SEO agency migrates to Wix for major improvement in CWV “Wix is the fastest loading CMS I've ever seen. I can't even fathom going back to WordPress. Why would you put yourself through that agony when there’s a platform that's better and cheaper, and does everything you could want it to and more?” 0% Loss in traffic during site migration 100% Good URLs after moving to Wix 264K Organic traffic over 12 months When Barry Adams moved his website from WordPress to Wix, he steeled himself for the loss in website traffic that typically occurs in a site migration. It’s safe to say he wasn’t prepared for his website’s rankings to improve overnight. The business Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Polemic Digital is an award-winning SEO agency for news publishers. It was founded in 2014 by Barry Adams, an influential search marketer who has been a pioneer in the SEO space since he first began practicing in 1998. Today, Polemic Digital is the agency of choice for the world’s top media brands, having previously worked with the likes of The New York Times, Fox News, and The Guardian. In 2018, Polemic Digital’s work for News UK was recognised as the Best SEO Campaign at the DANI Awards. Barry Adams, Founder of Polemic Digital The SEO challenge Barry was getting frustrated with Polemic Digital’s website: constant maintenance, sluggish load times, and a cumbersome UI were all taking up far too much of his time and energy. “I finally decided I was fed up with WordPress—the plugin bloat, the new interface with the Gutenberg Press, the WYSIWYG editor—everything just got painful,” he recalls. “And I'm a technology guy, so I don't mind playing around under the hood, fiddling with knobs and buttons and tweaking here and there.” Barry also noticed that his website images would come out subpar. “I tried to minimize it as much as possible, but then you need plugins to do things like smash images and strip out your CSS, and all of that was just excruciating.” The solution Barry had seen other businesses move to Wix and found himself admiring how bespoke the builds looked. What finally clinched the decision for him was the lightning-fast speed that Wix promised. With that, Barry decided to take his “blinkers off” and move to a platform that would help his SEO, rather than hinder it. To take care of the move, Barry enlisted the help of Optix Solutions , a digital marketing agency based in the UK. In a very smooth process, they rebuilt his website on Wix and migrated all his pages over. Barry took this opportunity to clean up his website content, removing old blog posts and editing the categories in his SEO services. Soon it was time to flip the switch on his new Wix website. “That’s always the most daunting part of any site migration,” Barry admits. “I’ve done a lot of them in my time, and whenever you change URLs, Google has to basically rely on your website. Even with 301 redirects, you tend to lose traffic along the way.” The results Despite the fact that Barry cleared out his website content and changed URLs, his new Wix website experienced zero loss in traffic. In fact, his rankings actually improved because his website got significantly faster. The only metric in Google Search Console which indicated that Barry’s website had migrated, was that his Core Web Vitals went from orange and red to entirely green, literally from one day to the next. Polemic Digital’s Google Search Console displaying an improvement in good URLs after moving to Wix “It was an absolute eye opener,” Barry says. “I’ve never had a site migration where the only indicator was that the site got better. There's always a cost, there's always a moment of pain. Except with Wix, there wasn’t any. My theory is that I probably lost a little bit of link value, but the insane improvement in Core Web Vitals perfectly balanced it out.” Barry is also hugely impressed with the suite of advanced SEO tools that Wix provides. In particular, he loves the level of flexibility they offer SEOs, as they have the option to rely on best-in-class defaults or customize every detail. “Wix has everything you could ever need in terms of SEO functionality,” Barry says. “It can hold your hand along the way, or you can tweak every single setting yourself. If you want auto-generated titles great, a few clicks and off you go. If you want to manually craft titles on a page level, you can do that too. For a more advanced user, there's nothing holding you back from taking complete control over your sites’ SEO.” Learn more about Wix’s advanced SEO features and explore our SEO Learning Hub for the latest insights from industry experts. 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

Menachem Ani, founder of JXT Group, is a digital marketing veteran with 20+ years of experience. He's a leading expert in Google Ads and uses a forward-thinking approach to help businesses grow. Menachem Ani Founder of JXT Group Menachem Ani, founder of JXT Group, is a digital marketing veteran with 20+ years of experience. He's a leading expert in Google Ads and uses a forward-thinking approach to help businesses grow. Articles & Resources 2 Sept 2024 On-page optimization for lead generation: Bolster your copy, design, and UX for better leads 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

Are search engines as relevant today as they once were? People’s expectations around search engines are changing. With a shift of focus on social search, is the way Google and other search engines go about serving results due for an upgrade? Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein dive into how search needs have evolved and how traditional search engines may need to adapt in order to stay relevant. Janet Machuka takes our guest slot to talk about how social media and search engines can work hand-in-hand for organic success. It’s episode 23 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast all about the relevancy of search engines in a social media centered world. Back Do search engines matter as much as they used to? Are search engines as relevant today as they once were? People’s expectations around search engines are changing. With a shift of focus on social search, is the way Google and other search engines go about serving results due for an upgrade? Wix’s own Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein dive into how search needs have evolved and how traditional search engines may need to adapt in order to stay relevant. Janet Machuka takes our guest slot to talk about how social media and search engines can work hand-in-hand for organic success. It’s episode 23 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast all about the relevancy of search engines in a social media centered world. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 23 | February 1, 2023 | 35 MIN 00:00 / 35:19 This week’s guests Janet Machuka Janet Machuka is a leading authority on helping businesses through their digital transformation of sales and marketing through consulting, training, and helping enterprises large and small develop and execute on various digital marketing platforms. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Cerps Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the Cerps Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm a very congested, head of SEO branding here at Wicks. My name is Mordy Oberstein and I'm joined by the very not congested, very awesome, very stupendous, very amazing head of SEO communications here at Wicks, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everybody. Hello all internet people. I'm in a good mood. I'm not congested, that's right, because I've been listening to my classic RnB all morning. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, is that what I should be doing for my cold? I didn't just listen to... Forget the medicine. Crystal Carter: Get yourself some nice like Toni Braxton or some nice Anita Baker and a cup of tea and just chill out. Honestly, it's vibes. How can you feel upset when- Mordy Oberstein: I feel my sinuses already clearing up. Crystal Carter: Just let it flow. Mordy Oberstein: I recovered listening to Bob Dylan because I feel like Bob Dylan. I feel amazely. Crystal Carter: How many tissues does a man need to use? I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: A lot. I'm not going there. A lot. The Cerps Up podcast is brought to you by Wicks, where you can instantly connect your site to Google Cert Console and automatically have your site map submitted automatically, and your homepage index instantly by the great Google in the sky. Why am I telling you this? One, because it's awesome, but also because this is talking about you submitting your site to search engines, and today we're talking about search engines. Huh? And if they still matter or not. Do they still matter? Will they continue to matter? Pum, pum, pum, pum. Crystal Carter: Is SEO dead? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, but search engines might be. Crystal Carter: What? Are search engine dead? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. We're going to find out, because on this episode we're talking about the potential evolution of search engines. Are we on the precipice? Will social come to replace search? Is Chat GPT a search engine killer. 10 blue links a thing of the past? Lion, tigers and bears, and bing. Oh my. Get it? I said bing. Not Bing. Lions, tigers and bing. Oh my. Plus Janet Machuka stops by to share how social can impact search, even if social doesn't end up replacing search. And we'll dive into all of the different search engines and how they handle queries in different ways. And as always, we have the Snappy News and who you should be following on social. Ready, set search, episode 23 of the Cerps Up podcast is here. So search engines. Crystal Carter: Search engines. Mordy Oberstein: For years you've been using them, you've been relying on them to access information. They're old, not new. We all get that. I feel in every episode we have to have a Barry Schwartz Easter egg. Crystal Carter: And I'm going to put on my Barry Schwartz merch slippers as well. Mordy Oberstein: Oh shoot, forgot my Barry Schwartz slippers. So search engines are old but not new, we all understand this. We all understand search engines have changed over times while the ones that have survived, RIP Alta Vista, Google isn't using just 10 blue links anymore. There's not the 10 old, plain old organic results. There's all sorts of, I'm officially calling them do hickeys. We spoke about search features, boxes that give you answers without URLs, boxes that gives you answers with URLs. Video results, images, filters. Search engines have obviously evolved. But have we evolved past search engines? Yes, with questions like that, I do wear jackets with leather patches because I'm all philosophical. I do. By the way, I have a jacket with leather patches. When I became a teacher, that's the first thing I did. I bought a jacket, leather patches. Crystal Carter: Did you stand on the desk and say, oh captain, my captain? Mordy Oberstein: No, I did stand on a desk one time, but I was yelling other things. We as an internet, have we gotten to the point where the traditional search engine doesn't meet or satisfy our needs anymore? Do we not want a list of results? Do we not even want answers from search engines anymore? Perhaps we want, I don't know, to move to social for our answers. It's not crazy, by the way, the young kids, they all like going to social. My kids, they go to the YouTube for answers and YouTubers for answers. They don't go to Google. Check that out. I am disappointed in them, by the way. Mr. Beast is not a replacement for Google, but I'm a curmudgeon, I get this. In other words, do we not want to a list of results? Do we instead want the ability to dive deeper into things or take up multiple aspects of a topic? Not only that, does emerging tech like Chat GPT mean that we want a more interactive and dynamic environment that search engines don't provide? Whether it's user expectations or emerging tech, there's a lot to say whether we're at a crossroads what it comes to search engines, and that perhaps the practical definition of a search engine is about to change. Crystal, what are your thoughts? Crystal Carter: I think that part of the reason why search engines have changed is because the way we search has changed and the kind of information that is useful to us has changed. Also, the kind of information that people can provide to us has changed. So the search features try to keep up with them. Sometimes when I'm searching for information, sometimes I find that I need multiple inputs, but maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not normal. But sometimes if if I want to know if the pumpkin patch is open and if they still have pumpkins around Halloween or something like that, I could Google it, but that may or may not be accurate. I could go to their Facebook page or something and they'll say whatever they said about the thing. But do you know what I tend to do for that sort of query? If I want to know if something is going on, if something's happening, if I want to know what realtime activity's happening? I'll tend to go to Instagram. I'll go to Instagram and I'll type in that pumpkin patch, where it is. I've literally done this. Then I'll see their most recent posts. And nobody's telling me the information, nobody's written down that they still have pumpkins. But I'll scan through the pictures and I'll go, "There's still a lot of pumpkins, those people look happy, and they just took that picture a half an hour ago. I bet if I go there they'll still have pumpkins." But Google also gives you real time stuff. If I want to know if I'm going to have to have a really long line when I go to the sandwich place, then I can see this place is busy on Google, and that's information that's useful. But I think that if Jeeves, Ask Jeeves back in the day, does anybody remember Jeeves? Good old Jeeves? Mordy Oberstein: I do. Crystal Carter: That was a popular search engine that people used, and now we're asking Chat GPT. I wonder if they'll bring back Jeeves. That would be amazing to bring back Jeeves with AI. If anybody does that, please give me a shout out when you make your millions. But I think that the way that it's changed is because there's so much information now and there's so many people putting information online now, and it needs to be organized in lots of different ways. So some tools will lean into some parts. So for instance, again, Instagram has a now, but their search feature is terrible. But they do have location and they have time. So if that's what you need to know, that's really useful. And I think Google for instance, has lots of information on what things people have published and that sort of thing. Chat GPT is fantastic, but they don't cite their sources in their content. And I never actually asked for the sources and which I might do the next time I try it, but it doesn't cite it's sources. So if you need to dig deeper, you just have to take their word for it, which as somebody who's studied academically, I don't call myself a professor, I don't have leather patches on my jacket. Mordy Oberstein: You don't have leather patches? I'll get you a jacket next time. I already won. Crystal Carter: But with academic rigor, if you've ever studied anything academically, they're like, "Who did you get this information from? Where is this from? Where is the bibliography? What is that from?" So I think that there's lots of different things depending on what you need you might need to get from different search engines, but there'll probably be some point where they converge. Mordy Oberstein: And I think with Chat GPT or GPT3 or AI writers in general, I think what we've done is basically said, you know what? That's going to come in and that's going to kill Google. And I just don't see that. I do think we're going to... I'll get to it. I do think that Google's going to have to change. What Google is now is not what people really want. But I don't think that a AI writer coming in... I think the interactivity is cool. I fully expect there to be some kind of interactivity, if they can move faster, it's still a little bit too slow. But I saw an article about how they're trying to fix that problem in general. They'll figure it out. You definitely do want to have that interactivity as a cool dynamic. I don't think it replaces search. I don't think it can ever replace search. For instance the point that you mentioned, even if it gave me the answer, I want to be able to explore, I want to be able to dive deeper, I want to be able to see multiple vantage points on this topic. And one true answer is not the answer. Crystal Carter: And I think that can be dangerous sometimes depending on what the question is. Either it says there isn't something. And so if you think that this is the definitive source, if you think one search engine is a definitive source, indeed I mean dangerous with a lower case D. But if you think that one search engine is a definitive source, then if it says that, oh no, there isn't an answer for that, then people might stop looking. If it tells you the answer and you go, oh yes, that is absolutely the answer, never in the history of information has that ever been useful. People need multiple perspectives. It's always important. Mordy Oberstein: That's why they're sourcing. It's an academic thing. It's a necessary thing for the nature of information. There has to be sourcing, which is why that's a thing. I think that people, your point about going to multiple sources, is why social is becoming more relevant. And I would say that if a search engine wants to adopt something, it should put access points to more social perspectives on the results page itself. Well you see Google doing that with a Twitter carousel, for example. And it is doing that with TikTok. The more, the better at this point. For certain types of queries, I don’t mean as a universal, because I do want to get information in real time for multiple people and see what's happening out there. I'll give you an example. Recently a new chain opened up here and I wanted to see what exactly are they selling, what kind of products are they selling, and all of the results that Google gave me were for press releases about the new store or articles from news outlets about the store. It didn't give me the information that I want. And where I got the information from? I went to the Google business profile, I took a look at the image that people posted there and looked in the background, what's on the shelves. I'm like, "Oh, they have that. Interesting. I want to go there now." Crystal Carter: Exactly. It's because a picture says a thousand words. Our picture's worth a thousand words. And sometimes these different bits of information can tell you a lot. Mordy Oberstein: People want to see what other people are doing and what's happening, how they're relating to whatever it is and the other thing. Crystal Carter: And TripAdvisor is a great search engine for things. So for instance, on TripAdvisor, if you want to know if a hotel is good, you can go and you can look at the pictures that the hotel puts up, you can also look at the pictures that regular folks have put up with their terrible camera phones and compare that to the reviews and compare that to the information. So you're getting lots of different points of information to make a decision. Mordy Oberstein: Isn't it interesting though, we're talking about, on the one hand, Chat GPT coming into search engine isn't replacing a search engine, which is a very cold... Replacing one cold machine with another cold machine. And on the other hand we're saying that people want to see what other people are saying more. You can't say both of those in the same breath. You can't say, people want the machine giving the answer and people also want to dive in more into social. My kids want to hear information from a person, so that's why they go to YouTube to get information. I think the era of the cold machine is dying. And that's not to say you can't integrate something like Chat GPT into the search engine. But I think a much more... Look, 10 blue links, the idea, and by the way, in my opinion, all results pages are still predicated, they're still fundamentally about 10 blue links, 10 organic results. They're not 10 anymore, whatever, eight or nine or seven, whatever the number is. That is the backbone of the results page. But that's not what I want. I want to see multiple media formats, I want to see multiple layers of information. If I search for this store that opened up, I do want to see the press release, I do want to see what the media outlets are reporting. I also want to see what people are reporting at the same time, I want to see the images at the same time. I want to get all of that all at once, dive into one, come back and go down the next rabbit hole. To me it's all about rabbit holes. I want to be able to go down as many rabbit holes as I possibly can, and the search engine that does that first is where I'm going to go. 10 blue links are dead. Crystal Carter: I think you're absolutely right and I think that we're able to process information a lot more quickly than when that was the day of that, and we were able to filter more quickly. And again, depending on what your search need is, if I want to find reviews, Amazon is absolutely part of my search engine process. Absolutely. Even if I'm not buying from Amazon, I'm checking the reviews on Amazon because they almost always have some. That's always part of it if I'm looking for reviews. If I want to do a deep dive review, if I'm spending out a lot of money on something... Let's say I win the lottery and I decide to buy myself a boat. I know nothing about boats, but I want to be like, "I'm on a boat." So before I'm on my boat, I'm going to go on YouTube. Mordy Oberstein: A rowboat. Crystal Carter: No, I'm not getting a rowboat. When I win the lottery, I'm not getting a rowboat, I'm getting a- Mordy Oberstein: If I win the lottery, I don't want oars. Crystal Carter: No man, I'm not rowing that boat. When I win the lottery, I'm getting a boat with rims. No, I'm kidding. You can't put rims on a boat. I'm going to get a big boat. My boat's going to be amazing. But I know nothing about boats so I'm going to have to watch a lot of YouTube videos about people on boats and in yachts, and looking amazing in Miami or whatever. And so I'm going to have to do all that research. And so for reviews, YouTube is absolutely going to be part of that. That's going to be a big part of that. Maybe TikTok a little bit or something, but probably YouTube because I want to get right into it. And also Google because they're doing well at reviews. So there's going to be certain parts of search where there's going to be certain ways of searching that are going to be better than others. If I was looking for book reviews for instance, I'm probably going to be checking out Good Reads a lot, actually. If I'm looking at film reviews, there's going to be stuff on Google, there's going to be stuff on IMDB, there's going to be stuff on Rotten Tomatoes. You know which ones are the places that you chat, and so they fall into categories when you're thinking about that stuff. But when I've done research on Chat GPT, I always end up going on search engines anyway. It's a good place to start. I think it might replace Wikipedia because I think much of it is summarizing what you get from Wikipedia Mordy Oberstein: Very much so. Crystal Carter: And sometimes in a tidier way. But to be fair, Wikipedia's got a very good search, it's very good on search as well. Mordy Oberstein: But that's what I mean. We're asking, is the age of the search engine dead? I would say, I'm going to qualify it as yes. The search engine as it is, I think people are feeling like, "It's not giving me exactly what I want." Does that mean that search engines as a concept are dead? No. And this is why I think, when the next new thing comes up, "Oh, that's going to replace the search engine." And then something new comes up, "That's going to replace the search engine." Because I think there's a general sense of not feeling satisfied, of wanting something different. And then when that next new thing, that different thing comes along, be like, "Oh, that's it." What I think it is is all of it. It's all of it. It's not, oh, this thing, it's social that's going to replace the search engine. No. Chat GPT it's going to replace a search engine. All of it is going to evolve in a new version of what a search engine is and what it should be. Crystal Carter: And I think it's if an Uber comes along, we're like, "Oh, taxis are over." No, I still get taxis. There's still a place for a taxi or whatever. If you go to a train station, there's always a taxi there, that's really easy, blah, blah, blah. but it explodes, so it's like a decentralization of the concept. So Apple's adding more search around maps and around other things as well. People are creating their own search engines in lots of different ways. So it's more of a diversification of those things. So for instance, when they say taxis aren't over, but there's also Uber, there's also Lyft, there's also Gett, there's also those little scooters that people take. It's become more complex because our needs have become more complex. And people say, "Well, I don't want that one, but I do want this one." And so people have more options for getting more information. And I think what other people forget is that a lot of these search engines will index each other. So Google will pull in search results from Pinterest, will pull in search results from Twitter, they will pull in results from various different things. Thing will pull in some results from certain things. Like Duck Duck Go is powered by Bing, in some countries Bing and Google overlap as well. So sometimes it'll say that it's from one company, but the search engine is actually powered by a different one. So there's a lot of different ways that search engines make sure that they're able to help people find information. Because then we go back to the taxi example, the point is that people want to get from A to B. And that's the same with information. People want to find information, and at the end of the day, people aren't particularly fussed about how they get from A to B, whether it's in a taxi or a bus or a train or whatever. And some people will have different preferences or whatever, but they want the best way. Mordy Oberstein: And if you want to take a lesson out of this, if you're thinking about, "Oh well surgeons are going to die, they're not going to die." The lesson is that what people expect out of content and out of information is rapidly shifting and it's becoming way more diverse and decentralized and offering as much option as possible and as much autonomy to the user as possible. People want autonomy. The way that knowledge has come across on the web has been very direct and very dictatored. That's not a real word. It's been a dictatorship. You go to the search engine, it gives you and it gives you this. But people want autonomy in their knowledge experience. And as a marketer, as a content creator, whatever it is that you're doing on the web, that sense of autonomy you can give over in the knowledge acquisition experience is going to go a long way with your audience. Now speaking about search engines and social media and whatnot, social media activity can actually impact your SEO. How does that work? Well, here's Janet Machuka on how does social media activity impact your SEO? Janet Machuka: My name is Janet Machuka and I will want to talk a little bit about SEO and social media. SEO basically is the optimization of content through search engines. And I like the fact that social media is a great search engine. Search engines will love you if people love you first. And we have seen it happen a lot of the times with even our content through social media, the way we write it. If the search engine on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook loves us, our content will actually be seen by so many people. And looking at it from the point of consistency, it means you need to create content that is consistent, content that is going to make people know that you exist. And you actually need to be active. Either be it on your Twitter, on your Instagram, on your Facebook. So what am I saying at the end of the day? Do content that will keep you be seen by the people who are searching you. And something else is social media actually benefits those people who are consistent from this point of view. If I search you on Google, for example, maybe I'm searching something about Twitter and you're creating amazing threads on Twitter, and I come across your content, it can actually lead me to your profile. So the consistency use of social media can lead to your profile on social media being seen on the search engines. Actually, it's not just about the Google alone. As I said earlier, social media alone is a search engine. And when people see the kind of information they search out of the keywords they are looking for, it helps you increase the visibility of your content and also the interactions of your content. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Janet for that. That was really interesting. Crystal Carter: It's really useful. And she talked about a few things there. She talked about being consistent on social media and about your profile and stuff, and I've spoken about this as well. I think that it's an absolutely underrated, super valuable thing. Because for instance, we talked about Twitter showing up in search results. That only happens when you are posting regularly on Twitter. But it's really valuable for a few reasons. One is because it's a good way to get your links actually onto the Cerp because if you share links there, then they show as live links on the Cerp. It's also really good, particularly if you're talking about branding or if you're talking about what they refer to as Cerp dominance because it takes up a lot of space on the Twitter account. And she also talked about being consistent with your brand, having your profile there. Optimizing your profile. If you do nothing else with your social media, optimizing your profile can add significant benefit for your SEO because you can link it to your schema markup which helps Google to understand your entity better, which helps everything you do online to work in conjunction and to benefit you overall. So there's a lot of good things there. And with regards to the consistency point, again, if you are using those profiles more like regularly and being consistent, then again, they will show up. So when people search for your name, they'll see your name, your Instagram, your Twitter, your TikTok, your YouTube, whatever it may be. Mordy Oberstein: If you have a result that's on the precipice and it's a negative result about your brand, I've definitely used the Twitter box as a way to push that down off of page one because again, the Twitter box can be really, really big sometimes. Also, and just what she was talking about, the content focus is a great... If you are thinking about, "How am I going to share this piece on social media with my audience?" It helps keep you topically focused and topically relevant. And that's also really good for your SEO. Crystal Carter: It also can help you build some momentum. If Google can see that there's a surge of interest on a particular topic, then it can help you to get indexed more quickly, because you're sending them lots of signals that lots of people want to see this content. And it can also help to see more keywords happen. It can also help you to get some more feedback on your content straight away, because if people are coming to the content and they're like, "What does that actually mean?" You're like, oh okay, maybe I'll write you another one. Maybe they'll write you a follow up piece. Mordy Oberstein: There's so much you can do there with that, there's so much value in this. Since, however, we're talking about search engines today, Crystal has an amazing idea. She's like, "Hey, let's do a new segment and let's call it, So Many Search Engines." Because there's not just one search engine, there's Bing, there's Duck Duck Go, there's Neighbor, there's View, there's all these search engines, and they don't always show the same exact thing or take the same exact approach with very straightforward keywords. So because we're talking about search engines and where they're heading on this episode, we thought today would be the day to introduce Crystal's brilliant new segment, So Many Search Engines. Speaker 4: Google's latest update, popular search engine Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, Jeeves. Crystal Carter: They're everywhere. Mordy Oberstein: They're so many. Crystal Carter: They're so many, oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: They're coming at me, there's so many of them. Crystal Carter: But no more Jeeves. No, I think Jeeves has gone. Am I misquoting that? Mordy Oberstein: Oh well, till there, I don't even know. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Poor Jeeves. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe it's gone. Maybe they shut that down Crystal Carter: Nobody's asking Clippy either. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, we thought with the inaugural version of So Many Search Engines, that we would start asking all of the different search engines, what is the best search engine? Crystal Carter: So Meta. That's so Meta. Mordy Oberstein: We just broke the fourth wall. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: It's like when they're watching TV while you're watching TV, on TV. Crystal Carter: I know somebody who gets a really big kick out of taking pictures of people taking pictures. Mordy Oberstein: I like this. So I've logged in, what is the best search engine into Google, and guess what? I got a bunch of ads. I did, I got three ads. One of them was from a Semrush and SEO ability. SEOs, there we go. And then I got a feature snippet listing the top 10 search engines and it gave me a list of eight. The best search engine in the world, Google. Search engine number two, Bing, then Baidu, then Yahoo, then Yandex and Ask, then Duck Duck Go, then Neighbor. And then it says more items so we have to click through to see the rest of the list. That's what I got on Google. Crystal Carter: All right. On my one I was checking out Neva, which is an interesting search engine which was recently has been shared by a few people. So Glenn Gabe's been talking about it, been talking about it, because they've got a search engine that allows you to tailor your search, but they also have a new feature where they're incorporating AI. So remember I was talking about how some of this AI generators, so if you're asking Chat GBT for things, they don't always give you sources. Neva has a feature where it does give you a source, which is very interesting. But I asked Neva, what is the best search engine? And it just gave you links, very similar to the plain blue links. It says 12 best search engines in the world and it's from inspire.scott, which is interesting. And then reliablesoft.net, 10 search engines. And then rapidapi.com, and then search enginejournal.com, which is very interesting because I've never heard of three of those websites. I've obviously heard of Search Engine Journal. Mordy Oberstein: That's very similar to what I got by the way, on Duck duck Go. So I got nothing rich in any way, shape or form, it's just your typical organic results. The first one from Life Wire, the best search engine of 2022, and then it has site links, like sublisting of some of the headers on the page. And then I just have another list of organic results. Some of them similar to Google, some of them not. Bing however, was completely different. And this is what we're talking about. Different search engines have very, very different approaches, so you need to be aware because you can get a lot of track from other search engines other than Google. Bing went full knowledge graph on me. First it gave me one organic result at the top from grape.com, which is a browser, which is very different in terms of organic results than anything else any other search you gave me. It says Brave, best search browser. So it gave me a browser and not a search engine. So that's a little weird Bing. But at the same time, it gave an answer of Google according to two sources, and then it gave me those two sources and a snippet from those two sources. So it was very clear and definitive Google is the best search engine, Bing being honest there, and giving sources. At the same time, it gave me a knowledge panel of search engine, like what is a search engine? Crystal Carter: And it's got multiple links in there. So Bing does this a lot with their knowledge panels where they can be very illustrative. So for some things, if you look up a lion on Bing, it gives you a picture of Africa and a beautiful photo of a lion, and all these different links to it. For the search engine one, it's got links to different parts of it. It's got links across Wikipedia and various different things. They're also citing. Even though their knowledge panel is pulling together content, presumably using AI to generate that content, they are citing their sources underneath the knowledge panel, which I think is really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: And just going to show you that being very much in general likes to take a very knowledge graph based approach even more than Google does. And I think it's because Microsoft has really vested heavily, heavily heavily in AI and they like to showcase it and they actually like to use it on the Cerp a little bit more than Google. I actually did the same thing, by the way, on TikTok. What is the best search engine? And I got a bunch of videos about private search engines.Private search engine. I was like, "I don't even know what this is talking about." Or I have a video about website the government should tell you about, a lot of privacy government stuff showing up, which I thought was- Crystal Carter: Very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: ... very interesting. Social was totally different than the traditional search engine here. Crystal Carter: YouTube, they're starting with similar sort of things, so 20 search engines that are better than Google. And then Duck Duck Go versus Google, which in Duck Duck Go is a more private search engine. And then the next one is, protect your privacy. And I think that something you get when you look at that is that people who are searching in places like YouTube, and YouTube is also a search engine obviously, and so people are searching on YouTube or searching on TikTok for search engines, might be searching for stuff that's maybe a little bit less mainstream. Because Google, for instance, has a lot of restricted searches, for instance. So people who work in the cannabis field, with CPD and things like that, they restrict a lot of the search results for that. And I've known SEOs who've worked in that space and they have to be very creative about how they optimize for search because it's very sensitive, it's a sensitive topic. So I think that in places like TikTok and places like YouTube, people can have those conversations a bit more easily, maybe, and so you might see more of that stuff coming to the fore in those search engines. Mordy Oberstein: Which just goes to show you, if you're researching a topic, don't just go to a queue to research tool that's focused on Google, go and look what's happening in other platforms because it could be a very diverse way of looking at what a topic is. So a little tip for you. And if that's news to you, guess what's also going to be news to you? Crystal Carter: What's news to me? Mordy Oberstein: The Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Oh boy. Perfect timing with the release of last week's episode of the service op podcast, all about ranking factors, because now you'll know how to handle the news that Yandex's 1,922 ranking factors have been leaked in a hack, per Danny Goodwin over at search engine land Yandex, leak reveals 1,922 search ranking factors. So what do you get as part of this leak? A lot of cool stuff, and what some calling the biggest SEO event in years as Yandex is similar to Google in a lot of ways, but also different in a lot of ways. So we know now that Yandex looks at things like is a page orphaned, meaning are there no internal links from the website pointing to a particular page. Looks at dwell time. How long are people spending on the page? How many queries the site or the page ranks for, the average ranking. Is a page being bookmarked by people, is actually a ranking factor with Yandex. Also keywords in the URL, also a ranking factor on Yandex, which Google has also said is a ranking factor, but super, super small. But we don't know what it is on Yandex, is the point. We have this whole list, but we don't know how they're weighted and how they're considered, which is what we spoke about on last week's episode, all about ranking factors. Alex Burkas has a great Twitter thread or two on this. I'll link to it in the show notes. And while it is all very, very interesting, really my question is now, now what? Let's assume Google uses the same 1,922 ranking factors, the exact same ones. Let's just pretend that they do. They don't, but let's pretend that they do. Now I need to create, according to these 1,922 ranking factors, if you go through all of them, which I have not gone through all of them, I've gone through a lot of them. But basically now I need to create well optimized content that I need to push out there to get some momentum around, maybe through social, get some folks to visit the content, maybe link to the content, which of course means I need to create really, really good content that helps my target audience. And now my life is different because... So now that I know all these ranking factors, my life is different because... And that's the Snappy News. See, I told you it was going to be news to you because it wasn't new. See, I didn't lie. Crystal Carter: That was new. That was some new news. Mordy Oberstein: It was new. Crystal Carter: It was new. It was not old, it was new. Mordy Oberstein: It was not old. I just saw a tweet recently. Bowery wants to now charge people to be asked, is this new? I'm going to go bankrupt. If it is new, he'll pay you $10. Crystal Carter: Oh, that's interesting. I could get that boat. Mordy Oberstein: I like this. Which that brings us to who you should be following on social media, and you're expecting it to be Barry Schwartz, but we actually recommended you follow Barry, I think like three or four times already. So follow Barry. Also, because we're talking about search engines, keeping with our theme here, someone who's been very focused on TikTok SEO and TikTok as a search engine has been the one, the only, Lidia Infante, who's @LidiaInfanteM on Twitter, that's L-I-D-I-A I-N-F-A-N-T-E M on Twitter. Crystal Carter: The M is very important. When she got married, I was like, "Happy wedding, Lidia Infante without the M, and it's a completely different person. So I'm sure that the other Lidia Infante's fantastic, but the Lidia Infante that we're talking about is a great SEO who's spoken at lots of events and has written extensively on various topics. She's particularly good on keyword research as well and keyword research gaps. Also, she's contributed to the Wix SEO hub, talking about international SEO, and her work on TikTok is really great. And so check it out. She's a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: Couple of pieces, I think Moz had a piece about TikTok SEO, so we'll link to them in the show notes. I'll find them. I'll use a search engine. I'll find the article she wrote. Which search engine? I don't know. Maybe I'll go to TikTok or Instagram alone. Crystal Carter: Who knows? Mordy Oberstein: Who knows? No one knows. I know. I'm not telling you yet. It's secret. You want me to tell you? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to use Google. Crystal Carter: Plot twist people. That was- Mordy Oberstein: I am so boring. Crystal Carter: I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't entirely expecting that. Mordy Oberstein: What flavor is Mordy? Vanilla. Crystal Carter: I remember having a conversation with you once and I was like, "Ah, vanilla." You're like, "Why is everybody always- Mordy Oberstein: Why is everybody... Vanilla's a great flavor. Especially with the little specks. Crystal Carter: The best flavor is mint chocolate chip. Mordy Oberstein: Mint chocolate chip. Absolutely. Hands down. Crystal Carter: It's the best one. Mordy Oberstein: We're not even going to argue that. Crystal Carter: We're not going to argue because it's got chocolate, which is great, and it's got mint and the mint is cold. You feel refreshed and nice. Mordy Oberstein: End of conversation, we'll stop here. Thank you for joining us on the Cerps Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we are back next week with an all new episode as we dive into how to pick an SEO tool. 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 the webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Janet Machucuke Lidia Infante Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Understanding Google SERP Features News: Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors Alex Buraks Twitter Thread on Yandex Ranking Factors Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Janet Machucuke Lidia Infante Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Understanding Google SERP Features News: Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors Alex Buraks Twitter Thread on Yandex Ranking Factors Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Cerps Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the Cerps Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm a very congested, head of SEO branding here at Wicks. My name is Mordy Oberstein and I'm joined by the very not congested, very awesome, very stupendous, very amazing head of SEO communications here at Wicks, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: Hello everybody. Hello all internet people. I'm in a good mood. I'm not congested, that's right, because I've been listening to my classic RnB all morning. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, is that what I should be doing for my cold? I didn't just listen to... Forget the medicine. Crystal Carter: Get yourself some nice like Toni Braxton or some nice Anita Baker and a cup of tea and just chill out. Honestly, it's vibes. How can you feel upset when- Mordy Oberstein: I feel my sinuses already clearing up. Crystal Carter: Just let it flow. Mordy Oberstein: I recovered listening to Bob Dylan because I feel like Bob Dylan. I feel amazely. Crystal Carter: How many tissues does a man need to use? I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: A lot. I'm not going there. A lot. The Cerps Up podcast is brought to you by Wicks, where you can instantly connect your site to Google Cert Console and automatically have your site map submitted automatically, and your homepage index instantly by the great Google in the sky. Why am I telling you this? One, because it's awesome, but also because this is talking about you submitting your site to search engines, and today we're talking about search engines. Huh? And if they still matter or not. Do they still matter? Will they continue to matter? Pum, pum, pum, pum. Crystal Carter: Is SEO dead? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know, but search engines might be. Crystal Carter: What? Are search engine dead? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know. We're going to find out, because on this episode we're talking about the potential evolution of search engines. Are we on the precipice? Will social come to replace search? Is Chat GPT a search engine killer. 