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Explore expert SEO insights and resources from Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Discover articles on AI, keyword research, SEO tools and more. Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix and the author of the Wix SEO Guide . Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education hosting webinars and podcasts ., Mordy is one of the organizers of #SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Articles & Resources 21 Jan 2025 Does brand support SEO or does SEO support brand? 6 Aug 2024 What is the Google algorithm? 11 Jun 2024 What are Google algorithm updates? 29 May 2024 GA4 lessons and tactics one year later 15 May 2024 The rise of situational content: Lessons from Google’s March 2024 core update 24 Apr 2024 Wix Studio: Top 5 features for SEOs & digital marketers 4 Jan 2024 The future of web content: Where AI, user preferences, and SEO meet 21 Aug 2023 Analyze your SEO competitors with the SE Ranking app on Wix 26 Jun 2023 Wix’s on-page SEO audit tool: The SEO Assistant 9 Mar 2023 What AI content generators mean for the future of search 9 Feb 2023 Wix’s SEO Dashboard makes GSC data available at a glance 9 Feb 2023 Monitor organic performance with GSC data in Wix Analytics Resources Mordy Oberstein Podcast planning template From guest scheduling to SEO, keep everything that goes into publishing a podcast on track with this template. Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Can publishers thrive on the web? How can publishers optimize their content for SEO? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss digital strategies media publishers can use to grow organic traffic across the web. We assess the state of the SERP (and the web overall) to see if and how publishers can indeed thrive in today’s ecosystem. Giselle Navarro of HouseFresh joins to weigh in on the SERP landscape for small to mid-sized publishers. Content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, also stops by to give further analysis into the overall web health of the publishing community. Learn why publishers are turning the page to digital as we evaluate the environment for media publishers on Google and across the web this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Does the SEO still work for online publishers? Can publishers thrive on the web? How can publishers optimize their content for SEO? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter are back to discuss digital strategies media publishers can use to grow organic traffic across the web. We assess the state of the SERP (and the web overall) to see if and how publishers can indeed thrive in today’s ecosystem. Giselle Navarro of HouseFresh joins to weigh in on the SERP landscape for small to mid-sized publishers. Content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, also stops by to give further analysis into the overall web health of the publishing community. Learn why publishers are turning the page to digital as we evaluate the environment for media publishers on Google and across the web this week on the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 90 | June 5, 2024 | 56 MIN 00:00 / 56:14 This week’s guests Gisele Navarro Gisele Navarro is the Managing Editor of HouseFresh, an independent publication about indoor air quality committed to informing consumers looking to purchase air quality products by thoroughly testing air purifiers, dehumidifiers, humidifiers, fans and sensors to uncover the devices that don't live up to the marketing hype. She is also the CEO of NeoMam Studios, a team on a mission to create content people want to share. Alli Berry Alli Berry is a Fractional SEO Director and Consultant. Over the last decade, she has helped businesses develop content strategies to grow their acquisition funnel through organic search in a variety of industries including finance, education, retail, automotive, and healthcare. Before starting her own business, she served as the SEO Director of The Motley Fool and Senior Director of Content Marketing for TheStreet. She was named to Inc Magazine and Masthead Media's Top 10 Women in Content Marketing, and has been featured on Search Engine Journal's list of Top SEO Experts to Follow. Recently, Alli has been a featured speaker at Content Marketing World, Semrush Summer Jam, and the Digital Summit Series. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Obertstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Obertstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I am joined by the prolific, should not be understated. She won't take credit for it, but she is prolific head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hi, everybody. I'm trying to remember what prolific means. I'm think it means you do a lot of stuff. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, and particularly writing and I don't like writing. I don't do a lot of writing, but you think about it, you actually do a lot of writing and publishing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I do a little bit, sometimes more than not. Do you know what it is? It's like I go through phases. Sometimes I have nothing, and then sometimes I'm just like, "And this and this and that and this and this and this and this." So you go through ebbs and flows. Mordy Obertstein: I'll break the fourth wall. I schedule a lot of my tweets and LinkedIn posts, and I try to sit down for an hour or so on a Sunday and plan it all out. There are weeks where I got 30,000 things to say, and that's good because everybody's like, "I have nothing to write." Crystal Carter: Right? This is it, but that's a good way to do it. It's a good way to do it though. You plan it, you do the things, but I think also I got to be in the mood. I feel clear. Also, I find my favorite time of writing is on a train. Mordy Obertstein: On a plane, in a box with a fox? Crystal Carter: Here or there or anywhere. Mordy Obertstein: I do not love writing anywhere. Crystal Carter: But no, I love writing on a train. You just sit down. Also, I like writing when there's no WiFi, because I love Grammarly. I love being able to look stuff up, but when there's no WiFi, you can just write. You can just get it all out, brain dump, and there's nothing going. Did you spell that right? And then I get distracted and that's truth. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, you get distracted. Truth. It is annoying. Crystal Carter: Yeah. There'll be two things at the same time. You'll have the document. We'll give you, "Oh, I don't know that spelling," and then Grammarly will say something to you as well. Then it's like I can't. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, better off not spelling things correctly or having good grammar. It works for Barry. Anyway, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. You can only subscribe to your SEO newsletter search like each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. To clarify, you can subscribe whenever you want. It releases every month, but it's also where you can use our winter integration within the Wix and Wix Studio SEO setup checklist and SEO assistant to find the healthiest keywords for your site and your pages. Because today, we're evaluating the health of Google's ecosystem for media publishers, because after all, if the Rolling Stone is writing articles about the best fridges in 2024 and not about this best singer songwriters from 1964, perhaps there's a problem. We'll get into big publishers publishing out of their lane, the forum frenzy on the SERP and what it all means for publishers, and Google's push for publishers to use AI. Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of HouseFresh, has a thing or two to say about the state of the SERPs for publishers as she'll stop by to share what the SERP currently looks like for small and medium-sized publishers. Alli Berry will also pop in to share her outlook on publishers being able to thrive on the web beyond just SEO. Of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and you should be following for more awesomeness on social media. So, breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in. Okay. You can probably breathe out now as episode 90 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you assess your publishing health on that crazy little thing we call the internet. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic introduction. Mordy Obertstein: It's one of those classic things. I don't know if that reference holds true for everybody. When you go to the doctor as a kid, breathe in, breathe out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they got the stethoscope. They get to see all that. Mordy Obertstein: They can do that now. Crystal Carter: If you listen to a stethoscope, you can hear all stuff. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, my wife is a nurse. So, my kids walk around all the time. She doesn't use a stethoscope anymore so much anyway. Crystal Carter: Okay, but then somebody shouts into the stethoscope, it's like, "Oh!" Mordy Obertstein: That's not a good idea. Crystal Carter: Oh no, don't do that. That would be bad. Mordy Obertstein: You know what's bad? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Obertstein: The state of the SERP publishers. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Obertstein: Is that too much? Too heavy? Crystal Carter: Oh, that was hard. Mordy Obertstein: Too early. That's the answer, too early. Too early for that. Crystal Carter: Talk about Knicks in the playoffs. Wow. Mordy Obertstein: Playoffs. That's a sport, deep cut right there. Playoffs. We're not getting into that. Anyway, anyway, anyway, back on track. A few months ago, Giselle Navarro, who we'll hear from in just a bit, wrote a piece that took the SEO world by storm and it basically showed how large publishers dominate the product review SERP. Product reviews meaning best microwaves 2024. These big publishers were not who you thought they were. It wasn't the Wirecutter who you would expect, who I would expect, who I love. Love the Wirecutter. It's not the Wirecutter. It's sites like the Rolling Stone and Popular Science writing product review content. So, Giselle working for a review site obviously took issue with the Rolling Stone writing about fridges as well as she should, but it got me wondering why is the Rolling Stone not writing about Bob Dylan but Bob Vance? For all you, Office fans, Bob Vance sells refrigerators. I think I had to explain that, but basically, why is the rolling still not writing about Bob Dylan and writing about refrigerators? So I did a little bit of digging, and according to Vanity Fair, revenue for the iconic music and lifestyle magazine is projected at a total of around $46 million. That was back in 2017. A print advertising revenue was expected to drop to just $10.9 million in 2020 as compared to ad revenue of $28 million in 2015. So, the circulation revenue was projected to fall by 50% by 2020 according to the Street. So, again, I don't have current numbers. Those are the last numbers that I have, but basically what I'm trying to tell you is that the forecasting numbers were showing that print magazines were losing ad revenue like crazy, which makes sense, because people stopped reading printed magazines and started consuming web content. Now if you go to 2014, Popular Science had a print circulation of 1.3 million. By 2021, it was only digital. It no longer had an actual physical magazine. So, what I'm trying to point out is that these publishers like the Rolling Stone writing about best refrigerators, they're not nefarious, because I want to dominate the SERP and takeaways from small sites. They're trying to pivot because they've all been bought up by huge conglomerates who need to produce some ROI. They need to produce revenue, and they can't do that with print magazines anymore. I don't think the web, by the way, is a better place for any of all of this. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is it hasn't been sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies or whatever for these giant publishers. The reason why they're now out of their lane and talking about product reviews and not about science or music is because they need to find a way to pull in revenue. I'll take it just one step further. If you look at Rolling Stone's web traffic, it's not great either. It went in 2022 from about 44 million searches a month hitting the site from Google, according to Semrush, to about 22 million in 2024, January 2024. They lost half of their organic traffic. Popular Science also doesn't have huge numbers. They bring in under two million users a month from Google. So, they have to expand. They have to find new ways to bring in users, to get eyeballs, to either get subscriptions or to get ad revenue, which I will compare this... By the way, so there's basically two models. There's two ways these people can get revenue. Either they get it through ad revenue or through subscribers, paid subscribers. If it's through the ad revenue per se, the display ads, you need to have the eyeballs. If you're looking at Rolling Stone losing half their organic traffic, they need to new channels or new content areas to write about to pull in that traffic. Now it is possible to get paid subscribers, but that's not easy- Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Obertstein: ... at all. So, check out Rolling Stone. The New York Times is great at this. So, the New York Times in 2023, according to sources, has 10 million total subscribers, 9.7 million of them are digital subscribers. So, less than a million are actual paid subscribers. The New York Times has knocked it out of the park. Compare that to Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone has only 400,000 paid subscribers, which means what? They need the display ad revenue, which means what? They need to find new topics to write about, which is why, which is my last point, which is why they're writing product review content. So, the question is, Crystal, if the Rolling Stone's not a bad actor, they're doing this because they need to find ways to improve organic traffic, to improve their ability to earn from display ads because they're not getting the digital subscribers that they think they should be getting, what are they supposed to do and what's Google supposed to do and what's the web supposed? What are we all supposed to do? Crystal Carter: So I think that the New York Times, I think you mentioned that they have a really big subscriber base, and I think one of the things that the New York Times has been very good is that they have lots of branches of the New York Times and they also have a really, really rock solid IP. So, in terms of intellectual property, people know the brand, people understand the brand, people appreciate the brand. They've also got a lot of legacy content. So, if you're a subscriber, you also get access to that legacy content and it's seen as if you were going to get a new subscription, they will cover most of the bases. Not only will they cover your current events, but they'll also have a great food section, for instance, which is really good. They cover news or they cover sports really well as well. I think that one of the tricky things is that we're in a situation where users have many, many, many options for discovering information, for discovering new content, for finding out what the news is. In fact, you don't even have to go and look for the news. Google sends it to you. I get notifications about different things that are happening all the time, whether I want them or not. So, I think that in that space, there's some tricky space to navigate. So, for a business like the Rolling Stone Magazine for instance, one of the tricky things they have is that they're a music magazine. Well, musicians have their own platforms that are huge. So, if I look up the Rolling Stone for instance on... I keep saying the Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stone Magazine. Mordy Obertstein: Rolling Stones. Crystal Carter: If they look up Rolling Stone Magazine, I can see on Instagram for instance, I can see that they have 7.5 million followers on Instagram for instance. Let's just take that as just a little bit of a benchmark. Their cover star at the moment is Billy Eilish, right? Billy Eilish has 119 million followers. So, I think that the thing is, if you're Rolling Stone and you're trying to publicize your magazine, you're trying to tell people about news, people who are fans of Billy Eilish will follow Billy Eilish and they will get that news probably faster and directly than they would from Rolling Stone. So, I think that in that space, people have to remember the ecosystem for users and the ecosystem for how users are discovering information. In order to do that, you have to have exclusive content. You need to have exclusive information, things that people cannot get from anywhere else. I think that the New York Times is really good at doing that. The Economist I think is really good at that. I don't know their subscriber numbers in particular, but I know that The Economist are a publication that have a very unique perspective in terms of news and you will get content there that you will not get in other places. So, I think it's important to think about that. So, yeah, I mean I'm not knocking the hustle in terms of these big publishers trying to throw the net wide, trying to capture new content funnels, because I think that they're up against a lot of different competition for information for access to the newest, latest thing. Mordy Obertstein: So that's why actually I really wanted to do this episode, because really as you point out, it's an ecosystem question. The way users are consuming content, it's not a pure SEO. It has enormous SEO implications, but it's fundamentally not an SEO question. How do people consume content? Like you mentioned, they're going right to Billy Eilish's Instagram or whatever, and I think it means a few things. One, I think it means that we are due for a market correction around web content. I think it's going to be very painful because I think that the current system or the current contract is not sustainable. It's not sustainable to have a brand so far out of its lane talking about best microwaves and not best albums of the year. That's not a sustainable paradigm. That's not a sustainable model. I don't think it'll fundamentally work, and I don't think it's fundamentally what people want. In a way, they're gaming this system. This will bring me to next point, they know Google's not looking at the Rolling Stone and it's like, "Okay, you talk about music, we're going to rank you for music and only music or whatever entertainment stuff." They're like, "Well, Google's a meritocracy when it comes to pages. So, if we have pages that talk about microwaves and we can rank those pages because Google's not looking at our identity the way that it should be, we can get around this and we can rank for microwaves, pull in people from the SERP, have them look at the ads, perhaps click on the ads, and earn revenue that way." Because by the way, as I mentioned, the Rolling Stone is gated except for product review content. That's not that gated. They're using to get the display ads. I'm not going to call it a manipulation. There's too much negative connotation attached to that, but that is getting around the system. Crystal Carter: Don't hate the player, hate the game. That's what that is. Mordy Obertstein: Exactly, but that's not what fundamentally you want as a user. That's not the way. If you were to envision the web, you would want the web to function, which is my next point that I think what Google needs to do is to rely more on site identity, and I think that's good for everybody. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because here's the thing. Giselle Navarro's article is fantastic. She gets really into all the details. I'm sure we'll link it in the show notes as well, but on the example that she talks about Rolling Stone, she talks about them ranking for air purifiers for pets in 2024. Now, as someone who knows people who are into music and knows people who have extensive record collections and maybe who have very expensive guitars and things like that, air purifiers is not something that people who are musos are not uninterested in. So, if somebody has very expensive vinyl collection, if somebody has very expensive guitars that they do not want to collect dust, they do not want to have damaging their very expensive perfect collection, an air purifier might be something that they're interested in. So, it's very interesting that they're going for something that's so basic and that's not even related to their- Mordy Obertstein: They know the search volumes. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Obertstein: They know the search volumes. Crystal Carter: They know the search volume. So, it's really interesting though that they haven't aligned it to something that is relevant to their audience. I think that that's something that's more long term, I think that's something that could make it valuable to their audience. Mordy Obertstein: That's how they should pivot eventually, but what I think they're trying to do now is saying, "We want to hit X number, X revenue number. We need to hit X revenue." When they got bought out by whoever who I think in 2018 they got bought out by somebody, they need to justify the purchase. They need to hit X dollars and cents, mainly dollars, and no one cares about the cents. We're going to do that. If we can do that, we will do that and that's what they're doing. If Google gets it right and if Google says we're going to rely more on site identity, so if you are a website that focuses on product reviews or on air purifiers, or in the case of Rolling Stone, music and instruments, so the best guitars of 2024, which guitars did you buy? Forget the air purifier. Which guitars did you buy? Then they'll be forced to do that. But what that'll mean for them as an organization unfortunately is they'll have to slim down, which they're trying to, or whoever bought them will have to incur a loss if they haven't made up the money already. That's what I mean, there's no way around the pain for these big publishers in my opinion. My prediction to quote Mr. T, pain. Crystal Carter: We had Barry Adams talking about SEO as a team sport on our last podcast. Barry Adams is somebody who's been working with news publishers for years for the majority of his career, and he talks about that they've been dealing with this since probably about 2018. Particularly UK publishers were hit really, really hard in 2018. Mordy Obertstein: I remember him talking about it. Crystal Carter: They have not seen the return to prominence or to visibility on the SERP since then. I think that that has created a really complex situation for some of these publishers. I think that where you see high quality publishing, then I think that it's really valuable for the web overall. I think it's really, really valuable for everyone. So, I hope that people are able to find something that's not just talking about air purifiers that are nothing to do with their core audience, but yeah, I do agree that it's something that's going to be very, very difficult to address in the next one. Mordy Obertstein: There's no easy solution. There's like either this continues on and Google doesn't address it, in which case Google will experience pain, because this doesn't reflect well on Google. It's like something somewhere has to give. Either the publishers are going to have to refine their focus because Google's going to force them to, or Google's going to be like, "Yeah, do what you want," which it's basically doing now, but Google will experience pain. Crystal Carter: But I think also there are a lot of publications who are leaning towards a multichannel approach. So, for instance, I follow British Vogue and Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is a fantastic publication. They don't just talk about teen stuff. They talk about lots of really interesting stuff. They're fantastic publications and they publish some great stuff across their social as well. They published some great stuff on YouTube as well. So, I think that there's lots of news publishers that are essentially using their brand. So, they're leveraging their brand across multiple channels, and I think that that brand legacy, particularly for some of these high legacy publications like Rolling Stone, like Vogue, like Grazia even, that brand recognition allows them to make a splash in some of those channels that would be much more difficult to do for other publications as well. Mordy Obertstein: Great minds because I was going to say the way out of this for publishers is to do what the New York Times did because the New York Times has done this successfully. As I mentioned before, something like 95% of their subscriptions are digital and they have an enormous amount of revenue from their digital subscriptions. Semrush did an event, Global Marketing Day in 2022, I don't remember 2023, one of those years. I was on a panel with someone from the New York Times. They talked about how they did this and basically it was brand building. They basically created a brand campaign basically showing you why you should want to pay for quality journalism, why that's not free and why you shouldn't expect it. If you want good stuff, you got to pay for it thing. That's what these brands need to do, but that's the issue. The real fundamental issue in my mind is that these brands, because they have all these metrics to meet, overvalue performance marketing. They're not thinking of the longer brand play and how the brand play will allow them to tap into the performance market they so deeply and desperately want, but it's going to be a brand play first and then it's going to be a performance play. They're not willing to do that yet because they're not willing to take the immediate repercussions of, okay, it's going to be difficult for a period of time. We are the Rolling Stone. We need to create content that's worthy of you paying for a subscription and we need to build a brand around that and we need to build a desire around that that's going to take time. They're it seems like not willing to invest in that time and resources to do that so that they can have a model that's actually sustainable, not relying on Google's algorithm to not care the fact they're running about microwaves and not guitars. Crystal Carter: I know that there are some people who have some interesting opinions on how Forbes do things, for instance, but Forbes have a lot of really interesting strands of the way that they generate income and the way that they connect with their community because I think that's another point as well. So, people who subscribe to Rolling Stone, people who are reading Rolling Stone are people who are interested in music, right? They're very interested in music and that stuff. There's some great brand partnerships that you can do across that. Forbes for instance has a lot of communities that they run. They have CMO communities. They have communities for different people with different intersectionalities and they have a series of events that they run across the year that are really, really well attended and really, really interesting. They also have their Forbes panel and people are like, "Oh, I'm on the Forbes panel and I do that thing." So I think that they also have a really interesting strand that they're pulling through and all of that helps to build up their brand. So, that IRL interaction with the brand, you can be a part of it, part of the brand, also brings that together. But I think if I go to rollingstone.com for instance, it doesn't really feel very interactive when I go in there. It doesn't feel like I could contribute. It doesn't feel like it's something that I could be a part of particularly. It's just like here's some stuff that Billy Eilish has done. Here's Drake mostly made himself look bad on his latest diss. I don't know. It's just opinion pieces about music and that's fine. That's fine, but I think that if you want to cut through, for instance, if you want to cut through to a very two-way internet that we have these days, it's both ways. Your people are reading your stuff, people are responding to your stuff. They're replying in the comments. There's people who on YouTube, on Instagram, on any of the video things, on literally any post on social media, people are like, "I'm just here for the comments. I literally just came here for the comments." So people expect to have that instant feedback, that instant participation in whatever media they're consuming. I think that brands that are able to make people feel connected to them, either in person or online or both are going to get a lot more out of that. Mordy Obertstein: 100%, I could not possibly agree more, but to weigh in now on what the SERP currently looks like or means for smaller, mid-sized publishers is the aforementioned wonderful Giselle Navarro. So, here's Giselle and what the SERP currently looks like for small to mid-sized publishers. Giselle Navarro: I can only answer this question confidently from the point of view of being the manager data of HouseFresh and being a small publisher within the air quality space. So, that's where I'm going to be answering it from. I don't know if this is the case for every other small publisher in every other niche, but it definitely is something I've seen in our space. That is that on top of what everybody already knows of big media sites being pushed to the top across different types of queries, a trend that I've noticed increasingly since September, October last year is a big push from Google site to get searchers to just buy from the SERPs. So, whether that is adding a sidebar filter product as if it were to be a shopping filter within search that perhaps are not a product search or they are a recommendation, what are the best amplifiers for bedrooms or something like that, and then suddenly, you already immediately get a filter pop up to your left, the sidebar that is just giving you options for you to filter by brand, by this, by that. Obviously, at that point, you don't know. That's why you're searching. Within that, it's not just that. There's also the topics at the top. So, when you're making searches like, "Oh, now what are the best budget amplifiers?" Suddenly, you get all these tags at the top, which when you were to add them to your search, the search gets regenerated again, and then the top results are always products. Then there's also shopping listings within subs and huge blocks like six rows of products, eight rows in some cases. Again, these are queries that are not people looking specifically for a brand and a product or a specific model. They are looking for information to try to make a decision and they're being pushed. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of these are sponsored shopping ads and they're not very good products at all. In many cases, they don't even satisfy the actual queries. So, if somebody's looking for best HEPA air purifier, I'm going a bit nerd here, but if somebody is looking for that, which is a specific air filtration technology, some of the products that get surfaced, and a lot of them actually are not even... They have other technologies. So, it's not even that Google is serving products and these products are the right products or that are useful products. Actually, they're misinforming people and confusing people and we get a lot of emails from readers who are confused and they would say, "I spent all this time and I was reading this and I was reading that. I just don't understand anymore and I was so happy to found your article." We interact with a lot of people on Reddit and it happens a lot that they are very confused. I think the reason why people are confused is because the searches are not really clarifying anything and just pushing more products at them. So, definitely, that's something that I have noticed. I don't know if every other small publisher is seeing the same, but that definitely has been a trend that I see growing of Google trying to push searchers to buy directly from Google, which is not great, because you wouldn't go to find information inside of Amazon or inside of Target or Walmart. So, if they're forgetting about the information part of what they're doing, then they're just trying to become a retailer. Obviously, they're not because they have deals with brands that pay ads and all this stuff. So, they're not even familiarizing themselves with the products, which is unfortunate, because at least that maybe they would do a better job. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much, Giselle. Make sure to give Giselle a follow over at I-C-H-B-I-N-G-I-S-E-L-E over on X and look for her on LinkedIn as well. I think Aleyda Solís was talking about this, maybe I'm getting this wrong, back at the SEOFOMO event we did with her at the Wix Playground in New York where just the e-com SERP is such a problem in a way. It's an opportunity, it's also a problem. It's interesting because you don't think of her product reviews and publishers, but those sites overlap with product buying intent. If I'm talking about best microwave, Google can interpret that as okay, here's a bunch of articles about choosing the best microwave or here are the best microwaves. That puts publishers at a very, very, very serious disadvantage, because if you look at the way, if you're not familiar, if you Google something like buy a microwave, at least in the US and other markets, the whole SERP changes. There are sidebar filters and PLA ads. It's a very different looking SERP and the organic results get lost in there. Crystal Carter: Giselle is coming from this place where she's looking after her brand. She's trying to make sure that everything's being displayed the way that she expects it to be, and she's trying to make sure that she understands her competitor landscape. So, she's looking at this and she's like, "The competitors that I'm seeing here are not the competitors that I would normally expect to see here." That's really, really tricky. Like you're saying, it's a really complex SERP. If you're doing buy a microwave, you expect to be maybe competing with other people who are selling microwaves. If you're suddenly competing with Rolling Stone for instance, it's tricky to figure out your strategy for that because you can't be everything for everyone. If they're looking for articles instead, that's going to change the way that you approach that particular digital marketing strategy. So, yeah, I think that it is tricky and they're constantly tinkering with that SERP. So, they're adding in things via Google Lens and they're adding in competitor aggregator thing. So, for instance, if you see one type of a Samsung microwave, I think they make microwaves. Yeah, if you see a Samsung microwave, they'll show a few different listings underneath it, which is slightly different from the way they were doing it before. Like you said, you get lots of filters. Sometimes you pretty much land on the shopping page for some things. So, yeah, it's really complexer. I think that those working in e-comm have a lot to think about at the moment. Mordy Obertstein: It's like a mini Amazon. The query I'm looking at, I'm doing best microwave, it's not even a full on transactional query and it looks like Amazon. It's hard. Give yourself a big thank you, Giselle, for contributing and for all the work you've been doing in this area for the SEO community over the past how many number of years already. Anyway, the SERP aside and that's no small thing, but there's a wider web out there just over yonder, past Google, skip it a stone, past Google. The question is how healthy is the web overall for the publishing community? To help us, we ask famed content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, how she see things as we move past pure SEO and go into the great beyond. Alli Berry: I will say that I think the state of online publishing is a little unpredictable at the moment. I think it really depends on what kind of online publishing we're talking about. I can tell you for affiliate for example, I have a client right now who has great organic rankings in certain financial verticals and is losing traffic not necessarily to competitors, but mostly to new SERP features. It looks like Google is adding SERP features that are providing their own set of recommendations based on who is popular for queries that have best or review or what have you in the query. Instead of seeing affiliate reviews for various products, I think you're going to see more brands that Google is associating with those terms, which is going to make it harder for affiliates to do well. I think you'll also see so much more Reddit everywhere, which is enraging, because so much of it is frankly shit. There are some sites that I think are doing affiliate the right way and actually testing products, and I think a lot of them are getting buried now for Reddit results. So, I think next to the question of can publishers still thrive? If you're trying to get into affiliate or build an affiliate publishing program, it's going to be a tough time for you. I don't know what else to say there. It's possible, especially if your brand already has some clout, but it's tough out there. I would be looking to diversify my revenue sources if I were you because it feels like Google is trying to bury affiliate sites from my perspective. There are some very authoritative sites that have gained ground in affiliate. Rarely do they have the best content on the topic, which is really frustrating for some of the smaller sites, but I think the opposite of diversification seems to be happening in the SERPs. So, if you're new, it's going to be tough. For bigger news publishers, so affiliate aside, I think it's also a strange time from what I've been seeing and hearing. Certainly, the big publishers are looking for ways to use AI to help them be more efficient, which really means they're trying to use AI to write certain types of articles and get away with it. I do think SGE has the potential to disrupt the news game a little bit. I think it's going to be more important than ever for news outlets to be the first to report something before AI can regurgitate it. I think interviews are going to be more valuable. Anything that is actually unique and human driven is the best way to combat SGE. Many publishers are moving away from content syndication, which to me feels long overdue. Google hasn't made any changes that would really cause publishers to make this change other than they keep saying, you should really ask your syndication partners to de-index the syndicated version of the article, which is wild and ridiculous and would never happen. Maybe everyone syndicating is finally starting to see how they were getting outranked by partners and the economics weren't really working out for them. It's definitely no longer as lucrative as it once was, especially since Yahoo has been pedaling down syndication and made the decision to bring content in house. It's an interesting decision too. If you look at Yahoo today, they're trying to be more of a news source than a search engine, which I think is interesting. I've also been looking at some smaller publishers that are more focused on niche topics, so local happenings, mommy blogs. There's been a lot of drop off in traffic for many of these sites that I've been looking at. The Pioneer Woman, My Dallas Mommy, Your Brooklyn Guide, et cetera, a lot of these sites do product promotions, event promotions for kickbacks. They have commissionable links. I'm wondering if Google is finally coming after those, but then if you look at food blogs, there's some really great SERP diversification that's present and happening there. New York Times Cooking is actually losing ground, which surprised me. All recipes has been steady but not growing and there are some really cool smaller sites with visibility like Love and Lemons, Once Upon a Chef. I don't really know what to make of it all. I think in certain verticals, there is a lot of hope for success for newer publishers. In others, a lot of them being in the YMYL space, maybe run far, far away. I do think though that the key to success doesn't seem that different than it did a decade ago. Really, I think if you're starting a new online publication, you should start with a unique angle, have a niche, build a small, engaged audience, do whatever you're going to do content wise, consistently learn from what's working, double down on it. You really should be able to build an audience over time. If you have that audience and go in your site directly and they're spreading the word and all of that good stuff, I do think you can still grow a site today, but it's definitely harder than it once was. I think you're going to do better if you're not in the YMYL space because it does seem like Google is doing the opposite of diversification there. