordy Oberstein: That just makes it grosser. The kids, I don't know. Oh, my gosh. I'm not a germophobe, but I'm freaking out on the other side of the screen. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. No, it was questionable. But people participated and they did it and got some exposure. Mordy Oberstein: That's awesome. Jen Cornwell: I wrote the blog. That's a... Mordy Oberstein: That is a great idea, by the way. That would make me feel like you're indispensable. Crystal Carter: Right. Unique, showing up with unique ideas. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Totally. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. I'm going to go Google this now. Got to find people flossing at Petco Park. Jen Cornwell: I give enough details. I give enough details. I think those are more fun conversations to have anyway, honestly. So it's a little bit of my own personal amusement of... And we don't get those opportunities with a lot of our clients. And clients really just look at us as, "You are the SEO partner, so your suggestions about CRO for this form, we don't actually care that much. Just get us the keywords and get us the content." And that works in some relationships. But really strong partnerships you get to have those fun conversations. Crystal Carter: And I think that's also important to being a good partner for your clients is understanding who's like, "I just want this one thing." And you're like, "Cool, here you go." And the people who are like, "Yeah, let's get in. Let's brainstorm." There's going to be some people who really want to be all about it. And I used to have some clients who were just like, "Did you do the internet?" And I'd be like, "Yeah, I did it." They'd be like, "Great." And they don't want anything to do... They don't want to be involved. You're just working with... They're happy, they trust you to handle whatever you need to do. Jen Cornwell: Sometimes that's indispensable too. You're right- Crystal Carter: Exactly. Jen Cornwell: ... it's relative. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I feel like I have to go floss my teeth now. So, if people want to brainstorm with you or brainstorm with Ignite, how could they find you and your company? Jen Cornwell: I'm on LinkedIn. Ignite is also on LinkedIn. And then, I'm also on Twitter. I think it's JenCornwell_. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, don't worry, I'll find it. I'll link to it in the profile. In the profile, in the show notes. Jen Cornwell: Sweet. But yeah, those are two good places. I'm sometimes on Twitter. Mordy Oberstein: Twitter these days is not indispensable. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. And LinkedIn, I don't know, it's a weird mix over there sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: There's nothing great. I'll be honest with you, we can go on a whole different tangent about there's nothing great on social media anymore. I don't TikTok, but Crystal TikToks now. Crystal Carter: Yeah, sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Yeah. You were at Moscon. I did tons of Moscon TikToks. Jen Cornwell: Oh, did you? I've not done any work TikToks. Crystal Carter: You could call it working. No, I'm kidding. Jen Cornwell: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe another podcast. I did make a TikTok where I built a house out of Taco Bell. And got a lot of views and Taco Bell saw it and sent me a whole box full of swag. Crystal Carter: Yo, these are the kind of ideas we need, Jen. Jen Cornwell: My claim to fame. Mordy Oberstein: Floss and the taco. This is- Crystal Carter: Tacos. You need to find a taco client. Jen Cornwell: Oh yeah, I know. Mordy Oberstein: Like Taco Bell. Jen Cornwell: Taco Bell, maybe. Yeah. Del Taco will take. I had El Pollo Loco. Crystal Carter: I used to go to Alberto's in San Diego. Jen Cornwell: Oh yeah, yeah. Crystal Carter: It has taquitos. Jen Cornwell: Rigoberto's, hit all the Berto's. Crystal Carter: Oh, there's the Filiberto's is also very good. They have a gigantic burrito that's amazing. But also I'm thinking, let's brainstorm right now taquitos, they're very much like Lincoln Logs. Jen Cornwell: Oh, Lincoln Logs. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Could build a whole to taquito fort. Jen Cornwell: Taquito. And you got to come up with a fun name. Mine was from Taco Bell Townhouse was because I saw a charcuterie chalet. This was during COVID, people were making little houses out of charcuterie. So yeah, did one out of french fries. Crystal Carter: Why didn't we make the podcast about- Jen Cornwell: We could have started with that. Crystal Carter: About literal food pyramids. Just saying. Mordy Oberstein: You make Lincoln Log, you can make out of asparagus. Crystal Carter: This is true. Jen Cornwell: We had somebody do hot dogs. Mordy Oberstein: Hot dogs. Jen Cornwell: This was all over a work competition. Mordy Oberstein: Work shopping this year. Jen Cornwell: Yeah, the gingerbread house kits. So it was just make anything out of food. And so, yeah, people showed up with some interesting pickles. Crystal Carter: I feel like the easiest thing is going to be carrot sticks because they're already made into things, whatever. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Yeah, that's cheap. Crystal Carter: Tater Tots though, I feel like you could brick those. Pickles are good. They're kind of juicy. Tater Tots, you could use hummus or something sticky as the mortar to keep it put together. Mordy Oberstein: Right. It could be like a stone cottage thing. Crystal Carter: Right. Or like a slightly melted cheese, which will then congeal and then go... You see what I'm saying? Do you see? Mordy Oberstein: I think we've gone completely off the rails. Jen Cornwell: Best bet. Mordy Oberstein: ... so much for coming on the show, and we'll see you out there on TikTok building asparagus, Tater Tot houses. Jen Cornwell: Thank you. Bye. Mordy Oberstein: Anywho, you may have heard this whole thing a little while back that there was a Google leak. Google's algorithm leaked. There was a nut that needed to be tightened, and it was dripping water. There was a Google leak, which everyone I'm assuming heard something about that. And one of the offshoots of that is a lot of SEOs are now talking about, "Oh, we need to be thinking about wider digital presence and brand marketing because of things in the leaks." Such as, oh, Google might be, emphasis on might be, looking at user behavior metrics or Chrome data. Or might be looking at mentions across the web, yada, yada, yada. Again, Amazon might be, we don't know how they're actually doing it, even with the leaks. So SEO is talking about a lot of these wider marketing topics all of a sudden. Which brings up the question that we alluded to earlier, is SEO starting to broaden? Join us now as we explore this fascinating and intriguing question with a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. I guess another way to phrase this question, is SEO starting to die? Is that too spicy? Crystal Carter: I think SEO is trying to use different tools, and also to utilize the tools that we have in different ways. I recently shared a post on LinkedIn, because I recently rewrote, remixed an article on long tail keywords. And historically speaking, the ways that SEOs have talked about long tail keywords is that we have long tail keywords and they've got good search volume accumulatively, and they allow you to connect with different parts of search, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. All the things that great SEOs do, right? This is perfectly good SEO practice. But, and this is what I think SEOs need to do. We need to look at what we've got, the resources that we've got in a different way. The long tail keywords are not just about the search volume, the long tail keywords, an example that I use, was vegan pizza and pizza delivery in Brooklyn after midnight. This article's on the Wix SEO learning hub. And the thing that long tail keyword gives you is a full campaign. That gives you a full marketing campaign. Vegan tells you that you should be talking to vegan influencers or vegan magazines or vegan YouTube channels, or whatever. Pizza delivery tells you people want pizza, people want it delivered. They tell you that you need to have a Google business profile. They tell you that you need to have the location, your name, address, phone number on your website, et cetera, et cetera. And the after midnight tells you that it's late night. So if you have ads, you only want to show them late at night. You're not going to show people who are looking for pizza delivery at two o'clock in the afternoon those ads, you want to show them at 12 o'clock at night so that they can see those ads and get that pizza straight away. You also might want to take out... You know the quiet storm that goes on the radio at midnight or something, or the late night show on the radio. If you sell pizza after midnight and there's a late night radio show in your area. Guess what, the ad spot for that's probably not going to be that expensive because most people are not looking to buy stuff in middle of the night. However, if somebody's listening to the radio at 12:30 and you're like, "Hey, you want a tasty slice," they might call you. Mordy Oberstein: ... how you phrase that on a late night radio show. Crystal Carter: I mean- Mordy Oberstein: Remembering my youth of what's on the radio at 12 o'clock at night. Crystal Carter: It's a good thing. After midnight in Brooklyn, obviously geolocates you. You might want to sponsor the local basketball team, the local fantasy football team, whatever it may be. But that long tail keyword is data, it's search data. There's somebody who recently shared, they're looking at how search is growing, and the way that they're talking about SEO is slightly different. He was talking about how we can drive search demand. He was talking about how search demand gives you an insight into consumer demand. And that's different from going like, oh, these keywords, oh, blah, blah, blah. We just need to use the tools we have in a new way. Mordy Oberstein: I don't think anything's actually changed, everything that you're saying are things we should have been doing anyway. I think the only thing that's actually changed... And it will change the industry, by the way, because perception is everything. Is that SEOs are now starting to think about this because they're realizing that the wider, I'll call it holistic or whatever kind of marketing, brand marketing. Could, should, probably does, definitely does in some way, shape, or form, impact performance marketing. And they're like, "Oh, snap. Now we have to think about this." But you should be thinking about this the whole time. Growing your digital presence, I like to call it grow your digital light, has a tremendous impact on your SEO efforts and what you're able to do and not able to do. Whether it's SEO super directly, like we're saying now with the leaks are indirectly. So nothing is actually true, but the mindset has changed. And I think that... I can't find it, I was searching for this. And I post too much on social media, this is my problem. And I was in a Slack group and I put it on a LinkedIn. I have no clue. Look, I can't find it. It's one of the things you're going hear more about, or a segment of SEO, is brand SEO. I don't mean getting your branded keywords, I mean looking at brand as a way to summon your SEO effort. And then, lo and behold, a month later the leaks come out and now all of a sudden we're talking... But none of this is new. None of it's new. Crystal Carter: Yeah. One of the reasons why you didn't find that tweet, Mordy, is because you've been saying that for years. Because, Mordy, if you were trying to find that tweet, that's like trying to find- Mordy Oberstein: A lot of people have. The Kevin Indigs of the world come to mind, Lily Ray comes to mind. Crystal Carter: Have you ever found something out, or learned a new word or something like that, and then all of a sudden you see it everywhere? And it's always been there, but you didn't know necessarily what that word was, or didn't necessarily know what that idea was, or something like that. And you find that it's like, "Oh, this has unlocked a whole new perspective for me." And I think that's kind of what some people are coming to. But yeah, it has always been there. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's like Taylor Swift for me. She started dating Travis Kelce, Taylor who? Oh, there's this whole Swift-y thing. I had no clue. But now that I’ve heard of football, now I know. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: My world has changed. Crystal Carter: And if you learn a new tool, it can really open things up. Or also, I think when we think about the skills that we had and the resources that we had, sometimes it's a case of taking stuff that you already know and looking at it differently. There's some people like avocados. Let's talk about avocados. Mordy Oberstein: Love avocados. Crystal Carter: You like avocados. Avocados are delicious. I love avocados. You can literally just... I could literally eat it with a spoon. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. Crystal Carter: Perfectly happy. Mordy Oberstein: Don't even use a spoon, just take your fingers. Crystal Carter: Just- Mordy Oberstein: Just dive in. Crystal Carter: Just get involved. You don't have to do anything to an avocado. Vegans looked at that and they were like, "I'm going to make that chocolate mousse." And people were like, "What?" And vegans were like, "I'm going to make a chocolate mousse." It's the same avocado everybody's been looking at, but they were like, "I'm going to make a chocolate mousse." Completely different vibe. Yeah, it's a completely different vibe. It's a completely different thing. It's the same avocado that you always liked, completely different vibe. Mordy Oberstein: I think the only problem or issue I take is that it's possibly happening in SEO for the wrong reasons. We're like, we're taking the avocado, we're making it into chocolate mousse because I want to shake chocolate mousse and I want to throw it at people on the street. That's fun for me. Crystal Carter: I did a webinar the other day and the audience was super engaged, but I was talking about internal linking. And I was like, "You should have internal links. Make sure you use line links. Line links, they're high priority in the crawl, and they're really useful and they're really helpful, and they add context and they have words before them and words after them," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And somebody was like, "Oh, but if I do use the links, will Google penalize me? And what about this one?" And I was like, "Yo, put the links on your page because they're helpful. They're helpful, they're useful." I cannot stand it if I'm reading an article that's like, "Oh my God, avocado mousse is so delicious. It's the best thing I've ever tried. And gosh, I tried this brand of avocado mousse and it just really blew my mind." And I'm like, "Link me, bro." I'm like, "Where's the link?" And there's no link, I'm mad. I'm big mad. I'm mad, I want to go somewhere else. So link me. Link me to the recipe, link me to the picture, link me to... Pixlr didn't happen. I want to see the stuff. Why? Because it's helpful. That's helpful. It's helpful to Google, it's helpful to users. So the things that we need to do in terms of brand should be helpful. You want to pull your brand forward, you want to use your data wisely. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, momentum and cadence and presence, all that good stuff. Oh, no, more it's going to happen is what happens now on LinkedIn. I connect with somebody, "Hi, how are you?" Oh, here it comes. "Would you like to buy links?" But in a year from now it's going to be, would you like to buy mentions? Because what guest? He was like, "Oh, the leaks talk about mentions, and now we need to be concerned about mentions. I have a good idea, I'll sell mentions." Who needs to get the lie to sell mentions? And you should be worrying about mentions. You don't mentions do? I'm reading an article, they say, "You know what's a really great thing? Avocados. Avocados from whatever company, from Bob's Avocados," and there's no link. But you know what I might do if I want an avocado? I might type in Bob's Avocado into Google. And do you think for a second Google's not looking at the fact that lots of people looking for avocados and Bob at the same time? Did a link do that? No, a mentioned did that. Did a mention do that only after the leaks happened? No, a mention did that many, many years before the leaks came out. But now SEOs are going to try selling mentions. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that really, generally speaking, and I've heard this from good SEOs. People say, "How do you weather the algorithm updates and things like that?" Nine times out of 10, it's just keeping your nose clean. But nine times out of 10, it's like keeping your nose clean doing solid SEO, doing stuff that helps your users, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that it seems really... Okay, so I learned to snowboard, right? Mordy Oberstein: Wait, you know how to snowboard? Crystal Carter: Yeah. I'm a mediocre snowboarder, but I've been on a few mountains in my time. And I don't fall over. Last time I was in Switzerland, I didn't fall over. I did all right. And I was riding Switch. So people who know that, your girl has to moves. Anyway, when I was learning to snowboard, my instructor told me, he was like, "You just look where you want to go." And I was like, "No, because it's got to be this and you have to do that, and you have to go over here, and got to..." And I was doing the most, I was doing too much. But literally, I will tell you, if you want to snowboard, and I tell this to people now. Literally, look where you want to go. It's literally that simple. It's that simple. You're on the board, your feet are planted, you turn your head and your body will go where it needs to go. And that's all it is. So we like, oh, what if I do this, and what if I do that? And da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And don't get me wrong, there are absolutely technical things you need to consider. You need to make sure your website's crawlable. You need to have lots of things that are in there. You need to coordinate your digital PR, et cetera, so that it makes sense for your brand. You need to have a coherent strategy. But essentially, if your goal is to add value for your users, for your audience, then you will be fine. And if your goal is to add value consistently for them, then that will support your brand, as long as you know what your brand is. That's not rocket science. We try to make it so it's super complicated, but it's not. It's not. Mordy Oberstein: It's just tuning out that noise, that's the hard part. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: You know who tunes out a lot of noise, keeps his nose clean, and always provides value? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: It's Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: That's the cleanest nose I've ever seen. Really, it's sparkling. Crystal Carter: I mean, sometimes. Mordy Oberstein: Which means, as we pay homage to Barry, that it's time for this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a whole bunch of stuff for you, it's all a AI related. Or actually, AI adjacent. Let's start with Search Engine Roundtables, Barry Schwartz. Well, I don't know why I said Search Engine Roundtables, Barry Schwartz. There only is Barry Schwartz as Search Engine Roundtable, which is an existential feeling. There only is Barry Schwartz. Anyway, Reddit blocked Bing search and others, but not Google. So, Reddit has blocked basically all other search engine, I'm pretty sure, from crawling them via the robot.txt file. I don't know if that applies to Perplexity actually. I thought somewhere I saw Perplexity was fine. Anyway, I'm definitely Bing. Bing is definitely out. Reddit is no longer allowing other search engines to crawl them. That's interesting, right? I never know. What do you say about that? It's an interesting look. What's basically happening is that Reddit is basically saying, "Hey, if you want our content, be like Google and pay for it." I personally don't like Reddit, so I don't know why anybody would pay for it. But, okay. It's really interesting. It's a new paradigm on the web, I guess. I don't know if this deal will work out well for Reddit. I'm highly suspect that making this kind of deal is in their long-term benefit. It's weird, by the way. I'll just say it's weird because, yeah, Bing's not the biggest search engine, it's only got whatever percent of market share. Let's say it's got 5% of market share. I don't remember the exact numbers, nor do I particularly care. 5% of that market share is saying, yeah, I have 5% market share of the entire world. That's a lot of people. I guess Reddit doesn't care about your grandmother going to Reddit anymore. I guess the lesson to take from that. That's a little snarky for this podcast. Anyway, just weird. Let's head over to Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land, where Google will soon test search shopping ads in AI overviews. So Google has talked about having an ad experience in the AI overviews for a while. Now they're saying you're going to see the tests coming up soon. The quote was, "And as you've probably noticed at GML, Google Marketing Live, we announced that soon we'll actually start testing search and shopping ads in AI overviews for users in the US," yada, yada, yada. So they're going to be testing them soon. Interesting. Let's see how that goes. Obviously, the ability to earn ad revenue is what will indicate if the AI overviews are going to work or not from a business point of view. All this is just interesting to me. Anyway. Now back to Search Engine Roundtable, Google Gemini adds related content and verification links. So the LLM formerly known as Bard, now known as Gemini, now contains links again. This is a weird week. I'm finding the news weird this week. Bard, now known as Gemini, used to show links to the content that the summary was based on. Much the way an AI overview does. But then stopped doing that. Well, now links are back inside of Gemini. Which is interesting, because now covering again from Search Engine Roundtable, SearchGPT, OpenAI search tool is out. It's announced. Like ChatGPT, you can now use SearchGPT to get answers to your questions. But here, with SearchGPT, you'll get citations that the content is based on. So it's basically Gemini. So it's basically the same thing. It's now you can search using OpenAI's platform much the way you would use Gemini. Again, get the summary and now get citations and links to content and so forth within the ecosystem. Will this disrupt the search engine market? Probably not. Because it's basically the same thing as Gemini, and kind of the same thing as the AI overview. So carry on as usual, I guess. I don't know. It's a weird week. It's a weird week. By the way, that article is brought to you by Barry Schwartz. Because, again, who else is writing at SE Roundtable? Actually, not true. Not true. I take that back. Sometimes Glenn Gabe actually writes an article over at SE Roundtable. You can always tell by the headline. Anyway, that's this week's weird and snappy news. It is hard to keep the noise out with the news sometimes. There's a lot of noise in the news. Crystal Carter: I'll be completely honest, I used to get a lot of my news from Twitter, and that is not a use a useful- Mordy Oberstein: Not a good place. Crystal Carter: ... source to get news from anymore. Barry's a great source. And I think a lot of times... There's certain people that I follow to keep on top of things like that as well. Lily Ray's a great person to follow for that, she's really on top of the news, and particularly for stuff. Mordy Oberstein: Glenn. Crystal Carter: Glenn is great as well, and Mike is great as well. Mike King is also a good one who jumps in. And Mike covers a lot of topics as well. So a lot of search, but also a few other topics as well, which is cool. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. That's why I like, by the way, I mentioned Glenn Gabe before, because he covers all tech news. I saw yesterday he posted about... This is insane. By the time this comes out, this will be old news. It's basically a social media thing where you can create an AI persona and then have all the AIs talking to each other. Crystal Carter: I heard the story about a comedian. Opinions on him aside, it was an interesting story. Dave Chappelle apparently had a Twitter account that was not his Twitter account, but this person was posting stuff. Kat Williams, and again, another controversial comedian or whatever. But he also had- Mordy Oberstein: All comedians are kind of controversial, it's what they do. Crystal Carter: He also had a... These two Twitter accounts were arguing with each other. The two of them actually met, these two comedians actually met, and they were like, "I'm sorry." Or, no. And Dave Chappelle apparently said to this other comedian, "I'm so sorry, that's not actually me that's been arguing with you." And Kat Williams was like, "I don't have a Twitter account either." And basically- Mordy Oberstein: Well, that was my comment back to Glenn when he posted about this. I'm like, yeah, AI, but people aren't so great either. So, there you go. You know who is a great person with the perfect pivot possible? Our follow of the week, Sam Rush's own head of influencer marketing, Nicole Ponce. Nicole is amazing. I work with Nicole. I still work with Nicole. Absolutely one of the greatest people you'll ever meet. Super incredible, super smart, super nice, helpful, everything. Give her a follow across all social media platforms. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely do. Not only is she super awesome, super smart, she also has all of the latest info and all the cool stuff that Sam Rush gets up to. They've got some cool events going on, they've got some interesting projects going on, and she's very much a part of that. She's really supportive of the SEO community as well. She supported stuff that Aletis put on. They've also supported things, different events. And they supported Search 'n Stuff, which is another great event as well. And I've worked with Nicole as well, and cannot speak highly enough of her. Big hearts to Nicole. Mordy Oberstein: We're all making heart signs. Crystal Carter: We're making those little hearts. Mordy Oberstein: ... the two of us here. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's just us. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. What an interesting selection of people today. We talked about Barry, Cole… Crystal Carter: ... all the other folks we were just mentioning as well. Mordy Oberstein: We've talked a lot of people on today's show, mentions of people. Mentions, you know what? No one even asked to buy them. We should sell them. We should sell mentions on the podcast. I found a new niche for us. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay, cool. Can we start a fun agency? Just, Mention. Mordy Oberstein: Mentions. Crystal Carter: Got to have a good name. Mordy Oberstein: With dollar signs. The brand, you be like dollar signs everywhere. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. Mordy Oberstein: Good idea. This is the thing, by the way, that we're joking. Obviously. And before we continue and go down this rabbit hole forever, because I will, because I'm salty about this topic. 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 the wonderful world of podcasting, on a podcast with podcasters who do marketing and marketing podcasts. So many fourth walls. So many fourth walls. 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 all of the great content and webinars and whatnot over on the Wix SEO learning at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Please 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