10 blue links a thing of the past? Lion, tigers and bears, and bing. Oh my. Get it? I said bing. Not Bing. Lions, tigers and bing. Oh my. Plus Janet Machuka stops by to share how social can impact search, even if social doesn't end up replacing search. And we'll dive into all of the different search engines and how they handle queries in different ways. And as always, we have the Snappy News and who you should be following on social. Ready, set search, episode 23 of the Cerps Up podcast is here. So search engines. Crystal Carter: Search engines. Mordy Oberstein: For years you've been using them, you've been relying on them to access information. They're old, not new. We all get that. I feel in every episode we have to have a Barry Schwartz Easter egg. Crystal Carter: And I'm going to put on my Barry Schwartz merch slippers as well. Mordy Oberstein: Oh shoot, forgot my Barry Schwartz slippers. So search engines are old but not new, we all understand this. We all understand search engines have changed over times while the ones that have survived, RIP Alta Vista, Google isn't using just 10 blue links anymore. There's not the 10 old, plain old organic results. There's all sorts of, I'm officially calling them do hickeys. We spoke about search features, boxes that give you answers without URLs, boxes that gives you answers with URLs. Video results, images, filters. Search engines have obviously evolved. But have we evolved past search engines? Yes, with questions like that, I do wear jackets with leather patches because I'm all philosophical. I do. By the way, I have a jacket with leather patches. When I became a teacher, that's the first thing I did. I bought a jacket, leather patches. Crystal Carter: Did you stand on the desk and say, oh captain, my captain? Mordy Oberstein: No, I did stand on a desk one time, but I was yelling other things. We as an internet, have we gotten to the point where the traditional search engine doesn't meet or satisfy our needs anymore? Do we not want a list of results? Do we not even want answers from search engines anymore? Perhaps we want, I don't know, to move to social for our answers. It's not crazy, by the way, the young kids, they all like going to social. My kids, they go to the YouTube for answers and YouTubers for answers. They don't go to Google. Check that out. I am disappointed in them, by the way. Mr. Beast is not a replacement for Google, but I'm a curmudgeon, I get this. In other words, do we not want to a list of results? Do we instead want the ability to dive deeper into things or take up multiple aspects of a topic? Not only that, does emerging tech like Chat GPT mean that we want a more interactive and dynamic environment that search engines don't provide? Whether it's user expectations or emerging tech, there's a lot to say whether we're at a crossroads what it comes to search engines, and that perhaps the practical definition of a search engine is about to change. Crystal, what are your thoughts? Crystal Carter: I think that part of the reason why search engines have changed is because the way we search has changed and the kind of information that is useful to us has changed. Also, the kind of information that people can provide to us has changed. So the search features try to keep up with them. Sometimes when I'm searching for information, sometimes I find that I need multiple inputs, but maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not normal. But sometimes if if I want to know if the pumpkin patch is open and if they still have pumpkins around Halloween or something like that, I could Google it, but that may or may not be accurate. I could go to their Facebook page or something and they'll say whatever they said about the thing. But do you know what I tend to do for that sort of query? If I want to know if something is going on, if something's happening, if I want to know what realtime activity's happening? I'll tend to go to Instagram. I'll go to Instagram and I'll type in that pumpkin patch, where it is. I've literally done this. Then I'll see their most recent posts. And nobody's telling me the information, nobody's written down that they still have pumpkins. But I'll scan through the pictures and I'll go, "There's still a lot of pumpkins, those people look happy, and they just took that picture a half an hour ago. I bet if I go there they'll still have pumpkins." But Google also gives you real time stuff. If I want to know if I'm going to have to have a really long line when I go to the sandwich place, then I can see this place is busy on Google, and that's information that's useful. But I think that if Jeeves, Ask Jeeves back in the day, does anybody remember Jeeves? Good old Jeeves? Mordy Oberstein: I do. Crystal Carter: That was a popular search engine that people used, and now we're asking Chat GPT. I wonder if they'll bring back Jeeves. That would be amazing to bring back Jeeves with AI. If anybody does that, please give me a shout out when you make your millions. But I think that the way that it's changed is because there's so much information now and there's so many people putting information online now, and it needs to be organized in lots of different ways. So some tools will lean into some parts. So for instance, again, Instagram has a now, but their search feature is terrible. But they do have location and they have time. So if that's what you need to know, that's really useful. And I think Google for instance, has lots of information on what things people have published and that sort of thing. Chat GPT is fantastic, but they don't cite their sources in their content. And I never actually asked for the sources and which I might do the next time I try it, but it doesn't cite it's sources. So if you need to dig deeper, you just have to take their word for it, which as somebody who's studied academically, I don't call myself a professor, I don't have leather patches on my jacket. Mordy Oberstein: You don't have leather patches? I'll get you a jacket next time. I already won. Crystal Carter: But with academic rigor, if you've ever studied anything academically, they're like, "Who did you get this information from? Where is this from? Where is the bibliography? What is that from?" So I think that there's lots of different things depending on what you need you might need to get from different search engines, but there'll probably be some point where they converge. Mordy Oberstein: And I think with Chat GPT or GPT3 or AI writers in general, I think what we've done is basically said, you know what? That's going to come in and that's going to kill Google. And I just don't see that. I do think we're going to... I'll get to it. I do think that Google's going to have to change. What Google is now is not what people really want. But I don't think that a AI writer coming in... I think the interactivity is cool. I fully expect there to be some kind of interactivity, if they can move faster, it's still a little bit too slow. But I saw an article about how they're trying to fix that problem in general. They'll figure it out. You definitely do want to have that interactivity as a cool dynamic. I don't think it replaces search. I don't think it can ever replace search. For instance the point that you mentioned, even if it gave me the answer, I want to be able to explore, I want to be able to dive deeper, I want to be able to see multiple vantage points on this topic. And one true answer is not the answer. Crystal Carter: And I think that can be dangerous sometimes depending on what the question is. Either it says there isn't something. And so if you think that this is the definitive source, if you think one search engine is a definitive source, indeed I mean dangerous with a lower case D. But if you think that one search engine is a definitive source, then if it says that, oh no, there isn't an answer for that, then people might stop looking. If it tells you the answer and you go, oh yes, that is absolutely the answer, never in the history of information has that ever been useful. People need multiple perspectives. It's always important. Mordy Oberstein: That's why they're sourcing. It's an academic thing. It's a necessary thing for the nature of information. There has to be sourcing, which is why that's a thing. I think that people, your point about going to multiple sources, is why social is becoming more relevant. And I would say that if a search engine wants to adopt something, it should put access points to more social perspectives on the results page itself. Well you see Google doing that with a Twitter carousel, for example. And it is doing that with TikTok. The more, the better at this point. For certain types of queries, I don’t mean as a universal, because I do want to get information in real time for multiple people and see what's happening out there. I'll give you an example. Recently a new chain opened up here and I wanted to see what exactly are they selling, what kind of products are they selling, and all of the results that Google gave me were for press releases about the new store or articles from news outlets about the store. It didn't give me the information that I want. And where I got the information from? I went to the Google business profile, I took a look at the image that people posted there and looked in the background, what's on the shelves. I'm like, "Oh, they have that. Interesting. I want to go there now." Crystal Carter: Exactly. It's because a picture says a thousand words. Our picture's worth a thousand words. And sometimes these different bits of information can tell you a lot. Mordy Oberstein: People want to see what other people are doing and what's happening, how they're relating to whatever it is and the other thing. Crystal Carter: And TripAdvisor is a great search engine for things. So for instance, on TripAdvisor, if you want to know if a hotel is good, you can go and you can look at the pictures that the hotel puts up, you can also look at the pictures that regular folks have put up with their terrible camera phones and compare that to the reviews and compare that to the information. So you're getting lots of different points of information to make a decision. Mordy Oberstein: Isn't it interesting though, we're talking about, on the one hand, Chat GPT coming into search engine isn't replacing a search engine, which is a very cold... Replacing one cold machine with another cold machine. And on the other hand we're saying that people want to see what other people are saying more. You can't say both of those in the same breath. You can't say, people want the machine giving the answer and people also want to dive in more into social. My kids want to hear information from a person, so that's why they go to YouTube to get information. I think the era of the cold machine is dying. And that's not to say you can't integrate something like Chat GPT into the search engine. But I think a much more... Look, 10 blue links, the idea, and by the way, in my opinion, all results pages are still predicated, they're still fundamentally about 10 blue links, 10 organic results. They're not 10 anymore, whatever, eight or nine or seven, whatever the number is. That is the backbone of the results page. But that's not what I want. I want to see multiple media formats, I want to see multiple layers of information. If I search for this store that opened up, I do want to see the press release, I do want to see what the media outlets are reporting. I also want to see what people are reporting at the same time, I want to see the images at the same time. I want to get all of that all at once, dive into one, come back and go down the next rabbit hole. To me it's all about rabbit holes. I want to be able to go down as many rabbit holes as I possibly can, and the search engine that does that first is where I'm going to go. 10 blue links are dead. Crystal Carter: I think you're absolutely right and I think that we're able to process information a lot more quickly than when that was the day of that, and we were able to filter more quickly. And again, depending on what your search need is, if I want to find reviews, Amazon is absolutely part of my search engine process. Absolutely. Even if I'm not buying from Amazon, I'm checking the reviews on Amazon because they almost always have some. That's always part of it if I'm looking for reviews. If I want to do a deep dive review, if I'm spending out a lot of money on something... Let's say I win the lottery and I decide to buy myself a boat. I know nothing about boats, but I want to be like, "I'm on a boat." So before I'm on my boat, I'm going to go on YouTube. Mordy Oberstein: A rowboat. Crystal Carter: No, I'm not getting a rowboat. When I win the lottery, I'm not getting a rowboat, I'm getting a- Mordy Oberstein: If I win the lottery, I don't want oars. Crystal Carter: No man, I'm not rowing that boat. When I win the lottery, I'm getting a boat with rims. No, I'm kidding. You can't put rims on a boat. I'm going to get a big boat. My boat's going to be amazing. But I know nothing about boats so I'm going to have to watch a lot of YouTube videos about people on boats and in yachts, and looking amazing in Miami or whatever. And so I'm going to have to do all that research. And so for reviews, YouTube is absolutely going to be part of that. That's going to be a big part of that. Maybe TikTok a little bit or something, but probably YouTube because I want to get right into it. And also Google because they're doing well at reviews. So there's going to be certain parts of search where there's going to be certain ways of searching that are going to be better than others. If I was looking for book reviews for instance, I'm probably going to be checking out Good Reads a lot, actually. If I'm looking at film reviews, there's going to be stuff on Google, there's going to be stuff on IMDB, there's going to be stuff on Rotten Tomatoes. You know which ones are the places that you chat, and so they fall into categories when you're thinking about that stuff. But when I've done research on Chat GPT, I always end up going on search engines anyway. It's a good place to start. I think it might replace Wikipedia because I think much of it is summarizing what you get from Wikipedia Mordy Oberstein: Very much so. Crystal Carter: And sometimes in a tidier way. But to be fair, Wikipedia's got a very good search, it's very good on search as well. Mordy Oberstein: But that's what I mean. We're asking, is the age of the search engine dead? I would say, I'm going to qualify it as yes. The search engine as it is, I think people are feeling like, "It's not giving me exactly what I want." Does that mean that search engines as a concept are dead? No. And this is why I think, when the next new thing comes up, "Oh, that's going to replace the search engine." And then something new comes up, "That's going to replace the search engine." Because I think there's a general sense of not feeling satisfied, of wanting something different. And then when that next new thing, that different thing comes along, be like, "Oh, that's it." What I think it is is all of it. It's all of it. It's not, oh, this thing, it's social that's going to replace the search engine. No. Chat GPT it's going to replace a search engine. All of it is going to evolve in a new version of what a search engine is and what it should be. Crystal Carter: And I think it's if an Uber comes along, we're like, "Oh, taxis are over." No, I still get taxis. There's still a place for a taxi or whatever. If you go to a train station, there's always a taxi there, that's really easy, blah, blah, blah. but it explodes, so it's like a decentralization of the concept. So Apple's adding more search around maps and around other things as well. People are creating their own search engines in lots of different ways. So it's more of a diversification of those things. So for instance, when they say taxis aren't over, but there's also Uber, there's also Lyft, there's also Gett, there's also those little scooters that people take. It's become more complex because our needs have become more complex. And people say, "Well, I don't want that one, but I do want this one." And so people have more options for getting more information. And I think what other people forget is that a lot of these search engines will index each other. So Google will pull in search results from Pinterest, will pull in search results from Twitter, they will pull in results from various different things. Thing will pull in some results from certain things. Like Duck Duck Go is powered by Bing, in some countries Bing and Google overlap as well. So sometimes it'll say that it's from one company, but the search engine is actually powered by a different one. So there's a lot of different ways that search engines make sure that they're able to help people find information. Because then we go back to the taxi example, the point is that people want to get from A to B. And that's the same with information. People want to find information, and at the end of the day, people aren't particularly fussed about how they get from A to B, whether it's in a taxi or a bus or a train or whatever. And some people will have different preferences or whatever, but they want the best way. Mordy Oberstein: And if you want to take a lesson out of this, if you're thinking about, "Oh well surgeons are going to die, they're not going to die." The lesson is that what people expect out of content and out of information is rapidly shifting and it's becoming way more diverse and decentralized and offering as much option as possible and as much autonomy to the user as possible. People want autonomy. The way that knowledge has come across on the web has been very direct and very dictatored. That's not a real word. It's been a dictatorship. You go to the search engine, it gives you and it gives you this. But people want autonomy in their knowledge experience. And as a marketer, as a content creator, whatever it is that you're doing on the web, that sense of autonomy you can give over in the knowledge acquisition experience is going to go a long way with your audience. Now speaking about search engines and social media and whatnot, social media activity can actually impact your SEO. How does that work? Well, here's Janet Machuka on how does social media activity impact your SEO? Janet Machuka: My name is Janet Machuka and I will want to talk a little bit about SEO and social media. SEO basically is the optimization of content through search engines. And I like the fact that social media is a great search engine. Search engines will love you if people love you first. And we have seen it happen a lot of the times with even our content through social media, the way we write it. If the search engine on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook loves us, our content will actually be seen by so many people. And looking at it from the point of consistency, it means you need to create content that is consistent, content that is going to make people know that you exist. And you actually need to be active. Either be it on your Twitter, on your Instagram, on your Facebook. So what am I saying at the end of the day? Do content that will keep you be seen by the people who are searching you. And something else is social media actually benefits those people who are consistent from this point of view. If I search you on Google, for example, maybe I'm searching something about Twitter and you're creating amazing threads on Twitter, and I come across your content, it can actually lead me to your profile. So the consistency use of social media can lead to your profile on social media being seen on the search engines. Actually, it's not just about the Google alone. As I said earlier, social media alone is a search engine. And when people see the kind of information they search out of the keywords they are looking for, it helps you increase the visibility of your content and also the interactions of your content. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much Janet for that. That was really interesting. Crystal Carter: It's really useful. And she talked about a few things there. She talked about being consistent on social media and about your profile and stuff, and I've spoken about this as well. I think that it's an absolutely underrated, super valuable thing. Because for instance, we talked about Twitter showing up in search results. That only happens when you are posting regularly on Twitter. But it's really valuable for a few reasons. One is because it's a good way to get your links actually onto the Cerp because if you share links there, then they show as live links on the Cerp. It's also really good, particularly if you're talking about branding or if you're talking about what they refer to as Cerp dominance because it takes up a lot of space on the Twitter account. And she also talked about being consistent with your brand, having your profile there. Optimizing your profile. If you do nothing else with your social media, optimizing your profile can add significant benefit for your SEO because you can link it to your schema markup which helps Google to understand your entity better, which helps everything you do online to work in conjunction and to benefit you overall. So there's a lot of good things there. And with regards to the consistency point, again, if you are using those profiles more like regularly and being consistent, then again, they will show up. So when people search for your name, they'll see your name, your Instagram, your Twitter, your TikTok, your YouTube, whatever it may be. Mordy Oberstein: If you have a result that's on the precipice and it's a negative result about your brand, I've definitely used the Twitter box as a way to push that down off of page one because again, the Twitter box can be really, really big sometimes. Also, and just what she was talking about, the content focus is a great... If you are thinking about, "How am I going to share this piece on social media with my audience?" It helps keep you topically focused and topically relevant. And that's also really good for your SEO. Crystal Carter: It also can help you build some momentum. If Google can see that there's a surge of interest on a particular topic, then it can help you to get indexed more quickly, because you're sending them lots of signals that lots of people want to see this content. And it can also help to see more keywords happen. It can also help you to get some more feedback on your content straight away, because if people are coming to the content and they're like, "What does that actually mean?" You're like, oh okay, maybe I'll write you another one. Maybe they'll write you a follow up piece. Mordy Oberstein: There's so much you can do there with that, there's so much value in this. Since, however, we're talking about search engines today, Crystal has an amazing idea. She's like, "Hey, let's do a new segment and let's call it, So Many Search Engines." Because there's not just one search engine, there's Bing, there's Duck Duck Go, there's Neighbor, there's View, there's all these search engines, and they don't always show the same exact thing or take the same exact approach with very straightforward keywords. So because we're talking about search engines and where they're heading on this episode, we thought today would be the day to introduce Crystal's brilliant new segment, So Many Search Engines. Speaker 4: Google's latest update, popular search engine Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, Jeeves. Crystal Carter: They're everywhere. Mordy Oberstein: They're so many. Crystal Carter: They're so many, oh my gosh. Mordy Oberstein: They're coming at me, there's so many of them. Crystal Carter: But no more Jeeves. No, I think Jeeves has gone. Am I misquoting that? Mordy Oberstein: Oh well, till there, I don't even know. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Poor Jeeves. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe it's gone. Maybe they shut that down Crystal Carter: Nobody's asking Clippy either. Mordy Oberstein: Anyway, we thought with the inaugural version of So Many Search Engines, that we would start asking all of the different search engines, what is the best search engine? Crystal Carter: So Meta. That's so Meta. Mordy Oberstein: We just broke the fourth wall. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: It's like when they're watching TV while you're watching TV, on TV. Crystal Carter: I know somebody who gets a really big kick out of taking pictures of people taking pictures. Mordy Oberstein: I like this. So I've logged in, what is the best search engine into Google, and guess what? I got a bunch of ads. I did, I got three ads. One of them was from a Semrush and SEO ability. SEOs, there we go. And then I got a feature snippet listing the top 10 search engines and it gave me a list of eight. The best search engine in the world, Google. Search engine number two, Bing, then Baidu, then Yahoo, then Yandex and Ask, then Duck Duck Go, then Neighbor. And then it says more items so we have to click through to see the rest of the list. That's what I got on Google. Crystal Carter: All right. On my one I was checking out Neva, which is an interesting search engine which was recently has been shared by a few people. So Glenn Gabe's been talking about it, been talking about it, because they've got a search engine that allows you to tailor your search, but they also have a new feature where they're incorporating AI. So remember I was talking about how some of this AI generators, so if you're asking Chat GBT for things, they don't always give you sources. Neva has a feature where it does give you a source, which is very interesting. But I asked Neva, what is the best search engine? And it just gave you links, very similar to the plain blue links. It says 12 best search engines in the world and it's from inspire.scott, which is interesting. And then reliablesoft.net, 10 search engines. And then rapidapi.com, and then search enginejournal.com, which is very interesting because I've never heard of three of those websites. I've obviously heard of Search Engine Journal. Mordy Oberstein: That's very similar to what I got by the way, on Duck duck Go. So I got nothing rich in any way, shape or form, it's just your typical organic results. The first one from Life Wire, the best search engine of 2022, and then it has site links, like sublisting of some of the headers on the page. And then I just have another list of organic results. Some of them similar to Google, some of them not. Bing however, was completely different. And this is what we're talking about. Different search engines have very, very different approaches, so you need to be aware because you can get a lot of track from other search engines other than Google. Bing went full knowledge graph on me. First it gave me one organic result at the top from grape.com, which is a browser, which is very different in terms of organic results than anything else any other search you gave me. It says Brave, best search browser. So it gave me a browser and not a search engine. So that's a little weird Bing. But at the same time, it gave an answer of Google according to two sources, and then it gave me those two sources and a snippet from those two sources. So it was very clear and definitive Google is the best search engine, Bing being honest there, and giving sources. At the same time, it gave me a knowledge panel of search engine, like what is a search engine? Crystal Carter: And it's got multiple links in there. So Bing does this a lot with their knowledge panels where they can be very illustrative. So for some things, if you look up a lion on Bing, it gives you a picture of Africa and a beautiful photo of a lion, and all these different links to it. For the search engine one, it's got links to different parts of it. It's got links across Wikipedia and various different things. They're also citing. Even though their knowledge panel is pulling together content, presumably using AI to generate that content, they are citing their sources underneath the knowledge panel, which I think is really interesting. Mordy Oberstein: And just going to show you that being very much in general likes to take a very knowledge graph based approach even more than Google does. And I think it's because Microsoft has really vested heavily, heavily heavily in AI and they like to showcase it and they actually like to use it on the Cerp a little bit more than Google. I actually did the same thing, by the way, on TikTok. What is the best search engine? And I got a bunch of videos about private search engines.Private search engine. I was like, "I don't even know what this is talking about." Or I have a video about website the government should tell you about, a lot of privacy government stuff showing up, which I thought was- Crystal Carter: Very interesting. Mordy Oberstein: ... very interesting. Social was totally different than the traditional search engine here. Crystal Carter: YouTube, they're starting with similar sort of things, so 20 search engines that are better than Google. And then Duck Duck Go versus Google, which in Duck Duck Go is a more private search engine. And then the next one is, protect your privacy. And I think that something you get when you look at that is that people who are searching in places like YouTube, and YouTube is also a search engine obviously, and so people are searching on YouTube or searching on TikTok for search engines, might be searching for stuff that's maybe a little bit less mainstream. Because Google, for instance, has a lot of restricted searches, for instance. So people who work in the cannabis field, with CPD and things like that, they restrict a lot of the search results for that. And I've known SEOs who've worked in that space and they have to be very creative about how they optimize for search because it's very sensitive, it's a sensitive topic. So I think that in places like TikTok and places like YouTube, people can have those conversations a bit more easily, maybe, and so you might see more of that stuff coming to the fore in those search engines. Mordy Oberstein: Which just goes to show you, if you're researching a topic, don't just go to a queue to research tool that's focused on Google, go and look what's happening in other platforms because it could be a very diverse way of looking at what a topic is. So a little tip for you. And if that's news to you, guess what's also going to be news to you? Crystal Carter: What's news to me? Mordy Oberstein: The Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Oh boy. Perfect timing with the release of last week's episode of the service op podcast, all about ranking factors, because now you'll know how to handle the news that Yandex's 1,922 ranking factors have been leaked in a hack, per Danny Goodwin over at search engine land Yandex, leak reveals 1,922 search ranking factors. So what do you get as part of this leak? A lot of cool stuff, and what some calling the biggest SEO event in years as Yandex is similar to Google in a lot of ways, but also different in a lot of ways. So we know now that Yandex looks at things like is a page orphaned, meaning are there no internal links from the website pointing to a particular page. Looks at dwell time. How long are people spending on the page? How many queries the site or the page ranks for, the average ranking. Is a page being bookmarked by people, is actually a ranking factor with Yandex. Also keywords in the URL, also a ranking factor on Yandex, which Google has also said is a ranking factor, but super, super small. But we don't know what it is on Yandex, is the point. We have this whole list, but we don't know how they're weighted and how they're considered, which is what we spoke about on last week's episode, all about ranking factors. Alex Burkas has a great Twitter thread or two on this. I'll link to it in the show notes. And while it is all very, very interesting, really my question is now, now what? Let's assume Google uses the same 1,922 ranking factors, the exact same ones. Let's just pretend that they do. They don't, but let's pretend that they do. Now I need to create, according to these 1,922 ranking factors, if you go through all of them, which I have not gone through all of them, I've gone through a lot of them. But basically now I need to create well optimized content that I need to push out there to get some momentum around, maybe through social, get some folks to visit the content, maybe link to the content, which of course means I need to create really, really good content that helps my target audience. And now my life is different because... So now that I know all these ranking factors, my life is different because... And that's the Snappy News. See, I told you it was going to be news to you because it wasn't new. See, I didn't lie. Crystal Carter: That was new. That was some new news. Mordy Oberstein: It was new. Crystal Carter: It was new. It was not old, it was new. Mordy Oberstein: It was not old. I just saw a tweet recently. Bowery wants to now charge people to be asked, is this new? I'm going to go bankrupt. If it is new, he'll pay you $10. Crystal Carter: Oh, that's interesting. I could get that boat. Mordy Oberstein: I like this. Which that brings us to who you should be following on social media, and you're expecting it to be Barry Schwartz, but we actually recommended you follow Barry, I think like three or four times already. So follow Barry. Also, because we're talking about search engines, keeping with our theme here, someone who's been very focused on TikTok SEO and TikTok as a search engine has been the one, the only, Lidia Infante, who's @LidiaInfanteM on Twitter, that's L-I-D-I-A I-N-F-A-N-T-E M on Twitter. Crystal Carter: The M is very important. When she got married, I was like, "Happy wedding, Lidia Infante without the M, and it's a completely different person. So I'm sure that the other Lidia Infante's fantastic, but the Lidia Infante that we're talking about is a great SEO who's spoken at lots of events and has written extensively on various topics. She's particularly good on keyword research as well and keyword research gaps. Also, she's contributed to the Wix SEO hub, talking about international SEO, and her work on TikTok is really great. And so check it out. She's a great follow. Mordy Oberstein: Couple of pieces, I think Moz had a piece about TikTok SEO, so we'll link to them in the show notes. I'll find them. I'll use a search engine. I'll find the article she wrote. Which search engine? I don't know. Maybe I'll go to TikTok or Instagram alone. Crystal Carter: Who knows? Mordy Oberstein: Who knows? No one knows. I know. I'm not telling you yet. It's secret. You want me to tell you? Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I'm going to use Google. Crystal Carter: Plot twist people. That was- Mordy Oberstein: I am so boring. Crystal Carter: I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't entirely expecting that. Mordy Oberstein: What flavor is Mordy? Vanilla. Crystal Carter: I remember having a conversation with you once and I was like, "Ah, vanilla." You're like, "Why is everybody always- Mordy Oberstein: Why is everybody... Vanilla's a great flavor. Especially with the little specks. Crystal Carter: The best flavor is mint chocolate chip. Mordy Oberstein: Mint chocolate chip. Absolutely. Hands down. Crystal Carter: It's the best one. Mordy Oberstein: We're not even going to argue that. Crystal Carter: We're not going to argue because it's got chocolate, which is great, and it's got mint and the mint is cold. You feel refreshed and nice. Mordy Oberstein: End of conversation, we'll stop here. Thank you for joining us on the Cerps Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we are back next week with an all new episode as we dive into how to pick an SEO tool. 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 the webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

How do you effectively repurpose content for Google Search? What types of assets should you be repurposing? Can AI help with repurposing content at scale? In this episode, Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter dive deep into repurposing your audio and video content for Search. Joining the show is LinkedIn’s very own Purna Virji to demonstrate the benefits of repurposing content at scale. Plus, take a directional look into where the SERP is headed for of audio and video content. Ready to get the most out of your content with max efficiency? The SERP’s Up SEO Podcast takes repurposing content for organic search head-on! Back Repurposing your content for search How do you effectively repurpose content for Google Search? What types of assets should you be repurposing? Can AI help with repurposing content at scale? In this episode, Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter dive deep into repurposing your audio and video content for Search. Joining the show is LinkedIn’s very own Purna Virji to demonstrate the benefits of repurposing content at scale. Plus, take a directional look into where the SERP is headed for of audio and video content. Ready to get the most out of your content with max efficiency? The SERP’s Up SEO Podcast takes repurposing content for organic search head-on! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 48 | July 26, 2023 | 42 MIN 00:00 / 42:13 This week’s guests Purna Virji Purna Virji is the author of High-Impact Content Marketing and Principal Content Solutions Consultant at LinkedIn. She has been named by Adweek on their Young Influentials List, was crowned the Search Personality of the Year by the US Search Awards and was named by PPC Hero as the #1 Most Influential Expert in the world. Prior to joining LinkedIn, Purna led global learning and thought leadership programs for Microsoft. An award-winning former journalist, Purna is an avid traveler, aspiring top chef, and enthusiastic tennis player in her spare time. 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 branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the un-impeccable, the uncomparable, the one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal J. Carter. Crystal Carter: Oh, snap. Mordy Oberstein: I don't think I've ever used your middle initial before. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, that's what I was saying. That's why I was like, oh no, it's gotten real because like we're pulling out. We're pulling out. It's like when your mom calls you and she uses your full name and you're like, oh, snap. Mordy Oberstein: Not good. Things are bad. Crystal Carter: Things are happening now. Mordy Oberstein: When that happens, things are definitely bad. Crystal Carter: I did not clean my room and I'm about to hear all about it, that kind of thing. Oh, no. Mordy Oberstein: But I didn't realize this until right now, by the way, which is just terrible. We have the same middle initial. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I doubt it's the same name. I don't want to discuss my middle name, but I doubt it's the same. Mordy Oberstein: It's not Jacob? Crystal Carter: Jacob is a good name. I like that as a name because you can short it to Jake. You can shorten it to Jake. Mordy Oberstein: Jake, yeah. Crystal Carter: Jake's a good name. Mordy Oberstein: Jake The Snake. Crystal Carter: What's it called? Was it like Big Man Jake or something? Was that a movie or something? Mordy Oberstein: It might be. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Something like that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can easily turn a great point in a blog post into a video for social media with a huge library of templates courtesy of Vimeo. I know, I've used it. This, as we're taking a look at repurposing your content for search. Have you ever done a webinar, perhaps a podcast, and now you're interested in making that content work for Google Search success? Then do we have the episode for you? Sorry, too salesy. Then you're in the right place. Still too salesy. Then today, we're talking about repurposing video and audio content that you love so much and making it work for the SERP. To use transcription or not to use transcription, this is the question when we're repurposing video and audio assets for search. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of user intent, how not to waste your time repurposing the wrong assets. Friends, Romans, lend me your ears and you shall hear how AI can help you repurpose video and audio content for search. Also, LinkedIn's own Purna Virji stops by to share tips on how to repurpose content at scale. And we'll talk the flip side as we get into repurposing your audio and video content into Google SERP features. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social. So if repurposing be the music of Google rankings, repurpose on as episode number 48 of the SERP's Up podcast is a bounty that is boundless as the sea. That's all the Shakespeare I know. In fact, that's more than the Shakespeare I know. I had to Google half of that. Crystal Carter: Alas, poor Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Alas, I do not like Shakespeare. Crystal Carter: You do not like Shakespeare? Mordy Oberstein: No, which is I don't know why I went all Shakespearean. It started off with to use a transcript or not to use a transcript, that is the question when repurposing content for search. Oh, my God, I guess I got to go Shakespeare with this, so I did. Crystal Carter: Maybe so. I feel like there's a way. Shakespeare wasn't that into video particularly. Mordy Oberstein: No. He was more a podcast person. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I reckon. He was more into- Mordy Oberstein: Relax. Crystal Carter: ... waxing more poetical and things like that, but I think that yeah, maybe he would've had a YouTube channel or something if Bill was around today. Mordy Oberstein: He would have had a YouTube channel. He would've had a thumbnail of him doing crazy poses. Crystal Carter: Yeah. He'd be like, like and subscribe to The Bard, dropping bars here on the YouTube channel. Mordy Oberstein: So basically, Shakespeare would be your typical less unreputable YouTuber. Crystal Carter: He'd probably be making YouTube Short or TikToks or something. Mordy Oberstein: They would not too short. It'd be very long. It'd be- Crystal Carter: Absolute. Mordy Oberstein: ... very long,- Crystal Carter: Very long soliloquies- Mordy Oberstein: ... very long. Crystal Carter: ... and very dramatic things for some of the tragedy. I've seen a lot of Shakespeare and some of the tragedies, they're brutal at the end and everyone. Mordy Oberstein: Know what will be a tragedy? If you had a great audio and video content and you didn't repurpose it for search because repurposing content is incredibly powerful. It helps build cadence. I love talking about cadence. I had a whole tweet the other day from a recording, not the other day, from re-releasing all about how cadence is your ally as a brand marketer. It helps you to reach new audiences in new ways and new channels and it's super efficient because you're maximizing the amount of effort you put into the content creation process. However, I tend to think that we generally think of repurposing, at least I do, about taking written content that's really made for search and turning it into a podcast or a video or a short. But today, we're doing the opposite. We're talking about the reverse of taking your not written content and then turning it into written content that you can repurpose for search. Crazy, crazy right there. I think it's a whole different mindset, by the way, and I think it's what makes it difficult. When you're to say creating an infographic for social, that's a very specific kind of mindset. You want something catchy. You want something that's going to grab on. It's going to get retweets. It's going to get liked. It's whatever it is. It's a very in the moment kind of way of thinking. But search is very, very, very different. I think the biggest thing here is mindset. Mindset matters most. I'm a big believer in that. I think here in particular, I think there's a lot to swap around in terms of mindset when you're repurposing audio video content for search versus taking, let's say, a blog post and repurposing it as audio video content for other media channels. I think that means, for example, just to be really specific about it, I think you want to leave aside the hook to a certain degree and bring out quality insights and targeting, which is to say it's different than say social media where the hook is super important. I think in terms of mindset, you want to figure out how to work faster because the barrier to entry is harder. You're creating written content for search. It's very time-consuming. I think you want to fit into a larger strategy that has lasting power because hot trends on social and capturing that for a quick win so you can get a thousand more followers for you and your company, in two weeks, that's just not search and it's a completely different mindset. So talking about repurposing content, audio, video content for search, I feel like start with the mindset. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think that essentially, when you're thinking about taking video and adding it into the content that you expect to rank on search, then you should be taking the same SEO approach that you would to everything. So thinking about keyword research, thinking about the keywords in the content. On YouTube, for instance, you can search for the words wI've done it before where I was looking up something and I was looking for somethingithin the YouTube transcript. They auto-generate transcripts. You can search for the words within the transcript. and I found a video of you, Mordy Oberstein,- Mordy Oberstein: Do you really? Crystal Carter: ... talking about something else. The topic of the webinar wasn't anything to do with that. The topic of the thing that you were on wasn't anything to do with that, but you had mentioned this specific element within that transcript and so they're able to pull those things out. So when you're creating content, it's very important to think about what you're saying in the video if you're planning, as part of the content life cycle, to include that into other parts of your web page. The other thing that's really important to think about is that video content can be repurposed on multiple pages that you expect to rank for search. There may very well be a few different places where you can put this on your website and you should think about that again when you're in the mindset that the point of entry is high. It takes a long time to think about a script and get your lighting right and get everybody in the right place and make sure the sound is all good and all of that sort of stuff. It takes time to invest in video, so you want to make sure that you're able to get maximum impact out of that content, so something that is fairly evergreen, maybe something that doesn't need to be changed every two weeks. Like you were saying, you don't want something that like, oh, it's a trend to this week and then nobody cares next week because it's not that useful. Mordy Oberstein: SEO is long-term stable growth for the long run. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. So think about that when you're thinking about the kinds of things that would make good video and would make good video for people who are searching. I think also it's important to think about how the content that you have that you expect to help other content rank will help that content to rank. We generally see that the click-through rate for videos is much higher, sometimes three times higher than the content that doesn't have videos on the SERP because you've got a few different options to show that video on the SERP. So make the most of it. Make sure that the video lines up with the content that's written with any images that you have with all of those things, that it's not just some random video that's nothing to do with the page because Google can tell and that's important. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's a good point because we're talking about you're setting up the video and you're thinking about the transcript, which is what you're going to be using for ranking and getting the right keywords in there. But let me bring up a question to you. Does it always make sense to transcript? Because sometimes, I find that the transcript can be very broad in a way. I'm not describing it the best way possible, but it's conversational, so getting those meaty points taken out of the transcript and really focusing on them might work better. Forget for search for your readers, but it also might work better for search. Now you can add in headers. Now you can structure the content a little bit better. I'm not saying that transcripts don't rank, can't rank and whatnot, but I'm wondering your thoughts on, you know what? Maybe that would be a good use case for AI. Maybe you take the transcript and say, "Hey, AI. Take this transcript and turn this into something that's more structured." Crystal Carter: Right. I think I've done similar exercises and you can tell the AI, I don't want this rewritten. Don't give me your hallucinations. I don't want that. I literally want you to tidy this up. Mordy Oberstein: Add headers to it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Take the ums out. Take all the likes out, like like, like, like and that sort of thing. So that's really useful. I think in terms of the content that supports the videos, so one thing that's really interesting about videos in search is that Google has recently, they keep adding more and more features on Google Search Console to help you manage your video pages. They've more clearly defined what a video page is. They've added in more documentation about what are the best requirements for having your videos show on the SERP, and particularly if you're using YouTube, which evidence has shown that YouTube is the service of choice. So definitely have a look at that. I'm talking about a lot of this at my MozCon presentation in August. Mordy Oberstein: A plug. Crystal Carter: So I'll get into this in a bit more detail, but studies have shown anecdotally in any way, we're seeing a lot of evidence that YouTube is a preferred platform. But the other thing that's great about YouTube is that YouTube has a lot of the defaults that match up with a lot of the requirements that Google has. YouTube will automatically generate a transcript. If you improve that transcript on YouTube, that is valuable. Mordy Oberstein: That's also true. Crystal Carter: That is useful. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Crystal Carter: Because YouTube, they doqn't always get it right. Mordy Oberstein: They don't always get it right. It's a little bit weird sometimes. Crystal Carter: Right, and they don't always put the periods, the full stops, whatever you want to call them. They don't always put those- Are Mordy Oberstein: That's what I mean. Crystal Carter: ... in the right place. Mordy Oberstein: You're talking about AI. I'm talking about AI and AI and AI. We talked about this with Ross Hudgens on our webinar that we did over the Wix SEO Learning Hub. When you give AI confines and you let it work in a closed environment, it is way better. If you already have some sort of content, which you generally have with video or a podcast you have, the transcript, you have something you're working with, it's an optimal case to use AI to refine it, which I'm not saying you don't need to go back and refine it yourself a little bit more, but you could take a lot of that hard work out. The repurposing video audio for search is a prime case where I think AI does work. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it does. It does. It works really well. And the thing is YouTube's using AI to understand it. YouTube's using AI to generate the transcript in the first place. So essentially, you're adding into more refinements there. So with regards to what's on the page, generally speaking, there can be good practice into adding a transcript. Again, it will depend on the quality of the transcript. Some videos are made specifically to be part of a page and so they essentially read and are written like a transcript. If you have a more conversational situation like a podcast or webinar or something or it's something to that effect, some editing, it can be really, really valuable. I think that it depends on the medium and on what users are expecting. I have very much, particularly when I've been looking for a quote, been extremely grateful when people have put the entire transcript of a webinar or an activity on a website because you can get the quote much more clearly when it's on the page. If you try to extract the transcript from YouTube, it's a little bit annoying. Then I use the AI to take out all the timestamps. So yeah, I think it depends on what the value is of the transcript and you'll know whether or not you were on topic or whether you were on a tangent and we're talking about Shakespeare when you were supposed to be talking about videos. Mordy Oberstein: We would never do that. We would never do that. Crystal Carter: Laser-focused. Mordy Oberstein: All the time. So we covered transcripts. We covered AI. I want to cover one more point if we could, and that's how to know if you're not wasting your time. How do you decide when you should repurpose video or audio content for the main search results? Because I'll give you a case. Did you know, Crystal, that Beatle videos has a global search volume of 1,100 searches every month according to Semrush? Wow. Did you know you should not repurpose your video content for written content there for the SERP because all of the results Google is showing is from YouTube? I could repeat this with the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan. Crystal Carter: Yeah. See? Mordy Oberstein: Beyonce. Crystal Carter: When you said Beatles, I wasn't sure which Beatles you were talking about. I was like, are we talking about stag beetles- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my God. Crystal Carter: ... because I like stag beetles. Stag beetles are cool. Mordy Oberstein: Let me quickly run this through Semrush again. Crystal Carter: B-E-E-T. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Beyonce videos has a monthly search volume of 4,400 every month, and I guarantee you if I Google it, it will all be YouTube videos. Do not waste your time. What I'm trying to say is you need to go and look and see what the intent on the surface because maybe it doesn't support written content. Crystal Carter: So here's the thing. When you're thinking about this, I tend to go the other way. I tend to look at what content you have on your site. Let's say you have written content on your site and you have some videos on your YouTube channel. You can do this on Semrush. I'm sure you can do this on other tools as well. Look at your site and look at which pages are ranking and which pages could be ranking for videos, which pages- Mordy Oberstein: You're spoiling it. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: You're spoiling it. Crystal Carter: What am I spoiling? Mordy Oberstein: This. This is our dynamic segment for later. Later, we're going to be going going Google where we talk about looking at what's ranking on the SERP for video and audio content. Crystal Carter: In the tool, you can do this. In the tool, you can do this. You can see what things are ranking for which SERP features. There's a few different tools that will tell you which SERP features are available and you can look on mass at your tools rather than just looking at a single page, which we will discuss in more detail. But you can look at which keywords your page is ranking for and you can look at and see where there are video opportunities. Doing it that way is really, really effective and can help make sure that you're not wasting your time and that you're complimenting content that is ranking well as well. Mordy Oberstein: It could be anything. It could be like, okay, I'm going to spend time optimizing this transcript and on the SERP, all that's there are very short, quick answers. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: You have to just make sure you're lining up with the intent when you're repurposing content for the SERP. Crystal Carter: Of course. Sometimes, it's a question of having a little bit of a mix and match. I'm going to caveat and say this isn't necessarily editorially my favorite publication, but one of the things that the Daily Mail does is they do a TLDR. They'll have an article about, oh, Blue Ivy performed with Beyonce at the London Show, and yes she did. Blue Ivy did not come out at the Cardiff show and I was a little bit upset because I was at the Cardiff show and I was not at the London show, and I was like, whatever. Okay, fine. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Crystal Carter: Anyway, so let's say there's this article about that. They will have the headline and they will also have a couple of TLDR points. So they'll say like, "Blue Ivy showed up for this song. Blue Ivy did this. Blue Ivy did that." They have a couple of lines and then they'll get into the long, long, long, long, long of the whole article. For instance, if you're seeing something like that and let's say maybe at this time, this moment in time, maybe you don't have time to do a full refit of your transcript page, but maybe you have time to do at the top a couple of quick summarizing points of this topic covers this, this, this and this. That's something that can help you to satisfy some of that quick TLDR intent and also allows you to have the people who want to get in and get the quote or who just want to jump to the part that they're interested in, which are those people, and I'm one of those people, then it allows you to satisfy both intents for instance. Mordy Oberstein: So if you're doing all these different intents and all these different pieces of content and all this repurposing to try to take your audio and your video content and make it ready for rankings among the traditional blue links, then you need to do it at scale, which means we need ideas about how to do this at scale, which is why LinkedIn's own principal content solutions evangelist, Purna Virji, is here to discuss how you can repurpose content at scale. By the way, she got a new book. I'll link in the show notes. We're plugging her book. Crystal Carter: Get the book. Mordy Oberstein: Get the book. Here's Purna. Purna Virji: Hi, Mordy and Crystal. I'm here to share three tips in just about three minutes on how you can repurpose your content at scale. To do this, we're going to take inspiration from Hollywood. Think of a movie like Star Wars. That one creative has been turned from movies into toys, video games, lunch boxes, clothes, you name it. That one idea has been used in a ton of different ways to make billions and billions of dollars overall. May some of that force be with us and it certainly can be with these three blockbuster strategies to repurpose content like a movie mogul. Let's start with tip number one. Now, if we think about biopics and movies based on true stories, they tend to have a really great track record at the box office. We can channel that same idea by building content from news and current affairs to be relevant and timely or suddenly rewrap our content in this news and current affairs newsjacking shell. Let's say, for example, you're a financial planning company and some existing content that you have provides advice on how people can reduce the inheritance bill. How can you reuse it in a way that feels current and fresh and still interesting? That's why you turn to the news. For example, a company called Birkett Long had seen this news story talking about how the actor Daniel Craig, aka James Bond, 007, will not be gifting his estate. So they created a post all about that and then they segued very, very cleverly into sharing their practical advice into how people can reduce their inheritance bill. So clever, existing content rewrap to feel fresh and current and get people to want to read it. Tip number two, remakes of older movies or foreign movies are big business. What we can learn from that is why create from scratch when you can curate from what's worked elsewhere? One of my favorite places to curate from, your data, especially data that can help you stand out during your customer's research process. Think about things like success or effectiveness rates or you can share how customers saw a big improvement. Any values or benefits for choosing you that can be found by data can be turned into really high-value content that already exists. I swear if Mulder and Scully from X-Files were content marketers, they'd agree that the content is out there. You just need to join forces with other teams to find it. Okay, tip number three, think about spin-offs, re-releases, movies made from TV shows, they all show us the value of reusing our own heads in new ways. But now when I'm saying reuse your existing content, I'm not saying just take the existing content and slap it everywhere. No, because that's not really exciting, is it? Something that many people miss, but is one of my favorite tips to do is to go and look at high-value or high-investment pieces, whether it's a research report or a white paper or some ultimate guide. Generally, there's a lot of really good richness in there and its content that can appeal to different types of audiences. So what I advise people to do is pull out different excerpts from it and create shorter pieces that are very highly targeted to certain demographics. Let's say if you are a B2B company and you are trying to appeal to maybe an HR or a manager would be the ultimate decision maker, but the employees of the company would be the end users. You'd want to appeal to both so that way, you can get employees asking and recommending your brand, but you also then appeal to managers and HR to assign the decision. This way, you can speak much more relevantly to each audience and it's not starting from scratch. You can do this by just repurposing what works. So remember, you can create dozens and dozens and dozens of assets with minimal work when you can use the same core IP in a variety of different ways. So anti-hustle culture, reuse, and recycle. Let's even be sustainable with our content. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Purna. Love all the movie references. This is great. Crystal Carter: Yeah, movies, TV. We had Star Wars. I'm guessing. Where it’s giving me like sci-fi fan vibes because she mentioned Star Wars and the X-Files. Mordy Oberstein: I love sci-fi. I love sci-fi. You know what I also love? Repurposing content the right way. Crystal Carter: Yes, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's so many good points. When I'm thinking about repurposing content, I'll tell you the way that I approach it is, what can I spin off really quickly that I can replicate over and over and over again without a lot of resources? Crystal Carter: Also, I think it's a question of what can add value to users in a new way? She talked about Star Wars for instance. One of the reasons why they rebooted it again was that- Mordy Oberstein: Make money, was to make lots of money. Crystal Carter: Well, there's that, but I think also, was to appeal to a new audience. We see this with a few different things where they'll take something that's a little bit retro and they'll reboot it with maybe a younger team or something. So then you have the people who remember it from the nostalgia, that audience, and then you have the people who are seeing it afresh and they're relating to the newer people who are involved with it. I think that this is the thing with your content. We've been talking about video in this particular instance. There might be people who really love a really chunky article that they can sit down with a nice cup of coffee and really get into. There's going to be some people who like video, who like to get video and they're getting most of their notifications via YouTube or via another video streaming platform. So if you're connecting with them in a different way, then that means that you're able to reach them in a way that they find most valuable. The content is going to be really good content, but if you're able to reformat it and repackage it, then yeah, all the better and great, better for user value. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, just make sure that you're not alienating your previous audience when you're creating this content like Star Wars did. I'm salty, very salty about the whole Star Wars thing. We had 20 years, 20 more, 30 years, 35 years, whatever, for Luke Skywalk to come. We're not even going to go there? I will say with repurposing content, one of the things that you want to think about is, hey look, you just got to get going with it sometimes. In order to get going with it, take the path of least resistance and build upon that and then take it from there because it can seem daunting. It can seem overwhelming and it can seem like five jobs all into itself. Get going. Find a quick way to get some momentum on it. See the value in it and that'll help you keep delving into that process even further. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Now, since we're talking about video and audio content, as you probably know, audio and video content does live on the SERP itself. Google has SERP features for both video and audio, which means that you want to get video and content itself to show up on the SERP whenever appropriate. Let's see where video and audio content on the SERP is heading as we take a directional look at where things are trending towards when it comes to audio and video content on the SERP as we are going, going, going Google. And it's going, going Google. It's out of here. As a podcaster, an award-winning podcaster I might add,- Crystal Carter: I've seen the award. Thanks, Mordy for reminding me that you got an award. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Hold on. Crystal Carter: It's obnoxiously gold. Mordy Oberstein: It is so golden and it's so heavy. Crystal Carter: It's like, what's that? There is a guy, speaking of movies, the baddie in Goldfinger. Mordy Oberstein: I never liked those movies. Crystal Carter: No, Goldmember, Goldmember, the Austin Powers. Mordy Oberstein: Ah. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That, I know. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: If it was Bond, I don't know, but Austin Powers, right up my alley. You may know that I like podcasting. One of the things I pay attention to as a podcaster is what happens on the SERP for podcast. We've all blog post about this on the SEO hub, the Wix SEO hub that I'll share in the show notes about how to optimize your podcast for search. One of the things that Google tends to show is a box or a carousel, however you want to describe it, that lists all of the podcasts related to the queries. If I search for baseball podcasts, I'll get organic results, but it'll generally sit under a giant box of actual podcast listings that represent baseball podcasts. Now, something that I happen to notice is that for more niche areas like SEO, for example, that carousel is often gone, which by the way, means that the organic placement itself, meaning your actual organic result for the podcast are being shown on lists that represent in the podcast are really important now or more important than they were before. They're really important before because that carousel is gone. I'm talking about, say particularly when you're searching for something, SEO podcast, the carousel, as of this recording, has been gone for a while. I was tracking, by the way, sports medicine podcast, not that I'll do a sports medicine podcast, but again, as a podcaster keeping tabs on these things, that's gone. The only time it shows up is when you search for best SEO podcast. Now the carousel is back, or best sports medicine podcast. I have a theory. Crystal Carter: What's your theory? Mordy Oberstein: I have a theory that Google realizes that people are trending towards not going to the SERP for podcast anymore. Crystal Carter: Interesting, interesting. Mordy Oberstein: They're just going to go to Spotify. Crystal Carter: That's very interesting. I think that that's absolutely true for some searches. You're going to get people who go straight to Spotify or maybe go straight to Google or to Google Podcasts or there's the Apple Podcasts as well. I think that it's a prime example of how SERP features are amazing, but it's also important that you rank in the plain blue links when you're doing things because we've seen that the podcast carousel, for instance, will show. I think on marketing podcasts at the moment, in the UK anyway, I'm getting the display, but as you're saying, it's very dynamic and I've seen that SEO podcast one go up and go down and go up and go down and show and not show. I think that if you're not ranking on the blue links at all, then when those features come and go, which they are want to do because Google might be doing a test or Google might be changing around, they might try to change the SERP feature, if you're not ranking on the plain blue links as well, then that's something that can be a challenge. This is one of the reasons why you should think about that for all kinds of content and not just podcasts as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and something to really pay attention to and it's interesting that it's changing. If you look at traffic around, let's say Spotify itself, you see a lot of the direct traffic, the organic traffic, a lot of this is going up and up and up over time. We didn't even see how the market ecosystem's play into what happens on Google. I'm just speculating. I don't really know. Crystal Carter: Well, I think they're also sending a lot of traffic to Spotify. So certainly on mobile, if you look up, I think we mentioned Beyonce or whatever, but let's mention her again, but if you look up one of her songs or one of her albums or something, they might very well give you a link to Spotify that goes direct to that part of Spotify that goes to that page or goes to that song or goes to that playlist or whatever. So they're very happy to send people directly into apps in order to satisfy the user need. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So that's audio. Let's talk about video because you started getting into this a little bit earlier around what's happening with the video SERP and what matters, what doesn't matter these days for getting your video onto the SERP. By the way, just some personal experience, we've seen it with our webinar videos. If you can get a video onto the SERP, you can drive a tremendous amount of views, traffic, or whatever to describe it to your YouTube channel, which is amazing. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think it's important to remember that those two things should work in conjunction. It's very much the case that if you have a video that is on your website and that you're using as a supplementary or complementary or even the primary aspects of a particular web page or blog, then you should also make sure that you're optimizing that page on YouTube. You can add in some of the chapters, for instance, on your YouTube videos. You can add in links back to your content on your YouTube video. You can add in keywords into your YouTube. You can also add in other things. Depending on how you're configuring your website, you can also use some of the attributes from your YouTube optimizations on your web page. So for instance, on Wix, we have Wix Video and one of the things that Wix Video does is you can embed a video from your website. Wix Video is using YouTube's configuration to generate schema markup for that video. So when you add a video onto Wix using Wix Video, it will automatically generate schema markup for that video and it will also pull out the attributes from the YouTube video. So not only will it pull out the summary and the name, but it will also pull out some of those keywords that you would add into your YouTube optimization. So if you are thinking coherently about your YouTube strategy and your video strategy as you're making your content, as you're optimizing your content, then you can find efficiencies through your optimizations. We've seen that users are very often clicking those links that are in the descriptions. We see that regularly. And also, the other thing that's really important to think about is backlinks. When you add a video onto YouTube, that counts as a backlink and that counts as referral traffic and that counts as Google being able to understand what's going on there. So that helps to distribute your content in a number of ways as well. Mordy Oberstein: And if you're going to have the video on the page, one thing to note as of more recent times is that in order for your page to have the video thumbnail show up, it has to be the video is the main content on the page. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's something to consider because if you do have that kind of video and you can show it where it's appropriate to show it towards the top of the SERP for that particular page, then do it because results that are visual are far more clickable than results that are just unto text. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Put the video at the top. Put it at the top. Put it at the top. There's nothing worse than having a video on your page and it says at the bottom like, "Oh, this isn't the main video." When you go onto Google Search Console that you can look in your video pages report and you can see whether or not this thinks this is the main content of the page, and if it is the main content of the page, put it at the top so that Google knows that it's the main content of the page. You shouldn't be any ambiguity about that. Mordy Oberstein: Since we're talking that directionally about Google, the fact that Google's adding more video information into Search Console kind of tells you everything that you really need to know about where the web is at. Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. Users are updating video all the time and users really enjoy video. We see the number of videos that people are watching only increases every year. The thing that's really strange is that even though that people are watching more and more videos, marketers are saying they should make more and more videos. If you ask users do they want more videos from marketers, they say yes. So I'm like, when will it end? How many videos do you need, people? No. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, I could literally waste my life away on YouTube. I am your target market. Crystal Carter: Right. I've definitely done that of an evening. I watched that video. It was seven ways to tie a scarf, which is years old, but that was peak what am I doing with my life. Because I knew all of the different ways. There's only so many ways to tie a scarf. Mordy Oberstein: I literally enjoy sports people talking about the same point, different sports hosts talking about the same point over and over and over again on a daily basis. Crystal Carter: I really like watching people get their hair done on YouTube. I like the before and after. I like that when somebody comes in and we're like, oh look, now they've got a different hairstyle. Well, it's very nice. Mordy Oberstein: I like yelling and screaming. You like- Crystal Carter: Potatoes, potatoes. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. Hey, look, by the way, I sent a bunch of tweets about baseball, which you never even saw. You should check out. It's old Slack. They're hilarious. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: They're talking about videos. Anyway, speaking of videos, we have a great Follow of the Week for you who does a lot of videos, but we got some news for you first. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: What's the news? Crystal Carter: I don't know. What is it? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know yet because I haven't gotten to yet, but I do know one thing. It's snappy. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First things first, the SEO tools that track changes in the levels of rank fluctuations have all been red-hot. Google is really mixing up rank these days. To that, Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable writes that, "Coming to a theater near you, you could expect an official Google algorithm update this summer." Prepare for impact, red alert and a bunch of other urgency-related catchphrases. Also, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable again, Google Merchant Center: How To Build Trust With Your Customers. A lot of really, really, really interesting takeaways from this one. This is how Google's looking at authority related to products, looking at trust related to products. One of the things they wrote is "include an about us page on your website to show your authenticity and tell customers your unique story." It's a very underrated tactic. You really should focus on the about page. It's one of the only pages where you can explicitly tell Google who you are, what you do in very direct terms. Also tell your users at the same time, but from an SEO point of view, really, really helpful. Also, Google wrote, "Help potential customers understand how to use your products or how other customers have used them. Show reviews and testimonials about your products and business." I've longed held that one of the things that can help a landing page really do better on search is showing informational content, how to use the product, when to use the product, all of that FAQ-ish kind of stuff. Usually on landing pages, we're very conversion-minded, but Google's basically telling you here, if you have a little bit of an informational intent embedded in there, it could be really helpful and I think it very much resonates with users at the same time, especially if they're a little more skeptical. Last one for you from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google's On Domain Name Selection: Branding Over Keywords. It's always good to get a refresh on this sort of points and to spell some SEO miss. This comes from Google's Search Off the Record podcast. The question, overarching question was, what do I do? Do I use a keyword to pick my domain name or do I choose a more brand-focused domain name? Gary from Google wrote for example, or rather he said, he didn't write, it's a podcast, Gary over Google said that basically, there's a very little impact from a ranking point of view using the keyword in the URL, but there could be a very big impact from a conversion point of view. I think the example that he gave was, let's say you are selling passport pictures and the domain name is something that relates to passport pictures like best passport picture place versus something very generic like get pictures. You're going to probably choose as a user the domain that is more specifically focused on what you're actually looking for. So keyword, not a big impact on rankings, but actually having the brand focus on what you do in very specific way, meaning don't worry about the keyword ranking stuff so much, more on the branding side can have a big conversion impact. John pointed out, and I always like John's perspective on these things, John Mueller said, "You should think long term because changing your domain name is always a hassle and you want to keep it for a long time if you can." What he's referring to is you want to think about how your business is going to expand. For example, I mentioned back in the day, the name of my website was vcrs.com when no one uses a VCR anymore. If the domain was more reflective on the wider media as opposed to the specific device, then I might be able to keep the same domain name as technology changes as my product or service offering expands. So really good points, really foundational points. Always good to get a refresher. Thank you, John. Thank you, Gary. Thank you Martin from Google for the podcast episode. We'll link to all these articles in the show notes and that is this week's Snappy News. As promised as always, so snappy. Crystal Carter: So snappy. Mordy Oberstein: Snappylicious, really. If it is a soft drink, it will be Snapple. Crystal Carter: I literally was just thinking of that and particularly I was thinking of the little poems that they put on their caps of the Snapple. That is proper microcopy. I don't know who thought of that, but the person who did- Mordy Oberstein: The branding right there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's iconic. It's iconic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Now, you know what else is iconic? Love my segues today. Sam Oh. If you're looking for videos about SEO, then you should definitely check out Sam Oh and the videos he's done for, Ahrefs. I'll call them timeless classics on SEO YouTube. Crystal Carter: We were very fortunate to have Sam Oh join us at a Wix SEO event at BrightonSEO. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I don't want to mess this up. This is our Follow of the Week, people. Sam Oh is our Follow of the Week. I got this, unprofessional award-winning podcast host. Crystal Carter: He is award-winning. You need to put that on your YouTube bio. Okay, so our Follow of the Week is Sam Oh. We were very fortunate to have him at a Wix SEO event during BrightonSEO recently. He walked in and he went, "Hi, I'm Sam Oh," and I was like, "Sam, everyone here knows who you are. We all know who you are." He's had billions and billions of views on YouTube and the guy is such a nice guy. He is so methodic and so clear in the way that he creates his videos and the content that he creates and the way that he approaches SEO and it's really very much a resource. It's the kind of content that is just exceptional. He's been doing it for a few years and he's a great asset to the SEO community, an absolute pillar. So absolutely follow Sam Oh, not only because his content's great, but he's a nice guy. Mordy Oberstein: And just to add value of it, is that on YouTube, I don't know how to put this gently, sometimes the SEO content is not of the highest quality and it's hard to know who to listen to. Sam is somebody you should listen to, so do follow Sam on Twitter. It's @samS-G-O-H, so S-A-M-S-G-O-H. We'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes. Now, if we were taking our own advice, we would repurpose our outro every single week. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes it does pay to do custom stuff, so we're going to do a custom outro. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: We're not going to repurpose from week to week. Crystal Carter: All right. Mordy Oberstein: We value the podcast. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Is it you're… Mordy Oberstein: You get what I'm saying? I'm saying we're talking about repurposing and saving time, but we're not repurposing something that many, many podcasts often repurpose, which is the intro in the outros. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. So are we saying goodbye now? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah, sorry. This is my way of saying goodbye. Crystal Carter: Okay. Bye, everybody. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for joining us at SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, does social media matter for SEO? 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 all the great content and webinars at the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Purna Virji Sam Oh Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter ChatGPT and AI Writers in SEO Content High-Impact Content Marketing News: Google: Expect A Confirmed Google Algorithm Update This Summer Google Merchant Center: How To Build Trust With Your Customers Google’s On Domain Name Selection: Branding Over Keywords Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Purna Virji Sam Oh Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter ChatGPT and AI Writers in SEO Content High-Impact Content Marketing News: Google: Expect A Confirmed Google Algorithm Update This Summer Google Merchant Center: How To Build Trust With Your Customers Google’s On Domain Name Selection: Branding Over Keywords 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 branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the un-impeccable, the uncomparable, the one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal J. Carter. Crystal Carter: Oh, snap. Mordy Oberstein: I don't think I've ever used your middle initial before. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah, that's what I was saying. That's why I was like, oh no, it's gotten real because like we're pulling out. We're pulling out. It's like when your mom calls you and she uses your full name and you're like, oh, snap. Mordy Oberstein: Not good. Things are bad. Crystal Carter: Things are happening now. Mordy Oberstein: When that happens, things are definitely bad. Crystal Carter: I did not clean my room and I'm about to hear all about it, that kind of thing. Oh, no. Mordy Oberstein: But I didn't realize this until right now, by the way, which is just terrible. We have the same middle initial. Crystal Carter: Oh. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: I doubt it's the same name. I don't want to discuss my middle name, but I doubt it's the same. Mordy Oberstein: It's not Jacob? Crystal Carter: Jacob is a good name. I like that as a name because you can short it to Jake. You can shorten it to Jake. Mordy Oberstein: Jake, yeah. Crystal Carter: Jake's a good name. Mordy Oberstein: Jake The Snake. Crystal Carter: What's it called? Was it like Big Man Jake or something? Was that a movie or something? Mordy Oberstein: It might be. Crystal Carter: I don't know. Something like that. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can easily turn a great point in a blog post into a video for social media with a huge library of templates courtesy of Vimeo. I know, I've used it. This, as we're taking a look at repurposing your content for search. Have you ever done a webinar, perhaps a podcast, and now you're interested in making that content work for Google Search success? Then do we have the episode for you? Sorry, too salesy. Then you're in the right place. Still too salesy. Then today, we're talking about repurposing video and audio content that you love so much and making it work for the SERP. To use transcription or not to use transcription, this is the question when we're repurposing video and audio assets for search. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of user intent, how not to waste your time repurposing the wrong assets. Friends, Romans, lend me your ears and you shall hear how AI can help you repurpose video and audio content for search. Also, LinkedIn's own Purna Virji stops by to share tips on how to repurpose content at scale. And we'll talk the flip side as we get into repurposing your audio and video content into Google SERP features. And of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social. So if repurposing be the music of Google rankings, repurpose on as episode number 48 of the SERP's Up podcast is a bounty that is boundless as the sea. That's all the Shakespeare I know. In fact, that's more than the Shakespeare I know. I had to Google half of that. Crystal Carter: Alas, poor Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Alas, I do not like Shakespeare. Crystal Carter: You do not like Shakespeare? Mordy Oberstein: No, which is I don't know why I went all Shakespearean. It started off with to use a transcript or not to use a transcript, that is the question when repurposing content for search. Oh, my God, I guess I got to go Shakespeare with this, so I did. Crystal Carter: Maybe so. I feel like there's a way. Shakespeare wasn't that into video particularly. Mordy Oberstein: No. He was more a podcast person. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I reckon. He was more into- Mordy Oberstein: Relax. Crystal Carter: ... waxing more poetical and things like that, but I think that yeah, maybe he would've had a YouTube channel or something if Bill was around today. Mordy Oberstein: He would have had a YouTube channel. He would've had a thumbnail of him doing crazy poses. Crystal Carter: Yeah. He'd be like, like and subscribe to The Bard, dropping bars here on the YouTube channel. Mordy Oberstein: So basically, Shakespeare would be your typical less unreputable YouTuber. Crystal Carter: He'd probably be making YouTube Short or TikToks or something. Mordy Oberstein: They would not too short. It'd be very long. It'd be- Crystal Carter: Absolute. Mordy Oberstein: ... very long,- Crystal Carter: Very long soliloquies- Mordy Oberstein: ... very long. Crystal Carter: ... and very dramatic things for some of the tragedy. I've seen a lot of Shakespeare and some of the tragedies, they're brutal at the end and everyone. Mordy Oberstein: Know what will be a tragedy? If you had a great audio and video content and you didn't repurpose it for search because repurposing content is incredibly powerful. It helps build cadence. I love talking about cadence. I had a whole tweet the other day from a recording, not the other day, from re-releasing all about how cadence is your ally as a brand marketer. It helps you to reach new audiences in new ways and new channels and it's super efficient because you're maximizing the amount of effort you put into the content creation process. However, I tend to think that we generally think of repurposing, at least I do, about taking written content that's really made for search and turning it into a podcast or a video or a short. But today, we're doing the opposite. We're talking about the reverse of taking your not written content and then turning it into written content that you can repurpose for search. Crazy, crazy right there. I think it's a whole different mindset, by the way, and I think it's what makes it difficult. When you're to say creating an infographic for social, that's a very specific kind of mindset. You want something catchy. You want something that's going to grab on. It's going to get retweets. It's going to get liked. It's whatever it is. It's a very in the moment kind of way of thinking. But search is very, very, very different. I think the biggest thing here is mindset. Mindset matters most. I'm a big believer in that. I think here in particular, I think there's a lot to swap around in terms of mindset when you're repurposing audio video content for search versus taking, let's say, a blog post and repurposing it as audio video content for other media channels. I think that means, for example, just to be really specific about it, I think you want to leave aside the hook to a certain degree and bring out quality insights and targeting, which is to say it's different than say social media where the hook is super important. I think in terms of mindset, you want to figure out how to work faster because the barrier to entry is harder. You're creating written content for search. It's very time-consuming. I think you want to fit into a larger strategy that has lasting power because hot trends on social and capturing that for a quick win so you can get a thousand more followers for you and your company, in two weeks, that's just not search and it's a completely different mindset. So talking about repurposing content, audio, video content for search, I feel like start with the mindset. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think that essentially, when you're thinking about taking video and adding it into the content that you expect to rank on search, then you should be taking the same SEO approach that you would to everything. So thinking about keyword research, thinking about the keywords in the content. On YouTube, for instance, you can search for the words wI've done it before where I was looking up something and I was looking for somethingithin the YouTube transcript. They auto-generate transcripts. You can search for the words within the transcript. and I found a video of you, Mordy Oberstein,- Mordy Oberstein: Do you really? Crystal Carter: ... talking about something else. The topic of the webinar wasn't anything to do with that. The topic of the thing that you were on wasn't anything to do with that, but you had mentioned this specific element within that transcript and so they're able to pull those things out. So when you're creating content, it's very important to think about what you're saying in the video if you're planning, as part of the content life cycle, to include that into other parts of your web page. The other thing that's really important to think about is that video content can be repurposed on multiple pages that you expect to rank for search. There may very well be a few different places where you can put this on your website and you should think about that again when you're in the mindset that the point of entry is high. It takes a long time to think about a script and get your lighting right and get everybody in the right place and make sure the sound is all good and all of that sort of stuff. It takes time to invest in video, so you want to make sure that you're able to get maximum impact out of that content, so something that is fairly evergreen, maybe something that doesn't need to be changed every two weeks. Like you were saying, you don't want something that like, oh, it's a trend to this week and then nobody cares next week because it's not that useful. Mordy Oberstein: SEO is long-term stable growth for the long run. Crystal Carter: Exactly. Exactly. So think about that when you're thinking about the kinds of things that would make good video and would make good video for people who are searching. I think also it's important to think about how the content that you have that you expect to help other content rank will help that content to rank. We generally see that the click-through rate for videos is much higher, sometimes three times higher than the content that doesn't have videos on the SERP because you've got a few different options to show that video on the SERP. So make the most of it. Make sure that the video lines up with the content that's written with any images that you have with all of those things, that it's not just some random video that's nothing to do with the page because Google can tell and that's important. Mordy Oberstein: Well, that's a good point because we're talking about you're setting up the video and you're thinking about the transcript, which is what you're going to be using for ranking and getting the right keywords in there. But let me bring up a question to you. Does it always make sense to transcript? Because sometimes, I find that the transcript can be very broad in a way. I'm not describing it the best way possible, but it's conversational, so getting those meaty points taken out of the transcript and really focusing on them might work better. Forget for search for your readers, but it also might work better for search. Now you can add in headers. Now you can structure the content a little bit better. I'm not saying that transcripts don't rank, can't rank and whatnot, but I'm wondering your thoughts on, you know what? Maybe that would be a good use case for AI. Maybe you take the transcript and say, "Hey, AI. Take this transcript and turn this into something that's more structured." Crystal Carter: Right. I think I've done similar exercises and you can tell the AI, I don't want this rewritten. Don't give me your hallucinations. I don't want that. I literally want you to tidy this up. Mordy Oberstein: Add headers to it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Take the ums out. Take all the likes out, like like, like, like and that sort of thing. So that's really useful. I think in terms of the content that supports the videos, so one thing that's really interesting about videos in search is that Google has recently, they keep adding more and more features on Google Search Console to help you manage your video pages. They've more clearly defined what a video page is. They've added in more documentation about what are the best requirements for having your videos show on the SERP, and particularly if you're using YouTube, which evidence has shown that YouTube is the service of choice. So definitely have a look at that. I'm talking about a lot of this at my MozCon presentation in August. Mordy Oberstein: A plug. Crystal Carter: So I'll get into this in a bit more detail, but studies have shown anecdotally in any way, we're seeing a lot of evidence that YouTube is a preferred platform. But the other thing that's great about YouTube is that YouTube has a lot of the defaults that match up with a lot of the requirements that Google has. YouTube will automatically generate a transcript. If you improve that transcript on YouTube, that is valuable. Mordy Oberstein: That's also true. Crystal Carter: That is useful. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Crystal Carter: Because YouTube, they doqn't always get it right. Mordy Oberstein: They don't always get it right. It's a little bit weird sometimes. Crystal Carter: Right, and they don't always put the periods, the full stops, whatever you want to call them. They don't always put those- Are Mordy Oberstein: That's what I mean. Crystal Carter: ... in the right place. Mordy Oberstein: You're talking about AI. I'm talking about AI and AI and AI. We talked about this with Ross Hudgens on our webinar that we did over the Wix SEO Learning Hub. When you give AI confines and you let it work in a closed environment, it is way better. If you already have some sort of content, which you generally have with video or a podcast you have, the transcript, you have something you're working with, it's an optimal case to use AI to refine it, which I'm not saying you don't need to go back and refine it yourself a little bit more, but you could take a lot of that hard work out. The repurposing video audio for search is a prime case where I think AI does work. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it does. It does. It works really well. And the thing is YouTube's using AI to understand it. YouTube's using AI to generate the transcript in the first place. So essentially, you're adding into more refinements there. So with regards to what's on the page, generally speaking, there can be good practice into adding a transcript. Again, it will depend on the quality of the transcript. Some videos are made specifically to be part of a page and so they essentially read and are written like a transcript. If you have a more conversational situation like a podcast or webinar or something or it's something to that effect, some editing, it can be really, really valuable. I think that it depends on the medium and on what users are expecting. I have very much, particularly when I've been looking for a quote, been extremely grateful when people have put the entire transcript of a webinar or an activity on a website because you can get the quote much more clearly when it's on the page. If you try to extract the transcript from YouTube, it's a little bit annoying. Then I use the AI to take out all the timestamps. So yeah, I think it depends on what the value is of the transcript and you'll know whether or not you were on topic or whether you were on a tangent and we're talking about Shakespeare when you were supposed to be talking about videos. Mordy Oberstein: We would never do that. We would never do that. Crystal Carter: Laser-focused. Mordy Oberstein: All the time. So we covered transcripts. We covered AI. I want to cover one more point if we could, and that's how to know if you're not wasting your time. How do you decide when you should repurpose video or audio content for the main search results? Because I'll give you a case. Did you know, Crystal, that Beatle videos has a global search volume of 1,100 searches every month according to Semrush? Wow. Did you know you should not repurpose your video content for written content there for the SERP because all of the results Google is showing is from YouTube? I could repeat this with the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan. Crystal Carter: Yeah. See? Mordy Oberstein: Beyonce. Crystal Carter: When you said Beatles, I wasn't sure which Beatles you were talking about. I was like, are we talking about stag beetles- Mordy Oberstein: Oh, my God. Crystal Carter: ... because I like stag beetles. Stag beetles are cool. Mordy Oberstein: Let me quickly run this through Semrush again. Crystal Carter: B-E-E-T. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Beyonce videos has a monthly search volume of 4,400 every month, and I guarantee you if I Google it, it will all be YouTube videos. Do not waste your time. What I'm trying to say is you need to go and look and see what the intent on the surface because maybe it doesn't support written content. Crystal Carter: So here's the thing. When you're thinking about this, I tend to go the other way. I tend to look at what content you have on your site. Let's say you have written content on your site and you have some videos on your YouTube channel. You can do this on Semrush. I'm sure you can do this on other tools as well. Look at your site and look at which pages are ranking and which pages could be ranking for videos, which pages- Mordy Oberstein: You're spoiling it. Crystal Carter: What? Mordy Oberstein: You're spoiling it. Crystal Carter: What am I spoiling? Mordy Oberstein: This. This is our dynamic segment for later. Later, we're going to be going going Google where we talk about looking at what's ranking on the SERP for video and audio content. Crystal Carter: In the tool, you can do this. In the tool, you can do this. You can see what things are ranking for which SERP features. There's a few different tools that will tell you which SERP features are available and you can look on mass at your tools rather than just looking at a single page, which we will discuss in more detail. But you can look at which keywords your page is ranking for and you can look at and see where there are video opportunities. Doing it that way is really, really effective and can help make sure that you're not wasting your time and that you're complimenting content that is ranking well as well. Mordy Oberstein: It could be anything. It could be like, okay, I'm going to spend time optimizing this transcript and on the SERP, all that's there are very short, quick answers. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: You have to just make sure you're lining up with the intent when you're repurposing content for the SERP. Crystal Carter: Of course. Sometimes, it's a question of having a little bit of a mix and match. I'm going to caveat and say this isn't necessarily editorially my favorite publication, but one of the things that the Daily Mail does is they do a TLDR. They'll have an article about, oh, Blue Ivy performed with Beyonce at the London Show, and yes she did. Blue Ivy did not come out at the Cardiff show and I was a little bit upset because I was at the Cardiff show and I was not at the London show, and I was like, whatever. Okay, fine. Mordy Oberstein: Wow. Crystal Carter: Anyway, so let's say there's this article about that. They will have the headline and they will also have a couple of TLDR points. So they'll say like, "Blue Ivy showed up for this song. Blue Ivy did this. Blue Ivy did that." They have a couple of lines and then they'll get into the long, long, long, long, long of the whole article. For instance, if you're seeing something like that and let's say maybe at this time, this moment in time, maybe you don't have time to do a full refit of your transcript page, but maybe you have time to do at the top a couple of quick summarizing points of this topic covers this, this, this and this. That's something that can help you to satisfy some of that quick TLDR intent and also allows you to have the people who want to get in and get the quote or who just want to jump to the part that they're interested in, which are those people, and I'm one of those people, then it allows you to satisfy both intents for instance. Mordy Oberstein: So if you're doing all these different intents and all these different pieces of content and all this repurposing to try to take your audio and your video content and make it ready for rankings among the traditional blue links, then you need to do it at scale, which means we need ideas about how to do this at scale, which is why LinkedIn's own principal content solutions evangelist, Purna Virji, is here to discuss how you can repurpose content at scale. By the way, she got a new book. I'll link in the show notes. We're plugging her book. Crystal Carter: Get the book. Mordy Oberstein: Get the book. Here's Purna. Purna Virji: Hi, Mordy and Crystal. I'm here to share three tips in just about three minutes on how you can repurpose your content at scale. To do this, we're going to take inspiration from Hollywood. Think of a movie like Star Wars. That one creative has been turned from movies into toys, video games, lunch boxes, clothes, you name it. That one idea has been used in a ton of different ways to make billions and billions of dollars overall. May some of that force be with us and it certainly can be with these three blockbuster strategies to repurpose content like a movie mogul. Let's start with tip number one. Now, if we think about biopics and movies based on true stories, they tend to have a really great track record at the box office. We can channel that same idea by building content from news and current affairs to be relevant and timely or suddenly rewrap our content in this news and current affairs newsjacking shell. Let's say, for example, you're a financial planning company and some existing content that you have provides advice on how people can reduce the inheritance bill. How can you reuse it in a way that feels current and fresh and still interesting? That's why you turn to the news. For example, a company called Birkett Long had seen this news story talking about how the actor Daniel Craig, aka James Bond, 007, will not be gifting his estate. So they created a post all about that and then they segued very, very cleverly into sharing their practical advice into how people can reduce their inheritance bill. So clever, existing content rewrap to feel fresh and current and get people to want to read it. Tip number two, remakes of older movies or foreign movies are big business. What we can learn from that is why create from scratch when you can curate from what's worked elsewhere? One of my favorite places to curate from, your data, especially data that can help you stand out during your customer's research process. Think about things like success or effectiveness rates or you can share how customers saw a big improvement. Any values or benefits for choosing you that can be found by data can be turned into really high-value content that already exists. I swear if Mulder and Scully from X-Files were content marketers, they'd agree that the content is out there. You just need to join forces with other teams to find it. Okay, tip number three, think about spin-offs, re-releases, movies made from TV shows, they all show us the value of reusing our own heads in new ways. But now when I'm saying reuse your existing content, I'm not saying just take the existing content and slap it everywhere. No, because that's not really exciting, is it? Something that many people miss, but is one of my favorite tips to do is to go and look at high-value or high-investment pieces, whether it's a research report or a white paper or some ultimate guide. Generally, there's a lot of really good richness in there and its content that can appeal to different types of audiences. So what I advise people to do is pull out different excerpts from it and create shorter pieces that are very highly targeted to certain demographics. Let's say if you are a B2B company and you are trying to appeal to maybe an HR or a manager would be the ultimate decision maker, but the employees of the company would be the end users. You'd want to appeal to both so that way, you can get employees asking and recommending your brand, but you also then appeal to managers and HR to assign the decision. This way, you can speak much more relevantly to each audience and it's not starting from scratch. You can do this by just repurposing what works. So remember, you can create dozens and dozens and dozens of assets with minimal work when you can use the same core IP in a variety of different ways. So anti-hustle culture, reuse, and recycle. Let's even be sustainable with our content. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much, Purna. Love all the movie references. This is great. Crystal Carter: Yeah, movies, TV. We had Star Wars. I'm guessing. Where it’s giving me like sci-fi fan vibes because she mentioned Star Wars and the X-Files. Mordy Oberstein: I love sci-fi. I love sci-fi. You know what I also love? Repurposing content the right way. Crystal Carter: Yes, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: It's so many good points. When I'm thinking about repurposing content, I'll tell you the way that I approach it is, what can I spin off really quickly that I can replicate over and over and over again without a lot of resources? Crystal Carter: Also, I think it's a question of what can add value to users in a new way? She talked about Star Wars for instance. One of the reasons why they rebooted it again was that- Mordy Oberstein: Make money, was to make lots of money. Crystal Carter: Well, there's that, but I think also, was to appeal to a new audience. We see this with a few different things where they'll take something that's a little bit retro and they'll reboot it with maybe a younger team or something. So then you have the people who remember it from the nostalgia, that audience, and then you have the people who are seeing it afresh and they're relating to the newer people who are involved with it. I think that this is the thing with your content. We've been talking about video in this particular instance. There might be people who really love a really chunky article that they can sit down with a nice cup of coffee and really get into. There's going to be some people who like video, who like to get video and they're getting most of their notifications via YouTube or via another video streaming platform. So if you're connecting with them in a different way, then that means that you're able to reach them in a way that they find most valuable. The content is going to be really good content, but if you're able to reformat it and repackage it, then yeah, all the better and great, better for user value. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, just make sure that you're not alienating your previous audience when you're creating this content like Star Wars did. I'm salty, very salty about the whole Star Wars thing. We had 20 years, 20 more, 30 years, 35 years, whatever, for Luke Skywalk to come. We're not even going to go there? I will say with repurposing content, one of the things that you want to think about is, hey look, you just got to get going with it sometimes. In order to get going with it, take the path of least resistance and build upon that and then take it from there because it can seem daunting. It can seem overwhelming and it can seem like five jobs all into itself. Get going. Find a quick way to get some momentum on it. See the value in it and that'll help you keep delving into that process even further. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: Now, since we're talking about video and audio content, as you probably know, audio and video content does live on the SERP itself. Google has SERP features for both video and audio, which means that you want to get video and content itself to show up on the SERP whenever appropriate. Let's see where video and audio content on the SERP is heading as we take a directional look at where things are trending towards when it comes to audio and video content on the SERP as we are going, going, going Google. And it's going, going Google. It's out of here. As a podcaster, an award-winning podcaster I might add,- Crystal Carter: I've seen the award. Thanks, Mordy for reminding me that you got an award. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Hold on. Crystal Carter: It's obnoxiously gold. Mordy Oberstein: It is so golden and it's so heavy. Crystal Carter: It's like, what's that? There is a guy, speaking of movies, the baddie in Goldfinger. Mordy Oberstein: I never liked those movies. Crystal Carter: No, Goldmember, Goldmember, the Austin Powers. Mordy Oberstein: Ah. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: That, I know. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: If it was Bond, I don't know, but Austin Powers, right up my alley. You may know that I like podcasting. One of the things I pay attention to as a podcaster is what happens on the SERP for podcast. We've all blog post about this on the SEO hub, the Wix SEO hub that I'll share in the show notes about how to optimize your podcast for search. One of the things that Google tends to show is a box or a carousel, however you want to describe it, that lists all of the podcasts related to the queries. If I search for baseball podcasts, I'll get organic results, but it'll generally sit under a giant box of actual podcast listings that represent baseball podcasts. Now, something that I happen to notice is that for more niche areas like SEO, for example, that carousel is often gone, which by the way, means that the organic placement itself, meaning your actual organic result for the podcast are being shown on lists that represent in the podcast are really important now or more important than they were before. They're really important before because that carousel is gone. I'm talking about, say particularly when you're searching for something, SEO podcast, the carousel, as of this recording, has been gone for a while. I was tracking, by the way, sports medicine podcast, not that I'll do a sports medicine podcast, but again, as a podcaster keeping tabs on these things, that's gone. The only time it shows up is when you search for best SEO podcast. Now the carousel is back, or best sports medicine podcast. I have a theory. Crystal Carter: What's your theory? Mordy Oberstein: I have a theory that Google realizes that people are trending towards not going to the SERP for podcast anymore. Crystal Carter: Interesting, interesting. Mordy Oberstein: They're just going to go to Spotify. Crystal Carter: That's very interesting. I think that that's absolutely true for some searches. You're going to get people who go straight to Spotify or maybe go straight to Google or to Google Podcasts or there's the Apple Podcasts as well. I think that it's a prime example of how SERP features are amazing, but it's also important that you rank in the plain blue links when you're doing things because we've seen that the podcast carousel, for instance, will show. I think on marketing podcasts at the moment, in the UK anyway, I'm getting the display, but as you're saying, it's very dynamic and I've seen that SEO podcast one go up and go down and go up and go down and show and not show. I think that if you're not ranking on the blue links at all, then when those features come and go, which they are want to do because Google might be doing a test or Google might be changing around, they might try to change the SERP feature, if you're not ranking on the plain blue links as well, then that's something that can be a challenge. This is one of the reasons why you should think about that for all kinds of content and not just podcasts as well. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and something to really pay attention to and it's interesting that it's changing. If you look at traffic around, let's say Spotify itself, you see a lot of the direct traffic, the organic traffic, a lot of this is going up and up and up over time. We didn't even see how the market ecosystem's play into what happens on Google. I'm just speculating. I don't really know. Crystal Carter: Well, I think they're also sending a lot of traffic to Spotify. So certainly on mobile, if you look up, I think we mentioned Beyonce or whatever, but let's mention her again, but if you look up one of her songs or one of her albums or something, they might very well give you a link to Spotify that goes direct to that part of Spotify that goes to that page or goes to that song or goes to that playlist or whatever. So they're very happy to send people directly into apps in order to satisfy the user need. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. So that's audio. Let's talk about video because you started getting into this a little bit earlier around what's happening with the video SERP and what matters, what doesn't matter these days for getting your video onto the SERP. By the way, just some personal experience, we've seen it with our webinar videos. If you can get a video onto the SERP, you can drive a tremendous amount of views, traffic, or whatever to describe it to your YouTube channel, which is amazing. Crystal Carter: Right, and I think it's important to remember that those two things should work in conjunction. It's very much the case that if you have a video that is on your website and that you're using as a supplementary or complementary or even the primary aspects of a particular web page or blog, then you should also make sure that you're optimizing that page on YouTube. You can add in some of the chapters, for instance, on your YouTube videos. You can add in links back to your content on your YouTube video. You can add in keywords into your YouTube. You can also add in other things. Depending on how you're configuring your website, you can also use some of the attributes from your YouTube optimizations on your web page. So for instance, on Wix, we have Wix Video and one of the things that Wix Video does is you can embed a video from your website. Wix Video is using YouTube's configuration to generate schema markup for that video. So when you add a video onto Wix using Wix Video, it will automatically generate schema markup for that video and it will also pull out the attributes from the YouTube video. So not only will it pull out the summary and the name, but it will also pull out some of those keywords that you would add into your YouTube optimization. So if you are thinking coherently about your YouTube strategy and your video strategy as you're making your content, as you're optimizing your content, then you can find efficiencies through your optimizations. We've seen that users are very often clicking those links that are in the descriptions. We see that regularly. And also, the other thing that's really important to think about is backlinks. When you add a video onto YouTube, that counts as a backlink and that counts as referral traffic and that counts as Google being able to understand what's going on there. So that helps to distribute your content in a number of ways as well. Mordy Oberstein: And if you're going to have the video on the page, one thing to note as of more recent times is that in order for your page to have the video thumbnail show up, it has to be the video is the main content on the page. Crystal Carter: Oh, yeah. Mordy Oberstein: It's something to consider because if you do have that kind of video and you can show it where it's appropriate to show it towards the top of the SERP for that particular page, then do it because results that are visual are far more clickable than results that are just unto text. Crystal Carter: Yeah, absolutely. Put the video at the top. Put it at the top. Put it at the top. There's nothing worse than having a video on your page and it says at the bottom like, "Oh, this isn't the main video." When you go onto Google Search Console that you can look in your video pages report and you can see whether or not this thinks this is the main content of the page, and if it is the main content of the page, put it at the top so that Google knows that it's the main content of the page. You shouldn't be any ambiguity about that. Mordy Oberstein: Since we're talking that directionally about Google, the fact that Google's adding more video information into Search Console kind of tells you everything that you really need to know about where the web is at. Crystal Carter: Right. Precisely. Users are updating video all the time and users really enjoy video. We see the number of videos that people are watching only increases every year. The thing that's really strange is that even though that people are watching more and more videos, marketers are saying they should make more and more videos. If you ask users do they want more videos from marketers, they say yes. So I'm like, when will it end? How many videos do you need, people? No. Mordy Oberstein: Hey, I could literally waste my life away on YouTube. I am your target market. Crystal Carter: Right. I've definitely done that of an evening. I watched that video. It was seven ways to tie a scarf, which is years old, but that was peak what am I doing with my life. Because I knew all of the different ways. There's only so many ways to tie a scarf. Mordy Oberstein: I literally enjoy sports people talking about the same point, different sports hosts talking about the same point over and over and over again on a daily basis. Crystal Carter: I really like watching people get their hair done on YouTube. I like the before and after. I like that when somebody comes in and we're like, oh look, now they've got a different hairstyle. Well, it's very nice. Mordy Oberstein: I like yelling and screaming. You like- Crystal Carter: Potatoes, potatoes. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah. Hey, look, by the way, I sent a bunch of tweets about baseball, which you never even saw. You should check out. It's old Slack. They're hilarious. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: They're talking about videos. Anyway, speaking of videos, we have a great Follow of the Week for you who does a lot of videos, but we got some news for you first. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: What's the news? Crystal Carter: I don't know. What is it? Mordy Oberstein: I don't know yet because I haven't gotten to yet, but I do know one thing. It's snappy. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First things first, the SEO tools that track changes in the levels of rank fluctuations have all been red-hot. Google is really mixing up rank these days. To that, Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable writes that, "Coming to a theater near you, you could expect an official Google algorithm update this summer." Prepare for impact, red alert and a bunch of other urgency-related catchphrases. Also, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable again, Google Merchant Center: How To Build Trust With Your Customers. A lot of really, really, really interesting takeaways from this one. This is how Google's looking at authority related to products, looking at trust related to products. One of the things they wrote is "include an about us page on your website to show your authenticity and tell customers your unique story." It's a very underrated tactic. You really should focus on the about page. It's one of the only pages where you can explicitly tell Google who you are, what you do in very direct terms. Also tell your users at the same time, but from an SEO point of view, really, really helpful. Also, Google wrote, "Help potential customers understand how to use your products or how other customers have used them. Show reviews and testimonials about your products and business." I've longed held that one of the things that can help a landing page really do better on search is showing informational content, how to use the product, when to use the product, all of that FAQ-ish kind of stuff. Usually on landing pages, we're very conversion-minded, but Google's basically telling you here, if you have a little bit of an informational intent embedded in there, it could be really helpful and I think it very much resonates with users at the same time, especially if they're a little more skeptical. Last one for you from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google's On Domain Name Selection: Branding Over Keywords. It's always good to get a refresh on this sort of points and to spell some SEO miss. This comes from Google's Search Off the Record podcast. The question, overarching question was, what do I do? Do I use a keyword to pick my domain name or do I choose a more brand-focused domain name? Gary from Google wrote for example, or rather he said, he didn't write, it's a podcast, Gary over Google said that basically, there's a very little impact from a ranking point of view using the keyword in the URL, but there could be a very big impact from a conversion point of view. I think the example that he gave was, let's say you are selling passport pictures and the domain name is something that relates to passport pictures like best passport picture place versus something very generic like get pictures. You're going to probably choose as a user the domain that is more specifically focused on what you're actually looking for. So keyword, not a big impact on rankings, but actually having the brand focus on what you do in very specific way, meaning don't worry about the keyword ranking stuff so much, more on the branding side can have a big conversion impact. John pointed out, and I always like John's perspective on these things, John Mueller said, "You should think long term because changing your domain name is always a hassle and you want to keep it for a long time if you can." What he's referring to is you want to think about how your business is going to expand. For example, I mentioned back in the day, the name of my website was vcrs.com when no one uses a VCR anymore. If the domain was more reflective on the wider media as opposed to the specific device, then I might be able to keep the same domain name as technology changes as my product or service offering expands. So really good points, really foundational points. Always good to get a refresher. Thank you, John. Thank you, Gary. Thank you Martin from Google for the podcast episode. We'll link to all these articles in the show notes and that is this week's Snappy News. As promised as always, so snappy. Crystal Carter: So snappy. Mordy Oberstein: Snappylicious, really. If it is a soft drink, it will be Snapple. Crystal Carter: I literally was just thinking of that and particularly I was thinking of the little poems that they put on their caps of the Snapple. That is proper microcopy. I don't know who thought of that, but the person who did- Mordy Oberstein: The branding right there. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's iconic. It's iconic. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Now, you know what else is iconic? Love my segues today. Sam Oh. If you're looking for videos about SEO, then you should definitely check out Sam Oh and the videos he's done for, Ahrefs. I'll call them timeless classics on SEO YouTube. Crystal Carter: We were very fortunate to have Sam Oh join us at a Wix SEO event at BrightonSEO. Mordy Oberstein: Well, I don't want to mess this up. This is our Follow of the Week, people. Sam Oh is our Follow of the Week. I got this, unprofessional award-winning podcast host. Crystal Carter: He is award-winning. You need to put that on your YouTube bio. Okay, so our Follow of the Week is Sam Oh. We were very fortunate to have him at a Wix SEO event during BrightonSEO recently. He walked in and he went, "Hi, I'm Sam Oh," and I was like, "Sam, everyone here knows who you are. We all know who you are." He's had billions and billions of views on YouTube and the guy is such a nice guy. He is so methodic and so clear in the way that he creates his videos and the content that he creates and the way that he approaches SEO and it's really very much a resource. It's the kind of content that is just exceptional. He's been doing it for a few years and he's a great asset to the SEO community, an absolute pillar. So absolutely follow Sam Oh, not only because his content's great, but he's a nice guy. Mordy Oberstein: And just to add value of it, is that on YouTube, I don't know how to put this gently, sometimes the SEO content is not of the highest quality and it's hard to know who to listen to. Sam is somebody you should listen to, so do follow Sam on Twitter. It's @samS-G-O-H, so S-A-M-S-G-O-H. We'll link to his Twitter profile in the show notes. Now, if we were taking our own advice, we would repurpose our outro every single week. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Sometimes it does pay to do custom stuff, so we're going to do a custom outro. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: We're not going to repurpose from week to week. Crystal Carter: All right. Mordy Oberstein: We value the podcast. Crystal Carter: Yes. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Crystal Carter: Is it you're… Mordy Oberstein: You get what I'm saying? I'm saying we're talking about repurposing and saving time, but we're not repurposing something that many, many podcasts often repurpose, which is the intro in the outros. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. So are we saying goodbye now? Mordy Oberstein: Oh, yeah, sorry. This is my way of saying goodbye. Crystal Carter: Okay. Bye, everybody. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much for joining us at SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, does social media matter for SEO? 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 all the great content and webinars at the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

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

Petra is an SEO consultant with a background of working in-house for B2C & B2B brands, TUI, Jack Wills, as well as enterprise software brands, Yext, and Botify. She is also an international conference speaker. Petra Kis-Herczegh SEO Consultant Petra is an SEO consultant with a background of working in-house for B2C & B2B brands, TUI, Jack Wills, as well as enterprise software brands, Yext, and Botify. She is also an international conference speaker. Articles & Resources 15 Aug 2024 SEO career development: How to prioritize your growth when skills change every year 16 May 2023 Beyond the basics: Conversations for developing customized SEO strategies 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

Matthew Kaminsky is responsible for introductory SEO education initiatives at Wix, helping people increase their sites’ visibility on search engines with SEO. Matthew Kaminsky Wix SEO Expert and Online Instructor Matthew Kaminsky is responsible for introductory SEO education initiatives at Wix, helping people increase their sites’ visibility on search engines with SEO. Articles & Resources 22 Jan 2022 How to set and track SMART goals for SEO 30 Nov 2021 What is your site for? Setting your website objectives 5 Aug 2021 Intro to SEO 6 May 2021 How to optimize your website’s title tags 6 May 2021 How to write meta descriptions for your web pages 6 May 2021 Verifying your site with Google 6 Mar 2021 How to use internal linking for SEO Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on the pulse of SEO

Jandira is a technical SEO A/B testing consultant. She works to prove the value of SEO for the world’s biggest websites, delivering profitable, attributable results. She also enjoys staying on top of SEO industry news and providing SEO advice to small minority businesses. Jandira Neto SEO Testing Consultant at SearchPilot Jandira is a technical SEO A/B testing consultant. She works to prove the value of SEO for the world’s biggest websites, delivering profitable, attributable results. She also enjoys staying on top of SEO industry news and providing SEO advice to small minority businesses. Articles & Resources 19 Dec 2023 SEO A/B testing: Experiment for superior title tags and meta descriptions 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

Is your content random and haphazard? How do you create a formal content strategy to drive efficient growth? Already have a content strategy? How do you adjust your content strategy to continue to get the best results? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, look into building a content strategy for SEO and beyond with special guest host Adriana Stein, CEO of AS Marketing. It’s 2023, so what’s a content and SEO strategy without AI! Crystal and Mordy explore how Bing AI has changed — or maybe not so much. Full steam ahead as Episode 41 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast gets all up in your content strategy! Back How to build a content strategy: SEO and beyond Is your content random and haphazard? How do you create a formal content strategy to drive efficient growth? Already have a content strategy? How do you adjust your content strategy to continue to get the best results? Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, look into building a content strategy for SEO and beyond with special guest host Adriana Stein, CEO of AS Marketing. It’s 2023, so what’s a content and SEO strategy without AI! Crystal and Mordy explore how Bing AI has changed — or maybe not so much. Full steam ahead as Episode 41 of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast gets all up in your content strategy! Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 41 | June 7, 2023 | 36 MIN 00:00 / 36:25 This week’s guests Adrian Stein Originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and founder of the marketing agency AS Marketing. She leads a team of multi-language SEO experts who develop holistic international marketing strategies for global companies. 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 Branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the adjective laden, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. A good adjective laden. Good adjective laden. Crystal Carter: That is the laziest one I've ever heard. It's like when I'm saying like, oh, this is a... And I just do like seven fire emojis. Because I'm like, insert fantastic adjective, whatever it may be that you choose based on the fire emoji, it's fire. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just out of adjectives. I don't know what to say anymore because each week it's the incredible, fantastic... The adjective laden. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you for a fantastic, stupendous, incredible, marvelous, Mordy-licious introduction. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: It's not easy. The last one you got stuck like, where do I go now? And you say, is it time to stop? Crystal Carter: Yeah, this is true. Although to be fair though, your name starts with the name an M, so there's like marvelous, marvelous Mordy, magnificent Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Mania. Crystal Carter: Mordy Mania. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but it's also where you can manage your content all in one place connected to datasets and more with the Wix content manager, so that you can dutifully execute both your SEO and content strategies. As today we're talking about both. Your SEO and content strategies. See the connection? Crystal Carter: Yes, I do see the connection. They're connected very, very well. Mordy Oberstein: Quite explicitly. I don't say so myself. Crystal Carter: It's almost like you wrote it. Mordy Oberstein: It's almost like we wrote that part of the... Yes, that's right. Today we're diving into the overlap between SEO and content marketing at the strategic level as we look at building a content strategy for SEO and beyond things like our SEO content and content marketing strategy, the same different, kind of the same, kind of different kind of not the same. Where do you start including your content and SEO content strategies, and how do you refine your strategy along the way to help us dive into that, we have a very special guest, hope stopping by in just a few minutes. And Adriana Stein, the CEO and founder of AS Marketing. Plus we're talking content, and if it's 2023 and we're talking content, we're talking about AI and AI and content. So we're going to explore how AI content produced or rather content produced by AI content generators in search engines as changed. And of course, the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So while the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, that doesn't apply to us because we're fricking SEOs and marketers. So hey, we're marketers here. These rules don't apply to us. So full steam ahead and full planning ahead as episode number 41 of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast gets all up in your strategy. Crystal Carter: Let's go. Mordy Oberstein: Let's go. So content strategies, in my opinion, are Jackson Pollock paintings. It seems kind of like chaos, but underneath I think there's some semblance of... Or should it be some semblance of order and planning that goes underneath it. Crystal Carter: That's true. This is sounds like somebody who's seen a Jackson painting in real life. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, real? Crystal Carter: I have. They're actually gigantic. And actually when you see them, you do see that actually it isn't just chaos. Mordy Oberstein: It does make sense. My first association to him was watching the movie with Ed Harris, but I was think like 10 or 11 when it came out. I am not sure that was appropriate for me to be watching, but either way kind of explains a few things. Chaos or planning rather, can easily become chaos, which means that the execution of the planning gets a hard thing to get. It also means that plans change, and I'm a firm believer that if your plan doesn't change, you're not doing it right. If you start with a content plan and you go through without any adjustment, you're probably doing something wrong. But what do these plans look like? Where does an SEO content plan fit in with the overall content plan? And for you pure content folks, where does a general content plan kind of play yourself out within the SEO strategy? So basically, what does a planning thing look like and how do you not just wing it? And to help us tackle all of this, put your hands together for the founder of AS marketing. Adriana Stein, welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast. Adriana Stein: Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Crystal Carter: Yay, we're so pleased to have you along, big fan of your work. Adriana Stein. Adriana and I are both members of the Women in Tech SEO group. Adriana Stein: Yes. Crystal Carter: And we've both attended the Women in Tech SEO conferences and mutual appreciation here on the podcast for the work that Adriana is doing, particularly on content but also on some amazing things, and also being the founder and director of your own agency there. Fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Tell us about that. Adriana Stein: Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so AS Marketing, we specialize in multi-language marketing, so we're a full service agency. Our projects tend to actually split between PPC and SEO. It started out being a lot more SEO focused, but now it's kind of interesting. There's a pretty widespread demand for multi-language international marketing, and that's where we basically come in and help our clients expand into new markets with localization. So it can be Germany to the US or the UK to the EU, or some sort of combination of madness like this. And we work with native speakers to help localize all of the strategy, implement, optimize everything and ensure there's conversions of some sort. So leads or sales, whether you're B2C or B2B, then that's where we're able to help. So a lot of content goes into that. Crystal Carter: And a lot of planning- Adriana Stein: And a lot of different places. A lot of planning. Crystal Carter: A lot of planning. And I think you've contributed a really great article on localization and content localization. And one of the things that comes up with that is that when you're planning that content, you're planning to make it in whatever is your X default language, but also planning to roll it out to other languages and also to maintain it across all of that. Do you have any sort of insights or experience that you can share on that? Adriana Stein: Yeah, so I think the first thing I would start off by saying is be really cautious with mass translations. That's one of the things that we first talk through with all of our clients. I will say talk through, because sometimes it's a top-down decision that they're like, okay, we're just going to copy paste everything we've been doing in the US and then we're just going to do that in Germany and then we will just work like that. And we don't have a say in anything, but ideally there is some sort of separate strategy per each market, and it doesn't have to be in incredibly minute detail. If you have the budget, the resources for that, great. I mean, you're probably going to get a better return on investment that way. But starting off at least try to have a little bit of separate understanding for each market and how it performs because every culture is different, every language is different. People phrase things in different ways. The buying cycle is very different in different markets. And so in terms of planning, really it's one, having an understanding of, okay, how am I going to go into this market effectively? And making sure you have the mindset, the operational mindset as a business to do that, and then that you also find the right strategic support, the right type of people to help you do that. So whether that's an agency or whether you do that in-house, it's really ideal that you work with someone who understands that market. It can really help you localize the strategy for that. And that's regardless of the channel. So whether that's SEO, whether that's Google Ads, LinkedIn, whatever the case may be, the more localized you can make everything, then the stronger the strategy is going to be because it's more personalized. The reason I always will say that this is going to be more efficient in the end is because think about the local competitors that you have in that country or in that market. They're already doing that anyways. So if you go in with that reduced sort of customer experience in comparison with the local markets, with the local competitors, they're not going to get very far. So you've basically got to outperform them from the get-go if you want to make an impact. Mordy Oberstein: To sort of zoom out on this. How much of that is... When you're creating all this content, whether it's in this market or that market or multiple markets all at one time, how much overlap is there in the strategy itself overall between the different... I'll call them verticals, whether it's content marketing, SEO, PPC, whatever it is? Adriana Stein: Yeah, there's a ton. I mean, ideally there should be a ton and no silo. In some companies there is unfortunately a silo if you have a lot of different teams that have different goals. But the best case scenario is when all of the content strategy holistically performs together. So I think it's important to kind of zoom out on content, and a lot of us perceive content purely for SEO purposes, but content is also for landing pages, for PPC case studies. White papers especially for B2B are important as well. Videos, music, I don't know anything that people produce in relation to a brand or even the customers or the users talk about that brand that is all content. So all of that can really come together to form what is the content strategy for a brand. Crystal Carter: I absolutely agree. I had a client who used to get a lot of traffic from some of their offsite assets from some of their IRL assets. They had a particular product and it needed instructions, and the way that you could get instructions was, there was a QR code or something that was in the back of the package and we used to get tons of traffic from that. So yeah, it's important to think about keeping the content strategy and the content strategy consistent, the content consistent across all of those different touch points. Can you give any insight for how to make sure you've got a common thread going through your content strategy? Adriana Stein: I think there are two things there. One is communication. Communication is going to be easier in a smaller company than in a bigger company. But if you can in a bigger company and you have separate departments, like a separate maybe advertising team, even a separate brand team, separate SEO team, just communicate all the time about here's what we're doing, here's how we're using this, because then you can repurpose all of that content that's produced too. It shouldn't just be used on one channel. And then the other thing really is the KPIs. It should be that everyone is working together on the same goal. So that really is a reason to then communicate, here's how our work is performing here. Here's how your work is performing here. How is that helping our overarching goal? And then involving sales and that as well is really ideal, especially in B2B, and to get everyone working toward that same goal because then you find that the content you produce can be used in all facets of every part of everyone's work. And that really helps keep everything very consistent too. Mordy Oberstein: I always say content is your brand, whatever medium it is, whether it's video, image or actual words, that is your brand, that's how you're commuting yourself to the public. There's like no other way. There's no audio language or anything like that. It has to be content. Do you find that your pure content strategy and your SEO content strategy are sort of converging together? I'll give you a good example of what I mean by this. I find that what users want and what search engines want both in terms of stylistically, I think users or people, I hate that people are looking for more conversational types of content from brands opposed to marketing schlock, and I think that ties into things around experience and expertise that Google's looking for. At the same time, they kind of very much align. Do you find that's happening more and more in 2023 than it did in years past? Adriana Stein: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you've heard this concept of analysis paralysis because it just means that there's so much information out there and so many options to choose that people do a lot of research, a lot of research before they buy something, even a lower price type product. You're looking at reviews, you're looking at prices, you're probably looking at multiple brands to try to understand what's best for you and trying to find a way through a bit of all of the madness. And I think the best way that brands can really do that with content is trying to help them rather than just pushing people towards a sale, but just try to help them make an informed decision because the less that you push, then the more they're likely to trust you and they're going to purchase from you anyways. Sometimes even if the pricing is higher, then the trust factor plays a much bigger role than that. Mordy Oberstein: Good point. Crystal Carter: So I was thinking when you were saying about the analysis paralysis, it made me think of the reason why I shop at Little. So I shop at Little because they don't have 3 million different types of peanut butter. They have chunky and they have smooth, and I know that they have generally decent quality stuff. So whether it's chunky or smooth, whichever one I pick, it's probably going to be fine, but what I want is peanut butter. But at the end of the day, I know that there's a general sort of quality level for them. How do you deliver that sort of quality, maintain that sort of quality with the demands of quantity for content? So to be competitive online at the moment, you know, have to keep feeding the algorithm and keep feeding the algorithm, whether you're on social, whether you're on your website, et cetera, et cetera. How do you maintain that quality while you're rolling out the quantity of content that you need to make a splash? Adriana Stein: Yeah, I mean that's honestly like a million-dollar question today I must say. But I think to answer it simply, it really comes down to processes. So if you have very streamlined processes, everyone knows what they're supposed to do, at which stage, by which date, how much you're trying to produce over a certain timeframe, who needs to have input on something? Ideally the less people the better, because if you have six people editing, this is one of the biggest roadblocks that I've seen to installing content is when you just have too many brains and they're trying to make sense of everything and it just takes way too long. So really processes is what it comes down to, and that will help you get that quality because there will be someone like a content strategist of some sort depending on the channel who's kind of overseeing quality, maybe some sort of project manager who's assigning things, telling people which part of the project they're supposed to do, which sort of task they're supposed to do, and just really aligning everyone on all of that. That's really the biggest thing. So if you don't have some sort of really clear checklist, here's our one to 10 steps, here's doing what, it just gets so random chaos and then you end up not producing a lot of content, the process is key. Mordy Oberstein: So to that process though, I think one of the things that's interesting to me is that when you're dealing with multiple teams and multiple pieces of content and multiple strategies, and what I inevitably find, and we talked about this on a previous podcast, there's a certain momentum at a certain cadence that you get. And then as that happens, new opportunities arise, new ways of thinking come about, new pain points are unearth, all of a sudden the brain starts flowing and you start thinking differently as things evolve. How do you refine along the way? How do you make sure you're open to refining along the way? Then how do you actually steer that because you're working with assets you've been planning on for so long that now you might have to reshift though with multiple teams and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It all seems like trying to make a giant U-turn and you're the Titanic. Adriana Stein: Oh yeah, I can relate to that- Mordy Oberstein: Iceberg. Adriana Stein: I would say really it still comes down to processes because it's about also adding that part in the process. So when is there a regular optimization happening or how often are content topics created and how? Is it one brainstorming session a month? Everyone's got to come there with their ideas and that's it, really stick to that. Or is it every three months we're doing an audit on this sort of thing, or every six months we're doing an audit on this sort of thing, or I don't know, maybe there's a new service offering. And so we need to understand, okay, how do we implement this with the rest of the content so that the messaging is consistent? We're still talking about both things, but there's different pain points that still is part of the optimization process. So I would say really just add space for that in this content production checklist. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Do you ever find though that there's parts of the strategy that are at odds with each other? So let's go back to the example of things are getting more conversational out there with brands. That's great. And you may say, you know what? We need to pivot. We need to become more conversational. And I can imagine an SEO saying, wait, wait, but the age two needs to have the keyword. You don't have the keyword now. Now what do we do? Adriana Stein: Well, yeah, I think that's the bane of every SEO's existence is like, how do we create really great content but that's still adheres to SEO formatting? Which is so strict in particular. It's very, very difficult to find a balance of both. But I think if you can try to focus, for example, content ideation, even if it's something conversational based on, okay, how from the beginning can we apply this to SEO? So not that SEO is a later stage in the content strategy, but it's really at the forefront. And I think that's one of the biggest channels that needs to be at the forefront because if you can think of, okay, this content group, content cluster or something like this, this can work really well for SEO and then here's how we're going to do the rest of the content in relation to that. We're going to link to some conversion mining pages. Maybe we're going to link to a lead magnet off of this page, and then that can be used for email marketing later to capture some emails like this. So put it directly within your content strategy, your content planning, and that will help that a little bit be a bit more natural. Because if SEO comes so much later down, you've got a content strategy and then three months later you're like, okay, let's do SEO and let's try to shove the SEO into this content strategy, then you're going to have some difficulties putting those keywords properly. Crystal Carter: And I think that it can be a challenge to build that in. What role do you consider education to play in making sure that your wider team are able to do some of that SEO as they go along or so are able to keep SEO in the forefront of their minds as they're creating even that more sort of conversational or reactionary content? Adriana Stein: Yeah, that's a good question. So what we use on our team is briefs. We use really, really detailed briefs for our content writers. I would say even a lot of the content is kind of half written. It's not elegantly written. That's what the writer is there to kind of help us refine, maybe dig in with some of the research a bit further. But what we provide the content writer, which comes from the strategist who knows the overarching business strategy, how this fits into the content strategy at hand, then they're creating a very, very detailed brief for the writer. So the writer really knows, okay, here's how this fits into SEO. Here's what I'm supposed to write in relation to the structure of the content. So what goes into each section focuses of the keywords so they know, and it comes off very naturally when you do it this way because then it's not asking the content writer to just add, I don't know like, say this keyword, write this keyword 20 times into this content. That doesn't work. That sort of way of doing SEO I think is really outdated. It's a lot about coming from the top down, putting SEO into the business strategy and then creating content topics based on that, and then briefing the writer based on that. And then all of the processes is a lot more natural. And it's not a struggle for the writer to do that. Mordy Oberstein: If there's like one consistent theme. It's the planning all the way throughout. Adriana Stein: Yes, it is. Mordy Oberstein: And it's such a good point because if the overlap between content and SEO was that much stronger, you really need to loop in the SEO into the full content process all the way down. It just makes so much sense. We could probably dive into way more of this, but I know that your time is short and extremely valuable, so we'll let you get back to creating all of that great content. But where can people find you first? Adriana Stein: Best place would be on LinkedIn probably. So feel free to send me a message. You can just type in my name, Adrian Stein, you'll find me there. I'm also on Twitter too if you're really keen on still using that Wild Wild West platform these days. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I guess it beat Mastodon. Adriana Stein: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry Simon. Crystal Carter: But thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. And yes, I'm getting the hint that process... It's all about the process. Adriana Stein: Yep. It's all about the process. Mordy Oberstein: Trust the process, trust the process with- Adriana Stein: I will probably be saying this from my grave, look at your process- Crystal Carter: It was the process. Mordy Oberstein: He trusted the process. Well, thank you so much Adriana, showed a link to your social profiles in the show notes for this episode, so you can keep getting awesomeness from Adriana out there on social media. Thank you, Adriana. Adriana Stein: Thanks so much for having me. Super pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. Adriana Stein: Bye. Mordy Oberstein: So speaking of plans and content plans and content plans, changing and planning and the planning and the planning, one thing that's constantly changing and I think where people are pivoting or platforms are pivoting with their content would be AI content generators. By the way, we're talking about content, does any other content even exist other than content written by AI generators? The answer was, I hope so. Crystal Carter: I hope so. Mordy Oberstein: I hope so Crystal Carter: Yes, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: But be that as it may and your stance on AI aside, it is super interesting what the search engines are doing with integrating AI chat experiences and how changing they are. And Bing actually has made some really interesting changes to their AI chat experience. So while we usually go Google this time, we're going Bing. Speaker 5: And it's going. Google. It's outta here. Mordy Oberstein: Recently, relatively recently, Bing made an update. It was covered by Search Engine Land & Search Engine Roundtable, both by Barry Schwartz back on April 21st, where Bing wrote quote, we've taken steps to help Bing give better answers if you're asking questions about news. And the pain point there is obviously, news is changing very quickly. You got to be really good at understanding what's happening out there in the ecosystem for an AI chat experience to offer back an answer of something that's relevant because it's news, it's constantly changing. So I thought we should take a look and see how good being has gotten with this. One of the things that I've done is, so I'm a big sports nut, as you all know at this point. And I thought, you know what I'll do? I'll ask Bing chat a bunch of questions about players and injury status because that's very current and let's see how well Bing can do it. And the answer is kind of okay. There's a player, his name is Giancarlo Stanton. He's a center fielder for the New York Yankees. He gets hurt a lot, all the time, at least- Crystal Carter: Unlucky. Mordy Oberstein: He's a big dude. He's very muscular in baseball. The traditional player was more stringy. Crystal Carter: I mean, Babe Ruth, come on, Babe Ruth was like... I mean- Mordy Oberstein: Well, Babe Ruth, this is a different... An aberration unto itself. He was eating a thousand hotdog before a game. Shows up, hits a couple home runs, goes back to eating the hotdog. That dude was different. Crystal Carter: Okay, built differently. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, built differently. Back in the day though, the player were just... They were more athletic than they were muscular. 'Cause muscular, you get hurt. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And John Carlo is a very muscular man and he gets hurt a lot. So I asked Bing chat, what is John Carlo Stanton's status? This, by the way, was after I asked Bing chat, what team has Aaron Rogers played for. Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: And he's a football player. He recently got traded and Bing got it wrong. He said he played for his old team. So I'm like, all right, let's give Bing another chance. Give it another chance. And I asked, what is Giancarlo Stanton? And Bing chat wrote back, Giancarlo Stan has missed most of the 2022 season. We're in 2023. With various injuries, including left achilles tendon, white quadricep and foot ankle. He told you he gets injured all the freaking time. Dude's a walking injury. He has not played the game since July 24th. That has not run the basis or gone on a rehab assignment. He hopes to return in September and October, but his status is alone unclear. He underwent x-rays on his foot ankle that came back negative, very prolific answer, very out of date. Crystal Carter: Foot ankle? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Foot slash ankle, sorry. Okay, that's my fault. That's the Mordy. That's not the AI. But then it said most recently he suffered a hamstring strain and will miss six weeks and that's accurate as hell. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Okay. So it's got a little bit of a mixed bag there. Mordy Oberstein: It's a little bit of both. And I just thought, it's so interesting how the content that these AI chat experiences are spitting out is changing and how far we've come because I think it's awesome that being is making that update. And I think what they've done is awesome and they've clearly gotten it right, but they've also clearly gotten it wrong. And I think there's two ways to look at this from a technology point of view. This is amazing. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: From a user point of view for the correct information, this is eh, sort of kind of. Crystal Carter: Yeah. If you said, if I jump off this bridge, will I live, and the answer was like 50% accurate, I wouldn't trust that information. So I think that that's the case. I mean, in my experiments with Bing Chat and I've used it a bit and I've kicked the tires a little bit, pushing on some more sensitive topics. What I sometimes find is that with sensitive topics, it'll just shut down. It'll say, "I don't want to talk about that. I think we should change the subject." Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes. Crystal Carter: And I'm like, "What?" So then I open up a new chat with the same question and then it'll say something and I say, "Well, why did you say that?" And says, "I don't want to talk about that." And then so I'm like, "Stop being so fragile Bing." Mordy Oberstein: I did the same thing. So when I asked Bing Chat, "Hey, you know what team has Aaron Rogers played for? He is a quarterback, he used to play for the Green Bay Packers and now he plays for the New York Jets." It came back. Aaron Rodgers, American football quarterback who currently plays for the Green Bay Packers, I wrote back, wasn't he traded to the Jets. And Bing Chat wrote back, according to recent reports, Aaron Rodgers has been traded to the New York Jets. And then I wrote being my snarky self. So why did you say he was on the Packers? Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: I then, "I apologize for the confusion. We must have missed the recent news." Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Precisely. And this is the thing, it gets a little bit sensitive, but I think that one of the other things that I find is that because it can be a bit sensitive, it sometimes hedges. So I think sometimes it will hedge itself on things on fairly safe information. So I asked it recently, what is the latest news in SEO? And the information that came back was sourced from Forbes past company and business Lancaster shouting out to Mark A. Preston. Actually, I'm talking about SEO. And the things that it said were pretty generic answers. They're not really news, they're just general sort of SEO trends. It was saying that Forbes says businesses must adapt their SEO strategies to ensure their content stays relevant. I mean, that could be the news from this week or from last month or from two years ago or from wherever it is. And I'm really surprised that those sources for SEO news, because there are a number of news publications for SEO that are notable. Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry Schwartz, SEJ, SEL there's tons of them that are very specifically dedicated to SEO. So I think it's interesting that they're hedging on some of these particular sources that are sort of seen as sort of maybe safe or maybe vanilla. Because I think Bing gets a little bit... It gets a little bit sensitive. It gets feelings get hurt. Mordy Oberstein: Well, oh, my feelings get hurt really easily too. So I can't blame Bing. Crystal Carter: We all have feelings. Mordy Oberstein: We all have feelings. Something really interesting about that point. Rich Tatum posted something on Twitter where I think what he posted was he was asking Chat GPT to basically fudge experience, write up a prompt about what it's like to drive a Ford Mustang or something similar to that. And it tried to fudge that experience of driving a Ford Mustang. And it gave pretty generic experiences. It was superfast and fun to drive that Mustang with those 220 ….. That level of nuance, you can't actually fudge actual experience and actual expertise. And it's a really good point. 'Cause I was thinking, you know what? I never thought of that hack. If I got... I'm trying to play the review update, right? I'm going to show experience, I'll just go ask the AI, right? As if I had experience. But you can't fudge it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's very difficult. 