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much for that, Alli. There's so much to chew on there. First up, that war on affiliates, we actually spoke about that a few episodes ago with Glenn Gabe. So, it's nice to hear some concurrence around that issue, around that topic because I think it's definitely what's going on. I think it's also interesting that she's talking about, and we're going to be talking about in another episode or two, about the value of brand ranking as opposed to affiliates ranking. I think that's where things are going to go. Again, it goes into this whole topic of Google's war in affiliate marketing or affiliate websites rather. It makes sense in a way that Google's going to double down on ranking those brands that have that identity, that are well established, that are well known, that have a strong digital presence and ranking them about their own stuff in the end, which is interesting because of the conflict of interest. But I think for Google's point of view, it's the lesser of two evils. If I have to rely on affiliate strike, the conflict of interest in a brand themselves and the conflict of interest in an affiliate trying to generate revenue, I would say that the lesser of those two evils is the brand themselves. I think they're more reliable. I think they're less likely to push things, less likely to lie for lack of a better word. I think it might be a little too harsh, but skew the truth, less likely to skew the truth. In that sense, I think she might be right that Google's going to say, "You know what? Forget all this. Let's just go with the brand." If that's by the way what happens, then folks like the Rolling Stone like we were talking about earlier are going to see their ranking slip away and it's going to increase the focus on doubling down on brand authority, brand presence, and all things brand, which we'll talk about in a later podcast. Crystal Carter: It's such a complex space for Google. It's such a complex space for brands. I think that everyone really needs to knuckle down on doing high quality content and that's for their users. I think one of the things that she touched upon was moving away from syndicated content, moving towards unique content, moving towards stuff that really differentiates yourself. I think that that is really a return to the core of what the web has been about for a good amount of time or what it should be about anyway. Give Google a reason to rank you. Give people a reason to actually visit your page that is unique to you, and I think that that's really important. I think that think about the unique perspective that you have on it, even if it is product reviews, even if it is the best microwave. Why is your best microwave page interesting? People often bring up that The Verge article that's about the printer. Mordy Obertstein: The printer, the Brother printer. Crystal Carter: They're like, "Oh, just buy the Brother printer." Don't get me wrong, they do- Mordy Obertstein: I did by the way. That's literally what I did. That's literally what I did. Crystal Carter: So those ones, that article is really actually interesting because it's both doing all of the things that you expect to see, but it's actually poking fun at that in an interesting way. It's breaking the fourth wall really on that content and that makes it unique. I think that that's where we need to think about. Be actually unique. Take that risk, be unique. Mordy Obertstein: It's interesting and it's something that we'll talk about on a later podcast episode. I know because we recorded a little bit out of order, so breaking the fourth wall for you, but I'm interested to see if brands will be able to do this because it's going to be taking your foot off the gas pedal a little bit. It's the same question we talked about the affiliate marketers. If brands are going to be searching for best microwave and it's ranking Samsung and their post about their best microwaves, they're going to have to do a little more on the informational side and a little less on the conversion side. Just like affiliate marketers are facing that same problem, will brands think about the overall brand value that that will bring and take the foot off the conversion performance marketing for just a bit? Who knows? Crystal Carter: Who knows? That's the question. Mordy Obertstein: You know what I do know? I know that when we cover the SEO news, we might cover Search Engine Journal and Matt Southern and Roger Monty who do a great job and even Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Obertstein: But I know we're going to cover at least one article from Barry. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Obertstein: So this is week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Whoa, that's a lot going on, but two big stories, one bigger than the next. I'm so flustered, I don't know where to start. Okay, here we go. From Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Roundtable, Google AI overviews are here to stay with improvements, the Ray AIO update, named after Lilly Ray. It's awesome. Anyway, Barry writes that "Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid wrote a blog post about AI overviews and how they're basically improving them and how they can make improvements and what they're doing to improve them," and so forth and so forth and so forth. I'll get into that in a second, but this comes with a blizzard of critique across the internet about the AI overviews and they're hallucinating. They're not accurate. They're recommending ridiculous things, yada, yada, yada, yada. So, this is Google essentially, I think, responding to that. Google made a whole bunch of claims. I'll read what Barry quoted Liz is saying here. We found a content policy violation on less than one in every seven million unique queries on which AIO reviews appeared and that they will keep improving, when and how we show AIO reviews and strengthening our protections and yada, yada, yada, yada, and yada. Some of the things that Liz Reid went on to say are a little bit, I guess, controversial. For example, she said that AI overviews are as accurate and as good as featured snippets or the accuracy is as good as feature snippets rather. They seem to be saying that a lot of these cases being shared across the internet of AI overviews going off the deep end are fake. That's a pretty heavy accusation to make, but Google did admit and they write, but some odd, inaccurate, unhelpful AI overview certainly did show up. The long story short is Google has heard of the web complaining about the AI overviews. They are responding. They are making improvements, and they're not going anywhere. There's going to be more AIO reviews. It's part of the core search experience, they said. I guess we'll have to keep an eye on what happens and how they improve or don't improve. Share your thoughts out there on the ether because it's a very controversial topic. Even more controversial topic, if you can imagine that. Oh boy, this from iPullRank, friend of the show, friend of the Wix SEO Learning Hub, friend of SEO in general, Mike King wrote an article, Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search's Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked. So, there was some leak internal documentation from Google searches content warehouse API that show theoretically what's happening in the algorithm. I'll talk about it from a top level TLDR point of view really quick. A lot of the things that Google has said they don't do or have indicated perhaps they don't do are shown in the API. Meaning that, oh, maybe they are actually doing these things. Google responded back basically saying, "This leak is real. However, you don't know just on reading the leak if this was a test, what exactly it means, how to interpret it, how heavy to weight any of these things and so forth." That is true. I'll get to some of the specifics in a minute. We don't know if they were part of a one-time test. We don't know. It's hard to piece this together. I'm going to try my best to piece it together the best that I possibly can in a snappy manner. This is not going to be snappy. I'm just letting you know right now. The second thing I want to say before I get into some of the details, people have started to question Google's honesty and whether or not some of their search advocates are good people. The answer is they are good people. Being a public spokesperson for a public company as large and as complicated as Google is not easy. I don't want to put words in any of this search advocate's mouths. This is my take. A lot of the time, I think you have what you have and you have to do the best with what you have and be as transparent with what you have and with what you are allowed and not allowed to say. You just have to do your best to be as transparent as possible with what you have to work with. I think the search advocates have done that the best they possibly could. So, I think a lot of the rhetoric or the negative rhetoric around the particular search advocates needs to be toned down. We need to be realistic and understanding of what it means for them to be in that role, what they are allowed to say, what they're not allowed to say, and what the best they possibly can do with what they have to work with. That aside, there was a lot of juicy information inside of this. Mike runs through it here in the original article. He also wrote an article on search engine land entitled, "How SEO Moves Forward with Google Content Warehouse API Leak." I'll link to both of those in the show notes. You can read through them on your own. Where do I start? Where do I start? Where do I start? Okay. So, I'm going to start with my approach to this is we don't know exactly what Google is using, what they're not using, how much of it they're using, to what extent they're weighing it and so forth. I like to look at these things a bit directionally. If you were to paint a picture, what direction does this show you where Google is going? In other words, what is Google at least trying to do? Because at a minimum, they're using these things in testing. So, what are they trying to do? That we do know. So, I look at this very directionally and what direction should we go based upon the direction that Google seems to be going with what was shown in the API leaks. With that, and I have just a bunch of random, random stuff to run through here, oh boy, okay. There is information that indicates that Google is using clicks. They have calls for metrics for bad clicks, good clicks, last longest clicks and so forth. If you combine that with the leak from the DOJ trial where they indicated there's something called Nav Boost that's looking at user behavior and in fact doing that into ranking, you do see that user behavior does really factor into the ranking equation in my opinion. It has been an issue of debate in front of the SEO for a while. I've actually personally, I'll call myself out, have gone back and forth on this over the years. It does very much seem that Google is incorporating user behavior into the algorithm. That doesn't mean you should be manipulating for clicks. What it does mean is that you need to think about the experience the user has on the website. Is the UX navigatable? Is that a word? I don't know. Can it be navigated easily? Does the content engage them? Does it satisfy their needs? Does it make them want to read another article from you and so forth? I think a lot of the things we're going to talk about here really quickly have to do with how strong your branding is, how strong of a website you are. When people go to the SERP and they see you ranking, let's say you're ranking number five and not number two or number one, do they click on you anyway because you have such a strong brand around that topic? To that, and again, I'm trying to go in some logical order here because there's so much to cover. So, part of what we've seen from the leaks that Google is looking to determine how on target your content is with your overall site and with what you're trying to do, or if it's not, which means as Mike writes in his article, actually content needs to be more focused. He writes, "We've learned definitively that Google uses vector embedding to determine how far off a given page is from the rest of what you talk about. This indicates that it'll be challenging to go far into upper funnel content successfully without a structured expansion or without authors who have demonstrated expertise in that subject area. Encourage your authors to call expertise in what they publish across the web and treat it to the gold standard that it is." Meaning Google's looking at the embeddings to see how far off they do or do it online with what you're writing about, and I've talked about this for years already. Google is able to look at and see what you're writing about and how much it does or doesn't align with who you are as an entity, with who you are as a brand or a business and so forth. One of the other interesting things along this line is that Google seems to have some commercial scoring where it's saying, "Okay, is this content commercial or not?" I speculate and that gives it something I've seen for a long time that might be because a lot of blog content tries to pretend that it's informational content, but really it's commercial content or backhanded commercial content. So, perhaps I have seen Google do this algorithmically. Perhaps this is the element that's doing that where they're able to say, "Okay, wait a second. This is not an actual information piece. This is actually a commercial piece. We can profile it like that." Which again goes back to the earlier point. Make sure your content meets the user need. It's more targeted and more specific and more, I'll say, transparent than anything else. There's a site authority score that came out of this. Google say, "We don't look at domain authority, blah, blah, blah," but there is a site authority score. I think we all knew there was an overall quality score to the website. Google said that there is an overall quality score. I know we talked about topic authority, so that would align with that as well. There's things in there around navigation demotions. This goes back to what we said before. If the UX isn't great, you could tell the user is not having successful experience with the website, that UX can impact rank. Again, make sure you're keeping your users in mind first and foremost. On short content, there seems to be some originality scoring, whether it's actively being used or not being used, but you see where Google is trying to go. So, much short content is just replicated over and over and over and over again. Google's looking to make sure that that content when they rank it has some originality to it. Whether or not they're actually doing it, whether or not that's a test, you do see where Google is directionally trying to go with something like that, which I think is the most important thing. Where is Google trying to go? I look at this again, like the quality rate guidelines are not in the algorithm per se, but it's definitely a clear statement of where Google wants to go. There's a lot about mentions in there. There's a whole slew of information about results getting re-ranked last second. Meaning last second factors or last second read jiggering of the results that happen as the query is being processed can happen. It's why you might see rank fluctuations being inconsistent perhaps sometimes for you and so forth and so forth and so forth. There is a lot in there. I think, again, my general takeaway is that there's a lot in there that points to content being more specific, content being aligned to what the site wants to do or what they say they do. Glenn Gabe actually recently talked about this in a case study that he did on the March 2024 core update. I'll link to that in the show notes also. So, again, the directionally see that things with navigation, user experience, user behavior, meaning making sure the user is satisfied. Google's trying to find ways to measure that. Make sure your users are satisfied. Make sure that you are recognizable as a brand because again, if Google is looking at what's happening on the SERP and you are recognized entity out there in that niche that can help you, it would seemingly help you with rankings. But again, read these articles but look at it again, like the quality reader's guidelines in many ways. What does it show you about where Google is trying to go? This is the very much not very snappy news. All right. News aside, well, not news aside actually, because our follower of the week comes from the news world. She actually recently spoke by the time this episode airs at the first New York City SEO for NEWS Meetup hosted at the Wix Playground in New York City by NewzDash and former guest of this podcast, John Shehata. She is the Senior Director of SEO at ESPN. I can't help myself. That sound is so nostalgic for me by the way. She is Louisa Frahm. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Fantastic follow. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, give her a big follow over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her in the show notes. ESPN does some amazing... That is a lot of content to run through. They run a double model. They have a paywall model and they have a pure open, organic, go ahead and read it model. It's really interesting what they're able to do, what they're able to rank for. She shares a lot of knowledge. So, follow Louisa over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I think that it's great to follow publishers as well. So, follow her. Absolutely, there's some great publishers to follow because they are, like you said, dealing with a lot of content and they to get really creative with the way that they present content. Sometimes Google has different features as well. So, if you think about sports for instance, sometimes you can get the sports scores on Google itself. So, publishers, for instance, for ESPN will have to think about how they capture content or how they capture traffic in new ways as they respond to those new SERP features. I think that it's great to pay attention to the ways that some of the big players do that. Mordy Obertstein: Interesting. By the way, pro tip, one way to do that is being more reliable. So, I consume a lot of sports and I go to that Google Box all the time. Sometimes because it defaults to an American time zone and I don't live in America anymore. It'll still default the game sometimes to the American Times. I'm like, "No, that doesn't look right." I'll go to ESPN and they do a better job of adjusting the times automatically. So, I know what I'm actually looking at. Crystal Carter: Unique and adding value. Mordy Obertstein: Added value and reliability. It's such an under thing, reliability. Crystal Carter: It's so important. Mordy Obertstein: So important. It's good for your website. It's good for your relationships. Reliability, it's good for everything. Crystal Carter: Not just SEO tips, people. Life skills, life tips. Mordy Obertstein: Right. We should do a life skills episode. Crystal Carter: Optimize your life. Mordy Obertstein: Optimize your life, the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: What is your life H1? Mordy Obertstein: Me? Crystal Carter: Any thoughts? Mordy Obertstein: Oh, off the cuff? Hide. Crystal Carter: So your H1 is white text on a white background. Is that what you're telling me? Mordy Obertstein: Hide. Get a screaming hide somewhere. Hide. Crystal Carter: I'm going to have to think about what mine is. Mordy Obertstein: I see a lot of neighbors. Hide. It's so good. Time to reveal too much. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next time with the new episode as we dive into why branded search matters more than you think it does. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guess it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gisele Navarro Alli Berry Louisa Frahm Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Housefresh News: Google AI Overviews Are Here To Stay With Improvements - The Ray AIO Update Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked How SEO moves forward with the Google Content Warehouse API leak Google March 2024 Core Update Case Study: A tale of four tremors, reversals, and a great example of the counterbalancing of systems Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Gisele Navarro Alli Berry Louisa Frahm Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Housefresh News: Google AI Overviews Are Here To Stay With Improvements - The Ray AIO Update Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked How SEO moves forward with the Google Content Warehouse API leak Google March 2024 Core Update Case Study: A tale of four tremors, reversals, and a great example of the counterbalancing of systems Transcript Mordy Obertstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Obertstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I am joined by the prolific, should not be understated. She won't take credit for it, but she is prolific head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hi, everybody. I'm trying to remember what prolific means. I'm think it means you do a lot of stuff. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, and particularly writing and I don't like writing. I don't do a lot of writing, but you think about it, you actually do a lot of writing and publishing. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I do a little bit, sometimes more than not. Do you know what it is? It's like I go through phases. Sometimes I have nothing, and then sometimes I'm just like, "And this and this and that and this and this and this and this." So you go through ebbs and flows. Mordy Obertstein: I'll break the fourth wall. I schedule a lot of my tweets and LinkedIn posts, and I try to sit down for an hour or so on a Sunday and plan it all out. There are weeks where I got 30,000 things to say, and that's good because everybody's like, "I have nothing to write." Crystal Carter: Right? This is it, but that's a good way to do it. It's a good way to do it though. You plan it, you do the things, but I think also I got to be in the mood. I feel clear. Also, I find my favorite time of writing is on a train. Mordy Obertstein: On a plane, in a box with a fox? Crystal Carter: Here or there or anywhere. Mordy Obertstein: I do not love writing anywhere. Crystal Carter: But no, I love writing on a train. You just sit down. Also, I like writing when there's no WiFi, because I love Grammarly. I love being able to look stuff up, but when there's no WiFi, you can just write. You can just get it all out, brain dump, and there's nothing going. Did you spell that right? And then I get distracted and that's truth. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, you get distracted. Truth. It is annoying. Crystal Carter: Yeah. There'll be two things at the same time. You'll have the document. We'll give you, "Oh, I don't know that spelling," and then Grammarly will say something to you as well. Then it's like I can't. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, better off not spelling things correctly or having good grammar. It works for Barry. Anyway, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. You can only subscribe to your SEO newsletter search like each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. To clarify, you can subscribe whenever you want. It releases every month, but it's also where you can use our winter integration within the Wix and Wix Studio SEO setup checklist and SEO assistant to find the healthiest keywords for your site and your pages. Because today, we're evaluating the health of Google's ecosystem for media publishers, because after all, if the Rolling Stone is writing articles about the best fridges in 2024 and not about this best singer songwriters from 1964, perhaps there's a problem. We'll get into big publishers publishing out of their lane, the forum frenzy on the SERP and what it all means for publishers, and Google's push for publishers to use AI. Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of HouseFresh, has a thing or two to say about the state of the SERPs for publishers as she'll stop by to share what the SERP currently looks like for small and medium-sized publishers. Alli Berry will also pop in to share her outlook on publishers being able to thrive on the web beyond just SEO. Of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and you should be following for more awesomeness on social media. So, breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in. Okay. You can probably breathe out now as episode 90 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you assess your publishing health on that crazy little thing we call the internet. Crystal Carter: Thank you for that fantastic introduction. Mordy Obertstein: It's one of those classic things. I don't know if that reference holds true for everybody. When you go to the doctor as a kid, breathe in, breathe out. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they got the stethoscope. They get to see all that. Mordy Obertstein: They can do that now. Crystal Carter: If you listen to a stethoscope, you can hear all stuff. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, my wife is a nurse. So, my kids walk around all the time. She doesn't use a stethoscope anymore so much anyway. Crystal Carter: Okay, but then somebody shouts into the stethoscope, it's like, "Oh!" Mordy Obertstein: That's not a good idea. Crystal Carter: Oh no, don't do that. That would be bad. Mordy Obertstein: You know what's bad? Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Obertstein: The state of the SERP publishers. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Obertstein: Is that too much? Too heavy? Crystal Carter: Oh, that was hard. Mordy Obertstein: Too early. That's the answer, too early. Too early for that. Crystal Carter: Talk about Knicks in the playoffs. Wow. Mordy Obertstein: Playoffs. That's a sport, deep cut right there. Playoffs. We're not getting into that. Anyway, anyway, anyway, back on track. A few months ago, Giselle Navarro, who we'll hear from in just a bit, wrote a piece that took the SEO world by storm and it basically showed how large publishers dominate the product review SERP. Product reviews meaning best microwaves 2024. These big publishers were not who you thought they were. It wasn't the Wirecutter who you would expect, who I would expect, who I love. Love the Wirecutter. It's not the Wirecutter. It's sites like the Rolling Stone and Popular Science writing product review content. So, Giselle working for a review site obviously took issue with the Rolling Stone writing about fridges as well as she should, but it got me wondering why is the Rolling Stone not writing about Bob Dylan but Bob Vance? For all you, Office fans, Bob Vance sells refrigerators. I think I had to explain that, but basically, why is the rolling still not writing about Bob Dylan and writing about refrigerators? So I did a little bit of digging, and according to Vanity Fair, revenue for the iconic music and lifestyle magazine is projected at a total of around $46 million. That was back in 2017. A print advertising revenue was expected to drop to just $10.9 million in 2020 as compared to ad revenue of $28 million in 2015. So, the circulation revenue was projected to fall by 50% by 2020 according to the Street. So, again, I don't have current numbers. Those are the last numbers that I have, but basically what I'm trying to tell you is that the forecasting numbers were showing that print magazines were losing ad revenue like crazy, which makes sense, because people stopped reading printed magazines and started consuming web content. Now if you go to 2014, Popular Science had a print circulation of 1.3 million. By 2021, it was only digital. It no longer had an actual physical magazine. So, what I'm trying to point out is that these publishers like the Rolling Stone writing about best refrigerators, they're not nefarious, because I want to dominate the SERP and takeaways from small sites. They're trying to pivot because they've all been bought up by huge conglomerates who need to produce some ROI. They need to produce revenue, and they can't do that with print magazines anymore. I don't think the web, by the way, is a better place for any of all of this. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is it hasn't been sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies or whatever for these giant publishers. The reason why they're now out of their lane and talking about product reviews and not about science or music is because they need to find a way to pull in revenue. I'll take it just one step further. If you look at Rolling Stone's web traffic, it's not great either. It went in 2022 from about 44 million searches a month hitting the site from Google, according to Semrush, to about 22 million in 2024, January 2024. They lost half of their organic traffic. Popular Science also doesn't have huge numbers. They bring in under two million users a month from Google. So, they have to expand. They have to find new ways to bring in users, to get eyeballs, to either get subscriptions or to get ad revenue, which I will compare this... By the way, so there's basically two models. There's two ways these people can get revenue. Either they get it through ad revenue or through subscribers, paid subscribers. If it's through the ad revenue per se, the display ads, you need to have the eyeballs. If you're looking at Rolling Stone losing half their organic traffic, they need to new channels or new content areas to write about to pull in that traffic. Now it is possible to get paid subscribers, but that's not easy- Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Obertstein: ... at all. So, check out Rolling Stone. The New York Times is great at this. So, the New York Times in 2023, according to sources, has 10 million total subscribers, 9.7 million of them are digital subscribers. So, less than a million are actual paid subscribers. The New York Times has knocked it out of the park. Compare that to Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone has only 400,000 paid subscribers, which means what? They need the display ad revenue, which means what? They need to find new topics to write about, which is why, which is my last point, which is why they're writing product review content. So, the question is, Crystal, if the Rolling Stone's not a bad actor, they're doing this because they need to find ways to improve organic traffic, to improve their ability to earn from display ads because they're not getting the digital subscribers that they think they should be getting, what are they supposed to do and what's Google supposed to do and what's the web supposed? What are we all supposed to do? Crystal Carter: So I think that the New York Times, I think you mentioned that they have a really big subscriber base, and I think one of the things that the New York Times has been very good is that they have lots of branches of the New York Times and they also have a really, really rock solid IP. So, in terms of intellectual property, people know the brand, people understand the brand, people appreciate the brand. They've also got a lot of legacy content. So, if you're a subscriber, you also get access to that legacy content and it's seen as if you were going to get a new subscription, they will cover most of the bases. Not only will they cover your current events, but they'll also have a great food section, for instance, which is really good. They cover news or they cover sports really well as well. I think that one of the tricky things is that we're in a situation where users have many, many, many options for discovering information, for discovering new content, for finding out what the news is. In fact, you don't even have to go and look for the news. Google sends it to you. I get notifications about different things that are happening all the time, whether I want them or not. So, I think that in that space, there's some tricky space to navigate. So, for a business like the Rolling Stone Magazine for instance, one of the tricky things they have is that they're a music magazine. Well, musicians have their own platforms that are huge. So, if I look up the Rolling Stone for instance on... I keep saying the Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stone Magazine. Mordy Obertstein: Rolling Stones. Crystal Carter: If they look up Rolling Stone Magazine, I can see on Instagram for instance, I can see that they have 7.5 million followers on Instagram for instance. Let's just take that as just a little bit of a benchmark. Their cover star at the moment is Billy Eilish, right? Billy Eilish has 119 million followers. So, I think that the thing is, if you're Rolling Stone and you're trying to publicize your magazine, you're trying to tell people about news, people who are fans of Billy Eilish will follow Billy Eilish and they will get that news probably faster and directly than they would from Rolling Stone. So, I think that in that space, people have to remember the ecosystem for users and the ecosystem for how users are discovering information. In order to do that, you have to have exclusive content. You need to have exclusive information, things that people cannot get from anywhere else. I think that the New York Times is really good at doing that. The Economist I think is really good at that. I don't know their subscriber numbers in particular, but I know that The Economist are a publication that have a very unique perspective in terms of news and you will get content there that you will not get in other places. So, I think it's important to think about that. So, yeah, I mean I'm not knocking the hustle in terms of these big publishers trying to throw the net wide, trying to capture new content funnels, because I think that they're up against a lot of different competition for information for access to the newest, latest thing. Mordy Obertstein: So that's why actually I really wanted to do this episode, because really as you point out, it's an ecosystem question. The way users are consuming content, it's not a pure SEO. It has enormous SEO implications, but it's fundamentally not an SEO question. How do people consume content? Like you mentioned, they're going right to Billy Eilish's Instagram or whatever, and I think it means a few things. One, I think it means that we are due for a market correction around web content. I think it's going to be very painful because I think that the current system or the current contract is not sustainable. It's not sustainable to have a brand so far out of its lane talking about best microwaves and not best albums of the year. That's not a sustainable paradigm. That's not a sustainable model. I don't think it'll fundamentally work, and I don't think it's fundamentally what people want. In a way, they're gaming this system. This will bring me to next point, they know Google's not looking at the Rolling Stone and it's like, "Okay, you talk about music, we're going to rank you for music and only music or whatever entertainment stuff." They're like, "Well, Google's a meritocracy when it comes to pages. So, if we have pages that talk about microwaves and we can rank those pages because Google's not looking at our identity the way that it should be, we can get around this and we can rank for microwaves, pull in people from the SERP, have them look at the ads, perhaps click on the ads, and earn revenue that way." Because by the way, as I mentioned, the Rolling Stone is gated except for product review content. That's not that gated. They're using to get the display ads. I'm not going to call it a manipulation. There's too much negative connotation attached to that, but that is getting around the system. Crystal Carter: Don't hate the player, hate the game. That's what that is. Mordy Obertstein: Exactly, but that's not what fundamentally you want as a user. That's not the way. If you were to envision the web, you would want the web to function, which is my next point that I think what Google needs to do is to rely more on site identity, and I think that's good for everybody. Crystal Carter: Yeah, because here's the thing. Giselle Navarro's article is fantastic. She gets really into all the details. I'm sure we'll link it in the show notes as well, but on the example that she talks about Rolling Stone, she talks about them ranking for air purifiers for pets in 2024. Now, as someone who knows people who are into music and knows people who have extensive record collections and maybe who have very expensive guitars and things like that, air purifiers is not something that people who are musos are not uninterested in. So, if somebody has very expensive vinyl collection, if somebody has very expensive guitars that they do not want to collect dust, they do not want to have damaging their very expensive perfect collection, an air purifier might be something that they're interested in. So, it's very interesting that they're going for something that's so basic and that's not even related to their- Mordy Obertstein: They know the search volumes. Crystal Carter: What's that? Mordy Obertstein: They know the search volumes. Crystal Carter: They know the search volume. So, it's really interesting though that they haven't aligned it to something that is relevant to their audience. I think that that's something that's more long term, I think that's something that could make it valuable to their audience. Mordy Obertstein: That's how they should pivot eventually, but what I think they're trying to do now is saying, "We want to hit X number, X revenue number. We need to hit X revenue." When they got bought out by whoever who I think in 2018 they got bought out by somebody, they need to justify the purchase. They need to hit X dollars and cents, mainly dollars, and no one cares about the cents. We're going to do that. If we can do that, we will do that and that's what they're doing. If Google gets it right and if Google says we're going to rely more on site identity, so if you are a website that focuses on product reviews or on air purifiers, or in the case of Rolling Stone, music and instruments, so the best guitars of 2024, which guitars did you buy? Forget the air purifier. Which guitars did you buy? Then they'll be forced to do that. But what that'll mean for them as an organization unfortunately is they'll have to slim down, which they're trying to, or whoever bought them will have to incur a loss if they haven't made up the money already. That's what I mean, there's no way around the pain for these big publishers in my opinion. My prediction to quote Mr. T, pain. Crystal Carter: We had Barry Adams talking about SEO as a team sport on our last podcast. Barry Adams is somebody who's been working with news publishers for years for the majority of his career, and he talks about that they've been dealing with this since probably about 2018. Particularly UK publishers were hit really, really hard in 2018. Mordy Obertstein: I remember him talking about it. Crystal Carter: They have not seen the return to prominence or to visibility on the SERP since then. I think that that has created a really complex situation for some of these publishers. I think that where you see high quality publishing, then I think that it's really valuable for the web overall. I think it's really, really valuable for everyone. So, I hope that people are able to find something that's not just talking about air purifiers that are nothing to do with their core audience, but yeah, I do agree that it's something that's going to be very, very difficult to address in the next one. Mordy Obertstein: There's no easy solution. There's like either this continues on and Google doesn't address it, in which case Google will experience pain, because this doesn't reflect well on Google. It's like something somewhere has to give. Either the publishers are going to have to refine their focus because Google's going to force them to, or Google's going to be like, "Yeah, do what you want," which it's basically doing now, but Google will experience pain. Crystal Carter: But I think also there are a lot of publications who are leaning towards a multichannel approach. So, for instance, I follow British Vogue and Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is a fantastic publication. They don't just talk about teen stuff. They talk about lots of really interesting stuff. They're fantastic publications and they publish some great stuff across their social as well. They published some great stuff on YouTube as well. So, I think that there's lots of news publishers that are essentially using their brand. So, they're leveraging their brand across multiple channels, and I think that that brand legacy, particularly for some of these high legacy publications like Rolling Stone, like Vogue, like Grazia even, that brand recognition allows them to make a splash in some of those channels that would be much more difficult to do for other publications as well. Mordy Obertstein: Great minds because I was going to say the way out of this for publishers is to do what the New York Times did because the New York Times has done this successfully. As I mentioned before, something like 95% of their subscriptions are digital and they have an enormous amount of revenue from their digital subscriptions. Semrush did an event, Global Marketing Day in 2022, I don't remember 2023, one of those years. I was on a panel with someone from the New York Times. They talked about how they did this and basically it was brand building. They basically created a brand campaign basically showing you why you should want to pay for quality journalism, why that's not free and why you shouldn't expect it. If you want good stuff, you got to pay for it thing. That's what these brands need to do, but that's the issue. The real fundamental issue in my mind is that these brands, because they have all these metrics to meet, overvalue performance marketing. They're not thinking of the longer brand play and how the brand play will allow them to tap into the performance market they so deeply and desperately want, but it's going to be a brand play first and then it's going to be a performance play. They're not willing to do that yet because they're not willing to take the immediate repercussions of, okay, it's going to be difficult for a period of time. We are the Rolling Stone. We need to create content that's worthy of you paying for a subscription and we need to build a brand around that and we need to build a desire around that that's going to take time. They're it seems like not willing to invest in that time and resources to do that so that they can have a model that's actually sustainable, not relying on Google's algorithm to not care the fact they're running about microwaves and not guitars. Crystal Carter: I know that there are some people who have some interesting opinions on how Forbes do things, for instance, but Forbes have a lot of really interesting strands of the way that they generate income and the way that they connect with their community because I think that's another point as well. So, people who subscribe to Rolling Stone, people who are reading Rolling Stone are people who are interested in music, right? They're very interested in music and that stuff. There's some great brand partnerships that you can do across that. Forbes for instance has a lot of communities that they run. They have CMO communities. They have communities for different people with different intersectionalities and they have a series of events that they run across the year that are really, really well attended and really, really interesting. They also have their Forbes panel and people are like, "Oh, I'm on the Forbes panel and I do that thing." So I think that they also have a really interesting strand that they're pulling through and all of that helps to build up their brand. So, that IRL interaction with the brand, you can be a part of it, part of the brand, also brings that together. But I think if I go to rollingstone.com for instance, it doesn't really feel very interactive when I go in there. It doesn't feel like I could contribute. It doesn't feel like it's something that I could be a part of particularly. It's just like here's some stuff that Billy Eilish has done. Here's Drake mostly made himself look bad on his latest diss. I don't know. It's just opinion pieces about music and that's fine. That's fine, but I think that if you want to cut through, for instance, if you want to cut through to a very two-way internet that we have these days, it's both ways. Your people are reading your stuff, people are responding to your stuff. They're replying in the comments. There's people who on YouTube, on Instagram, on any of the video things, on literally any post on social media, people are like, "I'm just here for the comments. I literally just came here for the comments." So people expect to have that instant feedback, that instant participation in whatever media they're consuming. I think that brands that are able to make people feel connected to them, either in person or online or both are going to get a lot more out of that. Mordy Obertstein: 100%, I could not possibly agree more, but to weigh in now on what the SERP currently looks like or means for smaller, mid-sized publishers is the aforementioned wonderful Giselle Navarro. So, here's Giselle and what the SERP currently looks like for small to mid-sized publishers. Giselle Navarro: I can only answer this question confidently from the point of view of being the manager data of HouseFresh and being a small publisher within the air quality space. So, that's where I'm going to be answering it from. I don't know if this is the case for every other small publisher in every other niche, but it definitely is something I've seen in our space. That is that on top of what everybody already knows of big media sites being pushed to the top across different types of queries, a trend that I've noticed increasingly since September, October last year is a big push from Google site to get searchers to just buy from the SERPs. So, whether that is adding a sidebar filter product as if it were to be a shopping filter within search that perhaps are not a product search or they are a recommendation, what are the best amplifiers for bedrooms or something like that, and then suddenly, you already immediately get a filter pop up to your left, the sidebar that is just giving you options for you to filter by brand, by this, by that. Obviously, at that point, you don't know. That's why you're searching. Within that, it's not just that. There's also the topics at the top. So, when you're making searches like, "Oh, now what are the best budget amplifiers?" Suddenly, you get all these tags at the top, which when you were to add them to your search, the search gets regenerated again, and then the top results are always products. Then there's also shopping listings within subs and huge blocks like six rows of products, eight rows in some cases. Again, these are queries that are not people looking specifically for a brand and a product or a specific model. They are looking for information to try to make a decision and they're being pushed. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of these are sponsored shopping ads and they're not very good products at all. In many cases, they don't even satisfy the actual queries. So, if somebody's looking for best HEPA air purifier, I'm going a bit nerd here, but if somebody is looking for that, which is a specific air filtration technology, some of the products that get surfaced, and a lot of them actually are not even... They have other technologies. So, it's not even that Google is serving products and these products are the right products or that are useful products. Actually, they're misinforming people and confusing people and we get a lot of emails from readers who are confused and they would say, "I spent all this time and I was reading this and I was reading that. I just don't understand anymore and I was so happy to found your article." We interact with a lot of people on Reddit and it happens a lot that they are very confused. I think the reason why people are confused is because the searches are not really clarifying anything and just pushing more products at them. So, definitely, that's something that I have noticed. I don't know if every other small publisher is seeing the same, but that definitely has been a trend that I see growing of Google trying to push searchers to buy directly from Google, which is not great, because you wouldn't go to find information inside of Amazon or inside of Target or Walmart. So, if they're forgetting about the information part of what they're doing, then they're just trying to become a retailer. Obviously, they're not because they have deals with brands that pay ads and all this stuff. So, they're not even familiarizing themselves with the products, which is unfortunate, because at least that maybe they would do a better job. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much, Giselle. Make sure to give Giselle a follow over at I-C-H-B-I-N-G-I-S-E-L-E over on X and look for her on LinkedIn as well. I think Aleyda Solís was talking about this, maybe I'm getting this wrong, back at the SEOFOMO event we did with her at the Wix Playground in New York where just the e-com SERP is such a problem in a way. It's an opportunity, it's also a problem. It's interesting because you don't think of her product reviews and publishers, but those sites overlap with product buying intent. If I'm talking about best microwave, Google can interpret that as okay, here's a bunch of articles about choosing the best microwave or here are the best microwaves. That puts publishers at a very, very, very serious disadvantage, because if you look at the way, if you're not familiar, if you Google something like buy a microwave, at least in the US and other markets, the whole SERP changes. There are sidebar filters and PLA ads. It's a very different looking SERP and the organic results get lost in there. Crystal Carter: Giselle is coming from this place where she's looking after her brand. She's trying to make sure that everything's being displayed the way that she expects it to be, and she's trying to make sure that she understands her competitor landscape. So, she's looking at this and she's like, "The competitors that I'm seeing here are not the competitors that I would normally expect to see here." That's really, really tricky. Like you're saying, it's a really complex SERP. If you're doing buy a microwave, you expect to be maybe competing with other people who are selling microwaves. If you're suddenly competing with Rolling Stone for instance, it's tricky to figure out your strategy for that because you can't be everything for everyone. If they're looking for articles instead, that's going to change the way that you approach that particular digital marketing strategy. So, yeah, I think that it is tricky and they're constantly tinkering with that SERP. So, they're adding in things via Google Lens and they're adding in competitor aggregator thing. So, for instance, if you see one type of a Samsung microwave, I think they make microwaves. Yeah, if you see a Samsung microwave, they'll show a few different listings underneath it, which is slightly different from the way they were doing it before. Like you said, you get lots of filters. Sometimes you pretty much land on the shopping page for some things. So, yeah, it's really complexer. I think that those working in e-comm have a lot to think about at the moment. Mordy Obertstein: It's like a mini Amazon. The query I'm looking at, I'm doing best microwave, it's not even a full on transactional query and it looks like Amazon. It's hard. Give yourself a big thank you, Giselle, for contributing and for all the work you've been doing in this area for the SEO community over the past how many number of years already. Anyway, the SERP aside and that's no small thing, but there's a wider web out there just over yonder, past Google, skip it a stone, past Google. The question is how healthy is the web overall for the publishing community? To help us, we ask famed content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, how she see things as we move past pure SEO and go into the great beyond. Alli Berry: I will say that I think the state of online publishing is a little unpredictable at the moment. I think it really depends on what kind of online publishing we're talking about. I can tell you for affiliate for example, I have a client right now who has great organic rankings in certain financial verticals and is losing traffic not necessarily to competitors, but mostly to new SERP features. It looks like Google is adding SERP features that are providing their own set of recommendations based on who is popular for queries that have best or review or what have you in the query. Instead of seeing affiliate reviews for various products, I think you're going to see more brands that Google is associating with those terms, which is going to make it harder for affiliates to do well. I think you'll also see so much more Reddit everywhere, which is enraging, because so much of it is frankly shit. There are some sites that I think are doing affiliate the right way and actually testing products, and I think a lot of them are getting buried now for Reddit results. So, I think next to the question of can publishers still thrive? If you're trying to get into affiliate or build an affiliate publishing program, it's going to be a tough time for you. I don't know what else to say there. It's possible, especially if your brand already has some clout, but it's tough out there. I would be looking to diversify my revenue sources if I were you because it feels like Google is trying to bury affiliate sites from my perspective. There are some very authoritative sites that have gained ground in affiliate. Rarely do they have the best content on the topic, which is really frustrating for some of the smaller sites, but I think the opposite of diversification seems to be happening in the SERPs. So, if you're new, it's going to be tough. For bigger news publishers, so affiliate aside, I think it's also a strange time from what I've been seeing and hearing. Certainly, the big publishers are looking for ways to use AI to help them be more efficient, which really means they're trying to use AI to write certain types of articles and get away with it. I do think SGE has the potential to disrupt the news game a little bit. I think it's going to be more important than ever for news outlets to be the first to report something before AI can regurgitate it. I think interviews are going to be more valuable. Anything that is actually unique and human driven is the best way to combat SGE. Many publishers are moving away from content syndication, which to me feels long overdue. Google hasn't made any changes that would really cause publishers to make this change other than they keep saying, you should really ask your syndication partners to de-index the syndicated version of the article, which is wild and ridiculous and would never happen. Maybe everyone syndicating is finally starting to see how they were getting outranked by partners and the economics weren't really working out for them. It's definitely no longer as lucrative as it once was, especially since Yahoo has been pedaling down syndication and made the decision to bring content in house. It's an interesting decision too. If you look at Yahoo today, they're trying to be more of a news source than a search engine, which I think is interesting. I've also been looking at some smaller publishers that are more focused on niche topics, so local happenings, mommy blogs. There's been a lot of drop off in traffic for many of these sites that I've been looking at. The Pioneer Woman, My Dallas Mommy, Your Brooklyn Guide, et cetera, a lot of these sites do product promotions, event promotions for kickbacks. They have commissionable links. I'm wondering if Google is finally coming after those, but then if you look at food blogs, there's some really great SERP diversification that's present and happening there. New York Times Cooking is actually losing ground, which surprised me. All recipes has been steady but not growing and there are some really cool smaller sites with visibility like Love and Lemons, Once Upon a Chef. I don't really know what to make of it all. I think in certain verticals, there is a lot of hope for success for newer publishers. In others, a lot of them being in the YMYL space, maybe run far, far away. I do think though that the key to success doesn't seem that different than it did a decade ago. Really, I think if you're starting a new online publication, you should start with a unique angle, have a niche, build a small, engaged audience, do whatever you're going to do content wise, consistently learn from what's working, double down on it. You really should be able to build an audience over time. If you have that audience and go in your site directly and they're spreading the word and all of that good stuff, I do think you can still grow a site today, but it's definitely harder than it once was. I think you're going to do better if you're not in the YMYL space because it does seem like Google is doing the opposite of diversification there. Mordy Obertstein: Thank you so much for that, Alli. There's so much to chew on there. First up, that war on affiliates, we actually spoke about that a few episodes ago with Glenn Gabe. So, it's nice to hear some concurrence around that issue, around that topic because I think it's definitely what's going on. I think it's also interesting that she's talking about, and we're going to be talking about in another episode or two, about the value of brand ranking as opposed to affiliates ranking. I think that's where things are going to go. Again, it goes into this whole topic of Google's war in affiliate marketing or affiliate websites rather. It makes sense in a way that Google's going to double down on ranking those brands that have that identity, that are well established, that are well known, that have a strong digital presence and ranking them about their own stuff in the end, which is interesting because of the conflict of interest. But I think for Google's point of view, it's the lesser of two evils. If I have to rely on affiliate strike, the conflict of interest in a brand themselves and the conflict of interest in an affiliate trying to generate revenue, I would say that the lesser of those two evils is the brand themselves. I think they're more reliable. I think they're less likely to push things, less likely to lie for lack of a better word. I think it might be a little too harsh, but skew the truth, less likely to skew the truth. In that sense, I think she might be right that Google's going to say, "You know what? Forget all this. Let's just go with the brand." If that's by the way what happens, then folks like the Rolling Stone like we were talking about earlier are going to see their ranking slip away and it's going to increase the focus on doubling down on brand authority, brand presence, and all things brand, which we'll talk about in a later podcast. Crystal Carter: It's such a complex space for Google. It's such a complex space for brands. I think that everyone really needs to knuckle down on doing high quality content and that's for their users. I think one of the things that she touched upon was moving away from syndicated content, moving towards unique content, moving towards stuff that really differentiates yourself. I think that that is really a return to the core of what the web has been about for a good amount of time or what it should be about anyway. Give Google a reason to rank you. Give people a reason to actually visit your page that is unique to you, and I think that that's really important. I think that think about the unique perspective that you have on it, even if it is product reviews, even if it is the best microwave. Why is your best microwave page interesting? People often bring up that The Verge article that's about the printer. Mordy Obertstein: The printer, the Brother printer. Crystal Carter: They're like, "Oh, just buy the Brother printer." Don't get me wrong, they do- Mordy Obertstein: I did by the way. That's literally what I did. That's literally what I did. Crystal Carter: So those ones, that article is really actually interesting because it's both doing all of the things that you expect to see, but it's actually poking fun at that in an interesting way. It's breaking the fourth wall really on that content and that makes it unique. I think that that's where we need to think about. Be actually unique. Take that risk, be unique. Mordy Obertstein: It's interesting and it's something that we'll talk about on a later podcast episode. I know because we recorded a little bit out of order, so breaking the fourth wall for you, but I'm interested to see if brands will be able to do this because it's going to be taking your foot off the gas pedal a little bit. It's the same question we talked about the affiliate marketers. If brands are going to be searching for best microwave and it's ranking Samsung and their post about their best microwaves, they're going to have to do a little more on the informational side and a little less on the conversion side. Just like affiliate marketers are facing that same problem, will brands think about the overall brand value that that will bring and take the foot off the conversion performance marketing for just a bit? Who knows? Crystal Carter: Who knows? That's the question. Mordy Obertstein: You know what I do know? I know that when we cover the SEO news, we might cover Search Engine Journal and Matt Southern and Roger Monty who do a great job and even Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Mordy Obertstein: But I know we're going to cover at least one article from Barry. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Obertstein: So this is week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Whoa, that's a lot going on, but two big stories, one bigger than the next. I'm so flustered, I don't know where to start. Okay, here we go. From Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Roundtable, Google AI overviews are here to stay with improvements, the Ray AIO update, named after Lilly Ray. It's awesome. Anyway, Barry writes that "Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid wrote a blog post about AI overviews and how they're basically improving them and how they can make improvements and what they're doing to improve them," and so forth and so forth and so forth. I'll get into that in a second, but this comes with a blizzard of critique across the internet about the AI overviews and they're hallucinating. They're not accurate. They're recommending ridiculous things, yada, yada, yada, yada. So, this is Google essentially, I think, responding to that. Google made a whole bunch of claims. I'll read what Barry quoted Liz is saying here. We found a content policy violation on less than one in every seven million unique queries on which AIO reviews appeared and that they will keep improving, when and how we show AIO reviews and strengthening our protections and yada, yada, yada, yada, and yada. Some of the things that Liz Reid went on to say are a little bit, I guess, controversial. For example, she said that AI overviews are as accurate and as good as featured snippets or the accuracy is as good as feature snippets rather. They seem to be saying that a lot of these cases being shared across the internet of AI overviews going off the deep end are fake. That's a pretty heavy accusation to make, but Google did admit and they write, but some odd, inaccurate, unhelpful AI overview certainly did show up. The long story short is Google has heard of the web complaining about the AI overviews. They are responding. They are making improvements, and they're not going anywhere. There's going to be more AIO reviews. It's part of the core search experience, they said. I guess we'll have to keep an eye on what happens and how they improve or don't improve. Share your thoughts out there on the ether because it's a very controversial topic. Even more controversial topic, if you can imagine that. Oh boy, this from iPullRank, friend of the show, friend of the Wix SEO Learning Hub, friend of SEO in general, Mike King wrote an article, Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search's Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked. So, there was some leak internal documentation from Google searches content warehouse API that show theoretically what's happening in the algorithm. I'll talk about it from a top level TLDR point of view really quick. A lot of the things that Google has said they don't do or have indicated perhaps they don't do are shown in the API. Meaning that, oh, maybe they are actually doing these things. Google responded back basically saying, "This leak is real. However, you don't know just on reading the leak if this was a test, what exactly it means, how to interpret it, how heavy to weight any of these things and so forth." That is true. I'll get to some of the specifics in a minute. We don't know if they were part of a one-time test. We don't know. It's hard to piece this together. I'm going to try my best to piece it together the best that I possibly can in a snappy manner. This is not going to be snappy. I'm just letting you know right now. The second thing I want to say before I get into some of the details, people have started to question Google's honesty and whether or not some of their search advocates are good people. The answer is they are good people. Being a public spokesperson for a public company as large and as complicated as Google is not easy. I don't want to put words in any of this search advocate's mouths. This is my take. A lot of the time, I think you have what you have and you have to do the best with what you have and be as transparent with what you have and with what you are allowed and not allowed to say. You just have to do your best to be as transparent as possible with what you have to work with. I think the search advocates have done that the best they possibly could. So, I think a lot of the rhetoric or the negative rhetoric around the particular search advocates needs to be toned down. We need to be realistic and understanding of what it means for them to be in that role, what they are allowed to say, what they're not allowed to say, and what the best they possibly can do with what they have to work with. That aside, there was a lot of juicy information inside of this. Mike runs through it here in the original article. He also wrote an article on search engine land entitled, "How SEO Moves Forward with Google Content Warehouse API Leak." I'll link to both of those in the show notes. You can read through them on your own. Where do I start? Where do I start? Where do I start? Okay. So, I'm going to start with my approach to this is we don't know exactly what Google is using, what they're not using, how much of it they're using, to what extent they're weighing it and so forth. I like to look at these things a bit directionally. If you were to paint a picture, what direction does this show you where Google is going? In other words, what is Google at least trying to do? Because at a minimum, they're using these things in testing. So, what are they trying to do? That we do know. So, I look at this very directionally and what direction should we go based upon the direction that Google seems to be going with what was shown in the API leaks. With that, and I have just a bunch of random, random stuff to run through here, oh boy, okay. There is information that indicates that Google is using clicks. They have calls for metrics for bad clicks, good clicks, last longest clicks and so forth. If you combine that with the leak from the DOJ trial where they indicated there's something called Nav Boost that's looking at user behavior and in fact doing that into ranking, you do see that user behavior does really factor into the ranking equation in my opinion. It has been an issue of debate in front of the SEO for a while. I've actually personally, I'll call myself out, have gone back and forth on this over the years. It does very much seem that Google is incorporating user behavior into the algorithm. That doesn't mean you should be manipulating for clicks. What it does mean is that you need to think about the experience the user has on the website. Is the UX navigatable? Is that a word? I don't know. Can it be navigated easily? Does the content engage them? Does it satisfy their needs? Does it make them want to read another article from you and so forth? I think a lot of the things we're going to talk about here really quickly have to do with how strong your branding is, how strong of a website you are. When people go to the SERP and they see you ranking, let's say you're ranking number five and not number two or number one, do they click on you anyway because you have such a strong brand around that topic? To that, and again, I'm trying to go in some logical order here because there's so much to cover. So, part of what we've seen from the leaks that Google is looking to determine how on target your content is with your overall site and with what you're trying to do, or if it's not, which means as Mike writes in his article, actually content needs to be more focused. He writes, "We've learned definitively that Google uses vector embedding to determine how far off a given page is from the rest of what you talk about. This indicates that it'll be challenging to go far into upper funnel content successfully without a structured expansion or without authors who have demonstrated expertise in that subject area. Encourage your authors to call expertise in what they publish across the web and treat it to the gold standard that it is." Meaning Google's looking at the embeddings to see how far off they do or do it online with what you're writing about, and I've talked about this for years already. Google is able to look at and see what you're writing about and how much it does or doesn't align with who you are as an entity, with who you are as a brand or a business and so forth. One of the other interesting things along this line is that Google seems to have some commercial scoring where it's saying, "Okay, is this content commercial or not?" I speculate and that gives it something I've seen for a long time that might be because a lot of blog content tries to pretend that it's informational content, but really it's commercial content or backhanded commercial content. So, perhaps I have seen Google do this algorithmically. Perhaps this is the element that's doing that where they're able to say, "Okay, wait a second. This is not an actual information piece. This is actually a commercial piece. We can profile it like that." Which again goes back to the earlier point. Make sure your content meets the user need. It's more targeted and more specific and more, I'll say, transparent than anything else. There's a site authority score that came out of this. Google say, "We don't look at domain authority, blah, blah, blah," but there is a site authority score. I think we all knew there was an overall quality score to the website. Google said that there is an overall quality score. I know we talked about topic authority, so that would align with that as well. There's things in there around navigation demotions. This goes back to what we said before. If the UX isn't great, you could tell the user is not having successful experience with the website, that UX can impact rank. Again, make sure you're keeping your users in mind first and foremost. On short content, there seems to be some originality scoring, whether it's actively being used or not being used, but you see where Google is trying to go. So, much short content is just replicated over and over and over and over again. Google's looking to make sure that that content when they rank it has some originality to it. Whether or not they're actually doing it, whether or not that's a test, you do see where Google is directionally trying to go with something like that, which I think is the most important thing. Where is Google trying to go? I look at this again, like the quality rate guidelines are not in the algorithm per se, but it's definitely a clear statement of where Google wants to go. There's a lot about mentions in there. There's a whole slew of information about results getting re-ranked last second. Meaning last second factors or last second read jiggering of the results that happen as the query is being processed can happen. It's why you might see rank fluctuations being inconsistent perhaps sometimes for you and so forth and so forth and so forth. There is a lot in there. I think, again, my general takeaway is that there's a lot in there that points to content being more specific, content being aligned to what the site wants to do or what they say they do. Glenn Gabe actually recently talked about this in a case study that he did on the March 2024 core update. I'll link to that in the show notes also. So, again, the directionally see that things with navigation, user experience, user behavior, meaning making sure the user is satisfied. Google's trying to find ways to measure that. Make sure your users are satisfied. Make sure that you are recognizable as a brand because again, if Google is looking at what's happening on the SERP and you are recognized entity out there in that niche that can help you, it would seemingly help you with rankings. But again, read these articles but look at it again, like the quality reader's guidelines in many ways. What does it show you about where Google is trying to go? This is the very much not very snappy news. All right. News aside, well, not news aside actually, because our follower of the week comes from the news world. She actually recently spoke by the time this episode airs at the first New York City SEO for NEWS Meetup hosted at the Wix Playground in New York City by NewzDash and former guest of this podcast, John Shehata. She is the Senior Director of SEO at ESPN. I can't help myself. That sound is so nostalgic for me by the way. She is Louisa Frahm. Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Fantastic follow. Mordy Obertstein: Yeah, give her a big follow over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her in the show notes. ESPN does some amazing... That is a lot of content to run through. They run a double model. They have a paywall model and they have a pure open, organic, go ahead and read it model. It's really interesting what they're able to do, what they're able to rank for. She shares a lot of knowledge. So, follow Louisa over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her profile in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I think that it's great to follow publishers as well. So, follow her. Absolutely, there's some great publishers to follow because they are, like you said, dealing with a lot of content and they to get really creative with the way that they present content. Sometimes Google has different features as well. So, if you think about sports for instance, sometimes you can get the sports scores on Google itself. So, publishers, for instance, for ESPN will have to think about how they capture content or how they capture traffic in new ways as they respond to those new SERP features. I think that it's great to pay attention to the ways that some of the big players do that. Mordy Obertstein: Interesting. By the way, pro tip, one way to do that is being more reliable. So, I consume a lot of sports and I go to that Google Box all the time. Sometimes because it defaults to an American time zone and I don't live in America anymore. It'll still default the game sometimes to the American Times. I'm like, "No, that doesn't look right." I'll go to ESPN and they do a better job of adjusting the times automatically. So, I know what I'm actually looking at. Crystal Carter: Unique and adding value. Mordy Obertstein: Added value and reliability. It's such an under thing, reliability. Crystal Carter: It's so important. Mordy Obertstein: So important. It's good for your website. It's good for your relationships. Reliability, it's good for everything. Crystal Carter: Not just SEO tips, people. Life skills, life tips. Mordy Obertstein: Right. We should do a life skills episode. Crystal Carter: Optimize your life. Mordy Obertstein: Optimize your life, the SERP's Up Podcast. Crystal Carter: What is your life H1? Mordy Obertstein: Me? Crystal Carter: Any thoughts? Mordy Obertstein: Oh, off the cuff? Hide. Crystal Carter: So your H1 is white text on a white background. Is that what you're telling me? Mordy Obertstein: Hide. Get a screaming hide somewhere. Hide. Crystal Carter: I'm going to have to think about what mine is. Mordy Obertstein: I see a lot of neighbors. Hide. It's so good. Time to reveal too much. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next time with the new episode as we dive into why branded search matters more than you think it does. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guess it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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Massive news in the SEO world on this special edition podcast! Wix’s Head of SEO Branding, Mordy Oberstein, and Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter give their impressions of Google I/O 2023 to deliver the inaugural SERP’s Up SEO Podcast BONUS episode. Google bounces back with its AI capabilities as a search engine. Taking a hard look at all the changes soon to come in search, Mordy and Crystal discuss their takes on the 2023 Google I/O conference while surveying what other notable SEOs had to say. Plus, the scary reality of AI, and some big changes in how Google rewards input with human ‘experience’. Dig into this exciting SEO news on this special BONUS episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back What’s up for SEO at Google I/O? Massive news in the SEO world on this special edition podcast! Wix’s Head of SEO Branding, Mordy Oberstein, and Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter give their impressions of Google I/O 2023 to deliver the inaugural SERP’s Up SEO Podcast BONUS episode. Google bounces back with its AI capabilities as a search engine. Taking a hard look at all the changes soon to come in search, Mordy and Crystal discuss their takes on the 2023 Google I/O conference while surveying what other notable SEOs had to say. Plus, the scary reality of AI, and some big changes in how Google rewards input with human ‘experience’. Dig into this exciting SEO news on this special BONUS episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Special episode | May 12, 2023 | 43 MIN 00:00 / 42:32 This week’s guests Google I/O Google I/O is an annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California. The name "I/O" is taken from the number googol, with the "I" representing the "1" in googol and the "O" representing the first "0" in the number. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to a special episode of SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO and boy are some things happening in SEO this time. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the always up to date on all of the things happening in SEO, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. Hello, Mordy Oberstein. I am here. I am here with some original organic material intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. I'm coming with some authentic intelligence, I hope anyway. Mordy Oberstein: I'm artificial, but I'm citing. Crystal Carter: Are you grounded? Is your intelligence grounded in something? Mordy Oberstein: No, definitely not grounded. Crystal Carter: No? It's not? Mordy Oberstein: That's an easy question. You want me to cite you references? Crystal Carter: So large language Mordy is what we've got. Mordy Oberstein: This is better than foul language Mordy, I guess. Crystal Carter: Oh no, that's every other day of the week. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can subscribe to our newsletter, search light over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. And where you can now utilize our headless CMS. Crystal Carter: So excited about the headless. Mordy Oberstein: Check that out. Crystal Carter: Oh, yes. Mordy Oberstein: We've lost our heads. Crystal Carter: Lost our heads, but gained a friend. We gained a friend in Netlify. Just like launching with Netlify, but also get involved with your GitHub, like it's super exciting. Very exciting. Mordy Oberstein: Check that out. Now, if this is your first time tuning into the SERP's Up podcast, this is a bonus episode of the SERP's Up podcast. SERP's Up podcast usually, typically, comes out each week on Wednesdays. We have all sorts of wonderful guests, from John Mueller to Barry Schwarz to Cindy Crumb. Fabulous guests, fabulous topics. Check it out. But this episode is a very, very special episode because Google I/O 2023 was upon us and it left us with some impressions. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah, there's a lot to talk about and I think it's a really good example of them coming back from their previous conference experience. So they had a conference in February. Mordy Oberstein: In Paris. Crystal Carter: In Paris, Google in Paris, and it was less than optimal for them, if I can say that. And I think that this is the conference that I think they wish they could have had then. And I think that it's been a real good redemption for them to be able to come out and really show what they can do in terms of AI and where they're planning to go in terms of search. Mordy Oberstein: In Star Trek terms, this is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan after that disaster of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Just for the people who speak Star Trek, that's what it is. I don't know why every episode now, we always default back to Star Trek. I have no idea. I'm not even watching Star Trek at the moment. Crystal Carter: Resistance is futile. Mordy Oberstein: Link, nice. Good way to phrase that. Wait, so I think what we're going to try to do in this particular episode is run through I think some of the larger AI themes that we saw and then dive into obviously how it's going to impact search and kind of get a consensus and a roundup from the wider SEO community. So I'll kick this off. I was blown away by the AI ability to answer emails and to heavily handedly modify images. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And it scared the crap out of me, I'm going to be honest. Crystal Carter: I think that there's a lot of some of the familiar tools that people have gotten used to in the generative AI space of creating text, creating images and things like that. I think what Google has in this particular thing is an audience that's already engaged with a lot of their products and they are already so integrated into our lives and how we use the internet and how we create content, how we edit content, how we update content. So the idea that when you're in Google Slides and they demoed this, in Google Slides you can sort of say, "I would like to add in a picture of this," I mean, that is solving a pain point that so many people have had. When you're making a deck or you're trying to do a presentation and you don't have an illustration, but you need one so that people aren't staring at a blank page or a wall of text, it's solving a really real challenge. Mordy Oberstein: That was brilliant. I think one of the things you and I cry about every once in a while is trying to find things in Gmail threads. Crystal Carter: Yes. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: But now you don't need to do it. It will find it. I thought that's brilliant. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: I think using the AI is information retrieval within their products, fabulous idea. What scared me is how do you know what's real at this point? And when I'm saying that I am not putting this on the tech providers, I kind of feel like they're just giving us what we want. I am putting this on humanity. Are we OK with things not being real? And then how do we handle that? And I'll give you an example from what they showed yesterday, yesterday from the day we're recording this, from Google I/O 2023. When they gave the example from Gmail, the scenario was you wanted a refund from a flight that you canceled, something like that, and you gave Gmail a prompt to write you an email and reply back to the answer that the airline gave you. And you can now expand, so not now, you will be able to expand on that answer. Say, "Hey, Gmail, make it longer. I feel like if this is a longer, more forceful email, I'll get the refund." And if you notice what the prompt returned was, "I am a loyal customer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Give me my refund." How do you know? Maybe I'm not a loyal customer. How did you know that? And are we OK with this? "Yeah. All right. Google will return that. I'm a loyal customer, it'll probably work. Let's just go with that." Is nothing real anymore? And the images, you're manipulating it and then it never actually happened that way. How do you know what's real? And that to me is scary. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So I think that we're kind of entering a space sort of now as well. And I think somebody writes something and you're like, "Did you write that though?" If somebody posts a picture and it's like, "Did you take that though?" And I think AI has been in our space for a long time, so on in Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok, there are tons of filters and people are going around. I have a cousin who whenever she posts anything on Facebook, there's like a million filters, I have no idea what her face looks like anymore because she always has so many filters on it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And so we've were like, "Oh my God, you look so young." It's like you look have a young person's filter, but they will completely change the bone structure of your face. And we've been in that space for a long time now. So one of the sections of I/O was James Manyika was talking about some of the guardrails that they had for helping us manage this reality. And he was saying that they're planning to add in and about this image panel as a guardrail and also giving meta tags for people to declare that something is an AI generated image. I think that these are great tools. My question is how many people are going to actually use them for these things? Mordy Oberstein: And that's sort of the problem. And I'm sort of summarizing a lot of sentiment that I saw out there. I know Kavi Kardos was interacting on Twitter a lot about this. She said, "This is my takeaway too. I feel like I'm the old man in the room." Because I said I feel like I'm the old man in the room. Do we not care what's real anymore as humanity? Jamar Ramos was jumping in there, he hit a line, "Yeah and I understand how loaded the phrase do our own research is." Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But I think the person who summed it up best to me was Blake DeMond from Rickety Rue who said a quote from Edward Wilson, I don't know who that is by the way, "The real problem with humanity is the following, we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology and it is terrifically dangerous and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall." That's from 2009. But it's a great way to sum this up because you can literally fake things and no one will know the difference. And I don't think we care. Crystal Carter: But I hate writing emails Mordy. I just... Mordy Oberstein: I'm OK with it writing the prompt. Crystal Carter: I think that I'm just saying that. I agree with all of those caveats. I think the challenge that we're facing though is that the technology is so, like they said, God-like technology. The technology is incredible. And so I think that we are going to be seeing more of this. And also there's that sort of singularity theory, which basically, if you think about where we are now compared to where we were when sort of ChatGPT kind of broke back in the autumn, miles, miles streaks ahead. We've moved forward so much, search has changed so much and the way we create technology and the way we create content and things has changed so much in just those few months. If you think about that compared to the rest of the web before, it's been a much, much bigger thing. So I think that it's true that these are challenging conversations, but I think we're going to have to keep having them. And I think that this is one of the reasons why Google's putting so much emphasis on experience, why they've added that experience caveat. But I think also, you say what's real, people lie on those emails all the time, like when they're trying to get, but anyway. Mordy Oberstein: The AI is just doing what we want it to do, which is lie, cheat and steal. Crystal Carter: So this is the other thing. So when you get generative images, it comes back, it's like a funhouse mirror kind of hodgepodge of various different things that it's seen. And this tends to be what you see on AI. I was talking about this, Garrett Sussman had a space which is on Twitter as well, you can play that recording. There's a few people talking about Google I/O hot takes there. And yeah, one of the troubles is that the models are based on what's on the web. So if what's on the web has some less than stellar content or opinions, then that's what we're going to get reflected back to us for, I think, there was somebody who was talking about Midjourney. Midjourney does a lot of, if you look up doctor on Midjourney, then you'll get a man. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, Natalie Slater did a lot of this. Crystal Carter: Right. So she was looking at all of the things. Mordy Oberstein: Engineer and it's all white men. Crystal Carter: Right. And so you get all these sorts of things coming through and that's a reflection of what's been on the web before. So no, it's not great, but it's also a reflection of the work that we as humans also need to do because the models are trained on what we had. But that's the existential things. Let's look into some of the additional. Mordy Oberstein: Let's go to Search. You brought up the helpful content update, I really want to get into that a lot because I think Google fired a shot across the bow kind of thing. But let's just first talk about does the functionality, in case you haven't seen what happened or what Google announced, so Bard itself is, which I would equate Bard to ChatGPT and that ecosystem, it's a separate environment. There are links being more interspersed into it now. It's now open for all, but then there's Search itself. And that looked, I thought, amazing. That looked amazing. So in certain cases, Google will return an AI prompt back to you. They said they won't do it for YMYL, so health, finance, where the information, if the AI's hallucinating, you will die. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's not going to have an AI response. You'll have your initial summary. There won't be citations like you have in Bing, but there will be little cards of websites that you can go to. So it's a little bit more visual in a way. And then you can refine the questions. And what I thought was super, super cool and I stand corrected, I thought we were getting a whole bunch of things that were not going to make me happy about Search because I am a curmudgeon fundamentally. What we got back has literally been asking for for two, three years. You can expand the AI response that Google will give you into a deeper dive. What it'll do is it'll break down the answer that it gave and it will essentially cite along the way. So if it says, you ask, "Where's a great place to go on vacation?" And it starts talking about if you have kids and you're going on vacation, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. When you expand the chat feature, it'll take that chunk and show you results about places to go on vacation with kids. And if in the next sentence talks about if you're going in the wintertime, it'll then show you a bunch of things about going on vacation in the wintertime. What it lets you do is A, give you the opportunity to see more organic links. What it really does is is that it breaks down that topic so well. So if you ask, "Was Michael Jordan a good basketball player?" And you get all different aspects of Michael Jordan and his career, it'll break that down for you and then give you links to explore more about that particular subtopic within the topic of Michael Jordan, which is amazing. It'll let you explore topics, it'll let you explore subtopics and it'll give you the links in order to do it. I thought it was awesome. Crystal Carter: I mean, this is Google achieving their goals. So they say that their goal is to organize the world's information and to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. And that's what they say their goal is. And this is them working to achieve that. And I think that this is something that works really well for introductions to topics, for instance. When I think about how I use ChatGPT, my best to use for ChatGPT is Googling rules for games. So George Wynn, the editor of the Wix SEO Hub, very kindly gifted me a set of Magic: The Gathering cards and Magic: The Gathering has a lot of complicated rules. I was trying to play this with my kid and I did a turn and I was like, "Oh, I think my gargoyle or my guide can play." And my kid says, "No, he has summoning sickness and he can't do that and he can't do this. " And I tried to look it up online and there's all these massive posts of 3,000 words of how to do the whole thing of Magic: The Gathering and stuff. And I'm like I don't need to know every single thing about it, I just need to know can I play my turn. Right? So I can say in Magic: The Gathering for instance, can I do this with this card. And they can go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's some links," some links, I'm like, "OK, but if it's like this, can I do that?" And then it can go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and you can do this." And if my kid who can be very suspicious sometimes of these things, if he doesn't like what I've returned, we can click through to the link and then we can say OK, this is what it says on this website. And I think this will work with a lot of their systems because I think the way that they're looking at this is they're stacking a lot of their AI. So you'll be able to also go straight to the passage as well where it's quoted from most likely in order to verify the information. So they'll give you the summary, they'll give you the link and then you can verify it. And that is a really good workflow in terms of being able to corroborate information and see that you're getting the right information. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm going to run through, I just pulled it up on the screen, the exact example that they gave about the query was what's better for a family with kids under three and a dog, Bryce Canyon or whatever it was, another national park. Because I can't see the rest of the query, it's like too long. And when you expand out from the AI answer, so first, the answer is both Bryce Canyon and Arches National Parks are family friendly. Stop. It gives you a link that talks about the park being family friendly. Next part of the prompt that it returned, "Although both parks prohibit dogs and unpaved trails, Bryce Canyon is two paved trails that allow dogs." Stop. It now gives you a whole bunch of links about pets and the two locations. It's letting you explore these topics in such an easy way. Because one of the things as a user, I don't always know what I'm actually looking for. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Tell me all the things I need to consider and then it's doing that and then it's giving me the links to do it. I think a couple of things about this from an SEO point of view, SEO tools, red alert. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: Red Alert because the blue links are not, as Cindy Crum pointed out on Twitter, David pointed out on Twitter, Nati Elimelech, our Head of SEO at Wix in my DMs, about this, Idan Segal was out there on Twitter talking about CTR is going to go down. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: For the 10 traditional blue links. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And what's going to matter more, I think it will use the expanded feature here because I will, are being featured in here. Now how do you track that? You might be able to give a tool the various long tail keywords that are relevant to you. I guess the tool can then run the scrape by running the query, seeing what the AI returns and then saying what URLs are in there, I guess is possible. But imagine organic research where you're not specifically telling the tool what keywords you want to track, but you want to research a competitor and see what keywords are they ranking for and where are they ranking. How is a tool going to do that? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's going to be tricky. I think that tools are kind of probably need to think more about entities because large language models have entities at their core and their understanding of entities is a sort of core sense of it. I think if you think about something like Kleenex for instance. Kleenex is a brand which is synonymous with tissues for instance. So if you have a brand, so I think that from an SEO point of view, I think those links are going to be getting few and far between. If Google understands that your brand is synonymous with a certain entity, if your brand is essentially that entity, then I think that you're more likely to show as part of those things and more likely to show more frequently. So I think that maybe pools might need to start thinking about how they're able to show the correlation between a certain brand or a certain website and certain entities. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's really interesting. I feel like it's a topic I haven't spoken about in a long time and trying to remember when I really was into this, it was when the core updates kind of came out back in 2018, of looking at your website as an entity. Because your website is an entity because it has a unique identity. Because I think if you're looking at how is Google going to decide what to rank or what to show, I hate to use rank in this case, what to show when it breaks down its AI response into smaller parts and then shows links associated with that. It's very entity based. If they're talking about pets and national parks, if your website is viewed as an entity that discusses, that is about, that is identified as parks and pets, national parks and pets, that's what's going to be, I would say not the difference maker, I don't know the algorithm, but it's going to be one of the very, very focused things that I think Google's going to use in order to say this URL should be here because as an entity it makes sense for it to be here. Crystal Carter: Right. So on that Bryce Canyon one, the results that they showed were from the national parks, that's what showed. It was national parks and pet friendly was one that was showing. And so those are all… Mordy Oberstein: So having a niche identity is going to be really important. Especially because, I'm a little bit worried actually, so is Nati about this, that yes, I'm so happy there are URLs and there's so many opportunity for URLs, but I'm a little bit worried that the big branch or the big websites are going to be the ones that show there are not the niche sites. Although maybe if you have really strong niche identity, you will. Crystal Carter: I think that for going forward, the kinds of opportunities that I think that this will present is the kind of content, and we've seen this, we've seen this, so Lily Ray has reported on this a number of times. So we've seen this over the few of the last few years. Google's not that into dictionary websites, encyclopedia websites. If you're encyclopedia website and you're not Wikipedia, what are you doing? And I think that these LLMs are kind of covering a lot of that stuff. If you want to know what is gee butter or something and they'll be like, "Oh gee butter is a clarified butter that's blah blah blah, blah, blah," they'll tell you that and that information will be fairly accurate. It's also not that sensitive. You just kind of need to know what it is while you're, I don't know, cooking or something. But I think the opportunities will lie in doubling down on your entity, on your brand entity, your website entity, the entities that are within your business, et cetera. But also I think that, potentially, there are opportunities around new ideas and around staying ahead of the curve. So where people are going to need to go to drill down into what's going on, it's going to need to be new content. So the historic content might be super competitive because Google, and I've seen this with Bing, bing is relying on very high authority sources, content that's been indexed for years in order to ground some of their LLM responses. So I think that for newcomers, for smaller businesses, being cutting edge, being on top of new ideas is going to be something that's beneficial to them. So for instance, trending topics is something that's going to be something that's really useful because when things are trending, people are looking for what's going on, what is happening, why is this a thing, what is this new term? And I think we're going to have a lot of new things going on anyway. So I think that where people are able to capture new ideas, they're going to be able to show in that space if they're a smaller business. Mordy Oberstein: I think I want to get back to that more, about the smaller business and all of that, because I want to talk about the helpful content update, which I think it's one of the more under discussed themes of what came out of there. My personal opinion. But before we do that, there's one in terms of the AI chat experience that Google has, we're going to have on the SERP. So Aleyda Solis made a great point, "Interesting how Google is highlighting the new AI search experience for commercial transactional queries rather than informational ones." And I think what she's referring to is all of the stuff they showed about the bicycles. So it's bonkers. So if you're searching for something related to getting a new bicycle, Google's going to give you an answer. I don't know, what do I need to consider when I'm looking to buy a new bicycle? I'm going to give you a bunch of information and then it'll show you a bunch of products. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: In the chat that you can click on and see a panel about and click on and go to and buy. And I thought to myself, "Holy cow, that is brilliant." Because if you're Google, there's no way, in my personal opinion, that you're going to be able to compete with Amazon and take them head on. Right? I'm looking to buy a product, I default many, many times, sometimes not, many, many times to Amazon and I bypass the SERP altogether, which is a problem for Google. But if I can catch you while you're in the research phase, then I've got you and you don't need to necessarily stop, now go to Amazon, I already got you in the research phase where Amazon can't get you. And I thought that was brilliant. If I was Amazon, I'd be a little bit concerned seeing that. Crystal Carter: I think also particularly the bicycle one that they showed, it's got a hybrid of there's also some of the search results there. So they've got the summary of your key points, they've got some deep dive blog posts and things and they've got the products there. And it's a pretty nice UX as well. It's not too cluttered, it doesn't feel overwhelming. It feels helpful. And I think the other thing that it highlights, and I started seeing this a lot more around product things, is unique content around products. So in order for the bicycles to show in different ways, having unique content around these things will be useful. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, because the layer of content they're showing is one level deeper than you would normally see for let's say a product description. Crystal Carter: And I think also the connection with Google Merchant here is going to be absolutely critical here. So they're using that as essentially a knowledge graph for products and that's really, really important. So for instance, they show one, it's like Avinton level two commuter bike and it's saying, "Oh, it's listed here and it's listed in seven other stores as well." So it's important to be on that. Mordy Oberstein: The importance of Google Merchant Center just increased a hundredfold. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. And it's super useful. And there's so many different ways, again, to define your entities and add structured data. They talked about structured data, they talked about being able to look at unstructured data as well when they're looking through content. And I think that they're kind of, after what happened in February and Bing came out very confident with their presentation. And I think Google's just like, "We have tons of bells and whistles. We've got lots of stuff," and they've put the full force of their AI might here behind this. And I think it'll be interesting to see. Mordy Oberstein: It's really interesting. But before we get into the, I want to round up some of the thoughts in the community. Before we do that though, I want to go back and touch on the helpful content update. By the way, if you haven't watched the keynote, we'll link to the keynote in the show notes of this episode. Also check out Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz, it's like an unbelievable amount of content that he produced very timely, in a very timely manner, going through all of the major changes. So definitely check out that. We'll link to a bunch of that in the show notes. And one of the articles that Barry wrote was, "Google to update helpful content system algorithm in the coming months. Google said its update will help it understand content created from a personal or expert point of view as part of the release for Google I/O." On the Google product blog, whatever you want to call it, there's a post, "Learn from others' experience with more perspectives on search." And at the bottom of that post, and the reason why I'm saying this, this is part of the official release at Google I/O, and I've never seen this before, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think I've ever seen them talk about an algorithm update as part of I/O. And they're right. I think it's like the second or third H2 on the page, how we help you find the expertise you need. And I'm just going to read it real quick, the first paragraph or two. "In addition to making it easier to find authentic perspectives, we're also improving how we rank results in search overall with a greater focus on content with unique expertise and experience." By the way, the fact that expertise and experience are linked is because expertise is linked to experience. They're not separate things. Anyway, "Last year, we launched a helpful content system to show more content made for people and less content made to attract clicks. In the coming months, we'll roll out an update to this system that more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view, allowing us to rank more of this useful information on Search. Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard to find places," addressing my point from earlier, "a comment in a forum, a thread, a post on a little known blog," OK, good, we're going to see that, "on an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these hidden gems on search, particularly when we think they'll improve the results." I kind of think this is a shot across the bow. It's a warning shot. OK? They're being far more specific about what they're trying to do with the helpful content than they ever been before, which is one difference to me. And also it's part of Google I/O, it's part of their official launch. You have to feel real confident in what you're about to do to announce it as a brand in that kind of way. So I think this is going to be legit and I think it's going to be impactful. I don't know if it's going to be one big update that's going to be, it might be a series of updates over time, but the net effect I think is going to be real and I think it's going to be legit. And if I could say, I think this whole time, back to your point like, "Oh, we looked at the Paris event link. Maybe Google's off its game." I think Google got off its game a little bit because Bing came out and had to respond to that. But I think if you take that little moment of time out, this entire time, Google has been playing three-dimensional chess with us. Go back to the product review update. What I think that they did there was they said, "OK," they knew the AI was coming because they were making the AI. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And they said, "OK, we need to figure out a way to handle this algorithmically." And they said, "OK, let's focus on one place on the internet where we can train ourselves to highlight expertise and experience in a very tangible way." What better place than product reviews where the actual firsthand experience is completely manifest in the content. It's not like an underlying theme, it's not latent or embedded. It's supposed to be actually manifest in the content itself and let's train ourselves on that. Crystal Carter: And also reviews, when people write reviews, it's full of all sorts of emotions and maybe might be good grammar, might not be the good grammar. It might be like, "This refrigerator sucks, it leaked and I didn't like it at all." Mordy Oberstein: It's the perfect place. It's the perfect close environment to train yourself on a particular thing. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And then what did Google do in April? It said, "Let's expand this. Let's go to all reviews. No more product review. It's review update." And now, and I called it, what's Google doing now? It's zooming out again and saying it's not just product and reviews, it's everything. Crystal Carter: Everything. Mordy Oberstein: Everything. Crystal Carter: Everything. Mordy Oberstein: And I think it's used a product review and now the review update in order to train itself so it could ultimately do this. I think Google knew they wanted to do this and they were training themselves the whole time for years. I think in 2021, the first product review, they came out, to do this, which is analyze content for experience and experience with expertise. Because it's one thing to say, "I went to Disneyland, it was fun." That experience has no value. Crystal Carter: Right. So I think the other thing that's interesting about that is that what I've seen when I look at reviews and pages, I've seen a couple of times where there was something that was reviewed and it was ranking, or one channel that was a review page and it was ranking and it didn't even have as many reviews as the other ones were below it. And I was like, 'Well, why is this? Why is this page? It's got fewer reviews." Then I looked at the reviews and the reviews were much more unique. The reviews there were much more nuanced, they had much more experience of actually interacting with that entity, with that actual thing. And I think the other thing is that I think we can think of experience as shorthand for human because we, in this space where everything's AI, the experience element is basically there was a human that touched this, there was a human that sat in this chair and said, "This chair is too small and I don't like it." Mordy Oberstein: It smelled weird. Crystal Carter: Right. Or I plugged this toy in and it was really noisy and it scared my cat. Mordy Oberstein: No AI is going to do that. Crystal Carter: They're not going to write that, but people who have cats want to know if the thing's going to be noisy. Mordy Oberstein: One of the pages I was looking at in my analysis on this February, 2023 product review update, they wrote, "Pro: Whatever, whatever. Con: It smelled funny out of the box." There's no way, either you completely made that up or you actually used it. So I think when Google says experience, it's interchangeable for AI, it's this code word. We don't want to say AI, so we're just going to say experience. Crystal Carter: Right. We're saying experience. So experience like we're saying this shows expertise, authority, trust and a human have something to do with this. And there's going to be, again, with YMYL things, it's going to be much more important that a human was involved with whatever was going on with, I don't know, that medicine or that particular tool or whatever that's to do with your money, your life, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason why they're mentioning in here, they're mentioning surfacing things from comments or from forums or from Reddit or from wherever is that's where humans are and that's where humans are speaking in a candid way, often unfiltered, often unedited. And I think that that's what they're trying to do. With regards to how you include that in your content, I think that's going to be an interesting thing, how we pull that in. The other thing that Google's doing, and they talked about this in Google Workspace, they're like, "Oh yeah, we're adding all these things so that you can just add a prompt and then it will write the essay for you. Or we're adding this thing so that you can take your notes and then format it." Mordy Oberstein: This is a cure to that disease, I think. Crystal Carter: Right. But I feel like people say, "Oh, can you find something that's 100% human written?" But I use Grammarly all the time and Grammarly... Mordy Oberstein: Right. 100%, well, I don't think, you can help me write it. I can write it, "Hey AI, make this better. Take out all of my weird syntax idiosyncrasies in my writing." Crystal Carter: But then it's less human. Mordy Oberstein: Well, in the case of my mind, let me better explain, I'm writing something that I want to be cold and generic. Crystal Carter: OK. Mordy Oberstein: And I am not good at writing cold and generic, so please do that for me. Whatever the use case actually is. Crystal Carter: I don't know, I can't imagine a time when you would ever write a thing that wasn't in your tone of voice. Mordy Oberstein: Right, see. So that's why I immediately thought of using AI to take my tone of voice out it of because maybe you don't want so much Mordy in your content. Crystal Carter: Everybody wants more Mordy, more Mordy-fication of their content. Mordy Oberstein: It converts. But I think you're right. I think it's going to change how we, I'm hoping it changes content fundamentally. For example, let's say you take a look, an SEO post. OK? How to do rank tracking. Crystal Carter: What is rank tracking? Mordy Oberstein: What is rank tracking? We talk about it in a vacuum. What I would like to see is, "What is rank tracking, blah, blah, blah?" And when I've done it, I've found that this did work or that didn't work or my clients or when we and then they and when we all... Crystal Carter: Do you know what? Actually, this brings me back to when I first had my kid, and you must have had this, you have children, and shout out to anybody who doesn't have children, but this is the experience that I found. What I found was that everybody had advice. People who had kids, people who didn't have kids, people who had kids 40 years ago or whatever. Everybody had advice for me. And I got very tired of advice from everybody about what I was doing, about whether I should, I don't know, let them cry, don't let them cry. I don't know, all the things. Eat this, don't eat that. Go to sleep here, go to sleep, all of that stuff. But what I did find was experience was useful. So whatever their experience was, if they were like, "Oh, when I had my kid, I would find that I could help them get to sleep if we did this, this or this." Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I know exactly what you're saying. Crystal Carter: Do you know what I mean? Mordy Oberstein: I know exactly what you're saying. Yes. Crystal Carter: If I hear their experience, I can take whatever nuggets... Mordy Oberstein: I want out of it and it's not forced on me. Crystal Carter: Right. It's just their experience. Their experience cannot be false, it can't be wrong. It's just their experience. And so I can say, "OK, well from what you've said, I can discern that actually I wouldn't do it that way, but this could work for this or that could work for that." So maybe that's a Google is trying to do, is less advice and more experience. I could give you advice on how to do parasailing, I have never parasailed in my life, but I could give you advice on it based on something that I've read. But I can't give you any of my experience because I've never done that. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. There's a post on the Wix S O about this, not about this, I think it was Sophie Brandt who wrote about SEO reporting, I could be misremembering the exact post, but I think what she did was she went through in different scenarios and you could tell the scenarios that she came across. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And I remember reading that post and being like, "I love this because it's different and it's hitting on a different level. It's hitting me in a different way." And I'm hoping that's where we all go in terms of content across the web. I think this is a good thing, net good thing. With that, it does bring up a lot of the E-A-T stuff and that was a wider consensus around what was happening in the SEO world. For example, John Luca for [inaudible 00:34:24] wrote, "So very hot takes. The fact that Google AI answers is presenting links above the fold, surely is important. That also means that everything we do to stand out according to the E-A-T principles is even more important now because we must suppose that the sites that Google considers the most expert with expertise, authority and trust are the ones that not only are going to rank better, but are going to be used as a source for the AI generated answer hence linked." That's a really interesting point. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think that we're going to see how that plays out in the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And it's an interesting point, you have to think what's the content that Google's basing the AI off of? You want to be that. I don't know how that works. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: As a concept, you want to be that. And Garrett Sussman chimed in with his hot takes, he wrote “keyword research is going to change, Entity research is the new keyword research. Crystal Carter: I agree. Mordy Oberstein: Everything depends, yes, we spoke about everything depends on when this replaces Google search and how there will be big problems when it's first rolled out, but they'll get it right. I think we both totally agree with that. And also, a good point, there's going to be problems when this rolls out. That's what happens when you release a new product. Crystal Carter: I mean, in the last few months, Google's been all over the place. There's been a lot of updates and there's a lot of changes where I've just been like, "What? Why is that?" Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: And stuff. So I think there's a lot of new things coming in. There's a lot of new features coming in. And I think the pace at which it's happening means that search is going to be very, very, very dynamic right now. Mordy Oberstein: So hard. Crystal Carter: Very dynamic. And I think also from a wider space, if people are accessing less of that sort of informational intent via Search, if people are using more generative things, like asking chatbots, "Oh, I asked about my plant," I was like, "What's another name for a mother-in-law's tongue plant?" And they were like, "Oh, it's a spider plant or it's a vipers thing or whatever. "And I'm like, "Oh, OK." Now, normally... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it makes sense a mother-in-law's viper think. Crystal Carter: So that particular one, so I would normally have done that on a Google Search, but I did it on the Bard chat and I also asked it, "Oh, why are the leaves going brown?" Because I've killed this plant. I'm pretty sure I've killed this plant. I need help. And these are different. So as those searches change and people are needing different content. What I did find for that particular one, so I tested it on Bing, I asked that question on Bing, and what I found in the chat was that they were constantly referencing this same website. So I asked it, I was like, "What is this plant called? Why are the leaves wilting? Why are the leaves brown? Should I cut it?" And I kept getting the same website, was coming back and forth with the same thing. And that tells me that that website knows all about this plant and all about this drama that I'm having with this plant. And now I'm like, "OK, I can go to that website to get good information about this thing." So I think that understanding the entities and understanding the flow of information and the kinds, people who have done topic clusters that flow all the way through the user journey. And Jonas Sticklers done a good article on the SEO Hub about this as well, but people who have a good understanding of the customer journey of, "I have a plant. I have a problem with my plant. How do I fix this problem with my plant?" That sort of thing, that flow I think will still be valid. And understanding the entities that are related to those queries will help us to rank and to perform and go forward on the web. Mordy Oberstein: And look, there's going to be so much change. There's going to be so many things that you're going to have to think about in totally new ways. All this raises all sorts of new questions and how are things going to happen? It's going to be very, I think, confusing in the beginning. Before we spoke about SEO tools, I think that's going to fundamentally change in a lot of ways. I know on Twitter, Caitlin Hathaway was saying, "Very keen to see how SEO tools are going to track the new developments, including clickable boxes with images and citations using generative name AI. Also keen to see," check this out, " if Google Search Console will let us track follow-up questions to the queries." Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's a good question. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Good question. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Lily Ray was saying that it's important to remember that not all searches will spark an AI answer. So it might be the case that, and I know Semrush recently launched an extra feature that said that there were SERP features or how many SERP features there are on a particular query. So it might be that they count it as a SERP feature. So whether or not this particular keyword or this particular question triggers an AI response, and if it does trigger an AI response, that's something that you should be aware of. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And just there's so many questions, so many larger questions still have to be unanswered. Brian Freiesleben was saying very in to see Google's approach for noting AI generated content with metadata and watermarking, which Google mentioned they're going to do, will let you do in images, you brought up before the guardrails. Will Google make this bold in their search results? Will they require publishers to note this? Also, a good question. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I mean, is this something that we're going to need to add into some of our systems and stuff? So for instance, on Wix, we automatically add meta tags, are we going to need to add that as a meta tag, for instance, for people to update. Also, what counts as an AI modified image. If I make myself look a little bit younger, is that the same? What if I dye my hair in my AI image? That's definitely an AI image. But I don't know. Where is the line? Mordy Oberstein: Right. And I'm kind of adverse to the whole thing. Which by the way, Lily Ray up a great point. Google's announcing all these features, what if there's backlash? What if people don't like them? Will they use them? That's also still left to be unanswered. In the SEO space, Brandish we're saying very interesting. I wonder how they'll incorporate local results and how accurate they'll be. Crystal Carter: Right. So it's very interesting as well though because they talked about Chrome and how Chrome's going to be super personalized and all of that sort of stuff. And I think that they're going to be using personalized results potentially for some of these AI things as well. So potentially, they'll know more about where you are. And so for instance, if you say, "Where's the best place to get a taco?" It's no good you telling me that I can get a taco, that the best taco is in Santa Fe, New Mexico if I'm not in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So it's going to be interesting. And also from the AI point of view with regards to entities and with regards to reviews and with regards to demonstrating experience and all that sort of stuff, they are all over Google Maps. The other big takeaway from Google I/O was like that they're just doing tons of stuff on Google Maps. Google Maps, they're doing as much as they possibly can. It was a meta-fication of Google Maps. They were like, "Oh, look at this sort of AI thing." And I'm like, "What?" .. Mordy Oberstein: That's bonkers. Crystal Carter: So they have a lot of proprietary stuff within Google Maps. You put your content into your Google GBP profile and they have access to that, to understand it through the reviews that are left on GBP and they can access that when they're figuring out what things are, and people check in and people review and people do all of those sorts of things. So I will guess that Google's going to add a lot of AI to local. And I think that... Mordy Oberstein: Local. I think it's one of the better places for the AI actually. I want to get into it, but we promise ourselves, because we could go on for hours with this. We literally said, "OK, we have to cap this off at around 45 minutes," and we're just past 45 minutes. So if you want to hear more of our thoughts, find us on Twitter, I guess. Crystal Carter: Yes. Find us on Twitter and thank you to everybody who shared their hot takes on Twitter. Yeah, really happy to hear from everybody. Mordy Oberstein: It was one of those moments of there's so much going on, there's so much conversation and made Twitter enjoyable again for a few moments. Crystal Carter: Awe. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, y'all. You guys are great. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. There are future episodes, our regular scheduled episodes are back next Wednesday. We're talking about Momentum and SEO with Erica Schneider. So if you want more SERP's Up awesomeness, well, go check out previous episodes and keep up with the podcast with our upcoming episodes released every Wednesday over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars we have on the Wix SEO Learning, I bet you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. If you like the podcast, don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time we see you, peace, love and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Nati Elimelech Idan Segal Garrett Sussman Barry Schwartz Brian Freiesleben Lily Ray Aleyda Solis Caitlin Hathaway Gianluca Fiorelli Kavi Kardos Jamar Ramos Brandon Schmidt Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Google i/o 2023 Keynote Google I/O Wix Headless The new Google search generative experience: Here’s what it looks like Google to update the helpful content system algorithm in the coming months Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Nati Elimelech Idan Segal Garrett Sussman Barry Schwartz Brian Freiesleben Lily Ray Aleyda Solis Caitlin Hathaway Gianluca Fiorelli Kavi Kardos Jamar Ramos Brandon Schmidt Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter Google i/o 2023 Keynote Google I/O Wix Headless The new Google search generative experience: Here’s what it looks like Google to update the helpful content system algorithm in the coming months Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to a special episode of SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO and boy are some things happening in SEO this time. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the always up to date on all of the things happening in SEO, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello. Hello, Mordy Oberstein. I am here. I am here with some original organic material intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. I'm coming with some authentic intelligence, I hope anyway. Mordy Oberstein: I'm artificial, but I'm citing. Crystal Carter: Are you grounded? Is your intelligence grounded in something? Mordy Oberstein: No, definitely not grounded. Crystal Carter: No? It's not? Mordy Oberstein: That's an easy question. You want me to cite you references? Crystal Carter: So large language Mordy is what we've got. Mordy Oberstein: This is better than foul language Mordy, I guess. Crystal Carter: Oh no, that's every other day of the week. Mordy Oberstein: The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can subscribe to our newsletter, search light over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. And where you can now utilize our headless CMS. Crystal Carter: So excited about the headless. Mordy Oberstein: Check that out. Crystal Carter: Oh, yes. Mordy Oberstein: We've lost our heads. Crystal Carter: Lost our heads, but gained a friend. We gained a friend in Netlify. Just like launching with Netlify, but also get involved with your GitHub, like it's super exciting. Very exciting. Mordy Oberstein: Check that out. Now, if this is your first time tuning into the SERP's Up podcast, this is a bonus episode of the SERP's Up podcast. SERP's Up podcast usually, typically, comes out each week on Wednesdays. We have all sorts of wonderful guests, from John Mueller to Barry Schwarz to Cindy Crumb. Fabulous guests, fabulous topics. Check it out. But this episode is a very, very special episode because Google I/O 2023 was upon us and it left us with some impressions. Crystal Carter: Oh yeah, there's a lot to talk about and I think it's a really good example of them coming back from their previous conference experience. So they had a conference in February. Mordy Oberstein: In Paris. Crystal Carter: In Paris, Google in Paris, and it was less than optimal for them, if I can say that. And I think that this is the conference that I think they wish they could have had then. And I think that it's been a real good redemption for them to be able to come out and really show what they can do in terms of AI and where they're planning to go in terms of search. Mordy Oberstein: In Star Trek terms, this is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan after that disaster of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Just for the people who speak Star Trek, that's what it is. I don't know why every episode now, we always default back to Star Trek. I have no idea. I'm not even watching Star Trek at the moment. Crystal Carter: Resistance is futile. Mordy Oberstein: Link, nice. Good way to phrase that. Wait, so I think what we're going to try to do in this particular episode is run through I think some of the larger AI themes that we saw and then dive into obviously how it's going to impact search and kind of get a consensus and a roundup from the wider SEO community. So I'll kick this off. I was blown away by the AI ability to answer emails and to heavily handedly modify images. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And it scared the crap out of me, I'm going to be honest. Crystal Carter: I think that there's a lot of some of the familiar tools that people have gotten used to in the generative AI space of creating text, creating images and things like that. I think what Google has in this particular thing is an audience that's already engaged with a lot of their products and they are already so integrated into our lives and how we use the internet and how we create content, how we edit content, how we update content. So the idea that when you're in Google Slides and they demoed this, in Google Slides you can sort of say, "I would like to add in a picture of this," I mean, that is solving a pain point that so many people have had. When you're making a deck or you're trying to do a presentation and you don't have an illustration, but you need one so that people aren't staring at a blank page or a wall of text, it's solving a really real challenge. Mordy Oberstein: That was brilliant. I think one of the things you and I cry about every once in a while is trying to find things in Gmail threads. Crystal Carter: Yes. Yes. Mordy Oberstein: But now you don't need to do it. It will find it. I thought that's brilliant. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: I think using the AI is information retrieval within their products, fabulous idea. What scared me is how do you know what's real at this point? And when I'm saying that I am not putting this on the tech providers, I kind of feel like they're just giving us what we want. I am putting this on humanity. Are we OK with things not being real? And then how do we handle that? And I'll give you an example from what they showed yesterday, yesterday from the day we're recording this, from Google I/O 2023. When they gave the example from Gmail, the scenario was you wanted a refund from a flight that you canceled, something like that, and you gave Gmail a prompt to write you an email and reply back to the answer that the airline gave you. And you can now expand, so not now, you will be able to expand on that answer. Say, "Hey, Gmail, make it longer. I feel like if this is a longer, more forceful email, I'll get the refund." And if you notice what the prompt returned was, "I am a loyal customer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Give me my refund." How do you know? Maybe I'm not a loyal customer. How did you know that? And are we OK with this? "Yeah. All right. Google will return that. I'm a loyal customer, it'll probably work. Let's just go with that." Is nothing real anymore? And the images, you're manipulating it and then it never actually happened that way. How do you know what's real? And that to me is scary. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So I think that we're kind of entering a space sort of now as well. And I think somebody writes something and you're like, "Did you write that though?" If somebody posts a picture and it's like, "Did you take that though?" And I think AI has been in our space for a long time, so on in Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok, there are tons of filters and people are going around. I have a cousin who whenever she posts anything on Facebook, there's like a million filters, I have no idea what her face looks like anymore because she always has so many filters on it. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And so we've were like, "Oh my God, you look so young." It's like you look have a young person's filter, but they will completely change the bone structure of your face. And we've been in that space for a long time now. So one of the sections of I/O was James Manyika was talking about some of the guardrails that they had for helping us manage this reality. And he was saying that they're planning to add in and about this image panel as a guardrail and also giving meta tags for people to declare that something is an AI generated image. I think that these are great tools. My question is how many people are going to actually use them for these things? Mordy Oberstein: And that's sort of the problem. And I'm sort of summarizing a lot of sentiment that I saw out there. I know Kavi Kardos was interacting on Twitter a lot about this. She said, "This is my takeaway too. I feel like I'm the old man in the room." Because I said I feel like I'm the old man in the room. Do we not care what's real anymore as humanity? Jamar Ramos was jumping in there, he hit a line, "Yeah and I understand how loaded the phrase do our own research is." Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But I think the person who summed it up best to me was Blake DeMond from Rickety Rue who said a quote from Edward Wilson, I don't know who that is by the way, "The real problem with humanity is the following, we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology and it is terrifically dangerous and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall." That's from 2009. But it's a great way to sum this up because you can literally fake things and no one will know the difference. And I don't think we care. Crystal Carter: But I hate writing emails Mordy. I just... Mordy Oberstein: I'm OK with it writing the prompt. Crystal Carter: I think that I'm just saying that. I agree with all of those caveats. I think the challenge that we're facing though is that the technology is so, like they said, God-like technology. The technology is incredible. And so I think that we are going to be seeing more of this. And also there's that sort of singularity theory, which basically, if you think about where we are now compared to where we were when sort of ChatGPT kind of broke back in the autumn, miles, miles streaks ahead. We've moved forward so much, search has changed so much and the way we create technology and the way we create content and things has changed so much in just those few months. If you think about that compared to the rest of the web before, it's been a much, much bigger thing. So I think that it's true that these are challenging conversations, but I think we're going to have to keep having them. And I think that this is one of the reasons why Google's putting so much emphasis on experience, why they've added that experience caveat. But I think also, you say what's real, people lie on those emails all the time, like when they're trying to get, but anyway. Mordy Oberstein: The AI is just doing what we want it to do, which is lie, cheat and steal. Crystal Carter: So this is the other thing. So when you get generative images, it comes back, it's like a funhouse mirror kind of hodgepodge of various different things that it's seen. And this tends to be what you see on AI. I was talking about this, Garrett Sussman had a space which is on Twitter as well, you can play that recording. There's a few people talking about Google I/O hot takes there. And yeah, one of the troubles is that the models are based on what's on the web. So if what's on the web has some less than stellar content or opinions, then that's what we're going to get reflected back to us for, I think, there was somebody who was talking about Midjourney. Midjourney does a lot of, if you look up doctor on Midjourney, then you'll get a man. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, Natalie Slater did a lot of this. Crystal Carter: Right. So she was looking at all of the things. Mordy Oberstein: Engineer and it's all white men. Crystal Carter: Right. And so you get all these sorts of things coming through and that's a reflection of what's been on the web before. So no, it's not great, but it's also a reflection of the work that we as humans also need to do because the models are trained on what we had. But that's the existential things. Let's look into some of the additional. Mordy Oberstein: Let's go to Search. You brought up the helpful content update, I really want to get into that a lot because I think Google fired a shot across the bow kind of thing. But let's just first talk about does the functionality, in case you haven't seen what happened or what Google announced, so Bard itself is, which I would equate Bard to ChatGPT and that ecosystem, it's a separate environment. There are links being more interspersed into it now. It's now open for all, but then there's Search itself. And that looked, I thought, amazing. That looked amazing. So in certain cases, Google will return an AI prompt back to you. They said they won't do it for YMYL, so health, finance, where the information, if the AI's hallucinating, you will die. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That's not going to have an AI response. You'll have your initial summary. There won't be citations like you have in Bing, but there will be little cards of websites that you can go to. So it's a little bit more visual in a way. And then you can refine the questions. And what I thought was super, super cool and I stand corrected, I thought we were getting a whole bunch of things that were not going to make me happy about Search because I am a curmudgeon fundamentally. What we got back has literally been asking for for two, three years. You can expand the AI response that Google will give you into a deeper dive. What it'll do is it'll break down the answer that it gave and it will essentially cite along the way. So if it says, you ask, "Where's a great place to go on vacation?" And it starts talking about if you have kids and you're going on vacation, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. When you expand the chat feature, it'll take that chunk and show you results about places to go on vacation with kids. And if in the next sentence talks about if you're going in the wintertime, it'll then show you a bunch of things about going on vacation in the wintertime. What it lets you do is A, give you the opportunity to see more organic links. What it really does is is that it breaks down that topic so well. So if you ask, "Was Michael Jordan a good basketball player?" And you get all different aspects of Michael Jordan and his career, it'll break that down for you and then give you links to explore more about that particular subtopic within the topic of Michael Jordan, which is amazing. It'll let you explore topics, it'll let you explore subtopics and it'll give you the links in order to do it. I thought it was awesome. Crystal Carter: I mean, this is Google achieving their goals. So they say that their goal is to organize the world's information and to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. And that's what they say their goal is. And this is them working to achieve that. And I think that this is something that works really well for introductions to topics, for instance. When I think about how I use ChatGPT, my best to use for ChatGPT is Googling rules for games. So George Wynn, the editor of the Wix SEO Hub, very kindly gifted me a set of Magic: The Gathering cards and Magic: The Gathering has a lot of complicated rules. I was trying to play this with my kid and I did a turn and I was like, "Oh, I think my gargoyle or my guide can play." And my kid says, "No, he has summoning sickness and he can't do that and he can't do this. " And I tried to look it up online and there's all these massive posts of 3,000 words of how to do the whole thing of Magic: The Gathering and stuff. And I'm like I don't need to know every single thing about it, I just need to know can I play my turn. Right? So I can say in Magic: The Gathering for instance, can I do this with this card. And they can go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's some links," some links, I'm like, "OK, but if it's like this, can I do that?" And then it can go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and you can do this." And if my kid who can be very suspicious sometimes of these things, if he doesn't like what I've returned, we can click through to the link and then we can say OK, this is what it says on this website. And I think this will work with a lot of their systems because I think the way that they're looking at this is they're stacking a lot of their AI. So you'll be able to also go straight to the passage as well where it's quoted from most likely in order to verify the information. So they'll give you the summary, they'll give you the link and then you can verify it. And that is a really good workflow in terms of being able to corroborate information and see that you're getting the right information. Mordy Oberstein: So I'm going to run through, I just pulled it up on the screen, the exact example that they gave about the query was what's better for a family with kids under three and a dog, Bryce Canyon or whatever it was, another national park. Because I can't see the rest of the query, it's like too long. And when you expand out from the AI answer, so first, the answer is both Bryce Canyon and Arches National Parks are family friendly. Stop. It gives you a link that talks about the park being family friendly. Next part of the prompt that it returned, "Although both parks prohibit dogs and unpaved trails, Bryce Canyon is two paved trails that allow dogs." Stop. It now gives you a whole bunch of links about pets and the two locations. It's letting you explore these topics in such an easy way. Because one of the things as a user, I don't always know what I'm actually looking for. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Tell me all the things I need to consider and then it's doing that and then it's giving me the links to do it. I think a couple of things about this from an SEO point of view, SEO tools, red alert. Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Mordy Oberstein: Red Alert because the blue links are not, as Cindy Crum pointed out on Twitter, David pointed out on Twitter, Nati Elimelech, our Head of SEO at Wix in my DMs, about this, Idan Segal was out there on Twitter talking about CTR is going to go down. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: For the 10 traditional blue links. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And what's going to matter more, I think it will use the expanded feature here because I will, are being featured in here. Now how do you track that? You might be able to give a tool the various long tail keywords that are relevant to you. I guess the tool can then run the scrape by running the query, seeing what the AI returns and then saying what URLs are in there, I guess is possible. But imagine organic research where you're not specifically telling the tool what keywords you want to track, but you want to research a competitor and see what keywords are they ranking for and where are they ranking. How is a tool going to do that? Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's going to be tricky. I think that tools are kind of probably need to think more about entities because large language models have entities at their core and their understanding of entities is a sort of core sense of it. I think if you think about something like Kleenex for instance. Kleenex is a brand which is synonymous with tissues for instance. So if you have a brand, so I think that from an SEO point of view, I think those links are going to be getting few and far between. If Google understands that your brand is synonymous with a certain entity, if your brand is essentially that entity, then I think that you're more likely to show as part of those things and more likely to show more frequently. So I think that maybe pools might need to start thinking about how they're able to show the correlation between a certain brand or a certain website and certain entities. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's really interesting. I feel like it's a topic I haven't spoken about in a long time and trying to remember when I really was into this, it was when the core updates kind of came out back in 2018, of looking at your website as an entity. Because your website is an entity because it has a unique identity. Because I think if you're looking at how is Google going to decide what to rank or what to show, I hate to use rank in this case, what to show when it breaks down its AI response into smaller parts and then shows links associated with that. It's very entity based. If they're talking about pets and national parks, if your website is viewed as an entity that discusses, that is about, that is identified as parks and pets, national parks and pets, that's what's going to be, I would say not the difference maker, I don't know the algorithm, but it's going to be one of the very, very focused things that I think Google's going to use in order to say this URL should be here because as an entity it makes sense for it to be here. Crystal Carter: Right. So on that Bryce Canyon one, the results that they showed were from the national parks, that's what showed. It was national parks and pet friendly was one that was showing. And so those are all… Mordy Oberstein: So having a niche identity is going to be really important. Especially because, I'm a little bit worried actually, so is Nati about this, that yes, I'm so happy there are URLs and there's so many opportunity for URLs, but I'm a little bit worried that the big branch or the big websites are going to be the ones that show there are not the niche sites. Although maybe if you have really strong niche identity, you will. Crystal Carter: I think that for going forward, the kinds of opportunities that I think that this will present is the kind of content, and we've seen this, we've seen this, so Lily Ray has reported on this a number of times. So we've seen this over the few of the last few years. Google's not that into dictionary websites, encyclopedia websites. If you're encyclopedia website and you're not Wikipedia, what are you doing? And I think that these LLMs are kind of covering a lot of that stuff. If you want to know what is gee butter or something and they'll be like, "Oh gee butter is a clarified butter that's blah blah blah, blah, blah," they'll tell you that and that information will be fairly accurate. It's also not that sensitive. You just kind of need to know what it is while you're, I don't know, cooking or something. But I think the opportunities will lie in doubling down on your entity, on your brand entity, your website entity, the entities that are within your business, et cetera. But also I think that, potentially, there are opportunities around new ideas and around staying ahead of the curve. So where people are going to need to go to drill down into what's going on, it's going to need to be new content. So the historic content might be super competitive because Google, and I've seen this with Bing, bing is relying on very high authority sources, content that's been indexed for years in order to ground some of their LLM responses. So I think that for newcomers, for smaller businesses, being cutting edge, being on top of new ideas is going to be something that's beneficial to them. So for instance, trending topics is something that's going to be something that's really useful because when things are trending, people are looking for what's going on, what is happening, why is this a thing, what is this new term? And I think we're going to have a lot of new things going on anyway. So I think that where people are able to capture new ideas, they're going to be able to show in that space if they're a smaller business. Mordy Oberstein: I think I want to get back to that more, about the smaller business and all of that, because I want to talk about the helpful content update, which I think it's one of the more under discussed themes of what came out of there. My personal opinion. But before we do that, there's one in terms of the AI chat experience that Google has, we're going to have on the SERP. So Aleyda Solis made a great point, "Interesting how Google is highlighting the new AI search experience for commercial transactional queries rather than informational ones." And I think what she's referring to is all of the stuff they showed about the bicycles. So it's bonkers. So if you're searching for something related to getting a new bicycle, Google's going to give you an answer. I don't know, what do I need to consider when I'm looking to buy a new bicycle? I'm going to give you a bunch of information and then it'll show you a bunch of products. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: In the chat that you can click on and see a panel about and click on and go to and buy. And I thought to myself, "Holy cow, that is brilliant." Because if you're Google, there's no way, in my personal opinion, that you're going to be able to compete with Amazon and take them head on. Right? I'm looking to buy a product, I default many, many times, sometimes not, many, many times to Amazon and I bypass the SERP altogether, which is a problem for Google. But if I can catch you while you're in the research phase, then I've got you and you don't need to necessarily stop, now go to Amazon, I already got you in the research phase where Amazon can't get you. And I thought that was brilliant. If I was Amazon, I'd be a little bit concerned seeing that. Crystal Carter: I think also particularly the bicycle one that they showed, it's got a hybrid of there's also some of the search results there. So they've got the summary of your key points, they've got some deep dive blog posts and things and they've got the products there. And it's a pretty nice UX as well. It's not too cluttered, it doesn't feel overwhelming. It feels helpful. And I think the other thing that it highlights, and I started seeing this a lot more around product things, is unique content around products. So in order for the bicycles to show in different ways, having unique content around these things will be useful. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, because the layer of content they're showing is one level deeper than you would normally see for let's say a product description. Crystal Carter: And I think also the connection with Google Merchant here is going to be absolutely critical here. So they're using that as essentially a knowledge graph for products and that's really, really important. So for instance, they show one, it's like Avinton level two commuter bike and it's saying, "Oh, it's listed here and it's listed in seven other stores as well." So it's important to be on that. Mordy Oberstein: The importance of Google Merchant Center just increased a hundredfold. Crystal Carter: Indeed, indeed. And it's super useful. And there's so many different ways, again, to define your entities and add structured data. They talked about structured data, they talked about being able to look at unstructured data as well when they're looking through content. And I think that they're kind of, after what happened in February and Bing came out very confident with their presentation. And I think Google's just like, "We have tons of bells and whistles. We've got lots of stuff," and they've put the full force of their AI might here behind this. And I think it'll be interesting to see. Mordy Oberstein: It's really interesting. But before we get into the, I want to round up some of the thoughts in the community. Before we do that though, I want to go back and touch on the helpful content update. By the way, if you haven't watched the keynote, we'll link to the keynote in the show notes of this episode. Also check out Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz, it's like an unbelievable amount of content that he produced very timely, in a very timely manner, going through all of the major changes. So definitely check out that. We'll link to a bunch of that in the show notes. And one of the articles that Barry wrote was, "Google to update helpful content system algorithm in the coming months. Google said its update will help it understand content created from a personal or expert point of view as part of the release for Google I/O." On the Google product blog, whatever you want to call it, there's a post, "Learn from others' experience with more perspectives on search." And at the bottom of that post, and the reason why I'm saying this, this is part of the official release at Google I/O, and I've never seen this before, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think I've ever seen them talk about an algorithm update as part of I/O. And they're right. I think it's like the second or third H2 on the page, how we help you find the expertise you need. And I'm just going to read it real quick, the first paragraph or two. "In addition to making it easier to find authentic perspectives, we're also improving how we rank results in search overall with a greater focus on content with unique expertise and experience." By the way, the fact that expertise and experience are linked is because expertise is linked to experience. They're not separate things. Anyway, "Last year, we launched a helpful content system to show more content made for people and less content made to attract clicks. In the coming months, we'll roll out an update to this system that more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view, allowing us to rank more of this useful information on Search. Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard to find places," addressing my point from earlier, "a comment in a forum, a thread, a post on a little known blog," OK, good, we're going to see that, "on an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these hidden gems on search, particularly when we think they'll improve the results." I kind of think this is a shot across the bow. It's a warning shot. OK? They're being far more specific about what they're trying to do with the helpful content than they ever been before, which is one difference to me. And also it's part of Google I/O, it's part of their official launch. You have to feel real confident in what you're about to do to announce it as a brand in that kind of way. So I think this is going to be legit and I think it's going to be impactful. I don't know if it's going to be one big update that's going to be, it might be a series of updates over time, but the net effect I think is going to be real and I think it's going to be legit. And if I could say, I think this whole time, back to your point like, "Oh, we looked at the Paris event link. Maybe Google's off its game." I think Google got off its game a little bit because Bing came out and had to respond to that. But I think if you take that little moment of time out, this entire time, Google has been playing three-dimensional chess with us. Go back to the product review update. What I think that they did there was they said, "OK," they knew the AI was coming because they were making the AI. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And they said, "OK, we need to figure out a way to handle this algorithmically." And they said, "OK, let's focus on one place on the internet where we can train ourselves to highlight expertise and experience in a very tangible way." What better place than product reviews where the actual firsthand experience is completely manifest in the content. It's not like an underlying theme, it's not latent or embedded. It's supposed to be actually manifest in the content itself and let's train ourselves on that. Crystal Carter: And also reviews, when people write reviews, it's full of all sorts of emotions and maybe might be good grammar, might not be the good grammar. It might be like, "This refrigerator sucks, it leaked and I didn't like it at all." Mordy Oberstein: It's the perfect place. It's the perfect close environment to train yourself on a particular thing. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And then what did Google do in April? It said, "Let's expand this. Let's go to all reviews. No more product review. It's review update." And now, and I called it, what's Google doing now? It's zooming out again and saying it's not just product and reviews, it's everything. Crystal Carter: Everything. Mordy Oberstein: Everything. Crystal Carter: Everything. Mordy Oberstein: And I think it's used a product review and now the review update in order to train itself so it could ultimately do this. I think Google knew they wanted to do this and they were training themselves the whole time for years. I think in 2021, the first product review, they came out, to do this, which is analyze content for experience and experience with expertise. Because it's one thing to say, "I went to Disneyland, it was fun." That experience has no value. Crystal Carter: Right. So I think the other thing that's interesting about that is that what I've seen when I look at reviews and pages, I've seen a couple of times where there was something that was reviewed and it was ranking, or one channel that was a review page and it was ranking and it didn't even have as many reviews as the other ones were below it. And I was like, 'Well, why is this? Why is this page? It's got fewer reviews." Then I looked at the reviews and the reviews were much more unique. The reviews there were much more nuanced, they had much more experience of actually interacting with that entity, with that actual thing. And I think the other thing is that I think we can think of experience as shorthand for human because we, in this space where everything's AI, the experience element is basically there was a human that touched this, there was a human that sat in this chair and said, "This chair is too small and I don't like it." Mordy Oberstein: It smelled weird. Crystal Carter: Right. Or I plugged this toy in and it was really noisy and it scared my cat. Mordy Oberstein: No AI is going to do that. Crystal Carter: They're not going to write that, but people who have cats want to know if the thing's going to be noisy. Mordy Oberstein: One of the pages I was looking at in my analysis on this February, 2023 product review update, they wrote, "Pro: Whatever, whatever. Con: It smelled funny out of the box." There's no way, either you completely made that up or you actually used it. So I think when Google says experience, it's interchangeable for AI, it's this code word. We don't want to say AI, so we're just going to say experience. Crystal Carter: Right. We're saying experience. So experience like we're saying this shows expertise, authority, trust and a human have something to do with this. And there's going to be, again, with YMYL things, it's going to be much more important that a human was involved with whatever was going on with, I don't know, that medicine or that particular tool or whatever that's to do with your money, your life, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason why they're mentioning in here, they're mentioning surfacing things from comments or from forums or from Reddit or from wherever is that's where humans are and that's where humans are speaking in a candid way, often unfiltered, often unedited. And I think that that's what they're trying to do. With regards to how you include that in your content, I think that's going to be an interesting thing, how we pull that in. The other thing that Google's doing, and they talked about this in Google Workspace, they're like, "Oh yeah, we're adding all these things so that you can just add a prompt and then it will write the essay for you. Or we're adding this thing so that you can take your notes and then format it." Mordy Oberstein: This is a cure to that disease, I think. Crystal Carter: Right. But I feel like people say, "Oh, can you find something that's 100% human written?" But I use Grammarly all the time and Grammarly... Mordy Oberstein: Right. 