Why do SEOs have a disdain for site migrations? Could it be the broken URLs, the redirects, or even a new hosting environment? It could be that or a million other things. The point is that successful site migrations require attention to detail. We explore the intricacies and considerations of site migrations on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast! Miracle Inameti, an expert in SEO and data strategy, joins the podcast to tackle challenging site migration problems by implementing practical and pragmatic solutions. This, as the SERP’s Up team discusses site migrations and the associated SEO considerations. Join Mordy and Crystal to understand the complexity of site migration. Back How big of a headache are site migrations? Why do SEOs have a disdain for site migrations? Could it be the broken URLs, the redirects, or even a new hosting environment? It could be that or a million other things. The point is that successful site migrations require attention to detail. We explore the intricacies and considerations of site migrations on this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast! Miracle Inameti, an expert in SEO and data strategy, joins the podcast to tackle challenging site migration problems by implementing practical and pragmatic solutions. This, as the SERP’s Up team discusses site migrations and the associated SEO considerations. Join Mordy and Crystal to understand the complexity of site migration. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 21 | January 18, 2023 | 34 MIN 00:00 / 34:17 This week’s guests Miracle Inameti A rounded SEO consultant, trainer, and speaker. Miracle provides expertise in SEO and Data Strategy to resolve challenging problems and implement practical and pragmatic solutions. Relentlessly focused on customer outcomes with strong commercial acumen, natural drive, with a strong passion for people. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Guess we're pushing out some grueling new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein head of SEO branding here at Wix, the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, I was going to say edible, but that doesn't make any sense. Our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. SEO internet people. Welcome to episode 21. We're about to double down on these SEO insights. Mordy Oberstein: It's Blackjack. It's our Blackjack episode. Crystal Carter: It's right. That's what's up. We're going to put two on the river or double down. I can't... I've forgotten about Blackjack. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. If I tell you, I've been to a casino one time. My wife, 15 years ago, we walked in, we played a couple of games. We said, "This is boring." And we bounced the hell out of there. Crystal Carter: I got married in Las Vegas. I spend a lot of time. Mordy Oberstein: On purpose? Crystal Carter: My family on purpose. Las Vegas. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you meant to get married? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Okay cool. I was checking. Crystal Carter: Yeah. You know Caesars Palace? Mordy Oberstein: Sure, I've heard of it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I got married across the street from there. Mordy Oberstein: Across the street. It's good set up. Crystal Carter: Thank you. So, yeah, they demolished it. It was a dive, but we had a great wedding. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can easily set up 301 redirects with our redirect managers. Set single redirects, group redirects when the URL follow the same logic like they live in the same folder, upload bulk redirects, or do nothing as we implement redirect automatically and aesthetic product and event pages. And we're talking about redirects because guess what we're talking about today? Site migrations. Oh, the word itself made me gas and choke. 'Cause you're going to wreck the URLs with the site migration. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. Mordy Oberstein: And that's where things get into problems. Crystal Carter: You weren't there, man. You weren't there. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Today's show is about the root canal and lobotomy of SEO site migrations. We'll dive into migrations and why do so many people get them wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen? What's the worst thing that can happen? Why are SEO so freaked out about site migrations? The ever wonderful Miracle Inameti stops by to talk about when SEOs should become involved in the site migration process. Also, have a bit of fun around migrations and the people also ask box. And of course, we have your ever so snappy SEO news and who you should be following on social. For more SEO awesomeness episode number 21 of the SERP's Up podcast is migrating your way. Get it. That was a bad one. Crystal Carter: That's right. Mordy Oberstein: That was a bad... I tried. That was a bad one. I was thinking of that or it's an SEO migraine-tion, get it because it's a migraine and migrate at the same time. Crystal Carter: Oh man. Wow. okay Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. How's that? Not good? Yeah. Crystal Carter: All right, so moving on. Mordy Oberstein: We're migrating past that and to the next thing. Crystal Carter: We're going to shift, we're going to do a 301 from that. No, kidding. Okay. So just so we're all on the same page, we are going to talk a little bit about what a site migration is. On the Wix SEO Learning Hub, there's a fantastic article from Mr. Chris Green where he explains the fundamentals of site migrations and he explains that site migration is a term that SEOs use quite often. But being familiar with the different types of elements that make up a site migration can really help you to make the process easier. He talks about a few common site migration scenarios. One is changing domain names, which is essentially where you change your name from, say, redshoes.com to maybe even redshoes.co.uk or the red shoes or bestredshoes.com. So that's where you change your domain name. There's also migrating through hosting providers, which is something that people don't very often think about, but that's one that he thinks about as well. And then he considers that where your website's hosted one company and then maybe moving hosting to another company. And sometimes going into the ins and outs of that can be quite complicated because sometimes with hosting, people don't remember where the hosting is and all of that sort of thing. Also, you can think about changing the content management system. So for instance, if you're keeping the same domain name but you're changing from maybe one CMS to another CMS, then that might be something that you want to think about with regards to... Well, it is absolutely something you need to think about with regards to migrations. I would also add to this, sometimes changing the design of your website can be migration. So there's a few SEOs that I've heard talk about migrations and they're like, "It can have it, big deal." And sometimes people don't think about this, but I've had it where clients were like, "Oh yeah, we're just changing the homepage," or, "We're just changing this big money page. We're changing around the design of it." And I'm like, "We need to check that." And they say, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, if you have the design of a page and you have a certain number of links that are coming from that, you have certain elements that are on that page that if you change that page, then we need to figure out what we're going to do with all of that link equity as we're spreading it out across the rest of the page. And that is something that we need to think about as well." So we can also think about URL changes overall. Now, when you're talking about your migration, Google sometimes call this a site move. So they have a page on their documentation saying, "What is a site move?" And in that they talk about site moves without URL changes and they talk about site moves with URL changes. And all of these things are considered migrations. And essentially what you want to think about when you have a migration is making sure that Google can find the new content and that Google can find the old content as well, so that if you have old content, that's really important that they can find it, that there's links to it. And you also need to think about how it impacts your wider digital footprint. So Mordy mentioned 301 redirects. 301 redirects are really useful for what happens within your site, but they're also really useful for what happens with the links that you have out there on the web still coming into your site. So for instance, let's say you changed your blog format. So let's say it used to be example.com/post, and then you change it to example.com/article for instance, you need to think about that because you'll have old links to the old URL format and those will impact how your site is indexed, how your site is performing, and how it all works out. So there's a lot of ins and outs. There's a lot of different parts of a migration that you should think about. They should not be taken lightly at all. And essentially anything that you're changing that's a structural change or even a design change that impacts your link structure should be considered a migration. And sometimes there's big, big migration. Sometimes it's a smaller migration, but you still should think about it in that way. Mordy Oberstein: I think you answered all three of the questions we mentioned in the intro in one breath. What was it? Why did so many people get cyber migrations wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen and why are we all freaked out about them? And it's because there's so many things to think about. And then you think about the implications of those. I've had a case one time where it's like they forgot like, "Oh wait, the canonicals that..." We actually use the old website for the canonical. We don't know why we did that, but we did. And now things are totally messed up and we don't want even thought about that. 'Cause you're not thinking about that. Okay, the URL, I got the old URL, I got the new URL, I got this. But when you're transferring things over and you're copying and pasting certain things, you end up copying and pasting the canonicals over and now doesn't make any sense. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And there can be other things underneath that. So sometimes it might be that you have old menu configurations in the back end of the website. You copied and pasted those over and there's a 404. I've seen that before where people are like, "Why have we got this 404?" And it's like, because it's in the menu that we migrated over from the other thing. Mordy Oberstein: You know what it's like? It's like when you're family, you stick all the dirty laundry, sweep it under the carpet for a long, long time and then a family event happens. And all those things, the dysfunction that you swept under the carpet for years, all of a sudden it comes out at one time and it's complete chaos and dysfunction. That's a site migration. Crystal Carter: I think that there's so many different moving parts. So there's the stuff with all the DNS stuff and making sure that all of that stuff is working well. There's also the migrations from before. So sometimes if somebody did a bad migration before you then that can haunt you when you try to do the next migration, for instance. So it can be very, very tricky. And then sometimes it can feel a little bit like... There's that magic trick where there's a fully set table and somebody tries to remove the tablecloth from the table. And what you want to do is essentially make sure that everything that you need stays there, but it can also be a really, really good time to clean house. So you talked about sweeping things under the carpet and migration can be a really good time to be like, "We don't need this URL, we don't need that one, we don't need this, we don't need that, we don't need that." And to clear those things out and that can be a really good time to do that as well. And I think also with migrations, it's very important that someone has the reins, that there is someone who is in charge of it. And this is normally an SEO and it should be an SEO. There's somebody who's in charge of making sure that holistically it works. So I've had it before where a client migrated a site to a new setup and the client, they had a third party subduing without documentation and they decided to copy all of those things and put them on the blog of the new site. And you're making a face here like, "Oh my gosh." But they did not cut off the old help doc. So instead we had a whole another set of content that was competing, which Google had already indexed the other site and then they added it onto the new site. And the way that it had been configured was super complicated and it was very, very difficult to unpick all of these different pages that had been added into and with all of the different URLs and stuff. So it can be very, very tricky. And one of the things we have built into Wix, because it's such a pain in the box, one of the things we have built into Wix is sometimes you have to do some of the big folder updates via DHT access file for instance. But within Wix for instance, you can go into this bulk URL management tool and you can set up so that any URL that starts with a certain prefix will be redirected to a certain thing. So for instance, in the post article example, if you had all of your blogs under post, you can set up bulk redirect within the tool that's within the CMS. You can set a bulk redirect that says any URL that starts with... That has the prefixed post should be redirected to this one in this framework. And you can set it up so it's in the same way that you would with an HD access file. And it makes it a lot easier to manage those things in bulk. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm going to catch the error. So that's also good. But I want to go back to your point about the tablecloth where you pull a tablecloth off and then you're hoping everything stays the same. I think one of the reasons why I think we're freaked out about site migration and why they're pain in the neck is that we don't properly set expectations. 'Cause when you pull that table cloth out, it's inevitable that something's going to shift around a little bit and it's not going to be a 100% perfect. I think Google has to come and say like, "Yep, if you're going to migrate over, expect there to be some traffic loss for some time." Those are the things that are just going to happen and there's going to be a problem, there's going to be things you have to fix. I mean, it could be, by the way, things that you have to fix that are not really even on the SEO side. For example, I saw they moved over, I don't remember how the heck they ended up like this, but all of their blog posts, the first paragraph, somehow they coded it automatically that the text was in white and you couldn't read it. You got to the page and you couldn't read it. Now Google could read it great, but the users got there and they were like, "This sucks." And no one's linking to it or whatever it is. It's just not good, obviously. And you mentioned being holistic about it and as an SEO, I mean maybe it's not really here, but you should look, you should see what's going on and you should be take care of what's... Because they're going to be things that shift and it impacts sometimes everything, which by the way, what's the worst that can happen? Well, that's like everything's the worst that could... It could be really bad, which is why you need to be careful. And I would say you're right about having one person manage all of it, or overseeing it. I would also recommend that person be a type A personality. Somebody who's got a checklist for everything. It's crossing every T, dotting every I, thinking about what the next problem is going to be so they can predict what the problem is going to be before it happens and have a list about those. It's one of those things that you could be super smart and greatest strategy and that's not be your thing. There are definitely people who are brilliant with migration, not their thing because it's so detail oriented. Crystal Carter: So detailed. And the other thing I would say is that thinking about that, is that one of the things that I always do with the migration is I always download the original site. So benchmarking and sorting out yourself before the website so that you can see. So for instance, if we're talking about the tablecloth, if you don't know what the table looked like before, how do you know if something moved? How do you know if something moved? How do you know if something changed? So you should always benchmark what you want to see. So benchmark what your normal traffic is, what things you normally rank for, which things you normally... What you would normally expect to see over the course of even a year. Because there's a lot of seasonality. In all businesses, there's going to be some seasonality. If you think about accountants or whatever, come tax season, there's going to be a high... There's going to be a peak season. And then for white collar industries, it tends to be like during holiday seasons, that tends to be a bit of a lull. So for instance, there's always some seasonality. So make sure you know what your traffic looks like. Make sure that you know what your keywords look like. And I always download the site before because it's always useful to have that to hand. There's a couple of tools that you can get to do this, but I always download the full site before so that I can see what it looked like before anything gets moved around. And also monitor it, monitor it, monitor it, before, during, after, throughout the whole thing and keep monitoring it. And I'll even monitor up to a year. And the other thing is if it's done well, you don't necessarily see a drop in traffic. Sometimes you see a big increase actually if you've done it well. And also, a migration, again, I talked about it being an opportunity to clean house. It's sometimes a really good opportunity to add new content and stuff because if you're changing around the format of the website, the how of the website, for instance, like how people navigate to different pages or how people use or how people access different information, you might look around and say, "Oh, actually we can do that in a different way." Maybe those bits of blogs that are thin should actually be formatted as FAQs instead. So maybe we can do that differently. And when you do that, you can add more value to the website and sometimes you actually see a boost, but you should make sure that you're mapping those things correctly. So for instance, if you change a blog into an FAQ, then make sure that you've done the 301s correctly and that you've formatted the new page correctly and that you're tracking it and you know what's going on. Mordy Oberstein: It's also a good time to reflect how your ecosystem is working. If you work with a bunch of sub domains and you're looking out from the main site to these other sub domains. First off, that might be the best way to do it. If you have to reform it, restructure anyway, this is a great time. I've seen sites where there's one page, for whatever reason, it's linking to all of their different sub-domains and then they mess around with that page. First off, even if you did that right, that might not be the best way to go about this to begin with. So it's a good opportunity to sit and think, does this actually make sense for how we want our site to be structured and how we want people to access and move along, as you said, from page to page or sub domain to sub domain or whatever it is. I guess to end off real quick, if you are migrating a website, hopefully you get a boost. If you see it, slight traffic loss, don't freak out. It's sometimes par for the course. Try to keep URL the same whenever you can. Just avoids a lot of the mess. Just makes things so much easier. And then check it all before it goes live so you don't end up with the canolicalization problem I mentioned before. Check it before it goes live, a bunch of times. Crystal Carter: Check it, check again, check it 25 times. I keep checking it. Mordy Oberstein: And then check it afterwards. Crystal Carter: Check it afterwards. Check all of the things and make sure that you're checking as well as user experience. Because the other thing is when you're migrating, there's all the technical stuff as well. But very funny, if I go to a website and they changed things around, I'm like, "Where's that thing I liked? I don't know where it is. I don't know where that is." So you might see your conversion rates change for a while, while people get used to your new configuration. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. It's a good time to look at the whole ecosystem. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good time. It's a good time for all. You know what's a good time? When's a good time? When is it a good time for an SEO to be involved in a site migration? If you are an SEO, when should you demand that you be involved? And if you're a website owner, when should you involve the SEO in the site migration process? To help answer that, let's please welcome Miracle Inameti. Take it away, Miracle. Miracle Inameti: Never involve the SEO team. Just wait. If it's a success, then take all the credit. If it's not, then you can blame them. As a general rule of thumb, I would say that you should always involve the SEO team. Once you start thinking of a site migration, you should speak to your SEO team. When this doesn't happen, it's either because people within the organization don't understand the SEO team's function. They see the SEO team on the marketing as a campaigns function and they want to present to you this shiny news site and go, "Is this fit for purpose?" However, there's so many things that the SEO team has to think about when you're planning a site migration. And in order for the site migration to be successful and for you not to lose any visibility, you need to involve the SEO team in the planning process. So there are various types of site migration. There is several migrations, there's platform migrations. There is just a risking, there's URL. I think the ones that are most critical to the SEO team is when you are changing the URL structure, migrating the domain because they need to plan redirects, make sure that everything is going end to end and relevant page to relevant page. On a page by page level, not just like the whole domain is redirected to the homepage. They need to ensure that all critical pages are taking long. They need to look at back links, which ones are relevant, which ones they want to, you know, walk contact into, to link directly to the pages. So there's so many things that the SEO team needs to think about. There is tracking as well. You want to make sure that your tracking and monitoring still stays on or are migrated to the right pages. So you need to make sure that you are set up in search console, any of the tools that you are using to track them and monitor the performance of your site is done. So all of these things. You need to make sure that when the site is migrated, the search engines are informed that your site is migrating. You want the new structure to get crawled quick and index. It's very, very critical that the SEO team is involved right at the start so that they can plan for all of this. Mordy Oberstein: Couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Miracle. Obviously, it's super important to have your SEO team involved in the migration process as soon as possible. I'll say I don't want to double down on SEO. I think it's really important to have all your teams involved in the migration process as soon as possible so you all can communicate and be on the same page with each other. I think it's just getting people involved in communication at the very, very beginning is probably the linchpin of migration success. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think everyone should know what's going on and I absolutely agree with Miracle about saying that it's very important to have input from SEO and for all of the different layers. When you're talking about having other teams involved, that impacts the effectiveness of the migration. So SEOs will have their own priorities. She talked a lot about back links, she talked a lot about the structure of the page. But again, there's going to be things that the sales team needs as well and that they want to. That might be their favorite thing, that's a really useful tool that works really, really well for them that an SEO might not be able to see from their assessment. So it's really important to have lots of different parts of your team involved. And not to just, like she said, just present "Oh, look at our shiny new thing." I've had people do that and they've had a panic attack because they're like, "Look at our brand new..." And then you didn't... This is completely no. And that can be really, really stressful and it can mean that you're starting on a back foot when you don't involve teams, then rely on the website in order to do their work and in order to make sure that the business is performing the way that it should. So- Mordy Oberstein: You know why you don't want to start on a bad foot, if you're an SEO, as strategically as possible, fight for a seat at the table. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's one of those things. Crystal Carter: Totally. And starting on the back foot particularly with migration can be a real challenge because Google's trying to figure out all of the things anyway. And so if you've just migrated the site and you have to do a lot of the SEO work that should have been done before whilst Google's trying to understand the new site, then it's going to make it very difficult to rank and fight those fires at the same time. So make sure that you're involved early. Make sure that if your SEO is saying they want a meeting about the migration, that you're getting that meeting, setting that meeting making sure that happens. Mordy Oberstein: The early SEO gets the worm. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of migration, so we sum that up a fascinating little example around keyword disambiguation that means, what does this keyword actually mean? So if I type in for example, Rangers, is that the New York Rangers hockey team? Is it the Rangers soccer football team? Is it the Texas Rangers, baseball team and or police organization? What does it actually mean? And Google has ways of disambiguating what that actually is, but we're going to use the term how to migrate the keyword, how to migrate to show you how you could use the PAA box, the people also ask box, which is Google's set of four initial questions that, I ask a very popular question, to ask around the web and then offer you a snippet of content and a URL to answer that question. So we're going to see how everyone's little favorite SERP feature the PAA, people also ask box can help you disambiguate because it is time for fun with the PAA box. Crystal Carter: Oh, we used to have so much fun with the PAA box. Mordy Oberstein: It's so much fun. When I ever go to Google and I look at it, I look at the SERP, I'm like, "Oh, the PAA box is so fun because you keep clicking on it and more things load." Crystal Carter: Just more and more. Mordy Oberstein: This is so much fun. Crystal Carter: This is so much fun. Mordy Oberstein: Look at, look more things load when you search for how to migrate, what I find interesting is sometimes Google has a little box on the side that's literally called an ambiguation box that helps you understand, okay, migrate what? As I mentioned before, rangers, if you type rangers, you'll probably get a box. I'm going to do that right now. I'm going to type rangers into Google. I know it. I'm going to get a box on the side, right? See results about Texas Rangers, baseball team, even though the one... The SERP I have now is about the hockey team. Google knows I might mean something else, but in this case how to migrate, it's not there, but it should be there. Crystal Carter: It should be there. Mordy Oberstein: And it's important. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. But the people also ask here, it's coming in to save the day on this particular section to help people to understand which thing they're talking about- Mordy Oberstein: Which is super important because if you are trying to target the keyword, how to migrate, because you have a blog post about how to migrate, then you need to understand what's actually showing up on Google because your post might not be the migrate that Google thinks it is, or Google thinks that users want. Crystal Carter: Indeed. So I think on this particular one we have, the questions that you get are how do we migrate, how does migrate work? Again, people also ask, sometimes it's not grammatically correct, but there we go. How do you plan a migration? Also, how long is a migration process? Now, when you think about the term migration, there's lots of different ways you can talk about that particular term if we're thinking about a disambiguation situation. And so they're hedging their bets with some of those answers. So some of them answers some kinds of ways to migrate and some of them answers other kinds of ways to migrate because they're trying to help people find what they need. Mordy Oberstein: So just so you know, by the way, I've had, how do we migrate? How does migrate work? How do you plan on migration? How is data migration done? So I have that last question that's different because I'm looking at it from the US right now and I'm assuming you're set up from the UK. Crystal Carter: Indeed. So then how do we migrate that gives us a human migration thing? Mordy Oberstein: Right, so that's topic one, is human migration. Crystal Carter: Then the second one I've got is how animal migration works. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, topic two, animal migration. Crystal Carter: And then I've got how do you plan a migration? And then that's talking about data migration. Mordy Oberstein: Topic three. Crystal Carter: And how long is migration process? That's also talking about data migration. So here Google's trying to figure out different ways to understand that. Similarly, with- Mordy Oberstein: Three different ways, 'cause I can count 1, 2, 3. Crystal Carter: And if you look up something similar like migrating, you also get some answers that are around human migration. Some answers that are around salmon migration, for instance. And so Google sometimes uses the people also ask to help point people where they need to go if they've entered a term that's ambiguous. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So by the way, this is a great example because if you're writing this post about how to migrate, let's say yours is about data migration. So realizing that you're limiting your chance to pull in organic traffic because Google's addressing three different intents on the page. So you probably want to go a little bit more specific or realize that if you're targeting how to migrate, you're not going to get a lot of traffic necessarily because you're only relevant to... Let's assume that Google has it proportionate to a third of the people who are coming for that keyword. Also, really interesting by the way, is that both of our cases, and this is part of the disambiguation process, the first question we both had was relevant to... I'm talking about human migration then animal migration. And even though our last two questions weren't the same, they both addressed data migration, meaning that shows you that the dominant intent might be data migration because Google thinks that's the strongest... Let's rephrase that, because Google is showing a double result there because that's probably the strongest intent on the page or for the keyword rather. Crystal Carter: Had a webinar recently and someone was asking about keywords and they said, "Oh, this keyword is too difficult." And sometimes that happens when you have a keyword that is like this. So something like how to migrate, if you were writing an SEO blog around that, for instance, then you would think, "Oh yeah, those are the questions that people are asking." But actually there's lots of people asking you those questions in lots of different ways. So as you're saying, if you're making it more specific, maybe you might not have the same huge search volume, but the people who are actually searching for what you are actually talking about are much more likely to actually find the information that you have. So that's really useful to think about. And again, the ways that that data flows from the people also ask can, yeah, give you such information about how people think about that terminology. And if you're finding that, like you said, that two out of three are for a different topic, actually, then- Mordy Oberstein: You should pivot. Crystal Carter: ... you should pivot. Mordy Oberstein: Which comes back to this old, the SEO adage. Don't just rely on when an SEO tool tells you the search volume is super high for this keyword, you should grow the SERP and see what it actually looks like. That's the best advice I could ever give you about SEO is go to the SERP, go to Google, look at the results and see what's there and use Google to your advantage. Now speaking of using Google to your advantage, what gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO? Crystal Carter: What gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO? Mordy Oberstein: Understanding the latest news around what's happening in SEO? Crystal Carter: You don't say. Mordy Oberstein: I do say, which means it's time for some snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Oh boy, the sky is falling. Big brands such as Bankrate are now using, well, now admitting to using AI writers for some of its content. And Google has taken notice per the great Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Google Search responds to Bankrate, more brands using AI to write content. As I mentioned about five seconds ago, AI written content has been spotted on big name websites because they admitted it right there on the page saying quote, "This article was generated using automation technology," et cetera. Don't say the et cetera, I'm just using half the quote. The attribution is, one, great to see, and two, also mentions the content was reviewed by a human. When you look at the actual article, it does list the name of the human who reviewed that content. And now a word of caution by Mordy Oberstein. AI scrapes the web and regurgitates what's already been said. So it can't really offer something genuinely unique. So be careful and don't be swayed by sites with a huge amount of topical authority using AI written content. Also, again, they may have extensionally revised it with their human reviewers. So it's not a carte blanche, just start doing whatever you want with AI written content. However, Google did say, and this is coming from Google's search liaison Danny Sullivan, that it is okay to use AI written content. The general problem with AI written content is that it's low quality content written for search rankings as opposed to users. But when it is used or written for the sake of being helpful, then that's spying. So Danny said, if content is helpful and creative for people first, that's not an issue referring to AI written content. So Google is in my opinion, walking back on its hard line that they've taken in the past. I think they have to, AA content is here, it is staying, it is not going anywhere. It does have a place, my personal opinion is that it has a place with borders. And knowing those borders and how to use AI properly is incredibly important, particularly if you're not one of these ginormous sites on the web that's just banking on a lot of pre-established authority. Article number two, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. This time Google linking to multiple providers in product reviews might give a small ranking boost. So way back when Google updated its guidance around product reviews in relation to its product review updates, saying that, "Yeah, you have to have more than one provider in the review." Meaning if you're just stuffing in an affiliate link or multiple affiliate links to the one company that you are tied to, that's not a great user experience, it's a questionable user experience altogether. So now we have official confirmation that Google is looking at this algorithmically. I would have expected the impact to have been bigger or Google to have wanted the impact, at least to have been bigger. Google is saying here, that's a pretty small factor. My takeaway is Google, as a whole, is not happy about the state of affiliates. They are looking at the web and trying to improve the web and is looking to the change the game here in regards to affiliates, which is why I thought that this would've been a bigger factor. But again, linking to multiple providers from the user's point of view is a more... It's called honest experience that Google is trying to push for and it has been confirmed. It is a small ranking boost. So if you are writing up product reviews and just stuffing in your one particular affiliate, that could, all things being equal, impact your rankings and that will do it for this week's snappy news. And now we're back from the Snappy news. Now, before we go, as we always do, you should have a diverse set of information in front of you from a diverse set of SEOs. So we always end off, before we have to duly depart with our follow of the week, and you already mentioned him. Yeah, you did. It was like SEO, podcasting, foreshadowing. Now who could it be? Who could it be? Crystal Carter: Who could it be? It's Chris Green people. Mordy Oberstein: It's Chris Green. Crystal Carter: Chris Green. Mordy Oberstein: The one and only Chris Green who you can find on Twitter at Chris Green SEO, C-H-R-I-S G-R-E-E-N SEO. Link to his profile and show notes. And Chris is a wonderful SEO, technical SEO to has done... As Crystal mentioned, he did a poll post on the Wix SEO hub about things you need to know about migrating and particularly about money you're migrating to Wix as well, so if you're looking to bring a site to Wix, that's a great resource for you. He says it's a great resource in general on social media. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he specializes in migrations, auditing, reporting, training, and so he's got a lot of really great information and his article on migration is particularly useful for people who are looking to migrate to Wix. I mean, he just lays it out really, really clearly. He's awesome. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he's got a lot of really cool resources for you, also, on his own website. It's chris-green.net, all sorts of templates you can use and checklists you can use, and all sorts of deep dive SEO stuffed greatness for you. So check that website out, which happens to be, by the way, a Wix website. Yes, dare I say. So definitely check that out. That gave you a quick Tech SEO audit template. There's mapping for keywords to your website for SEO using blended data to add annotations onto time series in Google Looker Data Studio. Lot of great resources for you on Chris's website, so definitely check that out. Awesome. I think we're done then. Crystal Carter: Well done. I think we have moved everything along. I think that everything has gone from one place to another. Mordy Oberstein: There's been no hiccups. It's all been- Crystal Carter: There's been no hiccups. Mordy Oberstein: Permanently moved with all the proper checks and balances and whatnot. Indeed. Crystal Carter: Indeed, we've moved everything we have migrated from the beginning of the podcast to the end of the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Amazingly. Crystal Carter: Now we shall see you again. Mordy Oberstein: I hope the traffic is good. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into why ranking factors might not matter nearly as much as you think. Heresy, I know. 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 the great content and webinars on the Wix 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. And until next time, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Miracle Inameti Chris Green Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub The Fundamentals of Site Migrations Site Moves & Migrations News: Google search responds to BankRate, more brands using AI to write content Google: Linking To Multiple Providers In Product Reviews Might Give A Small Ranking Boost Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Miracle Inameti Chris Green Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub The Fundamentals of Site Migrations Site Moves & Migrations News: Google search responds to BankRate, more brands using AI to write content Google: Linking To Multiple Providers In Product Reviews Might Give A Small Ranking Boost Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Guess we're pushing out some grueling new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein head of SEO branding here at Wix, the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, I was going to say edible, but that doesn't make any sense. Our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. SEO internet people. Welcome to episode 21. We're about to double down on these SEO insights. Mordy Oberstein: It's Blackjack. It's our Blackjack episode. Crystal Carter: It's right. That's what's up. We're going to put two on the river or double down. I can't... I've forgotten about Blackjack. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. If I tell you, I've been to a casino one time. My wife, 15 years ago, we walked in, we played a couple of games. We said, "This is boring." And we bounced the hell out of there. Crystal Carter: I got married in Las Vegas. I spend a lot of time. Mordy Oberstein: On purpose? Crystal Carter: My family on purpose. Las Vegas. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, you meant to get married? Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Okay cool. I was checking. Crystal Carter: Yeah. You know Caesars Palace? Mordy Oberstein: Sure, I've heard of it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I got married across the street from there. Mordy Oberstein: Across the street. It's good set up. Crystal Carter: Thank you. So, yeah, they demolished it. It was a dive, but we had a great wedding. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can easily set up 301 redirects with our redirect managers. Set single redirects, group redirects when the URL follow the same logic like they live in the same folder, upload bulk redirects, or do nothing as we implement redirect automatically and aesthetic product and event pages. And we're talking about redirects because guess what we're talking about today? Site migrations. Oh, the word itself made me gas and choke. 'Cause you're going to wreck the URLs with the site migration. Crystal Carter: Oh, good. Mordy Oberstein: And that's where things get into problems. Crystal Carter: You weren't there, man. You weren't there. Mordy Oberstein: That's right. Today's show is about the root canal and lobotomy of SEO site migrations. We'll dive into migrations and why do so many people get them wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen? What's the worst thing that can happen? Why are SEO so freaked out about site migrations? The ever wonderful Miracle Inameti stops by to talk about when SEOs should become involved in the site migration process. Also, have a bit of fun around migrations and the people also ask box. And of course, we have your ever so snappy SEO news and who you should be following on social. For more SEO awesomeness episode number 21 of the SERP's Up podcast is migrating your way. Get it. That was a bad one. Crystal Carter: That's right. Mordy Oberstein: That was a bad... I tried. That was a bad one. I was thinking of that or it's an SEO migraine-tion, get it because it's a migraine and migrate at the same time. Crystal Carter: Oh man. Wow. okay Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. How's that? Not good? Yeah. Crystal Carter: All right, so moving on. Mordy Oberstein: We're migrating past that and to the next thing. Crystal Carter: We're going to shift, we're going to do a 301 from that. No, kidding. Okay. So just so we're all on the same page, we are going to talk a little bit about what a site migration is. On the Wix SEO Learning Hub, there's a fantastic article from Mr. Chris Green where he explains the fundamentals of site migrations and he explains that site migration is a term that SEOs use quite often. But being familiar with the different types of elements that make up a site migration can really help you to make the process easier. He talks about a few common site migration scenarios. One is changing domain names, which is essentially where you change your name from, say, redshoes.com to maybe even redshoes.co.uk or the red shoes or bestredshoes.com. So that's where you change your domain name. There's also migrating through hosting providers, which is something that people don't very often think about, but that's one that he thinks about as well. And then he considers that where your website's hosted one company and then maybe moving hosting to another company. And sometimes going into the ins and outs of that can be quite complicated because sometimes with hosting, people don't remember where the hosting is and all of that sort of thing. Also, you can think about changing the content management system. So for instance, if you're keeping the same domain name but you're changing from maybe one CMS to another CMS, then that might be something that you want to think about with regards to... Well, it is absolutely something you need to think about with regards to migrations. I would also add to this, sometimes changing the design of your website can be migration. So there's a few SEOs that I've heard talk about migrations and they're like, "It can have it, big deal." And sometimes people don't think about this, but I've had it where clients were like, "Oh yeah, we're just changing the homepage," or, "We're just changing this big money page. We're changing around the design of it." And I'm like, "We need to check that." And they say, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, if you have the design of a page and you have a certain number of links that are coming from that, you have certain elements that are on that page that if you change that page, then we need to figure out what we're going to do with all of that link equity as we're spreading it out across the rest of the page. And that is something that we need to think about as well." So we can also think about URL changes overall. Now, when you're talking about your migration, Google sometimes call this a site move. So they have a page on their documentation saying, "What is a site move?" And in that they talk about site moves without URL changes and they talk about site moves with URL changes. And all of these things are considered migrations. And essentially what you want to think about when you have a migration is making sure that Google can find the new content and that Google can find the old content as well, so that if you have old content, that's really important that they can find it, that there's links to it. And you also need to think about how it impacts your wider digital footprint. So Mordy mentioned 301 redirects. 301 redirects are really useful for what happens within your site, but they're also really useful for what happens with the links that you have out there on the web still coming into your site. So for instance, let's say you changed your blog format. So let's say it used to be example.com/post, and then you change it to example.com/article for instance, you need to think about that because you'll have old links to the old URL format and those will impact how your site is indexed, how your site is performing, and how it all works out. So there's a lot of ins and outs. There's a lot of different parts of a migration that you should think about. They should not be taken lightly at all. And essentially anything that you're changing that's a structural change or even a design change that impacts your link structure should be considered a migration. And sometimes there's big, big migration. Sometimes it's a smaller migration, but you still should think about it in that way. Mordy Oberstein: I think you answered all three of the questions we mentioned in the intro in one breath. What was it? Why did so many people get cyber migrations wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen and why are we all freaked out about them? And it's because there's so many things to think about. And then you think about the implications of those. I've had a case one time where it's like they forgot like, "Oh wait, the canonicals that..." We actually use the old website for the canonical. We don't know why we did that, but we did. And now things are totally messed up and we don't want even thought about that. 'Cause you're not thinking about that. Okay, the URL, I got the old URL, I got the new URL, I got this. But when you're transferring things over and you're copying and pasting certain things, you end up copying and pasting the canonicals over and now doesn't make any sense. Crystal Carter: Right. Absolutely. And there can be other things underneath that. So sometimes it might be that you have old menu configurations in the back end of the website. You copied and pasted those over and there's a 404. I've seen that before where people are like, "Why have we got this 404?" And it's like, because it's in the menu that we migrated over from the other thing. Mordy Oberstein: You know what it's like? It's like when you're family, you stick all the dirty laundry, sweep it under the carpet for a long, long time and then a family event happens. And all those things, the dysfunction that you swept under the carpet for years, all of a sudden it comes out at one time and it's complete chaos and dysfunction. That's a site migration. Crystal Carter: I think that there's so many different moving parts. So there's the stuff with all the DNS stuff and making sure that all of that stuff is working well. There's also the migrations from before. So sometimes if somebody did a bad migration before you then that can haunt you when you try to do the next migration, for instance. So it can be very, very tricky. And then sometimes it can feel a little bit like... There's that magic trick where there's a fully set table and somebody tries to remove the tablecloth from the table. And what you want to do is essentially make sure that everything that you need stays there, but it can also be a really, really good time to clean house. So you talked about sweeping things under the carpet and migration can be a really good time to be like, "We don't need this URL, we don't need that one, we don't need this, we don't need that, we don't need that." And to clear those things out and that can be a really good time to do that as well. And I think also with migrations, it's very important that someone has the reins, that there is someone who is in charge of it. And this is normally an SEO and it should be an SEO. There's somebody who's in charge of making sure that holistically it works. So I've had it before where a client migrated a site to a new setup and the client, they had a third party subduing without documentation and they decided to copy all of those things and put them on the blog of the new site. And you're making a face here like, "Oh my gosh." But they did not cut off the old help doc. So instead we had a whole another set of content that was competing, which Google had already indexed the other site and then they added it onto the new site. And the way that it had been configured was super complicated and it was very, very difficult to unpick all of these different pages that had been added into and with all of the different URLs and stuff. So it can be very, very tricky. And one of the things we have built into Wix, because it's such a pain in the box, one of the things we have built into Wix is sometimes you have to do some of the big folder updates via DHT access file for instance. But within Wix for instance, you can go into this bulk URL management tool and you can set up so that any URL that starts with a certain prefix will be redirected to a certain thing. So for instance, in the post article example, if you had all of your blogs under post, you can set up bulk redirect within the tool that's within the CMS. You can set a bulk redirect that says any URL that starts with... That has the prefixed post should be redirected to this one in this framework. And you can set it up so it's in the same way that you would with an HD access file. And it makes it a lot easier to manage those things in bulk. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I'm going to catch the error. So that's also good. But I want to go back to your point about the tablecloth where you pull a tablecloth off and then you're hoping everything stays the same. I think one of the reasons why I think we're freaked out about site migration and why they're pain in the neck is that we don't properly set expectations. 'Cause when you pull that table cloth out, it's inevitable that something's going to shift around a little bit and it's not going to be a 100% perfect. I think Google has to come and say like, "Yep, if you're going to migrate over, expect there to be some traffic loss for some time." Those are the things that are just going to happen and there's going to be a problem, there's going to be things you have to fix. I mean, it could be, by the way, things that you have to fix that are not really even on the SEO side. For example, I saw they moved over, I don't remember how the heck they ended up like this, but all of their blog posts, the first paragraph, somehow they coded it automatically that the text was in white and you couldn't read it. You got to the page and you couldn't read it. Now Google could read it great, but the users got there and they were like, "This sucks." And no one's linking to it or whatever it is. It's just not good, obviously. And you mentioned being holistic about it and as an SEO, I mean maybe it's not really here, but you should look, you should see what's going on and you should be take care of what's... Because they're going to be things that shift and it impacts sometimes everything, which by the way, what's the worst that can happen? Well, that's like everything's the worst that could... It could be really bad, which is why you need to be careful. And I would say you're right about having one person manage all of it, or overseeing it. I would also recommend that person be a type A personality. Somebody who's got a checklist for everything. It's crossing every T, dotting every I, thinking about what the next problem is going to be so they can predict what the problem is going to be before it happens and have a list about those. It's one of those things that you could be super smart and greatest strategy and that's not be your thing. There are definitely people who are brilliant with migration, not their thing because it's so detail oriented. Crystal Carter: So detailed. And the other thing I would say is that thinking about that, is that one of the things that I always do with the migration is I always download the original site. So benchmarking and sorting out yourself before the website so that you can see. So for instance, if we're talking about the tablecloth, if you don't know what the table looked like before, how do you know if something moved? How do you know if something moved? How do you know if something changed? So you should always benchmark what you want to see. So benchmark what your normal traffic is, what things you normally rank for, which things you normally... What you would normally expect to see over the course of even a year. Because there's a lot of seasonality. In all businesses, there's going to be some seasonality. If you think about accountants or whatever, come tax season, there's going to be a high... There's going to be a peak season. And then for white collar industries, it tends to be like during holiday seasons, that tends to be a bit of a lull. So for instance, there's always some seasonality. So make sure you know what your traffic looks like. Make sure that you know what your keywords look like. And I always download the site before because it's always useful to have that to hand. There's a couple of tools that you can get to do this, but I always download the full site before so that I can see what it looked like before anything gets moved around. And also monitor it, monitor it, monitor it, before, during, after, throughout the whole thing and keep monitoring it. And I'll even monitor up to a year. And the other thing is if it's done well, you don't necessarily see a drop in traffic. Sometimes you see a big increase actually if you've done it well. And also, a migration, again, I talked about it being an opportunity to clean house. It's sometimes a really good opportunity to add new content and stuff because if you're changing around the format of the website, the how of the website, for instance, like how people navigate to different pages or how people use or how people access different information, you might look around and say, "Oh, actually we can do that in a different way." Maybe those bits of blogs that are thin should actually be formatted as FAQs instead. So maybe we can do that differently. And when you do that, you can add more value to the website and sometimes you actually see a boost, but you should make sure that you're mapping those things correctly. So for instance, if you change a blog into an FAQ, then make sure that you've done the 301s correctly and that you've formatted the new page correctly and that you're tracking it and you know what's going on. Mordy Oberstein: It's also a good time to reflect how your ecosystem is working. If you work with a bunch of sub domains and you're looking out from the main site to these other sub domains. First off, that might be the best way to do it. If you have to reform it, restructure anyway, this is a great time. I've seen sites where there's one page, for whatever reason, it's linking to all of their different sub-domains and then they mess around with that page. First off, even if you did that right, that might not be the best way to go about this to begin with. So it's a good opportunity to sit and think, does this actually make sense for how we want our site to be structured and how we want people to access and move along, as you said, from page to page or sub domain to sub domain or whatever it is. I guess to end off real quick, if you are migrating a website, hopefully you get a boost. If you see it, slight traffic loss, don't freak out. It's sometimes par for the course. Try to keep URL the same whenever you can. Just avoids a lot of the mess. Just makes things so much easier. And then check it all before it goes live so you don't end up with the canolicalization problem I mentioned before. Check it before it goes live, a bunch of times. Crystal Carter: Check it, check again, check it 25 times. I keep checking it. Mordy Oberstein: And then check it afterwards. Crystal Carter: Check it afterwards. Check all of the things and make sure that you're checking as well as user experience. Because the other thing is when you're migrating, there's all the technical stuff as well. But very funny, if I go to a website and they changed things around, I'm like, "Where's that thing I liked? I don't know where it is. I don't know where that is." So you might see your conversion rates change for a while, while people get used to your new configuration. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, exactly. It's a good time to look at the whole ecosystem. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's a good time. It's a good time for all. You know what's a good time? When's a good time? When is it a good time for an SEO to be involved in a site migration? If you are an SEO, when should you demand that you be involved? And if you're a website owner, when should you involve the SEO in the site migration process? To help answer that, let's please welcome Miracle Inameti. Take it away, Miracle. Miracle Inameti: Never involve the SEO team. Just wait. If it's a success, then take all the credit. If it's not, then you can blame them. As a general rule of thumb, I would say that you should always involve the SEO team. Once you start thinking of a site migration, you should speak to your SEO team. When this doesn't happen, it's either because people within the organization don't understand the SEO team's function. They see the SEO team on the marketing as a campaigns function and they want to present to you this shiny news site and go, "Is this fit for purpose?" However, there's so many things that the SEO team has to think about when you're planning a site migration. And in order for the site migration to be successful and for you not to lose any visibility, you need to involve the SEO team in the planning process. So there are various types of site migration. There is several migrations, there's platform migrations. There is just a risking, there's URL. I think the ones that are most critical to the SEO team is when you are changing the URL structure, migrating the domain because they need to plan redirects, make sure that everything is going end to end and relevant page to relevant page. On a page by page level, not just like the whole domain is redirected to the homepage. They need to ensure that all critical pages are taking long. They need to look at back links, which ones are relevant, which ones they want to, you know, walk contact into, to link directly to the pages. So there's so many things that the SEO team needs to think about. There is tracking as well. You want to make sure that your tracking and monitoring still stays on or are migrated to the right pages. So you need to make sure that you are set up in search console, any of the tools that you are using to track them and monitor the performance of your site is done. So all of these things. You need to make sure that when the site is migrated, the search engines are informed that your site is migrating. You want the new structure to get crawled quick and index. It's very, very critical that the SEO team is involved right at the start so that they can plan for all of this. Mordy Oberstein: Couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Miracle. Obviously, it's super important to have your SEO team involved in the migration process as soon as possible. I'll say I don't want to double down on SEO. I think it's really important to have all your teams involved in the migration process as soon as possible so you all can communicate and be on the same page with each other. I think it's just getting people involved in communication at the very, very beginning is probably the linchpin of migration success. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think everyone should know what's going on and I absolutely agree with Miracle about saying that it's very important to have input from SEO and for all of the different layers. When you're talking about having other teams involved, that impacts the effectiveness of the migration. So SEOs will have their own priorities. She talked a lot about back links, she talked a lot about the structure of the page. But again, there's going to be things that the sales team needs as well and that they want to. That might be their favorite thing, that's a really useful tool that works really, really well for them that an SEO might not be able to see from their assessment. So it's really important to have lots of different parts of your team involved. And not to just, like she said, just present "Oh, look at our shiny new thing." I've had people do that and they've had a panic attack because they're like, "Look at our brand new..." And then you didn't... This is completely no. And that can be really, really stressful and it can mean that you're starting on a back foot when you don't involve teams, then rely on the website in order to do their work and in order to make sure that the business is performing the way that it should. So- Mordy Oberstein: You know why you don't want to start on a bad foot, if you're an SEO, as strategically as possible, fight for a seat at the table. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's one of those things. Crystal Carter: Totally. And starting on the back foot particularly with migration can be a real challenge because Google's trying to figure out all of the things anyway. And so if you've just migrated the site and you have to do a lot of the SEO work that should have been done before whilst Google's trying to understand the new site, then it's going to make it very difficult to rank and fight those fires at the same time. So make sure that you're involved early. Make sure that if your SEO is saying they want a meeting about the migration, that you're getting that meeting, setting that meeting making sure that happens. Mordy Oberstein: The early SEO gets the worm. Crystal Carter: Indeed. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of migration, so we sum that up a fascinating little example around keyword disambiguation that means, what does this keyword actually mean? So if I type in for example, Rangers, is that the New York Rangers hockey team? Is it the Rangers soccer football team? Is it the Texas Rangers, baseball team and or police organization? What does it actually mean? And Google has ways of disambiguating what that actually is, but we're going to use the term how to migrate the keyword, how to migrate to show you how you could use the PAA box, the people also ask box, which is Google's set of four initial questions that, I ask a very popular question, to ask around the web and then offer you a snippet of content and a URL to answer that question. So we're going to see how everyone's little favorite SERP feature the PAA, people also ask box can help you disambiguate because it is time for fun with the PAA box. Crystal Carter: Oh, we used to have so much fun with the PAA box. Mordy Oberstein: It's so much fun. When I ever go to Google and I look at it, I look at the SERP, I'm like, "Oh, the PAA box is so fun because you keep clicking on it and more things load." Crystal Carter: Just more and more. Mordy Oberstein: This is so much fun. Crystal Carter: This is so much fun. Mordy Oberstein: Look at, look more things load when you search for how to migrate, what I find interesting is sometimes Google has a little box on the side that's literally called an ambiguation box that helps you understand, okay, migrate what? As I mentioned before, rangers, if you type rangers, you'll probably get a box. I'm going to do that right now. I'm going to type rangers into Google. I know it. I'm going to get a box on the side, right? See results about Texas Rangers, baseball team, even though the one... The SERP I have now is about the hockey team. Google knows I might mean something else, but in this case how to migrate, it's not there, but it should be there. Crystal Carter: It should be there. Mordy Oberstein: And it's important. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. But the people also ask here, it's coming in to save the day on this particular section to help people to understand which thing they're talking about- Mordy Oberstein: Which is super important because if you are trying to target the keyword, how to migrate, because you have a blog post about how to migrate, then you need to understand what's actually showing up on Google because your post might not be the migrate that Google thinks it is, or Google thinks that users want. Crystal Carter: Indeed. So I think on this particular one we have, the questions that you get are how do we migrate, how does migrate work? Again, people also ask, sometimes it's not grammatically correct, but there we go. How do you plan a migration? Also, how long is a migration process? Now, when you think about the term migration, there's lots of different ways you can talk about that particular term if we're thinking about a disambiguation situation. And so they're hedging their bets with some of those answers. So some of them answers some kinds of ways to migrate and some of them answers other kinds of ways to migrate because they're trying to help people find what they need. Mordy Oberstein: So just so you know, by the way, I've had, how do we migrate? How does migrate work? How do you plan on migration? How is data migration done? So I have that last question that's different because I'm looking at it from the US right now and I'm assuming you're set up from the UK. Crystal Carter: Indeed. So then how do we migrate that gives us a human migration thing? Mordy Oberstein: Right, so that's topic one, is human migration. Crystal Carter: Then the second one I've got is how animal migration works. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, topic two, animal migration. Crystal Carter: And then I've got how do you plan a migration? And then that's talking about data migration. Mordy Oberstein: Topic three. Crystal Carter: And how long is migration process? That's also talking about data migration. So here Google's trying to figure out different ways to understand that. Similarly, with- Mordy Oberstein: Three different ways, 'cause I can count 1, 2, 3. Crystal Carter: And if you look up something similar like migrating, you also get some answers that are around human migration. Some answers that are around salmon migration, for instance. And so Google sometimes uses the people also ask to help point people where they need to go if they've entered a term that's ambiguous. Mordy Oberstein: Right. So by the way, this is a great example because if you're writing this post about how to migrate, let's say yours is about data migration. So realizing that you're limiting your chance to pull in organic traffic because Google's addressing three different intents on the page. So you probably want to go a little bit more specific or realize that if you're targeting how to migrate, you're not going to get a lot of traffic necessarily because you're only relevant to... Let's assume that Google has it proportionate to a third of the people who are coming for that keyword. Also, really interesting by the way, is that both of our cases, and this is part of the disambiguation process, the first question we both had was relevant to... I'm talking about human migration then animal migration. And even though our last two questions weren't the same, they both addressed data migration, meaning that shows you that the dominant intent might be data migration because Google thinks that's the strongest... Let's rephrase that, because Google is showing a double result there because that's probably the strongest intent on the page or for the keyword rather. Crystal Carter: Had a webinar recently and someone was asking about keywords and they said, "Oh, this keyword is too difficult." And sometimes that happens when you have a keyword that is like this. So something like how to migrate, if you were writing an SEO blog around that, for instance, then you would think, "Oh yeah, those are the questions that people are asking." But actually there's lots of people asking you those questions in lots of different ways. So as you're saying, if you're making it more specific, maybe you might not have the same huge search volume, but the people who are actually searching for what you are actually talking about are much more likely to actually find the information that you have. So that's really useful to think about. And again, the ways that that data flows from the people also ask can, yeah, give you such information about how people think about that terminology. And if you're finding that, like you said, that two out of three are for a different topic, actually, then- Mordy Oberstein: You should pivot. Crystal Carter: ... you should pivot. Mordy Oberstein: Which comes back to this old, the SEO adage. Don't just rely on when an SEO tool tells you the search volume is super high for this keyword, you should grow the SERP and see what it actually looks like. That's the best advice I could ever give you about SEO is go to the SERP, go to Google, look at the results and see what's there and use Google to your advantage. Now speaking of using Google to your advantage, what gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO? Crystal Carter: What gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO? Mordy Oberstein: Understanding the latest news around what's happening in SEO? Crystal Carter: You don't say. Mordy Oberstein: I do say, which means it's time for some snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Oh boy, the sky is falling. Big brands such as Bankrate are now using, well, now admitting to using AI writers for some of its content. And Google has taken notice per the great Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Google Search responds to Bankrate, more brands using AI to write content. As I mentioned about five seconds ago, AI written content has been spotted on big name websites because they admitted it right there on the page saying quote, "This article was generated using automation technology," et cetera. Don't say the et cetera, I'm just using half the quote. The attribution is, one, great to see, and two, also mentions the content was reviewed by a human. When you look at the actual article, it does list the name of the human who reviewed that content. And now a word of caution by Mordy Oberstein. AI scrapes the web and regurgitates what's already been said. So it can't really offer something genuinely unique. So be careful and don't be swayed by sites with a huge amount of topical authority using AI written content. Also, again, they may have extensionally revised it with their human reviewers. So it's not a carte blanche, just start doing whatever you want with AI written content. However, Google did say, and this is coming from Google's search liaison Danny Sullivan, that it is okay to use AI written content. The general problem with AI written content is that it's low quality content written for search rankings as opposed to users. But when it is used or written for the sake of being helpful, then that's spying. So Danny said, if content is helpful and creative for people first, that's not an issue referring to AI written content. So Google is in my opinion, walking back on its hard line that they've taken in the past. I think they have to, AA content is here, it is staying, it is not going anywhere. It does have a place, my personal opinion is that it has a place with borders. And knowing those borders and how to use AI properly is incredibly important, particularly if you're not one of these ginormous sites on the web that's just banking on a lot of pre-established authority. Article number two, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. This time Google linking to multiple providers in product reviews might give a small ranking boost. So way back when Google updated its guidance around product reviews in relation to its product review updates, saying that, "Yeah, you have to have more than one provider in the review." Meaning if you're just stuffing in an affiliate link or multiple affiliate links to the one company that you are tied to, that's not a great user experience, it's a questionable user experience altogether. So now we have official confirmation that Google is looking at this algorithmically. I would have expected the impact to have been bigger or Google to have wanted the impact, at least to have been bigger. Google is saying here, that's a pretty small factor. My takeaway is Google, as a whole, is not happy about the state of affiliates. They are looking at the web and trying to improve the web and is looking to the change the game here in regards to affiliates, which is why I thought that this would've been a bigger factor. But again, linking to multiple providers from the user's point of view is a more... It's called honest experience that Google is trying to push for and it has been confirmed. It is a small ranking boost. So if you are writing up product reviews and just stuffing in your one particular affiliate, that could, all things being equal, impact your rankings and that will do it for this week's snappy news. And now we're back from the Snappy news. Now, before we go, as we always do, you should have a diverse set of information in front of you from a diverse set of SEOs. So we always end off, before we have to duly depart with our follow of the week, and you already mentioned him. Yeah, you did. It was like SEO, podcasting, foreshadowing. Now who could it be? Who could it be? Crystal Carter: Who could it be? It's Chris Green people. Mordy Oberstein: It's Chris Green. Crystal Carter: Chris Green. Mordy Oberstein: The one and only Chris Green who you can find on Twitter at Chris Green SEO, C-H-R-I-S G-R-E-E-N SEO. Link to his profile and show notes. And Chris is a wonderful SEO, technical SEO to has done... As Crystal mentioned, he did a poll post on the Wix SEO hub about things you need to know about migrating and particularly about money you're migrating to Wix as well, so if you're looking to bring a site to Wix, that's a great resource for you. He says it's a great resource in general on social media. Crystal Carter: Yeah, he specializes in migrations, auditing, reporting, training, and so he's got a lot of really great information and his article on migration is particularly useful for people who are looking to migrate to Wix. I mean, he just lays it out really, really clearly. He's awesome. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, he's got a lot of really cool resources for you, also, on his own website. It's chris-green.net, all sorts of templates you can use and checklists you can use, and all sorts of deep dive SEO stuffed greatness for you. So check that website out, which happens to be, by the way, a Wix website. Yes, dare I say. So definitely check that out. That gave you a quick Tech SEO audit template. There's mapping for keywords to your website for SEO using blended data to add annotations onto time series in Google Looker Data Studio. Lot of great resources for you on Chris's website, so definitely check that out. Awesome. I think we're done then. Crystal Carter: Well done. I think we have moved everything along. I think that everything has gone from one place to another. Mordy Oberstein: There's been no hiccups. It's all been- Crystal Carter: There's been no hiccups. Mordy Oberstein: Permanently moved with all the proper checks and balances and whatnot. Indeed. Crystal Carter: Indeed, we've moved everything we have migrated from the beginning of the podcast to the end of the podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Amazingly. Crystal Carter: Now we shall see you again. Mordy Oberstein: I hope the traffic is good. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into why ranking factors might not matter nearly as much as you think. Heresy, I know. 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 the great content and webinars on the Wix 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. And until next time, peace, love and SEO. 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