'Cause I think also there's sometimes where... I think this is where actual reviews are really interesting is because... And I've seen this before where you see some sites are ranking for reviews and others are not, because the particular reviews that they have on their site are more unique than the other ones. So if the other reviews are like, oh, it's great, or oh, it's nice, then that's going to be different from a review that's very detailed. And they're very often the ones that are on the edges, they're either the one star or the five star who are getting into the sort of like, oh actually when I tried to assemble this chair, it didn't come with enough bolts. Or when I tried to... I recently bought an office chair and someone said, I do not like this chair. I would not wish this cursed chair on my worst enemies. And I was like, cursed. Did you really put cursed in there? But that is a unique review full of some unique feelings. And those sorts of things are not... Being Bing are very sensitive about how it feels about its results. It's not going to put that kind of content in what it's saying. Chat GPT probably wouldn't as well. I mean, I don't know if you could ask Chat GPT add to, I never asked Chat GPT to write a salty review about it- Mordy Oberstein: But it probably wouldn't had that level of nuance. I just wouldn't be there. So end of the day, 'cause we're talking about refining content strategies and refining content plans on the pivoting and refining the strategy when Bing saw the need to get news more accurate, A plus. Good job on you Bing, that's what you should be doing. In the execution, I think we're at a C. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think they can A for effort, and I did actually test this. So after the Oscars, there was an image AI image of Zendaya at the Oscars that was making the rounds on Twitter, and it was retweeted by a few major news publications. And I asked Bing, "Was Zendaya at the Oscars." And they were like, "No, she wasn't. She was in London with her boyfriend." And I was like, okay, Bing. All right, I see you good. That's good information. Good sorting out that information there. So I think also they were fighting it a lot, so they'll get there- Mordy Oberstein: It's a work in project. It's not a critique at all. This whole technology really is in its infancy, but as a user, if you're going to be asking you questions about like Giancarlo Stanton injury status, take the answer with a grain of salt. You have to really be careful. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it might be worth them putting a little label on there that's like, do check. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. But be that as it may anyway. Well, this was kind of new. What was definitely new is the news. Crystal Carter: The news. Mordy Oberstein: So here's our owed, our weekly owed to Barry Schwartz. As we get into the Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Get a whole bunch of things for you from Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineRoundtable.com. They're all from Barry this week, and they're all from SearchEngineRoundtable.com. First up, Google rolling out multiple feature snippets on desktop search. Reports are coming in showing that Google is using multiple featured snippets. Three to be exact on desktop. So you search on desktop and you would get three snippets of texts with three URLs crammed into the same space at the top of the SERP. I'm not sure how widespread this is. I don't see it on desktop. I do see it on mobile, which goes back to a previous Google release. Again, I don't see it on desktop in the US or not in the US. I don't see it, but maybe you do. By the way, the idea of Google going more diverse with feature snippets is something I've been clamoring about for a long time. Did whole article about it on the Wix DEO hub. So I will link to that in the show notes. Okay, AI, Google search, generative experience results are not really personalized. Thank you, Barry. Good to know. Google Bard can now provide more precise local results if you allow Bard to access your location. Thank you, Mary. Good to know, Microsoft, Bing chat to work on all browsers soon. Once again, Barry, thank you very much. Great to know. And that's this week's snappy news. Thanks for listening to our little news section. I hope you enjoyed it. Crystal Carter: Thank you. We have some listeners who say that the news is their favorite part of the SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. We have one listener who says that. His name rhymes with Mary Borts. Crystal Carter: No, there was somebody else who said that they absolutely love the Snappy News. And shout out to all of our listeners. Hello, listeners out there in Radioland... Not Radioland. Podcast Land. Mordy Oberstein: Podcast Land. Crystal Carter: Thank you for joining us and thank you for enjoying the Snappy News. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, it was quite snappy. But before we do the part for this week, we have to go through our follow of the week and we have... 'Cause we're talking about content and content strategies. We have somebody who's all about content, contributor to the Wix SEO Hub herself, Maddy Osman over at Maddy Osman on Twitter, that's M-A-D-D-Y O-S-M-A-N. And Maddy is a content strategist execution. She wrote a book. She has a book about writing content that you can buy. Crystal Carter: She's really into her content. She's contributed some fantastic articles on the Wix SEO Hub. And she has, again, yeah, written the book and she's got a really good community that she runs that talks about content as well. So yeah, do you check out Maddy at Blocksmiths, she also runs courses on content as well. Super, super friendly. Super, super clever. A great follow if you're looking to increase your content quality and quantity. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, she's definitely little more prominent SEOs on the content side, thinking about content from an SEO point of view and just from a pure content point of view. So give a follow to Maddy and tell her we sent you. Nut you can't do when you follow someone, I wish you could... There should be a referral of some kind. Like I followed you because the SERP's Up Podcast editor follow you. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that'd be good. Ride the wave. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Ride the Wave because the SERP's Up Podcast, it's a whole surfing thing. Get it? Thanks. Anyway, thank you for joining us on this SERP's Up Podcast. Already going to miss us not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into what the heck is helpful content, actually? Crystal Carter: What is helpful, what is unhelpful? What's going on with helpful content? Let's talk about it. Mordy Oberstein: What does it all mean? What does it all mean? Crystal Carter: Can we get some help? Mordy Oberstein: Yes- Crystal Carter: I need somebody. Mordy Oberstein: It would be very helpful. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning them over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Checkout all of the great content and webinars and newsletter on the Wix SEO Learning, however you guessed it. wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Adriana Stein Maddy Osman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter AS Marketing Agency Google SERP Content Diversity News: Google Rolling Out Multiple Featured Snippets On Desktop Search Google Search Generative Experience Results Are Not Really Personalized Google Bard Can Now Provide More Precise Local Results Microsoft: Bing Chat To Work On All Browsers Soon Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Adriana Stein Maddy Osman Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Searchlight SEO Newsletter AS Marketing Agency Google SERP Content Diversity News: Google Rolling Out Multiple Featured Snippets On Desktop Search Google Search Generative Experience Results Are Not Really Personalized Google Bard Can Now Provide More Precise Local Results Microsoft: Bing Chat To Work On All Browsers Soon 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 Branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the adjective laden, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. A good adjective laden. Good adjective laden. Crystal Carter: That is the laziest one I've ever heard. It's like when I'm saying like, oh, this is a... And I just do like seven fire emojis. Because I'm like, insert fantastic adjective, whatever it may be that you choose based on the fire emoji, it's fire. Mordy Oberstein: I'm just out of adjectives. I don't know what to say anymore because each week it's the incredible, fantastic... The adjective laden. Crystal Carter: Well, thank you for a fantastic, stupendous, incredible, marvelous, Mordy-licious introduction. Thank you. Mordy Oberstein: It's not easy. The last one you got stuck like, where do I go now? And you say, is it time to stop? Crystal Carter: Yeah, this is true. Although to be fair though, your name starts with the name an M, so there's like marvelous, marvelous Mordy, magnificent Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Mania. Crystal Carter: Mordy Mania. Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but it's also where you can manage your content all in one place connected to datasets and more with the Wix content manager, so that you can dutifully execute both your SEO and content strategies. As today we're talking about both. Your SEO and content strategies. See the connection? Crystal Carter: Yes, I do see the connection. They're connected very, very well. Mordy Oberstein: Quite explicitly. I don't say so myself. Crystal Carter: It's almost like you wrote it. Mordy Oberstein: It's almost like we wrote that part of the... Yes, that's right. Today we're diving into the overlap between SEO and content marketing at the strategic level as we look at building a content strategy for SEO and beyond things like our SEO content and content marketing strategy, the same different, kind of the same, kind of different kind of not the same. Where do you start including your content and SEO content strategies, and how do you refine your strategy along the way to help us dive into that, we have a very special guest, hope stopping by in just a few minutes. And Adriana Stein, the CEO and founder of AS Marketing. Plus we're talking content, and if it's 2023 and we're talking content, we're talking about AI and AI and content. So we're going to explore how AI content produced or rather content produced by AI content generators in search engines as changed. And of course, the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So while the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, that doesn't apply to us because we're fricking SEOs and marketers. So hey, we're marketers here. These rules don't apply to us. So full steam ahead and full planning ahead as episode number 41 of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast gets all up in your strategy. Crystal Carter: Let's go. Mordy Oberstein: Let's go. So content strategies, in my opinion, are Jackson Pollock paintings. It seems kind of like chaos, but underneath I think there's some semblance of... Or should it be some semblance of order and planning that goes underneath it. Crystal Carter: That's true. This is sounds like somebody who's seen a Jackson painting in real life. Mordy Oberstein: Oh, real? Crystal Carter: I have. They're actually gigantic. And actually when you see them, you do see that actually it isn't just chaos. Mordy Oberstein: It does make sense. My first association to him was watching the movie with Ed Harris, but I was think like 10 or 11 when it came out. I am not sure that was appropriate for me to be watching, but either way kind of explains a few things. Chaos or planning rather, can easily become chaos, which means that the execution of the planning gets a hard thing to get. It also means that plans change, and I'm a firm believer that if your plan doesn't change, you're not doing it right. If you start with a content plan and you go through without any adjustment, you're probably doing something wrong. But what do these plans look like? Where does an SEO content plan fit in with the overall content plan? And for you pure content folks, where does a general content plan kind of play yourself out within the SEO strategy? So basically, what does a planning thing look like and how do you not just wing it? And to help us tackle all of this, put your hands together for the founder of AS marketing. Adriana Stein, welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast. Adriana Stein: Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Crystal Carter: Yay, we're so pleased to have you along, big fan of your work. Adriana Stein. Adriana and I are both members of the Women in Tech SEO group. Adriana Stein: Yes. Crystal Carter: And we've both attended the Women in Tech SEO conferences and mutual appreciation here on the podcast for the work that Adriana is doing, particularly on content but also on some amazing things, and also being the founder and director of your own agency there. Fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Tell us about that. Adriana Stein: Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so AS Marketing, we specialize in multi-language marketing, so we're a full service agency. Our projects tend to actually split between PPC and SEO. It started out being a lot more SEO focused, but now it's kind of interesting. There's a pretty widespread demand for multi-language international marketing, and that's where we basically come in and help our clients expand into new markets with localization. So it can be Germany to the US or the UK to the EU, or some sort of combination of madness like this. And we work with native speakers to help localize all of the strategy, implement, optimize everything and ensure there's conversions of some sort. So leads or sales, whether you're B2C or B2B, then that's where we're able to help. So a lot of content goes into that. Crystal Carter: And a lot of planning- Adriana Stein: And a lot of different places. A lot of planning. Crystal Carter: A lot of planning. And I think you've contributed a really great article on localization and content localization. And one of the things that comes up with that is that when you're planning that content, you're planning to make it in whatever is your X default language, but also planning to roll it out to other languages and also to maintain it across all of that. Do you have any sort of insights or experience that you can share on that? Adriana Stein: Yeah, so I think the first thing I would start off by saying is be really cautious with mass translations. That's one of the things that we first talk through with all of our clients. I will say talk through, because sometimes it's a top-down decision that they're like, okay, we're just going to copy paste everything we've been doing in the US and then we're just going to do that in Germany and then we will just work like that. And we don't have a say in anything, but ideally there is some sort of separate strategy per each market, and it doesn't have to be in incredibly minute detail. If you have the budget, the resources for that, great. I mean, you're probably going to get a better return on investment that way. But starting off at least try to have a little bit of separate understanding for each market and how it performs because every culture is different, every language is different. People phrase things in different ways. The buying cycle is very different in different markets. And so in terms of planning, really it's one, having an understanding of, okay, how am I going to go into this market effectively? And making sure you have the mindset, the operational mindset as a business to do that, and then that you also find the right strategic support, the right type of people to help you do that. So whether that's an agency or whether you do that in-house, it's really ideal that you work with someone who understands that market. It can really help you localize the strategy for that. And that's regardless of the channel. So whether that's SEO, whether that's Google Ads, LinkedIn, whatever the case may be, the more localized you can make everything, then the stronger the strategy is going to be because it's more personalized. The reason I always will say that this is going to be more efficient in the end is because think about the local competitors that you have in that country or in that market. They're already doing that anyways. So if you go in with that reduced sort of customer experience in comparison with the local markets, with the local competitors, they're not going to get very far. So you've basically got to outperform them from the get-go if you want to make an impact. Mordy Oberstein: To sort of zoom out on this. How much of that is... When you're creating all this content, whether it's in this market or that market or multiple markets all at one time, how much overlap is there in the strategy itself overall between the different... I'll call them verticals, whether it's content marketing, SEO, PPC, whatever it is? Adriana Stein: Yeah, there's a ton. I mean, ideally there should be a ton and no silo. In some companies there is unfortunately a silo if you have a lot of different teams that have different goals. But the best case scenario is when all of the content strategy holistically performs together. So I think it's important to kind of zoom out on content, and a lot of us perceive content purely for SEO purposes, but content is also for landing pages, for PPC case studies. White papers especially for B2B are important as well. Videos, music, I don't know anything that people produce in relation to a brand or even the customers or the users talk about that brand that is all content. So all of that can really come together to form what is the content strategy for a brand. Crystal Carter: I absolutely agree. I had a client who used to get a lot of traffic from some of their offsite assets from some of their IRL assets. They had a particular product and it needed instructions, and the way that you could get instructions was, there was a QR code or something that was in the back of the package and we used to get tons of traffic from that. So yeah, it's important to think about keeping the content strategy and the content strategy consistent, the content consistent across all of those different touch points. Can you give any insight for how to make sure you've got a common thread going through your content strategy? Adriana Stein: I think there are two things there. One is communication. Communication is going to be easier in a smaller company than in a bigger company. But if you can in a bigger company and you have separate departments, like a separate maybe advertising team, even a separate brand team, separate SEO team, just communicate all the time about here's what we're doing, here's how we're using this, because then you can repurpose all of that content that's produced too. It shouldn't just be used on one channel. And then the other thing really is the KPIs. It should be that everyone is working together on the same goal. So that really is a reason to then communicate, here's how our work is performing here. Here's how your work is performing here. How is that helping our overarching goal? And then involving sales and that as well is really ideal, especially in B2B, and to get everyone working toward that same goal because then you find that the content you produce can be used in all facets of every part of everyone's work. And that really helps keep everything very consistent too. Mordy Oberstein: I always say content is your brand, whatever medium it is, whether it's video, image or actual words, that is your brand, that's how you're commuting yourself to the public. There's like no other way. There's no audio language or anything like that. It has to be content. Do you find that your pure content strategy and your SEO content strategy are sort of converging together? I'll give you a good example of what I mean by this. I find that what users want and what search engines want both in terms of stylistically, I think users or people, I hate that people are looking for more conversational types of content from brands opposed to marketing schlock, and I think that ties into things around experience and expertise that Google's looking for. At the same time, they kind of very much align. Do you find that's happening more and more in 2023 than it did in years past? Adriana Stein: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you've heard this concept of analysis paralysis because it just means that there's so much information out there and so many options to choose that people do a lot of research, a lot of research before they buy something, even a lower price type product. You're looking at reviews, you're looking at prices, you're probably looking at multiple brands to try to understand what's best for you and trying to find a way through a bit of all of the madness. And I think the best way that brands can really do that with content is trying to help them rather than just pushing people towards a sale, but just try to help them make an informed decision because the less that you push, then the more they're likely to trust you and they're going to purchase from you anyways. Sometimes even if the pricing is higher, then the trust factor plays a much bigger role than that. Mordy Oberstein: Good point. Crystal Carter: So I was thinking when you were saying about the analysis paralysis, it made me think of the reason why I shop at Little. So I shop at Little because they don't have 3 million different types of peanut butter. They have chunky and they have smooth, and I know that they have generally decent quality stuff. So whether it's chunky or smooth, whichever one I pick, it's probably going to be fine, but what I want is peanut butter. But at the end of the day, I know that there's a general sort of quality level for them. How do you deliver that sort of quality, maintain that sort of quality with the demands of quantity for content? So to be competitive online at the moment, you know, have to keep feeding the algorithm and keep feeding the algorithm, whether you're on social, whether you're on your website, et cetera, et cetera. How do you maintain that quality while you're rolling out the quantity of content that you need to make a splash? Adriana Stein: Yeah, I mean that's honestly like a million-dollar question today I must say. But I think to answer it simply, it really comes down to processes. So if you have very streamlined processes, everyone knows what they're supposed to do, at which stage, by which date, how much you're trying to produce over a certain timeframe, who needs to have input on something? Ideally the less people the better, because if you have six people editing, this is one of the biggest roadblocks that I've seen to installing content is when you just have too many brains and they're trying to make sense of everything and it just takes way too long. So really processes is what it comes down to, and that will help you get that quality because there will be someone like a content strategist of some sort depending on the channel who's kind of overseeing quality, maybe some sort of project manager who's assigning things, telling people which part of the project they're supposed to do, which sort of task they're supposed to do, and just really aligning everyone on all of that. That's really the biggest thing. So if you don't have some sort of really clear checklist, here's our one to 10 steps, here's doing what, it just gets so random chaos and then you end up not producing a lot of content, the process is key. Mordy Oberstein: So to that process though, I think one of the things that's interesting to me is that when you're dealing with multiple teams and multiple pieces of content and multiple strategies, and what I inevitably find, and we talked about this on a previous podcast, there's a certain momentum at a certain cadence that you get. And then as that happens, new opportunities arise, new ways of thinking come about, new pain points are unearth, all of a sudden the brain starts flowing and you start thinking differently as things evolve. How do you refine along the way? How do you make sure you're open to refining along the way? Then how do you actually steer that because you're working with assets you've been planning on for so long that now you might have to reshift though with multiple teams and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It all seems like trying to make a giant U-turn and you're the Titanic. Adriana Stein: Oh yeah, I can relate to that- Mordy Oberstein: Iceberg. Adriana Stein: I would say really it still comes down to processes because it's about also adding that part in the process. So when is there a regular optimization happening or how often are content topics created and how? Is it one brainstorming session a month? Everyone's got to come there with their ideas and that's it, really stick to that. Or is it every three months we're doing an audit on this sort of thing, or every six months we're doing an audit on this sort of thing, or I don't know, maybe there's a new service offering. And so we need to understand, okay, how do we implement this with the rest of the content so that the messaging is consistent? We're still talking about both things, but there's different pain points that still is part of the optimization process. So I would say really just add space for that in this content production checklist. Mordy Oberstein: That's a great point. Do you ever find though that there's parts of the strategy that are at odds with each other? So let's go back to the example of things are getting more conversational out there with brands. That's great. And you may say, you know what? We need to pivot. We need to become more conversational. And I can imagine an SEO saying, wait, wait, but the age two needs to have the keyword. You don't have the keyword now. Now what do we do? Adriana Stein: Well, yeah, I think that's the bane of every SEO's existence is like, how do we create really great content but that's still adheres to SEO formatting? Which is so strict in particular. It's very, very difficult to find a balance of both. But I think if you can try to focus, for example, content ideation, even if it's something conversational based on, okay, how from the beginning can we apply this to SEO? So not that SEO is a later stage in the content strategy, but it's really at the forefront. And I think that's one of the biggest channels that needs to be at the forefront because if you can think of, okay, this content group, content cluster or something like this, this can work really well for SEO and then here's how we're going to do the rest of the content in relation to that. We're going to link to some conversion mining pages. Maybe we're going to link to a lead magnet off of this page, and then that can be used for email marketing later to capture some emails like this. So put it directly within your content strategy, your content planning, and that will help that a little bit be a bit more natural. Because if SEO comes so much later down, you've got a content strategy and then three months later you're like, okay, let's do SEO and let's try to shove the SEO into this content strategy, then you're going to have some difficulties putting those keywords properly. Crystal Carter: And I think that it can be a challenge to build that in. What role do you consider education to play in making sure that your wider team are able to do some of that SEO as they go along or so are able to keep SEO in the forefront of their minds as they're creating even that more sort of conversational or reactionary content? Adriana Stein: Yeah, that's a good question. So what we use on our team is briefs. We use really, really detailed briefs for our content writers. I would say even a lot of the content is kind of half written. It's not elegantly written. That's what the writer is there to kind of help us refine, maybe dig in with some of the research a bit further. But what we provide the content writer, which comes from the strategist who knows the overarching business strategy, how this fits into the content strategy at hand, then they're creating a very, very detailed brief for the writer. So the writer really knows, okay, here's how this fits into SEO. Here's what I'm supposed to write in relation to the structure of the content. So what goes into each section focuses of the keywords so they know, and it comes off very naturally when you do it this way because then it's not asking the content writer to just add, I don't know like, say this keyword, write this keyword 20 times into this content. That doesn't work. That sort of way of doing SEO I think is really outdated. It's a lot about coming from the top down, putting SEO into the business strategy and then creating content topics based on that, and then briefing the writer based on that. And then all of the processes is a lot more natural. And it's not a struggle for the writer to do that. Mordy Oberstein: If there's like one consistent theme. It's the planning all the way throughout. Adriana Stein: Yes, it is. Mordy Oberstein: And it's such a good point because if the overlap between content and SEO was that much stronger, you really need to loop in the SEO into the full content process all the way down. It just makes so much sense. We could probably dive into way more of this, but I know that your time is short and extremely valuable, so we'll let you get back to creating all of that great content. But where can people find you first? Adriana Stein: Best place would be on LinkedIn probably. So feel free to send me a message. You can just type in my name, Adrian Stein, you'll find me there. I'm also on Twitter too if you're really keen on still using that Wild Wild West platform these days. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, I guess it beat Mastodon. Adriana Stein: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Sorry Simon. Crystal Carter: But thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. And yes, I'm getting the hint that process... It's all about the process. Adriana Stein: Yep. It's all about the process. Mordy Oberstein: Trust the process, trust the process with- Adriana Stein: I will probably be saying this from my grave, look at your process- Crystal Carter: It was the process. Mordy Oberstein: He trusted the process. Well, thank you so much Adriana, showed a link to your social profiles in the show notes for this episode, so you can keep getting awesomeness from Adriana out there on social media. Thank you, Adriana. Adriana Stein: Thanks so much for having me. Super pleasure. Mordy Oberstein: Bye. Adriana Stein: Bye. Mordy Oberstein: So speaking of plans and content plans and content plans, changing and planning and the planning and the planning, one thing that's constantly changing and I think where people are pivoting or platforms are pivoting with their content would be AI content generators. By the way, we're talking about content, does any other content even exist other than content written by AI generators? The answer was, I hope so. Crystal Carter: I hope so. Mordy Oberstein: I hope so Crystal Carter: Yes, absolutely. Mordy Oberstein: But be that as it may and your stance on AI aside, it is super interesting what the search engines are doing with integrating AI chat experiences and how changing they are. And Bing actually has made some really interesting changes to their AI chat experience. So while we usually go Google this time, we're going Bing. Speaker 5: And it's going. Google. It's outta here. Mordy Oberstein: Recently, relatively recently, Bing made an update. It was covered by Search Engine Land & Search Engine Roundtable, both by Barry Schwartz back on April 21st, where Bing wrote quote, we've taken steps to help Bing give better answers if you're asking questions about news. And the pain point there is obviously, news is changing very quickly. You got to be really good at understanding what's happening out there in the ecosystem for an AI chat experience to offer back an answer of something that's relevant because it's news, it's constantly changing. So I thought we should take a look and see how good being has gotten with this. One of the things that I've done is, so I'm a big sports nut, as you all know at this point. And I thought, you know what I'll do? I'll ask Bing chat a bunch of questions about players and injury status because that's very current and let's see how well Bing can do it. And the answer is kind of okay. There's a player, his name is Giancarlo Stanton. He's a center fielder for the New York Yankees. He gets hurt a lot, all the time, at least- Crystal Carter: Unlucky. Mordy Oberstein: He's a big dude. He's very muscular in baseball. The traditional player was more stringy. Crystal Carter: I mean, Babe Ruth, come on, Babe Ruth was like... I mean- Mordy Oberstein: Well, Babe Ruth, this is a different... An aberration unto itself. He was eating a thousand hotdog before a game. Shows up, hits a couple home runs, goes back to eating the hotdog. That dude was different. Crystal Carter: Okay, built differently. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, built differently. Back in the day though, the player were just... They were more athletic than they were muscular. 'Cause muscular, you get hurt. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: And John Carlo is a very muscular man and he gets hurt a lot. So I asked Bing chat, what is John Carlo Stanton's status? This, by the way, was after I asked Bing chat, what team has Aaron Rogers played for. Crystal Carter: Sure. Mordy Oberstein: And he's a football player. He recently got traded and Bing got it wrong. He said he played for his old team. So I'm like, all right, let's give Bing another chance. Give it another chance. And I asked, what is Giancarlo Stanton? And Bing chat wrote back, Giancarlo Stan has missed most of the 2022 season. We're in 2023. With various injuries, including left achilles tendon, white quadricep and foot ankle. He told you he gets injured all the freaking time. Dude's a walking injury. He has not played the game since July 24th. That has not run the basis or gone on a rehab assignment. He hopes to return in September and October, but his status is alone unclear. He underwent x-rays on his foot ankle that came back negative, very prolific answer, very out of date. Crystal Carter: Foot ankle? Mordy Oberstein: Yes. Foot slash ankle, sorry. Okay, that's my fault. That's the Mordy. That's not the AI. But then it said most recently he suffered a hamstring strain and will miss six weeks and that's accurate as hell. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. Okay. So it's got a little bit of a mixed bag there. Mordy Oberstein: It's a little bit of both. And I just thought, it's so interesting how the content that these AI chat experiences are spitting out is changing and how far we've come because I think it's awesome that being is making that update. And I think what they've done is awesome and they've clearly gotten it right, but they've also clearly gotten it wrong. And I think there's two ways to look at this from a technology point of view. This is amazing. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: From a user point of view for the correct information, this is eh, sort of kind of. Crystal Carter: Yeah. If you said, if I jump off this bridge, will I live, and the answer was like 50% accurate, I wouldn't trust that information. So I think that that's the case. I mean, in my experiments with Bing Chat and I've used it a bit and I've kicked the tires a little bit, pushing on some more sensitive topics. What I sometimes find is that with sensitive topics, it'll just shut down. It'll say, "I don't want to talk about that. I think we should change the subject." Mordy Oberstein: Yes, yes. Crystal Carter: And I'm like, "What?" So then I open up a new chat with the same question and then it'll say something and I say, "Well, why did you say that?" And says, "I don't want to talk about that." And then so I'm like, "Stop being so fragile Bing." Mordy Oberstein: I did the same thing. So when I asked Bing Chat, "Hey, you know what team has Aaron Rogers played for? He is a quarterback, he used to play for the Green Bay Packers and now he plays for the New York Jets." It came back. Aaron Rodgers, American football quarterback who currently plays for the Green Bay Packers, I wrote back, wasn't he traded to the Jets. And Bing Chat wrote back, according to recent reports, Aaron Rodgers has been traded to the New York Jets. And then I wrote being my snarky self. So why did you say he was on the Packers? Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: I then, "I apologize for the confusion. We must have missed the recent news." Crystal Carter: Right. Right. Precisely. And this is the thing, it gets a little bit sensitive, but I think that one of the other things that I find is that because it can be a bit sensitive, it sometimes hedges. So I think sometimes it will hedge itself on things on fairly safe information. So I asked it recently, what is the latest news in SEO? And the information that came back was sourced from Forbes past company and business Lancaster shouting out to Mark A. Preston. Actually, I'm talking about SEO. And the things that it said were pretty generic answers. They're not really news, they're just general sort of SEO trends. It was saying that Forbes says businesses must adapt their SEO strategies to ensure their content stays relevant. I mean, that could be the news from this week or from last month or from two years ago or from wherever it is. And I'm really surprised that those sources for SEO news, because there are a number of news publications for SEO that are notable. Mordy Oberstein: Barry Schwartz. Crystal Carter: Barry Schwartz, SEJ, SEL there's tons of them that are very specifically dedicated to SEO. So I think it's interesting that they're hedging on some of these particular sources that are sort of seen as sort of maybe safe or maybe vanilla. Because I think Bing gets a little bit... It gets a little bit sensitive. It gets feelings get hurt. Mordy Oberstein: Well, oh, my feelings get hurt really easily too. So I can't blame Bing. Crystal Carter: We all have feelings. Mordy Oberstein: We all have feelings. Something really interesting about that point. Rich Tatum posted something on Twitter where I think what he posted was he was asking Chat GPT to basically fudge experience, write up a prompt about what it's like to drive a Ford Mustang or something similar to that. And it tried to fudge that experience of driving a Ford Mustang. And it gave pretty generic experiences. It was superfast and fun to drive that Mustang with those 220 ….. That level of nuance, you can't actually fudge actual experience and actual expertise. And it's a really good point. 'Cause I was thinking, you know what? I never thought of that hack. If I got... I'm trying to play the review update, right? I'm going to show experience, I'll just go ask the AI, right? As if I had experience. But you can't fudge it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's very difficult. 'Cause I think also there's sometimes where... I think this is where actual reviews are really interesting is because... And I've seen this before where you see some sites are ranking for reviews and others are not, because the particular reviews that they have on their site are more unique than the other ones. So if the other reviews are like, oh, it's great, or oh, it's nice, then that's going to be different from a review that's very detailed. And they're very often the ones that are on the edges, they're either the one star or the five star who are getting into the sort of like, oh actually when I tried to assemble this chair, it didn't come with enough bolts. Or when I tried to... I recently bought an office chair and someone said, I do not like this chair. I would not wish this cursed chair on my worst enemies. And I was like, cursed. Did you really put cursed in there? But that is a unique review full of some unique feelings. And those sorts of things are not... Being Bing are very sensitive about how it feels about its results. It's not going to put that kind of content in what it's saying. Chat GPT probably wouldn't as well. I mean, I don't know if you could ask Chat GPT add to, I never asked Chat GPT to write a salty review about it- Mordy Oberstein: But it probably wouldn't had that level of nuance. I just wouldn't be there. So end of the day, 'cause we're talking about refining content strategies and refining content plans on the pivoting and refining the strategy when Bing saw the need to get news more accurate, A plus. Good job on you Bing, that's what you should be doing. In the execution, I think we're at a C. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I think they can A for effort, and I did actually test this. So after the Oscars, there was an image AI image of Zendaya at the Oscars that was making the rounds on Twitter, and it was retweeted by a few major news publications. And I asked Bing, "Was Zendaya at the Oscars." And they were like, "No, she wasn't. She was in London with her boyfriend." And I was like, okay, Bing. All right, I see you good. That's good information. Good sorting out that information there. So I think also they were fighting it a lot, so they'll get there- Mordy Oberstein: It's a work in project. It's not a critique at all. This whole technology really is in its infancy, but as a user, if you're going to be asking you questions about like Giancarlo Stanton injury status, take the answer with a grain of salt. You have to really be careful. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it might be worth them putting a little label on there that's like, do check. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. But be that as it may anyway. Well, this was kind of new. What was definitely new is the news. Crystal Carter: The news. Mordy Oberstein: So here's our owed, our weekly owed to Barry Schwartz. As we get into the Snappy News. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Get a whole bunch of things for you from Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineRoundtable.com. They're all from Barry this week, and they're all from SearchEngineRoundtable.com. First up, Google rolling out multiple feature snippets on desktop search. Reports are coming in showing that Google is using multiple featured snippets. Three to be exact on desktop. So you search on desktop and you would get three snippets of texts with three URLs crammed into the same space at the top of the SERP. I'm not sure how widespread this is. I don't see it on desktop. I do see it on mobile, which goes back to a previous Google release. Again, I don't see it on desktop in the US or not in the US. I don't see it, but maybe you do. By the way, the idea of Google going more diverse with feature snippets is something I've been clamoring about for a long time. Did whole article about it on the Wix DEO hub. So I will link to that in the show notes. Okay, AI, Google search, generative experience results are not really personalized. Thank you, Barry. Good to know. Google Bard can now provide more precise local results if you allow Bard to access your location. Thank you, Mary. Good to know, Microsoft, Bing chat to work on all browsers soon. Once again, Barry, thank you very much. Great to know. And that's this week's snappy news. Thanks for listening to our little news section. I hope you enjoyed it. Crystal Carter: Thank you. We have some listeners who say that the news is their favorite part of the SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. We have one listener who says that. His name rhymes with Mary Borts. Crystal Carter: No, there was somebody else who said that they absolutely love the Snappy News. And shout out to all of our listeners. Hello, listeners out there in Radioland... Not Radioland. Podcast Land. Mordy Oberstein: Podcast Land. Crystal Carter: Thank you for joining us and thank you for enjoying the Snappy News. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, it was quite snappy. But before we do the part for this week, we have to go through our follow of the week and we have... 'Cause we're talking about content and content strategies. We have somebody who's all about content, contributor to the Wix SEO Hub herself, Maddy Osman over at Maddy Osman on Twitter, that's M-A-D-D-Y O-S-M-A-N. And Maddy is a content strategist execution. She wrote a book. She has a book about writing content that you can buy. Crystal Carter: She's really into her content. She's contributed some fantastic articles on the Wix SEO Hub. And she has, again, yeah, written the book and she's got a really good community that she runs that talks about content as well. So yeah, do you check out Maddy at Blocksmiths, she also runs courses on content as well. Super, super friendly. Super, super clever. A great follow if you're looking to increase your content quality and quantity. Mordy Oberstein: Yes, she's definitely little more prominent SEOs on the content side, thinking about content from an SEO point of view and just from a pure content point of view. So give a follow to Maddy and tell her we sent you. Nut you can't do when you follow someone, I wish you could... There should be a referral of some kind. Like I followed you because the SERP's Up Podcast editor follow you. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I think that'd be good. Ride the wave. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Ride the Wave because the SERP's Up Podcast, it's a whole surfing thing. Get it? Thanks. Anyway, thank you for joining us on this SERP's Up Podcast. Already going to miss us not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into what the heck is helpful content, actually? Crystal Carter: What is helpful, what is unhelpful? What's going on with helpful content? Let's talk about it. Mordy Oberstein: What does it all mean? What does it all mean? Crystal Carter: Can we get some help? Mordy Oberstein: Yes- Crystal Carter: I need somebody. Mordy Oberstein: It would be very helpful. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning them over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Checkout all of the great content and webinars and newsletter on the Wix SEO Learning, however you guessed it. wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . 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If they measure it, it matters. The SERP’s Up team dive into the One SEO Tool to Rule Them All: Google Search Console. This free Google tool is, by far, the most important tool for site owners to understand how Google values their sites. Mordy and Crystal share their love of Google Search Console and unpack the importance of the platform. Google Search Console gives a wealth of information about your site: from page indexing to Google’s crawl frequency, the impressions that specific pages receive, and most importantly, what issues Google seems to be having with a website. This is the main conduit of communication from Google to the site owner, and trust us - if they measure something in there, it matters. SEOs should pay attention to Video Pages (hint, hint - get them going if you haven’t), Page Experience stats, mobile usability, and more. The team catches up with Lazarina Stoy, data scientist, and SEO, who shares one of her favorite features of GSC, the Links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. Back Google Search Console: One SEO tool to rule them all If they measure it, it matters. The SERP’s Up team dive into the One SEO Tool to Rule Them All: Google Search Console. This free Google tool is, by far, the most important tool for site owners to understand how Google values their sites. Mordy and Crystal share their love of Google Search Console and unpack the importance of the platform. Google Search Console gives a wealth of information about your site: from page indexing to Google’s crawl frequency, the impressions that specific pages receive, and most importantly, what issues Google seems to be having with a website. This is the main conduit of communication from Google to the site owner, and trust us - if they measure something in there, it matters. SEOs should pay attention to Video Pages (hint, hint - get them going if you haven’t), Page Experience stats, mobile usability, and more. The team catches up with Lazarina Stoy, data scientist, and SEO, who shares one of her favorite features of GSC, the Links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 12 | November 9, 2022 | 36 MIN 00:00 / 35:57 This week’s guests Lazarina Stoy Lazarina is an SEO consultant specializing in Data Science and is currently a senior manager at enterprise-level marketing agency Intrepid Digital. As a proponent of SEO automation, Lazarina often speaks at webinars and conferences and creates helpful resources for fellow SEOs to kick off their data science journey. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our wonderful Head of SEO Communications, the one, the only, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: It's me. Hello, internet people. Hi. Hello, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Hello. You just gave me a recommendation for a show. That's first time you've ever recommended anything to me to... Oh, scratch that. You've made many recommendations to me, not a watching recommendation. So I'm excited. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's good. Mordy Oberstein: How about telling what the audience is. I'm not telling you what it is. Crystal Carter: I really enjoyed it. It was a good show. It had a lot of interesting things and the pace was good. I like a show that moves along and has a lot of pace. Mordy Oberstein: There was a show I was watching with my wife and it was a good show, but they could have wrapped it up in one episode and it was nine. Crystal Carter: Honestly, honestly, when they drag it out. Also, I don't like it when people introduce too many characters at once and too much information. I'm like, "Give me one character and fan out from there." If you give me 12 characters and all of their details straight at once, I cannot cope. But I love an ensemble cast. That's all good. But you need somebody who's like- Mordy Oberstein: Slowly, but surely. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they meet this person. Then you find out about them. Then they meet the next person, you find out about them. If they're like, "This person's here and that person." I'm like, "It's too much. I'm both bored and confused." I don't like it. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like marketers, there's a lot you can take away for your content strategy from what these shows do wrong so much. Crystal Carter: Honestly, do you know, I genuinely, when I'm doing deliverables for SEO projects, I structure them like soap operas. Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? You have people who are in various scandals? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Marrying other people. Crystal Carter: Basically, in a soap opera, what will happen is during the season, there'll be one long story that runs in the background, like, who did that mysterious thing, or whose glove was it that was found in wherever? And they'll give you a little bit of that story every time for every episode. But then on every episode, there's also little stories that happen as well, and they will conclude a story on every episode. So every month, you should have something that you definitely finish. And over the course of say, six months of your deliverables, you should have something that you're chipping away at as you go. So it's the big thing that you want to build up to, like building up a content portfolio, or maybe you want to be more competitive on a certain thing. So you chip away at that every month, and it might be a long term project, but you move it forward a little bit every month. Mordy Oberstein: And who says soap operas were worthless, other than me? My grandma used to love them. I'm like, "I don't know what this thing is. This is terrible." But anyway, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where traffic thresholds for core web vitals are a thing of the past. Google Search Console not giving you field data that you so desire? Use Wix's speed dashboard. Get field data built off user sessions from multiple browsers. No more guessing what your actual core web vitals are with Wix's site speed dashboard. That is absolutely novel, by the way. And I don't think people appreciate that. Crystal Carter: I love it so much because you want to do better. And with Google Search Console, we're going to talk loads about Google Search Console and you get some fantastic information from it. Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic and amazing and wonderful. However, if you are a smaller site, you don't get a lot of that core web vitals information until you reach a certain threshold of traffic. In the meantime, you're just sort of wondering. Mordy Oberstein: Guessing. Crystal Carter: Guessing. Mordy Oberstein: Because the lab data and the field data, the data that Google's giving you, that's simulated to what users actually experience, also known as lab data, is not very close to the actual user experience. Crystal Carter: It's very different. It's very different and it might include you as well. And if you're a small site, then you checking your blog 20 times, let's say you're only getting, I don't know, 70 people coming to that blog, then that's going to be a big portion of the traffic, for instance. So anyway, I'm just saying it's really, really useful if you're trying to make these improvements and also, if you're trying to make these improvements for maybe future traffic that you're going to get. Because if you're like, "We're going to be huge, this blog's going to be amazing, this shop's going to be incredible," you want to make sure that you're able to build and to get off on the right footing. And that report is a great place to start. Mordy Oberstein: And you don't need to use total blocking time is a really bad simulation for FID, which is amazing. They're not similar at all. Anyway, on this show, one tool to rule them all, and it's not the speed dashboard we just mentioned, it's a different tool. Or conversely, you could say if you were stuck on a desert island and you can only bring one tool with you to do your SEO with, which would you bring? The answer of course is Search Console. But why? We'll get into the value of Google Search Console today and what it can provide you with, whether you're a business owner or an SEO or a marketer of any kind. Also, Lazarina Stoy will stop by and share how she extracts value out of Google Search Console. Plus, we'll dive into a little tool from Screaming Frog to help you maximize your Google Search Console prowess. Of course, we'll get into some Snappy News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness as episode 12 of the SERP's Up podcast is knocking on your audio doors. So much to get into with Search Console. But I think maybe we should sort of explain Search Console a little bit if you're not so familiar with it. Because when you talk about SEO tools, it can get complicated quickly. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So Google Search Console is sometimes abbreviated GSC. If you're on Twitter, if you're online, if you see SEOs chatting with each other, they will talk about Google Search Console like this. Mordy Oberstein: Or just SC. Crystal Carter: SC. Okay, yeah. For the in crowd. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And essentially, what Google Search Console does is it gives you information on how Google is seeing your website. So it's not exactly the same as Google Analytics. Google Analytics will give you information about all of the traffic that's coming through to your website that they can track. So you add a tag to your website and then they will tell you about all of the different channels. So from a marketing point of view, it's absolutely crucial for you to have Google Analytics. Sometimes, SEOs will almost exclusively have access to Google Search Console. But what Google Search Console is really, really good for is understanding how Google is seeing your content, both which rich results you might get and which result is some of those cards. For instance, if you ever Google and you see a recipe card, that's a rich result. If you see a job listing for instance, that's a rich result as well. Product listings, those are also rich results and they show at the top of the SERP. And Google Search Console will tell you about how many of them they are showing and will tell you about which pages they are pulling them from. Google Search Console will also tell you about ranking, where you're ranking on Google. They'll also tell you about which pages are actually in their index. And when we talk about indexing and crawling, Google Search Console will also tell you the difference. So they'll tell you, "We've crawled this page, but we have not put it in any index." And if you don't know what the difference between those two things are, it's essentially like if you were trying to be a pop star musician and you wanted to be top of the charts, you would have to get played on the radio at some point probably. So what being index is like being played on the radio. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be top of the charts, that you're going to have a Billboard Award or that sort of thing, but it means you've been played on the radio, so you registered on their index. If you have not been played on the radio, you can't necessarily be top of the charts first. So you need to make sure that you're indexed and that you're crawled. So just because your crawled doesn't mean that you're indexed, just because your indexed doesn't mean that you rank. Mordy Oberstein: Just because your content doesn't mean you deserve to be indexed because some content shouldn't be indexed. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So there's a lot of different nuances within that. Google Search Console breaks down all of the different parts of it. We, at Wix, have recently released our Google Search Console URL inspection tool. And as part of that, we've got a great blog on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which Mordy explains what the tool does. And one of the good things about that is we also put together a list of understanding, within our support tool documents, there's also a list of understanding what those things mean, what the different differentiations mean. So discovered in non-indexed and crawl, but non-indexed, that sort of thing. So dig into those as well. There's also lots of links in that documentation to lots of the Google details as well. So yeah, it can be complicated, but it can also be fairly straightforward. So they try to make sure that the reports are really easy to access for people of all different knowledge abilities. And you can also see lots of things about your links. You can also see lots of things about whether or not you've got security things, whether or not you've had a glitch in your server. You can carry out a very detailed technical SEO audit using Google Search Console almost exclusively if you need to. But one of the limitations of Google Search Consoles, it only tells you what's happening on Google, and it only tells you what's happening on Google organically. So you can't get information on your traffic from Facebook, you can't get information on your traffic from paid. You can't get information on your traffic from other search engines like say Bing or Baidu or whatever it is. So those are the limitations. Bing Webmaster Tools also has something very similar to Google Search Console and it can be interesting to compare the two to see how your site is being crawled. And yeah, it's a great tool. Publication called the State of Technical SEO asked over 800 SEOs, which tools they use for their technical SEO. And 93% of SEOs said they use Google Search Console. So if you want to do better with your SEO, getting into Google Search Console is really important. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what we kind of plan on doing today. But what we're kind of going to do is give you sort of an overview of some of the things that it can do and why it's so valuable. But I think the most important thing for you to do is after listening to this, if you are familiar with Search Console, to play around with it more. And if you're not familiar with Search Console, play around with it because it is kind of intuitive once you poke around a little bit and sort of experiment with what's going on in there. Out of all the tools, I would say Google Analytics, like, whoa, okay, you got to take a step back, you got to really get into it, especially GA4. But Search Console's not that way. A lot of the reporting is pretty straightforward. Some of the more technical things around indexing are not, but you can find good documentation around it. But kind of what you said is really the value of Search Console, that it does everything. It's so comprehensive, it talks to you about how many clicks you're getting. It talks how your pages are performing on Google. It also gives you a more technical analysis. You can look at things like which Google bots are crawling your website and how often are they crawling your website? There's a lot of great data in there and there's data around links and it's all free. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's all free. I think we talk a lot about SEO generally. But if you are not familiar with Google Search Console and you are a Wix user, you have the ability to, within the SEO set of checklists, connect directly to Google Search Console as you set up your Wix website. And this is fantastic. You also have built into the CMS a URL inspection tool that allows you to see information about Google Search Console, about your index ability for individual pages. And that, I think, is testament to how important a team at Wix thinks Google Search Console is and I think it's a testament to how important we think it is for SEO success. So yeah, it's a great tool. And I think that you mentioned that it's fairly accessible and I've had before where people are like, "Oh, Google Search Console, what's so great about that?" And I think sometimes people look at it and they go, "This is really basic information," and it's actually not. It's almost deceptively simple. The way it's presented is pretty straightforward. But you can also get very clear information about which keywords you're actually ranking for, which is really interesting because you might be trying to rank for one thing, but the keywords that you're actually ranking for might be very, very different. So it's worth looking at the keywords that you're ranking for and the keywords that different pages are ranking for. You can also filter by region. So for instance, if you're seeing that you're getting a lot of traffic, but maybe it's not very relevant, you can filter by region and see maybe you're ranking really, really well in another country. I've seen this happen before. Maybe you're ranking it really, really well in a different country, but actually, you serve customers locally. And so you should be looking at the rankings for your country that you're in. So this can happen sometimes when countries share a similar language. So I've seen it where people based in England were ranking in the US and it wasn't that valuable to them because they could only serve clients in the UK. So we had to adjust our Search Console filters so that we were only looking at where we were ranking in the UK. And then we could make better, more actionable SEO strategies. Mordy Oberstein: You can definitely get super complicated with the filters. I implore you to look at the filters, but don't necessarily think it's super complicated either with the filters, there's just basic comparisons you can do. And again, you're seeing things like, okay, so three months ago, how many clicks did I get versus now, how many clicks am I getting? And that's also one of the things you can do great with Search Console. One of the unique things about Search Console is you can see the impressions that you're getting, meaning your pages are showing up on Google, but you're not getting any clicks. Why is that? Perhaps my title tags are just absolutely horrific and I don't know, they just say home for homepage. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: I'm ranking but no one's clicking. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So that's a really, really interesting one. So people sometimes show impressions. Impressions aren't always great. Sometimes if the impressions you have are for keywords that aren't relevant for your website, then you need to retune your content. And when you're looking at the performance report, you can see total clicks. Total clicks, that's pretty straightforward. Those are themes that people actually clicked on. And your impressions is when somebody entered a query and your content was shown. They might not have clicked on it, but your content was shown after somebody entered a query. The click through rate is essentially one divided by the other. So for every 10 times that your content was shown, one person clicked on it. Is that 10% click through rate? I don't know. That would be really, really high. Mordy Oberstein: Math. It's really high by the way, 10% click through rate. Crystal Carter: That's really high. 10% click through rate is very high. You might have that for one particular query, like maybe for your brand or something like that. And then your average position is the average place where you rank. Mordy Oberstein: You should be careful with that one because it's not exactly accurate and it should give you a general sense of things. By the way, data in general gives you a general sense of things. The numbers are never going to be actually exact, even in Search Console, even though it's Google data. But it does kind of bring up why you sometimes, or best practice would be to use a third party tool for various things. If a queue were to super important to you, you see that you're getting a lot of impression and clicks for it in Search Console, then that's something you might want to track in a rank tracking tool. Because the average rank studies have shown is less than accurate all the time. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I almost never rely on a single data source for a particular bit of information because Google Search Console's obviously getting information from Google. Sometimes with Google Search Console, you don't get the information straight away. So sometimes, you might not see the data, like you might not see yesterday's data straight away. You might have to wait a couple of days before the data comes through, which sometimes if you've got a flash sale or if you've got some very important news that's dropping, then you might want to know where you were ranking on that day. So that can be tricky. But yeah, I would very rarely rely on a single source. Also, this is one of the reasons why I bring up Bing. Bing also gives you information on those things. So for instance, if your ranking suddenly drop in Google Search Console, it's worthwhile checking what your rankings are like on Bing to see if they've changed as well or if they're the same. And again, the other thing about Bing and Google Search Console is that if you're like, "I don't spend a lot of time on Bing," that's okay. When you go to Bing to set up your analytics, you go to Bing Webmaster, I think it's Bing Webmaster Tools, and you can connect to Google Search Console with one click and they will pull through all of the information you have from there into their system. So again, if you see your ranking suddenly change in Google Search Console and they don't change in Bing, then it might be that there was an algorithm update that affected you in Google and didn't affect you in Bing. If you see that they both change really quickly, then it might be that there's a technical issue on your website. Mordy Oberstein: Which again, the tools can help you with because you can check out indexing issues which is by the way, I think it's really important these days. Because I think things that are changing around indexing. I think Google is being a little more choosier about what it decides to index. So a little bit of a myth that every page should be in. No, if there's a page that's not really helpful. Imagine had a page and all it was, was like a sign up button for subscribe to an email, a newsletter. That's not a very useful page. Google's probably not going to index that page and nor should it really be indexed. It's really meant for people who are already on your site to follow through and subscribe to your newsletter, whatever it is. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. And I think that you should be very, very much, it's all killer, no filler. You want to make sure that you've got your most important pages indexed. And sometimes, you look in the discover not indexed and you say, "There's a lot of URLs there." Well, look at which ones they are. Sometimes they're UTMs because sometimes those get indexed. Sometimes they're from different campaign ads, sometimes they are category pages that might not necessarily be- Mordy Oberstein: Archive pages. Crystal Carter: Archive pages. Sometimes they're old links from an old URL that Google knows about and they need to know about that so that they can manage the redirect so that they can pay attention to how that traffic flows and the value of those URLs. So for instance, if you had an old domain and you migrated it to, let's say it was HTTP and you migrated it to HTTPS, then those are two different URLs to Google. So they might very well still have in their record the old URL and that will be discovered but not indexed. That's something they know about, but they don't have that in the index because they're indexing the new one. They're doing you a favor. So that's something to think about as well. So look at which ones are discovered and not indexed. If you see something in there that you're like, "Wait a second, that should absolutely be indexed," then there's a couple of things that you can do, and we might talk about that on another podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and don't afraid because you're going to see all these different, crawl but not indexed, discovered but not indexed, all these different statuses. And they might seem confusing, but there's a lot of documentation Google has around them and there's a lot of great resources around what they mean and how to possibly fix them. So if you see them crawl but not indexed, it could be very much that you have a page that's very, very similar. And Google's like, "Well, we already have this page on the index so we're not going to put it there." But for you it's very different. And then a different intent or might be more of a commerce intent or transactional intent rather. So definitely pay attention to what's happening in there because Google, again is getting a little bit choosier. The way I think about it is if Google's better understanding content, it's going to be choosier about what it decides to index or not to index. And as it gets better at doing that, which it has been in more recent times is getting better that, it's going to get choosier and choosier about what gets indexed, which means there could be real issues for you. So don't be afraid of putting your toe into that index kind of stuff and to the page's reports that you have in there inside of Search Console. Research, ask questions, dig into it because it's super important, even though it might seem a little bit daunting to deal with it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, don't be afraid of it and ask for help. The SEO community can be really helpful and there's absolutely opportunities for that. And I think the more signals you can give Google about which pages are most important to you, the better. We've talked about internal linking, for instance. Internal linking is a great signal for telling Google that something is an important page. It's like people sending lots of referrals to someone. If they're getting lots of referrals, then that's going to tell Google that it's an important page. So show them that it's important, don't just assume that they'll figure it out. Show them with links internally, externally, with relevant content, additional schema, lots of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: And we'll put some resource into the show notes that'll help you. If you see a certain status in your Search Console reporting, we'll give you some information and resources that you can use to come up some possible solutions to fix those problems. So check out the show notes. With that, we have a fabulous SEO who's going to share with you how she uses Google Search Console to make well informed SEO decisions, keyword well inform SEO decisions. Here's Lazarina Stoy and how she uses Search Console. Lazarina Stoy: I love Google Search Consult and use it daily. There are so many useful reports there and it's ever changing. From the more recent reports, the video indexing feature is something I use to quickly troubleshoot performance of no indexed videos and ensure that the companies I'm working with appear as expected in all the different search types that they're targeting. I frequently use the page indexation reports as well as the crawl data to identify any changes to crawling behavior and quick fix errors that might be prohibiting pages to appear as expected. These reports can also help signal content issues as well. The enhancements reports are amazing for websites that have structured data implemented because at a glance, I can identify errors as well as the overall effort and strategy implemented, which in turn enables me to better identify opportunities on what can be implemented to enhance the search appearance of websites via featured snippets. Often, not very much used by SEOs, but still a super useful report for anyone that does not have access to SEO tooling is the links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. I always recommend this to small website owners to take advantage of. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Lazarina. A great point, by the way. She brings up the video reporting in there. That's relatively new. And one thing to keep in mind when you're looking at Search Console and using Search Console is that Google's put a lot of emphasis on dev inside of Search Console and they're constantly refining and bringing in new reporting. So keep an eye for new things inside a Search Console, that'll be really helpful. In this case, the video is absolutely super cool if you have a very, very video intensive website. So keep an eye out for what Google's doing. They're doing a great job over there with their development around Search Console. Crystal Carter: And I think particularly, you mentioned the video and she mentions it as well, and I think that one of the other things that's great about Search Console's it tells you what Google cares about. So they add all these features when it's something that they say, if it's not measured, it doesn't matter. That's a thing people say. And if they're measuring it, it means that it matters. So if they've got a whole report all about video, then that tells you that maybe you should have some video on your website. And if you don't have any, then maybe you should consider making some or including some, because with the video report, for instance, it doesn't have to be your YouTube video, it doesn't have to be a YouTube video at all. But if you have a video that's embedded on your page, then Google is able to see it and it can help your content to perform better and it can help you to track better. Google Search Console also lets you filter by the types of media so you can see where images are ranking and things like that, for instance. And Lazarina, one of the reasons why I was really pleased to have her along here is because she does a lot of really interesting things with Google Search Console. Not just the things she talked about, but also some of the reports that she's able to create by combining Google Search Console data with what was Google Data Studio and is now Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Looker, yeah, that's a weird name. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Huh? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. We'll link to the Google Looker dashboard thing, I don't know what you call it now, in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I'm going to look at the Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Let's not get into the branding names. That was bizarre to me. But anyway, hey, who are we to judge, right? It works for them. I'm sure they've done their research for it. Looker is definitely a better name than Google Beta Studio. Crystal Carter: Are you sure? Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I kind of like names that where in the name, you can sort of understand what you're going to get out of it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: With Looker, I kind of feel like, I'm not even going to go there. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Now with that, there are so many, just got to pivot it right out that, there are so many tools that pull in Search Console data. Every SEO tool really does. A few years go ranking tracking tool. Oftentimes, they will let you integrate with Google Search Console through Google Search Console's APIs. You can compare all sorts of ranking data and Search Console data to this data, to that data and to other sorts of the data. As I mentioned before, we integrated with Google's URL inspection tool API to create our site inspection dashboard. So Google's Search Consoles, because it is foundational SEO information, will often be used by various third party SEO tools, which is why we're proud to bring you Tool time by the SERP's UP podcast. This time we're going to Screaming Frog, which itself is a seminal SEO tool and how they pull in Google Search Console's URL inspection API, and what you can do with Screaming Frog. Crystal Carter: Screaming Frog, as you mentioned, is a foundational tool. It's used for technical SEO and it allows you... You can also use it for content as well. But it allows you to do a crawl of your website. It allows you to assess your site map and lots of information like that. I use it with Google Search Console to corroborate data to prioritize what things you need to do, for instance. So within Google Search Console, you can submit your site map and that should form the bulk of what gets crawled and what gets indexed. There are sometimes bits of your website that are not in your site map and they sometimes end up being indexed as well. So one of the things you can do with Screening Frog is you can do a different mode, not the standard crawl, but you can do a list, for instance, and you can submit your site map list and then you can crawl that with the Google Search Console API. And then you can see which things are being indexed from your site map and which things are not being indexed from your site map. And if they're not being indexed, then you can go, "Why isn't this indexed? Should it be in the site map? Should it be indexed? What should we do here?" And so essentially, you can take those little bits of information and you can compare them. Then again, as I say, I very rarely rely on a single thing. But if you're comparing this with the information you get in, say like the Wix URL inspection tool, then you can also see which part of the site it's in, which site map it's in, which folder it's in, and see if there's some commonalities across URLs that are within the same site map or have the same configuration, for instance. But Screaming Frog, like Google Search Console, is something that it can seem both simple and complicated at the same time. Essentially, if you use Screaming Frog, which you can on a free version, you can see 500 URLs. So you can crawl your website, you pump the URL and you press crawl, and then you can get lots of information on your website. And it kind of just looks like a spreadsheet and you really need to click around and dig around. I tweeted ages ago, "Has anyone ever completed Screaming Frog? Because I just keep finding more levels." And it's absolutely true because people do incredible things. And you can also export it to different things. So you can export the data from your from Screening Frog as a CSV, and then you can use it in whatever kind of data, whether you're using Excel or whether you're using Google Sheets, or you can connect it directly to Google Sheets and you can export your data there. And then you can do more SEO analysis or more bulk updates from that. But you can see lots of information about both crawl information and also different parts of your site. So your images, your meta descriptions, whether things are indexable, what status could they have, lots of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking at all the pages that Google has actually crawl but not indexed, and you're able to combine them with all the headers are on those pages, you're like, "Wow, okay, there's a pattern here. There's something going," that's good information. Because you could see there's a content issue with those pages. That's probably the reason why Google's crawled them but hasn't decided to index them. So combining information that these tools allow you to do with Search Console data in all sorts of ways can be super helpful to you. Crystal Carter: Super helpful. And I've had it before where I looked at a site and we had a site map, that was fine, and that had loads of URLs in it. And then I ran it through a Screaming Frog with the Spider tool and it only pulled up two URLs. And I was like, "What? What's going on?" And when I ran it through the site map, it was like, "Yeah, you've got all these URLs and they're all 200s," and all that stuff. And I was like, "How come we can't find? Why isn't this?" And essentially, the Spider one is interesting because essentially, it bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces. If all of your pages are orphans, which is what I found with this one, I did this crawl- Mordy Oberstein: Or maybe there's no link to any other page. Crystal Carter: There's no link to any of the pages. Then basically the crawler won't crawl. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: It goes to that one page and goes, "Cool. Awesome." So you need to make sure, so it's worth comparing. And within Screaming Frog, you can compare the two. You can compare your site map and your crawl and you can see where the things are missing, and that's worth thinking about as well. Mordy Oberstein: And again, all these kind of things, it can be a little bit overwhelming. But again, there's a free version of Screaming Frog. It's really simple to run the site. Just play around. Whatever you get out of it, you get out of it and you go back again. And whatever you get of it next time, you get out of it the next time. Slow and steady runs a race, baby steps. Crystal Carter: One thing I will also say about Screaming Frog is that because it's so foundational, there's lots of documentation and lots of SEOs have gone through Screaming Frog and done this, this, that, that and the other. So if there's ever anything you want to find on Screaming Frog and you are not sure, you can Google how to find this on Screaming Frog. There was a blog that I found recently that was like how to do almost everything on Screaming Frog. Their documentation is also very good. And I would say that yeah, if you're stuck on anything, literally just Google it. Don't flounder around for ages. Just Google it and somebody's almost already figured it out. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. You know what else you should be diving into other than Screaming Frog and Google's Search Console, it's the latest and greatest news coming out of the SEO world. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, more reasons to keep an eye on what Google is doing in the e-comm space. If you have to pay attention to one area of Google and what it's up to, e-comm would be it in my honest opinion. Per Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google introduces new search labels for coupons and promo. So in a nutshell, Google made a bunch of announcements related to their on the SERP shopping experience. For example, the zoo functionality to copy a coupon code from a shopping listing, as well as Google's price insights coming to the search results, which by the way is a nifty little feature that lets you see how much the product typically costs. And the product that you're buying, how much does it typically cost? So in other words, you're getting a good idea if you're getting a good deal or not. To me, by the way, this is where Google's shopping experience really shines. They have the power to give you so much data. And for whatever reason ,Amazon just doesn't. So Google making price data insights accessible to me is basically their way of moving in on Amazon's eCommerce dominance. Okay, next up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Check this out. Links may be less important to the Google search ranking algorithm in the future. I've been saying this for a long time and thank God. Here's what Google said directly. Here's a direct quote from Google's John Mueller, "Well, it's something where I imagine over time the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can't figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web. And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It's like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it? But my guess is over time, it won't be such a big factor. Sometimes it is today. I think already, that's something that's been changing quite a bit." That again, was Google's direct words, John Mueller's direct words, not mine. Just to give you a kind of conceptual understanding of what he's saying. Links are a secondary signal. Links don't tell you whether the content is actually good or not, or it actually answers a question or it's actually usable, digestible, and awesome for the user. Links are a signal that basically say, "Well, so many people keep linking to this page. It must be awesome. We don't really know, but it must be." The better Google gets actually understanding the content, I put a tweet out about this and it got a lot of comments and controversy because people are still really hung up on links, too hung up on links. We spoke about it on a previous episode of the podcast. I think it was episode 10, so check that out. We'll link to it in the show notes. Links don't tell you how good the actual content is. So if Google's getting better at actually understanding the content, why would they keep so heavily relying on links when they actually understand what the content is saying and therefore, know if it's relevant or awesome, or answers to question is usable and digestible and so forth. So kind of makes sense logically when you think about it. Sorry, link Builders. Anyway, that's been the Snappy News for this week. It's been snappy and it's been news. Anyway, as we wrap this show up, we were wondering who should we have as a follow of the week. Every week we like to bring somebody else for you to follow on social media, typically on Twitter, because the SEO world's core people live on Twitter. And we're wondering who could it be? Who could it be? Who could it be? We really racked our brains on this one and it was hard to find someone who you should follow. We're talking about Search Console and who could it be? Crystal Carter: Oh, man. Mordy Oberstein: It's all about Search Console on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Somebody who talks about- Mordy Oberstein: Somebody who talks about. So maybe somebody who works on the Search Console product over at Google? Crystal Carter: They maybe done some videos on it or something. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe they have done a few videos, maybe even a webinar or an actual live event actually over at Wix, about Search Console. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. I can't think of anyone like that. Mordy Oberstein: I know, John Mueller. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I mean, you should follow John. He was our follow of the week, I think two weeks ago, three weeks ago. This week, we're talking about Daniel Waisberg. Crystal Carter: The fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: The fantastic Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate over a Google who works on Google's own Search Console team. Who better to follow than the search advocate who works on the Search Console team over at Google? It's Daniel Waisberg. Crystal Carter: Daniel Waisberg, who has been at Google for ages working first with the Analytics team and now with Google Search Console. I had a good chat with him at Brighton about all of the new reports and things they keep adding to Google Search Console because they've been refining it a lot this year and it's been really, really great to see all of that. We have some show notes from the Google Search Console webinar that he did with us in the summer, and he talked about some great things there. And yeah, he's a great advocate and he also talked about a few things that I hadn't heard of. There was one that was new to me, which was the question hub from Google, which is actually new to me. He's extremely knowledgeable about search and very much into his data and a great person to follow if you want to know things about Google Search Console. Mordy Oberstein: And a great person overall. Crystal Carter: Yes, he's lovely. We love Daniel. Mordy Oberstein: We do love Daniel. He's family. So check out Daniel Waisberg, @DanielWaisberg on Twitter. That's D-A-N-I-E-L W-A-I-S-B-E-R-G. It's the W-A-I that might confuse you. Crystal Carter: And tell him we sent you. Mordy Oberstein: And tell him you followed him because Crystal and Mordy sent you over. Crystal Carter: Sure he'll love that. Mordy Oberstein: I want keep track. We'll ask him. Anyway. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all new episode, as we satisfy our need for speed with a look at site performance and SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on our learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Lazarina Stoy Daniel Waisberg Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Google Search Console Optimizing your website performance with Search Console How to Automate The URL Inspection API Get to know the Wix Site Inspection tool Search Console Data Template Are links everything SEOs make them out to be? News: Google Introduces New Search Labels For Coupons & Promos Links may be less important to the Google Search ranking algorithm in the future Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Lazarina Stoy Daniel Waisberg Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Google Search Console Optimizing your website performance with Search Console How to Automate The URL Inspection API Get to know the Wix Site Inspection tool Search Console Data Template Are links everything SEOs make them out to be? News: Google Introduces New Search Labels For Coupons & Promos Links may be less important to the Google Search ranking algorithm in the future Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our wonderful Head of SEO Communications, the one, the only, Crystal Carter. Crystal Carter: It's me. Hello, internet people. Hi. Hello, Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: Hello. You just gave me a recommendation for a show. That's first time you've ever recommended anything to me to... Oh, scratch that. You've made many recommendations to me, not a watching recommendation. So I'm excited. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's good. Mordy Oberstein: How about telling what the audience is. I'm not telling you what it is. Crystal Carter: I really enjoyed it. It was a good show. It had a lot of interesting things and the pace was good. I like a show that moves along and has a lot of pace. Mordy Oberstein: There was a show I was watching with my wife and it was a good show, but they could have wrapped it up in one episode and it was nine. Crystal Carter: Honestly, honestly, when they drag it out. Also, I don't like it when people introduce too many characters at once and too much information. I'm like, "Give me one character and fan out from there." If you give me 12 characters and all of their details straight at once, I cannot cope. But I love an ensemble cast. That's all good. But you need somebody who's like- Mordy Oberstein: Slowly, but surely. Crystal Carter: Yeah, they meet this person. Then you find out about them. Then they meet the next person, you find out about them. If they're like, "This person's here and that person." I'm like, "It's too much. I'm both bored and confused." I don't like it. Mordy Oberstein: I feel like marketers, there's a lot you can take away for your content strategy from what these shows do wrong so much. Crystal Carter: Honestly, do you know, I genuinely, when I'm doing deliverables for SEO projects, I structure them like soap operas. Mordy Oberstein: Oh really? You have people who are in various scandals? Crystal Carter: No. Mordy Oberstein: Marrying other people. Crystal Carter: Basically, in a soap opera, what will happen is during the season, there'll be one long story that runs in the background, like, who did that mysterious thing, or whose glove was it that was found in wherever? And they'll give you a little bit of that story every time for every episode. But then on every episode, there's also little stories that happen as well, and they will conclude a story on every episode. So every month, you should have something that you definitely finish. And over the course of say, six months of your deliverables, you should have something that you're chipping away at as you go. So it's the big thing that you want to build up to, like building up a content portfolio, or maybe you want to be more competitive on a certain thing. So you chip away at that every month, and it might be a long term project, but you move it forward a little bit every month. Mordy Oberstein: And who says soap operas were worthless, other than me? My grandma used to love them. I'm like, "I don't know what this thing is. This is terrible." But anyway, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where traffic thresholds for core web vitals are a thing of the past. Google Search Console not giving you field data that you so desire? Use Wix's speed dashboard. Get field data built off user sessions from multiple browsers. No more guessing what your actual core web vitals are with Wix's site speed dashboard. That is absolutely novel, by the way. And I don't think people appreciate that. Crystal Carter: I love it so much because you want to do better. And with Google Search Console, we're going to talk loads about Google Search Console and you get some fantastic information from it. Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic and amazing and wonderful. However, if you are a smaller site, you don't get a lot of that core web vitals information until you reach a certain threshold of traffic. In the meantime, you're just sort of wondering. Mordy Oberstein: Guessing. Crystal Carter: Guessing. Mordy Oberstein: Because the lab data and the field data, the data that Google's giving you, that's simulated to what users actually experience, also known as lab data, is not very close to the actual user experience. Crystal Carter: It's very different. It's very different and it might include you as well. And if you're a small site, then you checking your blog 20 times, let's say you're only getting, I don't know, 70 people coming to that blog, then that's going to be a big portion of the traffic, for instance. So anyway, I'm just saying it's really, really useful if you're trying to make these improvements and also, if you're trying to make these improvements for maybe future traffic that you're going to get. Because if you're like, "We're going to be huge, this blog's going to be amazing, this shop's going to be incredible," you want to make sure that you're able to build and to get off on the right footing. And that report is a great place to start. Mordy Oberstein: And you don't need to use total blocking time is a really bad simulation for FID, which is amazing. They're not similar at all. Anyway, on this show, one tool to rule them all, and it's not the speed dashboard we just mentioned, it's a different tool. Or conversely, you could say if you were stuck on a desert island and you can only bring one tool with you to do your SEO with, which would you bring? The answer of course is Search Console. But why? We'll get into the value of Google Search Console today and what it can provide you with, whether you're a business owner or an SEO or a marketer of any kind. Also, Lazarina Stoy will stop by and share how she extracts value out of Google Search Console. Plus, we'll dive into a little tool from Screaming Frog to help you maximize your Google Search Console prowess. Of course, we'll get into some Snappy News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness as episode 12 of the SERP's Up podcast is knocking on your audio doors. So much to get into with Search Console. But I think maybe we should sort of explain Search Console a little bit if you're not so familiar with it. Because when you talk about SEO tools, it can get complicated quickly. Crystal Carter: Yeah. So Google Search Console is sometimes abbreviated GSC. If you're on Twitter, if you're online, if you see SEOs chatting with each other, they will talk about Google Search Console like this. Mordy Oberstein: Or just SC. Crystal Carter: SC. Okay, yeah. For the in crowd. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Crystal Carter: And essentially, what Google Search Console does is it gives you information on how Google is seeing your website. So it's not exactly the same as Google Analytics. Google Analytics will give you information about all of the traffic that's coming through to your website that they can track. So you add a tag to your website and then they will tell you about all of the different channels. So from a marketing point of view, it's absolutely crucial for you to have Google Analytics. Sometimes, SEOs will almost exclusively have access to Google Search Console. But what Google Search Console is really, really good for is understanding how Google is seeing your content, both which rich results you might get and which result is some of those cards. For instance, if you ever Google and you see a recipe card, that's a rich result. If you see a job listing for instance, that's a rich result as well. Product listings, those are also rich results and they show at the top of the SERP. And Google Search Console will tell you about how many of them they are showing and will tell you about which pages they are pulling them from. Google Search Console will also tell you about ranking, where you're ranking on Google. They'll also tell you about which pages are actually in their index. And when we talk about indexing and crawling, Google Search Console will also tell you the difference. So they'll tell you, "We've crawled this page, but we have not put it in any index." And if you don't know what the difference between those two things are, it's essentially like if you were trying to be a pop star musician and you wanted to be top of the charts, you would have to get played on the radio at some point probably. So what being index is like being played on the radio. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be top of the charts, that you're going to have a Billboard Award or that sort of thing, but it means you've been played on the radio, so you registered on their index. If you have not been played on the radio, you can't necessarily be top of the charts first. So you need to make sure that you're indexed and that you're crawled. So just because your crawled doesn't mean that you're indexed, just because your indexed doesn't mean that you rank. Mordy Oberstein: Just because your content doesn't mean you deserve to be indexed because some content shouldn't be indexed. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So there's a lot of different nuances within that. Google Search Console breaks down all of the different parts of it. We, at Wix, have recently released our Google Search Console URL inspection tool. And as part of that, we've got a great blog on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which Mordy explains what the tool does. And one of the good things about that is we also put together a list of understanding, within our support tool documents, there's also a list of understanding what those things mean, what the different differentiations mean. So discovered in non-indexed and crawl, but non-indexed, that sort of thing. So dig into those as well. There's also lots of links in that documentation to lots of the Google details as well. So yeah, it can be complicated, but it can also be fairly straightforward. So they try to make sure that the reports are really easy to access for people of all different knowledge abilities. And you can also see lots of things about your links. You can also see lots of things about whether or not you've got security things, whether or not you've had a glitch in your server. You can carry out a very detailed technical SEO audit using Google Search Console almost exclusively if you need to. But one of the limitations of Google Search Consoles, it only tells you what's happening on Google, and it only tells you what's happening on Google organically. So you can't get information on your traffic from Facebook, you can't get information on your traffic from paid. You can't get information on your traffic from other search engines like say Bing or Baidu or whatever it is. So those are the limitations. Bing Webmaster Tools also has something very similar to Google Search Console and it can be interesting to compare the two to see how your site is being crawled. And yeah, it's a great tool. Publication called the State of Technical SEO asked over 800 SEOs, which tools they use for their technical SEO. And 93% of SEOs said they use Google Search Console. So if you want to do better with your SEO, getting into Google Search Console is really important. Mordy Oberstein: Which is what we kind of plan on doing today. But what we're kind of going to do is give you sort of an overview of some of the things that it can do and why it's so valuable. But I think the most important thing for you to do is after listening to this, if you are familiar with Search Console, to play around with it more. And if you're not familiar with Search Console, play around with it because it is kind of intuitive once you poke around a little bit and sort of experiment with what's going on in there. Out of all the tools, I would say Google Analytics, like, whoa, okay, you got to take a step back, you got to really get into it, especially GA4. But Search Console's not that way. A lot of the reporting is pretty straightforward. Some of the more technical things around indexing are not, but you can find good documentation around it. But kind of what you said is really the value of Search Console, that it does everything. It's so comprehensive, it talks to you about how many clicks you're getting. It talks how your pages are performing on Google. It also gives you a more technical analysis. You can look at things like which Google bots are crawling your website and how often are they crawling your website? There's a lot of great data in there and there's data around links and it's all free. Crystal Carter: Yeah, it's all free. I think we talk a lot about SEO generally. But if you are not familiar with Google Search Console and you are a Wix user, you have the ability to, within the SEO set of checklists, connect directly to Google Search Console as you set up your Wix website. And this is fantastic. You also have built into the CMS a URL inspection tool that allows you to see information about Google Search Console, about your index ability for individual pages. And that, I think, is testament to how important a team at Wix thinks Google Search Console is and I think it's a testament to how important we think it is for SEO success. So yeah, it's a great tool. And I think that you mentioned that it's fairly accessible and I've had before where people are like, "Oh, Google Search Console, what's so great about that?" And I think sometimes people look at it and they go, "This is really basic information," and it's actually not. It's almost deceptively simple. The way it's presented is pretty straightforward. But you can also get very clear information about which keywords you're actually ranking for, which is really interesting because you might be trying to rank for one thing, but the keywords that you're actually ranking for might be very, very different. So it's worth looking at the keywords that you're ranking for and the keywords that different pages are ranking for. You can also filter by region. So for instance, if you're seeing that you're getting a lot of traffic, but maybe it's not very relevant, you can filter by region and see maybe you're ranking really, really well in another country. I've seen this happen before. Maybe you're ranking it really, really well in a different country, but actually, you serve customers locally. And so you should be looking at the rankings for your country that you're in. So this can happen sometimes when countries share a similar language. So I've seen it where people based in England were ranking in the US and it wasn't that valuable to them because they could only serve clients in the UK. So we had to adjust our Search Console filters so that we were only looking at where we were ranking in the UK. And then we could make better, more actionable SEO strategies. Mordy Oberstein: You can definitely get super complicated with the filters. I implore you to look at the filters, but don't necessarily think it's super complicated either with the filters, there's just basic comparisons you can do. And again, you're seeing things like, okay, so three months ago, how many clicks did I get versus now, how many clicks am I getting? And that's also one of the things you can do great with Search Console. One of the unique things about Search Console is you can see the impressions that you're getting, meaning your pages are showing up on Google, but you're not getting any clicks. Why is that? Perhaps my title tags are just absolutely horrific and I don't know, they just say home for homepage. Crystal Carter: Right, right. Mordy Oberstein: I'm ranking but no one's clicking. Crystal Carter: Right, exactly. So that's a really, really interesting one. So people sometimes show impressions. Impressions aren't always great. Sometimes if the impressions you have are for keywords that aren't relevant for your website, then you need to retune your content. And when you're looking at the performance report, you can see total clicks. Total clicks, that's pretty straightforward. Those are themes that people actually clicked on. And your impressions is when somebody entered a query and your content was shown. They might not have clicked on it, but your content was shown after somebody entered a query. The click through rate is essentially one divided by the other. So for every 10 times that your content was shown, one person clicked on it. Is that 10% click through rate? I don't know. That would be really, really high. Mordy Oberstein: Math. It's really high by the way, 10% click through rate. Crystal Carter: That's really high. 10% click through rate is very high. You might have that for one particular query, like maybe for your brand or something like that. And then your average position is the average place where you rank. Mordy Oberstein: You should be careful with that one because it's not exactly accurate and it should give you a general sense of things. By the way, data in general gives you a general sense of things. The numbers are never going to be actually exact, even in Search Console, even though it's Google data. But it does kind of bring up why you sometimes, or best practice would be to use a third party tool for various things. If a queue were to super important to you, you see that you're getting a lot of impression and clicks for it in Search Console, then that's something you might want to track in a rank tracking tool. Because the average rank studies have shown is less than accurate all the time. Crystal Carter: Yeah. I almost never rely on a single data source for a particular bit of information because Google Search Console's obviously getting information from Google. Sometimes with Google Search Console, you don't get the information straight away. So sometimes, you might not see the data, like you might not see yesterday's data straight away. You might have to wait a couple of days before the data comes through, which sometimes if you've got a flash sale or if you've got some very important news that's dropping, then you might want to know where you were ranking on that day. So that can be tricky. But yeah, I would very rarely rely on a single source. Also, this is one of the reasons why I bring up Bing. Bing also gives you information on those things. So for instance, if your ranking suddenly drop in Google Search Console, it's worthwhile checking what your rankings are like on Bing to see if they've changed as well or if they're the same. And again, the other thing about Bing and Google Search Console is that if you're like, "I don't spend a lot of time on Bing," that's okay. When you go to Bing to set up your analytics, you go to Bing Webmaster, I think it's Bing Webmaster Tools, and you can connect to Google Search Console with one click and they will pull through all of the information you have from there into their system. So again, if you see your ranking suddenly change in Google Search Console and they don't change in Bing, then it might be that there was an algorithm update that affected you in Google and didn't affect you in Bing. If you see that they both change really quickly, then it might be that there's a technical issue on your website. Mordy Oberstein: Which again, the tools can help you with because you can check out indexing issues which is by the way, I think it's really important these days. Because I think things that are changing around indexing. I think Google is being a little more choosier about what it decides to index. So a little bit of a myth that every page should be in. No, if there's a page that's not really helpful. Imagine had a page and all it was, was like a sign up button for subscribe to an email, a newsletter. That's not a very useful page. Google's probably not going to index that page and nor should it really be indexed. It's really meant for people who are already on your site to follow through and subscribe to your newsletter, whatever it is. Crystal Carter: Right, absolutely. And I think that you should be very, very much, it's all killer, no filler. You want to make sure that you've got your most important pages indexed. And sometimes, you look in the discover not indexed and you say, "There's a lot of URLs there." Well, look at which ones they are. Sometimes they're UTMs because sometimes those get indexed. Sometimes they're from different campaign ads, sometimes they are category pages that might not necessarily be- Mordy Oberstein: Archive pages. Crystal Carter: Archive pages. Sometimes they're old links from an old URL that Google knows about and they need to know about that so that they can manage the redirect so that they can pay attention to how that traffic flows and the value of those URLs. So for instance, if you had an old domain and you migrated it to, let's say it was HTTP and you migrated it to HTTPS, then those are two different URLs to Google. So they might very well still have in their record the old URL and that will be discovered but not indexed. That's something they know about, but they don't have that in the index because they're indexing the new one. They're doing you a favor. So that's something to think about as well. So look at which ones are discovered and not indexed. If you see something in there that you're like, "Wait a second, that should absolutely be indexed," then there's a couple of things that you can do, and we might talk about that on another podcast. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, and don't afraid because you're going to see all these different, crawl but not indexed, discovered but not indexed, all these different statuses. And they might seem confusing, but there's a lot of documentation Google has around them and there's a lot of great resources around what they mean and how to possibly fix them. So if you see them crawl but not indexed, it could be very much that you have a page that's very, very similar. And Google's like, "Well, we already have this page on the index so we're not going to put it there." But for you it's very different. And then a different intent or might be more of a commerce intent or transactional intent rather. So definitely pay attention to what's happening in there because Google, again is getting a little bit choosier. The way I think about it is if Google's better understanding content, it's going to be choosier about what it decides to index or not to index. And as it gets better at doing that, which it has been in more recent times is getting better that, it's going to get choosier and choosier about what gets indexed, which means there could be real issues for you. So don't be afraid of putting your toe into that index kind of stuff and to the page's reports that you have in there inside of Search Console. Research, ask questions, dig into it because it's super important, even though it might seem a little bit daunting to deal with it. Crystal Carter: Yeah, don't be afraid of it and ask for help. The SEO community can be really helpful and there's absolutely opportunities for that. And I think the more signals you can give Google about which pages are most important to you, the better. We've talked about internal linking, for instance. Internal linking is a great signal for telling Google that something is an important page. It's like people sending lots of referrals to someone. If they're getting lots of referrals, then that's going to tell Google that it's an important page. So show them that it's important, don't just assume that they'll figure it out. Show them with links internally, externally, with relevant content, additional schema, lots of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: And we'll put some resource into the show notes that'll help you. If you see a certain status in your Search Console reporting, we'll give you some information and resources that you can use to come up some possible solutions to fix those problems. So check out the show notes. With that, we have a fabulous SEO who's going to share with you how she uses Google Search Console to make well informed SEO decisions, keyword well inform SEO decisions. Here's Lazarina Stoy and how she uses Search Console. Lazarina Stoy: I love Google Search Consult and use it daily. There are so many useful reports there and it's ever changing. From the more recent reports, the video indexing feature is something I use to quickly troubleshoot performance of no indexed videos and ensure that the companies I'm working with appear as expected in all the different search types that they're targeting. I frequently use the page indexation reports as well as the crawl data to identify any changes to crawling behavior and quick fix errors that might be prohibiting pages to appear as expected. These reports can also help signal content issues as well. The enhancements reports are amazing for websites that have structured data implemented because at a glance, I can identify errors as well as the overall effort and strategy implemented, which in turn enables me to better identify opportunities on what can be implemented to enhance the search appearance of websites via featured snippets. Often, not very much used by SEOs, but still a super useful report for anyone that does not have access to SEO tooling is the links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. I always recommend this to small website owners to take advantage of. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you, Lazarina. A great point, by the way. She brings up the video reporting in there. That's relatively new. And one thing to keep in mind when you're looking at Search Console and using Search Console is that Google's put a lot of emphasis on dev inside of Search Console and they're constantly refining and bringing in new reporting. So keep an eye for new things inside a Search Console, that'll be really helpful. In this case, the video is absolutely super cool if you have a very, very video intensive website. So keep an eye out for what Google's doing. They're doing a great job over there with their development around Search Console. Crystal Carter: And I think particularly, you mentioned the video and she mentions it as well, and I think that one of the other things that's great about Search Console's it tells you what Google cares about. So they add all these features when it's something that they say, if it's not measured, it doesn't matter. That's a thing people say. And if they're measuring it, it means that it matters. So if they've got a whole report all about video, then that tells you that maybe you should have some video on your website. And if you don't have any, then maybe you should consider making some or including some, because with the video report, for instance, it doesn't have to be your YouTube video, it doesn't have to be a YouTube video at all. But if you have a video that's embedded on your page, then Google is able to see it and it can help your content to perform better and it can help you to track better. Google Search Console also lets you filter by the types of media so you can see where images are ranking and things like that, for instance. And Lazarina, one of the reasons why I was really pleased to have her along here is because she does a lot of really interesting things with Google Search Console. Not just the things she talked about, but also some of the reports that she's able to create by combining Google Search Console data with what was Google Data Studio and is now Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Looker, yeah, that's a weird name. Yeah. Crystal Carter: Huh? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. We'll link to the Google Looker dashboard thing, I don't know what you call it now, in the show notes. Crystal Carter: I'm going to look at the Looker. Mordy Oberstein: Let's not get into the branding names. That was bizarre to me. But anyway, hey, who are we to judge, right? It works for them. I'm sure they've done their research for it. Looker is definitely a better name than Google Beta Studio. Crystal Carter: Are you sure? Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: I kind of like names that where in the name, you can sort of understand what you're going to get out of it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: With Looker, I kind of feel like, I'm not even going to go there. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: Now with that, there are so many, just got to pivot it right out that, there are so many tools that pull in Search Console data. Every SEO tool really does. A few years go ranking tracking tool. Oftentimes, they will let you integrate with Google Search Console through Google Search Console's APIs. You can compare all sorts of ranking data and Search Console data to this data, to that data and to other sorts of the data. As I mentioned before, we integrated with Google's URL inspection tool API to create our site inspection dashboard. So Google's Search Consoles, because it is foundational SEO information, will often be used by various third party SEO tools, which is why we're proud to bring you Tool time by the SERP's UP podcast. This time we're going to Screaming Frog, which itself is a seminal SEO tool and how they pull in Google Search Console's URL inspection API, and what you can do with Screaming Frog. Crystal Carter: Screaming Frog, as you mentioned, is a foundational tool. It's used for technical SEO and it allows you... You can also use it for content as well. But it allows you to do a crawl of your website. It allows you to assess your site map and lots of information like that. I use it with Google Search Console to corroborate data to prioritize what things you need to do, for instance. So within Google Search Console, you can submit your site map and that should form the bulk of what gets crawled and what gets indexed. There are sometimes bits of your website that are not in your site map and they sometimes end up being indexed as well. So one of the things you can do with Screening Frog is you can do a different mode, not the standard crawl, but you can do a list, for instance, and you can submit your site map list and then you can crawl that with the Google Search Console API. And then you can see which things are being indexed from your site map and which things are not being indexed from your site map. And if they're not being indexed, then you can go, "Why isn't this indexed? Should it be in the site map? Should it be indexed? What should we do here?" And so essentially, you can take those little bits of information and you can compare them. Then again, as I say, I very rarely rely on a single thing. But if you're comparing this with the information you get in, say like the Wix URL inspection tool, then you can also see which part of the site it's in, which site map it's in, which folder it's in, and see if there's some commonalities across URLs that are within the same site map or have the same configuration, for instance. But Screaming Frog, like Google Search Console, is something that it can seem both simple and complicated at the same time. Essentially, if you use Screaming Frog, which you can on a free version, you can see 500 URLs. So you can crawl your website, you pump the URL and you press crawl, and then you can get lots of information on your website. And it kind of just looks like a spreadsheet and you really need to click around and dig around. I tweeted ages ago, "Has anyone ever completed Screaming Frog? Because I just keep finding more levels." And it's absolutely true because people do incredible things. And you can also export it to different things. So you can export the data from your from Screening Frog as a CSV, and then you can use it in whatever kind of data, whether you're using Excel or whether you're using Google Sheets, or you can connect it directly to Google Sheets and you can export your data there. And then you can do more SEO analysis or more bulk updates from that. But you can see lots of information about both crawl information and also different parts of your site. So your images, your meta descriptions, whether things are indexable, what status could they have, lots of things like that. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking at all the pages that Google has actually crawl but not indexed, and you're able to combine them with all the headers are on those pages, you're like, "Wow, okay, there's a pattern here. There's something going," that's good information. Because you could see there's a content issue with those pages. That's probably the reason why Google's crawled them but hasn't decided to index them. So combining information that these tools allow you to do with Search Console data in all sorts of ways can be super helpful to you. Crystal Carter: Super helpful. And I've had it before where I looked at a site and we had a site map, that was fine, and that had loads of URLs in it. And then I ran it through a Screaming Frog with the Spider tool and it only pulled up two URLs. And I was like, "What? What's going on?" And when I ran it through the site map, it was like, "Yeah, you've got all these URLs and they're all 200s," and all that stuff. And I was like, "How come we can't find? Why isn't this?" And essentially, the Spider one is interesting because essentially, it bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces. If all of your pages are orphans, which is what I found with this one, I did this crawl- Mordy Oberstein: Or maybe there's no link to any other page. Crystal Carter: There's no link to any of the pages. Then basically the crawler won't crawl. Mordy Oberstein: Yep. Crystal Carter: It goes to that one page and goes, "Cool. Awesome." So you need to make sure, so it's worth comparing. And within Screaming Frog, you can compare the two. You can compare your site map and your crawl and you can see where the things are missing, and that's worth thinking about as well. Mordy Oberstein: And again, all these kind of things, it can be a little bit overwhelming. But again, there's a free version of Screaming Frog. It's really simple to run the site. Just play around. Whatever you get out of it, you get out of it and you go back again. And whatever you get of it next time, you get out of it the next time. Slow and steady runs a race, baby steps. Crystal Carter: One thing I will also say about Screaming Frog is that because it's so foundational, there's lots of documentation and lots of SEOs have gone through Screaming Frog and done this, this, that, that and the other. So if there's ever anything you want to find on Screaming Frog and you are not sure, you can Google how to find this on Screaming Frog. There was a blog that I found recently that was like how to do almost everything on Screaming Frog. Their documentation is also very good. And I would say that yeah, if you're stuck on anything, literally just Google it. Don't flounder around for ages. Just Google it and somebody's almost already figured it out. Mordy Oberstein: Exactly. You know what else you should be diving into other than Screaming Frog and Google's Search Console, it's the latest and greatest news coming out of the SEO world. Here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, more reasons to keep an eye on what Google is doing in the e-comm space. If you have to pay attention to one area of Google and what it's up to, e-comm would be it in my honest opinion. Per Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google introduces new search labels for coupons and promo. So in a nutshell, Google made a bunch of announcements related to their on the SERP shopping experience. For example, the zoo functionality to copy a coupon code from a shopping listing, as well as Google's price insights coming to the search results, which by the way is a nifty little feature that lets you see how much the product typically costs. And the product that you're buying, how much does it typically cost? So in other words, you're getting a good idea if you're getting a good deal or not. To me, by the way, this is where Google's shopping experience really shines. They have the power to give you so much data. And for whatever reason ,Amazon just doesn't. So Google making price data insights accessible to me is basically their way of moving in on Amazon's eCommerce dominance. Okay, next up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Check this out. Links may be less important to the Google search ranking algorithm in the future. I've been saying this for a long time and thank God. Here's what Google said directly. Here's a direct quote from Google's John Mueller, "Well, it's something where I imagine over time the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can't figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web. And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It's like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it? But my guess is over time, it won't be such a big factor. Sometimes it is today. I think already, that's something that's been changing quite a bit." That again, was Google's direct words, John Mueller's direct words, not mine. Just to give you a kind of conceptual understanding of what he's saying. Links are a secondary signal. Links don't tell you whether the content is actually good or not, or it actually answers a question or it's actually usable, digestible, and awesome for the user. Links are a signal that basically say, "Well, so many people keep linking to this page. It must be awesome. We don't really know, but it must be." The better Google gets actually understanding the content, I put a tweet out about this and it got a lot of comments and controversy because people are still really hung up on links, too hung up on links. We spoke about it on a previous episode of the podcast. I think it was episode 10, so check that out. We'll link to it in the show notes. Links don't tell you how good the actual content is. So if Google's getting better at actually understanding the content, why would they keep so heavily relying on links when they actually understand what the content is saying and therefore, know if it's relevant or awesome, or answers to question is usable and digestible and so forth. So kind of makes sense logically when you think about it. Sorry, link Builders. Anyway, that's been the Snappy News for this week. It's been snappy and it's been news. Anyway, as we wrap this show up, we were wondering who should we have as a follow of the week. Every week we like to bring somebody else for you to follow on social media, typically on Twitter, because the SEO world's core people live on Twitter. And we're wondering who could it be? Who could it be? Who could it be? We really racked our brains on this one and it was hard to find someone who you should follow. We're talking about Search Console and who could it be? Crystal Carter: Oh, man. Mordy Oberstein: It's all about Search Console on Twitter. Crystal Carter: Somebody who talks about- Mordy Oberstein: Somebody who talks about. So maybe somebody who works on the Search Console product over at Google? Crystal Carter: They maybe done some videos on it or something. Mordy Oberstein: Maybe they have done a few videos, maybe even a webinar or an actual live event actually over at Wix, about Search Console. Crystal Carter: Yeah, I don't know. I can't think of anyone like that. Mordy Oberstein: I know, John Mueller. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Mordy Oberstein: No, no. I mean, you should follow John. He was our follow of the week, I think two weeks ago, three weeks ago. This week, we're talking about Daniel Waisberg. Crystal Carter: The fantastic. Mordy Oberstein: The fantastic Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate over a Google who works on Google's own Search Console team. Who better to follow than the search advocate who works on the Search Console team over at Google? It's Daniel Waisberg. Crystal Carter: Daniel Waisberg, who has been at Google for ages working first with the Analytics team and now with Google Search Console. I had a good chat with him at Brighton about all of the new reports and things they keep adding to Google Search Console because they've been refining it a lot this year and it's been really, really great to see all of that. We have some show notes from the Google Search Console webinar that he did with us in the summer, and he talked about some great things there. And yeah, he's a great advocate and he also talked about a few things that I hadn't heard of. There was one that was new to me, which was the question hub from Google, which is actually new to me. He's extremely knowledgeable about search and very much into his data and a great person to follow if you want to know things about Google Search Console. Mordy Oberstein: And a great person overall. Crystal Carter: Yes, he's lovely. We love Daniel. Mordy Oberstein: We do love Daniel. He's family. So check out Daniel Waisberg, @DanielWaisberg on Twitter. That's D-A-N-I-E-L W-A-I-S-B-E-R-G. It's the W-A-I that might confuse you. Crystal Carter: And tell him we sent you. Mordy Oberstein: And tell him you followed him because Crystal and Mordy sent you over. Crystal Carter: Sure he'll love that. Mordy Oberstein: I want keep track. We'll ask him. Anyway. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all new episode, as we satisfy our need for speed with a look at site performance and SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on our learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Related episodes Get more SEO insights right to your inbox * * By submitting this form, you agree to the Wix Terms of Use and acknowledge that Wix will treat your data in accordance with Wix's Privacy Policy . 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Eli Schwartz is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy. A growth advisor and enterprise SEO consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the internet's top sites. Eli Schwartz Growth Advisor and SEO Consultant Eli Schwartz is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy . A growth advisor and enterprise SEO consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the internet's top sites. Articles & Resources 15 Dec 2025 Why 2026 will be the best year for small businesses in search 29 Nov 2022 Starting in enterprise SEO: 10 tips for success 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

SEO Ranking Factors. Do they matter? Should you focus on them? And if not, what should you be focused on? Do some ranking factors matter more than others? How do you know if a tactic has directly influenced your ranking? On this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast we’re diving into the narrative around “ranking factors”! Marcus Tober, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions for Semrush, joins the podcast to further discuss ranking factors and SEO. Tune in as Mordy and Crystal take on the importance, or lack thereof, of ranking factors. Back Do ranking factors matter for SEO? SEO Ranking Factors. Do they matter? Should you focus on them? And if not, what should you be focused on? Do some ranking factors matter more than others? How do you know if a tactic has directly influenced your ranking? On this episode of the SERPs Up SEO Podcast we’re diving into the narrative around “ranking factors”! Marcus Tober, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions for Semrush, joins the podcast to further discuss ranking factors and SEO. Tune in as Mordy and Crystal take on the importance, or lack thereof, of ranking factors. Previous Episode Next Episode Episode 22 | January 25, 2023 | 37 MIN 00:00 / 36:59 This week’s guests Marcus Tober Marcus Tober is a leading global SEO specialist and speaker, named a top-8 Online Influencer in Digital Marketing and EU Search Personality of the Year 2016. He previously founded and led Searchmetrics, a global search experience platform, and joined Semrush as Head of Enterprise in 2022. Notes Transcript Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're approaching our groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO Branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazing and fabulously incredible, the greatest of all, Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for that fantastic introduction, Mordy Oberstein. One of these days I'm going to listen back to the podcast and see if they're all different, or if you- Mordy Oberstein: No, there are slight variations. I don't script it out. I get stuck. I guess like, "Wait. What do I say next? That doesn't rhyme. I don't know. Okay, stop here and just say her name." Crystal Carter: The breath control is very impressive. I must say. Mordy Oberstein: I'm having a hard time because I have a cold. Crystal Carter: Awe. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone take pity on me. Pity me. Pity, pity, pity please. Crystal Carter: Put the tiny violins on the audio track, please. Right there. For Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I will take it. Don't forget, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where every Wix site is HTTPS. Wix offers enterprise level security, keeping your site safe and your users happy. After all, HTTPS is a ranking factor. Interesting. Why would I mention that random fact? I don't know. By the way, it's a very small ranking factor. Don't get hung up over it. But I'm saying that because today's topic is ranking factors. Do they matter? Should you focus on them? And if not, what should you be focused on? Again, spoiler alert, HTTPS is a very, very small ranking factor. Be that as it may, we'll dive into, do some ranking factors matter more than others? How do you know if a tactic has directly influenced your ranking? Why a focus on intent has perhaps replaced a focus on ranking factors? And why ranking factors matter less in a world that's all about interpreting meaning. That sounds abstract. Plus, we'll dive into a whole lot on Google's machine learning and its impact on the ranking wormhole. And of course, we have your snappiest of snappiest news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Get ready, get set, get ranking factors, or not. Episode number 23 of the SERP's Up podcast is flying. I don't know what we're flying to yet. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: If it’s a nonstop flight or not, because I have a cold and might need to pause for a few minutes here and there. Crystal Carter: We're a top-ranked podcast. We are. I lied. There's- Mordy Oberstein: I know all the factors too. Crystal Carter: All of the factors. Mordy Oberstein: All of the factors. All 200 of the factors. We'll get to all of this. Let's take a step back. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: When someone's searching for something, the question is, how does Google know what results to show? It's a simple foundational question, but we don't really have a lot of information, when you think about it, about that process. As much as we do know, it's what we don't know. It's the tip of the iceberg kind of thing. We have, I'll call it breadcrumbs. We know certain things that Google officially looks at. For example, we know that back links are something that Google has looked at in order to determine whether or not a page should rank or not. When I say back links, by the way, we also know ... well, we know that Google is considering it less important over time, officially, but we don't know how big of a factor it is. So we know that certain things are factors like back links, but how big of a factor are they? Again, in fact, Google has downplayed links recently. We know that, for example, your site being secure is a factor, but how big of a factor is it? Or we know, for example, that your location is a factor when you're searching for things like, "Pizza near me." So you can get some pizza near you, and put that pizza near you inside of you. That location is a factor. How close the businesses are to you when you're searching are a factor. So you would think ranking on Google would kind of be easy. We have a list of all these factors. Oh, factors here, factors there. Just check them off, no problem. And supposedly there are 200 plus of these different factors. Whether or not that's actually true or not, I don't know. But that's what the general consensus has said, there's 200 of these factors. I don't know. First off, when it comes to factors, all sorts of misinformation, things like LSI keywords being a factor, false. No such thing. They don't exist. LSI factors, not a thing. Or Google looking how old your domain is. False. No. Not true. False. Heck, there was one time where Google ... or someone misunderstood what a Googler said about RankBrain, which we'll get into later, I'm sure, and said that it's a top three ranking factor. RankBrain's not even a ranking factor. It's got nothing to do with being a factor. It impacts. It impacts what might be a factor, but it itself is not a ranking factor. It's a machine learning property. We're going to talk more about that later. Then on top of all of that, the ranking factors that we do know that actually exist, we don't always know the role that they play, and when they play and how big of a role. For example, Google has said that they assess the quality of a website at the domain level. They look at quality across the entire site, not page by page. But what exactly does quality even mean? What exactly are they looking at? You can quickly get the picture that focusing on ranking factors may not be the best thing to do if you're trying to thrive on the old Googs. Crystal Carter: I think that's absolutely true in an almost evangelical delivery. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on, that's the sound of me getting off my soapbox. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Just so you know. I think that it's absolutely true, because basically, it's a question of, if you're focusing on ranking factors, you're essentially simplifying ... you're really, really oversimplifying some extremely complex systems. Google today calls them ranking systems. They've got a really good piece of documentation that talks about their ranking systems. Talks about how those systems overlap, intersect, and how there are various different machine learning properties and various different machine learning models that help Google to understand what's going on with search results. We've got deduplication systems. There's the local news systems. There's MUM. There's BERT. There's neural matching. There's various different things that are going on at once. So yeah, a correlation doesn't always equal causation. Sometimes with a website there's lots of different factors happening at once. So it's sometimes difficult to understand which variable was the decision maker on that. But it's very complex. It's a very complex system, or very complex set of systems that overlap and intersect and are engaging with a very dynamic web that's more and more dynamic every day. So if you're just focusing on so-called factors, you're going to be missing a lot of important elements. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's one of the things that frustrates me the most about the ranking factor conversation is not just, "Okay, is it a factor? Is it not a factor? How big of a factor?" But it's really the mindset that it produces. Whereas you are so focused on, "Oh, the title tag, Google looks at that for ranking. It is a factor. I must make sure my keyword is in the title tag in order to be factored in for the factor of the factoring, of the factoring of the ranking." You're missing out on the whole mindset of, "Let me make sure that I create really good content on a page that's technically healthy, so Google can crawl, index it, and then serve this really great piece of content to users." You're missing all of that when you focus on the 200 plus ranking factors. Crystal Carter: Right. For instance, it's like the equivalent of if you were trying to get fit or if you were trying to get more physically fit, then you might say, "Oh, I need to eat this many calories." What if all those calories are junk calories? What if all those calories are from Skittles or something? And then you're going to be missing a lot of nutrition if you're just focusing on that. Or if you say, "Oh, I need to exercise for two hours." Let's say you do those two hours and then you go and eat 17 cheeseburgers. Paying attention to the holistic situation is really important and understanding that there's lots of very complex systems that are interacting at once. If we think about the fitness thing, what you eat, how you sleep, when you eat, all of those different things will come into play in order to make sure that you're happy and healthy. This is the same with your website. When Google sees that your website is happy and healthy and full of good quality content and full of good quality information, and functions well using lots of different criteria, then they'll be able to serve it to users because they know the users will get a good experience. Mordy Oberstein: That, to me, from an actual technical SEO point of view kind of thing is the point. There's things that happen beyond the ... let's call them the factors or the signals, that impacts how Google ranks something, that we don't appreciate and talk enough about. Let's say, for example, like user intent. This is something that has been more and more of an issue in the last, let's say, five, six years, where the particular factors that are applicable all depend on the various intents. So you don't even know what the factor is here because you don't really understand how Google's understanding it. For example, I'll give you a concrete example of this. Back in the day, not all recipe pages had images on them. Today, any ranking page, any ranking recipe page has an image on it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And very likely, a video. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Because machine learning, Google, RankBrain in particular, figured out that when users go to a webpage for a recipe, they want an image. An image became a ranking factor. You might say, "Okay, great, I'm not talking about a recipe, I'm a health website. I'm cooking something." Let's say meatloaf for people with diabetes. Making that up. Yeah. You might be a health website or you might be a medical website, but you're talking about a recipe. So now a recipe ranking factor steps into your health website, which you never would've thought of, because, "I'm a health website. I don't have to worry about the ranking factors for a recipe website." You don't even know what works anywhere at any point at this point. Part of the reason is because of machine learning, which we're going to talk about later on, but part of that is also, in a world where Google's trying to focus on ... Listen, take a step back. What's Google trying to do is trying to offer relevant results to people. A lot of what goes into what it shows or doesn't show is how well it understands the query and how well it understands the content. So things like MUM or BERT ... MUM, not so much yet, but Bert, all these kind of machine learning things that help Google actually understand the content itself, those are not ranking factors. Those impact what might be a ranking factor ultimately, but those things just help Google understand stuff. So while you are focusing on ranking factors, Google's focusing on understanding stuff. What can actually impact the ranking has nothing to do with the factors per se, but what happens beyond the factors or what's a meta factor. What plays into Google and how they understand the content itself versus the factors per se. Crystal Carter: Right. What helps Google to read it with their machines and what helps users to be able to understand and appreciate the content, and to convey the information appropriately. One of the things you mentioned was, "What is Google doing?" If you go to how search works, if you ask Google, "What do they want to do?" They say they want to organize the world's information. They don't talk about websites. They say they want to organize the world's information. And they want to do that in a way that is high quality. That's their business. Their business is to be able to provide high quality information to people. So whatever enables you to do that in the best possible way is what will help you to rank better, if that's your objective. Sometimes that might mean making sure that you're actually using words in your content that are relevant to the query. So when they're talking about their favorite pastries, they're talking about Ding Dongs instead of Ring Dings, then you should probably include Ding Dongs. Mordy Oberstein: Ring Dings all the way. Crystal Carter: Then you should probably include something about Ring Dings. But if you wanted to do something more niche, that only Mordy Oberstein likes, then you can maybe write some content about Ring Dings. Mordy Oberstein: Harry Schwartz also likes Ring Dings. Crystal Carter: That might include their content. It might include the way that your content is formatted. It might include things like site speed, mobile performance. That sort of thing. Make sure that you're doing whatever will help your content perform best. Again, one of the things that people sometimes get overwhelmed with, particularly when you're talking about ranking factors and ranking, da, da, da, da, da, you can accumulate ranking. Your ranking, it's dynamic. It will change. It goes up and down with regards to algorithm updates and stuff like that and different cert features. So if you start with one thing, you can go back and you can optimize. You can go back and you can optimize again. There are pages that rank for years because they're regularly updating those. Certainly something we talked about on the podcast previously with Rebecca from the Wix blog, they regularly update their content to make sure that it's relevant, it's accurate, and it's meeting user's expectations with regards to format, content, et cetera. Mordy Oberstein: On the relevant point, relevancy is a ranking factor, but if you focus on it like that, "Oh, I need to make sure my content is relevant because it's a ranking factor," that's not the way I would approach it. I'll just put it that way. One is because you don't really know anything. Doesn't tell you anything. What you should be thinking about is your user. But let's say you're thinking about Google. Let's just say you are thinking about Google that way. I would think about it as, "Okay, how is Google determining relevancy? How does machine learning properties understand content in order to say, 'This is or this isn't relevant'?" In that case, what I'm trying to say before is that you're not focused on the ranking factor when you're doing that, you're focused on the ecosystem. You're focusing on what's happening before Google ever gets to the point of saying, "Okay, how do we weigh this page for this query? How do we weigh the different ranking factors?" You're looking at, okay, relevancy, great, whatever, that's a ranking factor, who cares? I'm more concerned with, what happens underneath the surface that Google ... to determine rate relevancy? What does relevancy mean to Google? Crystal Carter: Right. If you think about just that one thing, they've got a couple of different things. They have a freshness systems. It says, "We have various Query Deserves Freshness systems designed to show fresher content for queries where it would be expected." That's something that they think about, for instance. They have local news systems, if it's something that's about local news, which might make it more relevant in certain places. For instance, if I Google hurricane, or something, and I'm in a place where there isn't a hurricane happening, then I don't need to know the local news about the hurricane. If I'm in a place where it's hurricane season and I Google hurricane, they know that I want to know what is coming. Like, "Do I need to batten down the hatches?" That's something that we need to think about. They also have systems that are around reliable information, which helps them to make sure that they're surfacing high quality content and elevating quality journalism and various different things. Their ranking systems guide is a really good outline of some of the things that they think about when they're considering that. I should also of course give a shout out to Lily Ray and her tireless commitment to encouraging people to read Google's Quality Reader Guidelines, which also talks about how they understand quality and all of the different nuances that are included, including E-E-A-T, which Lily talks a lot about, but lots of other, not factors, but considerations as well. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That's a good thing, I think, because again, you're not focusing on, "Is this a factor? Check." You're trying to get into a mindset and an approach and an understanding of content relative to users, and what Google may or may not be doing in the algorithm. That's what you should be focused on, not ranking factors. That's not to say, however, that thinking about ranking factors is inherently bad. It's like anything, it's how you use it, how you approach it. Let's bring in someone who I remember way, way, way back when, when ranking factor studies were the big thing in SEO, who is moving the industry along from general ranking factor studies to niche ranking factor studies, who's really been a part of the ranking factor conversation since it started. Senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions over at Semrush, Marcus Tober, is going to share his thoughts about, is thinking about ranking factors harmful to SEO? Marcus Tober: I believe thinking about ranking factors is helpful to SEO, as it helps to reflect and create context between your own pages and to competition. It also helps to create aspirational goals and is actually really motivating. But generally, just checking boxes, meaning chasing irrelevant or broad ranking factors is not SEO. This is how SEO used to be 15 years ago, but it's not really SEO anymore. But there are general ranking factors and this is something people should keep in mind all the time. Like, the page of your website and the context of your competition, and not just purely following Google's recommendations. Or looking at user engagement metrics and having a good CTR to know that, "Okay, I'm actually relevant. People click my results." Or generally, basic SEO, which I believe many people are not getting right, like having a good page structure, relevant title text, clean code, crawlable content, or generally, a crawlable website, avoiding load and duplicate content. Then I would also put into the bucket of ranking factors is having a good internal linking structure. Generally, relevant content. A good usage of structured data. And of course, as we all know, you need to be appealing to others, so that you track back links. Because Google is still machine, Google need these back links to discover your content and understand if you're important or not. But if you then think about ranking factors, Google really wants to deliver the most relevant result for this particular query the user has. Generally, basically, there are ranking factors on a keyword level. That's why before you start optimizing your website, you should really think about why you should rank, why you might be or will be the best and most important source, and if you cannot believe even yourself that you should be the one ranking first, then you should do something else before you apply SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much to Marcus for that. If you were looking to find Marcus on the internet, you can take a look for Marcus over on Twitter. That's @MarcusTober, at M-A-R-C-U-S-T-O-B-E-R. He's absolutely right. I think my contention with ranking factors has to do with the fact that that's not the approach that we should be constantly thinking about. That's not to say that ... Hey, look, HTTPS is a ranking factor. All things being equal, if I could just quickly make my site HTTPS, leaving aside all the reasons why you would want to do that anyway, well, why not? Why not try to get any competitive edge I can over another website, from a ranking factor point of view? Crystal Carter: I think the fitness analogy is another one as well. For instance, exercise is a factor for being more fit. Doing some exercise, if you're doing none is going to be better than ... doing some exercise is going to be better than doing none. It might not make you look like an Adonis or whatever, but it'll make you look ... it'll be better than not doing anything. Absolutely. With regards to the HTTPS thing, you said that it's not as important. They've included that as part of their page experience network of systems. One of the reasons why it's less important is because most people have it now. So if most people have HTTPS now, then it's not going to give you a particularly competitive edge. However, if you do not have HTTPS on your website, then yeah, if you add, it'll improve your website because people- Mordy Oberstein: In so many ways. In so many ways. Also, at a minimum, you have an extra S. Everyone loves the letter S. Crystal Carter: Everybody loves the letter S. It's very useful in Wordle. I'm not going to lie. I- Mordy Oberstein: It's done me wrong in Wordle. So we'll talk about the S later. Crystal Carter: My starter word has an S in it. It's super easy. Mordy Oberstein: I tried it. It doesn't always work for me. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. What's your starter word? Mordy Oberstein: It depends on my kid, but I always try to ... We do it together. I try to put an S in it. "No, do this one, it has an S in it." Or an R. I like Rs. Right? Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: But it doesn't always work. I would need, I would like, a machine learning algorithm to help me get my Wordle right. Which brings us to our conversation that I think we need to have. It behooves us to have. We wouldn't be doing our job as podcast host, an SEO podcast host, if we were not talking about machine learning relative to ranking factors, and how the whole machine learning thing has changed the dynamic around ranking factors, because it has changed. Back in the day, all anyone talked about was ranking factor, ranking factor, ranking factor. That conversation has sort of died off in a lot of ways because of what's happened with machine learning. So, let's take a little bit of a deep thought into machine learning and ranking and the role it plays. Ranking factors mean algorithms. Algorithms mean technical advancements. In Google land, that means machine learning. That's what fuels the advancements in the algorithm. Ranking factors play a more immediate role. I'll put it like this, ranking factors play a more immediate role, whereas machine learning plays a meta role. I'll give you a good example of what I mean. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: You can hit all the ... you've checked all ... Let's assume we know all the ranking factors. All of them. And you've checked all of the boxes. You've checked them twice. You have all the ranking factors. You get a metal. You have a ranking factor, and you get a ranking factor, and you get a ranking factor, to quote my inner Oprah. Crystal Carter: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: The problem is, is that machine learning dictates the SERP itself. What do I mean? Let's say you type in, "Buy car insurance," and you have a page that sells car insurance. Again, you have all the ranking factors checked off, you've done them all. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But machine learning is telling Google that the intent here is not just to buy car insurance, it's also to learn about buying car insurance. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Google will say, and they literally do this, "We will have six slots for pages that sell car insurance and four slots among the top 10 results that offer places to learn more about car insurance." So even though you've checked off all the boxes, if your page sells car insurance, you are limited to six out of 10 slots, let's say, on the first page. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: So ranking factors are one thing. Great, you've checked off the ranking factors. But unless you're understanding the Google ecosystem from machine learning point of view, which in this case means that there's multiple intents and Google's going to divide the SERP into multiple intents, and you should have content that hits both of those intents, you will be limiting yourself to just 60% of the SERP, assuming you can rank for all six slots. Crystal Carter: This is why Mordy and I both very regularly tell people to look at the SERP, and also, to experience the SERP. For instance, for that "Buy car insurance" thing or car insurance query, sometimes machine learning starts before the person even gets to the SERP. They'll start typing in, "Car insurance," or, "Buy car insurance," and they'll get some results, some preview results, and those are machine learning generated. Google learns that lots of people, when they start typing in car will type in insurance, or something. I've gone off on and fallen into an internet wormhole based on some of those things, where I started typing in something and it then started giving me ... I was like, "What is that? I've never even heard of that." Mordy Oberstein: The autocomplete is very helpful sometimes. If you're thinking about ranking factors, you're not thinking about access points or entry points to your content from the SERP, and you're not even creating any of that content. Crystal Carter: Users are very aware of this as well. Users are very aware that Google will give them an autocomplete. They're also aware that Google will filter them. I was having a conversation with somebody who was talking about, "How do I compete with a brand that has the same name as a city?" For instance. I was like, "Think about your entity." The way that Google understands entities and the knowledge graph is also another thing to consider with regards to quote, unquote ranking, because those knowledge panels show up with high priority, either on mobile or on the sidebar of the desktop search. How Google understands those entities will affect whether or not they rank certain bits of content. That's really important to think about as well. For instance, I looked up the band Texas during this conversation. Or no, I looked up the word Texas. Texas is a band in the UK. And obviously, it's Texas. Don't mess with Texas. Mordy Oberstein: What's that? I heard about the band, what's the other thing? Crystal Carter: Exactly. Because I'm in the UK where that band is famous, I got a disambiguation box that was like, "Do you mean Texas the band or do you mean Texas the state?" It popped up. That is machine learning. Google knows that people in the UK are regularly looking for Texas the band, and then sometimes, Texas the state. Then I also did the same query for Chicago. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, a working band. Crystal Carter: The first time I did- Mordy Oberstein: Terrible city. I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: Shout out to all my Chicago fans. The Bulls. Mordy Oberstein: Hi, Dr. Pete. Hi, Kevin. Crystal Carter: I also looked up Chicago. The first time I looked up Chicago, I didn't get a disambiguation thing for Chicago, the band. But then I kept looking around and I didn't click on the thing that it was talking about, Chicago, the city, and then Google gave me the disambiguation for the band. Because they were like, "You're clearly not finding what you want." So it's very important to remember that Google is doing this ... it's machine learning. It's happening in real time. They have lots of things that are happening in real time that are very complex. Mordy Oberstein: It's not even conjecture. I'm going to read something from Google to you. This is Google telling you that the way they appropriate ranking factors is based on machine learning. This is in reference to RankBrain, which is the first machine learning property Google introduced. I'm going to say 2015, could be 2014. Not 2016, but I think it's either 2014 or '15. I'm terrible with years, but it's one of those two. RankBrain helped Google understand not only queries that it never saw before, but also helped Google understand intent and what users want out of the pages that they're seeing. Or potentially be seeing. I'm quoting you from Google here. You ready? "Beyond looking at keywords, our systems also analyze if content is relevant to a query in other ways. We also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries. We transform that data into signals that help our machine learned systems better estimate relevance. Just think, when you search for dogs, you likely want a page with the word dogs on it hundreds of times. With that in mind, algorithm's assessment page contains other relevant content beyond the keyword dogs, such as pictures of dogs, videos, or even lists of breeds." It's what I said to you before about recipes. Google saw, hey, users, when they went to a recipe page that had no picture, bounced, and when it had a picture, they stayed. So, pictures are a ranking factor for recipes. Crystal Carter: Everyone's really going mad for machine learning. Everyone's going really mad for ChatGPT right now. They're saying, "Oh, Google's really lagging behind." I'm like, "Google's been doing generative search results for years." With featured snippets, they're able to extract different content, they're able to manipulate it. For instance, sometimes you go to a webpage and they've got numbers, they've got a list in numbers, and then sometimes on the SERP it shows it in bullets. They know what they're doing. They change around the ... They change around ... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they'll take the H2 and H3s and turn that into a numbered list. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. They're able to do that. In the featured snippets, what you get is Google understands the intent. For instance, the word for ladybug in America is called a ladybird in the UK. If I look up, "Why are ladybugs different colors?" I'll tell you why. One of them. Because the orange ones in Ohio bite you. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Crystal Carter: Yeah. They're awful. They're vicious. They come out in the … Mordy Oberstein: You know why, because Ohio's near Chicago. Crystal Carter: Whoops. We love the Midwest. We love the Midwest. And all of the pop that happens in the Midwest. Mordy Oberstein: I love pop. Crystal Carter: I love pop. It's my favorite. Shout out to Kenyon College. Hey. Shout out to my alma mater, Kenyon College in Ohio. Anyway. Yeah, if you look up, "Why are ladybugs different colors in the UK?" Or, "Why are ladybirds different colors in the UK?" They will give you information about ladybugs because they understand that that's not the literal word, that is the fly. They understand that there's different words for those things. And they do that in real time. As things change and as language evolves, which it does really regularly, they understand this. And yeah, it's something that they actively work with, and machine learning is absolutely crucial to that. Mordy Oberstein: I think the point we're trying to drive home is that things that are not ranking factors per se, impact rank more so than your specific ranking factors. Crystal Carter: I think that there's a difference between SEO best practice and ranking factors. There's SEO best practice, like your headings and your meta descriptions, and your this and that and the other. All of those things are great best practice, and they contribute to how Google understands your content so that they can rank it. Mordy Oberstein: So the next time you see a, "This is a list of the top ranking factors." Have a look. Sure, whatever. But focus more on what's happening in the ecosystem. How is Google going about actually understanding content and trying to align with that? Because if you align with how Google's trying to understand content, Google will see you as relevant. And then when they weigh the ranking factor of relevancy at 90% for this query, you will rank. Crystal Carter: There you go. There we have it. Mordy Oberstein: And you'll have done it without ever worrying about a ranking factor. You know what you should be worried about though? Crystal Carter: What? What? Mordy Oberstein: The news, and what's happening in the news. Maybe something's- Crystal Carter: What is happening? Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're about to find out, because here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy news. Some people will lie, "I hate to say, I told you so," but I revel in it. I told you so. Just one week after I reported to you about bank rate using AI to write content. I said, "Be careful." CNET stepped in it like you would not believe. Allegedly, they have been spitting up AI content and having it reviewed by people. But it turns out it's been a hot mess of inaccuracy from Mia Sato and James Vincent over at The Verge, inside CNET's AI powered SEO money machine. I am not going to get into the whole thing here. I will link to the story in the show notes. Most definitely read it. Fascinating. I feel like we've gone backwards in time in SEO world. Not happy about it, but read the article. But the article said it goes through CNET's alleged content farm or content building of over 70 articles built by AI writers, saying, quote, "The business model is straightforward and explicit. It publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for high intense queries, and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links." Meaning exactly what Google says you are not allowed to do in their guidelines. For the record, by the way, according to Mashable, CNET has ceased with the creation of AI powered content. The moral of the story is this is an emerging technology that needs to be used the right way. Please, please, please don't just jump into these tools carte blanche. Let the dust settle. Be mature with them. Figure it out. In other news, Google will be adding an AI powered chatbot in 2023. How's that for contrast? Per Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land. Report, "Google Search will debut chatbot features this year." It's been speculated that Google went bonkers when the popularity of ChatGPT came about, trying to determine how it might impact their business model. So it makes sense that Google's anxiously letting you know, "Hey, hey, we're going to do this. We're not behind the times here. We have this. We've got you covered. We're going to have the chatbot. We're going to have the chatbot." At least according to a report from the New York Times. I think this will be an interactive chat experience, where instead of getting a simple question answered with a simple result, which Google already does, it'll be something like, "Hey, where can I get pizza near me?" The chatbot replies back with a bunch of listings. And then you say, "Hey, chatbot, which one of these listings has gluten free pizza?" In other words, it'll be a way of interactively refining or exploring topics and queries. Expanding on that and refining in on that ... on all new and interactive ways. With that, this is this week's Snappy News. You no longer have to worry because now you know the news. Crystal Carter: I'm even more worried now. No, I'm not. I'm not. That was great news. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks. I was worried that you weren't going to like it. Crystal Carter: No, I love good news. It's always good to get good news. It's great. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. All news is good news. Is that a thing? No, that can't be a thing. That shouldn't be a thing. Crystal Carter: Well ... Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: You know what might be news to you, then? Crystal Carter: What's news to me? Mordy Oberstein: Who you should be following this week from our social awesomeness around SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Social media is a great way to hear about SEO. That's where I get a lot of my SEO news. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking to get a more holistic understanding of how you should be going about content and SEO, and not worrying so much about, "Is this a ranking factor?" You know who you should be following, is Dr. Marie Haynes. Crystal Carter: Dr. Marie Haynes, she's an absolute gem. Mordy Oberstein: She's a treasure. Crystal Carter: She has such a healthy, incredible curiosity for SEO. She asks questions about things that she's considering. And she thinks deeply about the questions and the answers and what it might mean. I saw her having a really interesting discussion about, again, mentioning ChatGPT, about what that means for search. I know a lot of people are asking those questions, but I'm really interested to see what she thinks about that. Speaking of which, she wrote a fantastic article about Google and their algorithm updates. Which has to do with ranking, particularly from a domain point of view, for the Wix SEO Hub, which is an absolute must-read. Please check that out. But yeah, she's a fantastic, incredible thought follow, and is amazing. All of the platitudes, all of the compliments for Marie. Mordy Oberstein: Great conversation on Twitter. Does great assets for the community. Search news you can use. So check that out. If you're looking to understand the algorithm better, the quality reader guidelines better, she's someone you definitely want to keep an eye on and follow. Over on Twitter, @MarieHaynes. That's at M-A-R-I-E underscore H-A-Y-N-E-S. On Twitter, @Marie_Haynes. We'll lead to it in the show notes. Definitely give her a follow because she's our follow of the week. Which means we have reached the end. Crystal Carter: We have? Mordy Oberstein: I hope I have factored in an ending. Crystal Carter: What did we learn today about machines? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, we learned there are a lot of factors, and worry about the machines more than the factors. Crystal Carter: Factors to consider about machines. Mordy Oberstein: I'm factoring in the point you've been making about machines, about the factors, and factoring in your point about the machines, my factoring of the factors is less. Does that make sense? Crystal Carter: How should we rank that assessment? Mordy Oberstein: It's very secure. Has an S. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, ooh, this is a hot topic, do traditional search engines matter as much as they used to? We're probably going to Chat GPT-3 with that one. Look for us wherever you consume your podcast, or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wick SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wick.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Marcus Tober Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Semrush The power of keyword intent for organic success News: Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine CNET pauses its controversial AI-generated stories 'for now' Report: Google search will debut chatbot features this year Notes Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Crystal Carter Mordy Oberstein Marcus Tober Resources : SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Semrush The power of keyword intent for organic success News: Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine CNET pauses its controversial AI-generated stories 'for now' Report: Google search will debut chatbot features this year Transcript Mordy Oberstein: It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're approaching our groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, head of SEO Branding here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazing and fabulously incredible, the greatest of all, Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communications here at Wix. Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for that fantastic introduction, Mordy Oberstein. One of these days I'm going to listen back to the podcast and see if they're all different, or if you- Mordy Oberstein: No, there are slight variations. I don't script it out. I get stuck. I guess like, "Wait. What do I say next? That doesn't rhyme. I don't know. Okay, stop here and just say her name." Crystal Carter: The breath control is very impressive. I must say. Mordy Oberstein: I'm having a hard time because I have a cold. Crystal Carter: Awe. Mordy Oberstein: Everyone take pity on me. Pity me. Pity, pity, pity please. Crystal Carter: Put the tiny violins on the audio track, please. Right there. For Mordy. Mordy Oberstein: I will take it. Don't forget, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where every Wix site is HTTPS. Wix offers enterprise level security, keeping your site safe and your users happy. After all, HTTPS is a ranking factor. Interesting. Why would I mention that random fact? I don't know. By the way, it's a very small ranking factor. Don't get hung up over it. But I'm saying that because today's topic is ranking factors. Do they matter? Should you focus on them? And if not, what should you be focused on? Again, spoiler alert, HTTPS is a very, very small ranking factor. Be that as it may, we'll dive into, do some ranking factors matter more than others? How do you know if a tactic has directly influenced your ranking? Why a focus on intent has perhaps replaced a focus on ranking factors? And why ranking factors matter less in a world that's all about interpreting meaning. That sounds abstract. Plus, we'll dive into a whole lot on Google's machine learning and its impact on the ranking wormhole. And of course, we have your snappiest of snappiest news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness. Get ready, get set, get ranking factors, or not. Episode number 23 of the SERP's Up podcast is flying. I don't know what we're flying to yet. Crystal Carter: I don't know. I don't know. Mordy Oberstein: If it’s a nonstop flight or not, because I have a cold and might need to pause for a few minutes here and there. Crystal Carter: We're a top-ranked podcast. We are. I lied. There's- Mordy Oberstein: I know all the factors too. Crystal Carter: All of the factors. Mordy Oberstein: All of the factors. All 200 of the factors. We'll get to all of this. Let's take a step back. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: When someone's searching for something, the question is, how does Google know what results to show? It's a simple foundational question, but we don't really have a lot of information, when you think about it, about that process. As much as we do know, it's what we don't know. It's the tip of the iceberg kind of thing. We have, I'll call it breadcrumbs. We know certain things that Google officially looks at. For example, we know that back links are something that Google has looked at in order to determine whether or not a page should rank or not. When I say back links, by the way, we also know ... well, we know that Google is considering it less important over time, officially, but we don't know how big of a factor it is. So we know that certain things are factors like back links, but how big of a factor are they? Again, in fact, Google has downplayed links recently. We know that, for example, your site being secure is a factor, but how big of a factor is it? Or we know, for example, that your location is a factor when you're searching for things like, "Pizza near me." So you can get some pizza near you, and put that pizza near you inside of you. That location is a factor. How close the businesses are to you when you're searching are a factor. So you would think ranking on Google would kind of be easy. We have a list of all these factors. Oh, factors here, factors there. Just check them off, no problem. And supposedly there are 200 plus of these different factors. Whether or not that's actually true or not, I don't know. But that's what the general consensus has said, there's 200 of these factors. I don't know. First off, when it comes to factors, all sorts of misinformation, things like LSI keywords being a factor, false. No such thing. They don't exist. LSI factors, not a thing. Or Google looking how old your domain is. False. No. Not true. False. Heck, there was one time where Google ... or someone misunderstood what a Googler said about RankBrain, which we'll get into later, I'm sure, and said that it's a top three ranking factor. RankBrain's not even a ranking factor. It's got nothing to do with being a factor. It impacts. It impacts what might be a factor, but it itself is not a ranking factor. It's a machine learning property. We're going to talk more about that later. Then on top of all of that, the ranking factors that we do know that actually exist, we don't always know the role that they play, and when they play and how big of a role. For example, Google has said that they assess the quality of a website at the domain level. They look at quality across the entire site, not page by page. But what exactly does quality even mean? What exactly are they looking at? You can quickly get the picture that focusing on ranking factors may not be the best thing to do if you're trying to thrive on the old Googs. Crystal Carter: I think that's absolutely true in an almost evangelical delivery. Mordy Oberstein: Hold on, that's the sound of me getting off my soapbox. Crystal Carter: Okay. Okay. Just so you know. I think that it's absolutely true, because basically, it's a question of, if you're focusing on ranking factors, you're essentially simplifying ... you're really, really oversimplifying some extremely complex systems. Google today calls them ranking systems. They've got a really good piece of documentation that talks about their ranking systems. Talks about how those systems overlap, intersect, and how there are various different machine learning properties and various different machine learning models that help Google to understand what's going on with search results. We've got deduplication systems. There's the local news systems. There's MUM. There's BERT. There's neural matching. There's various different things that are going on at once. So yeah, a correlation doesn't always equal causation. Sometimes with a website there's lots of different factors happening at once. So it's sometimes difficult to understand which variable was the decision maker on that. But it's very complex. It's a very complex system, or very complex set of systems that overlap and intersect and are engaging with a very dynamic web that's more and more dynamic every day. So if you're just focusing on so-called factors, you're going to be missing a lot of important elements. Mordy Oberstein: I think that's one of the things that frustrates me the most about the ranking factor conversation is not just, "Okay, is it a factor? Is it not a factor? How big of a factor?" But it's really the mindset that it produces. Whereas you are so focused on, "Oh, the title tag, Google looks at that for ranking. It is a factor. I must make sure my keyword is in the title tag in order to be factored in for the factor of the factoring, of the factoring of the ranking." You're missing out on the whole mindset of, "Let me make sure that I create really good content on a page that's technically healthy, so Google can crawl, index it, and then serve this really great piece of content to users." You're missing all of that when you focus on the 200 plus ranking factors. Crystal Carter: Right. For instance, it's like the equivalent of if you were trying to get fit or if you were trying to get more physically fit, then you might say, "Oh, I need to eat this many calories." What if all those calories are junk calories? What if all those calories are from Skittles or something? And then you're going to be missing a lot of nutrition if you're just focusing on that. Or if you say, "Oh, I need to exercise for two hours." Let's say you do those two hours and then you go and eat 17 cheeseburgers. Paying attention to the holistic situation is really important and understanding that there's lots of very complex systems that are interacting at once. If we think about the fitness thing, what you eat, how you sleep, when you eat, all of those different things will come into play in order to make sure that you're happy and healthy. This is the same with your website. When Google sees that your website is happy and healthy and full of good quality content and full of good quality information, and functions well using lots of different criteria, then they'll be able to serve it to users because they know the users will get a good experience. Mordy Oberstein: That, to me, from an actual technical SEO point of view kind of thing is the point. There's things that happen beyond the ... let's call them the factors or the signals, that impacts how Google ranks something, that we don't appreciate and talk enough about. Let's say, for example, like user intent. This is something that has been more and more of an issue in the last, let's say, five, six years, where the particular factors that are applicable all depend on the various intents. So you don't even know what the factor is here because you don't really understand how Google's understanding it. For example, I'll give you a concrete example of this. Back in the day, not all recipe pages had images on them. Today, any ranking page, any ranking recipe page has an image on it. Crystal Carter: Yeah. And very likely, a video. Mordy Oberstein: Right. Because machine learning, Google, RankBrain in particular, figured out that when users go to a webpage for a recipe, they want an image. An image became a ranking factor. You might say, "Okay, great, I'm not talking about a recipe, I'm a health website. I'm cooking something." Let's say meatloaf for people with diabetes. Making that up. Yeah. You might be a health website or you might be a medical website, but you're talking about a recipe. So now a recipe ranking factor steps into your health website, which you never would've thought of, because, "I'm a health website. I don't have to worry about the ranking factors for a recipe website." You don't even know what works anywhere at any point at this point. Part of the reason is because of machine learning, which we're going to talk about later on, but part of that is also, in a world where Google's trying to focus on ... Listen, take a step back. What's Google trying to do is trying to offer relevant results to people. A lot of what goes into what it shows or doesn't show is how well it understands the query and how well it understands the content. So things like MUM or BERT ... MUM, not so much yet, but Bert, all these kind of machine learning things that help Google actually understand the content itself, those are not ranking factors. Those impact what might be a ranking factor ultimately, but those things just help Google understand stuff. So while you are focusing on ranking factors, Google's focusing on understanding stuff. What can actually impact the ranking has nothing to do with the factors per se, but what happens beyond the factors or what's a meta factor. What plays into Google and how they understand the content itself versus the factors per se. Crystal Carter: Right. What helps Google to read it with their machines and what helps users to be able to understand and appreciate the content, and to convey the information appropriately. One of the things you mentioned was, "What is Google doing?" If you go to how search works, if you ask Google, "What do they want to do?" They say they want to organize the world's information. They don't talk about websites. They say they want to organize the world's information. And they want to do that in a way that is high quality. That's their business. Their business is to be able to provide high quality information to people. So whatever enables you to do that in the best possible way is what will help you to rank better, if that's your objective. Sometimes that might mean making sure that you're actually using words in your content that are relevant to the query. So when they're talking about their favorite pastries, they're talking about Ding Dongs instead of Ring Dings, then you should probably include Ding Dongs. Mordy Oberstein: Ring Dings all the way. Crystal Carter: Then you should probably include something about Ring Dings. But if you wanted to do something more niche, that only Mordy Oberstein likes, then you can maybe write some content about Ring Dings. Mordy Oberstein: Harry Schwartz also likes Ring Dings. Crystal Carter: That might include their content. It might include the way that your content is formatted. It might include things like site speed, mobile performance. That sort of thing. Make sure that you're doing whatever will help your content perform best. Again, one of the things that people sometimes get overwhelmed with, particularly when you're talking about ranking factors and ranking, da, da, da, da, da, you can accumulate ranking. Your ranking, it's dynamic. It will change. It goes up and down with regards to algorithm updates and stuff like that and different cert features. So if you start with one thing, you can go back and you can optimize. You can go back and you can optimize again. There are pages that rank for years because they're regularly updating those. Certainly something we talked about on the podcast previously with Rebecca from the Wix blog, they regularly update their content to make sure that it's relevant, it's accurate, and it's meeting user's expectations with regards to format, content, et cetera. Mordy Oberstein: On the relevant point, relevancy is a ranking factor, but if you focus on it like that, "Oh, I need to make sure my content is relevant because it's a ranking factor," that's not the way I would approach it. I'll just put it that way. One is because you don't really know anything. Doesn't tell you anything. What you should be thinking about is your user. But let's say you're thinking about Google. Let's just say you are thinking about Google that way. I would think about it as, "Okay, how is Google determining relevancy? How does machine learning properties understand content in order to say, 'This is or this isn't relevant'?" In that case, what I'm trying to say before is that you're not focused on the ranking factor when you're doing that, you're focused on the ecosystem. You're focusing on what's happening before Google ever gets to the point of saying, "Okay, how do we weigh this page for this query? How do we weigh the different ranking factors?" You're looking at, okay, relevancy, great, whatever, that's a ranking factor, who cares? I'm more concerned with, what happens underneath the surface that Google ... to determine rate relevancy? What does relevancy mean to Google? Crystal Carter: Right. If you think about just that one thing, they've got a couple of different things. They have a freshness systems. It says, "We have various Query Deserves Freshness systems designed to show fresher content for queries where it would be expected." That's something that they think about, for instance. They have local news systems, if it's something that's about local news, which might make it more relevant in certain places. For instance, if I Google hurricane, or something, and I'm in a place where there isn't a hurricane happening, then I don't need to know the local news about the hurricane. If I'm in a place where it's hurricane season and I Google hurricane, they know that I want to know what is coming. Like, "Do I need to batten down the hatches?" That's something that we need to think about. They also have systems that are around reliable information, which helps them to make sure that they're surfacing high quality content and elevating quality journalism and various different things. Their ranking systems guide is a really good outline of some of the things that they think about when they're considering that. I should also of course give a shout out to Lily Ray and her tireless commitment to encouraging people to read Google's Quality Reader Guidelines, which also talks about how they understand quality and all of the different nuances that are included, including E-E-A-T, which Lily talks a lot about, but lots of other, not factors, but considerations as well. Mordy Oberstein: Right. That's a good thing, I think, because again, you're not focusing on, "Is this a factor? Check." You're trying to get into a mindset and an approach and an understanding of content relative to users, and what Google may or may not be doing in the algorithm. That's what you should be focused on, not ranking factors. That's not to say, however, that thinking about ranking factors is inherently bad. It's like anything, it's how you use it, how you approach it. Let's bring in someone who I remember way, way, way back when, when ranking factor studies were the big thing in SEO, who is moving the industry along from general ranking factor studies to niche ranking factor studies, who's really been a part of the ranking factor conversation since it started. Senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions over at Semrush, Marcus Tober, is going to share his thoughts about, is thinking about ranking factors harmful to SEO? Marcus Tober: I believe thinking about ranking factors is helpful to SEO, as it helps to reflect and create context between your own pages and to competition. It also helps to create aspirational goals and is actually really motivating. But generally, just checking boxes, meaning chasing irrelevant or broad ranking factors is not SEO. This is how SEO used to be 15 years ago, but it's not really SEO anymore. But there are general ranking factors and this is something people should keep in mind all the time. Like, the page of your website and the context of your competition, and not just purely following Google's recommendations. Or looking at user engagement metrics and having a good CTR to know that, "Okay, I'm actually relevant. People click my results." Or generally, basic SEO, which I believe many people are not getting right, like having a good page structure, relevant title text, clean code, crawlable content, or generally, a crawlable website, avoiding load and duplicate content. Then I would also put into the bucket of ranking factors is having a good internal linking structure. Generally, relevant content. A good usage of structured data. And of course, as we all know, you need to be appealing to others, so that you track back links. Because Google is still machine, Google need these back links to discover your content and understand if you're important or not. But if you then think about ranking factors, Google really wants to deliver the most relevant result for this particular query the user has. Generally, basically, there are ranking factors on a keyword level. That's why before you start optimizing your website, you should really think about why you should rank, why you might be or will be the best and most important source, and if you cannot believe even yourself that you should be the one ranking first, then you should do something else before you apply SEO. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you so much to Marcus for that. If you were looking to find Marcus on the internet, you can take a look for Marcus over on Twitter. That's @MarcusTober, at M-A-R-C-U-S-T-O-B-E-R. He's absolutely right. I think my contention with ranking factors has to do with the fact that that's not the approach that we should be constantly thinking about. That's not to say that ... Hey, look, HTTPS is a ranking factor. All things being equal, if I could just quickly make my site HTTPS, leaving aside all the reasons why you would want to do that anyway, well, why not? Why not try to get any competitive edge I can over another website, from a ranking factor point of view? Crystal Carter: I think the fitness analogy is another one as well. For instance, exercise is a factor for being more fit. Doing some exercise, if you're doing none is going to be better than ... doing some exercise is going to be better than doing none. It might not make you look like an Adonis or whatever, but it'll make you look ... it'll be better than not doing anything. Absolutely. With regards to the HTTPS thing, you said that it's not as important. They've included that as part of their page experience network of systems. One of the reasons why it's less important is because most people have it now. So if most people have HTTPS now, then it's not going to give you a particularly competitive edge. However, if you do not have HTTPS on your website, then yeah, if you add, it'll improve your website because people- Mordy Oberstein: In so many ways. In so many ways. Also, at a minimum, you have an extra S. Everyone loves the letter S. Crystal Carter: Everybody loves the letter S. It's very useful in Wordle. I'm not going to lie. I- Mordy Oberstein: It's done me wrong in Wordle. So we'll talk about the S later. Crystal Carter: My starter word has an S in it. It's super easy. Mordy Oberstein: I tried it. It doesn't always work for me. Crystal Carter: Oh, okay. What's your starter word? Mordy Oberstein: It depends on my kid, but I always try to ... We do it together. I try to put an S in it. "No, do this one, it has an S in it." Or an R. I like Rs. Right? Crystal Carter: Yep. Mordy Oberstein: But it doesn't always work. I would need, I would like, a machine learning algorithm to help me get my Wordle right. Which brings us to our conversation that I think we need to have. It behooves us to have. We wouldn't be doing our job as podcast host, an SEO podcast host, if we were not talking about machine learning relative to ranking factors, and how the whole machine learning thing has changed the dynamic around ranking factors, because it has changed. Back in the day, all anyone talked about was ranking factor, ranking factor, ranking factor. That conversation has sort of died off in a lot of ways because of what's happened with machine learning. So, let's take a little bit of a deep thought into machine learning and ranking and the role it plays. Ranking factors mean algorithms. Algorithms mean technical advancements. In Google land, that means machine learning. That's what fuels the advancements in the algorithm. Ranking factors play a more immediate role. I'll put it like this, ranking factors play a more immediate role, whereas machine learning plays a meta role. I'll give you a good example of what I mean. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: You can hit all the ... you've checked all ... Let's assume we know all the ranking factors. All of them. And you've checked all of the boxes. You've checked them twice. You have all the ranking factors. You get a metal. You have a ranking factor, and you get a ranking factor, and you get a ranking factor, to quote my inner Oprah. Crystal Carter: Yay. Mordy Oberstein: The problem is, is that machine learning dictates the SERP itself. What do I mean? Let's say you type in, "Buy car insurance," and you have a page that sells car insurance. Again, you have all the ranking factors checked off, you've done them all. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: But machine learning is telling Google that the intent here is not just to buy car insurance, it's also to learn about buying car insurance. Crystal Carter: Right. Mordy Oberstein: Google will say, and they literally do this, "We will have six slots for pages that sell car insurance and four slots among the top 10 results that offer places to learn more about car insurance." So even though you've checked off all the boxes, if your page sells car insurance, you are limited to six out of 10 slots, let's say, on the first page. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: So ranking factors are one thing. Great, you've checked off the ranking factors. But unless you're understanding the Google ecosystem from machine learning point of view, which in this case means that there's multiple intents and Google's going to divide the SERP into multiple intents, and you should have content that hits both of those intents, you will be limiting yourself to just 60% of the SERP, assuming you can rank for all six slots. Crystal Carter: This is why Mordy and I both very regularly tell people to look at the SERP, and also, to experience the SERP. For instance, for that "Buy car insurance" thing or car insurance query, sometimes machine learning starts before the person even gets to the SERP. They'll start typing in, "Car insurance," or, "Buy car insurance," and they'll get some results, some preview results, and those are machine learning generated. Google learns that lots of people, when they start typing in car will type in insurance, or something. I've gone off on and fallen into an internet wormhole based on some of those things, where I started typing in something and it then started giving me ... I was like, "What is that? I've never even heard of that." Mordy Oberstein: The autocomplete is very helpful sometimes. If you're thinking about ranking factors, you're not thinking about access points or entry points to your content from the SERP, and you're not even creating any of that content. Crystal Carter: Users are very aware of this as well. Users are very aware that Google will give them an autocomplete. They're also aware that Google will filter them. I was having a conversation with somebody who was talking about, "How do I compete with a brand that has the same name as a city?" For instance. I was like, "Think about your entity." The way that Google understands entities and the knowledge graph is also another thing to consider with regards to quote, unquote ranking, because those knowledge panels show up with high priority, either on mobile or on the sidebar of the desktop search. How Google understands those entities will affect whether or not they rank certain bits of content. That's really important to think about as well. For instance, I looked up the band Texas during this conversation. Or no, I looked up the word Texas. Texas is a band in the UK. And obviously, it's Texas. Don't mess with Texas. Mordy Oberstein: What's that? I heard about the band, what's the other thing? Crystal Carter: Exactly. Because I'm in the UK where that band is famous, I got a disambiguation box that was like, "Do you mean Texas the band or do you mean Texas the state?" It popped up. That is machine learning. Google knows that people in the UK are regularly looking for Texas the band, and then sometimes, Texas the state. Then I also did the same query for Chicago. Mordy Oberstein: Ah, a working band. Crystal Carter: The first time I did- Mordy Oberstein: Terrible city. I'm just kidding. Crystal Carter: Shout out to all my Chicago fans. The Bulls. Mordy Oberstein: Hi, Dr. Pete. Hi, Kevin. Crystal Carter: I also looked up Chicago. The first time I looked up Chicago, I didn't get a disambiguation thing for Chicago, the band. But then I kept looking around and I didn't click on the thing that it was talking about, Chicago, the city, and then Google gave me the disambiguation for the band. Because they were like, "You're clearly not finding what you want." So it's very important to remember that Google is doing this ... it's machine learning. It's happening in real time. They have lots of things that are happening in real time that are very complex. Mordy Oberstein: It's not even conjecture. I'm going to read something from Google to you. This is Google telling you that the way they appropriate ranking factors is based on machine learning. This is in reference to RankBrain, which is the first machine learning property Google introduced. I'm going to say 2015, could be 2014. Not 2016, but I think it's either 2014 or '15. I'm terrible with years, but it's one of those two. RankBrain helped Google understand not only queries that it never saw before, but also helped Google understand intent and what users want out of the pages that they're seeing. Or potentially be seeing. I'm quoting you from Google here. You ready? "Beyond looking at keywords, our systems also analyze if content is relevant to a query in other ways. We also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries. We transform that data into signals that help our machine learned systems better estimate relevance. Just think, when you search for dogs, you likely want a page with the word dogs on it hundreds of times. With that in mind, algorithm's assessment page contains other relevant content beyond the keyword dogs, such as pictures of dogs, videos, or even lists of breeds." It's what I said to you before about recipes. Google saw, hey, users, when they went to a recipe page that had no picture, bounced, and when it had a picture, they stayed. So, pictures are a ranking factor for recipes. Crystal Carter: Everyone's really going mad for machine learning. Everyone's going really mad for ChatGPT right now. They're saying, "Oh, Google's really lagging behind." I'm like, "Google's been doing generative search results for years." With featured snippets, they're able to extract different content, they're able to manipulate it. For instance, sometimes you go to a webpage and they've got numbers, they've got a list in numbers, and then sometimes on the SERP it shows it in bullets. They know what they're doing. They change around the ... They change around ... Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, they'll take the H2 and H3s and turn that into a numbered list. Crystal Carter: Right. Exactly. They're able to do that. In the featured snippets, what you get is Google understands the intent. For instance, the word for ladybug in America is called a ladybird in the UK. If I look up, "Why are ladybugs different colors?" I'll tell you why. One of them. Because the orange ones in Ohio bite you. Mordy Oberstein: Ooh. Crystal Carter: Yeah. They're awful. They're vicious. They come out in the … Mordy Oberstein: You know why, because Ohio's near Chicago. Crystal Carter: Whoops. We love the Midwest. We love the Midwest. And all of the pop that happens in the Midwest. Mordy Oberstein: I love pop. Crystal Carter: I love pop. It's my favorite. Shout out to Kenyon College. Hey. Shout out to my alma mater, Kenyon College in Ohio. Anyway. Yeah, if you look up, "Why are ladybugs different colors in the UK?" Or, "Why are ladybirds different colors in the UK?" They will give you information about ladybugs because they understand that that's not the literal word, that is the fly. They understand that there's different words for those things. And they do that in real time. As things change and as language evolves, which it does really regularly, they understand this. And yeah, it's something that they actively work with, and machine learning is absolutely crucial to that. Mordy Oberstein: I think the point we're trying to drive home is that things that are not ranking factors per se, impact rank more so than your specific ranking factors. Crystal Carter: I think that there's a difference between SEO best practice and ranking factors. There's SEO best practice, like your headings and your meta descriptions, and your this and that and the other. All of those things are great best practice, and they contribute to how Google understands your content so that they can rank it. Mordy Oberstein: So the next time you see a, "This is a list of the top ranking factors." Have a look. Sure, whatever. But focus more on what's happening in the ecosystem. How is Google going about actually understanding content and trying to align with that? Because if you align with how Google's trying to understand content, Google will see you as relevant. And then when they weigh the ranking factor of relevancy at 90% for this query, you will rank. Crystal Carter: There you go. There we have it. Mordy Oberstein: And you'll have done it without ever worrying about a ranking factor. You know what you should be worried about though? Crystal Carter: What? What? Mordy Oberstein: The news, and what's happening in the news. Maybe something's- Crystal Carter: What is happening? Mordy Oberstein: Well, we're about to find out, because here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy news. Some people will lie, "I hate to say, I told you so," but I revel in it. I told you so. Just one week after I reported to you about bank rate using AI to write content. I said, "Be careful." CNET stepped in it like you would not believe. Allegedly, they have been spitting up AI content and having it reviewed by people. But it turns out it's been a hot mess of inaccuracy from Mia Sato and James Vincent over at The Verge, inside CNET's AI powered SEO money machine. I am not going to get into the whole thing here. I will link to the story in the show notes. Most definitely read it. Fascinating. I feel like we've gone backwards in time in SEO world. Not happy about it, but read the article. But the article said it goes through CNET's alleged content farm or content building of over 70 articles built by AI writers, saying, quote, "The business model is straightforward and explicit. It publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for high intense queries, and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links." Meaning exactly what Google says you are not allowed to do in their guidelines. For the record, by the way, according to Mashable, CNET has ceased with the creation of AI powered content. The moral of the story is this is an emerging technology that needs to be used the right way. Please, please, please don't just jump into these tools carte blanche. Let the dust settle. Be mature with them. Figure it out. In other news, Google will be adding an AI powered chatbot in 2023. How's that for contrast? Per Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land. Report, "Google Search will debut chatbot features this year." It's been speculated that Google went bonkers when the popularity of ChatGPT came about, trying to determine how it might impact their business model. So it makes sense that Google's anxiously letting you know, "Hey, hey, we're going to do this. We're not behind the times here. We have this. We've got you covered. We're going to have the chatbot. We're going to have the chatbot." At least according to a report from the New York Times. I think this will be an interactive chat experience, where instead of getting a simple question answered with a simple result, which Google already does, it'll be something like, "Hey, where can I get pizza near me?" The chatbot replies back with a bunch of listings. And then you say, "Hey, chatbot, which one of these listings has gluten free pizza?" In other words, it'll be a way of interactively refining or exploring topics and queries. Expanding on that and refining in on that ... on all new and interactive ways. With that, this is this week's Snappy News. You no longer have to worry because now you know the news. Crystal Carter: I'm even more worried now. No, I'm not. I'm not. That was great news. Mordy Oberstein: Thanks. I was worried that you weren't going to like it. Crystal Carter: No, I love good news. It's always good to get good news. It's great. Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. All news is good news. Is that a thing? No, that can't be a thing. That shouldn't be a thing. Crystal Carter: Well ... Anyway. Mordy Oberstein: You know what might be news to you, then? Crystal Carter: What's news to me? Mordy Oberstein: Who you should be following this week from our social awesomeness around SEO. Crystal Carter: Yeah. Social media is a great way to hear about SEO. That's where I get a lot of my SEO news. Mordy Oberstein: If you're looking to get a more holistic understanding of how you should be going about content and SEO, and not worrying so much about, "Is this a ranking factor?" You know who you should be following, is Dr. Marie Haynes. Crystal Carter: Dr. Marie Haynes, she's an absolute gem. Mordy Oberstein: She's a treasure. Crystal Carter: She has such a healthy, incredible curiosity for SEO. She asks questions about things that she's considering. And she thinks deeply about the questions and the answers and what it might mean. I saw her having a really interesting discussion about, again, mentioning ChatGPT, about what that means for search. I know a lot of people are asking those questions, but I'm really interested to see what she thinks about that. Speaking of which, she wrote a fantastic article about Google and their algorithm updates. Which has to do with ranking, particularly from a domain point of view, for the Wix SEO Hub, which is an absolute must-read. Please check that out. But yeah, she's a fantastic, incredible thought follow, and is amazing. All of the platitudes, all of the compliments for Marie. Mordy Oberstein: Great conversation on Twitter. Does great assets for the community. Search news you can use. So check that out. If you're looking to understand the algorithm better, the quality reader guidelines better, she's someone you definitely want to keep an eye on and follow. Over on Twitter, @MarieHaynes. That's at M-A-R-I-E underscore H-A-Y-N-E-S. On Twitter, @Marie_Haynes. We'll lead to it in the show notes. Definitely give her a follow because she's our follow of the week. Which means we have reached the end. Crystal Carter: We have? Mordy Oberstein: I hope I have factored in an ending. Crystal Carter: What did we learn today about machines? Mordy Oberstein: Yeah. Well, we learned there are a lot of factors, and worry about the machines more than the factors. Crystal Carter: Factors to consider about machines. Mordy Oberstein: I'm factoring in the point you've been making about machines, about the factors, and factoring in your point about the machines, my factoring of the factors is less. Does that make sense? Crystal Carter: How should we rank that assessment? Mordy Oberstein: It's very secure. Has an S. Crystal Carter: Okay. Mordy Oberstein: Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, ooh, this is a hot topic, do traditional search engines matter as much as they used to? We're probably going to Chat GPT-3 with that one. Look for us wherever you consume your podcast, or on our SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wick SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wick.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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