100%, well, I don't think, you can help me write it. I can write it, "Hey AI, make this better. Take out all of my weird syntax idiosyncrasies in my writing." Crystal Carter: But then it's less human. Mordy Oberstein: Well, in the case of my mind, let me better explain, I'm writing something that I want to be cold and generic. Crystal Carter: OK. Mordy Oberstein: And I am not good at writing cold and generic, so please do that for me. Whatever the use case actually is. Crystal Carter: I don't know, I can't imagine a time when you would ever write a thing that wasn't in your tone of voice. Mordy Oberstein: Right, see. So that's why I immediately thought of using AI to take my tone of voice out it of because maybe you don't want so much Mordy in your content. Crystal Carter: Everybody wants more Mordy, more Mordy-fication of their content. Mordy Oberstein: It converts. But I think you're right. I think it's going to change how we, I'm hoping it changes content fundamentally. For example, let's say you take a look, an SEO post. OK? How to do rank tracking. Crystal Carter: What is rank tracking? Mordy Oberstein: What is rank tracking? We talk about it in a vacuum. What I would like to see is, "What is rank tracking, blah, blah, blah?" And when I've done it, I've found that this did work or that didn't work or my clients or when we and then they and when we all... Crystal Carter: Do you know what? Actually, this brings me back to when I first had my kid, and you must have had this, you have children, and shout out to anybody who doesn't have children, but this is the experience that I found. What I found was that everybody had advice. People who had kids, people who didn't have kids, people who had kids 40 years ago or whatever. Everybody had advice for me. And I got very tired of advice from everybody about what I was doing, about whether I should, I don't know, let them cry, don't let them cry. I don't know, all the things. Eat this, don't eat that. Go to sleep here, go to sleep, all of that stuff. But what I did find was experience was useful. So whatever their experience was, if they were like, "Oh, when I had my kid, I would find that I could help them get to sleep if we did this, this or this." Mordy Oberstein: Yes, I know exactly what you're saying. Crystal Carter: Do you know what I mean? Mordy Oberstein: I know exactly what you're saying. Yes. Crystal Carter: If I hear their experience, I can take whatever nuggets... Mordy Oberstein: I want out of it and it's not forced on me. Crystal Carter: Right. It's just their experience. Their experience cannot be false, it can't be wrong. It's just their experience. And so I can say, "OK, well from what you've said, I can discern that actually I wouldn't do it that way, but this could work for this or that could work for that." So maybe that's a Google is trying to do, is less advice and more experience. I could give you advice on how to do parasailing, I have never parasailed in my life, but I could give you advice on it based on something that I've read. But I can't give you any of my experience because I've never done that. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. There's a post on the Wix S O about this, not about this, I think it was Sophie Brandt who wrote about SEO reporting, I could be misremembering the exact post, but I think what she did was she went through in different scenarios and you could tell the scenarios that she came across. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And I remember reading that post and being like, "I love this because it's different and it's hitting on a different level. It's hitting me in a different way." And I'm hoping that's where we all go in terms of content across the web. I think this is a good thing, net good thing. With that, it does bring up a lot of the E-A-T stuff and that was a wider consensus around what was happening in the SEO world. For example, John Luca for [inaudible 00:34:24] wrote, "So very hot takes. The fact that Google AI answers is presenting links above the fold, surely is important. That also means that everything we do to stand out according to the E-A-T principles is even more important now because we must suppose that the sites that Google considers the most expert with expertise, authority and trust are the ones that not only are going to rank better, but are going to be used as a source for the AI generated answer hence linked." That's a really interesting point. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think that we're going to see how that plays out in the SERP. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And it's an interesting point, you have to think what's the content that Google's basing the AI off of? You want to be that. I don't know how that works. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: As a concept, you want to be that. And Garrett Sussman chimed in with his hot takes, he wrote “keyword research is going to change, Entity research is the new keyword research. Crystal Carter: I agree. Mordy Oberstein: Everything depends, yes, we spoke about everything depends on when this replaces Google search and how there will be big problems when it's first rolled out, but they'll get it right. I think we both totally agree with that. And also, a good point, there's going to be problems when this rolls out. That's what happens when you release a new product. Crystal Carter: I mean, in the last few months, Google's been all over the place. There's been a lot of updates and there's a lot of changes where I've just been like, "What? Why is that?" Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: And stuff. So I think there's a lot of new things coming in. There's a lot of new features coming in. And I think the pace at which it's happening means that search is going to be very, very, very dynamic right now. Mordy Oberstein: So hard. Crystal Carter: Very dynamic. And I think also from a wider space, if people are accessing less of that sort of informational intent via Search, if people are using more generative things, like asking chatbots, "Oh, I asked about my plant," I was like, "What's another name for a mother-in-law's tongue plant?" And they were like, "Oh, it's a spider plant or it's a vipers thing or whatever. "And I'm like, "Oh, OK." Now, normally... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it makes sense a mother-in-law's viper think. Crystal Carter: So that particular one, so I would normally have done that on a Google Search, but I did it on the Bard chat and I also asked it, "Oh, why are the leaves going brown?" Because I've killed this plant. I'm pretty sure I've killed this plant. I need help. And these are different. So as those searches change and people are needing different content. What I did find for that particular one, so I tested it on Bing, I asked that question on Bing, and what I found in the chat was that they were constantly referencing this same website. So I asked it, I was like, "What is this plant called? Why are the leaves wilting? Why are the leaves brown? Should I cut it?" And I kept getting the same website, was coming back and forth with the same thing. And that tells me that that website knows all about this plant and all about this drama that I'm having with this plant. And now I'm like, "OK, I can go to that website to get good information about this thing." So I think that understanding the entities and understanding the flow of information and the kinds, people who have done topic clusters that flow all the way through the user journey. And Jonas Sticklers done a good article on the SEO Hub about this as well, but people who have a good understanding of the customer journey of, "I have a plant. I have a problem with my plant. How do I fix this problem with my plant?" That sort of thing, that flow I think will still be valid. And understanding the entities that are related to those queries will help us to rank and to perform and go forward on the web. Mordy Oberstein: And look, there's going to be so much change. There's going to be so many things that you're going to have to think about in totally new ways. All this raises all sorts of new questions and how are things going to happen? It's going to be very, I think, confusing in the beginning. Before we spoke about SEO tools, I think that's going to fundamentally change in a lot of ways. I know on Twitter, Caitlin Hathaway was saying, "Very keen to see how SEO tools are going to track the new developments, including clickable boxes with images and citations using generative name AI. Also keen to see," check this out, " if Google Search Console will let us track follow-up questions to the queries." Crystal Carter: Yeah, that's a good question. Mordy Oberstein: Right? Good question. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Lily Ray was saying that it's important to remember that not all searches will spark an AI answer. So it might be the case that, and I know Semrush recently launched an extra feature that said that there were SERP features or how many SERP features there are on a particular query. So it might be that they count it as a SERP feature. So whether or not this particular keyword or this particular question triggers an AI response, and if it does trigger an AI response, that's something that you should be aware of. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. And just there's so many questions, so many larger questions still have to be unanswered. Brian Freiesleben was saying very in to see Google's approach for noting AI generated content with metadata and watermarking, which Google mentioned they're going to do, will let you do in images, you brought up before the guardrails. Will Google make this bold in their search results? Will they require publishers to note this? Also, a good question. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And I mean, is this something that we're going to need to add into some of our systems and stuff? So for instance, on Wix, we automatically add meta tags, are we going to need to add that as a meta tag, for instance, for people to update. Also, what counts as an AI modified image. If I make myself look a little bit younger, is that the same? What if I dye my hair in my AI image? That's definitely an AI image. But I don't know. Where is the line? Mordy Oberstein: Right. And I'm kind of adverse to the whole thing. Which by the way, Lily Ray up a great point. Google's announcing all these features, what if there's backlash? What if people don't like them? Will they use them? That's also still left to be unanswered. In the SEO space, Brandish we're saying very interesting. I wonder how they'll incorporate local results and how accurate they'll be. Crystal Carter: Right. So it's very interesting as well though because they talked about Chrome and how Chrome's going to be super personalized and all of that sort of stuff. And I think that they're going to be using personalized results potentially for some of these AI things as well. So potentially, they'll know more about where you are. And so for instance, if you say, "Where's the best place to get a taco?" It's no good you telling me that I can get a taco, that the best taco is in Santa Fe, New Mexico if I'm not in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So it's going to be interesting. And also from the AI point of view with regards to entities and with regards to reviews and with regards to demonstrating experience and all that sort of stuff, they are all over Google Maps. The other big takeaway from Google I/O was like that they're just doing tons of stuff on Google Maps. Google Maps, they're doing as much as they possibly can. It was a meta-fication of Google Maps. They were like, "Oh, look at this sort of AI thing." And I'm like, "What?" .. Mordy Oberstein: That's bonkers. Crystal Carter: So they have a lot of proprietary stuff within Google Maps. You put your content into your Google GBP profile and they have access to that, to understand it through the reviews that are left on GBP and they can access that when they're figuring out what things are, and people check in and people review and people do all of those sorts of things. So I will guess that Google's going to add a lot of AI to local. And I think that... Mordy Oberstein: Local. I think it's one of the better places for the AI actually. I want to get into it, but we promise ourselves, because we could go on for hours with this. We literally said, "OK, we have to cap this off at around 45 minutes," and we're just past 45 minutes. So if you want to hear more of our thoughts, find us on Twitter, I guess. Crystal Carter: Yes. Find us on Twitter and thank you to everybody who shared their hot takes on Twitter. Yeah, really happy to hear from everybody. Mordy Oberstein: It was one of those moments of there's so much going on, there's so much conversation and made Twitter enjoyable again for a few moments. Crystal Carter: Awe. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Nice. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks, y'all. You guys are great. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. There are future episodes, our regular scheduled episodes are back next Wednesday. We're talking about Momentum and SEO with Erica Schneider. So if you want more SERP's Up awesomeness, well, go check out previous episodes and keep up with the podcast with our upcoming episodes released every Wednesday over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars we have on the Wix SEO Learning, I bet you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. If you like the podcast, don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time we see you, 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

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Back SEO cheat sheet for web designers An SEO checklist to help web designers create with SEO in mind. 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 cheat sheet to: Follow best practices for UX and mobile-first design Set up for optimal performance by understanding the importance of Core Web Vitals and site speed Get a handle on site structure that makes sense for users and search engines Figure out the best page layout for your site’s needs Implement local SEO and structured data Learn how to optimize images for search Thomas Haynes Director of Strategy, Optix Solutions LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Thomas Haynes is a digital marketer with 16 years’ experience in SEO and digital strategy. He is currently Director of Strategy at Optix Solutions in Exeter, Devon. More about this topic Watch this webinar on designing Wix sites with SEO in mind 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

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Ready to unlock the secrets to negotiating your salary and getting paid what you deserve? Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they chat with Carolyn Lydon about how to navigate the salary negotiation maze in the SEO and digital marketing space. They dig into the art of asking for raises, identifying your market worth, and ensuring you’re not left counting pennies. Plus, Nick LeRoy drops by to share his wisdom on pitching your projects to clients with the finesse of a seasoned pro. Don't miss out as we help you secure that spondulix on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Back Hey SEOs, here's how to grab your bag (of $) Ready to unlock the secrets to negotiating your salary and getting paid what you deserve? Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they chat with Carolyn Lydon about how to navigate the salary negotiation maze in the SEO and digital marketing space. They dig into the art of asking for raises, identifying your market worth, and ensuring you’re not left counting pennies. Plus, Nick LeRoy drops by to share his wisdom on pitching your projects to clients with the finesse of a seasoned pro. Don't miss out as we help you secure that spondulix on this episode of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 119 | January 29, 2025 | 53 MIN 00:00 / 53:14 This week’s guests Carolyn Lyden With a strategic mind and a passion for driving impactful digital growth, Carolyn Lyden brings over a decade of experience in SEO and content strategy. Carolyn’s expertise extends beyond SEO tactics; she is deeply committed to fostering pay equity and salary negotiation education, frequently speaking at industry events, webinars, and podcasts. Her insights have empowered many to advocate for fair compensation, contributing to her reputation as a thought leader in the digital marketing space. Nick LeRoy Nick LeRoy is a freelance SEO consultant, podcaster, and newsletter author in St. Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in SEO strategy, technical SEO, editorial strategy, and website migrations through his company Nick LeRoy Consulting Nick is the author of the #SEOForLunch newsletter and owner of the boutique job board SEOjobs.com 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 she who is always on the money, our head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, everybody. I hope that you are securing all of the bags and collecting all of this spondoolie and all of the dough. Mordy Oberstein: What's that sound? I hear like a jangling in your pockets or something as you're... Oh, that's your money. That's your coin. That's your money. I like because the audience has no idea why we're doing this yet. They're like, all right, you guys are talking about money. Crystal Carter: Money. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of money, give us your money. The SERP'S Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also supplement your income by selling your custom apps and widgets inside of the Wix Studio app market. This, as we talk, how to negotiate your salary if you're in the SEO or digital marketing space that you can get top dollar. How to go about ensuring you get what you deserve. Never too late? Can you renegotiate? The end, the idiosyncrasies of salary negotiation in the SEO space. To help us make a withdrawal from the proverbial ATM, Carolyn Lyden will join us in just a bit. It's a two-for this week, by the way, as Nick Leroy hops on to talk about how you can pitch your projects to get the client to sign on the data line and into your bank account. Just in case you're not a salaried employee, or if you're in-house, by the way, we'll talk how to pitch your projects so you might get that raise. And of course, we have the snappies of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So bosses and managers beware. Episode 117 of the SERP'S Up podcast is here to help your employees line their pockets with a little bit of extra dough. Crystal Carter: I was going to say, I think spondoolie is my favorite euphemism for money. I just like spondoolie, just- Mordy Oberstein: That's underused. Crystal Carter: Skrilla. Skrilla is also very good. I like that one as well. Mordy Oberstein: Also underused. Wow. Crystal Carter: Right? Paper. Benjamins, benjies. Hundies, I like this as well. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so usually we do a little intro like why this topic's important and blah, blah, blah. I feel like we don't need any introductions why this topic's important. It's important so you can pay your bills, which is why Carolyn Lyden is here to help talk about making more money. Hey Carolyn, how are you? Carolyn Lyden: Hi. I'm doing well. How are you? Mordy Oberstein: I'm good. I need some tips. I hope my boss is listening. Carolyn Lyden: Me too. I hope everyone's boss is listening because it's not just the job of the person negotiating, I think. It's also the job of managers to be good managers and advocate for their employees. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: What utopia you living in? Carolyn Lyden: One that I am creating for us all. Mordy Oberstein: Here, employee, take more of my money. Carolyn Lyden: Well, happy employees stay. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. Carolyn Lyden: And perform better. Crystal Carter: Well paid employees stay. Carolyn Lyden: Yes. Crystal Carter: That's something that I think is crazy because you have these situations where people are like, "Oh, I'd like a raise. I'd like a raise. I'd like a raise." And then they get headhunted or they get offered a new job and then suddenly the person's like, "Oh no, we can counteroffer." And you're like, "Where was the money last year when I asked you? How are you suddenly out of pocket now? What's that about?" Carolyn Lyden: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's bad vibes too. Carolyn Lyden: It is bad vibes to be like, "Cool. Was I not valuable before someone else wanted me?" Mordy Oberstein: I had that, by the way. I asked at a previous job whom I shall not mention, I asked for a raise and they said no. This is a long time ago. So if people are trying to look at my- Carolyn Lyden: I was going to say, people know where you've worked, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah yeah, you got to go back. And I'm like okay, I'm, I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. And I found another job and they said they're going to pay me this. And then they finally gave me the money, which sucked. It was a lot of work. Carolyn Lyden: Magically popped up out of nowhere. Where did it come from? Who knows? Mordy Oberstein: There was a leprechaun and there was a rainbow and a pot of gold, and- Carolyn Lyden: Someone came across it and they were like, yay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Carolyn Lyden: I was going to say, this is designated to Mordy, this rainbow pot of gold. Crystal Carter: But this is a topic that you've covered as well for a little while, and you've been fairly outspoken on this. Why did you start talking about this? Why were you like this needs to be said? What made you want to have those conversations? Carolyn Lyden: Yeah, so actually a long time ago in a galaxy far away, I worked at a company called CallRail, and I started essentially their ERG group for women. So I started this women's circle where women could get together to just talk about all the different things that we wanted to talk about from like when people are like, "Oh, how do you do it all? How do you have a job and have kids?" And it's like, "I don't do it all. We're suffering here. Help." But one of the topics when I surveyed the people who joined the group that they really wanted to talk about was salary negotiations. So I just said okay, I'm going to dig in and do all the research and present what I find based on this. And so that's what I did for our first women's circle session when I was at CallRail, and a lot of people were really into it. They were like, "Oh, wow, I didn't know, not only all these statistics, but the fact that if I don't negotiate, I'm sort of starting my entire career behind and losing millions of dollars over my lifetime potentially by not asking for what I'm worth. And also doing the work on the back end, the research to make sure that I am asking correctly or what my market worth is." So hearing that feedback and then taking it to a wider group of women and men and people in the SEO industry, I was like okay, this is something that we're all unspoken about it. We're all just secretly not talking to each other, not our colleagues, not our managers. We're just pretending we know how the system works. I didn't know how the system works, so I was like all right, we need to be talking about this a lot more and putting the information out there for everyone. Crystal Carter: Do you think that people are embarrassed to talk about salaries and money? Do you think that that's why we don't talk about it? Carolyn Lyden: I mean isn't that one of the three things you're not supposed to talk about is money, politics and religion? Because yeah, it's- Mordy Oberstein: Wait, wait, I talk about all three of those things. You're not supposed to talk about those? Carolyn Lyden: I mean, I talk about them too. This is why people don't follow me on... People follow me on Twitter and then immediately unfollow. They're like, wait a second. I thought you talked about SEO. I'm like nope, that's not what you're here for. I love it when people follow me for SEO stuff. Like I can see they have SEO in their tag and I'm like, "You're going to immediately unfollow," which is fine. But yeah, I think it's a taboo topic, but also in America and in probably a bunch of other cultures, we associate our salaries with how much we are worth as individuals. And there's almost a deeper thing to be like I am worth less than you as a human if I make less than you. Or you also see it when you find out, rightfully so, that people at your job, if there is salary transparency, when you find out the one jerk who never works on the projects, who's like the person who's always like, "Hey, can you do this for me?" makes way more than you. And you're like what the heck? I'm working harder, I'm doing more, I'm providing more results than this other person, and I'm worth less than them? So I think there are a lot of interpersonal social issues around it, and I think some companies are doing a good job of laying out the transparency of this and being like, "These are the tiers we have. These are the levels. Here's what is expected at this, you know, tier two." Individual contributors, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or whatever. So there is that transparency to understand what it does take to move up and what's required of you so you're not in one of those positions, but I still think it's something that everybody needs to be advocating for, which is why at the beginning I said managers should be listening too. Mordy Oberstein: Do you think there's any idiosyncrasies about all this in the SEO space or in the digital marketing space? Does it play itself out differently? Is it universal? How does that work? Carolyn Lyden: I think this is an interesting question because it takes me back to 2020 when COVID first happened and everyone was like, "All right, we're trying to figure out our budgets here. Things are changing. I'm not sure if I'm going to have money for the next whatever." So if you're a vendor or someone in SEO or even in digital marketing, where do we pull back? I was a freelancer, I had my own business then, and it was interesting to see who accelerated money into SEO versus who pulled back and what their end results were. And I think it now plays in still too to the salary discussion now. So if your company or your clients can see the value that you're bringing to them, they can see, "Okay, this is where we do need to invest that money." But I think it's almost like a bigger communication issue about our industry to the wider market to display that value. I feel like I'm rambling on about it, but I've noticed that a lot of people don't... If you don't understand how SEO works, then it's hard to see the value in it to then understand why it's important to continue to invest in your employees or your projects and things like that too and improve that investment there. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if it's getting more difficult because you have all this chatter around the Google results not being great anymore, and Google kind of feels like a little bit of a sinking ship lately just from the optics of everything. And then you have the LLM search engines and like well, those get market share and blah, blah, blah. So it kind of feels like it might be a little bit harder to make that SEO value sell right now, which I wonder if that means maybe broaden your skill set or broaden SEO as a topic a little bit more into the wider digital presence they can offer you. I don't know. Carolyn Lyden: Yeah, I've been talking to a bunch of different people in my organization and outside about expanding their mindset because I think so many people are... We're in it so we know what SEO actually is, but so many people still think it's just putting the keywords on the page. It's 2024, and I still get people who are like, "Will you look at this document and SEO it for me?" And I'm like, "No, you should have talked to me before you even created the document." So I think that so many people still think that's what it is. And I feel like my whole career at many organizations, and this is involving your stakeholders, but zooming out and talking about this is a search ecosystem. We're not talking about Google. We're not talking about ChatGPT search. We're not talking specifically about Bing. We're not talking about anything with a search bar is a search engine sort of thing. We're zooming out and seeing how all of these things work together to optimize our presence in those places or optimize how we show up in those places too. So I think zooming out and having the ecosystem talk, which is kind of an ongoing conversation sort of helps out in that way because yes, I think too many people get zoomed in on... We all have had the people who are like, "Oh, I really love this one keyword, and we were number one and now we're number three, and oh my God, fix it." And you're like, "Okay, cool. When you search this next week, it's going to be different. So stop searching the same words over and over and then telling me when they drop once." So the same conversations we've been having for a long time, but really involving those weird things that are coming in now that we're all just still kind of learning about too. Like I know people that use ChatGPT exclusively. Mordy Oberstein: Really? Carolyn Lyden: And they just have search conversations with it. And it's more because it's a conversation, not just a blop, here's the result, and then researching. It's saying, "Okay, here's what I'm looking for." And then they pop up whatever answers, and then you say, "Okay, we're on the right track, but I need something that's more geared toward automotive industry," or something like that. And, "Okay, cool, that's really helpful, but I need things that are doing XYZ." So being able to have that conversation I think is really interesting. So how can we take those use cases and those models and put it in our bigger search ecosystem? Crystal Carter: But I think also that you've touched on a few things there about the variations in what SEOs do, right? Carolyn Lyden: Correct. Crystal Carter: So you might have somebody who's an SEO lead, and you'll see lots of jobs that are SEO lead, but what an SEO lead does at one place might be completely different to what an SEO lead does at another place. And one of the other things that's tricky as an SEO professional is that a lot of times you're fairly self-taught. Like you can get certifications. We have a great course for instance on the Wix SEO Learning Hub and we talk about technical SEO and keyword research and client management and client engagement. But a lot of the stuff, for instance, like ChatGPT search and new platforms as they emerge, new ways of training, new ways of training on different technology, the SEO for your particular tech stack, those sorts of things, you'll very often need to learn yourself and need to learn how to learn it for yourself. So though you have the SEO lead here and SEO lead there, they might not have the same skillset. How do you find that when you're thinking about salary negotiations and even... I think Nick Leroy's going to talk about pitching, but when you're thinking about salary negotiations, how do you quantify the value of your skillset? So let's say you spent all that time learning the TikTok algorithm, which oh my God, if you've done that, please tell me. But let's say you spent all the time, how do you say, "This is worth this much more on my salary. I now have this skill and it's worth this much more for this business." How do you connect those two things? Carolyn Lyden: I think it's understanding business, looking through the job description, which is sort of where the front end work in job hunting is, and seeing what they're looking for, what they actually need, and seeing how your specific skills apply. I also don't... Sorry, everyone, I don't know anything about TikTok. I signed up for it, and then I logged on and immediately was like I am deleting this app from my phone. So, sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Not to switch directions completely, but because something that's on my mind I wanted to ask you about, because I think it's like the thing that people always get, I think, stuck on is how far can I push it? Because if I push it too far and I'm negotiating, then maybe I'll get a no. Or maybe they'll think that this person's too aggressive, whatever it is, but you also don't want to be walked all over. How do you know and how far can you actually push the envelope when negotiating your salary? Carolyn Lyden: I think that ties in a little bit to what Crystal was saying too. So doing the research, listing out what your... I hate the word soft skills, but the interpersonal skills, the cross communication between departments, listing all that out, seeing the alignment between what you can do, what the job description is, and then doing the research to determine okay, other jobs that are equivalent to this that have these exact skill sets are offering XYZ right now. This is a tangent. I've been seeing so many jobs that are like Senior VP of SEO, it's like 80k. And I'm like, are you freaking kidding me right now? Stop. This is not equivalent unless I guess, I don't know, you can live off of $0 while you're doing a hundred hours of work a week. So that is an example of where it's totally not equivalent, the salary is not equivalent to the job role that they're asking. So doing that research to see what else is out there. Actually, on Nikla Roy's site, I wrote an article about salary negotiation SEO, and this is actually a really good use of ChatGPT. So I did a couple of tests for jobs that had the salary band listed. I took the salary band off and I copied the title and the job description and the skills they required and all that into ChatGPT, and if it was remote or based somewhere, and I said, "What would you assume the salary band for this role is?" And it was pretty spot on to what they were offering. So I wouldn't only use ChatGPT for this, but you can also put in all your skills there and say, "All right, are these one-to-one? Am I going the right direction here or am I going to over-ask for this?" So I think seeing what else is out there using the tools that you have to your advantage to see where you can push a little bit. And honestly, start the conversation with salary expectations. So if you go in and you get the initial interview, you can just say, "Hey, I know this is a great company and you're known for paying really well. I just want to know what the salary band for this position is." So you can start off by knowing okay, they're going to offer me 30k less than I'm getting paid now, so I'm not going to finish this interview. I'm not going to waste my time. It's okay to start with that. Crystal Carter: Sometimes, I see though that the salary bands are huge. Like I've seen sometimes where the salary band is like 50,000 to 175,000 or something like that. And it's like those are two different tax brackets. Like what are we talking about here? So if you see that, I'm not even sure what that even means from that company. Carolyn Lyden: Yeah. So I think one, companies are trying to get around state laws that require them to... In the United States, I think Colorado is one state where you're required if you're going to post a job there to list the salary band. And so they're trying to get around that by being like oh... I saw one the other day that was like 31k to 299k. And I was like okay, this is a joke. It also means there are more people that are going to apply, so they have a larger pool to pull from. And it also means that... So for example, when I previously worked at Oracle, they had like individual contributor and manager level. So there were essentially step levels for things. And the government is similar, the federal government in America. If a role is anywhere from like a step three to a step seven, it could be all the way from 50k for the entry level of a step three all the way to the top level of a step seven, which is why they're sort of having these huge bands. So they're expecting that potentially you could come in at a lower or mid-level skill-wise. Maybe you only have five years of experience in the industry. They could get someone who will be at the top of this role in the next five years, but isn't right now, and they're expecting you to be able to grow into that. Or if they just want someone who's going to take it, hit the ground running, hire someone at the top of the level. That really screws the applicants over because you don't know. So I think it's, again, understanding where your skills fall, what they're asking for. If you look at a job description, and please do not wait until you have 100% of the qualifications to apply. Apply with 50%. There are people out there getting jobs in the current American government that have no experience. So YOLO, no imposter syndrome here, just apply. If you meet a certain set of the criteria, apply, but don't expect to get the top level of the salary band if you don't have all the experience, you haven't used all the technology they use, those sort of things. Mordy Oberstein: So you get in, you're whatever, level three, whatever employee, and I don't even know what that means. And now it's a year later and you feel like okay, fine, I feel like I just acquired 10% more of my skill set this year. How do you renegotiate that? Or can you renegotiate that now? Carolyn Lyden: Yeah, I think you totally can. I think first things first, look at your job description when you started the position and add everything that you now do that is additional into your job description or things that have changed. And then you can do the research to see okay, equivalent jobs that are doing this sort of thing, like I started as an SEO and I was just doing optimizations, but now I'm also doing reporting, now I'm also doing content strategy, now I'm also taking care of some of the technical stuff. You can do research and see what other jobs have these responsibilities, what are they getting paid? What are their titles? Crystal Carter: I had a situation where they hired a bunch of people who were the same job role as me, same pay as me or whatever, and then they had me train all of them and I was like, no. Carolyn Lyden: I had a friend, a very dear friend of mine recently that her company hired somebody. I think they're getting ready to... They were a startup and now they're growing beyond startup phase. And they hired somebody who's now a senior VP of whatever. And she got laid off and they were like, "Oh, before you go, will you tell us how you did everything?" And I was like, "Do not fucking tell them anything." They fired you. You don't have to train them on... Crystal Carter: No. Carolyn Lyden: How that works. I was like, throw up deuces and leave. Crystal Carter: Here's my invoice for my time, my freelance, which is double what you paid me before. Thank you. Carolyn Lyden: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Or here's how you do it, but it's all the wrong advice. Carolyn Lyden: I mean, you're more devious than I am. I would just be like, I don't work here anymore, so sayonara suckers. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of sayonara, before we start to sign off, here's a good pivot, where can people find you to learn more about whatever it is you post about on social media, which is not SEO? Carolyn Lyden: Yeah, I am on Twitter @CarolynLyden. I recently had to start protecting my tweets because random bros were rude. But feel free to follow, and I will approve you if you're not a meanie. And then, I don't know, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I don't do anything on LinkedIn, but... Mordy Oberstein: Did everybody really do anything on LinkedIn other than just post random stuff? Myself included. Crystal Carter: No, everyone's thrilled. People are thrilled on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: I'm thrilled that you're excited and congrats on your new apple pie that you bought. Carolyn Lyden: Oh yes, please. I'm a pumpkin pie person, not apple. Mordy Oberstein: I'm all pie. Carolyn Lyden: I how I feel about hot fruit. You know? Mordy Oberstein: All right. Crystal Carter: Okay. Pecan pie, though. Pecan pie. Mordy Oberstein: Pecan pie, key lime pie, custard pie, pumpkin pie, cherry pie, blueberry pie, pineapple pie. Carolyn Lyden: No, no, no, no, no. Those are hot fruits. Mordy Oberstein: What? Cherry pie? Carolyn Lyden: Cherry pie is hot fruit. Crystal Carter: What about pineapple on pizza? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, obviously with the … Carolyn Lyden: I'm not mad at it. I mean, I would eat it. Crystal Carter: It's hot fruit and tomato and garlic. Carolyn Lyden: Well, that's valid. Crystal Carter: Combination. Carolyn Lyden: Listen, when somebody offered me a piece of pizza once and it had pineapple on it, I wasn't going to say no. Like if Mordy was like, "I baked this apple pie with love in my heart," I wouldn't be like, "Fuck that." I would just eat his apple pie. But I would not make- Mordy Oberstein: Throw it out behind my back. Carolyn Lyden: But if someone was like, "Carolyn, make a pie or make a pizza," I wouldn't do hot fruit on them. I'm not a jerk. I would eat someone else's if they offered it to me. Mordy Oberstein: That's a hot take on the hot fruit thing in pie. Carolyn Lyden: I mean, listen, maybe I am a jerk. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you clearly have no taste in pie. Carolyn Lyden: No, I don't. That's okay. Mordy Oberstein: All right. Thanks Carolyn Lyden: I mean, of all the desserts, I wouldn't choose pie, but yeah. You're welcome. Happy to talk about pie anytime. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, cheesecake though? Carolyn Lyden: I hope that everyone here gets their slice of the pie. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, before I say goodbye... Oh, that's good. That's good. But you don't put cherries on cheesecake? Carolyn Lyden: No. Crystal Carter: But those cold fruit. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but pie doesn't have to be hot. You wait for the pie of cool down. It's not hot anymore. Carolyn Lyden: But you have to make the fruit hot to make it a pie. Mordy Oberstein: But if you put it in the fridge, it's not hot anymore. It's cold cherries. Carolyn Lyden: But it's mushed. Mordy Oberstein: So the mushing is also a problem now. Carolyn Lyden: Yes. I have texture issues. This is why I say all the time that eating is annoying. I wish I did not. Crystal Carter: Are you team Huel? Are you somebody who's just about Huel? Carolyn Lyden: No, I don't do Huel, but if I could just consume nutrition via liquid, that would be awesome. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, we're off the rails. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Follow on social media. Put the money in your bank account, everybody. Carolyn Lyden: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Kaching. Mordy Oberstein: All right, so thanks so much again, Carolyn. Make sure you give her a big follow on social media. But now you might be wondering, "What about me? I don't have a salary. What money advice do you have for me? Help me line my pockets." Not to worry friends, we have a special guest to help make sure that your pitch to your clients turns into Benjamins. And if you're in-house, by the way, how to pitch a product to your boss, same kind of thing. Anyway, welcome to the show, Nick Leroy as we move across the funnel frontier. Hey Nick, how's it going? Nick Leroy: Hey, Mordy and Crystal. How are you doing? Mordy Oberstein: Good. You're fresh off an overtime win that you barely pulled out, but- Nick Leroy: Hey, we take all victories that we can get here. It's just like Google SERPs. We don't complain or ask questions, we just take the win. Mordy Oberstein: They asked Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, after one of the games, "How do you rate the offense?" He goes, "W." Nick Leroy: I like it. That's exactly how we're working on the Vikings front is it's not sexy, this is no Patriots offense like that. Patriots of old, I should say. Crystal Carter: For those of you who are tuning in from outside of the United States, they are talking about American football, which is not to be confused with football, which Americans refer to as soccer. And yes, go team. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, sorry about that. I'm rooting for you, Nick. Nick, before we get started, pitch. What do you got? SEO Jobs. SEO for lunch. Nick Leroy Consulting. Nick Leroy: Yeah, I'm working on a whole bunch of things. So real quick, my pitch. Hi, I'm Nick Leroy. I am a freelance SEO consultant. I have been doing this for about five years. Previous to that I had been agency-side. So if you're looking for a fractional director of SEO or just even some advisor work, check me out nickleroy.com or Nick Leroy Consulting is my company. If you want to stay up for some SEO updates, I have a weekly email, SEOforlunch.com. And last but not least, where we're going to chat probably more, is SEOjobs.com. We finally have an alternative to the evil Indeed and LinkedIn job posts. No more are we going to be typing in SEO and getting a JavaScript developer with one little data point that says "SEO a bonus". So check out SEOjobs.com as well. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Love all of it. So you're the right person to tap into. We're talking, "Hey, okay, client came, they asked me to draw something up, I have a pitch. How do you get them to sign the dotted line and open up the wallet?" Nick Leroy: So that's a fantastic question and I'm going to- Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. I thought of it myself. Nick Leroy: Oh no you didn't. We know Crystal force-fed it to you. There's no way you came up with that good of a question. Crystal Carter: It was my idea. Nick Leroy: Exactly. It's all Crystal. So my only asterisk to this is I'm never going to use "it depends" officially, but it's going to be different for every single type of company. Me as an individual consultant, I only need a handful of clients at any point in time. Whereas if you're a mega agency, you're probably signing daily or weekly what I take on for an entire year. So my personal experience when it comes to selling is, and I am going to make salespeople just like shudder in saying this, is I'm almost the anti-sales guy. I'm trying to convince everybody why they shouldn't go with me. Because for me, I am in a unique position where because I can only take on so many clients, making sure that it's a really good fit, they have a really good appetite for buying into SEO is there as well as just the resources. So I'm interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing me. And what it is it's self-preservation. Again, I had mentioned earlier that I had done agency SEO for 10 years prior to going to my own. And I think all of us know what it's like to be handed a client and be like, "Great, they signed last week. Go do SEO." And you're like, "With what?" It's like you just don't see the vision. So I realize that's a very long answer to it, but for me, the biggest headline or H1 as some people would say, is literally interview your clients just as much as they are you because I find that it builds a lot of trust and it shows that what that relationship looks like on day one versus jumping into a conversation simply saying, "Give me, give me, give me." Crystal Carter: When I was working agency-side, we would kind of do this during the audit process. And audit is fairly straightforward, but what we'd find was in the conversations with them, if I was like, "Oh, can I get access to this? Oh, can you share this data with me? Oh, who's the best person to speak to in your team about that?" Like the kinds of information you might need from the team. During that process, really that's when you're seeing what it would be like to work with this person over the long term. And that also, you talked about resources, which is so important when you're talking about what you'll be able to get over the line when you're pitching, like when you're talking to them and they're like, "Oh, we don't have somebody who does that. I've been doing all of that for the whole time." And you're like okay. And then they're like, "Oh, we have another agency that works on that part for us." And it's like okay, that's interesting as well. So when you're trying to pitch what will be relevant for them, taking that time to get to know them well will make a big, big difference. And as you said when you said what resources, you will pitch a different solution for somebody who has in-house implementation teams. Like let's say they have a bunch of marketing executives that can just crack on and you can just give them a list and be like, "Update these pages, change these links, do that." And they're like, "Great, wonderful," and they can crack on. Whereas if it's one person who... If it's like owner-operator or something, you would give them a different thing. You might give them a list of consultants that can help them to do the implementation for instance. But absolutely. Getting to know them should be core to how you're pitching. And the trust part is great as well, because even if you're interviewing for a job, the person that asks the good questions back, that's the person where you're like oh, they were paying attention. Oh, they actually care because they asked good questions. Mordy Oberstein: That's the beauty of the negative marketing thing, right? Sorry. You're building trust like, "Hey, I'm not going to take your money. I'm not going to jump right into this. Let's make sure it's a good fit," actually and counterintuitively in a way builds that trust. So I like that. Nick Leroy: Oh, absolutely. And the thing that's crazy too is the amount of times I've told people like SEO is not going to be a fit for you. It's amazing. You can also make people champions for your brand. All of a sudden they're the ones that are commenting on your posts or sharing your name for other people. And it's simply because you could have taken the easy 1,000, 5,000, $10,000 a month for however long they're willing to let it go to ultimately fail, which doesn't make you look good or them. Or you can kind of win them over as an individual, a super fan if you will, up front, which yes, doesn't always pay the bills, but I have found that typically doing the right thing in that aspect pays dividends tenfold down the line. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. People will know you're a stand-up guy, and they'll also know that when you actually do recommend them, that you genuinely mean it. You're not just saying, "Yeah, yeah, you definitely need to have this brand new thing on your website and stuff. You definitely need to implement this," I don't know, chat box feature or something. "That will help you drive leads, and I'm going to charge you this much for it or something." They'll trust your recommendations and also trust that you're not wasting their time. Because as you said, time is money. For you, you also don't want to be wasting your time with people who maybe it's not the best fit for them, maybe they'll be unhappy because the results won't be what they expect because it's not a good fit for them. Like you said, SEO isn't always the best fit at every business stage. And so if they're unhappy then unhappy clients are stressful clients. Like they're calling you... Right? Nick Leroy: Well, and as cliche as it sounds, Crystal, it's like for me, again, speaking that... You know, I'm working with maybe four or five clients at most, and I'm looking to truly be a partner. And of those clients, I have two of them that have been with me for four years out of the five years I've been freelance now. And that last point you made about a not very stressful engagement. These are the people that I'm riding the roller coasters with, and they are bought in. And it's a lot easier to maintain and keep existing clients happy that are bought in and have resources than it is to turn over new clients that are just going to sit there for six months and then be like, "We don't get SEO. You know, it's snake oil. We're out." Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's really the whole problem with the whole getting them to sign the deal, put their name on the bottom line, whatever it is. That whole question is a faulty premise. I mean it's good for podcasting, it's good for radio, but it's a long process. It's a relationship. It's a whole build. It's a whole lead-up. It's a whole slow burn until you finally land the client. It doesn't happen in one shot with this "sign on the dotted line", which I think again is the problem with the premise of that question is it makes it seem like it's an instantaneous one-time thing, no problem. Nick Leroy: So Mordy and Crystal real quick, you'll appreciate this. And I don't actually mean this as a plug, even though it will inadvertently be. But we are in a situation, no surprise to you guys, where there are a lot of really good salespeople that can sell anything they want. And our industry has gotten a little bit muddied because of that. So what I have done is I actually created an advisor services where I have CEOs reaching out to me. And I'll just use, for example, I have one that recently reached out to me and said, "Nick, I just inherited this team, this company. I'm the brand new CEO. I'm paying $18,000 a month for SEO agency services, but I have no clue what the heck they're doing and I just genuinely don't engage well with them. And we have nobody internally now that can basically gauge whether we're getting the value or not." So my service is I'm coming in and being an advisor. And the first thing I did to build trust is I told the CEO to her face, I was like, "I would love to help you. $18,000 is a big investment, so you should have high expectations, but also realize while there's as much of a chance of me calling these individuals out for maybe not doing as great of work as they could, it may very well be your team is not executing on your part of the agreement." So I was like, "As long as you're okay in a situation for me to say your kid is ugly, you have to allow for that." And I've always kind of pitched it as almost like an insurance policy. I hate that it has to exist, but this is where we are in our industry, is people are able to sell dreams and then they try to execute with checkbox SEO, which does not work today like it did five years ago. So now I am trying to keep a fairly low retainer just to be able to come in and be the true advocate or brand champion for SEO, and unfortunately it just means holding other people accountable. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's definitely the case. And again, this goes back to when you're pitching and when you're thinking about how much it's going to cost and how much the lift is on your site, you need to know are they able to do the thing? So if it's an $18,000 retainer or something, if it's the case that every month, let's say... Because sometimes in SEO as an agency, you don't even have access to the CMS. You're making recommendations, you're looking at documentation, you're looking at all that sort of stuff, you're making recommendations, but sometimes they don't implement. And sometimes they need the dev to implement or sometimes you need the team to implement. So if you have the case where this person's like, "Oh, the SEO team is not doing any good," like you said, if they're also not implementing, then when you're pitching in terms of the bottom line for them and whether or not the ROI is there, you also need to understand whether or not they're willing to invest on their side as well. So, so, so important. And I've definitely seen that. And also sometimes the alignment is incorrect. So sometimes maybe the SEO is going for traffic or downloads or whatever, but maybe the CEO actually wants a different outcome. So sometimes it's just that no one's told the SEO that this is the important thing we need to be driving people towards. Maybe they're just doing their best, and maybe that needs to be moved along as well. So when you're thinking about the pitching and you're thinking about the ROI and how it's going to be valuable, it's definitely good making sure that they align as well. Nick Leroy: Yeah, and it's funny Crystal, because actually right now I have two advising clients, and it's each side of the spectrum. One is just making sure that the agency is doing great work and guiding them, getting the most for what they're being paid. And then the other side, they have an internal SEO team where some of the leadership just maybe don't have the right expectations. So I am being the guy that's just not afraid to speak the truth and tell them what they don't want to hear, but it's really championing that team because they're just going in circles so it just goes back to what you're saying. Mordy Oberstein: That's kind of what I feel it means to be a consultant, right? You're coming in and you're telling them what they need to know that they don't see. Nick Leroy: Exactly. No, and unfortunately it requires having the conversations that are uncomfortable. I mean, the amount of CMOs and CEOs that I've had to say, "Your expectations are completely irrational or for the budgets that you're doing," and it's like just help them contextualize. It's not about being a jerk. It's just you don't know what you don't know. And if someone in a CMO or a CEO role has so many hats that they're wearing, I don't even expect them to know everything about SEO. That's my job to help them understand. Mordy Oberstein: Let's say people don't know where to follow you and they want to know where to follow you. How could they know? Nick Leroy: Yeah, how could they know? They could do a Google search and check me out on Twitter, X, or I just joined Bluesky so- Mordy Oberstein: That's the new hot thing. Bluesky. Nick Leroy: Yeah, exactly. And I'm probably most active on LinkedIn, so definitely follow me there. Nick Leroy SEO on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: They should also join your awesome newsletter, SEO for Lunch. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Come on Nick. Nick Leroy: Yeah, look at that. See, look at that. I'll just have Crystal and Mordy promote me. They do a better job than I do. Mordy Oberstein: Look for Nick out there on social media. Check out SEOjobs.com and SEOforlunch.com and Nick Leroy Consulting. Sorry I'm confusing all your URLs together. Nick Leroy: Thank you guys. I love talking about careers and freelancing and making money and spending money. Who doesn't? So definitely looking forward to chatting with you guys more as well as anybody else in the industry. Mordy Oberstein: Cha-ching. Catch you next time, Nick. Once again, thank you so much, Nick. Make sure you give Nick a big subscribe on SEO for Lunch, check out SEO Jobs and Nick Leroy's own consulting. So much Nick, but check out all of it, please. Crystal Carter: There's some great stuff. He also has a great webinar over on the Wix Partners channel where he talks about lots of the things he was covering about qualifying leads and making sure that clients are ready for that and stuff. So he gets into that in a lot of detail, so highly recommend checking out that deep cut. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. You know who also talks a lot? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry. Barry talks a lot. He's been talking for 21 years. As we're recording this, we're coming right off the 21st anniversary of SEroundtable.com. Barry, that's a lot of talking. A lot of passionate talking from Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: So much, so much. I listened to a podcast with him and the team from Google and they were talking about how he started RustyBrick when he was 14 years old. Little Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: Did he have the goatee back then? Do you think he had the goatee? Crystal Carter: I don't know, but I feel like rust accumulates over time, so maybe he was just a regular brick then. Maybe that was before he became- Mordy Oberstein: He was like a regular brick. Crystal Carter: ... the RustyBrick. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but by the time 20 years from now, he'll become a crusty brick. You know, I once had a fake social account called Crusty Brick. Crystal Carter: That tracks. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I tried to get some engagement on it, but it didn't take, I don't know why. But it's Crusty Brick. Anyway. Crystal Carter: There we go. Bring it back. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Anyway, here's the real RustyBrick with some... Well, it's me covering him with some snappy SEO news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. I got a juicy one for you, but I'm going to make you wait for it. For the not so juicy one, from Search Engine Journal from Matt said the LinkedIn report reveals most in-demand marketing skills. LinkedIn released a whole report. I wouldn't say a whole report. It's not like it's a huge deep dive. It's basically a couple of paragraphs and an infographic, but one of the things they showed was that marketing-related job postings on LinkedIn increased by 76% year over year. Yeah. We're back baby. Okay, next up from Search Engine Roundtable, from the Barry Schwartz, Google Search quality rater guidelines gain 11 new pages. I have not read all 11 new pages, and I highly doubt I will. I will wait for people to summarize them so I can read them. Thank you, Lily Ray. On Thursday the 23rd of January, Google updated the Quality rater guidelines PDF document. Barry says the last time this was updated was back in March of 2024, so that's 10 months ago. Barry did the math. I didn't. So if that math is wrong, blame Barry. What's changed? Barry writes that Google changed the page level quality lowest and low sections, and that was to better line with Google's web policies. We've seen a lot of change in Google's web spam policies. We've seen a lot of changes in the web spam policies over the last year. I'm looking at you, Parasite SEO. Okay. They also expanded on guidance related to assessing minor interpretations and intents and minor changes throughout, Barry says, updated rating ranges, removed outdated examples, fixed typos. Huh? Fixed typos. That's strange. Okay, and last but not least, and here's the doozy. From the Dan D. Goodwin, man of integrity and character. HubSpot's SEO collapse, what went wrong and why? So basically, the SEO community has been abuzz with HubSpot, who was once the gold standard of content, getting crushed, absolutely crushed on the Google SERP. They've lost a ton. I wrote it in a LinkedIn post, they lost all of their search traffic. I meant that hyperbolically, if you read that post, like, "They didn't lose everything, Mordy." They went from 13.5 million organic hits or traffic hits from organic search to 8.6 million. It's a huge drop-off. That data is per Semrush, by the way. Everyone and everyone in SEO are losing their minds about this for various reasons. I don't want to dig into the mudslinging that's going on. I really don't like that. It actually does really bother me personally. I know people are also slinging mud. I wasn't referring to slinging mud at HubSpot. I was referring to other mud slinging, which I don't like. Why would you want to throw mud? It's icky. It's gooey. It's gross. Throw a snowball. Snowballs don't hurt and they're fun. Anywho, there's been a lot of mud slinging also or stone throwing at HubSpot. "This is what they get for doing this and what they get for doing that," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I also don't think that's super mature. You could look at what HubSpot did and learn lessons from it. I don't think people at HubSpot were like, "Yeah, let's ruin the internet with garbage content." I'm not even saying their content was garbage. What I do say, and it ties into my post that I wrote, I'll link to that in the show notes with the show out in the Wix Studio SEO Hub about brand being first and brand being primary, that if you don't have strong brand identity, you might end up kind of all over the place. You might end up not being focused or targeting the right audience, and it might impact the overall quality of your content. I know this is an SEO podcast and saying this is heresy, but if you lead with an SEO-first content strategy, it inevitably leads to a decaying quality, it inevitably leads to a decay in topical focus, and it inevitably... If I say inevitably one more time, I'm going to lose my tongue, inevitably causes you to lose your focus audience. What's happened because, and I think it's kind of the real cause, is that it's worked for so long, companies have to double down that SEO-first content strategy. So I don't blame anybody. I want to say this. I don't know what happened behind the scenes at HubSpot. I don't work for Hub Spot. I have no clue. We're all kind of just speculating. With that, and I'm not talking about HubSpot in this case necessarily, because again, I don't know what happened behind the scenes at Hub Spot. What I do know is this idea of a SEO content-first strategy is slowly decaying. It's something I recently talked about on an SCJ webinar also. You have to have a brand-first strategy and fit the SEO content into that because again, you can't escape this reality of the content quality decay, the content audience decay, the content topical focus decay. It's inevitably what happens. So I urge you to take a different kind of focus because maybe it seems like Google is really catching up here. Also, it would be really nice if Google were to just come out and say, "We're really catching up here," so we don't have to sit here and speculate on the SERP'S Up podcast in the snappy news. Barry's not actually crusty. He comes off as a little crusty, but he's actually not. Crystal Carter: No, he's all right. And he also has a limited amount of time that he likes to engage with folks at conferences. So he came to Brighton SEO San Diego for one day. He was there for one day. He flew in and flew out on the same day from New York to San Diego. Mordy Oberstein: And then he showed up by the next morning on no sleep for It's New. Like me and him recorded It's New, which you should also check out if you're listening to this. It's our daily SEO. Crystal Carter: Yes, do that, do that. Great tips. Mordy Oberstein: And he wasn't crusty about it at all. He was happy. Crystal Carter: No he was happy- Mordy Oberstein: Well, happy by Barry standards. Crystal Carter: He was happy because he was able to go back home. That's why he was happy. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, make sure you check out our It's New series with Barry and Greg Finn Mondays through Thursdays right here on the Wix Studio SEO Hub, and on the RustyBrick YouTube channel, which brings us to our follower of the week, which this week is Zoe Ashbridge, who has been a former guest on this very podcast. Crystal Carter: Yes, Zoe is fantastic. So he has a great TikTok account where she talks about- Mordy Oberstein: What? What's TikTok? Crystal Carter: TikTok. Mordy Oberstein: TikTok. Crystal Carter: Yes. It's a place where they make clocks. No, I'm kidding. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? Crystal Carter: So she has a great TikTok account where she talks about freelancing and her freelance journey, and she talks about money. She talks about money and how you get paid from clients, how you navigate that whole situation. She's really, really frank and really, really clear about it. And cannot shout enough, if you're going on that journey, if you're getting into the freelance space, if you're setting up your own shop, then go and check out Zoe's TikTok account. So follow her on TikTok. That's our follow of the week. I think she might be our first TikTok follow of the week. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I got to make sure to put a TikTok profile in the show notes. I'm going to mess that up. All right. Crystal Carter: I know. Okay. It's fine. Let me see if I can- Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm making a note right now in the show notes, my show notes, not the actual official show notes. Those are not released yet to- Crystal Carter: Yeah, so she's @ZoeFreelanceSEO. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, show notes. Zoe. I got to go to TikTok. Ah, that's going to be difficult for me. Okay. I'll do it for you, Zoe. To be frank, it'll be hard for me. By the way, I never understood that. Is like frank this very direct person who is always like no facade with Frank? He's Frank. You get the real deal from Frank. Why don't you say like, "Yeah, to be Tom," no, but it's to be frank. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. It's also like, "Bear with me." Why do I have to be a bear? And I think the bear with me is spelled bear, B-E-A-R, like I think it is. Mordy Oberstein: Because maybe originally everyone was dressing up in bear suits, like "bear with me", and everyone's dancing in bear suits. Crystal Carter: Maybe. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone bear with me now. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's bear with me like B-E-A-R, and I don't wait for bears. If I see a bear, I'm running. I'm sorry. I'm not waiting. Mordy Oberstein: To be frank, I really need you to bear with me here. I don't want to be Frank, by the way. To be frank, I know some Franks, and the one in my mind that I'm envisioning, I do not want to be Frank. Sorry, Frank. Crystal Carter: The Frank I'm thinking of is Frank Sinatra. He was all right, I think. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know if I want to be Frank Sinatra. I mean, I want to have his fame and fortune. I don't know if I want to actually be him. Does that make sense? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: He was a little rough around the edges, and his liver seemed to have issues. Crystal Carter: Okay. That's- Mordy Oberstein: On that happy note, thanks for listening to this SERP'S Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week as we dive into your inbox with a look at how email marketing impacts SEO in 2025. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and our SEO course at the Wix Studio Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Carolyn Lyden Nick LeRoy Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course Nick LeRoy SEO Consulting SEO For Lunch Newsletter SEO for Jobs How to Successfully Negotiate Your SEO Salary: A Complete Guide k News: LinkedIn Report Reveals Most In-Demand Marketing Skills Google updates search quality raters guidelines with a focus on spam HubSpot’s SEO collapse: What went wrong and why? Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Carolyn Lyden Nick LeRoy Resources: Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter SEO Resource Center Wix Studio SEO Course Nick LeRoy SEO Consulting SEO For Lunch Newsletter SEO for Jobs How to Successfully Negotiate Your SEO Salary: A Complete Guide k News: LinkedIn Report Reveals Most In-Demand Marketing Skills Google updates search quality raters guidelines with a focus on spam HubSpot’s SEO collapse: What went wrong and why? 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 she who is always on the money, our head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello, everybody. I hope that you are securing all of the bags and collecting all of this spondoolie and all of the dough. Mordy Oberstein: What's that sound? I hear like a jangling in your pockets or something as you're... Oh, that's your money. That's your coin. That's your money. I like because the audience has no idea why we're doing this yet. They're like, all right, you guys are talking about money. Crystal Carter: Money. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of money, give us your money. The SERP'S Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also supplement your income by selling your custom apps and widgets inside of the Wix Studio app market. This, as we talk, how to negotiate your salary if you're in the SEO or digital marketing space that you can get top dollar. How to go about ensuring you get what you deserve. Never too late? Can you renegotiate? The end, the idiosyncrasies of salary negotiation in the SEO space. To help us make a withdrawal from the proverbial ATM, Carolyn Lyden will join us in just a bit. It's a two-for this week, by the way, as Nick Leroy hops on to talk about how you can pitch your projects to get the client to sign on the data line and into your bank account. Just in case you're not a salaried employee, or if you're in-house, by the way, we'll talk how to pitch your projects so you might get that raise. And of course, we have the snappies of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So bosses and managers beware. Episode 117 of the SERP'S Up podcast is here to help your employees line their pockets with a little bit of extra dough. Crystal Carter: I was going to say, I think spondoolie is my favorite euphemism for money. I just like spondoolie, just- Mordy Oberstein: That's underused. Crystal Carter: Skrilla. Skrilla is also very good. I like that one as well. Mordy Oberstein: Also underused. Wow. Crystal Carter: Right? Paper. Benjamins, benjies. Hundies, I like this as well. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, so usually we do a little intro like why this topic's important and blah, blah, blah. I feel like we don't need any introductions why this topic's important. It's important so you can pay your bills, which is why Carolyn Lyden is here to help talk about making more money. Hey Carolyn, how are you? Carolyn Lyden: Hi. I'm doing well. How are you? Mordy Oberstein: I'm good. I need some tips. I hope my boss is listening. Carolyn Lyden: Me too. I hope everyone's boss is listening because it's not just the job of the person negotiating, I think. It's also the job of managers to be good managers and advocate for their employees. Crystal Carter: Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: What utopia you living in? Carolyn Lyden: One that I am creating for us all. Mordy Oberstein: Here, employee, take more of my money. Carolyn Lyden: Well, happy employees stay. Mordy Oberstein: That's true. Carolyn Lyden: And perform better. Crystal Carter: Well paid employees stay. Carolyn Lyden: Yes. Crystal Carter: That's something that I think is crazy because you have these situations where people are like, "Oh, I'd like a raise. I'd like a raise. I'd like a raise." And then they get headhunted or they get offered a new job and then suddenly the person's like, "Oh no, we can counteroffer." And you're like, "Where was the money last year when I asked you? How are you suddenly out of pocket now? What's that about?" Carolyn Lyden: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: That's bad vibes too. Carolyn Lyden: It is bad vibes to be like, "Cool. Was I not valuable before someone else wanted me?" Mordy Oberstein: I had that, by the way. I asked at a previous job whom I shall not mention, I asked for a raise and they said no. This is a long time ago. So if people are trying to look at my- Carolyn Lyden: I was going to say, people know where you've worked, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah yeah, you got to go back. And I'm like okay, I'm, I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. And I found another job and they said they're going to pay me this. And then they finally gave me the money, which sucked. It was a lot of work. Carolyn Lyden: Magically popped up out of nowhere. Where did it come from? Who knows? Mordy Oberstein: There was a leprechaun and there was a rainbow and a pot of gold, and- Carolyn Lyden: Someone came across it and they were like, yay. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Carolyn Lyden: I was going to say, this is designated to Mordy, this rainbow pot of gold. Crystal Carter: But this is a topic that you've covered as well for a little while, and you've been fairly outspoken on this. Why did you start talking about this? Why were you like this needs to be said? What made you want to have those conversations? Carolyn Lyden: Yeah, so actually a long time ago in a galaxy far away, I worked at a company called CallRail, and I started essentially their ERG group for women. So I started this women's circle where women could get together to just talk about all the different things that we wanted to talk about from like when people are like, "Oh, how do you do it all? How do you have a job and have kids?" And it's like, "I don't do it all. We're suffering here. Help." But one of the topics when I surveyed the people who joined the group that they really wanted to talk about was salary negotiations. So I just said okay, I'm going to dig in and do all the research and present what I find based on this. And so that's what I did for our first women's circle session when I was at CallRail, and a lot of people were really into it. They were like, "Oh, wow, I didn't know, not only all these statistics, but the fact that if I don't negotiate, I'm sort of starting my entire career behind and losing millions of dollars over my lifetime potentially by not asking for what I'm worth. And also doing the work on the back end, the research to make sure that I am asking correctly or what my market worth is." So hearing that feedback and then taking it to a wider group of women and men and people in the SEO industry, I was like okay, this is something that we're all unspoken about it. We're all just secretly not talking to each other, not our colleagues, not our managers. We're just pretending we know how the system works. I didn't know how the system works, so I was like all right, we need to be talking about this a lot more and putting the information out there for everyone. Crystal Carter: Do you think that people are embarrassed to talk about salaries and money? Do you think that that's why we don't talk about it? Carolyn Lyden: I mean isn't that one of the three things you're not supposed to talk about is money, politics and religion? Because yeah, it's- Mordy Oberstein: Wait, wait, I talk about all three of those things. You're not supposed to talk about those? Carolyn Lyden: I mean, I talk about them too. This is why people don't follow me on... People follow me on Twitter and then immediately unfollow. They're like, wait a second. I thought you talked about SEO. I'm like nope, that's not what you're here for. I love it when people follow me for SEO stuff. Like I can see they have SEO in their tag and I'm like, "You're going to immediately unfollow," which is fine. But yeah, I think it's a taboo topic, but also in America and in probably a bunch of other cultures, we associate our salaries with how much we are worth as individuals. And there's almost a deeper thing to be like I am worth less than you as a human if I make less than you. Or you also see it when you find out, rightfully so, that people at your job, if there is salary transparency, when you find out the one jerk who never works on the projects, who's like the person who's always like, "Hey, can you do this for me?" makes way more than you. And you're like what the heck? I'm working harder, I'm doing more, I'm providing more results than this other person, and I'm worth less than them? So I think there are a lot of interpersonal social issues around it, and I think some companies are doing a good job of laying out the transparency of this and being like, "These are the tiers we have. These are the levels. Here's what is expected at this, you know, tier two." Individual contributors, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or whatever. So there is that transparency to understand what it does take to move up and what's required of you so you're not in one of those positions, but I still think it's something that everybody needs to be advocating for, which is why at the beginning I said managers should be listening too. Mordy Oberstein: Do you think there's any idiosyncrasies about all this in the SEO space or in the digital marketing space? Does it play itself out differently? Is it universal? How does that work? Carolyn Lyden: I think this is an interesting question because it takes me back to 2020 when COVID first happened and everyone was like, "All right, we're trying to figure out our budgets here. Things are changing. I'm not sure if I'm going to have money for the next whatever." So if you're a vendor or someone in SEO or even in digital marketing, where do we pull back? I was a freelancer, I had my own business then, and it was interesting to see who accelerated money into SEO versus who pulled back and what their end results were. And I think it now plays in still too to the salary discussion now. So if your company or your clients can see the value that you're bringing to them, they can see, "Okay, this is where we do need to invest that money." But I think it's almost like a bigger communication issue about our industry to the wider market to display that value. I feel like I'm rambling on about it, but I've noticed that a lot of people don't... If you don't understand how SEO works, then it's hard to see the value in it to then understand why it's important to continue to invest in your employees or your projects and things like that too and improve that investment there. Mordy Oberstein: I wonder if it's getting more difficult because you have all this chatter around the Google results not being great anymore, and Google kind of feels like a little bit of a sinking ship lately just from the optics of everything. And then you have the LLM search engines and like well, those get market share and blah, blah, blah. So it kind of feels like it might be a little bit harder to make that SEO value sell right now, which I wonder if that means maybe broaden your skill set or broaden SEO as a topic a little bit more into the wider digital presence they can offer you. I don't know. Carolyn Lyden: Yeah, I've been talking to a bunch of different people in my organization and outside about expanding their mindset because I think so many people are... We're in it so we know what SEO actually is, but so many people still think it's just putting the keywords on the page. It's 2024, and I still get people who are like, "Will you look at this document and SEO it for me?" And I'm like, "No, you should have talked to me before you even created the document." So I think that so many people still think that's what it is. And I feel like my whole career at many organizations, and this is involving your stakeholders, but zooming out and talking about this is a search ecosystem. We're not talking about Google. We're not talking about ChatGPT search. We're not talking specifically about Bing. We're not talking about anything with a search bar is a search engine sort of thing. We're zooming out and seeing how all of these things work together to optimize our presence in those places or optimize how we show up in those places too. So I think zooming out and having the ecosystem talk, which is kind of an ongoing conversation sort of helps out in that way because yes, I think too many people get zoomed in on... We all have had the people who are like, "Oh, I really love this one keyword, and we were number one and now we're number three, and oh my God, fix it." And you're like, "Okay, cool. When you search this next week, it's going to be different. So stop searching the same words over and over and then telling me when they drop once." So the same conversations we've been having for a long time, but really involving those weird things that are coming in now that we're all just still kind of learning about too. Like I know people that use ChatGPT exclusively. Mordy Oberstein: Really? Carolyn Lyden: And they just have search conversations with it. And it's more because it's a conversation, not just a blop, here's the result, and then researching. It's saying, "Okay, here's what I'm looking for." And then they pop up whatever answers, and then you say, "Okay, we're on the right track, but I need something that's more geared toward automotive industry," or something like that. And, "Okay, cool, that's really helpful, but I need things that are doing XYZ." So being able to have that conversation I think is really interesting. So how can we take those use cases and those models and put it in our bigger search ecosystem? Crystal Carter: But I think also that you've touched on a few things there about the variations in what SEOs do, right? Carolyn Lyden: Correct. Crystal Carter: So you might have somebody who's an SEO lead, and you'll see lots of jobs that are SEO lead, but what an SEO lead does at one place might be completely different to what an SEO lead does at another place. And one of the other things that's tricky as an SEO professional is that a lot of times you're fairly self-taught. Like you can get certifications. We have a great course for instance on the Wix SEO Learning Hub and we talk about technical SEO and keyword research and client management and client engagement. But a lot of the stuff, for instance, like ChatGPT search and new platforms as they emerge, new ways of training, new ways of training on different technology, the SEO for your particular tech stack, those sorts of things, you'll very often need to learn yourself and need to learn how to learn it for yourself. So though you have the SEO lead here and SEO lead there, they might not have the same skillset. How do you find that when you're thinking about salary negotiations and even... I think Nick Leroy's going to talk about pitching, but when you're thinking about salary negotiations, how do you quantify the value of your skillset? So let's say you spent all that time learning the TikTok algorithm, which oh my God, if you've done that, please tell me. But let's say you spent all the time, how do you say, "This is worth this much more on my salary. I now have this skill and it's worth this much more for this business." How do you connect those two things? Carolyn Lyden: I think it's understanding business, looking through the job description, which is sort of where the front end work in job hunting is, and seeing what they're looking for, what they actually need, and seeing how your specific skills apply. I also don't... Sorry, everyone, I don't know anything about TikTok. I signed up for it, and then I logged on and immediately was like I am deleting this app from my phone. So, sorry. Mordy Oberstein: Not to switch directions completely, but because something that's on my mind I wanted to ask you about, because I think it's like the thing that people always get, I think, stuck on is how far can I push it? Because if I push it too far and I'm negotiating, then maybe I'll get a no. Or maybe they'll think that this person's too aggressive, whatever it is, but you also don't want to be walked all over. How do you know and how far can you actually push the envelope when negotiating your salary? Carolyn Lyden: I think that ties in a little bit to what Crystal was saying too. So doing the research, listing out what your... I hate the word soft skills, but the interpersonal skills, the cross communication between departments, listing all that out, seeing the alignment between what you can do, what the job description is, and then doing the research to determine okay, other jobs that are equivalent to this that have these exact skill sets are offering XYZ right now. This is a tangent. I've been seeing so many jobs that are like Senior VP of SEO, it's like 80k. And I'm like, are you freaking kidding me right now? Stop. This is not equivalent unless I guess, I don't know, you can live off of $0 while you're doing a hundred hours of work a week. So that is an example of where it's totally not equivalent, the salary is not equivalent to the job role that they're asking. So doing that research to see what else is out there. Actually, on Nikla Roy's site, I wrote an article about salary negotiation SEO, and this is actually a really good use of ChatGPT. So I did a couple of tests for jobs that had the salary band listed. I took the salary band off and I copied the title and the job description and the skills they required and all that into ChatGPT, and if it was remote or based somewhere, and I said, "What would you assume the salary band for this role is?" And it was pretty spot on to what they were offering. So I wouldn't only use ChatGPT for this, but you can also put in all your skills there and say, "All right, are these one-to-one? Am I going the right direction here or am I going to over-ask for this?" So I think seeing what else is out there using the tools that you have to your advantage to see where you can push a little bit. And honestly, start the conversation with salary expectations. So if you go in and you get the initial interview, you can just say, "Hey, I know this is a great company and you're known for paying really well. I just want to know what the salary band for this position is." So you can start off by knowing okay, they're going to offer me 30k less than I'm getting paid now, so I'm not going to finish this interview. I'm not going to waste my time. It's okay to start with that. Crystal Carter: Sometimes, I see though that the salary bands are huge. Like I've seen sometimes where the salary band is like 50,000 to 175,000 or something like that. And it's like those are two different tax brackets. Like what are we talking about here? So if you see that, I'm not even sure what that even means from that company. Carolyn Lyden: Yeah. So I think one, companies are trying to get around state laws that require them to... In the United States, I think Colorado is one state where you're required if you're going to post a job there to list the salary band. And so they're trying to get around that by being like oh... I saw one the other day that was like 31k to 299k. And I was like okay, this is a joke. It also means there are more people that are going to apply, so they have a larger pool to pull from. And it also means that... So for example, when I previously worked at Oracle, they had like individual contributor and manager level. So there were essentially step levels for things. And the government is similar, the federal government in America. If a role is anywhere from like a step three to a step seven, it could be all the way from 50k for the entry level of a step three all the way to the top level of a step seven, which is why they're sort of having these huge bands. So they're expecting that potentially you could come in at a lower or mid-level skill-wise. Maybe you only have five years of experience in the industry. They could get someone who will be at the top of this role in the next five years, but isn't right now, and they're expecting you to be able to grow into that. Or if they just want someone who's going to take it, hit the ground running, hire someone at the top of the level. That really screws the applicants over because you don't know. So I think it's, again, understanding where your skills fall, what they're asking for. If you look at a job description, and please do not wait until you have 100% of the qualifications to apply. Apply with 50%. There are people out there getting jobs in the current American government that have no experience. So YOLO, no imposter syndrome here, just apply. If you meet a certain set of the criteria, apply, but don't expect to get the top level of the salary band if you don't have all the experience, you haven't used all the technology they use, those sort of things. Mordy Oberstein: So you get in, you're whatever, level three, whatever employee, and I don't even know what that means. And now it's a year later and you feel like okay, fine, I feel like I just acquired 10% more of my skill set this year. How do you renegotiate that? Or can you renegotiate that now? Carolyn Lyden: Yeah, I think you totally can. I think first things first, look at your job description when you started the position and add everything that you now do that is additional into your job description or things that have changed. And then you can do the research to see okay, equivalent jobs that are doing this sort of thing, like I started as an SEO and I was just doing optimizations, but now I'm also doing reporting, now I'm also doing content strategy, now I'm also taking care of some of the technical stuff. You can do research and see what other jobs have these responsibilities, what are they getting paid? What are their titles? Crystal Carter: I had a situation where they hired a bunch of people who were the same job role as me, same pay as me or whatever, and then they had me train all of them and I was like, no. Carolyn Lyden: I had a friend, a very dear friend of mine recently that her company hired somebody. I think they're getting ready to... They were a startup and now they're growing beyond startup phase. And they hired somebody who's now a senior VP of whatever. And she got laid off and they were like, "Oh, before you go, will you tell us how you did everything?" And I was like, "Do not fucking tell them anything." They fired you. You don't have to train them on... Crystal Carter: No. Carolyn Lyden: How that works. I was like, throw up deuces and leave. Crystal Carter: Here's my invoice for my time, my freelance, which is double what you paid me before. Thank you. Carolyn Lyden: Exactly. Mordy Oberstein: Or here's how you do it, but it's all the wrong advice. Carolyn Lyden: I mean, you're more devious than I am. I would just be like, I don't work here anymore, so sayonara suckers. Mordy Oberstein: Speaking of sayonara, before we start to sign off, here's a good pivot, where can people find you to learn more about whatever it is you post about on social media, which is not SEO? Carolyn Lyden: Yeah, I am on Twitter @CarolynLyden. I recently had to start protecting my tweets because random bros were rude. But feel free to follow, and I will approve you if you're not a meanie. And then, I don't know, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I don't do anything on LinkedIn, but... Mordy Oberstein: Did everybody really do anything on LinkedIn other than just post random stuff? Myself included. Crystal Carter: No, everyone's thrilled. People are thrilled on LinkedIn. Mordy Oberstein: I'm thrilled that you're excited and congrats on your new apple pie that you bought. Carolyn Lyden: Oh yes, please. I'm a pumpkin pie person, not apple. Mordy Oberstein: I'm all pie. Carolyn Lyden: I how I feel about hot fruit. You know? Mordy Oberstein: All right. Crystal Carter: Okay. Pecan pie, though. Pecan pie. Mordy Oberstein: Pecan pie, key lime pie, custard pie, pumpkin pie, cherry pie, blueberry pie, pineapple pie. Carolyn Lyden: No, no, no, no, no. Those are hot fruits. Mordy Oberstein: What? Cherry pie? Carolyn Lyden: Cherry pie is hot fruit. Crystal Carter: What about pineapple on pizza? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, obviously with the … Carolyn Lyden: I'm not mad at it. I mean, I would eat it. Crystal Carter: It's hot fruit and tomato and garlic. Carolyn Lyden: Well, that's valid. Crystal Carter: Combination. Carolyn Lyden: Listen, when somebody offered me a piece of pizza once and it had pineapple on it, I wasn't going to say no. Like if Mordy was like, "I baked this apple pie with love in my heart," I wouldn't be like, "Fuck that." I would just eat his apple pie. But I would not make- Mordy Oberstein: Throw it out behind my back. Carolyn Lyden: But if someone was like, "Carolyn, make a pie or make a pizza," I wouldn't do hot fruit on them. I'm not a jerk. I would eat someone else's if they offered it to me. Mordy Oberstein: That's a hot take on the hot fruit thing in pie. Carolyn Lyden: I mean, listen, maybe I am a jerk. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: Well, you clearly have no taste in pie. Carolyn Lyden: No, I don't. That's okay. Mordy Oberstein: All right. Thanks Carolyn Lyden: I mean, of all the desserts, I wouldn't choose pie, but yeah. You're welcome. Happy to talk about pie anytime. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, cheesecake though? Carolyn Lyden: I hope that everyone here gets their slice of the pie. Mordy Oberstein: Wait, before I say goodbye... Oh, that's good. That's good. But you don't put cherries on cheesecake? Carolyn Lyden: No. Crystal Carter: But those cold fruit. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but pie doesn't have to be hot. You wait for the pie of cool down. It's not hot anymore. Carolyn Lyden: But you have to make the fruit hot to make it a pie. Mordy Oberstein: But if you put it in the fridge, it's not hot anymore. It's cold cherries. Carolyn Lyden: But it's mushed. Mordy Oberstein: So the mushing is also a problem now. Carolyn Lyden: Yes. I have texture issues. This is why I say all the time that eating is annoying. I wish I did not. Crystal Carter: Are you team Huel? Are you somebody who's just about Huel? Carolyn Lyden: No, I don't do Huel, but if I could just consume nutrition via liquid, that would be awesome. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, we're off the rails. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Follow on social media. Put the money in your bank account, everybody. Carolyn Lyden: Yeah. Crystal Carter: Kaching. Mordy Oberstein: All right, so thanks so much again, Carolyn. Make sure you give her a big follow on social media. But now you might be wondering, "What about me? I don't have a salary. What money advice do you have for me? Help me line my pockets." Not to worry friends, we have a special guest to help make sure that your pitch to your clients turns into Benjamins. And if you're in-house, by the way, how to pitch a product to your boss, same kind of thing. Anyway, welcome to the show, Nick Leroy as we move across the funnel frontier. Hey Nick, how's it going? Nick Leroy: Hey, Mordy and Crystal. How are you doing? Mordy Oberstein: Good. You're fresh off an overtime win that you barely pulled out, but- Nick Leroy: Hey, we take all victories that we can get here. It's just like Google SERPs. We don't complain or ask questions, we just take the win. Mordy Oberstein: They asked Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, after one of the games, "How do you rate the offense?" He goes, "W." Nick Leroy: I like it. That's exactly how we're working on the Vikings front is it's not sexy, this is no Patriots offense like that. Patriots of old, I should say. Crystal Carter: For those of you who are tuning in from outside of the United States, they are talking about American football, which is not to be confused with football, which Americans refer to as soccer. And yes, go team. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, sorry about that. I'm rooting for you, Nick. Nick, before we get started, pitch. What do you got? SEO Jobs. SEO for lunch. Nick Leroy Consulting. Nick Leroy: Yeah, I'm working on a whole bunch of things. So real quick, my pitch. Hi, I'm Nick Leroy. I am a freelance SEO consultant. I have been doing this for about five years. Previous to that I had been agency-side. So if you're looking for a fractional director of SEO or just even some advisor work, check me out nickleroy.com or Nick Leroy Consulting is my company. If you want to stay up for some SEO updates, I have a weekly email, SEOforlunch.com. And last but not least, where we're going to chat probably more, is SEOjobs.com. We finally have an alternative to the evil Indeed and LinkedIn job posts. No more are we going to be typing in SEO and getting a JavaScript developer with one little data point that says "SEO a bonus". So check out SEOjobs.com as well. Mordy Oberstein: Nice. Love all of it. So you're the right person to tap into. We're talking, "Hey, okay, client came, they asked me to draw something up, I have a pitch. How do you get them to sign the dotted line and open up the wallet?" Nick Leroy: So that's a fantastic question and I'm going to- Mordy Oberstein: Thank you. I thought of it myself. Nick Leroy: Oh no you didn't. We know Crystal force-fed it to you. There's no way you came up with that good of a question. Crystal Carter: It was my idea. Nick Leroy: Exactly. It's all Crystal. So my only asterisk to this is I'm never going to use "it depends" officially, but it's going to be different for every single type of company. Me as an individual consultant, I only need a handful of clients at any point in time. Whereas if you're a mega agency, you're probably signing daily or weekly what I take on for an entire year. So my personal experience when it comes to selling is, and I am going to make salespeople just like shudder in saying this, is I'm almost the anti-sales guy. I'm trying to convince everybody why they shouldn't go with me. Because for me, I am in a unique position where because I can only take on so many clients, making sure that it's a really good fit, they have a really good appetite for buying into SEO is there as well as just the resources. So I'm interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing me. And what it is it's self-preservation. Again, I had mentioned earlier that I had done agency SEO for 10 years prior to going to my own. And I think all of us know what it's like to be handed a client and be like, "Great, they signed last week. Go do SEO." And you're like, "With what?" It's like you just don't see the vision. So I realize that's a very long answer to it, but for me, the biggest headline or H1 as some people would say, is literally interview your clients just as much as they are you because I find that it builds a lot of trust and it shows that what that relationship looks like on day one versus jumping into a conversation simply saying, "Give me, give me, give me." Crystal Carter: When I was working agency-side, we would kind of do this during the audit process. And audit is fairly straightforward, but what we'd find was in the conversations with them, if I was like, "Oh, can I get access to this? Oh, can you share this data with me? Oh, who's the best person to speak to in your team about that?" Like the kinds of information you might need from the team. During that process, really that's when you're seeing what it would be like to work with this person over the long term. And that also, you talked about resources, which is so important when you're talking about what you'll be able to get over the line when you're pitching, like when you're talking to them and they're like, "Oh, we don't have somebody who does that. I've been doing all of that for the whole time." And you're like okay. And then they're like, "Oh, we have another agency that works on that part for us." And it's like okay, that's interesting as well. So when you're trying to pitch what will be relevant for them, taking that time to get to know them well will make a big, big difference. And as you said when you said what resources, you will pitch a different solution for somebody who has in-house implementation teams. Like let's say they have a bunch of marketing executives that can just crack on and you can just give them a list and be like, "Update these pages, change these links, do that." And they're like, "Great, wonderful," and they can crack on. Whereas if it's one person who... If it's like owner-operator or something, you would give them a different thing. You might give them a list of consultants that can help them to do the implementation for instance. But absolutely. Getting to know them should be core to how you're pitching. And the trust part is great as well, because even if you're interviewing for a job, the person that asks the good questions back, that's the person where you're like oh, they were paying attention. Oh, they actually care because they asked good questions. Mordy Oberstein: That's the beauty of the negative marketing thing, right? Sorry. You're building trust like, "Hey, I'm not going to take your money. I'm not going to jump right into this. Let's make sure it's a good fit," actually and counterintuitively in a way builds that trust. So I like that. Nick Leroy: Oh, absolutely. And the thing that's crazy too is the amount of times I've told people like SEO is not going to be a fit for you. It's amazing. You can also make people champions for your brand. All of a sudden they're the ones that are commenting on your posts or sharing your name for other people. And it's simply because you could have taken the easy 1,000, 5,000, $10,000 a month for however long they're willing to let it go to ultimately fail, which doesn't make you look good or them. Or you can kind of win them over as an individual, a super fan if you will, up front, which yes, doesn't always pay the bills, but I have found that typically doing the right thing in that aspect pays dividends tenfold down the line. Crystal Carter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. People will know you're a stand-up guy, and they'll also know that when you actually do recommend them, that you genuinely mean it. You're not just saying, "Yeah, yeah, you definitely need to have this brand new thing on your website and stuff. You definitely need to implement this," I don't know, chat box feature or something. "That will help you drive leads, and I'm going to charge you this much for it or something." They'll trust your recommendations and also trust that you're not wasting their time. Because as you said, time is money. For you, you also don't want to be wasting your time with people who maybe it's not the best fit for them, maybe they'll be unhappy because the results won't be what they expect because it's not a good fit for them. Like you said, SEO isn't always the best fit at every business stage. And so if they're unhappy then unhappy clients are stressful clients. Like they're calling you... Right? Nick Leroy: Well, and as cliche as it sounds, Crystal, it's like for me, again, speaking that... You know, I'm working with maybe four or five clients at most, and I'm looking to truly be a partner. And of those clients, I have two of them that have been with me for four years out of the five years I've been freelance now. And that last point you made about a not very stressful engagement. These are the people that I'm riding the roller coasters with, and they are bought in. And it's a lot easier to maintain and keep existing clients happy that are bought in and have resources than it is to turn over new clients that are just going to sit there for six months and then be like, "We don't get SEO. You know, it's snake oil. We're out." Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's really the whole problem with the whole getting them to sign the deal, put their name on the bottom line, whatever it is. That whole question is a faulty premise. I mean it's good for podcasting, it's good for radio, but it's a long process. It's a relationship. It's a whole build. It's a whole lead-up. It's a whole slow burn until you finally land the client. It doesn't happen in one shot with this "sign on the dotted line", which I think again is the problem with the premise of that question is it makes it seem like it's an instantaneous one-time thing, no problem. Nick Leroy: So Mordy and Crystal real quick, you'll appreciate this. And I don't actually mean this as a plug, even though it will inadvertently be. But we are in a situation, no surprise to you guys, where there are a lot of really good salespeople that can sell anything they want. And our industry has gotten a little bit muddied because of that. So what I have done is I actually created an advisor services where I have CEOs reaching out to me. And I'll just use, for example, I have one that recently reached out to me and said, "Nick, I just inherited this team, this company. I'm the brand new CEO. I'm paying $18,000 a month for SEO agency services, but I have no clue what the heck they're doing and I just genuinely don't engage well with them. And we have nobody internally now that can basically gauge whether we're getting the value or not." So my service is I'm coming in and being an advisor. And the first thing I did to build trust is I told the CEO to her face, I was like, "I would love to help you. $18,000 is a big investment, so you should have high expectations, but also realize while there's as much of a chance of me calling these individuals out for maybe not doing as great of work as they could, it may very well be your team is not executing on your part of the agreement." So I was like, "As long as you're okay in a situation for me to say your kid is ugly, you have to allow for that." And I've always kind of pitched it as almost like an insurance policy. I hate that it has to exist, but this is where we are in our industry, is people are able to sell dreams and then they try to execute with checkbox SEO, which does not work today like it did five years ago. So now I am trying to keep a fairly low retainer just to be able to come in and be the true advocate or brand champion for SEO, and unfortunately it just means holding other people accountable. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's definitely the case. And again, this goes back to when you're pitching and when you're thinking about how much it's going to cost and how much the lift is on your site, you need to know are they able to do the thing? So if it's an $18,000 retainer or something, if it's the case that every month, let's say... Because sometimes in SEO as an agency, you don't even have access to the CMS. You're making recommendations, you're looking at documentation, you're looking at all that sort of stuff, you're making recommendations, but sometimes they don't implement. And sometimes they need the dev to implement or sometimes you need the team to implement. So if you have the case where this person's like, "Oh, the SEO team is not doing any good," like you said, if they're also not implementing, then when you're pitching in terms of the bottom line for them and whether or not the ROI is there, you also need to understand whether or not they're willing to invest on their side as well. So, so, so important. And I've definitely seen that. And also sometimes the alignment is incorrect. So sometimes maybe the SEO is going for traffic or downloads or whatever, but maybe the CEO actually wants a different outcome. So sometimes it's just that no one's told the SEO that this is the important thing we need to be driving people towards. Maybe they're just doing their best, and maybe that needs to be moved along as well. So when you're thinking about the pitching and you're thinking about the ROI and how it's going to be valuable, it's definitely good making sure that they align as well. Nick Leroy: Yeah, and it's funny Crystal, because actually right now I have two advising clients, and it's each side of the spectrum. One is just making sure that the agency is doing great work and guiding them, getting the most for what they're being paid. And then the other side, they have an internal SEO team where some of the leadership just maybe don't have the right expectations. So I am being the guy that's just not afraid to speak the truth and tell them what they don't want to hear, but it's really championing that team because they're just going in circles so it just goes back to what you're saying. Mordy Oberstein: That's kind of what I feel it means to be a consultant, right? You're coming in and you're telling them what they need to know that they don't see. Nick Leroy: Exactly. No, and unfortunately it requires having the conversations that are uncomfortable. I mean, the amount of CMOs and CEOs that I've had to say, "Your expectations are completely irrational or for the budgets that you're doing," and it's like just help them contextualize. It's not about being a jerk. It's just you don't know what you don't know. And if someone in a CMO or a CEO role has so many hats that they're wearing, I don't even expect them to know everything about SEO. That's my job to help them understand. Mordy Oberstein: Let's say people don't know where to follow you and they want to know where to follow you. How could they know? Nick Leroy: Yeah, how could they know? They could do a Google search and check me out on Twitter, X, or I just joined Bluesky so- Mordy Oberstein: That's the new hot thing. Bluesky. Nick Leroy: Yeah, exactly. And I'm probably most active on LinkedIn, so definitely follow me there. Nick Leroy SEO on LinkedIn. Crystal Carter: They should also join your awesome newsletter, SEO for Lunch. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Come on Nick. Nick Leroy: Yeah, look at that. See, look at that. I'll just have Crystal and Mordy promote me. They do a better job than I do. Mordy Oberstein: Look for Nick out there on social media. Check out SEOjobs.com and SEOforlunch.com and Nick Leroy Consulting. Sorry I'm confusing all your URLs together. Nick Leroy: Thank you guys. I love talking about careers and freelancing and making money and spending money. Who doesn't? So definitely looking forward to chatting with you guys more as well as anybody else in the industry. Mordy Oberstein: Cha-ching. Catch you next time, Nick. Once again, thank you so much, Nick. Make sure you give Nick a big subscribe on SEO for Lunch, check out SEO Jobs and Nick Leroy's own consulting. So much Nick, but check out all of it, please. Crystal Carter: There's some great stuff. He also has a great webinar over on the Wix Partners channel where he talks about lots of the things he was covering about qualifying leads and making sure that clients are ready for that and stuff. So he gets into that in a lot of detail, so highly recommend checking out that deep cut. Mordy Oberstein: Absolutely. You know who also talks a lot? Crystal Carter: Who's that? Mordy Oberstein: Barry. Barry talks a lot. He's been talking for 21 years. As we're recording this, we're coming right off the 21st anniversary of SEroundtable.com. Barry, that's a lot of talking. A lot of passionate talking from Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: So much, so much. I listened to a podcast with him and the team from Google and they were talking about how he started RustyBrick when he was 14 years old. Little Barry Schwartz. Mordy Oberstein: Did he have the goatee back then? Do you think he had the goatee? Crystal Carter: I don't know, but I feel like rust accumulates over time, so maybe he was just a regular brick then. Maybe that was before he became- Mordy Oberstein: He was like a regular brick. Crystal Carter: ... the RustyBrick. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, but by the time 20 years from now, he'll become a crusty brick. You know, I once had a fake social account called Crusty Brick. Crystal Carter: That tracks. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I tried to get some engagement on it, but it didn't take, I don't know why. But it's Crusty Brick. Anyway. Crystal Carter: There we go. Bring it back. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Anyway, here's the real RustyBrick with some... Well, it's me covering him with some snappy SEO news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. I got a juicy one for you, but I'm going to make you wait for it. For the not so juicy one, from Search Engine Journal from Matt said the LinkedIn report reveals most in-demand marketing skills. LinkedIn released a whole report. I wouldn't say a whole report. It's not like it's a huge deep dive. It's basically a couple of paragraphs and an infographic, but one of the things they showed was that marketing-related job postings on LinkedIn increased by 76% year over year. Yeah. We're back baby. Okay, next up from Search Engine Roundtable, from the Barry Schwartz, Google Search quality rater guidelines gain 11 new pages. I have not read all 11 new pages, and I highly doubt I will. I will wait for people to summarize them so I can read them. Thank you, Lily Ray. On Thursday the 23rd of January, Google updated the Quality rater guidelines PDF document. Barry says the last time this was updated was back in March of 2024, so that's 10 months ago. Barry did the math. I didn't. So if that math is wrong, blame Barry. What's changed? Barry writes that Google changed the page level quality lowest and low sections, and that was to better line with Google's web policies. We've seen a lot of change in Google's web spam policies. We've seen a lot of changes in the web spam policies over the last year. I'm looking at you, Parasite SEO. Okay. They also expanded on guidance related to assessing minor interpretations and intents and minor changes throughout, Barry says, updated rating ranges, removed outdated examples, fixed typos. Huh? Fixed typos. That's strange. Okay, and last but not least, and here's the doozy. From the Dan D. Goodwin, man of integrity and character. HubSpot's SEO collapse, what went wrong and why? So basically, the SEO community has been abuzz with HubSpot, who was once the gold standard of content, getting crushed, absolutely crushed on the Google SERP. They've lost a ton. I wrote it in a LinkedIn post, they lost all of their search traffic. I meant that hyperbolically, if you read that post, like, "They didn't lose everything, Mordy." They went from 13.5 million organic hits or traffic hits from organic search to 8.6 million. It's a huge drop-off. That data is per Semrush, by the way. Everyone and everyone in SEO are losing their minds about this for various reasons. I don't want to dig into the mudslinging that's going on. I really don't like that. It actually does really bother me personally. I know people are also slinging mud. I wasn't referring to slinging mud at HubSpot. I was referring to other mud slinging, which I don't like. Why would you want to throw mud? It's icky. It's gooey. It's gross. Throw a snowball. Snowballs don't hurt and they're fun. Anywho, there's been a lot of mud slinging also or stone throwing at HubSpot. "This is what they get for doing this and what they get for doing that," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I also don't think that's super mature. You could look at what HubSpot did and learn lessons from it. I don't think people at HubSpot were like, "Yeah, let's ruin the internet with garbage content." I'm not even saying their content was garbage. What I do say, and it ties into my post that I wrote, I'll link to that in the show notes with the show out in the Wix Studio SEO Hub about brand being first and brand being primary, that if you don't have strong brand identity, you might end up kind of all over the place. You might end up not being focused or targeting the right audience, and it might impact the overall quality of your content. I know this is an SEO podcast and saying this is heresy, but if you lead with an SEO-first content strategy, it inevitably leads to a decaying quality, it inevitably leads to a decay in topical focus, and it inevitably... If I say inevitably one more time, I'm going to lose my tongue, inevitably causes you to lose your focus audience. What's happened because, and I think it's kind of the real cause, is that it's worked for so long, companies have to double down that SEO-first content strategy. So I don't blame anybody. I want to say this. I don't know what happened behind the scenes at HubSpot. I don't work for Hub Spot. I have no clue. We're all kind of just speculating. With that, and I'm not talking about HubSpot in this case necessarily, because again, I don't know what happened behind the scenes at Hub Spot. What I do know is this idea of a SEO content-first strategy is slowly decaying. It's something I recently talked about on an SCJ webinar also. You have to have a brand-first strategy and fit the SEO content into that because again, you can't escape this reality of the content quality decay, the content audience decay, the content topical focus decay. It's inevitably what happens. So I urge you to take a different kind of focus because maybe it seems like Google is really catching up here. Also, it would be really nice if Google were to just come out and say, "We're really catching up here," so we don't have to sit here and speculate on the SERP'S Up podcast in the snappy news. Barry's not actually crusty. He comes off as a little crusty, but he's actually not. Crystal Carter: No, he's all right. And he also has a limited amount of time that he likes to engage with folks at conferences. So he came to Brighton SEO San Diego for one day. He was there for one day. He flew in and flew out on the same day from New York to San Diego. Mordy Oberstein: And then he showed up by the next morning on no sleep for It's New. Like me and him recorded It's New, which you should also check out if you're listening to this. It's our daily SEO. Crystal Carter: Yes, do that, do that. Great tips. Mordy Oberstein: And he wasn't crusty about it at all. He was happy. Crystal Carter: No he was happy- Mordy Oberstein: Well, happy by Barry standards. Crystal Carter: He was happy because he was able to go back home. That's why he was happy. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, make sure you check out our It's New series with Barry and Greg Finn Mondays through Thursdays right here on the Wix Studio SEO Hub, and on the RustyBrick YouTube channel, which brings us to our follower of the week, which this week is Zoe Ashbridge, who has been a former guest on this very podcast. Crystal Carter: Yes, Zoe is fantastic. So he has a great TikTok account where she talks about- Mordy Oberstein: What? What's TikTok? Crystal Carter: TikTok. Mordy Oberstein: TikTok. Crystal Carter: Yes. It's a place where they make clocks. No, I'm kidding. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, really? Crystal Carter: So she has a great TikTok account where she talks about freelancing and her freelance journey, and she talks about money. She talks about money and how you get paid from clients, how you navigate that whole situation. She's really, really frank and really, really clear about it. And cannot shout enough, if you're going on that journey, if you're getting into the freelance space, if you're setting up your own shop, then go and check out Zoe's TikTok account. So follow her on TikTok. That's our follow of the week. I think she might be our first TikTok follow of the week. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I got to make sure to put a TikTok profile in the show notes. I'm going to mess that up. All right. Crystal Carter: I know. Okay. It's fine. Let me see if I can- Mordy Oberstein: No, I'm making a note right now in the show notes, my show notes, not the actual official show notes. Those are not released yet to- Crystal Carter: Yeah, so she's @ZoeFreelanceSEO. Mordy Oberstein: Okay, show notes. Zoe. I got to go to TikTok. Ah, that's going to be difficult for me. Okay. I'll do it for you, Zoe. To be frank, it'll be hard for me. By the way, I never understood that. Is like frank this very direct person who is always like no facade with Frank? He's Frank. You get the real deal from Frank. Why don't you say like, "Yeah, to be Tom," no, but it's to be frank. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. It's also like, "Bear with me." Why do I have to be a bear? And I think the bear with me is spelled bear, B-E-A-R, like I think it is. Mordy Oberstein: Because maybe originally everyone was dressing up in bear suits, like "bear with me", and everyone's dancing in bear suits. Crystal Carter: Maybe. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone bear with me now. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's bear with me like B-E-A-R, and I don't wait for bears. If I see a bear, I'm running. I'm sorry. I'm not waiting. Mordy Oberstein: To be frank, I really need you to bear with me here. I don't want to be Frank, by the way. To be frank, I know some Franks, and the one in my mind that I'm envisioning, I do not want to be Frank. Sorry, Frank. Crystal Carter: The Frank I'm thinking of is Frank Sinatra. He was all right, I think. Mordy Oberstein: I don't know if I want to be Frank Sinatra. I mean, I want to have his fame and fortune. I don't know if I want to actually be him. Does that make sense? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: He was a little rough around the edges, and his liver seemed to have issues. Crystal Carter: Okay. That's- Mordy Oberstein: On that happy note, thanks for listening to this SERP'S Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week as we dive into your inbox with a look at how email marketing impacts SEO in 2025. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and our SEO course at the Wix Studio Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. 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